Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Midwesterners

The comments section has been busy with musings about the Midwest migration to Arizona and the degree to which it is to blame for the disaster facing the state and Phoenix. I've offered my assessment in previous posts (it's a great deal to blame).

That doesn't mean every midwesterner is at fault, much less that I hate the Midwest. I spent nearly a decade there, in southwest Ohio, and hold it warmly in my heart. I saw it at its best and lately I've seen it at its worst. But no discussion of Phoenix is complete without assessing this huge tide of immigrants and the things they carried.

The first Anglo settlers of Phoenix were a ragtag group of tough adventurers, everybody from "Lord" Darrell Duppa, namer of Phoenix, who was born in England (maybe France), to the father of Tempe, Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Yankee who had worked the Santa Fe trail. The Mormons settled Mesa.

But Southerners and former Confederates were arguably in the early majority, personified by founder Jack Swilling, CSA. This gave the town a peculiar Southern-Western character that persisted into the early 1960s. My family came from Indian Territory and before that the pre-Civil War Texas frontier. Midwesterners arrived in more numbers with the completion of the Santa Fe Railway and its direct connection from Chicago. Among them was Dwight Bancroft Heard, who bought the Arizona Republican in 1912. He was a major landowner and farmer, and was the driving force behind the region's cotton industry. Along with his wife, Maie Bartlett Heard, he founded the Heard Museum.

Other midwesterners of note: Kansan Eugene C. Pulliam, who built a publishing empire including the renamed Arizona Republic. Lawyer Frank Snell was from Kansas City. (His partner Mark Wilmer, the star litigator who won Arizona v. California before the Supreme Court, came from Wisconsin by way of Texas.)

Another former Chicagoan was Walter Bimson who built Valley National Bank into a powerhouse. Heard, Pulliam, Snell and Bimson were city builders. The latter three, for example, in the late 1940s and 1950s, recruited the high tech industries whose fumes the metro area still runs on. All loved Phoenix. It was their home. In every way they connected the health of the city to that of their companies.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Nihilism triumphant

"And for you Democrats looking for some silver lining…I got nothing" — Election-night tweet

Well, that was over in a flash. Our liberal, even socialist-curious, president. Our far-left Congress. And perhaps they reached too far, too fast. After all, President Obama chose as his top economic advisers Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, as well as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. Inheriting the bank bailout from George W. Bush, he imposed a stringent windfall profits tax on Wall Street which he used to help foreclosed house-owners. Wall Street felt the iron hand of liberalism, with a new Glass-Steagall, big enough to even turn the shadow banking system from speculation into investing in job-creating productive industries. Mr. Obama's Attorney General perp walked dozens of leading banksters. And the stimulus: Instead of wasting it in tax cuts, as some advocated, it was more than $1 trillion aimed at cutting-edge infrastructure, including rebuilding our passenger train system and high-speed rail, not being thrown away on highways. Where did the money come from for this socialist reign of terror? Higher taxes on the richest, making corporations actually pay taxes, and winding down the vast national security/empire economy. We were well on our way to retrofitting suburbia for a high-cost energy future, addressing climate change, moving away from foreign oil. And in doing so, creating millions of high-paid jobs. And many union ones, for these ruthless bastards immediately pushed through the Employee Free Choice Act. No wonder, the forces of reaction reacted…

Of course none of that happened. The quick lessons of the election: 1) When an ignorant, afraid electorate, seeing its living standards fall, must choose between bought-off Republican-lite Dems and real bought-off Republicans, they will choose the latter. 2) Except for the bluest states and most farcical candidates, money buys elections and the liberals can't outspend what John Judis calls "the party of reactionary insurrection." 3) The quiet coup has been completed. 4) The Democratic Party may not be dead, but it should be. 5) Most voters have no memory of a government that works well and fights for average people, and that bodes ill for liberalism. 6) Did it matter that the president is black? To many Americans, it did, and negatively. 7) Arizona is toast.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The magical thinking election

A few last thoughts as we head into what might be a historic election.

