Uniform Hieroglyphic

Wisconsin Workers: The Last Line of Defense for American Labor

American labor has been taking on the chin for 30 years.

Broad economic changes--from globalization and outsourcing, to technological changes in manufacturing, shipping, delivery--have forced both public and private unions into a generation of givebacks which not only have worsened financial conditions of members but also have undermined union strength. Sometimes is has seemed that the only job of union leaders has been to negotiate the size of layoffs and pay and benefits cuts for member every few years.

It started of course with the union-busting Ronald Regan's wholesale firing of the nation's air traffic controllers in 1981 because the had gone on strike. It was a moment that changed labor relations in America forever--making replacing striking workers no longer anathema but standard operating practice and neutering the strike, organize labor's most powerful weapon, as leverage.

From that day to this, it has been one roll back after another for union workers. The ensuing years have led to shrinking wages, shrinking workforces, and shrinking pensions for blue collar union workers--who once could count on working class jobs that paid enough and provided enough stability to allow them to buy a home,  to pay for the next generation to become college educated and to retire, opening up jobs for new workers.

But lo these 30 years, as union power has waned under an organized, post-Regan assault, blue collar non-service jobs have disappeared from these shores, and the American dream of class mobility has eroded, it has been the enduring and passionately-cherished dream of conservatives generally and the Republican party in particular to eliminate unions in the United States altogether.

And the battle raging in Wisconsin between Republican lawmakers and state workers may be a decisive one in determining whether or not conservatives achieve their dream.

Make no mistake about it, destroying the ability of the state's public workers to unionize and negotiate from the position of strength in numbers--and by extension beginning the process of dismantling public workers unions across the country--is the dark heart of the proposed law that has driven thousands of workers into the streets and led Democratic lawmakers to flee the state to prevent the state's senate from achieving a quorum.

Need proof? Listen to this interview from last night's Hardball broadcast that Chris Matthews conducted with Wisconsin State Sen. Glenn Grothman:

MATTHEWS: Would you like to get rid of the public employee unions altogether, just get rid of them?

GROTHMAN :...Personally I would yes.

MATTHEWS: So you don't believe in collective bargaining for public employees period?

GROTHMAN: No I don't think public employees need collective bargaining, that's correct.

Here is the crux of the issue that his driven state workers into the streets and Democratic lawmakers across state lines. It's not the givebacks proposed in the bill--an increase in the amount of money workers contribute to their pension fund and health care coverage--which Democratic lawmakers say they are open to negotiating. It is the sweeping language that will strip state workers of the power to collectively bargain on any issue but wages--not work rules, not workplace safety, not pensions, that have people up in arms.

Stripping unions of the power to negotiate on behalf of members has nothing to do with closing Wisconsin's budget gap, but everything to do with wiping out the power of unions, and it serves only two interests--anti-union politicians who suffer at the hands of organized groups of voters who oppose them; and corporate interests who--as they did following Reagan's firing of the Patco workers--will use the political cover of the public measure to work to achieve the same kind of spaying of union power in the private sector.

The images of 15,000 workers in the streets, many occupying the Wisconsin state house, warms my heart. But it should also give lie to the grand, ludicrous fantasy of conservative populism--that the GOP is for the little guy and is doing what is can and should to give working stiffs a chance to better their economic circumstances.

It should go without saying that unionization and collective bargaining have done more to improve working conditions, salaries, job security, and the standard of living for working Americans than 30 years of upper income tax cuts, capital gains tax cuts, government spending cuts, and corporate deregulation--all those cherished measures that conservatives continually claim, falsely, are designed to improve economic conditions for average Americans.

It should go without saying, but in fact it needs to be said because too many Americans--including many whose own economic interests are much more closely aligned with those of the Wisconsin state workers than with those who do benefit from Republican economic policies--fall for the fraudulent rhetoric of GOP leaders like House Speaker John Boehner who had this to say about the situation in Wisconsin:

Republicans in Congress - and reform-minded GOP governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich  and Chris Christie - are daring to speak the truth about the dire fiscal challenges Americans face at all levels of government, and daring to commit themselves to solutions that will liberate our economy and help put our citizens on a path to prosperity.

Stripping unions of their right to bargain will do exactly the opposite of putting our citizen on a path to prosperity, it will hasten the continuing erosion of decent paying working class jobs, decrease workplace safety, and expand the widening gap between rich asset owners in America and the working poor and middle classes. Don't believe the hype.

