Newt “don’t call it lobbying” Ginrgrich

Six Republican presidential candidates sat around a mock Thanksgiving table Saturday to discuss God and social issues at an Internet-only debate held by “Citizen Link” (formerly “Focus on the Family Action”) and moderated by Republican pollster Frank Luntz.  In keeping with the Thanksgiving theme Newt discussed Captain John Smith who told the early settlers “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”   Gingrich went on to say that principle is the basis for a sound value system, and proof of “how much the left has collapsed in our country.” His topper was his message to Occupy Wall Street; “Go get a job, right after you take a bath."  This brought a big laugh form the morons in Iowa.

Let us ponder this for a moment (a moment is all I am going to be able to stand); getting beyond the odd retort of "get a job" in our present economy we have this corrupt and decadent symbol of wealth and power, a very paradigm of crony capitalism lecturing fellow Americans about exercising their right to protest.  While I find the Occupy Wall Street movement a bit juvenile, they are bringing up very serious issues that go directly to the heart of the way guys like Gingrich make a living. 

Perhaps the leftist scum who occupy Wall Street have not had access to the $10’s of millions of dollars in lobbying fees that Gingrich’s firm have received, including over $1.5 million (of essentially taxpayer dollars) from perhaps the most corrupt and costly business organization in American history Freddie Mac.  Gingrich is a multimillionaire leaching off the intersection of corporate and legislative special interests and he is going to lecture us on, values, work ethics, and Captain John Smith at a “Family Forum,” are you fucking kidding me!

That's not capitalism & the death of the American Dream

From a wonderful piece by bank analyst Mike Mayo from the WSJ on Saturday (11/5/11) discussing his history of negative advisory positions regarding the Banking industry:

To fix the banking sector, should we rely more on government regulation and oversight or let the market figure it out? Tougher rules or more capitalism? Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. We have a purportedly capitalistic system with a lot of rules that are not strictly enforced, and when things go wrong, the government steps in to protect banks from the market consequences of their own worst decisions. To me, that's not capitalism.

There are 2 key phrases here; “we have the worst of both worlds” and “that’s not capitalism,” so that leaves the question is what the hell it is, this foul symbiotic relationship between politics and big business that leaves this class, the power elite, literally living above the law and too big to fail. 

Of these facts there is really no dispute, the larger question is how much this corrupting crony capitalism that has overtaken our government has impacted our current economic environment.  Has a government focused primarily on the needs of its corporate masters led to the current stagnation of our middle class, the ever growing gap between rich and poor, our failing educational system and most importantly the decline of upward mobility?   

America has always had notable inequality, but it also had the upward mobility that is the hallmark of real free market capitalism. That was critically important, I may be down now but with hard work and a little luck I could better myself and my children could/would have a better and more prosperous life then I had, I think that is really the core of what we call the American dream.  According to a recent, excellent article in Time magazine that seems to be vanishing (“Opportunity Nation Highlights a Lack of Upward Mobility” By Kayla Webley 11/4/2011).  That leaves me to ask once again, in light of knowing that major Wall Street financial firms are too big to fail, I wonder if America is.

Occupy Wall Street - Part 3

We need to be clear that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are addressing very serious issues concerning corporate influence over American public policy and America’s growing economic inequality.  The right has decided that the way to cut this movement off at the knees is to turn them into a joke.  “Conservative” commentators say the OWS folks are hippies, they are dirty, they will be gone when the first snow falls, they are backed by liberal fat cats (George Soros), they have sex in their sleeping bags, they play in drum circles & chant, etc.  The right hopes that by turning OWS members into a joke they will essentially diffuse the serious message they bring forward, it is a cowardly means of avoiding these very complex and critical issues.  The left should recognize this technique; they used it to attack the Tea Party, find the idiot with the placard of Obama made up as Hitler or dressed as an African bushman and paint them as racist.  This shit is easy; we are human and thus full of hypocrisy, illusions and inconsistencies.  Yes, I am sure that there are as many OWS protesters with (corporate) smart phones as there is social security and Medicare recipients railing in favor of small government in the Tea Party, but none of this necessarily invalidates or should invalidate the serious matters raised by both groups.   

The Tea Party missed the larger issue of our dangerous corporate crony capitalism that underpins our current “democracy.”  This situation has yielded our new American plutocracy.  This fact gets lost in their odd dialogue about socialism and big government.  The OWS protesters think that additional government regulation is the order of the day.  Any additional government regulation will be of the “Swiss cheese” variety.  Written by corporate lobbyist with holes big enough for the rats to crawl in and continue to eat, in this case the physician cannot heal itself.  Asking our government to legislate solutions to the problems OWS see will not work; it is like asking the fox to make the laws governing safety at the hen house.

At the end of the government cannot legislate economic equality, it can only ALLOW for economic equality by staying the fuck out of the way.  Allowing Americans, the businesses and institutions they create to be responsible for their own destinies, to stand and fall based on their own merits with no superfluous interventions from the government - that is (or should be) the American way. 

Occupy Wall Street – Part 2

On Bill Maher’s HBO program this past Friday he stated that the folks involved in Occupy Wall Street was “not against capitalism but against what capitalism has become.”   If you have a hard time grasping the concept of the dialectic, this should help – a statement that is both true and false at the same time.  Clearly the OWS protesters abhor capitalism, but Maher is correct that modern big business and Wall Street represents a complete corruption of free market capitalism.  No individual that respects the natural function of the free market can embrace big business in this county with its statutory dependence on the government.  Legislation like Dodd-Frank and government “investments” in private business are a mockery, lobbyists writing actual legislation and our tax code bloated with thousands on special interest tax breaks often written in for 1 specific company.  These are all things that OWS mentions in their various manifestos, but these are not an indictment of real free market capitalism but of the brazen crony capitalism that has overrun our country and threatens its very existence.

