Singularity
Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.
Friday, September 30, 2005
It'll Make You Go Blind
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions...
Thanks to Quiddity for the link.
On the other hand, correlation does not imply causation.
Let me refer you to this list for the careful analysis of such arguments. ¶ 10:11 PM 1 comments links to this post
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions...
Thanks to Quiddity for the link.
On the other hand, correlation does not imply causation.
Let me refer you to this list for the careful analysis of such arguments. ¶ 10:11 PM 1 comments links to this post
Thursday, September 29, 2005
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The Good:
There's a general mood of glee in the progressive blogsphere that this bloated arachnid has finally gotten tangled in his own web.
As the Professor says, this web goes everywhere in the Cheneyburton administration, so we may finally be seeing the beginning of the Fall of the House of Bu$hCo.
If, of course, the stoolies don't get whacked first.
The Bad:
Roberts, the man no one knows, is neither conservative nor liberal. He is an animal of the Company, and about as straight as a six dollar bill. Under his rule, women's bodies will be the property of Pat Robertson, men will be thralls under Corporate fiat, and whatever happens to Cheneyburton may well be reversed for the major players by the Supreme Court.
And the Ugly:
...The first commandment of governing is Thou Shalt Not Steal the People's Money. Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 on the mantra that he would rid the nation of Waste, Fraud and Abuse. He proceeded to raise the national deficit by $2 trillion with tax cuts and spending on the military in the face of a collapsing Soviet Union. This led to the peppy military procurement scandals of the late'80s and early'90s — the $435 hammer and the $640 toilet seat.
When Newt Gingrich and Co. took power in 1994, they promised many "reforms" and spent millions of dollars on hearings and investigations — the endless prosecution of Henry Cisneros may actually be a stronger case in point than the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Despite these splendid efforts, they never could find the Waste, Fraud and Abuse they claimed were the hallmarks of government. But this Bush administration has given us Waste, Fraud and Abuse galore.
The waste of money in Iraq is already into the billions, and the lack of accountability is fed by a Republican Congress that refuses to seriously investigate anything done by the Republican administration. The sums being overtly wasted are already staggering, and because there is no accountability, we can expect that situation not only to continue, but deteriorate.
With billions being allocated to clean up after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, you can already smell the corruption — fat contracts awarded without competitive bidding. The New York Times reports, "More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse."
"Provoking concerns," eh? Good old Times, eternally blah — why doesn't it ever run a screaming headline that says, "You're getting ripped off!" "They are Stealing Your Money to Pay Off Their Political Pals!" The trouble with journalism in this country is that it's too damn polite.
Look, this is rank, nasty business — corruption, cronyism and competence (the lack thereof) are the issues here. And as we have so recently and so painfully been reminded, when government is run by corrupt, incompetent cronies, real people pay a real price. There is nothing abstract about swollen bodies floating in flooded streets or dozens of old people dead in nursing homes.
Frankly, it's just a mercy most of Houston didn't drown in a giant traffic jam last week. Already, the corporate vultures are moving in — contracts are arranged through people like Joe Allbaugh, the former FEMA director who brought in his old buddy Michael ("Heckuva job, Brownie") Brown to run the agency.
This pattern is not just one rotten agency: The arrest last week of David Safavian, the Bushie who oversaw contracts for the Office of Management and Budget, ties into a whole nest of cronyism. Safavian's friend and former lobbying partner is Jack Abramoff, who in turn is big buddies with Texas Rep. Tom DeLay.
The corporate clout in this administration is mirrored everywhere, with the same pattern of crony contracts. Allbaugh didn't just start getting contracts for politically connected firms after Katrina. He's been in Iraq, where he has a flourishing lobbying business precisely to help corporations get government contracts.
Already, Homeland Security is flooding what's left of New Orleans with mercenaries from the same private security contractors flourishing in Iraq. The Nation reports companies like DynCorp, Intercon Security, American Security Group, Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International are all in New Orleans.
"Some, like Blackwater, are under federal contract. Others have been hired by the wealthy elite, like F. Patrick Quinn III, who brought in private security to guard his $3 million private estate and his luxury hotels, which are under consideration for a lucrative federal contract to house FEMA workers."
Baghdad on the Bayou for real. ¶ 10:04 PM 0 comments links to this post
There's a general mood of glee in the progressive blogsphere that this bloated arachnid has finally gotten tangled in his own web.
As the Professor says, this web goes everywhere in the Cheneyburton administration, so we may finally be seeing the beginning of the Fall of the House of Bu$hCo.
If, of course, the stoolies don't get whacked first.
The Bad:
Roberts, the man no one knows, is neither conservative nor liberal. He is an animal of the Company, and about as straight as a six dollar bill. Under his rule, women's bodies will be the property of Pat Robertson, men will be thralls under Corporate fiat, and whatever happens to Cheneyburton may well be reversed for the major players by the Supreme Court.
And the Ugly:
...The first commandment of governing is Thou Shalt Not Steal the People's Money. Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 on the mantra that he would rid the nation of Waste, Fraud and Abuse. He proceeded to raise the national deficit by $2 trillion with tax cuts and spending on the military in the face of a collapsing Soviet Union. This led to the peppy military procurement scandals of the late'80s and early'90s — the $435 hammer and the $640 toilet seat.
When Newt Gingrich and Co. took power in 1994, they promised many "reforms" and spent millions of dollars on hearings and investigations — the endless prosecution of Henry Cisneros may actually be a stronger case in point than the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Despite these splendid efforts, they never could find the Waste, Fraud and Abuse they claimed were the hallmarks of government. But this Bush administration has given us Waste, Fraud and Abuse galore.
The waste of money in Iraq is already into the billions, and the lack of accountability is fed by a Republican Congress that refuses to seriously investigate anything done by the Republican administration. The sums being overtly wasted are already staggering, and because there is no accountability, we can expect that situation not only to continue, but deteriorate.
With billions being allocated to clean up after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, you can already smell the corruption — fat contracts awarded without competitive bidding. The New York Times reports, "More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse."
"Provoking concerns," eh? Good old Times, eternally blah — why doesn't it ever run a screaming headline that says, "You're getting ripped off!" "They are Stealing Your Money to Pay Off Their Political Pals!" The trouble with journalism in this country is that it's too damn polite.
Look, this is rank, nasty business — corruption, cronyism and competence (the lack thereof) are the issues here. And as we have so recently and so painfully been reminded, when government is run by corrupt, incompetent cronies, real people pay a real price. There is nothing abstract about swollen bodies floating in flooded streets or dozens of old people dead in nursing homes.
Frankly, it's just a mercy most of Houston didn't drown in a giant traffic jam last week. Already, the corporate vultures are moving in — contracts are arranged through people like Joe Allbaugh, the former FEMA director who brought in his old buddy Michael ("Heckuva job, Brownie") Brown to run the agency.
This pattern is not just one rotten agency: The arrest last week of David Safavian, the Bushie who oversaw contracts for the Office of Management and Budget, ties into a whole nest of cronyism. Safavian's friend and former lobbying partner is Jack Abramoff, who in turn is big buddies with Texas Rep. Tom DeLay.
The corporate clout in this administration is mirrored everywhere, with the same pattern of crony contracts. Allbaugh didn't just start getting contracts for politically connected firms after Katrina. He's been in Iraq, where he has a flourishing lobbying business precisely to help corporations get government contracts.
Already, Homeland Security is flooding what's left of New Orleans with mercenaries from the same private security contractors flourishing in Iraq. The Nation reports companies like DynCorp, Intercon Security, American Security Group, Blackwater, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International are all in New Orleans.
"Some, like Blackwater, are under federal contract. Others have been hired by the wealthy elite, like F. Patrick Quinn III, who brought in private security to guard his $3 million private estate and his luxury hotels, which are under consideration for a lucrative federal contract to house FEMA workers."
Baghdad on the Bayou for real. ¶ 10:04 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The Company Humors the Congressional Dons
WASHINGTON - The CIA is gleaning intelligence from an unusual source: Congress. House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said the agency has become more willing to consider sensitive information that comes from his oversight committee — a shift he's seen in recent months under CIA Director Porter Goss.
Without being specific about who is giving his panel the information, Hoekstra said the intelligence tips have touched on several current issues, including terrorism, al-Qaida, Iraq and Iran. Hoekstra said he has personally met with individuals and organizations in different places around the world.
"Obviously, I can't do analysis," he said. "I can't tell whether these sources are any good or not, but I do know that they are unconventional sources of information."
In the past, Hoekstra said, these sources would have been discounted in the "sifting process" at the CIA because they came from Congress.
"This is not where we normally get information," Hoekstra said. "But Porter is more than willing — and encouraging — to take a serious look at these sources to see what value they might have."
Hoekstra said individuals with potentially useful information sometimes can't figure out how to gain access to U.S. intelligence agencies, and the committee has developed a reputation for providing that opening. He was vague about the nature of his contacts.
A CIA clandestine service officer in the 1960s, Goss served as the House Intelligence chairman for nearly eight years ending in August 2004. One of his aides declined comment Tuesday.
The CIA and other U.S. spy agencies have been highly criticized recently by intelligence commissions for failing to collect information on some of the country's most pressing problems, including terror groups and the weapons programs of Iran and North Korea.
In a report this spring, President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction encouraged the development of new and innovative spying techniques at U.S. agencies that have shown "too little innovation to succeed in the 21st century."
During the last six to eight months, Hoekstra said his committee has shared information with the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and White House National Security Council. He said he encourages those offices to develop their own relationship with the sources.
"We are not in the business of maintaining our own set of contacts around the world," Hoekstra said of his committee. "We can't do that — not at all."
The CIA devotes significant energy toward developing relationships with individuals who have access to intelligence and then protecting their identities.
Hoekstra's sources could stem from any number of contacts made inside or outside Washington.
Congress members, especially the House Intelligence Committee, take official trips to meet with members of foreign governments, interest groups and individuals. For instance, Hoekstra and other intelligence committee members spent Congress' August break hop-scotching from Great Britain to Egypt to Jordan to Iraq.
This would be pretty funny if it also wasn't so ridiculously serious.
I'm sure intelligent men such as Tom "I am the Government" DeLay can supplement the Company with all kinds of Intelligence. DeLay, after all is very tight with Abramoff's Organization, and Abramoff has friends who can make an intelligence offer you can't refuse.
Here's a bit of Intelligence the Company needs to think about. It is certain Goss won't send any Agents on assignment to check it out. But I doubt DeLay's substitute Don Blunt knows much about it either:
The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in a century, continuing a trend toward less summer ice that is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, various experts on the region said today.
The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century in which much of the once ice-locked ocean is routinely open water in summers.
It also appears that the change is becoming self sustaining, with the increased open water absorbing solar energy that would be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which compiled the data along with NASA.
"Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold," Dr. Scambos said. "The consecutive record-low extents make it pretty certain a long-term decline is underway."
The North Pole ice cap always grows in winter and shrinks in the summer, but the new summer low, measured on Sept. 19th, was 20 percent below the average minimum ice extent measured from 2000 back to 1978, when precise satellite mapping of the ice began, the snow and ice center reported.
The difference between the average ice area and the area that persisted this summer was about 500,000 square miles, or twice the size of Texas, the scientists said.
This summer was the fourth in a row with ice extents sharply below the long-term average, said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the snow and ice center and a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
A natural cycle in the polar atmosphere, the Arctic Oscillation, that contributed to the reduction in Arctic ice in the past was not a significant factor right now, he said, adding that rising temperatures driven by accumulating greenhouse-gas emissions had to be playing a role.
He and other scientists said that there could be more variability ahead, including some years in which the sea ice will grow. But they have found few hints that other factors, like more Arctic cloudiness in a warming world, might reverse the trend.
"With all that dark open water, you start to see an increase in Arctic Ocean heat storage," Dr. Serreze said. "Come autumn and winter that makes it a lot harder to grow ice, and the next spring you're left with less and thinner ice. And it's easier to lose even more the next year..." ¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments links to this post
Without being specific about who is giving his panel the information, Hoekstra said the intelligence tips have touched on several current issues, including terrorism, al-Qaida, Iraq and Iran. Hoekstra said he has personally met with individuals and organizations in different places around the world.
"Obviously, I can't do analysis," he said. "I can't tell whether these sources are any good or not, but I do know that they are unconventional sources of information."
In the past, Hoekstra said, these sources would have been discounted in the "sifting process" at the CIA because they came from Congress.
"This is not where we normally get information," Hoekstra said. "But Porter is more than willing — and encouraging — to take a serious look at these sources to see what value they might have."
Hoekstra said individuals with potentially useful information sometimes can't figure out how to gain access to U.S. intelligence agencies, and the committee has developed a reputation for providing that opening. He was vague about the nature of his contacts.
A CIA clandestine service officer in the 1960s, Goss served as the House Intelligence chairman for nearly eight years ending in August 2004. One of his aides declined comment Tuesday.
The CIA and other U.S. spy agencies have been highly criticized recently by intelligence commissions for failing to collect information on some of the country's most pressing problems, including terror groups and the weapons programs of Iran and North Korea.
In a report this spring, President Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction encouraged the development of new and innovative spying techniques at U.S. agencies that have shown "too little innovation to succeed in the 21st century."
During the last six to eight months, Hoekstra said his committee has shared information with the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and White House National Security Council. He said he encourages those offices to develop their own relationship with the sources.
"We are not in the business of maintaining our own set of contacts around the world," Hoekstra said of his committee. "We can't do that — not at all."
The CIA devotes significant energy toward developing relationships with individuals who have access to intelligence and then protecting their identities.
Hoekstra's sources could stem from any number of contacts made inside or outside Washington.
Congress members, especially the House Intelligence Committee, take official trips to meet with members of foreign governments, interest groups and individuals. For instance, Hoekstra and other intelligence committee members spent Congress' August break hop-scotching from Great Britain to Egypt to Jordan to Iraq.
This would be pretty funny if it also wasn't so ridiculously serious.
I'm sure intelligent men such as Tom "I am the Government" DeLay can supplement the Company with all kinds of Intelligence. DeLay, after all is very tight with Abramoff's Organization, and Abramoff has friends who can make an intelligence offer you can't refuse.
Here's a bit of Intelligence the Company needs to think about. It is certain Goss won't send any Agents on assignment to check it out. But I doubt DeLay's substitute Don Blunt knows much about it either:
The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in a century, continuing a trend toward less summer ice that is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, various experts on the region said today.
The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century in which much of the once ice-locked ocean is routinely open water in summers.
It also appears that the change is becoming self sustaining, with the increased open water absorbing solar energy that would be reflected back into space by bright white ice, said Ted A. Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which compiled the data along with NASA.
"Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold," Dr. Scambos said. "The consecutive record-low extents make it pretty certain a long-term decline is underway."
The North Pole ice cap always grows in winter and shrinks in the summer, but the new summer low, measured on Sept. 19th, was 20 percent below the average minimum ice extent measured from 2000 back to 1978, when precise satellite mapping of the ice began, the snow and ice center reported.
The difference between the average ice area and the area that persisted this summer was about 500,000 square miles, or twice the size of Texas, the scientists said.
This summer was the fourth in a row with ice extents sharply below the long-term average, said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the snow and ice center and a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
A natural cycle in the polar atmosphere, the Arctic Oscillation, that contributed to the reduction in Arctic ice in the past was not a significant factor right now, he said, adding that rising temperatures driven by accumulating greenhouse-gas emissions had to be playing a role.
He and other scientists said that there could be more variability ahead, including some years in which the sea ice will grow. But they have found few hints that other factors, like more Arctic cloudiness in a warming world, might reverse the trend.
"With all that dark open water, you start to see an increase in Arctic Ocean heat storage," Dr. Serreze said. "Come autumn and winter that makes it a lot harder to grow ice, and the next spring you're left with less and thinner ice. And it's easier to lose even more the next year..." ¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
"The Republican War on Science"
As reviewed by the Christian Science Monitor, with thanks to Truthout for the link.
The Republican War on Science lives up to its incendiary title. The book will undoubtedly raise hackles among conservatives and spawn sharp-tongued counterattacks. But the real test of its efficacy may be whether or not it persuades independents and moderate Republicans that without a new approach toward science America is headed for what the author calls "economic, ecological, and social calamity."
As a good polemicist, Chris Mooney, a journalist who specializes in writing about science and politics, knows to protect his argument by first making two concessions.
First, not all Republicans have been anti-science. Teddy Roosevelt was a great early conservationist. Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to recognize that the White House needed a science adviser. Ronald Reagan's Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, weighed scientific evidence "dispassionately" on subjects like AIDS and the health effects of abortion and declared, "I am the nation's surgeon general, not the nation's chaplain."
Even the first President Bush was largely regarded by scientists as "a friend," Mr. Mooney says. And today, a few GOP mavericks like Sen. John McCain speak the truth on issues like global warming.
Secondly, Mooney wisely - albeit briefly - acknowledges that liberals have also sometimes twisted science for their own political ends. Some of the alarm over genetically modified foods has exceeded what science shows; animal rights activists have argued that animal testing isn't necessary when most scientists disagree; and some Democratic politicians have overstated the likelihood that stem-cell research will produce quick cures.
But these transgressions, Mooney says, pale in comparison with the breathtaking audacity of Mr. Bush's "New Right" in its cynical manipulation of science. In a kind of Orwellian newspeak, they label conventional science as "junk science" and seek to replace it with what they call "sound science" - in other words, questionable, fringe science that conveniently props up the interests of big industry and conservative Christians.
All sides might agree that science should inform policy, not make it. Other considerations may trump it. But what irks Mooney is when, in his eyes, science is distorted to defend a policy.
In this regard, Mooney contrasts the Clinton and Bush administrations in their approaches to needle-exchange programs for drug addicts. Numerous reputable scientific studies show that needle-exchange programs reduce the transmission of AIDS without encouraging drug abuse. The Clinton administration acknowledged these findings, but simply decided to ignore them, apparently unwilling to take an unpopular political stance.
The Bush administration also opposed needle-exchange programs but "twisted the science," Mooney says, by insisting that some scientists doubted the findings. Yet when the press followed up, the scientists cited by the White House said they had no such doubts.
A key GOP tactic, Mooney says, has been "magnifying uncertainty" - finding a few dissenting voices on the scientific fringe and calling for "more research" to forestall action - a tactic the tobacco industry used for decades, he says.
Chapter by chapter, Mooney picks through the hot-button issues - global warming, creationism, intelligent design, stem cells - and finds conservatives politicizing and distorting the science involved.
He rejects the idea of even "teaching the controversy" over these issues in schools, arguing that the far right has invented the controversy itself by ginning up a kind of faux science alternative that has no solid basis. He isn't even willing to move the controversy out of science classes into social studies or current events.
Mooney does offer a brief list of solutions. Congress should revive the Office of Technology Assessment "or a close equivalent," which once offered nonpartisan scientific advice to lawmakers. The White House should restore its science adviser from his peripheral position now to the president's inner circle, where the office resided under President Kennedy. Journalists should resist slick PR campaigns and "spin" on science-related stories.
(According to Mooney, although a "powerful consensus" exists among scientists that global climate change is under way, that has not been reflected in the mainstream press, which feels compelled for reasons of "balance" to report as though the issue were still in doubt.)
"Our future relies on our intelligence ... nourishing disturbing anti-intellectual tendencies - cannot deliver us there successfully or safely," Mooney warns.
For those who have felt even vaguely disturbed by their government's attitude toward science, this book is likely to bring those concerns into sharp focus.
Aside from sheer demagoguery, and the appeal to irrational fundamentalist voters, much of the war on science has been to maximize the profits for the cronies of this administration.
Occasionally the level of incompetence reaches the point where even fellow Republicans can not protect the appointee. ¶ 7:30 PM 0 comments links to this post
The Republican War on Science lives up to its incendiary title. The book will undoubtedly raise hackles among conservatives and spawn sharp-tongued counterattacks. But the real test of its efficacy may be whether or not it persuades independents and moderate Republicans that without a new approach toward science America is headed for what the author calls "economic, ecological, and social calamity."
As a good polemicist, Chris Mooney, a journalist who specializes in writing about science and politics, knows to protect his argument by first making two concessions.
First, not all Republicans have been anti-science. Teddy Roosevelt was a great early conservationist. Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to recognize that the White House needed a science adviser. Ronald Reagan's Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, weighed scientific evidence "dispassionately" on subjects like AIDS and the health effects of abortion and declared, "I am the nation's surgeon general, not the nation's chaplain."
Even the first President Bush was largely regarded by scientists as "a friend," Mr. Mooney says. And today, a few GOP mavericks like Sen. John McCain speak the truth on issues like global warming.
Secondly, Mooney wisely - albeit briefly - acknowledges that liberals have also sometimes twisted science for their own political ends. Some of the alarm over genetically modified foods has exceeded what science shows; animal rights activists have argued that animal testing isn't necessary when most scientists disagree; and some Democratic politicians have overstated the likelihood that stem-cell research will produce quick cures.
But these transgressions, Mooney says, pale in comparison with the breathtaking audacity of Mr. Bush's "New Right" in its cynical manipulation of science. In a kind of Orwellian newspeak, they label conventional science as "junk science" and seek to replace it with what they call "sound science" - in other words, questionable, fringe science that conveniently props up the interests of big industry and conservative Christians.
All sides might agree that science should inform policy, not make it. Other considerations may trump it. But what irks Mooney is when, in his eyes, science is distorted to defend a policy.
In this regard, Mooney contrasts the Clinton and Bush administrations in their approaches to needle-exchange programs for drug addicts. Numerous reputable scientific studies show that needle-exchange programs reduce the transmission of AIDS without encouraging drug abuse. The Clinton administration acknowledged these findings, but simply decided to ignore them, apparently unwilling to take an unpopular political stance.
The Bush administration also opposed needle-exchange programs but "twisted the science," Mooney says, by insisting that some scientists doubted the findings. Yet when the press followed up, the scientists cited by the White House said they had no such doubts.
A key GOP tactic, Mooney says, has been "magnifying uncertainty" - finding a few dissenting voices on the scientific fringe and calling for "more research" to forestall action - a tactic the tobacco industry used for decades, he says.
Chapter by chapter, Mooney picks through the hot-button issues - global warming, creationism, intelligent design, stem cells - and finds conservatives politicizing and distorting the science involved.
He rejects the idea of even "teaching the controversy" over these issues in schools, arguing that the far right has invented the controversy itself by ginning up a kind of faux science alternative that has no solid basis. He isn't even willing to move the controversy out of science classes into social studies or current events.
Mooney does offer a brief list of solutions. Congress should revive the Office of Technology Assessment "or a close equivalent," which once offered nonpartisan scientific advice to lawmakers. The White House should restore its science adviser from his peripheral position now to the president's inner circle, where the office resided under President Kennedy. Journalists should resist slick PR campaigns and "spin" on science-related stories.
(According to Mooney, although a "powerful consensus" exists among scientists that global climate change is under way, that has not been reflected in the mainstream press, which feels compelled for reasons of "balance" to report as though the issue were still in doubt.)
"Our future relies on our intelligence ... nourishing disturbing anti-intellectual tendencies - cannot deliver us there successfully or safely," Mooney warns.
For those who have felt even vaguely disturbed by their government's attitude toward science, this book is likely to bring those concerns into sharp focus.
Aside from sheer demagoguery, and the appeal to irrational fundamentalist voters, much of the war on science has been to maximize the profits for the cronies of this administration.
Occasionally the level of incompetence reaches the point where even fellow Republicans can not protect the appointee. ¶ 7:30 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, September 26, 2005
Pickin' and Grinnin'
Guitar George, he knows all the chords...
George W. Bush will go down in history as the president who fiddled while America lost its superpower status.
Bush used deceit and hysteria to lead America into a war that is bleeding the US economically, militarily, and diplomatically. The war is being fought with hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from foreigners. The war is bleeding the military of troops and commitments. The war has ended the US claim to moral leadership and exposed the US as a reckless and aggressive power.
Focused on a concocted "war on terrorism," the Bush administration diverted money from the New Orleans levees to Iraq, with the consequence that the US now has a $100 billion rebuild bill on top of the war bill.
The US is so short of troops that neoconservatives are advocating the use of foreign mercenaries paid with US citizenship.
US efforts to isolate Iran have been blocked by Russia and China, nuclear powers that Bush cannot bully.
The Iraqi war has three beneficiaries: (1) al Qaeda, (2) Iran and (3) US war industries and Bush-Cheney cronies who receive no-bid contracts.
Everyone else is a loser.
The war has bestowed on al Qaeda recruits, prestige, and a training ground.
The war has allied Iran with Iraq’s Shi’ite majority.
The war has brought soaring profits to the military industries and the firms with reconstruction contracts at the expense of 20,000 US military casualties and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties.
The Republican Party is a loser, because its hidebound support for the war is isolating the party from public opinion.
The Democratic Party is a loser, because its cowardly acquiescence in a war that is opposed by the majority of its members is making the party irrelevant.
The latest polls show that a majority of Americans believe the US cannot win against the Iraq insurgency. The majority support withdrawal and the redirection of war spending to rebuilding New Orleans. Despite the clarity of the public’s wishes, the Republican Party continues to support the unpopular war.
With the exceptions of Reps. Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers, Democrats fled the scene of the Sept. 24 antiwar rally in Washington DC. The cynical Democrats are apparently owned by the same interest groups that own the Republicans and are refusing the mantle of majority party that the electorate is offering to the party that will end the war.
The Bush administration is churning out red ink in excess of $1 trillion annually. The federal budget deficit is approaching $500 billion. The US trade deficit is approaching $700 billion.
The budget deficit is being financed by foreigners, primarily Asians who now hold enough US government debt to exercise power over US interest rates and the value of the dollar whenever they decide to use the power that Bush has placed in their hands.
The trade deficit is being financed by turning over the ownership of US assets and future income streams to foreigners, making Americans forever poorer from the loss of accumulated wealth.
For the time being, China is willing to accumulate US assets as a way of taking over our consumer markets, attracting US manufacturing industry with cheap labor subsidized by artificial currency values, and gaining our technology. China’s strategy is to over-value the US dollar in order to encourage the transfer of US economic capabilities to China. China’s strategy gives artificial value to the dollar and keeps US interest rates at an artificial low.
The values of US stocks, bonds, and real estate depend on the support that Asians’ economic strategies provide the dollar and US interest rates. As Asia achieves its goal of preeminence in manufacturing, innovation, and product development, the strategy will change. Once China completes its acquisition of US capabilities, it will no longer have a reason to support the dollar.
When the dollar goes, it will affect costs, profits, interest rates and living standards in dramatic ways. Costs and interest rates will soar, and profits, living standards, equity values, bond prices and real estate will plummet.
These unpleasant events await only Asia’s decision to curtail its support for US red ink. That will happen when this support no longer serves Asia’s interest.
When Asia pulls the plug on the dollar, the US government will find that monetary and fiscal policy are powerless to offset the consequences.
Compared to US budget and trade deficits, terrorists are a minor concern. The greatest danger that the US faces is the dollar’s loss of reserve currency role. This would be an impoverishing event, one from which the US would not recover.
An intelligent government sincerely concerned with homeland security would find a way to halt the global labor arbitrage that is stripping the American economy of high value-added jobs and manufacturing capability, thereby causing the US trade deficit to explode. The loss of tax base that results when US companies outsource jobs and relocate production abroad makes it ever more difficult to balance a budget strained by war, natural disasters, and demographic impact on Social Security and Medicare.
Global labor arbitrage is rapidly dismantling the ladders of upward mobility and thereby endangering American political stability. This threat is far greater than any Osama bin Laden can mount.
Time is running out for Republicans and Democrats to escape from the distraction of a pointless war and to focus on the real threats that endanger the United States of America. ¶ 9:15 AM 0 comments links to this post
George W. Bush will go down in history as the president who fiddled while America lost its superpower status.
Bush used deceit and hysteria to lead America into a war that is bleeding the US economically, militarily, and diplomatically. The war is being fought with hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from foreigners. The war is bleeding the military of troops and commitments. The war has ended the US claim to moral leadership and exposed the US as a reckless and aggressive power.
Focused on a concocted "war on terrorism," the Bush administration diverted money from the New Orleans levees to Iraq, with the consequence that the US now has a $100 billion rebuild bill on top of the war bill.
The US is so short of troops that neoconservatives are advocating the use of foreign mercenaries paid with US citizenship.
US efforts to isolate Iran have been blocked by Russia and China, nuclear powers that Bush cannot bully.
The Iraqi war has three beneficiaries: (1) al Qaeda, (2) Iran and (3) US war industries and Bush-Cheney cronies who receive no-bid contracts.
Everyone else is a loser.
The war has bestowed on al Qaeda recruits, prestige, and a training ground.
The war has allied Iran with Iraq’s Shi’ite majority.
The war has brought soaring profits to the military industries and the firms with reconstruction contracts at the expense of 20,000 US military casualties and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties.
The Republican Party is a loser, because its hidebound support for the war is isolating the party from public opinion.
The Democratic Party is a loser, because its cowardly acquiescence in a war that is opposed by the majority of its members is making the party irrelevant.
The latest polls show that a majority of Americans believe the US cannot win against the Iraq insurgency. The majority support withdrawal and the redirection of war spending to rebuilding New Orleans. Despite the clarity of the public’s wishes, the Republican Party continues to support the unpopular war.
With the exceptions of Reps. Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers, Democrats fled the scene of the Sept. 24 antiwar rally in Washington DC. The cynical Democrats are apparently owned by the same interest groups that own the Republicans and are refusing the mantle of majority party that the electorate is offering to the party that will end the war.
The Bush administration is churning out red ink in excess of $1 trillion annually. The federal budget deficit is approaching $500 billion. The US trade deficit is approaching $700 billion.
The budget deficit is being financed by foreigners, primarily Asians who now hold enough US government debt to exercise power over US interest rates and the value of the dollar whenever they decide to use the power that Bush has placed in their hands.
The trade deficit is being financed by turning over the ownership of US assets and future income streams to foreigners, making Americans forever poorer from the loss of accumulated wealth.
For the time being, China is willing to accumulate US assets as a way of taking over our consumer markets, attracting US manufacturing industry with cheap labor subsidized by artificial currency values, and gaining our technology. China’s strategy is to over-value the US dollar in order to encourage the transfer of US economic capabilities to China. China’s strategy gives artificial value to the dollar and keeps US interest rates at an artificial low.
The values of US stocks, bonds, and real estate depend on the support that Asians’ economic strategies provide the dollar and US interest rates. As Asia achieves its goal of preeminence in manufacturing, innovation, and product development, the strategy will change. Once China completes its acquisition of US capabilities, it will no longer have a reason to support the dollar.
When the dollar goes, it will affect costs, profits, interest rates and living standards in dramatic ways. Costs and interest rates will soar, and profits, living standards, equity values, bond prices and real estate will plummet.
These unpleasant events await only Asia’s decision to curtail its support for US red ink. That will happen when this support no longer serves Asia’s interest.
When Asia pulls the plug on the dollar, the US government will find that monetary and fiscal policy are powerless to offset the consequences.
Compared to US budget and trade deficits, terrorists are a minor concern. The greatest danger that the US faces is the dollar’s loss of reserve currency role. This would be an impoverishing event, one from which the US would not recover.
An intelligent government sincerely concerned with homeland security would find a way to halt the global labor arbitrage that is stripping the American economy of high value-added jobs and manufacturing capability, thereby causing the US trade deficit to explode. The loss of tax base that results when US companies outsource jobs and relocate production abroad makes it ever more difficult to balance a budget strained by war, natural disasters, and demographic impact on Social Security and Medicare.
Global labor arbitrage is rapidly dismantling the ladders of upward mobility and thereby endangering American political stability. This threat is far greater than any Osama bin Laden can mount.
Time is running out for Republicans and Democrats to escape from the distraction of a pointless war and to focus on the real threats that endanger the United States of America. ¶ 9:15 AM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Better Than a Black Budget
The Pentagon has no accurate knowledge of the cost of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or the fight against terrorism, limiting Congress's ability to oversee spending, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released yesterday.
The Defense Department has reported spending $191 billion to fight terrorism from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through May 2005, with the annual sum ballooning from $11 billion in fiscal 2002 to a projected $71 billion in fiscal 2005. But the GAO investigation found many inaccuracies totaling billions of dollars.
"Neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing and details of how appropriated funds are being spent," the report to Congress stated. The GAO said the problem is rooted in long-standing weaknesses in the Pentagon's outmoded financial management system, which is designed to handle small-scale contingencies.
The report said the Pentagon overstated the cost of mobilized Army reservists in fiscal 2004 by as much as $2.1 billion. Because the Army lacked a reliable process to identify the military personnel costs, it plugged in numbers to match the available budget, the report stated. "Effectively, the Army was reporting back to Congress exactly what it had appropriated," the report said.
The probe also found "inadvertent double accounting" by the Navy and Marine Corps from November 2004 to April 2005 amounting to almost $1.8 billion...
More here in the GAO report, thanks to Defense Tech and Intel Dump.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. ¶ 9:21 PM 1 comments links to this post
The Defense Department has reported spending $191 billion to fight terrorism from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks through May 2005, with the annual sum ballooning from $11 billion in fiscal 2002 to a projected $71 billion in fiscal 2005. But the GAO investigation found many inaccuracies totaling billions of dollars.
"Neither DOD nor Congress can reliably know how much the war is costing and details of how appropriated funds are being spent," the report to Congress stated. The GAO said the problem is rooted in long-standing weaknesses in the Pentagon's outmoded financial management system, which is designed to handle small-scale contingencies.
The report said the Pentagon overstated the cost of mobilized Army reservists in fiscal 2004 by as much as $2.1 billion. Because the Army lacked a reliable process to identify the military personnel costs, it plugged in numbers to match the available budget, the report stated. "Effectively, the Army was reporting back to Congress exactly what it had appropriated," the report said.
The probe also found "inadvertent double accounting" by the Navy and Marine Corps from November 2004 to April 2005 amounting to almost $1.8 billion...
More here in the GAO report, thanks to Defense Tech and Intel Dump.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. ¶ 9:21 PM 1 comments links to this post
Disappointment in Desolation Alley
Cindy Sheenan, today:
Last weekend, Karl Rove said that I was a clown and the anti-war movement was "non-existent." I wonder if the hundreds of thousands of people who showed up today to protest this war and George's failed policies know that they don't exist. It is also so incredible to me that Karl thinks that he can wish us away by saying we aren't real. Well, Karl and Co., we are real, we do exist and we are not going away until this illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq is over and you are sent back to the depths of whatever slimy, dark, and loathsome place you came from. I may be a clown, Karl, but you are about to be indicted. You also preside over one of the biggest three-ring, malevolent circuses of all time: the Bush administration.
The rally today was overwhelming and powerful. The reports that I was arrested today were obviously false. The peace rally was mostly very peaceful. Washington, DC was filled with energetic and proud Americans who came from all over to raise their voices in unison against the criminals who run our government and their disastrous policies that are making our nation more vulnerable to all kinds of attacks (natural and "Bush"-made disasters)...
And yesterday? Peaceful, and despite the non-coverage from CNN, massive. The New York Pravda put it this way in a short notice:
Vast numbers of protesters from around the country poured onto the lawns behind the White House on Saturday to demonstrate their opposition to the war in Iraq, pointedly directing their anger at President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
A sea of anti-administration signs and banners flashed back at a long succession of speakers, who sharply rebuked the administration for continuing a war that has cost the lives of nearly 2,000 Americans and many more Iraqis. Many of the speakers also charged Mr. Bush with squandering resources that could have been used to aid people affected by the two hurricanes that slammed into the Gulf Coast.
