Posted inPolitics: National

Obama’s world of troubles

One of the most questionable propositions of our political journalism is that President Obama is to blame for trouble in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, the rise of Russian aggressiveness and poor relations with Israel.

The trouble is, I have yet to find anyone questioning it.

One can blame Mr. Obama for many missteps and blunders. Chuck Hagel was a poor choice for Secretary of Defense. The inner circle of the White House probably does micromanage too often, and does so from a blinkered perspective.

Blame the ignorance of Americans and the self-interest of defense contractors for the conceit that we have control of a messy world. We do not.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The new world order

The Republicans are on a roll, or so the conventional wisdom goes. The American public, with the memory of a kicked dog, is ready to re-entrust power to the Party that Wrecked America. It certainly has the eye-candy for horny white male voters, such as the comely-but-stupid Christine O'Donnell and the leggy half-term Gov. Palin. It has billions of dollars thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling on corporate campaign spending (corporations are people, you see, except when they break the law). And it has issues: Gays and Muslims are taking over the country, along with Obama's "socialism" — such as the big giveaway to the for-profit health-care sector, the rescue of the casino on Wall Street and continued funding of the for-profit national security economy. Issues such as that the Constitution is sacrosanct, with its mandated theocracy, that evolution is a "theory" (like gravity) and should not be taught, that stem-cell research is, like all science, of the devil and we should just incinerate all those embryos, that tax cuts and no regulation will solve every ill, that brown people cutting your lawn are the biggest threat to American civilization.

America has become like Arizona: Ignorant, fearful, disconnected from and hostile to the commons, inordinately dependent on gub'ment dollars even as it rails against gub'ment. And, most of all, locked in a clueless feedback loop trying to avoid reality. But the real world moves on.

A new world order is crashing down on us whether we like it or not. And it's not the new world order of Glenn Beck's paranoia or George H.W. Bush's optimistic post-Cold War vision.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Mad hatters at tea

Now the meme is how we must show the "tea-party movement" more respect. After all, it was responsible for Republican Scott Brown's victory, taking a Senate seat held for decades by Democrats. The "liberal media" flagship, The New York Times, carried an analysis that said, "The remarkable Republican victory in Massachusetts demonstrated
convincingly that the deep populist anger fueling the Tea Party
movement has migrated from the political fringe to the mainstream,
forcing both parties to confront how to channel a growing mood of
public resentment to their own ends." Others have talked about the movement's "diverse" elements, and how we shouldn't judge it merely by its loudest advocates. Some liberal talk-radio hosts have urged progressives to co-opt the tea-partiers.

Anyone who has lived in Arizona knows this is nonsense. The tea-baggers are Republicans, not independents. They an ignorant, easily-led rabble that is energized, most of all, by the fact that a black man is president of the United States. Where, for example, was their outrage when George W. Bush was running up the biggest deficit in history? Gathered and ginned up by Fox "News" and talk radio, they are against government — all government. They are against taxes — all taxes. They are animated by all manner of strange fetishes, from President Obama's birth certificate to communist plots lurking in every element of public policy. They love to hate, no matter the large number who are evangelicals. Force is their first resort, whether dealing with the Muslim world or local gun laws. They make "low information" voters seem like Plutarch, with the most recent poll showing large numbers of Republican voters believe Obama is a racist, a socialist, and not an American citizen.

In other words, the tea party is the Kookocracy taken to a national level.

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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 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 inUncategorized

Obama gets aboard high-speed rail

President Obama has pledged $13 billion to begin high-speed rail in America. I don't want to be a cynic and ask, does anyone believe we'll see this in our lifetimes (or at all, as American continues its whacko-driven, debt-laden decline)? I'll say the action is a good start. And the sensibility — actually acknowledging the importance of rail to the 21st century — is first rate.

It's important to note a few essentials to understanding the situation. 1) Rail is essential to a sustainable future, using less fuel and having a smaller negative environmental impact that airlines or freeways. 2) It's essential to improving productivity and competitiveness, as workers and semis are stuck in gridlock, and face steadily rising fuel costs anyway. 3) Modern rail systems are thriving around the world, and China sees this as essential to its leapfrog to world supremacy — note to Americans who don't get out much: We're the country that's behind, far behind. 4) The nation's only passenger rail system, Amtrak, has been starved of funding for years, so it has much catching up to do, just on refitting equipment, etc.

With Obama's plan, the devil will be in the details, of course. Yet we're still not thinking holistically about the issue — and we'd better get our act together toot sweet.

