'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
1The rich are finally afraid. You can see it in their eyes. They're laying off their nannies. The smart ones are fleeing into Treasury notes, even though the yield is zero. According to the New York Times,
Perhaps. But it might, just might, jolt Americans back to reality. That means an economy based on producing things of real value. And a re-valuation of business, which in this country means a re-evaluation of our very lives. It won't be easy, perhaps not even likely, because the dead hand of the past rests oh-so-heavy on everything we do. If it happened, however, it might just save us.
6Now Janet Napolitano heads to Washington, leaving not much of a legacy in Arizona, despite what the Sewing Circle cult of personality would have us believe. She was a victim of her native caution and the unwillingness to take on issue No. 1 (land use and all its permutations, including sprawl and water) — to do otherwise would have caused the Real Estate Industrial Complex to destroy her ambitions. Michael Lacey has some further trenchant thoughts on immigration policy and deals with devils. But the biggest reason for Napolitano's failure is simply that the Legislature is by far the most powerful branch of government (the second being the media-ignored Corporation Commission). And the Legislature is dominated by kooks.
Now they will have one of their own as Secretary of State Jan Brewer ascends to the governorship. This is change I can believe in. Brewer is a member of the Kookocracy, having politicized the office charged with the integrity of elections. Except for Attorney General Terry Goddard, Arizona will now have an all-Kookocracy leadership. And I say, go for it. I want no Jane Hull-like temporizing or moments of sanity from Gov. Brewer. I want her to lead Arizona into the brave future that the minority who actually votes has consistently demanded.
This is the state where the most popular politician is Joe Arpiao, the civil-liberties-optional sheriff of Maricopa County. The state where Andrew Peyton Thomas won a resounding re-election as Maricopa County Attorney. Both have waged a thuggish war on the poor, underclass and minorities in the guise of "fighting illegal immigration." Funny, I have yet to see a big construction mogul or developer do a perp walk for hiring them by the hundreds.
It's time for Arizona to get the government it deserves.
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No CommentsIt's widely acknowledged by economists, and supported by mounting evidence, that we're in for the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. This is not "negative news" the media are inventing, dear positive-thinkers. It is simply reality. Yet it won't be as bad as the Depression, right?
For months, I have been giving a qualified "no" to that question. First, because the safety nets of the New Deal and Great Society, although badly frayed by Republican misgovernance, are still in place. Second, Americans are more affluent — we don't have a third of the nation "ill clad, ill-fed and ill-housed" and millions lacking even electricity. My "no" was qualified because expert opinion got us into this mess and will continue to hold sway — watch as the proteges of Robert Rubin steer the Obama economic plan. Experts were flummoxed by the Great Depression and in many cases carried out policies that made it worse. Expertise is only useful when it grows, as when a man demanded to know why Keynes had changed his view on an issue. Keynes responded: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
Now, however, I am starting to wonder about my reassurances. Friday's report that 533,000 jobs were lost in November alone, signaling that the pace of unemployment is accelerating fast, was a kick in the teeth. Could this recession turn into a depression to rival, or surpass, the 1930s?
It is possible.
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No CommentsA reader asks, "how come you have not weighed in on the Gannett bloodbath that is going on with the layoffs all across the board? The Republic, as a big fish, should be pretty hard hit…I know there is no love lost there, on your part, but it is your hometown and your hometown paper and you still are friends with some of the folks there. Anyway, just curious."
I don't know many specifics, but the outcome will be bad. According to Gannett Blog, it is part of the largest mass layoff in newspaper history. The paper has been quietly cutting staff for two years, and the losses have been heavily centered on the most experienced journalists. In other words, the institutional knowledge and highest journalistic skills have been slashed. It's as if Microsoft fired its leading sources of intellectual capital. The result is predictable: a further erosion of the newspaper industry, whose journalism is a practice so vital to the health of the nation that it is enshrined in the Constitution.
I worked for the nation's largest "newspaper" company twice. Once as business editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer and then as a columnist at the Arizona Republic. In general, I was treated fairly, although this was certainly not the case with many employees. I was allowed to commit real journalism, although in both cases after a few years this was made impossible, and so I moved on. I learned a few things, chiefly that Gannett is not really a newspaper company. Yet it will be remembered as the company that destroyed newspapers.