Sever years ago Ralph Nader commented that the only true capitalist in our country were the small business men and women because they were allowed to fail.  I have hundreds of small business clients in my practice and I can tell you that other than their families, employees, vendors and (hopefully) their customers nobody cares if they fail – THAT is free market capitalism, anything else is a sham.          

Occupy Wall Street

The new Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is sprung from exactly the same anger impulse as the Tea Party.  Both movements express the overarching feeling that the government is not working for the citizenry or the common good of America.  As the modern American plutocracy solidifies there is an odd brazenness about this governmental apathy (broken only briefly during the election cycle). 

While the Tea Party comes at this situation from a more conservative (small government) position the new Occupy Wall Street movement engages the problem from a more (pro-Government) progressive angle.  The underlying root of this problem is clearly the corrupting marriage of big business and big government, but the OWS participants do not grasp that the government is (at least) half of the problem.  The inequity that they rail against is not the isolated product of corporate greed but those corporations and giant Wall Street investment firms working in harmony with a big and intrusive government.   Politicians need massive amounts of money to run for office and the plutocrats who run these big businesses provide those funds and thus gain the legislative influence (you had a rather stark example of this yesterday as Barney Frank voiced his sympathy with the OWS movement as he headed out to a major fund raising dinner in New York at the house of Charles Myers, a banker at Evercore Partners).

The root of this problem is money; campaign reform is not going to happen, neither major party wants it, and the current Supreme Court is simply not going to allow it so the only solution is a smaller government.  You cannot fix this problem thru additional government intervention but only thru the removal of government from both the business and the personal life of its citizens, i.e. a libertarian model.  It is only thru the elimination of points of contact between business and government that you might start to ameliorate our current mess, if there are less points of contact than there is less opportunity for the corrupting complicity between big business and big government.    

Romney vs. Obama or where did we find that barrel!

America is apparently looking at a possible Presidential election choice of Mitt Romney vs. Barak Obama.  All I can think of is where we found the barrels from which bottoms we were able to scrape up these two guys.  Here we have a corporate democrat and a classic corporate republican, each possessing virtually NO discernable personal values, standards or ethics.  I guess on the other hand that is the point, perfect corporate stooges, guys who do not have any personal vision to get in the way of performing their duties to their corporate/special interest donors.  I mean, think of how problematic it would be if they actually cared about America, the constitution or its citizens – that could really get in the way of business as usual.

I implore republicans to pick either a real conservative, such as Ron Paul or at least someone interesting such as Herman Cain so the election might actually be about something (Michele Bachmann is correct when she says the republican party needs to nominate a real conservative, she has recognized that neither Romney and Perry are actually conservative).  It is already very clear that a 1^st Romney term and a 2^nd Obama term would be very similar.  Romney has already embraced a hand off approach to Medicare, he wants a large and archivist military with its associated foreign involvement and corporate welfare and has refused to address solutions for social security (any of this sounding familiar).  This means that the very serious subject of controlling government spending and deficit reduction is off the table (apparently) for both of these contenders.   

If republicans don’t make a bolder choice then Romney we will have an elections choice just like the one comedian Lewis Black spoke of during the Bush vs. Kerry race.  He said that you walked into the voting booth and there was to piles of shit…..     

Happy Columbus Day 2011!   

The Genius of Steve Jobs

As an accountant I have never been a user of Apple products, they were never designed for accounting/tax environment where PC’s and Windows dominate.  As a business man what most impressed me about Apple products was its user’s absolute compulsion to show me what their devices could do.  It was most apparent on iPhones but has continued unabated with iPads.  The subject would come up when interviewing clients on potential tax deductions for the year.  Even in tax season with its short appointment time’s clients simply HAD to show me their favorite cool app. 

The book editor/author that loved the app that recognized font names when you held the phone up to any typeface, or the recording studio owner who loved the app that could identify a recording (artist, song title, record label, etc) when the phone was put up to the speaker.  The studio owner made me pick the most obscure CD I had in the office so he could demonstrate (and, of course in both instances you were able to purchase said font or recording right from your phone).  I would joke when I interviewed clients that told me they had purchased an iPhone or iPad how folks HAD to show me something that the device could do in an attempt to circumvent the coming demonstration, but it was always to no avail.  The compulsion to show and demonstrate something the device was capable of was just too powerful! 

I can’t think of any other product made by any company that fosters such a compulsion, or a piece of technology that people feel so connected to and love (we PC/Windows users have always had a clear love/hate relationship with our technology, love it when it is working well, hate it when it isn’t - which happened regularly in the pre-Window’s 7 environment).  There are products I like that if you ASK me about them I will tell you what I like, but a product that I HAVE to tell you about and demonstrate whether you ask or not, that is the result of genius.  RIP Steve Jobs   

Tax Policy and the American Economy 2011

Nearly half of all American households, or 48.5% of the population, is receiving some type of government benefit, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report.  The figure reflects the amounts of assistance U.S. families were receiving last year, and it's the highest percentage ever. 

This is coupled with another alarming statistic (which I have written about often):  The Tax Policy Center (an independent organization that monitors tax policy) has reported that 46.4% of households will pay no federal income tax this year.

Still, most of those households will be liable for payroll taxes; just 18.1% of households pay neither payroll nor federal income taxes, the Tax Policy Center said, as they comprise the nation's most needy and poorest households.

So there you have it in 2011, almost half of American citizens receive some form of government benefit and almost half pay no income taxes, most assuredly many of the same individuals populate both groups. 

This is not a conservative or liberal issue; this is a question about free and effective democracy.  You cannot have a properly functioning and engaged citizenry when this is the economic reality for almost half of the country.   

Will Rogers on politics and politicians

·       The Democrats and the Republicans are equally corrupt where money is concerned. It's only in the amount where the Republicans excel.

·       Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

·       Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke, when it used to be vice versa.

