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

Oh, yeah? Well, your mama’s a socialist!

With all the screams of "socialism" by the McCain camp, a thoughtful electorate might shake its heads and move on, or perhaps use this as a teaching moment. I have yet to believe we have such an electorate, but who knows?

If you are of a certain age, when history was still taught in American schools, you know that socialists believed that the "means of production" should be owned by the people, not by private interests. Railroads, mines, utilities, banks, insurers — it's a very 19th and early 20th century concept (unless you're the Bush administration and Hank Paulson). Real socialism also never took hold in America, not even in the Great Depression. For one thing, it was co-opted by the Progressives and the New Deal. Socialists weren't communists. The two detested each other.

Europe saw the evolution of social democracy, which combined a large welfare state and activist government with democratic freedoms — this is pretty much the governing model in much of the EU today. In America, you could probably fit all the true socialists into a mid-sized tavern or faculty lounge.

No, when wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III and his running mate, the unqualified and dangerous Sarah Palin, yell that Obama is a "socialist," they're not giving a history lesson. They're engaging in soft McCarthyism.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

John McCain: He’ll always have Phoenix

Fifty-nine percent. That's the lead in Arizona for wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, according to the Rasmussen poll. It's perhaps all you need to know about today's Arizona, already a burden on federal taxpayers and likely to become a disastrous drag on the nation in the decades ahead.

A casual viewer might think this is a tremendous vote of confidence for McCain, as "these are the voters who know him best." In fact, they are the voters who likely know him least — with some exceptions I'll get to in a moment. McCain has rarely been a presence in his "home state." He rarely rises from his self-anointed position of national leadership to address an issue facing Arizona, unless it is to thunder "no!" As Arizona has changed and urbanized, as its economy has become more backward and it has skidded along on the bottom of almost every scale of social well-being, as its needs have ballooned — McCain has done nothing.

For most of these 59 percent, McCain is a television and talk-radio presence. They are the right-wing faithful and "low information voters" who came to Arizona to escape "socialism" — i.e., any obligations to society. Because of the sacrifices of real Arizonans and their leaders who came before McCain — and vast amounts of federal money ("socialism"), they get to unthinkingly live in an air-conditioned, water-abundant (or so it seems), wide-freeway, flood controlled "resort." It would not exist if earlier Arizonans had followed the prescriptions of McCain and the rest of the Republican delegation — but this is deeper thinking than we can expect. In this transient place, most know nothing of its history or critical issues.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Can candidate Hoover fool us again?

John Sidney McCain III said today "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," sounding exactly like Herbert Hoover after the crash of 1929. The parallels are interesting. Republican policies largely caused the Great Depression. Hoover had done honorable and even miraculous work before the presidency (feeding World War I refugees). He was a progressive Republican but became a reactionary. The biggest similarity, besides "the fundamentals" lines, is that the world had passed both men by. The world had become too complex for their remedies or policies. They were/are overwhelmed. Except Hoover didn’t have Karl Rove, "the base" (which interestingly translates in Arabic as al Queda) and so many ignorant, easily led voters.

On the other hand, maybe the key word in McCain’s statement is "our" economy. As in the economy represented by his rich friends and supporters, the nationless corporate oligarchy and his Treasury secretary-to-be, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (also prime architect of banking and Wall Street deregulation). He of the "nation of whiners" and "mental recession." For them, the winners at a time when income inequality is worse than anytime since before the crash of ’29, the economy is strong. So maybe unlike his campaign of late, McCain actually spoke the truth.

The recession that’s all in our heads claimed two of the most powerful and influential investment banks in the world over the weekend. Anybody who claims to tell you what will happen next — much less that the worst has passed — is about as reliable as all those telephone mortgage chislers during the housing bubble. What is more clear is how it happened, and, perhaps, some of the ramifications.

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