Williams: 'War on coal' hurts Heritage Foundation funders

Today Buz Williams, the regular Courier columnist with no writing or intellectual credentials who chooses to misspell his own nickname, rails against the President for an unreasonable "war" against the coal industry at the expense of the poor and middle classes. He has a point, if you're willing to ignore every good reason to move away from our dirtiest fuel and you're unable to comprehend basic economics.
   First, the idea of moving the country to cleaner energy resources did not originate with the President, nor would he likely have much interest in the political fight over it if not for the solid majority of Americans who recognize that the preferred fuel of the 19th century is hurting us in the 21st. Long before anyone but a few scientists knew anything about climate change, we recognized that coal emissions are the primary source of ill health and broad economic impairment due to air pollution.
   Remember the unbreathable air in LA in the '60s? (I'm sure Buz does.) Remember acid rain eating up concrete all over the Northeast? The automotive component was significant, but that was primarily coal. When Congress in the '70s began addressing those issues, we heard the same "war on coal" arguments and the same predictions of doom, from the same people. The sky didn't fall for the industry then, and much as we might prefer, it won't fall due to the President's current initiative, which I hasten to add is far from even passing its first legislative or bureaucratic hurdles, let alone having real effect.
   Buz's research for the piece is rooted entirely in the Heritage Foundation, an organization funded primarily and generously by the coal and oil industries, which anyone reading this likely already knows. But I'm perfectly willing to posit that yes, as we move away from burning coal for electricity, there will be fewer people employed in the industry, his core emotional point.
   Here's where basic economics come into the picture. As those people leave coal, employment demand is ramping up in cleaner industries. Nowhere is this clearer than in the awful fracking fad, which is drawing people directly from oil drilling to gas drilling. Somehow Buz misses that reducing energy from coal doesn't mean less energy, it means more of other kinds in younger industries that will employ more people than coal has.
   Cleaning up the mess from coal will displace workers, yes, but in aggregate it will put them into better jobs. The only people who will feel pain from this inevitable change are those who continue to bet their extensive riches on dirty fuels, like the funders of Heritage.
   I suppose I don't really need to remark on the childish petulance Buz expresses at the end of the piece, but in a way it opens a window on the emotional basis for the resistance to the kind of change that we must embrace for our economic and even species survival. The thing is, as we do embrace it, we'll find that we'll be happier and more prosperous. But I doubt that Buz and his ilk will ever be able to see it.

Editorial: McCain saves the day

Honestly, sometimes the editor's ability to turn real life into Bizarro World takes my breath away.

Here "saving the day" means preserving the ability of Senate Republicans to permanently obstruct any kind of legislative progress without doing a lick of work. He gives McCain credit for high diplomacy for standing in front of his criminal gang and saying, "OK, we'll let you get a couple of small things done if you don't shoot us all in the head."

News you won't find in the Courier, episode 117

We can look forward to similar savings here if our Legislature gets out of the way.

NYT:  Health Plan Cost for New Yorkers Set to Fall 50%

Trippy bug

Be glad it's not some cute puppy.

Editorial: Surprise! The whiter guy wins!

The editor's headline sets the properly comic tone, perhaps unintended, for his unsurprising expression of confidence in the law as the guy who killed the unarmed teen walks. This caps off the Trial of the Summer, an annual media event designed to keep viewers engaged with their teevees during the rerun/baseball season.

I have to think that he meant to put a comma in the head, i.e. "Legal system worked, as always," setting up his confident, ain't-we-the-greatest-country-in-the-world column. But he left it out, and for those of us with enough hashmarks to recall exactly how the legal system has historically worked for black folk in this country, it speaks more truth than the editor knows.

There's another angle to it, though, another blind irony, in that the law certainly worked as the Florida legislature intended when it passed its ALEC-dictated "stand your ground" law. They designed it to make it very hard to convict anyone who uses a gun to "defend" anything, anywhere, anytime from anyone they consider a threat. The person at the wrong end of the gun doesn't have to actually be a threat, of course. Now it's all so much simpler than the traditional lynching party.

Everyone seems to agree that both parties did stupid things, granted. But only one died, and only one had the tool for killing, and that is enough to put the killer in jail long-term in most of the developed world. Not in Florida, though, where juries must receive explicit instructions that if the guy with the gun is afraid, it's okay for him to kill.