As protesters moved from the rally to a march around the White House, they packed city streets, and in some areas, came face to face with groups of pro-administration demonstrators, who held up signs expressing support for the war.
Organizers of the rally and march had a permit for 100,000 people, but the National Park Service no longer provides official estimates for large gatherings in Washington.
Rallies held on Saturday in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and other cities drew considerably smaller crowds, but unlike the more varied themes of recent protests against administration policies, antiwar sentiment on Saturday was consistent throughout. In Washington, it was evident from the start, as an organizer screamed over the microphone, "Let Bush and Cheney and the White House hear our message: Bring the troops home now."
Mr. Bush was in Colorado and Texas monitoring hurricane developments, and Mr. Cheney was undergoing surgery at George Washington University hospital... As Karl Rove cowered in the Dakotas somewhere.
Rummy is all dressed up to exploit the protesters with Granite Shadow, but this time around the antiwar movement is too smart to engage in violence. This administration wants violence, and we all realize you never fight your opponent on their terms.
All in all, this war's been tougher than the neoclowns expected. They went to the trouble to make heroin the number one export of Afghanistan, and pumped up methamphetamine to the status of the poor's drug of choice. Cocaine is easier than ever to get with the Columbian cartels back on board with The Company.
The only problem is, the most likely people to use these drugs are the very people Cheneyburton can't afford to lose: poor, uneducated white folks, generally in the South, and generally strong supporters of Dear Leader and the War on Terra.
Like I said. This time around, the antiwar movement is deadly serious. We learned. We're armed with the Powell Doctrine, which Cheneyburton discarded:
Never Fight a Battle You Can't Win.
Never, Ever, Let Your Enemy Pick the Battlefield. ¶ 12:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Last weekend, Karl Rove said that I was a clown and the anti-war movement was "non-existent." I wonder if the hundreds of thousands of people who showed up today to protest this war and George's failed policies know that they don't exist. It is also so incredible to me that Karl thinks that he can wish us away by saying we aren't real. Well, Karl and Co., we are real, we do exist and we are not going away until this illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq is over and you are sent back to the depths of whatever slimy, dark, and loathsome place you came from. I may be a clown, Karl, but you are about to be indicted. You also preside over one of the biggest three-ring, malevolent circuses of all time: the Bush administration.
The rally today was overwhelming and powerful. The reports that I was arrested today were obviously false. The peace rally was mostly very peaceful. Washington, DC was filled with energetic and proud Americans who came from all over to raise their voices in unison against the criminals who run our government and their disastrous policies that are making our nation more vulnerable to all kinds of attacks (natural and "Bush"-made disasters)...
And yesterday? Peaceful, and despite the non-coverage from CNN, massive. The New York Pravda put it this way in a short notice:
Vast numbers of protesters from around the country poured onto the lawns behind the White House on Saturday to demonstrate their opposition to the war in Iraq, pointedly directing their anger at President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
A sea of anti-administration signs and banners flashed back at a long succession of speakers, who sharply rebuked the administration for continuing a war that has cost the lives of nearly 2,000 Americans and many more Iraqis. Many of the speakers also charged Mr. Bush with squandering resources that could have been used to aid people affected by the two hurricanes that slammed into the Gulf Coast.
As protesters moved from the rally to a march around the White House, they packed city streets, and in some areas, came face to face with groups of pro-administration demonstrators, who held up signs expressing support for the war.
Organizers of the rally and march had a permit for 100,000 people, but the National Park Service no longer provides official estimates for large gatherings in Washington.
Rallies held on Saturday in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and other cities drew considerably smaller crowds, but unlike the more varied themes of recent protests against administration policies, antiwar sentiment on Saturday was consistent throughout. In Washington, it was evident from the start, as an organizer screamed over the microphone, "Let Bush and Cheney and the White House hear our message: Bring the troops home now."
Mr. Bush was in Colorado and Texas monitoring hurricane developments, and Mr. Cheney was undergoing surgery at George Washington University hospital... As Karl Rove cowered in the Dakotas somewhere.
Rummy is all dressed up to exploit the protesters with Granite Shadow, but this time around the antiwar movement is too smart to engage in violence. This administration wants violence, and we all realize you never fight your opponent on their terms.
All in all, this war's been tougher than the neoclowns expected. They went to the trouble to make heroin the number one export of Afghanistan, and pumped up methamphetamine to the status of the poor's drug of choice. Cocaine is easier than ever to get with the Columbian cartels back on board with The Company.
The only problem is, the most likely people to use these drugs are the very people Cheneyburton can't afford to lose: poor, uneducated white folks, generally in the South, and generally strong supporters of Dear Leader and the War on Terra.
Like I said. This time around, the antiwar movement is deadly serious. We learned. We're armed with the Powell Doctrine, which Cheneyburton discarded:
Never Fight a Battle You Can't Win.
Never, Ever, Let Your Enemy Pick the Battlefield. ¶ 12:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Warming Trend
Posted from the The Independent, from Steve Connor:
A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.
The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.
Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average.
Experts believe that such a loss of Arctic sea ice in summer has not occurred in hundreds and possibly thousands of years. It is the fourth year in a row that the sea ice in August has fallen below the monthly downward trend - a clear sign that melting has accelerated.
Scientists are now preparing to report a record loss of Arctic sea ice for September, when the surface area covered by the ice traditionally reaches its minimum extent at the end of the summer melting period.
Sea ice naturally melts in summer and reforms in winter but for the first time on record this annual rebound did not occur last winter when the ice of the Arctic failed to recover significantly.
Arctic specialists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University, who have documented the gradual loss of polar sea ice since 1978, believe that a more dramatic melt began about four years ago.
In September 2002 the sea ice coverage of the Arctic reached its lowest level in recorded history. Such lows have normally been followed the next year by a rebound to more normal levels, but this did not occur in the summers of either 2003 or 2004. This summer has been even worse. The surface area covered by sea ice was at a record monthly minimum for each of the summer months - June, July and now August.
Scientists analysing the latest satellite data for September - the traditional minimum extent for each summer - are preparing to announce a significant shift in the stability of the Arctic sea ice, the northern hemisphere's major "heat sink" that moderates climatic extremes.
"The changes we've seen in the Arctic over the past few decades are nothing short of remarkable," said Mark Serreze, one of the scientists at the Snow and Ice Data Centre who monitor Arctic sea ice.
Scientists at the data centre are bracing themselves for the 2005 annual minimum, which is expected to be reached in mid-September, when another record loss is forecast. A major announcement is scheduled for 20 September. "It looks like we're going to exceed it or be real close one way or the other. It is probably going to be at least as comparable to September 2002," Dr. Serreze said.
"This will be four Septembers in a row that we've seen a downward trend. The feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover."
The extent of the sea ice in September is the most valuable indicator of its health. This year's record melt means that more of the long-term ice formed over many winters - so called multi-year ice - has disappeared than at any time in recorded history.
Sea ice floats on the surface of the Arctic Ocean and its neighbouring seas and normally covers an area of some 7 million square kilometres (2.4 million square miles) during September - about the size of Australia. However, in September 2002, this dwindled to about 2 million square miles - 16 per cent below average.
Sea ice data for August closely mirrors that for September and last month's record low - 18.2 per cent below the monthly average - strongly suggests that this September will see the smallest coverage of Arctic sea ice ever recorded.
As more and more sea ice is lost during the summer, greater expanses of open ocean are exposed to the sun which increases the rate at which heat is absorbed in the Arctic region, Dr. Serreze said.
Sea ice reflects up to 80 per cent of sunlight hitting it but this "albedo effect" is mostly lost when the sea is uncovered. "We've exposed all this dark ocean to the sun's heat so that the overall heat content increases," he explained.
Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.
"When the ice becomes so thin it breaks up mechanically rather than thermodynamically. So these predictions may well be on the over-optimistic side," he said.
As the sea ice melts, and more of the sun's energy is absorbed by the exposed ocean, a positive feedback is created leading to the loss of yet more ice, Professor Wadhams said.
"If anything we may be underestimating the dangers. The computer models may not take into account collaborative positive feedback," he said.
Sea ice keeps a cap on frigid water, keeping it cold and protecting it from heating up. Losing the sea ice of the Arctic is likely to have major repercussions for the climate, he said. "There could be dramatic changes to the climate of the northern region due to the creation of a vast expanse of open water where there was once effectively land," Professor Wadhams said. "You're essentially changing land into ocean and the creation of a huge area of open ocean where there was once land will have a very big impact on other climate parameters," he said.
Much of the data concerning the retreat of artic ice is summarized here in a "State of the Cryosphere". The extent of sea ice is covered in maps and the rate of change with time is graphically covered here. No wonder the Company is so eager to cut funding for the NOAA, data like these reveal the damage unequivocally. ¶ 6:38 AM 0 comments links to this post
A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.
The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.
Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average.
Experts believe that such a loss of Arctic sea ice in summer has not occurred in hundreds and possibly thousands of years. It is the fourth year in a row that the sea ice in August has fallen below the monthly downward trend - a clear sign that melting has accelerated.
Scientists are now preparing to report a record loss of Arctic sea ice for September, when the surface area covered by the ice traditionally reaches its minimum extent at the end of the summer melting period.
Sea ice naturally melts in summer and reforms in winter but for the first time on record this annual rebound did not occur last winter when the ice of the Arctic failed to recover significantly.
Arctic specialists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University, who have documented the gradual loss of polar sea ice since 1978, believe that a more dramatic melt began about four years ago.
In September 2002 the sea ice coverage of the Arctic reached its lowest level in recorded history. Such lows have normally been followed the next year by a rebound to more normal levels, but this did not occur in the summers of either 2003 or 2004. This summer has been even worse. The surface area covered by sea ice was at a record monthly minimum for each of the summer months - June, July and now August.
Scientists analysing the latest satellite data for September - the traditional minimum extent for each summer - are preparing to announce a significant shift in the stability of the Arctic sea ice, the northern hemisphere's major "heat sink" that moderates climatic extremes.
"The changes we've seen in the Arctic over the past few decades are nothing short of remarkable," said Mark Serreze, one of the scientists at the Snow and Ice Data Centre who monitor Arctic sea ice.
Scientists at the data centre are bracing themselves for the 2005 annual minimum, which is expected to be reached in mid-September, when another record loss is forecast. A major announcement is scheduled for 20 September. "It looks like we're going to exceed it or be real close one way or the other. It is probably going to be at least as comparable to September 2002," Dr. Serreze said.
"This will be four Septembers in a row that we've seen a downward trend. The feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover."
The extent of the sea ice in September is the most valuable indicator of its health. This year's record melt means that more of the long-term ice formed over many winters - so called multi-year ice - has disappeared than at any time in recorded history.
Sea ice floats on the surface of the Arctic Ocean and its neighbouring seas and normally covers an area of some 7 million square kilometres (2.4 million square miles) during September - about the size of Australia. However, in September 2002, this dwindled to about 2 million square miles - 16 per cent below average.
Sea ice data for August closely mirrors that for September and last month's record low - 18.2 per cent below the monthly average - strongly suggests that this September will see the smallest coverage of Arctic sea ice ever recorded.
As more and more sea ice is lost during the summer, greater expanses of open ocean are exposed to the sun which increases the rate at which heat is absorbed in the Arctic region, Dr. Serreze said.
Sea ice reflects up to 80 per cent of sunlight hitting it but this "albedo effect" is mostly lost when the sea is uncovered. "We've exposed all this dark ocean to the sun's heat so that the overall heat content increases," he explained.
Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.
"When the ice becomes so thin it breaks up mechanically rather than thermodynamically. So these predictions may well be on the over-optimistic side," he said.
As the sea ice melts, and more of the sun's energy is absorbed by the exposed ocean, a positive feedback is created leading to the loss of yet more ice, Professor Wadhams said.
"If anything we may be underestimating the dangers. The computer models may not take into account collaborative positive feedback," he said.
Sea ice keeps a cap on frigid water, keeping it cold and protecting it from heating up. Losing the sea ice of the Arctic is likely to have major repercussions for the climate, he said. "There could be dramatic changes to the climate of the northern region due to the creation of a vast expanse of open water where there was once effectively land," Professor Wadhams said. "You're essentially changing land into ocean and the creation of a huge area of open ocean where there was once land will have a very big impact on other climate parameters," he said.
Much of the data concerning the retreat of artic ice is summarized here in a "State of the Cryosphere". The extent of sea ice is covered in maps and the rate of change with time is graphically covered here. No wonder the Company is so eager to cut funding for the NOAA, data like these reveal the damage unequivocally. ¶ 6:38 AM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, September 23, 2005
Wormsign
About the time of my previous post, leveymg at Kos noticed there are some funny things happening in D.C. this weekend.
The New York Pravda has removed the link Kos cited saying that Dear Leader is planning on spending quality time with Jim Beam under a mountain in Colorado this weekend. But the one I cited is still up. Less traffic from here, I guess.
Kos tells us that there is a planned domestic terror exercise in Washington this weekend. They caught this a couple of days ago at Defense Tech:
"Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a... Top Secret and compartmented [exercise of] the military’s extra-legal [response to] weapons of mass destruction," writes William Arkin, on his extremely awesome new blog, Early Warning. "It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.
That classified plan, I believe, after extensive research and after making a couple of assumptions, is CONPLAN 0400, formally titled Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. [It's] a long-standing contingency plan of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) that... lays out national policy and priorities for dealing with WMD threats in peacetime and crisis -- from far away offensive strikes and special operations against foreign WMD infrastructure and capabilities, to missile defenses and "consequence management" at home if offensive efforts fail...
U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the military's new homeland security command, is preparing its draft version of CONPLAN 0400 for military operations in the United States, and the resulting Granite Shadow plan... include[s] deployment of "special mission units" (the so-called Delta Force, SEAL teams, Rangers, and other special units of Joint Special Operations Command) in Washington, DC and other domestic hot spots...
Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.
In The Coming Wars, Seymour Hersch quoted an intelligence source in the Pentagon as saying:
“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.”
No mattress mice in the Granite Shadow... ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments links to this post
The New York Pravda has removed the link Kos cited saying that Dear Leader is planning on spending quality time with Jim Beam under a mountain in Colorado this weekend. But the one I cited is still up. Less traffic from here, I guess.
Kos tells us that there is a planned domestic terror exercise in Washington this weekend. They caught this a couple of days ago at Defense Tech:
"Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a... Top Secret and compartmented [exercise of] the military’s extra-legal [response to] weapons of mass destruction," writes William Arkin, on his extremely awesome new blog, Early Warning. "It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.
That classified plan, I believe, after extensive research and after making a couple of assumptions, is CONPLAN 0400, formally titled Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. [It's] a long-standing contingency plan of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) that... lays out national policy and priorities for dealing with WMD threats in peacetime and crisis -- from far away offensive strikes and special operations against foreign WMD infrastructure and capabilities, to missile defenses and "consequence management" at home if offensive efforts fail...
U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the military's new homeland security command, is preparing its draft version of CONPLAN 0400 for military operations in the United States, and the resulting Granite Shadow plan... include[s] deployment of "special mission units" (the so-called Delta Force, SEAL teams, Rangers, and other special units of Joint Special Operations Command) in Washington, DC and other domestic hot spots...
Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.
In The Coming Wars, Seymour Hersch quoted an intelligence source in the Pentagon as saying:
“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.”
No mattress mice in the Granite Shadow... ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments links to this post
In Control
The Washington Post jumps the gun in praising the way Dear Leader's New and Improved FEMA has the Rita-cane firmly under control (link thanks, Atrios).
Meanwhile, outside of Houston, 5 million people are stuck in a 100-mile long traffic jam extending beyond Dallas.
Exploding buses of evacuees in the Dallas 'burbs.
But Dear Leader's on his way- woops, nope, he heard it might get unpredictable. So he's hiding from the antiwar rally this weekend under a mountain in Colorado instead.
I wonder why? Time for another Operation Northwoods in D.C., probably. The 9/11 effect has worn off, and nobody even showed up for Rummy's spiffy Contry Music fest a couple of weeks ago. ¶ 4:25 PM 0 comments links to this post
Meanwhile, outside of Houston, 5 million people are stuck in a 100-mile long traffic jam extending beyond Dallas.
Exploding buses of evacuees in the Dallas 'burbs.
But Dear Leader's on his way- woops, nope, he heard it might get unpredictable. So he's hiding from the antiwar rally this weekend under a mountain in Colorado instead.
I wonder why? Time for another Operation Northwoods in D.C., probably. The 9/11 effect has worn off, and nobody even showed up for Rummy's spiffy Contry Music fest a couple of weeks ago. ¶ 4:25 PM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, September 22, 2005
On the Nature of Evil
What is Evil? Submitted for your approval:
"I was looking over the list of budget cuts proposed by House Republicans to save the president's tax cuts. And the big thing that sticks out is just how much comes out of Medicare. But a bit down further into the document which they put out there's a $1.8 billion annual cut in funding for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). That's great thinking, seeing as though we don't need to worry about Avian Flu from South Asia or other contagious diseases any more."
-- Josh Marshall
What is Evil? Willful stupidity. Intentional ignorance. The Bush Administration. ¶ 10:39 PM 0 comments links to this post
"I was looking over the list of budget cuts proposed by House Republicans to save the president's tax cuts. And the big thing that sticks out is just how much comes out of Medicare. But a bit down further into the document which they put out there's a $1.8 billion annual cut in funding for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). That's great thinking, seeing as though we don't need to worry about Avian Flu from South Asia or other contagious diseases any more."
-- Josh Marshall
What is Evil? Willful stupidity. Intentional ignorance. The Bush Administration. ¶ 10:39 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tight Allies
President Bush decided Wednesday to waive any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Washington's closest Arab ally in the war on terrorism, for failing to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers.
In June, the State Department listed 14 countries as failing to adequately address trafficking problems, subjecting them all to possible sanctions if they did not crack down.
Of those 14, Bush concluded that Bolivia, Jamaica, Qatar, Sudan, Togo and the United Arab Emirates had made enough improvements to avoid any cut in U.S. aid or, in the case of countries that get no American financial assistance, the barring of their officials from cultural and educational events, said Darla Jordan, a State Department spokeswoman.
Cambodia and Venezuela were not considered to have made similar adequate improvements. But Bush cleared them nonetheless to receive limited assistance, for such things as combatting trafficking. In the case of Venezuela — which has had a tense relationship with the United States under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez, one of Latin America's most outspoken critics of U.S. foreign policy — Bush also allowed funding for strengthening the political party system and supporting electoral observation.
In addition to Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and Kuwait — another U.S. ally in the Middle East — were given a complete pass on any sanctions, Jordan said. Despite periodic differences, oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United States have a tight alliance built on economic and military cooperation.
That left Myanmar, Cuba and North Korea as the only nations in the list of 14 barred completely from receiving certain kinds of foreign aid. The act does not include cutting off trade assistance or humanitarian aid, Jordan said.
The White House statement offered no explanation of why countries were regarded differently. Jordan also could not provide one.
As many as 800,000 people are bought and sold across national borders annually or lured to other countries with false promises of work or other benefits, according to the State Department. Most are women and children. ¶ 1:26 PM 0 comments links to this post
In June, the State Department listed 14 countries as failing to adequately address trafficking problems, subjecting them all to possible sanctions if they did not crack down.
Of those 14, Bush concluded that Bolivia, Jamaica, Qatar, Sudan, Togo and the United Arab Emirates had made enough improvements to avoid any cut in U.S. aid or, in the case of countries that get no American financial assistance, the barring of their officials from cultural and educational events, said Darla Jordan, a State Department spokeswoman.
Cambodia and Venezuela were not considered to have made similar adequate improvements. But Bush cleared them nonetheless to receive limited assistance, for such things as combatting trafficking. In the case of Venezuela — which has had a tense relationship with the United States under the leadership of President Hugo Chavez, one of Latin America's most outspoken critics of U.S. foreign policy — Bush also allowed funding for strengthening the political party system and supporting electoral observation.
In addition to Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and Kuwait — another U.S. ally in the Middle East — were given a complete pass on any sanctions, Jordan said. Despite periodic differences, oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United States have a tight alliance built on economic and military cooperation.
That left Myanmar, Cuba and North Korea as the only nations in the list of 14 barred completely from receiving certain kinds of foreign aid. The act does not include cutting off trade assistance or humanitarian aid, Jordan said.
The White House statement offered no explanation of why countries were regarded differently. Jordan also could not provide one.
As many as 800,000 people are bought and sold across national borders annually or lured to other countries with false promises of work or other benefits, according to the State Department. Most are women and children. ¶ 1:26 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Deja Vu All Over Again
jesselee at the DCCC Weblog detects a pattern.
I'd say it's about time somebody did.
Thanks to Atrios for the link. ¶ 11:18 PM 0 comments links to this post
I'd say it's about time somebody did.
Thanks to Atrios for the link. ¶ 11:18 PM 0 comments links to this post
Stormy Weather, Again
Today Rita got her wings, and was upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane, with her sights set on Galveston, Houston, and whatever oil rigs are left in the Gulf of Mexico.
Nobody needed this, but since it's the second once-in-a-lifetime storm to hit the Gulf in the last 3 weeks, and the second year running with record numbers of tropical storms, it's only fair to ask, "what's going on here"?
Perhaps this is best described by the technical literature (Science, Vol 309, Issue 5742, 1844-1846 , 16 September 2005):
Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment
P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, H.-R. Chang
During the hurricane season of 2004, there were 14 named storms in the North Atlantic, of which 9 achieved hurricane intensity. Four of these hurricanes struck the southeast United States in rapid succession, causing considerable damage and disruption. Analysis of hurricane characteristics in the North Atlantic (1, 2) has shown an increase in hurricane frequency and intensity since 1995. Recently, a causal relationship between increasing hurricane frequency and intensity and increasing sea surface temperature (SST) has been posited (3), assuming an acceleration of the hydrological cycle arising from the nonlinear relation between saturation vapor pressure and temperature (4). The issue of attribution of increased hurricane frequency to increasing SST has resulted in a vigorous debate in the press and in academic circles (5).
Numerous studies have addressed the issue of changes in the global frequency and intensity of hurricanes in the warming world. Our basic conceptual understanding of hurricanes suggests that there could be a relationship between hurricane activity and SST. It is well established that SST > 26°C is a requirement for tropical cyclone formation in the current climate (6, 7). There is also a hypothesized relationship between SST and the maximum potential hurricane intensity (8, 9). However, strong interannual variability in hurricane statistics (10-14) and the possible influence of interannual variability associated with El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation (11, 12) make it difficult to discern any trend relative to background SST increases with statistical veracity (8). Factors other than SST have been cited for their role in regulating hurricane characteristics, including vertical shear and mid-tropospheric moisture (15). Global modeling results for doubled CO2 scenarios are contradictory (15-20), with simulations showing a lack of consistency in projecting an increase or decrease in the total number of hurricanes, although most simulations project an increase in hurricane intensity.
Tropical ocean SSTs increased by approximately 0.5°C between 1970 and 2004 (21)... Here we examine the variations in hurricane characteristics for each ocean basin in the context of the basin SST variations. To this end, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of global tropical cyclone statistics for the satellite era (1970–2004). In each tropical ocean basin, we examined the numbers of tropical storms and hurricanes, the number of storm days, and the hurricane intensity distribution. The tropical cyclone data are derived from the best track archives of the Joint Typhoon Warning Center and of international warning centers, including special compilations and quality control (22).
...Tropical cyclonic systems attaining surface wind speeds between 18 and 33 m s–1 are referred to as tropical storms. Although storms of intensity >33 m s–1 have different regional names, we will refer to these storms as hurricanes for simplicity. Hurricanes in categories 1 to 5, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale (23), are defined as storms with wind speeds of 33 to 43 m s–1, 43 to 50 m s–1, 50 to 56 m s–1, 56 to 67 m s–1, and >67 m s–1, respectively. We define the ocean basins that support tropical cyclone development as follows: North Atlantic (90° to 20°W, 5° to 25°N), western North Pacific (120° to 180°E, 5° to 20°N), eastern North Pacific (90° to 120°W, 5° to 20°N), South Indian (50° to 115°E, 5°-20°S), North Indian (55° to 90°E, 5°-20°N), and Southwest Pacific (155° to 180°E, 5° to 20°S). Within these basins, total tropical storm days are defined as the total number of days of systems that only reached tropical storm intensity. Total hurricane days refer to systems that attained hurricane status, including the period when a system was at tropical storm intensity. Total tropical cyclone number or days refers to the sum of the statistics for both tropical storms and hurricanes.
...hurricanes in the strongest categories (4 + 5) have almost doubled in number (50 per pentad in the 1970s to near 90 per pentad during the past decade) and in proportion (from around 20% to around 35% during the same period). These changes occur in all of the ocean basins. A summary of the number and percent of storms by category is given in Table 1, binned for the years 1975–1989 and 1990–2004. This increase in category 4 and 5 hurricanes has not been accompanied by an increase in the actual intensity of the most intense hurricanes: The maximum intensity has remained remarkably static over the past 35 years...
Table 1. Change in the number and percentage of hurricanes in categories 4 and 5 for the 15-year periods 1975–1989 and 1990–2004 for the different ocean basins.
............................................Period
Basin...................1975–1989............................1990–2004
........................Number.......Percentage..............Number........Percentage
East Pacific Ocean......36...........25......................49............35
West Pacific Ocean......85...........25......................116...........41
North Atlantic..........16...........20......................25............25
Southwestern Pacific....10...........12......................22............28
North Indian............1............8.......................7.............25
South Indian............23...........18......................50............34
...There is evidence of a minimum of intense cyclones occurring in the 1970s (11), which could indicate that our observed trend toward more intense cyclones is a reflection of a long-period oscillation. However, the sustained increase over a period of 30 years in the proportion of category 4 and 5 hurricanes indicates that the related oscillation would have to be on a period substantially longer than that observed in previous studies.
We conclude that global data indicate a 30-year trend toward more frequent and intense hurricanes, corroborated by the results of the recent regional assessment (29). This trend is not inconsistent with recent climate model simulations that a doubling of CO2 may increase the frequency of the most intense cyclones (18, 30), although attribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state.
References and Notes
1. S. B. Goldenberg, C. W. Landsea, A. M. Maestas-Nunez, W. M. Gray, Science 293, 474 (2001).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
2. J. B. Elsner, B. Kocher, Geophys. Res. Lett. 27, 129 (2000).[CrossRef][ISI]
3. K. E. Trenberth, Science 308, 1753 (2005).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
4. K. E. Trenberth et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 1205 (2003).[CrossRef][ISI]
5. R. A. Pielke Jr. et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., in press (available at http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resourse-1762-hurricanes%20and_global_warming.pdf).
6. J. Lighthill et al., Bull. Am. Meterol. Soc. 75, 2147 (1994).
7. W. M. Gray, Mon. Weather Rev. 96, 669 (1968).[ISI]
8. K. A. Emanuel, Nature 326, 483 (1987).[CrossRef][ISI]
9. G. J. Holland, J. Atmos. Sci. 54, 2519 (1997).[CrossRef][ISI]
10. M. A. Lander, C. P. Guard, Mon. Weather Rev. 126, 1163 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
11. C. W. Landsea, R. A. Pielke Jr., A. M. Maestas-Nunez, J. A. Knaff, Clim. Change 42, 89 (1999).[CrossRef][ISI]
12. J. C. L. Chan, K. S. Liu, J. Clim. 17, 4590 (2004).[CrossRef][ISI]
13. W. M. Gray, Mon. Weather Rev. 112, 1649 (1984).[CrossRef][ISI]
14. C. K. Folland, D. E. Parker, A. Colman, R. Washington, in Beyond El Nino: Decadal and Interdecadal Climate Variability, A. Navarra, Ed. (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1999), pp. 73-102.
15. L. J. Shapiro, S. B. Goldenberg, J. Clim. 11, 578 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
16. H. G. Houghton et al., Climate Change—2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
17. A. Henderson-Sellers et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 79, 19 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
18. T. R. Knutson, R. E. Tuleya, J. Clim. 17, 3477 (2004).[CrossRef][ISI]
19. J. F. Royer, F. Chauvin, B. Timbal, P. Araspin, D. Grimal, Clim. Dyn. 38, 307 (1998).[CrossRef]
20. M. Sugi, A. Noda, N. Sato, J. Meteorol. Soc. Jpn. 80, 249 (2002).[CrossRef]
21. P. Agudelo, J. A. Curry, Geophys. Res. Lett. 31, Art. No. L22207 (2004).
22. C. J. Neumann, in Global Guide to Tropical Cyclone Forecasting, G. J. Holland, Ed. (WMO/TD-560, World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 1993), chap. 1.
23. See www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/lib/laescae.html for a description of the Saffir-Simpson scale.
24. R. M. Hirsche, J. R. Slack, R. Smith, Water Resource Res. 18, 107 (1982).[ISI]
25. V. F. Dvorak, Mon. Weather Rev. 103, 420 (1975).[CrossRef][ISI]
26. C. S. Velden, T. L. Olander, R. M. Zehr, Weather and Forecasting 13, 172 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
27. J. P. Kossin, C. S. Velden, Mon. Weather Rev. 132, 165 (2004).[CrossRef][ISI]
28. G. J. Holland, Aust. Meteorol. Mag. 29, 169 (1981).
29. K. Emanuel, Nature 436, 686 (2005).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline]
30. See www.prime-intl.co.jp/kyosei-2nd/PDF/24/11_murakami.pdf.
31. This research was supported by the Climate Dynamics Division of NSF under award NSF-ATM 0328842 and by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is funded by NSF.
People, I'd get an umbrella, at least. A life jacket might be useful occasionally, too. Not to mention a government that paid attention to what its' scientists were trying to tell it. ¶ 10:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
Nobody needed this, but since it's the second once-in-a-lifetime storm to hit the Gulf in the last 3 weeks, and the second year running with record numbers of tropical storms, it's only fair to ask, "what's going on here"?
Perhaps this is best described by the technical literature (Science, Vol 309, Issue 5742, 1844-1846 , 16 September 2005):
Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment
P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, H.-R. Chang
During the hurricane season of 2004, there were 14 named storms in the North Atlantic, of which 9 achieved hurricane intensity. Four of these hurricanes struck the southeast United States in rapid succession, causing considerable damage and disruption. Analysis of hurricane characteristics in the North Atlantic (1, 2) has shown an increase in hurricane frequency and intensity since 1995. Recently, a causal relationship between increasing hurricane frequency and intensity and increasing sea surface temperature (SST) has been posited (3), assuming an acceleration of the hydrological cycle arising from the nonlinear relation between saturation vapor pressure and temperature (4). The issue of attribution of increased hurricane frequency to increasing SST has resulted in a vigorous debate in the press and in academic circles (5).
Numerous studies have addressed the issue of changes in the global frequency and intensity of hurricanes in the warming world. Our basic conceptual understanding of hurricanes suggests that there could be a relationship between hurricane activity and SST. It is well established that SST > 26°C is a requirement for tropical cyclone formation in the current climate (6, 7). There is also a hypothesized relationship between SST and the maximum potential hurricane intensity (8, 9). However, strong interannual variability in hurricane statistics (10-14) and the possible influence of interannual variability associated with El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation (11, 12) make it difficult to discern any trend relative to background SST increases with statistical veracity (8). Factors other than SST have been cited for their role in regulating hurricane characteristics, including vertical shear and mid-tropospheric moisture (15). Global modeling results for doubled CO2 scenarios are contradictory (15-20), with simulations showing a lack of consistency in projecting an increase or decrease in the total number of hurricanes, although most simulations project an increase in hurricane intensity.
Tropical ocean SSTs increased by approximately 0.5°C between 1970 and 2004 (21)... Here we examine the variations in hurricane characteristics for each ocean basin in the context of the basin SST variations. To this end, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of global tropical cyclone statistics for the satellite era (1970–2004). In each tropical ocean basin, we examined the numbers of tropical storms and hurricanes, the number of storm days, and the hurricane intensity distribution. The tropical cyclone data are derived from the best track archives of the Joint Typhoon Warning Center and of international warning centers, including special compilations and quality control (22).
...Tropical cyclonic systems attaining surface wind speeds between 18 and 33 m s–1 are referred to as tropical storms. Although storms of intensity >33 m s–1 have different regional names, we will refer to these storms as hurricanes for simplicity. Hurricanes in categories 1 to 5, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale (23), are defined as storms with wind speeds of 33 to 43 m s–1, 43 to 50 m s–1, 50 to 56 m s–1, 56 to 67 m s–1, and >67 m s–1, respectively. We define the ocean basins that support tropical cyclone development as follows: North Atlantic (90° to 20°W, 5° to 25°N), western North Pacific (120° to 180°E, 5° to 20°N), eastern North Pacific (90° to 120°W, 5° to 20°N), South Indian (50° to 115°E, 5°-20°S), North Indian (55° to 90°E, 5°-20°N), and Southwest Pacific (155° to 180°E, 5° to 20°S). Within these basins, total tropical storm days are defined as the total number of days of systems that only reached tropical storm intensity. Total hurricane days refer to systems that attained hurricane status, including the period when a system was at tropical storm intensity. Total tropical cyclone number or days refers to the sum of the statistics for both tropical storms and hurricanes.
...hurricanes in the strongest categories (4 + 5) have almost doubled in number (50 per pentad in the 1970s to near 90 per pentad during the past decade) and in proportion (from around 20% to around 35% during the same period). These changes occur in all of the ocean basins. A summary of the number and percent of storms by category is given in Table 1, binned for the years 1975–1989 and 1990–2004. This increase in category 4 and 5 hurricanes has not been accompanied by an increase in the actual intensity of the most intense hurricanes: The maximum intensity has remained remarkably static over the past 35 years...
Table 1. Change in the number and percentage of hurricanes in categories 4 and 5 for the 15-year periods 1975–1989 and 1990–2004 for the different ocean basins.
............................................Period
Basin...................1975–1989............................1990–2004
........................Number.......Percentage..............Number........Percentage
East Pacific Ocean......36...........25......................49............35
West Pacific Ocean......85...........25......................116...........41
North Atlantic..........16...........20......................25............25
Southwestern Pacific....10...........12......................22............28
North Indian............1............8.......................7.............25
South Indian............23...........18......................50............34
...There is evidence of a minimum of intense cyclones occurring in the 1970s (11), which could indicate that our observed trend toward more intense cyclones is a reflection of a long-period oscillation. However, the sustained increase over a period of 30 years in the proportion of category 4 and 5 hurricanes indicates that the related oscillation would have to be on a period substantially longer than that observed in previous studies.
We conclude that global data indicate a 30-year trend toward more frequent and intense hurricanes, corroborated by the results of the recent regional assessment (29). This trend is not inconsistent with recent climate model simulations that a doubling of CO2 may increase the frequency of the most intense cyclones (18, 30), although attribution of the 30-year trends to global warming would require a longer global data record and, especially, a deeper understanding of the role of hurricanes in the general circulation of the atmosphere and ocean, even in the present climate state.
