What Happened Today: March 23, 2022
Wall St.’s record bonuses; Humanitarian corridors; Congress’ payday payoff
The Big Story
Wall Street bonuses hit an all-time high in 2021, shooting up by 21% over 2020, while the rest of the U.S. economy moved sluggishly toward exiting the COVID-19 recession, and workers saw their wages eaten away by rising inflation. A report from the New York State comptroller puts the total securities-industry bonus pool at a cool $45 billion and finds the average bonus paid out was $257,500 in 2021. In bonuses alone, the financial wizards on Wall Street earned over 2.5 times more than the full salary taken home by an average private-sector worker in New York in the same year. If that sounds unfair, consider that the entire state of New York is essentially subsidized by the taxes taken from Wall Street and would be perpetually on the brink of insolvency without that revenue. The comptroller’s report notes that the bonus boom “should help the city exceed its expected revenue from income taxes.” The report attributes the record-setting payouts to “Wall Street’s soaring profits” in 2021—a record-setting market that was driven by the explosive growth of tech stocks. Why is that relevant? Because the surge of tech stocks was directly tied to the COVID-19 pandemic and extended lockdown policies that destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses while delivering a $1.4 trillion total payout to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, who saw their collective profits increase by more than 55% in 2021. So New York relies on Wall Street to keep the lights on, and Wall Street is increasingly relying on tech companies that see their profits soar when middle-class Americans are put out of work. How long can that last?
In The Back Pages: How Polio-Stricken Brooklyn-Born Jerome Felder Became ‘Doc Pomus,’ Legendary Blues Shouter
The Rest
→ India has been a key U.S. ally since the end of the Cold War, but cracks are beginning to show in that relationship, as India resists pressure from the United States to sanction Russia and takes steps to preserve its relations with Moscow, another critical ally and the country’s largest supplier of weapons. One of four so-called “Quad” countries (including the United States, Australia, and Japan) that belong to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue alliance, India is the only member that has not sanctioned Russia for its actions in Ukraine, and it was singled out by President Biden for being “somewhat shaky” in comments made Monday. Meanwhile, India is preparing for a visit from China’s defense minister on Thursday. Piece by piece, the U.S.-led global security order that has held in place since the end of the Cold War is coming apart.
→ In a counterstrike to the financial sanctions against Moscow from Western countries, President Vladimir Putin announced Wednesday that “unfriendly” foreign gas buyers would be required to make their purchase in rubles. That news, intended to strengthen the ruble and jack up gas prices, achieved the latter effect almost instantaneously—leading wholesale gas prices to jump by 30% in some European markets.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/business/putin-russian-oil-gas-rubles.html
→ Ukraine and Russia have agreed to open nine “humanitarian corridors” for the evacuation of civilians from besieged cities and towns across Ukraine. The agreement was announced by Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Wednesday and includes safe routes out of several cities—though not out of Mariupol, where the Russian onslaught has been most devastating. On Monday, Russia demanded that Ukraine surrender Mariupol and said it would provide citizens with safe passage in exchange. “There can be no talk of any surrender,” Vereshchuk said in response.
→ The congressional leaders tasked with overseeing payday lending reform have received a payoff. According to data from OpenSecrets, the payday loan industry has given $3.4 million in campaign donations to 67 of the 78 senators and representatives who sit on the two committees that oversee the loan industry: the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and the House Committee on Financial Services. Payday loans are short-term, high-interest loans that use the borrower’s future paycheck as collateral. The industry is rife with predatory lenders who capitalize on the paycheck-to-paycheck precarity of the working poor, often by charging interest rates as high as 600%, which can tick up even higher when borrowers struggle to pay back their debt. The payday industry has been making these campaign donations—and spent $4.2 million on lobbying efforts in 2021—as the committees consider legislation that would cap interest rates at 36%.
→ Excerpt from a New York Times interview with American film director John Waters: movie icon, gay icon, pencil mustache icon, icon of bad taste and of glorious amateurism.
Do you see differences in the way those on the left and on the right try to provoke each other?
The right used to be my censors. They aren’t anymore. I don’t have any. If I did, it would be young woke liberals. But I always try to use humor to put everything in perspective because I question my own values. Why is this OK and that isn’t? The only way you can do that is with humor.
→ Three of the top editors at BuzzFeed News, including editor-in-chief Mark Schoofs, resigned from the organization this week following news of massive cuts in the news operation, which is reportedly losing $10 million a year. An offshoot of internet content giant BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed News was considered an industry leader just a few years ago and touted as a savior of the journalism business. By running a large and costly news operation that attracted some big names in journalism and scored a Pulitzer Prize, BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti managed to earn respectability for a company previously known for time-wasting listicles while garnering it great publicity. But now, Peretti says, he’s ready for the news to earn a profit.
→ Not everyone was a believer.
→ Funerals were held Wednesday for the four people killed in a terrorist stabbing attack carried out Tuesday in the city of Beersheba in southern Israel. They were “Doris Yahbas, 49, a mother of three, Laura Yitzhak, 43, also a mother of three, Rabbi Moshe Kravitzky, a father of four, and Menahem Yehezkel, 67, a brother to four.” Several first responders to the scene, including a police officer and a medical worker, were close relatives of the victims. The attacker, identified as a 34-year-old Arab Israeli, Mohammad Ghaleb Abu al-Qi’an, died at the scene after being shot by an armed civilian. He previously served four years in prison for trying to join the Islamic State before being released in 2019.
