Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Arizona crazy

From the Jim Crow anti-immigrant law and birther bill to the reality television show Sunset Daze, Arizona is gaining an international reputation for being crazy. It's not just "image" or "bad publicity." How did this happen to my beloved home? It took decades and tectonic shifts. Some will sound familiar to regular Rogue readers, but for the sake of the thousands of newbies that have found Rogue Columnist and are curious/frightened about Arizona, here's a primer:

The new Republican Party: Arizona always had a strong reactionary element, going back to its dependence on mines and railroads. Even the Democrats were mostly conservative. Arizona never produced, for example, a William Borah, the progressive Republican senator from Idaho. But even among the Republicans, there was independence and an understanding that Arizona would blow away without massive amounts of federal money. Republicans were a minority until Barry Goldwater slowly built them into the state's dominant party in the 1960s. Even then, Goldwater, Arizona Republic publisher Eugene C. Pulliam and others kept the John Bircher element at arms length, happy to use them but never let them take control. This changed with time and massive influx of new people. By the 1980s, conservative extremism was in the governor's seat. From the 1990s onward, the Christian Coalition and other national right-wing groups began taking control of the party from the lowest levels up, and purging old Arizona Republicans who now were labeled RINOS (Republicans in Name Only). They also focused on winning offices that held the most budget power, from school boards to the Legislature. The result is an entirely different creature: militant, frozen in ideological conformity, hostile to the facts, deeply committed to enacting "conservative" abstractions with little evidence they succeed. And, as the evidence shows, racist. Now, the Republicans have pretty much ruled for decades and the state is a catastrophe. Questions? That doesn't stop them from acting like victimized outsiders and the duhs and ignos in this ill-educated state fall for it.

The Big Sort: The journalist Bill Bishop used this as the title of his book on the dramatic clustering of like-minded people in different regions. It's a big change from most of American history, and as Bishop puts it, the Big Sort "is tearing us apart." Arizona is Exhibit A in this self-selecting process, especially among the Anglo population that votes, has money or is easy pickings for the demagogues. Arizona doesn't have its Austin (sorry, Democratic Tucson's strings are ultimately pulled by a car dealer and the sprawl barons). Despite the notion in the mid-1990s that population growth would moderate Arizona politics, or even the Democratic seats picked up during the nadir of the Bush presidency, Arizona has become redder and redder. People increasingly seemed to move to Arizona or the Phoenix suburbs to be with their co-religionists on the right, while progressive-minded folks moved out.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Causes and consequences

They came from far away by the millions, bringing strange, sometimes offensive customs and values. They show no interest in Arizona's history or traditions, preferring to keep to themselves. Through their numbers and the way the state uses them for economic gain, they profaned the peerless beauty of the Sonoran Desert and destroyed the magic of the Salt River Valley. They caused billions in public costs that will linger for decades. While many are said to be hard-working, most are in the state for its government-subsidized goodies, and their numbers have included no small share of criminals, even kingpins seeking to extend their dangerous empires across the border. And it's the smaller things, too. As wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III would have it, they deliberately cause accidents on the freeways and otherwise drive like maniacs. I'm no bigot — some individuals are even personal friends — but I even find their accents grating, their clothing bizarre, the ever-growing accommodations we must make for them unfair.

I'm writing, of course, about the other great migration that destabilized my home state: That of the Midwesterners and Californians. We all have our biases. If mine had been acted upon, Arizona would have passed appropriate taxes and strong land-use protections to help mitigate and reduce this wave of destructive immigration. Instead, it has rolled out the nation's harshest law against illegal immigrants. A Legislature whose majority prides itself on disdain for learning and believes the facts have a leftist bias won't solve one of the most complex problems facing America, or any rich nation adjoining a poor one. But it can guarantee racial profiling and provide tools to further oppress the working poor. It has also made Arizona an international pariah, ground zero of crazy. How did we get here?

Arizona was once part of Mexico, and without the Gadsden Purchase the international border would be just south of Phoenix. For generations, people came and went at will between the (territory and) state and Mexico. Mexican-American families predate the arrival of my kin in the 19th century. The economic and social destinies of the Arizona and Mexico were tightly intertwined (rent the movie Lone Star to understand the textures and ironies). The Anglo elites long exploited Mexican workers for the farms and groves of the Salt River Valley (including the Goldwater family's Goldmar), officially for a time through the Bracero Program. The American government implicitly allowed Mexico to use the states as a "safety valve" for lack of economic opportunity at home, in exchange for the authoritarian ruling party's anti-communism. Everything started to change in the 1980s.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

State of cruelty

America is starting to catch on that something's happening in Arizona and that it matters. The New York Times has opened a Phoenix bureau and the LA Times reporting is such that it might as well. This isn't Idaho. This is the third or even second most populous state in the West, contains the nation's fifth most populous city and 13th largest metro. And it's insane.

