Rogue Columnist

Sun city

In a place so starved for "good news," Arizona greeted the announcement that China's Suntech would locate its first U.S. manufacturing plant, growing to 250 jobs, in metro Phoenix as if it had won a Boeing jetliner assembly line. "This is a great day for Arizona," enthused Gov. Jan Brewer. "I've been so determined that we have a business climate that will bring us jobs."

It's important to note that this "business climate" is a complete repudiation of the ideology of Arizona's Kookocracy. Suntech will benefit from tax incentives and was pursued aggressively, a strategy that has worked well for Southern states. This had been dismissed in the past by legislative leaders and other ruling mandarins who argued that all Arizona needed was more tax cuts, less regulation and sunshine to become the Hong Kong of the desert. Suntech was also roped in by the solar and sustainability research at ASU, some long-standing but much ramped up under Michael Crow. The Kookocracy has consistently cut university funding and scoffed at research. Finally, it represented a reaching out to the world economy by a place that was historically inward looking, just waiting for the next wave of house-buyers from the Midwest. This, too, while pushed by Barry Broome of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, had received little traction among the local economic elites for years.

So, good for Phoenix. With one of the worst and least diverse major metro economies in the nation, any boost will help. If the lessons from the Suntech deal are learned and expanded upon, who knows what might happen. Yet, not to sun on their parade, the deal also raises some troubling questions.

Greenscam

The Phoenix Convention Center is the site of the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, involving, the Info Center reports, "thousands of entrepreneurs, sales executives

and marketers in the fast-growing 'green' construction industry." I'm sure every attendee's welcome kit contained a laminated printout of the Rogue post, "Did you hear the one about sustainable Phoenix?" Or they should, as Phoenix is the capital of denial, pipe dreams of hydrogen cars and cooling sidewalks, and the green of sales, sales, sales. It is an international poster child of unsustainability. Put the conferees on buses, drive them around town, say "Don't do this!" and send them home.

In the same edition of the newspaper, oops, Information Center, was a story about shading the new Diamondbacks spring training structure out on the rez. I'm sure this can be spun as "green" construction, and this is one of the big problems with the entire green-built movement. A new stadium on what was rural land, surrounded by a giant heat-radiating parking lagoon and wholly dependent on long drives in automobiles is by its nature not green, not adding to sustainability. This is hardly a Phoenix problem. One sees all these new houses and buildings in new office "parks" trumpeting their LEED certification. Unless they are infill or rehabbing an existing (preferably historic) building, they are not really green. They are not green if they expand the urban footprint. Nor can they be divorced from their surroundings, such as walkable neighborhoods, transit, in-neighborhood shopping, etc. Otherwise, they are greenwash. Still, Phoenix takes the destructive absurdity to operatic levels. The idea that the already too-large Phoenix urban footprint can be enlarged by Superstition Vistas, and all those houses will be "green" (without a mandate, sure) is insanity.

The Info Center likely didn't have an article that came out of the European press, where whistleblowers claimed the International Energy Agency, under political pressure, has been inflating world petroleum reserves. It's a charge backed by academics and the reality of peaking production, the only reliable measure of oil. In other words, the world is running out of oil much faster than we're being told. The world is changing fast — don't forget climate change, too — and the biggest casualties will be cities such as Phoenix.

Not like Ike

The nut baggers are right. Socialism has come to America. It is here, now. The government owns the "commanding heights" of this economy, as is the case in classic socialist doctrine. Citizens of this American socialism get free medical care, housing, food, clothing, even travel. They have abundant educational opportunities, including college. It promises and actually delivers both diversity and social mobility. It also has elements of fascism, just as the nut baggers have warned in their rallies attended by hundreds: The socialism has a heavy corporate component, with giant companies moving in lockstep with the regime's demands yet also holding strong political sway within the regime. In exchange for its benefits, members of the society give up certain freedoms -- yet they keep joining enthusiastically.

I'm writing about the military, of course, and not just to show the absurdity of the nut baggers' claims. In a nation where six people are chasing every job, where college is increasingly out of reach, the only advanced nation in the world where people go without health insurance -- in today's America, the military is often the only option open. It made news last month when a man who couldn't get insurance joined the Army so his cancer-stricken wife could get help. (When I Googled "joined Army to get health care," the second and third hits out of 53 million were Army recruiting sites). Military recruiters have more than met their targets -- ones raised for the Army -- since the economic meltdown. Even with the danger of war, many Americans just don't see another way.

Elements of this have long happened. There's the classic case of the directionless kid from high school who joins the military -- sometimes under a parent or even judge's threat -- and becomes an adult. I went to high school with young men who joined up, served honorably and succeeded as civilians -- I doubt most of them ever would have chosen the military as a first option. And we honor their service. But the Great Disruption's first act -- the crash and its resulting unemployment, combined with two wars seemingly without end -- is creating something new. New and unsettling.

Hard landing

When you think about the prison-like atmosphere in which we're forced to travel -- lacking the high-speed rail transforming the advanced nations of the world -- and the five-mile-high coffins in which we're locked for a cramped, nasty trip, who can argue with the punishments already meted out and yet to come for two Northwest Airlines pilots? They flew 150 miles past Minneapolis while distracted by their laptop computers. On second and third glance, they represent much more than two jokers in the cockpit.

Am I the only one who thinks America is much like these pilots? Off-course, befuddled by the latest merger and its consequences, living in a world where your pay has been cut in half already, enchanted by technology and believing it can save you (those laptops -- or the electric car), while the airship cruises along, on autopilot, past its destination. The difference is that America is not going to get a call from the flight attendant asking "what the hell is happening?" We're so adept at ignoring such questions even if they were to arise.

Delta and Northwest is a merger that never should have happened. It hasn't lessened the airlines' financial troubles -- for no transportation system really "pays for itself" (so why the hell do we expect that from Amtrak?). It has taken away one more competitor, consolidated an industry even further -- which means not only fewer choices and jobs, but fewer competitive ideas. Consider, for example that we are some 40 years into the era of widespread use of "jetways" to board aircraft -- and yet there's still only one way on or off, adding much time to boarding. That's what happens with groupthink. These cartelized airlines send much of the maintenance work to Third World countries, where managers order the cheapest fixes to airplanes, whether they are safe or not. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been eliminated. All to appease the free-market gods. And the wayward pilots will be appropriately punished, banged down so hard they will have a hard time getting a minimum-wage job at the local Lowe's. And its two more jobs that Delta can check off its list, throwing the two into the worst labor market since the Great Depression. Christian America loves Old Testament retribution.

