Rogue Columnist

Newspapers and democracy

I confess: I'm tired of arguing about newspapers. In my city, one of the most literate in America, there's still a numb feeling from the loss of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Rocky Mountain News is barely cold in the ground. Thousands of skilled journalists are unemployed and perhaps can never regain their former living standards. The suicide of the industry has little to do with what the dumb-downers and consultants claim. All the enemies we made over the years can dance on our graves. But the issue is pretty well settled. Some newspapers will remain in some form. But the era of great newspapering is over.

So comes Jack Shafer's latest rattle-the-cage piece on Slate, "It's Time to Kill the Idea that Newspapers are Essential for Democracy." Shafer claims he likes newspapers, but...the Republic did fine for its first 100 years without investigative journalism, most people don't care whether newspapers survive, many newspapers did mediocre work and even the best journalism rarely kept government honest for long. Also, "political parties, special interests, and government itself all have a stake in the maintenance of elections and democracy."

Arizona's mysterious jobless rate

Why is Arizona's unemployment rate relatively low? The national rate in February was 8.1 percent, while Arizona's rate was 7.4 percent. This was 2.9 percentage points higher than in the same month last year, but well below California's 4.3 jump (to 10.5 percent) or Washington's 3.7 increase (to 8.4 percent).

This was the question that the Arizona Republic political columnist Robert Robb claimed to set out to answer in a recent column. I tend not to pay attention to Robb because he pretty much always says the same thing: status quo good, government bad, etc. Robb, the only editorial columnist for the paper, is not a journalist and came out of the "Goldwater" Institute and right-wing/growth machine political world. So one knows where he's coming from.

Not surprisingly, he uses this question to set up a straw-man. He disputes the notion that Arizona is too dependent on real estate, asserts that the state has "a fundamentally solid underlying economy," and deplores "various advocates of various dubious schemes to 'diversify' Arizona's economy." (A graceful stylist, no). So that's it. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Has Obama already sold out?

The stock market is a leading indicator. I fear the recent "Obama rally" (such as it is) is telling us that the president has made peace with the financial barons that brought us to the abyss. He will throw crumbs to average Americans while shoveling trillions into the corrupt system so thoroughly outed by Matt Taibbi's essential-reading article in Rolling Stone. The barons, through their henchmen Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, have assured Obama that they can right the system and have average Americans back on their feet (i.e., create another bubble). The coup of the economic royalists -- they really more resemble Third World kleptocrats than the moguls who opposed FDR -- may have happened long ago. And Obama has no choice but to go along.

Or so he may think. Meanwhile, the cheap rage over AIG seems to be abating. But where's the rage over FedEx threatening to cancel a big order from Boeing if its workers are more easily allowed to join a union? Where's the outrage over Arlen Specter's defection on the Employee Free Choice Act -- dooming it -- because he fears an ultra-reactionary primary opponent? The disconnect between unions and the majority of working Americans continues. Neither labor nor liberal Democrats can find the compelling language to reach them, or to take the debate from the sterile ground it has occupied for years. And how to match the huge war chests of a corporate American that wants its workers cheap, pliable and hating organized labor?

Thus, the average duh and igno can bluster against AIG while watching Fox News, listening to right-wing talk radio and blaming government for his falling living standard. Probably the majority of Americans are just too baffled by the discontinuity facing them, too emotionally limited to look for more than "optimism," however illusory and temporary, and too into their distracting material worlds, to realize the stakes and act. At the moment, Obama and the Dow comfort them. Now, gotta pick up the kids from their play date.

The apocalyptics

Readers have asked me what I think of the school of writers The New Yorker has dubbed "the dystopians." There is no shortage of slap-in-the-face reality on this blog, so you can decide whether I am one of them. Chief among them is James Howard Kunstler. Another is the Russian emigre Dmitry Orlov. In the magazine, Ben McGrath writes:

Thomas Malthus first lent rational philosophy to the apocalyptic inklings of religious prophets with his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” in 1798, and secular doom booms have tended to coincide with periods of political upheaval or economic breakdown ever since. The Malthusian movement has expanded with time into a kind of peaknik diaspora. Peak oil and peak carbon (i.e., global warming) are the heaviest. The bank and auto industry bailouts have thrust a new concern to the front: peak dollars...

Malthus was wrong in his time, of course. Kunstler, on the other hand, has proven remarkably prescient in the here-and-now.

Breaking the greed compact

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Sound familiar? Those were Franklin Roosevelt's famous speech in 1936, where he also said, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred." In reality, FDR always had to backtrack to keep from antagonizing capital too much. On the other hand, he led a nation in the 1930s that was on the verge of repudiating capitalism for what then seemed viable alternatives of fascism or communism.

Early 21st century America is reveling in easy populist anger over bonuses paid out to the very AIG executives who did so much to collapse the economy. But I wonder if they have Roosevelt's understanding of these "old enemies of peace"? And what will they do about it? If things really change, it will be because Wall Street did something far worse than break the social compact. It broke the greed compact.

