August Naysayer newsletter

August 5, 12:42 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

The Naysayer of the Month

The airport has been an immense patronage plum of city hall. If nothing else, it is where the administration has exiled employees.  It has also been an endless source of profit for preferred contractors.  From the beginning, work at DIA was often done wrong, requiring endless repair jobs.

City hall has finally admitted that the entire management of the facility is thoroughly incompetent.  This comes across in its plan to hire a private, out-of-town firm, Parsons Transportation, to oversee upwards of $1 billion in improvements.  The remake of the terminal is urgent, the administration explains, because the airport has never delivered as promised or been a prime shopping mall.

The terminal improvement is the same hoopla that has enriched contractors since the birth of the scheme during the financial crisis of the 1980s.  It will do nothing to make flying easier or safer.  On the contrary, it will be a new burden on locals using the facility.

Denver was once proud of its employees.  They managed to keep the city working through their skill and devotion.  At least since the days of Federico Peña, the region’s foremost champion of the “public/private partnership,” the city has been quick to turn profitable ventures over to the private sector while subsidizing special interests.  Of course, the community’s leaders have zero ability to connect these developments with why the city faces severe financial shortfalls.

On the contrary, as the suggested contract to Parsons Transportation shows, it is ready to repeat the morass, figuring that the citizens are such suckers that city hall can endlessly bamboozle them with new DIA scams.  As such, the airport’s champions are the Naysayer of the Month.

Endorsing King George

High-ranking officeholders can do no wrong.  Such is the message of Barack Obama.  By his commitment to “look forward,” he has conveniently managed to ignore the mess that top government officials have created, especially the ruins left behind by the Bush League.  Instead of confronting the tyrannical usurpations of his predecessor, Obama’s lack of action in calling malefactors to account guarantees that powerful public officials will be allowed to wreak havoc as they wish.

Besides, officeholders, acting in a judicial capacity, are not legally accountable for anything.  Such is the ultra-cynical ruling of Denver District Court Judge Larry Naves in the Ward Churchill case.  In a decision spewing contempt for the jury system and the civil rights revolution, Naves recently decided that the jury’s decision ruling that the University of Colorado (CU) had wrongfully terminated Churchill did not matter.  In particular, he argued that the courts had no ability to review the decision of the CU board of regents because those public officials were acting in a judicial capacity.  As such, they are immune from the consequences of their actions.

Naves’ decision cites other cases where courts have cleared rulers of their highly questionable decisions.  He never dealt with the main point of which Churchill convinced the jury:  that without the professor’s statements about 9/11, the university would have never dismissed him.  As such, the firing was an outright political purge.

Here Naves stands in the tradition of McCarthyism.  The parallel is apropos.  CU terminated professors in the 1950s because of their political views.  While the communist teachers were far more politically advanced than Churchill, they had amazing similarities.  Instead of depending on a continued mass mobilization of workers and efforts to build a new society, the Communist Party had readily allied itself with the government during the Popular Front and World War II.  Rather than calling for wage earners to stand up for themselves and see the continual necessity of socialism, they worked in the system.  When the system no longer needed them, it scorned and purged them.

So it is with Churchill.  While he has been ready to employ a goon squad to intimidate those who disagree with him on the role of Columbus Day and has demanded a censoring of “hate speech,” he has no program of change.  At the most, he and his confederates in the American Indian Movement have sought to work within the system via means of affirmative action and lawsuits.  As the Naves’ decision shows, the courts will decide for the status quo unless mass forces of protest force the system to change.

Prior to the trial, CU lawyers had filed for a dismissal of the suit.  Rather than considering the legal merits of their case, Naves allowed the decision to go the jury.  The fact that after the verdict he decided that CU’s pretrial motion was correct hints that he had expected the jury to rule for the school.  When it did not, he issued his decision which he should have made before the trial.  The message is that those who serve on juries are wasting their time.

Judges and attorneys pompously declare that the jury is the “conscience of the community.”  It is where everyday citizens have a chance to review the actions of the government and hold one and all to an equal standard of justice.  This claim rapidly disintegrates when juries reach the “wrong” decisions.  Judges have been particularly irate with those advocating jury nullification:  that jurors can refuse to convict when they realize that the laws are insane and tyrannical as is the case with most drug laws.  They readily dismiss members of the venire who state they will not convict defendants accused of breaking such oppressive rules.

Those demanding human sacrifice also lambaste the jury system.  These are individuals who are convinced that prosecutors and the police never do anything wrong.  An indictment, they are sure, is equivalent to guilt.  When the jury disagrees, be it in the case of O. J. Simpson or Ward Churchill, they attack the very nature of the jury system.  They want the state to convict and kill those who are charged regardless of the evidence.  They similarly wish to prevent juries from awarding damages in civil actions to those who have been injured by governmental misconduct and corporate negligence.

Churchill sued for reinstatement to CU under a civil rights statute enacted in the 1960s.  It passed in reaction to southern racism and reaction.  Instead of giving public officials a free hand to do whatever they liked in dealing with African-Americans, the law required due process in dealing with terminations, especially where racial, sexual, ethnic, and political factors were blatantly obvious.  The civil rights movement forced Congress to act because voices of protest well recognized that public officials do wrong, that unaccountable officeholders, including those functioning in a judicial capacity, had repeatedly acted capriciously and tyrannically in dealing with those questioning the system.  Without such reforms from above, Lyndon Johnson and company well knew there would be more explosions from below.

