Posted inPolitics: National

I have scene the future…

To think: All those years I was called the "socialist" columnist at the Arizona Republic, that it would come to this. Me, standing alone as the only defense of capitalism against the Red Tide. That was my role, at least, in a recent debate held by Socialist Alternative at Seattle University and attended by I'd guess about 100 people. Yes, this was one of those "only in a blue state" moments. The two or three socialists in Arizona are distinguished by carrying meek .357 magnum or smaller caliber weapons. These were real socialists, or socialist-curious.

They were very nice and polite, only booing me when, at a snoozy moment, I said that all who voted for Nader in 2000 could thank themselves for the "election" of George W. Bush. I had warned the organizers that I would not exactly be, well, a "Goldwater" Institute sock puppet in a debate over whether "free market capitalism" had failed in the recent crash. Of course it did, but as Voltaire would say, define your terms. Were I fit and twenty-five, I would seriously consider moving to a social democracy in northern Europe. Even this, however, seemed to qualify me to stand in defense of what my debate partner continued to derisively call "neoliberalism" (neoliberalism, neoconservatism…Neo is always bad except in The Matrix, where he gets to kiss Carrie-Anne Moss, too).

I'm happy to report that the republic (if not The Republic) is safe. Nobody marched off behind red banners to tear up the cobblestones and attack the ruling class. As far as I could tell, the program of this particular organization called for a state takeover of the 500 largest companies, which would be run by workers' committees (i.e., soviets, before Stalin ruined things). A revolution would be necessary rather than reform "around the edges." I pointed out that in revolutions, many innocents are killed and except in one case, 1776, successful revolutions trend toward the murderously radical. This was brushed off against two centuries of real and imagined American crimes against the world. The only time I was truly offended was when my opponent belittled the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who died to liberate the world from totalitarianism in World War II. No, the Red Army did that, he emphasized, incomplete to say the least in his understanding of history.

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:Carl Hayden
Posted inPhoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

:Carl Hayden

Young_Carl_haydenThis week, Sen. Robert Byrd will surpass Arizona's Carl Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress. As Arizona's only congressman and later its fixture of a senator, Hayden was there for 56 years. The Arizona Republic's Dan Nowicki provides a good primer on Hayden for the majority of Arizonans who have either never heard of him, or merely associate his name with a high school.

When he was alive, Hayden was the most prominent of the walking reminders of Arizona as a frontier state. He had been born when the Salt River Valley was barely settled, had chased outlaws on horseback as Maricopa County sheriff (above left), then had become the Baby State's first representative in Congress.

"Ol' Carl Hayden," as he was known by the time I was alive, will forever be associated with the Central Arizona Project. The best book on Hayden and the CAP is my friend Jack August's Vision in the Desert. It was his life's work, and as it headed toward victory, Hayden realized it would not mean the sustenance and extension of agriculture in the Salt River Valley, but rather its transformation into a megalopolis. I have heard he was ambivalent about this reality, as many who fought for the CAP came to be. Ironically, many of the sustainability issues Phoenix and the Southwest face today were made in the 1950s and 1960s by the CAP adversaries in California — although they were hardly angels.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Not like Ike

The nut baggers are right. Socialism has come to America. It is here, now. The government owns the "commanding heights" of this economy, as is the case in classic socialist doctrine. Citizens of this American socialism get free medical care, housing, food, clothing, even travel. They have abundant educational opportunities, including college. It promises and actually delivers both diversity and social mobility. It also has elements of fascism, just as the nut baggers have warned in their rallies attended by hundreds: The socialism has a heavy corporate component, with giant companies moving in lockstep with the regime's demands yet also holding strong political sway within the regime. In exchange for its benefits, members of the society give up certain freedoms — yet they keep joining enthusiastically.

I'm writing about the military, of course, and not just to show the absurdity of the nut baggers' claims. In a nation where six people are chasing every job, where college is increasingly out of reach, the only advanced nation in the world where people go without health insurance — in today's America, the military is often the only option open. It made news last month when a man who couldn't get insurance joined the Army so his cancer-stricken wife could get help. (When I Googled "joined Army to get health care," the second and third hits out of 53 million were Army recruiting sites). Military recruiters have more than met their targets — ones raised for the Army — since the economic meltdown. Even with the danger of war, many Americans just don't see another way.

