Showing posts with label Depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Depression. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

No brain fart left behind


The beauty of the Great State of Nebraska is that it can survive -- indeed, prosper -- under the dullest of governors.

Take Ben Nelson, who was an OK governor, I guess, but who moved up to the U.S. Senate only to offer up blather like this on MSNBC.

Unsurprisingly, Nelson then gets utterly owned by Rachel Maddow as he argues that federal construction of schools is an unwarranted intrusion into local affairs. Just like the unfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind.

YOU CAN'T make this stuff up.

So, when can we expect the senator's office to compile a list of every Nebraska school building or college hall or arena constructed as a WPA project during the last depression?

And when that list is completed, can we then expect Ben Nelson to demand every such structure be razed so that Nebraska education might be rid of the malign federal interference it has suffered, lo, these many decades?

I didn't think so.

That darn Roosevelt!


No matter how dumb the past eight years have made the GOP look, there always are some Republicans who will think that's just not dumb enough.

LIKE U.S. Rep. Steve Austria of Ohio. Says The Columbus Dispatch:
Freshman U.S. Rep. Steve Austria conceded yesterday that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not cause the Great Depression.

In a one-page e-mail, the Beavercreek Republican wrote: "I did not mean to imply in any way that President Roosevelt was responsible for putting us into the Depression, but rather was trying to make the point that Roosevelt's attempt to use significant spending to get us out of the Depression did not have the desired effect. Roosevelt did not put us into the Depression, but rather his policies could not pull the nation out of the recession."

The day before, as Austria was explaining his opposition to the huge federal stimulus package backed by President Barack Obama, he told The Dispatch editorial board: "When Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression. ... He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That's just history."
AND THE FAILED Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, from an appearance on Hugh Hewitt's radio show:
HH: Does it make sense for the President of the United States, though, to use the term catastrophe? Doesn’t that add alarm to an already panicky financial situation?

JM: Well, Hugh, I think he probably believes that, and there are Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes who would probably agree with that. The job of the presidency, in my view, is to give people hope, give people hope. Whether you happen to have liked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies, and there’s a number of them I still think exacerbated the Great Depression, but he gave the fireside chats, and gave people hope and optimism for the future. I think that’s, there’s no problem that America can’t prevail over, because we’re still the greatest nation in the world.
I'M A LITTLE UNSURE how you exacerbate the Great Depression from the 25 percent-plus unemployment that existed when FDR took office in 1933, but why let the facts get in the way of bashin' them lib'ruls, right?

I just got a robocall from my congressman, Lee Terry (R-Neb.), wanting my opinion on the "stimulus" package. You would think Terry might have wanted that input before he voted against the House version of the bill nearly two weeks ago . . . but, whatever.

At the risk of advising the good representative to do something silly like exacerbate our current depression -- if not, indeed, cause it -- I'd tell him to vote for the compromise emerging from conference. Of course, it won't be enough to stop the tailspin and isn't weighted enough toward public works and job creation (think the Works Progress Administration that did so much to "cause" the last depression) . . . but it's better than nothing.

And nothing is exactly what the Republican Party has to offer us, and is stupid enough to think we'll buy.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Would they prefer a pay cut . . . or else?


Barack Obama is giving the plunderers of Wall Street a stay of execution, and those who prefer a nice chablis with their thievery are too stupid and greedy to accept it and just shut up.

MSNBC HAS THE DETAILS of the president's generous gift to folks who deserve so much more than a mere pay cut:
President Barack Obama on Wednesday imposed $500,000 caps on senior executive pay for the most distressed financial institutions receiving federal bailout money, saying Americans are upset with “executives being rewarded for failure.”

Obama announced the dramatic new government intervention into corporate America at the White House, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at his side. The president said the executive-pay limits are a first step, to be followed by the unveiling next week of a sweeping new framework for spending what remains of the $700 billion financial industry bailout that Congress created last year.

The executive-pay move comes amid a national outcry over huge bonuses to executives heading companies seeking taxpayer dollars to remain afloat. The demand for limits was reinforced by revelations that Wall Street firms paid more than $18 billion in bonuses in 2008 even amid the economic downturn and the massive infusion of taxpayer dollars.