True to form, the editor doesn't even think through the elements of the story as he writes them. Like the rest of white America, he's only looking for comfort. Justice? Not so much.

I'm sure it would utterly surprise him to learn that in most similar cases under similar laws where the person with the gun was black, the legal system still "works as always."

Williams: Defending his right to be hateful

Buz trolls concern about campus codes against hate speech, but he doesn't call it hate speech, he calls it "debate."

He wants to be able to say racist things about the President and be protected (by whom, I wonder?) from being called on it.

The bottom line is that teaching kids to use accurate descriptions of people rather than demeaning slurs and epithets improves debate. Discouraging hateful and demeaning language against others is how we help ensure that everyone can safely participate, and it's always been what adults do.

Buz argues only for the poor downtrodden assholes who believe that the Bill of Rights is a Bill of Licenses to do whatever they want, whenever and to whom they want. This is nothing more than another spasm of nostalgia for the days of the unquestioned social supremacy of the white Protestant male, and no one should have any doubts about the exclusivity of that club.

If you want to argue that rights are impaired, you have to show the impairment. Buz doesn't bother, of course, as then we'd be talking about facts, which is just too hard for him.

Some commenters want to set him up as a martyr in a tricorn hat. The Americans who actually wore those tricorn hats would never have tolerated the boorish behavior he advocates outside the beer hall. Perhaps the whites-only, male-only beer hall is Mr Williams' idea of utopia.

Whose rights are they, anyway?

Today we have another of those letters that seem to come in every other week on the same old subjects, making the same old arguments in the same old eye-crossing ways and drawing the same old tail-chasing comments. Perhaps the reader will indulge me a comment in hopes of a slightly different perspective.

Carl Fishel wants the world to understand, if I may paraphrase, that our rights as Americans came from the imagination of his version of the Supreme Being, and our Founders only took dictation, presumably from some celestial speakerphone at Independence Hall that has since vanished with the original shorthand.

These screeds inevitably cite the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which of course has no standing in law, but has entered the sacred canon somewhere between Judges and Ruth, beside the Second Amendment, as the Received Word of Gad rather than Mr Jefferson and his buddies.

Like most of the stories Xtians revere, this version of history takes a pretty firm push on the self-delusion lever to hang together. The argument against it isn't difficult, but it requires some basic understanding of historical context.

With the Declaration, the 13 vassal colonies of George III set out to build a system of self-government, a concept that ought not to be controversial now. Then, it was a new idea. As such, in declaring independence, the Founders had to build a legal argument for it that would convince the world outside merry old Blighty to recognize them.

The idea of self-government was every bit as new and frightening in Germany, Italy, France and Spain as it was in Britain, so the argument had to not only furnish evidence of the justice of our cause, but show to a paternalistic and superstitious world that the new States we were creating would act in an adult manner.

Every feudal monarchy since time began justified its claim to power as coming directly from a supreme being, just as the churches did. So regardless of the religious views or divine inspiration of the Founders, reference to a supreme being would be obligatory in this context. The other governments simply wouldn't have taken seriously anything other than an appeal to the only power higher than the English king, who up to that moment legally owned us.

(Tangent: If we posit that gad did grant rights, why would he single out a gaggle of irregular little backwaters on the wrong side of the planet when His Truth Had Been Marching On for over a thousand years in Europe, over the backs of serfs, peasants and various other cannon fodder who never had a right to anything other than endless poverty and death in squalor? Why didn't they get the rights too? Do the dominionists imagine that the Declaration was equivalent to Luther's leaflet and the founders started their own religion called America? That must be hard given how our proto-republic was received by the churches. [hint: not well])

What bothers me most about this ridiculous gad-given argument is that it minimizes the accomplishments of the Founders in embracing a set of radical ideas and seeing them through.

The most radical of those ideas is that human beings are not only all equal in principle, but simply by existing we own ourselves and our dignity. That idea alone is enough to smash the bonds of class and strip the aristocracy of all legitimacy. These men were expressly moving away from the world of superstition and into one of new, more rational social structures, and doing it at great risk and cost to themselves.

They agreed that it didn't matter how we individually believe we came to exist, rather it was existence itself  that endows us with human rights.

