If only I were Edith Piaf. But alas, I can’t say je ne regrette rien. Once upon a wasted time (circa late 1970′s and early 80′s) I hung on New York City’s downtown art/music scene. The scene never fit me, I tried to fit it. Which was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. My only excuse is that I was caught in a spiritual downdraft. Couldn’t see how deeply the Punk New Wave No Wave Ironic Transgressive thing wasn’t me. Its gods weren’t mine. The Velvet Underground gave good vinyl but their legend was tiresome. William Burroughs seemed shallow. Neo-Expressionism? A few pieces were sharp (albeit over-priced) but a lot looked like puke splattered on a sidewalk outside the Mudd Club.

Oh. Yeah. Those fabulous avant-garde nite spots…

Color me ashamed for ever taking pride in being approved by a doorman.

By ’83, I was outta there. Living in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson from Manhattan. In those days Hoboken felt far from NYC. An escape from hip happening hell. David Solomonoff (my future husband) and I lived in a five floor walk-up in the tallest building on our block. No telephone. Couldn’t afford it. Up there in the clouds, where no phone ever rang, we began doing Mail Art and making music cassettes as Solomonoff & Von Hoffmannstahl. The post office became our scene and we loved it. No cliques, clacks or clutter, just real deal underground art. Via snail mail we connected with artists and musicians all over the world.

Our first connect came via Jim Sauter of Borbetomagus. (Aka the “pioneers of aggressive improvised noise music.”) Jim gave us contact info for Japanese Mail Artist and musician Masami Akita. The work received from Akita was a revelation. His dense rich collages were non splatter and his music as Merzbow was full-tilt lush noise. Apres Akita, the deluge. Our correspondents eventually numbered in the hundreds. Some were creative trifectas (art, music, words) others specialized. We developed collaborative relationships (as opposed to just trading work) with many, both for Mail Art and cassette projects. We contributed numerous pieces to cassette compilations and also supplied material for other musicians to cut up and rework.

In no particular order, our cassette culture collaborators* included: Joel Haertling (Architect’s Office), Zan Hoffman (Zanstones, Zanoisect, Zidsick, etc.), Al Margolis (Sound of Pig; If Bwana), GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters), Seiei Jack Nakahara (Joke Project), Rafael Flores (Comando Bruno), Mike Honeycutt (Mystery Hearsay), M. Nomized (Fraction Studio), Hal McGee (Homemade Alien Music), Shinichi Igari (Uterus of Plant), Alain Neffe (Insane Music Productions), Rudi Tuscher (Nisus Anal Furgler), Wally Shoup, Kowa Kato, Bart Plantenga, Ken Clinger, Denier Du Culte, Calypso Now, Soft Joke Productions, Magthea, Absolute Body Control, DDAA (Déficit Des Années Antérieures), Intrendent Fansette, Bog-Art, Reportage, and So On & So Forth. The last a place holder for anyone I’ve inadvertently omitted.

Over roughly four years, we produced five cassette “albums”: In The Mood, Swim Or Die, Great In Bed, God Is Love, and finally, The Element That Defies Description. Great In Bed was a compilation which included work by some of the people listed above. It came packaged in a black nylon stocking. (We’d bought boxes of them at a Hoboken odd lots store.) In The Element we took tracks supplied by others and reworked the material into an overarching musical structure and metaphysical theme.

The Solomonoff & Von Hoffmannstahl sound was shaped by having little money. Dirty Harry/Clint Eastwood once said “A man’s got to know his limitations.” The same goes for broke musicians. Our equipment was limited and we knew those limitations intimately. We worked them. Our apartment was our studio. Its ancient inadequate wiring meant lots of line hum. The hum would sing in shrill choruses when channeled through the frequency analyzer (aka ring modulator), a groovy 70′s effect manufactured by Electro-Harmonix. David had a made-in-Korea electric guitar and a Polytone Mini-Brute amp. Which was indeed brutish. When its spring-reverb was sproinging and its distortion was cranked the Mini-Brute turned into Godzilla doing Tokyo. We also had a vintage tube hifi amp which we played through the kind of wooden PA speakers that once hung in schoolrooms.

Our biggest (in terms of size and lineage) instrument was a 1960′s Vox Continental organ. The keyboard that carried The Doors. When momentarily flush from a freelance writing job, I’d bought the Vox for 200 bucks from The Major Thinkers, an Irish punk group. They claimed it previously belonged to Hall & Oates. The Vox was a workhorse. It had a few iffy drawbars but the randomness was a good thing; it seemed as if the Vox were actively improvising. Vox and Mini-Brute were bosom buddies.

Our other keyboards were miniature Casios. An MT-40 and VL-5. Among the earlier Casios on the market, their cheesy rhythm sections had options that allowed jump-cut transitions twixt say, samba and disco. When jacked with the line-humming frequency analyzer and/or our Doctor Q envelope filter (also made by Electro-Harmonix) samba and disco shattered into infinity. When the Casios’ batteries got weak, the shattering became even more extreme.

We also snagged rhythm from records. Most typically, ones from the 1950′s that demonstrated the exciting new audio technology of Stereo. Think demented bongos bouncing back and forth, forth and back, while Dad mixes martinis (clink clink) in the rec room. We also pulled snippets of exotic instrumentation from easy listening albums. We found countless treasures of Incredibly Strange Music and Exotica in Hoboken’s many junk shops. Prices ranged from 10 cents to a dollar. An LP had to be really special to warrant a dollar. Something like: Mario Lanza Gargles Gershwin — in Stereo.

We listened intently to the records we mined. Culling snippets of rhythm, minuscule musical phrases, and single syllables. Everything we sampled was sampled without a sampler. David was fast on the draw with our Pioneer turntable. He’d hover over a spinning platter, tone arm in hand — his other hand poised to punch the ree-cord button on our cheapie cassette deck. We had three cheapie decks. Plus a stereo amp with cheapie speakers, a good set of headphones, and a Radio Shack four channel mixer. Four tracks in, two tracks out. Layer up and do it all over again. Toss in a few guitar effect pedals (which we also used on samples and keyboards), a Roland analog micro synth/sequencer, a microphone, and me on vocals. That was our sound. Tech wise. As for the creative process –

When creating a piece we carefully assembled and structured the materials, then combined them through improvisation. We’d have a clear idea of what mood we wanted to create, how it should sound, and how the piece should generally progress. But the road was open to inspiration. Instrumentals by David and myself, together and solo, were improvised but sometimes sampled, cut-up, and recast. My vocals were fairly straight (no, no Yoko) inclining more to cocktail lounge and big band than rock. Sometimes a bit gospel. The sound of Solomonoff & Von Hoffmannstahl (in Stereo) was/is described by others with words such as Industrial, Electronic, Experimental, Sound-Collage, Noise, Art-Rock. I’ve never known how to describe it. Guess I’d just say it is what it is.

One thing I do know — we had a whole lot of fun doing it. Though being so broke was no fun. That big old railroad apartment was only heated at one end, by the kind of gas heater that even then was archaic. Up on the top floor we froze in the winter and baked in the summer. We didn’t have a stove for a year and juggled pots on a hot plate. And like I said, no phone. But hey, we always managed to scrape together enough for postage and blank cassettes. And when the no-cash blues got tough we got going. Cranking the Mini-Brute to the max and ring-modulating our cares into the international ether.