“This is America. We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success,” Obama said. “But what gets people upset — and rightfully so — are executives being rewarded for failure. Especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.”

The pay cap would apply to institutions that negotiate agreements with the Treasury Department for “exceptional assistance” in the future. The restriction would not apply to such firms as American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., and Citigroup Inc., that already have received such help.

“There is a deep sense across the country that those who were not ... responsible for this crisis are bearing a greater burden than those who were,” Geithner said.
ONE EXECUTIVE has a problem with senior brass being put on a money diet, and whines to The New York Times:
“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”

Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms.

“It would be really tough to get people to staff” companies that are forced to impose these limits, he said. “I don’t think this will work.”
THEN I GUESS the government will just have to flat-out nationalize the firms and put government functionaries in those jobs. After all, how could they do a worse job than the capitalist pigs?

They couldn't do a worse job than a crowd that has paid itself outlandishly while flying the economy into the ground. These executives should count themselves fortunate, indeed, to still have jobs at all.

And they should get down on their knees and thank God -- or their good fortune, or whatever -- they live in the United States of America, where rarely do the masses take to the streets, ransack stately office towers and drag executives such as James F. Reda onto the pavement below.

They should get on their knees in gratitude that they -- at least for the time being -- don't live in a country where the bottom rail emphatically places itself atop the fence as the new overseer of revenge. Where we don't . . . yet . . . have true People's Courts proclaiming the erstwhile titans of finance and industry guilty, guilty, guilty of capital crimes of capital and immediately remanding them to the jurisdiction of a court not of this world.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

3 Chords & the Truth: Will podcast for food

Because we couldn't afford Cloud 9.


It's brutal out there. And the economy is even worse.

I guess you've figured out -- and, boy, are you sharp! -- that we're taking a musical look at the signs of the times this week on 3 Chords & the Truth. Of course, the music will be great (that's a given, he says modestly), but whether your response to it is to enjoy the aesthetics or to howl in rage at the shape we're in . . . well, that's entirely your own choice.

ME, I GO back and forth between wanting to raise the red flag and get revolutionary on Wall Street's arse . . . and thinking, "What you gonna do?" while trying to make the best of what's going to be some hard, hard times.

Perhaps there's room for a little of both responses, you know? But, ultimately, we all do have to make the best of it, no matter what "it" might be. Like the ubiquitous "they" say, the flip side of crisis is opportunity.

Perhaps, like Tony Bennett sings about on the Big Show this week, we're all being called to live "the simple life" . . . because it's good for us. There's something absolutely biblical (in the good sense, not the "of biblical proportions" sense) about that notion.

MAYBE THAT'S the question we're ultimately exploring on this week's 3 Chords & the Truth. Not just "How do we get through this colossal mess?" but, indeed, "What is life?"

A lot of baggage for one weekly music show, eh? That's why the blog is here -- on a music show, you need to have time for the, er . . . music. That we do.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. It's just like radio -- except for it doesn't suck.

Be there. Aloha.

Monday, January 05, 2009

Brother, can you spare some bling?


Paul Krugman, the Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist, says it's beginning to
look a lot like the Great Depression out there. I am not going to argue economics with a Nobel laureate.

ELSEWHERE in the Times, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn explain that the sad financial straits we're in isn't a matter of bad breaks or a few bad Wall Street bankers, but instead is a matter of national insanity.

Einhorn and Lewis:

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 — more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed — but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff — he wasn’t an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff’s failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.’s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud.

What’s interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it. It wasn’t just Harry Markopolos who smelled a rat. As Mr. Markopolos explained in his letter, Goldman Sachs was refusing to do business with Mr. Madoff; many others doubted Mr. Madoff’s profits or assumed he was front-running his customers and steered clear of him. Between the lines, Mr. Markopolos hinted that even some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have suspected that they were the beneficiaries of a scam. After all, it wasn’t all that hard to see that the profits were too good to be true. Some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have reasoned that the worst that could happen to them, if the authorities put a stop to the front-running, was that a good thing would come to an end.