The focus for now is the draconian anti-immigrant law passed by the Legislature and signed by the Kook-tool Gov. Jan Bewer. It will turn law enforcement into a baby border patrol and essentially require racial profiling and further marginalization of the Hispanic community. This is the capstone of the career of state Sen. Russell Pearce, the Mormon East Valley lawmaker who has gone from the lunatic fringe to the height of power. (And I mention Pearce's denomination to ask, where are the powerful LDS voices denouncing him for actions that go against Mormon values of compassion? I hear many LDS oppose this.). Beyond this, everything gets murky. Arizona can't deport people (they tried with me); it lacks the funding to operate its current prison-industrial complex, much less incarcerate a million illegal aliens. This is only the beginning of what's wrong here.

The measure, like the other anti-immigrant laws of recent years, is hypocritical. Arizona's low-wage, low-quality economy is built around the inexpensive labor of illegal immigrants. Construction, tourism and landscaping companies have made huge profits on the backs of workers making less than citizens and lacking even the minimal protections and safeguards that Arizona provides. Why do you think you "get so much house for the money"? The remains of the state's agriculture industry would die without illegals. Anglos from the toffs in north Scottsdale to working stiffs in Phoenix get housekeepers and yard care for a fraction of its real cost. As Phoenix, especially, became a narrower economy focused on house building, illegals became more important. The people in power sure as hell weren't going to pay competitive wages for citizens, much less allow unions.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

A volcano at the party

A tiny pinprick in the earth, as author Simon Winchester puts it, offered an object lesson in just how vulnerable our high-flying, high-tech civilization has become. The American media are obsessed with the grounded airline passengers, and, because our society now must always put a price tag on everything, how many hundreds of millions of dollars it is costing the airlines.

They are oblivious to other things: How much of Europe is doing fine because of its excellent rail system. How the global interconnections that have arisen over the past 30 years bring dangers more profound that the intertwined investment banks that nearly blew up the world economy. These connections are complex yet highly limiting and unsustainable. Consider Wal-Mart's 10,000-mile "supply chain" facing a future of higher energy costs and shortages. Yet just as America once had a great intercity rail system, it could once feed and clothe itself. In many cases, that's no longer true. Phoenix once produced a huge variety of foods, from strawberries to steaks. Now if the global links shut down, Phoenix would starve. You can't eat foreclosed houses.

I think about that when I am at Pike Place Market in Seattle, five blocks from my home, watching the tourists ooh and ahh over the bounty of food and flowers, most of it grown and harvested locally. Then they go back home and shop at Wal-Mart. Do they even wonder if their towns once had such markets? Most did, if not the size and abundance of choices available here. Now, except for a few hippy-dippy eat-local places, they're gone. It might not prove to be the best choice in the decades to come.

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Posted inPhoenix

Sense of self

Amid all the tribulations of Phoenix and Arizona, this seems like a small one. If the NHL Coyotes ultimately remain, they will drop the name "Phoenix" and replace it with "Arizona" or even "Glendale." What the hell?

I lived away from Phoenix from 1979 until 2000, and one of the striking changes upon returning was not merely the reluctance to use Phoenix as the name for the metropolitan area, but the outright and growing hostility to it. "The Valley" was no longer a nickname, a la, the Mile High City, but almost a mandated moniker for a region that was ashamed of its major city. This was propelled in no small measure by the media, especially the Arizona Republic. What's lost is far more than one of the most magical names among American cities — Phoenix. The failure to capitalize on the name is one more thing
holding back the entire metropolitan area.

It's difficult to think of another example. Seattle makes up less of its metro area than Phoenix in either population or area, but people in Bellevue, Federal Way, Shoreline, Kent, Burien, etc. are happy for the nation and world to know they live in "Seattle." Atlanta is one of the most sprawl-ridden metros in America, with a city of Atlanta that has less population than Mesa, and yet no one question's the metro's name. When NCR despicably betrayed Dayton to move its headquarters, it went to an exurban Georgia location, but the news reports said, "suburban Atlanta." People from Winnetka, Aurora, Naperville, etc — they always say they're from Chicago. I could go on, but you get the idea. The anti-Phoenix sentiment is very odd and pathological.