References and Notes
1. S. B. Goldenberg, C. W. Landsea, A. M. Maestas-Nunez, W. M. Gray, Science 293, 474 (2001).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
2. J. B. Elsner, B. Kocher, Geophys. Res. Lett. 27, 129 (2000).[CrossRef][ISI]
3. K. E. Trenberth, Science 308, 1753 (2005).[Abstract/Free Full Text]
4. K. E. Trenberth et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 1205 (2003).[CrossRef][ISI]
5. R. A. Pielke Jr. et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., in press (available at http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resourse-1762-hurricanes%20and_global_warming.pdf).
6. J. Lighthill et al., Bull. Am. Meterol. Soc. 75, 2147 (1994).
7. W. M. Gray, Mon. Weather Rev. 96, 669 (1968).[ISI]
8. K. A. Emanuel, Nature 326, 483 (1987).[CrossRef][ISI]
9. G. J. Holland, J. Atmos. Sci. 54, 2519 (1997).[CrossRef][ISI]
10. M. A. Lander, C. P. Guard, Mon. Weather Rev. 126, 1163 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
11. C. W. Landsea, R. A. Pielke Jr., A. M. Maestas-Nunez, J. A. Knaff, Clim. Change 42, 89 (1999).[CrossRef][ISI]
12. J. C. L. Chan, K. S. Liu, J. Clim. 17, 4590 (2004).[CrossRef][ISI]
13. W. M. Gray, Mon. Weather Rev. 112, 1649 (1984).[CrossRef][ISI]
14. C. K. Folland, D. E. Parker, A. Colman, R. Washington, in Beyond El Nino: Decadal and Interdecadal Climate Variability, A. Navarra, Ed. (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1999), pp. 73-102.
15. L. J. Shapiro, S. B. Goldenberg, J. Clim. 11, 578 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
16. H. G. Houghton et al., Climate Change—2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
17. A. Henderson-Sellers et al., Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 79, 19 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
18. T. R. Knutson, R. E. Tuleya, J. Clim. 17, 3477 (2004).[CrossRef][ISI]
19. J. F. Royer, F. Chauvin, B. Timbal, P. Araspin, D. Grimal, Clim. Dyn. 38, 307 (1998).[CrossRef]
20. M. Sugi, A. Noda, N. Sato, J. Meteorol. Soc. Jpn. 80, 249 (2002).[CrossRef]
21. P. Agudelo, J. A. Curry, Geophys. Res. Lett. 31, Art. No. L22207 (2004).
22. C. J. Neumann, in Global Guide to Tropical Cyclone Forecasting, G. J. Holland, Ed. (WMO/TD-560, World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 1993), chap. 1.
23. See www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/lib/laescae.html for a description of the Saffir-Simpson scale.
24. R. M. Hirsche, J. R. Slack, R. Smith, Water Resource Res. 18, 107 (1982).[ISI]
25. V. F. Dvorak, Mon. Weather Rev. 103, 420 (1975).[CrossRef][ISI]
26. C. S. Velden, T. L. Olander, R. M. Zehr, Weather and Forecasting 13, 172 (1998).[CrossRef][ISI]
27. J. P. Kossin, C. S. Velden, Mon. Weather Rev. 132, 165 (2004).[CrossRef][ISI]
28. G. J. Holland, Aust. Meteorol. Mag. 29, 169 (1981).
29. K. Emanuel, Nature 436, 686 (2005).[CrossRef][ISI][Medline]
30. See www.prime-intl.co.jp/kyosei-2nd/PDF/24/11_murakami.pdf.
31. This research was supported by the Climate Dynamics Division of NSF under award NSF-ATM 0328842 and by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is funded by NSF.
People, I'd get an umbrella, at least. A life jacket might be useful occasionally, too. Not to mention a government that paid attention to what its' scientists were trying to tell it. ¶ 10:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Even Paranoids Have Real Companies
Business appears to be booming for the Company in Iraq.
"A British soldier jumps from a burning tank which was set ablaze after a shooting incident in the southern Iraqi city of Basra September 19, 2005. Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after Iraqi authorities said they had detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on police."
Jeff Wells puts together another story from this:
How it began:
"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.
Here are the two while in Iraqi police custody. Reuters appended a note to each photo over the wire: "ATTENTION EDITORS - THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTS THAT THE IDENTIFICATION OF THIS MAN IS NOT REVEALED, EITHER VIA PIXELLATION OF THEIR FACES OR BY NOT PUBLISHING THE PHOTOS."
As you probably know, they didn't remain in custody for long:
British forces using tanks broke down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra late Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos, who had been arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.
Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled the jail.
Violence flared earlier in the day as demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks; at least four people were killed.
The British Defense Ministry spun, but found it difficult to maneuver with its pants about its ankles. "We‘ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison," a defense ministry spokesman in London said. "We understand there were negotiations." When it found some equilibrium, it changed its story to better comport with the undeniables: "We understand that the authorities ordered their release. Unfortunately they weren't released and we became concerned for their safety and as a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke down the perimeter wall in one place."
These hard men, likely SAS ops, must have had some stories to tell, otherwise tanks would not have negotiated their way through the prison walls of Britain's reputed hosts so soon after their capture.
Walking into the untidied mess of this astonishing and grotesque and predictable story feels a bit like the British detective catching the killer red-handed: "Well well well, what have we here?" We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.
It doesn't make sense? Only if you haven't been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy: blow up the Hajis and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game, and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.
I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we won't forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.
What Jeff tends to miss is that you don't have to conspiring to take over the world to walk amidst the noise and confusion, and take solace in owning a piece thereof.
You can find a more in-depth reporting of the known knowns about this incident at Defense Tech.
There is also a good link to Professor Cole's timeline describing the sequence as we know it.
When you hear descriptions of how Bu$hCo's allies in the Ownership Society are spreading its unique version of liberation- oil liberation, that is- in Iraq, bear in mind that like America, the British Government has its' share of connections with its' own private contractors.
Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established.
While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground.
The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10...
While reliable figures are difficult to come by and governmental accounting and monitoring of the contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US army estimates that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly $30bn, will be spent on contracts to private companies...
But this is a field in which British companies dominate, with nearly half of the dozen or so private firms in Iraq coming from the UK.
The big British player in Iraq is Global Risk International, based in Hampton, Middlesex...
Pre-Negroponte pre-Statehood, and quite dated, this article (Dec. 2003), but now that it's hitting the fan, one can't help but wonder if all these Patriotic Companies have a stake in keeping the fires burning bright.
Just another conflict of interest in the Neoconomy, I'd say. ¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments links to this post
"A British soldier jumps from a burning tank which was set ablaze after a shooting incident in the southern Iraqi city of Basra September 19, 2005. Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after Iraqi authorities said they had detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on police."
Jeff Wells puts together another story from this:
How it began:
"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.
Here are the two while in Iraqi police custody. Reuters appended a note to each photo over the wire: "ATTENTION EDITORS - THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTS THAT THE IDENTIFICATION OF THIS MAN IS NOT REVEALED, EITHER VIA PIXELLATION OF THEIR FACES OR BY NOT PUBLISHING THE PHOTOS."
As you probably know, they didn't remain in custody for long:
British forces using tanks broke down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra late Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos, who had been arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.
Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled the jail.
Violence flared earlier in the day as demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks; at least four people were killed.
The British Defense Ministry spun, but found it difficult to maneuver with its pants about its ankles. "We‘ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison," a defense ministry spokesman in London said. "We understand there were negotiations." When it found some equilibrium, it changed its story to better comport with the undeniables: "We understand that the authorities ordered their release. Unfortunately they weren't released and we became concerned for their safety and as a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke down the perimeter wall in one place."
These hard men, likely SAS ops, must have had some stories to tell, otherwise tanks would not have negotiated their way through the prison walls of Britain's reputed hosts so soon after their capture.
Walking into the untidied mess of this astonishing and grotesque and predictable story feels a bit like the British detective catching the killer red-handed: "Well well well, what have we here?" We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.
It doesn't make sense? Only if you haven't been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy: blow up the Hajis and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game, and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.
I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we won't forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.
What Jeff tends to miss is that you don't have to conspiring to take over the world to walk amidst the noise and confusion, and take solace in owning a piece thereof.
You can find a more in-depth reporting of the known knowns about this incident at Defense Tech.
There is also a good link to Professor Cole's timeline describing the sequence as we know it.
When you hear descriptions of how Bu$hCo's allies in the Ownership Society are spreading its unique version of liberation- oil liberation, that is- in Iraq, bear in mind that like America, the British Government has its' share of connections with its' own private contractors.
Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established.
While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground.
The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10...
While reliable figures are difficult to come by and governmental accounting and monitoring of the contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US army estimates that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly $30bn, will be spent on contracts to private companies...
But this is a field in which British companies dominate, with nearly half of the dozen or so private firms in Iraq coming from the UK.
The big British player in Iraq is Global Risk International, based in Hampton, Middlesex...
Pre-Negroponte pre-Statehood, and quite dated, this article (Dec. 2003), but now that it's hitting the fan, one can't help but wonder if all these Patriotic Companies have a stake in keeping the fires burning bright.
Just another conflict of interest in the Neoconomy, I'd say. ¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments links to this post
It's All Relative
Let's say a one thousand dollar bill is 1 millimeter thick.
1 millimeter = 0.0393701 inch
Four hundredths of an inch, pretty close to reality.
If you have a stack of thousand dollar bills one meter high, you're a millionaire.
1 meter = 3.2808399 feet
That's a stack of thousand dollar bills little bit above your waist if you're a 6 foot tall person.
Most people think, "It's just numbers. Basically it means richer than I'll ever be. Millionaire, billionaire, not that different. "
Not so much.
If you have a stack of thousand dollar bills one kilometer high, you're a billionaire.
1 kilometer = 3,280.839895 feet
That's a stack of thousand dollar bills as tall as two Sears Towers on top of each other plus a high-rise apartment building, or two.
1 kilometer = 0.6213712 mile
More than half the way from Sea Level to Denver. Straight up into the sky. One million Grover Clevelands stacked on top of each other.
Conclusion: the non-metric system (whatever the hell it's called) is a ploy by the capitalist overlords to prevent US and UK citizens from conceptualizing the wealth of the super-rich or the size of government expenditures. No wonder Europe has more egalitarian societies.
Bill Gates' net worth (2005): $46.5 billion
Cost of War in Iraq to US taxpayers (by end of FY 2005): $204.6 billion
As the L-Curve guy says, "You will not be outraged by outrageous statistics if you don't comprehend the numbers." Word.
Thanks, shystee.
This should be required reading in high schools across the nation.
Go over to the L-Curve and think about what David Chandler has to say. ¶ 8:19 AM 2 comments links to this post
1 millimeter = 0.0393701 inch
Four hundredths of an inch, pretty close to reality.
If you have a stack of thousand dollar bills one meter high, you're a millionaire.
1 meter = 3.2808399 feet
That's a stack of thousand dollar bills little bit above your waist if you're a 6 foot tall person.
Most people think, "It's just numbers. Basically it means richer than I'll ever be. Millionaire, billionaire, not that different. "
Not so much.
If you have a stack of thousand dollar bills one kilometer high, you're a billionaire.
1 kilometer = 3,280.839895 feet
That's a stack of thousand dollar bills as tall as two Sears Towers on top of each other plus a high-rise apartment building, or two.
1 kilometer = 0.6213712 mile
More than half the way from Sea Level to Denver. Straight up into the sky. One million Grover Clevelands stacked on top of each other.
Conclusion: the non-metric system (whatever the hell it's called) is a ploy by the capitalist overlords to prevent US and UK citizens from conceptualizing the wealth of the super-rich or the size of government expenditures. No wonder Europe has more egalitarian societies.
Bill Gates' net worth (2005): $46.5 billion
Cost of War in Iraq to US taxpayers (by end of FY 2005): $204.6 billion
As the L-Curve guy says, "You will not be outraged by outrageous statistics if you don't comprehend the numbers." Word.
Thanks, shystee.
This should be required reading in high schools across the nation.
Go over to the L-Curve and think about what David Chandler has to say. ¶ 8:19 AM 2 comments links to this post
Monday, September 19, 2005
They Always Hurt the Ones They Love
Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq, last night brought her campaign to end the war to New York, where she accused Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of not doing enough to challenge the Bush administration's Iraq policies.
Speaking in front of more than 500 supporters in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Ms. Sheehan, speaking of Senator Clinton, said, "She knows that the war is a lie but she is waiting for the right time to say it."
Then, as the crowd cheered, she issued a challenge to Senator Clinton, saying, "You say it or you are losing your job."
A spokesman for Senator Clinton, while not commenting about Ms. Sheehan's remarks, said that the senator, while voting to give President Bush the authority to go to war, has been very critical of the way he has chosen to use that authority...
In a perhaps not unrelated story,
Former US president Bill Clinton sharply criticised George W. Bush for the Iraq War and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and voiced alarm at the swelling US budget deficit.
Breaking with tradition under which US presidents mute criticisms of their successors, Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq "virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction."
The Iraq war diverted US attention from the war on terrorism "and undermined the support that we might have had," Bush said in an interview with an ABC's "This Week" programme.
Clinton said there had been a "heroic but so far unsuccessful" effort to put together an constitution that would be universally supported in Iraq.
The US strategy of trying to develop the Iraqi military and police so that they can cope without US support "I think is the best strategy. The problem is we may not have, in the short run, enough troops to do that," said Clinton...
Perhaps it is also revealing what they don't say.
Instead of saying "this is a mistake, we never should have gone there, and we should leave immediately" they say "this is a mistake, it has been mismanaged, and we could have done it better".
Instead of saying "this is a war for oil, not freedom, designed to enrich some of the most powerful corporations in the world today" they say "this is a heroic war against terror and Bush has squandered our mighty military alliance".
The Clintons regret the Hegemony That Might Have Been and long for The One That May Be Again. But like Tolkien said in his Preface, in the real world men never destroy their Ring of Power. The Clintons long for the Precious, and it tortures them to see it on the hand of the Enemy they allowed to form again. ¶ 9:28 PM 5 comments links to this post
Speaking in front of more than 500 supporters in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Ms. Sheehan, speaking of Senator Clinton, said, "She knows that the war is a lie but she is waiting for the right time to say it."
Then, as the crowd cheered, she issued a challenge to Senator Clinton, saying, "You say it or you are losing your job."
A spokesman for Senator Clinton, while not commenting about Ms. Sheehan's remarks, said that the senator, while voting to give President Bush the authority to go to war, has been very critical of the way he has chosen to use that authority...
In a perhaps not unrelated story,
Former US president Bill Clinton sharply criticised George W. Bush for the Iraq War and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and voiced alarm at the swelling US budget deficit.
Breaking with tradition under which US presidents mute criticisms of their successors, Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq "virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction."
The Iraq war diverted US attention from the war on terrorism "and undermined the support that we might have had," Bush said in an interview with an ABC's "This Week" programme.
Clinton said there had been a "heroic but so far unsuccessful" effort to put together an constitution that would be universally supported in Iraq.
The US strategy of trying to develop the Iraqi military and police so that they can cope without US support "I think is the best strategy. The problem is we may not have, in the short run, enough troops to do that," said Clinton...
Perhaps it is also revealing what they don't say.
Instead of saying "this is a mistake, we never should have gone there, and we should leave immediately" they say "this is a mistake, it has been mismanaged, and we could have done it better".
Instead of saying "this is a war for oil, not freedom, designed to enrich some of the most powerful corporations in the world today" they say "this is a heroic war against terror and Bush has squandered our mighty military alliance".
The Clintons regret the Hegemony That Might Have Been and long for The One That May Be Again. But like Tolkien said in his Preface, in the real world men never destroy their Ring of Power. The Clintons long for the Precious, and it tortures them to see it on the hand of the Enemy they allowed to form again. ¶ 9:28 PM 5 comments links to this post
Ownership Society
Since 2000 a half century of sustained decline in infant death rates first slowed and then reversed. The infant mortality rate is now higher for the United States than for many other industrial countries. Malaysia — a country with an average income one-quarter that of the United States — has achieved the same infant mortality rate as the United States . . . the Indian state of Kerala has an urban infant death rate lower than that for African Americans in Washington, DC.
United Nations Development Programme
Human Development Report
September 2005
Thanks to Billmon for the link. ¶ 8:36 PM 0 comments links to this post
United Nations Development Programme
Human Development Report
September 2005
Thanks to Billmon for the link. ¶ 8:36 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 18, 2005
The Honorable John Conyers Writes Letters
The Honorable Alberto R. Gonzales
Attorney General of the United States
U. S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530
Dear Mr. Attorney General:
Today I learned that according to an article in the Clarion-Ledger that your office has sent an email to U.S. Attorney's Offices asking "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."
If this is true, I am concerned that the motivation may be perceived as political, rather than an attempt to pursue a legitimate law enforcement goal or objective, which should be the Department's primary goal. This diversion of time and resources would seem particularly problematic given the difficulties the affected U.S. Attorneys offices have no doubt had in responding to Hurricane Katrina, and the incredibly heavy workloads they must be facing. As a result, I would appreciate your responding to the following questions:
1. Did your office circulate this or a similar e-mail? If so, to which offices was the e-mail circulated?
2. What caused your office to circulate the e-mail, and what personnel both inside and outside the Department were involved in the matter?
3. Did you set a deadline for a response? Have you received any responses yet? Please forward to my office any responses you have received or receive in the future.
4. Please estimate the cost - both out-of-pocket, and lost person hours - to both consider and circulate this request and for the various U.S. Attorney offices to respond?
1. What safeguards, if any, did you interpose to insure that a responding to this e-mail did not displace any legitimate law enforcement priorities of the applicable offices?
5. Has the Department ever sought information regarding previous litigation activity in connection with any other natural disaster other than Hurricane Katrina? If so, please provide my office with a description of such requests. I would appreciate receiving a full or partial response to this letter at your earliest possible convenience, and by no later than September 23, 2005 in any event. Please forward your response to my Judiciary Committee Minority Office, 2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515.
Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr.
Ranking Member
House Judiciary Committee
cc: The Honorable F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., The Honorable William E. Moschella
Rip him a new one, sir. ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments links to this post
Attorney General of the United States
U. S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530
Dear Mr. Attorney General:
Today I learned that according to an article in the Clarion-Ledger that your office has sent an email to U.S. Attorney's Offices asking "Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation."
If this is true, I am concerned that the motivation may be perceived as political, rather than an attempt to pursue a legitimate law enforcement goal or objective, which should be the Department's primary goal. This diversion of time and resources would seem particularly problematic given the difficulties the affected U.S. Attorneys offices have no doubt had in responding to Hurricane Katrina, and the incredibly heavy workloads they must be facing. As a result, I would appreciate your responding to the following questions:
1. Did your office circulate this or a similar e-mail? If so, to which offices was the e-mail circulated?
2. What caused your office to circulate the e-mail, and what personnel both inside and outside the Department were involved in the matter?
3. Did you set a deadline for a response? Have you received any responses yet? Please forward to my office any responses you have received or receive in the future.
4. Please estimate the cost - both out-of-pocket, and lost person hours - to both consider and circulate this request and for the various U.S. Attorney offices to respond?
1. What safeguards, if any, did you interpose to insure that a responding to this e-mail did not displace any legitimate law enforcement priorities of the applicable offices?
5. Has the Department ever sought information regarding previous litigation activity in connection with any other natural disaster other than Hurricane Katrina? If so, please provide my office with a description of such requests. I would appreciate receiving a full or partial response to this letter at your earliest possible convenience, and by no later than September 23, 2005 in any event. Please forward your response to my Judiciary Committee Minority Office, 2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515.
Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr.
Ranking Member
House Judiciary Committee
cc: The Honorable F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., The Honorable William E. Moschella
Rip him a new one, sir. ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments links to this post
Get Your War On, South of the Border
The Left Coaster has a good update here on the attempted Company takeover of South America.
A while back, one of our wrong-wing wregulars took me to task for linking to an article in Pravda which announced US plans for a military base in Paraguay. Seems like such a thing is coming to pass...
The specific issue here isn't whether Paraguay is allowing a US military presence, but what the presence is intended to be used against.
Looking at a CIA map [Hey - I'm a taxpayer!], it's easy to see that Paraguay sits in a strategic location, congruent to certain assets that are important to Bu$hCo supporters, who expect that they will receive certain protective services for their foreign investments in the region that my tax dollars can provide. I'll cover more on this later.
First, what is to be the mission for a Paraguayan presence of US military personnel? Toppling the Bolivian government if the coming electoral campaign goes against neo-liberalist economic policies...
And wouldn't it be convenient if US forces provided the logistics for the American security companies 'requested' to protect such candidates as Quiroga and Medina from 'insurgents' - just like in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Let's look at these 'insurgents' and why they represent such a threat to US economic interests...
Just how rich can a foreign company make itself in Bolivia? According to the KITCO Silver charts as of 9/17/05, silver is going for just over $US 7.20 per ounce. Keep this in mind when reading the next excerpt...
We'll call it $US 7.20 for simplicity. At current prices, 206 million ounces of silver is worth $US 1.4832 BILLION from a country whose 2004 per capita GDP is $2600. That's a major Bu$hel of boliviano! ...
Silver isn't the reason why Bu$hco is so interested in local economics that they would spend money that is needed to repair the Gulf Coast of the United States on yet another foreign military base while 22 are about to close in the US. Something much more valuable is - petroleum energy resources...
Other oil companies could enter into the fray: Andina, Chaco, Maxus [Maxus Bolivia, Inc. Headquarters: The Woodlands, TX], Petrobras and Don Wong.
But Maxus is the one which provides Bu$hCo with their opening to inject US forces into Bolivia, and Paraguay is the best possible location to protect their spheres of influence. They would also have to protect their local puppet...
Bolivia is only one South American country where foreign investments are threatened by uprisings of the local people, and the 'problem' of keeping the locals in their place - which is only to provide vast profits as almost no cost to the investor - is made much more difficult and costly by the example of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez standing up to the US...
Since none of those messages resonated with the American people, it's time to return to the tired (sic) and true, one which has lasted since the rise of Richard Nixon - the War on Drugs. There are reports that Bu$hCo seeks ways of Turning Chavez Into Noriega to justify a Panama-like invasion, but more likely is the time-honored war excuse of a border dispute with Colombia, which is themselves a nation rife with drugs via the activities of the Medellin Cartel - an organization that couldn't exist today without their participation in Poppy Bu$h'$ Iran-Contra operation. [More here, here, and here ]
Only one problem: the drug-running plan doesn't seem to be working so well.
Regardless of what, when, where, why, and how, the 'who' of the equation is those globalization afficianados who seek to impose their drive for massive profits on the world through the agency of those they bankrolled into power - only there are now some doubts as to whether Bu$hCo has the cojones to carry out their entrusted tasks...
Thus, the pressure from neo-liberal neocon-men is clearly felt on one side while a counter-pressure in the form of public image as competent managers of the commonweal lost through their delayed response to the Katrina disaster squeezes from the other side. Chavez isn't helping this Bu$hCo dilemma much, either...
Read it all, it's in much more depth than covered here. ¶ 8:06 AM 2 comments links to this post
A while back, one of our wrong-wing wregulars took me to task for linking to an article in Pravda which announced US plans for a military base in Paraguay. Seems like such a thing is coming to pass...
The specific issue here isn't whether Paraguay is allowing a US military presence, but what the presence is intended to be used against.
Looking at a CIA map [Hey - I'm a taxpayer!], it's easy to see that Paraguay sits in a strategic location, congruent to certain assets that are important to Bu$hCo supporters, who expect that they will receive certain protective services for their foreign investments in the region that my tax dollars can provide. I'll cover more on this later.
First, what is to be the mission for a Paraguayan presence of US military personnel? Toppling the Bolivian government if the coming electoral campaign goes against neo-liberalist economic policies...
And wouldn't it be convenient if US forces provided the logistics for the American security companies 'requested' to protect such candidates as Quiroga and Medina from 'insurgents' - just like in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Let's look at these 'insurgents' and why they represent such a threat to US economic interests...
Just how rich can a foreign company make itself in Bolivia? According to the KITCO Silver charts as of 9/17/05, silver is going for just over $US 7.20 per ounce. Keep this in mind when reading the next excerpt...
We'll call it $US 7.20 for simplicity. At current prices, 206 million ounces of silver is worth $US 1.4832 BILLION from a country whose 2004 per capita GDP is $2600. That's a major Bu$hel of boliviano! ...
Silver isn't the reason why Bu$hco is so interested in local economics that they would spend money that is needed to repair the Gulf Coast of the United States on yet another foreign military base while 22 are about to close in the US. Something much more valuable is - petroleum energy resources...
Other oil companies could enter into the fray: Andina, Chaco, Maxus [Maxus Bolivia, Inc. Headquarters: The Woodlands, TX], Petrobras and Don Wong.
But Maxus is the one which provides Bu$hCo with their opening to inject US forces into Bolivia, and Paraguay is the best possible location to protect their spheres of influence. They would also have to protect their local puppet...
Bolivia is only one South American country where foreign investments are threatened by uprisings of the local people, and the 'problem' of keeping the locals in their place - which is only to provide vast profits as almost no cost to the investor - is made much more difficult and costly by the example of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez standing up to the US...
Since none of those messages resonated with the American people, it's time to return to the tired (sic) and true, one which has lasted since the rise of Richard Nixon - the War on Drugs. There are reports that Bu$hCo seeks ways of Turning Chavez Into Noriega to justify a Panama-like invasion, but more likely is the time-honored war excuse of a border dispute with Colombia, which is themselves a nation rife with drugs via the activities of the Medellin Cartel - an organization that couldn't exist today without their participation in Poppy Bu$h'$ Iran-Contra operation. [More here, here, and here ]
Only one problem: the drug-running plan doesn't seem to be working so well.
Regardless of what, when, where, why, and how, the 'who' of the equation is those globalization afficianados who seek to impose their drive for massive profits on the world through the agency of those they bankrolled into power - only there are now some doubts as to whether Bu$hCo has the cojones to carry out their entrusted tasks...
Thus, the pressure from neo-liberal neocon-men is clearly felt on one side while a counter-pressure in the form of public image as competent managers of the commonweal lost through their delayed response to the Katrina disaster squeezes from the other side. Chavez isn't helping this Bu$hCo dilemma much, either...
Read it all, it's in much more depth than covered here. ¶ 8:06 AM 2 comments links to this post
Saturday, September 17, 2005
On Taking Back America
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gave a very stirring speech at Sierra Summit 2005.
...As the communities that our parents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the public lands, the fisheries, the wildlife, the public areas that connect us to our past, that connect us to our history, that provide context to our communities that are the source ultimately of our values and virtues and character as a people. Over the past 22 years as an environmental advocate, I’ve been disciplined about being non-partisan and bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don’t think there is any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.
I think the worst thing that could happen to the environment is it becomes the province of a single political party. It was mentioned that I have a book out there that is very critical of this president and that’s true but it’s not a partisan book. I didn’t write that book because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Republican. If he were a Democrat, I would have written the same book. I’m not objecting to him because of his political party and I’ve worked for Republicans if they’re good on the environment and democrats on the same level but you can’t talk honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically of this president. This is the worst [applause].
This is the worst environmental president we’ve had in American history.
If you look at NRDC’s website you’ll see over 400 major environmental roll backs that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It’s a stealth attack.
The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear Skies Bill.
But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.
President Bush appointed as head of the Forest Service a timber industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious in history. He put in charge of public lands a mining industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. He put in charge of the air division of the EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air polluters in America. As head of Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.
The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago we all read that as second in command of CEQ which is in the White House directly advising the president of environmental policy, he put a lobbyist of the American Petroleum Institute whose only job was to read all of the science from all the different federal agencies to make sure they didn’t say anything critical, to excise any critical statements about the oil industry.
He was there to lie to the American public, to protect one of the big corporate contributors to this White House. This is true throughout all of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce which regulates fisheries, the Department of the Interior, EPA of course, and the relevant divisions of the Justice Department. The same thing, all these agencies and sub secretariats, it is the polluters who are now running these agencies.
There is nothing wrong with having business people in government. It’s a good thing if you’re objective is to recruit competence and expertise but in all of these cases these individuals as I show in my book, have entered government service not to benefit the public interest but rather to subvert the very laws they’re now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the president’s corporate pay masters.
They have imposed enormous diminution in quality of life in this country.
The problem is most Americans don’t know about it, they don’t see the connection and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down American democracy [applause]. All this right wing propaganda which is planned and organized and dominated this country, the political debate for so many years talking about a liberal media. Well, you know and I know there is no such thing as a liberal media in the United States of America.
There is a right wing media and if you look where most Americans are now getting their news, that’s where they’re getting it. According to Pew 30 percent of Americans now sway that their primary news source is talk radio which is 90 percent dominated by the right.
22 percent sat their primary news source is Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, all dominated by the right and another 10 percent, Sinclair Network which is the most right wing of all. That’s the largest television network in our country. It’s run by a former pornographer who requires all 75 of his affiliate television stations and this is where Mid-Westerners get their news, red state people get their news, all of them have to take a pledge to not report critically about this president or about the war in Iraq.
Then the rest of us are - the majority of Americans are still getting their news from electronic media and it’s the corporate owned media and they have no ideology except for filling their pocket books and many of them are run by big polluters. All of them are run by giant corporations that have all kinds of deals with the government and are not going to offend public officials.
This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public trust assets just like our air and water and that the broadcasters could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news hours. None of those networks wanted to show the news because it’s expensive, they loose money on it. They had to avoid corporate consolidation. They had to have local control and diversity of control. That was the requirement of the law since 1928.
Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what we see as news.
The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewer ship. How do you do that? not by reporting the news that we need to hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip [applause]. So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant and we’re today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.
If you look at the Pippa Report and I’ve known this for many, many years because I do 40 speeches a year in red states Republican audiences and there is no difference. When people hear this message and what this White House is doing and the Gingrich Congress, there is no difference between the way Republicans react and the democrats react except the republicans come up afterwards and say, "Why haven’t we ever heard of this before? I say to them, "It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush."
...there is a huge informational deficit in the red states and I’ve known this for a long time reaction I get people and the Pippa Report confirmed that by going and asking people who voted for Bush and who voted for Kerry about their knowledge of current events. What they found that of the people that voted for Bush had the same ideology, the same basic values, they were just misinformed. 70 percent said that they believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, 70 percent believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, 64 percent believed that President Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and environmental standards in our foreign treaties and on and on.
When Pippa went back and asked them what they believed, there was almost no difference between what the Republicans and Democrats believed where America should be headed. The problem was a huge information deficit because the news media in this country is letting down American democracy and democracy cannot survive long without a vigorous news media...
What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient and the kind of corporate cloning capitalism which has been embraced by this White House which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria [applause].
There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks, they maximize wealth, they create jobs. I own a corporation.
They’re a great thing but they should not be running our government.
The reason for that is they don’t have the same aspirations for America that you and I do.
A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits and the best way for them to get profits is to use our campaign finance system which is just a system of legalized bribery to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the market place to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the common, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us. That’s why. From the beginning of our national history our most visionary political leaders.
And that doesn’t mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they’re amoral and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process.
Let them do their thing but they should not be participating in our political process because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic.
Its against the law in this country because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins and that’s the way the law works and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process.
This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders republican and democrat have been warning the American public against the domination by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt and again, this White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid the domination of our government by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another republican in his most famous speech ever warned America against the domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country I fear the bankers more."
Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of Fascism" and Benito Mussolini who had an insider’s view of that process said the same thing. Essentially he said that - he complained that Fascism should not be called Fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state of corporate power.
And we what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called Communism.
The domination of government by business is called Fascism.
And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail in between which is free market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
In order to do that we need an informed public and an activist public.
And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that’s something that we all, puts us all, all the values we care about in jeopardy because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined, they go together.
There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction. I could talk about that all day but you cannot - the only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy.
You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but over the long term the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number one issue for all of us; to try to restore American democracy because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.
I’ll say one last thing which is the issue I started off with which is that we’re not protecting the environment. What Justice Douglas understood.
We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds.
We’re protecting it for our own sake because we recognize that nature enriches us. It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy. And we ignore that at our peril...
Lots more of this can be found at the Truthout and Sierra Club sites.
But there's another issue that may have to be address first before we can address the corporate control of the press and the government.
It's the corporate control of the ballot box, and yesterday there was a good post at Corrente on this. What got the issue rolling was an observation at the Brad Blog that Diebold's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet.
Pointing to a little-noticed "Cyber Security Alert" issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the source inside Diebold -- who "for the time being" is requesting anonymity due to a continuing sensitive relationship with the company -- is charging that Diebold's technicians, including at least one of its lead programmers, knew about the security flaw and that the company instructed them to keep quiet about it...
Chicago Dyke says she had an exchange last year with one of Kerry’s “legal team” a professor at a top-ten university law school, about the OH results and other areas that were in question (at least in the minds of us following e-voting issues). He had written a nice op-ed in a leading national daily about OH, and while it was good to see this issue in print, the wording of the piece struck me as all together too timid, and basically not in anyway reflective of the seriousness of the problem or possibility it entailed for representative democracy. I said as much to him in the e-mail, and he responded that essentially, he and most members of Kerry’s team were “just learning about the problem” and didn’t really understand it very well.
There have been several bills introduced into the House relating to such ‘fixes’ as making electronic machines produce a paper trail, and other suggestions about how to increase the level of confidence people feel for computerized voting. Russ Holt has introduced at least two that I know of. Interestingly, there haven’t been any Republican co-sponors for these bills. Not that they’re into bipartisanship so much, but still, you’d think a couple of them would worry for a future day then Democrats were in power, and the system could be used against Republican interests. Yet that’s not a concern. Hmmmm.
Very simply, problems with electronic voting have become so widespread, and so well documented, that it’s an issue well beyond CT land and one that sits squarely in the mainstream. I can think of stories I’ve read, solid well researched pieces in major publications, detailing problems in CA, NC, TX, FL and of course OH. Click on the links provided so far and follow the rabbit hole, I promise you it goes very, very deep.
I have two points to make about what this means for 06. The first is that people concerned with this issue shouldn’t assume that the Republicans have a master computer hidden somewhere in Virginia that’s linked to every voting machine in the nation, and which they control with the push of a button. That may be true, but it’s probably not- a more subtle and more difficult to track method is being employed, I think. As many researchers on the issue have noted, vote tampering doesn’t have to happen everywhere, just a few strategically located precincts. One large precinct can turn the results for a whole region, and when there are a lot of votes to be tallied, it’s “more likely” that unusual results are statistical probabilities. It’s a very hard thing to do, even for computer experts and dedicated activists, to predict, observe and prove vote tampering in the areas in which it occurs- we just can’t know which the tamperers will choose.
Adjunct to this point is that the old-fashioned, time honored methods of vote tampering are also still a concern. One needn’t fuck with electronic vote tallies if one prevents people from voting in the first place. OH is the prime example here, where in 2004 thousands of people in urban areas and on college campuses were give insufficient numbers of voting machines, resulting in long lines and probably fewer (Democratic) votes. There are also ID scams, intimidation, voter ‘tests’ and all the other tricks that have been employed for decades, mainly to keep black people from voting but I’m sure still used today for anyone leaning left. So we have to remember not to underestimate those who’d prevent democratic representation from happening. They use lots of tricks, and fruadulent tallying of e-voting is only one way that can happen.
