Rogue Columnist

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.

Why newspapers matter, still

Seattle's recent snowbound mess offered an object lesson in why newspapers remain essential to communities. With analysts expecting several major newspapers to shut down in 2009, including those in one-paper cities, it's worth noting what happened in the Emerald City.

A little background: On Dec. 18, it began snowing here, even at sea-level downtown. Snow is a rarity in this city of hills -- even though enough falls to stick every three years or so. This was reportedly the worst snowfall in a dozen years. We got about six inches downtown, and it was far worse in other parts of Seattle. The city has 27 snowplows. The city was paralyzed.

Phoenix's light-rail hope

I shed much blood professionally for the Valley Metro light-rail system, as the only columnist, or even journalist, to consistently stand up against the lies, myths and misconceptions that might well have killed this essential project if Phoenix is to have a future. This, as much as my outing of the Real Estate Industrial Complex and illuminating Arizona's looming water crisis, led to my demise at the Arizona Republic.

The opposition was powerful, ranging from suburban developers to right-wing thugs who didn't even live in the city. Some opponents were merely ignorant. Others were happy to see the central city die. They failed. So forgive me, as Metro prepares to open, for a moment of crowing.

We built it, you bastards.

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.

The Big Lie about unions

Somewhere over the past few decades, Americans became something new: followers. They became, as an earlier generation put it with disdain, "easily led." Keeping them that way requires a successful propaganda offensive in the case of the Big Three automakers. You see, it's all the union's fault. It's all the workers' faults. Just keep repeating that, over and over. Who knows what might happen if you failed to believe. Belief in the god "free markets" has been shaken by the incompetence of the Bush administration -- and by the inevitable consequence of law-of-the-jungle capitalism: the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Who knows what might happen if working Americans were suddenly not so easily led.

They might follow the example of 240 workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, who staged a sit-in after Bank of America cut off credit to the company -- and the company, in the way of today's America, laid off the workers without even a severance. They occupied the factory until the bosses and the bank capitulated. The action was hailed as a new sign of backbone, but there was a critical difference between these workers and most average Americans. A difference between them and the 35,000 employees that BofA itself is cutting. They were members of a union.

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?

The Madoff scandal: More than a Ponzi scheme

Were the damage not so great, it would be amusing to see SEC Chairman Chris Cox running around shocked, shocked, that Bernard Madoff had allegedly pulled off the biggest financial fraud in history -- and the watchdog was again caught napping. Or worse. The agency ignored years of warnings about Madoff's activities, and Barron's did an article questioning his returns a decade ago. Madoff reportedly bragged about his influence in D.C., including having an in-law who worked for the SEC.

As the victims of the alleged scheme, including many charities, see their investments wiped out, Madoff is out on bond, having to wear an ankle bracelet and stay home. Had he been a minority/poor kid who stole $100 from a cash register drawer, he'd be in county lockup with hardened criminals. Meanwhile, Attorney General Michael Mukasey has recused himself from the investigation, without giving a reason. This is America in the new gilded age, where government has been essentially handed over to the wealthy and connected -- and we're surprised they went wilding?

An older America learned from the frauds and follies of the 1920s, including the legendary collapse of the Samuel Insull monopoly. Regulation of securities and banks was put in place, helping to ensure the success of American business for decades through transparency, competition and fairness. That all began to unravel with the Reagan Revolution -- but especially in the 1990s with deregulation pushed by Sen. Phil Gramm (R-UBS) and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a kingpin from Goldman Sachs.

When presidents had class

In 1901, President William McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo when an anarchist stepped forward and shot him, a mortal wound. As the crowd fell upon the assassin, McKinley said, "Don't hurt him."

Everyone has had a chance to see the shoe-throwing incident by now. This is the pathetic coda of a failed presidency, akin to the Jimmy Carter "killer rabbit." Yet the problem with the way many get "news" is that few will reflect on what the incident means. President Bush seemed clueless and callous as to why the Iraqi journalist might represent the rage of so many of his countrymen against America's actions in the country.

