Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Nihilism triumphant

"And for you Democrats looking for some silver lining…I got nothing" — Election-night tweet

Well, that was over in a flash. Our liberal, even socialist-curious, president. Our far-left Congress. And perhaps they reached too far, too fast. After all, President Obama chose as his top economic advisers Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, as well as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. Inheriting the bank bailout from George W. Bush, he imposed a stringent windfall profits tax on Wall Street which he used to help foreclosed house-owners. Wall Street felt the iron hand of liberalism, with a new Glass-Steagall, big enough to even turn the shadow banking system from speculation into investing in job-creating productive industries. Mr. Obama's Attorney General perp walked dozens of leading banksters. And the stimulus: Instead of wasting it in tax cuts, as some advocated, it was more than $1 trillion aimed at cutting-edge infrastructure, including rebuilding our passenger train system and high-speed rail, not being thrown away on highways. Where did the money come from for this socialist reign of terror? Higher taxes on the richest, making corporations actually pay taxes, and winding down the vast national security/empire economy. We were well on our way to retrofitting suburbia for a high-cost energy future, addressing climate change, moving away from foreign oil. And in doing so, creating millions of high-paid jobs. And many union ones, for these ruthless bastards immediately pushed through the Employee Free Choice Act. No wonder, the forces of reaction reacted…

Of course none of that happened. The quick lessons of the election: 1) When an ignorant, afraid electorate, seeing its living standards fall, must choose between bought-off Republican-lite Dems and real bought-off Republicans, they will choose the latter. 2) Except for the bluest states and most farcical candidates, money buys elections and the liberals can't outspend what John Judis calls "the party of reactionary insurrection." 3) The quiet coup has been completed. 4) The Democratic Party may not be dead, but it should be. 5) Most voters have no memory of a government that works well and fights for average people, and that bodes ill for liberalism. 6) Did it matter that the president is black? To many Americans, it did, and negatively. 7) Arizona is toast.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

The Arizona syndrome

Arizona Democrats may have thought they were on a roll in recent years, at least in congressional elections. Harry Mitchell beat J.D. Hayworth in a solid red district and Gabrielle Giffords won a swing seat. Much of that was actually anti-Bush, anti-J.D. sentiment. Now Arizona seems poised to rejoin the South and most of the Plains and Intermountain West states as solidly red. My recent sojourn to my home state did nothing to dissuade me from this view. Many Democrats are dispirited. The party lacks the infrastructure of the right — from "think tanks" and big corporate money to endless right-wing talk radio. In a state with a fairly recent past of vigorous two-party competition, the Democrats were largely asleep as the extreme Republican right took control from the ground up, starting with school boards and obscure boards, eventually taking commanding power in the Legislature, by far the most powerful branch of government.

This is a crying shame for Terry Goddard. I heard the meme of "he thinks he deserves to be governor because his old man was." Far from it. Goddard is the most qualified candidate, a smart, open-minded public servant who has earned his way in elective office and actually did the most to attack border crime. The Democrats have a number of excellent candidates for statewide races, including David Lujan, Andrei Cherny and my old colleague and friend John Dougherty. They stand little chance against the vast capacity of the right. Mitchell and Giffords may well go down.

The big weapon against the Dems is, of course, SB 1070, the Jim Crow anti-immigrant bill.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Arizona depression II

My favorite hotel, adjacent to the Willo Historic District, is full. Two large conventions are downtown. This was all booked before Arizona passed its Jim Crow anti-immigration law. Now every restaurant owner and person associated with the tourism industry I speak with is terrified about the growing backlash against the state. Many here are outraged about boycott calls. But it's fair game: Without the boycott, Gandhi, King and Chavez would not have had a key weapon against a grave moral injustice. I wish people would boycott by legislative district, while spending money and time in central Phoenix and Tucson, as well as with Hispanic- and progressive-owned local businesses. The rocks come with the farm, and the residents of the state allowed the Kookocracy to run wild, not only with SB 1070 but a host of madness.