The second point I’d like to make is about the word “moot.” As in, everything else progressive and liberals do to get a Democratic majority in 06 is a complete waste of time until we have some kind of guarantee that votes will be counted. Now, I’m not naive enough to suggest we can have 100% of the votes counted and 100% of voters who want to vote voting. Shit, I’d settle for 87% at this point, and I know we’ve never had a truly free and fair election in the history of this country. But when one reviews the long, depressing list of races in 2000. 2002, and 2004 that had very questionable results, counting methods and/or verification procedures, it becomes obvious that if something isn’t done soon, we may as all start singing Deutschland Uber Alles and be done with it.
I am honestly puzzled, frightened and confused by the lack of Democratic leadership on this issue. Truly- even the most sold out corporate DINO hack has got to worry that his seat isn’t secure enough to prevent a more sold out more corporate Republican hack from taking his place. But they don’t. I don’t know if this is because the consultants are telling them the issue “doesn’t play in Peroria” or because it really is a giant conspiracy and the “opposition” is in on the game. But whatever the reason keeping them back, Democrats are beyond the level of Chamberlinesque stupidity and naiveté for not making this a central focus.
I was just reading about the leader of Jewish quarter in Lodz during WWII, Chiam Rumkowski. You may remember him, for his policies of “saving the body by cutting off a limb” in which he worked with the Nazis, and sent off some groups of Jews to the gas chambers in the hope that the rest could be spared. None were, and he himself was shipped off on the last train. I wonder if his Nazi masters laughed as he went...
She's right about this. Yes, voting corruption has doubtless existed since the beginning of this country. But no, there has never been wholesale theft of an election that couldn't be traced before. Electronic voting makes this very easy to do with the current software. Just like Microsoft can scan any Windows operating system using Explorer, the presence of a backdoor in the Diebold software makes it simple for a knowledgable person to change vote tallies.
Prediction (assuming nothing is done): in 2006 the Republicans will have exit polls at the election indicating they were beat by a landslide. But instead when the "actual" votes are tallied, they will gain seats in both Houses of Congress. ¶ 8:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
...As the communities that our parents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the public lands, the fisheries, the wildlife, the public areas that connect us to our past, that connect us to our history, that provide context to our communities that are the source ultimately of our values and virtues and character as a people. Over the past 22 years as an environmental advocate, I’ve been disciplined about being non-partisan and bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don’t think there is any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.
I think the worst thing that could happen to the environment is it becomes the province of a single political party. It was mentioned that I have a book out there that is very critical of this president and that’s true but it’s not a partisan book. I didn’t write that book because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Republican. If he were a Democrat, I would have written the same book. I’m not objecting to him because of his political party and I’ve worked for Republicans if they’re good on the environment and democrats on the same level but you can’t talk honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically of this president. This is the worst [applause].
This is the worst environmental president we’ve had in American history.
If you look at NRDC’s website you’ll see over 400 major environmental roll backs that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.
It’s a stealth attack.
The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear Skies Bill.
But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.
President Bush appointed as head of the Forest Service a timber industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious in history. He put in charge of public lands a mining industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. He put in charge of the air division of the EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air polluters in America. As head of Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.
The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago we all read that as second in command of CEQ which is in the White House directly advising the president of environmental policy, he put a lobbyist of the American Petroleum Institute whose only job was to read all of the science from all the different federal agencies to make sure they didn’t say anything critical, to excise any critical statements about the oil industry.
He was there to lie to the American public, to protect one of the big corporate contributors to this White House. This is true throughout all of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce which regulates fisheries, the Department of the Interior, EPA of course, and the relevant divisions of the Justice Department. The same thing, all these agencies and sub secretariats, it is the polluters who are now running these agencies.
There is nothing wrong with having business people in government. It’s a good thing if you’re objective is to recruit competence and expertise but in all of these cases these individuals as I show in my book, have entered government service not to benefit the public interest but rather to subvert the very laws they’re now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the president’s corporate pay masters.
They have imposed enormous diminution in quality of life in this country.
The problem is most Americans don’t know about it, they don’t see the connection and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down American democracy [applause]. All this right wing propaganda which is planned and organized and dominated this country, the political debate for so many years talking about a liberal media. Well, you know and I know there is no such thing as a liberal media in the United States of America.
There is a right wing media and if you look where most Americans are now getting their news, that’s where they’re getting it. According to Pew 30 percent of Americans now sway that their primary news source is talk radio which is 90 percent dominated by the right.
22 percent sat their primary news source is Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, all dominated by the right and another 10 percent, Sinclair Network which is the most right wing of all. That’s the largest television network in our country. It’s run by a former pornographer who requires all 75 of his affiliate television stations and this is where Mid-Westerners get their news, red state people get their news, all of them have to take a pledge to not report critically about this president or about the war in Iraq.
Then the rest of us are - the majority of Americans are still getting their news from electronic media and it’s the corporate owned media and they have no ideology except for filling their pocket books and many of them are run by big polluters. All of them are run by giant corporations that have all kinds of deals with the government and are not going to offend public officials.
This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public trust assets just like our air and water and that the broadcasters could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news hours. None of those networks wanted to show the news because it’s expensive, they loose money on it. They had to avoid corporate consolidation. They had to have local control and diversity of control. That was the requirement of the law since 1928.
Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what we see as news.
The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewer ship. How do you do that? not by reporting the news that we need to hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip [applause]. So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant and we’re today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.
If you look at the Pippa Report and I’ve known this for many, many years because I do 40 speeches a year in red states Republican audiences and there is no difference. When people hear this message and what this White House is doing and the Gingrich Congress, there is no difference between the way Republicans react and the democrats react except the republicans come up afterwards and say, "Why haven’t we ever heard of this before? I say to them, "It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush."
...there is a huge informational deficit in the red states and I’ve known this for a long time reaction I get people and the Pippa Report confirmed that by going and asking people who voted for Bush and who voted for Kerry about their knowledge of current events. What they found that of the people that voted for Bush had the same ideology, the same basic values, they were just misinformed. 70 percent said that they believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, 70 percent believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, 64 percent believed that President Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and environmental standards in our foreign treaties and on and on.
When Pippa went back and asked them what they believed, there was almost no difference between what the Republicans and Democrats believed where America should be headed. The problem was a huge information deficit because the news media in this country is letting down American democracy and democracy cannot survive long without a vigorous news media...
What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism which democratizes a country, which makes us more prosperous and efficient and the kind of corporate cloning capitalism which has been embraced by this White House which is as antithetical to democracy, to prosperity and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria [applause].
There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. They encourage us to take risks, they maximize wealth, they create jobs. I own a corporation.
They’re a great thing but they should not be running our government.
The reason for that is they don’t have the same aspirations for America that you and I do.
A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it wants profits and the best way for them to get profits is to use our campaign finance system which is just a system of legalized bribery to get their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public official to dismantle the market place to give them a competitive advantage and then to privatize the common, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us. That’s why. From the beginning of our national history our most visionary political leaders.
And that doesn’t mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they’re amoral and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political process.
Let them do their thing but they should not be participating in our political process because a corporation cannot do something genuinely philanthropic.
Its against the law in this country because their shareholders can sue them for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will not increase their profit margins and that’s the way the law works and we have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political process and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political process.
This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders republican and democrat have been warning the American public against the domination by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt and again, this White House has done a great job of persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat ultimately but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid the domination of our government by corporate power.
Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another republican in his most famous speech ever warned America against the domination by the military industrial complex.
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me. And for my country I fear the bankers more."
Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by corporate power is "the essence of Fascism" and Benito Mussolini who had an insider’s view of that process said the same thing. Essentially he said that - he complained that Fascism should not be called Fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state of corporate power.
And we what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of business by government is called Communism.
The domination of government by business is called Fascism.
And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail in between which is free market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.
In order to do that we need an informed public and an activist public.
And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America. And that’s something that we all, puts us all, all the values we care about in jeopardy because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a functioning democracy. They are intertwined, they go together.
There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny and the level of environmental destruction. I could talk about that all day but you cannot - the only way you can protect the environment is through a true, locally based democracy.
You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny where there is some kind of beneficent dictator but over the long term the only way we can protect the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number one issue for all of us; to try to restore American democracy because without that we lose all of the other things that we value.
I’ll say one last thing which is the issue I started off with which is that we’re not protecting the environment. What Justice Douglas understood.
We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds.
We’re protecting it for our own sake because we recognize that nature enriches us. It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy. And we ignore that at our peril...
Lots more of this can be found at the Truthout and Sierra Club sites.
But there's another issue that may have to be address first before we can address the corporate control of the press and the government.
It's the corporate control of the ballot box, and yesterday there was a good post at Corrente on this. What got the issue rolling was an observation at the Brad Blog that Diebold's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet.
Pointing to a little-noticed "Cyber Security Alert" issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the source inside Diebold -- who "for the time being" is requesting anonymity due to a continuing sensitive relationship with the company -- is charging that Diebold's technicians, including at least one of its lead programmers, knew about the security flaw and that the company instructed them to keep quiet about it...
Chicago Dyke says she had an exchange last year with one of Kerry’s “legal team” a professor at a top-ten university law school, about the OH results and other areas that were in question (at least in the minds of us following e-voting issues). He had written a nice op-ed in a leading national daily about OH, and while it was good to see this issue in print, the wording of the piece struck me as all together too timid, and basically not in anyway reflective of the seriousness of the problem or possibility it entailed for representative democracy. I said as much to him in the e-mail, and he responded that essentially, he and most members of Kerry’s team were “just learning about the problem” and didn’t really understand it very well.
There have been several bills introduced into the House relating to such ‘fixes’ as making electronic machines produce a paper trail, and other suggestions about how to increase the level of confidence people feel for computerized voting. Russ Holt has introduced at least two that I know of. Interestingly, there haven’t been any Republican co-sponors for these bills. Not that they’re into bipartisanship so much, but still, you’d think a couple of them would worry for a future day then Democrats were in power, and the system could be used against Republican interests. Yet that’s not a concern. Hmmmm.
Very simply, problems with electronic voting have become so widespread, and so well documented, that it’s an issue well beyond CT land and one that sits squarely in the mainstream. I can think of stories I’ve read, solid well researched pieces in major publications, detailing problems in CA, NC, TX, FL and of course OH. Click on the links provided so far and follow the rabbit hole, I promise you it goes very, very deep.
I have two points to make about what this means for 06. The first is that people concerned with this issue shouldn’t assume that the Republicans have a master computer hidden somewhere in Virginia that’s linked to every voting machine in the nation, and which they control with the push of a button. That may be true, but it’s probably not- a more subtle and more difficult to track method is being employed, I think. As many researchers on the issue have noted, vote tampering doesn’t have to happen everywhere, just a few strategically located precincts. One large precinct can turn the results for a whole region, and when there are a lot of votes to be tallied, it’s “more likely” that unusual results are statistical probabilities. It’s a very hard thing to do, even for computer experts and dedicated activists, to predict, observe and prove vote tampering in the areas in which it occurs- we just can’t know which the tamperers will choose.
Adjunct to this point is that the old-fashioned, time honored methods of vote tampering are also still a concern. One needn’t fuck with electronic vote tallies if one prevents people from voting in the first place. OH is the prime example here, where in 2004 thousands of people in urban areas and on college campuses were give insufficient numbers of voting machines, resulting in long lines and probably fewer (Democratic) votes. There are also ID scams, intimidation, voter ‘tests’ and all the other tricks that have been employed for decades, mainly to keep black people from voting but I’m sure still used today for anyone leaning left. So we have to remember not to underestimate those who’d prevent democratic representation from happening. They use lots of tricks, and fruadulent tallying of e-voting is only one way that can happen.
The second point I’d like to make is about the word “moot.” As in, everything else progressive and liberals do to get a Democratic majority in 06 is a complete waste of time until we have some kind of guarantee that votes will be counted. Now, I’m not naive enough to suggest we can have 100% of the votes counted and 100% of voters who want to vote voting. Shit, I’d settle for 87% at this point, and I know we’ve never had a truly free and fair election in the history of this country. But when one reviews the long, depressing list of races in 2000. 2002, and 2004 that had very questionable results, counting methods and/or verification procedures, it becomes obvious that if something isn’t done soon, we may as all start singing Deutschland Uber Alles and be done with it.
I am honestly puzzled, frightened and confused by the lack of Democratic leadership on this issue. Truly- even the most sold out corporate DINO hack has got to worry that his seat isn’t secure enough to prevent a more sold out more corporate Republican hack from taking his place. But they don’t. I don’t know if this is because the consultants are telling them the issue “doesn’t play in Peroria” or because it really is a giant conspiracy and the “opposition” is in on the game. But whatever the reason keeping them back, Democrats are beyond the level of Chamberlinesque stupidity and naiveté for not making this a central focus.
I was just reading about the leader of Jewish quarter in Lodz during WWII, Chiam Rumkowski. You may remember him, for his policies of “saving the body by cutting off a limb” in which he worked with the Nazis, and sent off some groups of Jews to the gas chambers in the hope that the rest could be spared. None were, and he himself was shipped off on the last train. I wonder if his Nazi masters laughed as he went...
She's right about this. Yes, voting corruption has doubtless existed since the beginning of this country. But no, there has never been wholesale theft of an election that couldn't be traced before. Electronic voting makes this very easy to do with the current software. Just like Microsoft can scan any Windows operating system using Explorer, the presence of a backdoor in the Diebold software makes it simple for a knowledgable person to change vote tallies.
Prediction (assuming nothing is done): in 2006 the Republicans will have exit polls at the election indicating they were beat by a landslide. But instead when the "actual" votes are tallied, they will gain seats in both Houses of Congress. ¶ 8:21 PM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, September 16, 2005
Priorities
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out electricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast.
That order - to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. - delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt.
At the time, gasoline was in short supply across the country because of Katrina. Prices increased dramatically and lines formed at pumps across the South.
"I considered it a presidential directive to get those pipelines operating," said Jim Compton, general manager of the South Mississippi Electric Power Association - which distributes power that rural electric cooperatives sell to consumers and businesses.
"I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority," Compton said. "Our people were told to work until it was done.
"They did it in 16 hours, and I consider the effort unprecedented."
Katrina slammed into South Mississippi and Southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, causing widespread devastation and plunging most of the area - including regional medical centers and rural hospitals - into darkness.
The storm also knocked out two power substations in Collins, just north of Hattiesburg. The substations were crucial to Atlanta-based Colonial Pipeline, which moves gasoline and diesel fuel from Texas, through Louisiana and Mississippi and up to the Northeast.
"We were led to believe a national emergency was created when the pipelines were shut down," Compton said...
Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney's office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately.
Jordan dated the first call the night of Aug. 30 and the second call the morning of Aug. 31. Southern Pines supplies electricity to the substation that powers the Colonial pipeline.
Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Mike Callahan said the U.S. Department of Energy called him on Aug. 31. Callahan said department officials said opening the fuel line was a national priority.
Cheney's office referred calls about the pipeline to the Department of Homeland Security. Calls there were referred to Kirk Whitworth, who would not take a telephone message and required questions in the form of an e-mail.
Susan Castiglione, senior manager of corporate and public affairs with Colonial Pipeline, did not return phone calls.
Compton said workers who were trying to restore substations that power two rural hospitals - Stone County Hospital in Wiggins and George County Hospital in Lucedale - worked instead on the Colonial Pipeline project.
The move caused power to be restored at least 24 hours later than planned.
Mindy Osborn, emergency room coordinator at Stone County Hospital, said the power was not restored until six days after the storm on Sept. 4. She didn't have the number of patients who were hospitalized during the week after the storm.
"Oh, yes, 24 hours earlier would have been a help," Osborn said...
Thespice oil must flow!
¶ 12:37 PM 1 comments
links to this post
That order - to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. - delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt.
At the time, gasoline was in short supply across the country because of Katrina. Prices increased dramatically and lines formed at pumps across the South.
"I considered it a presidential directive to get those pipelines operating," said Jim Compton, general manager of the South Mississippi Electric Power Association - which distributes power that rural electric cooperatives sell to consumers and businesses.
"I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority," Compton said. "Our people were told to work until it was done.
"They did it in 16 hours, and I consider the effort unprecedented."
Katrina slammed into South Mississippi and Southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, causing widespread devastation and plunging most of the area - including regional medical centers and rural hospitals - into darkness.
The storm also knocked out two power substations in Collins, just north of Hattiesburg. The substations were crucial to Atlanta-based Colonial Pipeline, which moves gasoline and diesel fuel from Texas, through Louisiana and Mississippi and up to the Northeast.
"We were led to believe a national emergency was created when the pipelines were shut down," Compton said...
Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney's office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately.
Jordan dated the first call the night of Aug. 30 and the second call the morning of Aug. 31. Southern Pines supplies electricity to the substation that powers the Colonial pipeline.
Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Mike Callahan said the U.S. Department of Energy called him on Aug. 31. Callahan said department officials said opening the fuel line was a national priority.
Cheney's office referred calls about the pipeline to the Department of Homeland Security. Calls there were referred to Kirk Whitworth, who would not take a telephone message and required questions in the form of an e-mail.
Susan Castiglione, senior manager of corporate and public affairs with Colonial Pipeline, did not return phone calls.
Compton said workers who were trying to restore substations that power two rural hospitals - Stone County Hospital in Wiggins and George County Hospital in Lucedale - worked instead on the Colonial Pipeline project.
The move caused power to be restored at least 24 hours later than planned.
Mindy Osborn, emergency room coordinator at Stone County Hospital, said the power was not restored until six days after the storm on Sept. 4. She didn't have the number of patients who were hospitalized during the week after the storm.
"Oh, yes, 24 hours earlier would have been a help," Osborn said...
The
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Following the Plan
Here's a good idea: Consumer groups and progressive congress-folks have joined in an effort to stop hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina from being further harmed by the new bankruptcy law, scheduled to take effect Oct. 17. This law was written of, by and for the consumer credit industry and is particularly onerous for the poor.
The bill was passed with massive support from the Republican leadership in Congress and from a disgusting number of sellout Democrats. While it was being considered in committee earlier this year, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) offered an amendment to protect victims of natural disasters. It was defeated, without debate, on a party-line vote.
Now, Congress has a chance to rethink some of the most punitive parts of the bill. Katrina victims who were planning to file before the new law goes into effect are out of luck - where are they gonna find a lawyer, let alone an open courthouse?
Under the new law, anyone whose income is above the state median must file under Chapter 13, a more restrictive category that requires some repayment of debt. The new law grants no exemption for natural disaster, even though it's going to be a little tough for some citizen sitting in the Houston Astrodome who no longer has a home to come up with tax statements, pay stubs and six months of income and expense data.
Meanwhile, it's an ill wind that blows no one good, so we should not be surprised to learn the first winner out of the gate on Katrina is Halliburton Co., whose deserving subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root already has been granted a $29.8 million contract for cleanup work in the wake of Katrina.
Of course, no one would suggest Halliburton and its subsidiaries get government contracts (it already has billions of dollars of Iraq rehab work) just because Vice President Dick Cheney is still on the payroll. Heavens no. The veep continues to get deferred pay from the company he once headed - $194,852 last year.
But Cheney has nothing to do with the Halliburton contracts - that, friends, goes through none other than the noted lobbyist and former head of - of all things - the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Since Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush's campaign manager in 2000, announced that he was leaving FEMA in December 2002, it appears he has been busy making sure reconstruction contracts in Iraq go to companies that give generously to the Republican Party.
...Allbaugh is now with a big-time Washington lobbying firm, where he also represents Shaw Group Inc., and - voila - Shaw Group, too, already has a $100 million emergency contract from FEMA for housing management and construction and a $100 million order from the US Army Corps of Engineers for Katrina repair...
Michael ("You're doing a heckuva job") Brown liked to spread federal money around. In fact, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) was so annoyed by Brownie's distribution of largesse in Miami after Hurricane Frances that he urged President Bush to fire Ol' Brownie last January. What upset Wexler about the $30 million in FEMA checks to cover new wardrobes, cars, lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, furniture and appliances was that the hurricane did not affect Miami. It landed 100 miles away...
Molly was a little slow on this one, releasing this column yesterday in response to John Conyer's initiative to give the broken a break.
Sensenbrenner canned it on Tuesday, alas.
The chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee said on Tuesday he had no intention of reopening a sweeping bankruptcy law passed by Congress earlier this year, despite proposals to exempt Hurricane Katrina victims from some of its provisions.
The new, more stringent bankruptcy law will not harm people left "down and out" by the storm, Wisconsin Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner said.
He said he would not hold a hearing in his committee on a bill by the panel's ranking Democrat, Michigan Rep. John Conyers, and 31 other Democrats who want to exempt Hurricane Katrina victims from parts of the new bankruptcy law. A chairman's decision not to hold a hearing usually prevents a House bill form advancing...
Ah, yes, James Sensenbrenner, from the same state that gave us Joe McCarthy, James Sensenbrenner, the leader of the Crusade to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. The guy who wants Dear Leader to have a lifetime job.
James Sensenbrenner, the one promoting a National ID- and allowing the government to sell everything about you to the highest bidder.
James Sensenbrenner, the Representative advocating repealing the Bill of Rights and making the PATRIOT act a permanent part of the American government.
The same man who introduced legislation that would essentially draft every American into the war on drugs. H.R. 1528, cynically named "Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act," would compel people to spy on their family members and neighbors, and even go undercover and wear a wire if needed. If a person resisted, he or she would face mandatory incarceration.
Here's how the "spy" section of the legislation works: If you "witness" certain drug offenses taking place or "learn" about them, you must report the offenses to law enforcement within 24 hours and provide "full assistance in the investigation, apprehension and prosecution" of the people involved. Failure to do so would be a crime punishable by a mandatory minimum two-year prison sentence, and a maximum sentence of 10 years...
So if you saw some kids smoking marijuana, and didn't turn them in, you would become an immediate felon, too.
You know, James Sensenbrenner. The psychopath. A fine example of everything one expects from a supporter of the Bush administration.
Jesse Jackson calls men like this "barracudas".
But while the victims are simply trying to get their bearings, the barracudas are circling. Naomi Klein, who witnessed this in Iraq, calls it "disaster capitalism." Congress has appropriated $62 billion already. Hundreds of billions more will be spent on reclaiming the Gulf Coast, rebuilding and relocation. The feeding frenzy has begun.
Already Halliburton is on hand with a no-bid contract for reconstruction. Fluor, Bechtel, the Shaw Group - Republican-linked firms - are lining up for contracts. Lobbyists like Joe Allbaugh, close friend of George Bush, and James Lee Witt, close friend of Bill Clinton - both former heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency - are advising their corporate clients to get teams on the scene. Normal rules of contracting and competition are being waived in the emergency. Big bucks are on the table. It is a time to be wired politically.
The ideologues are in the hunt, too. Newt Gingrich is circulating memos calling for turning the region into a massive enterprise zone, slashing corporate taxes, reducing regulations. The oil lobby is pushing for drilling in Alaska and off the shores of the United States. Right wing activist Grover Norquist calls for cutting taxes on the wealthy even more to stimulate the economy. Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flak suggests conservatives use the crisis to try out their favorite ideas - vouchers for education and health care.
President Bush characteristically issued an executive order effectively lowering the wages of reconstruction workers - and hiking the profits of their companies. He wiped out the requirement to pay prevailing wages in the disaster region, apparently thinking that $9 an hour for construction workers was too high a price to pay. The government can save money, no doubt, by exploiting illegal immigrant labor.
The New Orleans business establishment has already created a headquarters in Baton Rouge. They want to reopen the French Quarter, which didn't suffer much flooding in 90 days. They are planning to lobby for one of the 2008 presidential nominating conventions - although it is hard to imagine that Republicans would want to remind folks of the administration's monumental failure. They're talking about capturing the next available Super Bowl.
Business optimism and energy are vital for rebuilding New Orleans. Big dreams and big schemes are essential to the human spirit that will bring the Gulf Coast back. But those who were abandoned in the Superdome are looking at another manmade catastrophe. Dispersed in 40 states, Katrina's victims are struggling to get by, as companies pick up contracts and others get the jobs. If New Orleans is rebuilt as an enterprise zone, private investors will wait for the government to clean up the mess and then build luxury condos to replace affordable housing. They'll turn New Orleans into a theme park, with its former residents unable to afford to come back.
We shouldn't let disaster capitalists make a killing while those who suffered the greatest devastation are left out of the mix. We need a serious plan to rebuild vital infrastructure, to make New Orleans sustainable, to develop affordable housing and mass transit, to rebuild schools. Tax breaks and enterprise zones will end up building floating casinos and luxury condos. We need public investment, linked to a Civilian Construction and Conservation Corps that gives priority to housing, hiring, training and putting to work the poor people who lost.
The Bush administration's inaction and indifference after Katrina hit abandoned the poor and added to their suffering. It would be tragic now if action by the Republican Congress and the Bush administration added to the misery. These people already have had their past swept away by Katrina's furies. We should ensure that their future is not erased by right wing ideologues rewarding disaster capitalists and excluding those who suffered the most from the deal.
You know I agree with him.
Thanks to Truthout for the links. ¶ 9:25 PM 0 comments links to this post
The bill was passed with massive support from the Republican leadership in Congress and from a disgusting number of sellout Democrats. While it was being considered in committee earlier this year, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) offered an amendment to protect victims of natural disasters. It was defeated, without debate, on a party-line vote.
Now, Congress has a chance to rethink some of the most punitive parts of the bill. Katrina victims who were planning to file before the new law goes into effect are out of luck - where are they gonna find a lawyer, let alone an open courthouse?
Under the new law, anyone whose income is above the state median must file under Chapter 13, a more restrictive category that requires some repayment of debt. The new law grants no exemption for natural disaster, even though it's going to be a little tough for some citizen sitting in the Houston Astrodome who no longer has a home to come up with tax statements, pay stubs and six months of income and expense data.
Meanwhile, it's an ill wind that blows no one good, so we should not be surprised to learn the first winner out of the gate on Katrina is Halliburton Co., whose deserving subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root already has been granted a $29.8 million contract for cleanup work in the wake of Katrina.
Of course, no one would suggest Halliburton and its subsidiaries get government contracts (it already has billions of dollars of Iraq rehab work) just because Vice President Dick Cheney is still on the payroll. Heavens no. The veep continues to get deferred pay from the company he once headed - $194,852 last year.
But Cheney has nothing to do with the Halliburton contracts - that, friends, goes through none other than the noted lobbyist and former head of - of all things - the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Since Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush's campaign manager in 2000, announced that he was leaving FEMA in December 2002, it appears he has been busy making sure reconstruction contracts in Iraq go to companies that give generously to the Republican Party.
...Allbaugh is now with a big-time Washington lobbying firm, where he also represents Shaw Group Inc., and - voila - Shaw Group, too, already has a $100 million emergency contract from FEMA for housing management and construction and a $100 million order from the US Army Corps of Engineers for Katrina repair...
Michael ("You're doing a heckuva job") Brown liked to spread federal money around. In fact, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) was so annoyed by Brownie's distribution of largesse in Miami after Hurricane Frances that he urged President Bush to fire Ol' Brownie last January. What upset Wexler about the $30 million in FEMA checks to cover new wardrobes, cars, lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, furniture and appliances was that the hurricane did not affect Miami. It landed 100 miles away...
Molly was a little slow on this one, releasing this column yesterday in response to John Conyer's initiative to give the broken a break.
Sensenbrenner canned it on Tuesday, alas.
The chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee said on Tuesday he had no intention of reopening a sweeping bankruptcy law passed by Congress earlier this year, despite proposals to exempt Hurricane Katrina victims from some of its provisions.
The new, more stringent bankruptcy law will not harm people left "down and out" by the storm, Wisconsin Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner said.
He said he would not hold a hearing in his committee on a bill by the panel's ranking Democrat, Michigan Rep. John Conyers, and 31 other Democrats who want to exempt Hurricane Katrina victims from parts of the new bankruptcy law. A chairman's decision not to hold a hearing usually prevents a House bill form advancing...
Ah, yes, James Sensenbrenner, from the same state that gave us Joe McCarthy, James Sensenbrenner, the leader of the Crusade to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. The guy who wants Dear Leader to have a lifetime job.
James Sensenbrenner, the one promoting a National ID- and allowing the government to sell everything about you to the highest bidder.
James Sensenbrenner, the Representative advocating repealing the Bill of Rights and making the PATRIOT act a permanent part of the American government.
The same man who introduced legislation that would essentially draft every American into the war on drugs. H.R. 1528, cynically named "Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act," would compel people to spy on their family members and neighbors, and even go undercover and wear a wire if needed. If a person resisted, he or she would face mandatory incarceration.
Here's how the "spy" section of the legislation works: If you "witness" certain drug offenses taking place or "learn" about them, you must report the offenses to law enforcement within 24 hours and provide "full assistance in the investigation, apprehension and prosecution" of the people involved. Failure to do so would be a crime punishable by a mandatory minimum two-year prison sentence, and a maximum sentence of 10 years...
So if you saw some kids smoking marijuana, and didn't turn them in, you would become an immediate felon, too.
You know, James Sensenbrenner. The psychopath. A fine example of everything one expects from a supporter of the Bush administration.
Jesse Jackson calls men like this "barracudas".
But while the victims are simply trying to get their bearings, the barracudas are circling. Naomi Klein, who witnessed this in Iraq, calls it "disaster capitalism." Congress has appropriated $62 billion already. Hundreds of billions more will be spent on reclaiming the Gulf Coast, rebuilding and relocation. The feeding frenzy has begun.
Already Halliburton is on hand with a no-bid contract for reconstruction. Fluor, Bechtel, the Shaw Group - Republican-linked firms - are lining up for contracts. Lobbyists like Joe Allbaugh, close friend of George Bush, and James Lee Witt, close friend of Bill Clinton - both former heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency - are advising their corporate clients to get teams on the scene. Normal rules of contracting and competition are being waived in the emergency. Big bucks are on the table. It is a time to be wired politically.
The ideologues are in the hunt, too. Newt Gingrich is circulating memos calling for turning the region into a massive enterprise zone, slashing corporate taxes, reducing regulations. The oil lobby is pushing for drilling in Alaska and off the shores of the United States. Right wing activist Grover Norquist calls for cutting taxes on the wealthy even more to stimulate the economy. Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flak suggests conservatives use the crisis to try out their favorite ideas - vouchers for education and health care.
President Bush characteristically issued an executive order effectively lowering the wages of reconstruction workers - and hiking the profits of their companies. He wiped out the requirement to pay prevailing wages in the disaster region, apparently thinking that $9 an hour for construction workers was too high a price to pay. The government can save money, no doubt, by exploiting illegal immigrant labor.
The New Orleans business establishment has already created a headquarters in Baton Rouge. They want to reopen the French Quarter, which didn't suffer much flooding in 90 days. They are planning to lobby for one of the 2008 presidential nominating conventions - although it is hard to imagine that Republicans would want to remind folks of the administration's monumental failure. They're talking about capturing the next available Super Bowl.
Business optimism and energy are vital for rebuilding New Orleans. Big dreams and big schemes are essential to the human spirit that will bring the Gulf Coast back. But those who were abandoned in the Superdome are looking at another manmade catastrophe. Dispersed in 40 states, Katrina's victims are struggling to get by, as companies pick up contracts and others get the jobs. If New Orleans is rebuilt as an enterprise zone, private investors will wait for the government to clean up the mess and then build luxury condos to replace affordable housing. They'll turn New Orleans into a theme park, with its former residents unable to afford to come back.
We shouldn't let disaster capitalists make a killing while those who suffered the greatest devastation are left out of the mix. We need a serious plan to rebuild vital infrastructure, to make New Orleans sustainable, to develop affordable housing and mass transit, to rebuild schools. Tax breaks and enterprise zones will end up building floating casinos and luxury condos. We need public investment, linked to a Civilian Construction and Conservation Corps that gives priority to housing, hiring, training and putting to work the poor people who lost.
The Bush administration's inaction and indifference after Katrina hit abandoned the poor and added to their suffering. It would be tragic now if action by the Republican Congress and the Bush administration added to the misery. These people already have had their past swept away by Katrina's furies. We should ensure that their future is not erased by right wing ideologues rewarding disaster capitalists and excluding those who suffered the most from the deal.
You know I agree with him.
Thanks to Truthout for the links. ¶ 9:25 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Smoking Gun
You were waiting for the smoking gun that would blow the lid off the right wing lies about Katrina and highlight the Bush Administration’s inept and potentially negligent response? After John Conyers established earlier in the day that Governor Blanco filed her request for assistance timely, the fine reporters at Knight-Ridder once again get the jump on their overpaid peers at the Post and Times and piece together a key fact tonight, that others like Josh Marshall have noted earlier.
In short, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff abdicated his existing responsibility to activate federal forces without waiting for any request from Governor Blanco, and wasted at least 36 hours of critical time before empowering FEMA to act. And the system wasn’t the problem, it was the White House...
Thanks to Atrios for the link. ¶ 5:23 PM 0 comments links to this post
In short, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff abdicated his existing responsibility to activate federal forces without waiting for any request from Governor Blanco, and wasted at least 36 hours of critical time before empowering FEMA to act. And the system wasn’t the problem, it was the White House...
Thanks to Atrios for the link. ¶ 5:23 PM 0 comments links to this post
... he will be...
Man: Here's one-
Cart-master: Ninepence.
Old Man: (feebly) I'm not dead!
Cart-master: (suprised) What?
Man: Nothing! Here's your ninepence....
Old Man: I'm not dead!
Cart-master: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead!
Man: Yes he is.
Old Man: I'm not!
Cart-master: 'E isn't?
Man: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill...
Old Man: I'm getting better!
Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Cart-master: I can't take 'im like that! It's against regulations!
Old Man: I don't want to go on the cart....
Man: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Cart-master: I can't take 'im....
Old Man: I feel fine!
Man: Well, do us a favor...
Cart-master: I can't!
Man: Can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long...
Cart-master: No, gotta get to Robinson's, they lost nine today.
Man: Well, when's your next round?
Cart-master: Thursday.
Old Man: I think I'll go for a walk....
Man: You're not fooling anyone, you know--
(to Cart-master) Look, isn't there something you can do...?
(they both look around)
Old Man: I feel happy! I feel happy!
(the Cart-master deals the old man a swift blow to the head with his wooden
spoon. The old man goes limp.)
Man: (throwing the old man onto the cart) Ah. thanks very much.
Cart-master: Not at all. See you on Thursday!
Man: Right! All right....
Guess who got the no-bid contract?
Thanks to Jeff Wells for the link. ¶ 1:12 PM 0 comments links to this post
Man: Here's one-
Cart-master: Ninepence.
Old Man: (feebly) I'm not dead!
Cart-master: (suprised) What?
Man: Nothing! Here's your ninepence....
Old Man: I'm not dead!
Cart-master: 'Ere! 'E says 'e's not dead!
Man: Yes he is.
Old Man: I'm not!
Cart-master: 'E isn't?
Man: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill...
Old Man: I'm getting better!
Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Cart-master: I can't take 'im like that! It's against regulations!
Old Man: I don't want to go on the cart....
Man: Oh, don't be such a baby.
Cart-master: I can't take 'im....
Old Man: I feel fine!
Man: Well, do us a favor...
Cart-master: I can't!
Man: Can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long...
Cart-master: No, gotta get to Robinson's, they lost nine today.
Man: Well, when's your next round?
Cart-master: Thursday.
Old Man: I think I'll go for a walk....
Man: You're not fooling anyone, you know--
(to Cart-master) Look, isn't there something you can do...?
