September 16, 2007

Cashing In On Shock

9/11, "War On Terror"  Black Ops  Disasters

I'm a big fan of Naomi Klein (see this, this, this, this, this, this, this), who's got a new book, Shock Doctine, coming out this week. Pre-ordered mine a month ago. While we wait, here's an intro made for her by filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, who made the wonderful Children of Men:

She's really onto something. Check it out.

And you know that once they figured out all the uses that shock could be put to, they started looking for ways to create the needed shocks — 9/11 being the mother of them all.

[Thanks, Miles]

Posted by Jonathan at 08:38 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

August 30, 2006

Photo Op Time

Disasters  Politics

Their cynicism is boundless. NYT:

On the eve of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's strike here, President Bush returned to the devastated region on Monday...

Winding his way through tattered towns in Mississippi on his way here, Mr. Bush spent the day demonstrating empathy and optimism...

In sweltering midday heat, his shirt soaked with sweat, Mr. Bush told a group of Biloxi, Miss., residents that he knew the rebuilding was so slow that to some it felt as if nothing was happening.

Still, Mr. Bush said, "For a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back, things are changing."

"I feel the quiet sense of determination that's going to shape the future of Mississippi," he said.

In an event with echoes of his prime-time speech in Jackson Square here last September, Mr. Bush spoke in a working-class neighborhood in Biloxi against a backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. But just a few feet away, outside the scene captured by the camera, stood gutted houses with wires dangling from ceilings. A tattered piece of crime-scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet sat on its side in the grass. [...]

Nearby, along the ocean, ravaged antebellum homes and churches dotted the waterfront. The beach from Gulfport, Miss., to Biloxi, was deserted. Debris hung from trees and motels stood shuttered. Blue tarpaulins still patched the roofs of most dwellings. Written in green spray paint on a fence around a home in Biloxi was "You loot, I shoot." [...]

"There will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered," the president said. "Houses will begat [sic] jobs, jobs will begat [sic] houses." [Emphasis added]

Lights, cameras, but no action. Nothing in a year. They have no interest in governing; they're too busy staging events that give the appearance of governing. The sheer audacity of it really is stunning: they haven't bothered to try to get anything right in all the time they've been in office. Anything, that is, beyond their permanent campaign for more power.

Posted by Jonathan at 12:43 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

August 28, 2006

Criminal Outrage

Disasters

This is outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. Criminally outrageous. Greg Palast, reporting from New Orleans:

It wasn't [Katrina] that drowned, suffocated, de-hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week. The killing was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with faulty levees. Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White House.

Here's the story you haven't been told. And the man who revealed it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell it.

Van Heerden...is no minor player. He's the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. He's the top banana in the field — no one knew more about how to save New Orleans from a hurricane's devastation. And no one was a bigger target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the information.

Here's what happened. Right after Katrina swamped the city, I called Washington to get a copy of the evacuation plan.

Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: No one can find it.

That's real bad. Here's the key thing about a successful emergency evacuation plan: you have to have copies of it. Lots of copies — in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first responder. Secret evacuation plans don't work. [...]

Specifically, I'm talking about the plan that was written, or supposed to have been written two years ago by a company called, "Innovative Emergency Management."

Weird thing about IEM, their founder Madhu Beriwal, had no known experience in hurricane evacuations. She did, however, have a lot of experience in donating to Republicans.

IEM and FEMA did begin a draft of a plan. The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars. Apparently, the IEM/FEMA crew didn't know that 127,000 people in the city didn't have cars. But Dr. van Heerden knew that. It was his calculation. LSU knew where these no-car people were — they mapped it — and how to get them out.

Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn't touch it. Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden's position. This official now works for IEM.

So I asked him what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor.

"Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That's the bottom line." The professor, who'd been talking to me in technicalities, changed to a somber tone. "They're still finding corpses."

Van Heerden is supposed to keep his mouth shut. He won't. The deaths weigh on him. "I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."