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Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

The CityScape Gamble

CityScape. For most cities of its size, this downtown development would be considered modest, especially with its first phase, which will apparently comprise a 27-story office tower and a retail arcade. For Phoenix, it's a big deal, especially for downtown and the central city. It could provide some answers as to "what next?" in the nation's fifth (for now) most populous city. Unfortunately the odds are long.

When the project was first hyped in the mid-2000s, it was supposed to be a game-changer, with iconic, soaring towers that included offices, hotel and 1,000 condo units. It took over the dismal Patriot's Square, which had been created by tearing down a block of historic, irreplaceable buildings, as well as adjoining vacant lots, which also once held viable commercial structures. Yet when the real renderings came out, the buildings looked very conventional and short (yeah, yeah, FAA…ask San Diego, Boston, etc.). The retail was inward-facing, risking another Arizona Center mistake. When the economy collapsed, even these modest plans were heavily cut back. An anchor tenant, Wachovia, died in the merger with Wells Fargo. The lack of inspiring architecture, a lively streetscape and pleasing spaces is no small thing.

This is a bad time to be bringing new office and retail space on the market, whether you're in thriving downtown Seattle or in a Phoenix which has faced special, self-inflicted wounds to its old core. The commercial real-estate bubble remains a danger. Still, RED Development has stuck with the more modest first phase and continues to roll out announcements of new restaurants, a comedy club and, importantly, a pharmacy. On the other hand, Eddie Basha, in bankruptcy reorganization, couldn't fulfill his desire to locate a grocery there,

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How freeways remade Phoenix
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

How freeways remade Phoenix

BlackCanyon1960s
The Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first, in the 1960s.

Motoring around metro Phoenix today, it's difficult to comprehend that this was not always a huge agglomeration of real-estate ventures connected by freeways. In fact, Phoenix didn't want them, would have been better off without many of them, yet couldn't avoid their eventual triumph.

In 1950, when Phoenix came in as America's 100th most populous city, it occupied a mere 17 square miles, with a population density of more than 6,200 per square mile, around what you'd find in today's Seattle or Portland. In other words, a real small city: cohesive, walkable, sustainable and scalable. Remnants of the old city exist, but much has been annihilated, not least by the freeways.

By 1960, the city of Phoenix had 439,170 people and nearly 188 square miles. It was a big city of the automobile age, the old streetcars long gone, and federally subsidized sprawl under way. Around this time, the state Highway Department adopted an ambitious freeway plan prepared by Wilbur Smith & Associates, one of the nation's leading highway transportation planning firms. It envisioned much of the system eventually built. The engineers had wanted to build freeways in Phoenix since the late 1940s. One route would have gone directly in front of the Hotel Westward Ho.

But most Phoenicians were horrified. They weren't enamored with the small Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first (it wound around at Durango Street to become the Maricopa Freeway, rammed through powerless barrios).

An urban legend persists that Eugene C. Pulliam single-handedly defeated the freeway plan in the early 1970s. Although the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette were indeed powerful in those days and not afraid to crusade (sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes not), freeways were widely resisted.

Phoenicians then didn't want to become another Los Angeles in this bad way, and they had a chance to avoid the fate. LA had shown (and Robert Moses' New York before it) that freeways didn't solve traffic congestion — they generated it through the phenomenon called induced demand. We didn't want worse smog. We didn't want to lose our views to concrete and the citrus groves to further sprawl. Of particular alarm was the 100-foot-high Papago Freeway Inner Loop planned across central Phoenix, with monstrous "helicoils" discharging traffic onto Third Avenue and Third Street. 

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Passages

If my editor and publisher allow it, the new David Mapstone Mystery, South Phoenix Rules, will come out in December. I've never written a novel in, essentially, three months, but I know Mapstone fans have been without a fix for some time. Thanks to blog readers for their patience.

