Hippies vs. Punks: Matthew Shipp's Piano Sutras (2013)

About a month ago I read some very positive comments about Matthew Shipp's Piano Sutras (2013) on the digital bulletin board of my public library. So I placed a hold on the record; it arrived at the end of last week; and I've been playing it ever since.

A solo piano recital (for an excellent review, see Will Layman's PopMatters piece) Piano Sutras sounds remarkably fresh, even after listening to the album 15 times in a row. Why is that? My guess is that it is because Piano Sutras manages to aurally picture our present history.

Two-thousand-thirteen in many ways is the jumping off point for our present history, a.k.a., the Zeitgeist. Obama's landslide reelection, rather than heralding a renewed progressive national government, turned out to be nothing more than business as usual.

The year began with the Democratic administration basically throwing in the towel on the fiscal cliff and sequestration negotiations, leaving the GOP to continue to dictate the agenda. Then in May Snowden flew to Hong Kong and revealed that Obama's government was spying on everyone globally. This was followed in July by the Sisi coup in Egypt, rolling back the Arab Spring, and then the Ghouta sarin attack in August, which prompted the Nobel Peace Prize winning president to illegally threaten to bomb a sovereign nation.

In other words. by the end of summer 2013, the idea that Obama represented something other than the maintenance of a rancid, war-based status quo could no longer be maintained rationally. The botched roll out of his signature legislative initiative, Obamacare, in the fall of 2013 reinforced the assessment that, according to Donald Trump's current mantra, "Our politicians are stupid."

Recorded in Brooklyn in February of 2013, Piano Sutras is pregnant with complex dark tones sprinkled with shards of light, the perfect soundtrack for the Zeitgeist of mass opt-out. Our politicians have failed; rather, our politicians are not our own but the employees of the super-rich. Things will continue to grow worse whether we try to catapult backwards to a more honest age (Bernie Sanders) or blow the whole fucking mess apart by launching a Latino pogrom (Donald Trump). Our present history demands enormous, dislocating alterations. Much pain is bubbling down the Zeit-sluice our way.

Bookmakers earn their living by accurately interpreting the Zeitgeist. Matthew Shipp is a master bookie. Do yourself a favor. Prepare yourself for what is coming. Listen to Piano Sutras. You will be stronger for it.

Sequester Partially Undone + Seymour Hersh's "Whose Sarin?"

The House and Senate budget conference led by Representative Raul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, and Senator Patty Murray, Washington Democrat, yesterday revealed its budget deal. It undoes the deep cuts that went into effect at the beginning of the year when the sequester kicked in and it averts a January 15 repeat of the government shutdown fiasco we went through in October. The reliable Jonathan Weisman has the particulars this morning in his story, "Capitol Leaders Agree to a Deal on the Budget":

The agreement, which would finance the government through Sept. 30, 2015, would eliminate about $63 billion in across-the-board domestic and military cuts. But it would provide $23 billion in deficit reduction by extending a 2 percent cut to Medicare providers through 2023, two years beyond the cuts set by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

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Under the agreement, military and domestic spending for the current fiscal year that is under the annual discretion of Congress would rise to $1.012 trillion, from the $967 billion level it would hit if sequestration spending cuts were imposed next month. Spending would inch up to $1.014 trillion in the 2015 fiscal year. 

The figure for this year is about halfway between the $1.058 trillion passed by the Senate this spring and the $967 billion approved by the House. 

Military spending would be set at $520.5 billion this fiscal year, while domestic programs would get $491.8 billion. The $63 billion increase over the next two years would be spread evenly between Pentagon and domestic spending, nearly erasing the impact of sequestration on the military. Domestic programs would fare particularly well because the 2 percent cut to Medicare health providers would be kept in place, alleviating cuts to programs like health research, education and Head Start. 

The increase would be paid for in part with higher airline fees that underwrite airport security. Higher contributions from federal workers to their pensions would save about $6 billion. Military pensions would see slower cost-of-living increases, a $6 billion savings over 10 years. Private companies would pay more into the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. 

