DECEMBER 2011 $10/year

THE NAYSAYER Box 18026; Denver 80218

24:6 WN 282

The Naysayer of the Month

The Battle of Courthouse Square

midst demands for handouts to the owners of professional sports franchises, Babbitts forever insist that the teams are good for the local economy. Somehow, their presence magically creates money and keeps the economy flourishing. Facing the shutdown of the Nuggets season by a labor dispute, however, economists have stated the obvious: spending on sports is primarily discretionary income. If the sports team does not exist, customers use their earnings on other entertainment. For forcing this admission of the obvious, the Nuggets are the Naysayer of the Month. Much sports promotion is nothing but a big gamble. Immense sums are made and lost in pushing various professional franchises and stadiums. Whether money spent on giveaways to sports comes close to paying for itself is most questionable. For example, the highly touted effort to close the Civic Center to the public by the rich (as opposed to the actions of Occupy Denver) for a ski-jumping competition last January lost $1.2 million. This led to the end of the effort to repeat it in 2012. Far from reflecting on this gambling loss, the righteous have screamed that a member of the Colorado Sports Commission engaged in personal gambling, forcing his resignation from the body. The implication is that gambling is otherwise absent from the sports scene. For so exposing the endless hypocrisy of the state capitalist/sports crowd, the Sports Commission is an Associate Naysayer of the Month. Another touted city hall event is in limbo, the Denver Biennial. This was among the make-believe cultural ventures pushed by the John Hickenlooper administration in 2010. It was supposed to be the beginning of a glittering international arts festival held every two years highlighting the wonders of the Western Hemisphere. Other than for the smug insiders at the heart of the culture industry, the event was a thorough flop with virtually no impact on the community. Seeing this, the city has postponed the next biennial until 2013 as a five-day event. For so exposing the empty boasting of the arts crowd, by delaying the Biennial for a year, its backers are an Associate Naysayer of the Month.

Occupying Muddleheads

envers Road Home was among the countless initiatives launched by John Hickenlooper when he was mayor. Without addressing the nature of the real estate industry, it promised to end homelessness within ten years. It has worked so well that members of city council have been rabidly insisting on banning the homeless from sleeping on the 16th Street Mall. They advocate this crackdown at the same time they are ready to subsidize elite hotel projects for the rich, be they at DIA, the Convention Center, or at Union Station. Simultaneously, advocates of law and order have insisted that the greatest crime of Occupy Denver is that the homeless have joined with protestors in illicitly sleeping in the Civic Center. Of course, there is no retrospection about why homelessness has again suddenly become such a problem amidst the political protest and the seeming success of Denvers Road Home. Nor, for that matter, do those decrying Occupy Denver, remember
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ecember 14 marks the centennial of the event that has come to define Denver politics and power. Late that night in 1911, Mayor Robert Speer mobilized the police and sent his goons to the county courthouse to oust assessor Henry J. Arnold from office. The latter was a typical sham reformer. A veteran real estate agent who had long supported the development policies of Speer, another one-time land dealer, Arnold had gained election in 1910 as Speers candidate for county assessor. At that time, in light of a 1905 Colorado Supreme Court ruling, there was a separate Denver County government from the administration of the City of Denver. Since his ascendancy as the head of the Denver Democratic Party at the beginning of the 20th century, Speer had been blunt: the advancement of business was the prime purpose of public policy. He was particularly closely allied with the utilities. In particular, he worked hand-in-glove with Denver Tramway, Denver Union Water, Colorado Telephone, and Denver Gas & Electric in assuring that the interests of these providers of vital public services were paramount. These businesses and the rest of 17th Street well recognized that the Democrat Speer was their best friend when they helped elect him the first mayor of the new City and County of Denver in May 1904 over reactionary Republican banker John W. Springer. Opponents of Speer, including many liberal Democrats, estimated that Speers machine, the Big Mitt, cast somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 votes to assure the bosss triumph. The Big Mitt was a typical machine. In exchange for support and votes, it sometimes functioned as a social-welfare agency, giving everyday workers slight assistance with financial emergencies and in dealings with city hall. Even while it so presented itself as a humane mechanism, it was at one with the corporate elite in working to smash the citys strong union movement. The organizations name, critics charged, was apropos: it readily swatted down anything and everything that got in its way. While the Big Mitt worked to promote corporate Denver, this was not enough for portions of 17th Street. They objected to the Big Mitt having a slight place for workers. Leaders of the Chamber of Commerce especially allied themselves with the goo-goos, middleclass and upper-class advocates of abstract good government. They demanded that Denver be run like a business: a heartless operation with no considerations other than strict financial accounting. Allied with Republicans who wished to gain control of the Mile High City, the goo-goos aggressively challenged Speer. The mayor cracked down on dissenthe was as opposed to an independent workers movement as much as the rest of the corporate community. He readily alienated those who argued Denver was far more than 17th Street. Before long, a powerful coalition had emerged between the most reactionary of businessmen and those advocating special programs for residents who were hurting from capitalist progress. While many alleged liberals readily backed the conservative corporate interests, others created the Citizens Party as an alternative to the Republicans and Democrats. Even with the Republicans successful crackdown on the repeat voting of the Big Mitt, Speer narrowly retained the mayors seat in 1908 against a corporate attorney. His opponents made significant
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The Naysayers will stage the centennial protest banquet of the Battle of Courthouse Square on Saturday, December 3, in the pizza room of Patsys, 3651 Navajo Street, 5:30 PM.

