'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
No CommentsJohn Sidney McCain III said today "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," sounding exactly like Herbert Hoover after the crash of 1929. The parallels are interesting. Republican policies largely caused the Great Depression. Hoover had done honorable and even miraculous work before the presidency (feeding World War I refugees). He was a progressive Republican but became a reactionary. The biggest similarity, besides "the fundamentals" lines, is that the world had passed both men by. The world had become too complex for their remedies or policies. They were/are overwhelmed. Except Hoover didn’t have Karl Rove, "the base" (which interestingly translates in Arabic as al Queda) and so many ignorant, easily led voters.
On the other hand, maybe the key word in McCain’s statement is "our" economy. As in the economy represented by his rich friends and supporters, the nationless corporate oligarchy and his Treasury secretary-to-be, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (also prime architect of banking and Wall Street deregulation). He of the "nation of whiners" and "mental recession." For them, the winners at a time when income inequality is worse than anytime since before the crash of ’29, the economy is strong. So maybe unlike his campaign of late, McCain actually spoke the truth.
The recession that’s all in our heads claimed two of the most powerful and influential investment banks in the world over the weekend. Anybody who claims to tell you what will happen next — much less that the worst has passed — is about as reliable as all those telephone mortgage chislers during the housing bubble. What is more clear is how it happened, and, perhaps, some of the ramifications.
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No CommentsMany Democratic operatives are advising Obama and Biden to essentially ignore Palin. I don’t think they can. President-elect McCain (I use the term to focus your mind on the stakes here) has made her one of the most important issues in this campaign.
In choosing — or being forced to choose — a person with no national or international experience, whose government background is a few years as mayor of a tiny exurb and 18 months as governor of a state with 670,000 people (less than half the population of Phoenix), McCain should be giving the nation pause. Pause to wonder about his judgment, for if he chose her it was the kind of impulsive, irresponsible action for which he’s known. Pause to wonder who is really pulling his strings, considering she is the candidates of the hard-core evangelicals McCain once denounced, and the oil industry he claims to be willing to fight. Pause that he would make a shameless political move to energize his base even if it meant putting the country at risk. President Palin. Think about that.
One of the many outrageous things about the Palin affair is her refusal to hold news conferences or meet with reporters. Proper "deference" was demanded by the McCain campaign. Deference? Here, ma’am, the people rule — unless you are willing to proclaim us an authoritarian empire where the press is treated as it is in, say, China. It should be a deal-breaker in itself that she has been shut off like a celebrity.
What is McCain hiding? What is he afraid of?
2Here’s my advice to Obama supporters: Turn off the television. Put away the depression. Get mad and get active. The race is far from over unless there has already been a stealth coup in this country — a subject for a future column. The Republicans are the party that wrecked America — and McCain and Palin are Republican to the core. They’re counting on Americans to be stupid and easily manipulated. Obama is counting on us to be smarter than that, to be Americans, a people who once were never "easily led" by demagogues.
I don’t trust the corporate media, especially the electronic kind. I don’t trust the polls. They are trying to game the outcome. The "economic royalists," to use FDR’s term, were never going to give up power easily — nor was the military industrial complex. I never doubted that the conservative base would come "home" eventually, or that this would be a close election. And there’s the elephant in the room: will enough white Americans vote for a black man?
It’s interesting to recall that, unlike many other democratic countries, America once had two mass parties. Republicans and Democrats had liberal and conservative wings. In 1936, for example, Gov. Alf Landon was a liberal Republican challenging FDR, and might have made a race of it had not his campaign been co-opted by the reactionaries in the GOP.
Now only one mass party remains: the Democrats.
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3"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." — Gore Vidal
"The (Bush) aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the
reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the
world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality.’ " — Ron Suskind
"This election is not about issues. This election is
about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." — Rick Davis, McCain campaign manager
Unfortunately Vidal is probably wrong, considering that most Americans get their tiny bits of information from television. Davis may well be right, despite the critical issues facing the country, and that his campaign is running to continue the very Bush-Cheney "faith-based" policies that created the disaster of the past eight years.
This is the background you need to understand the successful McCain effort to cow the corporate media into submission in the final weeks before the election. Remember that McCain called the big-time media "his base" and there’s been a long love-fest between them. But the old fighter jock will now slap around and intimidate his love — and many Americans will approve. It will be the Rovian tactic that puts the race within stealing distance, if not produce an outright McCain victory.
1I’m late posting this morning on the takeover of Fannie and Freddie because I spent last night and part of today writing for the Seattle Times on the ouster of Washington Mutual’s chief executive. It’s not a far leap from one to the other, because both bags of trouble have their genesis in the collapse of the housing bubble. In the case of Fannie and Freddie, of course, the problem became so serious that it put the entire financial system at risk.
That’s right. Don’t be fooled by Hank Paulson’s "what this means to you" comments about how the federal takeover will make it easier for Americans to buy homes. The Bush Treasury was forced into using taxpayer money to back these two giant corporations to avoid a financial China Syndrome. And India, Japan, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, et al. Here’s the chilling line buried in Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday New York Times story:
The proposal to place both mortgage giants, which own or back $5.3
trillion in mortgages, into a government-run conservatorship also grew
out of deep concern among foreign investors that the companies’ debt
might not be repaid. Falling home prices, which are expected to lead to
more defaults among the mortgages held or guaranteed by Fannie and
Freddie, contributed to the urgency, regulators said.
Toes curled yet? This is what it means to be the world’s largest debtor nation. As the duhs and ignos rush to coronate McCain and Palin, there it little understanding of this predicament.
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No CommentsPhoenix and Arizona sleepwalk on. Mesa is giddy about the promise of a big new resort out in the middle of nowhere. It’s fascinating that the metropolitan area and state seem to have no substantial economic development strategy other than to hope that more clones of Scottsdale golf resorts can be birthed. Tourism, of course, brings notoriously low-paying jobs, many part time and lacking benefits. It may be facing structural challenges as American living standards fall and energy prices rise. And considering that golf is a stagnant pastime — as many give it up as take it up every year — well, do the math…
"Chandler shifts to urban focus," the headline proclaims. The story is about studies on what happens when the suburb runs out of greenfield development space. But they know they shoot studies in Arizona. Chandler has been deeply engineered as an automobile suburb, complete with wide highways ("streets"), walled off "communities" and ugly berms to separate land use from highways. It is completely car dependent, without commuter or light-rail links. I doubt there will be much interest by developers in doing anything remotely urban. But it’s rich enough to survive awhile if the growth machine revives and moves elsewhere…
Meanwhile, a "marketing strategy" was launched to tout Phoenix as an "emerging leader" in green and solar technology. Hahahahahahaha. I hope this is better than the "marketing strategy" of Copper Square. I guess anything helps, if the region could lure at least a few California companies. Unfortunately, the Legislature and extreme political climate’s refusal to fund meaningful economic development tools and research will keep metro Phoenix a backwater. A "city" based on endless driving in individual automobile trips while spreading out into the desert without enough water to sustain it can’t be any kind of green leader, emerging or even flaccid…
Then there’s the crackup of the medical school…
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