The myth. The Legend. Atlantic City. Saying I went to AC is a bit misleading since we didn’t leave the Tropicana Resort for more than five minutes, a brief foray into a somehow unnatural natural beach environment that felt awkward and uncomfortable from the moment we left “the bubble”; an artificial world with rules and lives that exist only within the cubic volume of highly conditioned air. It was not my first time in a casino, but it was the first time I have been in the company of casino royalty and treated as such. Eric is a gambler and The Trop wants his action, so they comp lavishly to He and his court; free drinks and extravagant meals to complement the complimentary suite. His end of the deal is to play their games and play big. And maybe bring friends who are at least willing to throw some crumpled twenties on the craps table. I have played poker before, but never with real clay casino chips. Ridiculously, my very first hand of Texas Hold ‘em was pocket Aces, on which I managed to instantly lose half my chips. Two hands later came pocket Kings, which I lost to a grizzler banking on a 3 and a 4. Nearly wiped out, I held on until going all in on pair of Jacks, pair of Kings — lost to a flush. I sat stunned for a moment until the dealer asked if I wanted to buy in again. No. Since then, the experience has haunted me as I revisit the ghosts of my plays, yet I am fascinated and intrigued by this game’s multilevel action; knowing when to hold ‘em, knowing when to fold ‘em, knowing how to bet, knowing how to bluff, knowing how to read your opponents and knowing how to make every small advantage work to your favor. It is brutally beautiful.

I have to say, however, that the rest of the casino games are pretty stupid. They are games of chance with odds stacked always and usually heavily in the house’s favor. Baccarat is essentially like betting on a coin flip with commission. Slots are so frighteningly mind numbing it pains me more to think about watching the inhabitants of Slotsville more than my own $50 fail at the poker table. Craps can make die rolling very expensive. But that’s not to say that they aren’t fun and good for a little thrill, especially when your entourage gets hot and makes a stirring late-night comeback to win more than most people earn in a month… It is a warped economy for sure in the bubble, and while I lack whatever fearlessness might be required to confidently ride my luck, I felt moments of surging adrenaline and can see the grip it has on some. My bottom line is that I lost an amount I can afford and had a great time doing it in this parallel universe of timeless financial mayhem.

Caitlin sent me a link to an interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com discussing his upcoming book. She wrote this note:

This interview reminded me of you because you’re happy and enjoy spreading happiness to others. That’s why I love ya!!

That is probably the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten! What else is there besides happiness? It is the only real currency… all else is just a means of achieving it. And who better to spread this message than one of the richest men in the world? He gets it; he has accomplished more in the technology and business world than most and has virtually unlimited wealth, yet his overarching theme is the pursuit of happiness. His philosophy is based on culture and promoting positive experiences, for vendor, customer and employee, being transparent with everybody involved in the process, thus building trust and a stable, self-sustaining relationship. Win-win-win. The game is not about maximizing profits, but about maximizing happiness. He values friendship and cultivates his “tribe” with a party-hearty lifestyle, fueled by vodka, redbull and other assorted happy-makers. Being connected, both to people and to a larger purpose in life, is essential in the quest for a life fulfilled.

The link included an offer to receive an advance copy of the book, to be published on June 7, for bloggers. That’s me! They sent two copies, with the suggestion of a giveaway, and so I will give a copy to the first two comments with an idea for how we can spread Supergood! culture and maximize happiness in a new way.

On April 20, an explosion on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico caused a massive leak a mile below the ocean’s surface. It was clear then that we were witnessing an historical catastrophe, and now, three weeks later, the oil continues to flow unchecked into our environment. Estimates of the damage have varied from bad to horrendous, and now there is video of the underwater oil geyser spewing forth its toxins into the environment. It is devastating. Having failed to contain it with a giant structure lowered to the seabed, BP admits that it’s arsenal to stop the leak is limited and includes a last ditch effort of shooting junk — actual human waste — into the hole in hopes of stopping it. While I am a fan of anything that works, this clearly demonstrates how unprepared the industry is to deal with their own environmental disasters.

Who is to blame? Everyone is pointing fingers and looking for a scapegoat. BP! Halliburton! The US Government! Each of these players had a role in this specific instance, but I think it comes down to our global obsession with petroleum. We have become oil fiends incapable of evaluating the true cost of our addiction. Not only does it wreak severe havoc on our natural environment with leaks and greenhouse gases, but we engage in war–as in destruction and murder– for its control. It is the basis of our economy, which relies on the illusion of cheap energy.

