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Rep. Katie Porter slammed Wells Fargo for robbing its customers by comparing the company to Neil Patrick Harris in ‘Harold and Kumar.’
Did you know that 1/3 of bank tellers rely on public assistance to make ends meet? Meanwhile, Wells Fargo made $20 billion in profit last year. Congresswoman Katie Porter asked CEO Charlie Scharf if he thought it was proper for taxpayer dollars to go toward shoring up his bank's underpayment of tellers. He didn't have many answers. He apparently wasn't even sure that Wells Fargo is profitable; he only said he "believes" it is!
23 May 21
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23 May 21
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FOCUS: Declan Kiberd | Bob Dylan at 80: He Was So Much Older Then, He's Younger Than That Now
Declan Kiberd, The Irish Times
Kiberd writes: "'Let me die in my footsteps,' sang the young Bob Dylan - but he hasn't gone yet. Instead, he has made it to 80; and, apart from one serious episode of pericarditis in 1997 ('I thought I was finally going to see Elvis'), he has stayed in good shape."
As with WB Yeats, whose muse grew younger as he aged, so too for his fellow Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, who turns 80 having found a new self every decade
ope I die before I get old”, sang The Who – and some of them did. The great fear back in the 1960s was of the loss of creativity that went with ageing. “Let me die in my footsteps,” sang the young Bob Dylan – but he hasn’t gone yet,
Instead, he has made it to 80; and, apart from one serious episode of pericarditis in 1997 (“I thought I was finally going to see Elvis”), he has stayed in good shape.
Old age is often experienced as a punishment for sins a person cannot remember committing; but the Dylan who in one song wished his friends to stay “forever young” has never pretended to be any younger than he is. When his finger-bones stiffened, he gave up playing guitar for most songs and stood instead at the keyboard, adopting the voice of a husky old lounge crooner. Dylan hears voices and is heard in many voices. He is a child of the radio days.
His visit to play for Pope John Paul II in 1997 (the year of the heart attack) baffled many: what was a Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota doing in the Vatican? But it made sense if you saw Dylan as paying homage to an ageing man who insisted on defiantly bearing the signs of his illness in public settings.
When he appeared jointly with Mick Jagger on a video, the oldest swinger in rock jumped, gyrated and swooped around Bob, who kept perfectly still. Jagger has always fancied himself a gymnast (after all his dad was a PE teacher), but the bemused Jokerman surely thought there were other better ways of staying forever young.
Even when first he emerged on LPs like Bob Dylan and Freewheelin’, he sounded old, croaky and cracked – a voice modelled on that of his folk hero Woody Guthrie. He travelled on pilgrimage to Woody’s deathbed, in time to sing for him and receive the apostolic blessing. A remarkable number of those early songs obsess about death, a common enough theme among poor-but-proud field hands (“see that my grave is kept clean”). But it was a theme made all the more urgent to a generation fearful it would perish in nuclear war.
The voices in Talkin’ World War 3 Blues are like the voices in Beckett’s Endgame, who fear they are among the few survivors of a nuclear blast. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall was a prophecy of a world gone wrong (and a reworking of the old ballad Lord Randal). Too shy to collect his Nobel Prize in person at the ceremony in 2016, Dylan asked Patti Smith to appear and sing Hard Rain on his behalf.
Most old rockers, haunted by thoughts of early or imminent death, identified with figures such as Buddy Holly and James Dean. They affected surprise at surviving another day, another year. “Great to be here,” Keith Richards would say at the start of a show: “Come to think of it, great to be anywhere.” (If you have fallen out of coconut trees or plunged off speeding motorbikes, you might see his point). But talking about death was a sure way of staving it off.
Dylan is one of those modernists who knew all along that he must struggle, and never triumph, and in the end struggle not to triumph. Hence the shape-changing, the aggression towards (mostly) adoring audiences, the nervousness about the Nobel.
The last time Dylan sang in Dublin, he was five lines into Like a Rolling Stone before most fans could recognise it. It was as if he had translated it into a strange new language, known only to a recently-uncovered self:
They do not know what is at stake;
It is myself that I remake.