(they both look around)
Old Man: I feel happy! I feel happy!
(the Cart-master deals the old man a swift blow to the head with his wooden
spoon. The old man goes limp.)
Man: (throwing the old man onto the cart) Ah. thanks very much.
Cart-master: Not at all. See you on Thursday!
Man: Right! All right....
Guess who got the no-bid contract?
Thanks to Jeff Wells for the link. ¶ 1:12 PM 0 comments links to this post
No Time to Diet
For the true connoisseur of cynicism -- and I'm talking about myself here -- the past few days have been about as good as it gets: the political equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Mobil five star restaurant. Everywhere you look, you can see mounds of mouthwatering hypocrisy, steaming heaps of juicy lies, fat slices of self-serving spin, and, of course, a bottomless tureen of hot buttered bullshit, fresh from the White House lavatory.
All of it served up by a horde of obsequious GOP waiters eager to fill your plate with deep fried nonsense and pop open another bottle of ridiculous excuses (Chateau du Bush, '05) -- until even the most fastidious eater starts to feel like Mr. Creosote...
Taking the blame like a man, huh?
That's a great smokescreen for the Bechtel, Fluor, and Halliburton boys, Karl.
No time to bid on contracts!
...The first large-scale contracts related to Hurricane Katrina, as in Iraq, were awarded without competitive bidding, and using so-called cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend.
Contracts for temporary housing have been awarded to politically connected companies like Fluor Corp. and Bechtel National Inc., a unit of Bechtel Group Inc., leading congressional Democrats to renew charges of cronyism they first leveled when the firms won lucrative work in Iraq...
Tax-free zones for the next 20 years!
Now that's the road to Wreckovery. ¶ 8:14 AM 0 comments links to this post
All of it served up by a horde of obsequious GOP waiters eager to fill your plate with deep fried nonsense and pop open another bottle of ridiculous excuses (Chateau du Bush, '05) -- until even the most fastidious eater starts to feel like Mr. Creosote...
Taking the blame like a man, huh?
That's a great smokescreen for the Bechtel, Fluor, and Halliburton boys, Karl.
No time to bid on contracts!
...The first large-scale contracts related to Hurricane Katrina, as in Iraq, were awarded without competitive bidding, and using so-called cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend.
Contracts for temporary housing have been awarded to politically connected companies like Fluor Corp. and Bechtel National Inc., a unit of Bechtel Group Inc., leading congressional Democrats to renew charges of cronyism they first leveled when the firms won lucrative work in Iraq...
Tax-free zones for the next 20 years!
Now that's the road to Wreckovery. ¶ 8:14 AM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Where Osama Loves to Shop
...A massive police presence is expected at the Defense Systems and Equipment International (DSEi) exhibition at the Excel Center in London's Docklands when it officially opens this morning to invited guests only. There were angry confrontations between police and demonstrators at the last arms fair two years ago, and similar protests are expected this time. The bill for policing is likely to cost the taxpayer millions of pounds.
The exhibition has been criticized by the Metropolitan Police for diverting resources during a period of heightened terror alert. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has also criticized the fair.
Among the 1,200 exhibitors from 34 countries are many which have made equipment used in Iraq. At the stand of Lockheed Martin, there are replicas of the Hellfire and Thaad (Theatre High Altitude Area Defense) missiles, both of which have been deployed in Iraq. Although the Hellfire is mainly as an air-launched missile, the version being promoted at DSEi is a new type for ground or sea launch. "It has been used regularly and very successfully in Iraq and this one is exactly the same," said Doug Terrell, a Lockheed Martin executive on the stand. "The US Army, Marine Corps and Special Forces absolutely love it." Almost 20,000 Hellfires have been sold worldwide.
The exhibition is run in conjunction with the Defense Export Services Organization (DESO), the arm of the Ministry of Defense that promotes the sale and licensing of British-made military equipment. Yesterday's press preview day included a catwalk-style show organized by DESO, with soldiers in full battledress posing with weapons. These included the British L96 sniper rifle used in Iraq as well as chemical detection equipment, airfield illumination systems and light anti-armour weapons...
DESO said invitations were issued after consultation with other departments such as the Foreign Office and the intelligence services... the majority were concerned with such areas as disaster relief, peacekeeping and humanitarian activities and homeland security.
What to buy this week:
* L96 sniper rifle. Made by Accuracy International and used by British troops, often as cover for bomb disposal experts.
* Hellfire Missile. Made by US-based Lockheed Martin. Normally fitted to Apache helicopters.
* The NLAW (Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon) is a disposable, one man, portable high explosive system made in Britain by the French company Thales.
* THAAD (Theatre High Altitude Area Defense). Designed, says Lockheed, to destroy attacking missiles.
The countries:
* CHINA
Invited despite an EU embargo on arms sales and Tony Blair's statement in Beijing this month that there was a "question mark" over human rights.
* INDONESIA
Dubious human rights record over the conflicts in Sumatra and Irian Jaya has kept Indonesia on the uninvited list since 1999. Campaigners have documented "extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence and destruction of property" by the military in 2004-05.
* COLOMBIA
The Foreign Office said "members of the security forces collude with paramilitaries and are involved in drug trafficking".
* SAUDI ARABIA
Third-largest recipient of UK arms exports, where Amnesty International last year reported an escalation of "killings by security forces exacerbating the already dire human rights situation in the country". Foreign Office said the state "continued to violate human rights".
* ALGERIA
The Foreign Office says there are "numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias".
Peacekeepers, huh?
Does Halliburton still have a blue light special on nuclear reactors and detonators? For peaceful use only!
Let's outline what happened there:
Scandal-plagued Halliburton -- the oil services company once headed by Vice President Cheney -- sold an Iranian oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, say Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies' business dealings.
Halliburton was secretly working at the time with one of Iran 's top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and sold the components in April to the official's oil development company, the sources said.
Just last week, a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, whose miltary unit just reported a 284 percent increase in its second quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the means to build a nuclear weapon.
With Iran's new hardline government now firmly in place, Iranian officials have rounded up relatives and close business associates of Iran's former President and defeated mullah presidential candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani, alleging the men were involved in widespread corruption of Iran's oil industry, specifically tied to the country's business dealings with Halliburton.
On July 27, one of Iran's many state countrolled news agencies, FARS, an 'information' arm of the Islamic judiciary, announced the arrest of several of the executives of the Oriental Oil Kish Company, which is owned by Rafsanjani's children and other relatives.
"They were brought up on charges of economic corruption," according to a report posted on the Iran Press News website. "Following the necessary investigations by the judiciary's bailiffs, with warrants from the public prosecutor's office (mainly mullahs who only dole out Islamic jurisprudence), the case of economic corruption and malfeasance, certain of the authorities of Oriental Kish Oil Company have been arrested and under questioning. The head of the board of directors was also among those detained."
Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting U.S. law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, vice chairman of the board of directors of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran's largest private oil companies, on oil and natural gas development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran's nuclear development team and has been negotiating Iran 's nuclear development issues with the European Union and at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with U.S. energy companies to develop the country's oil industry," the Financial Times reported.
"A reliable source stated that, given the parameters, the close-knit cooperation and association of one of the key members of the regime's nuclear negotiation team with Halliburton can be an alarm bell which will necessarily instigate the dynamics of the members of the regimes' negotiating committee," according to the Iran Press News story.
Oriental Oil Kish is registerd in the United Kingdom and Dubai .
Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran 's nuclear secrets and accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton, Iranian government officials said. During the first round of interrogations in the judiciary, a huge network of oil mafia has been exposed, according to the IPS report.
It's unclear whether Halliburton was privy to information regarding Iran 's nuclear activites. Halliburton sources said the company sold centrifuges and detonators to be used specifically for a nuclear reactor and oil and natural gas drilling parts for well projects to Oriental Oil Kish.
A company spokesperson did not return numerous calls for comment. A White House spokesperson also did not return calls for comment.
In 1991, Halliburton sold Libya , another country that sponsors terrorism, nuclear detonator devices. The company paid more than $3 million in fines for violating a U.S. trade embargo that President Reagan imposed in 1986 because of Libya 's ties to terrorist activities.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton became public knowledge in January when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars natural gas drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered in the Cayman Islands.
Following the announcement, Halliburton said the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran . The BBC reported that Halliburton, which took in $30-$40 million from its Iranian operations in 2003, "was winding down its work due to a poor business environment."
Halliburton, under mounting pressure from lawmakers in Washington, D.C., pulled out of its deal with Nasseri's company in May, but has done extensive work on other areas of the Iranian gas project and was still acting in an advisory capacity to Nasseri's company, two people who have knowledge of Halliburton's work in Iran said.
In an attempt to curtail other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations, the Senate approved legislation July 26 that would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct business in Libya, Iran and Syria, and avoid U.S. sanctions under International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, is part of the Senate Defense Authorization bill.
"It prevents U.S. corporations from creating a shell company somewhere else in order to do business with rogue, terror-sponsoring nations such as Syria and Iran ," Collins said in a statement.
"The bottom line is that if a U.S. company is evading sanctions to do business with one of these countries, they are helping to prop up countries that support terrorism -- most often aimed against America ," she said.
The law currently doesn't prohibit foreign subsidiaries from conducting business with rogue nations provided that the subsidiaries are truly independent of the parent company.
But Halliburton's Cayman Island subsidiary never did fit that description.
Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.
According to a February 2001 report in the Wall Street Journal, "Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is non-American. But, like the sign over the receptionist's head, the brochure bears the company's name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world."
Moreover, mail sent to the company's offices in Tehran and the Cayman Islands is forwarded to the company's Dallas headquarters.
Not surprisingly, in a letter drafted by trade groups representing corporate executives vehemently objected to the amendment saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite terrorist attacks on the United States and "greatly strain relations with the United States' primary trading partners."
"Extraterritorial measures irritate relations with the very nations the United States must secure cooperation from to promote multilateral strategies to fight terrorism and to address other areas of mutual concern," said a letter signed by the Coalition for Employment through Exports, Emergency Coalition for American Trade, National Foreign Trade Council, USA Engage, U.S. Council on International Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
"Foreign governments view U.S. efforts to dictate their foreign and commercial policy as violations of sovereignty, often leading them to adopt retaliatory measures more at odds with U.S. goals."
Still, Collins' amendment has some holes. As Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney pointed out in a July 25 story, "the Collins amendment would seek to penalize individuals or entities who evade IEEPA sanctions -- if they are "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States ."
"This is merely a restatement of existing regulations," Gaffney said.
"The problem with this formulation is that, in the process of purportedly closing one loophole, it would appear to create new ones. As Sen. Collins told the Senate: "Some truly independent foreign subsidiaries are incorporated under the laws of the country in which they do business and are subject to that country's laws, to that legal jurisdiction. There is a great deal of difference between a corporation set up in a day, without any real employees or assets, and one that has been in existence for many years and that gets purchased, in part, by a U.S. firm."
"It is a safe bet that every foreign subsidiary of a U.S. company doing business with terrorist states will claim it is one of the ones Sen. Collins would allow to continue enriching our enemies, not one prohibited from doing so," Gaffney said.
Going a step further, Dow Jones Newswires reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sent letters in June to energy corporations demanding that the companies disclose in their security filings any business dealings with terrorist supporting nations.
"The letters have been sent by the SEC's Office of Global Security Risk, a special division that monitors companies with operations in Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, which were created by the U.S. Congress in 2004," Dow Jones reported.
The move comes as investors have become increasingly concerned that they may be unwillingly supporting terrorist activity. In the case of Halliburton, the New York City Comptroller's office threatened in March 2003 to pull its $23 million investment in the company if Halliburton continued to conduct business with Iran .
The SEC letters are aimed at forcing corporations to disclose their profits from business dealings rogue nations. Oil companies, such as Devon Energy Corp., ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp., that currently conduct business with countries that sponsor terrorism, have not disclosed the profits received from terrorist countries in their most recent quarterly reports because the companies don't consider the earnings "material."
Devon Energy was until recently conducting business in Syria . The company just sold its stake in an oil field there. ConocoPhillips has a service contract with the Syrian Petroleum Co. that expires on Dec. 31.
The detonators were stopped by some Agent embedded in the Company:
You’ve heard, of course, about the Israeli citizen who shipped 200 U.S.-made nuclear weapons detonators to Pakistan? Neither had we. It’s one of those stories that you’d think would rise to the surface, but sometimes doesn’t. AP has been doing its best, but not many papers have been running the stories (the case has gotten a lot of ink abroad).
In any case, here’s what we know. On Jan. 2, the feds arrested a guy named Asher Karni, who is described as an Israeli citizen living in South Africa, for illegally exporting the high-speed electrical switches, known as triggered spark gaps, to Pakistan. Besides detonating nuclear explosions, the devices appear to have one other use: their pulses can break up gall stones. In this case, we have to assume that the switches were destined for weapons use by Pakistan – at the moment our ally in the “war on terrorism,” but also a politically unstable nuclear power with a history of selling the technology to others.
In late January, the chief of the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency (such as it is) described the nuclear blackmarket centered around Pakistan as one of “fantastic cleverness” that benefitted both Libya (which recently pledged to give up its nuclear weapons programs) and Iran (which, absurdly, claims it has none).
Fortunately, Asher Karni’s plot was disclosed to U.S. authorities by a business associate. After being alerted by the feds, the switch-maker, Perkin Elmer Optoelectronics, disabled the shipment of switches so they’d be useless to whoever eventually received them, and the sale went ahead. Karni was arrested when he visited Colorado on a ski vacation.
Then – incredibly, IMHO -- the presiding judge let Karni, who I have to believe is a major flight risk, out of the slammer on bond on condition he agreed to electronic monitoring and stayed with a rabbi in Maryland (the case against him has been filed in U.S. District Court in D.C.). This Denver Post piece sums up some of the questions, and risks, involved in the case...
It's really hard to get your world war on when your Company still has some closet Agents in it worried about silly things like keeping weapons out of the wrong hands and keeping America safe. ¶ 10:11 PM 0 comments links to this post
The exhibition has been criticized by the Metropolitan Police for diverting resources during a period of heightened terror alert. Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, has also criticized the fair.
Among the 1,200 exhibitors from 34 countries are many which have made equipment used in Iraq. At the stand of Lockheed Martin, there are replicas of the Hellfire and Thaad (Theatre High Altitude Area Defense) missiles, both of which have been deployed in Iraq. Although the Hellfire is mainly as an air-launched missile, the version being promoted at DSEi is a new type for ground or sea launch. "It has been used regularly and very successfully in Iraq and this one is exactly the same," said Doug Terrell, a Lockheed Martin executive on the stand. "The US Army, Marine Corps and Special Forces absolutely love it." Almost 20,000 Hellfires have been sold worldwide.
The exhibition is run in conjunction with the Defense Export Services Organization (DESO), the arm of the Ministry of Defense that promotes the sale and licensing of British-made military equipment. Yesterday's press preview day included a catwalk-style show organized by DESO, with soldiers in full battledress posing with weapons. These included the British L96 sniper rifle used in Iraq as well as chemical detection equipment, airfield illumination systems and light anti-armour weapons...
DESO said invitations were issued after consultation with other departments such as the Foreign Office and the intelligence services... the majority were concerned with such areas as disaster relief, peacekeeping and humanitarian activities and homeland security.
What to buy this week:
* L96 sniper rifle. Made by Accuracy International and used by British troops, often as cover for bomb disposal experts.
* Hellfire Missile. Made by US-based Lockheed Martin. Normally fitted to Apache helicopters.
* The NLAW (Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon) is a disposable, one man, portable high explosive system made in Britain by the French company Thales.
* THAAD (Theatre High Altitude Area Defense). Designed, says Lockheed, to destroy attacking missiles.
The countries:
* CHINA
Invited despite an EU embargo on arms sales and Tony Blair's statement in Beijing this month that there was a "question mark" over human rights.
* INDONESIA
Dubious human rights record over the conflicts in Sumatra and Irian Jaya has kept Indonesia on the uninvited list since 1999. Campaigners have documented "extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence and destruction of property" by the military in 2004-05.
* COLOMBIA
The Foreign Office said "members of the security forces collude with paramilitaries and are involved in drug trafficking".
* SAUDI ARABIA
Third-largest recipient of UK arms exports, where Amnesty International last year reported an escalation of "killings by security forces exacerbating the already dire human rights situation in the country". Foreign Office said the state "continued to violate human rights".
* ALGERIA
The Foreign Office says there are "numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias".
Peacekeepers, huh?
Does Halliburton still have a blue light special on nuclear reactors and detonators? For peaceful use only!
Let's outline what happened there:
Scandal-plagued Halliburton -- the oil services company once headed by Vice President Cheney -- sold an Iranian oil development company key components for a nuclear reactor, say Halliburton sources with intimate knowledge into both companies' business dealings.
Halliburton was secretly working at the time with one of Iran 's top nuclear program officials on natural gas related projects and sold the components in April to the official's oil development company, the sources said.
Just last week, a National Security Council report said Iran was a decade away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. That time frame could arguably have been significantly longer if Halliburton, whose miltary unit just reported a 284 percent increase in its second quarter profits due to its Iraq reconstruction contracts, was not actively providing the Iranian government with the means to build a nuclear weapon.
With Iran's new hardline government now firmly in place, Iranian officials have rounded up relatives and close business associates of Iran's former President and defeated mullah presidential candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani, alleging the men were involved in widespread corruption of Iran's oil industry, specifically tied to the country's business dealings with Halliburton.
On July 27, one of Iran's many state countrolled news agencies, FARS, an 'information' arm of the Islamic judiciary, announced the arrest of several of the executives of the Oriental Oil Kish Company, which is owned by Rafsanjani's children and other relatives.
"They were brought up on charges of economic corruption," according to a report posted on the Iran Press News website. "Following the necessary investigations by the judiciary's bailiffs, with warrants from the public prosecutor's office (mainly mullahs who only dole out Islamic jurisprudence), the case of economic corruption and malfeasance, certain of the authorities of Oriental Kish Oil Company have been arrested and under questioning. The head of the board of directors was also among those detained."
Now comes word that Halliburton, which has a long history of flouting U.S. law by conducting business with countries the Bush administration said has ties to terrorism, was working with Cyrus Nasseri, vice chairman of the board of directors of Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran's largest private oil companies, on oil and natural gas development projects in Tehran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran's nuclear development team and has been negotiating Iran 's nuclear development issues with the European Union and at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"Nasseri, a senior Iranian diplomat negotiating with Europe over Iran's controversial nuclear program is at the heart of deals with U.S. energy companies to develop the country's oil industry," the Financial Times reported.
"A reliable source stated that, given the parameters, the close-knit cooperation and association of one of the key members of the regime's nuclear negotiation team with Halliburton can be an alarm bell which will necessarily instigate the dynamics of the members of the regimes' negotiating committee," according to the Iran Press News story.
Oriental Oil Kish is registerd in the United Kingdom and Dubai .
Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran 's nuclear secrets and accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton, Iranian government officials said. During the first round of interrogations in the judiciary, a huge network of oil mafia has been exposed, according to the IPS report.
It's unclear whether Halliburton was privy to information regarding Iran 's nuclear activites. Halliburton sources said the company sold centrifuges and detonators to be used specifically for a nuclear reactor and oil and natural gas drilling parts for well projects to Oriental Oil Kish.
A company spokesperson did not return numerous calls for comment. A White House spokesperson also did not return calls for comment.
In 1991, Halliburton sold Libya , another country that sponsors terrorism, nuclear detonator devices. The company paid more than $3 million in fines for violating a U.S. trade embargo that President Reagan imposed in 1986 because of Libya 's ties to terrorist activities.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton became public knowledge in January when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars natural gas drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered in the Cayman Islands.
Following the announcement, Halliburton said the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran . The BBC reported that Halliburton, which took in $30-$40 million from its Iranian operations in 2003, "was winding down its work due to a poor business environment."
Halliburton, under mounting pressure from lawmakers in Washington, D.C., pulled out of its deal with Nasseri's company in May, but has done extensive work on other areas of the Iranian gas project and was still acting in an advisory capacity to Nasseri's company, two people who have knowledge of Halliburton's work in Iran said.
In an attempt to curtail other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations, the Senate approved legislation July 26 that would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct business in Libya, Iran and Syria, and avoid U.S. sanctions under International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins, R- Maine, is part of the Senate Defense Authorization bill.
"It prevents U.S. corporations from creating a shell company somewhere else in order to do business with rogue, terror-sponsoring nations such as Syria and Iran ," Collins said in a statement.
"The bottom line is that if a U.S. company is evading sanctions to do business with one of these countries, they are helping to prop up countries that support terrorism -- most often aimed against America ," she said.
The law currently doesn't prohibit foreign subsidiaries from conducting business with rogue nations provided that the subsidiaries are truly independent of the parent company.
But Halliburton's Cayman Island subsidiary never did fit that description.
Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.
According to a February 2001 report in the Wall Street Journal, "Halliburton Products & Services Ltd. works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is non-American. But, like the sign over the receptionist's head, the brochure bears the company's name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world."
Moreover, mail sent to the company's offices in Tehran and the Cayman Islands is forwarded to the company's Dallas headquarters.
Not surprisingly, in a letter drafted by trade groups representing corporate executives vehemently objected to the amendment saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite terrorist attacks on the United States and "greatly strain relations with the United States' primary trading partners."
"Extraterritorial measures irritate relations with the very nations the United States must secure cooperation from to promote multilateral strategies to fight terrorism and to address other areas of mutual concern," said a letter signed by the Coalition for Employment through Exports, Emergency Coalition for American Trade, National Foreign Trade Council, USA Engage, U.S. Council on International Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
"Foreign governments view U.S. efforts to dictate their foreign and commercial policy as violations of sovereignty, often leading them to adopt retaliatory measures more at odds with U.S. goals."
Still, Collins' amendment has some holes. As Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney pointed out in a July 25 story, "the Collins amendment would seek to penalize individuals or entities who evade IEEPA sanctions -- if they are "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States ."
"This is merely a restatement of existing regulations," Gaffney said.
"The problem with this formulation is that, in the process of purportedly closing one loophole, it would appear to create new ones. As Sen. Collins told the Senate: "Some truly independent foreign subsidiaries are incorporated under the laws of the country in which they do business and are subject to that country's laws, to that legal jurisdiction. There is a great deal of difference between a corporation set up in a day, without any real employees or assets, and one that has been in existence for many years and that gets purchased, in part, by a U.S. firm."
"It is a safe bet that every foreign subsidiary of a U.S. company doing business with terrorist states will claim it is one of the ones Sen. Collins would allow to continue enriching our enemies, not one prohibited from doing so," Gaffney said.
Going a step further, Dow Jones Newswires reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sent letters in June to energy corporations demanding that the companies disclose in their security filings any business dealings with terrorist supporting nations.
"The letters have been sent by the SEC's Office of Global Security Risk, a special division that monitors companies with operations in Iran and other countries under U.S. sanctions, which were created by the U.S. Congress in 2004," Dow Jones reported.
The move comes as investors have become increasingly concerned that they may be unwillingly supporting terrorist activity. In the case of Halliburton, the New York City Comptroller's office threatened in March 2003 to pull its $23 million investment in the company if Halliburton continued to conduct business with Iran .
The SEC letters are aimed at forcing corporations to disclose their profits from business dealings rogue nations. Oil companies, such as Devon Energy Corp., ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp., that currently conduct business with countries that sponsor terrorism, have not disclosed the profits received from terrorist countries in their most recent quarterly reports because the companies don't consider the earnings "material."
Devon Energy was until recently conducting business in Syria . The company just sold its stake in an oil field there. ConocoPhillips has a service contract with the Syrian Petroleum Co. that expires on Dec. 31.
The detonators were stopped by some Agent embedded in the Company:
You’ve heard, of course, about the Israeli citizen who shipped 200 U.S.-made nuclear weapons detonators to Pakistan? Neither had we. It’s one of those stories that you’d think would rise to the surface, but sometimes doesn’t. AP has been doing its best, but not many papers have been running the stories (the case has gotten a lot of ink abroad).
In any case, here’s what we know. On Jan. 2, the feds arrested a guy named Asher Karni, who is described as an Israeli citizen living in South Africa, for illegally exporting the high-speed electrical switches, known as triggered spark gaps, to Pakistan. Besides detonating nuclear explosions, the devices appear to have one other use: their pulses can break up gall stones. In this case, we have to assume that the switches were destined for weapons use by Pakistan – at the moment our ally in the “war on terrorism,” but also a politically unstable nuclear power with a history of selling the technology to others.
In late January, the chief of the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency (such as it is) described the nuclear blackmarket centered around Pakistan as one of “fantastic cleverness” that benefitted both Libya (which recently pledged to give up its nuclear weapons programs) and Iran (which, absurdly, claims it has none).
Fortunately, Asher Karni’s plot was disclosed to U.S. authorities by a business associate. After being alerted by the feds, the switch-maker, Perkin Elmer Optoelectronics, disabled the shipment of switches so they’d be useless to whoever eventually received them, and the sale went ahead. Karni was arrested when he visited Colorado on a ski vacation.
Then – incredibly, IMHO -- the presiding judge let Karni, who I have to believe is a major flight risk, out of the slammer on bond on condition he agreed to electronic monitoring and stayed with a rabbi in Maryland (the case against him has been filed in U.S. District Court in D.C.). This Denver Post piece sums up some of the questions, and risks, involved in the case...
It's really hard to get your world war on when your Company still has some closet Agents in it worried about silly things like keeping weapons out of the wrong hands and keeping America safe. ¶ 10:11 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, September 12, 2005
Shrinking Government Until They Can Strangle It
With this famous quote of Grover Norquist's in mind, for your consideration, Paul Krugman:
The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown - who is no longer overseeing relief efforts but still heads the agency - has become a symbol of cronyism.
But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?
Unfortunately, it's easy to find other agencies suffering from some version of the FEMA syndrome.
The first example won't surprise you: the Environmental Protection Agency, which has a key role to play in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, but which has seen a major exodus of experienced officials over the past few years. In particular, senior officials have left in protest over what they say is the Bush administration's unwillingness to enforce environmental law.
Yesterday The Independent, the British newspaper, published an interview about the environmental aftermath of Katrina with Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst in the agency's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, whom one suspects is planning to join the exodus. "The budget has been cut," he said, "and inept political hacks have been put in key positions." That sounds familiar, and given what we've learned over the last two weeks there's no reason to doubt that characterization - or to disregard his warning of an environmental cover-up in progress.
What about the Food and Drug Administration? Serious questions have been raised about the agency's coziness with drug companies, and the agency's top official in charge of women's health issues resigned over the delay in approving Plan B, the morning-after pill, accusing the agency's head of overruling the professional staff on political grounds.
Then there's the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose Republican chairman hired a consultant to identify liberal bias in its programs. The consultant apparently considered any criticism of the administration a sign of liberalism, even if it came from conservatives.
You could say that these are all cases in which the Bush administration hasn't worried about degrading the quality of a government agency because it doesn't really believe in the agency's mission. But you can't say that about my other two examples.
Even a conservative government needs an effective Treasury Department. Yet Treasury, which had high prestige and morale during the Clinton years, has fallen from grace.
The public symbol of that fall is the fact that John Snow, who was obviously picked for his loyalty rather than his qualifications, is still Treasury secretary. Less obvious to the public is the hollowing out of the department's expertise. Many experienced staff members have left since 2000, and a number of key positions are either empty or filled only on an acting basis. "There is no policy," an economist who was leaving the department after 22 years told The Washington Post, back in 2002. "If there are no pipes, why do you need a plumber?" So the best and brightest have been leaving.
And finally, what about the department of Homeland Security itself? FEMA was neglected, some people say, because it was folded into a large agency that was focused on terrorist threats, not natural disasters. But what, exactly, is the department doing to protect us from terrorists?
In 2004 Reuters reported a "steady exodus" of counterterrorism officials, who believed that the war in Iraq had taken precedence over the real terrorist threat. Why, then, should we believe that Homeland Security is being well run?
Let's not forget that the administration's first choice to head the department was Bernard Kerik, a crony of Rudy Giuliani. And Mr. Kerik's nomination would have gone through if enterprising reporters hadn't turned up problems in his background that the F.B.I. somehow missed, just as it somehow didn't turn up the little problems in Michael Brown's résumé. How many lesser Keriks made it into other positions?
The point is that Katrina should serve as a wakeup call, not just about FEMA, but about the executive branch as a whole. Everything I know suggests that it's in a sorry state - that an administration which doesn't treat governing seriously has created two, three, many FEMA's.
My views on the real reasons why they want to strangle government can be found here in an essay by Stirling Newberry.
Riggsveda at Corrente has some germane points by William Grieder "Rolling Back the 20th Century" on the strategy and tactics the Republicans are using to change what this country is and where it is headed over the next century.
A Holy War by any other name gives the same results. ¶ 12:42 PM 0 comments links to this post
The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown - who is no longer overseeing relief efforts but still heads the agency - has become a symbol of cronyism.
But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?
Unfortunately, it's easy to find other agencies suffering from some version of the FEMA syndrome.
The first example won't surprise you: the Environmental Protection Agency, which has a key role to play in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, but which has seen a major exodus of experienced officials over the past few years. In particular, senior officials have left in protest over what they say is the Bush administration's unwillingness to enforce environmental law.
Yesterday The Independent, the British newspaper, published an interview about the environmental aftermath of Katrina with Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst in the agency's Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, whom one suspects is planning to join the exodus. "The budget has been cut," he said, "and inept political hacks have been put in key positions." That sounds familiar, and given what we've learned over the last two weeks there's no reason to doubt that characterization - or to disregard his warning of an environmental cover-up in progress.
What about the Food and Drug Administration? Serious questions have been raised about the agency's coziness with drug companies, and the agency's top official in charge of women's health issues resigned over the delay in approving Plan B, the morning-after pill, accusing the agency's head of overruling the professional staff on political grounds.
Then there's the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose Republican chairman hired a consultant to identify liberal bias in its programs. The consultant apparently considered any criticism of the administration a sign of liberalism, even if it came from conservatives.
You could say that these are all cases in which the Bush administration hasn't worried about degrading the quality of a government agency because it doesn't really believe in the agency's mission. But you can't say that about my other two examples.
Even a conservative government needs an effective Treasury Department. Yet Treasury, which had high prestige and morale during the Clinton years, has fallen from grace.
The public symbol of that fall is the fact that John Snow, who was obviously picked for his loyalty rather than his qualifications, is still Treasury secretary. Less obvious to the public is the hollowing out of the department's expertise. Many experienced staff members have left since 2000, and a number of key positions are either empty or filled only on an acting basis. "There is no policy," an economist who was leaving the department after 22 years told The Washington Post, back in 2002. "If there are no pipes, why do you need a plumber?" So the best and brightest have been leaving.
And finally, what about the department of Homeland Security itself? FEMA was neglected, some people say, because it was folded into a large agency that was focused on terrorist threats, not natural disasters. But what, exactly, is the department doing to protect us from terrorists?
In 2004 Reuters reported a "steady exodus" of counterterrorism officials, who believed that the war in Iraq had taken precedence over the real terrorist threat. Why, then, should we believe that Homeland Security is being well run?
Let's not forget that the administration's first choice to head the department was Bernard Kerik, a crony of Rudy Giuliani. And Mr. Kerik's nomination would have gone through if enterprising reporters hadn't turned up problems in his background that the F.B.I. somehow missed, just as it somehow didn't turn up the little problems in Michael Brown's résumé. How many lesser Keriks made it into other positions?
The point is that Katrina should serve as a wakeup call, not just about FEMA, but about the executive branch as a whole. Everything I know suggests that it's in a sorry state - that an administration which doesn't treat governing seriously has created two, three, many FEMA's.
My views on the real reasons why they want to strangle government can be found here in an essay by Stirling Newberry.
Riggsveda at Corrente has some germane points by William Grieder "Rolling Back the 20th Century" on the strategy and tactics the Republicans are using to change what this country is and where it is headed over the next century.
A Holy War by any other name gives the same results. ¶ 12:42 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Predators are Opportunists
The complete 911 timeline.
9/11 and Manipulation of the USA
And finally Bill Moyers, on the spiritual consequences of September the 11th:
...Suddenly we were immersed in the pathology of a "holy war" as defined by fundamentalists on both sides. You could see this pathology play out in General William Boykin. A professional soldier, General Boykin had taken up with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members apply military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning warriors "to the spiritual warfare for souls." After Boykin had led Americans in a battle against a Somalian warlord he announced: "I know my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol." Now Boykin was going about evangelical revivals preaching that America was in a holy war as "a Christian nation" battling Satan and that America's Muslim adversaries will be defeated "only if we come against them in the name of Jesus." For such an hour, America surely needed a godly leader. So General Boykin explained how it was that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, "was not elected by a majority of the voters - he was appointed by God." Not surprising, instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while in uniform, General Boykin is now the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. (Just as it isn't surprising that despite his public call for the assassination of a foreign head of state, Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing was one of the first groups to receive taxpayer funds from the President's Faith-Based Initiative for "relief work" on the Gulf Coast.)
We can't wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: "This is a problem we can't walk away from." We're talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what's on God's mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.
True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws and morals - this very seminary is part of that tradition; it's the American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America's great political parties - the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is - and they are driving American politics, using God as a a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.
What's also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance - their loathing of other people's beliefs, of America's secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge - has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists, ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic interests and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that couching political ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the passion of followers as ferociously as when Constantine painted the Sign of Christ (the "Christograph") on the shields of his soldiers and on the banners of his legions and routed his rivals in Rome. Never mind that the Emperor himself was never baptized into the faith; it served him well enough to make the God worshipped by Christians his most important ally and turn the Sign of Christ into the one imperial symbol most widely recognized and feared from east to west.
Let's take a brief detour to Ohio and I'll show you what I am talking about. In recent weeks a movement called the Ohio Restoration Project has been launched to identify and train thousands of "Patriot Pastors" to get out the conservative religious vote next year. According to press reports, the leader of the movement - the senior pastor of a large church in suburban Columbus - casts the 2006 elections as an apocalyptic clash between "the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell." The fear and loathing in his message is palpable: He denounces public schools that won't teach creationism, require teachers to read the Bible in class, or allow children to pray. He rails against the "secular jihadists" who have "hijacked" America and prevent school kids from learning that Hitler was "an avid evolutionist." He links abortion to children who murder their parents. He blasts the "pagan left" for trying to redefine marriage. He declares that "homosexual rights" will bring "a flood of demonic oppression." On his church website you read that "Reclaiming the teaching of our Christian heritage among America's youth is paramount to a sense of national destiny that God has invested into this nation."
One of the prominent allies of the Ohio Restoration Project is a popular televangelist in Columbus who heads a $40 million-a-year ministry that is accessible worldwide via 1,400 TV stations and cable affiliates. Although he describes himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but a "Christocrat" - a gladiator for God marching against "the very hordes of hell in our society" - he nonetheless has been spotted with so many Republican politicians in Washington and elsewhere that he has been publicly described as a"spiritual advisor" to the party. The journalist Marley Greiner has been following his ministry for the organization, FreePress. She writes that because he considers the separation of church and state to be "a lie perpetrated on Americans - especially believers in Jesus Christ" - he identifies himself as a "wall builder" and "wall buster." As a wall builder he will "restore Godly presence in government and culture; as a wall buster he will tear down the church-state wall." He sees the Christian church as a sleeping giant that has the ability and the anointing from God to transform America. The giant is stirring. At a rally in July he proclaimed to a packed house: "Let the Revolution begin!" And the congregation roared back: "Let the Revolution begin!"
