Posted inUncategorized

Alan Greenspan: He did it his way

Alan Greenspan is worried about his reputation and is trying to set the record straight in an interview with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. I was prepared to be sympathetic after reading this quote:

"I was praised for things I didn’t do," Mr. Greenspan said during one
of three interviews at his sun-drenched office in downtown Washington,
D.C. "I am now being blamed for things that I didn’t do."

But then the reporter tells us that the former Federal Reserve chairman "doesn’t regret a single decision." This makes my bullshit detector go off. How could any thinking person live a full life, especially one at the pinnacle of international leadership, and say with a straight face they have no regrets. Even Frank Sinatra had a few.

Greenspan wants us to draw the correct lessons from his tenure and the current market disaster, so that we don’t implement the wrong policies. But what if the wrong policies are the very ones implemented on Mr. Greenspan’s watch?

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Posted inPolitics: National

A war against truth in the Iraq hearings

I wonder why news organizations are even covering, much less hyping, the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus before Congress this week. We know nothing will change. President Bush will do as he pleases. He has shown the president to be above the law on torture, eavesdropping of American citizens, environmental policy, etc. Why should the president be above common sense?

All three presidential candidates will be among the members of Congress questioning Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. This, too, will be entirely predictable. McCain, why is slyly trying to conflate Sunni and Shia extremists for a gullible public, will proclaim that the escalation ("surge") is a success. Obama and Clinton will try to look presidential and tough without alienating the anti-war elements of their party.

Nothing will change until we have a new president and more Democrats in Congress. The only question is whether anyone has the guts to level with the American people about what the change will be.

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Posted inPhoenix

The center of the, er, recession

Many days the Arizona Republic reads like a bad real-estate supplement to the National Lampoon, but today is especially priceless. The editorial proclaims Glendale as "center of the Valley."

Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. And Glendale has quite a group gathering. It includes far more than ever-loyal football fans drawn to University
of Phoenix Stadium to watch the Arizona Cardinals fight for a win. It’s more than hockey fans or screaming concert-goers drawn to Jobing.com Arena. It’s more than the baseball fans who will certainly flock to Glendale’s
spring-training complex near Loop 101 and Camelback Road next spring.

I compressed the dodo short paragraphs and will cut the reminder for the sake of your gag reflex, but you get the idea. It talks about the developers and real estate ventures and concludes, "Wow." I am sure the Pulitzer judges are already taking note.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Congress and big oil: junkies blaming the pusher man

Maybe it was inevitable, with the closing of the frontier and the amassing of so much wealth, with the death of history teaching in schools and the idiocy inducing drug of television. Maybe it was inevitable with all this and more that America would become a nation of whining children.

Fresh evidence comes today with the theater of oil executives being called before "outraged" members of Congress to defend their obscene profits at a time when gasoline profits are so high. As the Washington Post reports:

Lawmakers seeking a way to deal with rising concern among motorists
took aim at the oil companies and the record profits they registered
last year amid record oil prices "I believe the laws of supply and demand when it comes to oil and gas are broken and completely malfunctioning," said Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.).

I hate to break it to the distinguished gentleman from the Constitution State, but the laws of supply and demand are functioning perfectly well.

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Posted inPolitics: National

‘Support the troops.’ What does that mean?

One of the most fascinating changes in my lifetime has been the militarization of America. It’s not just the rise of the national security state with the Cold War, extended vastly by the so-called war on terror. It’s not just the Military-Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned against, where profits drive policy, often to disastrous ends. It’s not even the necessary burdens of being a superpower, or, if we’re not careful, an imperial power.

It’s the whole "support the troops" religion that has grown up. In fact, Americans were historically suspicious of a large standing army. Support the troops? Newly commissioned, young U.S. Grant was heckled and ridiculed when he came home from West Point. It made him forever shy away from gaudy uniforms. World War II was fought by citizen-soldiers who wanted to get the job done and come home. Architects of the post-war world sought collective security with diplomacy and strength. Americans had been oppressed by a king with hired troops. They knew from ancient history that permanently militarized republics eventually became centralized tyrannies.

Do we even think about these things as we "support the troops"?

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Posted inPolitics: National

Is it already over for Obama, II?

From today’s New York Times, a story that adds ammo to my skepticism that Obama can win. The headline: "Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal be a Unifier." Imagine a similar question about McCain: Can a conservative be a unifier? The historical record says no, but set that aside for a moment. The supposedly liberal media continue not only to give McCain a free ride, but to buy into the destructive narrative about "liberals" and "conservatives."

The Times writes:

To achieve the change the country wants, he (Obama) says, “we need a leader
who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and
bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things
done.”

But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can
such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was,
by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?

Also,
and more immediately, if Mr. Obama wins the Democratic nomination, how
will his promise of a new and less polarized type of politics fare
against the Republican attacks that since the 1980s have portrayed
Democrats as far out of step with the country’s values?

So are we to believe that breaking the military in endless wars of choice, installing a theocracy of ‘family values’ intolerance, ignoring global warming, wrecking the constitutional separation of powers and whittling away the middle class in favor of a corporate elite are "in step with the country’s values"? God help us if they are.