The Madoff scandal echoes a deeper absence inside our financial system, which has been undermined not merely by bad behavior but by the lack of checks and balances to discourage it. “Greed” doesn’t cut it as a satisfying explanation for the current financial crisis. Greed was necessary but insufficient; in any case, we are as likely to eliminate greed from our national character as we are lust and envy. The fixable problem isn’t the greed of the few but the misaligned interests of the many.


(snip)

Our financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.
THUS DO AMERICANS great and small, and thus have they done ever since Gordon Gekko told us "Greed is good," and the Reagan Administration governed as if it were so. Today is the enemy of tomorrow, and our wants have become the mortal enemy of our needs.

We Americans live as if we can separate faith and life -- or lack of faith and life, for that matter. It doesn't work out. God won't stay in a box, only to be taken out for an hour on Sundays -- if then. There are consequences when we try to do that, both individually and collectively.

Likewise, Satan won't stay in a box either, content to come out only when we want to have a little naughty fun. You don't have to give the devil his due; he'll just take it.

Among other things.

WHAT HAS BEEN playing out on Wall Street, in Detroit . . . and on Main Street, too, resembles nothing so much as it does a cleaned-up version of ghetto nihilism. You know, the kind of life your kids like to hear glorified by the likes of Lil' Wayne, T-Pain and 50-Cent.

Er, Fiddycent.

If you have no hope of long-term reward for right behavior, no faith in a better day to come, see no prospect of something -- Someone -- greater than yourself caring for even the humblest of creatures and someday setting what is wrong aright, why not go for the bling, the blow and the booty? Or, in polite "society", the immediate return writ large, the second home in the Hamptons and "friends with benefits."

Or a high-priced "escort." Whatever.

ONE PATHOLOGY widespread among the "underclass" is an inability -- often so ingrained as to be a cultural trait -- to act in its own long-term interest through self-restraint and delayed gratification. Today, nothing so defines the culture of Wall Street, and of Main Street, so much as this same pathology.

How else do we explain McMansions, investment banks with 30 times more debt than assets, three cars in the garage and subprime mortgages?

Today's headlines tell us of a financial crisis. The systemic and cultural dysfunction behind the financial crisis, however, speaks to a longtime -- and ongoing -- spiritual depression. Our society struggles with a deficit of faith, while deflationary pressures deplete its reservoirs of hope.

WE'VE EATEN. We've drunk. We thought we were merry. Was it all because the only prospect we saw for tomorrow was "die"?

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

'My advice to you is to start drinking heavily'

The official United States YouTube clip.
We just keep going to this one . . .
because it's so true. Contains profanity.

Dear World,


Hey! You f***** up!

You trusted us!

The Washington Post reports on markets and banks and economies (Oh, my!) in deep doo all across the world:

The turmoil that began on Wall Street now spans the globe.

Stock markets around the world cascaded lower Monday, European regulators announced the rescue of four major banks, and U.S. and foreign officials pledged to make hundreds of billions of dollars available to ensure that banks would continue lending to each other.

Yet the contagion continued. U.S. stocks opened weak, then fell off a cliff after the House of Representatives voted down a $700 billion plan intended to restore stability to the nation's wobbly financial system. That sent Brazil's stock market down 10 percent, prompting authorities in Sao Paulo to temporarily suspend trading, amid worries of a deep U.S. economic slowdown.

In the seldom-interrupted cycle of global financial markets, the extraordinary pace and scale of events brought an abrupt end to the confident attitude displayed by European officials as recently as last week, when officials claimed that shareholders and investors there had less to fear than their American counterparts because European banks weren't as heavily exposed to the troubled mortgage loans undermining the U.S. system.

(snip)

In France, authorities had been worrying about a sell-off of the stock of Dexia, a Franco-Belgian bank catering to local governments. The bank's stock dropped by more than a third in early trading Monday, then recovered slightly on a pledge from Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders to step in with government funds if necessary.

