Posted inPhoenix

Central Phoenix: Good, bad, ugly

Because I know the fragile self-esteem of Phoenicians is at stake, let me begin my observations about the state of the center city with the good stuff. I smelled the orange blossoms — even stepping out into one of ugliest urban spaces anywhere, the pedestrian loading zone at Sky Harbor. Many of the Midwestern transplants dislike the scent, which makes me dislike some of them even more. But this small, fleeting thing reminds me of my often magical city that is gone forever.

Some of the projects begun under former Mayor Skip Rimsza and spearheaded by people like former Deputy City Manager Sheryl Sculley, retired Deputy City Manager Jack Tevlin and Ed Zuercher, now a deputy city manager, have turned out quite well. As I wrote before, the starter light-rail line is great. Now lots of places are clamoring for LRT; the trick will be to avoid using light rail when commuter rail would be more efficient. A metro area the size of Phoenix needs both. The Convention Center is such a startlingly attractive set of buildings that you wonder if the design was approved by mistake, given Phoenix's ability to erect such ugliness. The ASU downtown campus, Mayor Gordon's signature accomplishment, is more of a reality, and thus will be more difficult for the Legislature to destroy. The lovely oasis of Arizona Center remains, shady and cool.

Read on if you want to know "the rest of the story," as the late Paul Harvey would say.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Will AIG be Obama’s Bay of Pigs?

The scandal over $165 million in retention bonuses paid to AIG executives goes beyond the rhetoric of cheap populism — including among Republicans who steadfastly deregulated the financial sector, defended outrageous executive compensation and thought the Greenspan-driven housing-derivatives bubble was just dandy. I know this much: It is the biggest test yet for President Obama. Will it be his Bay of Pigs?

The bonuses are being paid out to "retain" executives at the Financial Products Unit at AIG that nearly brought the world economy to collapse — leading the U.S. government to pump in so much taxpayer money to rescue AIG that we own 80 percent of it. These executives who created the house of cards of credit-default swaps are now government employees, for all intents and purposes. If only our teachers were paid so well. And "retain"? The teenagers working in the AIG mail room would be more prudent than these Masters of the Universe. But the government claims it has little ability to stop the payments. Contracts must be honored, don't you know.

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Posted inPhoenix

How Arizona can feel good

Random observations from my trip to Arizona:

'Zonies, particularly Phoenicians and the Real Estate Industrial Complex, are always after cheap praise. "Make the community feel good about itself," as the diktat from the Arizona Republic to its "information center" goes. This is usually a license for boosterish fraud and an extended holiday from reality. Real accomplishment must be earned. I saw some of that on display.

    * This past weekend's inaugural Tucson Festival of Books was a wonder. Sponsored by the Arizona Daily Star (what a concept: a newspaper supporting reading and printed media) and the University of Arizona, it was the first big-time book festival to happen in the state. The crowds were large and enthusiastic (people even came to see me speak and sign books). Big-name authors came from around the country. What was most amazing was the cohesive community support behind the event, from the array of corporate and philanthropic sponsors to the army of smiling volunteers. Tucson took its best-practices from the world-class Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and gave the state something magical. It's also important: a community push to improve literacy in a county where one out of five residents is functionally illiterate. Eat your heart out Phoenix.

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Posted inPhoenix

Phoenix and Mesa dementia

As the Great Disruption rolls across the globe, changing everything, Arizona slips ever deeper into unreality. And that's saying something. Mesa's notoriously anti-everything voters approved — by 84 percent — using tax incentives to lure what the Republic calls "two massive upscale resort projects." Meanwhile, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon is due to "outline an ambitious strategy to make Phoenix the first carbon-neutral city – and the greenest – in the entire country." And what will the strategy, to be unveiled in today's State of the City speech, include? Providing bicycle rentals. Installing solar panels on city buildings. "Developing Phoenix's canal system for recreation and business use similar to the Tempe Town Lake area."

Where to begin? What's most remarkable is how Arizona is willfully ignoring three mortal perils: water, global warming and the rising possibility that it could have one of the world's failed states on its southern border. Oh, the relatively lesser perils remain as well: the growing underclass, the horrible schools, linear slums, income inequality, inadequate infrastructure, serious environmental damage and the health consequences that follow, etc. There's little realization that the props that held up the old growth machine are gone, done, over. I know: Let's build "two massive upscale resort projects!"