In Arizona, the state's largest newspaper wrote an especially tortured endorsement for Gov. Jan Brewer. The "reasoning" of the Arizona Republic is that Brewer is best positioned to help the state's ailing economy (!). And that she can work with dominant Republicans in the Legislature (!).  Of course the latter is true because she will go along with the Kooks. The former is insanity, for Brewer doesn't understand the first thing about economic development. If sunshine, low taxes and "light regulation" were the keys to prosperity, then Arizona would be Hong Kong. So she promises more of the same, especially failure to understand the housing boom isn't coming back. This endorsement is all about appeasing the white-right advertisers and readers in the suburbs, especially the East Valley. Brewer is an idiot, and the stories are legion (e.g., being the first governor in memory to skip out after a very brief appearance at Governor's Arts Awards dinner). A more cogent endorsement came for Terry Goddard from the Arizona Daily Star.

It's said that statewide elections are decided in Pima County. Not this time, alas. If Raul Grijalva is in trouble, then the Arizona Democratic Party is kaput. As with the nation, the red states will become redder; so much for angry Tea Partiers and theocrats voting to "throw out the bums" who caused the disaster. They are the stooges, the useful idiots, of the corporate elite pulling the strings for a "permanent Republican majority."

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Posted inUncategorized

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Posted inPolitics: National

The gathering storm

So the "conservatives" on Wall Street and in parts of corporate America seem on their way to buying an election. This is not foreordained: Voters could come to their senses and not return to power the very party whose policies and ideology most caused our mess. Democrats might come out fighting as Democrats, not Republican-lite — although that window is closing thanks to the odious and dangerous vote-by-mail trend. But it looks as if this is the world we'll live in. And we'll look back fondly on the hapless Harry Reid and the rictus smile of Nancy Pelosi.

The ideal world of the Republican plutocracy and their Tea Party stooges is the 1920s, if not the Gilded Age. No New Deal. No Social Security or Medicare. No worker protections purchased with union blood. It's a far cry from the "right to rise" for everyone and heavy emphasis on government infrastructure that characterized the early GOP, from Abraham Lincoln's pronouncement: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." It is far from Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford or even Ronald Reagan." They want government to enhance the fortunes of the rich, the big corporations, a huge defense establishment and devil take the hindmost — for the middle class, it will be the law of the jungle. At least the years of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover didn't include theocracy, the sidelining of science and endless wars.

Whether they get it will be another matter. But if the election turns out as it appears, I wonder whether the Democratic Party has much future, whether it will become the Whigs of the 21st century, or the equivalent of Britain's Liberal Party. And, forgive me,  I wonder, in the wake of the Citizens United decision by the permanently "conservative" Supreme Court combined with an ignorant citizenry and the bungling of the Obama administration, whether progressivism can ever make a comeback in America. Karl Rove and the old white people win, after all. And who knows if the coming racially diverse and smart young America promised by Mr. Obama's election will ever materialize as a positive electoral force in the face of so much corporate and plutocratic power?

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Another shot to the foot

The great question as Arizona seems headed into its next phase of destruction is: How could they vote for Jan Brewer? How could they vote for the same bunch of Kooks in the Legislature, with the same policies, that have already caused so much damage in the Grand Canyon State? It is a thundering question for the nation, as well. How could so many people be willing to return to power the party and philosophy that gave is the Lost Decade of the Bush years (stagnant stock market, falling living standards, record income inequality, rising deficit and the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression)?

For Arizona, the answers seem painfully obvious: The long incubation of right-wing philosophy seeded by Barry Goldwater but returned in a whirlwind of nihilism, hatred and God-guns-gays gasbaggery that Barry would despise. The Big Sort that has drawn like-minded people there in a surprising cluster for such a populous state (Washington, of similar population, is much more diverse politically). The fierce political activism and reliability of the neo-Birchers, paranoiacs, racists, proto-fascists and Mormons that decides elections where turnout it low. The civic detachment of a state where many residents don't consider it "home" and resort-apathy is rampant. The "What's the Matter With Kansas" mentality of working-class whites consistently voting against their economic interests. And the campesino mindset of the Mexican-American population that doesn't vote, even though its very existence is threatened by the Kookocracy.

