My Precious Valentine

Valentine's Day! Usually this meant an ouch day for me on February 14ths gone by. Not these days. Holiday notches on the calendar now strictly belong to the advertising and marketing wanks of the world, and those who fall prey to their craft. No matter what the holiday, I no longer listen to the guilt driven messages from jewelry companies, auto manufacturers, chocolate empires and floral conglomerates trying to worm some more money from me on useless or redundant consumer goods intended to pacify all those I held/hold most dear.

In my life I have made a ton of mistakes, but in love I found myself lucking out. This small post today reflects how I feel about my precious Valentine.


Smiles on a rainy afternoon
Sympathetic beats to the well worn tune
Nods of reassurance when wild winds blow
The gentle touch that lifts when a spirit sinks low

Timeless sparkles always in those soft young eyes
Curiosity speaks softly, no veiled disguise
The soft voice lifting conversations from old to new
The most sublime gift of life is simply to be with you

My precious Valentine, Vicky.



    

2011 Spare Change

These days the sky hangs like a wet gray sheet over the Central Valley. My cats use the outdoors now only for private business practices, and then scurry back inside to snooze and munch some treats as their daily ritual of marking the calendar one repetitive scratch after the other. The overcast beats record rainfall, but crummy days and the same forecasts dampen the spirits.

A new year, 2011, with so much old moldy laundry from years past still hanging on the lines or soaking the hampers. The nation passed a health care reform bill in 2010. No one in America can say it was a perfect solution to the giant mess that health care costs and practices evolved into over a couple of centuries of neglect, but it moved the cylinders in the right direction while working to include more people who had been separated from the insured pile and were excluded from the health care cycle. Estimates peg those without health insurance at over 50 million right now.The reformed health care legislation does not fully start until 2014, so the nation will stagger for three full years before any real impact will be felt. This knowledge has not stopped the Republican Party from campaigning to repeal the reforms because they cost too much.

Yes, covering everybody with health insurance in a nation does cost a bundle. Ask the European nations and Japan, or Canada and Australia. The tax rates in those countries are significantly higher than the tax rates found here in America for all classes of people and trade. But, in those nations everyone gets covered and gets reasonable care. Here, we have a very small segment of our population in control of all the wealth, and these very elite people argue they are taxed too much. I would ask any of you reading these paragraphs how the Bush tax cuts made America a better place from 2002 to today's 2011. Leave a comment, and I'll read it and respond.

So, as 2011 gets fully underway we see the Bush Tax cuts extended. We see the small health care reforms enacted in 2010 threatened with repeal, and businesses showing no signs of adding significant numbers of jobs for all those displaced from the past three plus years of economic contraction. What is interesting to note is that those on Wall Street appear to be doing just fine. The Dow-Jones now stands at 11,700 points, which is a 44% gain over the low that occurred in March of 2009. As Tom Petty would say, "It's good to be King."

Here's an old dude who knows the score.



I hear my big cat call me. I need to rustle some dry salmon, and work on the chord changes of this song.

Of Was and When

The leaves turn color, shiver and fall this month. This next six week stretch offers the least amount of daylight for the year here in the northern hemisphere. The elections and Thanksgiving marked this November. I do appreciate the facade of democracy, and I'm thankful to so many people I know and love.

I found out today I won't be saying, "good to to see you after so many years" to a friend from my childhood. I read his obituary in the local paper this morning. I did not know he lived about 45 minutes away in Tehachapi. I looked for his name in the phone books here locally when I moved back to Bakersfield after having lived in Northern California for thirty years, but never found him or his number.

His father was Frank senior. He was Frank junior, but his mother always called him Dober. The affectionate moniker stuck with his early mates, and I was one. 

Sometimes it seems like just moments ago, Dober and I scurrying to the Y in a much smaller version of Bakersfield crammed inside some parent's car for basketball, gymnastics or handball.  I can still smell the insides of that old building to this day with the odd mixture combining pounds of perspiration with a sprinkle of Right Guard rubbed with dashes of rubber soles and urine. I think the YMCA ritual lasted about two years when gym interest and rides petered out altogether in the early Sixties. Maybe the Beatles killed our Y evenings, but probably the sight of all those screaming girls wanting a piece of the Beatles on television sparked the new peter principle in the both of us.