Elements of this have long happened. There's the classic case of the directionless kid from high school who joins the military — sometimes under a parent or even judge's threat — and becomes an adult. I went to high school with young men who joined up, served honorably and succeeded as civilians — I doubt most of them ever would have chosen the military as a first option. And we honor their service. But the Great Disruption's first act — the crash and its resulting unemployment, combined with two wars seemingly without end — is creating something new. New and unsettling.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Job One for America

As America faces its worst run of job losses since the Great Depression with no end in sight, one thing should be clear. Our federal government is being run by a coalition of the financial sector, lobbyists for entrenched interests and a disciplined Republican opposition of dubious loyalty. Barack Obama is not only very close to being a failed president, he could be on track to be a one-termer if the GOP snags an opponent such as Gen. David Petraeus or even a rehabbed Mitt Romney. (The Nobel will only hurt Obama without substantive achievements for average Americans).

Perhaps the problem is centered on Obama and the cowardly Democrats in Congress (Memo to Blue Dogs: You'll lose anyway, so do the right thing and maybe you can pull a Harry Truman; oh, wait, Truman wasn't getting millions from the moneyed interests and hoping to get a job with them after politics). Could Hillary have done better? Or is this just the latest evidence of a quiet coup and no individual can change America's trajectory to self-immolation. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family and David Wessel's In Fed We Trust (and throw in Maggie Mahar's Money Driven Medicine) and you begin to see the financialized theocracy we have become. One facing unsustainability on every front, including in a military whose quiet evangelization by the Christian right should raise alarms never before heard in America (were it covered by the media).

As for unemployment, the best Washington can do is become aroused over a tax credit for job creation. This won't work — it's not tied to real demand. And it will lower tax revenues, adding to the deficit. It's a stunning sign of America's enervation and institutional corruption that President Obama is not rolling out a crash program to modernize our rail system. It could be done now. It would create huge numbers of jobs, not only for construction but also for operating and maintenance. Real jobs that would last. And an infrastructure whose benefits would repay the Treasury many times over.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Say you want a revolution?

I was in Phoenix over the weekend to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore and mark the launch of the short-story collection, Phoenix Noir. For those of you with thin skins, be proud of the cool new restaurants downtown. And that Barry Schoeneman of Men's Apparel Club, who sells the best suits for the lowest prices in America and has toughed out a retail-hostile downtown for more than 4 years, is moving to a bigger store uptown, but still in the central core. And if you care (I don't), there are still plenty of hip, skinny, rich people at Snottsdale nightclubs despite the overall depression. More gravel. Less shade. More vacant lots. Fewer completed projects. Light rail still succeeds (gloat). Yea, my hometown.

But what caught my attention most was not this or even another well-intentioned civic project rolled out in the Information Center. It was an article on the front of the Viewpoints section, beneath pieces trumpeting this well-intentioned project. It was headlined, "A rebuttal: Why I am a conservative," by the "school choice movement" activist lawyer Clint Bolick, who now has what seems to be a well-endowed sinecure at the local Krack-Pot "Think" Tank. I thought: Why is this a rebuttal? The reactionaries have won in Arizona and the efforts of the latest well-intentioned project will go nowhere. They, not Bolick, should be the rebuttal to the ruling reactionary/growth status quo. But it was just bad newspaper design. Bolick was chastising my former colleague Richard Nilsen who had the guts to write an op-ed saying why he was not a conservative. In Arizona this is an enterprise akin to trying to teach opera to pigs (it's futile because it can't be done and it irritates the pigs).

