Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Nihilism triumphant

"And for you Democrats looking for some silver lining…I got nothing" — Election-night tweet

Well, that was over in a flash. Our liberal, even socialist-curious, president. Our far-left Congress. And perhaps they reached too far, too fast. After all, President Obama chose as his top economic advisers Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, as well as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. Inheriting the bank bailout from George W. Bush, he imposed a stringent windfall profits tax on Wall Street which he used to help foreclosed house-owners. Wall Street felt the iron hand of liberalism, with a new Glass-Steagall, big enough to even turn the shadow banking system from speculation into investing in job-creating productive industries. Mr. Obama's Attorney General perp walked dozens of leading banksters. And the stimulus: Instead of wasting it in tax cuts, as some advocated, it was more than $1 trillion aimed at cutting-edge infrastructure, including rebuilding our passenger train system and high-speed rail, not being thrown away on highways. Where did the money come from for this socialist reign of terror? Higher taxes on the richest, making corporations actually pay taxes, and winding down the vast national security/empire economy. We were well on our way to retrofitting suburbia for a high-cost energy future, addressing climate change, moving away from foreign oil. And in doing so, creating millions of high-paid jobs. And many union ones, for these ruthless bastards immediately pushed through the Employee Free Choice Act. No wonder, the forces of reaction reacted…

Of course none of that happened. The quick lessons of the election: 1) When an ignorant, afraid electorate, seeing its living standards fall, must choose between bought-off Republican-lite Dems and real bought-off Republicans, they will choose the latter. 2) Except for the bluest states and most farcical candidates, money buys elections and the liberals can't outspend what John Judis calls "the party of reactionary insurrection." 3) The quiet coup has been completed. 4) The Democratic Party may not be dead, but it should be. 5) Most voters have no memory of a government that works well and fights for average people, and that bodes ill for liberalism. 6) Did it matter that the president is black? To many Americans, it did, and negatively. 7) Arizona is toast.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The president and the general

Mindful of the saying that a bitching soldier is a happy soldier, I'm hard-pressed to join in the oft hysterical condemnation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for said bitching by him and his staff in the Rolling Stone article. Many on what passes for the "left" today, having seen that President Obama is neither Lincoln nor FDR, now want him to be Harry Truman and enjoy a MacArthur moment. They forget, or don't know, that Truman's dismissal of the five-star general from command in the Korean War helped make him the most unpopular modern president — before George W. Bush, that is. In addition, Truman had served as an artillery captain in World War I and had little use for top military brass, particularly one with MacArthur's temperament and the intolerable situation in which the general had placed Truman. MacArthur wasn't trash-talking Truman but disobeying direct orders. As Truman said, "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the
President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch,
although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it
was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."

I even admire McChrystal on a certain level. Historically, America often had political senior officers in peacetime, ones good at keeping their civilian masters happy and maintaining the status quo — even if it meant, say, ignoring the meaning of air power or the tank. In wartime, which was not a continuous national endeavor at one time, the political officers were shunted aside for the fighting officers. McChrystal is plainly one of the latter. But what about the Tillman cover-up and the prisoner abuse that happened under his command? Worse, much worse, happened in World War II, the "good war." This is why William Tecumseh Sherman's full quotation should always be at our national shoulder: "I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all
moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the
shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for
vengeance, for desolation. War is hell." These may seem like different times, when our forces are being asked to do impossible tasks driven by incoherent policies. But the brutality of the enterprise remains the same, and its coarsening effect on a democracy, as feared by Woodrow Wilson, is as potent as ever.

Maybe McChrystal's self-immolation in the Stone was a subliminal desire to get the hell out of this chickenshit unit.

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Posted inPolitics: National

And that’s the way it is

I wondered if Barack Obama became a one-term president with his astonishingly vapid Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster. But maybe Mr. Obama has the pulse of the nation better than any of us who wanted real change and the fierce urgency of now. It was grotesquely ironic that a few days after offering the usual presidential platitudes about the need to wean ourselves off oil, he was in Columbus, Ohio, touting his stimulus by dedicating work on a road expansion. It was, he said, the 10,000th road project that the stim has funded.

Around the nation the transit systems that had been dramatically expanding ridership as gasoline prices rose are now starving from state and local fiscal crises. Amtrak, despite the vice-president's supposed love of it, remains a shadow of the passenger rail system it succeeded and a political pawn awaiting further cutbacks and the demand that it "pay for itself." This even though no major transportation network pays for itself, certainly not roads. And this despite evidence that road projects don't even have much of a positive effect on unemployment. High-speed rail? It's being studied, even though other advanced and ambitious nations already have systems and are expanding them. Cincinnati, a lovely central city that has been devastated by freeways and sprawl, can't even
muster the civic sanity to fund a streetcar line. America will continue its dependency on roads and cars — something far beyond our competitors in Europe or China. Why? Because that's the way it it.

