Electric history

Posted on September 23, 2012 by hro50ta1

 

Electric History:

Detection and Measurement of Human Behavior Through Quantifiable Historical Records

By Joel Thurtell

Ever hear of an “electric historiscope”?

Nor had I until I began thinking about history in a new way.

“Electric historiscope” is my offbeat way of imposing order on the way I perceive and explain the passage of time and events.

What we call “history.”

I don’t use a real meter or oscilliscope. It’s definitely a conceptual thing.

For those who are not specialists in some section of a historical discipline, let me explain that I do a form of investigation known as “quantitative history.”

I count.

I count things that I think will help me understand how people’s lives were changing over time.

Then, I use a computer to help me figure out what was happening. Now, while the computer sure helps, my own imagination and power of observation form a large part of the process. It was the latter which helped me discern a pattern in surname-giving that led to my discovery of something previously unknown about Tarascan Indians after the Spanish Conquest — they resisted priests’ efforts to adopt Christian surnames and instead kept on using surnames dating to before the Spanish arrival in the New World.

My area of interest is western Mexico.

My period of interest is pre-Hispanic and colonial times.

But I don’t feel confined by those terms. I don’t recognize barriers between so-called “periods.”

My particular focus and the documentary source for my investigation is the set of records compiled by priests as they tried to keep track of important events in church life.

Those events are births of parishioners, followed by marriages followed by their deaths.

Priests in colonial Mexico wrote down these important events in separate books known as “registers.” I’ve worked with all three kinds of register, but my primary focus now is on a book containing priests’ notations of baptisms of Tarascan Indian babies born to parents from the villages of Cuanajo and Tupátaro, Michoacán, between 1665 and 1690.

Each baptismal notation contains dozens of pieces of information, from the baby’s name, date of baptism, church where the baptism took place, name of priest officiating, birth date (sometimes), race of baby, names of father, mother, residence of parents, race of each parent, and similar information for godmother and godfather, including in some cases the free or slave status of a participant and, if slave, who the owner was.

That is a lot of information packed into a notation that might take up an inch of vertical space on a page.

You can see, though, that with such an array of information being repeated for newborns week after week, month after month, year after year, there is a tremendous flow of data with the consequent possibility of asking questions about subjects like who is selecting whom as godparent, or, are people from one town choosing, say, other Tarascans or maybe Spaniards as godparents? It turns out that sometimes Tarascans were appointing negro slaves — in one case a slave owned by the officiating priest — as godparent.

In some places, the stream of data sometimes begins as early as the late 1500s and flows well into the 20th century.

Such sources of data give us an opportunity to approach history in a scientific way. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel describes the concept of a “natural experiment” in which data are created in a way unintended by the compiler but suitable for analysis by modern historical detectives. So it is with parish archives. The priests had no idea that by ritually setting down vital data about individual human beings, they were actually creating a compendium of data capable of being mined and analyzed in an orderly way.

The person who convinced me to study colonial Latin American history was the late Professor Charles Gibson of the University of Michigan. Before I went to Mexico in 1970, I was influenced by the French social historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who was encouraging students to think demographically. Think people in the aggregate. The way to study trends in population is to look at parish registers of burials, marriages and burials.

I went to Mexico looking for parish registers with the express purpose of transferring their data onto individual data recovery forms. I would — and did — carry the forms home, where the plan was for me to transfer the data again, this time onto punch cards that could be processed by an IBM mainframe computer at the University of Michigan.

That last step — the UM mainframe — turned out to be a huge stumbling block, or so it seemed at the time. Nowadays, I’m using my MacBook Pro with Parallels and Microsoft Access to do my analysis. I don’t have to finesse a computer bureaucracy. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why waiting 40 years to process my data turns out to be serendipitously a good idea, but that is another essay.

What I want to discuss now is my idea for electrifying history, at least conceptually.

I find it helpful to look at change in this way. Maybe you will find it useful, too.

Remember, I wrote that there are dozens of pieces of information in each baptism notation. Over time, it adds up to huge numbers of data points.

You can think of them as static entries on a page.

Or you can do as I do, and envision parish register data — or any quantifiable historical data — as electrons conducted in a circuit. The conceptual shift is important — we’ve gone from static to dynamic.

Month-to-month, year-to-year, individual negatively-charged pieces of data flow toward the positively-charged present. In a particular locale, say a Catholic parish where data are recorded, we have a continuous forward or future-directed stream that can be measured as an electrician might insert an ammeter to measure rate of flow — amperes — or electrical current.

[We might also use the movie metaphor: We’ve gone from a single photograph to a series of pictures related lineally in time to form a moving image of human behavior.]

The historian inserts metaphorical probes into points in time. While a simple meter measures one dimension, an oscilloscope (a cathode-ray tube displaying contemporaneous, disparate electronic behaviors) can detect complex changes in waveform. And so it is with parish registers, where our computer analysis can query about gender, surname, race, free/slave status, godparent selection, as well as birth and fertility, death and mortality, and a host of other qualities.

Are there differences between different inhabited places? Again, the electrical analogy helps conceptualize how we might measure differences in potential between towns where priests simultaneously recorded data. So, our meter probes would measure and compare rates, say, of erosion or retention of native surname transmission in two or more parishes. Or we might measure the extent to which people from one town marry people from another, maybe even correlating to social class.