→ The enormous supply disruptions caused by the pandemic are being complicated further by the war in Ukraine. More than a million shipping containers that were set to travel from China to Europe must now be rerouted to circumvent the expanding war zone. Exporters are also worried about facing boycotts if they use Russian rail lines for their shipments. It remains unclear where these containers will go and how they will get there. There are labor shortages at many ports, forcing container ships to idle at sea for weeks or even months while waiting to berth and unload. Meanwhile, in other bad news about the supply chain, the latest surge in COVID-19 cases in China is now beginning to hamper the country’s production lines. On Wednesday, BMW was forced to suspend all manufacturing in Shenyang due to China’s COVID-19 controls.
In Out of the Fog, historical detective Brian Berger digs through newspaper columns, clippings, and other clues to bring readers the fascinating, scandalous, and forgotten tales of the past. In this installment: HOW BROOKLYN-BORN JEROME FELDER BECAME A LEGENDARY BLUES SHOUTER.
It’s a story nobody could make up, about the polio-stricken Brooklyn Jew who invented himself as a teenage blues shouter during World War II. This itself was quite extraordinary—something no white person was known to have done before. That this same singer, who could stand only with crutches, would, after a decade of making raucous music for a largely Black working class audience, find much greater fortune as a songwriter capable of searing, poetic introspection in tunes like Ray Charles’ 1956 rhythm & blues hit “Lonely Avenue” defies credulity.
How did it happen?
He was born Jerome Solon Felder on June 27, 1925, the first child of immigrants, Morris and Millie. Morris was a scuffling Brooklyn lawyer of Austrian descent, active—and unsuccessful—in Democratic reform politics. Millie, born Goldstein, came from London and, too poor for college, became a seamstress.
In 1932, Jerome was diagnosed with infantile paralysis after an epidemic swept New York. He underwent years of arduous rehabilitation but needed crutches and leg braces for the rest of his life.
In 1935, the family moved to 75 Manhattan Avenue, at McKibbin Street in Williamsburg, a plain three-story building remarkable only for the elevator which could lift Jerome to the family’s second-floor apartment. In 1939, the Felder’s had another son, Raoul—who’d become a famous attorney—while Jerome began attending nearby Bushwick High School.
Though an avid reader, Jerome was an indifferent student– except in music. A jazz fanatic from listening to the radio, he’d taken piano lessons but found the alto saxophone more congenial. Jerome’s first band came together at the instigation of an attractive classmate and pianist named Mary Barget, who said she could get them a gig at the Lincoln Cabaret, a local bar and grill, at 530 Broadway at Boerum Street. Another gig at a nearby kosher deli, followed. If Jerome had a future as a saxophonist, however, the Williamsburg streets ended it. Caught in the crossfire of a snowball fight, he fell hard and broke his right hand, which never fully recovered.
Fortunately, Jerome had something else to offer as a musician: a bellowing voice that could approximate that of his idol, the Black, Kansas City-raised blues shouter, Big Joe Turner. His vocal debut came in 1943 at a Greenwich Village jazz club. When the co-owner complained about him taking up a table without spending money, Jerome said he was a blues singer clambered to the band—led by the great trumpeter, Frankie Newton—and launched into Big Joe Turner’s “Piney Brown Blues.” Asked his name afterwards, Jerome said “Doc Pomus.” It didn’t mean anything, it just sounded good.
Though far from an overnight sensation, Doc’s acceptance by a community of highly skilled, largely Black musicians ten to twenty years older than himself was better than sticking with Brooklyn College.
While the integrated Greenwich ViIlage scene was well documented, Doc would also find work at many Black clubs in Harlem and Brooklyn which—owing to the de facto Jim Crow of the city’s press—remain barely known, including the Verona Café on Fulton Street, in the heart of Black Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Club Cobra on East New York Avenue in a section of Brownsville previously ruled by the Jewish and Italian gangsters of “Murder Incorporated.”
Doc made his first record in October 1945 and would make numerous other records of his own songs in the years after, but none were remarkable, and none were hits.
That only changed after a decade of meager subsistence—sometimes living in a Manhattan hotel, others returning home to Williamsburg—when Doc began writing more carefully. In the summer of 1956, Doc was on a hit record: the b-side of Big Joe Turner’s “Corrinne, Corinne” was Turner’s cover of Doc’s “Boogie Woogie Country Gal” (later covered brilliantly by Bob Dylan). A couple months later, Doc’s song was the hit: “Lonely Avenue.”
Many more hits would follow, including, “A Teenager In Love,” “Save The Last Dance For Me,” “This Magic Moment,” “Little Sister”— but those songs are are for another time.
As for the meaning of Doc’s early days, I offer two discoveries that eluded both prior researchers and Doc’s own recollections.
The first is from March 5, 1949 issue of the New York Age, the city’s oldest, and arguably most dynamic Black newspaper, with a notably strong Brooklyn section. Here he is—adjacent a photo of Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella at a “bean supper” in Harlem— singing before an Armed Forces Radio Service microphone at an Age-sponsored USO charity event. Whatever Doc’s limits as a singer might have been, his credibility—as would be proven time and again— was unimpeachable.
The second discovery was a letter Doc sent to the editor of The Eagle. It read:
I am 15 years old, attend high school and am one of the great army of physically handicapped as a result of infantile paralysis. I play the saxophone pretty well—even the neighbors admit that.
I know there are a great number of boys and girls around my age similarly handicapped
or suffering from a cardiac or spastic disease possessing talent and a liking for music. I
think it would be a good idea if we formed a band or orchestra, or even went further
and in conjunction with same, a singing, acting or dramatic group. Vocalists would also be needed for the band or orchestra.
I certainly would be happy to hear from those interested.
Jerome S. Felder