Rain Today, Gone Tomorrow

A fine mist this morning greeted my weary eyes on the short walk over the Crossroads train tracks to work. At least I have a job in this crap economy, I thought, as my gaze carried over Main Street and into Washington Square Park where the homeless struggled for comfortable sleeping positions on the hard concrete benches. They will all be roused and booted out by tomorrow as the tents and booths go up for Irish Fest at Crown Center. If I let my gaze really stretch out and waif up the hill where the Liberty Memorial stands erect, then I could see the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City cast a dramatic and ominious shadow over the industrious business district of KC.

Economists are calling for the FED to be more active in staving off deflation and worry that the U.S. could become like Japan. We need more stimulus spending! say Krugman and the neo-Keynesians. But the deficit hawks say no! It is Obama's runaway checkbook and stifiling regulation that's created such uncertainty that businesses are unwilling to invest in new projects and thus more employees. For it is entitlement programs and unions that are producing sticky wages and high unemployment!
And people who actually have a job are being asked to shoulder more of the burden for health care:

Workers’ share of the cost of a family policy jumped an average of 14 percent, an increase of about $500 a year. The cost of a policy rose just 3 percent, to an average of $13,770.

Are things just going to shit? Can we no longer afford this air-conditioned, American dream anymore? Was my grandpa's generation really the "greatest generation" and not that they're dead the whole shithouse is burning down?

Robert Reich continues the theme of his earlier books that middle class Americans have not shared in the economy's boom for the past 30 years, shown by the fact that the median male worker makes less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago. The only way the American consumer has been able to keep up their consumption has been to bring in more women workers, work more hours for the smae pay and go into serious debt. Now we have income inequality of the kind not seen since just before the Great Crash of 1929.

Reich's policy solutions: TAX THE RICH! We have less income equality when the marginal income tax rate was between 70 and 90 percent for the very rich. With more money then redistributed to the middle class, the economy would start humming along as aggregate demand is increased by lower to mid-income consumers buying more of the stuff made by American companies in America rather than glitzy financial instruments and foreign speculation. His proposal is to extend Federal Income Tax Credits to the middle class by raising taxes on the rich, expanding early childhood education to create a better skilled job force with a fee on financial transactions, making public universities free but having graduates contribute 10% of their incomes in the first 10 years to pay for program and earnings insurance which would make up the difference between new, lower paying job and previous job for two years in leiu of unemployment insurance.

I like Reich because he is policy-oriented -- he actually proposes various policy measures to accopmlish his goals. But are his goals too far-fetched in this free market-oriented country where Republicans cry "socialism" when any politician proposes increasing the economic burden on the absurdly wealthy -- "But they currate jobs!" they howl from their privledged senate chambers and stuffy offices at the Wall Street Journal. His NY Times article did not create much buzz in the econ blogs today or ever because I think he heralds pretty much the same message everytime he writes. But does this mean it's not still relevant?

TD Pack Band Laid Off

Tony performing taps for his own pep band's funeral




As if the economic news isn't bad enough, Tony DiPardo's legendary TD Pack Band will no longer be a fixture at Arrowhead after this dismal 2008 season. Their bandstand in the east endzone of the stadium was not included in the new redesign for Arrowhead Stadium.
Fans could hear the familiar horn sounds of the Pack Band after a Chiefs huddle was broken or after a first down was made. The 8-piece unit has been under the direction of DiPardo's daughter Patti DiPardo Livergood for 20 years, but Tony is still around and kicking at age 96. And yes we can blame this poor decision again on Carl Peterson who has spearheaded the stadium renovation project. And again, the little soccer-loving Hunt boy has not been heard from regarding another major development with the proud franchise his father built.
Many fans will not miss Patti belting out tunes before the game as her vocal skills are questionable, but with the TD Pack Band going the way of Warpaint, the horse that was the team's official mascot before the buffoonish KC Wolf started stalking the stands, many old fans will have less and less tradition to remember on game day. The TD Pack Band may have been the only pep-style band in the NFL and gave Arrowhead a uniquely sonic tradition all its own.


