House Democrats Ready to Blame Pelosi, Maybe, for Losses—Just Don’t Blame the Message

Nancy Pelosi at San Fran World Series paradePolitico got enough House Democrats to
state the obvious about Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s
leadership vis a vis the midterm elections, where Democrats lost
TKTK seats in the House. Faced with two consecutive midterm losses
in the lower chamber of Congress, Democrats are still uneasy
blaming the message of the Democratic Party over the last six years
and its messenger-in-chief, Barack Obama.
Via Politico:

“The president is the president; we can’t control him. Good, bad
or indifferent. I think the Democratic Caucus, we can be loyal to
the president, we can be part of the team, which we should to the
best of our ability. But we need to focus more on middle-class
issues,” said Rep. Michael Capuano of Massachusetts. “We now have
lost three elections in a row based on those themes [health care,
immigration, minimum wage, pay equity for women] — all of which I
agree with, all of which I can run on in my district, they’re fine
— but middle-class Americans are not hearing that message. When was
the last time the Democratic Caucus as a caucus — not individually
— really talked about jobs? For me, we don’t do that enough.”

Democrats don’t talk enough about jobs? It seems that’s all
anyone in the establishment, Democrat or Republican, talk about.
Who doesn’t have some kind of “Jobs
Act“? They’re not going to create jobs in any meaningful way
because economic growth and government intervention are almost
entirely mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, Politico
reports House Democrats are still most likely to blame President
Obama, not Nancy Pelosi, and the “six year itch.” This despite
losses in 2010 and winning only 8 seats in 2012, a year Democrats
insist they saw a mandate for President Obama and the 51.1 percent
of voters he won in the election.

Pelosi is running unopposed for re-election as caucus leader. In
2010 she became the first Speaker to hold on to a leadership
despite her party losing the House since Sam Rayburn stayed on in
1954. Rayburn had served two non-consecutive tenures as Speaker and
would return to the position two years later, dying in office in
1961. Politico reports on some token opposition to Pelosi
this time around and grumbling over her decision to remain in
leadership:

A few Democrats — including some new members-elect such as Gwen
Graham of Florida — are expected to vote against Pelosi on Tuesday,
although the number of defections is still expected to be small.
Pelosi has bristled at suggestions that it may be time for her to
move on after a dozen years running the Democratic Caucus,
dismissing questions about her age and ability.

Pelosi even told POLITICO that she might have thought about
retiring if Democrats had won the House, but she needs to stay all
the more because the party lost seats. That comment caused some
eyes to roll in Democratic circles.

“If we had lost 30 or 40 seats, rather than the dozen we lost,
then [Pelosi] would have said she’s never leaving,” joked one
Democrat, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If we keep losing
seats, she’ll be here until she’s 90.”

Pelosi dismissed suggestions she should step down after House
Democrats’ losses in the midterm election by claiming the question
was
about age, and therefore sexist. She insisted nobody asked
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that question. McConnell
will be taking over as Majority Leader for the first time after
Republicans won control of the Senate in the midterms.

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Hack Watch: With Keystone, the Left Suddenly Notices Most Infrastructure Jobs Are Temporary

Keynes would be all "With friends like these ..." if he weren't dead.It appears as though the Senate
is one vote short of getting the votes it needs to
approve the Keystone XL pipeline and push it forward to
President Barack Obama to possibly sign or veto. Sen. Mary Landrieu
(D-La.), who is facing a
run-off re-election for the Senate and desperately needs some
sort of a win before December, is trying to whip up support among
Democrats. If she fails, obviously Keystone will be back before a
Republican Senate (possibly without her).

Obama recently commented on the pipeline in a fashion that
suggests that he understands the new party dynamics in play in
Washington. Ha, ha, no I’m just kidding. He is full of partisan
bullshit.
Here’s what he said last week:

“Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of
Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the
Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an
impact on US gas prices,” he said, growing visibly frustrated.

“If my Republican friends really want to focus on what’s good
for the American people in terms of job creation and lower energy
costs, we should be engaging in a conversation about what are we
doing to produce even more homegrown energy? I’m happy to have that
conversation,” he continued.

Because, you know, increasing the supply of oil “everywhere
else” won’t put also supply downward pressure on oil prices
produced by other nations and sold to the United States. Perhaps
the prices of goods at Walmart are completely unrelated to the
prices of goods at Target, right? People just shop where they shop
and never look for bargains. It’s not like fracking in the United
States has caused OPEC to
drop oil prices to compete or anything, right?