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Posted inUncategorized

At the interchange

In the arresting prologue to his book, The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. describes America on the day of the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt — an economy nearly shut down, people starving, machine-gun nests around Washington, opinion-makers taking of the need for dictatorship, capitalism given up as dead, even the March sky dark and foreboding. Pace today's revisionists such as Amity Shlaes, FDR indeed restored confidence and began an economic recovery that was only tripped up when he reverted to his instinctive desire to balance the budget and back away from stimulus. If it makes them feel better, many of the New Deal's successes built off the programs first established by Herbert Hoover, the often unfairly maligned onetime progressive. Yet those policies had not been pushed with the energy or scale demanded by FDR.

Many liberals and progressives want to see the current economic phase of the Great Disruption as a Depression-like opportunity. Meanwhile, conservatives such as Ms. Shlaes — and the reactionary thugs who consider even Social Security, as they would phrase it, SOCIALISM!! — use the Depression and New Deal as a foil. The reactionaries back then wanted to raise taxes to balance the budget. Otherwise, today's right is little changed intellectually from its predecessors.

And yet as I watch us move along the leading edge of history every day, I doubt many of the Depression analogies. We are not yet, most of us, on our backs. We have lost a huge amount of wealth — more than we realize, when one factors in the 25 years of destructive mergers, deindustrialization, deunionization and unwise trade deals. The floodwaters intrude on our peripheral vision — a friend laid off, a "depressing" news story. Otherwise, life goes on. American Idol goes on. A new release of Grand Theft Auto. Watchmen brings to the screen "the greatest graphic novel of all time" (was Sad Sack a graphic novel?). Talk radio continues to stir up the faithful. We are entertained, distracted, agitated, yet sleepwalking. Hoping for the next bubble. The next "Flip this House" casino economy moment. We don't realize how gone it all is, gone with the wind.

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Posted inUncategorized

A conspiracy of bears?

My economics blog in liberal Seattle has lately attracted a crowd of commenters that would make Phoenix proud. The stock market's decline has nothing to do with the collapse of housing and banking bubbles, with historic levels of debt and all the unwinding of contracts based on leverage, nothing to do with a nation groping against fundamental discontinuity. No, it's Obama's fault. Sure enough, this has become a growing point of attack by the reactionaries, who offer no solutions beyond the failed policies that caused this mess.

But it caused me to think…we have Tim Geitner at Treasury, rather than, say, Joe Stiglitz. We have Larry Summers, and hovering in the background, Bob Rubin, as chief White House economic advisers. Not Robert Reich. Kathleen Sebelius at Health and Human Services, instead of Dr. Howard Dean. Obama insiders rushed to reassure the idiot David Brooks that "they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see
themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy
that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an
ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution…"

This may be smart centrist politics. It will be completely inadequate to address the crises before us. Yet it may also mean that Obama realizes that the government was long ago taken over by, let's say a community of interests, that is fundamentally opposed to reform. Does this group have the capacity to bring him into line by collapsing the stock market — naked short-selling it — until he yells "uncle"?

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Posted inPhoenix

Arizona: Deeper into the Kook zone

The Kookocracy continues not to disappoint. Their draconian cutbacks mean that new state archives building will be closed less than two weeks after being dedicated. State parks have, or are on the way to being, closed — with no provisions being made to protect these priceless sites from looters. Meanwhile, the Kooks are rushing a bill through the Legislature that would bar Arizona from participating in the Western Climate Initiative — a mild but promising effort by states to begin curbing greenhouse gases.

This is what you get when you don't vote. This is what you get when you have an ineffective opposition party, which made few noticeable gains in local and legislative offices during the reign of Saint Janet. This is what you get when the party of Lincoln, TR, Eisenhower — even of Coolidge, Hoover, Reagan and George H.W. Bush is taken over by a nihilistic bunch of extremists. They want a radical individualistic law of the jungle, where the strong rule and profit, and devil (or Arpaio) take the hindmost.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg — the press in the state has been suffering its own draconian cutbacks, and fear of crossing the right-wing thugs by reporting on their activities.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Useful idiots

After seeing a bit of the Conservative Political Action Conference on CSPAN, I've concluded that the only thing Democrats have to fear is Democrats themselves. Admittedly a big fear, that, but CPAC was almost a parody of how out of touch, out of ideas and full of hate "conservatives" have become (the one exception being, perhaps, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman). It would be a parody if these activists didn't still have the power to make mischief.