After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been "overtopped" for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the levees would have held, and the city would have been saved.

He had taken the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush's doorstep. "I myself briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House." The response: the university's trustees threatened his job.

While in Baton Rouge, I dropped in on the headquarters of IEM, the evacuation contractors. The assistant to the CEO insisted they had "a lot of experience with evacuation" — but couldn't name a single city they'd planned for when they got the Big Easy contract. And still, they couldn't produce the plan.

An IEM press release in June 2004 boasted legendary expert James Lee Witt as a member of their team. That was impressive. It was also a lie. In fact, Witt had nothing to do with it. When I asked IEM point blank if Witt's name was used as a fraudulent hook to get the contract, their spokeswoman said, weirdly, "We'll get back to you on that."

Back at LSU, van Heerden astonished me with the most serious charge of all. While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would drown.

Van Heerden said, "FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o'clock that the levees had breached...They took video. By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew...I was at the State Emergency Operations Center." Because the hurricane had missed the city that Monday night, evacuation effectively stopped, assuming the city had survived.

It's been a full year now, and 73,000 New Orleanians remain in FEMA trailers and another 200,000, more than half the city's former residents, remain in temporary refuges. [...]

Should they come home? Rebuild? Is it safe? Team Bush assures them there's nothing to worry about: FEMA won't respond to van Heerden's revelations. However, the Bush Administration has hired a consulting firm to fix the failed evacuation plan. The contractor? A Baton Rouge company named "Innovative Emergency Management." IEM. [Emphasis added]

Palast has produced a two-part video special that you can watch online at Democracy Now. It's gut-wrenching.

One thing shown in the video that's not covered above: there are public-housing communities in New Orleans that were completely untouched by the flood that have been boarded up, all the residents (poor and black) expelled and barred from returning. Why? It's prime real estate not far from the downtown business district and the French Quarter. It's real estate that developers have long wanted to get their hands on. As Palast says, Katrina was the "perfect storm" from the perspective of developers and their political cronies.

A year ago, I wrote:

Yes, it sounds too evil to be true, but we appear to be looking at a deliberate program of ethnic cleansing. Wait and watch. A lot of people with ties to the administration are going to make a ton of money on the contracts to clear and rebuild a Disney-fied version of what was one of the world's great cities.

Watch Palast's short film, and you'll see it's all coming true. It is a criminal outrage on a truly colossal scale, yet there is no accountability. No one even really expects accountability anymore. What has happened to this country?

Posted by Jonathan at 05:19 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

August 27, 2006

Ernesto Track Moved Eastward

Disasters

Ernesto has been upgraded to hurricane status, but the projected storm track has now been moved eastward.

The Gulf coast may have dodged a bullet.

Posted by Jonathan at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

August 26, 2006

Ernesto Threatens Gulf

Disasters

Computer models used by hurricane forecasters indicate that tropical storm Ernesto could become a powerful hurricane threatening the Gulf Coast, possibly even New Orleans. Oil and gas production in the Gulf is also threatened. StormTrack (via OilDrum):

For a couple days now we have been talking up Ernesto and warning that there was a significant chance that this could be the new big story. After looking at the situation today, I am convinced that things could be very bad indeed. I always try not incite undue worry, but Ernesto could get ugly. Those of you in the Gulf Coast need to re-examine your hurricane plans, especially is you live in the north Gulf from Houston to Tallahassee. A very deep layer of warm water in the northern Gulf could allow for Ernesto to become a very powerful hurricane if it reaches the area.

...The official forecast calls for Ernesto to enter the Gulf of Mexico early next week, where it could become a very powerful hurricane....

Ernesto's limited strength thus far has been due to moderate wind shear displacing the convection from the center of circulation. This wind shear should lessen today and allow for strengthening to continue. The current convective pattern is very healthy and Ernesto seems to mean business...[T]he Western Caribbean holds much deeper warm water that can allow for rapid intensification.