Birthers Now GOP Majority, Truth Optional

Americans are living in a new dark ages in which science bends before faith, in which fanatical delusions are discussed as if they were rational ideas, in which the very facts before our faces are perpetually under assault.

From Glenn Beck's surreal and paranoiac theory of a cabal of atheistic communists conspiring with fanatical Islamists in the Middle East, to the routine assaults on peer reviewed science by groups of organized skeptics--doubters on global warming, on autism and childhood vaccines, to the ideological, Soviet-style rewriting of history textbooks by panels of bureaucrats in states like Texas; we now live in a culture where there's no shared truth left to bind us.

How we got to this point will be a matter for sociologists and historians to puzzle out in decades to come. Living in the middle of our descent into madness it's hard for us to have the necessary perspective.

Did the steady erosion of faith in government's honesty, beginning with the revelations of The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, play a role? The flagging quality of public education that has left us with a nation in which one quarter of us don't know who we fought the Revolutionary War against certainly must shoulder a portion of the blame. So too the twisted cult of "balance" in journalism, requiring, as it does, that reporters treat every bit of information as if it were opinion, placing one attributed "fact" next to an equal and opposite one regardless of the independently verifiable truth or falsity of the attributed information.

Conservatives would argue that the growth of widespread relativism in society at large, which proceeds from the notion that there's more than one truth, is to blame for our inability to discern truth from falsity. Maybe. But widespread faith in the truth as arbitrated by a single authority that demands fealty--a church, a government, a political movement--while inspiring unanimity of mind, rarely leads adherents closer to facts, those nettlesome empirical things that we now routinely contest. Maybe it's the sheer cognitive dissonance of living with all these competing notions that has driven us off the deep end.

Nevertheless here we find ourselves, in a pernicious and fundamental contest for reality itself. The latest evidence of the malleability of truth in American life comes from Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling who reports on a new poll finding that 51% of likely Republican presidential primary voters believe the President Obama was not born in the United States. Jensen writes:

Birthers make a majority among those voters who say they're likely to participate in a Republican primary next year. 51% say they don't think Barack Obama was born in the United States to just 28% who firmly believe that he was and 21% who are unsure. The GOP birther majority is a new development. The last time PPP tested this question nationally, in August of 2009, only 44% of Republicans said they thought Obama was born outside the country while 36% said that he definitely was born in the United States. If anything birtherism is on the rise.

Or as PPP commentor Marvin Marks : "This means that only 28% of GOP primary voters are sane."

Writes Steve Benen at Washington Monthly: "In other words, the Republican fringe is no longer the fringe."

In the spirit of trying, for as long as possible, to cling to our shared sanity, I present a link to Jonathan Strong's recap of those facts that we do know about President Obama's birth . Why the President will not release the long form birth certificate does remain an open question and one can only suspectit is because the document possesses some embarrassing personal detail. But the State of Hawaii's Certification of Live Birth and contemporaneous birth announcements leave no supportable doubt about the location of the president's birth.

Nevertheless nearly three quarters of prime Republican voters cling to an unsupported truth of their own.

There are those, like Dave Weigel of Slate who see the poll results as a mere political proxy in highly partisan times :

Does that mean that 72 percent of Republicans think Obama should be disqualified from the presidency? No. It suggests that birtherism has become another screen for extreme partisanship.

But I agree with Steve M at No More Mr. Nice Blog :

I don't see any reason why we shouldn't believe the vast majority of birthers mean exactly what they're saying and absolutely believe that Obama has become president through deliberate deceit.

You have to remember that these people feel they're at war with Obama, Democrats, liberalism, socialism, and so on (up to and including a Kenyan anti-colonialist Piven/Cloward-meets-sharia vast conspiracy).

Believers are unconvinceable. Reason holds no sway in the kingdom of faith. So is there any hope left for America?

In the 1330s, when first advancing the notion of the Dark Ages, Petrach wrote:

My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in the former pure radiance.

You see even he was a believer. I'm not quite so sanguine.

Murdering Abortion Providers Could Become Legal in South Dakota

In a grotesque and barbaric escalation of the culture war declared in the 1990s by the American political right, the House of Representatives in South Dakota--which is already considering a bill to require household gun ownership in that state--is considering a measure that will make it legal to kill an abortion provider.

To be sure the measure--in the form of two amendments to the state's definition of justifiable homicide-- construed narrowly, wouldn't permit the kind of murder and political terror that has led to the assassination of eight doctors in America since 1993. Reading the language of the statute it's hard to imagine it sheltering a third party killer of a doctor. But it would provide an air tight defense for, say, the husband of a woman about to undergo an abortion who walks into a clinic and guns down the medical professionals attempting the provide the procedure.