·       A Republican moves slowly. They are what we call conservatives. A conservative is a man who has plenty of money and doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't always have plenty of money. A Democrat is a fellow who never had any, but doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't have some.

·       America has the best politicians money can buy. (my personal favorite!)

·       Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
- Mark Twain in an Op-Ep in the New York Sunday Mercury 4/21/1867

Down in New Orleans where everything’s fine….

Thus sang Stick McGhee in the famous “Wine Spodee-O-Dee” back in the late 40’s.  As the 10^th anniversary of the Ponderosa Stomp comes to a close everything is indeed fine, but there was no wine (at least for this guy!).  The elusive qualities of “the Stomp” that make it simply one of the most special and unique musical events in the world also demands a serious commitment, the Stomp is not for the faint of heart.  Over the course of the 2 nights you are unlikely to get more then 6 to 8 hours of sleep, that is, if you plan on attending the 2 consecutive nights of 8+ hour shows that include conferences in the daytime starting @ 11 in the morning!  That is why I say “drinkin’ wine Spodee-O-Dee” is probably not a good idea for serious Stomp attendees.

The Ponderosa Stomp (named after a tune by the swamp blues harp master Lazy Lester) springs from the strange and wonderful mind of our fearless leader Ira “Dr Ike” Padnos who after 10 years NEVER fails to surprise and delight his audience.  It is a truism that once you come to 1 Stomp you never want to miss another one.  That is the reason you see the same faces year after year coming from all over the world.  Beyond the innovative bookings, if there is a secret to the Ponderosa Stomp it is in its bands.  The DNA of the Stomp might be found in what has become its 4 key bands, Lil Buck and the Top Cats, led by Paul “Lil’Buck” Sinegal, Deke Dickerson & the Eccophonics, The Bo-Keys, and Michael Hurtt and his Haunted Hearts.  These 4 amazing groups bring a level of skill, heart and soul to the proceedings that succeed virtually 100% of the time in making these older and often fragile (to coin a term Deke Dickerson used with me last night) sound great.  If the Stomp has a secret, at least one that exists outside the weird and wonderful mind of Dr Ike, that may be it.

Ponderosa Stomp nights typically have a theme if you will, as each night tends to be “anchored” by a particular musical style and/or performer.  For the special 10^th anniversary, Friday night featured and artist the Dr Ike has been trying to get for years, Allen Toussaint.   Toussaint has visited the stomp in the past and on one amazing occasion appeared on stage with the late Wardell Quezerque and Dave Bartholomew.  Fans of New Orleans R&B were stunned to see all 3 of its most revered arrangers & composers on stage at the same time. 

For his first official Stomp appearance Allen brought his great working band but thankfully left behind the “show band” aspects of his usual appearances (I have written about this in an earlier blog) and came to do some serious playing.  As is typical with the Stomp, Dr Ike got Toussaint to do a couple of his old “Wild Tousan” tunes: “Whirlaway” and “Java” that he rarely performs.  Toussaint then backed up the delightful Clarence “Frogman” Henry in a rollicking (I Don’t Know Why I Love You) “But I Do” and “Ain’t got no Home,” Robert Parker in a smokin’ version of his hit “Barefootin’,” and ended with a medley of his own compositions including a robust singalong from the audience on Ernie K-Doe’s massive hit “A Certain Girl” (which as produced and written by Toussaint).  All this was part of a tribute to the ailing Cosimo Mattasa the engineer and owner of the famed New Orleans recording studio J&M that was such an integral part of recording in New Orleans. 

Other highlights of the first night was an incredible set of delta blues from Bobby Rush and a tribute to the great Louisiana record label “Excello” with wonderful performances by Classie Ballou, Carol Fran and Lazy Lester full of trademark swamp pop, blues and gulf-coast soul.

Saturday night’s main event was a Stax Records tribute with The Bo-Keys Memphis soul band backing what are the 3 greatest male soul singers alive; William Bell, Eddie Floyd and Otis Clay.   We were extraordinarily blessed to attend the Saturday afternoon rehearsal watching these great singers interacting with Scott Bomar’s all-star Memphis soul band The Bo-Keys as they worked out a set that included such soul classics as “Raise your Hand” and “Knock on Wood” by Eddie Floyd, “Trying to Live my Life Without You” and “Got to Get Back” by Otis Clay (“Got to Get Back” is the title track from the fabulous new record by The Bo-Keys) , William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “I Forgot to be Your Lover” and songwriter Sir Mack Rice doing his classic “Mustang Sally.”  The Bo-Keys are a mix of Memphis veterans such as guitarist Charles “Skip” Pitts, drummer Harold Grimes, keyboard player Archie “Hubby” Turner, and trumpeter Ben Cauley as well as younger players such as band leader and bassist Scott Bomar.  This band lays down a wicked and ferocious Memphis groove that literally blew the roof of the club.  Their 2+ hour set (that started after midnight!) had no highpoints or lowpoints but was one continuous blast furnace of deep Memphis soul and serious testifying by these master singers who command the stage with stunning authority, energy and grace.  I have no doubt that any modern configuration of band or singers that could have conjured up such an authentic and powerful Memphis soul stew.

Other highlights of the night was stomping set of early Chicago blues with Billy Boy Arnold, a rip-roaring session with 80+ year old sax honker Big Jay McNeely (who a fellow Stomp attendee said was “moving slow, but blowing hard”) and a short high energy set by Louisiana rockabilly master Joe Clay all backed with typical genius by Deke Dickerson.   

So there you have it, the rich fabric of American roots music presented by the original practitioners, the “real deal,” performed in a loving environment with taste, skill, soul, sensitivity and love.  Every year I leave New Orleans with one simple thought, God Bless “Dr Ike” and the Ponderosa Stomp.

