If you missed Bill Moyers Journal on Friday night, “A Tale of Two Quagmires”, you can still watch it online or read the transcript, or listen to excerpts.

Do it now.

Moyers walks viewers through the history of President Lyndon Johnson’s struggle with Vietnam policy, using the president’s recorded conversations with key advisors and Congressional leaders. The parallels to today’s policy quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan are striking, and easier to see in hindsight.

I hope that President Obama and his advisors were able to watch this and absorb its lessons.

Honolulu Advertiser writer Rick Daysog reports a private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management LP, is buying up a chunk of Hawaiian Telcom.

I probably feel differently hearing that news after a National Public Radio report on a new book predicting that the next major credit crisis will be triggered by the leveraged buyouts of companies by private equity firms.

First a little primer on how private-equity firms operate. Private equity firms buy businesses the way that homebuyers acquire houses. They make a down payment and finance the rest. The financings are structured like balloon mortgages, with big payments due at some point in the future. The critical difference, however, is that while homeowners pay the mortgages on their houses, PE firms have the businesses they buy take out the loans, making them responsible for repayment. They typically try to resell the company or take it public before the loans come due.

Played out within reasonable limits regarding the amount of the debt, the strength of the acquired company, and the continuation of some threshold level of investment to maintain that strength, it’s a strategy that can offer big payoffs. But private-equity players are quintessential Wall Streeters whose grasp of the concept of reasonable limits is quite limited. For them, the whole purpose of doing business is to make money, so if a strategy works, each success is just an encouragement to raise the ante and be a bit more daring next time.

We’ve already seen some of this playing out here. The Turtle Bay Resort foreclosure is the closest to us here in Kaaawa, but not the only hotel to have been buried in debt.

I guess I’ll have to buy the guy’s book and read more of the details.

Okay, this next one has nothing to do with the day’s headlines. Back in June 2000, NPR interviewed guitarist Carol Kaye. Her name meant nothing to me. But it turns out that she provided the signature sound to a lot of hit rock and roll songs. She’s part of the relatively unknown history of the music business, and I keep going back to this interview because it’s such an eye-opener. Anyway, it’s good Sunday listening.

Here’s her bio from Kaye’s web site.

In another interview, she said:

We were satisfied with being background session players in those days. It took a lot of guts, pain, and tears to be a star — so many were treated like meat back then, and it takes a special talent to get up on the stage and be an entertainer for sure, something jazz musicians were not into (bigband musicians either).

We knew some of the lies being put in the trade papers and magazines, but it didn’t really matter back then, we just collected our monies at the Union (2-3 weeks later) and went home to our families, that was what was real to us.

The Union then about 1973 compelled the record companies to put musicians names (especially the rhythm section) on the backs of albums. We have found out later that companies (like Motown) got away with murder tho’, and sometimes we don’t get our rightful credits (and the re-use monies too) from our works, this doesn’t sit well with us now.

We’re in our 60s and can’t do that again, altho’ we enjoy good pensions and most of our due-reuses, it hurts a little to know that the public is being lied to, and our work is just cast aside as “musicians”, something that has happened to musicians for centuries — but lately we’re becoming more known for it, so it’ll all work out I think. More films about us, more credits know, etc.