But even more absurdly, there is now a talking point that
KeystoneXL maybe isn’t so great because it actually doesn’t produce
a bunch of jobs. The job numbers people are tossing about are only
temporary. This is technically true, but the absurdity comes from
these same folks pushing other infrastructure and energy projects
that have the same fundamental “flaw” (scare quotes because it’s
not a flaw). Most of the jobs touted by these projects are only
temporary. Fixing roads and bridges, something Obama keeps
hammering about? Those are all temporary jobs. The “homegrown
energy” projects Obama mentions? Mostly temporary jobs!

CNN’s Van Jones noted the temporary nature of the KeystoneXL
jobs back in February, prompting a
Politifact check declaring his claim it would create only 35
permanent jobs to be true. Some have been attempting to claim that
there would be
thousands of permanent jobs, so it’s not as though Politifact
is carrying water for the left and advancing a one-sided argument
in this particular case. I looked to see if they were fact-checking
other exaggerated claims of permanent jobs from infrastructure
projects that the left loves, and they dinged Charlie Crist for
saying that Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s rejection of federal stimulus
money to build
high-speed rail eliminated the possibility of 60,000 jobs.
Those jobs were mostly temporary, Politifact points out.

But for pundits and politicians, trying to use the temporary
nature of the KeystoneXL jobs is pure hackery entirely because so
many projects near and dear to the Obama administration and any
Democrat looking to bring home the bacon heavily depend on
temporary jobs. That massive Ivanpah solar project I wrote about
last week? The one that got
$1.6 billion in federal loans and is now looking for hundreds
of millions in federal grants to help pay off its federal loans
because it’s not producing nearly as much energy as it promised? It
produced more than 2,000 temporary construction jobs and only 86
permanent jobs. These are their own numbers from their web page.

Now take a look at this self-promoting hackery from Bob Keefe of
Environmental Entrepreneurs (featuring an embedded advertisement
from NRG, which operates the aforementioned Ivanpah solar project)
at the
Huffington Post:

Keystone XL will create about 35 full-time jobs and 15 temporary
jobs, according to the U.S. State Department’s analysis. Granted,
about 1,950 construction jobs will be created, but those jobs —
while important — disappear after the pipe goes in the ground.

Clean energy companies, meanwhile, announced more than 18,000
jobs in more than 20 states in just the last three months alone,
according to the latest report from my organization, Environmental
Entrepreneurs (E2).
See the full report here.

Thanks for the link, Keefe! Did you check out the report
yourself? Because thousands of those jobs are also only temporary.
From his own organization’s report:

Solar generation accounted for 4,600 announced jobs — three
quarters of clean power generation’s total. All the announcements
came from companies with operations in states that have strong
public policies designed to expand solar power generation,
including California, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Maryland. For
example, nearly 2,000 announced solar construction jobs came from
California’s Imperial, Merced and Madera counties. ­… Duke Energy
expects to complete three utility-scale solar PV projects next
year, bringing 800 construction jobs to Bladen, Duplin, and Wilson
counties.

These are temporary jobs. More than half the solar power
generation jobs he is promoting are only temporary, but note the
absence of the word in the text. The charts in their report do not
differentiate between permanent or temporary jobs, but Keefe is
more than happy to critique the nature of Keystone’s employment to
serve his own agenda.  

(Hat tip to William Freeland for
pointing out this trend)

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Jeremy Grantham’s Bubble Watch Update: “S&P To 2250 Before It Crashes”

When GMO’s Jeremy Grantham says that he is “still a believer that the Fed will engineer a fully-fledged bubble” what can one say but, yes: it did so a few years back.

Recall that back in May, Grantham so far accurately predicted that on the back of central bank liquidity, the overstretched market will stretch even further “at least enough to drive the market to its 2-sigma level of 2,250 and perhaps a fair bit beyond… And although nothing is certain in the market, this is exactly what I  believe will happen.”

In fact, his prediction so far has been spot on in terms of not only magnitude but also timing, accurately calling for the recent swoon and subsequent rebound. Notably, he also offered his forecast for when the bubble would burst which he timed as follows:  “then around the election or soon after, the market bubble will burst, as bubbles always do, and will revert to its trend value, around half of its peak or worse, depending on what new ammunition the Fed can dig up.”

