Rogue Columnist

The 'Goldwater' Institute

When Hillary Clinton lashed out in 1998 at "the vast right-wing conspiracy," most people laughed. I certainly did. Then I returned to Phoenix two years later to see how correct she was. Exhibit A was the "Goldwater" Institute, motto: "Where freedom wins." Before he died, Barry wanted his name removed from the organization, but he backed off because it was dear to his brother. So I have always referred to it with Goldwater in quotes or as the Bob Goldwater Institute. Either way, it has played a pivotal role in damaging Arizona and holding back progress.

After its founding in 1988, local media accorded the institute respect as a "think tank." Robert Robb, a political operative who came out of the "Goldwater" Institute, was hired as an editorial columnist for the Arizona Republic. After the departure of Ricardo Pimentel and me, he became the only real editorial columnist after the 2007 newsroom organization. Unlike most entrusted with a position of such influence, Robb did not spend 20 years gaining experience and accolades as a journalist for a major newspaper. He was always a member of "the vast right-wing conspiracy." And the institute itself was regularly quoted in news stories as an authority on virtually every issue.

The trouble is that the "Goldwater" Institute is not a think tank as conventionally understood, an organization where scholars pursue research with open minds and produce material that is vigorously peer reviewed (think The Brookings Institution). Instead, it is an advocacy organization such as the NRA or the Sierra Club. It is rarely identified as such in the media — unless I am writing about it, which I try to avoid, aside from one takedown in the early 2000s.

Rogue open thread

Conversation starters (feel free to add your own):

Nice to see ASU moving baseball to give new life to Phoenix Muni, after spring training all but abandoned the city, also good that the Sun Devils will play at Chase Field rather than send hundreds of buses to Glendale (Ariz.) and play at the cotton field (University of Phoenix Stadium). Light rail pays off (WBIYB).

Nearly half of New York City residents live at or near poverty — and the city measures. I'd love to see a comparable census for the city of Phoenix.

Almost anything Clyde Prestowitz writes is top-notch. Here he departs from his trade expertise, but his Japan/Asia expertise is on full display.

Tucson is giving its city employees a 55-cent raise, and grudgingly. Amid all the hate directed at government workers, it's interesting to note that nobody in Boston was begrudging their unionized public employees after the marathon bombing.

Days after the explosion in West, Texas, Gov. Rick Perry was trying to lure business by boasting about the state's weak regulations. A model for Brewer?

Jeff Flake was caught in his background check double-talk. Even wealthy Republican Sen. John Sidney McCain III voted for them, but not Flake, R-NRA. And here's an interesting question: Why does America lose its head over "terror" while ignoring its daily gun deaths? Here's a running tally since Newtown.

 

Magical thinking

James Hamilton on the Econobrowser blog recently offered a post titled, "The Death of Peak Oil." It pivots off an article by Colin Sullivan wondering if it has "gone the way of the Flat Earth Society." Sullivan continues, "Those behind the theory appear to have been dead wrong, at least in terms of when the peak would hit, having not anticipated the rapid shift in technology that led to exploding oil and natural gas production in new plays and areas long since dismissed as dried up."

Hamilton does a capable job of dismantling Sullivan. Comments from the expert readership of the Oil Drum do excellent mop-up. Still, the exchange seemed an opportune time to re-examine where we stand on several fronts amid what I had termed the Great Disruption. This blog shouldn't be a church. It is not a prisoner of any closed-loop ideology. I don't have all the answers. We should always remember the exchange John Maynard Keynes had with a man who demanded to know why his position on a certain issue had shifted. Said Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

After all, no less an authority figure than the President of the United States has assured us that America has a one-hundred-year supply of natural gas and his administration is fast-tracking all manner of fossil-fuel production. Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to bring tar-sands oil from Alberta to the refineries of the Gulf Coast seems a given. The housing industry is coming back, even in the overbuilt suburbs of places such as Phoenix and California's "Inland Empire." The recession slowed "job sprawl," but hardly stopped, much less reversed it. New freeways are being built. American life is going on much as before 2008. Could it be that all the notions of a "great reset" in the wake of the crash were magical thinking?

A note to readers

Since this blog was launched in January 2008, I have attemped to do two columns a week, generally one for national readers and another focused on Phoenix for the thousands of readers I left behind at the Arizona Republic. For now, I can't keep up that pace. Too many other obligations are slamming me: My Seattle Times Sunday columns and daily blog; appearing on radio, including KUOW, the local NPR affiliate; speaking engagements; my journalism posts on the blog of the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at ASU, and my novels.

