July Naysayer newsletter

July 6, 4:55 PMDenver City Hall ExaminerLisa Jones

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Phil Goodstein publishes The Naysayer newsletter each month. He has agreed to let me post it here. Phil is Denver's most prolific historian, with more than a dozen books to his credit ranging from local ghost stories to in-depth studies of crime and scandal. He offers unique walking tours of the city.

By Phil Goodstein

Naysayer of the Month

During the reign of RTD general manager Cal Marsella, the city’s bus system has gotten worse. Often there is but coincidence between schedules and when buses actually run. Riders have been forced to make inconvenient transfers to serve the gods of light rail. The latter system was sold at an artificially low price. It has done anything but abate congestion and get people out of their cars. All the while, fares have soared while the system talks about tax hikes to pay for its incredibly expensive light rail plans. Amidst this, Marsella has jumped ship for a private transit venture that aims to feast on RTD privatization. The latter is a Republican scheme, fully supported by the Democrats in charge of the legislature, to bust unions and hike total costs of public services by giving private firms a share of the public business. Marsella’s departure comes amidst controversy over his ever escalating salary and performance bonuses. In the process, RTD has shown it can operate just like a Wall Street company: arrogant and irresponsible while it rewards failure. For having the wit to see this and bailing out, Marsella is the Naysayer of the Month.

Ritter and the Labor Fakers

Instead of fighting for those who have to sell their labor power to survive, trade unions are a feeble auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Time and again, they have mobilized their members for supporters of the corporate establishment. In response, the Democrats have scorned workers. Federico Peña and Wellington Webb, for example, called the police against union organizers. Generally, the farther a labor dispute was from the Mile High City, the more intense were their devotions of support of workers.

Like a masochist who loves the one who beats her, the worse the Democrats have treated unions, the more the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class have lined up behind that party of Wall Street. Colorado unions were in the vanguard of transforming Bill Ritter, the city’s reactionary district attorney, into the state’s governor. He immediately rewarded his "friends" by vetoing a mild amendment of the state’s viciously anti-worker Labor Peace Act. Despite this, labor continued to work with Ritter and associates. In 2008, rather than mobilizing workers to fight a corporate offensive through sweeping ballot initiatives aimed at checking the giveaways and special deals received by the commonwealth's most powerful capitalists, labor junked its opportunity for independent political action by allying with the Chamber of Commerce! This was a clear message to Ritter that he was dealing with a bunch of milquetoast weasels without backbone or vision. Not surprisingly, he has again wielded his veto pen against favored reforms labor helped push through the legislature.

Having sold its soul to the Democrats, labor has no place to turn politically. The more it has made itself into a tool of the Democrats, the more it has destroyed efforts at independent worker political and industrial action. The labor fakers have always been far more intent at censoring criticism of the Democrats than in providing alternatives to the likes of Ritter. Given their past record, their bluster is meaningless. When push comes to shove, they will invariably capitulate.

The labor leaders defend their dead-end tactics by explaining that the likes of Michael Bennet, Roy Romer, and Bill Ritter are "lesser evils" to the Republicans. In the process, they fail to recognize what they have just admitted: that their candidates are evil. What is more, as illustrated by the Ritter vetoes, they have lost by playing the establishment’s game. In the process, their electoral tactics nurture cynicism and future defeat.

Opposed to the labor Democrats, the business Democrats have a stranglehold on the party. Led by the likes of Norm Brownstein and Steve Farber, they have been blunt: either the Democrats nominate corporate candidates or the moneyed-class will do its all to defeat the Democrats. Appropriately, the Brownstein Democrats were in the vanguard of pushing through the coronation of Barack Obama at the Denver convention of the Democrats, a police-state affair that was a prelude to the president’s emergence as Bush III.

Labor has been in the vanguard of Democratic dupes who are desperately trying to convince themselves that Obama is anything but a continuation of the previous administration. The president’s liberal champions especially heralded his appointment of Hilda Solis as secretary of labor. The latter responded by making veteran Denver political hack and insider, Katherine Archuleta, her chief of staff, a woman who has been in the forefront of city hall giveaways to business since the days of Federico Peña.

The unions’ failure is not surprising. Instead of realizing that as long as the government is committed to advancing the interests of the capitalist class the workers will suffer, labor fakers muffle radical voices while denouncing socialism. After World War II, led by the likes of Walter Reuther, they convinced themselves that capitalism had achieved permanent affluence and stability. Consequently, rather than pushing for a society that honored the contributions of all people and rewarded them as human beings, it accepted the capitalist ethic that profits are everything—they simply wanted a share of the booty. In the process, the worse capitalism has become, the more workers have lost. Until unions recognize they have made a hideously wrong turn, they will continue to jolt from failure to failure, sprinkled with illusions that they have succeeded by putting men like Bill Ritter into office.

Planning Bad Zoning

The city claims it is in a deep financial crisis. To save money, it has ordered workers to take furloughs while it talks about drastically hiking fines and fees. Simultaneously, it is wasting immense sums on the planning office's new zoning code. As is typical of the administration and the city planning establishment, the justifications for the program are hot air combined with self-infatuated make-believe. Such planning initiatives are continually necessary because past planning programs have failed to deliver as promised. For that matter, had previous planning panaceas for airports and convention centers delivered what backers insisted they would, the city would not be facing financial shortfalls.

The current zoning code is a Byzantine set of exceptions to the rules. It reflects that the code the planners sold the community in the 1950s never worked ideally. No zoning program has ever achieved the results planners have insisted it would deliver. Far from seeking to create a community for people, planners have endlessly sought to serve the business establishment while seeing themselves as masterful puppeteers manipulating life around them. The city’s department of community planning and development has been especially marked by its ignorance, incompetence, and arrogance. At times, it appears more to invent facts to suit its nostrums than actually studying the community it claims to serve.