The [computer] models are in a clear consensus agreeing on a track over the western tip of Cuba by Tuesday. By early to mid next week, Ernesto could be roaming the Gulf of Mexico as a hurricane...Houston, New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile, Pensacola, and Panama City [are] all now in the potential danger zone. Due to disrupting of the hurricane while it passes over and near land in Jamaica and Cuba, it will be hard to make any forecasts on a landfall point along the Gulf Coast until Ernesto clears Cuba and settles into the Gulf. [Emphasis added]

NOAA:

Say it ain't so.

Posted by Jonathan at 11:09 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

June 20, 2006

Iraq: Millions Of Barrels Dumped

Disasters  Environment  Global Guerrillas  Iraq

So, how's that Iraqi reconstruction coming along? Check this out. NYT:

An environmental disaster is brewing in the heartland of Iraq's northern Sunni-led insurgency, where Iraqi officials say that in a desperate move to dispose of millions of barrels of an oil refinery byproduct called "black oil," the government pumped it into open mountain valleys and leaky reservoirs next to the Tigris River and set it on fire.

The resulting huge black bogs are threatening the river and the precious groundwater in the region, which is dotted with villages and crisscrossed by itinerant sheep herders, but also contains Iraq's great northern refinery complex at Baiji.

The fires are no longer burning, but the suffocating plumes of smoke they created carried as far as 40 miles downwind to Tikrit, the provincial capital that formed Saddam Hussein's base of power.

An Iraqi environmental engineer who has visited the dumping area described it as a kind of black swampland of oil-saturated terrain and large standing pools of oil stretching across several mountain valleys. The clouds of smoke, said the engineer, Ayad Younis, "were so heavy that they obstructed breathing and visibility in the area and represent a serious environmental danger." [...]

...He added that at least some of the black oil was already seeping into the river.

Exactly how far those pollutants will travel is unknown, but the Tigris passes through dozens of population centers from Baghdad to Basra. In the past, oil slicks created when insurgents struck oil pipelines in the Baiji area have traveled the entire length of the river.

As much as 40 percent of the petroleum processed at Iraq's damaged and outdated refineries pours forth as black oil, the heavy, viscous substance that used to be extensively exported to more efficient foreign operations for further refining. But the insurgency has stalled government-controlled exports by taking control of roadways and repeatedly hitting pipelines in the area, Iraqi and American officials have said.

So the backed-up black oil — known to the rest of the world as the lower grades of fuel oil — was sent along a short pipeline from Baiji and dumped in a mountainous area called Makhul.

A series of complaints handed up the Iraqi government chain were conveyed to oil industry officials, and as of last weekend the fires had at least temporarily stopped, but black oil was still being poured into the open valleys, according to Mr. Younis, who works in the province's Department of Environment and Health Safety. [...]

But with few options for disposing of Baiji's current production of black oil and so much at stake for the Iraqi economy, it is unclear whether the government will even be able to hold the line on the burning at Makhul. A United States official in Baghdad, speaking anonymously according to official procedure, said earlier this month that Baiji was still turning out about 90,000 barrels a day of refined products, which would yield about 36,000 barrels a day of black oil.

Iraq's refineries will grind to a halt if the black oil does not go somewhere. "Unless we find a way of dealing with the fuel oil, our factories will not work," said Shamkhi H. Faraj, director of economics and marketing at the Iraqi Oil Ministry.

The dumping and burning has embarrassed ministry officials and exposed major gaps in the American-designed reconstruction program, even as President Bush appeals to the international community for much more rebuilding money in the wake of his visit to Baghdad. [Emphasis added]

This is how a modern insurgency can bring a country to its knees: isolated, relatively low-risk actions by small teams that hit the country's economic infrastructure at key points where the effects cascade and are magnified manyfold. Blow up an oil pipeline here, sabotage a refinery there, and in the end, you've got the government dumping millions of barrels of heavy oil into valleys and reservoirs. The downward spiral feeds on itself.