Finally, notice that when it came down to defining those rights and structuring this new society, in writing the Constitution they dispensed with supernatural references and expressly forbade us for ever from operating our government on superstition.

How much evidence do you really need?

Barnes: Society needs more right-brain thinkers

It fascinated me how quickly and savagely the trolls have targeted Ron Barnes. In today's column he discusses how the future needs a different kind of thinking, an idea that's painfully obvious to anyone who's attempted any real thinking at all, and there's no hint of political divisiveness or judgment in it. Yet because they see Ron as an adversary, nothing he says can be right.

What's most ironic here is that commenters who have demonstrated publicly for years a desperate aversion to logic and fact in forming their opinions are insisting on identifying themselves with left-brain thinking, and concluding that Ron would doom them to the dustbin of history.

Perhaps Ron might have incurred less trollish wrath had he used other terms than the left-right dichotomy, which some people will always see (unthinkingly) as political. But the possible alternatives — holistic, intuitive, comprehensive, integrative — just as easily trigger the embedded aversion to hippie-dippiness.

We have an old cultural bias in favor of concepts like logic, hard evidence, system and method, instilled in the centuries since the Enlightenment brought us out of bondage to superstition and gave us the sciences and the scientific method, which in part led to the material wealth we enjoy today. (The most important part was slave labor, of course.) These are obviously extremely useful modes of thought and action, and despite the knee-jerks of his critics, nowhere does Ron say that we don't need them anymore.

The alternatives to linear thinking are not limited to a return to superstition. What Ron means to point up is the developing need for the ability to grasp complex systems in their entirety and work with both the big picture and the microcosm simultaneously — systems like economics, climate, big data, urban engineering, quantum physics and sustainable agriculture. We are coming to recognize the deep interdependence of the system services that support our survival and prosperity, but the numbers of variables are exploding to the point where linear thinking becomes a drag on understanding them.

This is not an original idea, of course. Many forward thinkers have advanced it, from Alvin Toffler to Bill Mollinson to John Muir (the VW mechanic, not the naturalist) and many more besides. I expect Ron was teaching it at Prescott College in the '70s. Again, it's obvious if you look.

As the conservatives of the Enlightenment chose to persecute Galileo rather than look at his results, and as those of the Industrial Revolution chose to retreat into dead-end agrarian utopias, will the conservatives of today resist the need to think bigger? Of course they will. But they're only fooling themselves when they choose to think they're being logical about it.

Neither political team can claim an edge in either linear or nonlinear thought. As Ron points out, everyone uses both. What we must be most aware of is that when we aspire to intuitive success, we risk seeing only what we want to see, intensifying the political divide. It really is a skill we need to develop as a species, and as (or, sadly, if) we begin to achieve it, we'll be surprised that it doesn't look anything like we imagine it now.

Editorial: Silly is as silly does

So for the unnamed editor the silly story of a teevee personality getting caught saying the N word is a "saga"?

After building up this person in repeated royal terms, he attempts some Rodney King language at the end, in which he equates racist hate speech with schoolyard taunts.

The inadvertent self-satire here is inescapable.

Could he really be this misinformed?

Prescott Councilman and frequent letter-writer Jim Lamerson tries to challenge Tom Cantlon on the facts, and just can't seem to find one.

Lamerson writes, "To begin with, it is difficult indeed to attack the facts of the "Fast and Furious" debacle, in which our government, under President Obama, armed foreign drug cartels, an act which cost the life of at least one American Law Enforcement Officer, Brian Terry."

Well, it's not all that difficult. Our government, under President Bush, tried to trace weapons routes by selling them, and it didn't go well. When Obama found out about it, he stopped it. Just fact.

Lamerson describes the Benghazi attack as "grievous incompetence or sickening self-interest on the part of President Obama's administration," of course presenting no facts at all. The facts are that it was a surprise attack on an unlikely target. Blaming Obama for that is desperately silly.

In naming "the IRS, spying on American citizens" the Councilman manages to conflate the IRS non-scandal with NSA data-mining against American citizens. The facts: the IRS investigation of nonprofit status covered more progressive and politically neutral groups than it did conservative groups, and no conservative group was impeded from conducting political activity in any way. The NSA programs are rooted in the Patriot Act, which Lamerson happily supported when the Bush Administration imposed it on us.

