‘The party of ideas’
Posted inPolitics: National

‘The party of ideas’

1024px-CPVI_for_115th_Congress
Here's something that baffles me about this moment. The right-wing captured Republican Party has complete control over Congress and the White House, as well as growing numbers of federal judges. Damage abounds. But based on their rhetoric and the desire of their voters…

…Why not enact a new version of the Immigration Act of 1924? This was a backlash against decades of record immigration and set strict quotas on people allowed to come, based on their country of origin (hint: big plus for whites, but also no restrictions on Latin Americans). These were in place until 1965 and, uncomfortably for liberals, coincided with the zenith of the American middle class. Congress, firmly in Republican hands and facing no presidential veto, has the absolute power to do this.

…Abolish the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Again, the Republicans have the complete power to do this. None of these entities existed in 1960, when America was "great." Devolve the responsibilities to the states.

…Repeal the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. It's a longstanding article of faith among conservatives that these are both unconstitutional and bad for the economy. Poof! Gone. Strict interpretation of Article 10 would allow states to impose environmental laws — or try to, facing right-wing federal judges — but it's not something enumerated in the Constitution for the national government.

Republicans, never more in lock-step with the most extreme agenda of their party, could do this. It could avoid the third rail of Social Security. True, it can't outlaw abortion (and birth control), force prayer into public schools, or reverse the gains of LGBTQ people. But the above would be monumental victories, on the order of the New Deal, Great Society, or Trump's beloved Jackson era. They might last only two years — but maybe not, given GOP control of the Census, gerrymandering, vote suppression, and divisions among the Democrats.The GOP couldn't accomplish these sweeping changes under Reagan (when it branded itself as "the party of ideas") or George W. Bush. Now it could.

Yet it didn't. This is fascinating.

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Still Nixon to kick around
Posted inPolitics: National

Still Nixon to kick around

Richard_Nixon_HS_YearbookI was listening to a Fresh Air podcast the other day when the guest said that President Richard Nixon, elected as a conservative Republican, declared a federal "war on cancer" in 1971 with seed money of $100 million for research ($580 million in today's dollars). It started the trajectory that now has cancer-research funding at $4.8 billion.

That snippet reminded me that Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency and enthusiastically signed the Clear Air Act. He supported the Clean Water Act but vetoed the version Congress sent him based on cost (the veto was overridden). The similarly groundbreaking Marine Mammal Protection Act — also supported by Nixon and it became law in 1972.

These things happened not because Nixon was the prisoner of a Democratic majority in Congress — the Democrats were often divided and in those days Republicans had liberals, centrists and conservatives — but because he believed in them or thought they made good politics. He also largely funded LBJ's Great Society, albeit some cloaked in the rhetoric of his "New Federalism."

Nixon was no tax cutter. Instead, he instituted revenue sharing with states and cities, putting federal funds behind his conservative principle that they could use the money more efficiently. He proposed a federal health-care program that foreshadowed in many ways Obamacare, as well as a form of guaranteed income for all. Amtrak saved passenger trains, albeit imperfectly, on Nixon's watch.

For decades, Richard Nixon has been the devil to the left. But the left isn't politically relevant anymore (Jerry Ford Republicanism is what passes for "the left" in today's broken political spectrum). What's more consequential is that Nixon is now the devil to the right, which is more powerful than ever. So in the public square today, we are relitigating not Watergate but the domestic achievements of Tricky Dick.

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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 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

Dangerous party animals

Dear God, I wish America had a real two-party system. As it is, the Republicans have been reduced to a regional gaggle of angry white guys. They're opposed to everything but tax cuts and — now that their profligate former president is gone — government spending. One of their most prominent governors hinted that Texas ought to secede. I wish we could let them go, confiscating North Dakota's nukes on the way out. And given the Great Disruption that is only beginning, national breakup is not out of the question. But the reality is that what's left of the Republican Party are welfare queen states such as Arizona and Mississippi that need the federal Treasury even as they curse it.