In Michoacán, western Mexico, there are at least 17 parishes with extensive runs of baptism, marriage and burial records back to the 1600s and sometimes 1500s. This is amazing, since in central Mexico, parish registers are virtually nonexistent, as I found when I surveyed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints section for Mexico on ancestry.org.

In Michoacan, for a reason I don’t yet understand, many, though certainly mot all, parish archives have been preserved. Whether or not you accept my electrical analogy, these archives provide an opportunity for comparative measurement of social change and even individual human behavior on a large scale both in temporal and geographic terms.

 

 

 

 

 

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A gender-sensitive surname transmission system among Tarascan Indians in colonial Mexico

Posted on September 11, 2012 by hro50ta1

Readers of joelontheroad my be surprised to learn that during the same time that I’ve been publishing blog articles about abuses in school finance in Michigan 19 years ago and in California right now, I’ve also been conducting research into the colonial history of Mexico.

In 1970-71, I lived in Mexico so that I could do research into the demographic history of Mexican Indians. I focused on the Tarascans of the western state of Michoacan, because that’s where I found a rich lode of church records going back sometimes to the late 1500s.

I returned to the US in 1971 with hundreds of data recovery forms — specially printed sheets of paper designed to receive the dozens of pieces of information for each baptismal notation that I was finding on parish registers of baptism.

I ran into some problems using the mainframe computer at the University of Michigan, and wound up doing other things. One of those “other things” was building schools and a well in northern Togo, West Africa while I was a Peace Corps volunteer. For some 30 years, I was a newspaper reporter.

Now, I’m again working with those by now 40-year-old data recovery forms with information more than three centuries old. I no longer need a mainframe computer. I have my laptop and Microsoft Access, and I’ve been getting excellent help from staff at UM’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Parish registers, I’m learning, contain far more than demographic data. They are amazing barometers of culture, and a shrewd reading of the registers can reveal behavior of not only Indians, but also Catholic priests, that otherwise would be invisible.

Occasionally, I’ll be posting results of my research.  My hope is that people with a general interest in history will look at an unusual way to learn about the past, while specialists in the history of colonial Mexico may find a different way of looking at their area of interest.

Tarascan surnames by gender:

Cuanajo and Tupataro, 1665-1690

Joel Thurtell

Tarascan Indians at least through the colonial period maintained a separate but apparently in their eyes equal dual set of surnames, one for women and one for men. The separate list of female surnames, it would appear, has remained largely invisible when viewed through the window of Spanish civil documents. A recent study[1] of Tarascan elites in the Tarascan heartland of Pátzcuaro, Michoacán based on civil records turned up no female Tarascan names.

The naming practice among Tarascans in western México was very different from the customs that have been reported in central Mexico. Among the Nahuas, a pre-hispanic name-giving system with separate names for men and women appears to have disappeared by the end of the 16th century. Instead, according to the prevailing academic view, Indians were giving babies two Spanish first names, one as a forename and another as surname. An example would be Juan Diego. James Lockhart asserts, “By the end of the sixteenth century, this type of appellation, consisting to all appearances of two Spanish first names, was becoming the norm for ordinary Nahuas (and Indians all over Mexico), and it was to retain that flavor until independence, despite many further complications of the system.”[2]

While the practice reported by Lockhart in Central Mexico of giving Nahua children two Spanish first names also occurred in Tarascan territory in western Mexico, it was far from dominant even by the end of the 17th century in two Tarascan villages whose parish baptism registers I’ve studied. By the late 17th century, giving children a Tarascan surname identical to the surname of the parent of the child’s gender still was the norm among Tarascans in two mountain towns of Michoacán: Cuanajo and Tupataro.

While female surnames did not appear in Spanish civil documents, they were routinely recorded by Roman Catholic priests in registers of the sacraments of baptism and marriage. Thus, parish registers are an invaluable source revealing a previously unobserved custom involving roughly half the Tarascan Indian population, that is, women.

In June of 1971, I worked in the notarial archive of the Santa Maria de la Natividad parish church in Cuanajo, Michoacán in the highlands of western México. I was transcribing data from a register of baptisms the priest, Padre Luis Arroyo, kindly allowed me to use. The leather-bound tome had the hand-lettered title, “Libro de Baptismos delos pueblos de Ganaxo y Tupataro 1665-1690.” In addition, I found a few entries for Cuanajo baptisms in a general register of baptisms in the Basilica church of San Salvador in Pátzcuaro. I interpolated those entries chronologically into my run of data recovery forms. I have in all 467 data recovery forms for 1665-1690 representing the same number of births and baptisms for the two towns which sit about 12 kilometers southeast of Pátzcuaro.

Typically, the priest did not mention the baby’s surname, except in those very few cases where the baby did receive a second Spanish forename, e.g., “Juan” or “Maria” as a second name. Surnames were recorded as part of the names of parents. I found evidence, also, that these surnames were passed from father to son and from mother to daughter. The surnames, in other words, were gender specific.

As I read the register entries, I noticed that the surnames for parents were Tarascan words. Furthermore, it was evident that mothers had different surnames than fathers, and that mothers’ names were distinctly female as fathers’ surnames were distinctly male. Rarely did a mother have a predominantly male name, and vice versa. Thus, Tarascans had two pools of names, one for boys and one for girls.

