Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


Friday July 22 was so hot that the New York Yankees cancelled batting practice. Their opponents Oakland Athletics did not, which may account for the 17-7 Yankee win. The first pitch was thrown when the temperature hit 100, and so it continued for the three plus hours. The team trainers could not remember such heat, and neither did manager Joe Girardi, though he had an experience years ago, when players were given lettuce leaves (Iceberg?) to wear under their helmets, for coolness.

The members of the Republican House caucus should probably wear the lettuce, to bring them back from the heat daze, probably brought on by the excess carbon in the air, generated by their favorite energy producers, coal burning electricity systems. This may account for the ideological inability to compromise on debt limit. The carbon caused greenhouse effect was last amplified by George W. Bush, who disregarded his EPA’s advice and did not build a carbon control system. Now we are all paying for that with our health, breathing poisonous excess ozone.



This country is basically suffering in three areas of economics, of budget excesses, inability to raise the debt limit and continuing job loss. All parties agree that debt limit need be raised but the GOP/tea party luddites want to pay for it almost solely by cutting government costs, with the House leadership shiftimg back and forth on the issue ofaccepting the fact that increased revenue is a most important source. The ideology of solely cutting costs is boosted by Grover Norquist, a financier who in 1985 founded the Americans for Tax Reform, a government hating organization of almost religious intensity (think radical Islam) who stated that he wants to reduce government enough to drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. He claims that President Reagan blessed him, the same president who in his day condemned the Congress for obstructing his efforts to raise the debt limit, an action he needed to avoid the US having to renege on payments and potentially starting a world wide recession. Now Norquist, who pays himself well for the part-time job (he also has a string of other poetical organizations a nod a hedge fund to run) has had all the GOP presidential candidates and many Cogresspeople sign a “no new taxes” pledge, and wows to slap down any legislator or candidate who has a “yes but” suggestion to increment revenue that looks like taxation. He slaps them down “like a freshman who finds excuses to ask to go to the prom, after being told that it is a no-no.” He accompanies the words with a slapping body language, appropriate to the imperious leader that he is.

What is not realized by Norquist's single-minded disciples is that his protection of business is destroying US manufacturing, now down to 8 or 9 percent of the GDP, and that wholesale cutting of government services is destroying jobs and economic recovery. Or is that their political objective, risk hurting the country to stop the Democrats?

All of us know, from media disclosures, that big business firms, e. g. GE and the oil companies, instead of paying the maximum 35 percent income tax, have managed to reduce it by deductions, even to zero. Further, clever accountants work hard to convert ordinary income to a 15 percent capital gains taxability A most costly gesture of favoring business emigration offshore and continuing loss of American jobs has been our support of China’s 1979 change to market –oriented economy.

It started with President Richard Nixon’s visiting China, invited by Premier Chou Enlai, in 1972, and US recognition of its government as the sole ruling power in 1979. President Mao Zedong died in 1976, and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping effected the economic turnaround, inviting the capitalist world to invest in China, exploiting its cheap labor, provided that the technology and research also be shared with the Chinese. What followed was an anti-Ricardoan economic shift, massive transfer form expensive unionized manufacturing from the US to China, $600 billion US trade deficit with China, and US government condoned hiding of corporate profits earned and sequestered abroad. A tax amnesty of such billions of such hidden funds in 2004, instead of the expected revival of US manufacturing and jobs, induced more offshoring and boosted corporate dividends. This process continues, and the “no new taxes” religion-like insistence, spearheaded by the 80-odd new Congresspeople, mostly tea party ideologues and apostles, continues to destroy US economy. If you are looking for evidence, think of the solar panel industry, a US invention, which is collapsing in the US because of China’s provided cheap imports, sponsored by US industry and protected by trade agreements that help China in keeping the value of its renmibi and yuan low (no violation of the WTO rules, claims China).. The last US panel maker, Evergreen in Boston area, recipient of $millions of taxpayer support, is moving to Wuhan in central China, losing 800 jobs locally and thousands of jobs country-wide.



Even the GOP leaders, recognizing the need for raising the debt limit to preclude US and worldwide recession if we renege on our debt obligations, only want a two step procedure with a resstricted ability to raise the debt limit, one that postpones the damage, maybe, with the added risk of a ratings loss. This is not enough for the protection of our economy. The GOP politicians will risk the US economy to gain power for their party, protecting their corporate sponsors and putting the burdens of balancing the budget on the middle class fellow citizens, recipients of Social Securitedicare and Medicaid. all this accompanied by more job loss. We are doomed, if this ideology wins in 2012.

Labels: Chou Enlai, Grover Norquist, Joe Girardi, Richard Nixon

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


Overwhelmed by worries about the US budget deficit and continuing unemployment, this writer has decided to devote more of his and your time on pleasant things, starting with the movies and musicals that have made him feel good in the spring season of 2011.