"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers," Vicki Saporta, the president of the National Abortion Federation, the professional association of abortion providers, told Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones.

The measure was supported according to Sheppard by "a parade of right-wing groups—the Family Heritage Alliance, Concerned Women for America, the South Dakota branch of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, and a political action committee called Family Matters in South Dakota..." who testified in favor of measure before a South Dakota House Committee earlier this month.

In one way it can be seen as part of the creeping effort by conservative activists to extend the full legal rights and protections of people to fetuses. In another way it can be seen as a bold expansion of the use of state power to coddle those who commit violence in the name of ideology.

It's easy to dismiss the practical effects of the measure were it to be signed into law. For one thing, the only abortion provider in South Dakota is one flown in weekly by Planned Parenthood according to Firedoglake. For another thing, the measure is might well be unconstitutional given the federal constitutional protection that abortion rights possess.

But the very fact of the legislative effort to move the measure forward--and it passed the state's House Judiciary committee by a 9-3 party line vote--indicated a profound change in the tactics of culture warriors from legislating prohibitions or controlling government spending as a means of advancing their social agenda to providing a legal shield for homicidal, moral vigilantism.

The very notion of a culture war should be anathema to a free society. Going back to Bismark's Kulturkampf targeting German Catholics in which Catholic clerics were jailed, efforts by governments to declare war on moral or ideological opponents have been hallmarks of authoritarian regimes.

In the climate of political violence and intimidation that has marked American conservatism during the Obama administration, the South Dakota measure, while exceptional, is, unfortunately, not entirely shocking.

Sunday Go to Meeting: Alex Bradford Singers, Too Close to Heaven (Specialty, 1954)

If you can find a reference to Alex Bradford at all in the history books of secular music, it will probably be to the high soprano scream he would swoop up to from his normally gruff baritone--that aquiline screech of a bird of prey, or, in Bradford's case, a bird of "pray" is famously referred to in such texts as a model for Little Richard's well-known whoop.

No doubt it was. It was a trademark for Bradford around Chicago and on the gospel highway in the late 1940s and early 1950s. "...I got up and they'd never heard a man make all those high soprano notes before," Bradford crowed to gospel historical Anthony Heilbut for The Gospel Sound, speaking of his Chicago debut. "Baby, they were carrying folks out bodily."

It's a theatrical gesture--and Bradford as a performer was known for theatricality, bringing synchronized dance steps into gospel, and ending his career not in the church but in the theater, winnng an Obie for his role in Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope and writing and composing Your Arms Too Short To Box With God, a musical retelling of the gospel of Matthew. But that whoop is a small part of the man's legacy (and far from the only falsetto swoop in gospel, though rare as a masculine example). Pianist, choir director, bandleader, and composer, Bradford, who died in 1978, left many a mark on the music.

No doubt his compositions comprise his most lasting legacy. The songs he composed for the Roberta Martin Singers in the early 1950s like the gospel standard "Since I Met Jesus"  made Bradford's reputation among gospel performers.

 

But it was his own recording, in 1954, of his composition "Too Close to Heaven" that made Bradford a star among the gospel record buying public.

Alex Bradford_03_Too Close To Heaven

The recording, made for Specialty with Bradford's Chicago group, is not only one of the greatest gospel records of all time but also an obvious model for the "death-tempo" gospel/blues waltz's, like "Drown in My Tears" that Ray Charles made his calling card. Bradford squeezes a high whoop into the record at about 2:12 seconds, almost like a painter signing a canvas, but it's a gesture that's gratuitously shoe-horned in to an otherwise low down, slow burn number at a creeping tempo.

The whoops fit better in uptempo, church wrecking numbers of the sort Bradford would perform more commonly in the 1960s, when his star as a recording artist had dimmed and he took over as choir director at Newark, NJ's Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church. Here he made the whoops full fledged part of the choir's vocal arrangements. At Abyssinian Baptist Bradford's second greatest legacy was shaped, because as director a generation of Newark singers passed through his hands from Cissy Houston to Dionne Warwick.

The records he made with the choir in the early 1960s burn with congregational conviction that the studio records of the 1950s, as great as they are, don't quite possess.

 
 

Ersatz Nation: Why Do We Love Subway?

It remains lost to time precisely when we Americans began replacing those real, indigenous, rib sticking, soul warming, handmade expressions of our culture and our selves with ersatz, commodified, mass producible simulacrums of the same.