Phoenix 101: Mesa

I got a rare treat in the mid-'60s for a poor kid from the 'hood: Getting to see Willie Mays play in a game of the Giants vs. the Dodgers. It was spring training and we drove to the little ballpark in Mesa. The game was great. Unfortunately, we were in the family 1959 Ford Galaxie, a source of never ending trouble and built, as my mother never tired of saying, during Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's tenure as Ford president. That night the only gear that would work was reverse -- and we drove all the way home to Phoenix going backwards.

It's low-hanging fruit to grab this memory as a metaphor for what has happened to Arizona's third most populous city. A city so populous, indeed, that it is larger than St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Pittsburgh -- and has nothing to show for it. No major university (an iffy branch of ASU miles from downtown doesn't count); no major corporate headquarters; no great museums; no magical neighborhoods. City Hall looks like a low-end office building. Even the area around the Arizona Temple, Mesa's one majestic asset, has been allowed to crater. The miles of enchanting citrus groves have almost all been bulldozed (and when I asked in 2006 if there was any preservation effort for the remainder, a top city official looked at me blankly).

It's a sad, and in many way surprising outcome. But operating by Arizona's rule of "when in a hole, keep digging," Mesa shows every sign of continuing the practices that got it in what is a morass even by Phoenix standards. The Cubs are playing the city for fools, threatening to leave, shopping spring training sites around the area, including some on the rez. Mesa's response could be to plan an intimate ballpark downtown on the light-rail line. It would enhance critical mass for a walkable urban space that Mesa lacks. It would be much more pleasant that the newer spring-training parks with their endless parking lagoons amid dehumanizing sprawl. It would help prepare Mesa to prosper in the higher-cost energy future.

Not surprisingly, Mesa is scouting two sites in the middle of nowhere, but on the all mighty freeway. When in a hole, keep digging.

Learning from the Lone Star State

If anyone thought the Sun Belt was in danger from the Great Disruption, they can find swaggering solace in The Economist's panting, sheet-clawing passion over Texas, in an article headlined Lone Star Rising. The teaser says, "Thanks to low taxes and light regulation, Texas is booming. But demography will bring profound changes."

The Economist's journalism is often some of the best around, and even its editorials can challenge the psychotic screamathon that has become American "conservatism." But it can't completely escape its Tory establishment roots, or its intellectual grounding in the conventional wisdom, BGD -- Before the Great Disruption. I don't doubt that America, and probably Britain, will exhaust themselves trying to resuscitate the old order. That will render it no less dead than the ubiquitous armadillos decorating the highways of Texas.

American right-wingers are no doubt sending the article to the faithful -- and using it to further cow the Democrats, if such a thing is possible. But a close reading of even this article -- and a better understanding of Texas -- shows that the Lone Star State's success has relatively little to do with "low taxes and light regulation." I speak as one who covered organized crime and the oil industry there, and whose family roots go back to the bloody pre-Civil War Texas frontier.

Phoenix 101: Vulnerabilities

People move to Phoenix bragging about the lack of blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. True enough. Yet they are moving into a place burdened by its own special hazards. They're the ones your real estate agent didn't mention; the ones that what is left of journalism rarely covers. That nobody talks about them besides -- I hope -- emergency planners, does not make them any less dangerous. Indeed, a case could be made that Phoenix is one of the highest-risk metro areas in the nation.

One of the most populous metropolitan areas in the nation has been built in a hostile desert. It's isolated, with limited highways, no passenger rail and surrounded by hundreds of miles of inhospitable, waterless badlands. Evacuation in an emergency would be impossible. The closest large cities -- Tucson and Las Vegas -- are as vulnerable as Phoenix. Gasoline must be brought in by pipelines from refineries hundreds of miles away. Water and the electricity for air conditioning depend on complex, vulnerable systems.

This harsh reality should have been brought home earlier in this decade, when, amidst brutal August heat, a gasoline pipeline broke; a year later, a mid-summer transformer fire threatened to shut down the power grid. The gas crisis was particularly frightening. Fights broke out at filling stations. People drove around in search of a tanker truck to follow. More inquisitive residents were surprised that such a large city has no refinery and is served by only two pipelines, one from the east, one from the west, built decades ago when Phoenix held a fraction of its current population.

Phoenix 101: The High Country

Mention the High Country now and several images come to mind. Escape from Phoenix during the worst days of summer. "Cabins," for those with means, that are usually just subdivisions plopped down amid the pines, sometimes with a golf course attached. Flagstaff's charming downtown. Prescott Valley's hideous sprawl. Wildfire season. The horrific traffic on Interstate 17 and the Beeline Highway.

Thank God, I got to see a very different High Country, as different from what exists now as old Phoenix was from the current migropolis.

Even in the 1960s, it was rough, empty country. The entire state population in 1960 was 1.3 million -- smaller than the city of Phoenix now -- and 1.7 million in 1970. In 1960, Flagstaff had 18,000 people, Prescott 13,000, Payson wasn't even counted (it had 1,800 in 1970). And yet Arizona had built good highways -- and still had passenger trains -- so it was possible to explore this enchanted land in relative comfort.

A giant leap, then the long fall

Amid the bitter war, in the Age of Aquarius, with fire in the streets, astronauts flew to the moon and stepped onto the trackless dust of the Sea of Tranquility... What's amazing is that I (over)wrote this sentence 20 years ago to mark the Apollo 11 anniversary. Nobody can outdo John Noble Wilford of the New York Times for his historic lede when the event happened: "Men have landed and walked on the moon." But my forgettable column from 1989 is a reminder of how fast time passes, for a man, for a nation.

You either got the space program or you didn't. I was a child of the Space Age, a rocket boy, minutely following every mission: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, as America raced the Soviets to the moon. I had NASA Facts films that the TV studio downtown had given me, sheaves of photos and publicity directly from the space agency, models of every rocket and spacecraft. I watched Neil Armstrong step out that July night in the company of my grandmother, a woman who had been born on the frontier, who had witnessed the invention of the automobile and the airplane -- and now she had lived to see this.

It remains one of the most moving moments of my life. I also choke up re-reading about the Apollo 8 mission, with the revolutionary photo Earthrise, when humans first saw their precious blue planet from afar, alone in the vast emptiness of cold space. When the astronauts read from Genesis on Christmas Eve and concluded with, "And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth."

You get it or you don't. But either way, at what a remarkable place we find ourselves 40 years -- 40 years! -- out.

Cities and 'markets'

Bashas' filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is a sad and telling marker for Arizona. You can forget about that downtown Phoenix store. And you can probably forget about Bashas', one of the state's last large, locally based and locally rooted companies.

Today's grocery company was founded in 1932, in the Great Depression, although its Arizona origins go deeper. That it may succumb in the Great Disruption is a tragic, but perhaps fitting bookend. I think of all the times I was out amidst the worst examples of unsustainable, desert-profaning sprawl, be it Gold Canyon, Hunt Highway or the insipid Verrado that was prematurely anointed the future by David Brooks of the New York Times. There would be a Bashas'. As the sprawl Ponzi scheme has collapsed, its not surprising that it takes down another vulnerable player.