(The Revolution's first goal, by the way, is to elect as governor next year the current Republican secretary of state who oversaw the election process in 2004 year when a surge in Christian voters narrowly carried George Bush to victory. As General Boykin suggested of President Bush's anointment, this fellow has acknowledged that "God wanted him as secretary of state during 2004" because it was such a critical election. Now he is criss-crossing Ohio meeting with Patriot Pastors and their congregations proclaiming that "America is at its best when God is at its center.")
...
The Ohio Restoration Project is spreading. In one month alone last year in the president's home state of Texas, a single Baptist preacher added 2000 "Patriot Pastors" to the rolls. On his website he now encourages pastors to "speak out on the great moral issues of our day...to restore and reclaim America for Christ."
Alas, these "great moral issues" do not include building a moral economy. The Christian Right trumpets charity (as in Faith Based Initiatives) but is silent on social and economic justice. Inequality in America has reached scandalous proportions: a few weeks ago the government acknowledged that while incomes are growing smartly for the first time in years, the primary winners are the top earners - people who receive stocks, bonuses, and other income in addition to wages. The nearly 80 percent of Americans who rely mostly on hourly wages barely maintained their purchasing power. Even as Hurricane Katrina was hitting the Gulf Coast, giving us a stark reminder of how poverty can shove poor people into the abyss, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that last year one million people were added to 36 million already living in poverty. And since l999 the income of the poorest one fifth of Americans has dropped almost nine percent.
None of these harsh realities of ordinary life seem to bother the radical religious right. To the contrary, in the pursuit of political power they have cut a deal with America's richest class and their partisan allies in a law-of-the-jungle strategy to "starve" the government of resources needed for vital social services that benefit everyone while championing more and more spending rich corporations and larger tax cuts for the rich.
How else to explain the vacuum in their "great moral issues" of the plight of millions of Americans without adequate health care? Of the gross corruption of politics by campaign contributions that skew government policies toward the wealthy at the expense of ordinary taxpayers? (On the very day that oil and gas prices reached a record high the president signed off on huge taxpayer subsidies for energy conglomerates already bloated with windfall profits plucked from the pockets of average Americans filling up at gas tanks across the country; yet the next Sunday you could pass a hundred church signboards with no mention of a sermon on crony capitalism.)
This silence on economic and political morality is deafening but revealing. The radicals on the Christian right are now the dominant force in America's governing party. Without them the government would not be in the hands of people who don't believe in government. They are culpable in upholding a system of class and race in which, as we saw last week, the rich escape and the poor are left behind. And they are on they are crusading for a government "of, by, and for the people" in favor of one based on Biblical authority.
This is the crux of the matter: To these fundamentalist radicals there is only one legitimate religion and only one particular brand of that religion that is right; all others who call on God are immoral or wrong. They believe the Bible to be literally true and that they alone know what it means. Behind their malicious attacks on the courts ("vermin in black robes," as one of their talk show allies recently put it,) is a fierce longing to hold judges accountable for interpreting the Constitution according to standards of biblical revelation as fundamentalists define it. To get those judges they needed a party beholden to them. So the Grand Old Party - the GOP - has become God's Own Party, its ranks made up of God's Own People "marching as to war."
Go now to the website of an organization called America 21 (http://www.america21.us/Home.cfm ). There, on a red, white, and blue home page, you find praise for President Bush's agenda - including his effort to phase out Social Security and protect corporations from law suits by aggrieved citizens. On the same home page is a reminder that "There are 7,177 hours until our next National Election....ENLIST NOW." Now click again and you will read a summons calling Christian pastors "to lead God's people in the turning that can save America from our enemies." Under the headline "Remember - Repent - Return" language reminiscent of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell reminds you that "one of the unmistakable lessons [of 9/11] is that America has lost the full measure of God's hedge of protection...
Just what does this have to do with the president's political agenda praised on the home page? Well, squint and look at the fine print at the bottom of the site. It reads: America21 is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to educate, engage and mobilize Christians to influence national policy at every level. Founded in 1989 by a multi-denominational group of pastors and businessmen, it is dedicated to being a catalyst for revival and reform of the culture and the government ."
The corporate, political and religious right converge here, led by a president who, in his own disdain for science, reason and knowledge, is the most powerful fundamentalist in American history.
What are the stakes? In his last book, the late Marvin Harris, a prominent anthropologist of the time, wrote that "the attack against reason and objectivity is fast reaching the proportions of a crusade." To save the American Dream, "we desperately need to reaffirm the principle that it is possible to carry out an analysis of social life which rational human beings will recognize as being true, regardless of whether they happen to be women or men, whites or black, straights or gays, employers or employees, Jews or born-again Christians. The alternative is to stand by helplessly as special interest groups tear the United States apart in the name of their "separate realities' or to wait until one of them grows strong enough to force its irrational and subjective brand of reality on all the rest."
That was written 25 years ago, just as the radical Christian right was setting out on their long march to political supremacy. The forces he warned against have gained strength ever since and now control much of the United States government and are on the verge of having it all.
It has to be said that their success has come in no small part because of our acquiescence and timidity. Our democratic values are imperiled because too many people of reason are willing to appease irrational people just because they are pious. Republican moderates tried appeasement and survive today only in gulags set aside for them by the Karl Roves, Bill Frists and Tom DeLays. Democrats are divided and paralyzed, afraid that if they take on the organized radical right they will lose what little power they have. Trying to learn to talk about God as Republicans do, they're talking gobbledygook, compromising the strongest thing going for them - the case for a moral economy and the moral argument for the secular checks and balances that have made America "a safe haven for the cause of conscience."
As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies - political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies - cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys don't fight fair; "Robert's Rules of Order" is not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front - and especially freedom of conscience - never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires us to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it on. Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental, dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to political life, put it this way: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."
Christian realists aren't afraid to love. But just as the Irishman who came upon a brawl in the street and asked, "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?" we have to take that love where the action is. Or the world will remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists. ¶ 10:07 AM 2 comments links to this post
9/11 and Manipulation of the USA
And finally Bill Moyers, on the spiritual consequences of September the 11th:
...Suddenly we were immersed in the pathology of a "holy war" as defined by fundamentalists on both sides. You could see this pathology play out in General William Boykin. A professional soldier, General Boykin had taken up with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members apply military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning warriors "to the spiritual warfare for souls." After Boykin had led Americans in a battle against a Somalian warlord he announced: "I know my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol." Now Boykin was going about evangelical revivals preaching that America was in a holy war as "a Christian nation" battling Satan and that America's Muslim adversaries will be defeated "only if we come against them in the name of Jesus." For such an hour, America surely needed a godly leader. So General Boykin explained how it was that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, "was not elected by a majority of the voters - he was appointed by God." Not surprising, instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while in uniform, General Boykin is now the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. (Just as it isn't surprising that despite his public call for the assassination of a foreign head of state, Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing was one of the first groups to receive taxpayer funds from the President's Faith-Based Initiative for "relief work" on the Gulf Coast.)
We can't wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: "This is a problem we can't walk away from." We're talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what's on God's mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.
True, people of faith have always tried to bring their interpretation of the Bible to bear on American laws and morals - this very seminary is part of that tradition; it's the American way, encouraged and protected by the First Amendment. But what is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America's great political parties - the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is - and they are driving American politics, using God as a a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, foreign policy, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services and so on.
What's also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and homegrown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance - their loathing of other people's beliefs, of America's secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge - has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power. They use the language of faith to demonize political opponents, mislead and misinform voters, censor writers and artists, ostracize dissenters, and marginalize the poor. These are the foot soldiers in a political holy war financed by wealthy economic interests and guided by savvy partisan operatives who know that couching political ambition in religious rhetoric can ignite the passion of followers as ferociously as when Constantine painted the Sign of Christ (the "Christograph") on the shields of his soldiers and on the banners of his legions and routed his rivals in Rome. Never mind that the Emperor himself was never baptized into the faith; it served him well enough to make the God worshipped by Christians his most important ally and turn the Sign of Christ into the one imperial symbol most widely recognized and feared from east to west.
Let's take a brief detour to Ohio and I'll show you what I am talking about. In recent weeks a movement called the Ohio Restoration Project has been launched to identify and train thousands of "Patriot Pastors" to get out the conservative religious vote next year. According to press reports, the leader of the movement - the senior pastor of a large church in suburban Columbus - casts the 2006 elections as an apocalyptic clash between "the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell." The fear and loathing in his message is palpable: He denounces public schools that won't teach creationism, require teachers to read the Bible in class, or allow children to pray. He rails against the "secular jihadists" who have "hijacked" America and prevent school kids from learning that Hitler was "an avid evolutionist." He links abortion to children who murder their parents. He blasts the "pagan left" for trying to redefine marriage. He declares that "homosexual rights" will bring "a flood of demonic oppression." On his church website you read that "Reclaiming the teaching of our Christian heritage among America's youth is paramount to a sense of national destiny that God has invested into this nation."
One of the prominent allies of the Ohio Restoration Project is a popular televangelist in Columbus who heads a $40 million-a-year ministry that is accessible worldwide via 1,400 TV stations and cable affiliates. Although he describes himself as neither Republican nor Democrat but a "Christocrat" - a gladiator for God marching against "the very hordes of hell in our society" - he nonetheless has been spotted with so many Republican politicians in Washington and elsewhere that he has been publicly described as a"spiritual advisor" to the party. The journalist Marley Greiner has been following his ministry for the organization, FreePress. She writes that because he considers the separation of church and state to be "a lie perpetrated on Americans - especially believers in Jesus Christ" - he identifies himself as a "wall builder" and "wall buster." As a wall builder he will "restore Godly presence in government and culture; as a wall buster he will tear down the church-state wall." He sees the Christian church as a sleeping giant that has the ability and the anointing from God to transform America. The giant is stirring. At a rally in July he proclaimed to a packed house: "Let the Revolution begin!" And the congregation roared back: "Let the Revolution begin!"
(The Revolution's first goal, by the way, is to elect as governor next year the current Republican secretary of state who oversaw the election process in 2004 year when a surge in Christian voters narrowly carried George Bush to victory. As General Boykin suggested of President Bush's anointment, this fellow has acknowledged that "God wanted him as secretary of state during 2004" because it was such a critical election. Now he is criss-crossing Ohio meeting with Patriot Pastors and their congregations proclaiming that "America is at its best when God is at its center.")
...
The Ohio Restoration Project is spreading. In one month alone last year in the president's home state of Texas, a single Baptist preacher added 2000 "Patriot Pastors" to the rolls. On his website he now encourages pastors to "speak out on the great moral issues of our day...to restore and reclaim America for Christ."
Alas, these "great moral issues" do not include building a moral economy. The Christian Right trumpets charity (as in Faith Based Initiatives) but is silent on social and economic justice. Inequality in America has reached scandalous proportions: a few weeks ago the government acknowledged that while incomes are growing smartly for the first time in years, the primary winners are the top earners - people who receive stocks, bonuses, and other income in addition to wages. The nearly 80 percent of Americans who rely mostly on hourly wages barely maintained their purchasing power. Even as Hurricane Katrina was hitting the Gulf Coast, giving us a stark reminder of how poverty can shove poor people into the abyss, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that last year one million people were added to 36 million already living in poverty. And since l999 the income of the poorest one fifth of Americans has dropped almost nine percent.
None of these harsh realities of ordinary life seem to bother the radical religious right. To the contrary, in the pursuit of political power they have cut a deal with America's richest class and their partisan allies in a law-of-the-jungle strategy to "starve" the government of resources needed for vital social services that benefit everyone while championing more and more spending rich corporations and larger tax cuts for the rich.
How else to explain the vacuum in their "great moral issues" of the plight of millions of Americans without adequate health care? Of the gross corruption of politics by campaign contributions that skew government policies toward the wealthy at the expense of ordinary taxpayers? (On the very day that oil and gas prices reached a record high the president signed off on huge taxpayer subsidies for energy conglomerates already bloated with windfall profits plucked from the pockets of average Americans filling up at gas tanks across the country; yet the next Sunday you could pass a hundred church signboards with no mention of a sermon on crony capitalism.)
This silence on economic and political morality is deafening but revealing. The radicals on the Christian right are now the dominant force in America's governing party. Without them the government would not be in the hands of people who don't believe in government. They are culpable in upholding a system of class and race in which, as we saw last week, the rich escape and the poor are left behind. And they are on they are crusading for a government "of, by, and for the people" in favor of one based on Biblical authority.
This is the crux of the matter: To these fundamentalist radicals there is only one legitimate religion and only one particular brand of that religion that is right; all others who call on God are immoral or wrong. They believe the Bible to be literally true and that they alone know what it means. Behind their malicious attacks on the courts ("vermin in black robes," as one of their talk show allies recently put it,) is a fierce longing to hold judges accountable for interpreting the Constitution according to standards of biblical revelation as fundamentalists define it. To get those judges they needed a party beholden to them. So the Grand Old Party - the GOP - has become God's Own Party, its ranks made up of God's Own People "marching as to war."
Go now to the website of an organization called America 21 (http://www.america21.us/Home.cfm ). There, on a red, white, and blue home page, you find praise for President Bush's agenda - including his effort to phase out Social Security and protect corporations from law suits by aggrieved citizens. On the same home page is a reminder that "There are 7,177 hours until our next National Election....ENLIST NOW." Now click again and you will read a summons calling Christian pastors "to lead God's people in the turning that can save America from our enemies." Under the headline "Remember - Repent - Return" language reminiscent of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell reminds you that "one of the unmistakable lessons [of 9/11] is that America has lost the full measure of God's hedge of protection...
Just what does this have to do with the president's political agenda praised on the home page? Well, squint and look at the fine print at the bottom of the site. It reads: America21 is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to educate, engage and mobilize Christians to influence national policy at every level. Founded in 1989 by a multi-denominational group of pastors and businessmen, it is dedicated to being a catalyst for revival and reform of the culture and the government ."
The corporate, political and religious right converge here, led by a president who, in his own disdain for science, reason and knowledge, is the most powerful fundamentalist in American history.
What are the stakes? In his last book, the late Marvin Harris, a prominent anthropologist of the time, wrote that "the attack against reason and objectivity is fast reaching the proportions of a crusade." To save the American Dream, "we desperately need to reaffirm the principle that it is possible to carry out an analysis of social life which rational human beings will recognize as being true, regardless of whether they happen to be women or men, whites or black, straights or gays, employers or employees, Jews or born-again Christians. The alternative is to stand by helplessly as special interest groups tear the United States apart in the name of their "separate realities' or to wait until one of them grows strong enough to force its irrational and subjective brand of reality on all the rest."
That was written 25 years ago, just as the radical Christian right was setting out on their long march to political supremacy. The forces he warned against have gained strength ever since and now control much of the United States government and are on the verge of having it all.
It has to be said that their success has come in no small part because of our acquiescence and timidity. Our democratic values are imperiled because too many people of reason are willing to appease irrational people just because they are pious. Republican moderates tried appeasement and survive today only in gulags set aside for them by the Karl Roves, Bill Frists and Tom DeLays. Democrats are divided and paralyzed, afraid that if they take on the organized radical right they will lose what little power they have. Trying to learn to talk about God as Republicans do, they're talking gobbledygook, compromising the strongest thing going for them - the case for a moral economy and the moral argument for the secular checks and balances that have made America "a safe haven for the cause of conscience."
As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies - political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies - cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys don't fight fair; "Robert's Rules of Order" is not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front - and especially freedom of conscience - never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires us to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it on. Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental, dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to political life, put it this way: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."
Christian realists aren't afraid to love. But just as the Irishman who came upon a brawl in the street and asked, "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?" we have to take that love where the action is. Or the world will remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists. ¶ 10:07 AM 2 comments links to this post
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Federally-hired Mercenary Troops Clear All Civilians from New Orleans to Aid the Corporate Land Grab
New Orleans - Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details of the former head of the US occupation, L. Paul Bremer and the former US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte.
"This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental United States)," a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. "We're much better equipped to deal with the situation in Iraq."
Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.
What is most disturbing is the claim of several Blackwater mercenaries we spoke with that they are here under contract from the federal and Louisiana state governments.
Blackwater is one of the leading private "security" firms servicing the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has several US government contracts and has provided security for many senior US diplomats, foreign dignitaries and corporations. The company rose to international prominence after 4 of its men were killed in Fallujah and two of their charred bodies were hung from a bridge in March 2004. Those killings sparked the massive US retaliation against the civilian population of Fallujah that resulted in scores of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees.
As the threat of forced evictions now looms in New Orleans and the city confiscates even legally registered weapons from civilians, the private mercenaries of Blackwater patrol the streets openly wielding M-16s and other assault weapons. This despite Police Commissioner Eddie Compass' claim that "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons."
Officially, Blackwater says it forces are in New Orleans to "join the Hurricane Relief Effort." A statement on the company's website, dated September 1, advertises airlift services, security services and crowd control. The company, according to news reports, has since begun taking private contracts to guard hotels, businesses and other properties. But what has not been publicly acknowledged is the claim, made to us by 2 Blackwater mercenaries, that they are actually engaged in general law enforcement activities including "securing neighborhoods" and "confronting criminals."
That raises a key question: under what authority are Blackwater's men operating? A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, Russ Knocke, told the Washington Post he knows of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security. "We believe we've got the right mix of personnel in law enforcement for the federal government to meet the demands of public safety." he said.
But in an hour-long conversation with several Blackwater mercenaries, we heard a different story. The men we spoke with said they are indeed on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and the Louisiana governor's office and that some of them are sleeping in camps organized by Homeland Security in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. One of them wore a gold Louisiana state law enforcement badge and said he had been "deputized" by the governor. They told us they not only had authority to make arrests but also to use lethal force. We encountered the Blackwater forces as we walked through the streets of the largely deserted French Quarter. We were talking with 2 New York Police officers when an unmarked car without license plates sped up next to us and stopped. Inside were 3 men, dressed in khaki uniforms, flak jackets and wielding automatic weapons. "Y'all know where the Blackwater guys are?" they asked. One of the police officers responded, "There are a bunch of them around here," and pointed down the road.
"Blackwater?" we asked. "The guys who are in Iraq?"
"Yeah," said the officer. "They're all over the place."
A short while later, as we continued down Bourbon Street, we ran into the men from the car. They wore Blackwater ID badges on their arms.
"When they told me New Orleans, I said, 'What country is that in?,'" said one of the Blackwater men. He was wearing his company ID around his neck in a carrying case with the phrase "Operation Iraqi Freedom" printed on it. After bragging about how he drives around Iraq in a "State Department issued level 5, explosion proof BMW," he said he was "just trying to get back to Kirkuk (in the north of Iraq) where the real action is." Later we overheard him on his cell phone complaining that Blackwater was only paying $350 a day plus per diem. That is much less than the men make serving in more dangerous conditions in Iraq. Two men we spoke with said they plan on returning to Iraq in October. But, as one mercenary said, they've been told they could be in New Orleans for up to 6 months. "This is a trend," he told us. "You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."
If Blackwater's reputation and record in Iraq are any indication of the kind of "services" the company offers, the people of New Orleans have much to fear. ¶ 10:44 PM 0 comments links to this post
"This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental United States)," a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. "We're much better equipped to deal with the situation in Iraq."
Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.
What is most disturbing is the claim of several Blackwater mercenaries we spoke with that they are here under contract from the federal and Louisiana state governments.
Blackwater is one of the leading private "security" firms servicing the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has several US government contracts and has provided security for many senior US diplomats, foreign dignitaries and corporations. The company rose to international prominence after 4 of its men were killed in Fallujah and two of their charred bodies were hung from a bridge in March 2004. Those killings sparked the massive US retaliation against the civilian population of Fallujah that resulted in scores of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees.
As the threat of forced evictions now looms in New Orleans and the city confiscates even legally registered weapons from civilians, the private mercenaries of Blackwater patrol the streets openly wielding M-16s and other assault weapons. This despite Police Commissioner Eddie Compass' claim that "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons."
Officially, Blackwater says it forces are in New Orleans to "join the Hurricane Relief Effort." A statement on the company's website, dated September 1, advertises airlift services, security services and crowd control. The company, according to news reports, has since begun taking private contracts to guard hotels, businesses and other properties. But what has not been publicly acknowledged is the claim, made to us by 2 Blackwater mercenaries, that they are actually engaged in general law enforcement activities including "securing neighborhoods" and "confronting criminals."
That raises a key question: under what authority are Blackwater's men operating? A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, Russ Knocke, told the Washington Post he knows of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security. "We believe we've got the right mix of personnel in law enforcement for the federal government to meet the demands of public safety." he said.
But in an hour-long conversation with several Blackwater mercenaries, we heard a different story. The men we spoke with said they are indeed on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and the Louisiana governor's office and that some of them are sleeping in camps organized by Homeland Security in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. One of them wore a gold Louisiana state law enforcement badge and said he had been "deputized" by the governor. They told us they not only had authority to make arrests but also to use lethal force. We encountered the Blackwater forces as we walked through the streets of the largely deserted French Quarter. We were talking with 2 New York Police officers when an unmarked car without license plates sped up next to us and stopped. Inside were 3 men, dressed in khaki uniforms, flak jackets and wielding automatic weapons. "Y'all know where the Blackwater guys are?" they asked. One of the police officers responded, "There are a bunch of them around here," and pointed down the road.
"Blackwater?" we asked. "The guys who are in Iraq?"
"Yeah," said the officer. "They're all over the place."
A short while later, as we continued down Bourbon Street, we ran into the men from the car. They wore Blackwater ID badges on their arms.
"When they told me New Orleans, I said, 'What country is that in?,'" said one of the Blackwater men. He was wearing his company ID around his neck in a carrying case with the phrase "Operation Iraqi Freedom" printed on it. After bragging about how he drives around Iraq in a "State Department issued level 5, explosion proof BMW," he said he was "just trying to get back to Kirkuk (in the north of Iraq) where the real action is." Later we overheard him on his cell phone complaining that Blackwater was only paying $350 a day plus per diem. That is much less than the men make serving in more dangerous conditions in Iraq. Two men we spoke with said they plan on returning to Iraq in October. But, as one mercenary said, they've been told they could be in New Orleans for up to 6 months. "This is a trend," he told us. "You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."
If Blackwater's reputation and record in Iraq are any indication of the kind of "services" the company offers, the people of New Orleans have much to fear. ¶ 10:44 PM 0 comments links to this post
Gold Rush
In Storm's Ruins, a Rush to Rebuild and Reopen for Business
By JOHN M. BRODER. Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La., for this article, Raymond Hernandez and Glen Justice from Washington, and Leslie Wayne and Ron Nixon from New York.
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 9 - Private contractors, guided by two former directors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other well-connected lobbyists and consultants, are rushing to cash in on the unprecedented sums to be spent on Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction.
From global engineering and construction firms like the Fluor Corporation and Halliburton to local trash removal and road-building concerns, the private sector is poised to reap a windfall of business in the largest domestic rebuilding effort ever undertaken.
Normal federal contracting rules are largely suspended in the rush to help people displaced by the storm and reopen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have already been let and billions more are to flow to the private sector in the weeks and months to come. Congress has already appropriated more than $62 billion for an effort that is projected to cost well over $100 billion.
Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are a bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have uncovered in post-war Iraq.
"They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door," said James Albertine, a Washington lobbyist and past president of the American League of Lobbyists. "I'm sure every lobbyist's phone in Washington is ringing off the hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money - and it's only a down payment."
Joe M. Allbaugh, a close friend of President Bush, the president's 2000 campaign manager and the FEMA director from 2001 to 2003, and James Lee Witt, an Arkansan close to former President Bill Clinton and a former FEMA director, are now high-priced consultants, and they have been offering their services to companies seeking or holding federal contracts in the post-hurricane gold rush.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was helping private companies, including his clients, cut through federal red tape to speed provision of services and supplies to the storm-wracked region. Two of his major clients, Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, and The Shaw Group, already are at work on disaster response efforts.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he had played no role in helping Shaw or Kellogg get the work, insisting that help with federal contracts is not a service he offers to clients.
"A lot of people want to connect the dots, but the dots don't exist," he said in a telephone interview from Texas. "I don't do federal contracts, end of story."
Heavens, certainly a friend of Dear Leader wouldn't lie.
However, one of the first things Shaw did after the storm was to invite Mr. Allbaugh to Louisiana, where he helped the company assemble its disaster team, giving advice on how to match the company's efforts to those of the government agencies it serves. He later helped other companies provide assistance.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was not paid for these efforts and that he did not sign up any new clients in Louisiana. He did acknowledge that he suggested to UltraStrip Systems Inc., a client that markets water filtration products through a subsidiary, that it send representatives to Louisiana.
"Given the situation in the hospitals and nursing homes, I called them up," he said. "I said, 'You've got to get your unit down there, I'm sure they can put it to use.' "
Clients of Mr. Witt, who is advising Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana on managing the crisis, are also in position to profit. Among the clients are Nextel Communications, Whelen Engineering, a manufacturer of warning systems, and the Harris Corporation, a telecommunications equipment company.
Mr. Witt said in a brief interview here on Thursday that it is critical to move quickly after a disaster to restore basic services and that rather than speed such efforts, government often gets in the way.
"Time is of the essence here and we have to make sure it's fast and smooth and works well," he said at the Louisiana emergency operations center here. He said that FEMA had been bureaucratically and financially hobbled since it was absorbed by the new Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Witt's company, James Lee Witt Associates, also employs Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander and Democratic presidential candidate, and Rodney Slater, a secretary of transportation in the Clinton administration. The firm's Web site says it provides "advice, counsel and assistance with strategic introductions primarily in the area of homeland security."
Mr. Witt did not respond to a request to comment specifically on the role of his clients in reconstruction.
One of the most immediate tasks after Hurricane Katrina hit was repair of the breaches in the New Orleans levees. Three companies - the Shaw Group, Kellogg Brown & Root and Boh Brothers Construction of New Orleans - have been awarded no-bid contracts by the Army Corps of Engineers to perform the restoration.
"After a disaster, we have certain authorities to execute contracts faster than we ordinarily would," Gene Pawlik, a Corps of Engineers spokesman in Baton Rouge, said on Friday. "There is a pot of money that Congress gives us that lets us respond quickly to an emergency."
The Shaw Group, based in Baton Rouge, is a $3 billion-a-year construction and engineering firm. It announced this week that it had received two contracts of up to $100 million each, one from FEMA, the other from the Corps of Engineers, to work on levees, pump water out of New Orleans and provide assistance with housing.
Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root's parent company, has a $500 million, five-year contract with the Navy to provide emergency repairs at military installations damaged in the hurricane. Under terms of the contract, Halliburton draws down on the money as it performs services for the military.
Halliburton is doing repair work at three Mississippi naval facilities, as well as at the Stennis Space Center. The company will also assess pump and infrastructure damage in New Orleans and construct a facility to support recovery efforts, it said.
To provide immediate housing in the region, FEMA says it suspended normal bidding rules in awarding contracts to the Shaw group and CH2MHill, based in Denver. Fluor, of Aliso Viejo, Calif.; Bechtel National Inc., of San Francisco; and Dewberry Technologies, of Fairfax, Va.; are doing similar work under longstanding FEMA contracts that allow the agency to turn to them during disasters.
John Corsi, a spokesman for CH2MHill, said that the contract could be the first of several and that it was awarded on a no-bid basis "because of unusual and compelling situation."
The sheer volume of the contracts and the speed in which they are being issued troubles some. The government is drawing down on Hurricane Katrina relief money at a rate of more than $500 million a day.
Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government spending watchdog group, said Katrina, like Iraq before it, would bring the greedy and the self-interested out of the woodwork.
"This is very painful," Ms. Brian said. "You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering - disaster profiteering."
Ya think?
Fluor already has identified some sites, including in Slidell, La., where the first 400 new homes will be installed, each of which can handle about five people, Mr. Tashjan said.
Bechtel, with $17.4 billion in annual revenues globally, is working under an informal agreement with no set payment terms, scope of work or designated total value. The company's zone is Mississippi, where it has started to install the first homes.
The company has 100 employees assigned to the task and it does not know how many will ultimately be working on it, said Howard Menaker, a Bechtel spokesman. It is also looking for subcontractors that can deliver portable water treatment, sewage and power plants, as well as mess halls, showers, even helicopters to move supplies.
Bechtel has a long pedigree in emergency response work, including helping to remove the remains of the twin towers in New York, building refugee camps in Kosovo in 1999 and doing safety assessment after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco. It is performing reconstruction work in Iraq under a large federal contract.
"Political contributions are not a factor," Mr. Menaker said. "It is the fact that we could get the job done."
The job being what it is, of course. ¶ 12:54 PM 0 comments links to this post
By JOHN M. BRODER. Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La., for this article, Raymond Hernandez and Glen Justice from Washington, and Leslie Wayne and Ron Nixon from New York.
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 9 - Private contractors, guided by two former directors of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other well-connected lobbyists and consultants, are rushing to cash in on the unprecedented sums to be spent on Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction.
From global engineering and construction firms like the Fluor Corporation and Halliburton to local trash removal and road-building concerns, the private sector is poised to reap a windfall of business in the largest domestic rebuilding effort ever undertaken.
Normal federal contracting rules are largely suspended in the rush to help people displaced by the storm and reopen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have already been let and billions more are to flow to the private sector in the weeks and months to come. Congress has already appropriated more than $62 billion for an effort that is projected to cost well over $100 billion.
Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are a bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have uncovered in post-war Iraq.
"They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door," said James Albertine, a Washington lobbyist and past president of the American League of Lobbyists. "I'm sure every lobbyist's phone in Washington is ringing off the hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money - and it's only a down payment."
Joe M. Allbaugh, a close friend of President Bush, the president's 2000 campaign manager and the FEMA director from 2001 to 2003, and James Lee Witt, an Arkansan close to former President Bill Clinton and a former FEMA director, are now high-priced consultants, and they have been offering their services to companies seeking or holding federal contracts in the post-hurricane gold rush.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was helping private companies, including his clients, cut through federal red tape to speed provision of services and supplies to the storm-wracked region. Two of his major clients, Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, and The Shaw Group, already are at work on disaster response efforts.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he had played no role in helping Shaw or Kellogg get the work, insisting that help with federal contracts is not a service he offers to clients.
"A lot of people want to connect the dots, but the dots don't exist," he said in a telephone interview from Texas. "I don't do federal contracts, end of story."
Heavens, certainly a friend of Dear Leader wouldn't lie.
However, one of the first things Shaw did after the storm was to invite Mr. Allbaugh to Louisiana, where he helped the company assemble its disaster team, giving advice on how to match the company's efforts to those of the government agencies it serves. He later helped other companies provide assistance.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was not paid for these efforts and that he did not sign up any new clients in Louisiana. He did acknowledge that he suggested to UltraStrip Systems Inc., a client that markets water filtration products through a subsidiary, that it send representatives to Louisiana.
"Given the situation in the hospitals and nursing homes, I called them up," he said. "I said, 'You've got to get your unit down there, I'm sure they can put it to use.' "
Clients of Mr. Witt, who is advising Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana on managing the crisis, are also in position to profit. Among the clients are Nextel Communications, Whelen Engineering, a manufacturer of warning systems, and the Harris Corporation, a telecommunications equipment company.
Mr. Witt said in a brief interview here on Thursday that it is critical to move quickly after a disaster to restore basic services and that rather than speed such efforts, government often gets in the way.
"Time is of the essence here and we have to make sure it's fast and smooth and works well," he said at the Louisiana emergency operations center here. He said that FEMA had been bureaucratically and financially hobbled since it was absorbed by the new Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Witt's company, James Lee Witt Associates, also employs Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander and Democratic presidential candidate, and Rodney Slater, a secretary of transportation in the Clinton administration. The firm's Web site says it provides "advice, counsel and assistance with strategic introductions primarily in the area of homeland security."
Mr. Witt did not respond to a request to comment specifically on the role of his clients in reconstruction.
One of the most immediate tasks after Hurricane Katrina hit was repair of the breaches in the New Orleans levees. Three companies - the Shaw Group, Kellogg Brown & Root and Boh Brothers Construction of New Orleans - have been awarded no-bid contracts by the Army Corps of Engineers to perform the restoration.
"After a disaster, we have certain authorities to execute contracts faster than we ordinarily would," Gene Pawlik, a Corps of Engineers spokesman in Baton Rouge, said on Friday. "There is a pot of money that Congress gives us that lets us respond quickly to an emergency."
The Shaw Group, based in Baton Rouge, is a $3 billion-a-year construction and engineering firm. It announced this week that it had received two contracts of up to $100 million each, one from FEMA, the other from the Corps of Engineers, to work on levees, pump water out of New Orleans and provide assistance with housing.
Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root's parent company, has a $500 million, five-year contract with the Navy to provide emergency repairs at military installations damaged in the hurricane. Under terms of the contract, Halliburton draws down on the money as it performs services for the military.
Halliburton is doing repair work at three Mississippi naval facilities, as well as at the Stennis Space Center. The company will also assess pump and infrastructure damage in New Orleans and construct a facility to support recovery efforts, it said.
To provide immediate housing in the region, FEMA says it suspended normal bidding rules in awarding contracts to the Shaw group and CH2MHill, based in Denver. Fluor, of Aliso Viejo, Calif.; Bechtel National Inc., of San Francisco; and Dewberry Technologies, of Fairfax, Va.; are doing similar work under longstanding FEMA contracts that allow the agency to turn to them during disasters.
John Corsi, a spokesman for CH2MHill, said that the contract could be the first of several and that it was awarded on a no-bid basis "because of unusual and compelling situation."
The sheer volume of the contracts and the speed in which they are being issued troubles some. The government is drawing down on Hurricane Katrina relief money at a rate of more than $500 million a day.
Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit government spending watchdog group, said Katrina, like Iraq before it, would bring the greedy and the self-interested out of the woodwork.
"This is very painful," Ms. Brian said. "You are likely to see the equivalent of war profiteering - disaster profiteering."
Ya think?
Fluor already has identified some sites, including in Slidell, La., where the first 400 new homes will be installed, each of which can handle about five people, Mr. Tashjan said.
Bechtel, with $17.4 billion in annual revenues globally, is working under an informal agreement with no set payment terms, scope of work or designated total value. The company's zone is Mississippi, where it has started to install the first homes.
The company has 100 employees assigned to the task and it does not know how many will ultimately be working on it, said Howard Menaker, a Bechtel spokesman. It is also looking for subcontractors that can deliver portable water treatment, sewage and power plants, as well as mess halls, showers, even helicopters to move supplies.
Bechtel has a long pedigree in emergency response work, including helping to remove the remains of the twin towers in New York, building refugee camps in Kosovo in 1999 and doing safety assessment after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco. It is performing reconstruction work in Iraq under a large federal contract.
"Political contributions are not a factor," Mr. Menaker said. "It is the fact that we could get the job done."
The job being what it is, of course. ¶ 12:54 PM 0 comments links to this post
Friday, September 09, 2005
The Only Timeline that Mattered
Quiddity points out this:
Sat 27 Aug
White House "The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing. The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures"
Mon 29 Aug
CNN 7 a.m.: Katrina makes landfall on the Louisiana coast
Got that?
