Posted inPhoenix

Sustaining denial as the old world collapses

The Arizona Republic spent a week writing articles about "sustainability." This was obviously Gannett top-down: the series was relentlessly "positive," aimed at "the average reader" and ultimately useless. Which is too bad, because reporter Shaun McKinnon is as close to an expert on water issues as you’ll find at major newspapers — when he’s allowed to write on them.

This was followed, equally predictably, by the kind of anodyne editorial the Republic has written hundreds of times before. This one had such deep renderings as:

Sustainability: The word is everywhere. Companies from Wal-Mart to Ford
are trumpeting their commitment to it. There are indexes to measure it,
including a Dow Jones corporate yardstick. Bloggers have seized on it.

And, after gently laying out some challenges, then offering soothing praise for the state:

But more needs to happen on the ground. While Gov. Janet Napolitano,
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and other leaders have certainly supported
sustainability, Arizona still seems in the minor leagues. The efforts
need to be bigger, better, faster.

"Seems"? Here’s what was not covered, as far as I can tell:

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Lisa Graham Keegan: Who says there are no second acts in American lives?

No 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.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The Stack: Super Loss; McCain greenwash; kid gloves for polygamists; Karen’s no crackpot; peak oil

The 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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Posted inPhoenix

The Stack: Turnaround?; Phoenix ‘architecture’; ruining Biltmore; lost HQs; illegal immigrant hypocrisy

The 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

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Posted inPolitics: National

In search of McCain conservatism

President-elect McCain, his worshipful media coterie in tow, visited New Orleans and declared that the response to Hurricane Katrina had been "disgraceful and terrible," and, according to the doting New York Times, "pledged it would never happen again." The corporate media seemed especially relieved that the "senator from Arizona" had distanced himself from the toxic Texan currently residing in the McCain’s next mansion.

Yet the federal response to Katrina was the natural outgrowth of "conservatism" as it has come to be practiced by the mainstream of the party of Lincoln. The calamity was not an aberration. It was pretty much what would be expected from the combination of ideology, policy and practice from today’s "conservatives."

Maybe the "senator from Arizona" will redefine conservatism. The media desperately want him to be Barry Goldwater (I hear from excellent sources that the elderly Barry, a real senator from Arizona, was dismissive of the carpetbagger McCain). But even Goldwater never ran the government, never contended with the issues facing a 21st century, continental, diverse empire/nation. My experience is that McCain is not much of a hard-core ideologue, except for being a tightwad, a naysayer and, oddly for a combat veteran, trigger happy with the armed forces and eager for foreign adventures.

So what will McCain Conservatism be?

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Posted inPolitics: National

The stack: Air madness, fake green, the Kookocracy keeps on keeping on

We start out with news of Delta Air Lines and Northwest intensifying their merger talks. We won’t hear how the mergers of the past have only worsened the mess at the airlines. Why? They take away competition, leave the remaining carriers in a group-think mode that discourages innovations (hello, newspaper industry), and are paid for partly by laying off the experienced employees and cutting the service that make for a great airline.

The combined carrier will be two drunks holding each other up — most mergers fail to deliver their promised "benefits." If either carrier is too weak to stand, let it liquidate (it wouldn’t) and make room for new competition, Doing the same disastrous thing over and over while expecting a different outcome is a definition of insanity. Ah, but every time the crazy top execs and investment bankers get richer. Meanwhile, we do nothing to improve our transportation system, such as building high-speed rail.

There’s also a stack of Arizona funnies..

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Posted inPhoenix

The crime against children in Arizona

As far as I can tell, the Arizona Republic devoted a mere four paragraphs to the latest evidence of the state’s dismal school system. Here they are:

Arizona spends less on educating its kids than almost any state in the
union, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Wednesday.

In 2006, the state spent $6,472 per student, or $2,666 less than the
national average. Only Idaho and Utah spent less. The report has ranked
Arizona second or third from the bottom in per-student spending dating
to 2000.

The state Legislature caps the amount of money schools can receive from
the general fund and in property taxes, said Chuck Essigs of the
Arizona Association of School Business Officials. That formula is more
restrictive than the majority of states’, he said.

Arizona also ranks in the bottom three when tallying money spent on
instruction, including teacher pay and benefits. Administrative costs
can’t be blamed for eating up the money, either. Arizona ranked second
from the bottom on money spent on administration of individual schools.