This take-down is sadder than most. Bashas' has a great story: immigrant success, ties to Chandler when it was a real town, and keeping its base there even as the anodyne subdivisions encroached. Eddie and Nadine Basha have been civic leaders in a place where they are more rare than shade in mid-summer. This is an unforgiving business with razor-thin margins. If greater Phoenix ends up losing its only locally owned grocery chain -- as, say, A.J.'s is sold off -- it will only deepen the deep-bore mineshaft that is the hole the place is in.

While you were out

Obama's honeymoon, if it ever really existed -- remember, not one House Republican voted for the stimulus -- is over. Some have their theories as to the signs behind this turning point, but I have no doubt. It was the return of the Great American Freak Show, in the form of the wall-to-wall news coverage of the death of a song-and-dance man, once gifted, later creepy. If the triple-digit increase in television ratings are any sign, this is what you want from your news media. It is the "national conversation" you crave. Can a missing comely teenage blonde be far behind?

Obama's election gave us a moment of seriousness, to take stock of the troubles bearing down on us and make the urgent and consequential adjustments necessary to address them. Yet it is apparently not to be. Imagine if the outpouring for the song-and-dance man had been applied to universal healthcare or global warming? There would be no hopeless bottleneck in a Congress owned by big business, no Dianne Feinstein saying that criticism about healthcare legislation from the left "doesn't move her." No calling climate change a "hoax." As Paul Krugman pointed out in his Monday column, "The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected...And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course."

Our present course, sadly, is to find fresh distractions. If you care to take a moment, however, here's a bit of what you probably missed in the past few days, reported by that hopeless "old media."

America becalmed

For all the vigor projected by our appealing president, America sits strangely stuck. Healthcare reform seems all but dead. Even the whateverthehellitmeans "public option" is struggling. Tom Daschle, who proved such a formidable leader for the Democrats during the onset of the Bush calamity, is urging President Obama to drop it. There just aren't the votes in the Senate. Indeed, the Democrats seem in a dead run to lose the next election, which would be a certainty if a credible opposition party existed.

It's easy for the senators to be complacent. They are deep in the pockets of the healthcare and insurance industries. The wife of Sen. Chris Dodd earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock grants serving on the boards of Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cardiome Pharma Corp., Brookdale Senior Living, and Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals. And Dodd is one of the good guys? Daschle has his own conflicts. The for-profit medical and insurance industries, along with the U.S. Chamber and assorted business lobbyists can bring hundreds of millions of dollars to bear to maintain the status quo. The only people who think this is a good idea are the diminishing ranks of Americans who have good insurance. The suffering and fear of everyone else has no political power. Meanwhile, the media hype the costs of single-payer (ignoring that America pays twice as much for its system as any advanced nation) and the alleged horror stories of rationing abroad. Can you believe this trick is working?

The same Democrats who won a historic election are struggling to enact the mildest of measures to limit greenhouse gases, even as the government issues a historic assessment of the consequences we are already seeing and will see from climate change. The Southwest can kiss its ass goodbye. So can the Southeast, including the exurban office "park" where the rat bastards at NCR are moving, stabbing Dayton, Ohio, in the back.

Peak oil — nevermind

One way to remain popular as a hip, iconoclastic media brand in America is to reinforce the conventional wisdom -- in a hip, iconoclastic way, of course. I've learned this from Freakonomics. Take the recent blog post entitled, "Has 'Peak Oil' Peaked?" Author Stephen Dubner asserts that with oil prices way down from their 2008 highs, the media "frenzy" over peak oil has faded away -- but without the media doing a reality check on this hysteria they were peddling to a gullible public.

Huh?

My memory of that time is quite a bit different. The mainstream media did little on peak oil and Freakonomics' partner, The New York Times, was nearly silent on the issue. All the air in the media bubble was being taken up by shrill blaming of the major oil companies (even though they were delivering a commodity prized by the world to American gas pumps with no lines or interruptions). Or it concerned sinister futures traders somehow gaming the market. Most of the discussion on peak oil was confined to sites such as The Oil Drum, the "doomer blogs" -- and inside the oil industry itself.

Phoenix 101: Water

On the mountain tops we stand
All the world at our command
We have opened up the soil
With our teardrops
And our toil
--Gordon Lightfoot (Canadian Railroad Trilogy)

That people can move to the Salt River Valley from the Midwest and turn on a reliable tap or jump in a shimmering swimming pool, never even wondering where the water originates, is testimony to the mighty acts and sacrifices of previous generations. Their spirit and grit are lost, not only in Arizona but probably all around an enervated America.

Today's transplants would never know it, but they live in one of the world's great fertile river valleys. But unlike the Nile and Euphrates, the Salt is dangerously unpredictable. It floods. It dries up to nearly nothing. In the end, it destroyed the most advanced hydraulic society north of the Aztecs, which we call the Hohokam.

It very nearly did the same to the Americans who found the valley after the Civil War, having sat there empty for centuries as if providentially awaiting them. Even some of the Hohokam canals were intact, needing only to be cleaned out by the newcomers. But the river had its own harsh logic. The territorial "lifestyle," as related by my grandmother, was unbelievably primitive, even at the end of the 19th century -- always dependent on the river's tricks. Phoenix might never have risen from the ashes.

Two roads to the future?

With the exception of LBJ, Democratic presidents since 1960 have fared badly in their legislative agendas, even when Congress was controlled by their party. President Obama, for all his gifts, may be on track to fare little better. Health care. Cap-and-trade. Financial reform. Big-time tax evasion. Even for this cool-handed moderate, it's a tough sell.

Meanwhile, the media and the salesmen on Wall Street are in a constant search for "green shoots" -- signs this historic recession is over. Nobody is thinking through what these shoots will turn into, exactly what the road ahead looks like. But for many, including policymakers, we find a desperate assumption that the economy will pick right up where it left off in 2006.

Two schools of thought are at work here. One says the fundamentals are sound, as President Hoover put it, and the future will look much like the recent past. The other, found more among the outliers, argues we have hit a historic pivot point -- but will we realize it and save ourselves?

How Detroit committed suicide

In the garage of my condo tower, someone parks a 1965 Buick Electra 225 convertible. It is sleek and big and powerful. This was Detroit, and in many ways America, at the zenith of its power.

Buick, like all GM divisions, still enjoyed great autonomy, including having its own design bureau. This car is a work of art. It is the successor to the legendary Roadmaster, and in those days Buick fans were fiercely loyal (my mother being one). GM cars were tiered so people could move up to a new GM brand as they became more affluent, as millions did in the 1950s and 1960s -- Chevy to Pontiac to Oldsmobile and even Cadillac. Ah, but the Buick was special: glamorous, racy, classy and exclusive. Built union.