That line of Yeats was his answer to followers annoyed by his tendency to revise even published versions of his poems. Yeats also constantly invented a new self, which led to the creation of new lyrics, in the light of which older, beloved ones had to be reformulated and defamiliarised.
When I was young, said Yeats, my muse was old; but when I turned old, my muse became young. So also for Dylan, who seemed to find a new self in every decade. He has always defied chronology and straight-line notions of artistic development. Most successful songsters achieve at age 30 a trademark sound which leaves them resistant to criticism – and incapable of change. Not Dylan. At the outset he wrote songs of indignation, but soon realised how ridiculous they would sound to a future self. Instead, he must question linear conventional ideas that youth precedes age; and so in My Back Pages he disowned his early preaching:
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow:
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.
His memoir, Chronicles, is anything but chronological. It sweeps past major life events such as marriage, birth of children or death of parents; and instead uses the technique of a spiralling autobiography, modelled on Stephen Spender’s World Within World. It spirals around those periods when inspiration unaccountably came and those other periods when it just as strangely went. Dylan is as baffled as anyone by those moments which leave him a medium for voices and forms that seem to come from a force beyond himself.
In recent years, by aligning himself with Sinatra and with Christmas songs of the 1950s – and also through the Theme Tune Radio Hour – he has shown himself as someone who allows the entire American song tradition speak through him. It was in fact ever thus, as far back as the cover versions of old songs on Self-Portrait (1970), which caused an irate Greil Marcus, who wanted more novelty, to write “what is this shit?” But there was always something humble about Dylan’s arrogance (he was learning from the greats), even as there was something arrogant about his humility (he was measuring himself against the very best).
And he has been caught in acts of strange humility – lurking like a stalking fan around Neil Young’s boyhood home in Winnipeg. (A durable legend claims he was arrested by a cop whose colleague said “I suppose you’re going to tell us you’re Bob Dylan” to which he replied “As a matter of fact I am”). Dylan is himself a superfan of other singers. During a trip to England, he took the open-top Beatles Bus tour while disguising himself with nothing more portentous than a hoodie.
In London, hoping to recruit Dave Stewart to work with him on an album, he was brought by taxi to the wrong street. “Is Dave in?” he asked a bemused lady, who happened to be married to one of London’s many Daves: “Not now, but if you come in, he’ll be back soon”. The visitor was downing his third cup of tea in the kitchen when Dave (a plumber) got home and was asked by the wife “Did you forget that Bob Dylan wanted to see you?”
There is something very consistent in Dylan’s desire to disappear. Terrified of pursuit by fans in his earlier tours, he would jump into hotel cupboards. Craving silence, he wrote in order to hide and he hid in order to write. Then there was the unexplained motorcycle accident which enabled a more total retreat.
The plagiarism of which he is often accused could be seen by a psychoanalyst as a desire for death. But by resorting to “love and theft”, he may be seeking something more subtle; re-entry to folk tradition under “anon” – the heroic anonymity achieved by “Napoleon in rags” or Odysseus seeking home.
Yet he zealously defends his copyrights against digital predators, wanting to be “there” and “not there” at the same time. Paul Morley and John Bauldie capture his multiple masks. The very list of chapters in The Cambridge World of Bob Dylan shows how he opened forms of modern music through ever-changing phases: pop, folk, protest, electro-rock, country, Christian, lounge-bar croon. He invented video (the flash-cards on Subterranean Homesick Blues); and he anticipated punk with his critiques of his own audience (recognising that those who oppose the age penetrate to essence far more than those who merely reflect it).
Yet, for all these transformations, each of his songs, however anonymous, is also “Dylanesque”. His signature element is often a wild playful audacity with rhyme and meter:
It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what’s worse
Is this pain in here.
I can’t stay in here.
Ain’t it clear….