The journalist is now behind bars, perhaps already having been beaten and tortured, and he may face years in prison. He is also a hero in the Arab world. The shrewdest thing for Bush to do would be to demand his release. And I thought Bush was a Christian -- or at least that's how he manipulated the electorate.

Welcome to my world, guv

Asked how he was enjoying being a columnist, disgraced formed New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer says, "It sucks."

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.

This is Wall Street

As Republican nihilists carry out their war on working Americans, it's important to understand just how rotten is the industry they rushed to deregulate and bail out. And yes, there were Robert Rubin, Chuck Schumer and some Clintonistias among the deregulators -- but let's be real. With the exception of Lincoln and TR, the GOP has always been Wall Street's party. And now we're getting a sense of just how corrupt the Street has become.

Bernard Madoff is one of the most prominent and influential financiers in America. Now we know he allegedly engineered the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, a fraud worth at least $50 billion. The fraud has snared many big names and forced at least one charity to close. Of course, regulators ignored years of red flags.

As we obsess over Blago and his pretty wife Patti, awaiting some connection to the president-elect, I hope we also pay close attention to Madoff and all he represents. He is Wall Street, not some outlier bad apple. The Wall Street that gave us years of job killing and community ravaging mergers; financial weapons of mass destructions called derivatives -- that have now exploded, and the worst collapse since the Depression. Their financial plays helped hollow out America's real economy and leave Red China holding $2 trillion in dollars.

And all that came from the "legitimate" activities that made billions for the financial elite as Americans saw their pay stagnate and now see their jobs cut, 401(k)s gutted and houses foreclosed. Yet all those billions weren't enough. The elite apparently also had to run real Ponzi schemes, so unquenchable is its venality. And yet Washington has given it as much as $2 trillion in assorted bailouts, no questions asked. So tell me why American auto workers, making an average $28-an-hour but enjoying some help from a union, are somehow greedy bastards who should be thrown out of work?

Obama's coming trouble (and it's not Blago)

Have we seen the future and it's ugly? I'm talking about the successful Republican effort to block the paltry $15 billion in bridge loans to the Big Three.

The hypocrisy should be well-known. The biggest Republican opponents of the bailout have large foreign automaker "transplant" factories in their states. Also, they are all terrified of attempts by the United Auto Workers to organize those plants (even though, contrary to right-wing propaganda, wages aren't that different between domestic and transplant factories). The bridge loans would have amounted to about $5,000 per job, while Alabama paid some $250,000 per job to lure Mercedes to build there. Overall the Southern states have paid about $150,000 per job in incentives to build a manufacturing base controlled by foreign automakers. Finally, this is political payback against Michigan, Ohio, what's left of the industrial Midwest and union workers for going for Obama in the election.

Republicans didn't filibuster the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, which has neither unfrozen the credit markets nor shown itself to be accountable or competently directed. It's a giveaway, not a loan. They're not raising a peep about $2 trillion -- with a "T" -- in funds dolled out to anonymous fat cats by the Federal Reserve. But given a chance to once again stick it to working people, especially in states hardest hit by Republican trade and industrial policies, they rush to the barricades.

I'm disappointed that the auto bailout as crafted seems to contain nothing transformative. But the only thing we need less than business-as-usual in Detroit is to lose the largest remaining piece of industrial base we have. Especially one so connected with building the middle class and at a time of such economic peril.

But the larger issue is that Democrats failed to win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Unless Barack Obama finds a Reaganesque way to go over the heads of the Congress to the American people, it's clear that the Mitch McConnells of the Senate will filibuster and block his entire program. The danger of the moment means nothing to them. Democrats had better quit celebrating and wake up.