I think of all this, of course, as Chrysler is pushed into bankruptcy and General Motors may well face the same fate. What went wrong, and what does it say about America's future?

The end is always near

Word comes this morning of a 6.0 earthquake centered about 130 miles from Mexico City, a place already frightened by the swine flu outbreak. "We Mexicans are not used to living with so much fear, but all that is happening -- the economic crisis, the illnesses and now this -- it feels like the apocalypse," a 22-year-old told the Associated Press. Take comfort, Yanks. Apparently the teaching of history is as neglected in Mexico as here. In 1519, apocalypse of the mighty and advanced Aztec Empire came at the hands of Hernan Cortes, 600 conquistadores and Indian allies who had chafed under the Aztec lash. Cortes leveled Tenochtitlan, built Mexico City.

Something American schoolchildren aren't taught: 90 percent of the indigenous population of the New World perished in the decades after first contact with the Europeans, mostly because the Europeans unwittingly carried diseases against which the Indians had no immunity. Entire tribes were wiped out. Civilizations do end, sometimes with great speed.

We have the jitters. This morning, the backup plane for Air Force One flew low over Manhattan accompanied by fighter jets. It was a photo-op, but nervous people evacuated several buildings. The flu -- it's hard to know. Much of instant, electronic, everywhere media have one speed: hysteria. Still, at least 20 million people were killed by the 1918 flu, perhaps many more -- and that particular strain is still not completely understood. It came as another world was ending, as empires were collapsing at the end of World War I's then unprecedented carnage and the particular optimism of the early 20th century vanished forever.

Obama gets aboard high-speed rail

President Obama has pledged $13 billion to begin high-speed rail in America. I don't want to be a cynic and ask, does anyone believe we'll see this in our lifetimes (or at all, as American continues its whacko-driven, debt-laden decline)? I'll say the action is a good start. And the sensibility -- actually acknowledging the importance of rail to the 21st century -- is first rate.

It's important to note a few essentials to understanding the situation. 1) Rail is essential to a sustainable future, using less fuel and having a smaller negative environmental impact that airlines or freeways. 2) It's essential to improving productivity and competitiveness, as workers and semis are stuck in gridlock, and face steadily rising fuel costs anyway. 3) Modern rail systems are thriving around the world, and China sees this as essential to its leapfrog to world supremacy -- note to Americans who don't get out much: We're the country that's behind, far behind. 4) The nation's only passenger rail system, Amtrak, has been starved of funding for years, so it has much catching up to do, just on refitting equipment, etc.

With Obama's plan, the devil will be in the details, of course. Yet we're still not thinking holistically about the issue -- and we'd better get our act together toot sweet.

The bigger hostage drama

The rescue of the American captain from pirates -- handled with cool competence from President Obama to the SEAL snipers -- gives the nation a much-needed boost. This comes after eight years of "bring 'em on" grandstanding by the Bush administration. And now, as the company that once stood for American success and the rising middle class, General Motors, faces bankruptcy. At least we can still do something right.

This should not distract us from piracy that has been happening on Wall Street, and that the Obama administration seems committed to, at best, merely applying a nip-and-tuck. It emerges that Obama chief economic adviser Larry Summers not only received $5.2 million from a hedge fund and $2.7 million in speaking fees from big financial institutions after he left Harvard. He also was working for a hedge fund while he was president of Harvard. Frank Rich asks, "Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players?" Ben Stein answers, "I know people and I know money, at least the basics. If anyone thinks that a man who has had a taste of honey from Wall Street on that scale will ever really crack the whip on Wall Street, he’s dreaming."

Larry Summers, the man leading Obama's reckless push into socialism; sorry, SOCIALISM!! (or is it fascism? -- the right-wingers can't figure it out). What's really happening is that the pirates are winning, and there's no SEAL team out of D.C. to protect taxpayers -- or the future of this republic.

Phoenix and Mesa dementia

As the Great Disruption rolls across the globe, changing everything, Arizona slips ever deeper into unreality. And that's saying something. Mesa's notoriously anti-everything voters approved -- by 84 percent -- using tax incentives to lure what the Republic calls "two massive upscale resort projects." Meanwhile, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon is due to "outline an ambitious strategy to make Phoenix the first carbon-neutral city - and the greenest - in the entire country." And what will the strategy, to be unveiled in today's State of the City speech, include? Providing bicycle rentals. Installing solar panels on city buildings. "Developing Phoenix's canal system for recreation and business use similar to the Tempe Town Lake area."

Where to begin? What's most remarkable is how Arizona is willfully ignoring three mortal perils: water, global warming and the rising possibility that it could have one of the world's failed states on its southern border. Oh, the relatively lesser perils remain as well: the growing underclass, the horrible schools, linear slums, income inequality, inadequate infrastructure, serious environmental damage and the health consequences that follow, etc. There's little realization that the props that held up the old growth machine are gone, done, over. I know: Let's build "two massive upscale resort projects!"

GM and Chrysler: Hasta la vista, baby

In earlier posts, I've urged federal help for the automakers. It would be a calamity to lose this manufacturing backbone, which especially props up what's left of the middle class in places like Michigan and Ohio. There was a large "if," however -- if the automakers fundamentally changed their business models to focus on green technology and building transportation for the 21st century beyond automobiles, particularly transit and rail.

Not surprisingly, none of that is coming true despite GM already receiving $13.4 billion in federal loans and Chrysler getting $4 billion. About the best GM can do is phase out the evil Hummer. Otherwise, it's business as usual and worse: cut 47,000 jobs worldwide, shut five more U.S. factories and phase out Saturn, the brand launched in the late 1980s as the reinvention of General Motors.

There comes a time to let go. It will be painful, but it's time. We need to let GM and Chrysler fail.

Stimulus lesson

Here's the salient paragraphs from a New York Times story today on where the big Japanese stimulus of the 1990s went wrong:

“In hindsight, Japan should have built public works that address the problems it faces today, like aging, energy and food sources,” said Takehiko Hobo, a professor emeritus of public finance at Shimane University in Matsue, the main city of Shimane. “This obsession with building roads is a holdover from an earlier era.”

and

“Roads and bridges are attractive, but they create jobs only during construction,” said Shunji Nakamura, chief of the city’s industrial policy section. “You need projects with good jobs that will last through a bad economy.”

Put the heat on your lawmakers to support transit. A good start is here and here.

So much for the honeymoon

I keep telling myself that the woozy feeling that the Obama administration is already failing is mainly due to the 24-hour news cycle. We get to see the sausage-making in real time. And the sudden ubiquity of Republicans all over the corporate media, despite the public's rejection of their failed ideas. I keep telling myself all this.

