BAD N' RAD in bright green spandex pants (photo by Charlie Van Stee)

BadNraD opened his metal garage door for me in the brightest and tightest neon green pants I had ever seen. His hair was as big and messy as it is on stage. Whether it be a Saturday night wielding his keytar for fans, or a Sunday morning sorting through his vast VHS collection, he is one and only.

We talked a lot about what BNR is exactly. Is it art?  What musical genre does BNR contribute to?

Sure, his music has some serious Techno influences, but he had another comparison to offer.  While Techno and Dance are huge in his musical library, “people also like to use thecomparison of Andrew W.K.”

BadNraD: To me it’s a compliment, I know to a lot of other people it would be like, “oh my god…ugh…” If you’re not into that kind of “in your face” fun, laughable type of music…. It’s not supposed to be the most serious music in the world. I don’t think that Andrew W.K. is that serious either.

Charlie Van Stee: Who could hate Andrew W.K?  He just wants you to have a good time.

BNR: Exactly. I’m in the same boat in a lot of ways. Although, I do like to veer a little deeper into different subject matter I think.

CVS: You do give off a kind of “metal head” look and you shred quite a bit. You go extreme with nearly everything you can add to the mix. There is still such a strong influence of Techno in your music.

BNR: Right. Honestly, House music is one of my favorite genres. The whole electronic music scene from harder dance to Daft Punk. Ever since, like, 1999 when I was really getting into that music. Then it was an “Oh my god, I can make music all by myself!” moment. Then you begin to listen to all these different producers and see that they can make these amazing songs. I knew that I wanted to do something like that, but this is how I’m going to do it.

BadNraD starting incorporating more metal influences into his music but, ran into a bit of a problem. He’s a one-man band and he didn’t know how to the play the guitar.

BNR: I knew I loved shred guitar, but I didn’t know anyone that could shred! So I thought I would just learn it myself. Then I started layering it over my songs where it needed to be.

CVS: You had been working on your first record for quite a few years before it was released.

BNR: Well, two solid years of learning and working on it. I had been working with QBASE software for a while which I think made it take longer. Then I got into ABLETON and the process began to speed up and I was able to learn a lot faster. Before all that, I wasn’t working on a computer. I had always used hardware. I was really finding my process. That’s how I like to look at it.

CVS: The difference now is that you have a formula to BadNraD, right?

BNR: Yeah, you figure it out and that’s when you get a flow going.

CVS: Where does a BNR melody come from? Do they start out as songs that you could sing by yourself with just one instrument?

BNR: It just depends on the song. For instance, with a song on my new E.P called “Too Cool,” my girlfriend and I were at here parent’s house looking through some of her old stuff. We found this game called “Dream Phone.” So I dialed a number and a message came on that said (rhythmically), “He. Looks. Cool. In. Whatever. He. Wears.” There’s the song. I brought it in (to the studio) and starting working around that line. I couldn’t tell you exactly where it went from there. It probably started with a bass line.The bass line is the melody in my head, usually. Sometimes I’ll just hit a chord (demonstrates a vintage synth tone on an old keyboard with a bright leopard print on the top) and I’ll just build around it.

CVS: If you were to look down a tunnel, four or five recordings into BNR, what would those recordings sound like compared to what you’re doing today? Is it going to be the same formula?

BNR: You can tell, song to song, that I’m kind of ADD. I’m constantly learning more so I would say it would keep evolving. Although, the source of my inspiration is still the same and has stayed with me while I’ve grown up. I could never see myself saying that I hate Casio keyboards or I’m not interested in fooling around with circuit bend keyboards. I’m never going to stop watching my VHS tapes or listening to weird 80’s funk and 90’s dance music.

CVS: Maybe a BNR Musical?

BNR: Yeah! A rock opera! I could see myself recording an E.P of all metal or maybe all Electro-Funk. I feel that a lot of my last E.P was an experiment in different directions.

CVS: Would you consider producing other bands?

BNR: That is a dream of mine for sure. I love performing, but I get really excited about being in the studio. I like sitting there and working on little edits. Someday, when I have a better facility to produce in.

CVS: I see similarities between you and Har Mar Superstar. You both are fully invested in a powerful image, but there is still substance to the music.

BNR: It’s tough because I play festivals and I don’t fit in with the Jam Bands and the rave purists complain. People do enjoy it, but it’s only to a certain extent. The audience that I can get into a show is only so big. Sure I’ve got these songs, but I have to think about how I’m going to stamp them in your brain.

