Phoenix

Several weeks ago, ASU President Michael Crow spoke before the Chandler Chamber of Commerce. His comments, as reported by the Arizona Republic, are instructive:

Let me start with something that’s really been on my mind the last
few months. People say to me, “What is the economic development
challenge of Arizona? It’s really kind of strange. It really isn’t what people think it is. The economic development challenge for Arizona, in my view, is our
inability to express the creativity, the adaptability, the successful
way of doing business, the free-enterprise spirit and the things that go
on here. It’s our inability to project positively.

Crow goes on to list a number of "positives," including that "there are very few communities with the assets Chandler has been able to amass. It is unbelievable! But you would think none of this is true." And, "If you took nothing but the newspaper and the political rhetoric spoken
now, you would think the United States is a failure. You would think
Arizona is a backwater, cornpone hangout….If we do not work on projecting the image of what this place is, we are fools. Fools!" Crow is no fool, and this could easily be dismissed as just saying something nice for the chamber types, but it was also picked up as a rallying cry in an editorial.

As every schoolchild once learned, at least before standardized testing, South Carolina precipitated the nullification crisis in 1832 by passing a law that said it could, essentially, pick and choose which federal laws would apply within the state. The immediate complaint was the tariff, but of course the deeper issues were slavery and state rights. And, as the child once learned, Old Hickory forced the South Carolina firebrands to back down, preserving the union.

What is less discussed is Andrew Jackson's situational approach to the rule of law. Indian Removal, one of the few national issues about which the Old Hero was specific and passionate, broke numerous solemn treaties and enacted theft and ethnic cleansing against the Five Civilized Tribes. When the Supreme Court finally found in favor of the Cherokee Nation, Jackson simply ignored it. Georgia and other Southern states wanted that improved and cultivated Indian land for plantations and the spread of slavery. Jackson was a slaveholder himself. He was also happy to allow South Carolina and other Southern states to ignore federal law when it furthered white supremacy. What he wouldn't countenance was secession, and hence the object lesson on nullification (and the tariff was modified anyway).

Which brings us to 21st century Arizona, the Crazy State. Prop. 120 asks voters to approve the following: "The State of Arizona declares its sovereign and exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the air, water, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within its boundaries…" Exceptions are made for Indian reservations and federal land that had been "ceded" in a way, I suppose, Arizona decided was Constitutional. I am not making this up.

A few years ago, when it seemed that Phoenix had become the nation's fifth most-populous city, the New York Times decided to post a reporter to this unknown land somewhere on the other side of Jersey. Recently, the job has been handed off to Fernanda Santos. Lately, the Newspaper of Record has uncovered that it's hotter than hell in the un-air-conditioned atrium of the Sandra Day O'Connor Federal Courthouse (a plan which I remain convinced starchitect Richard Meier just pulled off the shelf from his student days, although others say he was enamored by the misters at a restaurant at Arizona Center). Santos has also revealed for the Times' influential readership the tortilla factory at the Ranch Market on Roosevelt at 16th Street.

Then came the topper: A story this week on the excessive heat that never mentioned the worsening urban heat island because of the loss of agriculture and sprawl, much less climate change and its dire potential consequences for a big city where, to paraphrase Ed Abbey, one should not be. The conclusion of this bastion of sophisticated journalism: It's very hot in Phoenix in August.

To be fair, Santos was said to looking for a house in the historic districts, according to sources who wished to remain anonymous because they wished to remain anonymous, as the Times might put it. Good for her. She has done some (reactive) lifting on the Badged Ego's legal troubles and immigration. And one never knows the misguidance being given by editors. But Phoenix desperately needs all the real enterprise journalism it can get, however much it discomfits the local-yokels. Let's help out the Old Gray Lady.

I don't mean to be harsh, but what is it with Arizona's climate-change denial? Sure, it's not as bad as North Carolina, which is trying to outlaw using climate science to estimate the rise in sea level. But Arizona is the focus of this blog, the home state I love (no matter what you believe) and fight for, even if it must be at a distance. Aside from the Republic's indispensable Shaun McKinnon, I am unaware of any public figures who are discussing a subject they should be screaming from the rooftops: The clear and present danger that climate change specifically presents to Arizona.

Of course, the Kooks (I coined the term, you're welcome) will be deniers. But consider the congressional primary race among Democrats Kyrsten Sinema, Andrei Cherny and David Schapira. I'm not sure the survivor from this circular firing squad will prevail in a new district that includes Chandler and Mesa. But one would think, especially given the talent and brains of the two candidates I know (Cherny and Sinema), that this could be a time for truth telling. Yet — and forgive me if I missed it — I can't find a mention of it on their campaign Web sites, much less in the "send money" push emails from Cherny and chirpy-happy-everything's-great-in-Arizona tweets from Sinema.

The New York Times on Sunday noted that Joe Arpaio's Arizona didn't become that way without some who fought back in public. It singled out Latino organizer Salvador Reza; Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox; community organizer Lydia Guzman; videographer Dennis Gilman; state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema; ACLU Director Dan Pochoda; Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and New Times reporter Stephen Lemons among others. If Arpaio finally goes down in the Department of Justice civil-rights lawsuit, they can hold their heads high.

Can you imagine what Attorney General Robert Kennedy would have done to Arpaio had he gone after his brother the president with a bogus quest over his birth certificate? Bobby wasn't called mean and ruthless for nothing. Or what LBJ or Nixon would have done? Arpaio would have been given the biggest IRS proctology exam in the history of the world, seen all his federal aid cut off, and been relentlessly hounded by federal prosecutors and FBI agents. President Obama, cool and contemplative, has a corporate lawyer as his Attorney General. So my hopes are muted.

The Resistence desperately needs heroes. Unfortunately, those listed by the Times either had no power or, in the case of Gordon, were severely constrained by both events and his own second-term swoon. The reality is that good intentions divorced from power get us nowhere. Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived his convictions against the Nazis, but the only reason we are able to celebrate his martyrdom today is the brute power used by the Allies to defeat them. When Lyndon Johnson suddenly became president, he was urged to back off on civil rights, so as not to use his political capital on a seeming lost cause. This master of the use of power, in Robert Caro's telling, replied, "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?" And a hero, with titanic, heroic flaws, emerged.

You might be tempted to pass on a story in Sunday's Arizona Republic with the process-y headline, "Case Asks Who Must Pay Taxes for Utility." Don't.

Ably reported by Ryan Randazzo, the article lays out a controversy in Sun Lakes. The small company that provides water for the "active living retirement community" wants a rate increase of about $6 a month from residents, the first such hike since 1994. Sounds reasonable. But it wants more: "About 40 percent of the increase would pay the utility owners' income taxes." The Residential Utility Consumer Office contends that the water company's "shareholders might have other business interests that lose money, and if they combine the tax credits of those operations with the tax liability from the water utility, they might not pay taxes at all, even though the customers would be paying a 'phantom tax.' 'When this happens, this is essentially free money for the shareholders paid by the ratepayers who receive no benefit from these payments,' RUCO wrote in a brief for the case."

This is about more than Sun Lakes. My sympathy is limited for people who want to buy houses in a leapfrogged, 98-percent white development with streets named after Michigan, Minnesota and Indiana, profaning our desert. But the case is a rare window into how power and influence work in the state. Power, especially, at what insiders call "the fourth branch of government," the Arizona Corporation Commission.