Still, some worries. If Rahm Emmanuel is so incredibly effective as Obama's right-hand, he has yet to show it. The so-called stimulus is bogged down and deeply flawed. One cabinet nominee after another is tripped by tax or conflict-of-interest problems. It's nice that Obama admitted a mistake, but he has yet to focus, in simple, Reaganesque language what he wants and use it to go over the head of an obstructionist Congress.

Why am I not comforted that a group of "moderate" senators is trying to cut $100 billion of "fat" -- the media's term -- from the stimulus? In this supposed lard is mass transit funding desperately needed for systems that are already cutting back -- hurting the working poor the hardest. Transit and rail are my markers for real change, and given stable funding they would provide jobs paying family wages that couldn't be sent overseas. Fat? How about South Carolina's unremarked interstate to nowhere?

The real risks of the stimulus

Renegade -- the president's secret service code name -- is pushing hard for "his" stimulus bill as it reaches the House floor today. What's in is? That's difficult to tell as the horse-trading continues, and as Obama tries to rope in at least some Republican support. FDR and the Democratic Congress in 1933 simply steamrolled the Republicans who demanded balanced budgets and reactionary policies -- but never mind. In the end, this will be a package crafted not only by 535 lawmakers, but countless lobbyists and staff. My biggest fear is that it will not be a renegade stimulus -- transformative and focused on the future.

Let me count the ways:

1. Tax cuts in the current environment won't provide help. U.S. tax rates and dodges are already generally at lows not seen since the Coolidge years. Obama promised a working-class tax cut. Fine. He's bowed to Grassley to provide more alternative-minimum tax relief. OK. But these should be different bills. They're not stimulative. Individuals will squirrel away their checks or use them to pay down credit-card debt. Corporations are already paying nothing in many cases. As for "investors and risk-takers" -- the Bush years demonstrated that tax cuts on investments merely fuel speculation while encouraging job-killing mergers and offshoring. Not for nothing did wages stagnate during those halcyon years. Perhaps worst of all, it continues the destructive "tax cut" entitlement mindset that Americans can get something for nothing.

Screwed on mass transit

Talking Points Memo did more digging to find out why mass transit and Amtrak were getting so little of the proposed stimulus. It's bad enough that $30 billion will go for "roads and bridges," most of which will worsen global warming, increase our dependency on imported oil and increase the environmental and urban damage of sprawl. But apparently these critical transportation choices -- a given in most advanced nations, and critical to face a future of expensive energy and global warming -- were sold out for tax cuts. It's also galling that mass transit and rail go begging while we sink trillions into the hole of the "financial services industry" swindles.

Urbanites -- and suburbanites who want alternatives to endless driving -- put Obama over the top. It's time they reminded him of their issues. Next up for enterprising reporters: What sprawl industries are pushing this for their financial benefit?

Selling out on mass transit?

The "all hands on deck" moment for the Obama administration is emerging now. Ironically, as the president-elect and VP-elect "Amtrak Joe" begin their rail journey from Philadelphia to Washington, it's becoming clear that rail and mass transit will be the poor match girls of the giant Obama stimulus. According to the Wall Street Journal, only $10 billion out of $825 billion would go to rail and mass transit projects.

Meanwhile, most states will line up for their "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects building roads. For example, South Carolina wants more than $2 billion for an interstate through the most rural part of the state. There can be only one reason: to enable sprawl, enrich developers, house builders and land bankers, and hollow out existing urban areas.

Talking Points Memo provides some details on competing proposals, adding:

All those who think the stimulus should put mass transit and highways on a more equal footing -- represent, Northeast Corridor riders! -- should check out Transportation for America's petition on the issue. Their in-depth analysis of the gaps between Oberstar's ideas and yesterday's reality can be found here.

This is not a small matter. Offering Americans 21st century transportation options is essential not only to providing jobs but to creating the infrastructure to allow us to compete. It doesn't really matter if most Americans blithely motor about in a 1965 transport system, the reality is that we're decades behind most advanced nations, not only in passenger rail but in freight capacity. It is only through providing rail and transit in our congested urban areas and retrofitting some of suburbia that we will be positioned to weather the enormous shock of peak oil and ameliorate global warming (and simply live more civilized lives). These are foundational to a sustainable economy and society. Yet they lack the powerful constituency of big oil, bankers, sprawl barons, etc. that would have us to go bankrupt trying to save the unsustainable.

If Obama will fold on such a basic matter, what does it say about the next four years? He promised to listen. Let's see if he does, and to more than the entrenched interests.

Fire and rain and blame

I keep getting emails from friends asking if I'm okay. The national news has been saturated with reports of the flooding in western Washington. I'm fine, largely because I live within the long-established urban footprint of Seattle (downtown, happily). Most of the damage has come in the exurbs, and much of it is human-caused. This is our second straight year of unusual flooding. It won't be the last.

This reminds me of my return to Arizona in 2000. Every year forest fires would erupt threatening cabins on the Mogollon Rim (pronounced Mug-e-on) in the High Country. One particularly devastating fire began in 2002 when a woman had a fight with her boss (boyfriend?) while they were on a trip to service his vending machines (I am not speaking in euphemism here). She stalked off into the forest, wearing only shorts, tank top and flip-flops, carrying a towel, cigarettes and lighter -- a survival kit I never learned about as a Boy Scout. When she became lost, she lit a "signal fire" that turned into one of the worst conflagrations in state history. (And you wonder why Arizona is rated America's dumbest state). Comedy aside, I was puzzled because these areas of the High Country had been mostly uninhabited National Forest land when I was a boy. Then I drove up and saw the "cabins" were mostly subdivisions plopped down amid stands of combustible pine trees.

These disasters, repeated around the West and indeed the nation, bring large public burdens, from relief efforts and firefighting, to higher insurance costs. Yet nothing is being done to address the cycle of disaster. And with climate change and other environmental degradation, we ain't seen nothing yet.

Dead town walking

Do even the most sober-minded Phoenicians realize how deep a hole they're in? The depression caused by the housing collapse is undeniable. So the answer is merely to reinflate the housing bubble and happy days are here again, right? More "master planned communities." More paving over Pinal and Yavapai counties and rolling over Wickenburg with lookalike tract houses. More boobs from the Midwest who will put up with anything as long as they don't have to shovel snow.

Indeed, a major effort will be made to craft the Obama stimulus to do just this. Sustainability has no powerful political base. Sprawl does. Even the nominally progressive radio talker Ed Schultz is pushing for a bailout of the house builders -- and no wonder: he also owns a small construction company and drives 50 miles each way to work from his suburban home. With progressives like these, who can understand that the old sprawl model is hopelessly broken? Trying to revive it will only increase and lengthen the pain of transition -- or leave the country too bankrupt to even get there. Reviving it in Arizona will only hasten the inevitable water emergency.