Although he’s still a solo performer when it comes to the music, Brand BNR has a fairly solid engine of volunteers made up of friends he’s had for years and people who have jumped inalong the way.

BNR: That’s really the best part. Having all these people helping because they believe in what you’re doing. I might be obnoxious to some people. Too bright, too loud or whatever it may be. If you take it the right way rather than feeling like I’m forcing it on you, you can join the party if you want.

BadNraD’s new album available now.

Thom Hartman

Minneapolis, June 17, 2011

Thom Hartmann is the nation’s #1 progressive radio talk show host (also simulcast as TV in 40 million homes by Dish Network/Free Speech TV), and the New York Times best-selling, 4-times Project Censored winning author of 21 books in print. He spoke about his new book Rebooting the American Dream in front of a packed crowd in Saint Paul’s Swedenborgian Church. He was nice enough to sit down with Lunch of Champions’ Charlie Van Stee to discuss some of the topics that he covers in his new book.

Charlie Van Stee (CVS): A recent piece in the Atlantic by Richard Florida,talked about moving away from trying to break our free trade agreements into a support for enriching service sector jobs with fair wages and benefits. Do you feel this is a viable compromise with free trade advocates?

Thom Hartmann (TH): No. The original way that free trade was sold to us is, this is going to force other countries to open up their markets to American manufactured goods. That’s basically what we bought into in the 80’s and 90’s and even the late 70’s when it was being aggressively promoted with Nixon and China and that whole thing. When that didn’t happen in the 90’s, when we signed NAFTA and joined the WTO, the argument became “we don’t need all these blue collar jobs, we are going to shift to the SiliconValley white collar jobs and everybody needs to become an engineer.” Then when all the engineering jobs started moving to India and China, they said, “ Well, there is anew economy and we just need to train people for it,” but,they stopped being specific. It’s all bullshit. There is just no other way to describe it.

The countries, to which our jobs are going, are countries that actually engage in protectionism themselves. So now what we are saying is that we need to get these countries to conform more to these free trade agreements and we need to raise their labor standards, we need to raise their environmental standards which will raise the cost of their goods so that our companies will be competitive again. It’s never going to happen.

As long as you can hire thirty people in China for the cost of one worker in America, the standards almost don’t matter. The best author on this is an Oxford economist named Chang who wrote a book called “BadSamaritans.” Historically,the only winners in free trade have been the Trans-national corporations. They’ve been the British East-India’s of the world, the General Electric’s of the world, etc. General Electric makes more than 50% of its revenue off shore, is it even an American country anymore?

CVS: Wouldn’t the argument be that now everything is cheaper for people at Wal-Mart?

TH: My rebuttal would be that I would be happy to pay 10% more for stuff at Wal-Mart if I had a good manufacturing job here that paid me 30% more. If you go back and talk to someone that is old enough to remember when Wal-Mart first opened, Sam Walton’s slogan was “Made in U.S.A.” He had big banners in front of Wal-Mart stores that said “Made in the U.S.A.” Until Sam Walton died, that was the focus of Wal-Mart. They still sold cheap stuff but it was made in the U.S.A. and people had good jobs.

CVS: It seems that the debate among conservatives and progressives has moved to questioning whether or not we should financially support our social institutions at all. Are they too expensive?

TH: No. It’s really very simple. America is a very, very wealthy nation. We can afford to have institutions in our country to provide a basic social safety net. We do need to go through the steps I outline in my book “Rebooting the American Dream.” We basically need to repair our broken tax system and bring back manufacturing, which actually produces wealth.

When Adam Smith wrote “Wealthof Nations” in 1776, the whole concept was that nations become wealthy by making
things. The example that Adam Smith used was a stick on the ground that has been carved into an axe handle. The stick has no inherent wealth; the nation, has no wealth when the stick is sitting on the ground. When you carve the stick into an axe handle and apply human labor to a raw material, you turn it into something that now has value. The value of the handle now is that it can be passed down through several generations, so the nation becomes wealthier. We need to go back to manufacturing.

CVS: Is it more of the principle of a nation building things versus making sure that people have good wages and benefits?

TH: Countries that manufacture things become wealthy.  Countries that simply move money around become poor.

When you’re making a billion dollars a year working on Wall Street because you have a computer that can churn 100,000 stocks a second, at the end of the year you have left nothing of value behind. But, you walked off with a billion dollars? That is a theft of our economy.

CVS: What do you say to people who claim that we wouldhave enough money to support ourselves if we were taxed less?