In theatre, the foremost was a revival of the 1950 Tony Award winner, Guys and Dolls, at the Barrington Stages, a summer theatre since 1990 or so in Sheffield, MA to which we were devoted until they moved to Pittsfield, MA, more of a trip. However, we could not miss G&D, the wonderful musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loeffler, based on two short stories and Broadway characters created by the legendary newspaperwriter Damon Runyon. The book, by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows , deals with the money troubles of Nathan Detroit, proprietor of the permanent floating crap game, who’s run out of locations and cash for bribes. To regain some, he persuades the gamble-on- anything ladies man Sky Masterson to try and seduce the forthright Sergeant Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army to fly to Havana for a night (they do) while he sneaks in to use the mission quarters for a game. Straightened out by love, Sky leads the gamblers back into the mission, to confess, culminated by singing Sit down, Your’e Rockin’ the Boat, led by Nicely-Nicely Johnson. The love ballads If I Were a Bell, My Time of Day, are a joy, and Luck be a Lady, A Bushel and a Peck, and the overture tune, I’ve Got a Horse Right Here, The Name is Paul Revere have the audience singing along, quietly (the high school kids at this matinee must have had an intro lesson) .

Another musical with a mission subject, dating back to 1932, Anything Goes, music by Cole Porter, has a distinguished authorship, by Guy Bolton and P, G. Wodehouse, refreshed for stage by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsey, without losing any of its goofiness and improbability. A Wall Street novice, Billy Crocker, in love with a debutante heiress Hope Harcourt, who’s engaged to a loony British lord. Billy hides on their ocean liner, bound for London, He is abetted by a chanteuse working the cruise, Rene Sweeney (Sutton Foster, great) and a phony preacher, the gambler Moonface Martin (impish Joel Grey, another perfect match) who also intends to work the cruise, as a gambler. Billy and Moonface are tagged as Public Enemies No1 and 13 and become shipboard celebrities, and Billy and the lord are eventually married by the captain to their respective newfound sweethearts. The plot grows more improbable as we go along, but all the crazinesses are compensated by the great songs, which include You’re the Top, I Get a Kick Out Of You, The Gypsy In Me, and Friendship. We all walked out with songs in our hearts.

In movies the best was Midnight in Paris, another nostalgia miracle, by Woody Allen, about a Hollywood scriptwriter, in the City of Dreams with his shopping minded sweetheart, who gets transported 80 years back at midnight at a certain corner when the churchbell rings, and has nighttime adventures with F. Scott Fitzgerald, his Zelda ( saving her from suiciding), Cole Porter, and meets Ernest Hemingway who passes the screenwriter’s novel manuscript to Gertrude Stein for review. He falls in love with one of Pablo Picasso’s girlfriends (she also had lived with Modigliani). He finds himself described in a book she wrote, which he buys front a Seine-side boquiniste, and tries to move his new artist friends, to change history. The outcome is indefinite, but the movie is a joy.

I also have a warning. My next movie, Bad Teacher, is anything but a joy. It is an excursion into humor by Cameron Diaz, best known for babe roles. You get a clue for her new direction early on, when her character, Elizabeth, confides to an interlocutor that she went into teaching for the best reasons: easy work, no responsibility, no controls, and good pay and free summers. But a rich fiancée dumped her, and we get to see Elizabeth in her true colors, a faker who drinks and takes drugs, shows movies instead to teaching, solicits bribes for grades, blackmails administrators. She fits every worst stereotype one has ever heard about the honorable profession. In this politically paranoid environment one could almost believe that this is a campaign motivated work, justifying the driven politicians who want to save budgets by firing educators. The screenwriters involved formerly wrote for The Office, the TV serial feeding on abuses we encounter at work. Try to stay away from this ostensible exercise in sarcasm; it will make any viewer connected with education sickened.

There’s no space left for concerts, except to mention that hundreds of events take place in our parks; Google NYC and events/concerts. Particularly joyful was a free concert in Rockefeller Park, way south, in hard to access Battery City, put together as part of the River to River Festival by café singers John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey in celebration of Jonathan Schwartz, now 73, the radio personality who for decades has put together marathon classical pop music concerts on Saturdays and Sundays, most recently on WNYC. It brought together volunteer performers, from jazz pianists Bill Charlap and Tony Monte , violinist Aaron Weinstein, to singers Rebecca Kilgore and Tierney Sutton. Schwartz, best known here for his expertise in Frank Sinatra songs, was lauded for putting on the map little known performers of quality. The concert was interrupted by a sudden rain downpour that sent performers and stagehands scurrying to save the venerable concert grand, and pushed most of the two or three hundred enthusiasts under the trees for protection. With some mist still in the air, Pizzarelli brought out his guitar to haul everybody back to seats, with a sing-along potpourri of Pennies from Heaven, I’m John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith and This Land is Your Land. Surprisingly, everybody knew the words.