But Jan Brewer? Is this the level of idiocy to which my home state has sunk? Roman Hruska, a forgotten Nebraska senator, defended a Nixon Supreme Court nominee by saying, "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos." I suppose the idiots of Arizona deserve the representation of Jan Brewer. And she came along at the right time: When  the white-right was ginning up its anti-immigrant hysteria.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The new world order

The Republicans are on a roll, or so the conventional wisdom goes. The American public, with the memory of a kicked dog, is ready to re-entrust power to the Party that Wrecked America. It certainly has the eye-candy for horny white male voters, such as the comely-but-stupid Christine O'Donnell and the leggy half-term Gov. Palin. It has billions of dollars thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling on corporate campaign spending (corporations are people, you see, except when they break the law). And it has issues: Gays and Muslims are taking over the country, along with Obama's "socialism" — such as the big giveaway to the for-profit health-care sector, the rescue of the casino on Wall Street and continued funding of the for-profit national security economy. Issues such as that the Constitution is sacrosanct, with its mandated theocracy, that evolution is a "theory" (like gravity) and should not be taught, that stem-cell research is, like all science, of the devil and we should just incinerate all those embryos, that tax cuts and no regulation will solve every ill, that brown people cutting your lawn are the biggest threat to American civilization.

America has become like Arizona: Ignorant, fearful, disconnected from and hostile to the commons, inordinately dependent on gub'ment dollars even as it rails against gub'ment. And, most of all, locked in a clueless feedback loop trying to avoid reality. But the real world moves on.

A new world order is crashing down on us whether we like it or not. And it's not the new world order of Glenn Beck's paranoia or George H.W. Bush's optimistic post-Cold War vision.

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Kenilworth at 90
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

Kenilworth at 90

I was asked to speak at the 90th birthday of Kenilworth School, my alma mater, on Oct. 23rd. Obligations keep me from attending, but this is what I would say:

Ten years ago I had the great fortune of speaking at the 80th birthday of Kenilworth School. I had come a long way from a child for whom this school held so many good memories, but also one for whom it held anxieties and fears, an average student except in reading, one who was poor in athletics, a target of bullies, who watched the clock on the wall in every classroom waiting for each school day to end, who quailed in terror when we were herded into the auditorium and made to lean against the walls and cover our heads as protection against Soviet missiles.

Ten years ago I had returned to a Phoenix spread across 1,500 square miles. A huge freeway cut its way beside Kenilworth. “Master planned communities” were where many people chose to live, even as they complained that Phoenix had no soul and no history. Natives were hard to find among the huge Midwestern influx. The temperature had risen 10 degrees and the summers were hotter and longer. Downtown and north Central had been denuded of retail and jobs. And yet Kenilworth School still stood. My message then was how Kenilworth and everyone who loved it — lawyer Fred Rosenfeld and other alums maintained an association to help the school — had kept faith. Here was Phoenix’s soul and history.

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Posted inPhoenix

It’s morning (after) in Glendale

News item: Glendale is stuck figuring out, in a shifting economic landscape, how to deal with roughly $500 million in borrowing for the sports district. By the time Glendale pays interest over three decades, the city will have spent close to $1 billion.

The common cover story, bought into by the Republic, goes like this: "Glendale had been on track to stunningly remake itself into a sports mecca with four major sports: hockey, baseball, basketball and football. Then the economy collapsed." In fact, Glendale epitomizes everything nearly wrong with metro Phoenix economic development. It was not so much a victim of the Great Recession as it invited a reckoning no matter that happened to the national economy. That's why, aside from its dark comedic value, this disaster is worth dwelling upon.

This was once one of the sweet and distinct farm towns of the Salt River Valley. It depended on a diverse array of crops grown in the surrounding fields, which were then packed in town and loaded on the Santa Fe Railway for shipment back east (a passenger train stopped daily, too). Other businesses supported the ag sector with supplies and equipment. The railroad itself had a large icing dock in the days before mechanical refrigerator cars. Nearly every retailer was local. The population was about 15,700 in 1960. This was the most scalable and sustainable it would ever be. Then it was absorbed by the Growth Machine and became just another Phoenix suburb with all the attendant drawbacks.

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Posted inPolitics: National

No, he can’t

Even though President Obama can still give a good speech, it's not too early to assess the latest failed American presidency.

Making advanced investments to create jobs and industries, as well as making America more competitive? No, he can't. Closing Guantanamo? No, he can't. Preparing America for a future of high energy costs and resource competition? No, he can't. Ending our ill-considered imperial adventures in the Muslim world? No, he can't. Addressing climate change? Reforming the dangerous Wall Street casino? Correcting bad trade deals that have cost millions of American jobs and closed thousands of American manufacturers? The employee free-choice act? Overcoming special interests. No. No. No. Hell, no.