Rebalancing our national portfolio

The rich are finally afraid. You can see it in their eyes. They're laying off their nannies. The smart ones are fleeing into Treasury notes, even though the yield is zero. According to the New York Times,

While this will lower the cost of borrowing for the United States government, economists worry that a widespread hunkering-down could have broader implications that could slow an economic recovery. If investors remain reluctant to put money into stocks and corporate bonds, that could choke off funds that businesses need to keep financing their day-to-day operations.

Perhaps. But it might, just might, jolt Americans back to reality. That means an economy based on producing things of real value. And a re-valuation of business, which in this country means a re-evaluation of our very lives. It won't be easy, perhaps not even likely, because the dead hand of the past rests oh-so-heavy on everything we do. If it happened, however, it might just save us.

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.

More newspaper suicide...

An excellent observation from Talking Points Memo:

The most depressing thing I've heard in a while was Wall Street Journal reporter Shira Ovide on Chicago public radio this morning describing Tribune Co.'s predicament. She pointed out that the Chicago Tribune itself actually has pretty good cash flow (relatively speaking) and some cash reserves. In other words, this is a company that should still be leading the industry - if it weren't for its massive, crippling debt.

That debt comes from two of the worst decisions in recent corporate history. The first was Tribune's purchase of Times Mirror in 2000 for the vastly inflated price of $8 billion, which made the company double down on old media without gaining any strategic benefit. The second bad decision piggy-backed on the first. Swooning from the fallout of the Times Mirror deal (including a very foreseeable $1 billion tax penalty), they paid another $8 billion to put a man who actively hates newspapers in charge of one of the nation's biggest newspaper operations. What could possibly go wrong?

Worse than the Great Depression?

It's widely acknowledged by economists, and supported by mounting evidence, that we're in for the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. This is not "negative news" the media are inventing, dear positive-thinkers. It is simply reality. Yet it won't be as bad as the Depression, right?

For months, I have been giving a qualified "no" to that question. First, because the safety nets of the New Deal and Great Society, although badly frayed by Republican misgovernance, are still in place. Second, Americans are more affluent -- we don't have a third of the nation "ill clad, ill-fed and ill-housed" and millions lacking even electricity. My "no" was qualified because expert opinion got us into this mess and will continue to hold sway -- watch as the proteges of Robert Rubin steer the Obama economic plan. Experts were flummoxed by the Great Depression and in many cases carried out policies that made it worse. Expertise is only useful when it grows, as when a man demanded to know why Keynes had changed his view on an issue. Keynes responded: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Now, however, I am starting to wonder about my reassurances. Friday's report that 533,000 jobs were lost in November alone, signaling that the pace of unemployment is accelerating fast, was a kick in the teeth. Could this recession turn into a depression to rival, or surpass, the 1930s?

It is possible.

Sunday musts

Frank Rich raises important questions about the Obama economic team in Sunday's New York Times:

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

And be sure to check out Timothy Egan's fabulous "Typing Without a Clue" tirade about "Joe the Plumber" and Sarah Palin getting book contracts:

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

Now we lose the Rocky

Unending sadness.

Now comes word that E.W. Scripps has put the Rocky Mountain News "up for sale." That means it will probably be closed in 2009 and America will lose one of its great newspapers. Even its name evoked romance and adventure. At the entrance to the Rocky's downtown Denver office building was a monument to the First Amendment.  I was honored to work at the Rocky in the early 1990s, going to Denver to start over after divorce. Those were the days of the thrilling newspaper war with the Denver Post -- not in a joint operating agreement, but two independent newspapers battling every day. The competition made both better, and made Denver a better city. And Denver was a literate, newspaper-hungry city (and a young city, so much for the stereotypes of readers).

I spent some great years in Denver and learned much at the Rocky. This is a deep, personal grief. Denver will not be a better city for having only one newspaper. No blog or 'zine or electronic distraction can replace two real news organizations paying professional journalists to do their best work in a competitive environment. As is the case everywhere, the Rocky suffered because its owners stuck with the old advertising business model and failed to capitalize soon enough on new technologies. Scripps had moved on, emotionally and financially, to projects such as Home & Garden television. After awhile, Scripps caved into a JOA with the Post, the first death knell. Still, the Rocky soldiered on with distinction and honor under John Temple. If the Rocky must go down, at least it will go down swinging.

