Posted inPhoenix

Dead town walking

Do even the most sober-minded Phoenicians realize how deep a hole they're in? The depression caused by the housing collapse is undeniable. So the answer is merely to reinflate the housing bubble and happy days are here again, right? More "master planned communities." More paving over Pinal and Yavapai counties and rolling over Wickenburg with lookalike tract houses. More boobs from the Midwest who will put up with anything as long as they don't have to shovel snow.

Indeed, a major effort will be made to craft the Obama stimulus to do just this. Sustainability has no powerful political base. Sprawl does. Even the nominally progressive radio talker Ed Schultz is pushing for a bailout of the house builders — and no wonder: he also owns a small construction company and drives 50 miles each way to work from his suburban home. With progressives like these, who can understand that the old sprawl model is hopelessly broken? Trying to revive it will only increase and lengthen the pain of transition — or leave the country too bankrupt to even get there. Reviving it in Arizona will only hasten the inevitable water emergency.

But Phoenix faces crises beyond the housing depression. As one of America's least literate and most poorly educated big cities — if it can even be called a city — it's not surprising that no one is talking about them. And even the "smart people" assume the growth machine will revive, simply because it always has. Call them the road kill of the Great Disruption, the new era of discontinuity.

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Posted inUncategorized

The kids are not alright

I keep waiting for the great Baby Boomer revolt.

It's not just that my generation is taking the brunt of the massive layoffs, replaced, if at all, by "lower cost" employees in their twenties. Or just that, even without a recession, we would face a hostile, age-biased job market at a time when many of us should be in our peak earning years. It's not just that we're the ones who lost the pension protection enjoyed by our parents, to be replaced by now decimated 401(k)s just as retirement nears. Or that we've spent a lifetime paying for the Social Security and Medicare of others to find that the nation sees our turn for this social compact a "looming danger" to be curtailed or stopped altogether. It's not just that the experience and skills many of us spent decades amassing are arbitrarily deemed worthless in "the marketplace."

It's all this, but more.

Throughout time people have awakened in a foreign country, whether they traveled anywhere: it's called old age. For many Boomers, this discontinuity has arrived much sooner compared with previous generations. And all the electronic distractions can't compensate for a simple fact: What happened to our country?

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Posted inPolitics: National

A stimulus mistake?

Much of the details of the new stimulus have yet to be known. What's emerging so far is cause for concern. For one thing, the $300 billion in tax cuts may be smart politics, but it's questionable economics and policy. Then there's the issue of how federal dollars might be used to prime the pump, with so much going to backfill basic programs being defunded by cash-strapped states, and lobbyists of the powerful highway-sprawl consortium lining up for the "roads and bridges" money.

George W. Bush and eight years of Republican misrule — really more than a quarter century — are leaving the new administration with the worst mess in nearly 80 years. And remember, all this was validated over and over by a majority of Americans at the polls (maybe not in 2000 and 2004). It's an open question whether any president can lead the changes really necessary to address the Great Disruption, of which the economic collapse is only part. We'll see. But the barriers to real change we can believe in are mammoth.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The Republicans look to magic

Much has been made of the candidate for Republican National chairman, Chip Saltsman, circulating a CD with the song, "Barack the Magic Negro": maybe it's racist, it's certainly bad taste. But most of all it's a sign that a party that has become a largely Southern/rural Western regional party has no inclination to change. Today, Paul Krugman writes about the larger collapse of the Southern Strategy and how Republicans still haven't realized the magnitude of their failure.

I'm fascinated by what we might call The Strange Case of Mark Sanford. The South Carolina governor was prepared to let 77,000 of his fellow citizens go without (meager) unemployment benefits, refusing to ask for $146 million in assistance from the federal government. He finally relented, with only hours to spare, under pressure from citizens, politicians and those still-important newspapers. This case tells us more about the prevailing Republican mindset than Saltsman's song.

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Posted inUncategorized

The elephant (oilfield) in the room

I can't find a major American news outlet that has published what is surely one of the biggest stories of 2008: the International Energy Agency's ominous about-face on the issue of peak oil. The report is admittedly heavy reading. George Monbiot in UK's Guardian cuts through the technocratese and provides essential context. The bottom line, as Monbiot writes, "we're in deep doodah."