Finally, Jim's misfiring killshot is that "President Obama, along with his supporters in Congress, passed an ordinance declaring governmental supremacy over individual choice for healthcare." (An ordinance?) The fact: Congress passed and the administration has instituted a program that changes nothing about your existing health-care coverage and offers the choice of coverage to millions of us who could never access it before.

Could this community leader really be so completely misinformed about these issues? What does it say about his ability to evaluate information related to the issues he addresses as a Councilman? What does it say about our media pandering to people who are similarly, aggressively misinformed?

Yarnell Hill fire and local coverage

The Yarnell fire story poses a special challenge for our local news providers, including the Courier. With national media covering the ongoing story, our local reporters will be pressured to step up their games and dig out the details that only local connections and knowledge can reveal. For the editors it's an opportunity to prove the paper's relevance and competence with the sort of "real" life-and-death news that they don't often face.

Our hearts go out to the residents of Yarnell and the families and comrades of the firefighters for their grave losses.

ToT: Tobin pretends to understand science and economics

I'm frequently amazed at how comprehensively a single person can illustrate the depth of a problem simply by saying what they think.

In this case the problem is the inability of some Republicans to cooperate with anyone they identify as an adversary. Here District 1 Representative (really the senior and better title, but he insists on ignoring it in favor of the supposedly grander Speaker of the House) Andy Tobin rails against the Obama administration's plan to bring the Navajo Generating Station into something resembling compliance with US laws against egregious polluters.

But before he gets to his complaint, he tips his hand to what it's really about: "... the federal government has fought against Arizona leadership ...." Note the delusion that "Arizona leadership" is on anything like a par with federal power. Note the self-importance required to imagine that the federal government cares in the slightest what he or Jan Brewer thinks. Note the comical and ignorant use of ellipses.

Andy complains that the EPA wants the station's operators to install new scrubbers at cost of something like a billion clams. Then he proudly states the station's economic value as $20 billion over thirty years. Leaving aside the preposterous idea that we'll still be generating significant energy from this or any other thermal coal plant in thirty years, simple arithmetic says that the state recovers the value of the upgrade in a little over a year. Sounds like a good loan risk to me.

Of course, the dollars and cents of the deal are not Andy's problem, rather it's the idea of the federal government coming into Arizona (like it ever left) and doing its job, presumably as he became so accustomed to its neglect under the Bush administration.

Air quality is not just for the tourists, it's how we survive on the planet. Andy's selective reading of the DoEnergy study (which we can expect will favor energy, duh) — or, I should say, of the choice excerpts circulating from ALEC in brief bullet points, no doubt involving words no longer than four syllables — ignores the very real benefits of cleaning up the plant for everyone who lives downwind, primarily natives, Utahns and tourism business in Southern Utah, which obviously Mr Tobin cares nothing about.

His dire warnings of shutting the plant down are pure hokum, obviously. I look forward to his apoplexy when the new rules come down from the new CO2 policy that  the President outlined last week. Better dust off some of those binders of energy legislation you've personally blocked, Mr Tobin, and look for ways to put our solar and wind-energy industry to work.

Days Past: Huntin' Injuns for sport

I love the historical articles that appear on weekends in the paper and the weekly Capitol Times. They're often pretty arcane in terms of relevance to history, but they deliver interesting stories of real people who walked our streets and shaped our communities not so long ago.

So with that anticipation going in, I was aghast reading today's entry, which gleefully recounts the pursuit of a small band of Apaches escaping from bondage and their eventual slaughter as an heroic "battle." The story is disgusting, and the language — "hostiles" for "people," "squaw" for "woman," for examples — which harks back to the bad old days of Manifest Destiny, and importantly the disinterest in presenting any context or contrasting view are shameful and callous. How would you react to this story if it was about the murders of your own relatives?

This should never have been accepted for publishing. I find it incredible that Sharlot Hall Museum would really allow its name attached to it.

Pricing water

In his ToT today, Howard Mechanic stumps for more rational pricing of effluent water to help balance revenues and address our water-mining problem. He sensibly takes a bite that's small enough for the average reader to chew, but we will need to go farther, of course.

Pricing is the most effective and arguably the easiest method for encouraging conservation and rational use of water, and it is vastly underused here given the magnitude of the problem we face.