States receiving mineral revenue payments would have to help defray the costs of managing the mineral leases, saving $415 million over 10 years. Deepwater, natural gas and other petroleum research programs would end. 

Democrats gave up their demand that the deal extend unemployment benefits that expire at the end of the month, but they hope to press for an extension in a separate measure.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't like giving up the sequester cuts without a grand baragin on Medicare and Social Security spending; Heritage Action and the Koch's Americans for Prosperity have come out against the deal. One wonders how many rank-and-file Tea Party Republicans in the House will follow suit. It will be an interesting indication of whether the Tea Party is solely focused on making government dysfunctional or whether they want to add to their House majority and possibly recapture the Senate. Clearly if Republicans keep their heads down and bide their time waiting for the reality of Obamacare to sink in they stand to reap the rewards in the 2014 mid-term elections. As Weisman notes,

For Republicans and their negotiator, Mr. Ryan, the deal should mean the political focus can remain on Mr. Obama’s health care law and not on another round of budget brinkmanship next month with the government moving to another possible shutdown.

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If you haven't had a chance to check out Seymour Hersh's article, "Whose Sarin?" in the London Review of Books it's worth taking the time. Moon of Alabama posted on it over the weekend. Hersh makes the argument that the Obama administration was engaged in the same type of cherry picking of intelligence as Bush in the run up to the invasion of Iraq; that plenty of evidence of existed pointing to Al Nusra Front having the capability to produce sarin, and that evidence was and continues to be suppressed.

What I found compelling was the refutation of the azimuth data that the New York Times and Human Rights Watch used at the eleventh hour to argue that "smoking gun" proof existed that Syrian government forces launched the August 21 chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta suburb:

Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.

Why is this important? Because those of us who took the time to dispute the official narrative being trotted out by John Kerry and Samantha Power, that the Syrian government had to be responsible for the gas massacre in the Ghouta because none of the rebel groups had access to the missiles or the chemicals used in the attack, that rather than being merely marginal, knee jerk conspiracy junkies tapping out keyboard fantasies of salafis with sarin, we were actually in line with a substantial body of expert opinion. Next time the war drums begin to pound it will be no different. The obvious, the sensible will be crowded out of the media. Just remember the missing WMD in Iraq and Obama's phony casus belli against Syria.

Grand Bargain Sought

Friday the sequester kicks in. Republicans aren't budging, though some in their caucus are grumbling about the Pentagon cuts. A good place to start the work week is Robert Pear's story this morning, "As Governors Meet, White House Warns Cuts Would Hurt States"; it runs down the basic math of the sequester:

On Friday, the administration said, $85 billion in cuts will automatically begin to take effect, with many domestic programs facing reductions of 9 percent and some military programs being reduced by 13 percent in the remaining seven months of the federal fiscal year.

“There are constraints to what an agency can do in taking this across-the-board $85 billion cut,” Mr. Werfel [the controller of President Obama’s budget office] said. “The way the law is written, it has to be taken from a percentage cut from every program, project and activity.”

Under the Budget Control Act of 2011, which created the latest version of the sequester, some programs, like Medicaid and food stamps, are exempt from the automatic cuts, and cuts in Medicare payments cannot exceed 2 percent. 

Social Security benefits would not be cut. But the White House said that the automatic budget cuts would force the agency to “curtail service to the public,” and that the backlog of Social Security disability claims would increase.

The Obama administration is outlining what these cuts actually mean: loss of education funding in Ohio; vaccines in Georgia; services for victims of domestic violence in Pennsylvania; etc. Republicans are crying foul; they're asserting all the doom and gloom is a public relations stunt designed to scare. But if you're a Republican what else can you say since you are unwilling to put corporate tax loopholes on the table?

But what's really troubling is Richard Stevenson's article from this past Saturday. What has not been mentioned much in the sequester coverage is what Obama is willing to give up:

Even as President Obama lashes out at Republicans over the automatic spending cuts that take effect next week, he is simultaneously sending them a strikingly different message: he is still interested in a big deficit-reduction deal and as evidence of his good faith has left on the table proposed Medicare and Social Security cuts that liberals hate.

