Rogue Columnist

Lies, damned lies and water

Whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting over — old adage.

So Doug Ducey and Fred DuVal have laid out their plans for addressing a water shortage in Arizona. DuVal, naturally, comes off as the sanest, including asking the state Department of Water Resources "to develop a detailed analysis of the Groundwater Management Act and provide specific recommendations for improving the law."

That's good. I don't trust ADWR or have confidence that the law is being adequately enforced or monitored.

DuVal is less convincing when he told the Arizona Republic that the state needs to "go big" on new water projects, including desalination. As regular readers know, the feds aren't going to invest in more waterworks. California and the Upper Basin states would also resist them with all their might (see here and here).

Ducey comes off full kook, including his insinuation that trees are to blame for drought. The last thing Phoenix needs to do is further degrade its historic oasis. Central Phoenix, especially, needs more trees to offset the heat island and climate change.

But nobody dared wake the elephant. You know, the one in the room

Rogue's Front Page Editor sends his last link from the old bunker — "Confederate cavalry near," he reports. He'll be moving to a new Undisclosed Location.

The Arizona experiment

Much has been made by "left-leaning" commentators, notably Thomas Frank, about the disaster created in Kansas by Gov. Sam Brownback's enactment of conservative policies. And yet check out this chart:

And this:

Not to diminish "What's the Matter With Kansas," but Arizona is in worse shape. It arguably offers the better example of what happens when orthodox right-wing policies are enacted in a state without the oil and massive federal investments enjoyed by Texas. That Arizona is a growing, highly urbanized state brings into even starker relief the complete bankruptcy of the Kookocracy's "conservative ideas."

And they own this mess. The interregnum of St. Janet saw a constitutionally weak governor playing defense and never tackling the sacred cows of land use, revenue or water. Arizona's ongoing woes are the work of the regressive right that has taken over the Republican Party.

And yet, polls show at best a dead heat between Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred DuVal — in every way the superior contender — and Republican Doug Ducey. And no chance for Democrats to gain control of the truly powerful branch of government, the state Legislature.

Phoenix in The Great War

Phoenix-born air ace Frank Luke Jr., Arizona's most famous hero from World War I, with his thirteenth official kill.

Arizona had been a state for little more than two years when the cataclysm broke out in Europe a century ago. When the United States finally entered the conflict in 1917, doughboys and sailors fought under the new flag bearing the perfectly symmetrical 48 stars created with the entry of the "Baby State." While the Great War was not as transformative here as its continuation in World War II, it still brought big changes to Phoenix.

When the guns of August 1914 commenced, Phoenix's population had clocked in at 11,314 in the Census four years before. By 1920, it would be more than 29,000. Although it was the state capital (and home of the "lunatic asylum," which in those days was separate from the Legislature), it was still smaller than Tucson. But downtown had become a thriving commercial center with multistory buildings.

The streetcar "suburb" of craftsman bungalows was taking shape in what are now the Roosevelt and F.Q. Story historic districts and the southeast corner of Willo. The city was tightly bound to the old township, with additions running out to the capitol, north above McDowell, south of Grant and east to around 16th Street. By 1917, bungalows were being built in the Bella Vista addition northeast of Osborn and Central. The Santa Fe and Southern Pacific had completed branch lines to the town, but civic leaders were lobbying hard for a mainline railroad.

In 1914, Phoenix adopted the reformist commissioner-manager form of government. It was meant to tame the corruption of the wide-open Western town. Soon, it was back to business as usual with compromised commissioners. It would be after World War II that meaningful reform would come to City Hall.

Arizona, with 204,354 in the 1910 Census, was still a wild place. It had been only 28 years since the surrender of Geronimo. The state's economy was based on mining, ranching and, in the Salt River Valley, a farming cornucopia.

 

What will Scotland mean?

As a true son of Scotland*, let me offer some opinions about the vote for independence sure to offend everyone.

In another Great Britain, independence vote leader Alex Salmond would have met a very different fate from the Blair-Cameron meek acquiescence. King James, the Scot who gained the throne of more powerful and richer Britain (and added the name "Great"), would have beheaded him. Churchill would have had him shot. During the high Empire, he would have been shipped off to the Raj or some other posting to work off his energies. Even during the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. Navy operated nuclear subs from Holy Loch, Salmond's vote would have never made it out of Parliament.

He strikes me as a bit of a scoundrel, a hustler politician making impossible promises. The economic risks are serious — pointing this out seems to have increased the "Yes" vote — but there will be unintended consequences, many unfortunate. And peaceful "Scottish Independence" seems like the kind of boutique hobby that is only possible in a place that is placidly, but unsustainably, divorced from the real world.

ISIS and us

President Obama has chosen to continue endless war. Imagine if we had spent the $3 trillion to $6 trillion already down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan on America.

