Tag Archives: money

Usual Rubbish

String theory.

2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmm, yeah. We’re getting close to the expiration date on THAT little scam. Hard to sustain that 20th anniversary narrative for more than a year, right? And hell, we missed the International House tenth anniversary. And people are beginning to figure out that our Volcano Man recording is not the famous one from the comedy movie. What’s the next grift, Lincoln? And how do we keep it secret? Thank god almighty Marvin isn’t typing this conversation into the blog … right …. Marvin …. ?

Oh, damn! Uh …. we were just working on the … um … lines for a play we’re writing about corrupt musicians. Fictional corrupt musicians. Pretty convincing, huh? Sure, like most writers, we draw on life experience. I mean, your first play is bound to be a veiled autobiography, right? It’s hard to imagine a band getting by on grift alone. It’s simply not remunerative enough, for one thing. Then before you know it you’re squatting in abandoned buildings, like maybe an old mill somewhere in upstate New York. Fighting the cockroaches for crumbs. One of these days we’re going to win one of those fights, after which we will all dine sumptuously. Or at least anti-Lincoln will – his favorite snack is stray crumbs, which, if you think about it, is the antimatter equivalent of chicken fricassee, the posi-matter Lincoln’s favorite snack. It all adds up, doesn’t it?

Okay, well … you’ve got us dead to rights. Whatever we may be as musicians and songwriters, we are utter failures at making money in any legitimate way. The closest thing we’ve come to steady day-labor was probably that two or three weeks when we rented the man-sized tuber out as an ornamental plant for a local bank lobby. (We convinced them he was a ficus. They may know all about money over there, but they’re no ornamental plant experts.) Then there was that brief period when we lent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to the Police Department as a traffic direction automaton, though that was only useful when the town had blackouts. (Marvin’s inventor Mitch Macaphee went so far as to contrive a couple of power failures just to increase demand on his robot creation.)

Nice work, tubey ... I mean, ficus!

These revenue streams have dried up, unfortunately. Man-sized tuber and Marvin are practically in open revolt. Who can blame them, right? It’s not like we take it upon ourselves to rent our aging bodies out as manikins, substandard as they might be. We can scrape just about enough money together each month to buy guitar strings. God help us if we ever need bass or piano strings! Once in a while we get a residuals check from interstellar MP3 sales, but it’s not enough to keep the lights on. What’s the solution? Another …. interstellar …. tour? No, that would be madness! After that last disaster a couple of years ago? Forget it! I’m not piling into another one of those slapped together space barges so that I can be piloted by a madman to some remote asteroid venue where there’s nothing to breathe but radioactive methane. That’s final.

Okay, Marvin – stop typing. Now …. when do we ship out for Aldebaran?

Political Rants

Only money.

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Sometimes I think my head is going to explode. Every get that way? It sometimes happens over stupid shit, like earlier this week when the MS Office install stopped working on my two-year-old PC, and Bill Gates’ automated tech support tried to trick me into buying a subscription to Office 365 rather than just reinstalling my Office 2016 once-and-done version. Hate when that happens, don’t you?

That’s not what really made my head explode this week. The true culprit was our ridiculous political culture – you know, the one that whines incessantly about how expensive Medicare For All will be (i.e. trillions of dollars less than what we’re spending now) but then turns around and drops two trillion dollars on saving Trump’s political bacon (they wanted to spend six trillion). Suddenly, all this money appeared out of nowhere.

And like the financial crisis, Congress’s piece is just the down payment. As David Dayen explained on Majority Report this past week, the $425 billion fund managed by Steve Mnuchin (the foreclosure king) will serve as initial capital in a Federal Reserve program that will direct more than ten times that amount towards select businesses – big banks, etc. – in the form of low-interest credit. Dayen refers to it as a money cannon, and he’s not wrong. There will be oversight in the form of an inspector general and an oversight board, but the review will be after the fact. It’s deja vu, all over again.

Sure, presumably every worker/taxpayer in America will get some kind of check. But the point is the bailout – the prole checks are just for window dressing. The bishops of austerity in the Senate are already whining about expanded unemployment benefits being too generous to people who are not working, as if there’s some moral hazard in paying people not to spread the Coronavirus. I’m not hearing them complain about trillions in public money being dropped on private enterprise, which will turn around and enrich themselves rather than use it for productive purposes, like hiring people. I’ve heard some vague hand-waving about the American people having a stake in the beneficiary industries, but this isn’t going to happen. Like the Wall Street and Detroit bailouts, there are very few strings attached to this money.

If we hand trillions of dollars out to private companies, we should own those companies. If we own those companies, we should put their workers in charge of managing them. If capitalism requires the government to resuscitate it every ten or so years with massive injections of socialism, we should start to rethink our system and, perhaps, pursue a vision of society that doesn’t entail crash-and-burn collapses every time something goes wrong … a vision that would emphasize social cohesion and a more robust approach to preparedness, involving – I don’t know – an exponentially larger number of, say, ICU beds, respirators, freaking PPE, for when the next plague comes strolling along.

We determine what’s possible. It’s just a question of political will.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Agro-botics.

2000 Years to Christmas

It think there’s room. Absolutely. We’ve got plenty of space on the shop floor. Just sweep those old discarded hammer parts out of there and we’re in business.

Oh, hi. Welcome to Big Green’s Cheney Hammer Mill headquarters, the innovation center of northeastern central New York! Sure, I know you folks all think we’re a bunch of layabout deadbeat motherfuckers, and, well, you’re mostly right about that, but I’m here to tell you that we’re on the verge of turning over a new leaf. And that leaf will be turned by the claw of a hired robot.

What am I talking about? Trends, my dear listeners, trends. Take a look at your non-existent newspaper. You don’t have to look very far at all to find stories about robots increasingly being used in agriculture. That’s right – robots plowing, robots planting, robots fertilizing, robots picking, etc., etc. Now look at us. (No, really …. look at us.) We are an independent band, planted in the middle of an agricultural community – a musical ficus plant, dying of thirst in a creative desert. Year after year, we seek something our community cannot give us: money delivered to our door in easy to negotiate, small denomination bills. After all this time, we’ve decided, why fight it? Let’s join the agricultural sector. Now … how can we do this without breaking a sweat?

Well, now there’s an answer to that age-old question: Robots! Robots are doing all the work these days, cultivating cash crops all across the country. Now you may say, “But Joe, you don’t have any land? Where will you grow the crops?” Well, nameless interlocutor, first, thanks for calling me Joe. Second, we’ve got all the growing space we need, right here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. We can set up a hydroponic garden on the shop floor. Hell, we won’t even need dirt! Just millions of gallons of water and … well, we’ll work that out.

And you may ask, “But Joe, where are you gonna get the robots?” My reply: Thanks for your question! In fact, we have robots. Well … at least one robot. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will be patient zero in our agricultural revolution. He will be the prototype, the one-bot vanguard for a future army of agro-matons. Right, Marvin? …. Marvin??

Marvin? Anyone seen Marvin today? It’s planting time, damn it!