The Feds told everyone they were taking over two days before landfall.
One must assume, in fact, either that things went according to plan, or that Chertoff and Brown are incompetent. ¶ 11:57 AM 0 comments links to this post
Sat 27 Aug
White House "The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing. The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures"
Mon 29 Aug
CNN 7 a.m.: Katrina makes landfall on the Louisiana coast
Got that?
The Feds told everyone they were taking over two days before landfall.
One must assume, in fact, either that things went according to plan, or that Chertoff and Brown are incompetent. ¶ 11:57 AM 0 comments links to this post
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Your Tax Dollars at Work
Gravy Train is rolling now.
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
The Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency has contracted with five of the nation’s major corporations to speed emergency housing relief to Gulf Coast families displaced by Hurricane Katrina...
The corporations contracted for support include:
* The Shaw Group Inc., of Baton Rouge, La. will stay close to home and will provide design, construction, transportation, utilities and facilities management. The company is also providing support to hospitals and other public buildings.
* Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Calif. heads up operations for the Housing Area Command. An engineering and construction firm, it is now in Louisiana beginning construction on temporary housing units that will provide electricity, potable water and sanitary sewage facilities.
* Bechtel National Inc. of San Francisco, an engineering and construction firm that is now on the scene in Gulf states to provide emergency housing relief.
* CH2M Hill of Denver specializes in sewerage design, hazardous-waste cleanup and transportation projects such as highways and bridges. It will be working on providing housing in Alabama.
* Dewberry Technologies, Fairfax, Va., an advanced technologies company, will be providing planning and reporting tools...
An interesting group. Bechtel certainly has a long interesting history with the Bush administration. Fluor Corp. has also helped rebuild Iraq. Dewberry has a long history of Pentagon and FEMA contracting being rather well connected to both sides of the aisle in Congress.
It's a small world, after all. ¶ 9:07 PM 0 comments links to this post
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
The Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency has contracted with five of the nation’s major corporations to speed emergency housing relief to Gulf Coast families displaced by Hurricane Katrina...
The corporations contracted for support include:
* The Shaw Group Inc., of Baton Rouge, La. will stay close to home and will provide design, construction, transportation, utilities and facilities management. The company is also providing support to hospitals and other public buildings.
* Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Calif. heads up operations for the Housing Area Command. An engineering and construction firm, it is now in Louisiana beginning construction on temporary housing units that will provide electricity, potable water and sanitary sewage facilities.
* Bechtel National Inc. of San Francisco, an engineering and construction firm that is now on the scene in Gulf states to provide emergency housing relief.
* CH2M Hill of Denver specializes in sewerage design, hazardous-waste cleanup and transportation projects such as highways and bridges. It will be working on providing housing in Alabama.
* Dewberry Technologies, Fairfax, Va., an advanced technologies company, will be providing planning and reporting tools...
An interesting group. Bechtel certainly has a long interesting history with the Bush administration. Fluor Corp. has also helped rebuild Iraq. Dewberry has a long history of Pentagon and FEMA contracting being rather well connected to both sides of the aisle in Congress.
It's a small world, after all. ¶ 9:07 PM 0 comments links to this post
First Things First
Wrong Priorities?
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Updated: 6:09 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005
In the weeks before Hurricane Katrina, state emergency-planning directors repeatedly warned that the Bush administration’s post-September 11 focus on terrorism was seriously undercutting the federal government’s ability to respond to catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters.
In a tough letter to Congress last July and in a private meeting with top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Aug. 21, a group of state emergency-planning directors complained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s traditional role of preparing for natural disasters “has been forgotten” under a DHS almost entirely devoted to the terror threat.
Not only did the Bush administration slash funding for natural-disaster planning this year, the state directors charged, Homeland Security—acting under a directive signed by the president—has geared almost all planning exercises with the states to responding to hypothetical terror attacks such as radioactive “dirty bombs” or anthrax attacks rather than far more common, and costly, disasters such as hurricanes, tornados and floods.
Internal Homeland Security documents obtained by NEWSWEEK lend support to the state directors’ complaints. Out of 15 “all hazards” disaster-planning scenarios approved by DHS and the White House Homeland Security Council last May, only three involved natural disasters, one document shows.
“I’ve been beating this drum for the past two years,” Bruce Baughman, director of the Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency and a former top FEMA official, told NEWSWEEK. “What I’ve seen happening is a total de-emphasis on natural disaster planning.”
The warnings by Baughman, the new president of the National Emergency Management Association, and other state emergency-planning directors are likely to become a focus of investigations now being planned by Congress into the administration’s botched response to the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans.
They also have fueled a push in Congress to undo at least part of the major federal government overhaul that created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said this week he was introducing legislation to take FEMA out of DHS and restore it as an independent agency whose director would have direct access to the president.
Once it was thrown into DHS, under the massive governmentwide reorganization proposed by President Bush in 2002, FEMA got swallowed up by a “monster bureaucracy” and lost clout, Dingell said. Moreover, DHS’s new secretary, Michael Chertoff, was chosen primarily because of his credentials as a terrorist fighter—not his ability to respond to natural disasters, Dingell added. A federal appellate-court judge prior to being chosen by President Bush, Chertoff had been assistant chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time of the September 11 attacks. “All Chertoff wants to do is chase terrorists and repeal parts of the Constitution,” Dingell told NEWSWEEK.
For his part, Baughman noted that FEMA’s two directors under Bush—Joe Allbaugh, who had previously served as the president’s 2000 campaign manager, and current director Michael Brown, a childhood friend of Allbaugh who had previously served as a commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association—also have had no experience in planning for and responding to natural disasters.
“To me, this is like putting somebody in charge of the Justice Department that has no legal background or putting somebody in charge of the FBI with no law-enforcement background,” said Baughman, who had previously served as director of FEMA’s Office of Natural Preparedness until he resigned two years ago.
Asked about the criticism from the state directors, Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke responded that in the aftermath of Katrina "a lot of people are wanting to play the blame game." But this was not the time to point fingers and assess blame while response and recovery operations in the disaster area are still continuing, he said. Knocke also said that concerns raised by state emergency officials about the lack of planning for natural disasters have already been incorporated in Homeland Security plans and procedures.
The concerns about the direction of FEMA have been building for some time, according to Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Planning Association, a group that represents state emergency planners. Some of it revolves around funding. While grants to states and local governments for counterterrorism emergency planning have soared to more than $1.1 billion a year, funding under FEMA’s Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) program—which is specifically for natural disasters—was cut back $10 million by the White House this year to only $170 million, she noted.
Baughman said the disparities for Alabama are especially sharp. In his state, between $30 million to $40 million in federal funds are available to plan and train for hypothetical terror attacks while only $1.8 million is available for natural disasters. Although Alabama hasn’t suffered any terror attacks in recent years, it has had 24 natural-disaster declarations over the past decade, including three in the last year or so, Baughman said.
The internal FEMA documents underscore the point even further. Even before Homeland Security officials published their set of theoretical disaster scenarios last spring—which involved planning for such calamities as an “aerosol anthrax” attack and the unleashing of a “10-Kiloton Improved Nuclear Device”—an earlier February 2004 “National All-Hazards Exercise Schedule” prepared by Homeland Security showed the same imbalance. The schedule, marked “for Official Use Only,” included planning for more than 100 disaster scenarios, almost all of them terror incidents. In fact, only seven involved natural disasters—two earthquakes and four hurricanes, although two of the hurricanes were described as incidents in which relief and recovery efforts would be practiced “in context of a credible WMD threat during a natural disaster.”
The dissatisfaction among state planning directors was raised even more this summer when Chertoff proposed a reorganization of DHS that would take the Office of Preparedness out of FEMA and set it up as a special Directorate for Preparedness within the department. In a July 27 letter to Congress, the state directors noted that there had already been 25 major disaster declarations in 2005 alone, including ones for flooding, severe storms, hurricanes, tropical cyclones and landslides. Chertoff’s reorganization plan “totally neglects natural hazards preparedness and, if implemented, will have an extremely negative impact on the people of this nation,” stated the letter, signed by David Lieberbach, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and Baughman’s predecessor as president of the state directors’ group.
The complaints finally led to a meeting in Washington on Aug. 21—just days before Katrina first started approaching the Gulf Coast—between a group of four state emergency planners, led by Baughman, and Michael Jackson, deputy secretary of Homeland Security, and FEMA Director Michael Brown. Baughman said he laid out the group’s concerns in some detail. While Jackson and Brown assured them that they understood their concerns and would address them, Baughman said he was not assuaged. “They were hell bent on going forward with [the reorganization],” he said. “They met with us as a courtesy.”
Doubtless Dons Brownie and Jackson expected something rather different from Baughman. ¶ 8:38 PM 0 comments links to this post
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Updated: 6:09 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005
In the weeks before Hurricane Katrina, state emergency-planning directors repeatedly warned that the Bush administration’s post-September 11 focus on terrorism was seriously undercutting the federal government’s ability to respond to catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters.
In a tough letter to Congress last July and in a private meeting with top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Aug. 21, a group of state emergency-planning directors complained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s traditional role of preparing for natural disasters “has been forgotten” under a DHS almost entirely devoted to the terror threat.
Not only did the Bush administration slash funding for natural-disaster planning this year, the state directors charged, Homeland Security—acting under a directive signed by the president—has geared almost all planning exercises with the states to responding to hypothetical terror attacks such as radioactive “dirty bombs” or anthrax attacks rather than far more common, and costly, disasters such as hurricanes, tornados and floods.
Internal Homeland Security documents obtained by NEWSWEEK lend support to the state directors’ complaints. Out of 15 “all hazards” disaster-planning scenarios approved by DHS and the White House Homeland Security Council last May, only three involved natural disasters, one document shows.
“I’ve been beating this drum for the past two years,” Bruce Baughman, director of the Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency and a former top FEMA official, told NEWSWEEK. “What I’ve seen happening is a total de-emphasis on natural disaster planning.”
The warnings by Baughman, the new president of the National Emergency Management Association, and other state emergency-planning directors are likely to become a focus of investigations now being planned by Congress into the administration’s botched response to the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans.
They also have fueled a push in Congress to undo at least part of the major federal government overhaul that created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said this week he was introducing legislation to take FEMA out of DHS and restore it as an independent agency whose director would have direct access to the president.
Once it was thrown into DHS, under the massive governmentwide reorganization proposed by President Bush in 2002, FEMA got swallowed up by a “monster bureaucracy” and lost clout, Dingell said. Moreover, DHS’s new secretary, Michael Chertoff, was chosen primarily because of his credentials as a terrorist fighter—not his ability to respond to natural disasters, Dingell added. A federal appellate-court judge prior to being chosen by President Bush, Chertoff had been assistant chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time of the September 11 attacks. “All Chertoff wants to do is chase terrorists and repeal parts of the Constitution,” Dingell told NEWSWEEK.
For his part, Baughman noted that FEMA’s two directors under Bush—Joe Allbaugh, who had previously served as the president’s 2000 campaign manager, and current director Michael Brown, a childhood friend of Allbaugh who had previously served as a commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association—also have had no experience in planning for and responding to natural disasters.
“To me, this is like putting somebody in charge of the Justice Department that has no legal background or putting somebody in charge of the FBI with no law-enforcement background,” said Baughman, who had previously served as director of FEMA’s Office of Natural Preparedness until he resigned two years ago.
Asked about the criticism from the state directors, Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke responded that in the aftermath of Katrina "a lot of people are wanting to play the blame game." But this was not the time to point fingers and assess blame while response and recovery operations in the disaster area are still continuing, he said. Knocke also said that concerns raised by state emergency officials about the lack of planning for natural disasters have already been incorporated in Homeland Security plans and procedures.
The concerns about the direction of FEMA have been building for some time, according to Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Planning Association, a group that represents state emergency planners. Some of it revolves around funding. While grants to states and local governments for counterterrorism emergency planning have soared to more than $1.1 billion a year, funding under FEMA’s Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) program—which is specifically for natural disasters—was cut back $10 million by the White House this year to only $170 million, she noted.
Baughman said the disparities for Alabama are especially sharp. In his state, between $30 million to $40 million in federal funds are available to plan and train for hypothetical terror attacks while only $1.8 million is available for natural disasters. Although Alabama hasn’t suffered any terror attacks in recent years, it has had 24 natural-disaster declarations over the past decade, including three in the last year or so, Baughman said.
The internal FEMA documents underscore the point even further. Even before Homeland Security officials published their set of theoretical disaster scenarios last spring—which involved planning for such calamities as an “aerosol anthrax” attack and the unleashing of a “10-Kiloton Improved Nuclear Device”—an earlier February 2004 “National All-Hazards Exercise Schedule” prepared by Homeland Security showed the same imbalance. The schedule, marked “for Official Use Only,” included planning for more than 100 disaster scenarios, almost all of them terror incidents. In fact, only seven involved natural disasters—two earthquakes and four hurricanes, although two of the hurricanes were described as incidents in which relief and recovery efforts would be practiced “in context of a credible WMD threat during a natural disaster.”
The dissatisfaction among state planning directors was raised even more this summer when Chertoff proposed a reorganization of DHS that would take the Office of Preparedness out of FEMA and set it up as a special Directorate for Preparedness within the department. In a July 27 letter to Congress, the state directors noted that there had already been 25 major disaster declarations in 2005 alone, including ones for flooding, severe storms, hurricanes, tropical cyclones and landslides. Chertoff’s reorganization plan “totally neglects natural hazards preparedness and, if implemented, will have an extremely negative impact on the people of this nation,” stated the letter, signed by David Lieberbach, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and Baughman’s predecessor as president of the state directors’ group.
The complaints finally led to a meeting in Washington on Aug. 21—just days before Katrina first started approaching the Gulf Coast—between a group of four state emergency planners, led by Baughman, and Michael Jackson, deputy secretary of Homeland Security, and FEMA Director Michael Brown. Baughman said he laid out the group’s concerns in some detail. While Jackson and Brown assured them that they understood their concerns and would address them, Baughman said he was not assuaged. “They were hell bent on going forward with [the reorganization],” he said. “They met with us as a courtesy.”
Doubtless Dons Brownie and Jackson expected something rather different from Baughman. ¶ 8:38 PM 0 comments links to this post
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Alternative Explanation for Some Very Funny Business
With all the oddball things FEMA and the United States have done about the disaster in New Orleans over the last week, perhaps there is a simpler explanation than the desire to eliminate a blue city in a red state.
Perhaps some of the private contractors associated with FEMA and Bu$hCo have noticed there are tens of millions of dollars laying around the drowned city.
Perhaps they regard this cash as perks of their business, and are willing to do anything to get it, and want no witnesses. ¶ 5:57 AM 13 comments links to this post
Perhaps some of the private contractors associated with FEMA and Bu$hCo have noticed there are tens of millions of dollars laying around the drowned city.
Perhaps they regard this cash as perks of their business, and are willing to do anything to get it, and want no witnesses. ¶ 5:57 AM 13 comments links to this post
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Conflict of Interest
Billmon noticed a few days back the difference between the FEMA response to Florida's hurricanes and the situation in New Orleans.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this display of the good old American can-do spirit didn't go unnoticed by the people of Florida -- nor did the millions of dollars in disaster relief and damage insurance checks that were cut by various federal agencies with record speed. FEMA officials must have been deeply gratified to see the effect their heroic efforts had in the place where they were most desperately needed -- Bush's poll numbers...
So you can see that when the chips are down, and the need is absolutely dire, this administration can still deliver the kind of coordinated emergency response that once made the U.S. government the envy of the world -- just as it cooly and capably protected the Iraqi Oil Ministry from the chaos and looting that trashed every other government office in post-invasion Baghdad. As is usually the case in public service, it's just a matter of having the right incentives.
The comparison between the TLC showered on Florida last year and Bush's initial "What, me worry?" response to this year's disaster no doubt will go unnoticed by the amnesia patients in the corporate media. And since I'm lucky enough to live in a swing state that is also coveted by GOP political strategists, I probably don't have to worry about it either -- that is, as long as any future disasters around my neck of the woods happen in one of those years divisible by two.
But for the citizens of staunch, deep red Mississippi and slightly less staunch but still red Louisiana, the lessons are painfully obvious. If you're going to insist on living in a hurricane alley, then you need to take personal responsibility for your own actions, stop whining about government incompetence, and embrace the free market solution to your problems -- by moving to Florida.
Quiddity posted a timeline of the response- and included yesterday's events where FEMA wouldn't let the Red Cross and other relief workers into the city.
As more people die.
As Halliburton mobilizes and the Republipork machine licks its chops.
As private citizens take initiative to act despite government orders to back off.
I prefer using Occam's razor, but when you compare the response of FEMA in New Orleans to their response last year in Florida, it only cuts one way.
New Orleans was a vibrant blue city in a red state. It had, as Louisiana stll has, many important Democrat politicians. New Orleans was allowed to die.
It is a waste of time to search for the blameworthy.
Simply follow the money.
We are witnessing a pogrom by neglect, but it's too unthinkable for most people to wrap their minds around. ¶ 12:08 PM 3 comments links to this post
As I'm sure you can imagine, this display of the good old American can-do spirit didn't go unnoticed by the people of Florida -- nor did the millions of dollars in disaster relief and damage insurance checks that were cut by various federal agencies with record speed. FEMA officials must have been deeply gratified to see the effect their heroic efforts had in the place where they were most desperately needed -- Bush's poll numbers...
So you can see that when the chips are down, and the need is absolutely dire, this administration can still deliver the kind of coordinated emergency response that once made the U.S. government the envy of the world -- just as it cooly and capably protected the Iraqi Oil Ministry from the chaos and looting that trashed every other government office in post-invasion Baghdad. As is usually the case in public service, it's just a matter of having the right incentives.
The comparison between the TLC showered on Florida last year and Bush's initial "What, me worry?" response to this year's disaster no doubt will go unnoticed by the amnesia patients in the corporate media. And since I'm lucky enough to live in a swing state that is also coveted by GOP political strategists, I probably don't have to worry about it either -- that is, as long as any future disasters around my neck of the woods happen in one of those years divisible by two.
But for the citizens of staunch, deep red Mississippi and slightly less staunch but still red Louisiana, the lessons are painfully obvious. If you're going to insist on living in a hurricane alley, then you need to take personal responsibility for your own actions, stop whining about government incompetence, and embrace the free market solution to your problems -- by moving to Florida.
Quiddity posted a timeline of the response- and included yesterday's events where FEMA wouldn't let the Red Cross and other relief workers into the city.
As more people die.
As Halliburton mobilizes and the Republipork machine licks its chops.
As private citizens take initiative to act despite government orders to back off.
I prefer using Occam's razor, but when you compare the response of FEMA in New Orleans to their response last year in Florida, it only cuts one way.
New Orleans was a vibrant blue city in a red state. It had, as Louisiana stll has, many important Democrat politicians. New Orleans was allowed to die.
It is a waste of time to search for the blameworthy.
Simply follow the money.
We are witnessing a pogrom by neglect, but it's too unthinkable for most people to wrap their minds around. ¶ 12:08 PM 3 comments links to this post
Ownership Society
Rescue 'ticket'
I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue.
Depending on who the rescuers were, they might be.
That alone might make some want to shoot at helicopters.
Thanks to Atrios for the link. ¶ 8:19 AM 1 comments links to this post
I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a "ticket." Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn't believe these people were afraid they'd be charged for a rescue.
Depending on who the rescuers were, they might be.
That alone might make some want to shoot at helicopters.
Thanks to Atrios for the link. ¶ 8:19 AM 1 comments links to this post
Monday, September 05, 2005
No Surprise
Facing extensive damage by Hurricane Katrina to naval installations in Mississippi, the Navy turned immediately to the Halliburton Company's KBR subsidiary for tasks like restoring electricity, repairing roofs and clearing debris at bases that are urgently needed for response efforts.
No wonder help is so long in arriving.
New Orleans and especially the French Quarter- which didn't get submerged entirely- is about to be eminent domained out of existence.
Doubtless Bu$hCo plans to open up a Dixieland version of Las Vegas. They'll certainly have a Halliburton-run port for all the oil that comes in, and all the Midwestern food that goes out of the Newer New Orleans, now that Big Time Dick understands its importance. There's just one itty bitty problem.
No matter how many times they re-build the flood walls, that patch of land will be part of the continental shelf in a generation or so.
Why?
Because the fools will burn every gram of fossil fuel before they think about alternative fuels.
They might as well use this architecture when they do the New Improved Superdome.
What did the islander who cut the last tree to move the last stone think?
Ask Dear Leader.
There's a similar depth of insight to his genius. ¶ 5:46 PM 0 comments links to this post
No wonder help is so long in arriving.
New Orleans and especially the French Quarter- which didn't get submerged entirely- is about to be eminent domained out of existence.
Doubtless Bu$hCo plans to open up a Dixieland version of Las Vegas. They'll certainly have a Halliburton-run port for all the oil that comes in, and all the Midwestern food that goes out of the Newer New Orleans, now that Big Time Dick understands its importance. There's just one itty bitty problem.
No matter how many times they re-build the flood walls, that patch of land will be part of the continental shelf in a generation or so.
Why?
Because the fools will burn every gram of fossil fuel before they think about alternative fuels.
They might as well use this architecture when they do the New Improved Superdome.
What did the islander who cut the last tree to move the last stone think?
Ask Dear Leader.
There's a similar depth of insight to his genius. ¶ 5:46 PM 0 comments links to this post
All the Information Fit to Search
Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.
"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."
The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.
As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.
"A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Battelle wrote in his widely read "Searchblog." "Thanks to Google Purge, you'll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music."
"Book burning is just the beginning," said Google co-founder Larry Page. "This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers."
Page added: "And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can't pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit."
As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.
"We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive," Schmidt said. "If you haven't given it a try, now's the time. In one week, the deleting begins."
Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.
The company's new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.
"Google finally has what it needs to catalog the DNA of every organism on Earth," said analyst Imran Kahn of J.P. Morgan Chase. "Of course, some people might not want their DNA indexed. Hence, the robot army. It's crazy, it's brilliant—typical Google."
Google's robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: "The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it's Google. It'll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain."
Markets responded favorably to the announcement of Google Purge, with traders bidding up Google's share price by $1.24, to $285.92, in late trading after the announcement. But some critics of the company have found cause for complaint.
"This announcement is a red flag," said Daniel Brandt, founder of Google-Watch.org. "I certainly don't want to accuse of them having bad intentions. But this campaign of destruction and genocide raises some potential privacy concerns."
Brandt also expressed reservations about the company's new motto. Until yesterday's news conference, the company's unofficial slogan had been "Don't be evil." The slogan has now been expanded to "Don't be evil, unless it's necessary for the greater good."
Co-founders Page and Brin dismiss their critics.
"A lot of companies are so worried about short-term reactions that they ignore the long view," Page said. "Not us. Our team is focused on something more than just making money. At Google, we're using technology to make dreams come true."
"Soon," Brin added, "we'll make dreams clickable, or destroy them forever."
Wait until you see the Microsoft version for Windows. ¶ 3:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.
"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."
The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.
As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.
"A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Battelle wrote in his widely read "Searchblog." "Thanks to Google Purge, you'll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music."
"Book burning is just the beginning," said Google co-founder Larry Page. "This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers."
Page added: "And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can't pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit."
As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.
"We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive," Schmidt said. "If you haven't given it a try, now's the time. In one week, the deleting begins."
Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.
The company's new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.
"Google finally has what it needs to catalog the DNA of every organism on Earth," said analyst Imran Kahn of J.P. Morgan Chase. "Of course, some people might not want their DNA indexed. Hence, the robot army. It's crazy, it's brilliant—typical Google."
Google's robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: "The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it's Google. It'll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain."
Markets responded favorably to the announcement of Google Purge, with traders bidding up Google's share price by $1.24, to $285.92, in late trading after the announcement. But some critics of the company have found cause for complaint.
"This announcement is a red flag," said Daniel Brandt, founder of Google-Watch.org. "I certainly don't want to accuse of them having bad intentions. But this campaign of destruction and genocide raises some potential privacy concerns."
Brandt also expressed reservations about the company's new motto. Until yesterday's news conference, the company's unofficial slogan had been "Don't be evil." The slogan has now been expanded to "Don't be evil, unless it's necessary for the greater good."
Co-founders Page and Brin dismiss their critics.
"A lot of companies are so worried about short-term reactions that they ignore the long view," Page said. "Not us. Our team is focused on something more than just making money. At Google, we're using technology to make dreams come true."
"Soon," Brin added, "we'll make dreams clickable, or destroy them forever."
Wait until you see the Microsoft version for Windows. ¶ 3:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Ignoring the Perfect Storm
Krugman:
Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.
Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."
I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
Dowd:
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
And last but certainly not least, Rich, truncated here because he justs keeps on frying them:
As the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja...
Aside from the storm brewing among the voters, there is also trouble brewing for the more lucrative financial engines of the Ownership Society:
OF all the sectors of the financial universe, the hedge fund world is probably the most secretive and almost certainly the most alluring. Open only to institutions and the wealthy, hedge funds offer sophisticated models of risk, access to the best financial minds and the chance for outsized returns. According to Van Hedge Advisors, hedge fund assets have topped a trillion dollars...
Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been studying hedge fund failures and risks, and he says that another hedge fund industry shakeout is likely in the near future. Mr. Lo runs a company, AlphaSimplex, that manages a $400 million hedge fund - so he is not looking for a reason to say hedge funds are in trouble. But that is exactly what he's saying, backing it up with powerful data and a couple of unexpected theories...
Traditionally, economists have thought that big up-and-down fluctuations in returns indicated risky investments, so many hedge fund investors have hoped to see a pattern of smooth and even returns. But Mr. Lo quickly saw that lots of hedge funds were posting returns that were just too smooth to be realistic. Digging deeper, he found that funds with hard-to-appraise, illiquid investments - like real estate or esoteric interest rate swaps - showed returns that were particularly even. In those cases, he concluded, managers had no way to measure their fluctuations, and simply assumed that their value was going up steadily. The problem, unfortunately, is that those are exactly the kinds of investments that can be subject to big losses in a crisis. In 1998, investors retreated en masse from such investments.
Now, in a paper to be published by the University of Chicago, Mr. Lo, working with his graduate students, has come to a disturbing conclusion: that smooth returns, far from proving that hedge funds are safe, may be a warning sign for the industry. (The paper is at http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/systemic2.pdf.)
...By Mr. Lo's measures, hedge fund investments are less liquid now than they have been in 20 years. His work shows that the same pattern of investing preceded the 1998 global hedge fund meltdown and the 1987 stock market crash...
So even some of the University of Chicago boys are saying the center will not hold?
Looks like there's a Storm coming. ¶ 7:38 AM 0 comments links to this post
Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all." It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.
So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared? After 9/11, hard questions were deferred in the name of national unity, then buried under a thick coat of whitewash. This time, we need accountability.
First question: Why have aid and security taken so long to arrive? Katrina hit five days ago - and it was already clear by last Friday that Katrina could do immense damage along the Gulf Coast. Yet the response you'd expect from an advanced country never happened. Thousands of Americans are dead or dying, not because they refused to evacuate, but because they were too poor or too sick to get out without help - and help wasn't provided. Many have yet to receive any help at all.
There will and should be many questions about the response of state and local governments; in particular, couldn't they have done more to help the poor and sick escape? But the evidence points, above all, to a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government's response.
Even military resources in the right place weren't ordered into action. "On Wednesday," said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., "reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!"
Maybe administration officials believed that the local National Guard could keep order and deliver relief. But many members of the National Guard and much of its equipment - including high-water vehicles - are in Iraq. "The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," a Louisiana Guard officer told reporters several weeks ago.
Second question: Why wasn't more preventive action taken? After 2003 the Army Corps of Engineers sharply slowed its flood-control work, including work on sinking levees. "The corps," an Editor and Publisher article says, citing a series of articles in The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain."
In 2002 the corps' chief resigned, reportedly under threat of being fired, after he criticized the administration's proposed cuts in the corps' budget, including flood-control spending.
Third question: Did the Bush administration destroy FEMA's effectiveness? The administration has, by all accounts, treated the emergency management agency like an unwanted stepchild, leading to a mass exodus of experienced professionals.
Last year James Lee Witt, who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the agency during the Clinton years, said at a Congressional hearing: "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared."
I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.
At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.
Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.
So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.
Dowd:
Stuff happens.
And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
Why does this self-styled "can do" president always lapse into such lame "who could have known?" excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.
In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.
Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Who are we if we can't take care of our own?
And last but certainly not least, Rich, truncated here because he justs keeps on frying them:
As the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.
As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised "victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln more than two years ago. For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."
This administration would like us to forget a lot, starting with the simple fact that next Sunday is the fourth anniversary of the day we were attacked by Al Qaeda, not Iraq. Even before Katrina took command of the news, Sept. 11, 2005, was destined to be a half-forgotten occasion, distorted and sullied by a grotesquely inappropriate Pentagon-sponsored country music jamboree on the Mall. But hard as it is to reflect upon so much sorrow at once, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the real history surrounding 9/11; it is the Rosetta stone for what is happening now. If we are to pull ourselves out of the disasters of Katrina and Iraq alike, we must live in the real world, not the fantasyland of the administration's faith-based propaganda. Everything connects.
Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before 9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu with a vengeance.
The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr. Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax increases."
But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.
You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja...
Aside from the storm brewing among the voters, there is also trouble brewing for the more lucrative financial engines of the Ownership Society:
OF all the sectors of the financial universe, the hedge fund world is probably the most secretive and almost certainly the most alluring. Open only to institutions and the wealthy, hedge funds offer sophisticated models of risk, access to the best financial minds and the chance for outsized returns. According to Van Hedge Advisors, hedge fund assets have topped a trillion dollars...
Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been studying hedge fund failures and risks, and he says that another hedge fund industry shakeout is likely in the near future. Mr. Lo runs a company, AlphaSimplex, that manages a $400 million hedge fund - so he is not looking for a reason to say hedge funds are in trouble. But that is exactly what he's saying, backing it up with powerful data and a couple of unexpected theories...
Traditionally, economists have thought that big up-and-down fluctuations in returns indicated risky investments, so many hedge fund investors have hoped to see a pattern of smooth and even returns. But Mr. Lo quickly saw that lots of hedge funds were posting returns that were just too smooth to be realistic. Digging deeper, he found that funds with hard-to-appraise, illiquid investments - like real estate or esoteric interest rate swaps - showed returns that were particularly even. In those cases, he concluded, managers had no way to measure their fluctuations, and simply assumed that their value was going up steadily. The problem, unfortunately, is that those are exactly the kinds of investments that can be subject to big losses in a crisis. In 1998, investors retreated en masse from such investments.
Now, in a paper to be published by the University of Chicago, Mr. Lo, working with his graduate students, has come to a disturbing conclusion: that smooth returns, far from proving that hedge funds are safe, may be a warning sign for the industry. (The paper is at http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/systemic2.pdf.)
...By Mr. Lo's measures, hedge fund investments are less liquid now than they have been in 20 years. His work shows that the same pattern of investing preceded the 1998 global hedge fund meltdown and the 1987 stock market crash...
So even some of the University of Chicago boys are saying the center will not hold?
Looks like there's a Storm coming. ¶ 7:38 AM 0 comments links to this post
Saturday, September 03, 2005
So Dear Leader Knows Someone Could Guess What's Coming
Just like a picture of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico provided by an NOAA satellite (which the Bush administration wants to cut funding for, and Republicans want to make it so a private corporation charges you for, even though you've already paid for it), so scientists across the world have been trying to alert us to the radical changes the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels produces worldwide.
For your consideration, an example, greatly condensed and hopefully easy enough to understand:
Modern Global Climate Change
Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 5 December 2003; 302: 1719-1723 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1090228]
Modern climate change is dominated by human in•uences, which are now large enough to exceed the bounds of natural variability. The main source of global climate change is human-induced changes in atmospheric composition. These perturbations primarily result from emissions associated with energy use, but on local and regional scales, urbanization and land use changes are also important. Although there has been progress in monitoring and understanding climate change, there remain many scienti•c, technical, and institutional impediments to precisely planning for, adapting to, and mitigating the effects of climate change. There is still considerable uncertainty about the rates of change that can be expected, but it is clear that these changes will be increasingly manifested in important and tangible ways, such as changes in extremes of temperature and precipitation, decreases in seasonal and perennial snow and ice extent, and sea level rise. Anthropogenic climate change is now likely to continue for many centuries. We are venturing into the unknown with climate, and its associated impacts could be quite disruptive.
...Planet Earth is habitable because of its location relative to the sun and because of the natural greenhouse effect of its atmosphere. Various atmospheric gases contribute to the greenhouse effect, whose impact in clear skies is ~60% from water vapor, ~25% from carbon dioxide, ~8% from ozone, and the rest from trace gases including methane and nitrous oxide (1). Clouds also have a greenhouse effect. On average, the energy from the sun received at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere amounts to 175 petawatts (PW) (or 175 quadrillion watts), of which ~31% is reflected by clouds and from the surface. The rest (120 PW) is absorbed by the atmosphere, land, or ocean and ultimately emitted back space as infrared radiation (1). Over the century, infrequent volcanic eruptions gases and debris into the atmosphere have significantly perturbed these energy flows; however, the resulting cooling has lasted for a few years (2). Inferred changes in total irradiance appear to have increased mean temperatures by perhaps as much as 0.2°C in the first half of the 20th century, but measured changes in the past 25 years have been small (2). Over the past 50 years, human influences have been the dominant detectable influence on climate change (2). The following briefly describes the human influences climate, the resulting temperature and precipitation changes, the time scale of responses, some important processes involved, the development of climate models for assessing the past or making projections into the future, and the need for better observational and information systems.
The main way in which humans alter global climate is by interference with the natural flows of energy through changes in atmospheric composition, not by the actual generation of heat in energy usage. On a global scale, even a 1% change in the energy flows, which is the order of the estimated change to date (2), dominates all other direct influences humans have on climate. For example, an energy output of just one PW is equivalent to that of a million power stations of 1000-MW capacity, among the largest in the world. Total human energy use is about a factor of 9000 less than the natural flow (3).
Global changes in atmospheric composition occur from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide that results from the burning of fossil fuels and methane and nitrous oxide from multiple human activities. Because these gases have long (decades to centuries) atmospheric lifetimes, the result is an accumulation in the atmosphere and a buildup in concentrations that are clearly shown both by instrumental observations of air samples since 1958 and in bubbles of air trapped in ice cores before then. Moreover, these gases are well distributed in the atmosphere across the globe, simplifying a global monitoring strategy. Carbon dioxide has increased 31% since preindustrial times, from 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to more than 370 ppmv today, and half of the increase has been since 1965 (4) (Fig. 1). The greenhouse gases trap outgoing radiation from the Earth to space, creating a warming of the planet.
Fig. 1. Time series of departures from the 1961 to 1990 base period for an annual mean global temperature of 14.0°C (bars) and for a carbon dioxide mean of 334 ppmv (solid curve) during the base period, using data fromice cores and (after 1958) from Mauna Loa (4). The global average surface heating approximates that of carbon dioxide increases, because of the cancellation of aerosols and other greenhouse gas effects, but this does not apply regionally (2). Many other factors (such as the effects of volcanic eruptions and solar irradiance changes) are also important.