The IEA has long soft-pedaled peak oil, saying world supplies wouldn't peak until 2030 (as if that gave us a lot of time to prepare for the transition). For the first time, however, the agency did a more in-depth inventory of the world's oilfields. Now it says peak could come in 2020. I think we're already there. But either way, this is an issue that will dominate our lives more than terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial meltdown or even global warming — and it is intertwined with all of those. There is no bigger national security issue. But Americans aren't talking about it.

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Posted inUncategorized

Why newspapers matter, still

Seattle's recent snowbound mess offered an object lesson in why newspapers remain essential to communities. With analysts expecting several major newspapers to shut down in 2009, including those in one-paper cities, it's worth noting what happened in the Emerald City.

A little background: On Dec. 18, it began snowing here, even at sea-level downtown. Snow is a rarity in this city of hills — even though enough falls to stick every three years or so. This was reportedly the worst snowfall in a dozen years. We got about six inches downtown, and it was far worse in other parts of Seattle. The city has 27 snowplows. The city was paralyzed.

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Posted inPhoenix

Phoenix’s light-rail hope

I shed much blood professionally for the Valley Metro light-rail system, as the only columnist, or even journalist, to consistently stand up against the lies, myths and misconceptions that might well have killed this essential project if Phoenix is to have a future. This, as much as my outing of the Real Estate Industrial Complex and illuminating Arizona's looming water crisis, led to my demise at the Arizona Republic.

The opposition was powerful, ranging from suburban developers to right-wing thugs who didn't even live in the city. Some opponents were merely ignorant. Others were happy to see the central city die. They failed. So forgive me, as Metro prepares to open, for a moment of crowing.

We built it, you bastards.

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Posted inPhoenix

Say goodnight to CityNorth

The Arizona Court of Appeals is doing Phoenix a favor by essentially killing its $97 million CityNorth project. Phoenix just doesn't know it. The Republic reports:

A major economic-development agreement between Phoenix and the CityNorth development has been ruled unconstitutional, meaning
the project may not grow into the once-envisioned second downtown on
the city's north side.

Part of the problem lies in the thinking encapsulated by that sentence. A real city has one downtown: the economic, cultural and retail heart of the city. By that definition Phoenix doesn't even have one downtown yet — but it wants a "second downtown"? But the bigger problem with CityNorth has always been that it is based on a dead business model. The old land-speculation economy is not coming back. These are problems not unusual to American cities. But Phoenix's case is extreme and instructive.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The Big Lie about unions

Somewhere over the past few decades, Americans became something new: followers. They became, as an earlier generation put it with disdain, "easily led." Keeping them that way requires a successful propaganda offensive in the case of the Big Three automakers. You see, it's all the union's fault. It's all the workers' faults. Just keep repeating that, over and over. Who knows what might happen if you failed to believe. Belief in the god "free markets" has been shaken by the incompetence of the Bush administration — and by the inevitable consequence of law-of-the-jungle capitalism: the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Who knows what might happen if working Americans were suddenly not so easily led.

They might follow the example of 240 workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, who staged a sit-in after Bank of America cut off credit to the company — and the company, in the way of today's America, laid off the workers without even a severance. They occupied the factory until the bosses and the bank capitulated. The action was hailed as a new sign of backbone, but there was a critical difference between these workers and most average Americans. A difference between them and the 35,000 employees that BofA itself is cutting. They were members of a union.

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Posted inPhoenix

To the barricades? Can we find them?

I started out the day cranky and sad. Sometimes it's the little things. A Republic story, apparently confined to the "neighborhood news," tells of a poor soul jumping to his death from the 26th floor of "a downtown office building." Unfortunately for the credibility of the "Information Center," the aforesaid building is the Phoenix Corporate Center, in Midtown Phoenix. (As with many stories now, this does not even include what was once a journalism basic, the Where, the address.)

