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: National

On the border

By Emil Pulsifer

Guest Rogue

Whatever your position on
the difficult issue of immigration, looming events make the need for
comprehensive immigration reform more important than ever, for America as a
whole and for Arizona in particular.  Mexico's proven oil reserves
are dwindling fast and may be exhausted at the current rate of production
within less than ten years: the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
estimates that Mexico will become a net oil importer by 2017.

Why is this a source of
concern for America in general and Arizona in particular?

First, is the fact
that Mexico has consistently been one of the top three sources of
America's imported oil (with Canada and Saudi Arabia). As of late 2009,
Mexico was the second largest source of America's imported oil. More importantly from the
standpoint of immigration policy is the reality that oil exports constitute
Mexico's largest source of legal revenues (about 40 percent); second to
this, and larger than tourism, are the remittances sent home by immigrants
working in foreign countries (chiefly the United States).  Remittances
are, in fact, so large a component of Mexico's economy, that they constitute a
peculiar form of foreign investment. So, barring rosy developments in
Mexico's oil industry, and unless the United States takes an even greater
nosedive than Mexico is going to in coming years, expect massive immigration,
on a scale to make the recent wave look puny, within a decade.

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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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