The Great American Bubble Machine

WHY?: I read an Los Angeles Times article last year that outlined how Goldman Sachs persuaded its high-end investment clients to place investment bets against the very bonds it sold to the state of California. Why? Both to profit off California's economic decline -- and because they could.

This insider trading-esque action was deemed "inappropriate" (but not illegal) at the time because the strategy could possibly raise the interest rate that the state would have to pay to borrow money (it did); and then the state's credit-worthiness would be in question (it is). Now look at California. This Rolling Stone article excerpt after the continued details how Goldman Sachs has "engineered every market manipulation since the Great Depression." Ecuador's President Correa was correct when he called all of this insane.

[Related reading: link ]

(SOURCE: Rolling Stone | by Michael Taibbi) The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.

But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline the committee to save the world. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

Goldman Sachs' Powerful Influence

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage.

Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs' Excuse

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance. (source)

[post continued...]

Ecuadorian Pres. Correa on capitalism, war, etc.

WHY?: Hearing views from outside the American bubble is extremely valuable. This is the first interview I've seen with the Ecuadorian president though. I like his clarity, especially concerning how to separate "hope" from "hype". He tells Obama, yes you're a good person, but many of us leaders in Latin America are good people too. Seems that he's suggesting actions speak louder than campaign intentions. If so, I can rock with that message.

(Watch here)

[post continued...]

Jackson 5 In Africa [nyc screening]

WHY?: This film will be screening Tuesday, July 14th up in Harlem for $15. Check the Liberator events calendar for details. Looks fresh.

[post continued...]

Remembering The Times.

{via Flickr}

WHY?: Michael A. Gonzales is a crazy talented writer. This is definitely the best piece on Michael Jackson that I've read so far. Definitely a must read.

(SOURCE: Soul Summer | by Michael A. Gonzales) As one of the first generation of kids who embraced those five flamboyant brothers known as The Jackson 5 in the pre-rap music ’70s—especially the perky innocence of the Afroed rug-rat that was Michael—it is difficult to comprehend that the “King of Pop” is now dead.

In those long-lost years before brother Jackson became a parody of his former self, his gorgeous voice and staggering image seeped into the fertile imaginations of America’s chocolate city children. ”We embraced the J5 like family, like imaginary best friends or make-believe boyfriends,” wrote soul historian David Ritz in his 1995 liner-notes for the four-CD Jackson box-set Soulsation! ”We loved their bounce and joyful rhythms.”

Many current artists from Jay-Z to Missy Elliott, Justin Timberlake to Usher, viewed M.J. as a guiding light. “I would sit in class and look out of the window hoping I’d see a limousine pull up outside,” Missy Elliott once gushed. “I’d hope to see a glittery glove on the limo door and it would be Michael Jackson and he’d say, I’m here to get Missy.”

I can only imagine how difficult it must be for her to think of M.J. lying in a coma, taking his last breath.

Before Michael started acting off the wall in the early ’90s and transformed himself into the biggest super freak of the century, he was just another black boy tossed into the flames of show-biz Babylon.

Signed to Motown in 1969 and introduced to the world by the label’s leading lady Diana Ross, baby boy Mike had a virginal image and a gorgeous voice. Michael Jackson’s youthful tenderness was as sweet as chocolate, as buttery as popcorn, and as endearing as a twinkling star in the night sky.

With a power that thrilled prepubescent girls to the verge of ecstasy while provoking young boys to intense imitation, Michael became a public icon before he grew his first pubic hair.

As a childhood fan, perhaps the worst headache I ever had in my life resulted from wearing my mother’s hard pink curlers overnight so I too could have a “curly afro” like the ones the Jackson bros styled while performing the hypnotic “Dancing Machine” on The Carol Burnett Show.

Trying to remember when I first heard the Jackson 5 is a bit of a strain on my old brain, but I believe it had something to do with my cousin Deenee. Three years older, Deenee dictated the youthful soundtrack of my musical initiation by introducing my ears to the funk. Spinning big-hole-in-da-middle seven-inch discs on a small black record player transported from the cluttered basement to her girly neat bedroom, Deenee stereo-boomed seminal jams by James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, Barry White, Curtis Mayfield and The Isley Brothers. Still, no other group moved us like those wailing Jackson brothers. Maybe it was the fact that we felt like the Jackson 5 could be our own playground buddies or blood brothers.