Porgy and Bess

In 1976 I saw the magnificent production by the Houston Grand Opera Company of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess (libretto by Ira and DuBose Heyward).  I remember sitting in the theatre for almost 15 minutes weeping uncontrollably I was so overcome with the sadness and emotion of the ending and the song “I’m on my Way.”   This story of the crippled African American man and his love of the fast living, drug addict Bess has always been, since that time, the most moving performance of anything I have ever witnessed.

This past month we were truly blessed to see a semi-performed Porgy and Bess at Tanglewood and the brilliant new production at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.  The Tanglewood performance with the BSO and chorus was sort of half acted out on a concert stage, no costumes or sets.  I suspect to the singers it just made sense to acknowledge the actions taking place rather than just standing there.  This performance was engaging and well sung (of course!) but the chorus was way too large and tended to overwhelm the singers, but this was a very satisfying production.  While the Tanglewood production was a full “operatic” creation the ART has taken a different approach
(with the blessing of the Gershwin Estate) moving Porgy and Bess back to being more of a musical and a little less of an Opera.

Director Diane Paulus, musical adaptor Deidra Murray and playwright Susan-Lori Parks have essentially re-imagined the play, adding bits of dialogue to make the story flow better and make more sense.  They have with great intelligence and respect for the music tried to look at the characters as actual people and create and underpinning of motivation and character development that does not make the story “better” but fleshes it out a bit more (now you have to keep in mind that we (THANKFULLY) saw the production late in the run when the travesty of the much discussed “happy ending” had been removed).

In the ART production Bess (played by the magnificent Audra McDonald) is a battered woman in the modern sense. Porgy (Norm Lewis) is not rolling around on a cart (like Eddie Murphy in “Trading Places”) but walking with a cane, Sportin’ Life (wonderfully realized by David Allen Grier) is a not the flashy cartoonish drug dealer with slick moves but a real lowlife playing on folks weaknesses for sex and drugs.  In this production Sportin’ Life does not want Bess for himself but clearly he wants to pimp her in NY.  Philip Boykin is the best Crown I have ever seen, and gets to the real heart of the true malevolence and violent evil of this character (he was booed when he took his curtain call, much to his delight as he curtsied!).

Is the production perfect, no, the none too subtle scar they put on Audra McDonalds’ cheek was a bit much, I thought the orchestrations were at times a little thin in their attempt to move Porgy and Bess from opera to “show,” the set was classic ART minimalist but at the end of the day none of this mattered.  It all worked and, again, they honored the characters, story and the music.  These are some of the most beautiful and moving songs ever written, focusing the story line a little, modernizing the characters and language simple cannot minimize or denigrate the deep emotion of a well sung and passionate performance of “I Loves you Porgy” and that we had here in abundance.    

PBS celebrates free market capitalism!

Recently came across a TV show featuring Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS called “Faces of America.” In the show he researches the ancestry of famous American’s, then meets with them to enlighten them about their family history.  If features such folks as Yo-Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor.  One segment I saw concerned the great Italian chef Mario Batali. Who commented on hearing some of the troubles that his ancestors had gone thru by saying: “I would have gone back to Italy.”  Gates then asked him, would you be here today talking to me if they had gone back to Italy, and he responded “no.”

This was true in many of the histories, families that had endured great hardships, but had survived and prospered within a system that offered no help, just opportunity and reward for intelligence and hard work.  In the case of champion skater Kristi Yamaguchi, her ancestors had been interned during WWII and all their property confiscated!  While this was not stated, most of the stories I heard were profound testaments to classic free market capitalism, not 1 family (that I heard) had benefited from any government programs, entitlements, preferential treatment, quotas, aid or any other form of help.  They came to America for opportunity; their work ethic, ambition and intelligence was the only other ingredient needed to succeed.       

Tax Incentives & “Loopholes,” or how stupid can the tax code get???

No doubt the president will be proposing some business tax breaks on Thursday night, and that got me thinking – do these do any good, will they promote growth or job creation?  My short answer is no.  I say that not because I don’t think there are tax policies that might help businesses by promoting expansion and growth, it is just that few of these recently have been around long enough to take root.  To gain any traction a business tax incentive has to be in effect for (at least) several years, 6 month and 1 year incentives are not around long enough to become inculcated into business planning and yield the desired result.  Most small business owners don’t even become aware of some of these tax deductions before they expire!

Many of these incentives just drain treasury with not one iota of the desired result.  Some of the new business tax credits; employment credits for new employee retained for more than a year, the credit for providing employee health insurance, and the plethora of energy credits are examples of less than effective tax incentives.  Why do I say “less then effective?” – Because they probably do not change any business owner’s behavior, they just provide tax breaks after the fact when firms like ours prepare the companies tax return. 

Conversely let us look at a long standing tax incentive that is well known to many business owners, the section 179 depreciation deduction.  This election to write off a chunk of tangible equipment in a single year has been in the code for many years and has become a staple of small business planning.  Every year I have dozens of conversations with business client that start out with; “should I buy a vehicle/truck/equipment before the end of the year.”  This is an example of a tax incentive that is designed to foster investment in tangible assets and it clearly accomplishes that goal. 

I am not necessarily a fan of “tax incentives” as many are clearly loopholes designed by and for specific interests/entities by corrupt politicians.  Need some examples?: Hedge fund managers that (essentially) get to declare compensation as long term capital gains, corporate deferred compensation and stock option schemes, electric & alternative auto credits, accelerated depreciation on corporate jets and last but not least MOST of the corporate and personal energy credits and deductions (“energy” credits are the reason GE got a tax benefit/refund of $3.2 billion from the IRS, and I am sure they lobbied ferociously for each and every one of them! – see below).

When I Googled “tax loopholes” I got discussions on the mortgage interest & charitable donation deduction, tax free municipal bond interest and long-term capital gains rates, it made me think that for some a tax loophole is anything somebody else gets to take advantage of.  