Watching Rush Limbaugh's keynote address was particularly arresting. A man who once marketed his own line of neckties, stood at the podium in an outfit that looked like a bathrobe, rambling on like an over-the-hill Third World dictator to the cheers of the true believers still down in the bunker. Of course, he wants Obama to fail — nevermind the damage to the country. How else can reactionary politics rise again? It will require Obama's failure — or decades of faded memory as to what the Republicans did to bring on the worst calamity in decades.

I was actually vaguely sad. I listened to Rush in the early years. He was funny. His blowhard personality held a wink of self-parody. The songs made me laugh. He often took listeners to an intellectual plane — albeit a right-wing one — that has remained missing from all the Rush copycats down through the years. When I've tuned-in in recent years, most of those redeeming characteristics are gone, especially the humor.

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Posted inUncategorized

Rocky Mountain requiem

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For a moment this morning I thought about asking a friend in Denver to send me a copy of the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News. But, no. It would hurt too much. After nearly 150 years, one of America's very good, and sometimes great, newspapers died today. Denver and America will be the worse for it.

For those of you dancing on the graves of newspapers, and the others who have their pet ideas for "saving" them, which always seem to continue the failed dumbing-down policies of the past 25 years (oh, but with streaming video and mom pages!). For those who think crowdsourcing and local opinion blogs can replace professional journalists in the lives of communities. All of you can stop reading now. I'm also tired of discussing the demise of the press — I've already made my views known. I hope the rest of you will stay for the wake.

Let there be no false sentimentality. The Rocky considered me a traitor because I chose to leave in 1993. I was young and ambitious and stupid. Yes, a traitor. We were in a war with the Denver Post — and what a war it was.

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Posted inUncategorized

What you do with zombies

Mila
The time for good options to deal with the banks was in, oh, 1999. That was when the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed, repealing the last of the Depression-era regulations that had kept the American banking system sound for more than six decades. (Yes, the same Gramm who got rich once he left the Senate and joined a big bank, and called us a "nation of whiners.") Now some of our largest financial institutions are Zombie Banks — but we have no Mila Jovovich armed with miniskirt and full arsenal to take them down. They are left with only the most primal instinct: To feed on the Treasury. Resident Evil, indeed.

Paul Krugman makes the case for nationalization today. Socialists Lindsey Graham and Alan Greenspan have also signed on. Economist Nouriel Roubini, who called the crash, says a takeover would avoid throwing good money after bad. Indeed, some of this is not too complicated: Think back to the wreck of the Penn Central railroad, when the government stepped in and created Conrail. Later it was relaunched as a successful public company. Receivership is a better way to think of this than the charged word "nationalize."

Who loses? The shareholders. And as much as one might get a populist shiver up the leg from the idea of some big hedge funds getting sucker punched, remember that average Americans were lured into the market, too. They've lost about half their nest eggs already. Those in bank stocks — and Bank of America and Citi are widely held — will lose more. But, as Jovovich's Alice teaches us, you can't mow down a bunch of zombies without collateral damage.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Say you want a revolution?

One of the greatest dangers to peace lies in the economic pressure to which people find themselves subjected.

–Calvin Coolidge

You can't handle the truth!

— Jack Nicholson

The honorary Page One Editor of Rogue Columnist and I have been in a friendly argument of late over when, or whether, the riots will begin. He sees sooner than later, as people are faced with the worst economic crisis in 80 years — perhaps in the history of the nation. Things will not turn around soon, and may well get much worse. And having worked around the world in some miserable and boiling hot-spots, he offers observations that should be discounted at one's peril. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski echoed this on MSNBC's Morning Joe, saying, "Hell, there could be even riots" as the unemployed take aim at the rich bastards that caused the calamity and are still doing fine.

I've tended to say later or never — the nation is too narcoticized by American Idol, Grand Theft Auto, endless driving, limitless digital distractions, the deadening civic isolation of suburbia. Human nature is unchanging but Americans have changed. They have become easily led. Short-changed of an education in history, civics and the humanities, too many Americans are just plugged into the matrix, sucking Wal-Mart subsistence, waiting for their next cog assignment.

Now, I'm not so sure.

