Rogue Columnist

Sustaining denial as the old world collapses

The Arizona Republic spent a week writing articles about "sustainability." This was obviously Gannett top-down: the series was relentlessly "positive," aimed at "the average reader" and ultimately useless. Which is too bad, because reporter Shaun McKinnon is as close to an expert on water issues as you'll find at major newspapers -- when he's allowed to write on them.

This was followed, equally predictably, by the kind of anodyne editorial the Republic has written hundreds of times before. This one had such deep renderings as:

Sustainability: The word is everywhere. Companies from Wal-Mart to Ford are trumpeting their commitment to it. There are indexes to measure it, including a Dow Jones corporate yardstick. Bloggers have seized on it.

And, after gently laying out some challenges, then offering soothing praise for the state:

But more needs to happen on the ground. While Gov. Janet Napolitano, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and other leaders have certainly supported sustainability, Arizona still seems in the minor leagues. The efforts need to be bigger, better, faster.

"Seems"? Here's what was not covered, as far as I can tell:

Sunday read: McCain's overdue back taxes

Newsweek is set to publish a story about how Cindy McCain "lost track" of the taxes she owes on the many properties she owns:

When you're poor, it can be hard to pay the bills. When you're rich, it's hard to keep track of all the bills that need paying. It's a lesson Cindy McCain learned the hard way when NEWSWEEK raised questions about an overdue property-tax bill on a La Jolla, Calif., property owned by a trust that she oversees. Mrs. McCain is a beer heiress with an estimated $100 million fortune and, along with her husband, she owns at least seven properties, including condos in California and Arizona.

Read the story online here. Guess we know why Republicans hate taxes so much.

On the Second Amendment ruling: unlock, unload

Forgive me if I take a holiday from some of the liberal and progressive hysteria over the Supreme Court's ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own a firearm. But, then, I am a Westerner and a gun owner.

The Bill of Rights is all about restraining government and specifying some of the rights of individuals (indeed, some of the Framers opposed the Bill of Rights because they feared individual rights would be seen as limited to those amendments). If the Framers intended to discuss state militias, the Bill of Rights seems an odd place to do it. It's meaningful that the amendment is No. 2 behind that wellspring of recognizing individual rights, the First Amendment. One could see how the Framers said, the people have these rights, and here's how will they be ensured of protecting them.

Remember, these men rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world, and many believed the people should always have the unalienable right to take up arms against a tyrannical government or leave a voluntary union of sovereign states. The Whiskey Rebellion and, most cataclysmically, the Civil War, settled some of those issues. Others were left to the courts.

Yet the ambiguity of the amendment has long been contested. And extreme measures on both sides brought matters to a head, and make the future even more contentious.

Charlotte faces its moment of truth

Around 1996, when I was the business editor of the Charlotte Observer, I provoked the ire of the president of the chamber of commerce -- as I so often do with such caudillos -- by pointing out an inconvenient truth: the city's economy was too dependent on two big banks. Charlotte was in the middle of a historic boom that turned a sleepy, mid-sized Southern city into the nation's second-largest banking center.

An Oz-like skyline shoots up dramatically from the flat treeline of the Carolina Piedmont. Signs of fabulous wealth are everywhere, from the expensive cars on the street to the beautiful people shopping at Dean & Deluca. It's an amazing testmony to what money can do -- to what being positioned at the heart of the capital markets can do. And it's mostly because of the two money center banks, what are now Bank of America and Wachovia, that are improbably headquartered there.

Then came the subprime and credit crises, partly authored by the smartest people in the room in Charlotte. Now, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "Charlotte is fretting over whether it can remain the last great U.S. banking center outside of New York." It should be fretting over more than that.

Speculators and oil prices: an idea running on empty

Some Democrats and even Republicans would have us believe that speculators are to blame for higher gasoline prices. A bill has been introduced to close the so-called Enron loophole that allowed some energy trading on unregulated "dark" markets. That and other "dark market" loopholes should be closed. But the affect on gas prices will be minimal.

Americans have often railed against speculators -- the Revolution and Civil War come to mind -- and sometimes with good reason. Unfortunately, you can't have capitalism without speculation. The key is sound regulation. But the idea that speculation is the major cause of higher oil prices is evidence of the magical thinking going on in much of America. It's deep denial about the real reasons for more expensive oil.

Thus, a war against speculators will be useless at best and could do real harm, both by gumming up the efficient mechanisms of the market -- of which speculators are an important part -- and distracting us from the real tasks at hand.

Private capital again fails downtown Phoenix

Here's a tragedy buried inside the Republic, and thanks to a reader for finding it:

Construction on the $100 million Hotel Monroe - a property seen as critical to downtown's rebirth- is winding down, and it is unclear when or if the project will be finished.