We know it happens--swinging jazz as it emerged from Mississippi River whorehouses and gambling dens, a music predicated on the individuality of soloists, gives way to the lite jazz music beds behind crawls on The Weather Channel, a style so generic it can be produced and successfully sold by faceless stock music houses; neo-eclectic developments of enormous houses of sheetrock and plywood adorned in brickface and stoneface surreally evoke the grandeur, elegance and substance of old mansions with none of the substance.

Maybe this replacement process began right away, in the earliest decades of the republic, with the emergence of the first  blackface song,  Backside Albany, in 1815, and over the subsequent decades with the institutionalization of the minstrel show--not merely a staged presentation of faux African American music and humor but also a production that became so formalized and franchise-able that publishers were able to issue instruction manuals for its staging.

Certainly the replacement process picked up speed with mechanization and mass production in the middle of the 20th century, a time when mechanization and mass production themselves became symbols of American genius and ingenuity. But it seems that during the post war expansion things really got out of hand, when the substitution process itself became a revered symbol of American progress, when atomic age conveniences like freeze dried instant coffee came close to promising the perfection of mankind.

We flock to ersatz attractions--like the faux street-scapes of Paris, New York, Luxor that adorn the Vegas strip--and most of all we love ersatz food: not only the McDonald's hamburger but also Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell nachos, et al.: cheap, profitable, and easy to sell replicas of our national cuisine; and is there any more surreal American institution than the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store--with its faux front porches, its indifferent food, and its fake rural storefront jammed with made-in-China tchochkes?

It's become all put impossible to find examples of the original versions of the institutions that inspired these substitutes. How many small, independent burger joints, chili houses, and fried chicken shacks with made to order meals does one come across anymore? And hard times have only made things worse: "According to NPD Group, there are 15,000 more chain restaurants now than there were five years ago--a 5 percent increase. During the same time period, there was nearly a 1 percent decline in the number of independent restaurants," reports The Daily Beast in introducing its photo gallery 40 Fast-Food Capitals, a photo essay exploring the American cities where there are the largest number of fast food chains per capita.

Florida is the state most dominated by ersatz food with three cities--Orlando, Miami, and Tampa--in the top 10. And the chain that is growing fastest? Subway!

With more than 34,000 restaurants in nearly 100 countries, Subway is the single largest chain restaurant brand in the world with more outlets than McDonald's. That makes it one of the nation's most important cultural exports, an institution by which America is more widely known than, say, Boeing, Apple, or Harley Davidson.

The dramatic growth of Subway is, to me, one of the grand, unfathomable mysteries of contemporary American life. It's easy for me to wrap my head around the production and price advantages that ersatz food establishments like McDonald's possess--assembly line cookery of mass manufactured, frozen ingredients makes for uniform end product, speedy production, and relatively low retail prices. Speedy service and cheap prices, not taste, have always been the primary appeals of ersatz food. But Subway doesn't cook food (at least not primarily), it sells sandwiches. There's little to streamline in process of assembling a sandwich--slicing cold cuts, slicing bread, daubing condiments, assembling components. And a virginia ham and cheese on a roll with mustard is pretty standard from one non-chain sandwich shop to another.  Subway's most popular sandwich, the 8 oz, 450-calorie Italian BMT (salami, pepperoni, ham, cheese), at $5.40 not including tax, is slightly cheaper than an Italian combo at my local pizzeria here in metro NYC, but it's also significantly smaller. On an ounce for ounce basis the prices are competitive.

I will conceded that Subway's ersatz American sandwich is at least as fair a representation of the real American sandwich--Dagwood Bumstead overstuffed with multiple meats and cheeses in contrast with the minimalist simplicity of many a European sandwich--as the McDonald's burger is of the real American burger. But of course that's damning with faint praise. And I understand how Subway has managed to grab marketshare from the likes of McDonald's and Burger King--targeting an appeal to health conscious eaters even as it sells italian combos and cheese steaks. But what I don't understand is why consumers would substitute a trip to Subway for a trip to the local sandwich shop.

Yes, I'm old enough to remember and long for the great old neighborhood delis of German, Jewish and Italian immigrants. I'm lucky enough to live in a part of the world where such places--though dwindling in numbers--still exist. Around here a trip to the kosher deli for half a pastrami on rye, a cup of matzoh ball soup, and a big plate of half sour pickles; or a trip to the Italian pork store for coppa, mozzarella and roasted peppers on a roll is still a cherished joy. But even when I'm not in the vicinity of great delis,  the indifferent contemporary sandwich shop--with its pre-sliced Boar's Head cold cuts and industrial packaged bread--stands as a something for which a chain substitution offers no meaningful advantage.