The pile-up of rhyme and half-rhyme first\thirst\curse\hurts\worse uncoiling through a single sentence is astonishing, as is the triple use of “in here” – all conveying a terrifying claustrophobia. In many other songs he rhymes identical words – or dissonant words like “necklace” and “reckless”. And so on…
Robert Shelton was the journalist who first wrote a piece “discovering” Bob Dylan for a wider world. His path-breaking book No Direction Home is reissued in a shrewdly abbreviated text but enhanced by brilliant pictorials and pre- and post-lude from Elizabeth Thomson. Both Shelton and John Bauldie died back in the 1990s, a reminder that Dylan has outlived many interpreters. But the Dean of Dylanology, Clinton Heylin, presses on with a double biography, revising his Behind the Shades in the light of material placed in the archive at Tulsa in 2016. If Bob can rewrite songs, his critics can redo their books.
Dylan once accused universities of being like old folks’ homes, but this has not deterred the professoriat. Under the baton of Sean Latham, who has charge of the Tulsa archive, they have produced 27 wonderful essays on the singer’s contexts in The World of Bob Dylan, a book filled with scholarly scruple and imaginative audacity. A true Dylanfest.
By now the songs can sound like voices from a hidden people; and that is exactly how Irish playwright Conor McPherson presented them in his Girl From the North Country, a dramatised version of songs set seven years before Dylan’s birth on May 24th, 1941. Morley says “it is as though the Dylan songs existed before he did”. Which, in some ways, they had.
The most modest book saluting the birthday as it comes is also the most challenging: a pocket street-guide, Troubadour Tales: Bob Dylan in London, by Jackie Lees and KG Miles. After two decades of people insisting on the artist’s Americana, this opens a new front, bringing it all back to the old world.
It shows how Martin Carthy taught him Scarborough Fair, which morphed into Girl from the North Country; how jittery Dylan was with Dominic Behan , because The Patriot Game by a living Behan had been thieved and turned into With God on Our Side; and how the jester’s first London gig was in a club called King and Queen “in a coat he borrowed from James Dean”. Carthy says nobody has fully documented the debt to English and Irish art and folksong in Dylan’s work.
Every fan thinks that he (less often she) owns Bob Dylan. This has led to spats. Is Miss Lonely Edie Sedgwick, or Marianne Faithful, or all the women he knew? Is Murder Most Foul about the Kennedy assassination or something else? Dylan knows too much to argue or to judge. He knows literally Nothing. Once, on a house-viewing mission with Leonard Cohen, he said “Lennie, you’ll always be number one”. As Cohen thoughtfully smiled, Dylan simply added: “Yes, and I’m zero”.
Suit Launched to Stop Navy Ships From Killing Whales
On May 8 two dead fin whales were pushed into port in San Diego, California, on the hull of a destroyer. It was the latest in a heartbreaking string of whale fatalities caused by vessel strikes off the West Coast. The more than two dozen whale deaths reported there from collisions between 2014 and 2018 may understate actual deaths by 20-fold.
So on Monday the Center for Biological Diversity sent a notice to the National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Navy demanding the agencies consult on ways to avoid killing endangered whales — or we’ll be forced to sue.
“These dead whales are grisly proof of the Navy’s dire ongoing threat to vulnerable marine mammals. We’re asking the Biden administration to find a better balance of marine protection with military readiness,” said Kristen Monsell, the Center’s oceans legal director.
Please help us save whales and other species with a gift to our Saving Life on Earth Fund. Do it now and your gift will be matched.
Take Action: Help Save These Missouri Crayfishes
Missouri’s Big Creek and St. Francis River crayfishes are in trouble. A non-native crayfish is squeezing them out of their streams, which are being poisoned with dangerous heavy metals from mining. The decline of these once-common little omnivores is heartbreaking — and a harbinger of mass biodiversity loss nationwide. But you can still help save them.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed safeguarding the rare crawdaddies under the Endangered Species Act and protecting habitat for their survival and recovery. The agency is accepting public comments on the proposal now — and that’s where you come in.
Tell the Service to protect Big Creek and St. Francis River crayfishes before it’s too late.