The priests rarely entered a second name for infants being baptized, a practice that gives no answer to the question of whether Tarascan parents were passing their gender-related surnames to their children. However, in the late 1680s,  a new priest, Padre Carreno, began adding to the notations for padrinos, or godparents, the full names, racial designations and places of residence of both padrinos’ parents. Invariably, in these notations, padrinos’ surnames are identical to the surnames of fathers, and madrinas’ surnames replicate the surnames of their mothers. I interpret this practice as evidence that Tarascans indeed did pass surnames to children in a gender-sensitive manner. Further proof of Tarascan surname transmission is in the contemporary telephone directory, where a search of popular names, e.g., “Cuini” and “Tzintzun,” reveals people with those surnames living today in the United States. In fact, a few 16h century Nahua names from Central Mexico mentioned by Lockhart also can be found in US phone books, suggesting that — despite Lockhart’s dictum that the practice of native surname-giving ended by 1600 — some Nahua names leaked through to the present.

I am researching the meanings of the surnames. A cursory attempt at translation reveals a substantive difference between the meanings of male and female surnames. A common surname for women is “Curinda,” which means “bread.” A common surname for men is “Cuini,” meaning “bird.” My hypothesis is that a thorough effort at translating Tarascan surnames will reveal what I call a “Good Housekeeping” and “Field & Stream” dichotomy – girls got names having to do with household things, while boys got names related to outdoor things. Whether Tarascans in colonial times were aware of these meanings, I don’t know. I suspect the name-giving system dates to pre-Hispanic times and represents a custom rooted in Tarascan religion, though that theory has still to be tested. The system certainly seems to represent a custom that Tarascans were loathe to abandon. I have evidence of and plan to write further about a period when priests actively tried to replace Tarascan surnames with Spanish names and then abruptly abandoned the effort. Were the priests frustrated in the face of  Tarascan resistance?

I’ve entered the data from my paper forms into my computer and I’ve run queries using Microsoft Access, software that uses Standard Query Language. I queried for a list of Indian names by gender. The raw list contains variations in spelling of what amounts to the same name. Sometimes the same name was written differently by different priests, so that I wound up in some cases with two, three, or even six or seven variations in spelling the same name. I’ve consolidated the names and standardized the surnames by selecting the spelling version with the largest number of entries and noting only that version on the following list.

The names I found in Cuanajo and Tupataro are by no means the total number of surnames in use by Tarascans in colonial times. Kuthy-Saenger found 34 elite surnames. It appears that all but two are male. The female names are Hispanic, e.g., “Castilleja,” and therefore not native. I found eight of the male names mentioned by Kuthy-Saenger in the Cuanajo book. If that 1:4.25 ratio is an accurate reflection of the proportion of Cuanajo surnames to the total pool of surnames, then we could expect that multiplying the total number of Cuanajo surnames times 4.25 would show us the total number of  Tarascan surnames everywhere. But the flaw is this: The 34 elite names don’t reflect the true number of female names. In Cuanajo, I found 38 male names and 52 female names. If we used the ratio of 4.25, then the total of Tarascan male names used everywhere would be 38 x 4.25 = 162. The same arithmetic estimates the total pool of Tarascan female names at 52 x 4.25 = 221. This estimate is strictly hypothetical.

Isn’t it interesting that the number of female surnames outnumbers the number of male surnames by a large margin?

The process of consolidation and standardization of surnames is ongoing, and I expect to be updating these figures as I correct my work and come to a better understanding of the historical and linguistic implications.

Here are lists of male and female surnames I found in a 25-year run of baptism data for Cuanajo and Tupataro. I’ve also noted the frequency of occurrence of each name; and if there were a gender cross-over, that frequency has been indicated using “F” or “M.”

 

Male  

 

Name                          Frequency                   Gender cross-over

 

1. Amume                                12

 

2. Bahitzi                                    1

 

3. Bazquis*                                  1

 

4. Boxas                                       1

 

5. Chara                                       1

 

6. Chasa                                        1

 

7. Chaxa                                        1

 

8. Chzichzui                                  1

 

9. Cuiristan                                   1

 

10. Cuini                                     155

 

11. Cuixis                                        5

 

12. Cumu                                        1

 

13. Cuni                                           1

 

14. Cuiris                                        10

 

15. Cutequi                                      1

 

16. Czucu                                         1

 

18. Gaysean                                      1

 

19. Goma                                         1

 

20. Hatzi                                        20

 

21. Inune                                          1

 

22. Ni                                                1

 

23. Nuri                                           3

 

24. Onche                                      12

 

25, Pagua                                         1

 

26. Pao                                             1

 

27. Paqui                                          7

 

28. Paua                                           2

 

29. Roxas*                                       6

 

30. Sirangua                                   30

 

31. Tzintzun                                   53                                              1

 

32. Tzitzuiqui                                 45                                             8

 

33. Tzunequi                                    2

 

34. Tzupequi                                    2

 

35. Tzurequi                                 130                                              2

 

36. Uapean                                     30

 

37. Zahpean                                     1

 

38. Zua                                              1

 

* Possibly Spanish

 

 

 

Female surnames

 

Surname                         Frequency                          Gender cross-over

 

1. Baraxas                                        2

 

