Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

City Hall

The first and perhaps only great mayor was Greek. He was Pericles of Athens, and he lived some 2500 years ago, and he said, "All things good on this Earth flow into the City, because of the City's greatness." Well, we were great once. Can we not be great again? — from the 1996 film City Hall.

Something strange is happening inside Phoenix City Hall, and I can't escape the nagging feeling that the ouster of police chief Jack Harris is part of it. Harris was removed as chief, but not as public safety director, after claims that the PPD inflated kidnapping numbers in order to get federal grants. Mayor Phil Gordon supported Harris, while Councilwoman Peggy Neely was a vocal Harris critic. That's the story so far, and the reporting has been disappointing. The back story has yet to fully emerge. (Here's a 3/11/11 update on council bickering; this is reaching Scottsdale levels of childishness).

To understand the modern Phoenix Police Department, you must go back to 1954, when Charlie Thomas was appointed chief. He was a rough equivalent of LA's William Parker, a modernizer and reformer who created a professional police force. PPD was never as corrupt or brutal as the LAPD that Parker inherited; it was a small force (149 officers for a city of 150,000) with a good-ole-boy culture in a mobbed-up town. It was still haunted by the 1944 murder of one its first African-American officers, "Star" Johnson, by detective "Frenchy" Navarre. Johnson and his partner were walking a beat in the Deuce when Frenchy, a notoriously brutal and racist cop, parked in a red zone off-duty and refused to move. He shot Johnson, who later died, and was acquitted by a Southern-culture Phoenix jury. Johnson's partner later came into Police Headquarters (on the first floor of the lovely, still-standing City-County Building) and gunned down Frenchy, who went down firing the two guns he wore. The bullet holes were in the walls for years. There was also the infamous World War II riot in "(racial slur) Town by soldiers, a rich historical event for some future scholar.

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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 inPolitics: National

Mad hatters at tea

Now the meme is how we must show the "tea-party movement" more respect. After all, it was responsible for Republican Scott Brown's victory, taking a Senate seat held for decades by Democrats. The "liberal media" flagship, The New York Times, carried an analysis that said, "The remarkable Republican victory in Massachusetts demonstrated
convincingly that the deep populist anger fueling the Tea Party
movement has migrated from the political fringe to the mainstream,
forcing both parties to confront how to channel a growing mood of
public resentment to their own ends." Others have talked about the movement's "diverse" elements, and how we shouldn't judge it merely by its loudest advocates. Some liberal talk-radio hosts have urged progressives to co-opt the tea-partiers.

Anyone who has lived in Arizona knows this is nonsense. The tea-baggers are Republicans, not independents. They an ignorant, easily-led rabble that is energized, most of all, by the fact that a black man is president of the United States. Where, for example, was their outrage when George W. Bush was running up the biggest deficit in history? Gathered and ginned up by Fox "News" and talk radio, they are against government — all government. They are against taxes — all taxes. They are animated by all manner of strange fetishes, from President Obama's birth certificate to communist plots lurking in every element of public policy. They love to hate, no matter the large number who are evangelicals. Force is their first resort, whether dealing with the Muslim world or local gun laws. They make "low information" voters seem like Plutarch, with the most recent poll showing large numbers of Republican voters believe Obama is a racist, a socialist, and not an American citizen.

In other words, the tea party is the Kookocracy taken to a national level.

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Posted inPhoenix

Reality bites

You know times are tough when even the JPMorgan Chase outlook luncheon, which for years was an orgy of boosterism and denial, sounds like a post from Rogue Columnist. ASU economist Lee McPheters said Arizona may not recover until 2014. McPheters is one of the genuinely intelligent ASU economists who usually pulled his punches because of past Kookocracy threats against honesty, especially the nuts' vendetta against the truth-telling Tom Rex. Elliott Pollack, the booster rubber-chicken-circuit fixture whom the Info Center consistently refuses to identify as the developer he is, even sounded clear-eyed about the dire situation. (You can read the entire report here).