Anti-Pollution Lawsuits Launched This Week
This week the Center launched three lawsuits to protect people, wildlife and the environment from toxic pollution.
We took action to defend Florida residents and marine ecosystems from radioactive “gypstacks.” These are mountains of a toxic-waste product called phosphogypsum, the radioactive waste that comes from processing phosphate ore into phosphoric acid (most often used in fertilizer).
We launched a lawsuit to protect Maryland and Michigan residents and the environment from sulfur dioxide air pollution, which contributes to health problems like asthma and ecological harm like acid rain.
And this morning we filed a notice of our intent to sue the federal government for failing to regulate polyvinyl chloride — more commonly known as PVC or vinyl — as hazardous waste. PVC is one of the mostly commonly used and discarded forms of plastic, but many studies have found it’s highly toxic to human health and the environment.
Massacres Show Why States Can’t Manage Wolves
Ten years after gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains lost their federal protection, new laws in Idaho and Montana may allow more than 2,000 of them to be killed. As the Center’s Andrea Zaccardi writes in a powerful new op-ed, these laws prove states can’t be trusted to manage wolves.
“The reckless spate of new laws in the northern Rockies may serve as dangerous templates for other wolf-hating legislatures like those in Wisconsin and Michigan to copy,” writes Andrea.
That’s why the Center and allies just called on the Biden administration to restore wolves’ Endangered Species Act safeguards before it’s too late.
Win for Whales: California to Close Crab Fishery Early
Following a Center lawsuit, California announced Tuesday that its commercial Dungeness crab fishery will close early this year to avoid entangling endangered humpback whales now migrating along the coastline. The closure on June 1, about a month early, is based on data from an analysis required by a legal agreement reached by the Center. We urged California to close the fishery earlier except to ropeless gear, which doesn’t entangle whales and sea turtles.
“It’s good to see California finally acting to avoid whale entanglements,” said the Center’s Kristen Monsell. “But we’re disappointed state officials were so slow to take meaningful action and haven’t acted on the promise of ropeless gear to let crabbers keep crabbing.”
American bumblebees were the first species the Center and allies petitioned to protect under the Biden administration. As this video demonstrates, they also have the cutest butts of all invertebrates (scientifically speaking).
What better occasion than World Bee Day — yep, that’s today — to advocate for American bumblebees? Take action now to help curb their catastrophic decline.
Bracing for Another Wildfire Season
The West Coast’s wildfire season started early last week with the human-caused Palisades brush fire. Last year’s blazes broke records; this year’s season, fueled by drought and climate change, could be another record breaker.
Federal land-management agencies and some lawmakers are calling for increased logging and roadbuilding to reduce wildfire risk. But for decades this approach has failed to keep people safe, instead hurting wildlife and increasing the danger of destructive fires.
“We can’t log our way out of the climate emergency,” the Center’s Randi Spivak told Roll Call. “Federal officials shouldn’t use the public’s understandable fear of wildfires to make a case for logging in the backcountry.”
The best ways to protect people and property from wildfires are to retrofit homes, create “defensible space” around structures, and avoid building new homes in high fire-prone areas.
Center Op-Ed: Being Joe Biden
Donning a mask with Joe Biden’s face on it doesn’t make you the president, as the Center’s Steve Jones now knows. But it can give you the opportunity to stand in for him and learn about the plastic pollution crisis — and what a #PlasticFreePresident can do, right now, to bring it to heel.
Read Steve’s column on Medium and let your members of Congress know how urgent it is that they support the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act.
That’s Wild: Are Trees Social?
According to Canadian ecologist and author Suzanne Simard, trees communicate and cooperate with each other in profound ways.
For example, her research shows, some forests have “mother trees” that help younger seedlings grow by sharing carbon, nutrients and water through an underground network of fungi that resembles neurons in the brain. This network also connects trees in other ways, letting them "warn" each other of dangers like the presence of damaging insects.
In the middle of her lifelong study of trees, Simard was diagnosed with breast cancer and found out one of her chemotherapy treatments was made from a substance some trees share for mutual defense.