So here is how the legendary investor predicts the upcoming timing of events in the near future, with a focus on the presidential cycle:

The Presidential Cycle

 

Regular readers know the score: +2.5% a month for the seven months from October 1 to April 30, in year three on average since 1932 (a total of +17%). This is now the 21st cycle. The odds of drawing 20 random 7-month returns this strong are just over 1 in 200 according to our 10 million trials. But 17 of the actual 20 historical experiences were up and the worst of the 3 downs was only -6.4%, so the odds of this consistency plus the high return would be much smaller. The remaining 5 months of the Presidential year have a good but not remarkable record, over .75% per month, but the killer here is that the remaining 36 months since 1932 averaged a measly +0.2% a month!

 

With the 7 months having returned over 10 times the average of the 36-month desert, it may seem like a nobrainer investment for those seven of us not intimidated by the obvious simplicity of the idea, but be advised that going into this particular cycle there appear to be more negatives than normal. (Though many of the previous 20 occurrences may well have seemed that way to investors at the time. Who knows?) The negatives this time  include the ending of the Fed’s bond purchase program. There is also talk of a rate increase early next year, given the recent recovery of the U.S. economy reflected in the improved employment report of early October (5.9% unemployed) and positive adjustments to the previous month’s employment numbers. Other negatives include the potential for escalation of several minor but intractable wars and the recent Ebola outbreak.

 

Some would mention the very substantial overpricing of the U.S. market at the top of the list but, surprisingly, overpricing has had no material effect on third-year returns or the particularly sweet seven-month subset: an average of 17% for seven months becomes 19% if cheap and 15% if expensive. Big deal. Value, however, is very important for the other three years in which the cheapest 25% have produced a respectable return of +12%, and the other three quartiles are absolutely not worth having, all three together averaging almost exactly nil! More disturbing to me than the obvious overvaluation is the large and growing number of other negatives – technical and psychological – put together by Hussman and other market experts. Nevertheless, despite my nervousness I am still a believer that the Fed will engineer a fully-fledged bubble (S&P 500 over 2250) before a very  serious decline.

One can add the BOJ and ECB to the list now too, even if netting out the impact of Jim Bullard’s verbal interventions.

So what is Grantham’s advice to a prudent investor, by which don’t mean your typical Virtu algo:

As always, the prudent investor (unlike the political year three) should definitely recognize overvaluation, factor in regression to the mean, and calculate the longer-term returns that result from this process. More easily, such prudent investors can use our seven-year numbers, which have a decent long-term record measured when we have viewed markets as overpriced, as we believe they are today, and a better record measured in the periods after bubbles break. The other necessary ingredients to the investment mix are suitable measures of risk, and when these are added to estimated returns we believe efficient portfolios can be produced. On our data, with U.S. large cap equities offering negative returns (-1.5%) except for high quality stocks (+2.2%), with foreign developed and emerging equities overpriced (+3.7%), and with bonds and cash also very unattractive, investors have to twist and turn to find even a semi-respectable portfolio. It is a particularly tough process today with nowhere to hide and no very good investments compared to, say, the time around the 2000 bubble when there were several. My colleagues Ben Inker and James Montier have written in some detail about the problems of investing in these difficult times.2 Designed to help your thinking about this topic, Exhibit 1 shows an example of a portfolio that might be used in a world that excludes private equity and venture capital, and for a client who can do without a benchmark and can settle for owning a (hopefully) sensible long-term efficient portfolio. Efficient, that is, in terms of trying to minimize risk per unit of estimated returns. As always, and particularly in this type of overpriced environment, there are no guarantees of success even if every GMO recommendation were to be implemented for, regrettably, we too are often imperfect.

 

His conclusion:

My personal fond hope and expectation is still for a market that runs deep into bubble territory (which starts, as mentioned earlier, at 2250 on the S&P 500 on our data) before crashing as it always does. Hopefully by then, but depending on what the rest of the world’s equities do, our holdings of global equities will be down to 20% or less. Usually the bubble excitement – which seems inevitably to be led by U.S. markets – starts about now, entering the sweet spot of the Presidential Cycle’s year three, but occasionally, as you have probably discovered the hard way already, history can be a snare and not a help.