TH: Maybe you’d be much stronger if I took 3 pints of blood off of you.  It’s like saying, “whatever your salary is, you’d be much richer if you took 20% less.” It’s basic economics. If we take in less money, we will have more?

CVS: Well, they would say, “I’m getting taxed less so I have more money in my paycheck to go out and buy the things I need to take care of myself.”

TH: There is actually a deeper and more important answer to that. There are two sets of rules for taxes.

When people who don’t spend most of their wealth get a tax cut, they actually end up with more money in their pockets.  That’s the intuitive form that everyone understands.

If you make a billion dollars a year and you spend a million dollars a year,you’re taking $999,000,000 and putting it into a Swiss bank account. If your taxes at home are taking $400,000,000 and the Swiss bank is only taking $300,000,000, you get an extra $100,000,000.

If you’re making $40,000 a year as gross income and after taxes you’re taking home $30,000 and you’re spending 100% of that paycheck, it means that you have calibrated your life to live on $30,000 a year.  Your employer knows you have calibrated your life to live on $30,000 a year.

If you had a tax cut that wiped out the tax all together, so that you are getting the whole $40,000 that your employer is writing the check for, what is your employer going to do?  He’s going to look at you and he’s going to say; “I know this guy will work for $30,000, why am I paying him $40,000?”

You can see this in history.  You can look at the record of taxes on working people and compare it with the record of wages. What you find is that while cutting taxes increases disposable income for rich people, but for working people, whenever there are tax cuts they are followed by wage cuts. Oddly, the opposite is true.

When you have tax increases. Say, you are making $40,000 and taking home $30,000. If your taxes go up so now you’re only taking home $25,000, both you and your employer know that you can’t live on $25,000.  You need $30,000.  Your employer over time will raise your wages up to $45,000 so you’re now taking home $30,000 again.

It absolutely happens that way. That is why Denmark, who has the average base tax for working people at 52%, the minimum wage is $18.70hr. Rising taxes on working people leads to rising wages.

CVS: Do you really believe that it is possible to scale back our trade laws considering half of the Democrats and all of the Republicans are in favor of free trade policies?

TH: It doesn’t matter.  It’s the people that matter.

You have 80% of the American electorate saying that free trade is crap. When Donald Trump comes out, who’s a mad man, he’s an entertainer, he’s a huckster and he’s been bankrupt a bunch of times. Trump’s daddy left him $400,000,000 and he almost blew it all. When this guy comes out, with his bad hair and everything, and says he’s going to slap a 25% tax on everything coming in from China and all of a sudden everyone in America stops and listens, you know there’s something to it.

CVS: PR problems have plagued modern day Unions,people seem afraid of losing their jobs or even bankrupting the place they work.  What could the Unions do differently to convey their message to young workers?

TH: A modern owner owned workplace, a non-co-operative workplace, is a kingdom. It is not a democracy.  There is an owner that acts as king, there is middle management that act as the lords and then there are the workers who act as the servants.

A Union is a democratic institution. Unions elect their officers and everyone in the Union votes on what they are going to ask for. Whether they are going to ask for more wages or even take pay cuts.  Everybody votes on it. So if you believe in democracy and if you believe democracy is a good thing, the logical next step would be to say that you support the idea of democracy existing in the workplace, which is what Unions are. End of discussion.

CVS: Why do you think that membership has been going down over the years?

TH: Number 1: Ever since the Reagan Administration,the National Labor Relations Board has not enforced our labor laws.

Right now they are talking about doing it with Boeing in South Carolina and they are acting like the sky is falling!  This is the first President that has actually tried to enforce our labor laws since Reagan.

Number 2: After the Wagner Act was passed in 1935, you could unionize anywhere in the United States, have democracy in the workplace and the employer couldn’t blow it up.  He couldn’t say, “okay, we are going to go someplace else.”

In the election of 1946, when Harry Truman was President, the Republicans took both the House and the Senate. The first thing they did was to pass the Taft Hartley Act. The Taft Hartley Act created an exception to the Wagner Act.On a state by state basis, states could choose to become essentially “Right to Work for Less” states rather than Union states. A number of companies moved to “Right to Work for Less” states. Those states began competing with Union states and it created a race to the bottom for America. Really what we need to do, and you can ask anybody who really understands labor, the solution to the problem is to repeal the Taft Hartley Act.

You can catch The Thom Hartmann Program weekdays from 2pm – 5pm on AM 950 in the Twin Cities or read his new book.