Stuffing ourselves on Jiffy-Pop popcorn and countless glasses of grape Kool-Aid, we transformed my Aunt Ricky’s basement into our own personal nightclub. Setting the record player on the black leather bar—cluttered with tacky highball glasses, a crimson lava lamp, and two bugged-eyed Keane kids on the wall—Deenee would attempt to teach my brother Perky and I how to dance while “Rockin’ Robin,” “ABC” or “The Love You Save” blared from the small speakers.

Whenever I was alone in the basement, the Michael Jackson track I compulsively played was the intoxicatingly soulful “Maria (You Were the Only One).” The aural narcotic of “Maria,” the b-side to J5’s syrupy 1971 single “Looking Through the Window,” became my drug of choice.

At the time, my young ears didn’t hear the song for what it was—the rawest soul that 13-year-old Michael had ever recorded. Paying homage to legends like Jackie Wilson and James Brown, Michael’s bewitching vocals slowly erupted like a black velveteen volcano. As lonely teardrops rolled from his sad eyes, M.J. jumped-up the good foot and screamed until he was satisfied: “Come back, come back, you… you keep a-running away!” Overflowing with heartache and a blues sensibility rare in a singer so young, “Maria” was a stirring anthem of lost love. And to me, one of the most endearing songs ever made.

While history would prove the staying power of Michaelmania, by 1973 (the same year Jermaine married Hazel, big daddy Berry Gordy’s baby girl) The Jackson 5’s sales began to slip. No longer young enough to be princes of black bubble-gum pop, but not old enough to compete with the heavy funk of George Clinton’s rump-shaking’ army (Parliament/Funkadelic/Bootsy Collins), Graham Central Station, Ohio Players, or Earth, Wind & Fire, the Jacksons were on the verge of becoming idle idols.

Yet with the release of their last great Motown single “Dancing Machine” in the chilly winter of ‘74, The Jackson 5 decided to pack their soul-pop suitcases and bless their fans with another American tour.

To this day I don’t know how she did it (perhaps it was some kind of Black mama mojo), but somehow my mother managed to get us three tickets for the Ash Wednesday show at Radio City Music Hall.

Come show day, school was closed due to a bad-ass blizzard. Ivory flakes buried the block in a thick shroud of snow. “I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to go see The Jackson 5 tonight,” announced Momduke, stomping her soaked boots at the front door. Sent home early from work because of the white mess gathering outside our window, she could only say, “I’m sorry.”

Falling, wailing, crying, bellowing, weeping, wounded, me and baby brother screamed bloody murder. “Pleeease, mommy!” we howled in unison, tears streaking our faces. ”I think them kids gonna die if you don’t take them to see the Jackson 5,” grandma joked as my little brother Perky and I rolled around on the floor like wounded dogs. Staring at our sour mugs of sadness, mom relented.

“All right already!” mommy said. ” We’re going, just stop crying.”

A few hours later, she dressed us warmly in thick parka coats, heavy snow boots, and wool gloves with matching hats. As we wobbled to the A train station at 145th Street, looking like black Russians from Harlem, silly smiles were frozen on our faces. The famed Radio City Music Hall was packed with rowdy children, high on a micture of sugar and adrenaline, and their long-suffering parents. As we walked towards our seats in the lower orchestra section, a crowd of screaming kids came running down the aisle with autograph books and cameras. “Somebody said Hazel (Jermaine’s wife) is sitting in front!” screamed one wild child. After suffering through the two opening acts, The Hues Corporation (”Rock the Boat”) and Blue Magic (”Side Show”), the clamorous kids could barely contain their excitement.

All week they had danced in their bedrooms, spinning Jackson jewels on the stereo, adjusting their denim applejack hats—just like the one M.J. wore on the cover of Got to Be There—in the mirror while deciding which color marshmallow shoes went best with their bell-bottom jeans. As the girls swooned in front of four-color Right On! posters, their brothers and boyfriends applied Blow-Out lotion to booming Afros.

Although it might have been just another show for The Jackson 5 (which now included younger siblings Janet and Randy), for us it was the most special day of our young lives. Everyone scrambled to their seats as the house lights began to dim. A loud explosion erupted from the stage and The Jackson 5 emerged from the shadows wearing their glittering, Vegas-style costumes and dancing with the wild abandon of a lost tribe.