Chris Johnson doing some tribal drumming during the Titans' drubbing of the Chiefs in October

Trampled Under Foot

Tonight I'm going to check out the power-blues-trio Trampled Under Foot
at Aftershock, formerly known as Marty's Blues Cafe. If you don't follow blues music
in Kansas City, TUF (as their fans refer to them) is composed of the Schnebelen siblings,
Nick on guitar, Kris on drums and Danielle Nicole on bass and sultry vocals. The band made
a splash on the national blues scene by winning the 2008 International Blues Challenge in
Memphis, Tennessee. Nick also took home the Albert King Award at the same competition for best guitarist,
and the booty included a brand-new amplifier.
The Schnebelen's parents, Robert and Lisa, were both well-known KC blues musicians and worked together in many bands,
the most notable being Little Eva & The Works. The Schnebelen sibilings absorbed music from an early age, observing
the rehearsals and band practices at their parents' house, eventually getting the nerve to sit in
like when Danielle impressed her father while singing to Koko Taylor's "Never Trust a Man." Danielle
lists Taylor among her influences along with Etta James (she does a great cover of James' "Rather Go Blind" among
others) and Aretha Franklin, although Susan Tedeschi and Janis Joplin comparisons are also
commonly made.
"White Trash" was the second full-length album the band released, and it pretty much sums up the
group's modest and wily upbringing, with the trio's childhood home featured prominently on
the cover. It features many covers and a few originals that still dominate the group's setlists and
was recorded live at the Trouser Mouse in Blue Springs.
But you don't have to head that far to see this trio tonight, and they will be sure to put on
a few hours of boozy and smoky soul-blues for those willing to travel to Merriam. I really
don't like the new name of Marty Cohen's blues bar, Aftershock. It was formally called Marty's
Blues Cafe, and the straightforward name sounded intimate and inviting; Aftershock sounds
like a biker bar where the bartenders are on speed and Monster energy drink is force-fed
to innocent bystanders with a bottle of bourbon in tow for a chaser. Check them out tonight 8-Midnight.
WARNING! $5 COVER! 5240 Merriam Dr. Merriam, Kansas :: (913) 384-5646 -- 10 Minutes from Midtown!
True it is in Johnson County, but you would never know it by looking at the place and its surroundings.
If there was ever a town that deserved to be in Wyandotte, it has to be Merriam.

Sports Update

I thought I would do a little recap of the top Kansas City sports stories of the week.

1. CoCo Crisp Trade
Dayton Moore made his second major deal of the offseason, sending middle reliever Ramon Ramirez to the Boston Red Sox for centerfielder Coco Crisp. Rany Jazayerli does a much better job breaking down this trade than I could ever hope to pull off. Earlier in the week Royals beat reporter Bob Dutton also reported that Moore was shopping Mark Teahen to the Cubbies, and second baseman Mike Fontenot's name kept coming up, as well as Felix Pie, although I think the Crisp trade all but nullified a Pie trade. At Dave's Stagecoach last night we were running through the 2009 line-up now with Crisp added:
1. CoCo Crisp
2. Mike Aviles
3. David Dejesus
4. Jose Guillen
5. Mike Jacobs
6. Alex Gordon
7. Billy Butler
8. Mike Fontenot (or Callaspo)
9. Miguel Olivo

