“Government At The Speed of Business.”
State 48’s outgoing Ice Cream governor repeated those words like a mantra in the rounds of softball media interviews he granted in the weeks before becoming Citizen Ducey on January 2.
Listen to one here. They’re all pretty much the same. Unchallenged fealty to the Ducey Doctrine of government by business, for business, and the hell with the rest of ‘ya all. Coming from him, Ducey’s “Speed of Business” actions sound so much better than the Arizona train wreck he delivered over the past eight years:
Arizona and COVID 19: #1 in the nation in per capita COVID deaths at 32,000+ or one for every 227 people.
Arizona Prisons: A shameful system costing taxpayers billions. Its Ducey-appointed leaders couldn’t keep cell doors locked, systemically violated inmates’ rights by denying them healthcare, and failed to protect from harm both those imprisoned and the corrections officers keeping watch.
Arizona’s Water Supply: The state is rapidly running out of water and has no comprehensive plan to identify new sources or conserve what little it has left. Golf courses are watered daily. A six-acre water park is under costruction.
Arizona Public Schools: A public education system nationally ranked in the bottom five by multiple metrics, starved by Ducey’s neglect in favor of private and religious schools.
Arizona’s Unemployment Compensation: A fumbling and bumbling unemployment benefit system that failed people during the COVID crisis, and lost billions to fraud due to poor management. Ducey answered to none of its failures.
Arizona’s Border: Ground zero for Ducey’s infinite “secure the border” gimmicks, including $150 million spent building and dismantling a speed bump of empty shipping containers that desecrated sacred grounds and poisoned pristine desert.
Arizona’s Coziness With Extremists: Simply because they are Republicans, Ducey offered a silent endorsement of White supremacists and insurrectionists who ran for statewide office. His silence gave them traction and legitimacy.
Doubt you’ll find this stuff in Doug’s LinkedIn profile.
“Speed of business,” huh? The whole concept is fatally flawed. More on that in a minute. For now, let’s talk about how Ducey cultivated his myth. You should judge him by the truth as he sells himself for future national office, even the White House.
“HE’S A CEO”
That’s what a colleague, a Republican political insider, told me in 2016 when we were both working for Democratic Sheriff Paul Penzone. Ducey harassed the Sheriff from afar through his proxies in the legislature. I just couldn’t grasp how this lightweight got the keys to the kingdom.
“The business community loves him,” he’d say. “He’s a CEO.”
Yeah, a CEO with some sketchy ethics.
Before inflicting himself on Arizona politics, Ducey ran the Coldstone Creamery chain. In 2007, he sold it for $80 million to Scottsdale-based franchise company Kahala. It was a nice ending to his fairy tale of taking a small local business to a big national finish.
Then came blowback. Little guy Cold Stone franchisees battled Ducey in blogs charging he sold them a flawed business model and pocketed excessive profits. What started as blogosphere noise grew louder when no less than The Wall Street Journal documented the troubles in a 2008 article. Blogs were one thing. The Wall Street Journal was scandal. Clearly Ducey’s Coldstone story wasn’t all ice cream with a cherry on top.
Kahala took notice and entered arbitration with Ducey and his partners. They ended up buying Coldstone for $16 million. The deep cut from the original $80 million price tag had roots in Ducey’s alleged overvaluation of his company. Through statements in friendly media, he denied wrongdoing and offered an “everything is fine” explanation. Ducey answered no hard questions. I mean, all’s fair in love, war, and bidness, right? We saw what became his practice and pattern of dodging accountability. He’d recycle it often over 12 years in office.
In 2011, Mr. Coldstone turned his attention to statewide politics as a devout disciple of the Koch Brothers. His timing was great. Arizona’s tinker toy Democratic Party was in disarray and fielding obscure candidates. With a lot of dark money backing, he won two terms as governor blasting the weakest Democratic candidates imaginable. All the while he kept the “Speed of Business” mantra on repeat. With the help of his loyal mouthpiece, Arizona Chamber of Commerce leader Glenn Hamer, Ducey had wealthy people with an “R” next to their name in an endless orgasmic fantasy of “run-government-like-a-business.”
Anyone breathing knows business often doesn’t run like a business, just ask Southwest Airlines. So certainly, government was never meant to run like a business, and certainly not at “the Speed of Business.” Government works to deliver essential services, like picking up your garbage. It’s doesn’t work to maximize shareholder returns. The entire “run like a business” idea is cover for what Ducey and his vandals really want: ZERO government.
THIS IS DOUG DUCEY
To know Doug Ducey then, is to face the truth about the moral vacancy of our love affair with CEO’s and their supposed wisdom. Our profit-centric focus elevates their value as the ultimate measurement of success. Without strong companies, we ask, what would America become? Canada? Finland? Lord help us, Mexico? No! We demand our companies have strong, dynamic leaders who are expected to make themselves, their board, and their shareholders filthy rich. Profits first. Ethical behavior if we get around to it. Let me get mine!