2. Barba*                                         1

 

3. Bustos*                                         1

 

4. Cana                                            2

 

5. Canana                                        1

 

6. Cani                                             3

 

7. Catahcu                                       8

 

8. Chziqui                                        1

 

9. Chzipagua                                   10                                               1

 

10. Cioui                                            1

 

11. Ciquipa                                         1

 

12. Claxa                                            1

 

13. Condahu                                      1

 

14. Cuatacua                                      1                                              1

 

15. Cuchunda                                   38

 

16. Cuctaorida                                    1

 

17. Cugan                                            1

 

18. Cutagua                                         1

 

19. Cuna                                              1

 

20. Cunda                                            1

 

21.  Cundahue                                     8

 

22. Cuni                                                     1

 

23. Cura                                                     1

 

24. Curi                                                       1

 

25. Curinda                                               71                                               3

 

26. Cuta                                                       2

 

27. Cutacu                                                    1

 

28. Cutagua                                                    4

 

29. Cutza                                                        1

 

30. Cutze                                                         1

 

31. Cuxa                                                          7

 

32. Naqueti                                                       1

 

33. Nispu                                                           9

 

34. Putaqua                                                       1

 

35. Ponce*                                                         1

 

36. Purequa                                                        1

 

37. Putzequa                                                     39

 

38. Quentzi                                                       40

 

39. Seta                                                                1

 

40. Tzihqui                                                           31

 

41. Tzipaqua                                                    211                               1

 

42. Tzitaqua                                                         1

 

43. Tiringuis                                                          2

 

44. Turan                                                               1

 

45. Turari                                                               6

 

46.  Ube                                                                  1

 

47. Veuma                                                              1

 

48. Xaloma                                                             2

 

49. Xara  ?Xari                                                       2

 

50. Xarichu                                                             1

 

51. Xaxi                                                                   2

 

52. Yrigua                                                               14

 

 

 

* Possibly Spanish

 

[1] Maria de Lourdes Kuthy-Saenger, “Strategies of Survival, Accommodation and Innovation: The Tarascan Indigenous Elite in Sixteenth Century Michoacán,” Michigan State University doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, 1996. See Table: “Presence of the Tarascan Elites in Historical Documents,” p. 82 and charts: “Geographical Distribution of Tarascan Lineages,” pp. 85-86.

 

 

[2] James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1992, pp. 117 ff.

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How to stop a bank run — again

Posted on September 11, 2012 by hro50ta1

This is the story that knocked my blog offline in fall 2008. There were bank runs back then, and the idea that one person would defy convention and two presidents seemed quite novel. Here, for fun, is that story:

By Joel Thurtell

A frantic financial adviser told me she’s warning everyone she knows with money in National City Bank, dead sure NatCity’s going under: Get your money out!

And I thought, gosh, isn’t that sort of like, well, promoting a bank run?

Panic!

She didn’t see it that way. She felt morally obligated to call people she knew who had more than $100,000 in National City. That’s the limit of federal insurance on bank deposits at the moment, though Congress may change that.

It made me think of a story I wrote 24 years ago for the South Bend Tribune, about a banker who stood up to the government during FDR’s 1933 Bank Holiday and refused to shut her bank.

A year ago (2007), it was Countrywide, then last summer it was IndyMac.
Wachovia’s in deep weeds today.

But the tiny G.W. Jones Exchange bank in Marcellus, Michigan, didn’t need suitors when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered all the nation’s banks to close from March 6-10 in 1933 (although she recalled it was in 1932, which would be when Herbert Hoover was still president) to stop people from withdrawing so much money it would cause banks to fail in some cases even if they were fundamentally sound..

Donna Schurtz told me the story in 1984 of how she trumped the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and won the right to keep her bank open. Apparently, the Jones bank was the only one in the country to stay open.

I was living in Marcellus at the time my story about Donna Schurtz ran in the Tribune’s Sunday Michiana Magazine on January 29, 1984. We had a checking and savings account at the Jones Bank, a dignified building with stone and mortar facade in a village so small you could hear cows lowing at one end of town and smell pig manure from the other side. There were 1,134 men, women and children living in Marcellus in 1980.

Marcellus is in the northeast corner of Cass County, a rolling, heavily wooded county with lots of streams and lakes. In 1980 there were 49,499 people and 199,000 pigs in Cass County. Hogs were not the only agriculture in Cass County. That rolling country was ideal for raising hogs on open range, and it provided great cover for some sizable marijuana plantations, which the sheriff would raid, directing cops to the spot from the county helicopter.

Much of the legitimately-earned money went into the Jones bank. I knew people from as far off as Three Rivers who were old enough to have lived through the Great Depression and still did all their banking at the G.W. Jones Exchange Bank because they remembered how Donna Schurtz kept her doors open when every other bank closed.

The Jones Bank was founded by her grandfather, G.W. Jones, a Quaker who went to California during the Gold Rush. The family had been Abolitionists before the Civil War and maintained a station on the Underground Railroad, helping slaves to freedom in Canada.