Maybe we've just become so used to artificial substitute experiences that we've lost our ability to appreciate the real thing.

 

 

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, & the American Dream

This week the Obama Administration plans to present a report to Congress to address Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the mortgage finance and guarantor companies the government seized two and a half years ago in an effort to stabilize the US housing market and save the nation's banking system. By all accounts--leaked widely in the press this morning--the crux of the report will be a variety proposals from spinning the entities back into the private sector to eliminating them altogether.

Perhaps nothing the administration does--from appointing Supreme Court justices to starting or ending US military commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere--will have a more important and lasting impact on American life, presuming that a end to government home mortgage support is even possible, fiscally or politically. For better and worse Fannie and Freddie--like a foreign object in the human body around which years of tissue have grown--are so intertwined with the American economy that surgically removing them without killing the patient will be a nearly impossible operation.

For one thing, it's almost impossible to understate the importance of mortgage lending to the US economy. We're talking about a $10.6 trillion chunk of cash, so even seemingly marginal changes, say, to the value of loans the entities guarantee to the amount of mortgage backed securities they own will send shockwaves through the economy as a whole. For another thing, since the economic meltdown, the two government sponsored enterprises have become even more crucial to the barely-breathing US housing market than before--today backing 90 percent of all new mortgage loans. As weak as the vital signs are for the US housing market, they are almost entirely dependent on Fannie and Freddie like a coma patient is dependent on a ventilator. Finally, and I know conservatives don't want to hear it, but Fannie and Freddie historically have actually done a better job managing risk and preventing the kind of bubble and crash we witnessed in recent years than private sector lenders and investors.

That last statement flies in the face of ideological and lobbyist-financed arguments Republicans on the Hill are likely to raise when they get their hands on the President's report this week. For the GOP it's an article of faith that government intervention in the housing market was the primary cause of the housing bubble of the 2000s. I'm not saying that government played no role. Far from it--undoubtedly though the government helped fuel the housing bubble through tax incentives and credits of the sort that created financial benefits for consumers to borrow money; it's also certainly true that the market presence of a government or quasi-government buyer of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities bends markets the government's way. But more than anything it was the boom in the securitization of mortgage debt, and the leveraged-lending feeding frenzy it touched off on Wall Street, as well and the privatized Fannie and Freddy's need to compete in that market, that played the biggest role in flooding the market with credit regardless of a borrower's risk.

Look at this chart published today by the Wall Street Journal:

 

It's far from coincidental that the real estate bubble years correspond to a flood of private cash--much of it borrowed--into mortgage backed securities. During the boom years, stable credit spreads attracted investors from hedge funds to ibanks into a mostly unregulated market in MBS's and derivative investments on top of them. Sustaining this paper churning, money making machinery required constantly feeding the furnace with new loans, preferably higher interest loans like those made to subprime borrowers.

The result was a sand castle housing market destined to crumble as uncreditworthy borrowers defaulted on mortgages, real estate values declined, and leveraged investors as well as consumer banks (who had been freed from preserving cash thanks to the "innovation" of off balance sheet accounting) found they had nowhere near the cash reserves they needed to cover their losses.

Two an a half years after the federal government first started to triage the wounded lenders and borrowers, the housing disaster is no better and trauma cases abound.

Writing last September in US News and World Report, Mort Zuckerman offered a tidier description than I can of the landscape then:

The economics of home ownership could hardly be more disastrously opposite to the expectations of generation after generation. Millions of homes have been foreclosed upon. About 11 million residential properties, or about 23 percent of such properties with mortgages, have mortgage balances that exceed the home's value. Given the total inventory, and the shadow inventory of empty homes, many experts expect prices to fall another 5 to 10 percent. That would bring the decline to 40 percent from peak-to-trough and expose an estimated 40 percent of homeowners to mortgages in excess of the value of their homes.

The growing risk of disappearing equity invites more strategic defaults on mortgages. Homeowners with negative equity are tempted simply to mail in their keys to their friendly lender even if they can afford the mortgage payment. Banks don't want to take the deflated properties onto their books because they will then have to declare a financial loss and still have to worry about maintaining the properties.

Little wonder foreclosure has not been enforced on a quarter of the people who haven't made a single mortgage payment in the last two years. A staggering 8 million home loans are in some state of delinquency, default, or foreclosure. Another 8 million homeowners are estimated to have mortgages representing 95 percent or more of the value of their homes, leaving them with 5 percent or less equity in their homes and thus vulnerable to further price declines. A huge percentage will never be able to catch up on their payment deficits.

