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Donald's Blog
July 8, 2014 Export-Import One of the things the papers are flapping about is the Export-Import Bank, a GSE (Government Sponsored Enterprise) that helps companies trying to export goods and services: should its charter be renewed or should it be abolished? The myopic Tea Party types are screaming corporate welfare! which is yet more evidence that they live in la-la land, where the playing fields are equal. One correspondent in the Wall Street Journal writes,
A James McDevitt had written an op-ed about his business, much smaller that Boeing: "My Company Depends on the Ex-Im Bank". Another letter-writer composes several long paragraphs questioning why banks don't step up to help Mr. McDevitt if his product is in demand overseas:
That's because there isn't any logic. The banks are sitting on trillions of dollars that they are not investing. They are not creating anything, let alone jobs, because they want bigger and faster returns than they can get from investing in solid American businesses, even if their bigger and faster returns soon turn to ashes and smoke, like bundles of toxic mortgages. The banks are not your friend. The banks are very very stupid. July 8, 2014 Group insurance Way back around 1950 Walter Reuther and the auto manufacturers invented the modern version of the group health insurance plan for members of the United Auto Workers. Reuther saw that if you had a large enough group to insure, with (mostly older) people who go to the doctor a lot and (younger) people who rarely go to the doctor, the insurance premiums could be lower for everybody. He wanted a group plan to cover all his members, but the car companies wouldn't go for it, afraid that saving everybody money would give the union too much power, so there had to be separate group plans for Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Nash, Hudson, Studebaker etc etc. Even so, group plans worked well for decades, and should have been a model for a national insurance plan for the whole country. But the USA was and still is too obnoxious to do the sensible thing. There was no cherry-picking: each group plan had to be the same for everybody, otherwise it wouldn't have worked. Now we have a ragbag called the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, which nobody likes, because we can't get what we want, which is a national group plan. But my grandson, who is diabetic, has health insurance for the first time in his life, so Obamacare is an improvement over nothing. I guess Obamacare provides group plans for employers, perhaps depending on how many employees they have; I don't know the details; but now the idiots on the Supreme Court have enabled cherry-picking for the obnoxious among us. Someone called Davis, who runs a chain of shops called Hobby Lobby, objected to some of the provision for birth control advice that could be supplied to his employees, believing that the "morning after" pill and the intrauterine device amount to abortion of a fertilized egg. Doctors and scientists say that these methods are in fact intended to prevent fertilization, not to abort anything, but the (deeply divided) Supremes decided that Davis's religious beliefs, if "sincerely held", whether they are right or wrong, entitled him to cherry-pick the new health insurance provision. Never mind that none of his employees would have been forced to accept any sort of birth control advice whatsoever, or that some of his employees might have wished to do so. I seem to remember people disapproving of the Vietnam War refusing to pay taxes to support it, on account of their sincerely held religious belief that "Thou shalt not kill". I can't think of anything more fundamental than the Ten Commandments, but it didn't work back then. Maybe we are becoming stupider by the decade. July 8, 2014 Catching up Yesterday I had a rant from an old friend about what he reads in the papers:
I agree with him absolutely, which is probably why I do not blog every day. What is the point? Why bother? Some children in Syria were shot at for painting graffiti on walls; locals objected, and Bashar could have solved the problem very easily with some generous local diplomacy. Instead he enabled a civil war which has costs tens of thousands of lives and destabilized the whole Middle East. He's a doctor for heaven's sake, and he couldn't pour water out of a boot if it had the instructions on the heel. After several wonderful years at Rodale in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, as editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening magazine, winning awards from the industry every year for her work, Ethne has been bounced. As she says, it was a "business decision", full stop. The upside is that we don't have to live in Pennsylvania any longer, which has nuisance taxes, silly alcohol laws, a legislature which is even more expensive than that of California, where there are three times as many people, and where our favorite supermarket doesn't even know what a doughnut is. (They call them friedcakes, and make them with sour cream.) So we are off to Kansas City for a week, where we have lots of friends, to have a look around. We are Midwesterners, and I guess we just can't stay away, since we can't afford California. Meanwhile I am still beavering away at loading up my computer with music so I can get rid of some CDs and a lot of vinyl (there will be less stuff to move). In the last week I have filled up a playlist with the work of Robert Parker, an Australian who was one of the first back in the 1980s to use digital methods to clean up old 78s, then bestowing his own "digital stereo" effect. He had a BBC radio program and the Beeb put out quite a lot of his work on vinyl, CDs and cassettes. Some of it was exquisite: I think of Paul Whiteman's "San" (1928), which had little to do with Whiteman; the pianist and arranger was the wonderful Bill Challis, and the tentet included Bix Beiderbeck, Jimmy Dorsey and Frank Trumbauer. Then Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators, a Duke Ellington small group, recorded the delightful "Frolic Sam" in 1936: both of these came up sounding like they were recorded last week. But on a sampler CD, Parker introduced his own work with the classic duet "Weather Bird", by Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines (1928). First he played a bit of an old 78, which sounded like an old 78; then he played his cleaned-up version, which sounded splendid, and then he played his stereoized version, laying on his electronic gimmick with a trowel: it was completely ruined with bags of echo. But I cherry-picked my Parker LPs, and saved the best one for last: a compilation called Kansas City. I hadn't looked at it for some time, and it was a big disappointment. For one thing, ten of the 18 tracks are by Bennie Moten's band, which would be fine, except that Moten is pretty easy to find. Then there was one track by Walter Page's Blue Devils, a classic tentet that contained the nucleus of what later became the Count Basie band; it only made two recordings: why couldn't Parker have given us both sides of the record? The legendary George E. Lee and his Orchestra made six sides in 1929; the pianist and arranger was the very talented Jesse Stone, who had a fascinating career, ending up 25 years later calling himself Charles Calhoun and writing stuff like "Shake Rattle And Roll" at Atlantic Records. But of George E. Lee we get only one track, "Passeo Strut", which is the same one we always get. There is no Julia Lee, George's sister, whose career of double-entendre R&B lasted until well into the 1950s; there's no Harlan Leonard and his Rockets, who recorded for RCA in 1940... And worst of all, the whole thing is drenched in echo, making all the tracks sound like they were recorded from a distance in an empty hangar at a disused airport. Oh, well... If I become a late-night radio host in Kansas City I'll just have to search the rest of my collection.
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