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Posted inUncategorized

ASU, part deux

ASU President Michael Crow has issued an apology for what he calls the "confusion" about the university's apparent decision to not award an honorary degree to President Obama when he delivers the commencement address. Crow also said ASU "is naming and expanding its most important scholarship program" in Obama's honor. The statement reads in part:

“I apologize for the confusion surrounding our invitation to President Obama to address ASU students at commencement,” said ASU President Michael M. Crow. “The entire ASU community has been electrified with excitement since we learned of his participation in our commencement ceremony. We hope that the recent discussion of honorary degrees will not detract from the honor and thrill that ASU – and indeed all of Arizona – is experiencing in anticipation of his visit. I am honored, as are our faculty, staff and students, that President Obama will give his first commencement speech as president of the United States at ASU.” 

You can read the Huffington Post take here, (with some background here) as well as comments. HuffPo and Politico ignited an international firestorm of criticism of ASU when they reported this story earlier this week. The original Rogue post raised indigation among readers — but also hackles in Sparkyville.

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Posted inUncategorized

No class: ASU’s Obama slight

President Obama will give Arizona State University the rare if not unprecedented honor of having a sitting president speak at its commencement. ASU, however, refuses to give Obama the typical recognition accorded such high-powered visitors: an honorary degree. I have searched the "Information Center" in vain for this rather huge story, but it obviously remains a supplicant to the propaganda organs of Tempe Normal. The world knows, however, from stories on Huffington Post and Politico. It's been on national television.

ASU, widely known as "the Desert Ivy," deemed Obama's accomplishments insufficient to merit an honorary degree. That mediocre diploma mill — you've probably never even heard of it — the University of Notre Dame is granting Obama a degree. In reality, perhaps Obama did not attend enough keggers or spend enough time oogling the coeds sunbathing outside the dorms or walking saucily by Hayden Library to qualify.

The more than 3,300 comments from around the world on HuffPo are devastating. Among them: "Arizona State??? Well, that's one way to get your name in the news and raise your admission levels. NOT!!!." "This is the proof African Americans needed to know for certain that
racism is also rooted in the academia of the country's highest
educational institutions." "As ASU alumni I am thoroughly disgusted!…If Lattie Coor were still president –
this more than likely never have happened." "This is an incredible act on the part of ASU. I would love the see the
body of work that the six member honorary committee has produced in
their lives so far. Something tells me it would pale in comparison to
what President Obama has done so far in his life. Shame on you ASU. Why did you invite him if you were going to insult him?" "What an insult to an extremely accomplished US President. Obama has
done more in 2+ months than his predecessor did in 8 years! This does
not surprise me, however. Wasn't AZ one of the last states to recognize
the MLK holiday?"

As to the committee that decided against granting the degree…sure. The faculty at ASU are less powerful than the teachers' lounge at Kenilworth School. Michael Crow runs the joint with an iron hand, and there's some hidden agenda. Perhaps trying to appease the screams of the Kookocracy or wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III that Obama would have been invited in the first place. I wonder if ASU realizes how much damage it has done to itself, and to the state, by this small and pathetic act. As JFK once remarked about Richard Nixon: "No class."

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Posted inUncategorized

A conspiracy of bears?

My economics blog in liberal Seattle has lately attracted a crowd of commenters that would make Phoenix proud. The stock market's decline has nothing to do with the collapse of housing and banking bubbles, with historic levels of debt and all the unwinding of contracts based on leverage, nothing to do with a nation groping against fundamental discontinuity. No, it's Obama's fault. Sure enough, this has become a growing point of attack by the reactionaries, who offer no solutions beyond the failed policies that caused this mess.

But it caused me to think…we have Tim Geitner at Treasury, rather than, say, Joe Stiglitz. We have Larry Summers, and hovering in the background, Bob Rubin, as chief White House economic advisers. Not Robert Reich. Kathleen Sebelius at Health and Human Services, instead of Dr. Howard Dean. Obama insiders rushed to reassure the idiot David Brooks that "they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see
themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy
that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an
ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution…"

This may be smart centrist politics. It will be completely inadequate to address the crises before us. Yet it may also mean that Obama realizes that the government was long ago taken over by, let's say a community of interests, that is fundamentally opposed to reform. Does this group have the capacity to bring him into line by collapsing the stock market — naked short-selling it — until he yells "uncle"?

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Posted inPolitics: National

Why tax cuts won’t stim this time

At the moment, tax cuts make up 42 percent of the so-called stimulus bill. This dooms it to be ineffectual, if not actually making things worse. The latter will happen because this is all borrowed money. Public investments provide the means to repay it by improving commerce and productivity. Tax cuts just piss it away. Where are the fighting liberals who are going to filibuster this mess and make the president realize his bipartisanship dance has only reinvigorated the Republicans, the party that wrecked America?

In 2003, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman laid out the exhaustive case against the cult of tax cuts, in a must-read, must-keep article in the New York Times Magazine. Yet this remains the only idea of the GOP, the party that wrecked America. And it has been given center stage by a naive president and weak Democrats who don't know how to act as winners. As a consequence, public investments in infrastructure, the best way to generate jobs and a return for the future, have been pared back. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But this is a rotten bill, and it is the enemy of the good, whether the punked good has realized yet or not.