2. Jayhawks Lose a Top Recruit
As an MU fan, I wouldn't necessarily put news of a KU recruit in a weekly news round-up, but this is actually recruiting news Tiger fans can enjoy. Xavier Henry was the third ranked player in the 2009-2010 college basketball recruiting class, and he reportedly chose Memphis over KU, the school his father attended, because his older brother C.J. is already on the Tiger team. MU fans also were buoyed by rumors that Gary Pinkel will sign a contract extension with the University of Missouri that would put him ahead of Mark Mangino in terms of salary for a Big 12 coach, although Mack Brown and Bob Stoops would still retain the league's top two spots. I will post more about the Border War in upcoming posts, but I just wanted to point out an observation that KC bars really don't favor one school over another. With the exception of a few JOCO bars, KC-area bars display the flags, banners and pennants of both schools in an effort to appear fair and balanced. It's good for business not to exclude a whole group of people, I suppose, but I think a bar could also earn some fierce loyalty if it shone its true colors proudly. I can't think of any decidedly KU or MU bars within KCMO limits -- Jaywalkers comes to mind on 39th and Rainbow, but that's in KCK and right across the street from KU MED CENTER. Where do MU fans in KCMO city limits to watch the game and galavant in a comfortable and pure Tiger atmosphere? Give me some suggestions here.

3. Flowers and Johnson Healthy
As far as the Chiefs injury report, it looks like CB Brandon Flowers and LB Derrick Johnson are back and participating fully in practice, which is blessed news for our beat-up defense. Tamba Hali, Jerrod Page, Patrick Surtain and Pat Thomas are all questionable; Mark Bradley, Tony Gonzalez, Adrian Jones and Donnie Edwards did not practice at all Wednesday, but none of these players have been ruled out for the game on Sunday. If Bradley and Gonzalez don't play against the Bills, rookies Brad Cottham and Will Franklin need to step up and make some noise if the Gailey's vaunted spread-offense is going to move the football.

4. Game Times
KU and MU are both off this week in football. Really the only game to watch on Saturday is
*Texas Tech at Oklahoma, 7 p.m, ABC
*Chiefs V. Bills, 12 p.m., CBS
*NYG V. Arizona Cardinals, 3:15 p.m., FOX
*San Diego @ Indianapolis, 7:15 p.m., NBC
*Green Bay V. New Orleans, 7:30 p.m., ESPN

Famous Kansas Citian: The Calvin Trillin Edition

The Arthur Bryant's website quotes Calvin Trillin saying "The single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant's Barbeque at 18th and Brooklyn in Kansas City." (I wonder if he would still make that assessment?) Trillan is a Kansas City-born writer who moved to the big city of New York as a writer for The Nation and The New Yorker without losing his Midwestern charm and his affinity for slow-smoked, smothered-in-sauce delicacies. Described as "the Walt Whitman of American eats," Trillin popularized food out of the mainstream of the food press, not pretentious restaurants serving Continental cuisine but places with history and character that served greasy but soul-satisfying food. It was Trillin who famously exclaimed, "Health food makes me sick."

After leaving Kansas City to join the army, Trillin got a job with Time magazine as a reporter in the South. He then moved to New York and joined the staff of The New Yorker, but he never stop considering himself a Kansas Citian. The first sentence of American Fried, the first installment of his so-called "Tummy Trilogy," acknowledges his bias right off the bat: “The best restaurants in the world are, of course, in Kansas City. Not all of them; only the top four or five. Anyone who has visited Kansas City and still doubts that statement has my sympathy: He never made it to the right places.”

At The New Yorker he wrote a magazine article every three weeks, taking the summers off for rest and travel. Although his writings spanned a spectrum of subjects, from murders to politics, he usually came back to eating, for he had experienced a lot of tastes and flavors while on assignment. He earned a reputation as a champion of regional cuisine in the United States, whether it was our smoky yet sweet barbeque here in Kansas City or boudin balls in New Orleans or chicken wings from Buffalo.

When asked why he wrote "Winsteads. Now that's how a hamburger should be," he responded:

A lot of that was nostalgia. I think one of the things that started me writing about eating was the realization that when people from Kansas City, which happened to be my hometown, got together, what they talked about was Winstead’s hamburgers or Bryant’s barbecue or something. They didn’t talk about some imitation French restaurant. The sort of eating I’ve always been interested in is what I guess you’d call vernacular eating. It has something to do with a place. Buffalo chicken wings have something to do with Buffalo. The fact that people in Cincinnati have something they call authentic Cincinnati chili, and seem unaware that people in the Southwest eat chili, let alone Mexicans, and think that chili is made by Macedonians and served on spaghetti, that’s interesting to me. Whether Skyline chili is better than Empress chili I don’t really care about.