The only problem is that once the bubble bursts, nobody will be able to put the Humpty Dumpty (or CYNK as some call it) market together again. Which is why the central banks will do everything in their power to avoid even a 10% correction. We are now in all in territory, and the next market crash will be the last: something the all-in central-planners know well, which is why the market’s emergency preparedness system now gets a daily test run: if and when the crash begins, the stock exchanges will simply “break” as investors suddenly find they have been volunteered for the last bail-in.

Source: GMO




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Peter Suderman on Why Jonathan Gruber Is Very Much An Obamacare “Architect”

In the space of a week, Jonathan Gruber has become a non-person
in Washington. Until last Monday, the MIT health economist was
widely and uncontroversially cited as an “architect” of the
Affordable Care Act, a go-to expert about the law’s politics and
mechanics.

But after multiple videos surfaced in which Gruber said or
implied that the bill’s backers relied on deception and an
assumption of voter stupidity in order to pass it, Obamacare’s
backers moved swiftly to distance themselves from Gruber and
downplay his role in the creation of the law. 

The reactions from Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and others were, for the
most part, technically true—but nonetheless misleading about
Gruber’s influence on the law. At a minimum, they were not fully
transparent about his role. In attempting to downplay Gruber’s
remarks, writes Reason Senior Editor Peter Suderman,
Obamacare’s supporters instead proved him right.

View this article.

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Don’t Show The Exuberant Homebuilders These 2 Charts

NAHB homebuilder sentiment rose to 58 in November, from 54 in Oct, beating expectations but remains below the 59 cycle highs in September. Since those highs, Prospective Buyer Traffic is down the most but remains near cycle highs. The Northeast saw a huge spike in Prospective Buyer Traffic (from 39 to 51) and The West bounced back from its plunge in October.

 

 

So if everything’s so awesome, what’s wrong with these two charts…

 

 

Charts: bloomberg




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S&P 500 Spikes To Record Highs As Oil Plunges & Macro Hedgers Fold

The S&P 500 is now up 12.5% from the Bullard lows in mid-October and has broken to new record highs over 2048 – within 2 points of Goldman Sachs year-end target. Since Bullard’s comments, the S&P 500 has been up 19 days and down only 5 (and today will be the 23rd day in a row of closing above its 5-day moving-average – a record!) WTI crude oil prices are collapsing back to cycle lows below $75 but perhaps most notable is the plunge in ‘implied correlation’ – which measures the relative demand for individual stock protection over index macro protection. Implied correlation is at a record low – which suggests capitulation among those with macro overlays (like Carl Icahn)…

 

S&P at record highs

 

Up 19, down only 5 since Bullard

 

As Oil collapses…

 

and Implied Correlation crashes to record lows as no one wants macro overlay protection any more…

 

 

Charts: Bloomberg




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“My Helicopters Are Ready. You Will All Be Trillionaires!” – Mario Draghi, ECB

“My Helicopters Are Ready. You Will All be Trillionaires!” – Mario Draghi, ECB

Concerns about deflation, recession and a return to the Eurozone debt crisis, may see the ECB follow Japan and print money to buy assets including shares, exchange traded funds and physical gold.

Counterintuitively, gold prices fell on the quite bullish news. In marked contrast to the sharp falls gold saw on the mere rumour of small Cyprus selling their miniscule gold reserves. Such odd trading leads to continuing concerns that the precious metals markets are still being manipulated.

Over the last couple of months, the ECB has launched several measures to revive the lacklustre euro zone economy. Mersch said the bank should let these steps take effect first before considering more action.

If more action was needed, the ECB’s hands wouldn’t be tied as it could theoretically purchase government bonds or other assets such as gold, shares, or exchange traded funds (ETFs).

But he said the bank was not determined to buy up assets come what may and should consider its actions carefully. He warned about the negative side effects were the central bank to start buying up government debt, urging political leaders instead to reform their economies to boost growth.

“Easing of monetary policy cannot work effectively when the European economy is structurally not in good shape,” Mersch said in a speech at an annual banking conference in Frankfurt.

There appears to be an ongoing tussle between the ultra dovish such as ECB President, Mario Draghi and the slightly less dovish members of the ECB.

Mario Draghi has explicitly cited government bond buying as a policy tool officials could use to further stimulate the economy should the outlook worsen again.