Read and enjoy. But the biggest problem with the argument is that the "conservatives" that rose to prominence after 1980, and especially 1994, didn't want to conserve. As Sam Tanenhaus makes clear in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, today's "conservatives" are radicals, with little connection to the Burkean conservatives who sought to conserve the best of the old, showed respect for tradition and custom, etc. But thanks to the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic Party, these radicals still control the agenda.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The doomsday machine

Two new books and an article in Wired are making more people aware of the doomsday system constructed by the Soviets during the 1980s, when they feared an American nuclear attack. Perimeter, nicknamed "the Dead Hand," went operational in 1986 and guaranteed that even if the leadership was killed and all command-and-control systems disrupted, the Soviets would still launch an all-out nuclear counter-attack. Like Skynet of the Terminator movies — Linda Hamilton, call your office. And "the dead hand" is still operational, although Moscow officially won't discuss it. It's a good thing nothing ever goes wrong with complex systems.

As we observe a one-year anniversary nearly every day of some calamity from last year's Great Panic, I can't stop that feeling of grating ambivalence. Yes, Messers Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner averted a collapse of "the global financial system" and perhaps averted another Great Depression. That's the story line and even I buy it most of the time. But now the too-big-to-fail banks have gotten even bigger. The derivative boys are back at work. Promised re-regulation is being gutted. The pain has fallen on average Americans and the American taxpayer.

It's almost as if "the global financial system" built its own Dead Hand doomsday machine. So the question becomes: Did we avert apocalypse last fall and winter, fortunately shutting down this fearsome device. Or did we actually arm it by our actions. In other words, should we have called the bastards' bluffs in late 2008?

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The Hispanic illusion

Progressives and liberals cling to the expectation that Republican antagonism of Hispanics will lead to electoral disaster. This was ever-present during the confirmation fight over Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Now the predictions of GOP doom are back. This time Republicans are slitting their own throats by using the health-care-for-illegal-immigrants lie to reignite the anti-immigrant (anti-Hispanic) hysteria in The Base. This is suicide to alienate the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority, and it will be especially lethal for Republicans in the Southwest, with its huge Hispanic population. That, at least, is the view from Washington, D.C. The reality can be summed up in two words.

Joe Arpaio.

The Italian-American sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, anchored by the nation's fifth-largest city, Arpaio waged a vicious campaign against illegals ahead of last fall's election. Egged on by talk-radio haters, the "sweeps" were part of a notorious climate of antagonism against all Hispanics, even Mexican-Americans who have been in the country for generations. Arpaio didn't go after the Anglo Republicans who employed the illegals. He arrested the weak, the vulnerable, the already exploited. Maricopa County is at least one-third Hispanic citizens who might object to this racist atmosphere. Risky, no? And it should be added that the incumbent was lacking in many ways that informed citizens of ethnic groups should have found deserving of a swift kick to the door. Arpaio was re-elected by a landslide — and the sweeps mostly stopped, having served their purpose for a publicity seeking hotdog many other cops call "The Badged Ego."

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Posted inPolitics: National

The debates we’re not having

As masterful as President Obama's health care speech was, he operates in a nation that is increasingly losing the capacity to govern itself. The blurt of the loutish South Carolina Republican congressman, calling the president a liar, something I have never heard in listening to presidential addresses before that body since JFK…well, that's the least of the problem.

Health care reform foundered on the vicious lies of a well-organized minority and, apparently, the simple-mindedness of the American people (all manipulated by the health industries' hundreds of millions of lobbying dollars). The side dish was the ongoing hyperventilation over the president's citizenship or lack thereof. Then came the hysteria over his "indoctrination" of schoolchildren from a harmless speech (two other presidents have done this, with no controversy). All this from a minority of nuts — and their reactionary masters — who nonetheless dominated the television from which most Americans get their "news." This is how we spent our summer. One would never know who won the election last fall.

Think of all we're not discussing. Not even thinking about as a nation.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Is it incompetence or the quiet coup?

It's gonna be a long three-and-a-half years.

When all the autopsies are completed on the Obama administration's early train wreck, all the shoulda-woulda-coulda, this is the most salient point. Whatever eloquence the president musters on Wednesday night, it's over — or almost so. One wonders if the crew in the White House is still so dazzled by the whole West Wing thing that they don't even realize their peril, and hence the nation's peril.