Phoenix is in trouble anyway. Mayor Phil Gordon, a good man who loves the city and came into office seven years ago amid such hope, seems adrift. The composition of the city council has changed and for the first time since the reforming Charter Government movement took power six decades ago is becoming politicized. The ability to do the big things accomplished by Skip Rimsza and seen through by Gordon appears gone. Huge swaths of the city look like Dresden after the rubble had been carted away. The largest business, based on signage, remains "Available." Light rail (we built it, you bastards) is a big success; for example, I see many guests at the hotel taking it to restaurants, the convention center or to and from Sky Harbor. Yet the fiscal crisis is causing cuts in frequency, which will hurt ridership. The bus system has already been reduced to service levels seen in small cities.

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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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Phoenix Underworld
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History Phoenix Confidential

Phoenix Underworld

BollesCar

The scene after Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was fatally injured when a bomb went off in his car in 1976.

You don't have to scrape too far beneath the veneer of "a clean, new, well-run city" to understand that Phoenix is perhaps historically one of America's more corrupt, crime-run cities. It didn't get a great city in exchange for its corruption, as with Chicago. And being crime-run isn't the same as being crime-ridden, so whatever statistics the boosters pull out to show community safety are really beside the point.

It's long been this way. When I was a child, Phoenicians sniffed that Tucson was the Mafia town, with Joe Bonanno, Pete Licavoli Sr., and company. Yet the FBI estimated that in the 1960s Phoenix had more mobsters per capita than New York City. I grew up just a few blocks from the house where, in 1958, Gus Greenbaum and his wife had their throats slit in retaliation for Gus' skimming from the casino tills in Vegas (and, local lore has it, the hitmen then ate the steaks the Greenbaums had just cooked). Phoenix was full of bars (Rocky's Hideaway, the old Blue Grotto, Ivanhoe, the Clown's Den, etc.) frequented by made men and the wanna-bes.

This was not the result, as some would have it, of "the Wild West atmosphere." Rather, it was the interface between a city growing too fast with few rules or institutional checks and the migration of Midwestern gangsters to exploit the situation (or, later, to be relocated by the feds). And an establishment willing to look the other way, or join in the "business." A culture of fraud built on successive real-estate booms, or scandals such as the collapse of Arizona Savings in the early 1960s, also made the city a magnet for criminals. The most prominent figure in this was Ned Warren (aka Nathan Waxman), the Kingpin of Arizona Land Fraud. He figured in the Bolles bombing.

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Posted inPhoenix

Jan and the floating diaphragm

Non 'Zonies will have to endure one more Phoenix-centric post before I end my visit. The Republic did a piece this morning on the first 100 days of Gov. Jan Brewer, the Republican secretary of state who replaced Janet Naploitano when she blew town to become secretary of Homeland Security. To say it's a puff piece would be too severe; it merely reflects the inexperience and lack of deep sources on the staff now, as well as fear and lack of curiosity, skepticism and leadership by the meeting-addled editors.

My sources give me this portrait of Brewer: A conservative Republican, but not an extremist ideologue; hard-working and well-meaning; not a mental giant; not very organized and served by a staff that pales in comparison to Saint Janet's "West Wing" stars; may not run for the office. She can be arrestingly tone deaf, for example, leaving the governor's arts awards dinner after delivering an early speech — the first time that has happened in memory, including chief executives of both parties. This benign annual do has plenty of Republican arts trustees, so it's not as if she were fleeing the socialists (excuse me, SOCIALISTS!!). As for her advocacy of a tax hike — more courageous, and realistic, than Saint Janet — but a roadblock to my hopes that the Kookocracy gets to rule, and then be rejected as their policies run the state even more into the ground

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Posted inPhoenix

Say goodnight to CityNorth

The Arizona Court of Appeals is doing Phoenix a favor by essentially killing its $97 million CityNorth project. Phoenix just doesn't know it. The Republic reports:

A major economic-development agreement between Phoenix and the CityNorth development has been ruled unconstitutional, meaning
the project may not grow into the once-envisioned second downtown on
the city's north side.

Part of the problem lies in the thinking encapsulated by that sentence. A real city has one downtown: the economic, cultural and retail heart of the city. By that definition Phoenix doesn't even have one downtown yet — but it wants a "second downtown"? But the bigger problem with CityNorth has always been that it is based on a dead business model. The old land-speculation economy is not coming back. These are problems not unusual to American cities. But Phoenix's case is extreme and instructive.

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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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