Enter Doug Ducey and his ilk, showered with the trappings of Third World dictators. They handpick their company’s boards of directors, who offer them astronomical salaries and bonuses, in exchange for their own big salaries and stock grants. Their public relations machines churn out propaganda in overblown accolades. They strut around groundbreakings and Super Bowls and babble about the “American Dream” of opportunity. “If I can be a kazillionaire, why can’t you?”
This thinking concentrates wealth among a few Gilded Age types while mollifying Americans whose measure of a thriving Democracy is a COSTCO membership. But, outside the privileged few, thousands struggle. I’ve asked many wealthy people about those left behind by systems stacked against them. They offer little sympathy and will they tell you those folks are just too weak or too stupid to get their share.
Want to see the Arizona Ducey ignores, the one not relaxing in a luxury suite with Mike Bidwell at a Cardinal’s game (as featured in the recent HBO Hard Knocks)? Walk the Valley’s many homeless encampments that’ve grown from popup to permanent. Hang out with a classroom teacher trying to instruct 43 students. Quietly wonder when your water faucet will produce…nothing. Here, folks, is what “Speed of Business” harvests.
The Ducey “CEO” playbook embraced by Arizona’s One Percenters features incessant whining about government as a barrier to business, dismisses regulations as an unnecessary burden, and makes the administrative state a target that must be dismantled if the Lords of Business are to prosper. It weaponizes tax cuts to defund and demoralize government, then pronounces it a failure.
The “CEO” rode that wave from 2014 to 2018. Except for a brief and very public skirmish with classroom teachers over salaries, his first term was a steamroller of tax cuts, court packing, and hamstringing the essential functions of government. You know, like helping people collect a check when they qualified for unemployment. Instead, Ducey allowed them to run into a system in meltdown…and refused to answer media questions about it.
THEN CAME HIS SECOND TERM…. And, as they say, “shit got real.”
Four mega events rapidly brought reality to CEO Ducey, starting with the first of multiple prison scandals.
MEGA EVENT # 1 – PRISON CHAOS
In 2019, Reports by ABC15 Investigators Dave Biscobing and Melissa Blasius revealed Arizona prison doors that didn’t lock, pitched battles between inmates and corrections officers, inmates setting fires while officers stood by and watched. The reporting elevated to public view the utter incompetence of Corrections Director Charles Ryan.
Ryan’s infamous inhumanity had already been exposed in 2011 by investigative reporter Wendy Halloran. She chronicled the death of Tony Lester. He was a severely mentally ill Native American inmate who bled out from self-inflicted wounds while corrections officers refused to render aid. They literally stood outside his cell and watched him die. Apparently, pro-life Ducey cared not much about Tony. However, images of open cell doors and fires underwritten by an annual budget of $1.5 billion was too much. Ryan “retired “in September of 2019.
MEGA EVENT # 2 — COVID 19 & TRUMP
The calendar turned to 2020, COVID 19 arrived, and the CEO got tripped up by forces of his own making. The catalysts were his instincts for business profits at all costs, the total insanity of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and a killer pandemic no one really understood.
For a very brief period Ducey’s COVID plan was rational and strategic. The governor actually seemed to believe that this COVID-19 thing was for real. Because he knew this virus was extremely dangerous and still is, he declared a state of emergency and all but locked down the state. Ducey wore a mask, convened the state’s universities for modeling and advice, and endured the backlash of businesses and the My Freedom-FU Crowd.
Then in May of 2020, The Donald’s campaign carnival came to town. As a swing state, Arizona had new importance in big time politics. Ducey folded under the pressure of the Mad King’s mayhem of weird cures (remember bleach?) and science denial. First, he tried to fire state scientists for delivering data that didn’t match up with his plans. Then, by Memorial Day, data be damned, Ducey joined the anti-science crowd and reopened Arizona. Now, in 2023, as State 48 is America’s deadliest COVID local place, Ducey accepts no responsibility for putting his own and Trump’s political futures ahead of human life.
MEGA EVENT # 3 — GEORGE FLOYD & WHITE PRIVILEGE
After ending COVID precautions and giving in to Trump’s pressure, CEO Ducey still hoped for a manageable summer of 2020 and big Republican victories in the November election. Then George Floyd was murdered on the same day an Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper killed Dion Johnson under questionable circumstances. So much for manageable.
Phoenix streets filled with demonstrations and the resulting confrontations with one of America’s most violent police departments. Ducey, sensing political opportunity in the images of chanting protestors – a racist dog whistle cultivated by Republicans for 50 years– did almost nothing to help defuse the situation. As far as he was concerned, the look of racial chaos in an election year was fine in Arizona’s largest city, a Democratic stronghold. Let Democratic Mayor Kate Gallego, a politician he’d battled and belittled throughout the COVID outbreak, figure it out.
Then came a sudden change of heart after the demonstrations moved from Democratic Phoenix to uber-Republican Scottsdale, also known as “Snotsdale.” Gangs who weren’t true protestors targeted high end Fashion Square Mall. Watching live TV coverage of looters smashing windows in a Mercedes dealership and stealing from the Apple Store was the trigger for CEO Ducey. What was fine for Democratic Phoenix was not for Republican Snotsdale. He called in the National Guard and convened a meeting with clergy and community leaders to figure out a solution.