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

“I hear you singing in the wire, I can hear you through the whine…”

Wichita Lineman, Jimmy Webb, 1968

*So as to not clog this paragraph with links, I’m supplying contacts and/or background material re our cassette collaborators below. Haven’t been in touch with some of them for years. Apologies if I’ve missed more apropos links:

• Joel Haertling/Architect’s Office
• Zan Hoffman/Zanstones, Zanoisect, Zidsick, etc.
• Al Margolis/Sound of Pig; If, Bwana
• GX Jupitter-Larsen/The Haters
• Seiei Jack Nakahara/Joke Project
• Rafael Flores/Comando Bruno
• Mike Honeycutt/Mystery Hearsay
• M.Nomized/Fraction Studio, Fraction Studio blog
• Hal McGee/Homemade Alien Music
• Shinichi Igari/Uterus of Plant
• Insane Music Productions/Alain Neffe
• Rudi Tuscher/Nisus Anal Furgler
• Wally Shoup
• Kowa Kato
• Bart Plantenga
• Ken Clinger
• Denier Du Culte
• Calypso Now
• Soft Joke Productions
• Magthea
• Absolute Body Control
• DDAA (Déficit Des Années Antérieures)
• Bog-Art
• Reportage — No info found. Too bad, ’cause their Iron Curtain sound was delightfully relentless.

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

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mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

Ho humdrum. It’s back to political bidness in the Empire State. The gubernatorial race ended just as predicted. Andrew Cuomo finally got elected to something. (Becoming attorney general on Eliot Spitzer’s coat tails doesn’t count.) Not that beating Carl Paladino is proof of public appeal. A friend of mine in Hudson County, New Jersey suggested that Andy’s dad, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, hired Paladino. I gave this theory serious consideration. Hudson County knows good ringers. (Point of info for folks living in Eden: political ringers are fake reform candidates who divide or reduce opposition to the machine candidate.) But as the campaign devolved, I rejected the notion. Buffalo developer Carl Paladino is definitely his own man. Albeit of an easily recognizable type. In upstate political circles, wacky little Caesars are a dime a dozen. Some are truly extreme. Remember Congressman Eric Massa?

Until resigning in March 2010, Democrat Massa repped the gerrymandered 29th district. The 29th contains a hefty chunk of primarily Democratic suburban Rochester in western New York, plus a swath of the state’s more Republican Southern Tier. (The latter incidentally, has a particularly fine collection of Caesars.)

Massa resigned under a cloud of sex scandal that reeked of abuse of power; he allegedly had a habit of harassing young male staffers verbally and physically. Coming on crude and overbearing. (Similar stories surfaced about Massa as a Lt. Commander in the Navy in the early 90s. Officers of lesser rank who shared quarters with Massa recalled waking up at night with his hands all over them — or with his junk in their face.) The scandal was a big story because Congressman Massa claimed top Democrats had targeted him for extinction, smearing him with lies damn lies. Why? Because Massa wouldn’t sign on to ObamaCare; he wanted a single-payer system. Massa later back pedaled on the claim, most spectacularly on the Glenn Beck show.

Beck had Massa on as a guest for a full hour in early March, thinking he was going to tell ALL about corrupt, arm-twisting Dems. But Massa only talked vaguely of how big money (from unnamed sources to unnamed pols) was corrupting both parties. Massa did talk at length about his “tickle fights.” Which were being seen through a glass, lewdly. His pile-on gropings of staffers were merely the horseplay of a rough mannered ex-military guy.

Every time Glenn Beck tried to pry Democrat dirt out of Massa, he dodged with tickle fight talk. Personally, I believe Massa’s appearance on Beck was the point at which Beck went round the bend. Before Massa (BM) I sometimes agreed with Beck and often found him funny. Sure, his sharp bi-partisan satire was already segueing into lectures re a vast, astonishingly competent commie conspiracy. And the Holy Prophet thing was kicking in. But after Massa (AM) Beck’s head totally ballooned.

Mother of God — did Eric Massa pass along the imp of the wacky little Caesar? If so, Upstate New York owes Beck an exorcism.

As for X Congressman Massa, no need to fear for his future. Word is, he’s been snapped up by the TSA. (The TSA is a big contractor in the Southern Tier.) Look for him at your local airport.

Massa is an extreme example of a wacky little Caesar. (He may actually qualify as a wacky little Caligula.) But his assumption that bully fun is a perk of power, along with his tone-deaf narcissism, are typical of many players in politically airless upstate New York. Where decadence isn’t divine, just day to day mundane. It’s been bred into the region’s old boys (and girls) by hoary political machines riding high in a post-industrial landscape of shrinking population. A sizable influx of civic minded residents might shake things up, but jobs that pay middle class wages are scarce. However, there is an influx of poor folks with substance abuse problems. They’re being shipped upstate to partake of one of the few growth industries. Halfway-Houses-R-Us! As an electorate, the poor and addicted are swell for political machines. What with their being so dependent on public money and all.

Speaking of being dependent on public money — and political machines — consider what passes for economic development in Upstate New York. Being Joe Doakes with a good idea for building widgets doesn’t cut it. Just try and build a few prototypes in your garage, Joe! Red tape and taxes will be on you like Eric Massa on a staffer. Meanwhile, when Widgetom Inc, a multi-national company supposedly headquartered somewhere in the USA, announces plans to build a facility upstate, they get the red carpet treatment from local pols, development officials, and New York’s quasi-public Empire State Development Corporation (ESD). In exchange for talking job creation and revitalization, and for stroking the egos and jazzing the war chests and vacation trips of assorted little Caesars, Widgetom receives tax breaks, public utility deals, EZ loans, and exemptions from environmental and land use regulations. Plus tons of taxpayer cash in combo platters of state and federal grants.

After several years of breathless local press coverage re Widgetom and the glorious revitalized future, Widgetom will announce that due to changing economic conditions and technological developments, the future will be smaller than initially projected. Maybe delayed indefinitely. However, a few more grants might just pull the rabbit out of the hat. Pols and development officials agree to stand and deliver. So much has already gone into the hat. The future of the region is at stake. Widgetom is too big to fail!

As for Joe Doakes, if he doesn’t flee the state, he may hew his way to a small business start-up. Heck, he might even get a few bucks from the local ESD funnel. (As long as his product doesn’t compete with Widgetom.) Tip 4 Joe: get cozy with your local little Caesars. Fealty can B fun.

Getting back to New York’s gubernatorial election, though numerous other states were able to field credible reform candidates of the Tea Party variety for major offices, the Empire State put forth Carl Paladino. An ultra wacky little Caesar whose real estate ponderosa in the Buffalo area is heavily dependent on state government contracts and ESD-based tax breaks. His bully in a china shop campaign style? I am what I am said Paladino. (Him and Popeye.) A rough mannered son-of-an-immigrant guy. At least Paladino wasn’t into tickle fights. He only emailed extreme pornography (woman w. horse) and puerile racist jokes to dozens of business associates, including ones with government addresses.

That Carl Paladino passed as a populist reformer in so much of upstate is a sign of that region’s decadent political condition. On the statewide front, the election of Andrew Cuomo, after no real race, is a like-minded sign. We New Yorkers love our Caesars. Be they little or big. As for the wacky, will Andy turn? Never say never. (See Eliot Spitzer.)