The damage from the Republican crackup goes beyond the latest laff riot on Fox "News" or even the bottleneck in the Senate. I think about Seattle, where Democrats have been in charge for years, often with bumbling results. It would be nice to have a real opposition party that would provide meaningful competition. One-party polities are never healthy. But the Republicans can't be trusted because in power, even those who claim independent thought almost invariably become janizaries of the extreme right and its bankrupt policies.

Think about Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Big Finance). Wouldn't it be nice to have a Prescott Bush-style Republican to take him on (Bush defeated Dodd's father for the senate seat Connecticut in the 1950s)? Such a Republican wouldn't be focused on defunding Amtrak, denying global warming and voting in lockstep with the extreme right. We would have an alternative — perhaps as much a creature of big money, perhaps not. But competition that would keep everyone more honest.

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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 inPolitics: National

The Republicans look to magic

Much has been made of the candidate for Republican National chairman, Chip Saltsman, circulating a CD with the song, "Barack the Magic Negro": maybe it's racist, it's certainly bad taste. But most of all it's a sign that a party that has become a largely Southern/rural Western regional party has no inclination to change. Today, Paul Krugman writes about the larger collapse of the Southern Strategy and how Republicans still haven't realized the magnitude of their failure.

I'm fascinated by what we might call The Strange Case of Mark Sanford. The South Carolina governor was prepared to let 77,000 of his fellow citizens go without (meager) unemployment benefits, refusing to ask for $146 million in assistance from the federal government. He finally relented, with only hours to spare, under pressure from citizens, politicians and those still-important newspapers. This case tells us more about the prevailing Republican mindset than Saltsman's song.

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Posted inPhoenix

The Kookocracy gets its moment

Now 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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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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Posted inPolitics: National

Behind the talk of Republican reinvention

We hear much talk now about the Republican Party trying to reinvent itself, fixing its "brand," facing an "identity crisis" or entering a period of internecine war. I'm skeptical about all this. We knew where the Republicans were coming from in the primaries, with a phalanx of middle-aged, rich white guys as candidates. All they had to offer was the same discredited mantra of tax cuts, theocracy and fear, with perhaps the exception of the entertaining libertarian Ron Paul. John McCain emerged as the perfect vessel for this exhausted, intellectually bankrupt yet madly power-hungry political party.

In the wake of a crushing defeat, several bigwigs are meeting at the Virginia estate of Brent Bozell, including "prominent conservatives" such as Grover Norquist — he of the lust to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub — and the religious extremist Tony Perkins. Same old, same old. The reality is that the Republicans have been reduced to a Southern white regional party, with some appeal in Southernized white rural areas elsewhere and the rural white libertarian West. This was brought home in a remarkable map in the New York Times, showing party gains in 2008 vs. 2004.

It's not just that the party's limited bag of ideas have been shown to hold frauds, and has finally been soundly rejected by the public. It's not just that the politics of hysteria and hate don't work now. This is a party totally out of step with the country, which is more diverse and urbanized than ever — even suburban voters recognized their essentially urban issues this time — and becoming more so in the future. This is a party whose ruling creeds are incapable of dealing with a complex modern society or the multi-layered challenges of the 21st century. And whose hidden creeds — policy crafted to ensure a plutocracy — were exposed in the financial crisis.

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Posted inUncategorized

The morning after

As one reader said last night, "Glad you were wrong." Thank God, America appears to have at last repudiated the poisonous, destructive politics of the past. A ban on gay marriage in California may be the last hurrah, for awhile, for the "values voters" who never seem to have social justice or equality as a value. Minnesota: How could the land of Humphrey even come close to re-electing Norm Coleman? Arizona: So typical, so sad.

