Too little? I hope it’s not too late

The gulf Coast oil spill is not President Barack Obama’s Katrina, but it has been damaging nonetheless, so damaging, in fact, that the mea culpa he offered this afternoon just doesn’t seem enough.

The president said he was the man responsible and that mistakes have been made. The biggest one, he acknowledges, was not moving

more aggressively to clean up what he called a cozy and corrupt relationship between regulators and industry, suggesting that the disaster might have been prevented if steps were taken sooner.

“Obviously they weren’t happening fast enough,” he said. “If they were happening fast enough, this might have been caught.”

No shit. That’s what critics from the left — like David Sirota and others — have been saying for a while. While the president and his administration have been involved and focused from the beginning — in a way that George Bush never was when Katrina hit — he has done what too many in Washington (and the state capitals do): He’s let industry clean up the mess, which is like asking an 8-year-old to clean his room. It’ll get done, but no one is ever sure when.

The problem from the beginning — which the president should have known — is that industry just doesn’t care what kind of messes it creates as long as it can generate profit. It takes aggressive action on the part of the people, through their government, to keep these greedheads honest and keep us safe and healthy.

Obama has tweaked around the edges when it comes to this — on Wall Street reform, on the cleanup, on just about everything — rather than strip our corporate overlords of their power. And progressives have let him get away with it.

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Thoughts on double albums and the Exile reissue

I picked up the reissue of Exile on Main Street, the classic double album that I’ve always viewed as the Rolling Stones‘ last masterpiece. (The band has released some real good music since — much of the ’70s catalogue, Some Girls, Emotional Rescue, Tattoo You, A Bigger Bang — but nothing with the sustained brilliance of Exile.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/28107384001?isVid=1

The decision to buy the reissue was not taken lightly because I generally am not one who likes to spend money on music I already own, but the band’s inclusion of a 10-song second disc, with a brilliant alternate take of “Loving Cup” and a couple of unfinished songs now finished by the band, altered the normal calculus.

This is an album that the so-called jam bands should study, a loose, instinctive romp through a highly personal take on American blues, R&B and country by a band at the absolute height of its powers.

The remastering is a plus — the sound is vibrant and electric — but it is the other material that made it a worthwhile purchase. (Apparently, the rarities disc has been released separately, as well, so people uninterested in the remastered album an still get the material; there also is a weird collector’s box that includes the rarities disc and a T-shirt — leave it to the Stones to milk it for all the cash it can generate.)

In any case, the reissue is not a disappointment, though it is not on a par with Let It Be … Naked, the interesting and flawed rethinking of The Beatles’ Let It Be issued a few years ago (that offered a few good alternate takes, including a cleaner, less sappy “Long and Winding Road,” new sequencing and a new edit of “Get Back” that strips it of the chatter).

Nonetheless, the release got me thinking about the double album, something that has become unusual in the digital age. The few double discs worth buying — Wilco’s Being There, Nellie McKay’s first two, Outkast’s Speaker Boxxx/Love Below, Sonic Youth, a handful of others — are rare because the compact disc allowed artists to go much longer. Think of all the discs out there with 70 minutes of music, a time span that would have required two vinyl records back in the old days.

Exile is, for me, one of the great examples of the double album, easily in the top three of studio doubles (as compared with double live albums, which were more prevalent). Off the top of my head, this is my top 10 — understanding that I probably forgot something and that I’ve used 1990 as an arbitrary cutoff:

  1. Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde
  2. Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
  3. The Clash, London Calling
  4. Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland
  5. The Beatles, The Beatles (the white album)
  6. Derek & the Dominoes, Layla
  7. Bruce Springsteen, The River
  8. Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti
  9. Prince, 1999
  10. Funkadelic, America Eats Its Young

Other notables: Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; Genesis, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway; PiL, Second Edition; Erik Burdon and War, The Black Man’s Burden; The Who, Tommy and Quadrophenia; Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life; XTC’s English Settlement and Oranges and Lemons.

Some notable doubles not included: James Brown, Sex Machine (it is live); George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, which would have been on the list except that it includes a third disc of jamming; The Clash, Sandanista! (a triple album); and material by Frank Zappa, who I can appreciate but have never connected with.

Some readers will note the exclusion of Pink Floyd’s The Wall — an album that many view as a masterpiece but that I think is incredibly pretentious and overrated. Those are fighting words, I know, so let the battles begin.

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Drill, spill and drill again

The Gulf slowly dies, sufficated by BP’s massive spill, and yet nothing of substance changes.

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.

The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.

Department of the Interior officials said in a statement that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells. It was not meant to stop permits for new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.