Let us take the famous case of General Electric (from the NYT 03.24.2011);  

General Electric reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill?  None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the I.R.S. for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former official treasury named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

If there was ever an argument for tax simplification this might be it, when a huge company like GE spends millions in tax planning and lobbying to yield not only 0 taxes but an actual refund of $3.2 million dollars!  If you couple this with the fact that over 50% of American taxpayers pay no income tax or that General Electric’s Chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Immelt is now head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and you know you have an incredibly corrupt and broken system.

Illiminate MOST if not all tax incentives, credits and deductions in favor of lower tax rates, let GE fire its tax attorney staff and lobbyist (maybe they can go to work on rebuilding American infrastructure projects!) and allow the millions of small business owners to concentrate of running their business instead of keeping up with the idiotic, ever changing minutiae of our tax code.

Happy Labor Day 2011!  

Pure Pop for Now People

On April 2nd we were treated to a wonderful “unplugged” show with the Boston based trio Buffalo Tom (featuring Newburyport’s own Tom Maginnis on drums).  Buffalo Tom was opening the new Loft space of the Portsmouth Music Hall.  The band was touring to support this year’s excellent “Skins” disk.  The acoustic setting complimented the voice of singer Bill Janovitz as he did not have to strain as much.  In this quieter setting I missed the powerful roar the band typically displays, but this show allowed me to appreciate the group’s lyrics and wonderful punk/pop melodic sensibilities all the more.  New songs such as “She’s Not Your Thing” and “The Kids Just Sleep” really shined.

Last month we finally caught up with The Smithereens, a band I have been listening to for over 30 years.  They were touring behind their great new record “2011,” their first record of new material in 12 years.  Amazingly, they sounded as fresh an energetic as if they were playing for the first time.  Classics like “Blood and Roses” and “Behind a Wall of Sleep” rocked with great muscle and authority.  The band still has 3 original members, and roared thru their show without a setlist with leader Pat DeNinzio’s calling out the songs as they went along.  The Smithereens have been biding their time recently with odd cover records (Beatles “B-Sides,” Tommy, etc) so the quality of the new CD was a surprise.  I asked Pat after the show why the delay when they obviously had so much good material and he told me that the record company did not want to release it, and only did so after the group agreed to release their “Tommy” cover disc (further evidence, if you needed it, of how fucked up the current record industry is).

On a final note, the new disk by New Jersey Pop-Meisters “Fountains of Wayne” called “Sky Full of Holes” is excellent, power pop at its best! (FOW is another band who has evaded me in concert)  

Sayings Heard Recently

Here are 3 sayings I have come across recently that I liked:

·       From a church letter board in Ossipee, New Hampshire:

“Excuses are the nails which hold the house of failure together”

·       From a client during an Internal Revenue Service audit (referring to a receipt that was being discussed):

You know the old saying: “you can have it good, fast or cheap, pick 2”

·       This from a professor discussing whether New Yorkers would heed the warnings concerning hurricane Irene:

You know the old saying about New Yorkers: “You can always tell a New Yorker, but you can’t tell them much”

Rockpile LIVE 1980

Back in 1980 the “Dean” of American rock critics Robert Christgau named The Clash, Gang of Four and Rockpile as the greatest live bands then playing.  Having seen all 3 of these bands live at least once during 1980 I knew this was true. Sadly there has been scant evidence of the greatness of the British all-star group known as Rockpile, until this week.  Rockpile was Nick Lowe on bass, Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner on guitar and Terry Williams on drums.  With the release of the new “Live at Montreux 1980” this week we now have ample evidence of this groups amazing ability to rock.  I did not realize until listening to this record this week what a powerful and unrelenting rhythm section Nick Lowe and Terry Williams were.  This album contains blistering live versions of so many classics from Dave and Nicks “solo” records: Crawling from the Wreckage, Girls Talk, Swichboard Susan, I knew the Bride (when she used to rock n’ roll), Queen of Hearts and So it Goes.  This is classic rock n’ roll of the highest order and delivered with sledgehammer power.

Amy Winehouse

With the sad death of Ms. Winehouse I would ask her fans to seek out and support some of the real soul survivors and soul sisters who would be thrilled (and deserve) to have some of your CD/download dollars and would love even a small amount of the press bestowed upon Ms. Winehouse. 

For your consideration:  Barbara Lynn, Sharon Jones, Bettye LaVette, La La Brooks, Jean Knight, Tammy Lynn, The Velvalettes, Dorothy Moore, Mavis Staples, Irma Thomas, Barbara Harris and I am sure there are many more I am forgetting about.  Make sure you are supporting the real thing and giving the folks that chose to work and survive the respect, honor and money that are their due!

Following Atticus

We here in Newburyport (our fair city) have been very fortunate to be featured in three wonderful books recently.  The first was Joel Brown’s superb murder mystery “Mirror Ball Man,” next was Andre Dubus’ celebrated “Townie” and next up is Tom Ryan’s “Following Atticus.”  Newburyport residents know Mr. Ryan as the provocative editor of the local political journal “The Undertoad.”  He was reviled by some and loved by many for his intrepid news reporting and his courageous stands against authority and power.  Mr. Ryan and “The Undertoad” were by turns smart, petulant, insightful, caustic, sentimental, enormously funny and ALWAYS worth reading.  In the days of “The Undertoad” you truly could not be considered “in the know” about Newburyport if you had not devoured the latest issue. 

Those of us who got to know Tom Ryan knew he was a fine writer, great storyteller and immensely witty.  Much like our local son’s Joel and Andre, Tom simply knows how to write.  In what I trust will be the first of many books, on September 20 “Following Atticus” will be published.  Newburyporter’s will certainly delight in his characterizations of our fair city and his observations of some of its inhabitants, both named and un-named. 