Why’d they do it? “They loved the excitement,” she told me.
That’s also why she got geeked about wildcatting for oil in Cass County. “It relieved the monotony,” she said.
In 1850, hearing that his father was sick, her grandfather was in California. He strapped gold onto his body in leather money bags and went home to pay off the family debts. However, family members argue over whether he actually had much gold — maybe it was only enough to make gold wedding ring.
In 1869, G.W. heard a railroad was coming through and platted Marcellus and doggone, in 1870, the Peninsular Railroad came through and G.W. made money selling lots in the fledgling village. Then he made $14,000 on a clover and timothy seed deal.
In 1877, he started the bank. By 1884, its assets were $86,561.35.
In those days, there was no federal deposit insurance. If a bank failed, you were out of luck. My paternal grandparents, Howard C. and Harriet Thurtell, lost all their savings when their bank failed in the Depression. That would have been around the time Donna Schurtz was battling the feds to keep her bank open.
In the 1880s, the bank didn’t pay interest. People considered themselves lucky to have a safe place to store their cash.
They hoped.
In Marcellus in 1907, a new bank was founded and it offered higher interest than the 3 percent G.W. Jones was paying.
The Jones bank handed out pencils stamped “Better sleep on 3 percent than lie awake on higher rates.”

By the early 1930s, the Jones bank was still competing against the First State Bank of Marcellus.
Vaughn Bartlet, onetime mayor, fire chief, postmaster, village marshal, county treasurer in Marcellus and Cass County told me how he was warned the First State Bank was about to go under.

“An old-timer fellow said to me one day, ‘Vaughn, the bank’s gonna go broke here in a few days.’ ”

“I says, ‘How do you know?’ ”

“He says, ‘I saw Sam Lowery, the cashier, working there with his derby on — he’s ready to run out of there any minute.’ ”

“My sister-in-law had a lot of money in there (the First State Bank) and she got 50 cents on the dollar,” Bartlett told me.

That  gives you some idea of the banking industry in Marcellus, where peppermint farming was big and farmers would store their refined mint — worth plenty — in the bank vault.

When I lived in Marcellus, running the Tribune’s Cass County News Bureau from the front porch of

our house in the early 1980s, there was a drinking fountain near the teller windows with a sign that said, “A FREE DRINK.”

In 1921, Donna Schurtz took over the bank. She was 28. She’d earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1916. Her major: Latin.

When I interviewed Donna Schurtz in 1984, she was 90 and still reading Cicero in the original Latin. Her daughter, Abigail Schten, was listening to our conversation.

Donna Schurtz had a great sense of humor. She told me how her grandfather walked to California.

“Well, he did have some common sense, and he decided he wasn’t going to walk back. So he went south to Panama, rode up the Mississippi home.”

“Well, now, mother,” said Abigail Schten, “How would he get from Panama to the Mississippi River?”

Donna Schurtz burst into laughter: “You tell me!”

When the order came to shut the bank, she told me, “Well, we phoned down to Washington and said, ‘Now we’re perfectly sound. Our community is unused to what you have requested.’ ”

“Well, you had to allow the public to have some money it its pocket, or they would have gone crazy!

We had quite a balance in Detroit (in a correspondent bank), and we had asked the teller — the currency department — to send us $40,000.”

“They said, ‘Forty thousand dollars!’ ”

“And I said, ‘You send that to us, or we’ll come right up there and look after you.’ Well, we got it. Nothing to be polite about.”

An armored car brought the currency, which she stacked on counters and window sills. Then she invited townspeople to come into the bank and see that it had money.

Spreading a rumor that a man wearing a derby hat means a bank is going bust is one way to start people withdrawing their funds in droves.

But stacking packets of real currency where everybody can see it is a way to stop a bank run.

Now, I can hear poeple saying, “That’s a quaint story from yesteryear, but stacking hundred dollar bills in the windows of hundreds of Wachovia branches ain’t gonna save that bank.”

No, you’re right.

But think about it: Wouldn’t the financial bailout plan of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke accomplish roughly the same thing Donna Schurtz managed to do in tiny Marcellus back in ’33?

She knew that if her customers could see the money, they would not be so likely to stampede her teller windows and actually demand to have their savings.

She bolstered their confidence that the micro-economy surrounding her little G. W. Jones Exchange Bank was sound.

It’s 2008 now, and we’re talking macro-macro-macro, but the logic is the same.

Isn’t spreading $700 billion of cash through the financial system sort of like stacking currency on a bank’s counters?

It might just be what it takes to keep our economy — and we’re talking the world’s economy  — from slapping on its derby hat and hightailing it.

We’re talking faith, but sometimes faith needs a kick-start.

Still, there are differences, it seems to me, between Donna Schurtz’s stunt in 1933 and the plans for a massive bailout of banks today. In 1933, President Roosevelt was imposing discipline and REGULATION on financial institutions with the creation of safeguards like deposit insurance and watachdogs like the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the Bush regime has dismantled and defanged those watchdogs, leading us back to a situation more like my grandparents faced under the Republican pro-business Herbert Hoover.

Then too, Donna Schurtz’s $40 k was backed by something of substance — gold in Fort Knox.

What’s behind the Treasury’s $700 B today?

Faith — and a mammoth printing press.

There was nothing inflationary about what Donna Schurtz did. Can we say the same about creating hundreds of billions of new money?

The biggest difference of all between 1933 and today, of course, is that back then the nation had someone in charge — someone who cared more about the common good than about the good of corporations.