In Arizona, two passings. Stu Udall, who served as one of the small state's two or three congressmen, and later became the distinguished Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, died at 90. The gift of years had its pain: Seeing his beloved West become overrun with people, independent old Arizona become a hotspot of white-right extremism and the conservation ethic he embodied undone in so many ways. Roy Elson also passed away. As the powerful top aide to Sen. Carl Hayden, Elson was one of the most important players in winning the Central Arizona Project. So lacking is the Information Center in institutional knowledge or curiosity — or a desire to be relevant — that it failed to note Elson's death for a week after it was being discussed in Phoenix. When what should be the state's newspaper of record thinks "there's no history here," why should we expect a different attitude from the Midwesterners and inland Californians who have swarmed the place like a biblical plague? Elson was a friend of my mothers, and after I returned to the state, I vowed to trek to southern Arizona and spend time hearing of the old water-war days. I regret that I never did it.

The Kookocracy has begun to attain its goals as Arizona becomes the first state to eliminate health care to children of the working poor. This underscores the cruelty, "devil take the hindmost" and sociopathic nature of the white-right (see "The Party of Cruelty" on The Front Page). Much more is being churned out of the Legislature, including the destruction of the state park system, draconian cuts to education and Medicaid, and hundreds of other measures. They will make Arizona's dire economic situation worse. But will voters reject the Kooks? Or will the state's large number of Anglos in low-wage jobs, who have seen their living standards drop and opportunities whither because of Republican policies, be led by talk radio to vote for more of the same? It's a national question, too. And, of course, the ruling elites want you to be stupid.

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Phoenix 101: Universities
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Universities

PalmWalk
The Palm Walk on ASU's Tempe campus.

Looking at Arizona State University today, with the largest student body in the United States, it's difficult to imagine that it began before statehood as the territorial "normal school," or teachers college. It didn't become a university until 1958, over the intense objections of the University of Arizona, which still considers itself The University, although ASU has eclipsed it in many ways. ASU now bills itself as "one of the premier metropolitan research universities in the nation, an institution of international scope, committed to excellence in teaching, research, and public service." The reality is somewhat different and rooted in the history of the state and the Salt River Valley.

Some sixty thousand souls resided in all of Arizona Territory when the UofA and the future ASU were established. It was frontier wilderness with the settlers scratching out a hard living in mining, ranching and farming. Aside from the occasional big copper strike — Jerome, Bisbee — people were poor. The railroads were only beginning to be built across the vast expanses of deserts, mountains and forests. That territorial leaders created these schools was an act of heroic vision (aided in UofA's case by the federal land-grant program). Later the Progressive state constitution would mandate that Arizona provide a college education for every qualified citizen.

But this rough country was also generally suspicious of colleges, whether from cowboys mistrusting the utility of the endeavor, to the big mining companies wanting cheap labor. Capital was scarce outside of the mines and railroads, controlled by eastern financiers only interested in extracting profit from the land. There were no Arizona Rockefellers or Carnegies who built fortunes, however ill-gotten, that would eventually fund world-class universities. People were scarce. Just before statehood, Tempe's population was little more than 1,400, fighting to make the desert bloom, sweating through summers without air conditioning. No wonder the state's elite, such as Carl Hayden, went to college in California.

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Posted inPhoenix

Eating the future

One of the problems of Phoenix's extremely limited media market is that reporting on such news as the city's new 2 percent food tax fails to go below the surface (and, of course, many vital stories are not reported at all). Funny how the grand new world of "citizen journalists" and "crowdsourcing" has not filled the yawning chasm of serious journalism done by seasoned professionals.

The tax is one of many bad options faced by a city that is at, and perhaps past, the tipping point. It faces a $241 million deficit through June 2011. The latest cuts total $140 million and more than 1,300 jobs, including eliminating 500 police officers and firefighters. But they are not enough. Thus, the food tax. In general, it's a bad idea. Sales taxes are very regressive, taking much more of the income of lower-income individuals than, say, income and property taxes. This is no small thing in the largest city with so many low-wage jobs. They also risk causing additional "shopping flight" to the suburbs (about which, more later).

And yet the city is in a bind. Or should we say, binds.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Teen Age Republican

The maxim holds that people move right as they grow older. I moved left. In each case, I was in the minority. Only one other child wore Goldwater buttons in 1964 at Kenilworth School, Barry's alma mater; LBJ buttons were in profusion. Later I handed out leaflets for state Rep. Betty Adams Rockwell. In high school, I manned the phones for Jack Williams and Richard Nixon. Even on a shallow, but oh-so-important level for a high-school boy (oh, I've grown up, honest…), being a Teen Age Republican was a lonely avocation. Back then, all the pretty girls, much less the pretty and smart girls, were Democrats. There were certainly no blond goddesses such as Monica Goodling, who led the hiring thought police at the Bush Justice Department. 