We care about the poor birds and fish being killed by the oil spill. But not enough to give up our cars. We live magical thinking: That technology will simply replace the inexpensive light sweet crude that powered the automotive age. Rather like the technology that was supposed to allow BP to drill miles down into the earth to extract the remaining crude in the Gulf of Mexico. Electric cars will be expensive and require minerals from places other than America — many of them unstable — as well as demanding electricity from power plants that will be run on…what? Fossil fuels most likely. Beyond that, the dreams become loopy. Space aliens are not going to drop by and give us magical hydrogen cars. Tar sands are not going to yield inexpensive gasoline. Few seem to understand that the fossil fuel "imputs" into most alternative fuels are greater than the new energy produced; many also have nasty environmental or other unintended consequences. Nowhere is this more true than with any alternative to the big oil hog: automobiles.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Difficult days ahead

Despite all the progressive wishing away, the election of a doctrinaire right-wing Republican to Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat is a calamity and a sign of calamities to come. The implications are national and international. Yes, Martha Coakley was a weak candidate who ran an inept campaign. Sure, the economy is bad and the party in power always suffers. And, yeah, the Obama and progressive voters stayed home in large numbers (this is to be comforting?). Meanwhile, the White House, said to be "blindsided" and "in disarray," seems to have interpreted the special election as an excuse to tack even more to "the center," i.e. the right.

We've got difficult days ahead.

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had failed in his first term: failed to enact meaningful legislation to immediately address the suffering of Americans and bring some fair play back to the republic; failed to take on, with relish, the "economic royalists"; failed to connect, in a visceral way, with Americans suffering from the Great Depression; failed to be wiley, cagey, downright dishonest in pursuit of his goals; failed to surround himself with a cadre of brilliant, independent, highly competent lieutenants, and failed to be willing to experiment with almost anything but a continuation of the Republican policies that had caused the Depression. Communism was popular, fascism perhaps even more so thanks to the seeming success and popularity of Mussolini. It was especially potent in the hands of populist demagogue Huey Long. The forces of reaction, although in disarray, still commanded great wealth and also had fascist sympathies. "Dictatorship" was a good word at the time.

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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

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

America becalmed

For all the vigor projected by our appealing president, America sits strangely stuck. Healthcare reform seems all but dead. Even the whateverthehellitmeans "public option" is struggling. Tom Daschle, who proved such a formidable leader for the Democrats during the onset of the Bush calamity, is urging President Obama to drop it. There just aren't the votes in the Senate. Indeed, the Democrats seem in a dead run to lose the next election, which would be a certainty if a credible opposition party existed.

It's easy for the senators to be complacent. They are deep in the pockets of the healthcare and insurance industries. The wife of Sen. Chris Dodd earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock grants serving on the boards of Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cardiome Pharma Corp., Brookdale Senior Living, and Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals. And Dodd is one of the good guys? Daschle has his own conflicts. The for-profit medical and insurance industries, along with the U.S. Chamber and assorted business lobbyists can bring hundreds of millions of dollars to bear to maintain the status quo. The only people who think this is a good idea are the diminishing ranks of Americans who have good insurance. The suffering and fear of everyone else has no political power. Meanwhile, the media hype the costs of single-payer (ignoring that America pays twice as much for its system as any advanced nation) and the alleged horror stories of rationing abroad. Can you believe this trick is working?

The same Democrats who won a historic election are struggling to enact the mildest of measures to limit greenhouse gases, even as the government issues a historic assessment of the consequences we are already seeing and will see from climate change. The Southwest can kiss its ass goodbye. So can the Southeast, including the exurban office "park" where the rat bastards at NCR are moving, stabbing Dayton, Ohio, in the back.

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Posted inPolitics: National

No we can’t?

Spring runs out and the American republic celebrates its societal strength and political will by regulating tobacco. That'll show the tobacco companies, long past their period of influence, and the diminishing ranks of smokers, primarily made up of the poor and disenfranchised.

Meanwhile, 10 big banks have begun repaying their bailout money to the taxpayers. Their primary reason is not to do the right thing or return to the business of funding productive enterprise. It is to gain the freedom to jack up the compensation of their 25 top executives. Like the Bourbons, the big bankers have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Unlike Big Tobacco, they not only retain their political clout — defeating an effort to regulate dangerous derivatives — but seem to largely run the federal government.