We could have built high-speed rail, bolstered our fading research dollars, seeded 21st century industries to address climate change and energy sustainability. But, no. Military Keynesianism is part of our industrial policy.

Do you feel safer than on Sept. 11, 2001? I don't.

The media played their role in scaring the hell out of the American people. They didn't mention the issues of overpopulation and climate change helping drive the destabilization, much less how we ran through Pottery Barn with a sledgehammer.

These adventures are profitable for the Military Industrial Complex and the neo-con echo chamber. For the common good, not so much. Our economy, marked by financial hustles and new electronic distractions, is a mess. This will affect our ability to win the next real war, where real national interests are at stake.

Floods in old Phoenix

 
The rampaging Salt River destroyed the railroad bridge at Tempe in 1891, the river's worst flood on record.

Downpours in Phoenix often flood social media. The combination of so many new residents because of the metropolitan area's extreme population churn, sprawl built out in flood plains and the on-the-cheap engineering of freeways makes many believe this is a shocking and rare event. In fact, flooding is commonplace in Phoenix.

As a child in 1965, my mother took me to see the Salt River running wild over its banks. The snowpack was especially heavy that year and as it melted it filled the lakes northwest of the city, causing the Salt River Project to release water from its dams. My grandmother told stories about the floods in the early 1900s, including two that destroyed the Southern Pacific bridge just north of downtown Tempe. In one case, a passenger car was hanging over the edge. "You might not see this again in your lifetime," my mother said.

In high school in south Scottsdale, Indian Bend Wash flooded regularly, dividing the town in half and disrupting classes. The city built bridges but neglected to raise the approaches, so the wash merely went around them. It took years to engineer decent bridges and create the green belt along the Indian Bend.

The 1980 flood (one of ten that hit between 1967 and that year) cut off Tempe, Mesa and Chandler. Amtrak ran a special train (the Hattie B., named after first lady Hattie Babbitt) from those cities to Union Station. Ominously, officials worried Stewart Mountain Dam might fail. And when I returned in the 2000s, the Salt ran rampant again.

 

Plan B

Present at the Creation: Chiang Kai-shek, FDR and Churchill at the Cairo Conference during World War II.

President Romney wants a "mighty" military. President Putin might be willing to fight a nuclear war to take down American "hegemony." President Xi is asserting a Chinese regional hegemony that writes its own international law. The brutality of ISIS is making Presidents Assad and Saddam Hussein look like pillars of stability by comparison. Americans, or at least the D.C. elites, claiming to value straight talk recoiled — quelle horreur! quelle gaffe! — when President Obama said "We don't have a strategy yet" regarding ISIS.

Better, I suppose they are saying, to further wreck the country with more of the Bush/Cheney fire, aim, ready. As the tour d'horizon above shows, these are unquiet times, made more so for those who know what happened 100 years ago.

As social critic Jim Kunstler says, we're not the world's hall monitor. On the other hand, Pax America, for all its fumbles and stains, has ensured the longest period without a general war since the 19th century. This was no accident.

Most American leaders of the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt foremost among them, believed Hitler rose to unleash the most destructive war in history because of American isolationism. Both in idealism and realpolitik, FDR hoped that a United Nations anchored by the five victorious allied powers would prevent a recurrence. (He had the foresight to insist that China be included in the Security Council). But it would be anchored by American power.

Stalin wrecked the hopes for the former, but the latter prevented a hot World War III. Our might was always based foremost on having the world's top economy, its gains widely shared, the greatest middle class in history, the commons...and relatively high tax rates.

While I was away

John Sperling passed on. I am mindful of Horace's de mortuis nil nisi bonum, but Sperling was a public figure of consequence, deserving an assessment. In keeping with the life he led, Sperling died in the Bay Area, not the city whose name he took for his empire of for-profit education.

The New York Times wrote, "A survivor of childhood illness, learning disability, poverty and physical abuse, he earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge; a liberal former union organizer, he spent years battling government regulation; a longtime professor who did not enter business until his 50s, he became a spectacularly successful capitalist."

The University of Phoenix made him fabulously wealthy. His net worth in 2002 was $1.1 billion and he spent 20 years on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. With the troubles of parent company Apollo and its stock drop, he was below a billion in 2013.

He reveled in being quirky, combative and rebellious, especially against the education establishment and the government. And yet the GI Bill — authored by Arizona Sen. Ernest McFarland — allowed Sperling to get his bachelor's degree from Reed College in Portland, Ore. Federal student loans turned what would have once been considered a "business college" into a mighty profit engine.

Among the individuals who wrecked the commons, Sperling is right up there. Privatizing profits, socializing losses, the cost and quality of an education at the University of Phoenix and other for-profit schools deeply questionable.