THE NAYSAYER, DECEMBER 2011, p. 2 Courthouse Square .............................................................................................. continued from p. 1

headway in the citys bicameral city council. Members of the Denver board of county commissioners were simultaneously ever more powerful and influential opponents of Speer. All the while, the mayor used his clout to see that citizens were saddled with utility franchises that assured high rates and poor service to those needing heat and electricity, using the telephone, drinking the water, or taking the streetcar. Critics endlessly hammered at these failures as the embodiments of the Big Mitts scorn for everyday citizens. Opponents of city hall also observed the completely skewered character of Denvers tax assessment policies. Large landholders generally paid but a tiny portion on the value of their real estate opposed to a sizeable percentage taken from the properties of middleclass homeowners. Cries about endless taxation were central to the complaints of the goo-goos. They were convinced that much of the spending of the city and the county went to line the pocket of Speers political and business associates. Amidst this, shortly after Henry Arnold taken office as assessor following the November 1910 county election in which, as a loyal Democrat, he defeated both the incumbent Republican and the challenger of the insurgent Citizens Party, he repeatedly clashed with his patron, Robert W. Speer. Seeing that reform was the order of the day, Arnold allied himself with the goo-goos. Denvers assessment policies, he observed, were rotten from core to circumference. Proclaiming he had no further political ambitions, he announced he would use his two-year term to redress property assessments that favored the rich while hurting middle-class homeowners. This meant stepping on the toes of Speers supporters who benefited from the unfair means of assessing property. As Denver County seemed to be ever more out of the control of Speer and his utility overlords, the Colorado Supreme Court reconsidered its 1905 ruling declaring that the City of Denver must have a separate governmental structure from Denver County. On May 1, 1911, it decided that a joint City and County of Denver, with a shared government, was legal after all. Numerous rehearings followed as did appeals to the federal bench. They exhausted themselves on November 23, 1911, the day marking the legal recombination of the City of Denver and the County of Denver. Speer saw this as his chance to crack the Big Mitts whip, silencing Arnold and others who challenged his policies. The courts decision, the mayor announced, meant that county offices no longer existed. He, rather, would use his power as mayor to appoint a new city assessor. When Arnold resisted this move, rather than turning to the courts, Speer resorted to physical force in what was called the Battle of Courthouse Square. After token opposition, Arnold surrendered to Speers thugs. Though he won the battle, Speer lost the war. His actions outraged the community. The goo-goos were ever more powerful, backed by liberals and much of the corporate community. The coalition agreed Speer had to go. The mayor, seeing the handwriting on the wall, announced he would not seek a third term in 1912. That year, reformers overwhelmingly put Arnold in city hall as the candidate of the Citizens Party. In office, he sought to be a second Speer, continuing his predecessors pro-utility policies. In reaction, reformers abolished both city council and the mayors office in 1913, replacing them with a five-member city commission. The business community saw this as a golden opportunity to exercise its dictatorial clout over the community through its Tax Payers Protective League. Nor was the city commission effective. In 1915, Speers backers gained control of the body, driving it into the ground. This paved the way for Speers return as mayor in 1916. In the process, he totally rewrote the city charter to give the mayor virtually dictatorial power. No sooner had Speer reconsolidated himself in city hall, completely committing himself to a corporate domination of the community, than he died in office in May 1918. Seventeenth Street especially mourned him. Typical were the comments of powerbroker Gerald Hughes, Denver has lost its father. In the process, a Speer myth emerged: that the mayor had been a wise, benevolent, far-sighted politician who had made Denver the city beautiful. Memories of the pervasive corruption of his administration faded. So did the results of his favoritism to utilities and the Battle of Courthouse Square. The citys historians, media, and corporate community came to bless the Speer corporate consolidation: that the advancement of business must occupy city hall and all public considerations while voices of dissent are a nuisance to be squashed as part of the celebration of the worst of the legacy of Robert W. Speer.

Occupy Denver ..................................................................................................... continued from p. 1

a couple of other recent occupations of the city. In 1997, the administration transformed central Denver into a veritable police state when the Summit of the Eight occupied the heart of the city. Police forces again occupied key parts of the city for the 2008 corporatedominated Democratic National Convention. Topping all of this are complaints that Occupy Denver is costing the city too much because of the administrations overwhelming use of police coercion against the harmless camp-in. Meanwhile, the righteous defenders of public spaces against Occupy Denver say nothing about the way restaurants have increasingly blocked public sidewalks for fenced-off dining areas. The Denver Public Library has readily closed its doors to the public to host glittering private, high-society parties. In other words, the real crime of Occupy Denver is that it lives up to its slogan of being the 99 percent of the population opposed to the elite served by city hall. Occupations by the latter are celebrated as the essence of ruling Denver. Without the rage of the establishment, Occupy Denver and cohorts would have likely collapsed by now as pretend radicalism and makebelieve street theater fully in tune with the illusions of the 1960s. Even so, the protest has been fueled by the courage and conviction of those who see that the one percents fury reflects the extreme insecurity and intolerance of those who have benefited from past policies giving 17th Street everything it has wanted. Instead of providing a program of action, work-within-theysystem muddleheads have both supported and condemned the Occupy phenomenon. Backers see it as a means of repeating the past failures of the New Deal and Great Society; friendly critics argue it must throw itself into the arms of the Democrats and move from protest to the voting booths to assure the future success of the likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In contrast to both its friends and foes, Occupy Denver is the most profound, heroic action that city has seen in decades. The flabbiness of those commenting about it shows how vitally it is needed as the beginning of the step to say nay to the entire system represented by the one percent.