'A pen warmed up in hell' | Reality-based commentary about Phoenix, Arizona, and the nation.
No CommentsThe McCain campaign "released" the president-elect’s long awaited, long promised, health records in classic fashion: on the edge of a holiday weekend, when they would be guaranteed to get little attention. Not only that, but the records were made available to only 20 reporters hand-picked by the campaign.
Those journalists were given three hours to view more than 1,000 pages of often highly technical records; they were not allowed to make copies or remove them. McCain’s doctors were made available for 90 minutes — or so the newspeople were told. The questions were cut short after 45 minutes.
America’s increasingly lapdog media did not report much about this odd, not to mention suspicious, situation, made more compelling given McCain’s age and cancer history. The headlines were essentially "McCain is healthy…robust…takes a baby aspirin…no cancer recurrence."
Tellingly, the McCain campaign excluded the New York Times’ Lawrence K. Altman, a reporter and a medical doctor. Even so, Dr. Altman’s examination of the pool report made the real news, which Rogue Columnist will start your week with and keep up.
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3On page A-21 of today’s New York Times and deep inside its Website is the day’s most consequential story: Karl Rove being subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about his involvement in the political prosecution of Alabama’s former Democratic governor and the firings of U.S. attorneys.
The onetime Bush political boss appears to have been deeply involved in the illegal and unethical acts. And of course he is refusing to testify. He may be held in contempt of Congress like his former colleague Harriet Meirs. The Bush Justice Department will refuse to prosecute the case. And the clock runs out.
Indeed, the clock is running out on American democracy. The United States Congress has only a little time to reassert its constitutional powers or the America we once knew is dead.
Unfortunately most of the media treat this as a minor tit-for-tat political story, which is exactly what the radical right wants.
2No doubt, the fetching Lisa Graham Keegan will play well on television as an education adviser to President-elect McCain. It will be instructive to see if the national media look beyond the blond good looks and quick mind to see that Keegan represents everything that voters want to get away from in Republican education policy.
As a legislator and then as superintendent of public instruction in Arizona — the equivalent of education secretary — she aggressively embraced the "charter school movement" and made Arizona into a national leader as an education "marketplace," where charters became as ubiquitous as Circle K stores. Properly constituted and regulated, individual charter schools have turned in impressive results nationally. These individual charters can be studied for best practices, but, there’s little evidence they can handle the job of public schools on a massive scale. Evidence mounts that many fail to ourperform public schools, yet are more costly and prone to financial abuse.
The results of Keegan’s crusade in Arizona were nothing short of tragic. Acting as if Arizona public schools were overfed, union-wrecked systems seen in a few big cities back east, she pushed for "school choice" in the form of charters. Few appear to perform well. Some are prime business ventures for well-connected right-wingers. Many are fly-by-night storefronts with no playgrounds, libraries or cafeterias. I recall seeing one where a roach coach would stop by at noon and toot the horn, as if it were a construction site. I guess the school owners were preparing the pupils for their future careers. Meanwhile, the costs of a school library — a given when I was in Arizona public schools — are foisted on the city library.
8The Arizona Republic’s Chad Graham traveled to Austin and Seattle to report on some lessons recession-slammed Phoenix might learn. Numerous Rogue Columnist readers have asked for my reactions. Chad is a fine journalist and a friend. His story fits into a continuum of sometime efforts by the newspaper to educate the public and policy makers about the real world — this goes back at least to the 1980s. These efforts are ignored as population growth resumes and the nation’s last big factory town returns to churning out suburban tract houses.
The editors tip their hands by, I would assume, inserting this sentence to make defensive "Valley residents" feel better: "Phoenix will never have a gateway seaport to Asia that hums with
activity. Seattle will never have the potential solar power of Phoenix." The sad reality is that the center of solar research, entrepreneurship and use is cloudy Germany. Phoenix literally started the solar power movement in the 1950s and let it get away — therein lies the tale of the town.
Graham’s important point is that Seattle and Austin "have learned the lesson that Phoenix is now being taught: Economic
downturns hit harder when you are overly reliant on one industry."
Rather than go through the story, or even rehash my years of "controversial" efforts to raise these issues, I’d rather make a few key points among dozens that could be discussed. My perspective is as a Phoenician who has lived in Seattle for nearly a year and has seen both close up.
4Gov. Janet Napolitano is not so tough when it comes to dealing with the real power in Arizona. Thus, we have this story broken last week by Capitol Media Services:
Gov. Janet Napolitano agreed to take home builders off the
financial hook for paying for new roads in exchange for a $100,000
donation to a campaign to persuade voters to boost their own taxes.
The deal, outlined in a letter obtained by Capitol Media Services,
resulted in the recrafting of the $42.6 billion transit improvement
initiative shortly before it was filed Tuesday to remove a provision to
raise at least some of the money from fees on new developments — fees
that would be added to the cost of new homes.
Instead the final version of the initiative — the one being
circulated for signatures — calls for the entire costs of new highways,
widened roads and mass transit projects to be paid for with a 1-cent
increase in the state sales tax, an increase of 18 percent from the
current 5.6 cent state levy.