Keep the faith, for sure, and keep your fingers crossed..

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 


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JOTR makes The Times

Posted on September 2, 2012 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

About the time somebody hacked joelontheroad on August 17, New York Times business columnist Floyd Norris wrote about Capital Appreciation Bonds in California.

Why, he even credited me, in kind of a backhanded way, with being first to report the monstrous debt taken on by Poway Unified schools in San Diego, California. But he linked to the third of my Poway stories, May 12, 2012. By that time, I’d broken the story on May 1 in “CABs = compound trouble for California,” and added to it on May 10 in “Disaster shadows Poway.”

As I say, The Times linked to my third Poway story: “CAB scam in Poway,” on May 12.

My aim from last April, when I started blogging about California CABs, has been to get media attention to this financial travesty in hopes the California Legislature will do what Michigan’s Legislature did 18 years ago: ban CABs.

But I couldn’t write about it.

I was mute.

I went to blog about The Times and found a Google warning that my site was infested with a virus. Beware!

We’re not a big operation. We’re not a medium-sized news organization. In fact, we are so tiny an operation that the only way I can justify saying “we” is to make up names for my columnists.

Melanie Munch, food critic.

Floyd Inkjet, media watchdog.

Ned Yardline, sports columnist.

Peter Pizzicato, music critic.

The only nonfiction member of my staff, besides me, is Peppermint Patti, the best-paid columnist. She happens to be a lapdog.

That’s all by way of explaining that when my site went down, I couldn’t simply call my IT department and demand immediate action.

So, I hired a free lance Internet trouble fixer and after a week, after google had inspected us and determined we are virus-free, I got joelontheroad back.

By then, I’d nearly forgotten my fleeting mention in The Times.

But now that I’m blogging again, I plan to write a column wherein I’ll explain why it happened that what Floyd Norris called “a Michigan blogger” broke the story of how a California school district borrowed $105 million and will repay almost a billion smackers.

And how similar CAB scams are going on all around California.

And how the Michigan Legislature banned CABs 18 years ago, after reading my stories in the Detroit Free Press.

Stay tuned.

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Thank you, Jack!

Posted on August 29, 2012 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

I’ve been very slow to acknowledge these kind words from Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry on June 20, 2012:

The bridge to somewhere: You just had to be happy last week when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Gov. Rick Snyder signed the deal to build the New International Trade Crossing. Personally, I would have liked to have been an invisible fly on the wall in Matty Moroun’s lair. For years, the old bloated billionaire spider has spent millions and woven webs of deceit to try to prevent this day from happening. But in the end, the good guys won.
For the sake of realism, however, we should note that they won in large part because every other corporate interest made it clear they want and need a new bridge. Essentially, everybody not on Moroun’s payroll is against him on this. Not that this is necessarily over yet.
Moroun is likely to fight, in court and out, by fair means or foul, every step of the way, at least till Jesus, Allah or some correctional institution, calls him home.
Whether he can stall the new bridge isn’t clear. What is clear is that if I were determining next year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service, it would be awarded to blogger Joel Thurtell (joelontheroad.com), who exposed Moroun long before anyone else did.
After a while, a few of us picked up on this and magnified his impact, and eventually, even the Detroit papers, which at first ignored or misrepresented the bridge issue, were forced to come around.
I am convinced that at the very least, Thurtell’s gutsy reporting (he had to face at least one shotgun-toting Moroun goon) made this bridge happen years before it otherwise would have. He may be the best and most valuable journalist in Michigan today.

Well, there are some really fine journalists at work in Michigan, including one Jack Lessenberry.

Again, thank you, Jack!

 

 

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Michigan CABs and the ‘Big Graphic’

Posted on August 27, 2012 by hro50ta1

MICHIGAN SCHOOLS LOAD THE FUTURE WITH DEBT

By Joel Thurtell

April 5, 1993 was doomsday for Capital Appreciation Bonds in Michigan.

On that day, the Detroit Free Press exposed the horrendously bad deal almost 100 Michigan school districts had dished out for their taxpayers.

Interest two, three, even five times principal, to be paid out long after the officials who negotiated the deals were gone.

Debt payments still being made long after computers, software, buses had been sent to landfills or crushed.

In addition to the stories, we had what we called the “Big Graphic” — a newsprint page listing all school districts in the state where CABs had been issued, the amount, what they paid for and how much interest was to be paid.

Here, with permission from the Free Press, is the BIG GRAPHIC.

This was before the Internet made it possible to post large data files for the world to see.

The Big Graphic let people in both peninsulas of Michigan check to see if their local school boards had betrayed them.

Along with the Big Graphic we showed normal rates of interest on a 7 percent house mortgage. Lou Schimmel, then executive director of the Municipal Advisory Council and a staunch foe of CABs, insisted that people needed that little graphic element to comprehend how badly they were being screwed.

A MATTER OF INTEREST

No surprise, homeowners were getting a much better deal borrowing on their homes than they got as they paid taxes to cover school debt in multiples of principal.

The Big Graphic and those six Free Press stories killed CABs in Michigan. I heard from school officials that our journalism made it politically impossible to issue CABs after April, 1993.

But the story was not easy. First, you had to understand CABs. Then you had to fathom the professional network of bond underwriters, bond attorneys and financial advisers who profited from no-bid bond deals and who steered school officials into buying their flim-flam.