His aides point to Mr. Obama’s continued willingness to swallow, over the intensifying objections of most of the left side of his party, a new way of calculating inflation adjustments for Social Security benefits that would reduce the growth of payments – in effect, a benefit cut. And Mr. Obama has alluded repeatedly to his willingness to re-engage with Republicans based on his last offer for $400 billion in Medicare cuts, made during the negotiations in December over the so-called fiscal cliff; that’s a level that gives heartburn to some Democrats in Congress who see no need to compromise at this point.

As the citizenry goes back to sleep after the election last November followed by the high stakes fiscal cliff negotiations in December, Obama's proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare are flying under the radar. Here's the take from a post this morning on naked capitalism:

The only logical inference that can be drawn is that Obama remains committed to inflicting the “Grand Bargain” (really, the Grand Betrayal) on the Nation in his quest for a “legacy” and continues to believe that the Sequester provides him the essential leverage he feels he needs to coerce Senate progressives to adopt austerity, make deep cuts in vital social programs, and to begin to unravel the safety net. Obama’s newest budget offer includes cuts to the safety net and provides that 2/3 of the austerity inflicted would consist of spending cuts instead of tax increases. When that package is one’s starting position the end result of any deal will be far worse.

In any event, there is a clear answer to how to help our Nation. Both Parties should agree tomorrow to do a clean deal eliminating the Sequester without any conditions. By doing so, Obama would demonstrate that he had no desire to inflict the Grand Betrayal.

This is also Krugman's position: just repeal the sequester. But, according to today's frontpage story by Jonathan Weisman and Ashley Parker, the sequester is going forward, not so much for the reason stated by Republicans, that it is a strategy to bring Obama to the table willing to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare (because we know from the Stevenson story that Obama is already there); no, the sequester is going forward for purely political reasons. According to Weisman and Parker,

With so many rank-and-file Republicans adamant that they would rather see the cuts stand than raise any taxes, Speaker John A. Boehner finds himself in a bind. Three times this year — on the tax deal to resolve the fiscal cliff, on a measure to suspend the debt ceiling and on a package of Hurricane Sandy relief — he has let legislation pass the House against the votes of a majority of Republicans. In 2011, Republicans accepted caps on military spending as well. 

Each time, the speaker has promised to stand his ground on the next showdown with the president. That showdown comes this week. 

Representative Tom Cotton of Arkansas, an Iraq War veteran with combat experience and a rising Republican star, said that the speaker was in a “very tough position” in one-on-one negotiations with the president, and that the opportunity for a grand bargain was gone.

Republicans must feel as if they have lost the upper hand with Obama in the recent fiscal cliff and debt ceiling negotiations. Never mind the results of last November's election. But given Obama's willingness to sell the working class down the river in search of a grand bargain, I'd say the House GOP is doing all of us a favor.

Glum Economic Forecast for Europe

Floyd Norris' usual page-three Business Day "Off the Charts" column is a good one today:

FOR the first time since 2009, the economies of major developed countries are shrinking. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 34 countries, said this week that the combined gross domestic product of its members declined at an annual rate of 0.6 percent in the final three months of 2012. It was a sign of just how far the global economy has weakened since 2010, when it appeared that the recovery was gathering strength.

It is unusual for downturns to be so widespread that they produce declines in the combined economies of the O.E.C.D. countries, which include all the major developed nations. Since 1962, when the O.E.C.D. statistics were first released, there have been only 13 quarters when that happened. The first three were in 1974 and 1975, during the worldwide recession brought on by the shock of soaring oil prices. There were four more in the early 1980s, during the double-dip American recession, one in 2001 and four in 2008 and 2009, during the credit crisis. 

On Friday, the European Commission issued a glum forecast, saying the 27 countries in the European Union would see economic growth this year of just 0.1 percent, while the euro zone economies would shrink by 0.3 percent. If the O.E.C.D. estimates are correct, each of those forecasts would represent an improvement from 2012. During the four quarters of 2012, the O.E.C.D. estimated, the economies of the entire European Union declined by 0.6 percent, while the euro zone economies were down 0.9 percent.