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

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mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

In early February 2009, I was skimming the Drudge Report and came across a headline that went something like this: Protester Throws Shoes at Mayor of Ithaca, New York. I immediately knew the shoe-thrower was my friend Robin Palmer. Robin died this August at age 80. He was a born rebel and lived in that skin all his life. He was never without a cause. Usually multiple causes. Which sometimes seemed wildly contradictory.

Robin ran with the radical left Weathermen in the late 1960′s and early ’70s. He spent several years in Attica prison for trying to bomb a New York City bank. By this millennium he was sort-of right wing. Why “sort-of”? Robin never regretted his terrorist actions or ceased believing the U.S. was a villain in Vietnam. He referred to Ho Chi Minh as “the George Washington of his people” and felt warmly toward his old Weather-friends, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. When candidate Barack Obama’s relationship with Ayers in Chicago became a hot topic during the 2008 presidential race, Robin wrote missives to local newspapers lauding Ayers and defending the Weatherman bombings. When election day rolled around Robin didn’t vote for Obama or McCain — he wrote in Bill Ayers.

Flip side: Robin disagreed vehemently with the standard left positions on Cuba and the Mid-East. When Robin denounced Fidel Castro at gatherings of old New Leftists, he was struck from the rad honor roll. (Attica only counted for so much.) His opinions on the Mid-East were equally heretical. Robin was always strongly pro-Israel. Not gung-ho for the PLO. By this millennium he stood 100 percent behind President Bush and the war in Iraq. The shoe hurling incident sprang from that support. The City of Ithaca had passed a resolution condemning the war. By tossing his shoes at the mayor, Robin was tearing a page from the book of Iraqi protesters who did likewise to Bush. Turning it upside down in the process.

That’s so Robin.

I first met Robin in New York City in the Spring of 1968. I was a blue collar kid from New Jersey. At 16, I’d beat it out of a severely dysfunctional family and had been bouncing around the adult world in Jersey and NYC for several years. File clerking one month, go-go dancing the next. By ’68, I was waitressing at Max’s Kansas City, watering hole of the Andy Warhol crowd. I was drawn to leftism by my convictions about the war in Vietnam and civil rights — and by desire for improvement in my own life.

I jumped into leftism with youthful abandon and went from peacenik to radical after a demonstration where the cops came in swinging. I first met Robin at meetings of the Coalition for an Anti-Imperialist Movement (CO-AIM). CO-AIM was composed of radical groups who believed the peace movement was too limited in its political analysis and too wimpy tactically. Groups in CO-AIM included the “youth” wing of Workers World Party (a vintage Marxist-Leninist group who dug the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary) and Veterans and Reservists Against The War (V&R). Robin, a vet from the Korean War era, was a member of V&R.

The V&R guys were all older than me, some considerably so. (One was a WW1 vet.) I liked the V&R guys. A number reminded me of blue collar Jersey boys. Possibly because several were undercover cops. (V&R was always a target for cop ops. Number one operator: the New York City Bureau of Special Services, aka BOSS or the Red Squad.) I became V&R’s unofficial mascot, attending their meetings and going to demonstrations under their banner. The guys gave me the kid sister treatment. On my birthday they chipped in and bought me a gift certificate for glasses. One of the undercover cops (then unknown) kidded me, saying they were tired of seeing me getting busted at demos.

Nearsightedness had nothing to do with it. I was just reckless.

According to his fellow V&R members, so was Robin. I knew Robin’s rep for recklessness long before we became friends. (Point of info: Robin and I were always friends, never romantic.) The guys kidded Robin about his penchant for getting arrested. They also said he could fall asleep anywhere (a skill admired by military guys, even anti-war ones) and would drop off in jail the minute the cell door slammed.

V&R also ribbed Robin about his dogs. Robin loved dogs. He always had several. Never ever leashed. In the 60′s and 70′s, many radical groups operated out of low-rent industrial lofts in mid and downtown Manhattan. Few working elevators, many flights of stairs. Robin’s dogs always preceded him up those stairs. They’d bound into meetings, tags jangling. Followed by Robin, who despite his rad ways, looked like an all-American boy with multiple Lassies. He appeared much younger than his age (38), wore his hair military short and had an aw-shucks grin. When Robin traveled to the massive anti-war protest at the August, 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he donned a baseball cap and flew youth fare. I went to Chicago with hippie friends from the East Village, but hung with Robin when things turned wild-in-the-streets. Robin got busted. I didn’t. Maybe the glasses did help…

A year later, Robin was one of the 18 activists named as unindicted co-conspirators in the federal case against those deemed responsible for the Chicago blowout. Among those who stood trial as the Chicago Seven (originally “eight” but Black Panther Bobby Seale got bumped for bad behavior in court) were Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. As well as being an anti-war vet, Robin was tight with the Youth International Party. As in — Yippie!

Robin was all over the NYC radical scene. He participated in the takeover of administrative offices at Columbia University by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the student strike of April, 1968, and was busted when cops reclaimed the territory. He manned literature tables for the U.S. Committee to Aid the NLF (a small but ideologically influential group headed by Walter Teague III) on Greenwich Village street corners. He was more than happy to argue the Vietnam War and the righteousness of the National Liberation Front (NLF) with any passerby who called him a traitor.

Robin was fluent in leftist ideology. (Including then trendy Maoism.) But at heart, his politics were personal and non-ideological. In my opinion, Robin’s political philosophy was, and continued to be throughout his life, rooted in romantic idealism, individualism, and a moral fervor akin to Calvinism in its either/or rigidity. The latter was blessedly tempered (most strongly in later years) by his generosity, sense of humor, and taste for the absurd.

Pigs’ Heads & Bomb Plots

Richard Robin Palmer grew up in Ithaca in Tompkins County, New York. His parents were college professors prominent in natural science fields. Both were politically conservative. Robin fought particularly fiercely with his father, a fan of Joe McCarthy. Robin entered the military and trained as a paratrooper in the early 1950′s. By the beginning of the 60′s, he was living in Greenwich Village. He was active in civil rights and anti-war circles and hung on the jazz scene. He was briefly married to singer Arlene Corwin, whom he met through vibraphonist Teddy Charles. Robin worked at various occupations, including deep sea diver and tree surgeon. He also taught high school in Harlem. Subject, English. Robin lost his teaching license after being busted for moonlighting in porn films. The classic plumber-meets-housewife kind. Male performers kept their black socks on at all times. Playboy gave Robin’s arrest a write-up, as did a tabloid. He did a little jail and dropped out of the porn biz when the Mafia started getting heavy. Demanding extreme subject matter. Such as bestiality. With dogs. That tore it for Robin.

I imagine Robin had been a good teacher. One night in late ’68, a friend (I’ll call him “Vic”) and I were driving around with Robin in his old station wagon. It broke down in some borough. Possibly Queens. Vic was about my age. We’d both segued from peacenik to radical freak. Aka Yippie. We both lived hand-to-mouth in the then rundown East Village. Our cultural references were downtown small. Anyway, there we were in the middle of the night, possibly in Queens, sitting in some garage with Robin waiting for a diagnosis on his car. The possibility of repair, up in the air. Most car owners would have been climbing the walls. Instead, Robin pulled a battered paperback anthology of William Blake out of his pocket and proceeded to read aloud. Delivering a discourse on why Blake was a great poet. To this day, I never encounter Blake without thinking of Robin. By the by, his car got repaired.