As we wind up into the council election, I'd like to see a public debate on pricing that includes big changes in favor of conservative use. (We'll also need to look hard at legislation that will allow us to keep what we conserve for the future — there are some legal complications that need addressing.) If we can price water according to something like its real value, what we give up in green lawns we will more than get back in secure water resources into the future.

Another waste-of-time debate

Today we have yet another letter (this one from Noel Dusek) in the endless and pointless debate over whether the Founders were Xtians. There's nothing new here, again, and as usual the argument is pitched over utterly irrelevant ideas.

The Enlightenment Xtians of the 18th century had very little in common with the deranged evangelicals of today, so it's more than a little silly for today's extremists to cite the professed faith of the signers of the Constitution as proof that the US was meant to be a "Christian nation." But it's also silly to debate them on that ground, because it's completely irrelevant.

Whatever their individual choices of faith, the men who debated and signed the Constitution agreed that there should never be a state religion here. That says conclusively that they put rational governance above their own superstition and understood the value of that. This is, by the way, a hallmark of Enlightenment thought.

Like Mormons reading the obits, evangelicals want to draft the Founders onto their team to support their aspirations to Xtian dominionism and a religious state.

So for gad's sake quit debating whether the Founders were deists or whatever. We have the document that they hammered out and agreed on. We know them by their fruits.

Williams: Artless deflecting

Buz childishly deflects from the conviction of Rick Renzi (R-Military-Industrial Complex) by pointing fingers at Dems he doesn't like. It's a complete waste of the paper's space and the reader's time, as usual.

You voted for him, Buz, twice. That's on you.

Here's a more pertinent and useful link.

The pain and gain of taxation

Between the news story from Cindy Barks, Tom Cantlon's column and the letter from Tom Britzman, local taxation is the theme of today's Courier.

The immediate issue is the City of Prescott raising our primary property tax coincident with a larger reduction in a secondary tax with the payoff of Willow and Watson lakes. I say "coincident" because the raise in the primary is not set out as a specific offset, rather it appears that Council sees a rare opportunity to bump up revenue in a way that won't likely attract a lot of opposition.

In his letter Britzman complains cynically that a tax, once instituted, never goes away, and overstates the situation — in fact, property taxes will go down, just not by as much as they would have without the primary hike — but he has a point in that Council is doing this hike opportunistically and without the public vote that many Arizonans have come to expect on new taxes.

In his column Tom points out some of the inconvenient complexities of taxation that prevent us from doing the sort of simple-minded "simplification" that many non-economists advocate. In going for the big picture, one complication he doesn't get to is why Prescott sees the need to boost property taxes: with the bursting construction bubble, we were badly burned by overreliance on sales taxes.

Social and economic scientists broadly agree that sales taxes more heavily burden low-income people, yes, but they also carry a land mine for governments that rely on them, in that when you need them most in an economic downturn, they disproportionately dry up.

At its core, the mission of government is to organize and deliver needed public services. Public reliance on those services increases in hard economic times, so depending on revenue streams that rise and fall with the economy exacerbates those problems.

The wise budgeter says, "So we should be saving up during good times so we have the funds available when things go sideways," and that makes all sorts of sense. Unfortunately the anti-tax powers-that-be in Arizona have amended our constitution to prevent that sort of forward planning.

Shifting from sales to property taxes will help make our public revenues more reliable over the long term. To do this most responsibly Council should be linking the property-tax hike with a reduction in the municipal sales-tax rate, which will be a marginal boost for both low-income residents and local retail businesses.

And since we're talking taxes, I have to add my usual rant that if we aspire to good and useful government, we have to change the conversation about taxes. It shouldn't be about how much money we pay individually, rather about how much value we receive for it. There is way too much focus on the dollar, and nothing like enough education about what it buys for us.

Voting Rights Act strikedown: Win or loss?

I expect most Arizonans don't know that our state is one of those selected for special scrutiny under Article 4 of the Voting Rights Act, struck down today by the Supreme Court. AZ won this honor with persistent,direct and official discrimination against minorities, particularly our native population.

An optimist who isn't paying much attention might think, terrific, we're finally past the era of racial discrimination, we can move on with an officially color-blind society. Sounds great.