The Paris newspaper Le Figaro said a U.S. subsidiary of Dexia, the bond insurer FSA, had caused concerns among investors because of involvement in shaky real estate mortgages in the United States.

Several analysts said the European banking problems are biggest at institutions with heavy exposure to European property bubbles. Millions of homeowners and developers took out loans against property that is no longer valued at what it was a few months ago.

Nicolas Véron, a research fellow at the Bruegel center in Brussels, said concern has risen about strains in the banking system spreading to the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe, where several nations also have experienced property bubbles.

"We knew this would happen, because the storm in the U.S. is so powerful," Véron said.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Suicide bombers of the economy


We're all Palestinian nut jobs now. Virtual suicide bombers of the economy.

Americans saw the prospect of a Wall Street bailout, and they freaked out. Started yelling "Death to the infidels!" Declared that if not pulling the financial markets' chestnuts out of the fire meant another Great Depression, then bring it on.

That's what enraged folks were telling reporters and cheerfully saying on talk radio all across the United States -- bring it on. Well, it's on. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 777.68 points today.

WHAT MIGHT have happened had Congress' failure to pass the "bailout bill" not come more than halfway through the trading day . . . before the Democrats and Republicans melted down into paroxysms of partisan s*** slinging?

Yep, barring a miracle of policy and politics, we really just might have us a depression now.
Like H.L. Mencken said so long ago, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Who'd have thought what American voters most wanted was to be just like some Palestinian nut job, so intent on killing Jews that he's perfectly willing to blow himself up -- and whatever other Arabs might be within blast range -- too? Today, just change "Jews" to "investment bankers."

That's what a clear majority of Americans have opted for -- blowing up the economy (and themselves . . . and their friends . . . and their neighbors . . . and their children) on the off chance all those Wall Street robber barons might be reduced from obscenely rich to moderately rich.

IN THEIR FIT of pique -- and in their abject denial that their own greed might have played any role whatsoever in America's financial crisis -- ordinary Americans have turned down what Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the House minority leader, called "a crap sandwich" in favor of strapping on an explosive vest.

A smart lot we Americans are. A smart lot who think the Palestinians are nuts.

If you want to put a Biblical spin on matters, maybe this is a prime example of why Jesus said we have to forgive others "70 times seven" times. Grudges and hatred make you blind -- blind to your own faults . . . your own sin . . . and your own self-interest.

Today, through our elected representatives, we've struck a powerful and wounding blow to the evil greedheads of Wall Street. We may not survive our glorious victory.

And neither may our children.

We must be so proud.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

3 Chords & the Truth: Br0 c4n U 5p4r3 4 d1m3?

The waiting is the hardest part. At least that's what Tom Petty thinks.

But that's what I'm doing here in the 3 Chords & the Truth studio, and that's what you're doing wherever. We're waiting for the end of the world . . . at least the world as we've known it.

FINANCIALLY, we're in a real pickle now. The "experts" say only Congress -- and an infusion of your tax money -- can save us now. Or, more precisely, save Wall Street, which is supposed to, in turn, save us.

From what, we're not sure. Maybe we're waiting for the pols to save us from another Great Depression, whatever that might look like in the 21st century. Perhaps it's just from a nasty recession.

Some folks have had it with the greedheads in finance and government, and they say, "Screw 'em all, being on the abyss!"

Be careful what you ask for. You may get it. "It," in this case, may be the Mother of All Noses Cut Off to Spite Faces.

HELL, I'm no prognosticator. I was expecting the stock market to tank Friday; it was up 120 points. But I think simple logic (and accounting) dictates that even if the politicians pull our butts out of the crack, America still will face a reckoning -- maybe now, maybe later.

I don't think the "American Dream," at least as we now define it, is sustainable. Even if our revolving credit holds out, the oil supply won't forever. And a change is gonna come.

That's what this week's show is all about -- and you knew I would get around to the show eventually, yes? This week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is about hitting the wall . . . it's about hard times and hard limits.

It's about being a lot poorer, and it's about redefining what it means to be rich. Wealth without cash, as it were.

