'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
The state has still not made up the jobs lost in the Great Recession…
Only Nevada and New Mexico among this sampling of other Western states have failed to recover (California has). Even hard-hit Oregon recently recovered all the jobs lost. Note that Washington is similar in population but has far more jobs…
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This was the most frequently asked question I encountered in Phoenix recently. Admittedly, the Resistance was demoralized by the results of the election. But the query-cum-statement came from more than activists — indeed, they are more likely to be too invested in the fight to allow a crack of doubt to enter.
Those asking are natives or have lived in the state for many years or decades. They are not nostalgiacs. They are intelligent and pragmatic. Some are considering leaving, adding to the brain drain of urbanites who come to Phoenix starry eyed at a "blank slate" only to discover the many barriers to progress and depart for Portland, Denver and Vancouver, B.C.
In raising this issue, I don't want to provoke the usual denial, sunny codependency or angry defensiveness. I was surprised that so many people, unprompted, asked the question.
Is Arizona hopeless?
It certainly doesn't seem that way to the Republicans and "conservative"-leaning independents who vote. They continue to get the place they want, with the exception of such socialist outbreaks as light rail (WBIYB). Some are people with whom I went to school but remained there. They are decent, smart individuals and, against all odds of the Cold Civil War, we remain friends. Anyway, the cons have no reason to complain — but that won't stop it from manufacturing its lifeline of perpetual grievance and victimhood. They tend to be sore winners.
So the question applies to others. How many are there? It's difficult to say with precision. People keep moving to Arizona, albeit at a slower pace. A Morrison Institute poll of more than a decade ago found that a strong plurality of residents would leave the state if they could.
Who would ask such a question? Anyone to the left of today's "conservative" dogma (which would include Barry Goldwater, were he alive); liberals and progressives; people with urban values; those concerned about the destruction of the environment; those disheartened by the struggle to build and maintain civic, economic and cultural assets as befits a big city, and the ones beaten down by the struggle as Arizona has become a one-party, one-ideology state.
Is Arizona hopeless?
You know this is the wrong place to look for booster lies ("Talton hates Arizona"). And as much as I would love to write a stirring column channelling Henry V or Churchill, it is a little late for in the game for that.
So the answer partly depends partly on how one defines Arizona and how one defines hopeless.
39How did we allow this sinister word to infiltrate our vernacular?
I don’t mean the television show starring the exquisite Claire Danes, who would be my pick to play Lindsey if the Mapstone Mysteries were ever made into a movie. No, I’m talking about the word now used in place of “continental United States,” “the home front” or “the nation.”
In addition to the Department of Homeland Security, the word is commonly attached to sentences and phrases, including in fine newspapers. As in “the U.S. homeland.” William Strunk says it best: omit unnecessary words. How about just “in the United States.”
Were Bill Safire alive, he would trace the exact origins. But we know it arose after 9/11, as the nation was being lied into two unnecessary wars, giving away our liberties in the so-called Patriot Act, setting up a proto-police state and enshrining torture as national policy.
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So this is what post-racial America looks like.
Businesses are burned and looted in a black suburb, not by white supremacists a la Tulsa's Greenwood in 1921 but apparently by some residents a la Watts in 1965, only this time in suburbia.
The spark was a grand jury declining to indict the white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man. Other outrages gained national attention. Among them, New York City police wrestling a black man to the sidewalk and his death following a "chokehold" and a Cleveland officer shooting and killing a 12-year-old black boy with a pellet gun.
All the progressive Web sites and MSNBC programs are unanimous in their verdicts: the police are at war with unarmed black men and black communities. Indeed, the police are dangerous to American society. Traffic and ratings increase with the coverage — the visuals are great, as are hashtags such as #HandsUpDon'tShoot and #ICan'tBreathe.
Protests against "police violence" repeatedly disrupt the downtowns of progressive cities. Again, great visuals. They are largely peaceful, so far. The grievance is that this injustice is obvious and intolerable.
Meanwhile, progressives are dealt their most devastating electoral defeat since the 1920s. From the U.S. Congress to most statehouses, political control is even more in the hands of those who see none of the above as serious problems.
At the risk of being crass and reductive, many are supporters of a new Jim Crow. What is undeniable is that the new entirely reactionary Republican Party's "platform" was opposition to the nation's first black president. It succeeded largely because of an irrational but instinctive backlash against him in the majority white electorate. The same happened in 2010.