“Following Atticus” is best described as a memoir that really reads like a novel.  As I got further into the book I would often forget that I knew Tom and much of the story and find myself just enjoying the craft, wit and heart of his storytelling.  The core of the book is Tom’s relationship with his amazing little dog Atticus and their adventures hiking in the White Mountains, but the story begins to unfold as family elements come into play and you soon realize that what you are really reading is a tale of redemption and discovery.  About a third of the way thru the book my wife asked me how I liked it and I told her with great authority that; “I didn’t care what Tom said, this is a dog book.”  Of course about 50 pages later as the book deepened and opened up I had to eat my words; this was certainly not a “dog book” or a “hiking book” but a great story.  In the way Moby Dick is not a “whale book”
Tom had succeeded in using his hiking quest and his friendship with this little dog to tell a much grander story about love, survival, fear, change, dysfunctional families, and of course small New England cities.  Like all great writers he uses the colors of his simple story to paint a much grander canvas about life itself and he does it with a quiet skill and artfulness of a fine writer.  So it will not matter if you love dogs, or care anything about hiking or the White Mountains, or live in a small New England city this book will draw you in with its heartfelt tale of love, survival and triumph.           

Just say HELL NO, after all “Deficits Don’t Matter”!

WOW, remember the halcyon days just a few short years ago when the Republican controlled Congress easily passed 8 increases to America’s debt ceiling with little or no debate and back when the great sage Dick Cheney told Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in 2002 that “deficits don’t matter” – ahhhh, those golden days of our youth!  There are so many glorious high points; back in 2003 Congress raised the debt ceiling “by almost 1 trillion dollars to cover the second round of Bush tax cuts approved by Congress, at $350 billion.  And to cover the President’s Medicare prescription drug bill, projected at $400 billion (but at an actual cost greater then $600 billion).  Bush signed it into law without the revenue to fund it” (from The Washington Spectator from July 15, 2011).  In a mind boggling dereliction of duty, the day the $350 billion tax cut was passed was the same day as the debt ceiling increase, clearly the new “hell no” Republican Party was not in session that day. 

I know what you are thinking, back in those splendid days a Republican was president, but in fact there was a young senator who spoke up deploring the raising of the debt ceiling:  “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” the senator thundered. “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. . . . Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.”  Of course the young Senator was Barak Obama in an earlier incarnation, before he morphed in to George W. V2 and brought us our current 3^rd term of the Bush administration complete with continued idiotic wars, insane tax policy, corporate welfare, more unfunded mandates and entitlements, same war on terrorism and rising deficits.   

So the question is; are the gates of hell going to open up and swallow us if we do not increase the debt ceiling by 8/2, probably not but the results could be very damaging.   It is important to remember that increasing the debt ceiling has nothing really to do with spending levels.  Increasing the debt ceiling is simply coming up with the money to pay the bills that are coming thru the door, bills that Congress itself approved.  One of the very real dangers in any sort of default no matter how minor is its effect on the interest rate we have to pay to borrow money.  As Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration wrote in the Washington Post today:  “J.P. Morgan recently surveyed its clients and asked how much rates would rise if there was a delay in (debt) payments, even a very brief one. Domestic investors thought they would go up by 0.37 percentage points, but foreign buyers — who own close to half the publicly held debt — predicted an increase of more than half a percentage point. Any increase in this range would raise Treasury’s borrowing costs by tens of billions of dollars per year.”

So at the end of the day this is not the stupid game of chicken that the tea party morons seem to think it is.  It is also not about taking a stand on debt, as this is money to pay the credit card bill for the stuff we already charged.  This August 2^nd “deadline” is an important line in the sand, do our elected officials have the intellect and guts to start down that road to more fiscal sanity.   The American people are simply asking our elected officials to do what millions of Americans have been doing (and struggling with) over the past 2 years; control spending, lower debt and live within our means.

Justice Scalia plays a Grimm game of Mortal Kombat

Part of Justice Scalia’s assenting decision in last week’s Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association (the case concerned whether California could regulate the selling of violent video games to minors) was much quoted:

California's argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children's access to depictions of violence, but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm's Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just deserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers "till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy." . . . Cinderella's evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven.

High-school reading lists are full of similar fare. Homer's Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops by grinding out his eye with a heated stake. . . . ("Even so did we seize the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows all about, as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame"). In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they be skewered by devils above the surface. . . . And Golding's Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other children while marooned on an island.

To the right this decision is another triumphant win for the 1^st amendment and free speech (I wonder if the right is going to end up regretting equating free speech with corporate profits), for the left it is another in a line of successes by big business in the Roberts court (about 20% of the sales of violent video games are to players under the age of 17).    

What struck me about Scalia’s argument was how vacuous it was.  Grimm’s fairy tales, stories that inhabit a moral universe, are being compared with games such as Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto which inhabits an amoral and nihilistic universe where violence is both random and extreme; intellectually, artistically and morally there is almost no reasonable basis for this comparison.  Secondly children were READ Grimm’s fairy tales not being asked to PARTICIPATE in them!  If the Grimm brothers had created a modern video game of Hansel and Gretel the players would have to devise the most violent and graphic death of their captors, and believe me it would not be as prosaic as being baked in an oven!  In Scalia’s argument all violence is equal and is not measured by its function in a story but just its severity, how else could anyone make a moral equivalence of Homer’s Odyssey and Mortal Kombat as Scalia essentially does?        

If the primary issue is that our society has not set up proper safeguards on ultra-violent imagery being delivered to minors as we have for pornographic content then so be it, Justice Scalia, spare us this insipid argument.

Cars 2, Audience 0

It is with great sadness that I write that heretofore the least film in the Pixar universe, Cars, has now been supplanted by a new and decidedly more marginal film “Cars 2.”  From Blue Sky or Dreamworks Animation studio’s Cars 2 would have seemed OK, but from John Lasseter and Pixar it becomes a major disappointment.  The film is to long with a spy plot that is too complicated for most kids, and it was certainly a questionable decision to make Tow Mater the main character. 