As a young columnist, I staked out what at the time was the Dead Career Zone in newspapers, as a supporter of free markets, free trade and limited government. Now I feel the need to put all of those goals in quotation marks. For I did move left, knowing, as Whittaker Chambers said in a different context, "that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side."

I must say a few things in my defense besides "young" and "stupid." I was raised in a staunchly Republican family, where my grandmother never voted for a Democrat again because of the way Woodrow Wilson treated Theodore Roosevelt. My mother was involved in Arizona GOP politics. It was an intensely political household, with dinner-table conversations over public policy. My mother's rule was that one could take any position, as long as he could defend it with learning and logic. Barry Goldwater was an icon and seemed to embody the best of Arizona and the West, as did leaders such as Paul Fannin and John J. Rhodes. In a house of books, I gravitated to the ones that tended to support my positions — a fatal intellectual flaw, of course. Buckley and Goldwater conservatism encouraged independent thinking, as opposed to the rigid ideologies of the left, or so it seemed. Growing up in old Arizona, I was in a sparsely populated place where abstractions seemed borne out by everything around us. And the existential struggle of the Cold War towered above all else; here the Republicans seemed stronger, no small thing.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Freeway to hell

What will be the final nail in the coffin of the city of Phoenix? I vote for the Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway.

If the freeway is built, it will be a gamble for everybody. A bet that the old sprawl model can work one last time to generate short-term profits for the Real Estate Industrial Complex by turning largely worthless land into sites for tilt-up commercial space, subdivisions, shopping strips, In-N-Out Burger boxes and the entire dreary aggregation of suburbia. Some stand to get very wealthy off the deal, including, apparently, Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio. Like so many "local leaders," he is not a high-tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, stem-cell researcher, professor or clergyman — he's a real-estate guy. But with so much leverage still weighing down the development game and higher energy prices just around the corner, one has to wonder if the ol' Growth Machine has one more go in it. Yet Arizona is like a dinosaur whose tiny reptilian brain hasn't yet processed that its tail is on fire — so it will keep building out a 1965 transportation system.

It worked in LA in 1965 because Los Angeles actually had a real economy, not just a real-estate economy. And gasoline was still cheap; America itself had not yet hit its national oil peak. Now Southern California has destroyed so much of itself with freeways and, facing the damage, has embarked on rebuilding its once-great rail infrastructure. Thus, LA now has one of the nation's most extensive light-rail systems and commuter rail operations. In Phoenix (and this deserves its own Phoenix 101 post), freeways were mostly about maximizing profits for landholders and developers whose property was otherwise good only for agriculture or worthless desert. The real economy always lagged, and finally stopped trying to keep up entirely. But the biggest loser from the freeways was the city of Phoenix.

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Phoenix 101: Indians
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Indians

Pima

The many faces of the Pima tribe. In the center is Ira Hayes, the decorated Marine who was among the famed flag raisers on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Phoenix has the largest population of urban American Indians in the United States. It's also the only major metro area that is flanked by reservations: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community east of Scottsdale, the Gila River Indian Community to the south and southwest, and farther to the east, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. With casinos and water rights, the tribes enjoy the greatest economic power in their modern history. This is a story that's only beginning. But of course it's a very old one, too.

The city's name comes from its location atop the ruins of the Hohokam civilization. Like the mythical Phoenix bird, it rose from its ashes (and it is by far the coolest city name in America, which makes it a shame that the suburban mandarins resist using it to describe the metro, as is commonplace in every other major city in America). When the first Anglo settlers came to the Salt River Valley after the Civil War, they cleaned out some of the Hohokam canals and resumed the region's oldest human activity: agriculture. The Hohokam were the most advanced hydrological civilization north of Mesoamerica. The sophisticated dam and canal structure built for today's Phoenix is simply an extension of the Hohokam's work.