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Posted inPolitics: National

So much for the honeymoon

I keep telling myself that the woozy feeling that the Obama administration is already failing is mainly due to the 24-hour news cycle. We get to see the sausage-making in real time. And the sudden ubiquity of Republicans all over the corporate media, despite the public's rejection of their failed ideas. I keep telling myself all this.

Still, some worries. If Rahm Emmanuel is so incredibly effective as Obama's right-hand, he has yet to show it. The so-called stimulus is bogged down and deeply flawed. One cabinet nominee after another is tripped by tax or conflict-of-interest problems. It's nice that Obama admitted a mistake, but he has yet to focus, in simple, Reaganesque language what he wants and use it to go over the head of an obstructionist Congress.

Why am I not comforted that a group of "moderate" senators is trying to cut $100 billion of "fat" — the media's term — from the stimulus? In this supposed lard is mass transit funding desperately needed for systems that are already cutting back — hurting the working poor the hardest. Transit and rail are my markers for real change, and given stable funding they would provide jobs paying family wages that couldn't be sent overseas. Fat? How about South Carolina's unremarked interstate to nowhere?

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Posted inUncategorized

The real risks of the stimulus

Renegade — the president's secret service code name — is pushing hard for "his" stimulus bill as it reaches the House floor today. What's in is? That's difficult to tell as the horse-trading continues, and as Obama tries to rope in at least some Republican support. FDR and the Democratic Congress in 1933 simply steamrolled the Republicans who demanded balanced budgets and reactionary policies — but never mind. In the end, this will be a package crafted not only by 535 lawmakers, but countless lobbyists and staff. My biggest fear is that it will not be a renegade stimulus — transformative and focused on the future.

Let me count the ways:

1. Tax cuts in the current environment won't provide help. U.S. tax rates and dodges are already generally at lows not seen since the Coolidge years. Obama promised a working-class tax cut. Fine. He's bowed to Grassley to provide more alternative-minimum tax relief. OK. But these should be different bills. They're not stimulative. Individuals will squirrel away their checks or use them to pay down credit-card debt. Corporations are already paying nothing in many cases. As for "investors and risk-takers" — the Bush years demonstrated that tax cuts on investments merely fuel speculation while encouraging job-killing mergers and offshoring. Not for nothing did wages stagnate during those halcyon years. Perhaps worst of all, it continues the destructive "tax cut" entitlement mindset that Americans can get something for nothing.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The dog ate his tax returns?

I can't help but point out with satisfaction that the pilot who perfectly glided the stricken US Airways plane into the Hudson, saving all aboard, is one of those experienced Baby Boomers who has spent a lifetime perfecting his skills, doing something real and productive, rather than pushing financial swindles. He's also a union member. These are the people our economy can't dump fast enough. And we wonder why America is in trouble.

Then there's Timothy F. Geithner, President-elect Obama's choice to be the next Treasury secretary. I've been uncomfortable with Geithner since his selection, chiefly because he has been president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the mother ship of the Fed, since 2003. This means he was in a position of significant influence as the financial portion of the Great Disruption was emerging. He apparently raised no alarms or did anything to stop the outright fraud running like a river of manure on Wall Street. He has been, as the New York Times put it, "a central player" in the $750 billion financial bailout. So he was a co-pilot who ditched the financial system, but unfortunately it keeps taking on water and the casualty toll is mounting.

Then there's the wee little problem with his taxes.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The house of cards falls down

When experts and commentators talk about the "crisis of confidence" or "crisis of trust" in the markets, it can be read in different ways. One: it’s a nice way of saying, a la Phil Gramm, the recession is in our heads and if we just had some confidence happy days could return. Two, confidence and trust in the system have collapsed for reasons, including bankers not lending because they know companies will fail, and people in general no longer trusting the economic "House that Ronald Reagan (and Phil Gramm) Built."

It is most decidedly the latter. If nothing else, the Great Disruption we are now experiencing should discredit the "free market" theories that led us to this pass. We shall see. When the Depression hit, the world was awash with alternatives to capitalism, most of them bad, but also with an engaged electorate and a middle class that read. Now we have video games and social networking sites. The igno-geeks must be truly baffled as their future vanishes, even though they kill at Grand Theft Auto version whatever.

Where’s Cheney? As I write, George W. Bush is preparing to make another pitiful "statement" as markets plummet around the world. The veep is nowhere to be seen, running things as he did in Iraq. Perhaps he is preparing his defense fund, or place in a country with no extradition agreement. Meanwhile, Paulson and Bernanke are in change. Yet they represent the wisdom of the old order that is in crisis. They can’t fully comprehend what is happening, for it so goes against all their learned learning, all their orthodoxies. The Age of Greenspan is over.

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