In the middle of the film my six year old spend 5 minutes searching for a piece of candy she thought she had dropped on the floor, and while she is a very experienced movie watcher I am quite sure she had no idea what was the hell was going on.  As soon as the end credits started running she looked at me and said, “Can we go now?” – not a good sign.  Of course the movie looks great, with stunning racing visuals but it is strangely heartless.  It is almost devoid of the tremendous feeling and soulfulness that Pixar seems to be able to conjure up with ease.  It was also lacking their laser like focus on story and character.  You have nothing in Cars 2 that even approaches the poignant depth of the furnace scene near the end of “Toy Story 3”, or the elegant space ballet between Wall-E and Eve in “Wall-E”, or that amazing voice over from Peter O’Toole that serves as the story climax in “Ratatouille.”  Moreover Cars 2 is built around the friendship between Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater but it never rings as true as the one between Sully and Mike in “Monsters Inc.”

While most of us assume that Lasseter is the mastermind at Pixar one wonders if he should have brought in some of the other geniuses at Pixar for help with Cars 2 such as Andrew Stanton or Brad Bird.  In any case Cars 2 is not bad; it is gorgeous and entertaining enough but just don’t expect the sheer greatness and emotional depth we have come to expect from Pixar Studios. 

  

Stuck in Downey with the Texas blues again – Jimmie Vaughn and Dave Alvin LIVE

Had the great good fortune to see two of America’s great roots artists in the last week.  First up was the great Jimmie Vaughn at Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry, NH.  The first saw Vaughn when he began his post Fabulous Thunderbird’s solo career he seemed a fish out of water onstage, unsure of himself in the front man role.  I am happy to report those days are gone, Vaughn was amiable and comfortable fronting his fabulous band.  While his voice is not great, it is solid and serviceable and he does a brilliant job of choosing material that compliments it.  We were also thrilled when he brought out Texas roadhouse songbird Lou Ann Barton to sing about half way thru the set.  Barton and Vaught complement each other perfectly. 

Vaughn’s band including sax players Greg Piccolo and Doug James, (from Duke Robillard’s original Roomful of Blues) who have played together for so long they literally sound like 1 horn then they riff!  Then, of course, is the guitar playing – Vaughn is true blues master with tone and taste to spare.  I have been a fan of Vaughn’s straight up Texas blues guitar since the first Fabulous Thunderbirds LP “Girls go Wild” back in 1979.  He is an elegant and tasteful player that never plays a superfluous note and his biting Fender tone is to die for.  I noticed even on fast tunes he never plays fast, just maintains his perfect lean and soulful style.  Vaughn featured a lot of tunes from his fine current CD, “Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites” and his upcoming CD called “More Blues, Ballads and Favorites.”

Next up was one of Americana’s great songwriters and performers Dave Alvin @ Johnny D’s in Somerville.  Dave and his brother Phil roared out of Downey California with “The Blasters” back in 1979 (same year as the first Fabulous Thunderbird’s LP!).  With New Orleans great Lee Allen on tenor sax and Gene Taylor on piano they were, for me, the greatest roots rock band that I ever heard.  Dave was the driving guitar player and main songwriter and Phil was the lead singer.  In his post Blaster’s career Dave has played with X and various other bands prior to beginning his formal solo career in 1987. 

At Johnny D’s Dave and his quartet featured mostly songs from his new CD “Eleven Eleven” (being his 11^th album, released in 2011).  The set was, was like all Alvin’s shows a wonderful mix of beautiful working class poetry and ragged but right rock and roll.  Highlights from the superb new CD were “Harlan County Line” and “Johnny Ace is Dead,” but there were great older tunes as well, the elegiac “Abilene” and rip roaring “Marie, Marie” and a menacing and deadly “Out of Control.”      

The Big Man, Master of the Universe, King of the World, able to leap tall women in a single bound!

It is with profound sadness that we learn of the death of Clarence Clemons from the E Street Band.  If  you were lucky enough to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band back in the 1970’s as I was you know that the relationship between Bruce and Clarence went way beyond anything musical and into the realm of the mythic.  Clarence was Bruce’s onstage foil and way beyond a “sidekick” as he has sometimes been characterized.  In thinking about the many wonderful moments I witnessed, the long kiss on the lips, the onstage slide into Clarence’s outstretched arm my favorite was at a show in Saratoga, NY on the “River” tour when Bruce and Clarence did a vignette during the song “Sherry Darling” where Clarence played the psychiatrist counseling Bruce while he declares his profound dislike of his girlfriends mother.   They performed it with Bruce laying on the stage with his head in Clarence’s lap and him this a clipboard in his hand studiously taking notes while Bruce ranted on.  If coarse Clarence loomed large in so many Springsteen onstage stories over the years (thanks to the wonderful folks at www.backsteets.com for this memory): 
 

This was in addition to Clarence's active participation, or at least invocation, in the gamut of stories Bruce told onstage. It was Clarence who walked through the woods with Bruce to find the gypsy woman, or it was Clarence that gave him the directions to find God to ask him whether he should be a writer or a lawyer. It was Clarence with whom Bruce drove through the wind and the snow and the tornado, the car falling apart, until the radio broke. It was Clarence in the forest when they were visited by Little Melvin and the Invaders in the spaceship. Clarence was there when Bruce and Steve sat on the porch trying to get up their nerve to talk to Pretty Flamingo, and it was Clarence on the park bench showing off the pictures of his son.

The onstage relationship between Bruce and Clarence faded over the years as Springsteen grew older, the elaborate stories and vignettes grew rarer.  My good friend Dave Little got it right the other night when I stated that it was a kind of father/son, big brother/little brother relationship and he corrected me (as he often does!).  He said that Clarence was the onstage anchor to his younger, wilder band leader.  Clarence was the steady presence, grounding the band against this young, unpredictable, out of control force of nature, and as such Clarence in the early days was in an odd way the center of the band.  As Bruce grew older this paradigm necessarily changed and thus the onstage relationship changed but was always essential. 