I suppose this could be shrewd if it delivers long-needed Phoenix-Tucson rail service and commuter rail to Pinal County, not merely more roads. But it comes at a huge price, may never be approved, and will face the usual rear-guard attacks by the Legislature.
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No Comments
2The funniest story in the stack is an item reporting that Glendale did not even recoup what it spent as host "city" for the Super Bowl. For years ahead of the spectacle, Phoenix media reported what an economic boon it would be. This is a classic example about how critical thinking is neither taught nor valued in today’s newsrooms (gee, why do we keep losing readers?).
A basic analysis of the hype would have shown that the promised economic benefits would be modest. It happened during high season, so resorts and hotels would already be booked. Indeed, considering the NFL demands blocks of rooms at a discount, the hotel industry probably made less money than it would have otherwise. Sales of souvenirs? Most of the profit goes back to the NFL. Restaurants would have similarly been packed anyway. And so on.
It’s not that the Super Bowl doesn’t bring benefits, in terms of exposure and the gathering of big deal makers. Too bad it took place in an amorphous place without an identity and a stadium in a cotton field on the metro fringe, in a place with little economy besides the great — now shuttered — housing factory. But the media shouldn’t have bought into the economic hype. Alas, the pressure is always extreme to "say something positive." Unfortunately, many reporters today would never even have applied the basic bullshit detector that was once a standard-issue item in their craft.
Read on for more of the Stack.
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No CommentsSome of the right-wing thugs that have the loudest voices in Arizona want to recall Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon for being too soft on illegal immigration. Gordon doesn’t have anything to worry about, even with the ridiculously small numbers needed to get an initiative started.
If anything, Gordon’s cautious temporizing over Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s war on the poor — before criticizing it before a Hispanic audience — should earn a recall effort from the 34 percent of Phoenicians who are Hispanic and mostly American citizens (and those are 2000 numbers). But of course one reason the thugs rule is the populations that outnumber them, whether moderate Anglos or Mexican-American citizens, lack their lunatic zeal and often don’t even vote.
As anyone who has been paying attention knows, the illegal immigration problem is because 1) Arizona is a border state; 2) has a low-end economy dependent on low-wage illegal immigrant labor, and 3) is doing nothing to really address the issue. Gordon, however, is in the spotlight, in his second term as mayor, and it’s fair to ask a question of substance.
Has Phil Gordon failed as Phoenix mayor?
4In a previous post, I discussed economic reforms that should be made in the sick, corrupt financial markets. But this is only the start of efforts the next president and Congress must make to prevent a startling decline that is already evident in America. Whatever the Dow shows, most Americans are suffering and for the first time in generations, young people wonder, with good cause, if they can live better lives than their parents.
Real change is needed, and the question is whether the American people and their elected representatives have the guts to face the truth and move ahead. The laughable gas-tax holiday and much wishful thinking about alternative energy and hydrogen cars represent the school of destructive denial. This is "sustainability" that seeks to sustain the current unsustainable economic and social arrangements. It can’t be done.
Yet much of the current mess was caused, not by inexorable laws of economics, but by policy changes to benefit the rich and transnational corporations, as well as a sprawl economy at the root of the current recession. We can change it.
2The Monday stack is rich, so let’s get right to it.
We’re hearing a lot of talk about seeing lights at the end of the tunnel, that the downturn is over or the recession will be mild…whatever. I hope so. But here are a few things to keep in mind. First, recovering from the collapse of a real-estate bubble takes much more time than the recovery we saw from the tech bubble after ’01. Japan in the 1980s and 1990s is Exhibit A.
Second, America has many "economies." So Wall Street and the globalized macro economy measured by the Dow and the GDP may well "recover." Another economy involves good jobs and diverse opportunities outside of the minority of fortunate cities such as New York, San Francisco and Seattle. I see no signs of that economy turning around. Indeed, by many measures it slips a little further back during and after the end of each business cycle. Jobless recoveries are only one aspect of this troubling trend. Throughout the boom of the past few years, most wages stagnated and many actually lost ground. So hold the celebration.
Read on for more of the Stack
2The bosses obviously on vacation, the Arizona Republic committed real journalism today. The newspaper dug out the serious accreditation crisis facing the Maricopa Integrated Health System, which serves 400,000 mostly poor residents and operates the "county hospital." According to the story by Yvonne Wingett and Amanda Crawford, two of the few surviving serious reporters at the joint:
A detailed inspection of the county’s health-care system obtained by The Arizona Republic revealed widespread record-keeping problems and other flaws that could have posed risks to patients’ safety.
Since the inspection, the Maricopa Integrated Health System has been
overhauling operations and has spent about $1.5 million so far to
address the deficiencies, which were identified in September by the
Joint Commission, a national accrediting body. MIHS, which operates the
Maricopa Medical Center, says it has fixed many of the problems and
continues to address others.
The reports revealed a culture of incomplete or inaccurate medical
record-keeping that meant, in some cases, there was no proof that vital
patient-care processes were conducted.
The danger is the people see the headline and the photo of Maricopa Medical Center, then shake their heads and murmur about wasted tax dollars and freeloading Mexicans. In fact, this is an intriguing political disaster and a lost opportunity of the first magnitude.
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