Posted by Jonathan at 11:17 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

May 02, 2006

"A Borderline Criminal National Disgrace"

Disasters

Katrina's old news. Except it's not, because much of New Orleans still lies in ruins with nothing being done to restore it. This, in a major American city. Bush did his photo ops, the media filed their stories, and now they've all moved on. Nobody wants to hear about New Orleans anymore, so it takes a sports writer, Peter King, to remind us of what we're all ignoring:

I sense that we in this country have Katrina fatigue. The New York Times reported as much recently, saying that people in some of the areas that welcomed Katrina evacuees last September are sick of hearing about the hurricane, the flooding and the aftermath.

Well, my wife and I were in a car last Wednesday that toured the hardest-hit area of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward. We worked a day at a nearby Habitat for Humanity site on Thursday, and we toured the Biloxi/Gulfport/Long Beach/Pass Christian gulf shore area last Friday. And let me just say this: I can absolutely guarantee you that if you'd been in the car with us, no matter how much you'd been hit over the head with the effects of this disaster, you would not have Katrina fatigue.

What I saw was a national disgrace. An inexcusable, irresponsible, borderline criminal national disgrace. I am ashamed of this country for the inaction I saw everywhere.

I mentioned my outrage to the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, on Thursday. He shook his head and said, "Tell me about it." Disgust dripped from his voice.

What are we doing in this country?

"It's been eight months since Katrina," said Jack Bowers, my New Jersey friend and Habitat for Humanity guide through the Lower Ninth Ward, as he took us through deserted streets where nothing, absolutely nothing, was being done about the wasteland that this place is.

"Eight months!" he said. "And look at it. When people talk to me about New Orleans, they say, 'Well, things are getting back to normal down there, aren't they?' I tell them things are a long, long way from normal, and it's going to be a long time before it's ever normal. And I tell them they've never seen anything like this." [...]

How can we let an area like the Lower Ninth Ward sit there, on the eve of another hurricane season, with nothing being done to either bulldoze the place and start over, or rebuild? How can Congress sit on billions of looming aid and not release it for this area?

I can't help but think that if this were Los Angeles or New York, that 500 percent more money — and concern — would have flooded into this place. [...]

Am I ticked off? Damn right I'm ticked off. If you're breathing, you should be morally outraged. Katrina fatigue? Hah! More Katrina news! Give me more! Give it to me every day on the front page! Every day until Washington realizes there's a disaster here every bit as urgent as anything happening in this world today — fighting terrorism, combating the nuclear threat in Iran. I'm not in any way a political animal, but all you have to be is an occasionally thinking American to be sickened by the conditions I saw.

The Lower Ninth Ward is a 1.5-by-2-mile area a couple of miles from the center of New Orleans. It is a poor area. I should say it was a poor area. Before the storm, 20,000 people lived there. Fats Domino lived there. So, formerly, did Marshall Faulk. And now you drive through it and see nothing being done to fix it or tear it down, or to do anything.

In Mississippi, we drove through one formerly thriving beach town that has two structures left. We drove past concrete pads with litter and shards of wood around them. Former houses. The houses, quite literally, have been eviscerated. Hundreds of them. This is what nuclear winter must look like, I thought. [Emphasis added]

This is the kind of thing that we used to associate with the old Soviet Union and other failed states. No amount of "We're number one!" boosterism can disguise the fact that the US increasingly displays the characteristics of a failed state itself. The big difference is that the US is still able to borrow a couple of billion dollars a day to keep up appearances. That won't last forever. Meanwhile, we're increasingly detached from reality. How else to explain the fact that we can leave a major American city in ruins and not see what a monumental failure that represents?

Posted by Jonathan at 09:50 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

April 26, 2006

Class Cleansing

Disasters  Politics

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, I wrote that New Orleans was going to be subject to a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing. Black neighborhoods were going to be razed and replaced by a Disney-fied New Orleans for yuppies. Some readers thought that was over the top: surely, once the smoke cleared, poor Blacks would be allowed to return to the city.