Barack Obama is one of the most gifted politicians in my lifetime. When he was elected, the comparisons were abundant: The second coming of Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, FDR. None of that turned out to be real. Instead, the comparisons now trend to Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. If the Republicans were not so crazy, Mr. Obama would be a one-term president. With Mitt Romney lurking in the wings, he may yet be.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Aliens among us

Among the weirdness of Phoenix, here's one that stood out. I went down to Union Station on one of regular pilgrimages, to this building that represented so much of the city that's gone yet I still love. When they finally find a way to tear it down, I'll be gone for good. Outside the nearby immense Maricopa County jail complex, uniformed correctional officers and deputies stood smoking. Down the street, work was continuing on the new courts building, yet another dreadful dehumanizing edifice plopped into the public square. It was shift change and workers were walking to their cars past Sheriff Joe's men. The laborers were all Hispanic, all speaking Spanish, all passing without a care. The coppers didn't even glance at them.

How many were really citizens or legal migrants? Did it even matter? I saw this all over Phoenix. Whatever fear or outmigration the Jim Crow anti-immigrant SB-1070 provoked, Hispanics are everywhere and everywhere working. It reinforced my belief that the law is more about voter suppression and keeping them in their place than any cry for help because Washington failed to "secure the border." Even with the migration of millions of Midwesterners, Phoenix can't escape its heritage as a Southern town, especially with segregation. And on the other side of the tracks remains the huge underclass that keeps the low-wage economy going. It wouldn't surprise me if the 2010 Census showed the city with close to a Hispanic majority.

Most work hard and play by the rules. Some want to earn money and return to Mexico. Most want to be Americans. To be sure, they face virulent bigotry not unlike that endured by the Irish and Italians before them. Unfortunately, Phoenix is a poor melting pot. It lacks the economy with the rungs in the ladder to allow most to rise. The education system is among the worst in America, including the joke of the "charter school movement." And yet the man who has presided over not only its continuing miserable performance but a worsening is on his way to a new public office. Meet the new Attorney General, Tom Horne.

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Posted inPhoenix

Arizona still life

The facts about Phoenix and Arizona are so numbingly, depressingly undeniable that I will offer a more impressionist view of the month I've spent there. What infuses everything is the heat. September was virtually impossibly to enjoy because of the constant drumbeat of 105 degrees or higher. Most people here have no memory of the time when the city started to cool down in September, just as they have no memory of the agriculture, shade trees, irrigation canals and much smaller urban footprint that made that cooling possible. So they either slog along, or brag with a bit too much frantic insistence that they don't have to tolerate Ohio winters. I hear people say moronic things like, "There are nine nice months and three hot months." Maybe in 1965 — Now it's more like five nice months and seven of varying degrees of unpleasantness.

The follies continue at the government of one of the most populous counties in America, a county desperately in need of good government and urban solutions yet won't find them. There's a sense that the entire edifice will soon collapse in the face of federal investigations if not the vengeance of a righteous God. At Phoenix City Hall, meanwhile, absence is the biggest presence. Phil Gordon, who began his two terms as mayor amid so much optimism, is barely visible. City council has descended into a paralyzing partisanship. The economy of the entire metro area remains in a depression, and who really gives a rat's ass if the rich in north Scottsdale are still rich? As a result, every municipal government remains in crisis and can only cut back what were inadequate services even in "flush times."

The hysterical turbocharge from the Jim Crow anti-immigrant SB 1070 has dissipated but not before making the idiot Jan Brewer's election a near certainty. Those debate gaffes that amused America? That's her. And the Arizona GOP. And the Arizonans who will vote them back into office yet again. An electorate of long pauses and no thoughts. All the years of Republican governance here, the low taxes and bare regulation — the state's fiscal situation is a disaster and the economy is a joke. No matter.

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Posted inUncategorized

Blue highways

Having business in Phoenix that I was in no hurry to begin, we took the back roads from Seattle. My preference is to take the train, but a funding-starved Amtrak doesn't even go to the nation's fifth most populous city (and Amtrak will probably be killed by the Republicans, should they gain control of Congress). The drive might recall the days when motoring was pleasant, synonymous with freedom in a big country. It might reveal the West as it was when I was younger, before the millions of newcomers, exurban sprawl and Interstate sameness.

