Another Day Older and Deeper In Debt
We socialists, I hope, are not the types to revel in I-told-you-so’s, but for years we’ve been sounding the alarm that the consumer purchasing power of our fellow patriotic Americans could not be counted on to fuel the global economy. Wages for working Americans have been essentially stagnant since the 1970’s, leaving a huge amount of consumer debt to preserve the American Way of Life. But, we warned, one day we will all have to pay the piper.
That day seems to be at hand, with a mortgage crisis and bank failures making headlines. Gee whiz, the New York Times is finally giving this story the attention that it deserves in an otherwise-excellent series of articles “about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.” One article, which readers will likely use as a yardstick for their own financial worries, profiles a Ms. Diane McLeod who amassed over $280,000 in debt through credit cards, the home shopping network and two mortgages:
Ms. McLeod, who is 47, readily admits her money problems are largely of her own making. But as surely as it takes two to tango, she had partners in her financial demise. In recent years, those partners, including the financial giants Citigroup, Capital One and GE Capital, were collecting interest payments totaling more than 40 percent of her pretax income and thousands more in fees.
The temptations are surely hard to resist. As soon as I entered college, I received unsolicited credit card applications on a weekly basis. As soon as my first mortgage bill came due, I received my first offer to refinance the loan. But my parents’ own problems with debt when I was a kid served as a cautionary example for me, and I’ve always chafed at the idea of owing anyone or anything. For the most part, I have what economists would call “good debt.” About twenty thousand dollars in student loans, still in an in-school deferment. A single home mortgage with tiny monthly payments of under $400. I own multiple credit cards, but, save for a period of unemployment a few years back, I’ve never carried a balance (and, ironically, the time that I did rack up – ultimately pay off – credit card debt probably improved my credit rating). I have a small auto loan that I’m rapidly paying off by trebling the minimum monthly payments. And I’ve even got a modest savings account!
So, all in all, I’m doing okay. Except that the credit crunch and general economic uncertainty is effecting all of us by making everything so damn uncertain. For example, I’ve been trying to sell my apartment since last September to no avail. But the only official bid I got was an insulting low-ball offer from some 23-year-old kid with such bad credit that it would be a miracle if he got a mortgage. As a board member of my co-op, one of the last buyers that I recall approving was a unionized Long Island schoolteacher earning an impressive six-figure salary, who, nevertheless, had amassed a significant amount of consumer debt that he was diligently paying down. His credit score wasn’t very good, but he obviously earned enough money to swing the mortgage and maintenance payments and still afford annual south american vacations. So we approved him as a shareholder, on the cusp of the mortgage crisis.
I’m fairly certain that if this teacher applied for a mortgage today, he would be rejected. So, if people like that can’t get clearance to buy their own homes, who can be counted on to buy us out of our grossly inflated mortgages? No wonder this entire country feels like it’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Keep Your Riches, Give Me a Bonus Track!
Finally getting their due after a generation and a half of younger bands cashed in on their legacy, the Replacements are in the midst of the rock-n-roll equivalent of a Presidential exploratory committee for a reunion tour. First came Jim Walsh’s adoring biography, and now the Mats’ early funny records get the deluxe treatment from Rhino records, re-mastered and fleshed out with bonus tracks.
The Replacements’ later years on a major label were marked by disappointment, as each effort to turn their next record into a “Great Rock Statement” missed the mark, making the out-takes and B-sides an essential part of the band’s narrative. Their indie years, on the other hand, were marked by a constant maturation and growth that culminated in as perfect a record as any band has ever committed to modified petroleum product, 1984’s “Let It Be.” Consequently, the bonus tracks are the usual mix of covers (“20th Century Boy”), demos (a more vulnerable sounding “Sixteen Blue” and a Westerberg solo “Answering Machine”) and excised tracks (“Temptation Eyes” and “Perfectly Lethal”) that add little to the record but a historical footnote and the slight satisfaction that there are better sounding versions of these songs than our muddy, 16th generation traded bootlegs.
It was on “Let It Be” that the band finally acquiesced and let lead singer Paul Westerberg load up the disc with four of the most beautiful fucked up ballads. On earlier records, these songs wound up as B-sides or home demos that were never fully realized. Now they are rightfully reclaim the spotlight, starting with “If Only You Were Lonely,” the cutesy, clumsy love-song left off of the band’s trash debut, “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” but featured on 76.5% of all mixtapes made ever since. “If Only You Were Lonely” hinted at a wit and maturity that songs like “I Hate Music” and “Shutup” belied, but guitarist Bob Stinson hated it, and it was relegated to B-side status. The remainder of the bonus tracks on “Sorry Ma” indicate that “I Hate Music” was as witty as all four band members were willing to get on their first record.
“If You Get Married” was probably the next great ballad that the Replacements might have recorded, an elegiac ode to swinging bachelorhood and the dread of growing up, except that Westerberg never had the nerve to propose its inclusion on a record. Heretofore, its only known existence was a low-quality recording of a slightly inebriated live performance. On the newly-remastered “Stink,” “Married” turns up as a fully realized home demo — a lost classic. The rest of the short record is fleshed out with Hank Williams and Bill Haley covers, which, as far as I can tell have never gotten out of the vaults until now. It’s enough to make a fan misty to hear the Replacements wail on some classic in the studio at the height of their prowess, and for that reason and “If You Get Married,” “Stink” is the best value of the Replacements’ re-mastered discs.