When then Free Press Projects Editor Ron Dzonkowski told me he wanted to show every CAB in the state, I told him it meant I’d be living at the Michigan Treasury office in Lansing. That was only a small exaggeration. For months, I commuted from my home in Metro Detroit to the Treasury in Lansing. Treasury officials set up a table and brought out all the CAB files. They let me use their photocopy machines as long as I brought my own paper. In my basement today I still have those files with photocopies of paperwork every CAB deal done in Michigan until about April, 1993.

The Bond Buyer followed the story. Business Week made it a cover story.

What about Michigan media?

Nobody chased the story.

Why?

The Big Graphic was a lot of work. You would either have to credit the Free Press, which was a hard pill for competitors to swallow. Or you would have to replicate the work I did. That didn’t happen.

But our stories were enough to push Michigan lawmakers to ban CABs. They passed their CAB-killing law in 1994.

The Big Graphic made it possible to write a CAB story with real power and authority.

Californians are just awakening to the plague of CABs their school districts have brought down on them.

Some CAB deals in California make the Michigan abuses look like chump change. Poway Unified schools in San Diego, for example, borrowed $105 million and will repay almost a billion dollars.

A billion dollars!

What California needs is a ban on CABs.

 

 

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Dayton & CABs

Posted on August 27, 2012 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Thanks to Kevin Dayton for his latest post on California CABs.

What Michigan did by banning CABs in 1994 is relevant to what’s been happening in California with school CAB debt since at least 2000.

A Detroit banker once described CABs as creating a “bow wave” of debt that just keeps reaching out through time.

Poway Unified schools, with a billion dollars of debt for a principal of $105 million is terrible, but the idea of postponing debt payoff till far into the future and at multiples of the amount borrowed is just too awful and too stupid to stand the light of exposure.

In future blog columns, I’ll explain why the Michigan Legislature crafted its anti-CAB legislation as it did.

 

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Me & Jimmy

Posted on August 27, 2012 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Joelontheroad.com had its debut on Sunday, December 9, 2007, the same day I was featured on E! Entertainment as an “expert” on labor history and the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa on E! Hoffa show.

Two years later, Taylor, Michigan, police officer Jeff Hansen published a book, Digging for the Truth, about the death of Hoffa.

Here, reprinted courtesy of the Detroit Free Press, is the July 8, 2007 story I wrote about Hansen and his theory about how the Teamster chief met his end.

FORMER DETROIT COP THINKS HE KNOWS

                                                           THE FATE OF TEAMSTERS LEADER

Byline: BY JOEL THURTELL

Jimmy Hoffa’s last car ride took less than two minutes.

On July 30, 1975, he rode one long block south from a two-story house at 17841 Beaverland on Detroit’s west side and turned right – west – on Grand River Ave.

He passed the greens of William Rogell Golf Course and a scenic footbridge, crossed the woodsy Rouge River, cruised past the brown brick Redford Granite Co. building and the Mt. Vernon Motel, made a U-turn and rode east a few yards on Grand River. He came to a brief stop in front of an iron service gate to Grand Lawn Cemetery.

The gates were opened, and Hoffa entered the cemetery. But the once powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader did not enjoy any of these sights. He was dead, having received two bullets in the head from his trusted old pal Frank Sheeran back in the Beaverland house.

Now, whether Hoffa really met his end this way is uncertain. Sheeran, the only person who claims it went down like this, died four years ago of cancer.

But the scenario makes perfect sense to Jeff Hansen, a Taylor cop who grew up near Grand Lawn Cemetery and later worked those streets as a Detroit police officer.

Hansen – author of the Detroit-based fictional crime book “Warpath” (Spectre Publishing, 2004) – has added a coda to Sheeran’s claim that he killed Hoffa in the Beaverland house at the command of mobsters. Hansen claims to have solved the mystery of what happened to Hoffa’s body. Rumors that Hoffa was buried under the New York Giants’ football stadium in New Jersey or under a Milford horse farm or maybe burned at a mob-controlled incinerator are baloney, Hansen says.

Hansen thinks Hoffa was cremated minutes after Sheeran dropped the murder pistol in the vestibule of the Beaverland house, either at Evergreen Cemetery at 7 Mile and Woodward, or more likely at Grand Lawn Cemetery at Telegraph and Grand River. His alleged proof: a pair of cremation ovens “a minute away from the Beaverland house” in the mausoleum at Grand Lawn, built two years before Hoffa vanished.

My drive from the Beaverland house to that gate lasted one minute, 37 seconds. I was not going fast. A minute from Beaverland to Grand Lawn? Possible. That doesn’t make Hansen’s hypothesis correct. He bristled when I called it “conjecture,” but that’s what it is. Fascinating conjecture, though.

Sheeran’s story received wide publicity three years ago thanks to “I Heard You Paint Houses,” a book by former Delaware chief deputy attorney general Charles Brandt. Brandt recorded long statements by Sheeran about his life as a Mafia hit man. Sheeran claimed he killed Hoffa at the command of Mafia boss Russell Bufalino. “Painting houses” referred to the blood left after people are shot. Sheeran also claimed to do “carpentry,” meaning he disposed of bodies.