For the next two hours within the walls of Radio City we experienced a musical dream, and nobody wanted to wake up. With their calculated innocence, complex choreography, and fierce flashes of electrifying elegance, The Jackson 5 performed with a ferocity that hinted to our young minds that tomorrow wasn’t promised.

As those Jackson boys soulfully sang their most popular singles, sweet sweat dripping from their brown faces, we were transported to a wondrous wonderland of boogie down delights. For days following The Jackson 5 concert, I recounted Michael’s performance in exquisite detail to friends, who could then pretend in their own minds that they, too, had attended the show.

“And when he sang lead on ‘Dancing Machine’ while doing The Robot [a dance I could actually do!] that was the joint!” I screamed to anyone who’d listen. “Better than Shaft and Superfly put together.” In my 10-year-old world of Black pop, Michael Jackson was all the art I needed.

Through my adult years, I still bought Michael’s records, went to see him in Los Angeles during the 1989 Bad tour, and even drunkenly sang “Remember the Time” in the middle of the night. But, whenever I rewind the movie of those youthful Harlem days in my mind, Michael Jackson is always on the soundtrack. (source)

[post continued...]

Cloud Cult.

WHY?: These are not hipsters. These are the quirky kids in school that maintained a tight circle of talented friends and spent every afternoon after school in the band room. At least that's who I'm reminded of. Point being, they are fresher than most people ever would have expected them to be, just by being honest and pursuing a true passion, not by trying to be fresher. I'm rooting for them. Every school should have a safe space for quirky kids to become the geniuses they're supposed to be. To be sure, they are definitely the inheritors of the white hippie legacy though. But that they invest much of their time and energy into the structure and the "how" of what they do, buys them back a lot more credibility than the average "white freedom song band".



(SOURCE: The Grist) A Cult Oriented: An interview with Craig Minowa of green-leaning band Cloud Cult

Imagine the soaring tribal rock of Arcade Fire, the head-nodding beat-pop of Postal Service, and the arty skronk of Modest Mouse, strung together in a loose-limbed, lo-fi pastiche. Toss in half a chamber orchestra and some found-sound collages, and top it off with vocals of almost childlike guilelessness and yearning.

That, in a nutshell, is Cloud Cult, a quirky little band out of Minnesota that in the last few years has emerged from obscurity into improbable indie success. Their last album, Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus, was an out-of-nowhere college-radio smash that brought major labels courting. That interest is only likely to increase with the release last week of the band's new album, The Meaning of 8, an artistic leap forward that melds the eccentricities beloved by long-time fans with accessible, unshakeable melodies.

Rarely has major label pursuit been so futile. Cloud Cult's DIY values go well beyond home-studio noodling into deeply committed green territory. The band records and produces its music on the organic farm of band leader, principal songwriter, and singer Craig Minowa. The northern Minnesota farm -- also Minowa's home and the offices of his nonprofit music label Earthology Records -- is heated entirely with geothermal energy. Early albums were shipped in recycled jewel cases, cleaned by hand by the band; since then, Earthology has developed a full range of eco-friendly packaging and reproduction services that it offers to other bands.

Minowa and crew are now headed out on tour in their biodiesel van. Grist will be co-presenting (with radio station KEXP) the band's shows in Portland and Seattle. I caught up with Minowa by phone.

Which came first, environmental awareness or love of music?

I've been directly involved with music for longer. I took piano lessons as a little kid, and didn't work in the environmental movement until early high school. But the passion for both grew together. I love both of them so much; I just don't feel like a complete person if I'm not doing both.

Were your parents environmentalists?

No. They weren't specifically environmentalists; it was a conservative Christian family. The birthing ground for the environmental tendencies was when I was young. I was kind of a freakazoid of the community, one of the kids that got picked on and beaten up by everyone. So I would go hang out in the woods. There's a tree I could climb but no one else could climb, so I spent a lot of time up there. Over the years I found a lot of solace and friendship out in the woods, and as I got older it felt like something I wanted to protect -- my sacred ground.

You got your degree in environmental science. How much experience did you have in the movement before you jumped over to music professionally?

All through college I was doing volunteer work with environmental groups, trying to find my niche in the environmental field. I ended up working with nonprofits, doing environmental education, even some work with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources -- all over the place, testing different things out. I found my niche working with smaller nonprofits. That's where I've been ever since, and I love it.

What is Earthology?