We know a few things. Obama is no FDR. Not only does he lack Roosevelt's deviousness, but he also has no Harry Hopkins, Rex Tugwell, Harold M. Ickes, Adolf Berle, Tommy Corcoran or Raymond Moley. Rahm Emmanuel? Give me a break. He may be a tough guy in the tussle over office space, but he and the president's other advisers have done Obama no favors, much less provided the ideas, toughness and administrative savvy of FDR's Brains Trust and other close aides.

The closer comparisons so far are less flattering. Herbert Hoover — another brilliant,  accomplished, initially beloved public servant who froze in the headlights. and became more detached as crisis progressed. Jimmy Carter — elected in a spirit of hope and revulsion against Republican crimes (literally) who crashed early on the rocks of Congress and never recovered. Obama lacks Carter's insufferable sanctimoniousness, but he has revealed one ruinous similarity: weakness. Successful presidents are never weak.

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Posted inPolitics: National

When August goes

On June 28, 1914, a bumbling gang of assassins failed to kill Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, on his trip to the troubled region of Bosnia-Herzegovina. One disheartened member lingered at a coffee shop in Sarajevo, when up pulled the archduke's automobile. His driver had made a wrong turn. But Gavrilo Princip pulled his pistol and fatally wounded Francis Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie. By August 1st, this tragedy in a small corner of Europe had ignited the First World War. By its end, at least 37 million soldiers and civilians were dead, three empires had been toppled and a fourth had been lethally wounded. In the imposing ossuary on the Verdun battlefield alone, you can look through recessed windows at the remains of 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.

For the rest of the 20th century we lived in the dark shadow of the Great War. The bungled peace of the "war to end all wars" led directly to World War II. Germany's dispatch of Lenin in a sealed train, like a deadly bacillus, back to St. Petersburg brought on the Bolshevik Revolution and eventually a nuclear standoff with the Free World that threatened humanity's extinction. The confidence of the West was forever shattered. Nationalism and tribalism were unleashed, usually with deadly consequences.

It was perhaps fitting, then, that the last British veteran of the Great War, Harry Patch, died on the cusp of August, allowed the gift of years that had been denied so large a portion of his generation. (A common inscription found on the war monuments dotting villages in the U.K: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for their tomorrow, we gave our today.").

Yet the equally fitting verse came from Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in the war: "If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied."

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Posted inPolitics: National

On the edge of Waterloo

Republican South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint says if Obama fails on healthcare, it will "break him"; it will be "his Waterloo." DeMint is right.

Those of a certain age remember the Jeff MacNelly cartoons during the Carter administration. As each day seemingly brought fresh setbacks, MacNelly's cartoon president shrank until he was a mini-me struggling amid the vast space of the presidential chair. Although he lacks Carter's tut-tut lecturing and, so far, foreign policy disasters, although Americans are proud of themselves for electing an African-American president, I sense Obama shrinking every day.

Many of the failures are not his. Obama inherited a nation in greater trouble than at any time since 1933, perhaps 1861. Not for nothing did the Onion have the headline: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." In addition to the financial panic, Obama got two wars, foreign policy in disarray, a huge budget deficit, a government that had attacked civil liberties and enshrined torture as policy. He took over a nation that is in hock to China and the petro-states, that has been deindustrialized and seen its middle class devastated by policies to serve the corporate elite. And a nation ill-prepared for climate change or peak oil — indeed, one digging itself ever deeper in the hole.

He and his party, however, continue to make critical missteps.

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Posted inPolitics: National

A giant leap, then the long fall

Earth_rise Amid the bitter war, in the Age of Aquarius, with fire in the streets, astronauts flew to the moon and stepped onto the trackless dust of the Sea of Tranquility… What's amazing is that I (over)wrote this sentence 20 years ago to mark the Apollo 11 anniversary. Nobody can outdo John Noble Wilford of the New York Times for his historic lede when the event happened: "Men have landed and walked on the moon." But my forgettable column from 1989 is a reminder of how fast time passes, for a man, for a nation.

You either got the space program or you didn't. I was a child of the Space Age, a rocket boy, minutely following every mission: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, as America raced the Soviets to the moon. I had NASA Facts films that the TV studio downtown had given me, sheaves of photos and publicity directly from the space agency, models of every rocket and spacecraft. I watched Neil Armstrong step out that July night in the company of my grandmother, a woman who had been born on the frontier, who had witnessed the invention of the automobile and the airplane — and now she had lived to see this.