Around that period I remember my parents giving me my 13th birthday present early. It was a Fender Musicmaster II redesigned from the Mustang model, and an upgrade from the 3/4 scale model Leo Fender introduced and manufactured in the mid 1950s. The gift came with a fashionable small Silvertone amplifier complete with both reverb and tremolo. My mom and dad had caved to my relentless whines of guitar noxiousness, and because Dober's parents had gifted him with a Gibson ES-355 Chuck Berry model  a couple of months earlier. With good luck and parental peer pressure we were both going to be rock stars.

We took lessons together for a year or so, learning the fundamentals, some scales and some songs along the way. The plaster from those little rooms must still echo  "So tired, tired of waiting, so tired of waiting for youuuuu." Sometimes I catch a memory of the many trips to Parlier's Music Store on Baker Street  in the Beetle Dober's dad owned.  Dober was never impressed with audio capability of his dad's Volkswagon Bug.  Over these trips we discovered guitar playing was hard work, and to our amazement we both had crummy vocal skills. We seldom practiced together, though we got together occasionally for sleepovers and wild on-foot midnight meanderings throughout lesser Bakersfield. After a year of joint lessons at Parlier's with two instructors, Jeff and Denny, we went solo citing musical differences.

The next years found us moving to the same schools, but no longer sharing the same classrooms. My extracurricular interests at this juncture began to focus on bank shots from concrete courts or from slate tops covered in felt. Our strokes found different streams and crossed hardly at all. Our parents who had often dined out, and over cocktails shared Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart records together during our fast-friend times of those early Sixties, seemed to lose touch with one another as well.

Sometime in the very early Seventies I saw Frank for the last time. I think it was at the junior college here in town, but it could have been at CSUB or some spot downtown just as likely. I thought he mentioned pursuing a career as a fireman, but from the obituary that thought now seems the stuff of made-up memory-filler from a brief meeting nearly forty years ago.

I read today Frank was a certified public accountant for many years with Deloitte-Touche, the audit and tax consulting giant of financial services. I would have liked to explore the Neil Young refrain "numbers add up to nothing" with an old friend and accountant, and find out what tunes he had been working on over all these years. But, as his chronicle today mentioned some health issues forced a premature retirement and a much too quick departure from this world.

So after all these years, Dober, you remain for me forever young.

For What We're Worth

Gawd! Another election takes place in just a few days. I am so burnt from politics today I feel like like a dude wrapped in gauze, tied to a bed and fed endless liquids of hell juice while forced to view locally produced political advertisements without end. I'm not sure if you remember Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange, but the vision of Alex undergoing his therapy treatments comes to mind regarding the media and our perpetual elections these days.

It would be one thing if elections actually allowed the ruling party to rule in this country, and to make needed changes quickly. If the voted on changes do not work then vote the shysters out of office and put in new ones with different ideas for solutions. But we the people must allow some time to put actual changes in place, and to give those changes an opportunity to fail on their merits. However, in the world in which we live this is not the case today in America the Stilted. 

After four years of Congressional majority, and two years with huge majorities in both houses of the legislature along with the White House, Democrats could only muster a tepid bill of fringe minutiae to address huge wrongs in the finance and credit card sector, a total cave-in to insurance companies over the idea of health care reform and a government backed stimulus package just small enough to stave off the Great Depression while making sure very few of the millions of people who lost good paying jobs under Republican sway will ever see even decent paying employment again. With the hammerlock of the super majority, 60% votes necessary to pass any bill in the U.S. Senate, and a two-thirds majority needed to pass any budget or spending bill in here in my dysfunctional State of California, nothing of positive consequence ever comes to embattled American working families. 

So the loose-screw confederation of amnesiacs, better known as the electorate, will now return control of Congress over to the Republican Party, which sawed the middle class off at the knees this decade with their financial brilliance of perpetual tax cuts for the rich wrapped in distorted terminology of freedom, equality and justice for the individual. The top five percent in this country do great job of convincing the 95% they are one lottery scratch, or one social network solution away from being just like them- wealthy beyond belief and devoted only to their social networked companions.