Read or listen on NPR to learn more about Simard's journey, the social dynamics of trees, and how we can learn from them.
We often talk about the environmental impact of the energy industry, but fossil fuel companies are not the only ones polluting our communities and harming people.
Meat and poultry giant Tyson Foods is responsible for mountains of livestock manure and fertilizer runoff from millions of acres of industrial corn and soybean fields, all of which flow freely into the Mississippi River, poisoning drinking water and compromising the health and well-being of communities downstream. Once this pollution makes its way into the Gulf of Mexico, it creates a massive "dead zone" that kills fish and other marine life and harms people who rely on fishing for a living.
Tyson executives have said they'll start using more sustainable farming practices, but so far they haven't followed through. Meanwhile, Tyson spent over $1 million dollars in 2020 alone lobbying to protect themselves from pro-environment and other regulations.
We're taking on Tyson and the pollution they bring to our communities and vital ecosystems. We need 1,000 members to make a gift by midnight on May 28—to help fuel our corporate accountability and other science—driven advocacy campaigns.
Not only is Tysons outsized carbon footprint having a devastating impact on the environment, but work at Tyson meatpacking plants is dangerous, with workers—mostly immigrants and people of color—required to work too fast, in too-tight quarters. Before the pandemic, the company ranked near the top among employers for rates of severe worker injuries. Over the last year, Tyson has been responsible for more than 12,500 COVID-19 cases and 39 deaths among its US workers, by far the largest numbers of any meat processing company.1
It will take regulatory changes on a large scale to break the hold Tyson and other giant agribusinesses have on agricultural policy and stop them from threatening people's health and safety. We need strong antitrust policies that will level the playing field for more socially and environmentally responsible producers and processors. And we need the USDA to enforce policies and regulations to protect our environment and the workers and communities who face the greatest risks from Tyson's business practices.
UCS members like you power the savvy, grassroots advocacy that can hold Tyson Foods and corporations like them accountable.
As the nation's largest meat and poultry producer, Tyson Foods has a lot of power, as do other companies that are part of Big Meat. But we can't be cowed by their lobbying budgets and million dollar megaphones. We have to use science and grassroots power to stop their negligent practices, which put their workers, neighboring communities, and our environment at risk.
Thank you,
John Mace
Membership Director
Union of Concerned Scientists
[1] https://blog.ucsusa.org/karen-perry-stillerman/4-ways-tyson-foods-made-2020-worse
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Not only are the rich different from you and me – they’re getting more different than ever.
I’m not referring to mere millionaires, but to the billionaire bunch. In the past year, while ordinary Americans have lost jobs, businesses, and homes due to the pandemic economic crash, America’s 664 billionaires have found themselves nearly 40 percent richer than before COVID! These fortunate few collectively added more than a trillion dollars in 2020 to their personal stashes of wealth. And practically all of them got so much richer by doing nothing – their money made the extra money for them, because corporate stock prices zoomed even as regular people lost income.
Take a peek at THE richest of these different ones: Jeff Bezos, the Alpha-geek of Amazon. He hauled in an additional $75 billion last year (roughly $37 million an hour). You could do a lot of good with such riches… or you could splurge on yourself.
Jeff splurged. He bought one of the largest sailing vessels ever built. More than one-and-a-third football fields long, the superyacht cost the diminutive mega-billionaire some half-billion bucks. Plus, he’ll pay some $60 million each year for operating expenses. Also, he had to buy a “support yacht” to sail along with his main boat. Why? Because the three sails on his 400-footer are so huge that a helicopter can’t land on the deck, requiring an auxiliary yacht to provide a helipad.
See, the rich really are different – where to park our helicopter while at sea is a problem you and I don’t have to face.
According to mega-yacht sellers, the main draw of these ostentatious purchases is that they reinforce inequality, literally letting the rich float in leisure and luxury, oceans apart from even having to see hoi Polloi like us.
This year, MAGA GOP activists in Georgia attempted to disenfranchise hundreds of students by trying to kick them off the voter rolls. De...