Considering timing and the route I wanted, the Interstate couldn't be avoided from Seattle to the Oregon border. Even so, it was showcased the variety of Washington state, particularly the bountiful farmland east of the Cascades and running down to Yakima and Walla Walla. The contrast with Arizona, which is all about attracting new house buyers, could not have been more striking. But the true drive began where U.S. 395 hits Pendleton, Oregon, just below the storied Columbia River.

Pendleton is the kind of real small town that has been largely lost in America, leaving either wealthy yupped-up towns that are imitations of small towns, or, more frequently, places hollowed out by Wal-Mart and de-industrialization, leaving ghost Main Streets and grotesque boxes of fast food and Wally hulking out "by the highway." Downtown Pendleton is blessed with real local shops such as an office supply store (!) that actually serve local customers, as well as a mission for the needy, government buildings, offices, churches, restaurants. They occupy a century's worth of architure, but most of it pleasingly historic and densely close together. Real neighborhoods are nearby. The Union Pacific main line to Portland goes through the heart of town — it serves the agricultural economy, and once had passenger trains before one of many Amtrak cutbacks. Taken together, the downtown is a delight of scale, walkability and beauty.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The slipstream of time

It's been a blessedly cool summer in Seattle. Only a couple of brief warm spells and plenty of days with morning clouds. The rest of the nation has suffered through the hottest summer on record and still we will do nothing to address climate change. The big polluters and fossil-fuel giants are pushing an initiative in California to roll back that state's "Global Warming Solutions Act." The Great Recession drags on and things may get worse, much worse. The commentariat and leading economists refuse to see how much we have changed as an economy, as a country. The changes have accumulated, not least being the shattered social compact, and now we are trapped as surely as the Chilean miners, except no one is digging us out.

I'll be headed back to Phoenix for awhile. The civilization that thrives in Seattle lets me forget what it must be like to live every day amid the madness that has overtaken my home state. That wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III won his primary against the hapless J.D. Hayworth should surprise no one. McCain has the backing of local and national elites. The media love fest with Maverick will resume. Few will ask: Four terms of McCain and what does Arizona have to show for it? It's not just what he didn't do, but what he did to actively hurt and hold back a state that wouldn't even exist without large amounts of federal investment.

The Kookocracy increases its hold. I had hoped that enough Arizonans would be horrified by this bunch, would actually notice that their policies, carried out for years, had failed miserably. It was not to be. Now the proto-fascism of the Arizona white-right is a national tide. As someone who was raised as a Theodore Roosevelt Republican, it amazes me that today's GOP is down to two ideas: Tax cuts for the rich and hate. They hate browns and blacks. They hate immigrants and Muslims. They hate gays. They hate the president, science, Social Security and women who want the government out of their reproductive decisions. They hate the First Amendment (but not the Second). They hate the poor, "liberals" and, of course, old Republicans, who are RINOs to be exterminated.

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Posted inPhoenix

The road ahead

Something about gated properties, lookalike subdivisions of lookalike tract houses, endless motoring and, especially, the heat, puts many Arizonans in the walking-talking equivalent of a persistent vegetative state. Nothing really seems to change. Nuts run the Legislature — our version of the Beverly Hillbillies. Sheriff Joe provides more entertainment. Freeways and shopping malls are the center of activity. Scottsdale is rich. Downtown Phoenix is still largely dead. ASU is big and can't win football games. The Mexicans are all right, as long as we don't have to see 'em or pay for 'em. Keep my taxes low. I moved here to be left alone. Even the worst recession in the state's modern history has done little to change the overall sense: Nothing much changes here.

This is, of course, nonsense. The world is changing fast and I can think of no place in America less prepared for it. Even Arizona is changing.

The Great Recession has temporarily frozen advantages and disadvantages; places have what they brought to the dance. Thus, with a talented, high-wage workforce, diverse economy and focus on tech, biomedical sectors and Asian trade, Seattle is doing pretty well. Houston and Oklahoma City have oil. Many smaller places with stable, real economies, places that didn't overbuild — you see them on the endless lists of "cities with jobs," etc. — are holding up. The industrial Midwest keeps losing jobs. Phoenix, so dependent on the housing Ponzi scheme, has little to pull itself out of a deep ditch. But this sense of stasis is temporary.

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