Trillin still writes his "Deadline Poet" column for The Nation about current political topics in rhymed couplets, but you would be better served seeking out archived articles on The New Yorker's website about his many travels to out-of-the-way places across this strange country or one of his 24 books, especially the aforementioned Tummy Trilogy.
He grew up "both a Midwesterner and a Jewish man. That peculiar heritage has given him his dry, sneaky wit, one particularly adept at puncturing the grandiose pretentions of self-important people (dubbed 'big k'nockers' by his father)." In the same interview Trillin commented on his Midwestern, jewish heritage: "It's true that when you talk about being from Kansas City -- and I've been reluctant to give up being from Kansas City -- people assume that you're a Methodist. But you're not necessarily a Methodist." Calvin Trillin was not a Methodist, but he was a damn good Kansas City writer who knew how to eat.

Greg Robinson fired (up)

Syracuse has fired head football coach Greg Robinson for the poor performance of his Orange football teams. In his first four years with the program, his first head coaching job at any level, he amassed a record of 9-36, including a dismal 3-25 record in the Big East. Kansas City Chiefs fans will remember him as the defensive coordinator at the helm during period of defensive impotency not rivaled until this season. The defense in 2001-2003 under Robinson could not shut any offense down, thereby causing the team to rely completely on their offensive juggernaut to outscore the competition. This all came to a head in the divisional playoff game against the Colts in January of 2004 when Peyton Manning picked us apart for 38 points, 434 yards and a staggering 27 first downs! In 2001, the Chiefs were ranked 23rd in total yards allowed, down from 18th the years before under the doomed Gunther Cunningham administration (the team also lost Derrick Thomas to a car accident after the 2000 season). From there the Chiefs were dead last in 2002 in both yards allowed with 390.5 per game and points allowed with 22.9. They moved up a few spots to 29th in 2003 but never gained the traction under Robinson's tenure. Robinson surprised head coach Dick Vermeil by resigning a few days after the Colts playoff loss.

BASH THE BIG 3!

GM is in danger of running out of cash by the end of the year. Ford’s cash should hold up a few months longer, but it is in a similar predicament to its hulking, rusty ol' Detroit triplet. Shareholders have been wiped out as stock in GM is practically worthless. And it would appear as of today that Democrats will not have enough votes in this lame-duck session to get a rescue plan enacted before the end of the year and, it would appear, the fall of GM.

There are more than 7, 300 employees at Ford and GM’s Kansas City-area assembly plants.
“For every United Auto Worker manufacturing job in our area, there are between seven and 14 people affected — everything from a glass plant to tires to parts,” said Jeff Manning, president of UAW Local 31 at the GM Fairfax Assembly Plant in KCK. GM will start laying off 370 from its 2,750 employee workforce at the Fairfax plant Feb. 2, although sales of the Chevrolet Malibu and Saturn Aura, which are assembled at the plant, have been up.

GM has announced it plans to layoff 5,500 workers total at parts stamping, engine and transmission factories in North America.

Ford announced cutbacks at its Claycomo plant for about 3,000 workers who make the Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner starting the week of Nov. 17 and following on the weeks of Dec. 15 and Dec. 22, just in time for the holidays. The layoffs will not affect some 1,000 workers who make the F-150 pickup truck because although sales of the vehicle are down, the company introduced a new F-150 model this fall.

I thought I would take this opportunity to present various arguments for and against the bailout proposals made by President-Elect Obama and congressional Democrats.

Arguments Against a Federal Bail-out

1. "Every dollar sent to Detroit buys a yard of steel, a reel of copper wire, an hour of labor that now cannot be consumed by a business that actually produces a profitable, desireable product. It's not right to strangle those businesses in order to steal some air for the dying giants of an earlier day." The free trade economist would argue that more efficient companies like Honda and Toyota that produce cars at non-unionized facilities in southern states would face subsidized competition.