As I became more Yippie, I took part in more political actions involving Robin and his partner Sharon Krebs. Sharon was around 30, had an M.A. in Russian literature, worked as a Russian translator, and in 1965, had helped launch the Free University of New York. (A hot spot of free thought that eventually turned dogma city.) Sharon’s political background was hard left. By ’68, she was also a Yippie. Sharon was intelligent, high-strung, and attractive. Robin and Sharon’s relationship was passionate and volatile. Despite their occasional outside affairs and the prevailing pressure to “Smash Monogamy” they were an unmarried married couple. When Vic and I rode in the backseat of their car and they bickered in the front, we felt like the kids in a counterculture sitcom.

An affinity group of roughly 30 or 40 people grew up around Robin and Sharon. We called ourselves The Crazies. (Proudly!) We specialized in guerrilla theater actions targeting prominent liberal politicians who in our eyes, were insufficiently against the Vietnam War. Liberals who didn’t work all the live-long-day to end the war were worse than hawks — they were hypocrites. The Crazies’ signature routine involved ambushing liberal pols at public events (ceremonial dinners, speeches in auditoriums, etc.) and presenting them with a pig’s head on a platter. The presentation was often done by Robin and Sharon — in the nude. (Though Robin would sometimes sport an Uncle Sam hat.) The rest of us would pop up from the audience waving NLF flags, dropping leaflets from balconies, shouting slogans, playing kazoos, and marching down the aisles. At one event, male Crazies dressed as red-jacketed waiters gained access to an elegant dinner dais (possibly at the New York Hilton?) packed with prominent pols. The “waiters” bore platters with silver covers. With a flourish they lifted the covers, revealing the pigs’ heads beneath. Each head neatly labeled with the name of the pol receiving it.

Occasionally we disrupted events that included the non-elected. At one, actress Shelley Winters threw a glass of booze at Sharon and screamed “beat her she’s naked.” At another, an equally lit Norman Mailer, who was quixotically running for NYC mayor, accused the Crazies of being CIA agents and wanted to duke it out with Robin. (I don’t remember if Robin was nude.) We kinda liked Mailer for that.

The Crazies unfairly zapped a lot of decent liberals. But at the same time, having an event disrupted by the Crazies became a sort of status symbol. A sign of being “in.” We’d sneak into some dining room or auditorium and people in the audience would already be looking around eagerly, whispering “Are the Crazies here?” For us, being “in” took the fun out of the thing…

Our belief that liberal hypocrites (in our estimation) were more deserving of attack than hawks, was symptomatic of a widespread reductivist vortex that was sucking many radicals toward committing, or supporting, domestic terrorism. Inexorable pressure hung in the air. Ultra militant talk was being talked. Revolution had come, time to pick up the gun. Scenarios of imminent, extreme government repression were being laid out in — dare I say it? — loving detail. Behind the militant gin-up and over anticipation of repression, lay eagerness to erase the oppression and militancy gap separating “white skin privilege” radicals from the Vietnamese and other third world revolutionaries, and vanguard domestic African-American groups such as the Black Panthers.

Within much of the New Left, the old left focus on class had been supplanted by devotion to foreign revolutions (oft seen through rose tinted glasses) and belief in a racial vanguard. The jettisoning of class as central issue was in part due to the success of American organized labor. Most blue collar workers had attained a rung on the ladder or believed they soon would, and just didn’t feel all that interested in smashing the state. And yes, many were casually racist and some were actively so. They feared losing what they had to the guy on the rung right below them. Another blue collar sin: their jobs depended on the nasty smoke-belching factories that were polluting the air. (Environmentalism was starting to stir.) But the biggest sin of all was that most working class people supported the war in Vietnam. Even those who didn’t, wanted the USA to come out OK. Which in radical eyes made them “good Germans.” They were sitting back (watching TV and drinking beer) while their government perpetrated a holocaust.

Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s dictum “you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem” was a favorite radical slogan. If you didn’t commit to stopping Pig Amerika by any means necessary you WERE Pig Amerika. Man up (feminism was barely stirring) for revolutionary violence or be damned.

Like most of my friends, I was part of the damnboree. Yet when Robin asked me to help him, Sharon, and several others bomb a bank, I refused. I gave tactical reasons (for one, I suspected a member of the group was a cop) but the deeper reason was I balked at alienating myself from common humanity to that degree. Not that I would have put it in those terms. But an image of my parents doing banking popped into my head. And I’d held clerical jobs; I knew banks were places where people worked. What if a bomb meant to merely damage property blew at the wrong time and someone got killed? So I nixed my opportunity to be a terrorist. Which made Robin angry. He critiqued my lack of commitment. He also reminded me of instances where he and Sharon had gotten my back, saying I was betraying them personally. This hurt quite a bit. Afterwards our paths diverged. I continued to see Robin and Sharon at political events, but was no longer a member of their inner circle. Since they were on the scene for months after Robin made his pitch, I assumed the bomb plot had been abandoned. I assumed wrong.

While in the Crazies and afterwards, Robin and Sharon were close with Weatherman, the ultra radical spin-off from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Robin was reportedly* instrumental in convincing John Jacobs, an SDS/Weatherman leader, that average Americans weren’t just blind to the evils of their society, they were actively supportive. Inspiring Jacobs to suggest that the slogan “Serve The People” (which originated with the Panthers) be changed to “Serve The People Shit.” From inception, Weatherman advocated revolutionary violence on the home front. It was time to “Bring The War Home.”

By Spring 1970, Weatherman was whirling in the vortex; they’d started bombing targets that to them, symbolized Pig Amerika. After several members blew themselves up while building an anti-personnel bomb (intended for an army dance at Fort Dix) in the basement of a West Village townhouse, Weatherman went fully underground. Becoming the Weather Underground. Robin and Sharon continued to be kept in the loop. Their bomb plot was not an official Weather Underground action, but leadership members knew about it beforehand. The bombing was set for December 4th, 1970 — in honor of Black Panther Fred Hampton, who’d been shot to death by Chicago police one year earlier.

Robin had allegedly participated in an earlier series of bombings that took place in 1969 under the aegis of Sam Melville and a group, or groups, of people loosely referred to as the New York Collective. Melville wasn’t a Weatherman. He was a middle-aged, profoundly alienated and unaffiliated radical who admired “Mad Bomber” George Metesky. Bombings ascribed by law enforcement to Sam Melville and the NY Collective were well executed. They employed dynamite and timers, and did major property damage to politically symbolic targets. (One also injured 16 office clerks working a night shift.) In conversations Robin had with me in later years, and in interviews with historian Jeremy Varon, he referred to his involvement in the Melville-connected bombings. The overall picture of Robin’s career as a bomber is murky (at least to me) but the one action of which I have clear knowledge is the bank job. Which played out like a black comedy of errors. No mission accomplished.