I'd been organizing environmental festivals -- Earth Day events, things like that. I started feeling it would be fun to have a nonprofit focused just on doing that type of thing, entertaining events that are environmentally focused; that could be a connection between my passion for music and my passion for the environment. It didn't come together until I finished Who Killed Puck? I realized there was no way to manufacture that CD in a way that made me feel comfortable. It came down to, do I just put this album I worked four years on in the drawer because I don't feel comfortable making albums out of plastic crap? Or is there a way to manufacture this in an environmentally friendly way?

I spent a lot of time asking questions, doing research into different types of production processes for CDs. At the time, CDs were relatively new on the market. I realized the only way to have an environmentally friendly plastic jewel case was to get used ones. People were dumping them off at local landfills all the time. I put boxes out at college bookstores; students could drop their used jewel cases in there. I have those shipped back to Earthology and can release my CDs that way.

The donated jewel cases started coming in a lot faster than I expected, so I figured I would turn it into something for other musicians interested in having their CDs manufactured in the most environmentally friendly way. It branched out all over the place, from working with the University of Illinois to get the biopolymer shrink wraps developed to figuring out ways of having the plastic trays be made out of hemp, and working on trying to get that biopolymer CD, which didn't end up working out.

The disc itself?

It's the last element that still isn't as environmentally friendly as I would like.

What do you do to reduce your impact once you're out on the road?

It's getting a lot easier for bands to tour in an environmentally friendly way. When we started to tour, I had a lot of ethical dilemmas -- you're exhausting so much gas, and energy in general. But NativeEnergy offers a program where you can have a carbon-neutral tour; you just figure out how much gas and energy you're using and they figure out how much wind power you need to pump back into the grid to balance that out. We also go to American Forests and calculate the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere, and plant enough trees to absorb that. The catch with that is, when you plant, say, 100 trees, the number of trees that are actually going to survive their entire life and absorb all that CO2 is less than 30 percent. You go to places like American Forests and figure out what you need to do for planting trees -- and multiply it times three.

Then we've got solar panels on our van, and we just purchased a van that we're able to do biodiesel with.

What do you do with the solar panels?

The panels pump into batteries inside the van, and those batteries power everything we're using in there. A couple of us do nonprofit environmental advocacy work while we're on the road. We do the shows at night, then while we're traveling from city to city we'll be on our laptops and cell phones doing our regular environmental nonprofit work. The solar panels power our laptops and our cell phones. Technically, the battery storage is enough that we could plug our amps in there -- we could do a full outdoor set on that.

Is the band a nonprofit entity?

Earthology is getting its 501(c)3. The band is discussing going 501(c)3 too.

How do you feed yourself?

Just like with any nonprofit, like Sierra Club or Greenpeace, people on staff are getting paid a modest salary. Once you've paid everybody their modest salary, and paid the bills, if you have something on top of that you don't go out and buy a Lamborghini; you do something good with it.

How did you stumble on geothermal energy?

When my wife and I moved out here, everything hit the fan right away. The roof started leaking all over the place; the furnace exploded; the car exploded. We did some research into alternative methods of heating the home, and geothermal seemed like the best option. It was interesting -- with government subsidies, it ended up costing not a whole lot more than it would to install central air and a furnace. And geothermal cools the home in the summer. Anybody who's building a new home could install geothermal for the same price as air conditioning and furnace. It's one of the things I recommend to everybody.

The biggest problem we've had is, the house is older so it's not all that energy efficient. We'd like to be fully off the grid. We have floor plans for an earth home worked out. We're looking for the land; we're hoping to start construction by this summer/fall. With the earth home you have 50 percent more energy efficiency, so the geothermal would be working half as much as now. With that, we'd be able to power the geothermal with the new backyard wind turbines or a photovoltaic system.

The Earthology offices are also in your house?

Yeah, everything's here. We need to build another out-building to hold all the used jewel cases coming in. [Laughs.] There's boxes everywhere.

I have this picture of you sitting in a room somewhere with paper towels and squirt cleaner for hours on end.

That's totally accurate. We clean them with water and vinegar, case by case. We figure, with how much energy and petroleum it takes to manufacture a brand new case, the amount we're using to hand clean them is actually pretty minimal. It feels like penance, in a way, for the bad things we've done in our lives to the planet.

What happens if you bust out on the pop charts with this next album? How's it going to scale up?