 

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Posted inUncategorized

The time bomb ticking in American portfolios

Once again people with 401(k)s are getting hammered by the stock market. The Dow may be up one day, down the next and up yet another day, but it’s been a bad year for most people’s portfolios. As Congress talks about long overdue regulation of Wall Street, you can bet that the artifice of 401(k)s won’t be on the table.

That’s too bad, because America is headed for a wave of impoverished baby boomers. It may not be a big one, because many will inherit the wealth of their parents. But each succeeding generation will be a little poorer. There may be more wealthy, too, but the majority will see declining living standards. It’s all so Gilded Age. And few have thought through the consequences.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Is it already over for Obama?

For everyone who was stirred and moved by Barack Obama’s inspiring and intelligent speech this week — one of the finest of my lifetime  — I have bad news. He will not be the next president. He may not even be the Democratic nominee. I pray and hope that I’m wrong. But the evidence is not good.

Why? Maybe it will be because, as Matt Bai pointed out in the New York Times Magazine, Obama only wins urban areas with concentrated black voters and states with few blacks — not enough for an electoral majority. He loses in the critical places with real (segregated) diversity, such as Ohio:

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other
races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually
makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.
The growing counties an hour’s drive from Cleveland and St. Louis are
filled with white voters whose parents fled the industrial cities of
their youth before a wave of African-Americans and for whom social
friction and economic competition, especially in an age of declining
opportunity, are as much a part of daily life as traffic and mortgage
payments.

Maybe it will be because Hillary Clinton has shown she will destroy the party rather than lose the nomination. Maybe it will be because Obama is such a threat to the community of interests that wants things to stay as they are (no need for conspiracy theories).

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Posted inPolitics: National

Five years that changed America, whether we know it or not

After five years of war in Iraq, we know a few things. None of them gives us much comfort for the future.

We know that, contrary to President Bush after 9/11 (used as a false pretense for waging war in Iraq), that everything did not change. That was certainly true on the home front. For the first time in American history, taxes were cut as the nation went to war. Most Americans were asked to make no sacrifices at all — indeed, we were told to "consume" more (imagine that admonition from FDR). Americans continued the unthinking choices that helped lead to the mess in the Middle East, chiefly driving ever longer distances in automobiles. Televised and electronic distractions continued and even increased. Many Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack. The media unthinkingly report on "al Queda" in Iraq, although it is a separate group of insurgents that emerged as a result of the invasion. Most Americans, it seems, have "moved on."

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Posted inUncategorized

Blond coed hooker Wall Street destroys economy

“How are you supposed to know? Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death…and destruction.”

These are the lines Linda Hamilton speaks in Terminator 2. Change a few words and she could be speaking of the current financial disaster. Now it’s out of control. Make no mistake: the extraordinary steps by the Federal Reserve in the past few days, including a Sunday night fire sale of Bear Sterns and an interest rate cut, are being taken out of fear.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Class, power and downtown development

Back when I was a college right-winger (and in those days we were few and had no pretty girls), I wrote fierce papers demonstrating the murderous fraud that was Karl Marx. A professor gently cautioned me that even if I disagreed with Marx, he offered another way of "seeing through history." He was right, of course. Marx's ideas led to some of the most bloody deeds in history. But his emphasis on class (and this was not original to him) is indeed useful.

I think about this as I watch downtown revivals and their failures. A city such as Seattle preserved most of its core buildings, many businesses and the downtown evolved organically and with all sorts of people. Phoenix and Charlotte, on the other hand, clear-cut most of their downtowns and started from scratch. If you arrived in Phoenix after 1980, you'd think the downtown was always vacant lots, government buildings and a few towers. Of course, Phoenix had a thriving downtown into the 1960s. Charlotte was similar.

Their results have been vastly different. But the class and power undertones are unmistakable and they have shaped the fate of each downtown and city.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Blond coed hooker admiral stands up against war with Iran

If only Admiral William Fallon had been involved with a $5,500 call girl named Kristen, or maybe had murdered a blond coed…

I don’t say this to libel this honorable man, but only to make the point about what it might take to get the attention of the addled, coddled, willfully ignorant American people about the really important things that are happening in the world. These thing will affect them far more than the hookers or coeds, or the "local news" that dominates their corporate-owned newspapers.

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Posted inPolitics: National

When we say NAFTA, what do we really mean?

NAFTA figured heavily into the Democratic primary in Ohio, yet most of the news coverage and the debates themselves proved unsatisfying. We were served the canard that NAFTA helps consumers but hurt manufacturing jobs. NPR made it sound as if the trade agreement’s consequences are ancient history. The Democrats were more muted on NAFTA in Texas, where Laredo has boomed as a trade port.

Of course, NAFTA is a proxy for trade liberalization and globalization. China has hurt Ohio manufacturing more than Mexico. So, too, have the domestic automakers, undergirding the state economy, that continue to make boring, homely cars that fewer Americans want to buy.

But the real issue goes deeper even than that, and any fixes will be problematic. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make them.

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