Guess again. From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, yesterday:

U.S. Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson shed little light Monday on the future of public housing in hurricane-battered New Orleans, but said that "only the best residents" of the former St. Thomas housing complex should be allowed into the new mixed-income development that replaced it.

In a wide-ranging interview with reporters, Jackson was asked about the relatively small number of apartments in the 60-acre River Gardens development in Uptown that have been set aside for former residents of St. Thomas. Jackson estimated it was 18 percent to 20 percent, although housing advocates said it is less.

"Some of the people shouldn't return," Jackson said. "The (public housing) developments were gang-ridden by some of the most notorious gangs in this country. People hid and took care of those persons because they took care of them. Only the best residents should return. Those who paid rent on time, those who held a job and those who worked."

The blunt-spoken Jackson, who is black, acknowledged his comments might be seen as racially offensive because virtually all of the former St. Thomas residents were African-American. He told a white reporter, "If you said this, they would say you were racist."

He went on to say, "I don't care what color they are, if they are devastating a community, they shouldn't be allowed to return." [...]

[Housing Authority of New Orleans] spokesman Adonis Expose also confirmed Monday that the agency is considering a long-rumored policy change that would require all public housing residents in New Orleans to have a job or be in a job-training program.

Eight months after Hurricane Katrina, the future of the 10 public housing complexes in New Orleans remains an open question. Times have never been tougher for low-income people, as a shortage of rental housing after Hurricane Katrina has seen rents rise to historic levels.

While HUD has reopened some complexes, such as Iberville, most remain closed and surrounded by fencing. Eager to return, former residents have marched in protest to force the government to open more, but HUD has refused. [Emphasis added]

These are American citizens who want to return to their homes, but the Federal government thinks it gets to decide who's good enough to come home. Where are the rest supposed to live? In government camps and trailer parks, forever? Maybe ethnic cleansing isn't exactly the right term. It's more like class cleansing, though in New Orleans, as in much of America, that turns out to be pretty much the same thing.

Posted by Jonathan at 09:53 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

April 11, 2006

Heckuva Job

Disasters  Politics

They're still finding bodies in New Orleans. The USA just ain't what it used to be. NYT:

The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans — in March alone there were nine, along with one skull. Skeletonized or half-eaten by animals, with leathery, hardened skin or missing limbs, the bodies are lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters or lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors. [...]

A landlord in the Lakeview section put a "for sale" sign outside a house, unaware that his tenant's body was in the attic. Two weeks ago, searchers in the Lower Ninth Ward found a girl, believed to be about 6, wearing a blue backpack. Nearby, they found part of a man who the authorities believe might have been trying to save her.

On Friday, contractors found a body in the attic of a home in the Gentilly neighborhood that had been searched twice before, officials said.

This, in a major city in what is supposedly the most prosperous and powerful nation on Earth. If the victims were rich, white Republicans, does anyone doubt that somebody would have bothered to locate their bodies before now?

Posted by Jonathan at 06:23 PM | Comments (3) | Link to this  

March 30, 2006

New Orleans: The Disaster Continues

Disasters  Politics

Republican ideologues believe government cannot solve problems, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who believe in government and who want government to succeed: those are the people who can govern well. Consider New Orleans. Bill Quigley:

In New Orleans, seven months after Katrina, senior citizens are living in their cars...Korean War veteran Paul Morris, 74, and his wife Yvonne, 66,...have been sleeping in their two-door sedan since January. They have been waiting that long for FEMA contractors to unlock the 240 square foot trailer in their yard and connect the power so they can sleep inside it in front of their devastated home.

This tale of lunacy does not begin to stop there.

Their 240 square foot trailer may well cost more than their house. While FEMA flat out refuses to say how much the government is paying for trailers, reliable estimates by the New York Times and others place the cost at over $60,000 each.