The cop I thought was a cop was a cop. His name was Steve. Apparently FBI. In the wee hours of December 4th, Robin and five others, including Sharon Krebs, were busted outside the First National City Bank at Madison Avenue and 91st Street. They’d just placed four, one gallon jugs of gasoline and benzene around the building when an army of cops descended. Several had been staked out on the sidewalk, convincingly posing as drunks. Robin and crew were planning to set the bank ablaze; the bomb plot was a burn plot. Other targets on their hit list including a building which housed a law firm where Richard Nixon once worked. Robin was the oldest in the group, which besides Sharon included a 19 year old man, two women in their early 20′s, and 25 year old Martin Balin (then Martin Lewis). Marty was a friend of mine. According to Robin, the night before the bust a Weather Underground leader called and said they believed Steve was a cop. Robin shared the warning with Marty, but not the rest of the group.

When the Weather Underground rang, why didn’t Robin listen? Part of the reason was Robin’s innate stubbornness, which at times made him as pigheaded as the pols he zapped. Also at play was his faith in cultural choices as indicators of character. Steve liked the right baseball team, hence he couldn’t be an “unsportsmanlike”** undercover cop. But I also gathered from later conversations with Robin (and with Marty) that he and Marty had steeled themselves to do the revolutionary thing and nothing was going to stop them. You were either part of the solution or you were part of the problem.

As I understand it, some of Robin’s co-conspirators later blamed him for their involvement in the bomb plot and for being busted. Years later, Robin expressed regret to me about not sharing the Weather Underground warning. But you didn’t need a Weatherman to know Steve was a cop. I wasn’t alone in my suspicions. A number of people had expressed doubt. When you tried to get a sense of what personally motivated Steve as a radical, there was no “there,” there. Just a check list of correct political positions. Steve had COP emblazoned on his forehead. You just had to be willing to see it.

The case against Robin et al resolved in guilty pleas. While awaiting resolution, Robin did time in assorted NYC jails (where a student from his teaching days hailed him as “Mr. Palmer”) and after sentencing, spent several years at Attica, in upstate New York near Buffalo. Sam Melville, who’d been arrested in late 1969, was already in residence. Return of the native. Melville grew up in and around Buffalo. Robin arrived at Attica just in time for the massive 1971 riot. Or “uprising.” Whichever word you prefer, it was one hell of a tragedy. Too large a topic for this article. Thumbnail:

Conditions at Attica were dismal. Administration was out to lunch. The social dynamics were a powder keg, particularly given the times. The majority of guards were white, from rural and working class northwest New York, the majority of prisoners, black or Hispanic from the NYC area. On September 9th, 1971, some 1,200 inmates took over a large section of the prison. One guard was killed in the takeover, several others were severely beaten. Three prisoners were killed by other prisoners. Thirty eight guards and other prison personnel were held hostage. After four days, negotiations between inmates and authorities broke down. Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused to visit Attica, despite being asked to do so by prison officials. With Rockefeller’s go-ahead, the National Guard, the State Police, and local law enforcement were unleashed. The final death count was 29 prisoners and 11 hostages. Except for the guard killed during the takeover, all hostages died from bullets fired by the State Police. Incidents of retaliatory torture of inmates took place during the take-back. Ultimately, the New York State Special Commission on Attica declared, “With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.”

Robin Palmer and Sam Melville took part in the Attica riot/uprising. Melville was killed during the take-back. According to Robin, Sam died in his arms.

After Robin got out of prison, I saw him a few times in the 1970′s. My dereliction of duty still lay between us. And though I continued to see life largely in leftist terms, doing so felt hollow. I was drifting philosophically. Robin and I seemed to have little in common. After the 70′s, I lost touch with him for several decades. Much of what I know about his life during that period, I learned later.

Post prison, Robin and Sharon’s relationship collapsed. Too much radical madness, too much bitterness. Robin lived in the West Village and once again worked as a deep sea diver and tree surgeon. He planted trees in his neighborhood. He traveled to Cuba. Fidel Castro looked better from afar. Seeing him up close led Robin to stop identifying himself as a communist. He’s been quoted as saying he made the mistake of thinking communism was good because “an enemy of your enemy is your friend.”*** As said, Robin never ceased believing the U.S. was a villain (akin to Nazi Germany) in Vietnam, but after his disillusionment with Castro, he increasingly defined his support for the Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh through references to the American Revolution. Despite his political sea change, Robin continued to stand by friends who were communists and to condemn the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

While Robin was in prison his father died; they never reconciled. His mother was another story. After she died in the 80′s, Robin moved back to Ithaca. Return of another native. With better outcome.

In Ithaca, Robin met and married Mimi Melegrito. They were together for more than 20 years, until Robin’s death. Mimi brought out the best in Robin. She often disagreed with him. Strongly. When she’d say his politics were lousy he’d reply “sorry my dear, you can’t do anything about it.” Politics were surface. Mimi and Robin “got” each other. They had fun together. They shared the kinds of private jokes and riffs that characterize happy marriages. Robin’s love of music resurfaced. He wrote songs for Mimi and members of their family and sang in Ithaca’s gay chorus. Describing himself as “the token.” Mimi gives occasional concerts (she has a rich soulful voice) of Filipino folk songs at colleges in Ithaca. She’s a social service professional with the city and met Robin when he asked her to appear as a guest on his public access cable show “For The Duration.” Before agreeing, Mimi checked out the show. She and a friend couldn’t believe what they saw. “This guy is crazy” exclaimed Mimi. None the less, she went on. The rest is romantic history.

In his later years, Robin was no less a rebel. (And at times, no less a pain in the ass.) But his perspective broadened. He wasn’t a left winger, but neither was he a right winger. He became what I believe was a fuller expression of what he’d always been — a Robin winger. His activities also broadened; to include not just large causes but community service. He was active in the Kiwanis club (as is Mimi) and a local veterans’ group. He fought to get Ithaca’s dogs their very own park. Robin aired community issues, large causes, and his own history on “For The Duration,” which ran for years on PEGASYS, the public access television system of Tompkins County.

Robin continued to remember Attica. He kept in touch with survivors, took part in reunions and forums, and supported Forgotten Victims of Attica (FVOA) the group formed by family members of guards who’d been slain or injured. Also on Robin’s to-do list: supporting gay marriage and nailing down Who Killed Kennedy. (Hint: it wasn’t you and me.) He was active in conspiracy theorist circles. At one point, the British filmmaker who made the notorious documentary series “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” (pulled from the History Channel in 2003 under threat of legal action by the family of Lyndon Johnson) stayed at Robin’s home. Robin also kept up his in-your-face protests. When senatorial candidate Hillary Clinton came to town to speak at a local college, Robin was there. He and his dog Junior had to be hauled from the auditorium. Robin (and seemingly Junior) disliked the Clintons deeply. Robin was particularly incensed by Bill Clinton’s alleged rape of Juanita Broaddrick when Bill was attorney general back in Arkansas. Yup, Robin raised many a ruckus in Ithaca. Saving one of his best for last.

The Great Shoe Toss of February, 2009.

When Robin threw his shoes at Ithaca’s mayor (and a Common Council member) he prefaced it with a statement protesting the city’s resolution condemning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Though the footwear missed its targets, a hubbub ensued. After the lobbing, nobody knew how to get Robin out of the room. He refused to leave. City officials didn’t want to give him the “satisfaction” of being arrested. But Robin insisted on it. Mimi, who hadn’t known what Robin was planning, was summoned. Her advice? Book him, Dan-o. Since Robin was in poor health the cops took him away in an ambulance. He didn’t have to exit in his stocking feet; the shoes he threw were extras he’d brought in a bag.