Of course there is no denying that there was an (unstated) racial element to their partnership.  Entering the public consciousness in the 1970’s there was no mistaking that a statement was being made on the iconic cover of “Born to Run.”  Thankfully their public persona was far too rich and deep to ever become bogged down racial politics; after all they were having too much fun!     

And then, of course, is the music – solos that are so truly iconic that it is hard to find a parallel in rock n’ roll, certainly not one that traverses 40 years; "Rosalita," "Backstreets," "Born to Run," "Jungleland," "Badlands," "The Ties that Bind," "Out in the Streets" and right up to "Girls in their Summer Clothes."  Solos that were by design the emotional center and focus of the songs, especially on the concert stage.  Clarence’s saxophone was the key element that tied Springsteen’s rock n' roll songs to their underpinning of the great soul and Rhythm and Blues that Bruce loved.  Springsteen’s music is inexorably changed without the presence and sound of Clarence Clemons’s saxophone.  So ultimately, even though Springsteen is indeed “the Boss” this was a wonderful partnership between these 2 men.  Clarence wrote in his delightful autobiography “Big Man” that “without scooter, there is no big man,” I would also say there without the big man there might have been no scooter (as we know him).  The very fabric and tone of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is altered inexorably in the absence of Clarence Clemons.  

Rest in peace and God bless Clarence Clemons - the best remembrance and obit is found on www.backstreets.com   

Tax reform and how to win the lottery when you file your 1040

At least once every tax season I have a client who is dumbfounded that their federal tax refund is bigger than the amount of income taxes they had withheld, and they invariably say “you mean the Internal Revenue Service will send back more than I paid in, that doesn’t make any sense!”  
Indeed, but in fact (according to a recent nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation report on 2009 Federal tax filings) about 30% of American taxpayers do, in fact, get back all and more of what they paid in for federal income tax.  This happens via something called “refundable tax credits,” credits that directly lower federal income taxes but are then refundable if the credit exceeds the taxpayer’s liability.  In the tax world these refundable credits are often called tax expenditures, i.e. the I.R.S. sends out a refund in excess of the money the taxpayer has actually paid in.  The growth of these refundable credits has produced this 30% of the population that gets back more than they paid in, as well as to the equally shocking 51% of Americans that pay no federal income taxes (according to the same Joint Committee  report).  These refundable credits include the much abused earned income tax credit, adoption credit, American Opportunities education credit and the new home buyer’s credit.  These credits essentially turn the Internal Revenue Service into a quasi-welfare agency for approximately 30% of American taxpayers.

So what is tax reform going to look like?  I suspect it will be modeled on the huge 1986 tax reform bill, and that can best be visualized in this way; if the tax code is a rubber ball, the reform will essentially squash the ball.  It will lower all marginal rates in exchange for eliminating special tax breaks and credits and it will broaden (flatten) the tax base.  Regardless of what one thinks about “tax breaks for the wealthy” no democracy is going to function properly if 51% of its citizens do not pay taxes and 30% see filing their taxes as akin to playing the lottery.  We certainly have poor people in this county that should not be paying taxes, but I have a hard time believing that group is 51% of US tax filers.  I also find it hard to believe that 30% of the American public needs to be collecting what amounts to welfare payments thru their tax filings (a process loaded with opportunities to manipulate income). 

While I am no fan of the Internal Revenue Service part of tax reform should be returning the Service to its proper function; the administration and collection of taxes.  It should not be a welfare agency and it should also not become the traffic cop for the national health reform (a subject for another day).  The I.R.S. should never be sending out checks in excess of what it has collected and most important more Americans have to become tax paying citizens.  I think before we even have the discussion on proper tax rates for “the rich” we desperately need to get more American’s with “skin in the game.”  A capitalist democracy demands and needs a citizenry that sees and understands the relationship between money paid in for taxes and goods and services received from the government.           

Brain-dead Liberalism 101

Highly recommended (and now widely read) is David Mamet’s Village Voice piece “Why I am no longer a “Brain-Dead” Liberal.”  This much reviled piece (by the liberal establishment) written back in March of 2008 is a must read, thoughtful and wholly non-partisan (at least as far as our current pathetic 2 party political system is concerned).  He takes a run at the world view of liberalism and conservatism thru a theatrical lens of his (then current) play “November”;

“The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.”

The article reminded me how daunting it is to challenge your own assumptions, especially in these days of instant 24 hour digital news.  It has become all too easy to make sure that your assumptions are never challenged by any alternative views, liberal or conservative.  The Fox News audience makes sure it is fed on a steady diet of “conservative” thinking as the CNBC viewers do the same with it brand of “liberal” swill.

The other issue that Mamet brought to my mind is how ingrained liberal thinking is to those of us “Born in the 50’s” (to quote the song by The Police).  Mamet made me remember a very fine literature teacher I had sitting with me one day “proving” that liberal thought and worldview was inherently more “moral and ethical” then the conservative view.  Thus these ideas become intellectual assumptions that are tough to overcome. 

While we are on the subject of “brain-dead” liberalism was Janeane Garofalo on Bill Mayer’s HBO show the other night who stated that among other things that she did not understand why Representative Anthony Weiner was “being thrown under the bus” as he had not “broken any laws” (this remains to be seen) and that his actions had not “impacted anyone’s life negatively.”  I was struck by this incredibly shallow and vapid ethical view.   This arrogant, lying, unfaithful little worm is only to be judged unfit for a leadership position in the country if he has “broken the law” or “impacted anyone’s life negatively.”  God help us if this is how otherwise intelligent (Ms. Garofalo has always struck me as bright and engaged) Citizens understand ethical leadership in this country.