THIS WEEK, the Big Show is all about being broke, and being broken. It's about the love of money and the pitfalls thereof. It's about what comes next, after the fall. It's about revolution, victory, peace and love.

And the show, as always, is about damn fine music, put together in a unique manner.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth. Be there. Aloha.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Mission accomplished, Mr. President


Once in khaki suits,
Ah, gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodle dee dum!
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with the drum!
Oh, say don't you remember?
They called me Al.
It was Al all the time.
Say, don't you remember?
I'm your pal.
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
-- "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" (1931),
lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

K-Doe say: Burn, Wall Street, burn!

This is a short documentary from 1990, when the (now) late, (always) great Ernie K-Doe was volunteering at Tulane University's WTUL radio, spinning the New Orleans R&B he helped make famous.

I DISCOVERED IT on the WTUL website, as I sat here in the studio, thinking I ought to add some sage observation to the Interwebs as Americans sit . . . and wait. Wait to find out how Congress is going to fix the fine mess we've gotten ourselves into, with an assist by the robber barons of Wall Street.

Wait to find out whether we're all poor now.

Wait to find out exactly how far the mightiest nation on Earth -- ever -- has fallen.

Yeah, I thought I needed to write something wise, or at least pithy, about this fine damn catastrophe waiting to swallow us all up. Is this Great Depression II? Shall we now arm ourselves, man the barricades and shoot the looters in three-piece suits?

Perhaps I could just sit at the keyboard and tell you I told you so. Whether or not I actually did.

BUT THAT'S not important now.

It seems to me -- as we tap dance on a ledge high above the abyss -- that the Fed, the Congress, the fancy bankers and the stock-exchange traders are powerless to screw up anything that particularly matters. We'll get by . . . somehow . . . with a little faith, a little orneriness and a little ingenuity.

We'll grow gardens and put in wood stoves, and we'll become a lot more "green" and a lot more local.

And we'll figure out that it ain't so bad, once you get used to it.

Screw Wall Street. Wall Street can't create an Ernie K-Doe. Or a decent R&B record.

We, if we are lucky, might figure out that our riches do not lie in our 401(k) accounts, but in our communities, in our churches and in our cultural cornucopia. We might come to see that we can be rich, even if we are poor (see New Orleans, City of).

Besides, not even Fort Knox could contain
a force of nature like Ernie K-Doe, the late Emperor of the World. A pearl of great price who started out life during the last Great Depression at New Orleans' Charity Hospital.

Burn, K-Doe, burn!

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Avoiding a depression . . . at what cost?


CNBC's Jim Cramer thinks the government's plan to buy up Wall Street's problem debt just might have saved us from the Great Depression, Part 2.

WHAT I'M WONDERING, though, is whether we've avoided the abyss at a terrible cost.

Just how much money is the government going to have to just start printing now? How bad will inflation become? How much debt will foreign governments have to buy from us . . . if they will at all anymore?

How far in the hole will Uncle Sam now be, and what does that mean?

Will we have avoided another depression -- an economic cataclysm -- by closing the door once and for all on the American Century? And has that sentence been commuted, or merely temporarily stayed?

I'm no economist, and I don't know. I also don't know whether anyone does know.

AND I DON'T KNOW, either, whether our government realizes that America's fate is no longer in American hands. We have an Achilles' heel, and the world knows what it is.

We've acquired a de facto empire, the product of power and hubris . . . and maybe we've just crossed a bridge too far. We're Napoleon, and we can see the spires of Moscow, but winter is coming on fast and we've outrun our supply lines.

Suddenly, it seems to me -- And, really, what the hell do I know? -- we've come to the end of an era. Suddenly, we're no longer exceptional. Suddenly, empire is something we no longer can afford . . . if ever we could.

We're the Army-Navy game. A faded treasure of formerly great consequence, now more suggestive of stubborn pride and greater witsfulness.

Time marches on. With us or without.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Gimme that old-time anti-Semitism. . . .



Oftentimes, it gets real weird real fast in the Catholic ghetto.