Central Phoenix: Good, bad, ugly

Because I know the fragile self-esteem of Phoenicians is at stake, let me begin my observations about the state of the center city with the good stuff. I smelled the orange blossoms -- even stepping out into one of ugliest urban spaces anywhere, the pedestrian loading zone at Sky Harbor. Many of the Midwestern transplants dislike the scent, which makes me dislike some of them even more. But this small, fleeting thing reminds me of my often magical city that is gone forever.

Some of the projects begun under former Mayor Skip Rimsza and spearheaded by people like former Deputy City Manager Sheryl Sculley, retired Deputy City Manager Jack Tevlin and Ed Zuercher, now a deputy city manager, have turned out quite well. As I wrote before, the starter light-rail line is great. Now lots of places are clamoring for LRT; the trick will be to avoid using light rail when commuter rail would be more efficient. A metro area the size of Phoenix needs both. The Convention Center is such a startlingly attractive set of buildings that you wonder if the design was approved by mistake, given Phoenix's ability to erect such ugliness. The ASU downtown campus, Mayor Gordon's signature accomplishment, is more of a reality, and thus will be more difficult for the Legislature to destroy. The lovely oasis of Arizona Center remains, shady and cool.

Read on if you want to know "the rest of the story," as the late Paul Harvey would say.

Will AIG be Obama's Bay of Pigs?

The scandal over $165 million in retention bonuses paid to AIG executives goes beyond the rhetoric of cheap populism -- including among Republicans who steadfastly deregulated the financial sector, defended outrageous executive compensation and thought the Greenspan-driven housing-derivatives bubble was just dandy. I know this much: It is the biggest test yet for President Obama. Will it be his Bay of Pigs?

The bonuses are being paid out to "retain" executives at the Financial Products Unit at AIG that nearly brought the world economy to collapse -- leading the U.S. government to pump in so much taxpayer money to rescue AIG that we own 80 percent of it. These executives who created the house of cards of credit-default swaps are now government employees, for all intents and purposes. If only our teachers were paid so well. And "retain"? The teenagers working in the AIG mail room would be more prudent than these Masters of the Universe. But the government claims it has little ability to stop the payments. Contracts must be honored, don't you know.

How Arizona can feel good

Random observations from my trip to Arizona:

'Zonies, particularly Phoenicians and the Real Estate Industrial Complex, are always after cheap praise. "Make the community feel good about itself," as the diktat from the Arizona Republic to its "information center" goes. This is usually a license for boosterish fraud and an extended holiday from reality. Real accomplishment must be earned. I saw some of that on display.

    * This past weekend's inaugural Tucson Festival of Books was a wonder. Sponsored by the Arizona Daily Star (what a concept: a newspaper supporting reading and printed media) and the University of Arizona, it was the first big-time book festival to happen in the state. The crowds were large and enthusiastic (people even came to see me speak and sign books). Big-name authors came from around the country. What was most amazing was the cohesive community support behind the event, from the array of corporate and philanthropic sponsors to the army of smiling volunteers. Tucson took its best-practices from the world-class Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and gave the state something magical. It's also important: a community push to improve literacy in a county where one out of five residents is functionally illiterate. Eat your heart out Phoenix.

Phoenix and Mesa dementia

As the Great Disruption rolls across the globe, changing everything, Arizona slips ever deeper into unreality. And that's saying something. Mesa's notoriously anti-everything voters approved -- by 84 percent -- using tax incentives to lure what the Republic calls "two massive upscale resort projects." Meanwhile, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon is due to "outline an ambitious strategy to make Phoenix the first carbon-neutral city - and the greenest - in the entire country." And what will the strategy, to be unveiled in today's State of the City speech, include? Providing bicycle rentals. Installing solar panels on city buildings. "Developing Phoenix's canal system for recreation and business use similar to the Tempe Town Lake area."

Where to begin? What's most remarkable is how Arizona is willfully ignoring three mortal perils: water, global warming and the rising possibility that it could have one of the world's failed states on its southern border. Oh, the relatively lesser perils remain as well: the growing underclass, the horrible schools, linear slums, income inequality, inadequate infrastructure, serious environmental damage and the health consequences that follow, etc. There's little realization that the props that held up the old growth machine are gone, done, over. I know: Let's build "two massive upscale resort projects!"

At the interchange

In the arresting prologue to his book, The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. describes America on the day of the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- an economy nearly shut down, people starving, machine-gun nests around Washington, opinion-makers taking of the need for dictatorship, capitalism given up as dead, even the March sky dark and foreboding. Pace today's revisionists such as Amity Shlaes, FDR indeed restored confidence and began an economic recovery that was only tripped up when he reverted to his instinctive desire to balance the budget and back away from stimulus. If it makes them feel better, many of the New Deal's successes built off the programs first established by Herbert Hoover, the often unfairly maligned onetime progressive. Yet those policies had not been pushed with the energy or scale demanded by FDR.

