Night time for the Car Biz

Rick Wagoner steps down from GM this week. What a long strange trip it has been from the post WWII heights, where the phrase "What's good for GM is good for America" defined the company, and the nation, to the depths of these past six months.

General Motors is the company that was behind the great American train robbery. I mean by that phrase that GM systematically removed from US cities our public transportation rail system line by line from the 1930s through the 1950s. This was uncovered in a 60 Minutes story that aired back in 1986, and spawned a seldom seen but important and riveting documentary, Taken For A Ride, written and directed by Jim Klein.

This is the company Michael Moore earned his documentary film chops covering in the still pertinent Roger & Me. Today all Americans can now share the pain and frustration exhibited by those seen in Flint, Michigan twenty years ago, which were captured by Moore's film crew.

How does a company create an electric vehicle and then have management decide to destroy the model in less than a decade, and expect any sympathy from the car buying public today? If you're interested you can check out Chris Paine's documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car? on Google video.

I, and I'm sure everybody else today, feels terrible about the many workers losing jobs, homes, health benefits and all traces of former dignity with each successive mismanaged turn this conglomerate has undertaken for the past forty years. John DeLorean left because the company was so unwieldy. The book, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, offers his recollections about the company. DeLorean was really GM design for the entire decade of the 1960s, the last decade the company had real relevance as an automaker. It became a bean counter's company from the 1970s until the last bean counter, Rick Wagoner, signed off.

Good night, and good luck, General Motors.

Springs To Mind

Rain and hail on the third day of spring with temperatures falling twenty plus degrees in a few hours behind winds that define male shrinkage blues. It's all good inside, though. I'm still healthy. I am a little shaken (not stirred) after reading my monthly AARP magazine about Superbugs.

Superbugs is not a new alt-metal band, but deadly new bacterial diseases that resist anti-biotics and kill 90,000 patients a year right here in the good old USA. We have twenty times more people die in hospitals and clinics yearly from staphloccocus strains(notably MRSA) and clostridium difficile than the US has lost during our nation's entire time in Iraq.

This past week we saw President Obama go on the talk show circuit to pitch his stimulus package efforts and the new bazillion dollar budget. Of course, his off-the-cuff self-deprecating comment on the Jay Leno set regarding the Prez's bowling skills being the equivelent of a special olympics achievement was what the speaking tour will be remembered for. The opposition party hates government spending on anything not related to defense, or to the oil and natural gas services industries, and radically expanded health care coverage could be the line in the sand where all swords will be drawn to prevent government intervention.

I'm sure most people reading this little blog of cyber-nonsense know that America is the only major industrialized nation in the world that does have a universal health care system for its citizens. It is the only nation where a person, or family, can be wiped out financially due to illness, or accident, from medical bills.

This is an excerpt from a Reuters article published on March 13, 2009 by reporter Donna Smith.

"The Business Roundtable, which represents the largest U.S. corporations, released a study showing that for every $100 spent in the United States on healthcare, a group of five leading economic competitors -- Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France -- spend about 63 cents.

"While today's economic challenges span the globe, companies in other countries may be better able to weather the storm in part because the value that their healthcare systems deliver," Business Roundtable Chairman Harold McGraw told reporters in a telephone conference. McGraw is chairman, president and chief executive of The McGraw-Hill Companies.

U.S. President Barack Obama has made reforming the expensive and inefficient U.S. healthcare system one of his top priorities and Democratic leaders in Congress hope to get a bill to him by the end of the year.

The United States spends more on healthcare than any other country, but some 46 million Americans are still uninsured.

Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and chief executive of Verizon Communications, said an overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system "should have been done yesterday."

The United States, where most workers get healthcare insurance through their employers, faces an even bigger competitive disadvantage against rising economic powers Brazil, India and China, the Business Roundtable study said.

It said those countries spend about 15 cents on healthcare for every dollar spent in America.

The Business Roundtable executives said their study showed that despite the money Americans spend on healthcare, U.S. workers are less healthy than workers in other countries, putting U.S. firms an even greater disadvantage."

So today's American workers are less healthy on the job, spend more of their money for worse coverage than their counterparts in every other major nation, and have to stress over new strains of microbes whenever they visit a doctors office, but must listen to bullshit arguments about the evils of socialism and why universal coverage must be stopped or America will be ruined forever.

If the Superbugs don't get us, the stupor bugs of health care intransigence certainly will.

Snake Oil Exposed- Jim Cramer paved by Jon Stewart

When I tuned in to the Daily Show last night I was expecting about five to eight minutes of Jim Cramer with Jon Stewart, and some Batman circa 1966 bubbles of comic book emphasis -Pow! Oomph! Crack!- popping up at chosen moments to keep our wandering attention span focused on the interview. I expected Jim Cramer to be apologetic, a little funny and chagrined at Stewart's ability to point out the obvious dilemma a Wall Street homer network has when the home team has been consistently losing.