Growing up in Phoenix, I was constantly aware of the Hohokam's ghosts — but I was an odd child, enchanted by the place and its history. For most in the 1960s, American Indians were not a common sight there. The reservations were relatively far away then. The stereotype of the drunken Indian was on tragic display in the Deuce. Prejudice was common, even as we romanticized the tribes, particularly the Apache and Navajo. It had not even been a century since the Apache wars had ended. Phoenicians mostly came in contact with the tribes passing by the Phoenix Indian School, an institution now reviled by scholars for destroying native culture but one which may deserve a fresh revision someday. Today's phenomenon of an urban Indian population was very limited. We had a Navajo boy, John Rogers, in my class at Kenilworth School: he had been adopted by a Anglo family. Not to be blind to the challenges he faced, but in the crucible of cruel children he seemed to garner a special respect. After all, in playing cowboys and Indians, we all wanted to be the latter. And growing up in the center city, I drank in the magic of the Heard Museum.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The Full Kook

Gov. Jan Brewer is pulling Arizona out of the coalition of Western states and Canadian provinces trying to make some regional progress in limiting greenhouse gases. J.D. Hayworth is taking on John McCain in the Republican Senate primary (make your own gasbag jokes). For awhile, I worried Arizona might be denied what I call "The Full Kook," where the Kookocracy implements its most cherished and dangerous proposals, rather than being the crazy aunt in the attic down at the Capitol whose ravings are muted by the adult in the governor's chair. Now I'm more hopeful. Why? Because the Full Kook is the only way I can see that Arizona might save itself. For decades, the creeping growth of the Kookocracy has slowly been damaging every part of the state's social and economic health. But still, the Kooks kept control of the Legislature because most eligible voters stay home. Only the Full Kook might shake most Arizonans out of their torpor — and we'll see if there's what Saint Janet called the "sensible center" majority — or if the Big Sort has turned Arizona into the nation's largest insane asylum.

Brewer is falling into line with the successful reactionary effort to halt any measures to address climate change — or even to accept its scientific legitimacy. Even the New York Times has strangely bought into this. The deniers of established science are "skeptics." What next in the flagship of the liberal media: "Evolution skeptics"?  Thus the big snowstorm in the East is a sign that "global warming is a hoax," when in fact it is confirmation of the destabilizing weather patterns we were told to expect from climate change. In Seattle, we just had our warmest January on record. (Stephen Colbert has a great retort for the deniers, in media most Americans can understand). No matter. The strategy is to keep arguing and prevent action. In D.C., any meaningful action to limit emissions is dead, another casualty of the Hoover/Carter/Obama malaise. What is barely reported is how much money Exxon/Mobil and other corporate giants are pouring into not only lobbying against action, but to prop up the elaborate propaganda machine of the "skeptics." Nor is there ongoing, serious discussion of the costs of inaction, whether because of what's coming from climate change or because we're abrogating opportunities to create new industries to help slow or reverse its effects.

So Arizona needn't worry. America will remain paralyzed. Reality will not, and the costs, destabilization and even national security perils from climate change will continue to creep forward. Brewer doesn't even hear the contradiction in her statement, when she withdraws from the Western Climate Initiative — hardly perfect but a start among serious leaders — and wants to avoid California emission standards, but also wants green-tech jobs. Sorry, the two work together. This is why Germany is solar-power central. And notice that China is working furiously to corner the technology and manufacture of renewable energy. In the U.S., the best shot at ameliorating the effects of climate change are happening in the smart states, not the cheap states. Even if ASU makes some research breakthroughs, Arizona lacks the economic capacity to exploit most of them.

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Posted inPhoenix

The Godot housing recovery

"Everybody" in the Arizona's limited cloud of good intentions believes the state needs to diversify its economy, particularly in suffering Phoenix. Unfortunately this doesn't include the two entities that could actually address this issue: the state government, which is controlled by the Kookocracy and can only cut services and taxes, and the Real Estate Industrial Complex. The latter is just waiting for the old reliable growth machine to wheeze to life once again. For both, rapid population growth alone has cloaked an array of dysfunctions and it's gone on for so many decades that few can imagine a future of discontinuity. In other words, nobody with real power has a Plan B.

As the Kookocracy has gone national, so, too, did much of Phoenix's delusional thinking during the years leading up to the crash. With so much of the economy hollowed out, more and more prosperity depended on house building and improvement, house selling and flipping, and mortgages — from generating and refinancing them to packaging them in elaborate swindles on Wall Street. No wonder that many days the national news sounds like the local land boosters giving a forecast at the Arizona Biltmore. Housing has hit bottom! A recovery is under way! Sales are up — ooops, today they're down, but tomorrow's another day.

None of these individual snapshots answer the fundamental question: Can the old housing market be restarted?

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