But good news abounds. Democrats increased their seats in Congress, unusual in a cycle after winning control. High-speed rail appears headed for a decisive victory in California, as well as big wins for transit projects in Northern and Southern California and Seattle. Elizabeth Dole, a onetime moderate Republican who allowed herself to be yoked to the most despicable extremist campaigning was thrown out. The once proud Republican Party finds itself reduced to a regional redoubt in the white South and the libertarian and Southernized parts of the country. And we have President-elect Obama. Thank God.

Now the hard work begins. Rather than discuss the policies needed for the new administration, let's begin with a more fundamental, foundational task. After years of distractions about gays, "the real America," red states vs. blue, color-coded terror threat levels, the right to bring guns in bars, socialism, blah-blah-blah, we must begin the difficult task of returning to the reality-based world.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Who to blame

So Alan Greenspan is shocked, shocked that gambling was going on in the casino that he and his fellow radicals made of the capital markets. In his testimony before Congress Thursday, he talked about how stunned he was that the markets weren’t self-regulating, that speculation and greed led to this disaster, which he likened to a “once in a century” financial tsunami.

But this is no act of God. The ongoing financial collapse is the direct result of the deregulation, trade, privatization and tax policies enacted by Alan Greenspan and the other rigid ideologues of the Republican Party over the past quarter of a century. The longtime Fed chairman is a disciple of the author Ayn Rand, whose advocacy of a brutal individualism has been turned into a devil-take-the-hindmost reality that would make Atlas blush.

It’s important for the American voter to understand this. The collapse of their savings, the deferment of their retirement dreams, the loss of their homes, the decline in their earnings, the elimination of their jobs – all has been the result of very conscious policies. They were promised an "ownership society," but, as Barack Obama said, the reality is that most Americans are on their own.

If Americans understand this, the election will not be in doubt. And, God willing, the calamity will discredit this extremist philosophy, just as happened in 1932, for decades to come. For this orthodox ideological extremism is every bit as bankrupt and failed as all its false prophet predecessors. Alan Greenspan and company, including former Sen. Phil Gramm, the great – and greatly compensated by the banking industry – deregulator and economic guru to wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, are the most dangerous of men: true believers.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Don’t get depressed — Get mad

Here’s my advice to Obama supporters: Turn off the television. Put away the depression. Get mad and get active. The race is far from over unless there has already been a stealth coup in this country — a subject for a future column. The Republicans are the party that wrecked America — and McCain and Palin are Republican to the core. They’re counting on Americans to be stupid and easily manipulated. Obama is counting on us to be smarter than that, to be Americans, a people who once were never "easily led" by demagogues.

I don’t trust the corporate media, especially the electronic kind. I don’t trust the polls. They are trying to game the outcome. The "economic royalists," to use FDR’s term, were never going to give up power easily — nor was the military industrial complex. I never doubted that the conservative base would come "home" eventually, or that this would be a close election. And there’s the elephant in the room: will enough white Americans vote for a black man?

It’s interesting to recall that, unlike many other democratic countries, America once had two mass parties. Republicans and Democrats had liberal and conservative wings. In 1936, for example, Gov. Alf Landon was a liberal Republican challenging FDR, and might have made a race of it had not his campaign been co-opted by the reactionaries in the GOP.

Now only one mass party remains: the Democrats.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The strange media romance with John McCain

Breaking up is hard to do, particularly with a lover you’ve idealized to the point of pathology. So what if the reality is as jarring, even dangerous, odds with the ideal? So it is with the mainsteam media and John McCain.

We were treated to this once again in the Sunday New York Times. A front page story described how this "maverick," "insurgent," "one of the most disruptive figures in his party" and "rebel" is now trying to be a standard-bearer who can unite his party. There was mention of his "volcanic" blowups, but in an admiring way.

On the op-ed page, Nicholas Kristof writes, "Even for those of us who shudder at many of John McCain’s positions,
there is something refreshing about a man who wins so many votes
despite a major political shortcoming: he is abysmal at pandering."

Such is the scary fog of McCain worship that envelops even smart people writing for the best newspaper in America. The reality is quite different.

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