According to Sheeran, Hoffa had more than one enemy’s house “painted.” Lured to the Beaverland house by Sheeran, Hoffa had his own house “painted” when Sheeran fired two shots into his brain.

In 2003, Brandt videotaped Sheeran’s deathbed confession to having murdered Hoffa on July 30, 1975.

A TV report on Sheeran’s confession to Brandt started Hansen thinking about Grand Lawn.

He’d worked as a cop in the old 8th Precinct, patrolling the streets around Beaverland and Grand Lawn Cemetery near Grand River and Telegraph. He wondered what Hoffa might have been thinking as the car came down Telegraph toward Grand Lawn Cemetery before he was shot. Hansen read Brandt’s book. It was the first time someone had actually confessed to killing Hoffa.

Sheeran described the area around the Beaverland house accurately, noting the Rogell golf course and precisely locating the house where he said he killed Hoffa. But the book was missing a piece of the puzzle. How did the mob get rid of Hoffa’s body?

The Hoffa file

Hoffa was a high-profile figure. He’d spent time in prison for jury-tampering. The Justice Department had restricted his union activities, even though he’d paid President Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell, half a million dollars for a pardon. In 1975, he was threatening to reveal the mob’s entanglement with Teamsters pension funds – even though he himself turned the Central States Pension Fund into the Mafia’s private piggy bank. Organized crime wanted to shut him up, wrote Brandt.

While the FBI was busy in May 2006 digging up a Milford horse farm, Hansen was thinking about Grand Lawn – he had even called the Detroit FBI office and reported his theory.

He visited the cemetery and saw two crematory ovens in a mausoleum building. “It’s like being struck by lightning,” he said. “This cemetery was chosen because it’s near the house.”

Hansen said that Rod Milne, who managed the cemetery in 1975, told him, “We were doing cremations left and right” in 1975. Later, Hansen said, Milne recanted.

Milne’s wife, Carol, said she doubts Hansen’s theory, but admitted it might have happened. She wasn’t sure if cremations were done at Grand Lawn in 1975. Hansen said he found a Grand Lawn interment log that records two cremations the day Hoffa went missing. Carol Milne said that often crematory workers didn’t look at the bodies before they incinerated them. A burial transit permit could have been faked by a Mafia-friendly funeral parlor, Hansen thinks.

No need to take Hoffa to Giants Stadium or a horse farm at Milford.

Not a federal case?

So why is it important where Hoffa was killed and where his body went?

Charles Brandt explained that the FBI has spent many years and lots of money in the hunt for Hoffa, assuming that he was kidnapped (a federal crime) from the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, murdered and his remains shipped somewhere out of state (another federal offense).

In all those years, the FBI has refused to release a complete, uncensored copy of the voluminous Hoffa file.

“Once they accept what Frank Sheeran said, the FBI completely loses jurisdiction of the case,” Brandt said. “They would have no reason to hold onto the file. It’s not a kidnapping. The murder occurred in the city of Detroit. Nobody crossed a state line. It’s actually a Detroit homicide.”

For more on the Jimmy Hoffa mystery, see Charles Brandt’s Web site www.hoffasolved.com or Jeff Hansen’s www.spectrepublishing.com.

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Michigan’s CAB-killer law

Posted on August 25, 2012 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

On July 10, 1994, the Michigan Legislature approved Public Act 278, the law (PA278-1994-corrected0001) that banned Capital Appreciation Bonds.

CABs have become controversial in California, where a prohibition on CABs is being debated.

The relevant sections are: 380.1352a Borrowing money and issuing bonds; 380.1351b Appreciation or sale at discount; and 380.1352 Borrowing or issuing bonds; contract for legal representation.

In future columns, I’ll explain the significance of each of these sections.

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MOUSE CODE

Posted on August 25, 2012 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

I’ve published another book.

MOUSE CODE is for sale NOW on amazon.com.

You can also order it from Barnes & Noble or any other bookseller with access to Books In Print.

Here’s the release from Hardalee Press:

Come with award-winning newspaper reporter, author and ham radio operator Joel Thurtell as he spins the tale of how mice invented radio to save themselves and their friends the moles, voles, shrews, groundhogs, badgers and yes, even a blue racer, from death by development.

Humans are plowing up meadows and bulldozing trees so they can build houses, shopping centers, gas stations and all kinds of human constructions that displace wildlife.

Enter Hannibal, the wise old field mouse who engineers a system to warn the animals of dangerous human activity.

Hannibal’s disciple, Arthur Mouse, is Hannibal’s loyal foot soldier. At great danger from hawks, snakes, owls and a cat, the two mice steal materials from a ham radio operator so they can build their early warning radios.

MOUSE CODE entertains through its unique story and by offering young people Morse Code as a “secret” language for talking among themselves..

Says ham operator George Petrides Sr., “One test of a story I have always liked is to read it out loud. MOUSE CODE scores a 10 in that category.” Petrides read MOUSE CODE to his 10-year-old grand-daughter, Kaelyn, and reported that she “was instantly captivated by the characters, the plow, the letters V and B, the pompous words, the plight of the mice and (was) able to follow the plot with no difficulty. She could define all of the more difficult words in her own words so she learned vocabulary too. We’re already having fun communicating in simple Mouse Code.”

Veteran book illustrator John Barnhart created the pictures and cover for MOUSE CODE.


 

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