Why the shrinkage? Austerity. The lack of government spending. Something you would think that our leadership would be cognizant of as the sequester kicks in:

The recent weakness is unusual in that there has been no countercyclical support from governments in many of the countries when the economy weakened. 

Historically, it has been very unusual for government consumption to decline, but that has become common in many countries, including the United States. During the first decade of this century, there was not a single quarter where such consumption was lower in the United States or the euro zone than it had been a year earlier. But since then, that has become the norm, not the exception, in both regions. In the United States, federal, state and local government budgets have been squeezed, while in Europe, austerity has become the byword in many countries.

To get a sense of how bad things are in Europe, check out James Kanter's "Dismal Data and Gloomy Forecasts From Europe":

In the euro zone, the European Commission also forecast that unemployment would continue to rise this year, to 12.2 percent, up from 11.4 percent in 2012.

In Spain, the commission said it expected joblessness to hit 26.9 percent, up from 25 percent last year. In Greece, the forecast was for unemployment to leap to 27 percent from 24.7 percent a year earlier. 

Even in buoyant Germany, which is expected to grow this year by 0.5 percent, unemployment was seen nudging up slightly this year, to 5.7 percent, from 5.5 percent in 2012. 

The grim figures add fuel to a furious debate over whether an insistence on austerity is creating a self-perpetuating cycle where state spending cuts diminish demand, weakening tax revenue and further straining government finances.

This is the direction we're headed as soon as the sequester kicks in.

GOP Government Shutdown Plan

House Republicans set their extortion calendar. Jonathan Weisman's story today about yesterday's House vote to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling until May 18 lays out how the government-shutdown thrill ride will proceed in the coming months. The good news is that we will be spared this frontpage-hog for the remainder of the month and all of February. Then March 1 "$110 billion in across-the-board spending cuts to military and domestic programs — known as a sequester — will go into force."

The next real showdown will come by March 27, when the stopgap measure financing the government expires. Republicans have made clear that they are willing to let the government shut down at that time to force deep spending cuts or changes to Medicare and Social Security that would bring down deficits in the long run.

Included in the debt-ceiling suspension is a provision to "withhold the pay of lawmakers in a chamber of Congress that fails to pass a budget blueprint by April 15." This is aimed at Senate Democrats who have not passed a budget since 2009.

The GOP design here is to get the Senate to produce a budget that can be reconciled in conference with the Ryan Plan, a.k.a., "The Path to Prosperity," and inflict as much damage as possible on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. We're talking about the block granting of Medicaid; the privatizing of Medicare and raising its eligibility age; and while Ryan changed his tune and now calls for no changes in Social Security, Boehner sought a chained CPI in the recent fiscal cliff negotiations, and privatization remains the Republican Holy Grail. And what Boehner is talking about, a balanced budget over the next ten years, is actually much worse than the Ryan Plan, which doesn't balance the budget until 2040. This is from today's lead unsigned editorial in the New York Times:

If the House actually wants to put forth a balanced budget over the next 10 years, as Mr. Boehner vowed to do on Wednesday, let the public see what that really means: unimaginable cuts and changes to Medicare and Medicaid, and the elimination of scores of popular and vital programs that benefit both the poor and the middle class. Up to now, Republicans have been understandably wary of specifying how that would be done without raising taxes. Mitt Romney wouldn’t do it, and even Representative Paul Ryan’s budgets up to now wouldn’t balance the budget until 2040.

Senate Passes Fiscal Cliff Deal

I awoke this morning in the New Year -- a few revelers still making noise on the street below -- to learn that the Senate passed in a 89-8 vote what's being called the McConnell-Biden Plan, details of which are compactly supplied in a New York Times sidebar.

The top tax rate for individuals earning above $400,000 a year, $450,000 for couples, reverts to the Clinton-era 39.6%, and capital gains and dividend taxes go from 15% to 20% for these earners; also, personal exemptions and deductions are phased out for singles making more than $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000.  The deal is projected to generate $600 billion in new revenue over ten years.