It's hard to make progress when reporters for the state's largest news organization don't even know where the hell downtown is — and, no, you can't just make up the boundaries because you rolled in from the Midwest yesterday and think Phoenix has no history. It could be worse, I suppose: I've heard radio stations refer to 24th and Camelback as "downtown." A little thing perhaps, but to me another sign of the total civic sickness in Phoenix, this reinforcing of a numbing, disowned, neglected "geography of nowhere." Almost as maddening as the Republic's cloying use of "the Valley." Alas, cities are the 21st century competitive units, and one that doesn't even know its own name (and such a beautiful one, too) won't go far.

And I suppose it's necessary to note the latest scaling back of CityScape, the office project that really is located in downtown Phoenix. Sigh. Every city is being affected by the real-estate bust and credit collapse — but just from my downtown Seattle window I can see five new skyscrapers going up. I won't retread familiar ground about Phoenix's unique challenges downtown. I will add that these major-mega projects won't work when they are built largely on spec, without a real business community that will create demand for such space. (And how sad Wells Fargo put so many jobs in the burbs, rather than downtown, to use one example of how the tiny existing biz community fails downtown). And it's unfortunate that land speculation and the apparent powerlessness of City Hall to do anything but throw down gravel makes it difficult to build more small projects, organically connected to the city scape around them.

In such a mood, I receive this link and read, from the Business Journal, a story headlined: "Ariz. police say they are prepared as War College warns military must prep for for unrest; IMF warns of economic riots." Seriously?

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Posted inUncategorized

The Madoff scandal: More than a Ponzi scheme

Were the damage not so great, it would be amusing to see SEC Chairman Chris Cox running around shocked, shocked, that Bernard Madoff had allegedly pulled off the biggest financial fraud in history — and the watchdog was again caught napping. Or worse. The agency ignored years of warnings about Madoff's activities, and Barron's did an article questioning his returns a decade ago. Madoff reportedly bragged about his influence in D.C., including having an in-law who worked for the SEC.

As the victims of the alleged scheme, including many charities, see their investments wiped out, Madoff is out on bond, having to wear an ankle bracelet and stay home. Had he been a minority/poor kid who stole $100 from a cash register drawer, he'd be in county lockup with hardened criminals. Meanwhile, Attorney General Michael Mukasey has recused himself from the investigation, without giving a reason. This is America in the new gilded age, where government has been essentially handed over to the wealthy and connected — and we're surprised they went wilding?

An older America learned from the frauds and follies of the 1920s, including the legendary collapse of the Samuel Insull monopoly. Regulation of securities and banks was put in place, helping to ensure the success of American business for decades through transparency, competition and fairness. That all began to unravel with the Reagan Revolution — but especially in the 1990s with deregulation pushed by Sen. Phil Gramm (R-UBS) and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a kingpin from Goldman Sachs.

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Posted inPolitics: National

When presidents had class

In 1901, President William McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo when an anarchist stepped forward and shot him, a mortal wound. As the crowd fell upon the assassin,…
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Posted inUncategorized

The real hole Seattle is digging with the viaduct

The Phoenixes, Tulsas and Fresnos of American can take heart. Sometimes even the most progressive cities make really dumb decisions. Seattle has been agonizing for years about what to do about the earthquake-damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct, which runs through downtown along the waterfront. The decision: replace it with another viaduct, or two surface streets.

Somehow the obvious answer, putting the roadway into a tunnel, which would have opened up the waterfront of Elliott Bay to downtown, never made the cut. Whatever the excuse, it's a potent reminder that America has lost the ability to do great and visionary projects. This didn't happen even in the worst years of the Great Depression. The problem is not lack of funding, but lack of will and hope, another symptom of decadence.

For Seattle, the lost opportunity will be as monumental as another viaduct is ugly. The renderings always show fanciful outdoor dining tables under the spaghetti concrete spans of traffic. But we know what will really be underneath the new monstrosity. At least the old viaduct had a certain 1950s Naked City gritty beauty. The surface street option is bad in its own special way, adding to congestion and placing a barrier of traffic between the city and its waterfront. A people who have lost the ability to dream big are not capable of designing wide Parisian boulevards.

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Posted inUncategorized

This is Wall Street

As Republican nihilists carry out their war on working Americans, it's important to understand just how rotten is the industry they rushed to deregulate and bail out. And yes, there…
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