The project's developer, Grace Communities, said Tuesday it was unable to get financing from Mortgages Ltd. to complete the project.

The Hotel Monroe was set to open in October as a 150-room boutique hotel. The property, a former professional building at Central Avenue and Monroe, was constructed in 1931 and once housed Valley National Bank.

Any successful big city has several boutique hotels in restored historic buildings downtown. Even in smaller cities, such as Denver, Seattle, Cincinnati, Des Moines...Oklahoma City. Not poor Phoenix. Once again, the dearth of private capital downtown shows. Yes, the downturn and Mortgages Ltd. meltdown hurt. But the old Valley Bank building has sat empty for years. The once grand Westward Ho was consigned to subsidized housing. I can't imagine such an outcome in any other big city. So, so sad.

UPDATE: read a new story about further damage to the few private-sector projects downtown due to the Mortgages Ltd. collapse. Gee...let's pay a Scottsdale company to come up with a new name for downtown -- that'll fix everything.

What's behind McCain's incoherent energy policy

President-elect McCain offered a "prize" of $300 million to anyone who can develop an efficient electric car battery. He might want to watch the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car, about the combination of powerful interests and consumer antipathy that quashed the effort before. I know the senator "from Arizona" calls himself a computer "illiterate," who depends on his wife, whom he obscenely berates in public, to do the techie stuff. Maybe she can work the VCR, too.

Things like electric and hydrogen-powered cars fuel much of the American imagination because of the hope that we can merely retrofit suburbia to new-fangled technology and keep sprawling as before. It's not going to happen. Most of these projects are highly speculative, some outright frauds. Electrics and hybrids can be part of the solution, but they will be costly. We haven't gotten our heads around the idea that alternative energy will be much more expensive than the cheap gift of light sweet crude that built 20th century America and is now in decline. Many Americans will choose to live differently in the future. The senator seems either ignorant or hostile to this.

You only need to know two things about McCain's energy policy. First, as a senator he opposed raising fuel-efficiency standards and subsidies not only for alternative fuels, on which there is legitimate disagreement, but also on research in general. Representing, or not, his state, he tried to kill Amtrak and was hostile to metro Phoenix's first, long-needed, light rail line. He showed no leadership on commuter trains and is generally anti-transit. Interestingly, some insiders thought it just as well: McCain is so disliked in the Senate, his advocacy might have actually hurt the Phoenix project. But his is a 1965 mentality in a new world demanding transportation options.

Second, to gain contributions from the corporate base of the GOP, he must embrace offshore drilling (which will do nothing to lower oil prices), nuclear power and the elusive research for cleaner coal -- which is a stalking horse to merely build more coal plants on the hope that "someday" the horrendous pollution/greenhouse gas problem will be solved. Just as Arizona's highly suspect, selectively applied 100-year water requirement is based on the stoned-in-the-dorm notion that in a few decades elves will cast a spell to allow enough water for a vast Sun Corridor of 8 million golfers.

How passenger rail was wounded, and how to fix it

The New York Times is a fine newspaper, but it has its blind spots. Its reporting on energy is often incomplete or downright wrong. The latter sin was not in evidence when it finally reported on the popularity of Amtrak. What's frustrating is what the article left out or left unsaid, which makes it harder to achieve some results beyond our transportation system frozen in 1965 (and we had more trains then).

From the article:

Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month.

But the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand.

And:

The problem is that rail has shriveled. The number of “passenger miles” traveled on intercity rail has dropped by about two-thirds since 1960, and the companies that build rail cars and locomotives have also shrunk, making it hard to expand.

Only late in the story is a glancing reference made to Amtrak's fate being tied to the whims of the federal government, and late late in the story the Times admits their boy crush President-elect McCain "was a staunch opponent of subsidies to Amtrak when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee." Indeed he wants to abolish it.

Let's fill in some of the blanks so Americans might have some options beyond expensive and congested driving, and airlines that treat passengers like cattle.

"At least we don't have to shovel sunshine"

The Republic has a page one brief on the weather. Headline: 7 straight days of 110+ and now, summer starts. Reporter John Faherty writes, "Last year set a record when the high temperature hit or exceeded 110 on 32 days...On average, that happens 10 times per year."  Oh, and there's an unhealthy air alert.

Sadly, this is the new normal. The summers have been getting hotter and lasting longer for years now. This is a man-made phenomenon: replacing agriculture with subdivisions, sprawling the urban island across 1,500 square miles or more, and throwing down asphalt, concrete and rocks with no thought to their consequences.

Sorry to say that miracle cool paving is about as likely and practical as a hydrogen car. The practical steps that would help, such as investing in shade oases, stopping sprawl and cutting concrete use won't happen. And what's mind-boggling is how the City of Phoenix keeps cutting down trees and eliminating cooling grass. The rock median on Camelback by the ruined Biltmore Fashion Park is an example.