I've always prided myself on being an iron man, a writer like my character in Deadline Man, who never freezes. But for now at least, I am going to have to generally cut Rogue back to one column per week. I hate this, and will hate the toll it will take in the site's steadily rising traffic. But it must be done. Rogue Columnist offers readers many features: The Front Page with new news you might not find in your daily newspaper or on television; the City Desk which aggregates news on urban issues; Arizona's Continuing Crisis; the Best of the Front Page archive, and the Climate Change/Energy page. All these are to be found to your right and are updated throughout the week. In addition, there are five years worth of columns in the archives, especially the Phoenix 101 history series.

Even at one a week, I hope you'll continue to click on Rogue. And keep spreading the word.

[UPDATE] I like the idea of an open thread. So let's try that. I'll set up the open thread with a few links to get the conversation started. Also, guest Rogue posts are always welcome if they require little editing on my part and fit into the mission of the blog.

 

 

Why they came

Washington Street in Phoenix, 1890. The trees and adobe buildings of 1870 were mostly gone from this view.

My grandmother, Sarah Ella Darrow, was born in 1889 in the Chickasaw Nation, Cumberland, Indian Territory. Her parents had come to I.T., as the postal address read for today's eastern Oklahoma, as Presbyterian missionaries. Then they ran a small store.

Earlier, on the Texas frontier, her mother (my great-grandmother), Emma Caroline Hulse, had been scalped as a baby during a Comanche attack after troops were withdrawn for the Civil War — she survived and went on to marry my great-grandfather, Francis Marion Darrow who hailed from the Midwest.

Indian Territory, home of the Five Civilized Tribes, was fine country for farming and timber, well watered, with growing towns and new railroads. But whites couldn't own land and that was Darrow's dream. The Chickasaw governor (chief) loved my great-grandfather and wanted to adopt him (thus putting him on "the rolls" as a tribal member), but Darrow declined. Then the store and their home were destroyed by a tornado, with one daughter killed.

They went west, to Arizona, to the Salt River Valley. They and hundreds like them came for relatively cheap land and good farming. Like much of the West, Phoenix was heavily publicized to draw settlers. One thing was even true: This was one of the world's great alluvial valleys, fanning out in mostly flat, irrigable land from a river that flowed year-round, or so it seemed.

Here the Hohokam had created the most advanced irrigation system in the New World, with at least 200 miles of canals, before that civilization faded. The Pima, likely the descendants of the Hohokam, had moved south to the Gila River and beyond, partly to escape raids by the Apache.

In the late 1850s, Charles Trumbull Hayden noticed this vast, mysterious valley with its tree-lined river while hauling freight to Tucson. He would be back. He would name his son Carl.

By the 1890s, the phoenix was stirring from the ashes. The Apache had been subdued by the U.S. Cavalry. Thousands of acres were under cultivation, especially for wheat, barley and fruit trees. Anything would grow in this soil, provided water was added. The project of clearing out and extending the old Hohokam Canals was well along by then. Phoenix as a settlement was more than 20 years old.

The first railroad had arrived on Independence Day, 1887. In 1890, the Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed. By the time my family arrived, the chance to start fresh and live the Jeffersonian dream of yeoman farmer was fading most places. Not here.

Nowhere man

It's been less than three months since Barack Obama was sworn in for a second term, and yet it feels as if he's fading from the scene. About the best thing I can find in his proposed budget is $40 billion for passenger rail over the next five years. That would be about the same as the U.S. was, until recently, throwing away every four or five months in Afghanistan. And it's contingent on getting through a House of Representatives with the usual anti-rail Republican fetish. But it's something.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama wants to begin what will no doubt be a series of cutbacks to the social safety net. If Nixon can go to China, the Democratic heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt can begin dismantling Social Security. As yet another attempt to prove reasonable and make the Republicans like him, this will fail, as Paul Krugman eloquently points out. Indeed, he is a Robert Rubin Democrat: He's been aiming at "entitlements" for a long time. Meanwhile, expenditures on the military are essentially unchanged.

