'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
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The interior of Los Arcos Mall, at Scottsdale Road and McDowell Road.
I was recently interviewed by a graduate student at Arizona State University, who is writing on the history and prospects for the area of south Scottsdale around the former Los Arcos mall. Zonies might find the exchange of some interest:
What are your memories of Los Arcos growing up?
I lived about half a mile away during high school, from 1970 to 1974. We had moved there from central Phoenix. It was very much a cohesive neighborhood. Like most of Phoenix then, it was very lush with grass, trees and landscaping. It was homogeneous: middle-class Anglo families, many of whose fathers worked at Motorola.
It was fairly new, and much of McDowell didn’t even have sidewalks. You could still see farming going on a quarter mile north of Thomas Road. Scottsdale Road was barely developed; we have a stunning view of the buttes out the back of our house. Scottsdale itself was still partly rural, with a rustic/touristy downtown. There was not much north of Chaparral Road.
The neighborhood was centered on Coronado High School, which then was a very fine school, including one of the best fine arts departments in the country.
6An industry that has been poorly managed, with executives looting it for huge bonuses and protected employees compensated far beyond the average American, making products that have caused untold damage to the planet, comes to Washington seeking a bailout. Without it, the executives say, the entire economy could be severely damaged. Of course lawmakers should say "hell no."
But they didn't. When the so-called financial services industry asked for a "rescue," lawmakers couldn't move fast enough.
American automakers are a different matter. Asking a fraction of what has been plowed into Wall Street — with not much to show for it — they are getting the brush off from the Bush administration and much of Congress. Myths proliferate about union compensation, this from the same people who hail obscene executive compensation and bonuses for the top swindlers on the Street. In fact, the union has been giving back for 20 years.
It's striking that the same people who celebrate the bootstrapping entrepreneur and the sanctity of contract are contemptuous of blue-collar workers who have created most of the wealth in a given business and painstakingly negotiated labor agreements that allowed their families to reach the middle class. And there's much carping about how the top executives failed to build cars for an expensive-energy future or to protect the environment. Yet policymakers consistently refused to insist on even modest improvements. Now it's so easy to say to Detroit: Drop dead.
8Whatever else might be said about the departure of Jerry Yang from Yahoo, I'll be glad to see him go. I'm sick of seeing the chief executive of a major company so badly dressed. Alas, he represents the spirit of the age.
I hate casual dress. I date the decline of our civilization not only by the demise of men wearing suits and ties, but by "casual" clothes becoming a mandatory business uniform. Far from being something that makes people comfortable, it's just the new man in the gray flannel suit — except the latter looked better. This is no victory for choice or egalitarianism. When I wear suits, people invariably ask, "Why are you so dressed up?," as if I am in white tie. I want to ask, "Why are you so badly dressed?"
Nowadays, outside of a few professional pockets, it's the rebels that wear suits. (And women look smashing in them, too).
8Even under the ownership of Gannett, with a publisher whose command to the newsroom is to "say something positive about the community" and a huge loss of talent and institutional knowledge, the Arizona Republic — er, Information Center — still does its occasional "let's do the right thing" stories. The latest appeared Sunday.
This is not investigative, "put-em-in-jail" journalism. Rather, it represents a white paper on the things the "community" needs to do to get better. The Republic has been doing this at least since the 1980s, when it became clear that Phoenix was headed for a trainwreck. I certainly wrote my share. And nothing ever happens. Now I read them, as the real power brokers must do, for entertainment value.
Editors must have been on vacation to allow Chad Graham, one of the small cadre of real reporters, to write:
The Valley's economy could start to recover in 2010. That is when some economists believe the glut of excess homes will be absorbed and new residents will spark new construction.But if history is a guide, metropolitan Phoenix will only seem to rebound. Despite decades of real- estate run-ups, quality-of-life measures for the region continue to fall.
That's the truth. But, then, the paper sometimes allows such unpleasantness on its pages. After all nothing will happen. Then the usual-suspect "experts" talking about "wake-up calls" and "initiatives" for biotech or solar power. There's just one problem with all of this:
4If you've ever wondered why these CEOs make hundreds of millions of dollars even if their companies are laying off thousands, their remaining employees have largely seen their paychecks stagnate and their stocks are circling the drain… If you've ever wondered whether you, or even the office boy, could have done a better job…consider the case of Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury and former chief executive of Goldman Sachs. As is now becoming clear, Paulson has little more clue than the office boy about addressing the financial crisis.