And global warming hasn't even begun to be seriously felt, with its effects on the water supply, along with raising temperatures even more.

The swells who leave town for the summer make their living on continuing this gathering calamity. So nothing will change. Faherty's opening sentence is "It's OK to be afraid." Indeed.

Copper Square bites the dust, but has anyone learned anything?

News item: A Phoenix business group plans to stop using the name Copper Square that has branded a 90-block downtown retail-and-office district for eight years. The Downtown Phoenix Partnership is working with Scottsdale's SHR Perceptual Management on a name that will highlight downtown Phoenix as "Arizona's cosmopolitan heart..."

Where to begin? Perhaps it's most telling that the Downtown Phoenix Partnership is paying a Scottsdale company to come up with a name for downtown Phoenix. Such is the fecklessness, confusion and drift that characterized the whole "Copper Square" debacle.

You know where I stand. I wrote against the silly name even before they rolled it out, saying, among other things, that the name of the "district" is already established by decades of custom: Downtown Phoenix. In a city hostile to public spaces, there is no square, and downtown has no historic link with the copper industry. And who wants to live in a city that doesn't have a downtown? Yet millions of dollars that might have been spent on, say, recruiting private employers to downtown, went to banners and assorted crap saying "Copper Square."

So what will these marketing gods from Scottsdale -- apparently there were no companies available in downtown Phoenix (which ought to tell you something of the real problem) say?

Dour Scot warns of market 'crash'

Ignored in the U.S. press amid the market's fall Wednesday is this report from London's Daily Telegraph:

The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks. "A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared," said Bob Janjuah, the bank's credit strategist.

The paper reported on another warning from Morgan Stanley, related to the different monetary strategies being pursued by the Fed and the EU central bank.

Gone fishin'...not quite

I'll be taking a break from the blog over the next two weeks as I finish my new mystery, The Pain Nurse, due out next spring. You'll hear from me if big news breaks. In the meantime, enjoy the archives. I also invite you to check out the items on the left: The Front Page is updated daily with the most provocative and important news, and The City Desk looks at the successes and challenges in urban areas around the world. The McCain file keeps us up to date on the facts concerning the senator "from Arizona."

Should the homeless always be with us?

Seattle is so generous to the homeless that it's known as "Freeattle." So it's not surprising that in this lovely, liberal city there would be protests over recent sweeps to remove homeless camps from greenbelts and underpasses. The city claims the camps are unsanitary and unsafe. The protesters say there are not enough shelters.

To be sure, the homeless here are not as obnoxious as in San Francisco. Even the People's Republic of Berkeley has had second thoughts about doing nothing to address panhandling and defecating on sidewalks. Phoenix, which offers a harsh minimum of services, eased somewhat in recent years by a services campus pushed by some business leaders, still attracts a huge homeless population.

My personal reaction to this has changed in recent years. Based on my street experience as an ambulance medic, I knew panhandlers would just go buy drugs or booze. So I never gave money. Once I started reading the Bible with more diligence, I changed my behavior. Now I always give money. This is just me. And it doesn't represent a societal answer.

Keegan op-ed: Talton misses facts on charter school success

EDITOR'S NOTE: Lisa Graham Keegan fires back at my post from May 21. The original post generated such interest, and the stakes for education are so high, that I think it's important that she get equal time. This is her response (also posted on the original's comment section:

By Lisa Graham Keegan

Jon Talton is an extremely talented writer, in my view, so it was particularly un-fun to read his snarkiness directed at me. But my husband and I are fans in spite of ourselves and him, so I wrote Jon and he suggested I post something.

While I doubt it will happen, I hope folks will check the facts on public charter schools. The people who start them and run them are largely teachers, often formerly part of the union leadeship, who simply wanted to control the environment they teach in and be more effective for their students. Six of the 10 highest performing high schools in AZ are charters, and when you look at math it is 14 of 15.

To say this is a failed experiment is a head-in-the sand ridiculous statement. There are well over a million students in public charter schools in America. They usually serve a higher percentage of minority students,with many of the models such as KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Aspire Schools, Green Dot Schools, built around a mission to serve in low wealth urban settings where kids are horribly undeserved right now.

I find it amazingly ironic that people who claim to embrace innovation would believe we should not seek ways to re-invent our public education system to accomodate the initiative of those who know our kids best. There are some mind-blowing models out there, brought to us by teachers, who had to fight tooth- and-nail against their own colleagues just for the right to exist.

I agree it is correct to seek to raise the hopes of an entire neighborhood. But why not believe that you can do that in part by creating community in the school that exists there? Teacher-owned schools, community-run schools are all part of this movement. And it is growing steadily, but not fast enough to serve its waiting lists. How is that not "the public"?