So weird that a generation of Catholics -- adrift in a Marty Haugen present and groping in the dark for a glorious lost Church it never knew -- will grab onto any crazy damn thing that brings to mind what it must have been like in the Good Old Days. Some turn to websites full of alleged signs, wonders and prophesies of how Mary warned that Jesus said that the Father's about to kick some cosmological ass and avenge the offended sensibilities of the True Faithful in this vale of tears.

OTHERS FIND a bishop who talks a good orthodox game and gives him the kind of fealty they ought to be reserving for Christ . . . even when the prelate turns out to be a better wolf than he is a shepherd. As we have witnessed again and again since 2001 in the Scandals.

And others, still, go around trying to rehabilitate notoriously nutty, anti-Semitic radio priests from the 1930s. Yes, I mean that demagogue of the Depression-era airwaves,
the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin.

Unsurprisingly, I stumbled across this last phenomenon because of the
Catholic Blog Awards. It's that time of the year in the Catholic blogosphere, and various members of "St. Blog's Parish" are campaigning for Best Whatever of 2008.

The awards are administered by
cyberCatholics.com, based in Abbeville, La. (Oh, Lord, why are all these things in my home state?) And if you go to the cyberCatholics.com home page -- which advertises nominations for the Catholic Blog Awards, incidentally -- and if you scroll down a bit, you will see a column of "guest contributors."

Actually, make that guest contributor. All of the highlighted articles (for example, "Wikipedia is Marxist!") are by the same Canadian guy, Stephen Volk. One of them, naturally, is
a press release for the website FatherCoughlin.com:

For everthing [sic] there is a season! Knowing that "Satan" means "slander," it's time to call a firm halt against the decades of unwarranted liberal slander towards Father Charles Coughlin…

While this man should by now be hailed as one of America's great heroes - who tirelessly fought for the poor during the Great Depression - his name is still being sloshed in the mud of liberal propaganda.

I have read many first editions by and about Father Coughlin. It is easy to conclude that he was never an antisemite. Absolute nonsense. But in the charisms of the Church he did have powerful, powerful God-given Gifts of Wisdom, Discernment and Knowledge:

"I do ask , however, an insane world to distinguish between the innocent Jew and the guilty Jew as much as I would ask the same insane world to distinguish between the innocent gentile and the guilty gentile."

Is this not completely fair? Or does the Bible not say, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

To clear up decades of confusion, www.FatherCoughlin.com is now open! As a Grand Opening Gift to you, go now to download your FREE complete book by Father Charles Coughlin, "Am I an AntiSemite?" Then check back often for FREE download of all his radio programs!

Why the urgency? Because today's "political correctness" is cultural Marxism.

Once again, we need strong, visionary leadership to prayerfully and boldly combat this before our civilization is left in ruins!

WAS FATHER COUGHLIN an anti-Semite? Here's a clue, from a Time magazine article, dated Nov. 14, 1938:

In Switzerland four years ago a book went on trial—the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—in a suit brought and won by the Swiss Jewish Community against two booksellers (TIME, Nov. 12, 1934). This notorious work, first published in Russia 33 years ago and circulated more or less surreptitiously throughout the western world since then, purported to expose a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization, dominate the earth. The Protocols, as the Swiss court found, have been repeatedly proved a fraud.

(snip)

Yet in the past two months Rev. Charles Edward Coughlin, rabble-rousing radio priest, has published the Protocols in his weekly Social Justice. Brushing aside the matter of their authenticity, Father Coughlin repeatedly stressed their "factuality," quoted Henry Ford (a onetime believer in the Protocols) : "They fit in with what is going on." Father Coughlin's point, buttered with many a some-of-my-best- friends-are-Jews disclaimer of antiSemitism, has been that Jews are to blame for Communism, that the aims of the Protocols closely resemble those of Communism—and of the New Deal, the C. I. O., numerous other Coughlin bogies.