You might think all those foreclosed upon, unemployed, underemployed, overworked/understaffed,  benefit-less work contractors and outsourced dead industry casualties would begin to get a clue as to who really holds the power in this country. The government did not layoff millions of workers this decade. The government did not cause the collapse of credit, or sell bogus mortgages as gold sealed certificates. That would be the private sector, a sector now swimming in cash and advertising loudly against any fool in government who might want to regulate illegal and unsafe practices, or tax at a socially responsible level the huge hoarded earnings that have wiped away a once vibrant middle class in this country.

It was only September 2008 when the end of the stock market was staring the public in the face as trillions of dollars in value got wiped away as Lehman Brothers and other financial heavyweights on Wall Street teetered on the brink, or collapsed outright. The Dow Jones Industrial average, just six months removed from the huge September stock plummet, and at the outset of the Obama Presidency in March of 2009, stood at 6,500. Today the market is over 11,000. No big job creation has happened from the private sector over that period, but the money guys are printing their dollars or yuan just fine.

In California, the unemployment figures now seem forever fixed at above 12%, and the rhetoric from the conservatives of Republican and Libertarian pinstripes proclaim that more tax cuts are needed to make sure the tepid national economic recovery does not stall with tax rates that will stifle all job creation. This group sat on three-quarters of a trillion dollars in 2008, and now has $943 billion as a stockpile.  Every analyst in the world knows that money will never go into creating much in the way of jobs, because as Moody's points out, "we believe companies are looking for greater certainty about the economy and signs of a permanent increase in sales before they let go of their cash hoards, which they suffered so much to build." Now that is some statement, even in this jaded new Gilded Age.

This brings me to the 2010 election pitting the multitudes of dissatisfied against the contented percentage who have at least $250,000 of investable assets. This group feels very confident about next year, and thought this year was a good one. The group with big money backs Meg Whitman while Jerry Brown, almost by default, stands as the lone iconoclastic figure progressives in California can rally around. Meg Whitman, Wall Street savvy and too rich to even bother voting for much of her life, now resides as the champion of wealthy hubris after spending more than $140 million of her billion dollar fortune on her own gubernatorial campaign. After all has been said and done she has not made a very good candidate for this government job.

I won't bother to get into all the personal attacks levied by and against both candidates, because I have no interest in resurrecting and dissecting the tonnage of toxic mud this campaign spawned. I won't even crack wise and compare the verbiage humorously to terrible recent disasters where toxic mud spewed out of control and wrecked  havoc on so much of the planet's landscape. I will say that in the campaign debate Tom Brokaw moderated in San Rafael there was one very telling question and response that I believe sums it all up. Tom Brokaw asked (in response to Whitman's large personal expenditure on the campaign and her dubious voting record) how she has used some of her fortune to benefit California and all Californians that many of the citizens might not be aware of. You can see and hear the question regarding spending, and  the answer on this Huffington Post clip here.

If you don't trust links, the lady candidate launched into a short voting apology and lengthy attack on public employment unions. She almost casually remembers in the middle of her attack on unions that, "Of course, Griff and I  have a family foundation that supports higher education and health care." She then goes right back on the attack. Listen to Jerry Brown's response and the obvious pride in his family foundation with the million dollars he gave to establish two charter schools, and decide for yourself who puts people first.   

I do not understand why anyone would vote for Meg Whitman, or for Carly Fiorina for that matter. These are two spoiled rich people who have only cuts in government to promote, and no idea on how to pry away investor money into creating jobs for people. Their only mantra is for further tax cuts and more subsidies for the privileged few. I am so saddened these days by the private sector's performance on jobs in so many industrial sectors it has made me sick at heart, and in a state of virtual despair over the future of this country.

High speed rail comes to mind as an example. This is a major effort to create a much needed public benefit, and meets with opposition from private investment that smacks of outright hostility. A very recent paper was published assessing the risks for the public regarding high speed rail. The report says the state cannot afford it, and that the private sector will not build it, or operate it, unless guarantees (subsidies to the private interests) are given to private operators. Of course, Europe and Japan have had high speed rail for years now, and China is busy building high speed rails at a fast clip, but it is just too expensive to put in place here in California, or in other parts of the nation (even though the teetering Obama Administration is fully behind the project).