Many liberals and progressives want to see the current economic phase of the Great Disruption as a Depression-like opportunity. Meanwhile, conservatives such as Ms. Shlaes -- and the reactionary thugs who consider even Social Security, as they would phrase it, SOCIALISM!! -- use the Depression and New Deal as a foil. The reactionaries back then wanted to raise taxes to balance the budget. Otherwise, today's right is little changed intellectually from its predecessors.

And yet as I watch us move along the leading edge of history every day, I doubt many of the Depression analogies. We are not yet, most of us, on our backs. We have lost a huge amount of wealth -- more than we realize, when one factors in the 25 years of destructive mergers, deindustrialization, deunionization and unwise trade deals. The floodwaters intrude on our peripheral vision -- a friend laid off, a "depressing" news story. Otherwise, life goes on. American Idol goes on. A new release of Grand Theft Auto. Watchmen brings to the screen "the greatest graphic novel of all time" (was Sad Sack a graphic novel?). Talk radio continues to stir up the faithful. We are entertained, distracted, agitated, yet sleepwalking. Hoping for the next bubble. The next "Flip this House" casino economy moment. We don't realize how gone it all is, gone with the wind.

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"?

Vox Kookuli

This is too good to leave to Kookocracy Watch (and too long). If you want a sense of the heart of the Arizona polity, check out the first comment on the Republic's story about Gov. Jan Brewer's call for budget reform. In response, "ToddStallion1" writes:

This is so pathetic.
These people are doing everything they can to keep robbing Arizonans while the average person is struggling to make ends meet.
For my entire life all I have ever heard is government claim that it was making investments.
Give us money, we will invest in roads, in healthcare, in education BLAH BLAH BLAH
WHEN IS THE RETURN ON THIS INVESTMENT?
Never.
Government does not create anything. All it does is take and redistribute (poorly).
The People who live in Arizona are the driving force behind the economy and the states growth.
BUT now we need to make more investments!
If these people are my investment advisors I WANT A REFUND.

I am not making this up. And why do they always write in CAPITAL LETTERS? Now that I don't have to get death threats from the thugs and job threats from the Real Estate Industrial Complex, reading this stuff is a Laff Riot. Yo, Stallion (little insecurity, there?) -- I suspect even if you didn't attend "government schools," you barrel down freeways and streets paid for by taxes. You drink water that wouldn't be there without government. These are among the returns on "this investment." Good Lord. We know 20-30 percent of undereducated Americans, indoctrinated by talk radio, actually believe this stuff. But probably 60-70 percent of Arizonans who actually vote believe it. Amazing. This is why it's so important that the Kooks actually govern, actually put their "ideas," into broad government policy, with no "moderates" to get in the way. Ideas, as they love to say, have consequences.

Arizona: Deeper into the Kook zone

The Kookocracy continues not to disappoint. Their draconian cutbacks mean that new state archives building will be closed less than two weeks after being dedicated. State parks have, or are on the way to being, closed -- with no provisions being made to protect these priceless sites from looters. Meanwhile, the Kooks are rushing a bill through the Legislature that would bar Arizona from participating in the Western Climate Initiative -- a mild but promising effort by states to begin curbing greenhouse gases.

This is what you get when you don't vote. This is what you get when you have an ineffective opposition party, which made few noticeable gains in local and legislative offices during the reign of Saint Janet. This is what you get when the party of Lincoln, TR, Eisenhower -- even of Coolidge, Hoover, Reagan and George H.W. Bush is taken over by a nihilistic bunch of extremists. They want a radical individualistic law of the jungle, where the strong rule and profit, and devil (or Arpaio) take the hindmost.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg -- the press in the state has been suffering its own draconian cutbacks, and fear of crossing the right-wing thugs by reporting on their activities.

Useful idiots

After seeing a bit of the Conservative Political Action Conference on CSPAN, I've concluded that the only thing Democrats have to fear is Democrats themselves. Admittedly a big fear, that, but CPAC was almost a parody of how out of touch, out of ideas and full of hate "conservatives" have become (the one exception being, perhaps, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman). It would be a parody if these activists didn't still have the power to make mischief.

Watching Rush Limbaugh's keynote address was particularly arresting. A man who once marketed his own line of neckties, stood at the podium in an outfit that looked like a bathrobe, rambling on like an over-the-hill Third World dictator to the cheers of the true believers still down in the bunker. Of course, he wants Obama to fail -- nevermind the damage to the country. How else can reactionary politics rise again? It will require Obama's failure -- or decades of faded memory as to what the Republicans did to bring on the worst calamity in decades.

I was actually vaguely sad. I listened to Rush in the early years. He was funny. His blowhard personality held a wink of self-parody. The songs made me laugh. He often took listeners to an intellectual plane -- albeit a right-wing one -- that has remained missing from all the Rush copycats down through the years. When I've tuned-in in recent years, most of those redeeming characteristics are gone, especially the humor.