Unfortunately, Phoenicians have two emotional speeds: irrational optimism and suicidal depression. While they should take this highly establishment verdict on the situation as a call to arms, I fear they will break out the cyanide capsules or just go to the booster sweat lodge chanting…all together now…Please, God, just give me one more real estate boom…

The reality is that things are even worse than the luncheon crowd heard. Phoenix is in a depression. I've created a searchable tag for it if you're on Twitter (#PhoenixDepression) to catalog all the news and data (my Twitter feed is jontalton). Yes, as my readers have heard for years, the region is too dependent on real estate and now has an inventory of houses and spec commercial space that will take years to work out. And, yes, contrary to the "Goldwater" Institute's sock puppet on the Info Center's editorial page, Arizona has been hit harder than any other state by job losses. Indeed, metro Phoenix led the nation in job cuts in October compared with the same month in 2008. Alas, the troubles run much, much deeper.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Go Goddard?

Terry Goddard is a good man. He was a popular and effective Phoenix mayor, and after failing to achieve the governor's office in the '90s came back to become the best attorney general in the state's history. Among his top achievements has been going after the wire transfer companies that are enabling the smuggling of people, drugs and guns. He's also knocked off some of the rough edges he was said to possess as mayor and, I would assume, collected lots of political IOUs. For all these reasons, I wonder if he should run for governor.

A Rasmussen poll showed Democrat Goddard only 9 points ahead of Gov. Jan Brewer and in virtually tied with Treasurer Dean Martin, his likely Republican opponents. Another survey indicated Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a huge favorite of Republican voters and, according to the Info Center, leading Goddard by 12 percentage points. It's unclear whether the Badged Ego will run.

This seems like madness, or, if the polls are accurate, the pulse of a madhouse. The Republicans have wrecked Arizona through their policies and set it on a collision course with a very nasty future. The party's cruel, spiteful behavior is epitomized by Arpaio and detailed in the brutal budget cuts of the Kookocracy Legislature. Brewer and Martin are empty suits. Arpaio probably won't run because the exposure of a statewide race might finally cause the mask to slip and leave him exposed as the calculating bully he is. Yet why would any of these clowns even be in contention against Goddard, a man of genuine accomplishments and a centrist one would hope represents the best of my home state and the hope for its future?

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Posted inPhoenix

Hey, y’all, watch this!

Since at least the 1980s, the Arizona Republic and its successor, The Information Center, have periodically rolled out campaigns to make the economy more than attracting freezing Midwesterners and building sprawl. I did my time in the trenches on several of these efforts earlier in the decade. The work continues with a Sunday story about attracting high-paid jobs and diversifying the economy. On the Viewpoints front, we find a piece explaining the stakes and solutions by Ioanna Morfessis, the first president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. Then there is the obligatory rebuttal by the Local Krackpot "Think" Tank: "Cut taxes and incentives to create jobs." Also: "Reducing government red tape would also create a job-friendlier climate."

And does anyone wonder why Phoenix and Arizona keep falling further behind? First, why does the "Goldwater" Institute have standing to weigh in on anything? It's an advocacy group funded by national "conservative" interests, repeating national talking points just like all the other right-wing "think tanks" that were seeded around the country out of the Mont Pelerin Society and other wealthy reactionary groups in the 1980s and 1990s. It is like PETA or the NRA. In no way is it an organization that does real research. And after years of the same old lines, what does it have to say that's new? What does its sock puppet on the editorial page have to say that's new? Nothing. Can't the Info Center find even one independent conservative voice to write something that's relevant and interesting?

More importantly: The ideology so relentlessly peddled by the "Goldwater" Institute has run Arizona for years if not decades. Its polemicists always strike the pose of victims standing up against the hordes of socialists that control everything — but it's a lie. They won. They're sore winners, out to quash any dissenting voices. Now they must continue to distract, keep the poor talk-radio zombies thinking that guv'munt is the problem. They must continue to carry water for the Real Estate Industrial Complex, which really controls the state (Please, God, give me one more boom…). All this because their ideology, implemented with ruthless, relentless effectiveness, has driven Arizona into the worst depression in its modern history. Their ideas have been tried and failed. And still they rule the day.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Say you want a revolution?