And so it goes in the United States of America — a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil industry.

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Angry sycophants strike back

We knew this was coming, though I’m surprised it took so long. The Obama sycophants have started targeting progressives who are not afraid to criticize a Democrat.

I was alerted to this by a wall posting from Mark Doty on his Facebook page, but it is the kind of thing that David Sirota has been writing about and is reminiscent of Clinton’s progressive defenders during the 1990s.

Jeff McMahon, an environmental reporter writing on Truth/Slant, attacked the poet Mark Doty for slipping into a lefty version of no-nothingism. Doty, he says, ignores the facts about the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill (McMahon, apparently, is ignoring his own set of facts, which include failures by the Obama administration in the permitting process for Gulf drilling).

Populist anger inspired and perpetuated by ignorance of the facts, remaining undeterred by the facts: it’s not terribly different from those who believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and who continue to believe it even when shown his birth certificate. The certificate is probably a forgery, they insist.

But is Doty the lefty equivalent of a birther? Is he walking away from Obama because of a misreading of the facts? Or, as I would argue (and I think Mark would concur), is the Gulf spill just the final cut of a thousand cuts, another sell-out from an administration that is far less progressive than many may have expected.

McMahon acknowledges that the left has to apply pressure, but he undercuts his own argument by raising the specter of a return of the Bush crowd to office:

It’s not a bad idea to put pressure on the government. It will probably be met with more attention to the Gulf and more vigor from the White House, if only in the form of better management of information. But it goes too far to categorically withdraw support for Obama based on BP’s disaster.

What no progressive seems to consider is that a weakened Obama probably will not be replaced by Ralph Nader or Jerry Brown. Only two years ago, we had a White House full of oil company executives, who are far more likely to return to power than the “Uncompromising Man” or “Governor Moonbeam.”

If Bush’s men do surf back into power, it will be on a wave of populist anger.

This argument — as David Sirota makes clear this week — has the effect of stripping the left of what little power it might have, making it appear to be little more than an adjunct of the Democratic Party.

I’ve written before about Obama’s abandonment of the very people who got him elected, about how his commitment to bipartisan consensus — which I believe stands in for ideology and leaves him without a governing philosophy — has allowed him to cut loose gays and lesbians (16 months into his term and all the LGBT community has to show for a friend in the White House is a minor executive order and a promise on DADT), civil libertarians (read Glenn Greenwald’s excellent dissections of Obama’s Bushian turns in this area) and economic populists (a smaller-than-necessary stimulus, corporate health-care plan, and so on).

The appointment of Ken Salazar — one of oil’s best friends in the Senate — to the Interior post, which is part of the story of what is happening in the Gulf as I write this, is very much a part of this lackluster record.

Democratic sycophants who are unwilling to acknowledge this are not doing anyone any favors, least of all the president they claim to support.

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Lobbyists have a difficult road ahead? Pardon me for not caring

A wave of nausea came over me this afternoon as I read this story on the proposed bank rules. The reason: It is clear from the story that Washington and the mainstream press see the lobbyists on the bank payrolls as just one more player in the big game of legislation.

The set-up on the story is simple, describing a series of fundraising events hosted by the financial industry — “just another day in the nonstop fund-raising cycle for members of the House Financial Services Committee, which has become a magnet for money from Wall Street and other deep-pocketed contributors, especially as Congress moves to finalize the most sweeping new financial regulations in seven decades.”

Executives and political action committees from Wall Street banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and related financial sectors have showered Congressional candidates with more than $1.7 billion in the last decade, with much of it going to the financial committees that oversee the industry’s operations.

In return, the financial sector has enjoyed virtually front-door access and what critics say is often favorable treatment from many lawmakers. But that relationship, advantageous to both sides for many years, is now being tested in ways rarely seen, as the nation’s major financial firms seek to call in their political chits to stem regulatory changes they believe will hurt their business.

But, according to the story, the environment has changed. As both houses of Congress have moved ahead with financial reform, something that the industry has sought to quash.

The biggest flash point for many Wall Street firms is the tough restrictions on the trading of derivatives imposed in the Senate bill approved Thursday night. Derivatives are securities whose value is based on the price of other assets like corn, soybeans or company stock.

The financial industry was confident that a provision that would force banks to spin off their derivatives businesses would be stripped out, but in the final rush to pass the bill, that did not happen.

Good news, right? But only when you consider the context (a government awash in lobbyist cash) and if you ignore that the legislation — which is far weaker than it should be — comes nearly two years after the financial meltdown.

So, pardon me for not being impressed that Congress is making the lobbyists work. I’m just not that impressed.

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