The pace of foreclosures was briefly slowed by loan modifications brought on by government programs. Alas, the programs have not been working as hoped. Half of the borrowers have been redefaulting within 12 months, even after monthly payments were cut by as much as 50 percent. The foreclosure pipeline remains completely clogged. As it unclogs, a new wave of homes will come on the market and precipitate additional downward pressure on prices. The number of foreclosed homes put on the market by banks will be a more powerful influence on the further decline of home prices than either consumer demand or interest rates.

A well-balanced housing market has a supply of about five to six months. These days the supply is more than double that, as inventory backlog has surged to about a 12½ months'....

Things have only gotten worse since last fall with prices continuing to drop and foreclosures and delinquencies continuing to occur.

The economic price of this disaster is clear in the millions of foreclosed houses clogging the market, in the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent to bailout collapsed banking institution, in wipeout of asset values of American families. But the impact on the national psyche is more subtle. When you ask people do define "the American dream" many will evoke images of the home in the suburbs with two cars in the garage, three kids playing in a picket fenced yard. That's not what writer James Truslow Adams meant exactly when he coined the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America. Here's what Adams wrote:

...that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Class mobility, that's the American dream. And while its erosion has more to do with things like the loss of high-paying working class jobs, the decline of American primary education, and the crippling costs of college and graduate schools, it remains intimately tied to hearth and home as  both  asset--since purchasing a home will always be the most substantial investment most American families will ever make and therefore will always be crucial to class mobility--and as symbol--since our homes not only provide the roofs over our heads but also stand as a metaphor for our sense of community.

While many Americans' eyes may glaze over as talk begins in Washington of mortgage backed securities and long term mortgage rates, make no mistake, as much as anything lawmakers will be talking about the aspirations that bind us as a people. Pay attention.

AOL Buys The Huffington Post: Into the Echo Chamber

Of the more than 100 discussion links Mediagazer has indexed on the matter of AOL purchasing The Huffington Post in the 11 hours since the deal was announced, there can't be more than a dozen original thoughts.

There are those that parse the deal itself, still best handled by the pros like Kara Swisher at the Wall Street Journal  who offers the best recap of the numbers;  or those that offer a play by play of how the deal came together.

There are those that speculate about what the deal "means" for AOL and its marketing  and business plans, for The Huffington Post, for other media properties AOL has launched or purchased in recent years (of which the Queen of all Media will now be editrix in chief), for the future of journalism, for the media industry, for blogs,  for Huffington's investors,  for personnel now in or out at the combined venture, for the legion of unpaid bloggers to which HuffPo redirects traffic.

There are insiders' takes--like Techcrunch's leaking of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's memo to staff or Steve Case's compelling take on Huffington and Armstrong's synergy trope:

AOL to Buy Huffington Post; Tim Armstrong says "1 + 1 will equal 11" (NYTimes) http://nyti.ms/g3QFHN Really? That wasn't my experience, the AOL founder tweeted, before backtracking  to tweet that is was all in jest.

There are those that parse the politics of the deal. And others that cast a deliberately skeptical eye on the whole enterprise.

For the parties to the deal itself the acquisition looks like a no-brainer. AOL buys things it desperately needs: traffic, ad inventory, and perhaps most importantly, talent not least in the person of Huffington herself whose ubiquitous, Gaboresque presence on every global media platform has done more to drive traffic to HuffPo than anything else. For Huffington and her investors the $315 million deal, nearly all cash, delivers a huge payday at a 10X trailing revenue multiple that was perfectly described by MediaMemo's Peter Kafka as "a very pre-Lehman multiple."

Whether the deal works for the parties remains to be seen and will depend on the same things that matter in all mergers--how well the cultures of the two parties mesh, how effectively the principals can work together, what efficiencies can be wrought from a combining of sales operations--as well as the peculiarities of dealing with a media property so structurally tied to a single personality. Like her or not, Arianna Huffington is, to the portal that bears her name, what Martha Stewart or Oprah Winfrey are to their media empires.

There's also the matter of the particular challenge of Internet media itself. The Net is of course a participant's platform, not a consumer's platform, which makes sustaining a portal of any sort--even one that is as canny a mix of original and curated content as HuffPo--a little bit like trying to turn a tsunami into a hydroelectric plant. You can build turbines as quickly as possible, redirect the torrent as efficiently possible, but the water will flow where it will. Will unpaid bloggers, and media properties to which HuffPo links, continue to be satisfied with the traffic the portal sends their way?