But Phoenix faces crises beyond the housing depression. As one of America's least literate and most poorly educated big cities -- if it can even be called a city -- it's not surprising that no one is talking about them. And even the "smart people" assume the growth machine will revive, simply because it always has. Call them the road kill of the Great Disruption, the new era of discontinuity.

A stimulus mistake?

Much of the details of the new stimulus have yet to be known. What's emerging so far is cause for concern. For one thing, the $300 billion in tax cuts may be smart politics, but it's questionable economics and policy. Then there's the issue of how federal dollars might be used to prime the pump, with so much going to backfill basic programs being defunded by cash-strapped states, and lobbyists of the powerful highway-sprawl consortium lining up for the "roads and bridges" money.

George W. Bush and eight years of Republican misrule -- really more than a quarter century -- are leaving the new administration with the worst mess in nearly 80 years. And remember, all this was validated over and over by a majority of Americans at the polls (maybe not in 2000 and 2004). It's an open question whether any president can lead the changes really necessary to address the Great Disruption, of which the economic collapse is only part. We'll see. But the barriers to real change we can believe in are mammoth.

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.

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?

Did you hear the one about sustainable Phoenix?

This week's Phoenix Laff Riot comes from the Arizona Republic, in a story headlined "Striving to be Green:

The Valley is lashed in national surveys for its poor air quality, derided for its urban sprawl and mocked for its searing temperatures and growing heat island.

But, despite these challenges, city boosters, business owners, environmentalists and academics all say Phoenix has a unique opportunity to become truly sustainable. They also say the Valley could squander that opportunity if it fails to make smart decisions now about growth, open spaces, wildlife and the economy.

Later in the story is the kind of cliche sentence editors wouldn't allow, if only they weren't in endless meetings and trying to put together graphics and assorted crap: "But only time will tell if the Valley can pull it off."

I hate to break the news, but time has told and "the Valley" can't pull it off.

Change? You can't be serious

Let the excuses begin.

The New York Times leads off:

Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.

The Washington Post weighs in:

Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like. "A business model based on gas -- a gas-guzzling past -- is unacceptable," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last week. "We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car."

But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part of a "sustainable U.S. auto industry" that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.

That's because car manufacturers still haven't figured out how to produce hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them.

Expect to hear more in the coming days and months. We will see a potentially debilitating alignment of old thinking and old, yet still politically powerful, economic interests. If it succeeds, the country will face much worse pain in the years ahead.

Lies, damned lies, and rail transit

At least two big rail transit measures are on the ballot around the country this November, maybe more. In Seattle, voters will be asked to approve light-rail expansion. And in California, there's a truly transformative measure to build a high-speed rail network.

Both will probably fail, both due to the financial crisis but, sadly, also to the pervasive myths and muddled thinking that keep America frozen with an increasingly unworkable 1965 transportation network. This post will attempt to take a few of these on:

• Buses: Many people who claim to support transit advocate expanding bus service, saying buses are cheaper and more flexible. Unfortunately this is also the bait-and-switch position of anti-rail, anti-transit forces -- they will initially support bus transit but then oppose actually funding it. In any event, while buses have their place, they are not enough for a balanced, multi-modal 21st century transportation system.

Buses get stuck in the same traffic congestion that snarls cars -- and politicians will never create enough bus-only lanes to alleviate this. In downtown Seattle, a bus-riders heaven, buses are routinely clotted up even with bus lanes. Your bus is not only late, but it can be the fourth or fifth one back in a line stopped to take on passengers. Good luck getting there if you walk slowly. Buses with stairs are hard for many people to enter. And buses have a sigma in many communities. As I say, buses have a valuable place. But they can't replace rail for reliability, ease of entry, ease of riding, rider appeal and passenger-miles-per-unit of energy.

Downtown Phoenix update, gentle and honest

The 31-story Sheraton opened in Phoenix this week, to the predictable cheerleading that it will "revive" downtown. I hate to sun on your parade, but my recent visit "home" showed that the central city is still facing mammoth challenges, and that, of course, bodes ill for the economic and social health of the region.

Let's start with the good news, for we always have to be mindful of "the Valley's" real-estate-promoter mindset and fragile ego. The thing looks less bad than many had feared; as it was going up an editorialist at the Republic memorably likened it to an overgrown motel by the Interstate. It is absolutely essential to the success of the Convention Center, a business where Phoenix should excel, rather than being an also-ran with Grand Rapids as it was before the expansion.

A modest mid-rise is going up, just north of the Valley Center tower (I use the old name because who knows who will own the bank tomorrow), and at least one at CityScape. Not sure if there are many tenants. ASU has added a couple of buildings and is expanding the nursing college. The Grace Court development is coming along. And light rail is in -- light rail has succeeded virtually everywhere in America, so Phoenix will have to work really, really hard to screw it up.

Now, if you feel better you can stop reading now. Or read on for the unfortunate "rest of the story."

Travels: Ohio and Arizona

A vague sadness hangs over the Ohio countryside, even though the trees hang on to their last vestiges of summer green. I flew into Cleveland's airport last week. This was once one of America's largest cities, and even though the airport remains a hub for Continental Airlines, the place has the feel of a small, regional terminal. The nice part is that people are nicer in a less crazed and crowded setting, but I keep asking myself, "this is Cleveland?"

Yes. I can see the changes as we drive out of town, on the way to my conference at Kent State University. Buildings that held large businesses a decade ago sit empty. The big Ford plant sits looking vulnerable. While I was there, Eaton, the city's largest Fortune 500 headquarters, announced it was leaving downtown for the suburbs. This is a downtown that has revived itself well and is a transit hub. Yet the Eaton bigs seem oblivious to the future of higher gas prices, as well as shameful as stewards of their hometown. Everybody talks about how bad the economy is, with high unemployment and job insecurity. The change in the vibe of this state from a decade ago is so real and raw you can't miss it. No wonder Ohioans threw out the Republicans -- the party that wrecked America -- in 2006. And yet, McCain has an edge if the polls are to be believed, and one wonders.

Still, Ohio is a state synonymous with white flight and de facto segregation. Apart from some successful downtowns and a few still-lovely upper-class neighborhoods, the big cities are heavily black, while their numerous suburbs are white. It's a class thing, but it's also a race thing. And it may well be that Ohioans won't vote for a black man. How they think Republican John Sidney McCain III, continuing the policies of 25 years of "conservatism," will help them is beyond me. But these are emptional responses beyond the reach of rational persuasion.

How Denver beat the odds and saved itself

As the Democratic National Convention begins in Denver, the world will see the First City of the Intermountain West. It's not Phoenix (population 1.5 million; metro 4.1 million), which sits in its desert frying pan like an overweight couch potato. It is Denver (pop. 567,000; metro 2.9 million). It's another reminder that population alone is more likely to mean problems than strength. Let me tell you about one of my adopted hometowns.