The Great Shoe Toss got local coverage and went national via the Drudge Report. Readers on both the political left and right scratched their heads. Say wha? A former radical bomber who proudly cites past ties to the Weather Underground and refers to Ho Chi Minh as “the George Washington of his people,” copycats an Iraqi anti-Bush protest and throws his shoes at the mayor of an ultra liberal city because said city has condemned the war in Iraq? What’s wrong with this picture?

Not a thing if you get Robin wing.

At the time of the shoe toss, Robin and I had been back in touch for eight years. In 2001, I’d discovered his snail mail on the Internet and dropped him a line. A week or so later my phone rang. After almost 25 years we were friends again. Among the first things he told me was that some people (meaning his old radical pals) now considered him a right winger. He said this with a mischievous chuckle. “Oh yeah?” I said. “Well, I converted to Catholicism in the late 1980′s.” Darned if that didn’t one-up him. I could tell Robin found my embrace of repressive papism hard to take. But even if Robin wasn’t totally bias-free re Catholicism, he had indeed changed. He was no longer an either/or guy with his friends. We agreed on some things (Castro! The Clintons!) but agreed to disagree about others. Take the Iraq war. (Please.) And neither George Bush nor Bill Ayers excited my admiration. As for Vietnam, I still believed the war wrong but no longer saw a halo over the NLF. And no matter how many times Robin invoked the image, I couldn’t envision Ho Chi Minh in a powdered wig.

In the last few years of Robin’s life we talked a lot on the phone. Cancer and chemo were taking hard toll but Robin rarely mentioned his health. Our conversations would start with one subject and go off into sidewinders. Laughs along the way. Sadder paths were covered too. Robin didn’t do computers, so I passed along Internet and email news of friends with whom he’d lost touch. I had to tell him several (including Marty and Sharon) were dead. I also picked up, but didn’t pass along, the impression that some (not all) of his old radical pals wanted nothing to do with Robin, the wild card “right winger.”

Couldn’t help but wonder how they’d have done at Attica…

Whatever. Robin had gazillion friends from many walks of life. He was widely loved. In late July, about a month before Robin died, my husband and I went to visit him and Mimi. I knew it was the last time I’d see Robin on earth. I’d missed his birthday party in April, which he’d dubbed an “I Ain’t Dead Yet” party. The crowd was huge and Robin was presented with a pair of bronzed shoes — the very ones he’d tossed at the mayor and Common Council a little over a year earlier.

When visiting in August my husband and I spent time at Robin and Mimi’s home. One of Robin’s oldest friends dropped by. A life long Ithacan, he’d gone to first grade with Robin. I asked him what Robin was like at age six. He answered “Just the same. He was always…different.”

Fly Robin fly…

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

*Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, Jeremy Varon, University of California Press, 2004

**Killing the Field of Dreams, Jeremy Varon, Fast Capitalism, 2005

***Steal This Dream, Larry Sloman, Doubleday, 1998

Note re a source: One of the most significant events in Robin Palmer’s life was the death of his good friend Sam Melville at Attica. A detailed account of Melville’s life, and events at Attica, can be found in Leslie James Pickering’s Mad Bomber Melville, (Arissa Media Group, 2007). Despite its sensational title and partisan tone, “Mad Bomber” is well researched and insightful.

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff

Send comments or confidential tips to:

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

As Summer rolls out its hazy crazy days, pimp hands are blooming all over. From White House plots to the gardens of assorted local governments and/or crime scenes. Though pimp hands are invasive (hence their common name “traveling pimp hands”) and if unchecked, will strangle all other growth, there’s no denying these fleurs du mal are showy. In DC, Michelle Obama’s virtuous veggies are being outshone by a variety of pimp hand called the Scarlet Faced Clintonis, which first appeared in the presidential digs in the 1990′s. Folks (including me) figured President Obama would rip out any lingering roots but according to senatorial candidate Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, Clintonis is back. Doing what pimp hands do.

OK. Pimp hands aren’t really plants. (Though they are invasive.) Gardening is on my mind. Tis the season. Like Michelle, I’ve been hauling watering cans and hefting sacks of soil. Urban Dictionary definition of pimp hands: “Your ability to control your ho’s. Or the control of your pimpin’ business. A pimp hand can be strong or weak. Keep your pimp hand strong.”

A former president offering a primary candidate an appointment so as to clear the field for a rival supported by the sitting president, is pure political pimp hand. Since Joe Sestak didn’t drop out to boost hoary Arlen Specter (and oh yeah, deprive voters of choice) one might argue that Presidents Clinton and Obama played a weak pimp hand. As did Mister In-Between, Rahm Emanuel. Weird, that. Rahm is normally all hand. (Wags claim he’s been scouted by Hamburger Helper.) Like Obama, Rahm hails from Chicago. Aka Hand Land. Maybe they need to get back to their roots and draw strength from the soil.

Damn, that gardening thing keeps creeping in…

Meanwhile, in Hand Land, the corruption trial of X Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois has kicked off. Blago allegedly kept his pimp hand strong by peddling public offices — including President Obama’s empty seat in the U.S. Senate. Then there’s street crime. On May 20th Chicago Mayor Richard Daley Jr. held a press conference to vent concern that the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn the city’s handgun ban via a decision re McDonald v. Chicago. An assortment of confiscated weapons was splayed out on a table. Reporter Mick Dumke (no gun fan but oft critical of Daley) raised his hand (non-pimp) and said, isn’t the ban ineffective? Given the number of shootings in Chicago? Daley responded by seizing up a rifle with a bayonet attached, saying “If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective this is. Let me put a round up your — ha ha!”

Daley Jr.’s pimp hand sally was strangely reminiscent of the witticism his dad, Mayor Richard Daley Sr., tossed at Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff at the 1968 Democratic Convention*. It was also particularly ill-timed. The night before, off-duty police officer Thomas Wortham (age 30) was shot to death in the driveway of his family home by thieves trying to steal his motorcycle. Wortham gifted himself with the bike after serving two tours in Iraq with the Army National Guard. Worthan lived in a middle class neighborhood, which like other such neighborhoods in Chicago, is suffering the impact of the city’s ongoing crime wave.

Those seeking info on Chicago crime and the inability of Mayor Daley to control it, might want to check the cop-authored blog, Arresting Tales. Which incidentally, recently demonstrated how far pimp hands can travel on the Internet.

In late May “Tales” commented on a news story about a pimp (an actual peddler of flesh not public offices) in Jersey City, New Jersey. The story by Michaelangelo Conte had appeared in the Jersey Journal and at NJ.com. The pimp’s name was Allen E. Brown aka “Prince.” (How pimp original is that?) Prince had pleaded guilty to human trafficking and extortion charges; the article covered his sentencing at Hudson County Superior Court.

According to a press release from the New Jersey Attorney General’s office, Prince ran prostitution rings in Jersey City for roughly two decades. Recruiting or coercing scores of women locally and from cities such as Newark, Atlantic City, Camden, and Philadelphia. Laundering profits through property (including real estate) held by cohorts and relatives. The latter included his mother and sister. Prince operated his most recent endeavor out of a home owned by his mother in a gated condo community called Society Hill (tony names are to Hudson County condos as royal titles are to pimps) overlooking the scenic Hackensack River. He and his underlings used threats, beatings, and drugs to control the girls. Some girls were underage. So far, your typical sad sordid story.

