Posted inPolitics: National

The new world order

The Republicans are on a roll, or so the conventional wisdom goes. The American public, with the memory of a kicked dog, is ready to re-entrust power to the Party that Wrecked America. It certainly has the eye-candy for horny white male voters, such as the comely-but-stupid Christine O'Donnell and the leggy half-term Gov. Palin. It has billions of dollars thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling on corporate campaign spending (corporations are people, you see, except when they break the law). And it has issues: Gays and Muslims are taking over the country, along with Obama's "socialism" — such as the big giveaway to the for-profit health-care sector, the rescue of the casino on Wall Street and continued funding of the for-profit national security economy. Issues such as that the Constitution is sacrosanct, with its mandated theocracy, that evolution is a "theory" (like gravity) and should not be taught, that stem-cell research is, like all science, of the devil and we should just incinerate all those embryos, that tax cuts and no regulation will solve every ill, that brown people cutting your lawn are the biggest threat to American civilization.

America has become like Arizona: Ignorant, fearful, disconnected from and hostile to the commons, inordinately dependent on gub'ment dollars even as it rails against gub'ment. And, most of all, locked in a clueless feedback loop trying to avoid reality. But the real world moves on.

A new world order is crashing down on us whether we like it or not. And it's not the new world order of Glenn Beck's paranoia or George H.W. Bush's optimistic post-Cold War vision.

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Posted inUncategorized

Peak oil and its deniers

UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has a running feature on his blog called, "Why, oh why, can't we have a better press corps?" Amen, brother. But even the best newspapers have blind spots, and that has especially unfortunate consequences when those dark zones concern some of the biggest issues of the day. The New York Times is already terrified of climate-change stories and won't plumb seriously into the soft empire we've created and its crushing costs. One of its biggest deficiencies is coverage of energy, especially the oil industry. Hence, we were served a story on Sunday about peak oil that failed to define the term and consigned the people in the story to the survivalist fringe. This from a newspaper that also publishes a deferential story about the retrograde nihilist Rand Paul and shrinks from nailing the tea party for its racist supporters, incoherent positions and — especially — shadow control by big corporate money.

Peak oil doesn't mean "we're about to run out of oil." Even defining it as "demand outstripping supply" is incomplete. Peak oil means the world has reached a point where half of the planet's oil has been burned up (see, "climate change"). The remainder will be increasingly hard to reach and more expensive to refine. America hit its national peak in the early 1970s. The North Sea has passed peak. Several of the world's giant "elephant fields" are near or past peak. This is a simple fact of geology about which there's no disagreement among most experts (the outlier: the oft-quoted and highly-paid-by-industry Daniel Yergin). Peak oil was being used in ads by major oil companies and speeches by their CEOs in the mid-2000s. As with climate change, the debate is over details; in this case, when will peak hit and what will be its effects?

Not for nothing did America fare well in World War II because it was a petro superpower and the world's leading oil exporter. Neither Hitler nor the Japanese Empire had much in the way of oil resources. Hitler failed to make the Caucasus oilfields an immediate priority in his attack on the Soviet Union, a geopolitical example of when cops say, "Thank god for stupid criminals." Now, more than three decades after hitting peak, America still produces oil, especially in Texas, Alaska, California and Louisiana. We're even still one of the world's larger oil producers, but that is way outstripped by our appetite.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Top kill

Our front page editor translates into honest English the typical hate letter that comes to Rogue Columnist:

Dear Mr. Talton: If it wasn’t for
you I’d have an additional 200 percent
equity in my house in my gated community in North Scottsdale. If you
would stop pointing out the minor problems we face in PHX, we could win
the NBA
and my greens fees would be lower.

He adds in his own voice: "We are a
nation of spoiled shits living off of debt and about
40 years past the high water mark of America. The real shame is that it
could all be fixable, but will never be. We live in Scamistan. The U.S. government scamming taxpayers and lenders. CEOs scamming shareholders.
Military
scamming the President. Corporations offloading the real cost of their
fat/salt laden food. BP/Massey Coal on the real cost of energy. Iowa corn farmers on ethanol and water/pesticides killing the Gulf
before BP…. 
People delusional in thinking short term and not long term in fixing
our
problems.  Pols worried about the next election, not the next 20-plus years."

And you think I'm gloomy. To paraphrase Emerson, God offers every mind its choice between truth and American brightsided "optimism." Take which you please — you can never have both. So, tell me, ye brightsiders, what are we to make of the unparalleled, at least in this country, environmental disaster happening off the coast of Louisiana?

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Posted inPhoenix

Greenscam

The Phoenix Convention Center is the site of the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, involving, the Info Center reports, "thousands of entrepreneurs, sales executives

and marketers in the fast-growing 'green' construction industry." I'm sure every attendee's welcome kit contained a laminated printout of the Rogue post, "Did you hear the one about sustainable Phoenix?" Or they should, as Phoenix is the capital of denial, pipe dreams of hydrogen cars and cooling sidewalks, and the green of sales, sales, sales. It is an international poster child of unsustainability. Put the conferees on buses, drive them around town, say "Don't do this!" and send them home.