While I would love to believe that this disaster will be a wake-up call and will shift our dependence, I am highly skeptical that we are capable of this necessary change. We will probably continue our unabated consumption just as our artificial lifeblood currently gushes into our true lifeblood.

I was an Economics major in college and anytime I tell people that they find it funny–probably because my job is playing music with kids instead of making money with money. I never had any interest in joining the corporate workforce but still found Econ the most interesting department at Middlebury. It incorporated so much about humanity, from history to psychology to our core values. The focus was usually money, but the how and why made the topic endlessly engaging. Stephen Levitt is an economist who brings the study into new realms; he sees the discipline as general tools to study human behavior rather than simply the flow of money. In his book Freakonomics, he tackles a wide variety of subjects, from the somewhat misaligned incentives between real-estate agents and the sellers they represent, to the corporate structure of a crack gang, to the sad realities of the American school system and the relative lack of influence that parents actually exert on their childrens’ lives. He writes in a refreshingly politically incorrect way, demonstrating that statistics often counter conventional wisdom and shedding light on subjects we only think we understand.
I then picked up Moneyball, a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, which looks in-depth at the subject of baseball and the shifting status quo in our evaluation of players and potential. Again, statistics are the epicenter of this change, moving from a talent scout’s subjective interpretaion of skills to a numbers-based approach that has proven successful in this expensive market.
Both books use the tools created by economists to describe the world we live in and enlighten our perceptions of the untruths of conventional wisdom.

I just finished reading Niall Ferguson’s book and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the history of finance. It is a fascinating look at the evolution of money and mankind from hunter-gatherer to creditor-debtor. The Incas were perhaps the last great moneyless empire but they were eradicated by conquers intent on claiming the metal in their mountains, a symbol of wealth and power in their own culture; and while rocks and metals could be immediately traded or transformed into goods and services, bankers took the concept temporal with loans and interest, creating stocks, derivatives, insurance, mortgages and futures. The World Financial Market is a living organism, or an ecosystem of many economic organisms, and over the past 500 years it has grown to dominate our planet and way of life, yet it is largely intangible and based solely on our belief in it. We work because we are paid, in effect selling our time for credit which can be redeemed for other goods and services provided by others. Our shared confidence in money’s credibility is how I can teach music for kids and still own a computer. I don’t have to make my own computer? That is awesome!

Unfortunately, money has its dark side… History is strewn with financial casualties and the events of the past few years are nothing new in the boom-and-bust style of capitalism we have been riding since the inception of fiat money; people are not always completely rational or informed and when prices are left up to the “market” they are often completely ungrounded in “reality” but end up determining the “future”…

Every time our economy crashes, we re-write the rules and hope that it won’t happen again. But it always does. We will always find a new way to exploit money and create illegitimate wealth, which vanishes in a wave of panic. There is a financial reform bill going through the Senate right now and, unsurprisingly, the Republicans are refusing its passage. While this bill is far from perfect and will almost certainly not prevent the next financial meltdown, it at least makes the offending parties from the most recent bubble burst more transparent and accountable. Bailouts are ridiculous – privatizing the profit and socializing the losses – but they are ingrained in our history and will probably not stop until money loses all its value and government loses all its power.

In the half of my lifetime that I have been working, I have been relieved of my duties twice. The first was at my very first job at an ice cream store, where I was accused of scooping kids cones too big. While she did have a point, I maintain that she was also completely crazy and not a person that I wanted to be working for anyway. The second time came last week, when I was told by a certain Upper East Side preschool that my one-day-a-week contract would not be renewed because “movement is more than just running and jumping”. I was shocked; I have been teaching at this school for three years and the director who delivered this news is in her first year. I probably should have been worried when the only criticism she ever gave me on my classes was that I was not allowed to sing Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”… It hurt me to think that I would not be working with the many teachers and kids that I truly love there but luckily, I am confident that I am a very well appreciated teacher everywhere else I work and that this was just a personal issue this woman had with me; I take it personally but only in relation to her. It’s their loss…

And so I move on. I was so lucky to find my work and the path it has taken me on over the past 8 years. I love music and I love kids and I have so many other venues to enjoy this experience that I refuse to let this situation have anything but positive effects on my life.