Where the administration got rolled was on the estate tax which bumped up a modest 5%, from 35% to 40%, on inheritances over $5 million.  Right now until the House passes the McConnell-Biden Plan and Obama signs it estates over $1 million are taxed at 55%.  This is a big giveaway and a huge loss of leverage.  Apparently Obama was pressured by some Democrats in Senate to go easy on concentrated wealth.

What the administration got was a one-year extension of emergency unemployment benefits (which are absolutely vital to millions of people), a permanent indexing of the alternative minimum tax for inflation, and an extension for five years of the middle-class tax cuts in the 2009 stimulus bill -- the child tax credit, an expanded earned income credit and a college tuition credit.

What all workers lost and what was never really on the table to maintain was the payroll tax holiday of 2%.  Most of us will notice a smaller paycheck in the next couple of weeks.

Overall no one appears satisfied with the McConnell-Biden Plan.  David Brooks supplies the consensus opinion that all this deal portends is more conflict: "Far from laying the groundwork for future cooperation, it sentences the country to another few years of budget trench warfare. There will be a fight over drastic spending cuts known as sequestration, then over the debt limit and on and on."  Then he proceeds to blame the dysfunctionality of our political economy on voters who feel entitled to health care when they retire; not a word about rising inequality or the outsized role of a too-big-to-fail financial sector.

Jonathan Weisman tells us what's in store the next couple of months:

The nature of the deal ensured that the running war between the White House and Congressional Republicans on spending and taxes would continue at least until the spring. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner formally notified Congress that the government reached its statutory borrowing limit on New Year’s Eve. Through some creative accounting tricks, the Treasury Department can put off action for perhaps two months, but Congress must act to keep the government from defaulting just when the “pause” on pending cuts is up. Then in late March, a law financing the government expires.

We'll hit the debt ceiling at the same time the two-month hold on the sequester expires.  Then after that, assuming we make it through without a default, we have to negotiate the continuing resolution that keeps the government running.

Paul Krugman frames the big picture on his blog this morning.  After being critical of the McConnell-Biden Plan as it was coming to fruition he is more positive today.  Neither Medicare nor Social Security is tomahawked, and the difference in new revenue between what Obama originally proposed and what he got is not a big deal when looked at in terms of GDP.  Krugman explains why it is the McConnell-Biden Plan leaves this bachelor feeling lousy:

So why the bad taste in progressives’ mouths? It has less to do with where Obama ended up than with how he got there. He kept drawing lines in the sand, then erasing them and retreating to a new position. And his evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling.

If Obama stands his ground in that confrontation, this deal won’t look bad in retrospect. If he doesn’t, yesterday will be seen as the day he began throwing away his presidency and the hopes of everyone who supported him. 

Maybe the House will do us a favor and vote McConnell-Biden down.

Negotiations Progress + Right Wing Strategy

The fiscal cliff news today reported by Jonathan Weisman and Jackie Calmes is that there is progress in the negotiations between Boehner and Obama.  The progress is that Boehner has finally agreed to a rate increase for the rich.  The problem is that the rate increase would apply only to households making more than $1 million a year, raising only $300 billion over ten years.  This is far short of Obama's recently lowered demand of $1.4 trillion in new revenue over ten years.  Republicans have yet to specify how they will make up the difference.  What deductions would be eliminated?

Another idea floated by Boehner is a one-year increase in the debt ceiling.  And while Boehner has shelved the proposal to raise Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67, he is sticking to his demand that government reduce its cost-of-living adjustments.

It seems like a ruse to me, the smallest of gestures; so when talks finally collapse and the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone and the sequester kicks in Boehner can say, "See, I tried; I gave ground."  This way he can deflect some of the public ire that polls show is coming the GOP's way once we go off the cliff.

An important story in today's paper is Nicholas Confessore and Monica Davey's description of how Amway scion Dick Devos along with the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity ginned up right-to-work legislation in Michigan.  Rightist strategy appears oriented towards gaining control in state legislatures and thereby ensuring "a favorable position for Congressional redistricting." 

The Mad Mullahs in the House of Representatives are going to be with us for a while.  Will we continue to placate them?