Rogue Columnist

Say you want a devolution?

Remember when the Republicans were "the party of ideas"? Not birtherism, hastening the End of Days, denying the settled scientific facts of climate change or that the earth is 4,000 years old. No, this was the fumes, at least, of the intellectual conservatism that was built by William F. Buckley Jr. It was a philosophy not inured to facts or changing circumstances; indeed, it celebrated its suppleness compared with the rigid ideologies of the left. To be sure, it co-existed with reaction, racism and paranoia, but it was better than what we see in today's GOP presidential "debates." One idea was devolution, grounded not only in the proposition that the federal government had far exceeded its constitutional limits, but that it had become too big to be effective in many areas.

The answer: Devolve power to the states. Thus, if California wanted to have stringent environmental laws, for example, that was up to Californians. If Mississippi or Arizona envied the non-existent protections of air and water in the Third World, it was the business of those states, with no mandates coming from Washington. The same could be true for old-age pensions, health care, business regulation and subsidies, etc. etc. Let there be 50 laboratories of democracy.

This elegant idea faces practical problems. From the Progressive era through the Great Society, from Theodore to Franklin Roosevelt and beyond, most Americans realized that big challenges and needs could only be fulfilled by the federal government, with its size and power. Only the federal government could stand up against big business — this was a Progressive article of faith. Nor is it new. We tried the Articles of Confederation and they didn't work out well. Hamilton always argued for a robust central government, and although Jefferson is presented as his philosophical opposite, he didn't hesitate to employ federal power beyond the strict wording of the Constitution when it suited him, as in the Louisiana Purchase. The Confederacy started out to break away from the "tyranny" of the central government in Washington, yet Jeff Davis ended up creating every bit as powerful a (con)federal government in Richmond. There had never been a continental democracy before in history, and the American experience shows the need for a strong central government and a Constitution that can adapt.

Graveyard of sprawl dreams

Just in time for Halloween, the Arizona Republic published a story headlined, "Massive West Valley development to launch." It reads in part: "Two Phoenix-area developers, John F. Long Properties and the Alter Group, are planning a massive mixed-use commercial development in the West Valley that will span Phoenix, Avondale and Glendale. The project is made up of three separate parcels totaling 1,500 acres and likely will take decades to complete, the developers said." It went on to promise 3 million square feet of "employment space," 10,000 jobs and represent an investment of half-a-billion dollars.

The immediate "deliverable" is much more modest: A 60,000-square-foot medical office building at Thomas and the 101, for an unnamed client (guesses whether it is one stolen from elsewhere in the region?). Long and partners have been assembling and hanging onto this land for decades — that's part of the back story not mentioned in this article. Another is that many of these plans were rolled out in the mid-2000s before the roof fell in. Unanswered is who would finance such a massive project in one of the worst real-estate markets in the country, or how it could be filled with so much unoccupied space already sitting on the market where such deals as exist are filching clients from existing buildings rather than growing the economic pie.

The reality confronting the Phoenix real-estate economy is far different from the closed loop of local-yokel zombie boosterism.

Here and Now and gone

As I reported exclusively last week, KJZZ will soon be ending its weekly local Here and Now with Steve Goldstein. With it goes the only locally produced public affairs radio program in the nation's sixth most populous city. With this move the incredibly narrow media spectrum in Phoenix becomes even more narrow. It's a terrible loss to discourse, journalism and democracy.

Goldstein had me on over the years, even after I was shown the door by the Republic for having the temerity to warn of the housing depression that now lays heavy on the land. He was unfailingly gracious, a class act. But more than that, his program was wide-ranging and fair to a fault, a forum for the Krackpots as well as for the sane elements in the state. He's a talented, intelligent broadcaster who could be a star in any major market. My sources say he'll stay on as a news announcer. One said plans call for "nine-minute daily segments," whatever that means. It can't replace an hour of thoughtful information, give-and-take and smart conversation about Arizona's most pressing issues.

My warning signals went up. Here was a program that couldn't fail to irritate the Real Estate Industrial Complex and the Kookocracy. But one source says its demise is more prosaic: internal politics.

Occupy

What is Occupy? According to the Occupy Wall Street Web site, "We are our demands. #OWS is conversation, organization, and action focused on ending the tyranny of the 1%. On Saturday we marched in solidarity against corrupt banking systems, against war, and against foreclosure." To Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, the protests transcend "left vs. right," despite the efforts of right-wing provocateurs: Instead, it is "a populist and wholly non-partisan protest against bailouts, theft, insider trading, self-dealing, regulatory capture and the market-perverting effect of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks." Justin Elliott of Salon writes that you can't understand the movement without also understanding its "radically decentralized structure."