After more than a year of denying the gathering storm, he suddenly rushed to Congress demanding an open-ended bailout of Wall Street, "to save the financial system." First the plan was to buy the "toxic debt" that had brought down much of the system. He was urged to inject capital directly into banks but rejected this advice. When the credit system seized up he changed the bailout to…inject capital directly into the banks. Yet the banks still refuse to do much lending, even as they use the taxpayers' money to buy competitors and pay fat compensation to their executives. Now the bailout has been changed yet again, to help "consumers." Well, not exactly: money would be given to companies dealing in credit cards, car loans and student loans. Don't expect any help personally.
Meanwhile, the real economy keeps spiraling downward as 401(k)s are vaporized, a million people have lost their jobs this year, the retail sector is moving into bankruptcy court and Detroit is facing collapse. This is one last gift of the Bush administration. Paulson's actions aren't incompetence on the level of Brownie — a political hack put in a critical position he for which he was completely unprepared. They may be worse.
8Like the mistreated girlfriend who just can't quit the abusive fighter jock, the national press is again scritch-scritch-scritching at John McCain's door. His concession speech — actually fumbling and average before a typically thuggish Phoenix crowd — was "dignified," "his best speech of the campaign," and "where was this guy during the campaign?". Now the media are busy predicting the re-emergence of the "old McCain" to do good things for the republic, maybe even build bridges between the conservatives and the Obama administration.
Illusions die hard. John McCain worked hard throughout his career to cultivate the national media — and for all our bravado, even the toughest in the working press can be seduced (whether they bend their principles as a result is another matter). He called them "his base" before the campaign required him to run as a hard-right extremist, right down to the media-blaming rhetoric.
Unfortunately for the media, they finally got a taste of the real, real McCain: a rather undisciplined, herky-jerky, shoot-from-the-hip opportunist, and most of the time a doctrinaire gunslinger for bankrupt, discredited conservatism. When he supported George Bush on torture after opposing him, he cut the last thread of my willingness to believe he was a "maverick" even on a few issues.
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No CommentsGeneral Motors is running out of cash. Think about that. What was once the company that embodied American strength is running out of cash. Little wonder that Detroit is angling to get its own "rescue package" from Washington. We should do it — with serious strings attached.
Anyone who has lived in the Midwest can attest to the foundational nature of the auto industry to American manufacturing. It's not just the Big Three themselves, but the vast supply chain they have spawned, from steelmakers to precision machine tool companies to providers of all manner of parts. As we bail out a "financial services industry" that increasingly made little more than frauds and swindles, the auto industry, even heavily diminished from its former greatness, makes real products and is an essential prop of the middle class, particularly in the heartland. A hollowed-out economy can stand no more losses.
Yet the American industry is the author of many of its own problems. The decline of GM and its sisters began decades ago in an unholy alliance of complacency, greed and contempt for customers between management and labor leaders. Despite 20 years of plant closings and pledges of new days, the carmakers never really reformed. There's one exception: hundreds of thousands of union workers in the Big Three and parts makers lost their jobs — and communities their livelihood. Contrary to a persistent mythology, the decline since the early 1990s has been almost entirely the fault of management, not the United Auto Workers.
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2We hear much talk now about the Republican Party trying to reinvent itself, fixing its "brand," facing an "identity crisis" or entering a period of internecine war. I'm skeptical about all this. We knew where the Republicans were coming from in the primaries, with a phalanx of middle-aged, rich white guys as candidates. All they had to offer was the same discredited mantra of tax cuts, theocracy and fear, with perhaps the exception of the entertaining libertarian Ron Paul. John McCain emerged as the perfect vessel for this exhausted, intellectually bankrupt yet madly power-hungry political party.
In the wake of a crushing defeat, several bigwigs are meeting at the Virginia estate of Brent Bozell, including "prominent conservatives" such as Grover Norquist — he of the lust to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub — and the religious extremist Tony Perkins. Same old, same old. The reality is that the Republicans have been reduced to a Southern white regional party, with some appeal in Southernized white rural areas elsewhere and the rural white libertarian West. This was brought home in a remarkable map in the New York Times, showing party gains in 2008 vs. 2004.
It's not just that the party's limited bag of ideas have been shown to hold frauds, and has finally been soundly rejected by the public. It's not just that the politics of hysteria and hate don't work now. This is a party totally out of step with the country, which is more diverse and urbanized than ever — even suburban voters recognized their essentially urban issues this time — and becoming more so in the future. This is a party whose ruling creeds are incapable of dealing with a complex modern society or the multi-layered challenges of the 21st century. And whose hidden creeds — policy crafted to ensure a plutocracy — were exposed in the financial crisis.
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