What wasn’t typical was the hair style Prince sported at his sentencing. The man’s do was a marvel. Its bizarre magnificence was captured in Jersey Journal photographs. (They also captured Prince’s gape-jawed incredulity when the judge gave him 18 years.) Squiggly cornrows ripple across Prince’s scalp like snakes on a plain. The widely spaced weave is ultra thin; so much so that it looks inked rather than braided. But what really takes Prince’s do to the outer limits is the long, Mongol-esque pigtail spring-a-linging from the top of his noggin. A style known in hellish hairdresser circles as “the Devil’s phone jack.” (Confession: I made that last thing up.) Speaking of inner circles, in some photos Prince appears to be using his pimp hands to send signals to the cognoscenti.

After Chicago-based “Arresting Tales” picked up on Prince, the story jumped to Japan. Where extreme pop culture is always welcome. A Japanese website featured even more Jersey Journal pics of Prince plus commentary in Japanese. A translation appeared at “Tales.” Including these poetic lines:

“Understanding violence against women and extortion by organized crime in the monstrosity had been soaked to the drugs, so heavy was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment/But the publics’ attention, it was rather a man who hairstyle/What kind of hair do, please/Attention should also be exposed…yeah/What are you exactly what an alien/Well just look towards the head of officials.”

I definitely agree one should “look toward the head of officials.” (While keeping an eye on their hands.) Though folks can be blind when told what they want to hear…

New York State (my home place) is great and beauteous. Populated by many fine people. But as voters, New Yorkers often seem like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Slow dancing with “Sport” and drinking up lies. Take our gubernatorial race. The anointed candidates, Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Rick Lazio, are machine men stamped out by the same old same old who’ve strangled the state with decades of crony capitalism and turned government into a corrupt invasive joke. Both candidates reek of oligarchy and monster institutions (HUD! JP Morgan!) and both have the imprimatur of their creaky national machines. Yet both are coming on all anti-status quo. Claiming to be a breath of fresh air. And get this — lots of New Yorkers who sincerely crave reform are lining up (more for Cuomo than born loser Lazio) to dance with them. The outcome is predictable. Cuomo will clear the floor. If the “race” weren’t so laughable, it would be deadly dull.

Oh wait — it is. Thank God for gardening. Pop culture is fun too. What kind of hair do, please?

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

*During the 1968 convention the massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration outside the hall turned violent as the Chicago cops went totally ape. (Not all protesters were innocents. Some were glad to battle. That being said, the majority were peaceful.) Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, D-Conn., denounced the “gestapo tactics” from the convention podium. Television cameras, with audio turned off, caught Mayor Richard Daley Sr. clearly screaming “F*** you, you Jew bastard.” In the days before closed captioning, this shot helped lip-readers across the nation fully partake of the political process.

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

["Sir Pimp" photo by Taber Andrew Bain; CC BY 2.0]

Join us, the members of the Conspiracy as we offer thoughts on government enforced intellectual property issues. . . . In this production, Gardner Goldsmith looks back at history, in an attempt to answer the question: Is government-enforced copyright and patent “protection” reconcilable with a free society?

The answer is no.

And is it economically efficient? No.

Take a listen! And then comment by calling 206-984-1069! Be Seeing You!

Hot damn. The government is going to stimulate the economy. Not with a lap dance or lubricated love glove, but with taxpayer dollars. Come summer, Mister and Miz America will get a rebate from Uncle Sam. What a man! Some people will get more than a thou of their own money back. Consumers will rush out and pump the economy. Wal-Mart here we come. Simultaneously, just like in romance novels.

Meanwhile, back at Rancho Notorious for Tax and Spend, pols will do it the usual way. On top, with the lights out.

Suddenly, next Summer…

Americans feel soiled and empty after trysting with Wal-Mart. Thanks to Helicopter Ben’s interest rate cuts/puts, the heat was fleeting. (Folks with saving accounts never defrosted.) “Is that all there is?” asks the collective Peggy Lee, “A couple of plastic lawn chairs and a bag of groceries?” Wal-Mart winks and promises more trash for more cash. While Starbucks says coffee is for closers.

Real estate! Will the stimulus pack bring sexy back? Rebates are the front load of the package; the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. The potential kicker, as agreed upon by President Bush and the House of Reps (the Senate still has to sign on) is the lifting of limits and loosening of standards governing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the GSE mortgage giants.

GSE equals government-sponsored enterprise. GSEs are private companies, but enjoy considerable support and advantages from the federal government. In return, they perform certain public chores and are regulated differently than non-GSE mortgage meisters. The largest GSEs are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their original mission was to buy conforming (not subprime) mortgages from lenders, thereby enabling them to make more loans. Fan and Fred hold some mortgages and market others as mortgage-backed securities (MBS). The securities are GSE guaranteed. While Fan and Fred aren’t pure government poodles, investors assume taxpayers will clean up after any mess they make, or do a bailout should they fail. The bailout assumption is fed by unclear policy re the level of support the GSEs would receive in a major crisis. The chance of meltdown is said to be slim. Until recently, so was the chance of a national housing crash. And until well into 2007, many financial pundits said subprime damage was contained.

Together, Fannie and Freddie back more than $4 trillion in mortgages. The question has often arisen as to whether their capital cushion is too thin to support such massive debt. At times, it’s been difficult to measure their cushion, due to pervasive book juggling.

Before Wall Street screamed bloody murder at the opening of 2008, President Bush was resisting pressure to lift the financial limit on the mortgages Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchase and securitize. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the GSEs’ wimpy watchdog, also objected to lifting the limit and continues to do so post stimulus agreement. The present GSE limit is $417,000. The stimulus would snap the cap to $625,500, and to $729,750 in extra pricey housing markets. Allowing Fannie and Freddie to purchase and securitize jumbo mortgages, the oversize loans MBS investors now shun as too risky.

The jumbo shun makes lenders, Realtors, developers, and the pols who represent inflated housing markets, sad. The cap snap makes them happy. A GSE guarantee could stimulate investor interest in jumbo! Hopefully, jumbo won’t get too frisky and drop dead in the sack ala Nelson Rockefeller. Taxpayers would be flattened.

Speaking of being crushed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are big buyers of mortgages cut by Countrywide Financial. They bought some 40% of Countrywide loans in 2006. The year mortgage lending went sub-cellar. Countrywide has been hit hard by lack of investor appetite for jumbo — and by its own unhinged underwriting. Of late, the mega lender has been denying bankruptcy rumors while selling itself to Bank of America. Bankruptcy talk caused Fan and Fred shares to tumble. That happens a lot these days. As do massive write downs. The GSEs took it on the chin in the 3rd quarter of 2007. Freddie had a record loss of $2 billion, Fannie lost $1.4 billion. The 4th quarter is expected to follow through.

As investors abandoned subprime MBS in 2007, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mounted a rescue mission. Fannie funded over $66 billion in subprime mortgage loans in the first half of 2007. But Patricia Parsons, director of product development, said Fannie “would continue to step lightly into this business.”* According to Becky Froass, senior director in industry and state relations at Freddie Mac, the company’s MBS portfolio held 15% subprime in 2006. Freddie hoped to buy $9 billion more in 2007.