Earthology now does 100 percent post-consumer recycled cardboard CD cases. That's helped a lot. When we're shipping them to radio and magazines, with a cardboard case we can just slap a stamp on there and put it in the mail. The plastic ones, you have to buy the recycled mailers for that. You end up with more packaging.

Why not move to 100 percent downloads and eliminate the need for physical packaging altogether?

It's definitely one of the benefits of the music industry combining with the internet. With the new album, we did a pre-release where people could download it. I loved it -- people would pay a smaller amount, and we wouldn't have to make any kind of product. The energy efficiency and benefits to the environment with that is just mind-blowing. It's the future of the industry.

Do you feel like your advocacy has impeded your success?

In some ways it has and in some ways it hasn't. When we were first starting to get decent college radio play, I found out that it's a lot less popular to have an environmental message, or to follow an environmental path, than I had assumed. We were getting interviewed by some hipster magazine, and I remember the interviewer asking, "Is it hard for you to bring music to this hip crowd when you have the stigma of this hippie image?" I was thinking, "Is that bad?" [Laughs.]

So that initially hurt us. We realized it was something we don't necessarily need to wear on our sleeve. We're doing this because we believe we have to do it. There'd be no reason to pursue this career option if we weren't doing it. Cloud Cult fans don't necessarily realize all we're doing to try and reduce our footprint, and I think that's OK. For those fans that are interested, they seek out that information -- they'll email us, or ask us at shows, and we can yammer on and on about it.

Have you consciously dialed back the advocacy in your music?

Yeah. Who Killed Puck? had some pretty strong environmental messages in it, and the project I was involved with before that was even more message. Over time, it just felt like everybody's getting preached to all the time. The information is out there; we have a lot of reading material at shows. I am just not comfortable with soapbox preaching. I'd rather teach by example than by preaching, so we're trying to build a good business model that other bands can emulate.

Environmental music has a stigma as dirty as Christian rock had about 10 years ago. Christian rock has gotten a lot better, but think about 10 years ago: you know they're going to have a message, but the music's probably gonna suck. A lot of people think that about any band with a message. You can only hear so many songs with the chorus, "Let's go recycle." [Laughs.]

What do you think the environmental movement is doing right and wrong?

The biggest thing is shifting the messaging. When the environmental movement first started sparking up in the '60s and '70s, the messaging was "down with this and down with that." At the time, that type of thing was necessary -- it got things rolling. I think it's changed. People have an aversion to that now, because we're so inundated with it. People want solutions; they want to feel good about what they're doing. It's not as helpful to go out and say, Wal-Mart organics are horrible. It's more helpful to say, it's better for you to stop at the farmers' market or the co-op -- offer those solutions.

The same thing with global warming. It can be overwhelming to read all the information about what's happening. Give people real, tangible, and effective solutions they can put into their everyday life. It is so important; everybody wants to do good. They just need the solution.

Does the band get involved in politics?

We're pretty vocal on stage about how we feel. There are some points that just need the limelight. We don't specifically endorse any candidate. If one comes along we totally fall in love with ...

What if Gore decides to hop in?

We would be all about Gore. (source)

[post continued...]

An illegal party.

WHY?: 1500 people came out to Ghislain Poirier and Khiasma's illegal party last June. I doubt we could get away with that in NYC -- doubly doubt it if it's black kids tryna do it -- but I admire the risk anyway. Footage from this year's (legally sanctioned?) party after the continued.

[post continued...]

"I spent five days crying in Argentina."

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

Please ignore the sensational "Latina Lover" graphic from Talking Points Memo and watch this press conference with South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. Remember how he went missing for a few days to "go hiking"? And somehow ended up in Buenos Aires visiting a woman who is not his wife?

Anyway, what struck me the most about this press conference is how open and vulnerable Sanford is, how he treated this conference as a confessional more than anything else. I felt uncomfortable for him the more he talked, and yet I also felt strangely compelled, moved even, by how genuinely upset and disappointed he seemed to be with himself.

It could be argued that Sanford doesn't deserve any empathy; after all, he voted to have Clinton impeached for the Monica Lewinsky scandal (which seems downright quaint nowadays, doesn't it?). And anyone who goes into politics knows that they lose their anonymity and privacy in exchange for the power and clout that comes with any public office.