“Unconventional measures might entail the purchase of a variety of assets, one of which is sovereign bonds,” the ECB president said in Brussels yesterday in answer to a question during his quarterly testimony to lawmakers at the European Parliament.

Draghi and the uber doves appear determined to ignore the failure of QE in both the U.S. and Japan.

The architect of Japan’s radical economic policies – ‘Abenomics’ – Koichi Hamada has described the recent bond buying binge by the Japanese central bank as a ponzi scheme: 

“In a Ponzi game you exhaust the lenders eventually, and of course Japanese taxpayers may revolt. But otherwise there are always new taxpayers, so this is a feasible Ponzi game, though I’m not saying it’s good.”

Japan’s GDP tanked an incredible 7.4% last quarter and social tensions are rife. Like in the U.S., the primary beneficiaries of Japan’s ultra-loose monetary policies have been speculators, investors and the ultra-rich – the Nikkei has been booming – or bubbling.

Meanwhile, Japan has hit the panic button with President Abe directing his cabinet to formulate policies such as printing up “gift certificates” for the poor to “support personal consumption directly.”

Against this backdrop Yves Mersch, from the ECB’s executive board, made an astounding observation regarding Abenomics:

“I’m not so sure it has worked, considering that this morning we saw that Japan has officially slid into recession again.”

In a speech in Frankfurt, Mr. Mersch made a suggestion which may be seen as an acceptable compromise by Germany with regard to monetary expansion to stoke inflation. 

He said “Theoretically the ECB could purchase other assets such as gold, shares, ETFs to fulfill its promise of adopting further unconventional measures to counter a longer period of low inflation.”

Germany have been resolutely opposed to monetary expansion through the purchase of debt, but asset backed money printing may be regarded as more palatable.

The suggestion that gold would be used, even in a limited way, to back the Euro is encouraging. Western central banks public utterance regarding gold is usually negative. 

Physical gold supply remains extremely tight. Gold is currently in backwardation meaning that the price on the futures market is lower than the spot price today. 

If holders of physical gold bullion sold it today they could profit by buying a forward contract which would guarantee them the same volume of gold but at a lower price in the future, avoiding storage costs in the interim period and using the proceeds of the sale to invest until that later date. 

Investors are not taking advantage of this opportunity probably because some are concerned that there will not be physical gold available at the lower price which may cause the counterparty to the trade to default.

It appears as though the trepidation of gold investors may sometime come to an end. That the ECB would even consider buying gold in QE may come to be seen as an important moment. 

If the Swiss people vote to pass the gold initiative at the end of this month it is likely that the ECB will feel pressure to enter the market sooner than they may have expected. 

As the currency wars continue it may be that other western central banks will feel compelled to enter the gold market to protect their currencies from speculative attack and devaluation. 

We advise owners of gold to ensure they own gold in allocated and segregated accounts and to sit tight – their patience will again be rewarded.

Get Breaking News and Updates on the Gold Market Here

 

MARKET UPDATE
Today’s AM fix was USD 1,202.00, EUR 959.68 and GBP 767.81 per ounce.
Yesterday’s AM fix was USD 1,187.00, EUR 950.36 and GBP 759.49 per ounce.

Gold fell $14.30 or 0.36% to $1,186.40/oz yesterday. Silver slipped $0.14 or 0.86% to $16.16/oz.


Gold in EUR – YTD, 2014  (Thomson Reuters) 

Today, gold jumped to a two week high at $1,202 per ounce as a weakening dollar and concerns about the global economy led to safe haven demand. Silver climbed 1.2% to $16.34 an ounce.
Gold climbed as markets digested the important news that the European Central Bank may purchase assets including gold bullion to counter low inflation.

ECB President Mario Draghi said yesterday that unconventional measures may include the purchase of a variety of assets to stimulate the economy. The central bank could theoretically buy sovereign debt, gold, exchange-traded funds, and even real estate to counter a longer period of low inflation, Executive Board member Yves Mersch said yesterday (see above).

Gold in USD – January 1986 to November 19, 2014  (Thomson Reuters) 

The largest gold backed ETF, SPDR Gold Trust, saw holdings rise 0.33% to 723.01 tonnes on Monday, the first increase since November 3. The fund’s 10th anniversary is tomorrow and its holdings are at a 6 year low as ‘weak hand’ investors sell and gold flows East. 