Delegates will see a sparkling downtown and central city that have made a remarkable comeback from their fading 1980s. It's genuine live-work-play. They can ride one of the best light-rail systems in the country, soon to be muscled up with commuter and light rail reaching more than 100 additional miles; the hub will be historic Union Station. Lovely old neighborhoods close to the core have been preserved and revived. Miles of bike and walking paths, including along Cherry Creek, flow seamlessly into a walkable, dense downtown. Nearby, the Cherry Creek district is a delightful walkable shopping area.

This city that sits at the edge of the arid Great Plains (it was the Queen City of the Plains before the Mile High City) is blessed with shady streets and gorgeous parks. It's rich in culture, with a superb performing arts center and art museum, and edge, with many galleries, coffee houses and warehouse spaces. Chain stores and local stores, historic architecture and avant-garde, sit side by side along 16th Street and in lively Lower Downtown. Four pro sports teams play in downtown stadiums, which only enhanced the move to preserve historic buildings full of real businesses, and add to the downtown population. Where the old Stapleton Airport once stood is one of the nation's top New Urbanist developments.

The Gateway to fresh folly in Phoenix

Here we go again.

According to the East Valley Tribune, DMB Associates has made public the plans for its part of the old GM Proving Grounds near Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. But wait,

Dense, urban spaces, narrow pedestrian pathways to a nearby coffee shop or bookstore, a short drive to work. That's the kind of urbanism southeast Mesa can expect in the future, if things go as planned by the developer of 3,200 acres of property.

My friend Grady Gammage, the land-use lawyer, adds: "We're hoping to hit the sweet spot where we embrace the 21st-century dynamic nature with something significantly urban." But then comes the story's money shot:

To embrace its moniker of "21st-century desert urbanism," DMB would like a flexible framework to work with, one that develops as the market dictates over the years. Under this new type of planned district, which Mesa approved last September, a developer gets to create a zoning ordinance for a property and is able to get some flexibility in future development.

What's wrong with this? Almost everything.

Oil prices falling -- will IQs follow?

Gasoline at $5, $6, $10 a gallon over the next two years would have been a severe mercy for the United States. It would have forced changes that will eventually be essential: more transit and rail passenger service, a return to our core cities, an urgency to raise fuel economy standards and develop alternatives. At last suburban and exurban living would be properly priced and costly, and the enterprise to retrofit savable suburbia to transit could begin. Foot-dragging on reducing greenhouse gases would have been similarly eliminated.

I don't think it will go down that way. Oil prices have been dropping in recent days, as I long predicted they would. The decline is because the nation that uses a quarter of the world's petroleum is seen heading into a nasty recession, which will cut world demand. So prices will drop, and soon we can expect some to start saying the worst is over and we can get back to driving SUVs and other self-destructive behavior.

(I think of a story in today's Arizona Republic about Lake Powell "recovering," and the 'Zonies thinking "happy days are here again!" even though their water crisis is unabated -- although a State Secret).

Yet the fundamentals haven't changed. World oil production has either reached peak or will do so in a few years. That means half of this one-time resource will have been extracted and burned off -- and it was the easy half, the cheap half. So the remainder will be more costly, and getting it will be more geopolitically destabilizing. So oil will fall a little, then rise more the next time; retreat a bit again and resume its upward climb. The major oil companies and oil exporting nations (which control most of the oil) know this. Most Americans still don't.

Phoenix broiling: Apocalypse now, or later

The Republic devoted a magisterial nine sentences today to the fact that Phoenix is on track to meet or exceed last year's record 32 days of 110 degrees or above.

Not that anybody living there now cares, but as late as the 1960s, the Salt River Valley had hard frosts in the winter (thus, far fewer mosquitoes, no West Nile virus). We went back to school in September, in un-air conditioned classrooms, because it was cooling down enough to open the windows. Night-time cooling in summer was significant, and the summers were not as hot, nor did they last as long, as now. The idea of more than a month of 110-and-above would have seemed frighteningly absurd.

Contrary to the mantra of "it's a desert, shut up about the heat!," these man-made changes in the Phoenix weather are a Big Deal. So far, they are mostly a local event, caused by the massive loss of agriculture and gargantuan increase in paved sprawl. Global warming's consequences haven't really started to kick in.

What happens then?

Outraged over Exxon Mobil's record profits?

Drive less.

Today's must read

I must call your attention to one of Jim Kunstler's best posts in years, "The Coming Re-Becoming." Must reading. It includes this priceless passage:

In the days when the Harmony Mill was built, only South Seas cannibals and sailors wore tattoos. You wonder: are tattoos now the only way left for this class of Americans to assert their selfhood? And what exactly are they proclaiming? I am a warrior. Or is it: I am a television (I display pictures, too) !?

The expanding class of the poor-and-idle has been remarkably passive in the face of their dwindling prospects. Perhaps they passed the point years ago (a generation or two ago!) when there was any sense of sequential improvement for the family's station-in-life.

The destiny of their everyday lives must seem totally beyond their control. They are subject to the fate of distant corporations who sell the staple corn-syrup byproducts and gasoline on which daily life is based.

Read to the end. And cheer.

In Seattle, another chance to shoot ourselves in the foot and reload?

Seattle is the most backward city on the West Coast when it comes to mass transit. That still puts it light-years ahead of most American cities. Its bus system is quite good, the first light-rail line opens next year and a street car now links downtown to the burgeoning South Lake Union district. Sounder commuter heavy rail runs from Tacoma north to Everett. In addition, the Cascades Amtrak service provides convenient service between Eugene, Ore., and Vancouver, B.C., including Portland and Seattle. The ferry service is the best in America, despite recent underfunding.

But Seattle residents feel profoundly inferior to Portland, with its world-class light rail system, and Vancouver, with its SkyTrain. And its a sign of how much progress has been made in California that all the service I mention above is a fraction of what's available in LA, San Francisco or San Diego. Yet Seattle is also the gang that couldn't shoot straight when it comes to many transit projects.

A roads-and-transit measure was defeated last year. Now an all-transit measure may come to the November ballot, and already newspapers, powerful suburban developers and even the generally pro-transit King County executive Ron Sims are opposing it. Seattle's misadventures with transit have lessons that apply to other cities, and will be more important in years ahead when a lifestyle based on long, individual auto trips becomes less viable.

'Drill drill drill' -- they think you're stupid

No point in re-inventing the wheel, so on the "drill drill drill!" scam, I will direct you to Jim Kunstler and his recent correspondence with the oil industry expert Matt Simmons.

Let's also be clear why oil prices are falling: the market believes the U.S. is in a recession and it will be a nasty one.

