Rogue Columnist

The reckoning

Let's deal with [the real-estate developer] first.

Many on the left see him as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. Despite Godwin's Law, Jim Kunstler wrote, "As for [the real-estate developer], he remains what I said at the campaign’s outset: worse than Hitler, lacking the brains, charm, and savoir faire of the Ol’ Fuhrer, and with his darkness even more plainly visible."

Google [the real-estate developer] and Hitler, and you got 5.6 million results as of today.

In an interview, New Left warhorse Noam Chomsky gave a more nuanced but still Weimar-y assessment of the reasons behind [the real-estate developer's] surprising strength:

Fear, along with the breakdown of society during the neoliberal period. People feel isolated, helpless, victim of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence. It’s interesting to compare the situation in the ‘30s, which I’m old enough to remember. Objectively, poverty and suffering were far greater. But even among poor working people and the unemployed, there was a sense of hope that is lacking now, in large part because of the growth of a militant labor movement and also the existence of political organizations outside the mainstream.

But let's calm down for a moment and note a few important differences.

 

Unchangeable you

I've been writing about Phoenix and Arizona for 15 years now, first as a columnist for the Arizona Republic and then in this space.

We've had some victories to be sure, and I'll take a little credit for being in the fight, often against the worst kind of civic thugs and wreckers. Among them: revitalizing central Phoenix, building the new Convention Center, winning T-Gen and making a start, albeit so slow, on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, creating the downtown ASU campus, and light rail (WBIYB). Under Michael Crow, ASU gained stature and I was writing in support all the way.

I worked hard to provide history and context to a place rich in both, but where so many people think they don't exist — indeed, that they are dangerous. Amid the rackets, my job was not to be a cheerleader for the short hustle but to call balls and strikes.

And yet, nothing much has changed in the big picture. We keep losing.

Despite a brief moment of hope when St. Janet became governor, the extreme right has become more dominant than ever. The charter school racket. Cutting public school funding while giving tax breaks to private schools and money to rich districts. The private prison racket. The refusal to consider sustainability in the face of climate change. Continuing to depend on sprawl real estate as the main engine of growth. Further profaning the deserts and forests. It's a long list. And nothing changes. Indeed, it gets worse.

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Phoenix Confidential: Frenchy

The 1944 murder of Phoenix Police Officer David "Star" Johnson by Detective "Frenchy" Navarre is well-known to regular readers here (if you're new, you can read this real-life-pulp-fiction tale here). For years, the police department and city tried to forget the incident — and subsequent retribution by Johnson's partner in killing Navarre — not least because of its racial component. Johnson and his partner, Joe Davis, were black. Navarre was white.

Now that it's more in the open, Johnson deserves to be recognized by the department as an in-the-line-of-duty death.

But mysteries continue to linger about the shooting on May 2, 1944 in the Deuce, and the cascade effect it had, resulting in two trials, Navarre's acquittal, and Davis taking revenge inside police headquarters. For example, how did Navarre post bail of $10,000 after his arrest on a city detective's modest pay?

A big part of the answer is that Navarre was friends with Gus Greenbaum, the high-ranking member of the Chicago Outfit who had been posted to Phoenix in 1928 and later became infamous at Las Vegas casinos and the victim of a high-profile assassination in Palmcroft in 1958.

The Republican 'mainstream'

A truly mass party: The 1976 Republican Convention shows the triumphant centrist Gerald Ford over the conservative Ronald Reagan. Liberal Nelson Rockefeller, Ford's vice president, is to his right. Next to him is Ford's daughter, Susan.

The media have constructed a narrative for their campaign horse race stories, the ones all about the positioning of candidates and little about real issues. It goes something like this: The Republican "establishment," apparently represented by the likes of Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, is contending with an "insurgency" from Ted Cruz and especially Donald Trump.

Things are so dire that the idiot David Brooks, who traveled to the sprawl abortion of Verrado in the mid-2000s and saw "the future" rather than the dangerous housing bubble, to write a column (kinda) missing President Obama.

This, of course, is nonsense from a cowed national media.