23Everybody seems to have a take on the fatal door-busters sale at Wal-Mart on the first day of holiday shopping, giving a grim meaning to the retail jargon Black Friday (there was also the less-noticed Toys 'R' Us shootout). Here's mine:
Who lines up at 5 in the morning to mob a store, much less waiting all night for the honor, as apparently was the case at the suburban New York mall where the Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death? Apparently they are the same people who required police to be called for crowd control at 3 a.m. And the same people who stomped the victim and walked on, and are now being sought by police. According to the New York Times:
Indeed it was. "Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and
trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him." Mr. Damour was a temporary worker, failing to enjoy even the niggardly "benefits" and wages that Wally's real employees get. Wal-Mart has been criticized for security so poor that a mob could stampede and kill a 270-pound man. What kind of company allows this to happen?
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5This week's Phoenix Laff Riot comes from the Arizona Republic, in a story headlined "Striving to be Green:
The Valley is lashed in national surveys for its poor air quality,
derided for its urban sprawl and mocked for its searing temperatures
and growing heat island.
But, despite these challenges, city boosters, business owners,
environmentalists and academics all say Phoenix has a unique
opportunity to become truly sustainable. They also say the Valley could squander that opportunity if it fails
to make smart decisions now about growth, open spaces, wildlife and the
economy.
Later in the story is the kind of cliche sentence editors wouldn't allow, if only they weren't in endless meetings and trying to put together graphics and assorted crap: "But only time will tell if the Valley can pull it off."
I hate to break the news, but time has told and "the Valley" can't pull it off.
7Whatever its complicated and ambivalent historical roots, the ideal of Thanksgiving is offering gratitude for the grace of our creator, if you swing that way, or at the very least to others who came together to create even a moment of common purpose and bounty. It's about looking outside ourselves.
The problem of American holidays being ever more commercialized is old. But over the past decade, maybe longer, something else has overtaken us. We've gone from a nation with hucksters to being a nation of hucksters. Suffice it to say that this was not the great commercial republic that Hamilton had in mind. In God We Trust? No. Always Be Selling.
I thought of this as I read a Washington Post piece on how banking regulators were not actually regulating the industry, but rather acting as an advocate for it. Yes, ideology and its handmaiden deregulation are to blame for the financial catastrophe. But so is the perverse mutation of American optimism just as the economy became driven more and more by financial swindles.
8Let the excuses begin.
The New York Times leads off:
The Washington Post weighs in:
Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like. "A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
said last week. "We need a business model based on cars of the future,
and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric
car."
But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision
for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part
of a "sustainable U.S. auto industry" that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.
That's
because car manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce
hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them.
Expect to hear more in the coming days and months. We will see a potentially debilitating alignment of old thinking and old, yet still politically powerful, economic interests. If it succeeds, the country will face much worse pain in the years ahead.
1I feel the need to come to the defense of Herbert Hoover, if for no other reason than this fundamental misreading of history will only set us up for costly mistakes in the future. The left long has labeled George W. Bush "President Hoover" for presiding over a historic economic crisis. Now the meme has been picked up by the right, as well.
Yet to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, President Bush, you're no Herbert Hoover. Among the differences: Hoover (1874-1964) was a self-made man, who worked his way through the new Stanford University, made a fortune as a brilliant engineer, then gained international acclaim for coordinating relief for refugees in World War I. Although a Republican, Hoover came from the party's Theodore Roosevelt progressive wing. He was mistrusted by Calvin Coolidge, and for good reason. Hoover wanted to move away from the rapacious capitalism of the 1920s to an ethic that embraced the common good and the obligations of business to society. He was a product of his time of scientific and engineering wonders: The Great Engineer, who could bring pragmatic, fact-based solutions to governing.
Unfortunately, Hoover was elected in 1929, not 1912 — the era in which his worldview had been shaped. After the great crash and with the gathering depression, Hoover was overwhelmed. His administration launched the greatest expansion of government intervention in the economy up to that point, including programs and ideas that would live on in the New Deal. Yet it did little good as unemployment reached a staggering 25 percent and Americans were forced into shantytowns they called Hoovervilles.
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