Traditional media outlets have bemoaned the Huffington Post's habit of aggregating the first few paragraphs of other sites' stories, calling them traffic and revenue leaches. My experience has been just the opposite: getting picked up by the Huffington Post has lead to a huge number of readers coming to read our articles here at ReadWriteWeb, writes Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Or will they turn HuffPo's business model on its ear now that there's a deep pocketed sugar daddy writing checks? Or will some next gen frame for encapsulating DIY media just come along and eat HuffPo's lunch?

Emerging from all the arm chair punditry one fact is clear: nearly 20 years into the Internet media revolution, while new modes of communication and new forms of content have emerged, no new business model has developed. It's still all about the old verities of advertising--eyeballs and valueable demographics as Armstrong's staff memo made crystal clear.

And speaking of arm chair punditry, the most perverse take on the whole matter this morning came from veteran journalist and HuffPo employee Howard Fineman who offereda bizarre and defensive arguement in favor of  armchair vs. shoe leather reporting:

I've tried to follow my Columbia prof's advice, traveling in and reporting about 49 states (North Dakota, here I come); traveling privately and on fellowships to more than 40 countries; earning a law degree and writing a book on American history.

I have been lucky to ride waves of change in the business. I began in the days of three-ply copybooks, manual typewriters and glue pots, and have worked for a local community newspaper, a regional newspaper (The Courier-Journal in Louisville), Newsweek magazine, msnbc.com, CNN and now NBC and MSNBC.

When I succeed in doing anything worthwhile, it invariably was when I picked up the phone to make one last call, or read another document, or went to the Hill or the White House instead of calling, or got on a plane to get outside the Beltway, or drove across Des Moines or Little Rock or Austin for one more interview.

Today it's one more web site or tweet or video clip or email. But I'm still going there. You're welcome to come with me.

Can we really "go there" without going anywhere? That sounds like a lazy man's revolution.

Sunday Go to Meeting: Rev. Julius Cheeks, (If Serving God Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right (Savoy Gospel, 1981)

Call it what you will--influence, crossover, exploitation--but it is by now a familiar tale: how gospel music's tunes, language, gestures, forms, styles, instrumentation and performers influenced or even transformed American secular pop giving rise to rock and soul.

How an obscure R&B singer and pianist, one of dozens of Nat Cole wannabes on the chit'lin' circuit, rose to national prominence in 1955 by raiding the gospel highway, transforming this 1954 regional gospel hit by The Southern Tones out of Houston:

 

into this proto-rock and roll R&B classic:

 

"I Got a Woman" opened the flood gates. The year following its release, gospel music's hottest young star, Sam Cooke, would leave The Soul Stirrers for crossover super stardom.

Cooke was both ahead of his time and behind it. On the one hand he blazed a trail from one world to another that would be trod by dozens of gospel performers in the 1950s and early 1960s; and, as one of the first artists (not to mention first black artists) to own his own record label and publishing business, he created a new business model for all musical performers. On the other hand Cooke's crossover model was a creeping and self-conscious one in which he all but outsmarted himself by blanching his sound. His plan worked, making him a star, but it was only years later later, in 1964, hearing The Rolling Stones' version of his friend and (fellow gospel crossover singer) Bobby Womack's "It's All Over Now" that Cooke realized that the white record buying public was ready for music that had the full bore gospel sound.

In the generation since the rock and soul explosion, the formal lines between the sounds and styles of secular and religious music have blurred as a cultural feedback loop has developed giving rise to everything from the sacred funk of contemporary gospel to white Christian rock formally indistinguishable from secular rock.

Still, examples of the reverse transformation of the "It Must Be Jesus"/"I Got A Woman" sort are rare. Rare, but not unheard of. And I offer one of my favorite gospel records of all time as an example, this 1980 transformation of Luther Ingram's 1972 hit "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" by the Reverend Julius Cheeks' Four Knights.

Rev Julius Cheeks-If Serving God Is Wrong I Don't Want to Be Right

Julius Cheeks was one of gospel music's most famous and influential shouters, his only rival for husky, cracked, fervent hollering in the 1950s and 1960s was Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, and his influence resounds in many of the major sold singers of the 1960s--James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding. Although at various points he sang with The Soul Stirrers and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, it was the the records he cut for Decca with The Sensational Nightingales that made Cheeks, well, a sensation. Later in the early 1960s, Cheeks formed his own group, the Four Knights with whom he would record, albeit infrequently, until his death in 1981.