Last week a fellow priest went to bat against the authenticity of the Protocols and, inferentially, against Jew-Baiter Coughlin. He was Rev. Michael Joseph ("Mike") Ahern, jovial, witty Jesuit, head of the geology department at Weston College near Boston. On his Sunday radio Catholic Truth Period, Father Ahern drew upon European Catholic sources to demolish the Protocols.

He closed his talk with a quotation from a recent talk by Pope Pius XI which, although published in European Catholic papers, has not been publicized in the U. S.* Said the Pope: "It is not possible for Christians to take part in antiSemitism. We fully acknowledge that everybody has the right to defend himself, protect himself against whatever threatens his legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are all Semites spiritually."

OF COURSE, the careful historian must consider his primary-source material. After all, this article was in Time, and Time was part of the media and -- as Coughlin often told his radio audience -- the press is dominated by the Jews.

Or so true anti-Semites would have us believe.

While Coughlin was serializing the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" -- a modern-day favorite of Islamic radicals everywhere -- in his national newspaper, something big was about to happen in Nazi Germany. The night of Nov. 9 - 10, 1938, came to be known as
Kristallnacht.

A month later, Coughlin continued a series of radio talks proposing that the Nazis weren't right, necessarily,
but they had their reasons for going after the Jews. Make sure you click on Undercover Black Man's audio links.

Here's what, again, Time reported about the first of Coughlin's post-Kristallnacht radio programs
in its Nov. 28, 1938, edition:
Although all week U. S. radio had been speaking with thunderous unanimity against Nazi pogroms, Father Coughlin made resounding reservations when he joined the chorus. Nazi persecution of Jews was bad, he said, but communist persecution of Christians was worse. Admitting that his sources were Nazi, he said that 56 out of 59 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the U. S. S. R. were Jews. He also accused Kuhn, Loeb & Co. of giving financial aid to the Bolshevik Revolution, attributed that accusation to a British White Paper.

Promptly Station WMCA (Manhattan) spoke for itself, followed its broadcast of the speech with more than the usual disclaimer of responsibility. Said the WMCA announcer: "Unfortunately, Father Coughlin has uttered certain mistakes of fact."
BOY, THOSE LEFTIST media Jews really had it in for that preacher of the True Faith, didn't they?

Or perhaps it's just that some "Catholic" websites have a weakness for lunatic-fringe "contributors" who specialize in defending the indefensible. Like the egregious media offerings of a demagogue Catholic priest from long ago, in some mythical gilded age when everything that called itself Catholic must have been really, really Catholic.

I shudder to think of what future generations in some dystopian remnant Church might latch onto from this present era of American Catholicism. Note to Catholics of the future: The music of Marty Haugen and David Haas --to name only a couple of bad composers of my time -- sucks now, and it'll suck then, too. Be forewarned.


The Catholic ghetto is a strange and interesting place. And the things Catholics in the cultural feedback loop get caught up with brings to mind a thought that, frankly, scares the crap out of me -- everything we do is a witness to the faith. And I have proven myself lousy at this "witness" thing over and over and over again.

You see, the Catholic cultural ghetto is just like the Evangelical ghetto, or the bar-scene ghetto, or the hip-hop ghetto, or any kind of popular-culture ghetto. There's a pearl to be found here and there (for example, the glories of the gin-and-tonic or black-and-tan within the bar-scene ghetto), but there's a lot more junk and stupidity to be found there.

For example, getting stupid drunk and throwing up all over your pants and shoes after too damn many gin-and-tonics or black-and-tans.

So, while all these Catholic blogs in the Internet section of the Catholic ghetto are competing for Best Whatever in the Catholic Blog Awards -- all in good fun, it must be said -- somebody who knows squat about the Church or what she really stands for . . . what Christ really stands for . . . is going to start following the links and seeing what's there.

If we're lucky, they might find an alleged image of the Blessed Mother on a piece of burned toast.

If we're not, they'll find some wingnut making apologies for a Jew-hating priest from Radio Days past on a website called cyberCatholics.com, which runs the Catholic Blog Awards, which lots of Catholic bloggers want to win.

And in the name of truth, justice and good taste, they'll look elsewhere for . . . well . . . truth, justice and good taste.