Those paying closer attention will more likely raise an eyebrow. The continuing political fracas over "immigration issues," right-wing code for keeping the brown people in their place, and voter ID is prima facie evidence that the reflex to discriminate and segregate remains alive and well in our official apparatus. Does that warrant us having to run changes in our election laws and procedures through the Justice Department? Well, someone has to be the adult in the room, and as the majority of Arizona voters so far are clearly not up to the task, I think I'd prefer it.

Then there are those who are paying attention with different motives, and this ruling simply enables those who would continue to use and encourage racial fear to build their own power and wealth. They can say that the Supreme Court says there's no more discrimination, so we needn't worry about it anymore.

Without the federal backstop against voting discrimination, it falls to us as Arizona voters to take more responsibility to ensure that we not only don't backslide further, but make real progress on being an open and fair society for all our citizens.

Update, Thursday: Think Progress has the story on how seven of the nine preclearance states have already moved to restrict voting rights as a result of the Supreme Court decision. I'm guessing Arizona's reactionaries are only regretting that their legislative session didn't last long enough to get them in the game, too.

Editorial: Cheap is gooder

I've read today's editorial three times and I still can't say with much confidence that I understand what the unnamed editor is getting at. It verges on a drunken ramble, full of non-sequitur and tangential dead-ends and apparently unscathed by proofreading.

Peering through the murk, the best I can tell is that he's reacting to outlay for vital public services, using fire suppression as an ideal good (he could see the fire from his house), and comparing that skeptically to the removal of the widely hated traffic cams in PV in favor of live police officers, speculating that maintaining the level of traffic safety that the machines brought will cost more.

Let's posit for the sake of argument that PV officials never slanted their estimations of the effect of the cameras to justify their own decisions to apply them, and so the reductions in traffic injuries have been real and related to the cameras. Most people still hate them, and want live officers to handle traffic enforcement. Therefore the public sees higher value in getting rid of the cameras and, if necessary, paying more for that higher-value enforcement. That's just how our political system works, and understanding it requires a little better ken of economics than the Walmart model.

Of course, the exclusive "this thing or that thing" argument is far too simplistic to matter. If traffic safety is secured by reducing vehicle speed, then we could accomplish the goal more cheaply and effectively by, for example, removing paving or adding frequent speed bumps. The point here is that even if you believe that the cameras have been effective (and I think there's a persuasive argument against that), you have to admit that there are other ways to accomplish the goal that people will hate less.

Note: "Ravish" means "carry away for the purpose of rape," and is usually used archly today, though its application to a mountain remains outside even the boundaries of satire. (He meant to use "ravage," of course.)

Editorial: It must be Obama's fault

The unnamed editor suddenly discovers the growing shortage of physicians and somehow sees it as a problem stemming from the ACA. This has been a talking point on the right for years, and like so many of them, is completely spurious.

This sort of shortage is in large part a consequence of the baby-boom bubble. That large generation of doctors is retiring with their contemporaries, taking themselves off the market just as their generation begins to need the most medical attention.

The problem is also increasingly rooted in our high-cost, high-debt education system. Those medical students who aren't filtered out by the high up-front costs of the programs are forced into high-dollar specialties just to stay ahead of their debts, leaving an inevitable shortage of generalists. Add in our ridiculously obstructive state-by-state and skill-by-skill licensing regimes, and you really have to wonder why anyone would not expect a shortage in this area, and nothing to do with Obamacare, which of course is not yet implemented.

Sure, I've heard the stories of medicos so put off by the idea of "socialized medicine" (we're so far from that it's laughable) that they're getting out, just as they've been so unhappy with Medicare reimbursements that they won't take those patients. Frankly I'll lose no sleep over these guys, as they're most likely either incompetent (as shown in their inability to understand how the system is really designed to work) or just greedy.

The only failing specific to Obamacare that I can see as a real factor here is its neglect of coverage for integrative and complementary medicine in fulfilling its mandate to improve prevention and wellness care and reduce costs. Many forward-thinking health-care professionals are choosing these disciplines because they work better than the traditional allopathic industry, which has long been hijacked by Big Pharma, mechanistic thinking and profit motive. I'd like to hope that Congress will tweak the ACA to bring these smart, science-based professionals into the system sometime relatively soon. We'll see.

The truly ironic thing here is that had Obama not tried to start fixing our absurd health-care system, we'd still have these same problems, but the editor wouldn't be able to blame him for them.