What I got was Jon Stewart deadly serious, and armed with evidence as damaging as Nixon's basement tapes. Stewart kept dialing up taped video camera confessions about rigging movement on Wall Street from the former hedge fund manager turned TV star, Jim Cramer, and repeatedly hammered this defenseless shill of CNBC.

Now we know where all the money went.

It was a reawakening of the Edward R. Murrow spirit in the body of one of the nation's best satirists. This was brilliant, but only a first step. The time has come to focus some legal clout and time on putting into prison the liars and thieves who stole so much money from the world. Those principals at Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers and so many more Bernard Madoff types deserve the Bernard Madoff sentence.

Thanks Jon Stewart.

Desperate Man Blues

Desperate Man's Blues tells quite an American tale in its offbeat fashion and subject matter. This film on DVD from Cube Media explores personal quests, passion of subject matter and the love of music, although this love confines itself to a finite recorded period of music. The film spreads joy in an unpretentious manner as we follow Joe Bussard, American musicologist and record collector, through his daily routine at home and on the road.

Joe hates rock 'n roll. He voices strong opinions from the time we join him and the film crew recording the events and his turns on a marvelous 78rpm turntable. Joe finds the stuff of 45s, LPs and CDs inauthentic. He lets us know homogeneous America offers little real culture of value.

Real culture was tucked away in defined small neighborhoods blanketed behind twisted unique roads. These roads led to places where honesty and individuality was personified and recorded on old shellac records of the 1920s and early 1930s.

I spent a goodly portion of my life on the road travelling throughout America. By the 1980s much of what differentiated regions had been swept away. Lost accents and peculiarly beautiful architecture bulldozed under by big Caterpillars of development crazed speculators looking for quick bucks. As Malvina Reynolds so aptly noted fifty years ago, a nation of "ticky-tacky and they all look just the same." If Malvina were alive today I doubt that she'd be surprised at what America has become. She would enjoy talking to a kindred individualist like Joe Bussard.

Leonard Cohen Tours: Iconclasm Lives

Before the next tsunami (physically and psychologically) hits, which could upset my world again, I mull over one word: iconoclast. The word iconoclast does not get much play these days. I find it curious given the fact that so many of our most sacred institutions, ideas and traditions currently totter under the weight of so much flux and attack. The word is defined as 1: one who destroys sacred images, and 2: one who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions. Depending on your dictionary source (I looked at Answers.com and Merriam-Webster’s) either one could be the first definition.

The height of iconoclasm occurred in the eighth and ninth centuries at the height of the Byzantine Empire. Big happenings over idol worship between Christian viewpoints with statues and paintings destroyed ended up being the result. This behavior surfaced about eight hundred years later during the reformation when Protestants had their way in dismantling idolatrous art from the Catholic Church for a brief period in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. In both instances heads rolled.

In the latter part of the 19^th Century, anarchists embodied iconoclasm by demanding that all governments and government institutions should be toppled and done away with. Disenchanted iconoclastic people targeted the ruling class and assassinated a fair number of influential people, including two American Presidents, Garfield and McKinley. The institutions did not topple by their actions, but in a perverse way the 20^th Century wars-to-end-all-wars ultimately leveled many of the stratified class barriers that had caused the anarchists’ outrage. It has taken only sixty years to use up that window of grace in the western world. We now seem gripped in some epileptic fit of destructiveness that has all institutions on the verge of toppling from their monolithic weight.

I bring this all up because I find it fascinating that old core struggles never seem to die. They are like those ash covered hot spots in the aftermath of a forest fire. Changes we prefer to think as revolutionary, become illusory when put to the fire. There will be new growth in the forest. The forest may thrive and be different for many years, but it is inevitable that the cycle of flames will reappear to reduce it in time.

Art mirrors life in the same respect, with accepted formulae crushed and rebuilt around some new perspectives that will die and pass into something else again. Through all these passages art remains intrinsically art, the creative expression of life.

There a very few iconoclasts in the world of artistic endeavors today. In the world of film the last great iconoclasts are all memory with the passing of Robert Altman. He and Sam Peckinpah were the last true movie directors to obliterate all those quaint film notions regarding bogus film-western values of virtue, cleanliness, chivalry and death where the good guys always won. The Wild Bunch remains the finest western ever made and it broke every story telling rule in the process. Above all, there were no good guys, only choices and actions. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller ranks right under Peckinpah’s masterpiece as a tremendous film achievement recording much the same struggle. Through Altman’s eyes the old west is reduced to a rainy dark dreary mining camp where the players are drawn to a small brothel and bar as the object of conquest. The brooding themes in Altman’s classic are expanded with the brilliant soundtrack composed by Leonard Cohen, one of the few living iconoclasts of popular music.