In the same edition of the newspaper, oops, Information Center, was a story about shading the new Diamondbacks spring training structure out on the rez. I'm sure this can be spun as "green" construction, and this is one of the big problems with the entire green-built movement. A new stadium on what was rural land, surrounded by a giant heat-radiating parking lagoon and wholly dependent on long drives in automobiles is by its nature not green, not adding to sustainability. This is hardly a Phoenix problem. One sees all these new houses and
buildings in new office "parks" trumpeting their LEED certification.
Unless they are infill or rehabbing an existing (preferably historic) building, they are not really green. They are not green if they expand the urban footprint. Nor can they be divorced from their surroundings, such as walkable neighborhoods, transit, in-neighborhood shopping, etc. Otherwise, they are greenwash. Still, Phoenix takes the destructive absurdity to operatic levels. The idea that the already too-large Phoenix urban footprint can be enlarged by Superstition Vistas, and all those houses will be "green" (without a mandate, sure) is insanity.

The Info Center likely didn't have an article that came out of the European press, where whistleblowers claimed the International Energy Agency, under political pressure, has been inflating world petroleum reserves. It's a charge backed by academics and the reality of peaking production, the only reliable measure of oil. In other words, the world is running out of oil much faster than we're being told. The world is changing fast — don't forget climate change, too — and the biggest casualties will be cities such as Phoenix.

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Posted inUncategorized

Hard landing

When you think about the prison-like atmosphere in which we're forced to travel — lacking the high-speed rail transforming the advanced nations of the world — and the five-mile-high coffins in which we're locked for a cramped, nasty trip, who can argue with the punishments already meted out and yet to come for two Northwest Airlines pilots? They flew 150 miles past Minneapolis while distracted by their laptop computers. On second and third glance, they represent much more than two jokers in the cockpit.

Am I the only one who thinks America is much like these pilots? Off-course, befuddled by the latest merger and its consequences, living in a world where your pay has been cut in half already, enchanted by technology and believing it can save you (those laptops — or the electric car), while the airship cruises along, on autopilot, past its destination. The difference is that America is not going to get a call from the flight attendant asking "what the hell is happening?" We're so adept at ignoring such questions even if they were to arise.

Delta and Northwest is a merger that never should have happened. It hasn't lessened the airlines' financial troubles — for no transportation system really "pays for itself" (so why the hell do we expect that from Amtrak?). It has taken away one more competitor, consolidated an industry even further — which means not only fewer choices and jobs, but fewer competitive ideas. Consider, for example that we are some 40 years into the era of widespread use of "jetways" to board aircraft — and yet there's still only one way on or off, adding much time to boarding. That's what happens with groupthink. These cartelized airlines send much of the maintenance work to Third World countries, where managers order the cheapest fixes to airplanes, whether they are safe or not. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been eliminated. All to appease the free-market gods. And the wayward pilots will be appropriately punished, banged down so hard they will have a hard time getting a minimum-wage job at the local Lowe's. And its two more jobs that Delta can check off its list, throwing the two into the worst labor market since the Great Depression. Christian America loves Old Testament retribution.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Job One for America

As America faces its worst run of job losses since the Great Depression with no end in sight, one thing should be clear. Our federal government is being run by a coalition of the financial sector, lobbyists for entrenched interests and a disciplined Republican opposition of dubious loyalty. Barack Obama is not only very close to being a failed president, he could be on track to be a one-termer if the GOP snags an opponent such as Gen. David Petraeus or even a rehabbed Mitt Romney. (The Nobel will only hurt Obama without substantive achievements for average Americans).

Perhaps the problem is centered on Obama and the cowardly Democrats in Congress (Memo to Blue Dogs: You'll lose anyway, so do the right thing and maybe you can pull a Harry Truman; oh, wait, Truman wasn't getting millions from the moneyed interests and hoping to get a job with them after politics). Could Hillary have done better? Or is this just the latest evidence of a quiet coup and no individual can change America's trajectory to self-immolation. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family and David Wessel's In Fed We Trust (and throw in Maggie Mahar's Money Driven Medicine) and you begin to see the financialized theocracy we have become. One facing unsustainability on every front, including in a military whose quiet evangelization by the Christian right should raise alarms never before heard in America (were it covered by the media).

As for unemployment, the best Washington can do is become aroused over a tax credit for job creation. This won't work — it's not tied to real demand. And it will lower tax revenues, adding to the deficit. It's a stunning sign of America's enervation and institutional corruption that President Obama is not rolling out a crash program to modernize our rail system. It could be done now. It would create huge numbers of jobs, not only for construction but also for operating and maintenance. Real jobs that would last. And an infrastructure whose benefits would repay the Treasury many times over.