This transformation of secular soul back into gospel was recorded live in Florida during a congregational performance by the Knights backed by the Shining Light Mass Choir at the very end of Cheek's life and released posthumously in 1981, when I first heard it on a gospel radio station in South Florida. In those final years Cheeks was sharing lead vocals with protege George McAllister who still leads a version of the Knights. It is reportedly McAllister singing lead this, but channelling Cheeks' shouting preaching style so effectively you'd be forgiven for thinking it's Cheeks himself testifying.

For a taste of Cheeks himself with the Knights in the early 1960s, this version of "Last Mile of the Way", which Cheeks had a hit on with the Nightingales, is well worth a listen

 

 

Who Loves the Gun?

As an interesting follow up to my piece earlier this week on Americans' enduring embrace of the gun as weapon and symbol have a look at the demographic breakdown of a survey by the Pew Center for the People & the Press on the subject of which is more important, preserving gun ownership right or controlling gun access.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that men, older folks, whites, and those who abide in rural areas are more likely to lean towards gun rights while women, younger folks, blacks and hispanics, and those who live in urban and suburban areas are more likely to favor gun control.

But most interesting are the regional demographics. While Easterners are predictably more concerned with gun control than gun rights (60-36% margin), Southerner's concern is almost equality divided (49-48%).

The big split in the South breaks down between the South Atlantic states (including Washington DC, DE, FL, GA, NC, SC, VA and WV)--whose residents lean towards gun control by a 54-43% margin--and the East South Central (AL, KY, MS, TN) and West South Central (AR, LA, OK, TX) regions.

In Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas respondents were more concerned with preserving gun rights by a 53-43 margin, while in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, respondents were more concerned with preserving gun rights by a 61-36 margin, almost exactly the inverse of the attitude in the Eastern states.

One other interesting finding, among the Christian religious sects whose responded Pew parsed, all Protestants leaned towards gun rights by a 62-34 margin, but Catholics favored gun control by a 62-36 margin.

Wanda Jackson: The Party Ain't Over

 Jack White has a way with older women.

In 2004 the songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and leader of the now defunct White Stripe, produced a brilliant album on Loretta Lynn, and last month saw the release of White's latest collaboration with a female star of the past--rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson.

In the testorone fueled world of early rock and roll, Jackson was an anomaly, a party girl who could rock with the big boys both in terms of grinding energy and undisguised sexuality, quite a contrast with the female country stars of the day, big voiced show singers like Patsy Cline singing honky tonk weepers, or singers like Kitty Wells whose signature records like "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" were morality tales of domestic tranquility.

 

By contrast Jackson was a spitfire. When she sang "Rock Your Baby" there no doubt of it's meaning:

 

Perhaps the only antecedent for Jackson's incendiary, yelping records of the 1950s were the wild, proto-rockabilly party records of The Maddox Brothers and Rose, whose guitar-fueled, slap-bass driven country boogie records of the 1940s mixed country, western swing and boogie in a style that is formally almost indistinguishable from the early rock and roll music that would emerge in the subsequent decade.

Give a listen to the Maddox Brothers & Rose's 1949 record George's Playhouse:

 

Jackson took it a step farther, rhythmically and lyrically. She wasn't sweet voiced nor was she anybody's idea of a domestic diva witness her most famous hit, 1956's Fujiyama Mama. "I drink a quart of sake, smoke dynamite/I chase it with tobaccy and then shoot out the light," Jackson sang. "Well you can talk about me say that I'm mean/I'll blow your head off baby with nitroglycerin" Incendiary indeed!

 

The Party Ain't Over, Jackson's White-produced new record, isn't the deep, personal record that was Van Leer Rose, the record White produced for Loretta Lynn. On that record White pulled original stories and songs from Lynn that were autobiographical and profound. With the The Party Ain't Over, instead of trying to draw something new from the 73-year-old singer, the producer paired Jackson with mostly older material that harkens back to the records, and era, that made Jackson famous, material like  Little Richard's "Rip It Up" and a version of the Andrews Sisters 1940s calypso novelty Rum and Coca-Cola that's not nearly as decorous as the original.

The ringer, and the albums' first single, is a cover of Bob Dylan's recent "Thunder on the Mountain," a song recommended to White for the project by Dylan himself. Dylan's original version hits at the rockabilly music that inspired him, but Jackson and White take it to the house with a full-burn rocked out version.

 

Who says old timers can't party?