Welcome to post-racial America.
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By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue
The recent string of well-publicized police killings of unarmed blacks and the nationwide wave of mass protests by young, multi-ethnic crowds, has once again brought the issue of police and race from the backburner of ethnic-studies classes to the forefront of public debate.
Some incidents triggering the protests are controversial (Ferguson); others, such as the shooting death of a 12-year old boy with a pellet pistol or the death of a sidewalk cigarette salesman from a banned choke-hold appear as unmistakable tragedies to those who have seen the video evidence.
Instead of dissecting these cases on an individual basis, I want to examine the push-back from conservative pundits, whose talking-points and rhetoric mirror police attitudes, including prominent and influential men like Rudy Giuliani, who is widely credited with amazing reductions in crime during his tenure as mayor of New York City, and whose policing models (most notably "broken windows") have been widely emulated.
The rhetoric from law and order conservatives is important because police tactics can best be changed through reforms in police attitudes and in the attitudes of politicians presiding over law enforcement communities. That rhetoric is filled with fictions, half-truths, faulty inferences, and misused statistics. Several prominent talking points deserve scrutiny:
1. "Ninety-three percent of black murder victims in the United States are killed by other blacks" — the "black on black crime" thesis. This comes from a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report covering the period from 1980 through 2008.
The fly in the ointment is that the report also says 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites. Yet nobody is talking about "white on white crime" as a means of distracting the conversation whenever a white is the victim of police abuse. Do we really believe that murderers politely decline to kill the members of other races, or is this simply a statistical artifact of demographic segregation and concentration?
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I was going to write about Ferguson but the reaction I provoked on Facebook yesterday over the name change for the Suns' home made me switch gears. I wrote, "Talking Stick Resort Arena. That pretty much says it all about Phoenix's inability to be a big city."
So far, 50 people have "liked" it. Much debate came in the comments. Aside from a small number of the usual why-are-you-picking-on-Phoenix notes, there was "Pitiful," "We have no visionary leadership in this city," "This all just makes me want to cry," and "Wait'll they move both teams to Talking Stick neighborhood. …..$10 says that is in the works."
On the other hand, I made some fans (so they said) mad for allegedly being unfair to Phoenix. Still others thought it wasn't a big deal. But they took the time to comment. Someone made the excuse that Phoenix is a "young city," a canard I have tried to knock down before. A couple of comments gave the whiff of, "he doesn't just hate Phoenix, he tortures kittens for sport (and from Seattle, which doesn't even have an NBA team!)".
It started as an offhand comment. Then it became clear I had run sandpaper over a very raw nerve.
Let's stipulate that pro sports are one of the many cesspools in our evermore corrupt and venal society. This is true everywhere. Naming rights always struck me as odd. Who chooses to do business with an outfit because their moniker is stuck on a sports arena? Maybe it's like penis enlargement spam. Somebody must be responding or it would go away.
All over the country, team owners have not been content to extort palaces from the taxpayers under threat of leaving. They also want to milk more cash from naming rights. Only a few places — Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park — have avoided the sellout. It's one more way to suck income upwards while also destroying the history and even poetry of many former sports venue names.
58One of the most questionable propositions of our political journalism is that President Obama is to blame for trouble in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, the rise of Russian aggressiveness and poor relations with Israel.
The trouble is, I have yet to find anyone questioning it.
One can blame Mr. Obama for many missteps and blunders. Chuck Hagel was a poor choice for Secretary of Defense. The inner circle of the White House probably does micromanage too often, and does so from a blinkered perspective.
Blame the ignorance of Americans and the self-interest of defense contractors for the conceit that we have control of a messy world. We do not.
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Last week, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics released per-capita personal income (PCPI) for metropolitan areas in 2013. For Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, income grew 0.7 percent to $38.745.
This placed the sixth-most-populous city and 12th largest metro area at 285th in growth against other American metropolitan areas. It was not a good year for growth. The metro average was 2 percent. Booming Seattle ranked 223rd.
The truly troubling number is the actual income. The national average was $44,765.
Compare it to other similarly large metropolitan statistical areas: Boston (10th largest), $61,754; San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward (11), $69,127; Detroit-Warren-Dearborn (14), $42,887; Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue (15), $55,190; Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington (16), $51,183.
Or compare metro Phoenix with smaller metros against which it competes for talent and capital: Austin, $44,760; Charlotte, $41,645; Denver, $51,946 and Portland, $46,461.