The first three Leonard Cohen albums were reissued on compact disc back in April 2007 by Sony/BMG. These are Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room and Songs of Love and Hate. These three album reissues marked the fortieth anniversary of Leonard Cohen’s remarkable musical career. If you had to pick just one get the Songs of Leonard Cohen. This album contains most of the material from McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as well the wistful tune Suzanne. The ubiquitous producer John Hammond produced this first Leonard Cohen album. I was googling and discovered Suzanne has been covered more than 1,200 times to date.

Two other records from the Leonard Cohen vault that I've grown old with and love are I’m Your Man and The Future, which whisper brutal truths of life in sinuous baritone. Songs like Waiting For The Miracle, Closing Time and Democracy from The Future all are epic tomes on the human condition whose themes are unlike any other in the annals of pop music. Anthem is another beautiful and tragic expression of life where the chorus intones, “Ring the bells that still can ring…. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.”

Atom Egoyan crafted an excellent film, Exotica, around the strange bonds between an exotic dancer and an obsessive club client who are locked in time to Cohen’s Everybody Knows. The song is on the album, I’m Your Man. Don Henley did a tremendous cover of this song that appears on his greatest hits album, Actual Miles.

In the world of music there was a gifted young man, Jeff Buckley, the son of another gifted young man, Tim Buckley. Both the father and son died tragically at very young ages. On the Jeff Buckley album, Grace, there is the most beautiful cover of a Leonard Cohen song my hears have inhaled. The song is Hallelujah. If I had to pick a top 100 song list this one would definitely be included.

If you're a fan, Leonard Cohen has a tour in full swing coming to a region near you. I've enclosed a link below that has all the concert information, and other cool Cohen confidences. If you cannot make a concert this time around, there is also an amazing documentary tribute DVD that was done a few years back entitled Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man. This DVD features performances by U2, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave and others. It recounts very effectively this poet and songwriter’s Canadian roots and travels of time, thought and life. Really a great view if you have not seen it. I hadn’t realized how closely Al Pacino resembles Leonard Cohen until I viewed this recently. Check out www.leonardcohenfiles.com if life needs a fresh look. Comments always welcome, spin one of your own.

The Same "American Tune"

March Madness takes on a very new meaning this year, 2009. I sit typing and watch the rain here in "drought" headlined California. It looks like we dodge a fatal bullet to our reeling economy in the Golden State this year with these late winter downpours. There will probably be enough water this year. It doesn't appear to brighten many people's outlook on life, however. People I chat with, of varying ages, seem to be under a dark cloud that this is the worst of times for America, ever.

I was listening to some compilation CDs I put together a few years back. I still engage in the practice of personal deejay in my unfailing pursuit to convert all my analog tapes and records to shiny disc. (Pity, CDs are almost as retro and useless today as my albums of tape and melted plastic grooves. Technology advancements to make sure obsolescence occurs to make you repeatedly buy the same shit over and over again.)

After that small digression, on one of my homemade masterpieces there spilled into the air Paul Simon's American Tune. The song first appeared on Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon album in 1973. At the heart of the song is the line "You cannot be forever blessed." That's the way the country felt during the decade of the 1970s. Viet Nam, Nixon, Watergate, high unemployment, rising interest rates.

It didn't get any better for most of the 1980s. Unions met Reagan and took it on the chin. There is a splendid documentary, American Dream, now almost 20 years old which covers the plight of organized labor when pitted against large corporations in America. The film deals with the Hormel meat packer strike in the 1980s but seems eerily topical today. The 1980s had the precursor to our latest financial woes with the Savings & Loan meltdown, the insider trading of Ivan Boesky and junk bond shenanigans of Michael Milken to ponder. We also witnessed the art of the leveraged buyout from private equity firms that decided mob economics could work on big scale with the RJR Nabisco deal.

I still remember the wild initial-public-offering ride of the 1990s followed by the collapse of the dot.coms from 2000 to 2001 and of course, 9/11, which put the nation on its collective heels, and ushered in an era of no recovery for anyone except the very top of the earnings pyramid until our latest greed-splurge bubble burst over real estate and credit crunches.

To Paul Simon's point, many of us in the USA just haven't been blessed for a long time. A lot of individuals, and families by extension, did leverage everything they had to create an unsustainable lifestyle that now looks like an aberration rather than an American reality. We be back to square one without much to show for all our efforts but more debt.

All this seems bleak, but really that is not the case. We are still in the same boat we were floating in about 36 years ago. Really, no worse for wear as a nation just a little nervous around the edges. There are great opportunities to be had today if we pull together and build a stronger network that includes all of us.