2. Think of all the money the Big 3 spent lobbying in Washington to protect their SUVs and prevent Congress from enacting fuel efficiency standards on those gas guzzlers when they could have been spending that money on innovations for more fuel efficient vehicles. Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of GM, was quoted in D Magazine of Dallas harping that global warming “is a total crock of shit.”

3. Not all car companies are doing poorly, in fact Honda and Toyota are building new plants in North America and these companies will swoop into the market and pick-up the slack, employing a lot of the workers GM will lay-off, although without the sweetheart UAW pension plans.

4. The legacy costs are unsustainable and were forged in the years before international competition when the Big 3 ran an oligopoly. No other companies provide the type of health care benefits for their retirees. The UAW leadership has proven that they are unwilling to budge on these conditions, and bankruptcy would force them to do so.

5. The company is crippled with too much debt and the solution is not to loan the company more money to pay off the interest to creditors who loaned them money a few years back. Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager of Pershing Square Capital Mgmt., argues that the company should reorganize through bankruptcy and then emerge as a leaner, healthier company. He goes on to argue that the government’s money would be better spent retraining the laid-off workers to do other jobs; for example, welders could be put to work improving the infrastructure of the country rather than working in vain for an insolvent company. He argues for a prepackaged bankruptcy that could help the company compete in a global system. [Thanks Mae$e for the link to this informative Charlie Rose interview.]

6. The Detroit car companies have been at overcapacity for years, artificially creating demand for new cars by offering cheap financing just to keep factories running at full capacity. The average age of the car on the road has fallen considerably, but during recessions people will be just as happy driving their slightly-older-but-no-less-reliable cars.


7. Bottom line, this package will reward failure when management has shown time and again that they are inept and completely unable to compete on a level, global playing field. When the federal government bailed out Chrysler way back in 1979, then-CEO Lee Iacocca promisedto gullible lawmakers that "you will see better cars, better service and better quality," and now we hear a similar line coming out of Detroit again about how they can produce innovative, fuel efficient cars if the government would just infuse them with enough capital. Have we learned our lesson?

Arguments For Bail-Out

1. A federal bailout package would include stiff requirements for restructuring like firing management, meeting financial goals and creating a leaner, more competitive company without the stigma of a bankruptcy filing. Consumers may not purchase cars from a company going through bankruptcy because the assurance wouldn’t be there for repairs and warranties by the factory. Used car values would decrease, and dealers would go out of business. Consumer surveys suggest that 80-90% of consumers would abandon the car company’s products if it filed for bankruptcy.

2. UAW workers could strike if “a bankrupt G.M. asked a court to throw out its labor contracts."

3. From the Economist: "David Cole of the Center for Automotive Research, which sounds like a industry-financed think tank, has “ modelled a scenario in which Detroit’s production falls by 50%. He estimates that in the first year that would cost 2.5m jobs: 240,000 from the carmakers themselves; 795,000 from suppliers and 1.4m from other firms indirectly affected. The cost in transfer payments and lost taxes would exceed $100 billion over three years. Some of Mr Cole’s assumptions are likely to be too pessimistic, but his blood-curdling forecast and others like it have helped to convince legislators that the $50 billion of help that the carmakers are asking for would be cheap at the price.”

Daniel Gross of Slate lays out a case here that says GM's Chapter 11 Bankruptcy would be too complex and costly because the company's many creditors would demand assurances on their share of the assets. He says this is a problem only the government can solve, which no doubt turns the stomachs of any principled conservative or libertarian.


Best Quote: There is a rich irony in that, less than two months ago, six of eight representatives in the Detroit area voted against the first iteration of Tarp. Only too happy to play a game of chicken with the global financial system by scoffing at the concept of “too big to fail”, they make precisely that justification for rescuing car manufacturers and the dozens of suppliers and millions of jobs linked to the big three, whose “collapse” would be unacceptable.