Then there are the lawsuits and investigations. Just like the subprime and/or jumbo players who operated sans government mattress, Fannie and Freddie have acquired a saucy rep.

In January, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and state Attorney General Mark Dan filed a class action suit against Freddie Mac. The retirement fund lost $27.2 million in Freddie Mac MBS. Attorney General Dan alleges Freddie Mac hid the fact that the securities were backed by subprime. Saying the GSE “participated in one of the largest housing investment deceptions in modern U.S. economic times.”** In 2006, Freddie coughed up $410 million in a national class action suit headed by two Ohio pension funds. In that case, fudged financial statements were at issue. And OFHEO is seeking $215 million in damages from Fannie Mae, related to account manipulation at Fannie during the reign of former Chief Executive Officer Franklin Raines.

In November, 2007, the office of New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued subpoenas to Fannie and Freddie. Seeking, among other things, “Information about all of the mortgage loans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have purchased from any bank, including Washington Mutual, and the mortgage backed securities associated with those loans.” According to Cuomo, Washington Mutual, aka WaMu, colluded with First American Corporation and subsidiary, eAppraiseIT (one of the nations largest appraisal management companies) to inflate appraisal values on homes WaMu mortgaged. If so, the value of the mortgage backed securities based on those appraisals would also be false. In 2007 alone, WaMu provided Freddie Mac with $24.7 billion in potential MBS. Fannie Mae bought $7.8 billion.

President Bush and his fellow economic stimulators say the GSE cap will only be raised temporarily. All the bad buzz re Fannie and Freddie could be as false as the alleged false appraisals buoying WaMu MBS. And buying, securitizing, and guaranteeing jumbo mortgages when housing values are slip-sliding may be a wise financial strategy. But come Summer, when the rebate part of the stimulus package arrives, taxpayers might want to sink their windfall into a bottle of generic hooch and party as if it were Fat Tuesday. Because the GSE jack in the back could mean one long stint in Lentville.

Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff
Mondo QT

*“Risky credit shunned by Wall Street,” Neil J. Morse, Inman News, 09/28/07

**“Ohio vs. Freddie Mac: Mortgage lender hid big risks, suit alleges,” James Nash, Columbus Dispatch, 01/23/08

Sources include but are not limited to:

“Fannie Risks Won’t Rise With Bigger Loans, Mudd Says,” Kathleen Hays and James Tyson, Bloomberg News, 01/29/08

“Fannie and Freddie to the Rescue?,” Dawn Kopecki, Business Week, 01/25/08

Statement of OFHEO Director James B. Lockhart on Conforming Loan Limit Increase, Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, 01/24/08

“Housing slump to continue: Fannie CEO,” Marcy Gordon, Associated Press, 01/08/08

“No Rescue Here: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in no position to bail out the housing market,” Washington Post, 11/23/07

“On Wall Street: Subprime flames lick at Freddie,” Saskia Scholtes, Financial Times, 11/23/07

“New York Attorney General Cuomo Sends Letters of Notice and Demand to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae,” Press Release, 11/06/07

“Fannie Mae Ex-Officers Sued by U.S.,” Eric Dash, New York Times, 12/19/06

Send comments or confidential tips to:

mailto:editor@mondoqt.com

I’m spending the week at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in Gilford, New Hampshire, this week, and so there likely won’t be any posts for this week.

While there is Internet access available on part of the site, it’s kind of spotty, and my cell phone has no service here. Not to mention this is supposed to be something like a vacation.

I am working on one project for someone who knows who he is and will be here Saturday. Aside from that, I’m going to be enjoying myself with hundreds of freedom lovers from all over the world.

PorcFest is the annual summer festival held by the Free State Project, a movement to get 20,000 liberty lovers to move to New Hampshire to work to restore liberty. People considering making the move come to PorcFest to meet other liberty lovers, tour the state and have fun.

If you’re nearby, consider joining us. It’s at Gunstock Mountain Resort all week.

For all of those of you who are younger than I am, you’re probably on Myspace, that huge social networking site which has a profile for almost everyone in the country under 30.

Now you can get Homeland Stupidity on Myspace.

This is just an experiment for now, to see what the level of interest is, but if it goes well, I’ll do more with Myspace in the future.

If you have a Myspace, add Homeland Stupidity to your friends!

I’m not copying Homeland Stupidity posts to Myspace at present, so if you want to be sure you get all the latest content delivered to you, I still recommend using RSS or email.

Homeland Stupidity passed another milestone last night, with the 10,000th comment left to the site.

The milestone comment from “george lucas” was a sentiment many of us can agree with, especially if we’ve just spent the entire lunch hour in line at the post office:

“The post office is officially on my shit list.”

Unfortunately, you didn’t win anything, because I can’t afford any prizes. Maybe if I didn’t have this horrible tax burden… but that’s another story.

Maybe by the time the 20,000th comment rolls around, I’ll have enough money saved up to buy the lucky commenter a keychain or something.

In the meantime, I want to thank all of you who comment here, for it’s you who make Homeland Stupidity what it is. And while I promise you’ll always find something to disagree with here, I hope that it will always be something to think about.

It’s been three days since I have been able to post anything to Homeland Stupidity. Fortunately, this isn’t because I got shipped off to Guantanamo. There’s been plenty of news, though, so I wanted to explain what has been going on behind the scenes.

As you may know, this site does not run on a typical web hosting service, subject to the whims of a hosting provider which tends to take down high traffic or controversial content if you wave papers with special words in their faces, or if they just feel like your site is using more than its fair share of resources.

Homeland Stupidity runs on a dedicated server which does little except serve out web pages and the occasional DNS request. Every other service, such as e-mail and backup DNS, runs on a second server in a separate data center. This setup has evolved over time to meet various challenges such as distributed denial of service attacks, the Slashdot effect, and so on.

On Thursday, the setup evolved a little further. I brought up a new server in a third location, the purpose of which is to store off-site backups of the other two servers and monitor them for any trouble. In the event that anything were to happen to either of the other two servers, such as a software crash, hardware failure or overzealous bureaucrats who don’t let the lack of probable cause stop them, this third server will notify me almost immediately, allowing me to restore normal services within as little as a few minutes, or from 4 to 24 hours in some of the worst-case scenarios.

Unfortunately, it took much longer to bring up the server and its new services than I’d planned. I originally figured it would take most of Thursday and part of Friday. Instead, it took from Thursday morning until earlier tonight to get everything set up and tested. I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but I will say that I did have to work around one bit of faulty hardware in the new server, which caused part of the delay. But most of the problem was that I could have planned it better. There was simply much more to do in bringing up this set of services than I’d planned for.

What’s done is done, though. Now, you have an extra level of assurance that Homeland Stupidity will remain online, come what may, and that even some of the worst possible things I can imagine will not keep it down for long. There are still a few changes to make behind the scenes, but they aren’t critical to providing the services, and I’m far enough behind as it is, so they can wait.

Normal posting, with the liberty-loving look at government stupidity you’ve come to know and love — or hate — will resume tomorrow afternoon, after I catch up on actually reading the news, and perhaps sleep.