A final Parks joy: visiting the Pavilion in Union Square Park some afternoon, when you hear Latin music, you may find the tango dancers in action, 30 or so women and men of all ages , races and apparel, seriously practicing the art. It is a polite serious group, of study and pleasure, where people bow to each other. Good manners in public, what a gracious peer group.

Finally, congratulations to the Japanese women, winners of World Soccer Cup. It has been my contention for a long time that it will take the equalization of the status of women for the world to turn normal.



Wally Dobelis thanks a nice lady, Jenny, who lent him her spare collapsible chair at the concert.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis





You may have noted over the years that this column is a bit ambivalent, dealing with both inner city and upstate NY problems, interests that do not always coincide, even within the same party. This writer is ambivalent himself, as explained in the words of Ogden Nash, who once confessed to be a Buddhist in the winter and a nudist in the summer. It is all regional, or dependent on location, location, as the realtors proclaim.

Right now our extended weekend stay in the family’s cabin, deep in the woods 40 miles south of Albany, affects my attitudes. Today, shopping at the local IGA, equivalent of the Metro supermarket on Third Avenue near 17th, I was struck by the 4th of July vacation week specials, big on eight piece packaged frankfurters, reduced to 99 cents, while nearby orange juice half-gallons retailed at $3.50 , half a buck above the city price. And that was not the only higher priced necessity.



I had some back and forth about this with a bakery salesman, stocking shelves, who helped me choose a loaf of Freihofers's multi-grain bred. He spoke of manufacturers' greed, describing how in a recession when people tighten their belts, the makers raise prices on necessities, to maintain their profit margins. This drifted into lost government jobs in New York State, 300 plus last month and another 400 coming. This is not the way to build employment - President Obama claims to have added 50,000 private industry jobs in June, but meanwhile budget -balancing state governments have discontinued 32,000 municipal and state positions, leaving a measly 18,000 gain. The stock market reacted immediately.

This puny gain of jobs did send some right wing observers into more talk of the Obama recession, conveniently forgetting that their budget balancing act, cutting expenses by eliminating. government jobs, counteracts all efforts to increase employment. All sound economists, even the Chinese in their 2008 setbacks, increase their Keynesian money outlays, such as unemployment benefits and infrastructure jobs, to increase the multiplier driven consumption and help slowly raise production and employment. Subsidies, road, bridges and other capital structure jobs help, while cutting taxes for the rich takes money out of circulation. The necessary raising of the federal debt ceiling above the $14.3 trillion by August 2, 2011, the date by which the Treasury Department will gradually exhaust its ability to borrow money, is by now recognized by the Republican leadership, notably Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House John A. Boehner. Without the increase of the ceiling , US government gradually will cease paying salaries, military pay, Social Security and other benefits, and more importantly, renege on paying its debt, both interest and principal . The world 's economic system, which fully depends on the stability of the US currency, (now that the potential rival, euro, is badly wounded), with loss of the dollar's value the international economy will go into rapid high inflation. While the Republican leaders have learned to appreciate the damage potential, with the aid of their banker friends, the anger- driven anti government and anti-tax Tea Party masses do not want to accept the facts. Fear of losing the support of their fidgety Tea Party friends accounts for the Republican leadership's inability to convince the troops to accept the principle of the compromise discussions started in the Sunday July 10 bipartisan meeting.

It is quite evident that Boehner accepted the idea of an increase in tax revenue, but not one in the tax rates affecting the rich. The new congressmen - and some of the old - are afraid of offending their sugar daddies that pay for their campaigns.

In light of the debt ceiling struggles the Congress should consider a tax reform as a tax income enhancer. President Reagan's budget director David Stockman, veteran of the 1986 tax reform , notes that hardly any corporation pays the high corporate tax of 35%, and that the tax code, ten times the size of the Bible, provides little solace, since it is stocked chock-full with exemptions. Corporate accountants manage to convert much ordinary income into 15% capital gains, and reforming that will buy much of the necessary budget relief. One general change would be most effective and much easier than cutting corporate exemptions, item by item. This is just one patriotic suggestions from the partisan Right, and there are more coming, from Senators Jon Kyl and McCain (R, AZ) and John Cornyn (R, TX) and more.

Reflecting upon the supermarket discussion above, it is important to note that there still are , among both the blue collar and white collar workers, many of us who approach the economics of our country and the world with knowledge and concern, rather than erupting in general anger against the government and politicians.

Good people of Washington, DC, please be worthy of our trust.