OK.

One thing that's clear is that the various Occupy protests have showcased the militarization of law enforcement, something that has long troubled my older cop friends. Billions of your tax dollars have gone into equipping a nationwide paramilitary force to protect the "homeland" from terrorists — and conveniently from citizens who might be seeking to change the status quo, even through peaceful assembly. A friend emailed me an evocative photo (above, taken by Mauro Whiteman for the Downtown Devil) from Occupy Phoenix showing a phalanx of robocop-looking  PPD officers confronting sitting demonstrators. Cal Lash, a distinguished retired officer and assistant to two chiefs of police, was among those deeply troubled. We all should be.

How the West was...

Phoenix once boasted two Cinerama movie houses: the Cine Capri and the Kachina in Scottsdale. Both were bulldozed. In Seattle, thanks to the stewardship of Paul Allen, the Cinerama theater downtown was saved and renovated. It just completed a three-week festival of movies originally filmed in 70 millimeter, which even with all the technology available to Hollywood today is something worth experiencing. Despite facing the terrible commute and traffic of going one block, I went anyway yesterday to see How the West Was Won, the 1962 epic.

At the risk of provoking readers, I must confess that I was deeply moved. Yes. The film has more than one historical inaccuracy. The cognoscenti will always condemn it as a celebration of genocidal Manifest Destiny, although for the era it shows a much more nuanced portrait of Western expansion. Still, with a grand old-time movie score, a battalion of big stars, surprisingly good dialogue and the scenery on that wide, curved screen, it was hard to resist. (An added treat: One of the card sharks was a dead ringer for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon). At the end, the packed house of Seattle lefties gave long applause.

I was moved partly because the story, which follows four generations of a family from 1839 to 1889, could have been about my family, too. The migration routes were somewhat different and my kin fought on both sides of the Civil War, literally brother against brother, but in both cases the family ended up in Arizona. Yes, in hindsight we were part of the problem, but I can't imagine any nation just walling off settlement beyond the Alleghenies. It wasn't going to happen. But this personal connection wasn't all that provoked strong emotions.

He is (not) The One

David Axelrod's soothing words and the desire of the media for a horse race notwithstanding, I don't see how President Hoover can win re-election. He won't win Scott Walker's Wisconsin, nor destitute-crazy Ohio, nor "I got mine" geezer Florida that elected Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. Pennsylvania is rightly styled as Alabama sandwiched between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, so do the math. Virginia and North Carolina? Forget it.

As I have written before, Barack Obama does not deserve a second term. Two-term presidencies should be rare, not the rule. The wasted and toxic second terms of Bill Clinton (repealing Glass-Steagall, for example) and George W. Bush are instructive. And while Mr. Obama was a gifted orator, his election the first time was also a vote against Bush, against the recklessness of a John McCain who would put Sarah Palin on a national ticket, and, in a fleeting moment of clarity, against the GOP, The Party That Wrecked America. It won't happen again.

Crazy is an easier default setting for an ignorant empire in decline. So we must begin to consider the Republican field.

What, us worry?

I had dinner last night with a friend from Phoenix. It was a beautiful night in downtown Seattle and our table had a great view of Elliott Bay with the ferries coming and going. But the news from home was uniformly bleak, from the ongoing housing depression to the normality of crazy politics. Neither of us think there's a chance that the odious Russell Pearce will be recalled. It makes me wonder for the thousandth time: Why did the East Valley get stuck with the nihilist Mormons? By contrast, Salt Lake just opened yet another light-rail line, along with its commuter rail service. None of that would have happened without support from the church.

A story in the paper about the real-estate situation quoted Elliott Pollack as an authoritative "Arizona economist." Pollack is a developer and a relentless shill for the Real Estate Industrial Complex. He's a pleasant guy and our relations were cordial. But why does he have any cred left, having completely missed or dismissed the state and metro's dangerous dependency on housing and usually sugar-coating the reality after things blew up. Must be a nice gig. As is the case in so much of America, there's no price to be paid, no accountability, as long as you hang with the right crowd and stay on message. And to be fair, this blindness/denial was true of all the "experts" as Arizona ran up to the edge and jumped off.

But everything's really fine, right? We just need more optimism. The boosters are still promoting the so-called Sun Corridor, a "megapolitan" area stretching from Tucson to Prescott and containing 10 million people, or 9 million, or 8 million by 2030 or 2040. Whatever. It's going to be big, and essentially the model that propelled Phoenix during the age of cheap gas and abundant water can go on for ever. The only concession by the boosters now seems to be that this thing will bring in a few less people.