Perhaps I should thank her?

Ever since I celebrated what I considered to be one of the greatest political victories of all-time, it has been a constant losing battle. Obama’s victory felt like such a reversal of bad trends that had consumed our country during the Bush administration, but since that peak in November 2008, we have been subjected to more of the same; more bailouts, more troops, more gay-marriage defeats, more inaction on climate change. On Tuesday, my home state of Massachusetts dealt me a blow by electing Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat. When Kennedy died, I cried. He was a a lion in Senate and a personal hero; everything he did represented something good as he fought for truth, justice and equality for all. He was especially a force in the health care debate, a champion for universal care and when he passed away, the movement lost a great leader. Yet it seemed as though the Democrats, enjoying a 60-40 advantage in the Senate, were on the move towards passing a bill that would protect the people from the tyranny of the insurance industry. And then those Massholes elected Brown, giving the Republicans the filibuster they will use to crush our hope. That hurt.

But the worst news came on Thursday, when the Supreme Court struck down major campaign finance regulations to allow corporations unlimited election spending. When it comes down to it, I believe that this is the very root of American politics. We The People has been replaced by We The Capital; money has become infinitely more powerful than voters in politics, as influence is bought and sold by those who direct its flow. Lobbyists, Special Interest groups and Corporations buy votes and candidates with their “donations” and focus political discourse on their own issues and needs, shifting policy away from serving our best interests, and towards their own political, financial or moral profit. Our elected officials are then forced to vote for the money over the people. I don’t see any way that a politician could justify doing the best thing for the population by voting against health care, but I do see how a few groups wielding a ton of cash could initiate fear and convince the public that any changes to the current system would lead to a (terrifying!) socialist state. In exactly the same way that advertising works, our perceptions are based on information (true and false) and we are, as consumers, highly susceptible to our media. While money has always influenced politics, this decision opens the door to unlimited abuse and worse, makes a mockery of democracy. Whatever fears people might imagine about a “Socialist” USA should be completely undermined by the realities of our current Capitalocracy; our votes and our candidates have become commodities and the marketplace has just been completely deregulated. The only person who can truly benefit from this political structure is not a liberal or a conservative, but a corporation, to whom we have granted the unalienable rights of personhood.

In theory, Democracy works…

A bail is a container used for extracting water from a flooding boat or a payment for extracting a criminal from jail. As a verb, it is to abandon a perilous situation. Bailout means using financial leverage to aid a failing industry. Any of these situations are bad, but the problem is that a bail is not a solution. Why is the boat flooding? Why is the criminal in jail? Why are we in such a perilous situation? We can scoop water out of the boat as fast as we can with the biggest bucket we can find and unless we find the hole, our boat is bound to sink. We can put up a bigger bail than we can even afford, and unless that criminal is innocent, he is going right back to jail. And now we find ourselves in an unprecedented economic crisis siphoning capital back into a broken system. Risks were taken and and later exposed; they were rewarded then, and they are rewarded now. Millions (if not billions) of people have been affected by this tidal wave of bad debt that hundreds of bankers wrote — and the money still flows towards the tiny minority responsible.

They invent the game and write all the rules

They always win even when they lose

As far as fall guys go, Jim Cramer makes a great one, and he took a major crash down the basement steps last night on The Daily Show. Clearly, he has said some questionable things and has questionable motivations, and Jon Stewart did not let him escape the truth that financial reporting should be objective and perhaps even investigative. He claimed that people lied to him and certainly they lied to everyone, but with a bit of thought it would have been obvious what was really going on. Of course, everyone wants the money no matter where it’s coming from, so nobody asks the questions and winks their way into the profits. It’s all a game and unfortunately, people get hurt. Cramer is just a tiny pawn in the fraud and he knows it; he took everything John threw at him with grace and a sad-puppy-who’s-just-been-scolded-for peeing-on-the-carpet face. It’s a sham and he understands the sham as well as anyone, hence he should be explaining it to the people, but instead he is an entertainer and he wins when you win. But when you lose…

Anyway, it’s all fine. We will survive. We will realize what is true about money and will reshape our financial culture based on reality. Money is man’s greatest invention and it is not going away, but we will need to take a hard look at ourselves to find the truth. I think that in doing so, we will come to understand that everyone’s well-being is dependent on complete transperancy and public information. Don’t buy low or sell high — be real.