I don't know if this is the power of the Military-Industrial Complex or a Democrat afraid of looking weak on "national security," but nobody seems willing to concede that a nation cannot be powerful without first and foremost a strong economy. The private sector is either poleaxed by the financialized economy and the powers of monopolies and cartels — or among the latter and sitting on record profits and cash but doing no hiring of Americans. So this would be the point where an energetic and sensible federal government would embark on a 21st century infrastructure project and "Project Apollo" to create the technologies to address climate change — but nothing from Mr. Obama. He seems content to see America becalmed for the next three years. The suffering unemployed and poor, after all, won't affect the chief executives he lunches with, or his fellow Ivy Leaguers, or the parents who send their children to Sidwell Friends.

Phoenix's new normal

Let's take a random walk through the "news from home." Much rejoicing must have come to the Real Estate Industrial Complex from the recent BusinessWeek story headlined, "A Phoenix housing boom forms in hint of U.S. recovery." Maybe it's even real and Homey was wrong when he predicted that the old growth machine — with championship golf! — isn't coming back. If so, a new housing boom would be the worst possible event in the long run. Any chance to learn the lessons of the crash will be lost, along with the opportunity to reset for a more sustainable future.

I suspect the bluster of a "boom" cloaks a recovery from a very deep bottom, so naturally the percentage gains will look impressive. In addition, we don't have the research to indicate the subdivisions that are being abandoned to "investors" — or just abandoned — as qualified buyers snap up the new stuff from the likes of Pulte. Population has increased, but not at the rates of the 1990s and 2000s. Also, the labor force for the metropolitan area is only slightly larger than it was in 2006, hardly the spectacular growth seen in the previous decades.

Some macro realities will not go away: most Americans are much poorer after the recession; wages are stagnant and have been falling on average for years; unemployment remains high and many may never find work again; "consumers" are still carrying more debt than historic norms; changing tastes and demographics, with talented young people and many boomers preferring real cities, not Sun City; Phoenix still has a low-wage economy. All these factors will be headwinds against the triumphal return of the Growth Machine.

Hair on fire

The conventional wisdom holds that North Korea is mostly bluster, the young dictator trying to solidify his power and distract his starving subjects, gaining negotiating leverage, and about the worst that might happen is the Crazy Aunt in the Asian Attic will have one of her periodic violent outbursts, deadly perhaps but contained. The "saber rattling" might be a sign of a troubled regime in Pyongyang. The United States will project a "show of force," along with a promise to deploy more missile interceptors (of dubious reliability) in the coming months and years. And the situation will cool down.

I'm not sure much of this is true.

David Kang and Victor Cha, writing in Foreign Affairs, are among the few to challenge the view that North Korea isn't that dangerous. A Stalinist state with one of the world's largest armies, and a capable one at that, attains nuclear weapons of a sort and launches a satellite — in other words, achieves at least the beginnings of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then its leaders make it repeatedly clear they intend to attack South Korea, Japan, Guam and the continental United States. Just the same old-same old, sixty years after the armistice that ended the Korean War? Prepare to be surprised.

Eddie Basha, an appreciation

Editor's Note: Eddie Basha, the last of the hometown merchant princes, died last week at age 75. The following article was originally published in 2008 but captures Basha well.

By Jack L. August, Guest Rogue

I answered the cell phone as I headed north on I-17 en route to Prescott. "This is Raul Lopez," the caller said in a heavy accent, "and I saw you on that Channel 8 program Horizon last night, Dr. August." Not knowing the caller I mumbled something about the then-host Michael Grant, but was interrupted with a string of criticisms about my discussion of former senators Carl Hayden, Barry Goldwater and Dennis DeConcini and, to add insult to injury, Mr. Lopez offered, "I don't like that moustache either." I tried to recover but the mystery called moved forward without pause: "The Haydens, Goldwaters and DeCincinis were not responsible for Arizona's growth and development but instead," he continued, "the miners and laborers in the copper mines of Morenci, Miami and Globe, should receive a lot more credit than those three politicians." He was contentious and irritated and I tried to find a diplomatic way to diffuse the situation. This Lopez character, though, seemed unbalanced and out to insult me at any cost.

He then said I could afford to lose a couple pounds and told me to wear a blue shirt and red tie the next time I was on television because what I wore that night had hurt his eyes. Finally, I exploded, asked him for his location, because I was going to turn around, head back to Phoenix, and confront him. I was furious and angrily terminated the call after hurling a few pejoratives of my own. The mystery tormentor tried three more times to call back but I refused to answer. Later, after I arrived in Prescott, I listened to my voice messages and heard, "Geez, Jack, this is Eddie Basha. I didn't mean to piss you off." He got me. I was the next in a long line of innocents caught in the Eddie Basha world of phone pranks.