It remains one of the most moving moments of my life. I also choke up re-reading about the Apollo 8 mission, with the revolutionary photo Earthrise, when humans first saw their precious blue planet from afar, alone in the vast emptiness of cold space. When the astronauts read from Genesis on Christmas Eve and concluded with, "And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth."

You get it or you don't. But either way, at what a remarkable place we find ourselves 40 years — 40 years! — out.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Signed, sealed, delivered

Remember the Sarah Palin turkey moment? She had gone to "pardon" one bird ahead of Thanksgiving, and then, cluelessly or not, gave an on-camera interview while a slaughterhouse employee fed less fortunate beasts into a machine. Their heads were stuck into a funnel, their throats cut, and their blood drained.

The world is more complex than ever. Economic, social, geopolitical and military situations are full of nuance, contradiction and layers of gray. Still, I don't about you, but I am feeling more and more like one of those turkeys. Most of our necks are in that funnel, and the blood being drained out is the wealth of a whole society.

Where is it going? To ever-higher profit margins demanded by Wall Street. Profit margins that translate into greater wealth for an elite that makes its living off investments rather than wages. To the gamed market that is the world of politically powerful, highly concentrated industries, especially finance. And to tax cuts, the opiate of the duhs and ignos, that have become so deeply ingrained in our local, state and national polities that our society as we knew it is starting to collapse. Who, for example, would have thought 30 years ago that we would reach the point where we couldn't afford to keep Interstate rest areas open? Never mind that "we can't afford" the rail network found in other advanced nations, etc.

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Phoenix 101: Conservatives
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Phoenix 101: Conservatives

Infromal_press_conference_following_a_meeting_between_Congressmen_and_the_President_to_discuss_Watergate_matters
Sen. Barry Goldwater, center, and Rep. John J. Rhodes, right, after the fateful showdown with President Nixon in 1974 when they told him he must resign.

Conservatism wasn't always synonymous with the Kookocracy. The political label has carried different meanings at different times through the state's history.

The Kooks down at the Capitol today would be anathema to the lions of the dawn of modern Arizona conservatism: John J. Rhodes, Paul Fannin and, especially, Barry Goldwater.

What later passed for Arizona conservatives could say, "Barry changed," when the senator criticized the religious right or the ban on gays in the military with his characteristic circumspection. No, he didn't. I had conversations with Rhodes late in his life — the House leader who, along with Goldwater and Republican Sen. Hugh Scott, told Richard Nixon he must resign the presidency. Rhodes was aghast at what the state Republicans had become.

Arizona conservative lions telling a disgraced president of their party it was time to go. Can you imagine John McCain or Jeff Flake showing such independence or integrity?

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Posted inPolitics: National

While you were out

Obama's honeymoon, if it ever really existed — remember, not one House Republican voted for the stimulus — is over. Some have their theories as to the signs behind this turning point, but I have no doubt. It was the return of the Great American Freak Show, in the form of the wall-to-wall news coverage of the death of a song-and-dance man, once gifted, later creepy. If the triple-digit increase in television ratings are any sign, this is what you want from your news media. It is the "national conversation" you crave. Can a missing comely teenage blonde be far behind?

Obama's election gave us a moment of seriousness, to take stock of the troubles bearing down on us and make the urgent and consequential adjustments necessary to address them. Yet it is apparently not to be. Imagine if the outpouring for the song-and-dance man had been applied to universal healthcare or global warming? There would be no hopeless bottleneck in a Congress owned by big business, no Dianne Feinstein saying that criticism about healthcare legislation from the left "doesn't move her." No calling climate change a "hoax." As Paul Krugman pointed out in his Monday column, "The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists
expected…And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise
in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be
considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome
if we continue along our present course."

Our present course, sadly, is to find fresh distractions. If you care to take a moment, however, here's a bit of what you probably missed in the past few days, reported by that hopeless "old media."

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