The Coles affair: Unsustainability is now

Once again, the Wall Street Journal goes to Phoenix to report on the most pathological aspects of our economic troubles. It does the in-depth, sophisticated and contextual story on the suicide of Scott Coles and the collapse of his Mortgages Ltd. that the local press will not allow its reporters the time and expertise to do. And remember, the Republic's in-house diktat is, "say something positive about the community" (and use streaming video!!).

The personal story of Coles is the stuff of a tragic novel, albeit for our tawdry era. He was 48 when he wrote a goodbye note, donned a tuxedo, climbed into bed, and apparently committed suicide. His company was in trouble, and with it some of the highest-profile projects in "the Valley." His 20-year-younger second wife, whom he had met in Las Vegas, wanted a trial separation. The darkness he must have felt merits our compassion and prayers.

But the business story must also be told, for it illustrates not only how Phoenix got into its worst downturn in perhaps decades, but also the peril of Ponzi Scheme Nation.

The mess we're in

The FDIC, one of those "liberal" "socialist" things foisted on free-market America by Franklin Roosevelt, had to step in Friday to avoid a major bank run. More failures are expected and -- dirty little secret -- only about $2.5 trillion of the $7 trillion deposited in U.S. banks are actually federally insured.

Seven trillion sounds like a lot. But Americans are in hock to $12 trillion in mortgage debt as housing prices have collapsed, the last big factory of America (making houses) has all but shut down, and foreclosures are reaching records. The Iraq war will cost another $3 trillion. The U.S. national debt is $10 trillion (nearly double from 2001). That ought to tell you something about the mess we're in.

What's being little reported about the seizure of IndyMac "Bank" is that the institution is a bastard child of Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo's death star of subprime calamity (now a boulder around the neck of Bank of America). IndyMac was spun off because it was collatoralizing mortgages too big to be sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now on federal life support. The bubble was so huge, fed by so much fraud and bad policy, that the barons had to find "innovative" ways to keep it going.  And all that time, the regulators waved it on. This is the mess we're in.

A shameful lack of leadership on global warming

We're in the summer dog-days of make-believe news, such as Obama's non-flip-flop on his Iraq position. The media fill days of news cycles with nothing. The winner so far is today's "pledge" by the G-8 industrialized nations to cut emissions in half by 2050.

Isn't that convenient? Any action to fulfill this promise would be taken long after the distinguished leaders are gone from office. So it's meaningless. President Bush continued his seven-and-a-half years of roadblocking action by saying the U.S. would not act unless China and India did. Otherwise, he reasons, it won't do any good.

Sadly, unless the U.S. leads, the world won't follow, especially developing nations dependent on coal and wanting to live an American suburban lifestyle. Historians and future generations will look back in anger and disbelief at the wasted years. The economic, social and security consequences of global warming will be unlike anything we have ever faced (say goodbye, for example, to Phoenix). And the White House has actively blocked action, such as California's emissions restrictions, that would have made a start.

U.S. leadership will make a difference. Not only will it slow emissions from our own huge smokestack of greenhouse gases, but it will launch a cornucopia of new approaches to energy, transportation and living. But maybe we're not up to the challenge, and maybe the next generations can just suck it up. The rich will be all right. That seems to be the Republican approach.

Speculators and oil prices: an idea running on empty

Some Democrats and even Republicans would have us believe that speculators are to blame for higher gasoline prices. A bill has been introduced to close the so-called Enron loophole that allowed some energy trading on unregulated "dark" markets. That and other "dark market" loopholes should be closed. But the affect on gas prices will be minimal.

Americans have often railed against speculators -- the Revolution and Civil War come to mind -- and sometimes with good reason. Unfortunately, you can't have capitalism without speculation. The key is sound regulation. But the idea that speculation is the major cause of higher oil prices is evidence of the magical thinking going on in much of America. It's deep denial about the real reasons for more expensive oil.

Thus, a war against speculators will be useless at best and could do real harm, both by gumming up the efficient mechanisms of the market -- of which speculators are an important part -- and distracting us from the real tasks at hand.

What's behind McCain's incoherent energy policy

President-elect McCain offered a "prize" of $300 million to anyone who can develop an efficient electric car battery. He might want to watch the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car, about the combination of powerful interests and consumer antipathy that quashed the effort before. I know the senator "from Arizona" calls himself a computer "illiterate," who depends on his wife, whom he obscenely berates in public, to do the techie stuff. Maybe she can work the VCR, too.

Things like electric and hydrogen-powered cars fuel much of the American imagination because of the hope that we can merely retrofit suburbia to new-fangled technology and keep sprawling as before. It's not going to happen. Most of these projects are highly speculative, some outright frauds. Electrics and hybrids can be part of the solution, but they will be costly. We haven't gotten our heads around the idea that alternative energy will be much more expensive than the cheap gift of light sweet crude that built 20th century America and is now in decline. Many Americans will choose to live differently in the future. The senator seems either ignorant or hostile to this.

You only need to know two things about McCain's energy policy. First, as a senator he opposed raising fuel-efficiency standards and subsidies not only for alternative fuels, on which there is legitimate disagreement, but also on research in general. Representing, or not, his state, he tried to kill Amtrak and was hostile to metro Phoenix's first, long-needed, light rail line. He showed no leadership on commuter trains and is generally anti-transit. Interestingly, some insiders thought it just as well: McCain is so disliked in the Senate, his advocacy might have actually hurt the Phoenix project. But his is a 1965 mentality in a new world demanding transportation options.

Second, to gain contributions from the corporate base of the GOP, he must embrace offshore drilling (which will do nothing to lower oil prices), nuclear power and the elusive research for cleaner coal -- which is a stalking horse to merely build more coal plants on the hope that "someday" the horrendous pollution/greenhouse gas problem will be solved. Just as Arizona's highly suspect, selectively applied 100-year water requirement is based on the stoned-in-the-dorm notion that in a few decades elves will cast a spell to allow enough water for a vast Sun Corridor of 8 million golfers.

How passenger rail was wounded, and how to fix it

The New York Times is a fine newspaper, but it has its blind spots. Its reporting on energy is often incomplete or downright wrong. The latter sin was not in evidence when it finally reported on the popularity of Amtrak. What's frustrating is what the article left out or left unsaid, which makes it harder to achieve some results beyond our transportation system frozen in 1965 (and we had more trains then).

From the article:

Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month.

But the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand.

And:

The problem is that rail has shriveled. The number of “passenger miles” traveled on intercity rail has dropped by about two-thirds since 1960, and the companies that build rail cars and locomotives have also shrunk, making it hard to expand.

Only late in the story is a glancing reference made to Amtrak's fate being tied to the whims of the federal government, and late late in the story the Times admits their boy crush President-elect McCain "was a staunch opponent of subsidies to Amtrak when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee." Indeed he wants to abolish it.

Let's fill in some of the blanks so Americans might have some options beyond expensive and congested driving, and airlines that treat passengers like cattle.