Peak oil for smart people

You will find nothing "for dummies" on this site. But let my try to cut through the wonk: We face a high-cost energy future. I usually try to phrase it this way to avoid the stigma that the oil industry's well-paid/well-placed propagandists attach to the term "peak oil." (Rather like "climate change" vs. "global warming"). America has done nothing to prepare for this future. It's going to get rough.

In fact, peak oil is well known within the oil industry (which I covered as a journalist). It means simply that half of this one-time gift of geology is gone. It doesn't mean "we're about to run out of oil." The clever conflation of these ideas has helped to confuse and distract even the dwindling number of Americans who are paying attention. The other bad news: When applied to a nation or world, peak means the "easy" oil is gone, and the remainder will be more difficult and expensive to recover and refine. National peaks go along with economic trauma. Hence, America hit national peak in the early 1970s, helping to cause the recessions and stagnation of that decade. These peaks are hard to predict in advance, clear in the rearview mirror.

The oil industry and our leaders know that we are headed for, or have reached, global peak. As with climate change, the debate is over details: Essentially when and what next. And as with climate change, the consequences will be profound. Not for nothing has the government kept then-Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force meeting minutes secret, and not for ideology's sake alone did we commit so much treasure to creating and sustaining the Army of the Euphrates.

The periphery

When you're talking Europe, the periphery (Greece, etc.) is ailing, while the core, especially Germany and Scandinavia, is doing well. In Phoenix, the situation is reversed. To be sure, the depression has clobbered huge swaths of Phoenix suburbia, left Pinal County circling the drain and driven a stake into the dreams of Superstition Vistas and Buckeye with 400,000 poor boobs from the Midwest. Glendale is underwater on its super mortgage to hucksters and Westgate is in foreclosure. And the compromised, local-yokel professional seers have once again pushed out their prediction of "recovery," this time to 2015. Still, what little economic activity that's happening is occurring in places such as Scottsdale and Chandler.

The news for the city of Phoenix is gloomy. What few companies are coming to the metro area are setting up shop on the periphery. Banner Health, which killed a hospital on the Phoenix Biosciences Campus that would have led to a quantum leap in its synergies, has teamed up with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to establish a "world class" treatment facility in Gilbert. (The irony here is that Anderson is part of the Texas Medical Center in central Houston that should be the model for the Phoenix campus). ASU and the Mayo Clinic are setting up a medical school in north Scottsdale. Even as central Phoenix is clearcut with huge swaths of empty land, a big data center chose Chandler for a new operation, among the other new projects and expansions that the suburbs can boast. Even within the city, venerable law firm Fennemore Craig stabbed downtown (well, Midtown) in the back, relocating to 24th and Camelback.

As far as I can tell, this isn't even being discussed in the Phoenix mayoral race. Yet it's one of the biggest problems facing the city and metro area.

The continuing crisis

Before Rogue resumes its regular commentary schedule next week, here are a few things that couldn't help but distract me from book-writing (and this was before I saw the New York Times' shocking story today on deforestation and climate change). Our perpetual state of war continues, moving more into Yemen and Somalia with secret CIA and DOD drone bases. Now American citizens can be targeted, without due process, for hellfire missiles. And while we may say al-Awlaki had it coming, one must wonder if hellfire missiles along with the entire security apparatus erected since 9/11/01 will not eventually be used in the streets and even cul-de-sacs of America. We're still leaving Iraq on George W. Bush's timetable. Did we "win"? Tom Ricks writes that somebody did, and it wasn't us, except for the "us" that's involved in the Military-Industrial Complex and D.C. real estate. We have become such a moral beacon to the world that Iran cited Gitmo in holding those U.S. "hikers" in solitary.

The economy is worse now than a month ago, and more analysts, economists and commentators are realizing a point I made some time ago: We're in depression territory. We don't have to be, but the cowardice of the Obama administration combined with the nihilism of the Republicans, all under the umbrella of the quiet coup of moneyed interests, have left us paralyzed and bewildered. The Occupy Wall Street movement is noble but small and mostly ignored by the corporate media. True, if the same numbers were Tea Party members, they would garner nationwide coverage.

Friends keep telling me of the coming working-class revolt (Mark Thoma writes about such here). I'll believe it when I see it. Civil insurrection is certainly likely as America continues its downward course, but it will play out with minorities burning their own neighborhoods and the whites and other better-offs retreating even deeper into suburban apartheid. The Revolution in a nation of dolts could only be caused by taking away television, video games, smart phones and cheap gasoline. Then, to the barricades!