Pollution is terrible in most parts of California from Redding to Bakersfield in the Central Valley, and throughout all Southern California not situated right at the beach. Putting modern and efficient public transportation throughout these areas seems like a big step in the right direction, but not according to the naysayers. Palo Alto's City Council recently voted down an opportunity to have a station in their city for High Speed Rail, because as their private investor class told them it would create too much traffic. Never mind getting all those cars off the 101 and 280 highways, putting too big a terminal into Palo Alto would be too much to bear for the millionaires of that little part of our world.

Not everyone is opposed to High Speed rail. With tens of thousands of good paying jobs as the big carrot 52% of Californians voted to approve almost $10 billion in bonds to get the project started. The federal government, finally pushing to improve our national infrastructure, earlier this year awarded $2.25 billion of stimulus money to make the start of this project happen within three years time.  Just this week an additional $902 million was given to California for High Speed Rail, and still the private sector drags its feet and hoards the gold.

I am not sure about the outcome of the high speed rail system throughout the country, or even in this state. I am not sure how much of the original concept will come to fruition. I am sure the private sector will have to be bullied by the people to become a major stakeholder, but I am not sure most Americans feel they have the strength to stand against the powerful who hold all the money.

Today the disparity between those who have everything and those who have nothing almost seems insurmountable. There are two very sobering articles recently looking at the growing gap between the classes of the masses. The first is an abstract, Building A Better America- One Wealth Quintile at a Time, by Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely which explores how typical Americans view the current distribution of wealth in the United States, and what they would like to see as an ideal. The stunning summation from the abstract is how wrong the typical American from all five economic wealth classes views how wealth is distributed today in this country, and that the consensus of this survey finds Sweden as the ideal. Who'd of thunk?

Dear reader you owe yourself a look at this abstract to see that 84% of all the wealth in this nation rests with one-fifth of its population and that 60% of Americans hold less than 4.5% of the economic pie. This is not what most Americans believe to be the case today. I guess most people in this country feel their recent ball card acquisitions, or those plastic super-gulp cups in their cupboards, will really appreciate in a few years time.  

Another detailed article on this economic condition from Reuters, written by Emily Kaiser, is found here. Several economists and the intrepid reporter find that from 2002 through 2007 the top 1% of earners saw annual economic growth of more than 10% during this period while the other 99% captured a 1.3% gain over the same time frame. Economists now have begun to question whether too great a gap in wealth creates the type of seismic economic upheavals that we have witnessed both in the Great Depression and our ongoing Great Recession where the gaps between the top and the bottom was very similar.

This recent Reuters article cites a Deutsche Bank strategist, Ajay Kapur, who saw the parallels between today and the Roaring 20s but did not see the meltdown coming. Kapur did note that the U.S. of 2005 and some other nations were developing into  "plutonomies" where the very few and powerfully rich drove the economy and did most of the consuming. Kapur is the former Citigroup analyst who essentially divided the world into two positions-the rich and the rest- for investment purposes. At least he understands the way things are.

Apologies for not writing sooner. I have just enough faith left in me to vote this upcoming Tuesday with hopes for better tomorrows as a result, or at least a firmer recognition of where we all stand. Hope you vote, and see you soon.











 

School Daze And A Few Choice Bricks For A Wall

I now hear the loudspeaker voice lead the kids in reciting the pledge of allegiance at the junior high school here in the land of Colonel Baker. The first couple of days of this ritual echo always takes me by surprise when I'm out skimming the pool and watering the plants. When I went to public school in this town, back in the days when a nickel was still worth a penny, the semester always began after Labor Day, but now classes for the masses convene in August. Everyone involved in education still gets Labor Day off, but now it comes about two weeks into the school year. God knows people need a break from each after getting just recently introduced.

My lads have been out of school for awhile now. They may have been the last pair to actually have gotten a decent deal in the California higher education arcade. They made the usual stops in the book gaming halls for the cash strapped, popping quarters into various junior college machines before ending their obligatory stay at two California State University campuses where the final level school-game bosses punched them out their hard fought prize, the paper diploma of no cache.

September always brings out the ranking lists of America's finest colleges from the self serving periodicals promoting themselves as the arbiters of academic taste for the discriminating parent, the worried collegiate administrator, or for the dental office patient stuck waiting in a tight fitting chair with a handful of mags to peruse while some root canal procedure in the back spaces runs long. The lists I saw this year waiting for my tooth cleaning came from Forbes and  U.S. News & World Report.   