One last lamentation is the industry's utter lack of creativity, even at a time when we may face mass closings. As with the recently closed Cincinnati Post, I can't understand why the Rocky couldn't be reinvented as an online newspaper. It would have a small staff, to be sure. But sustainable business models exist to make success possible. Denver would still have the essential public benefit of competing newspapers. But Scripps has apparently moved on. Moved on, too, from serving the public trust.

The chickens come home to roost at Gannett

A reader asks, "how come you have not weighed in on the Gannett bloodbath that is going on with the layoffs all across the board? The Republic, as a big fish, should be pretty hard hit...I know there is no love lost there, on your part, but it is your hometown and your hometown paper and you still are friends with some of the folks there. Anyway, just curious."

I don't know many specifics, but the outcome will be bad. According to Gannett Blog, it is part of the largest mass layoff in newspaper history. The paper has been quietly cutting staff for two years, and the losses have been heavily centered on the most experienced journalists. In other words, the institutional knowledge and highest journalistic skills have been slashed. It's as if Microsoft fired its leading sources of intellectual capital. The result is predictable: a further erosion of the newspaper industry, whose journalism is a practice so vital to the health of the nation that it is enshrined in the Constitution.

I worked for the nation's largest "newspaper" company twice. Once as business editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer and then as a columnist at the Arizona Republic. In general, I was treated fairly, although this was certainly not the case with many employees. I was allowed to commit real journalism, although in both cases after a few years this was made impossible, and so I moved on. I learned a few things, chiefly that Gannett is not really a newspaper company. Yet it will be remembered as the company that destroyed newspapers.

The death on Black Friday

Everybody seems to have a take on the fatal door-busters sale at Wal-Mart on the first day of holiday shopping, giving a grim meaning to the retail jargon Black Friday (there was also the less-noticed Toys 'R' Us shootout). Here's mine:

Who lines up at 5 in the morning to mob a store, much less waiting all night for the honor, as apparently was the case at the suburban New York mall where the Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death? Apparently they are the same people who required police to be called for crowd control at 3 a.m. And the same people who stomped the victim and walked on, and are now being sought by police. According to the New York Times:

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Indeed it was. "Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him." Mr. Damour was a temporary worker, failing to enjoy even the niggardly "benefits" and wages that Wally's real employees get. Wal-Mart has been criticized for security so poor that a mob could stampede and kill a 270-pound man. What kind of company allows this to happen?

A new look at Goldwater and the GOP

What if Barry Goldwater wasn't the father of today's Republican Party? What if the patriarch were Joe McCarthy instead? That's the provocative idea by Neal Gabler writing in the Los Angeles Times:

...there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

Arizonans are blindly proud of Barry, and I'm not immune. But a school of revisionism is well overdue. It's true that Goldwater would have no use for the religious-based extremism and corporate kleptocracy of today's Republican Party -- which has come to dominate Arizona, too. Yet he was a product of the Intermountain West as it existed in my grandmother's lifetime, particularly the first half of the 20th century: tamed and made livable by the federal government, with a relatively small population and ample room.

His background and temperament, informed by and informing his philosophy, made him too impatient for the complexities of governing an advanced nation in the space age. He lacked any executive experience, beyond running a department store. Reagan had been governor of a large state, and a generally effective one, operating from the center. Barry was an individualist and a rabble-rouser. He didn't even particularly want to run in 1964, but was infuriated by the "Eastern establishment" Republicans. As president, he wouldn't have blown up the world. He would have been bored, jumping Air Force One for the first chance to sneak off with his cameras to the Navajo Nation. About the only thing Goldwater has in common with today's conservatives is a philosophy incompatible with effective government.

So let the argument begin...