Have you all spent much time talking to parents in low-income neighborhoods? Their schools often don't provide much hope.

Corey Booker, mayor of Newark who chose to live in one of the poorest neighborhoods in town long before he ran for mayor, is a strong avdocate for school choice and charters. And he is a Barack Obama supporter. This movement has crossed party lines while you were busy opposing it.

One of the things that frustrates me most about education is that affiliations seem to matter more than ideas. Let me make the world safe for you...there are A LOT of public charter school supporters on Barack Obama's team. Lots of them own these schools and are seeking to proliferate them.

The world will be a lot better for a whole bunch of kids if you will offer them your support. Or at least check your facts.

Frank Rich makes an essential point...

In his Sunday column:

Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama’s epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.

Today's best read

The incomparable Peggy Noonan writes about the majestic moment of Obama's victory and about Hillary Clinton. The latter falls into the category JFK spoke of when he once dismissed Richard Nixon with a mere two words: "No Class." A sampling:

It is the most amazing thing that a young black man who was just a few short years ago unknown to most of his countrymen—really, unknown—could, this week, win the presidential nomination of one of our two great political parties. It is even more amazing that this historic news could be overshadowed by the personal drama and spite of the woman who lost to him.

I like it that she spent the campaign accusing America of being sexist, of treating her differently because she is a woman, and then, when she lacked the grace to congratulate the victor, she sent her stewards out to tell the press she just needs time, it's so emotional. In other words, she needs space because she's a woman.

Then she drills down:

Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.

We have been spared this...

Newspaper suicide watch: the folly of "local-local"

The Wall Street Journal took a look at what it calls a "big daily's hyperlocal flop," as the Washington Post poured resources into creating a "local-local" product for an affluent county.

For believers in the power of rigorous local coverage to help save newspapers, the Washington Post's launch of LoudounExtra.com last July was a potentially industry-defining event. It paired a journalistic powerhouse with a dream team of Internet geeks to build a virtual town square for one of Virginia's and the nation's most-affluent and fastest-growing counties.

Almost a year later, however, the Web site is still searching for an audience. Its chief architect has left for another venture in Las Vegas, and his team went with him. And while Post executives say they remain committed to providing so-called hyperlocal news coverage, they are re-evaluating their approach.

This was sadly predictable, and indicative of the group-think that is causing newspapers to commit suicide.

How appropriate...

President-elect McCain is giving a speech tonight, hoping to peel off disaffected Hillary voters (to whom I have two words: Supreme Court). He started by saying he was so glad to be "in New Orleans." Actually, he is out in the suburbs, in Kenner. This New Orleans 'burb is nearly 70 percent white and significantly richer than New Orleans. The relationship between the mostly poor, black city and the white suburbs was brought into sharp relief after Hurricane Katrina, when gun-toting suburban cops blocked evacuees from leaving the city. From this safe distance, he claims to feel Nola's pain...

This fits with McCain's tour of supposedly forgotten, poor areas, which somehow ended up playing to white exurban crowds, notably at Selma, Ala. To the extent that McCain is even a senator "from Arizona" -- refusing to do anything for his alleged home state -- he keeps his office in an exclusive part of Phoenix, and apparently found the tony north-central part of the city too, er, close to the barrio...?...for his Scottsdale-seeking residential tastes.

I give you the candidate of gated communities.

Plus, check out David Kurtz' on TPM about the latest McCain fib:

Still in Louisiana today, following his epic speech in Kenner last night, John McCain was asked by a local reporter why he had voted against creating a federal commission to investigate the Katrina disaster.

McCain's response? "I've supported every investigation and ways of finding out what caused the tragedy. . . ."

The problem is that's just not true. He voted against such a commission -- twice.

Daddy, what did you do in the war on the Constitution?

It's clear that President-elect McCain will run with this major theme: Barack Obama is not qualified to be president because he didn't serve in the military. For example, when Obama praised McCain's service and wondered why he refused to support the new GI Bill, McCain shot back, "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did."

The "religious test" prohibited by the Constitution has been seriously eroded by modern politics. But what McCain implies is more dangerous still to the future of the nation: that only soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are really qualified to lead the nation, particularly in wartime.

So many contradictions and hypocrisies here. Neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin Roosevelt were veterans, yet they led the nation in the two world wars. And where was McCain's outrage over the neo-con chicken-hawks who took draft deferments during Vietnam, notably Dick Cheney (five deferments). Obama was a child during Vietnam. And what of the swift-boated John Kerry?

But the biggest concerns cut to the core of the American republic. They could reveal McCain not merely as a misinformed and misguided candidate, but a potentially dangerous one.