Forbes could find no public college or university in their Top 25 list of best academic places. UC Berkeley and UCLA made the U.S. News & World Report  Top 25 at numbers 22 and 25 respectively. Cal and UCLA could not break the Top 50 for Forbes. You can check the criteria on how the lists were made through the links if you wish. They both read like Charlie Brown's teacher sounds to me.

All this windup for the obvious pitch, which finds the wealthy taking their dollars directly to where their familial descendants will go- to a carefully cultivated private school where a building might have the same last name as a well heeled rush student or two of year 2022. When you see what the endowment picture for some of the top tier private colleges and universities on the Forbes and U.S. News & World Report lists look like compared to what the public universities total you get a clearer idea of how class warfare is truly waged in this world.

Stanford University serving about 19,000 students showed an endowment fund of $12.6 billion at the end of 2009 . The University of California system serving ten times the number of students (191,000) carried an endowment fund of just under $5 billion by the end of 2009 for its 10 campuses, but none of that money can go to pay salaries for teachers or defray other education costs. The California State University system, which serves more than 400,000 students, possessed an endowment fund of just under $900 million at the end of 2007, and given what the typical losses have been for the past two years a conservative estimate would put that figure at about $750 million for the end of 2009. Cal Tech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena has a private endowment fund almost twice the size of the largest public university system in the nation.

With all that endowment money (gift dollars as tax write-offs opposed to tax dollars for public benefit) at so many institutions of higher learning  a person might start to wonder why student fees keep going ever higher. I ask myself the same question concerning my energy bills as I keep setting the thermometer higher in the summers and lower in the winters but even with lower usage pay a much higher cost each month over the previous year.

Harvard made a big splash a few years back by utilizing their huge endowment fund to underwrite qualified students at their school with a free ride for all those admitted whose families earned $60,000 per year or less. About 20% of the student body at Harvard utilizes this benefit today, but do not think those who chose this path feel all that comfortable while attending this very elite school.The gulf between the rich and poor today now seems as vast a distance as separate galaxies are from each other throughout the universe. 

You certainly do not see the U.C. system, or the California State University system, underwriting the poor any longer, although more than 50% of C.S.U. students do receive some financial aid. The citizens of my home state now spit fire in full tax revolt, and have no desire to help underwrite a college education for their neighbors children at this time. These modern Libertarians either will send their brood to a private school, or on the other side of the socio-economic door will never send any family member to any college. Fees have skyrocketed the past couple of years at both California higher learning institutions where the cost of education for students spiked up more than 30% over the last couple of years. KCET reported that state supported per student aid has plummeted 50% this decade for college students while the cost of tuition rose $2,500 over the same time frame.

The sad fact for the world remains that we create many more poor each day than we do the very wealthy. At some point, and that point may be nearer than anyone imagines, the poor are going to revolt against the current economic and social systems that have created such huge earnings discrepancies between the chosen few and the neglected multitudes. The likelihood becomes so much greater for violent upheaval when all opportunities for advancement have been taken away from the lower class. Lottery scratch tickets may not convince enough folks that they too can have untold wealth and happiness. Drugs and alcohol may no longer pacify all those trapped in meaningless low paying occupations. In truth no one needs a college education to make these assumptions. It is the law of physics when you apply too much pressure for too long a time the reaction can be rather messy.

A thoughtful electorate might try to remove some of that pressure, and particularly those who fly in the gilded skies above the masses, and who might have the most to lose. Chip in a little more for tax purposes to ease the pressure. Allow the dollar disadvantaged some hope through affordable higher education costs without years of debt to tie them down and dispirit their dreams. Let the Bush tax cuts expire on the top 2% of earners, and allow a tax rate of 20% on capital gains. Instead of having the biggest portions of government money go to the few defense contractors and data stream computer-spy companies, allow some public money to go to places and people where unemployment sits at 15% or above with median per capita earnings at close to poverty. Maybe those shiny gated communities might be saved, instead of potentially becoming little prisons surrounded by mobs of  angry unemployed and uneducated gun-toting freedom fighters searching for the good life, or at the very least the slightly used high-def 50-inch monitor of their choice.  

Roger Waters may have been on to something about those walls and bricks thirty years ago.
Thanks for stopping by.