I was in Phoenix over the weekend to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore and mark the launch of the short-story collection, Phoenix Noir. For those of you with thin skins, be proud of the cool new restaurants downtown. And that Barry Schoeneman of Men's Apparel Club, who sells the best suits for the lowest prices in America and has toughed out a retail-hostile downtown for more than 4 years, is moving to a bigger store uptown, but still in the central core. And if you care (I don't), there are still plenty of hip, skinny, rich people at Snottsdale nightclubs despite the overall depression. More gravel. Less shade. More vacant lots. Fewer completed projects. Light rail still succeeds (gloat). Yea, my hometown.

But what caught my attention most was not this or even another well-intentioned civic project rolled out in the Information Center. It was an article on the front of the Viewpoints section, beneath pieces trumpeting this well-intentioned project. It was headlined, "A rebuttal: Why I am a conservative," by the "school choice movement" activist lawyer Clint Bolick, who now has what seems to be a well-endowed sinecure at the local Krack-Pot "Think" Tank. I thought: Why is this a rebuttal? The reactionaries have won in Arizona and the efforts of the latest well-intentioned project will go nowhere. They, not Bolick, should be the rebuttal to the ruling reactionary/growth status quo. But it was just bad newspaper design. Bolick was chastising my former colleague Richard Nilsen who had the guts to write an op-ed saying why he was not a conservative. In Arizona this is an enterprise akin to trying to teach opera to pigs (it's futile because it can't be done and it irritates the pigs).

Read and enjoy. But the biggest problem with the argument is that the "conservatives" that rose to prominence after 1980, and especially 1994, didn't want to conserve. As Sam Tanenhaus makes clear in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, today's "conservatives" are radicals, with little connection to the Burkean conservatives who sought to conserve the best of the old, showed respect for tradition and custom, etc. But thanks to the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic Party, these radicals still control the agenda.

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Posted inPhoenix

Valley of denial

ASU's Morrison Institute has always labored under two Sisyphean tasks. First, its public-policy scholarship necessarily antagonized the state's ruling elites — hence, it was forced to pull its punches to avoid losing funding, and, even then, the elites wouldn't accept its work. Second, it was treated in the media as the "liberal" equivalent of the (Bob) Goldwater Institute. This, even though the "Goldwater" Institute is an arm of the national right-wing advocacy machine, not a genuine think tank that engages in open-minded, peer-reviewed research. With the loss a few years ago of my sometime collaborator Mary Jo Waits, author of Morrison's most prescient and important works (Five Shoes, Meds and Eds), the institute became even more marginalized. Now Morrison is trying once again to become part of the conversation under the leadership of Sue Clark-Johnson, retired Arizona Republic publisher and close friend of ASU President Michael Crow.

Good luck. Unfortunately, the first effort, Forum 411, seems destined for the dustbin of forgotten, well-intended reports at an even faster speed than its predecessors. It is brief, as to be expected from an entity now headed by a former Gannett executive, and strives to be inoffensive. Think of a pep talk. Anthony Robbins on economic development. It states two broad themes: the obvious (Arizona needs to diversify its economy) and the untrue (which I will deal with momentarily). Worst of all, it leaves critical information entirely out. The loss of Waits' intellectual heft is obvious. So, too, is the continued bowing before the Real Estate Industrial Complex (the report's sponsor is the suburban mall developer, Westcor).

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Posted inPhoenix

The conscience of the Kookocracy?

They wish they knew how to quit me. Even though it's been two years since I wrote a column for the Arizona Republic, I keep popping up on various Web sites as the devil that's missed by the Kookocracy. After all, who can they now denounce as a SOCIALIST!! — Clay Thompson? The pretty-in-pink Moms Like Me page? Anyway, this was brought home again in a story last week about a conference on the flatlined-in-a-body-bag Arizona economy.