The consequences of this are manifold. The institutions that were "too big to fail" should have taught us that they are too big to exist. Instead, they have grown even larger. The secrecy of the Bush administration that led us into the Iraq fiasco has become the secrecy of the Geithner-Summers-Bernanke administration. We have only the tiniest sense of where the trillions in bailout money and "lending facilities" went, or who scratched the back of whom. We know, for example, that tax money went to help AIG repay Goldman Sachs which repaid…? You get the picture. Meanwhile, real unemployment is at least 16 percent, and millions may never regain their old earning power. Some may never be employable again outside of Wal-Mart.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Secession — A good idea this time

The Republic is beset by many distractions: Dick Cheney running madly in the midair of potential war crimes prosecution, a la Wile E Coyote; cowardly Democratic Senators bowing to tales of Osama's boys living on welfare in Oklahoma City, watching for those "green shoots" that mean we can go back to business as usual.

I don't put the Texas secession dustup in that category. We should take it seriously. We should even look on it favorably.

Note that President Obama doesn't seem to dwell on Lincoln any longer — the Lincoln who said that if he failed, he would be the last president of the United States. Obama's judicious mind has persuaded him that the crisis that seemed to engulf the nation last fall was overstated. He has been enveloped in the protective visions of his moneymen, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and, behind them, Bob Rubin. The Obama administration will be Clinton 2.0, without Bill's missteps and with the magnificent oratory — as was done yesterday in the glow of the Constitution — that makes one proud to be an American.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Say you want a revolution?

One of the greatest dangers to peace lies in the economic pressure to which people find themselves subjected.

–Calvin Coolidge

You can't handle the truth!

— Jack Nicholson

The honorary Page One Editor of Rogue Columnist and I have been in a friendly argument of late over when, or whether, the riots will begin. He sees sooner than later, as people are faced with the worst economic crisis in 80 years — perhaps in the history of the nation. Things will not turn around soon, and may well get much worse. And having worked around the world in some miserable and boiling hot-spots, he offers observations that should be discounted at one's peril. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski echoed this on MSNBC's Morning Joe, saying, "Hell, there could be even riots" as the unemployed take aim at the rich bastards that caused the calamity and are still doing fine.

I've tended to say later or never — the nation is too narcoticized by American Idol, Grand Theft Auto, endless driving, limitless digital distractions, the deadening civic isolation of suburbia. Human nature is unchanging but Americans have changed. They have become easily led. Short-changed of an education in history, civics and the humanities, too many Americans are just plugged into the matrix, sucking Wal-Mart subsistence, waiting for their next cog assignment.

Now, I'm not so sure.

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Posted inPolitics: National

So let us begin anew

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death… Yet sometimes grace bestows a tomorrow of soaring magic and hope, and so it will be with the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday. Whether it began with his moving rhetoric or much of America's desire to simply be rid of George W. Bush, Obama has captivated this nation. The vast majority of people believe in him and, if polling is right, are willing to give him time to fix the disasters produced by the past eight years.

Just to have a president who can speak well and intelligently, who reads books and newspapers, who seems to have an interior life, calm center and an open mind, who's smart, who won't embarrass us in the world. A man who is willing to change his mind when the facts change. Just these things will mean much. America will no longer use torture as an instrument of national policy. Science will come center stage in guiding policy. Diplomacy will once again be worthy of a great power. This president's Christianity will be made manifest through humility and witness, not as a creepy "God talks to me in the Oval office" or as tactic of division and inciting the mob. This constitutional scholar will know about separation of church and state and separation of powers. His vice president will be a vice president. Just these things will be healing tectonic shifts from the scoundrel time we have endured. I, for one, will see the flag raised and hear the national anthem with tears of renewed pride rather than sorrow.

So you can stop reading here. Or come back after the inauguration and read further. Otherwise, we must brace ourselves for the extremely difficult work that will follow tomorrow.

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Posted inUncategorized

Selling out on mass transit?

The "all hands on deck" moment for the Obama administration is emerging now. Ironically, as the president-elect and VP-elect "Amtrak Joe" begin their rail journey from Philadelphia to Washington, it's…
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Posted inPolitics: National

A stimulus mistake?

Much of the details of the new stimulus have yet to be known. What's emerging so far is cause for concern. For one thing, the $300 billion in tax cuts may be smart politics, but it's questionable economics and policy. Then there's the issue of how federal dollars might be used to prime the pump, with so much going to backfill basic programs being defunded by cash-strapped states, and lobbyists of the powerful highway-sprawl consortium lining up for the "roads and bridges" money.

George W. Bush and eight years of Republican misrule — really more than a quarter century — are leaving the new administration with the worst mess in nearly 80 years. And remember, all this was validated over and over by a majority of Americans at the polls (maybe not in 2000 and 2004). It's an open question whether any president can lead the changes really necessary to address the Great Disruption, of which the economic collapse is only part. We'll see. But the barriers to real change we can believe in are mammoth.

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Posted inUncategorized

Worse than the Great Depression?

It'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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