Metro Phoenix comes in lower than any other large metro with a big city in it. What's going on?
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Some initial impressions on President Obama's immigration plan:
1. We have become so cynical that the talking heads, especially, can't imagine a leader doing something mostly for the decency of it. Yet this is likely Mr. Obama's prime motivation. Whites make up 75 percent of the electorate and anti-"amnesty" Anglos vote while too many potentially Democratic Hispanics don't. So it's a political loser.
2. Despite similar precedents set by Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the Republicans will try to impeach Obama or otherwise act out. They can't stop themselves.
I moderated a panel of eminent China experts last night. One of the consistent themes is how our dysfunctional government sends the message to Beijing to not take us seriously, or to make a dangerous miscalculation.
3. Mr. Obama's limited overhaul doesn't address the core problems: Our appetite for cheap labor; the way trade agreements disrupted traditional economies and drew workers el norte; bad governance in Mexico and much of central America, and the fact that too many American employers and even average Americans are satisfied with the status quo.
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130When Barack Obama was elected president, the nation was facing its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. For all its flaws — a too-small-stimulus, lack of enough relief for average mortgage holders, etc. — Obama, with the help of Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve, averted a second Great Depression.
When Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent on its way to 10 percent. Last month it was 5.8 percent…
…The federal deficit was $1.4 trillion or almost 10 percent of gross domestic product. Now it’s about $483 billion or 3.3 percent of GDP. The deficit has fallen faster than any time since the end of World War II…
…America's GDP was $14.4 trillion. In the third quarter of this year it had risen $17.5 trillion, despite the headwinds of a slow recovery. It is the best performance among advanced nations…
…Corporate profits after taxes were about $1 trillion in January 2009. In the second quarter of this year, the most recent data available, they hit a record $1.84 trillion…
…The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 7,949 the day he took office. Today it is above 17,652…
…And the Affordable Care Act extended health insurance to millions of Americans, and would have included millions more if not for the cruel obstruction of Republican governors.
In the hands of Ronald Reagan's ad men, this would have been Morning in America. For Democrats this election, it was something from which to run (hat tip to Emil's comment in the previous post). They deserved the destruction that befell them.
55The Republican wave last Tuesday is truly stunning, as this New York Times map shows.
I was talking to a friend — smart, college-educated, a former-Republican-turned-progressive — who recalled the great hope she had when Barack Obama was elected. "But we've been losing ever since."
Her answer is to go off the grid. Keep subscribing to newspapers to help support them, but not read them. No more politics on the Internet. No more Rachel Maddow, however smart she is. What's the point?
She already doesn't own a car and uses transit and trains wherever possible. Shops locally and has a tiny carbon footprint with a downtown condo. She will continue to vote in every election, for Democrats (progressive where possible), for every transit, parks and school funding initiative.
But she's done with living so close to the heartache of constant defeat, of the nation's astounding retrograde move. Where one of our two great political parties doesn't even believe in science. Sorry, legalized pot and same-sex marriage aren't enough.
62Initial impressions on the Tuesday disaster:
1. Arizona is redder than ever. For decades seers have been predicting that newcomers would make politics here less conservative. Instead, the opposite has happened. Arizona has grown less competitive and more reactionary. Every major statewide office has been captured by Republicans for the second straight time (see official results here).
2. Ideology trumps logic. How does a nullity like Doug Ducey not only beat his Democratic challenger, a man with deep policy experience and good ideas, but do so by a commanding margin (nearly 54 percent to 43 percent)? The only answer I can come up with is that Ducey did the Aflac duck conservative quack and that was enough. It's not that voters are happy with conditions in Arizona. And the problems have been caused by decades of right-wing political and policy dominance. Ergo, vote for more of the same!
3. The great independent factor wasn't. Remember when the media were trumpeting the tidbit that independent voters outnumbered those of either party? But as polling research at Pew and elsewhere has shown, "independents" usually lean one direction or the other, whatever their twee affectation to independence of thought and judgment. In Arizona, most lean to the right.
4. The Hispanic wave (still) hasn't arrived. "Mexicans don't vote." Therefore, combined with gerrymandering and voter suppression, this phenomenon means Democrats will be waiting a very long time for Latino Salvation. An angry, old, white minority can rule in perpetuity. The apathy is especially startling considering how Anglo Arizona has been viciously racist against Hispanics, in a way not seen in much of Texas.
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