So it is with the proposed zoning code. Far from permitting a free public input into this effort, it has engulfed the effort in secrecy. The usual suspects have been involved with it, citizen volunteers who readily rubber stamp whatever the administration wishes. Otherwise, the planning office has claimed that its draft code is secret. Apparently, the planners have something to hide.

Typical is the way planning director Peter Park, an import from Milwaukee, insists that a new zoning code is necessary to accentuate pedestrian-friendly developments. As usual, rhetoric is miles removed from reality. In recent years, especially during Park’s tenure, the city has allowed numerous developments which make walking in the city far worse. Instead of being public rights-of-way on which pedestrians can easily and safely make their way, sidewalks have increasingly become obstacle courses with numerous barriers. The city has allowed restaurants to fence off sidewalks for private dining areas. In the process, pedestrians encounter clouds of deadly second-hand tobacco smoke. Council recently authorized merchants to place signs in the middle of sidewalks. (When he was a saloon owner, Mayor John Hickenlooper's establishments were notorious for blocking sidewalks with then illegal signs.) New buildings, instead of having setbacks from the street, have been built right next to them with cramped sidewalk areas.

Far from seeing this and redressing these horrid developments, the planners have launched Denver Living Streets, a program which it insists will make streets more pedestrian friendly. Those behind it have been completely blind to the increasing blockades the city has placed in the way of those trying to make their way around the metropolis on two feet. The obnoxious moralism behind Denver Living Streets is apropos. The new zoning code will no more solve the problems of urban living and bad design than the pedestrian measure will address obstacles to safe walking: both systematically ignore causes and their effects.

Nor is either effort needed. A basic enforcement of existing statutes would redress many of the most blatant problems. Others require dealing with power and how special interests benefit from bad planning, hideous signs, and sidewalk obstacles. This requires courage and conviction. Both are far beyond the planners. They invariably find it much easier to draw pretty pictures than actually go out for a walk and see the bad conditions their antisidewalk, anti-walking measures have created. Indeed, their vows of a more pedestrian-friendly city hint that walking conditions will become much worse under their “improvements.”

Missing from the hoopla about the zoning code and pedestrians is any discussion of sprawl and how Denver is essentially an automobile city where a car is vital to get to many places. Instead of dissecting this and how light rail is nothing but a means of enhancing spread-out real estate developments, the planners treat it as a salvation. At the same time they do so, the Democratic-controlled state government has acted to build more roads to assure more automobile dependency. Planning documents are the essential whitewash seeking to obscure this reality.

Attending public forums on the zoning utopia is a waste of time. The planners are set on their course. They hold the meetings more for propaganda value to tell the public what it should think than to reflect upon the emptiness of their proposals. Instead of first publishing their proposals so interested citizens can evaluate them, they use the "public hearings" as means of preaching their esoteric doctrine to the gullible.

If the planners or city hall cared about the future of the city and the welfare of its residents, they would begin by putting aside the zoning revision as an obscene charade. Given the city’s financial shortages, shelving the program is a premier means of cutting costs. Naturally, it will not happen since selling illusions is the prime purpose of the planners. In the process, they strengthen the foundations on which the status quo lurches from scheme to scam.

Library Deceit, Discrimination, Destruction, and Despair

"I’m an agitator and a troublemaker. That’s my reputation and that is what I’m going to be.” So boasted Corky Gonzales when he accepted a high post in the Tom Currigan administration in 1965. A year later, the mayor ousted Gonzales when his appointee showed himself unable to handle criticism while financial improprieties surrounded the administration of the Neighborhood Youth Corps. Gonzales responded by forming the Crusade for Justice. It quickly emerged as a foremost national radical Chicano organization. During the next decade, he and its members constantly clashed with the police. The establishment decried him as a rebel and a nuisance.

By the time of Gonzales’ death in 2005, ruling Denver had essentially beatified him. This clearly comes across at a show on Gonzales at the Western History Department of the Denver Public Library. Far from probing why Gonzales created such controversy or mentioning that many within the Hispanic community greatly feared and hated him, it makes him into a crusading pioneer of equal opportunity and the success of working within the system. In the process, it whitewashes the essence of the man’s style and the dirty deeds the police used against him. The result is an anemic history.

The library’s failure to offer a full appreciation of Gonzales’ role in the community is minor compared to some of its other failures. It remains the most discriminatory, primitive public institution in town in forcing people to walk through a cloud of tobacco smoke by its main entrance. Those seeking to complain not only find themselves forced to encounter the tobacco haze, but they also discover that if they do not have e-mail, the library treats them as nonpersons.

Then, during its recent used book sale, during which the library sometimes disposes of irreplaceable volumes, it added hucksters. Those who thought they were going to a literary event found themselves continually annoyed by a carnival barker who was a combination of George W. Bush and George Babbitt: a buffoon spouting phrases about "patriotism" and the duty to buy, complete with the condescending snobbery that is part and parcel of public broadcasting fund-raising pleas. He also emphasized the library's role in promoting the wasteful, expensive, and meaningless one Denver/one book charade. He did not mention how, at the end of the sale, the library "recycled," i.e., destroyed, unsold volumes. The result was to send anybody who cared about books away from the institution. Given such an approach, the library's presentation about Corky Gonzales is the epitome of the institution’s integrity.

Phil Goodstein will speak at the Colfax Tattered Cover on Tuesday, July 14, 7:30 PM.