The Ward Churchill saga is an illustration of how the lack of accountability of high-ranking public officials results in thorough incompetence.  The very fact he gained an appointment without appropriate academic credentials was indicative of a very badly administered university.  The way he freely called for censorship of others, compete with threats of physical force, showed he was anything but an ideal person to represent the principles of free speech and a free society.

Instead of calling Churchill into account for such behavior, in a politically inspired decision, CU turned on him only when politicians discovered that the bogus Indian had made telling criticisms about the hypocrisy of American foreign policy and the problematic character of the official version of 9/11.  In attacking his publications, it never bothered to review the actions of professors who have taken money from corporate interests and published articles (sometimes written by public-relations hacks) extolling businesses and the status quo.  A professor in the CU history department, Tom Noel, has even shamelessly published a counterfeit photo as a legitimate historical document—the school celebrates him as “Dr. Colorado.”

Abhorrent actions by public officials cry for redress.  The lack of sanctions against such policy makers allows someone like Dick Cheney to make the law as he sees fit.  This is the double-standard blessed by Obama and Naves:  immunity for those with power who abuse it while cracking down on those who criticize the government.  In this light, Naves has shown himself as a worthy candidate for the Supreme Court as a judge who will uphold the usurpations of the latest King George.

*

The Churchill imbroglio has occurred while CU has been led by politician-businessmen Hank Brown and Bruce Benson.  Their "success" has been so great that corporate Colorado has installed comparable hacks at Colorado State University (Joe Blake) and the University of Northern Colorado (Kay Norton).  The latter school is currently immersed in sex scandals.  To investigate what is going on, the state has commissioned the union-busting Mountain States Employers Council.  This is an agency that argues management is always right and workers do not have a right to organize the speak out for themselves.  The result is a guaranteed whitewash.  Nor, thanks to the ruling of Judge Naves, does the school have to worry about legal redress by the victims.  According to his decision, by definition, the university and the Mountain States Employers Council cannot do anything wrong.  This is another affirmation of the triumph of King George.

Stimulating Destruction

City council recently unanimously rejected a proposal to declare the 1964 wing of the abandoned University Hospital at Ninth Avenue and Colorado Boulevard a landmark.  This was a green light for the demolition of numerous buildings in excellent physical condition.  The decision shows what Denver's Road Home really means.

Rather than substance, city hall has emphasized catchy slogans.  It has repeatedly come up with obnoxious names like "Quick Wins II" and "Blueprint Denver" to bamboozle the gullible as part of the John Hickenlooper administration's endless vows of progress and social justice.  To help redress homelessness, the city has even installed old parking meters through the city to collect spare change for Denver’s Road Home, its vaunted effort to providing lodging for one and all.  (At the same time such begging meters have spread, the city has been ever more fierce in finding ways to chase live beggars off the streets.)

If the city's goal was to find housing for everybody, its first step would be to stop the demolition of existing buildings.  Far from doing this, it eagerly collaborated with Washington to destroy housing projects in the 1990s and 2000s.  In their place, it encouraged the poor to emulate the middle class in the Hope VI program whereby they would become homeowners.  (Of course the worthy middle class never gets into debt or fails to meet its mortgage payments—such was a central premise of this effort, one fully backed by developers and lenders and which was a point of pride of the Bill Clinton administration.  Locally, nobody did more to make it a reality than Steve Farber.)

Next to protecting children, getting the poor into good, safe, clean, affordable lodging has become a favorite excuse of the corporate and political elite to pull various scams.  Such was the original promise of both public housing projects and urban renewal.  In a particularly obscene way of encouraging one and all to take out mortgages, the city requires developers to provide a certain portion of "affordable" housing in their efforts.  "Affordable" actually encompasses nearly half the population, specially those unable to buy the "luxury" condos touted by real estate interests.  The effort does nothing to provide or preserve low-income rental units.  As such, it is window dressing to justify the continuing destruction of existing low-cost housing.

If the city actually wanted to provide universal lodging, it would immediately halt development plans at the abandoned University Hospital campus.  Rather, it would use its power to convert the existing buildings into residences.  That is the last thing it desires.  Despite the glut of existing "luxury" units, it wants more of them—that is a prime purpose of neighborhood "improvement" efforts and the proposed new zoning code.  Council rejected the University Hospital landmark nomination to encourage Shea Properties, the developer of the effort.  If the preservation proposal passed, Shea threatened to walk away from the University Hospital project.  Actually, Shea has realized that the effort does not make sense.  It is considerably behind schedule in carrying out its objectives.

A foremost goal of the Obama “stimulus” plan is to help Shea and cohorts make questionable development schemes a reality.  Far from addressing why the economy has collapsed or why more "luxury" housing should be built in face of the over supply, the government’s effort is to return conditions to just as they were before the crash.  In particular, it wants the likes of the Bank of America and Wells Fargo to resume disastrous lending and financing schemes.

Here city council had a chance to say no.  The landmark nomination was an excellent opportunity for the Denver legislature to concede that the entire relocation of University Hospital was an extreme tragedy compounded by the stupidity of destroying functional buildings.  Of course, it did the wrong thing as it remains a body affirming the worst of the local and national administration as the city careens from crisis to crisis.  Many of the current problems stem from past policies of encouraging growth, development, and special interests while giving everyday people the false promises of Denver’s Road Home.