Well, that backfired. The assembled leaders found Ducey’s authoritative style, as he spoke to them from a podium, both unproductive and telling. Dr. Warren H. Stewart, Sr., pastor of the First Institutional Baptist Church in Phoenix, told the ABC15 that CEO Ducey had displayed his White Privilege. He lacked understanding of the dangers police posed for people of color. He was not helpful. In fact, Ducey and those around him, were exactly the problem.
Was the CEO finally cornered by reality and accountability? No. Relief for Ducey came with the summer heat. As June’s 110-degree temperatures wore on and the demonstrators tired, there was no more protesting and no more looting. CEO Ducey hoped to work on the November Election, deliver the state to Trump, and keep the Senator he appointed, Martha McSally, in office.
MEGA EVENT # 4 – HAIL TO THE CHIEF
America knows the rest of that story. On election night, FOX News called Arizona for Joe Biden, Trump went wild, and the Big Lie found its footing in State 48.
Welcome to Trumpland. Fake electors. Rudy Giuliani’s hearings. Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Fake audits. Harassment and threats. Real violence on January 6th endorsed and aided by many Arizona Republicans. Kari Lake getting close to the governorship. Ducey found himself hated by the Left, despised by the MAGA Right, and welcome only be his constituency of the wealthy.
This time, to his credit, the CEO did his job. As he sat with his eventual successor, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Ducey certified the votes for a Joe Biden win, ignoring the “Hail To The Chief” ringtone that signaled an incoming call from the MAGA Madman himself. Was it a brave act? Taken through the filter of insurrection, maybe.
But, after watching CEO Ducey’s many moral and ethical failures over the years, I think he used the certification spotlight to position himself for a place on a national ticket.
He knew his appeal to the small government, “country club” Republicans who were stunned into irrelelvance by the wild west wackiness of MAGA. Witness columnist George Will's teary eyed pining for a Ducey led return to the days of unbridled capitalism without the Confederate flags. Never mind that the GOP openly carries the torch of White supremacy, misogyny, book banning, homophobia, uncontrolled gun violence, and QAnon. Ducey for PRESIDENT!
THE SLIPPERY CEO
From election certification emerged a signature moment in resume padding for Ducey’s next phase. With the Mad King discredited (for now), he’d leverage his constitutional bona fides with the convenience of the Border crisis to energize a campaign for national office. And so was born “Ducey The Slippery CEO.”
Over the years, through many news conferences, tours, and visits to the border, Governor Slippery has speed bagged Biden’s immigration practices without offering a single credible idea for comprehensive immigration reform. The border was a slam dunk issue for Republicans – forget the fact that they share the blame for the dysfunction there. Ducey used it as a theater for an Oscar-worthy performance.
First, he touted his “Border Strike Force,” a toothless gimmick in which he allegedly deployed state troopers to block cartel drug smuggling. Thanks to relentless reporting by the Arizona Republic, which fought for years to get public records of Strike Force activity, we know it was all just Slippery Ducey BS.
There was no actual Border Strike Forcing underway, just a lot of label gaming. Governor Slippery delivered a master’s class in embellishment, crediting any DPS activity anywhere in Arizona – not just at the border – to the Strike Force. There he was in news conferences and press releases looking all large and in charge, taking down the cartels.
By the time the Strike Force records were released, Slippery Ducey had moved on to another scheme. He’d finish Trump’s border wall using shipping containers stacked like building blocks across the desert. Without permits or permission from the feds, who own the land and actually are responsible for border security, his contractors dug up pristine landscape including sacred Native cultural sites.
It got a ton of media attention. Here was Slippery, er I mean, CEO Ducey, rescuing America from the “invasion” of brown-skinned “illegal” people “invading our Southern Border.” While this stunt was underway – one that cost Arizona taxpayers $150 million – Slippery joined Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis in busing immigrants north to DC and New York. All of it immensely ineffective. Just a big show for the campaigns ahead. As for the shipping container wall, the feds sued and Ducey agreed to dismantle it.
THIS IS THE DUCEY FILE
This is the stuff America needs to know before Ducey’s campaign ads begin and he starts sniffing around Washington. You’ll hear he cut taxes, created jobs, stood up for democracy, secured the border, protected school children from communist teacher unions and “the woke.” His “Arizona Miracle” around private education fires up the Right.
You won’t hear how he gave away millions in state sports gambling revenues by granting free licenses to billionaire team owners like his buddies Michael Bidwell (AZ Cardinals) and Ken Kendrick (AZ Diamondbacks). You won’t hear the Arizona Miracle for what it is, public education money shoveled by Ducey to private and religious schools as an “empowerment scholarship” scam. You won’t hear about his awful record picking leaders to run the state’s parks, employment security, and prisons. You won’t hear how he weaponized the culture wars to terrify parents and win statehouses around the country.
When you start hearing Ducey, and “CEO,” and “Speed of Business” just call up this post and review all the links.
With a hat tip to the late coach Denny Green, “Ducey is who we thought he was …” Don’t let him off the hook.
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NOTE: An earlier version of this post did not specify Arizona as # 1 in per capita COVID 19 deaths, as opposed to # 1 in overall COVID 19 deaths. The post has been updated.