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Posted inPhoenix

I told you so

Every time the Arizona Republic's journalists manage to sneak in a story about the depression ravaging metro Phoenix, I am deluged with emails from people, telling me how "I called it" years ago — "You were so right." They are generous about my seven years as a columnist in my hometown. It didn't take a genius to see where Phoenix was heading. And, both to preserve my job and keep some alliances for the greater good, I pulled my punches way too often.

Sunday's story was headlined "Growth pattern crippled Phoenix." (Is it just me, or does the Republic usually use "Phoenix" in a headline about "bad" news, but "Valley" in every other reference to the metropolitan area?). It focuses on the disaster in the newest fringes of sprawl, but also calls into question the entire growth model. Or, as the story puts it, "Phoenix grew into the nation's fifth-largest city through a reliable
pattern: Build affordable homes on the metro area's edges, welcome
waves of new buyers, and then roads, schools and retail centers follow." It goes on:

One reason the current housing collapse has been so brutal in Phoenix
is how suddenly that pattern broke down. In only a couple of years, the
breakdown trapped people in unfinished communities much like a
fast-moving landslide buries people in their tracks.
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Posted inUncategorized

The biggest issue no one wants to discuss

Financial Times pronounced the recent Davos conference the gloomiest in its history. The "global agenda" of world leaders has crumbled. With the Doha round of trade liberalization in shambles, "protectionism" is seen on the rise. This is one thing that happens during historic economic collapses: old arrangements, particularly unsustainable ones, crash down. This is what happens when an old order enters an pivot point of discontinuity, where the future will be profoundly different from the recent past.

Dangerous destabilization is headed our way. This is why Dennis Blair, the national intelligence director, said this week that the global economic collapse is the biggest threat to the United States, bigger than al Qaeda. The more we try to deny the current reality, or return to the bubbles of the past decade, the worse the reckoning. This is also true of trade. The "free trade" regime that has coalesced since 2000 has hugely benefited the swells and oligarchs that attend Davos, especially by increasing their personal wealth thanks to cheap labor in developing countries.

But the millions of Americans who have lost well-paid manufacturing jobs as a result, with nothing to replace them but a collapsed housing bubble, don't do Davos. They are not all blameless, to be sure. Like all Americans, they are blissfully unaware of the consequences of their consumer decisions. So they happily shopped at Wal-Mart as their jobs went away. No matter. Beware the meme that facing this, as in an abortive House attempt to put a "buy American" provision in the stim package, is "protectionism." Going forward, a new world trade arrangement is essential. It is the biggest issue facing the country that no one in power wants to discuss.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Legalize drugs?

Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske has been selected as the nation's next "drug czar." His predecessor, Norm Stamper, argues for legalization, saying that the "war against drugs" has not only failed, but inflicted misery on people and undermined the effectiveness of law enforcement. (Watch an interview here). The divergence shows a blue divide little known to civilians, with a growing number of police officers who want partial or full decriminalization of drugs. I certainly hear it from the cops who help me in the research for my mysteries. There's an organization, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), dedicated to the cause.

Decriminalization is one of the last issues where you'll find both liberal and conservative supporters. For example, National Review, which at least once represented an intellectual brand of conservatism, urged legalization years ago. NR said "the drug war is lost." Chief Stamper put it this way:

It's not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug
use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut
back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of
new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go.
The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the
1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per
100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900
Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had
ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses
than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault
combined. Feel safer?

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Posted inPolitics: National

Why tax cuts won’t stim this time

At the moment, tax cuts make up 42 percent of the so-called stimulus bill. This dooms it to be ineffectual, if not actually making things worse. The latter will happen because this is all borrowed money. Public investments provide the means to repay it by improving commerce and productivity. Tax cuts just piss it away. Where are the fighting liberals who are going to filibuster this mess and make the president realize his bipartisanship dance has only reinvigorated the Republicans, the party that wrecked America?

In 2003, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman laid out the exhaustive case against the cult of tax cuts, in a must-read, must-keep article in the New York Times Magazine. Yet this remains the only idea of the GOP, the party that wrecked America. And it has been given center stage by a naive president and weak Democrats who don't know how to act as winners. As a consequence, public investments in infrastructure, the best way to generate jobs and a return for the future, have been pared back. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But this is a rotten bill, and it is the enemy of the good, whether the punked good has realized yet or not.

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