“Hootenany” is a hoot. At the time of its release, it was the most stylistically diverse of the Replacements’ records. The bonus tracks continue in that freewheeling style. Two of those extra tracks are alternate versions of “Lovelines,” a first reading of the back pages of the Twin Cities’ favorite weekly alternative newspaper and a rambling rocker that steals the melody for the band’s smart ass entry into a Miller college band contest (“Keep your riches, give me a Budweiser,” our favorite weisenheimers shout). The highlight here, as on other records, is a Westerberg solo home demo, “Bad Worker,” in which our hero takes himself to task for being an otherly-motivated employee and a disappointment to his father.
A band as bootlegged as this is likely to leave a few key tracks off, but that seems an intentional tease for the boxed set that could follow (and the reunion tour to support it).
Blame It On the Solo Career
Ever since “Satellite Rides” failed to make them stars and lead singer Rhett Miller cut loose for a middling solo career, the Old 97s have reunited every four years to record a mellow studio album. Their latest, “Blame It On Gravity,” seems slight and easily dismissible, but so did their last long-player, “Drag It Up,” which turned out to be a real sleeper and is probably the Old 97s record that I listen to the most.
As can be expected from a band with multiple songwriters and a moonlighting lead singer, the sidemen deliver some of the best material here. In particular, bassist Murray Hammond, always one to take a star turn here and there, turns in a pair of crooning country ballads (Pick Hit: “The Color of a Lonely Heart Is Blue”) that serve to remind that the 97’s started out as the band that just might save country music. Otherwise, Miller steers the band towards power pop and VH1-style rock.
Rhett Miller remains a clever songwriter with a gift for wordplay and indelible characters, like the kid who “came from Pheonix in a borrowed VW Bug just to prove that he was on her like she was a drug” (“The Fool”) or the lothario who preys on “girls like you with your flip flop smiles and your big blue eyes on vacation” (“Dance With Me”). Most of these songs, particularly the slow burn of “The Easy Way” and the driving “Ride,” merely hint at the incredible power of this band live. Whatever else are “Blame it On Gravity’s” merits, at least it will put the Old 97s back on tour.
Toward Social Justice
One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there.
Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” co-written with Fernando Gapasin. Centered on the recent split between the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win group, the book features quite a bit of inside baseball reportage on the machinations leading up to the split. Fletcher is highly critical of the “undebate” that took place and focused on marginal and highly technical matters of per capita rebates and core jurisdictions, avoiding a larger reexamination of the role of our labor unions within a wider labor movement. Although Fletcher identifies some key differences in ideology and vision within the union movement, these were not addressed and anyway tend to cut across international union lines. Instead, both the AFL-CIO and what emerged as the Change to Win group, he charges, fundamentally share the same neo-Gompersian framework of “pure and simple” trade union roles and functions that the reason for the split was unnecessary.
One of Fletcher’s most cogent points in this book is that leftists who work in the trade union movement in relatively large numbers have, absent an organized Left, ideologized the mere act of organizing workers into unions, as though this is an inherently radical act. This point hit home for me as I have recently risen to a position of responsibility in my union without any organizational affiliations beyond my union membership and have made organizing workers the most important thing in my life. Indeed, William Z. Foster has become a hero of mine, in his 1919 incarnation, for his sincere belief that organizing mass production workers into the conservative craft unions would necessarily radicalize them and their unions. Of course, Fletcher points out, the real point of organizing workers is to empower them to challenge their employers and improve their jobs and communities, not merely to collect their dues and “represent” them.
The last section of Fletcher and Gapasin’s book is devoted to their modest proposal to transform our trade union movement into a social justice movement that represents all workers, regardless of nation or employment status, and which challenges white supremacy, male patriarchy, U.S. imperialism and the entire global capitalist system. Good luck with that, Bill. In all seriousness, some of Fletcher and Gapasin’s proposals could gain traction among labor movement decision makers, as, for example, their proposal to transform our central labor councils (currently, the umbrella organizations of local unions in a city that gets together for political endorsements and campaigning and occasional strike support) into central workers councils embracing labor organizations beyond “pure and simple unions” and begin functioning like real community coalitions.
However, for the most part, Fletcher and Gasparin’s program is one that needs, as they call for in the proposal itself, an organized Left movement to carry out. At March’s Left Forum, Fletcher made a seemingly oft-hand reference to the need for a real socialist party that inspired very loud and spontaneous applause. During the Q&A, I waited very patiently (and, it turned out, futilely) to be called on and ask: “Bill, I’m with you on the need for a socialist party, and given the applause we heard, I’m not alone. Obviously such a project would not be an easy thing, given our legitimate political differences and the tendency towards factionalism and sectarianism. Still, any process that will move us towards a real organized Left will need leaders such as yourself out front, sponsoring the early calls and meetings. So, in your ample spare time, can you move on this?”