One commenter generously wrote: "Jon Talton preached this for nearly a decade, yet no one believed him.
In fact, the GOP-led Legislature and the Real Estate Industrial Complex
put a lot of pressure on The Arizona Republic to silence him, and in
the end, Talton was run out of town. Perhaps if those idiots had
actually paid attention to what Talton had to say, then the state
wouldn't be in this mess. And legislators wouldn't have to solicit
advice from ordinary Arizonans, as they did just last week. Fools." This was followed by — I am not making this up: "You mean John Talton the corporate socialist shill?" Etc. Spelling has never been their thing.

Back to this big summit, convened by the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. Chairman Michael Bidwill "said that…the state relies too much on retail and contracting revenues." Yes, he of the Arizona Cardinals whose taxpayer-funded stadium in the cotton field was meant to be a magnet for contracting and retail. Glendale Mayor Elaine Scruggs said, "It's overwhelming. It's really overwhelming when you look at all the areas where we are deficient." Duh, ace, as we said in fifth grade. You get the picture. Deeply unserious — another summit to nowhere. But rather than go back to discuss the real problems and solutions, which you can find here, I want to encourage the Kookocracy to use Teabag Day to redouble their efforts.

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Posted inPhoenix

More beer saves Arizona economy

Today's installment of the Phoenix Laff Riot begins with Tuesday's truly pathetic story in the Arizona Republic headlined "Big game proves a winner for state economy." Ordered up, no doubt, by the "say something positive about the community" bosses, here's the gist:

Consumers who had been watching their pennies splurged in
celebration of the Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl, giving the
state's ailing economy an unexpected shot in the arm. Fans bought hats, T-shirts, televisions, snack trays and beer. They
partied at sports bars and in homes around the state, cheering on the
Cardinals.

Let's apply a little critical thinking not allowed in news meetings. The story has no data to back up this claim. And even if people spent more on beer and chips for the game, it simply changes the shape of the water balloon. In other words, that consumer spending was diverted from other areas; the Big Game didn't represent an increase in purchasing power or living standards. That would require, oh, a diverse economy with well-paid jobs and an educated workforce. In any event, even Super Bowl economic impact reports by real economists are always suspect, requiring a skepticism that was once required of journalists.

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Posted inPhoenix

The Kookocracy gets its moment

Now Janet Napolitano heads to Washington, leaving not much of a legacy in Arizona, despite what the Sewing Circle cult of personality would have us believe. She was a victim of her native caution and the unwillingness to take on issue No. 1 (land use and all its permutations, including sprawl and water) — to do otherwise would have caused the Real Estate Industrial Complex to destroy her ambitions. Michael Lacey has some further trenchant thoughts on immigration policy and deals with devils. But the biggest reason for Napolitano's failure is simply that the Legislature is by far the most powerful branch of government (the second being the media-ignored Corporation Commission). And the Legislature is dominated by kooks.

Now they will have one of their own as Secretary of State Jan Brewer ascends to the governorship. This is change I can believe in. Brewer is a member of the Kookocracy, having politicized the office charged with the integrity of elections. Except for Attorney General Terry Goddard, Arizona will now have an all-Kookocracy leadership. And I say, go for it. I want no Jane Hull-like temporizing or moments of sanity from Gov. Brewer. I want her to lead Arizona into the brave future that the minority who actually votes has consistently demanded.

This is the state where the most popular politician is Joe Arpiao, the civil-liberties-optional sheriff of Maricopa County. The state where Andrew Peyton Thomas won a resounding re-election as Maricopa County Attorney. Both have waged a thuggish war on the poor, underclass and minorities in the guise of "fighting illegal immigration." Funny, I have yet to see a big construction mogul or developer do a perp walk for hiring them by the hundreds.

It's time for Arizona to get the government it deserves.

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