...There is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere is changing because of human activities, and today greenhouse gases are the largest human influence on global climate (2). Recent greenhouse gas emission trends in the United States are upward (11), as are global emissions trends, with increases between 0.5 and 1% per year over the past few decades (12). Concentrations of both reflective and nonreflective aerosols are also estimated to be increasing (2). Because radiative forcing from greenhouse gases dominates over the net cooling forcings from aerosols (2), the popular term for the human influence on global climate is “global warming,” although it really means global heating, of which the observed global temperature increase is only one consequence (13) (Fig. 1). Already it is estimated that the Earth’s climate has exceeded the bounds of natural variability (2), and this has been the case since about 1980...
...There is considerable uncertainty as to exactly how anthropogenic global heating will affect the climate system, how long it will last, and how large the effects will be. Climate has varied naturally in the past, but today’s circumstances are unique because of human influences on atmospheric composition. As we progress into the future, the magnitude of the present anthropogenic change will become overwhelmingly large compared to that of natural changes. In the absence of climate mitigation policies, the 90% probability interval for warming from 1990 to 2100 is 1.7° to 4.9°C (19). About half of this range is due to uncertainty in future emissions and about half is due to uncertainties in climate models (2, 19), especially in their sensitivity to forcings that are complicated by feedbacks, discussed below, and in their rate of heat uptake by the oceans (20). Even with these uncertainties, the likely outcome is more frequent heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation events, and related impacts (such as wild fires, heat stress, vegetation changes, and sea level rise) that will be regionally dependent. ....
...Our understanding of the climate system is complicated by feedbacks that either amplify or damp perturbations, the most important of which involve water in various phases. As temperatures increase, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases along with water vapor amounts, producing water vapor feedback. As water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, this diminishes the loss of energy through infrared radiation to space. Currently, water vapor feedback is estimated to contribute a radiative effect from one to two times the size of the direct effect of increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases (24, 25). Precipitation-runoff feedbacks occur because more intense rains run off at the expense of soil moisture, and warming promotes rain rather than snow. These changes in turn alter the partitioning of solar radiation into sensible versus latent heating (14). Heat storage feedbacks include the rate at which the oceans take up heat and the currents redistribute and release it back into the atmosphere at variable later times and different locations...
Here I skip some fairly technical material and a figure regarding how as temperatures and the associated water holding capacity of the atmosphere (15) increase, more precipitation falls in heavy (more than 40 mm/day) to extreme (more than 100 mm/day) daily amounts.
In other words, as a climate gets hotter, it rains heavier.
Fig. 3. Components of the climate system and the interactions among them, including the human component. All these components have to be modeled as a coupled system that includes the oceans, atmosphere, land, cryosphere, and biosphere. GCM, General Circulation Model.
...Ensembles of model predictions have to be run to generate probabilities and address the chaotic aspects of weather and climate. This can be addressed in principle with adequate computing power, a challenge in itself. However, improving models to a point where they are more reliable and have sufficient resolution to be properly able to represent known important processes also requires the right observations, understanding, and insights (brain power). Global climate models will need to better integrate the biological, chemical, and physical components of the Earth system (Fig. 3). Even more challenging is the seamless flow of data and information among observing systems, Earth system models, socioeconomic models, and models that address managed and unmanaged ecosystems. Progress here is dependent on overcoming not only scientific and technical issues but also major institutional and international obstacles related to the free flow of climate-related data and information. In large part, reduction in uncertainty about future climate change will be driven by studies of climate change assessment and attribution. Along with climate model simulations of past climates, this requires comprehensive and long-term climate-related data sets and observing systems that deliver data free of time-dependent biases. These observations would ensure that model simulations are evaluated on the basis of actual changes in the climate system and not on artifacts of changes in observing system technology or analysis methods (34). The recent controversy regarding the effects that changes in observing systems have had on the rate of surface versus tropospheric warming (35, 36) highlights this issue. Global monitoring through space-based and surface-based systems is an international matter, much like global climate change. There are encouraging signs, such as the adoption in 1999 of a set of climate monitoring principles (37), but these principles are impotent without implementation. International implementation of these principles is spotty at best (38). We are entering the unknown with our climate. We need a global climate observing system, but only parts of it exist. We must not only take the vital signs of the planet but also assess why they are fluctuating and changing. Consequently, the system must embrace comprehensive analysis and assessment as integral components on an ongoing basis, as well as innovative research to better interpret results and improve our diagnostic capabilities. Projections into the future are part of such activity, and all aspects of an Earth information system feed into planning for the future, whether by planned adaptation or mitigation. Climate change is truly a global issue, one that may prove to be humanity’s greatest challenge. It is very unlikely to be adequately addressed without greatly improved international cooperation and action.
References and Notes
1. J. T. Kiehl, K. E. Trenberth, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 197 (1997).
2. J. T. Houghton et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001) (available at www.ipcc.ch/).
3. R. J. Cicerone, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 10304 (2000).
4. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations fromair samples and from ice cores are available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm and http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/siple.htm, respectively.
5. M. Sato et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 6319 (2003).
6. A. J. Dolman, A. Verhagen, C. A. Rovers, Eds. Global Environmental Change and Land Use (Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2003).
7. G. B. Bonan, Ecol. Appl., 9, 1305 (1999).
8. J. G. Charney, Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 101, 193 (1975).
9. C. Nobre et al., in Vegetation, Water, Humans, and the Climate, P. Kabot et al., Eds. (Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, in press, 2003).
10. A. N. Hahmann, R. E. Dickinson, J. Clim. 10, 1944 (1997).
11. U.S. Department of State, U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 (Washington, DC, 2002) (available at http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/ResourceCenterPublicationsUSClimateActionReport.html).
12. G. Marland, T. A. Boden, R. J. Andres, at the Web site Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change (CO2 Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 2002; available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/em-cont.htm).
13. Global temperatures are available from www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2002/ann/ann02.html.
14. K. E. Trenberth, A. Dai, R. M. Rasmussen, D. B. Parsons, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 1205 (2003) (available at www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/rainChBamsR. pdf).
15. The Clausius Clapeyron equation governs the waterholding capacity of the atmosphere, which increases by ~7% per degree Celsius increase in temperature (13).
16. R. W. Katz, Adv. Water Res. 23, 133 (1999).
17. P. Ya. Groisman, Clim. Change. 42, 243 (1999).
18. T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 1107 (1998).
19. T. Wigley, S. Raper, Science 293, 451 (2001).
20. S. J. Levitus et al., Science 287, 2225 (2001).
21. W. S. Broecker, Science 278, 1582 (1997).
22. T. F. Stocker, O. Marchal, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 97, 1362 (2000).
23. M. Hoffert et al., Science 298, 981 (2002).
24. U.S. National Research Council, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy, Washington, DC, 2001).
25. R. Colman, Clim. Dyn. 20, 865 (2003).
26. T. R. Karl, K. E. Trenberth, Sci. Am. 281, 100 (December 1999).
27. P. Ya. Groisman, T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, G. L. Stenchikov, Science 263, 198 (1994).
28. C. E. Forest, P. H. Stone, A. Sokolov, M. R. Allen, M. D. Webster, Science 295, 113 (2002).
29. J. Coakley Jr., C. D. Walsh, J. Atmos. Sci. 59, 668 (2002).
30. J. Coakley Jr., personal communication.
31. M. A. Saunders, Geophys. Res. Lett. 30, 1378 (2003).
32. M. P. Hoerling, J. W. Hurrell, T. Xu, Science 292, 90 (2001).
33. K. E. Trenberth, T. J. Hoar, Geophys. Res. Lett. 24, 3057 (1997).
34. K. E. Trenberth, T. R. Karl, T. W. Spence, Bull. Amol. Meteor. Soc. 83, 1558 (2002).
35. The Climate Change Science Program plan is available at www.climatescience.gov.
36. B. Santer et al., Science, 300, 1280 (2003).
37. The climate principles were adopted by the Subsidiary Body on Science, Technology and Assessment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
38. Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), The Second Report on the Adequacy of the Global Observing Systems for Climate in Support of the UNFCCC. (GCOS-82, WMO/TD 1143, World Meteorological Organisation, Geneva, 2003) (available from www. wmo.ch/web/gcos/gcoshome.html).
39. We thank A. Leetmaa, J. Hurrell, J. Mahlman, and R. Cicerone for helpful comments, and J. Enloe for providing the calculations for Fig. 2. This article reflects the views of the authors and does not reflect government policy. The National Climatic Data Center is part of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Services. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the NSF.
Web Resources
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5651/1719/
¶ 10:35 PM 3 comments links to this post
For your consideration, an example, greatly condensed and hopefully easy enough to understand:
Modern Global Climate Change
Thomas R. Karl and Kevin E. Trenberth
Science 5 December 2003; 302: 1719-1723 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1090228]
Modern climate change is dominated by human in•uences, which are now large enough to exceed the bounds of natural variability. The main source of global climate change is human-induced changes in atmospheric composition. These perturbations primarily result from emissions associated with energy use, but on local and regional scales, urbanization and land use changes are also important. Although there has been progress in monitoring and understanding climate change, there remain many scienti•c, technical, and institutional impediments to precisely planning for, adapting to, and mitigating the effects of climate change. There is still considerable uncertainty about the rates of change that can be expected, but it is clear that these changes will be increasingly manifested in important and tangible ways, such as changes in extremes of temperature and precipitation, decreases in seasonal and perennial snow and ice extent, and sea level rise. Anthropogenic climate change is now likely to continue for many centuries. We are venturing into the unknown with climate, and its associated impacts could be quite disruptive.
...Planet Earth is habitable because of its location relative to the sun and because of the natural greenhouse effect of its atmosphere. Various atmospheric gases contribute to the greenhouse effect, whose impact in clear skies is ~60% from water vapor, ~25% from carbon dioxide, ~8% from ozone, and the rest from trace gases including methane and nitrous oxide (1). Clouds also have a greenhouse effect. On average, the energy from the sun received at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere amounts to 175 petawatts (PW) (or 175 quadrillion watts), of which ~31% is reflected by clouds and from the surface. The rest (120 PW) is absorbed by the atmosphere, land, or ocean and ultimately emitted back space as infrared radiation (1). Over the century, infrequent volcanic eruptions gases and debris into the atmosphere have significantly perturbed these energy flows; however, the resulting cooling has lasted for a few years (2). Inferred changes in total irradiance appear to have increased mean temperatures by perhaps as much as 0.2°C in the first half of the 20th century, but measured changes in the past 25 years have been small (2). Over the past 50 years, human influences have been the dominant detectable influence on climate change (2). The following briefly describes the human influences climate, the resulting temperature and precipitation changes, the time scale of responses, some important processes involved, the development of climate models for assessing the past or making projections into the future, and the need for better observational and information systems.
The main way in which humans alter global climate is by interference with the natural flows of energy through changes in atmospheric composition, not by the actual generation of heat in energy usage. On a global scale, even a 1% change in the energy flows, which is the order of the estimated change to date (2), dominates all other direct influences humans have on climate. For example, an energy output of just one PW is equivalent to that of a million power stations of 1000-MW capacity, among the largest in the world. Total human energy use is about a factor of 9000 less than the natural flow (3).
Global changes in atmospheric composition occur from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide that results from the burning of fossil fuels and methane and nitrous oxide from multiple human activities. Because these gases have long (decades to centuries) atmospheric lifetimes, the result is an accumulation in the atmosphere and a buildup in concentrations that are clearly shown both by instrumental observations of air samples since 1958 and in bubbles of air trapped in ice cores before then. Moreover, these gases are well distributed in the atmosphere across the globe, simplifying a global monitoring strategy. Carbon dioxide has increased 31% since preindustrial times, from 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to more than 370 ppmv today, and half of the increase has been since 1965 (4) (Fig. 1). The greenhouse gases trap outgoing radiation from the Earth to space, creating a warming of the planet.
Fig. 1. Time series of departures from the 1961 to 1990 base period for an annual mean global temperature of 14.0°C (bars) and for a carbon dioxide mean of 334 ppmv (solid curve) during the base period, using data fromice cores and (after 1958) from Mauna Loa (4). The global average surface heating approximates that of carbon dioxide increases, because of the cancellation of aerosols and other greenhouse gas effects, but this does not apply regionally (2). Many other factors (such as the effects of volcanic eruptions and solar irradiance changes) are also important.
...There is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere is changing because of human activities, and today greenhouse gases are the largest human influence on global climate (2). Recent greenhouse gas emission trends in the United States are upward (11), as are global emissions trends, with increases between 0.5 and 1% per year over the past few decades (12). Concentrations of both reflective and nonreflective aerosols are also estimated to be increasing (2). Because radiative forcing from greenhouse gases dominates over the net cooling forcings from aerosols (2), the popular term for the human influence on global climate is “global warming,” although it really means global heating, of which the observed global temperature increase is only one consequence (13) (Fig. 1). Already it is estimated that the Earth’s climate has exceeded the bounds of natural variability (2), and this has been the case since about 1980...
...There is considerable uncertainty as to exactly how anthropogenic global heating will affect the climate system, how long it will last, and how large the effects will be. Climate has varied naturally in the past, but today’s circumstances are unique because of human influences on atmospheric composition. As we progress into the future, the magnitude of the present anthropogenic change will become overwhelmingly large compared to that of natural changes. In the absence of climate mitigation policies, the 90% probability interval for warming from 1990 to 2100 is 1.7° to 4.9°C (19). About half of this range is due to uncertainty in future emissions and about half is due to uncertainties in climate models (2, 19), especially in their sensitivity to forcings that are complicated by feedbacks, discussed below, and in their rate of heat uptake by the oceans (20). Even with these uncertainties, the likely outcome is more frequent heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation events, and related impacts (such as wild fires, heat stress, vegetation changes, and sea level rise) that will be regionally dependent. ....
...Our understanding of the climate system is complicated by feedbacks that either amplify or damp perturbations, the most important of which involve water in various phases. As temperatures increase, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases along with water vapor amounts, producing water vapor feedback. As water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, this diminishes the loss of energy through infrared radiation to space. Currently, water vapor feedback is estimated to contribute a radiative effect from one to two times the size of the direct effect of increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases (24, 25). Precipitation-runoff feedbacks occur because more intense rains run off at the expense of soil moisture, and warming promotes rain rather than snow. These changes in turn alter the partitioning of solar radiation into sensible versus latent heating (14). Heat storage feedbacks include the rate at which the oceans take up heat and the currents redistribute and release it back into the atmosphere at variable later times and different locations...
Here I skip some fairly technical material and a figure regarding how as temperatures and the associated water holding capacity of the atmosphere (15) increase, more precipitation falls in heavy (more than 40 mm/day) to extreme (more than 100 mm/day) daily amounts.
In other words, as a climate gets hotter, it rains heavier.
Fig. 3. Components of the climate system and the interactions among them, including the human component. All these components have to be modeled as a coupled system that includes the oceans, atmosphere, land, cryosphere, and biosphere. GCM, General Circulation Model.
...Ensembles of model predictions have to be run to generate probabilities and address the chaotic aspects of weather and climate. This can be addressed in principle with adequate computing power, a challenge in itself. However, improving models to a point where they are more reliable and have sufficient resolution to be properly able to represent known important processes also requires the right observations, understanding, and insights (brain power). Global climate models will need to better integrate the biological, chemical, and physical components of the Earth system (Fig. 3). Even more challenging is the seamless flow of data and information among observing systems, Earth system models, socioeconomic models, and models that address managed and unmanaged ecosystems. Progress here is dependent on overcoming not only scientific and technical issues but also major institutional and international obstacles related to the free flow of climate-related data and information. In large part, reduction in uncertainty about future climate change will be driven by studies of climate change assessment and attribution. Along with climate model simulations of past climates, this requires comprehensive and long-term climate-related data sets and observing systems that deliver data free of time-dependent biases. These observations would ensure that model simulations are evaluated on the basis of actual changes in the climate system and not on artifacts of changes in observing system technology or analysis methods (34). The recent controversy regarding the effects that changes in observing systems have had on the rate of surface versus tropospheric warming (35, 36) highlights this issue. Global monitoring through space-based and surface-based systems is an international matter, much like global climate change. There are encouraging signs, such as the adoption in 1999 of a set of climate monitoring principles (37), but these principles are impotent without implementation. International implementation of these principles is spotty at best (38). We are entering the unknown with our climate. We need a global climate observing system, but only parts of it exist. We must not only take the vital signs of the planet but also assess why they are fluctuating and changing. Consequently, the system must embrace comprehensive analysis and assessment as integral components on an ongoing basis, as well as innovative research to better interpret results and improve our diagnostic capabilities. Projections into the future are part of such activity, and all aspects of an Earth information system feed into planning for the future, whether by planned adaptation or mitigation. Climate change is truly a global issue, one that may prove to be humanity’s greatest challenge. It is very unlikely to be adequately addressed without greatly improved international cooperation and action.
References and Notes
1. J. T. Kiehl, K. E. Trenberth, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 197 (1997).
2. J. T. Houghton et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001) (available at www.ipcc.ch/).
3. R. J. Cicerone, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 10304 (2000).
4. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations fromair samples and from ice cores are available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm and http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/siple.htm, respectively.
5. M. Sato et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 6319 (2003).
6. A. J. Dolman, A. Verhagen, C. A. Rovers, Eds. Global Environmental Change and Land Use (Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2003).
7. G. B. Bonan, Ecol. Appl., 9, 1305 (1999).
8. J. G. Charney, Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 101, 193 (1975).
9. C. Nobre et al., in Vegetation, Water, Humans, and the Climate, P. Kabot et al., Eds. (Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, in press, 2003).
10. A. N. Hahmann, R. E. Dickinson, J. Clim. 10, 1944 (1997).
11. U.S. Department of State, U.S. Climate Action Report 2002 (Washington, DC, 2002) (available at http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/ResourceCenterPublicationsUSClimateActionReport.html).
12. G. Marland, T. A. Boden, R. J. Andres, at the Web site Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change (CO2 Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 2002; available at http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/em-cont.htm).
13. Global temperatures are available from www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2002/ann/ann02.html.
14. K. E. Trenberth, A. Dai, R. M. Rasmussen, D. B. Parsons, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 1205 (2003) (available at www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/rainChBamsR. pdf).
15. The Clausius Clapeyron equation governs the waterholding capacity of the atmosphere, which increases by ~7% per degree Celsius increase in temperature (13).
16. R. W. Katz, Adv. Water Res. 23, 133 (1999).
17. P. Ya. Groisman, Clim. Change. 42, 243 (1999).
18. T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 78, 1107 (1998).
19. T. Wigley, S. Raper, Science 293, 451 (2001).
20. S. J. Levitus et al., Science 287, 2225 (2001).
21. W. S. Broecker, Science 278, 1582 (1997).
22. T. F. Stocker, O. Marchal, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 97, 1362 (2000).
23. M. Hoffert et al., Science 298, 981 (2002).
24. U.S. National Research Council, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy, Washington, DC, 2001).
25. R. Colman, Clim. Dyn. 20, 865 (2003).
26. T. R. Karl, K. E. Trenberth, Sci. Am. 281, 100 (December 1999).
27. P. Ya. Groisman, T. R. Karl, R. W. Knight, G. L. Stenchikov, Science 263, 198 (1994).
28. C. E. Forest, P. H. Stone, A. Sokolov, M. R. Allen, M. D. Webster, Science 295, 113 (2002).
29. J. Coakley Jr., C. D. Walsh, J. Atmos. Sci. 59, 668 (2002).
30. J. Coakley Jr., personal communication.
31. M. A. Saunders, Geophys. Res. Lett. 30, 1378 (2003).
32. M. P. Hoerling, J. W. Hurrell, T. Xu, Science 292, 90 (2001).
33. K. E. Trenberth, T. J. Hoar, Geophys. Res. Lett. 24, 3057 (1997).
34. K. E. Trenberth, T. R. Karl, T. W. Spence, Bull. Amol. Meteor. Soc. 83, 1558 (2002).
35. The Climate Change Science Program plan is available at www.climatescience.gov.
36. B. Santer et al., Science, 300, 1280 (2003).
37. The climate principles were adopted by the Subsidiary Body on Science, Technology and Assessment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
38. Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), The Second Report on the Adequacy of the Global Observing Systems for Climate in Support of the UNFCCC. (GCOS-82, WMO/TD 1143, World Meteorological Organisation, Geneva, 2003) (available from www. wmo.ch/web/gcos/gcoshome.html).
39. We thank A. Leetmaa, J. Hurrell, J. Mahlman, and R. Cicerone for helpful comments, and J. Enloe for providing the calculations for Fig. 2. This article reflects the views of the authors and does not reflect government policy. The National Climatic Data Center is part of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Services. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the NSF.
Web Resources
www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5651/1719/
¶ 10:35 PM 3 comments links to this post
Friday, September 02, 2005
Information Control and Consent of the Damned
...With a crucial assist from the Supreme Court, George W. Bush became the first president of the 21st century and promptly set about restoring, even increasing, presidential powers. A hallmark of this effort was his assertion of control over information about what the government is, or has been, up to.
The first case was the work of a task force on energy policy chaired by Vice President Cheney. This was followed in November 2001 by an executive order giving an incumbent president decisionmaking authority over release of past presidents' papers. This overrode a congressional act that requires a president's records be available to the public no later than 12 years after he has left office. The Bush executive order makes this contingent upon the incumbent president's consent.
A further opportunity to assert presidential authority came when Al Qaeda terrorists flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center buildings in New York, another into the Pentagon, and would have flown a fourth into another target in Washington (probably the White House or Capitol) but for heroic passengers who forced a crash in rural Pennsylvania.
Historically, wars lead to increased presidential powers. There is an urge in the public and in Congress to rally round the flag and support the president no matter how foolish his actions.
But it was a Democratic Senate that forced Democrat Johnson into early retirement. In 2001, Senate Democrats were overcome by jelly where their backbones had been in 1968-69. True, their numbers had been reduced to 50 out of 100 senators, but 50 senators can be a powerful bloc. Nevertheless, Democrats acquiesced in the misnamed USA Patriot Act which shredded the Bill of Rights. They acquiesced in scandalous tax cuts. Worse, they supported the invasion of Iraq, on the basis of false justifications.
The question of controlling information has arisen again in connection with the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee reasonably want to know what Judge Roberts did and what views he expressed during his service in the Reagan administration. While Bush professes full cooperation with the Senate Judiciary Committee, including its Democratic members, he has been careful about which documents from these periods of Roberts' career are made available. A great many documents have been supplied, but some have been withheld. Many of those that have been supplied have large sections blacked out. The Bush executive order says these redactions should be made on the basis of national security considerations, but in the end they come down to subjective judgments by the incumbent president or his White House staff.
In the name of protecting national security, President Bush has arrogated to himself and to all his successors (unless one of them should be sufficiently public-spirited to change it) the power to control which presidential papers going back to George Washington can be made public. One must ask: Why would Bush be moved to do this?
A cynical, but possibly true, explanation is to protect Reagan and his vice president - the current president's father - from disclosure of the full truth about the Iran-contra scandal, which possibly contained grounds for another impeachment.
Pat M. Holt, The Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 1, 2005
Thanks to Lambert for the tip.
If the Company had the media control it wants, yesterday we would have nothing but the Happy Talk from Bush, Chertoff, and Brown.
The stories of what were really happening in New Orleans would be unheard.
One wonders if the the food and water would have ever arrived- and how many would survive.
One also wonders, since food and water and aid didn't show up to where the cameras were until yesterday evening, how much aid is showing up to where the cameras aren't?
With over a million displaced persons, the possibility of 100,000 dead, and a country reeling, one wonders how much of the apparent ineptitude is an lassiez faire rape of a blue city in a red state?
Last night there was an interesting exhange between a Louisiana Senator and a distaught cable anchorman, and a silent assent by Bill Clinton as Poppy asserted Junior was doing the best he could do- that no one predicted this nightmare.
Landrieu and the Clintons both feel it important to get the Congress to send those billions to the relief of New Orleans and avoid the passive resistance of the Company.
That is, of course, why they are letting themselves get buggered by by Bu$hCo.
They feel compromise is the only way to get the ruthless to help.
The problem is that when you sleep with people to get them to show a little mercy to your babies, they just end up raping the children too.
Clinton and Landrieu make the mistake of thinking they can negotiate with the robber barons. In reality they are being puppets. They may get some relief for the needy in the short run, but in the long run they enable enslavement and despoilation. ¶ 7:35 AM 1 comments links to this post
The first case was the work of a task force on energy policy chaired by Vice President Cheney. This was followed in November 2001 by an executive order giving an incumbent president decisionmaking authority over release of past presidents' papers. This overrode a congressional act that requires a president's records be available to the public no later than 12 years after he has left office. The Bush executive order makes this contingent upon the incumbent president's consent.
A further opportunity to assert presidential authority came when Al Qaeda terrorists flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center buildings in New York, another into the Pentagon, and would have flown a fourth into another target in Washington (probably the White House or Capitol) but for heroic passengers who forced a crash in rural Pennsylvania.
Historically, wars lead to increased presidential powers. There is an urge in the public and in Congress to rally round the flag and support the president no matter how foolish his actions.
But it was a Democratic Senate that forced Democrat Johnson into early retirement. In 2001, Senate Democrats were overcome by jelly where their backbones had been in 1968-69. True, their numbers had been reduced to 50 out of 100 senators, but 50 senators can be a powerful bloc. Nevertheless, Democrats acquiesced in the misnamed USA Patriot Act which shredded the Bill of Rights. They acquiesced in scandalous tax cuts. Worse, they supported the invasion of Iraq, on the basis of false justifications.
The question of controlling information has arisen again in connection with the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee reasonably want to know what Judge Roberts did and what views he expressed during his service in the Reagan administration. While Bush professes full cooperation with the Senate Judiciary Committee, including its Democratic members, he has been careful about which documents from these periods of Roberts' career are made available. A great many documents have been supplied, but some have been withheld. Many of those that have been supplied have large sections blacked out. The Bush executive order says these redactions should be made on the basis of national security considerations, but in the end they come down to subjective judgments by the incumbent president or his White House staff.
In the name of protecting national security, President Bush has arrogated to himself and to all his successors (unless one of them should be sufficiently public-spirited to change it) the power to control which presidential papers going back to George Washington can be made public. One must ask: Why would Bush be moved to do this?
A cynical, but possibly true, explanation is to protect Reagan and his vice president - the current president's father - from disclosure of the full truth about the Iran-contra scandal, which possibly contained grounds for another impeachment.
Pat M. Holt, The Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 1, 2005
Thanks to Lambert for the tip.
If the Company had the media control it wants, yesterday we would have nothing but the Happy Talk from Bush, Chertoff, and Brown.
The stories of what were really happening in New Orleans would be unheard.
One wonders if the the food and water would have ever arrived- and how many would survive.
One also wonders, since food and water and aid didn't show up to where the cameras were until yesterday evening, how much aid is showing up to where the cameras aren't?
With over a million displaced persons, the possibility of 100,000 dead, and a country reeling, one wonders how much of the apparent ineptitude is an lassiez faire rape of a blue city in a red state?
Last night there was an interesting exhange between a Louisiana Senator and a distaught cable anchorman, and a silent assent by Bill Clinton as Poppy asserted Junior was doing the best he could do- that no one predicted this nightmare.
Landrieu and the Clintons both feel it important to get the Congress to send those billions to the relief of New Orleans and avoid the passive resistance of the Company.
That is, of course, why they are letting themselves get buggered by by Bu$hCo.
They feel compromise is the only way to get the ruthless to help.
The problem is that when you sleep with people to get them to show a little mercy to your babies, they just end up raping the children too.
Clinton and Landrieu make the mistake of thinking they can negotiate with the robber barons. In reality they are being puppets. They may get some relief for the needy in the short run, but in the long run they enable enslavement and despoilation. ¶ 7:35 AM 1 comments links to this post
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Great Oil PhWrauds
It has been just one disgusting day as the Company tries both hard and soft spin to get the spreading stain of Lake George off its hands.
Since a lot of these links were summarized well today at Eschaton and Corrente and other places, let me start off with a generalized kudos to these sites and their supporting casts.
Dear Leader started it off today with the amazing statement that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." This is a pretty baldfaced lie, as noted, quoted, and referenced in heavy detail. Thank Matthew Yglesias for that last one. Leah A. at Corrente has a long rant about this, too, referencing a Bill Moyers NOW episode outlining the entire problem and the likely results if not attended to... in 2002.
Babies dying while Chertoff blames the victims for not gassing up the SUVs and getting out of town. I guess he thinks all good people are part of the Ownership Society. Even those who owned a ticket out but were stranded by a sudden cancellation of all air and land transportation.
The guy heading FEMA, Michael D. Brown, was an estate planning lawyer before Bush hired him to manage our emergencies.
And FEMA is telling people to give donations to Pat Robertson instead of organizations that might actually do some good.
Still to come in these pages over the long weekend ahead: more about the causes and effects of global warming, and why legitimate scientists might think that if we crank through all that fossil fuel left in the ground we might start to look like this in a hundred years or so.
Just so long as somebody tells Dear Leader.
I wouldn't want it to surprise him. ¶ 9:45 PM 0 comments links to this post
Since a lot of these links were summarized well today at Eschaton and Corrente and other places, let me start off with a generalized kudos to these sites and their supporting casts.
Dear Leader started it off today with the amazing statement that "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." This is a pretty baldfaced lie, as noted, quoted, and referenced in heavy detail. Thank Matthew Yglesias for that last one. Leah A. at Corrente has a long rant about this, too, referencing a Bill Moyers NOW episode outlining the entire problem and the likely results if not attended to... in 2002.
Babies dying while Chertoff blames the victims for not gassing up the SUVs and getting out of town. I guess he thinks all good people are part of the Ownership Society. Even those who owned a ticket out but were stranded by a sudden cancellation of all air and land transportation.
The guy heading FEMA, Michael D. Brown, was an estate planning lawyer before Bush hired him to manage our emergencies.
And FEMA is telling people to give donations to Pat Robertson instead of organizations that might actually do some good.
Still to come in these pages over the long weekend ahead: more about the causes and effects of global warming, and why legitimate scientists might think that if we crank through all that fossil fuel left in the ground we might start to look like this in a hundred years or so.
Just so long as somebody tells Dear Leader.
I wouldn't want it to surprise him. ¶ 9:45 PM 0 comments links to this post
Ecological Disaster
In case you were wondering what may be coming down in the Gulf weather-wise, you can get good satellite information here. The major cable services, even the Weather Channel, are too obsessed with their storm porn and commercials to keep the general public updated. We're relatively lucky: the only organized storms in the Atlantic are still in their breeding ground off the coast of Africa, giving us some breathing room. Hopefully the evacuations in the Gulf area will continue with no new storms.
Meanwhile, from Kos, it seems we've lost a large number of our oil rigs in the Gulf, and a major ecological disaster is brewing.
20 oil rigs missing in Gulf of Mexico: US Coast Guard
"WASHINGTON (AFP) - At least 20 oil rigs and platforms are missing in the Gulf of Mexico and a ruptured gas pipeline is on fire after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region, a US Coast Guard official said. "We have confirmed at least 20 rigs or platforms missing, either sunk or adrift, and one confirmed fire where a rig was," Petty Officer Robert Reed of the Louisiana Coast Guard told AFP."
Onto the diary...
Newest (and very informative and very scary) report from an anonymous insider
"There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10's of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf - they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission. MMS regulations require us to plug each of the wells that were on these platforms - HUGE cost now, as the platforms are gone... Hopefully, MMS will grant `abandon in place' status for these wiped out structures."
Sounds like an ecological disaster to me.
"In short, the Gulf area hit by the storm is basically in about the same shape as Biloxi. The damage numbers you have gotten from the government and analysts are, in my opinion, much too low. We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm. The eastern Gulf of Mexico is primarily oil production..."
There's more to the article but I think what this basically says is that oil production in the Gulf is going to be affected in a much larger way than is being reported, and also for a much longer time.
Thanks to Atrios for the tip.
If they get another couple of hurricanes this season, the Gulf shore may end up on the north side of the lake.
And regarding the media: no, they won't talk about the real trouble, and they won't hold Bush or the energy cartels that produced this insane situation responsible.
But it will be amusing next year (in a very black sort of way) to watch the republicans steal the '06 elections- you know they will, every last seat in Congress they can- with only, say, ten percent of the public supporting them.
Especially if after the end of this year's hurricane season and a summer of category 5's next year, the Gulf coast is at Vicksburg, and gasoline is $20 a gallon.
When do you suppose Negroponte will declare martial law nationwide? Before or after 2006? Because if there aren't some major policy changes, the national dysfunctionality is only going to grow.
When do you think people realize Negroponte and Gonzales are the ones now running the show? Karl Rove never could run anything- he's great at vicious plans, but little else. On the other hand, Negroponte and Gonzales can run a Secret Police force, but little else.
Bush is overtly demented and nonfunctional, Dick is sick (when Team Xinhua tried to buy Unocal it almost killed him), and Rummy's barking crazy when he talks in public. ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments links to this post
Meanwhile, from Kos, it seems we've lost a large number of our oil rigs in the Gulf, and a major ecological disaster is brewing.
20 oil rigs missing in Gulf of Mexico: US Coast Guard
"WASHINGTON (AFP) - At least 20 oil rigs and platforms are missing in the Gulf of Mexico and a ruptured gas pipeline is on fire after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region, a US Coast Guard official said. "We have confirmed at least 20 rigs or platforms missing, either sunk or adrift, and one confirmed fire where a rig was," Petty Officer Robert Reed of the Louisiana Coast Guard told AFP."
Onto the diary...
Newest (and very informative and very scary) report from an anonymous insider
"There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10's of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf - they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission. MMS regulations require us to plug each of the wells that were on these platforms - HUGE cost now, as the platforms are gone... Hopefully, MMS will grant `abandon in place' status for these wiped out structures."
Sounds like an ecological disaster to me.
"In short, the Gulf area hit by the storm is basically in about the same shape as Biloxi. The damage numbers you have gotten from the government and analysts are, in my opinion, much too low. We are looking at YEARS to return to the production levels we had prior to the storm. The eastern Gulf of Mexico is primarily oil production..."
There's more to the article but I think what this basically says is that oil production in the Gulf is going to be affected in a much larger way than is being reported, and also for a much longer time.
Thanks to Atrios for the tip.
If they get another couple of hurricanes this season, the Gulf shore may end up on the north side of the lake.
And regarding the media: no, they won't talk about the real trouble, and they won't hold Bush or the energy cartels that produced this insane situation responsible.
But it will be amusing next year (in a very black sort of way) to watch the republicans steal the '06 elections- you know they will, every last seat in Congress they can- with only, say, ten percent of the public supporting them.
Especially if after the end of this year's hurricane season and a summer of category 5's next year, the Gulf coast is at Vicksburg, and gasoline is $20 a gallon.
When do you suppose Negroponte will declare martial law nationwide? Before or after 2006? Because if there aren't some major policy changes, the national dysfunctionality is only going to grow.
When do you think people realize Negroponte and Gonzales are the ones now running the show? Karl Rove never could run anything- he's great at vicious plans, but little else. On the other hand, Negroponte and Gonzales can run a Secret Police force, but little else.
Bush is overtly demented and nonfunctional, Dick is sick (when Team Xinhua tried to buy Unocal it almost killed him), and Rummy's barking crazy when he talks in public. ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments links to this post