The "moderate" Kasich is obsessed with a balanced budget achieved by cutting federal spending, attacking women's reproductive rights and charter schools. At least he said climate change is real — once. His ambition has him back denying mainstream science and he opposes EPA regulation of carbon emissions.

Kasich cut more than $84 million from Ohio's public schools. He removed a modest amount of state funding that had been slated for the Cincinnati streetcar and deep-sixed Ohio's plans for high-speed rail. Ohio boasted some of the finest public universities in the nation, including "public ivies" Miami University and Ohio University. Kasich threatened to "take an ax" to them if they didn't cut costs and raise tuition.

As a presidential candidate, he says he wants to keep Medicaid expansion, but favors "repealing and replacing" the rest of Obamacare (with what is murky). He wants to cut taxes and reduce union bargaining power. He wants "boots on the ground" to fight the Islamic State.

University of nowhere

So it has come to this: Private equity will buy Apollo Education, the parent of the Unaiversity of Phoenix. It is "a move," the Wall Street Journal reports, "that would take the beleaguered company out of the eye of public investors."

But perhaps not out of peril from criticism by the White House and investigations by federal and California regulators. Maybe. The "for-profit education" sector is a contributor in politics (see here and here); even better, it fits the ideological bias of the ruling Republican Party (and neoliberal Dems) that the "free market" is the solution to everything.

The former, especially in Arizona, has spent years defunding public institutions of higher education. In other words, real universities, where one received a "universal" education under greater or lesser but real rigorous standards. Where students often had their first real experience with people from different countries, ethnicities and, if they were fortunate, different life paths. Places with real campuses, libraries, and traditions.

Nor will the controversial "business model" of the University of Phoenix likely change much. For all the "free market" triumphalism, the company depended on the U.S. taxpayers for 81 percent of its revenue. Most of this was in the form of federal student loans. The graduation rate is poor. Either way, students are disproportionately on the hook for debt. Since 2010, when the "university" had 477,000 students, it has been bleeding enrollment (See Business Insider's useful primer here).

Of all the hustles and rackets in Arizona that needed a lengthy proctological exam by the press, this is one of the top opportunities not primarily involving water or land use (even more so than public pensions or expense account padding!). Yet it has never, to my knowledge, received it.

The trouble with Hillary

The trouble with Hillary Clinton was painfully captured in a New Hampshire town hall, carried on CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper, Wednesday night. I'll let Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post take it from here:

For 59 minutes of it, she was excellent — empathetic, engaged and decidedly human. But, then there was that other minute — really just four words — that Clinton is likely to be haunted by for some time to come.

"That’s what they offered," Clinton said in response to Cooper's question about her decision to accept $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in the period between serving as secretary of state and her decision to formally enter the 2016 presidential race.

Clinton is both seemingly caught by surprise and annoyed by the question all at once. Neither of those is a good reaction to what Cooper is asking. Both together make for a uniquely bad response.

Here's the thing: I'm not sure there is a great answer, politically speaking, for Clinton on the question of her acceptance of huge speaking fees from all sorts of groups — from colleges and universities to investment banks. She took the money because these groups were willing to pay it. And who wouldn't do the same thing in her shoes?

The problem is that you can't say that if you are the front-running candidate for the Democratic nomination, a front-runner facing a more-serious-than-expected challenge from a populist liberal who has made your ties to Wall Street a centerpiece of his campaign.

And that's just part of the trouble with Hillary Clinton.

The governor from Koch

No one should be surprised that Arizona’s governor, wealthy Republican Douglas A. Roscoe Jr., aka Doug Ducey, attended yet another conference sponsored by a Koch brothers front group.

As Howard Fischer reports, in the gubernatorial election the Koch organization American Encore spent more than $750,000 on attack ads against Democrat Fred DuVal. Another $650,000 was plowed into pro-Ducey efforts.

This is chump change in the multi-decade effort by right-wing reactionary billionaires to take control of American politics and game policy to their ends. Jane Mayer of the New Yorker does an excellent job of exposing its reach in the book, Dark Money.

The Democrats, much less liberals, have nothing that can compete.