2
Posted inPolitics: National

A giant leap, then the long fall

Earth_rise Amid the bitter war, in the Age of Aquarius, with fire in the streets, astronauts flew to the moon and stepped onto the trackless dust of the Sea of Tranquility… What's amazing is that I (over)wrote this sentence 20 years ago to mark the Apollo 11 anniversary. Nobody can outdo John Noble Wilford of the New York Times for his historic lede when the event happened: "Men have landed and walked on the moon." But my forgettable column from 1989 is a reminder of how fast time passes, for a man, for a nation.

You either got the space program or you didn't. I was a child of the Space Age, a rocket boy, minutely following every mission: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, as America raced the Soviets to the moon. I had NASA Facts films that the TV studio downtown had given me, sheaves of photos and publicity directly from the space agency, models of every rocket and spacecraft. I watched Neil Armstrong step out that July night in the company of my grandmother, a woman who had been born on the frontier, who had witnessed the invention of the automobile and the airplane — and now she had lived to see this.

It remains one of the most moving moments of my life. I also choke up re-reading about the Apollo 8 mission, with the revolutionary photo Earthrise, when humans first saw their precious blue planet from afar, alone in the vast emptiness of cold space. When the astronauts read from Genesis on Christmas Eve and concluded with, "And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth."

You get it or you don't. But either way, at what a remarkable place we find ourselves 40 years — 40 years! — out.

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Posted inUncategorized

Peak oil — nevermind

One way to remain popular as a hip, iconoclastic media brand in America is to reinforce the conventional wisdom — in a hip, iconoclastic way, of course. I've learned this from Freakonomics. Take the recent blog post entitled, "Has 'Peak Oil' Peaked?" Author Stephen Dubner asserts that with oil prices way down from their 2008 highs, the media "frenzy" over peak oil has faded away — but without the media doing a reality check on this hysteria they were peddling to a gullible public.

Huh?

My memory of that time is quite a bit different. The mainstream media did little on peak oil and Freakonomics' partner, The New York Times, was nearly silent on the issue. All the air in the media bubble was being taken up by shrill blaming of the major oil companies (even though they were delivering a commodity prized by the world to American gas pumps with no lines or interruptions). Or it concerned sinister futures traders somehow gaming the market. Most of the discussion on peak oil was confined to sites such as The Oil Drum, the "doomer blogs" — and inside the oil industry itself.

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Posted inUncategorized

How Detroit committed suicide

In the garage of my condo tower, someone parks a 1965 Buick Electra 225 convertible. It is sleek and big and powerful. This was Detroit, and in many ways America, at the zenith of its power.

Buick, like all GM divisions, still enjoyed great autonomy, including having its own design bureau. This car is a work of art. It is the successor to the legendary Roadmaster, and in those days Buick fans were fiercely loyal (my mother being one). GM cars were tiered so people could move up to a new GM brand as they became more affluent, as millions did in the 1950s and 1960s — Chevy to Pontiac to Oldsmobile and even Cadillac. Ah, but the Buick was special: glamorous, racy, classy and exclusive. Built union.

I think of all this, of course, as Chrysler is pushed into bankruptcy and General Motors may well face the same fate. What went wrong, and what does it say about America's future?

6
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.

1
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?

5
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.

5
Posted inUncategorized

Change? You can’t be serious

Let the excuses begin.

The New York Times leads off:

Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming
more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and
oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil
fuel.

The Washington Post weighs in:

Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like. "A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.)
said last week. "We need a business model based on cars of the future,
and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric
car."

But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision
for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part
of a "sustainable U.S. auto industry" that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.

That's
because car manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce
hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them.

Expect to hear more in the coming days and months. We will see a potentially debilitating alignment of old thinking and old, yet still politically powerful, economic interests. If it succeeds, the country will face much worse pain in the years ahead.

1
Posted inUncategorized

The morning after

As one reader said last night, "Glad you were wrong." Thank God, America appears to have at last repudiated the poisonous, destructive politics of the past. A ban on gay marriage in California may be the last hurrah, for awhile, for the "values voters" who never seem to have social justice or equality as a value. Minnesota: How could the land of Humphrey even come close to re-electing Norm Coleman? Arizona: So typical, so sad.

But good news abounds. Democrats increased their seats in Congress, unusual in a cycle after winning control. High-speed rail appears headed for a decisive victory in California, as well as big wins for transit projects in Northern and Southern California and Seattle. Elizabeth Dole, a onetime moderate Republican who allowed herself to be yoked to the most despicable extremist campaigning was thrown out. The once proud Republican Party finds itself reduced to a regional redoubt in the white South and the libertarian and Southernized parts of the country. And we have President-elect Obama. Thank God.

Now the hard work begins. Rather than discuss the policies needed for the new administration, let's begin with a more fundamental, foundational task. After years of distractions about gays, "the real America," red states vs. blue, color-coded terror threat levels, the right to bring guns in bars, socialism, blah-blah-blah, we must begin the difficult task of returning to the reality-based world.

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