So that’s that. We can go back to the ever-desperate "everything’s fine!" Of course, it’s not.

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Posted inPhoenix

In Arizona, small quivers of an impending quake?

Despite the mandate to "say something positive about the community," sometimes the Arizona Republic can’t avoid saying something truthful about the community. Today there’s an ominous story about emerging evidence that in-migration "slowed sharply last year."

This matters because "growth" is the overwhelming (legal) economic driver of the state economy. There’s tourism, too — hardly a way to sustain a populous, urbanized region in the 21st century. The few other assets, such as the chip plants, would be big for, say, Tulsa. But for a region Phoenix’s size, the technology sector is actually smaller as a proportion of the economy than it was 20 years ago.

That leaves "growth" — meaning population growth, not growth of venture capital, IPOs, Ph.D.s, patents, per-capita income, foreign direct investment, research grants, college graduates, etc. If this even slows for long, the urban Arizona economy will face a recession the likes it hasn’t seen in modern times.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The strange media romance with John McCain

Breaking up is hard to do, particularly with a lover you’ve idealized to the point of pathology. So what if the reality is as jarring, even dangerous, odds with the ideal? So it is with the mainsteam media and John McCain.

We were treated to this once again in the Sunday New York Times. A front page story described how this "maverick," "insurgent," "one of the most disruptive figures in his party" and "rebel" is now trying to be a standard-bearer who can unite his party. There was mention of his "volcanic" blowups, but in an admiring way.

On the op-ed page, Nicholas Kristof writes, "Even for those of us who shudder at many of John McCain’s positions,
there is something refreshing about a man who wins so many votes
despite a major political shortcoming: he is abysmal at pandering."

Such is the scary fog of McCain worship that envelops even smart people writing for the best newspaper in America. The reality is quite different.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Ground zero in the illegal immigration nightmare

For the second time in two weeks, the New York Times has produced major stories on Phoenix and illegal immigration (read the stories here and here). It’s about time the nation took notice of Phoenix’s second largest industry (after house building): people smuggling. Many of the immigrants that staff the chicken plants of North Carolina and the meat-packing plants of the upper plains states came through Phoenix.

This industry has caused a low-intensity war to be fought on the streets of Phoenix and its suburbs for several years, recently leading to the gunning down of a police officer. Of the millions who have gone through the city, many have settled. A third of the city is officially Hispanic, but the real numbers are probably far larger and many are illegal. Meanwhile, the Anglo population, whether from the Midwest or from Arizona, has increasingly rebelled against the influx. Arizona has passed some of the most draconian laws against illegals, and the state is full of anti-Hispanic sentiment, much of expressed in the most thuggish manner (check out any blog or story comment on the Arizona Republic if you doubt me).

But the situation is complex and contradictory. It’s not rocket science. It’s much, much more complicated.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Who is this ‘maverick’ I keep hearing about?

Every time I hear the media say Sen. John McCain "of Arizona" it makes me crazy. McCain has done as little for Arizona as possible and it shows. The state is Mississippi in the Southwest, an Appalachia with golf courses, the epicenter of a brewing socio-environmental calamity. It is a place frighteningly behind in the competitive world of the 21st century, however much it provides a haven for a certain kind of rich person and, until recently, for real-estate players. Arizona was never anything but a national political platform for McCain.

If McCain had been governor, his apathy would be an especially tempting target. Even so, as a senator he has done as little as possible in education, research, transportation, health care, the environment…the list goes on and on. Most days one wondered if Arizona even had senators representing it, rather than trying to be national political figures.

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Posted inPhoenix

What I didn’t write at the Arizona Republic

People kept telling me they couldn’t believe I got away with what I wrote as a columnist for the Arizona Republic. I identified and questioned the vast power of the Real Estate Industrial Complex. While most of the local media were mindless boosters, I discussed the serious challenges to the state’s economy (which are coming true) and indeed to its future as a quality place to live (ditto). How, hundreds of readers asked, did I keep my job?

In the end I didn’t, of course. But for nearly seven years, I offered one of the few alternatives to local cheerleading and media growthgasms. And I was the only one to keep a sustained focus on economic, social and environmental issues — and how they were all tied together.

And yet, dear readers, I pulled my punches nearly every time I wrote.

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