India’s central bank is rumoured to announce new restrictions on gold imports tomorrow, a finance ministry source noted to the media.
In the world’s largest consumer China, local prices remain at a premium of $2-$3 an ounce, as buying increased on firmer prices. 

S&P 500 – Jan, 1986 to November 19, 2014 (Thomson Reuters) 

Stock markets continue their constant march higher. The Stoxx Europe 600 was up 0.6% after Germany’s ZEW institute stated that although the economic environment remains fragile, the recent eurozone growth figures suggest a degree of stabilization. 

U.S. stocks eked out slight gains, with the S&P 500 recording a 42nd record close of the year, as comments by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi helped offset data that unexpectedly showed Japan’s economy in a recession.

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At UC-Davis, Students Can’t Register Until They Concede It’s Wrong to Say ‘I’d Hit That’

The University of California, Davis, requires students to
complete an online activity in which they must identify certain
words and phrases as “problematic” before they register for
classes. Students are prompted to match “I’d hit that,” “I raped
that exam,” “bitch,” “pimp,” and “slut” with the correct
explanation for why each term should not be uttered.

The correct answer for “I’d hit that” is, “Expression used to
indicate interest in having sex with the subject of the statement.
This phrase indicates an inherent connection between sex and a
physically violent act.” Here is a screenshot of the quiz, courtesy
of the
Foundation for Individual Rights:

UCDavisProblematic.jpg (754×423)

FIRE informed the university that the activity violates
students’ First Amendment rights, since it requires them to affirm
that these words are indeed problematic. FIRE’s Susan Kruth

explains:

There is no option for students to argue that the
phases aren’t problematic, or to simply
acknowledge that the phrases are considered problematic by many.
Students must agree that
they are problematic.

As FIRE notes in our letter:

“While UC Davis is free to urge students to consider the broader
social and political implications of their speech, the university
cannot, consistent with students’ right to be free from compelled
speech, require its students to adopt certain viewpoints or affirm
that particular types of constitutionally protected speech are
objectionable as a condition of their ability to register for
classes at the university.”

University administrators maintain the activity is consistent
with First Amendment principles because students are still
permitted to register even if they get all the questions wrong. But
this is merely akin to letting students choose from a range of
compelled viewpoints—they are still compelled to express one of
those viewpoints. The College Fix’s Greg Piper summarizes the
university’s position as, “you can pick your god as long as you
pray.”

Additionally, I would heartily dispute that merely using the
word “bitch” promotes violence. But I would be forced to change my
mind if I tried to register for classes at UC-Davis.

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Freeform Radio: The Movie

The book, which is quite good.Last weekend, Tim K. Smith’s documentary Sex
and Broadcasting premiered at the DOC NYC festival in New York. The
movie isn’t actually about sex—it takes its name from Lorenzo
Milam’s
book on the art of creative radio. (*) Instead the picture’s
about WFMU, a legendarily
freewheeling station in New Jersey. FMU offers some of the most
strange and eclectic programming available anywhere in the country,
and it manages to sustain itself without any commercials,
underwriting, or government subsidies, and without being attached
to a university that might help pay the bills. (It used to be owned
by Upsala College, but the school went bankrupt nearly two decades
ago. Improbably, the station survived. [**])

It’s a good movie (***), shifting back and forth between the
outlet’s wild programs and the nuts-and-bolts work required to keep
such a relentlessly uncommercial operation on the air. The station
underwent a major financial crisis while Smith was filming, and
that provides much of the picture’s narrative spine; in the
meantime, a host of smaller daily mini-crises come and go.

The movie will be screened one more time before the festival
ends, at 9:45 Thursday
evening. Here’s the trailer:

* Milam’s book doesn’t have much to say about sex either. He
claims to have given it that name at the behest of his Great Aunt
Beulah, who “convinced me that…the word Sex in the title would
double its sales, and quadruple its readership.”

** Some of the film’s best footage comes from the days right
after the college went under, when the station was the only
occupied building on an abandoned campus. One DJ reminisces, not
very nostalgically, about the shady characters who’d come to Upsala
to shoot their guns because they figured there wouldn’t be anyone
around.

*** Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the movie,
wearing my
radio historian hat, and while my comments wound up on the
cutting room floor they were still kind enough to give me a line in
the credits. That may make this the single smallest conflict of the
interests in the history of disclosure statements, but I guess I
should mention it.

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