But I won't make that argument. This is one of the most unusual displays of humanity I've seen from a politician in a while. No sound bites. No stoic wife standing at his side, pretending she's okay with hearing her husband describe the "who, what, when, where, why, and how"s of his affair. No spokesperson whispering prompts into his ear. Just a man admitting he screwed up. I can't laugh or scoff at that. I can't make some sarcastic, biting, witty comment about that. I can't look at this as anything other than a man whose life seems to be unraveling, and unfortunately for him it's all happening under the gaze of the beast known as the 24-hour news cycle. For his and his family's sake, I hope he pulls it together.

Sigh. I must be getting soft in my old age.

[post continued...]

2009 Black Weblog Awards: "Vote Liberator"

Round 1: Fight! Well not exactly. But you know the deal. We thrive on your support. The first round (The "Nominations" Round) has begun. If you think we deserve it (and only if you think we do) please vote for us in round 1. And we'll let you know if we make it to the finals.

["our world is full of STARS" is the slogan by the way, despite the myriad of alternatives our picture might suggest. it just got cut off a little is all.]

[post continued...]

Michael Jackson passes at age 50.

WHY?: You already know why. Let's just hope the vultures don't rip the legacy apart too much and that historians and journalists and teachers capture the breadth of this man's legacy so folks can remember. On remembering, the first thing that came to my mind was when my man William did the moonwalk one time in our elementary school "program". William was a black boy with no real family to speak of. He came to school smelling like garbage everyday as if he were homeless. I guess even though he had a house he kinda was "home"-less. But this night that boy shined. In the "play", I had the role of some kid in a "gang" spraying graffiti on cardboard "walls" -- chosen by and my friends because we were "too cool to be singing and dancing and shit."

We came on stage first, with no real parts to perform we just walked to the fake wall and sprayed the silly string our teachers handed us on it. Then the lights went dark, the music start blastin and William/"Michael" entered the stage to cheers, then approached us and proceeded to show us how "bad" he was by doing the moonwalk in circles around us. Our role demanded we run off stage. William proceeded to control the crowd of 30-something parents and teachers, grabbing his crotch, doing spins, leg spits. I will never forget how amped Will was -- and we were kids born in the early 80s. Shows you a sliver of the enormous reach this man had. I distinctly remember William getting his props at lunch the next day in between bites of folded rectangle slices of school lunch pizza, and something about that day was very right -- everyone has something valuable to contribute, it's all about opportunity. Mike was fresh. But I'ma remember him most for the way he made those around me feel and the effect his art has had on my little bubble of friends and loved ones on Earth.

The [LA Times is sayin] they are delaying tribute due to a screening of a new Sacha Baron Cohen movie. Wow.

[post continued...]

Russell Simmons plays ol girl.

WHY?: Sometimes the subconscious things folks reveal when they let their guard down is stunning. In Russell Simmons case though, it involves how he treats his women and it's pretty deep. For the curious, after the jump there's this video of an interview with T.I. where you see what it means to constantly have your guard up. Seems like a pertinent question for any broadcast majors and psychology majors out there would be how one can trust any image of a person that has been 100% controlled the entire time you've observed that image? = pretty much any celebrity and politician you know.

[post continued...]

Nas + Damian Marley = Big Expectations.

WHY?: This joint has the potential to be Magical (Blackstar-Mos-Kweli) or a huge disappointment (note: that choir of lily white kids in the video -- how "Africa" is that? lol). Nevertheless, worth paying attention to.

Distant Relative [snippet] (listen/download)

[post continued...]

Liberator 8.1 cover = "Most Inspiring Image"

Check out [abduzeedo.com]'s "Daily Inspiration" and you'll see our Liberator 8.1 cover featured as one of their "most inspiring images". Props to our Art Director Joseph Lamour (he's listed on the site as "@rococococoa").

[post continued...]

Israel and the management of minorities.

WHY?: Israel pretty much seems to have 3 options. 1) The continued spreading of occupation, 2) Integrate Palestinians into Israeli nationality, 3) Support the creation of a Palestinian state. The ball's in their court. Problem is, some very prominent Israelis see all those options as having negative consequences. What seems to be left on the table is some surreal 4th option of perpetual "war". Sound familiar?

[post continued...]

An interview with Bill Russell [the daily show]

WHY?: Most youngins like me have no idea who Bill Russell actually is, aside from basketball. This interview should change that -- the memories he shares in these few minutes make me want to read a biography on the man.

[post continued...]