How could these tiny FEMA trailers cost so much?

Follow the money.

Circle B Enterprises of Georgia was awarded $287 million in contracts by FEMA for temporary housing. At the time, that was the seventh highest award of Katrina money in the country. According to the Washington Post, Circle B was not even being licensed to build homes in its own state of Georgia and filed for bankruptcy in 2003. The company does not even have a website.

Here is how it works. The original contractor takes their cut and subcontracts out the work of constructing the trailer to other companies. Once it is built, they subcontract out the transporting the trailers to yet other companies which pay drivers, gas, insurance and mileage. They then subcontract out the hookups of the trailers to other companies and keep taking cuts for their services. Usually none of the people who make the money are local workers.

With $60,000 many people could adequately repair their homes.

Why not just give the $60,000 directly to the elderly couple and let them fix up their home? Ask Congress. FEMA is not allowed to give grants of that much. Money for fixing up homes comes from somewhere else and people are still waiting for that to arrive.

While many corporations are making big money off of Katrina, Mr. and Mrs. Morris wait in their car.

Craziness continues in the area of the right to vote.

You would think that the nation that put on elections with satellite voting boxes for Iraqis and Afghanis and Haitians and many others would do the same for Katrina evacuees. Wrong. There is no satellite voting for the 230,000 citizens of New Orleans who are out of state. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Advancement Project, ACORN and the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund have all fought for satellite voting but Louisiana and the courts and the U.S. Justice Department have said no.

The rule of thumb around here is that the poorer you are, the further you have been displaced. African Americans are also much more likely to be poor and renters — the people who cannot yet come back to a city where rents have doubled. They are the ones bearing the burdens of no satellite voting.

The people already back are much more affluent than the pre-Katrina New Orleans. The city is also much whiter. Many of those already back in New Orleans are not so sure that all of New Orleans should be rebuilt. The consequence of that is not everyone will be allowed to return. Planners and politicians openly suggest turning poor neighborhoods into green spaces. No one yet has said they want to turn their own neighborhood into green space — only other people's neighborhoods — usually poor people's neighborhoods. Those who disagree are by and large not here.

New Orleans has not been majority white for decades, but it is quite possible that a majority of those who are able to vote in the upcoming election will be white. Thus the decisions about the future of New Orleans are poised to be made by those who have been able to get back and will exclude many of those still evacuated. Guess what type of plans they will have for New Orleans? [Emphasis added]

The majority party in Washington thinks their responsibility ends when they decide which political crony to reward with a contract. They have no interest in governing, no interest in managing. Their interest is in plundering the treasury and accumulating power. Banana Republicans.

What is happening in New Orleans is a disgraceful national failure. Every time we countenance such failure, we grow weaker as a nation. Morally weaker. And if there ever was a time when we needed all our strength to face the challenges ahead, this is that time.

Posted by Jonathan at 11:05 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

March 28, 2006

The Fire Next Time

Disasters  Environment

When Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans, we got a preview of what awaits the world's coastal cities as global warming leads to bigger storms and higher sea levels.

In the interior, however, the global warming threat isn't floods, it's fire. Fire fed by drought, like the current drought in the Texas Panhandle that has led to the largest wildfires in Texas history. Texas officials say that if such wildfires were to reach Austin, they would be powerless: much of Austin would be lost. Austin American-Statesman (link via Viridian):

Authorities urged residents in six Panhandle towns to evacuate Wednesday and warned that the state's largest wildfire outbreak in history could cross into Oklahoma. [...]

Although this fire was raging in sparsely populated ranching country, Texas Forest Service Director James B. Hull warned Wednesday that such a fire striking Austin and Travis County would yield a more nightmarish fate.

"Austin is going to be the worst catastrophe Texas has ever seen," Hull said as he toured firefighting operations in the Panhandle. "The conditions we're having in the Panhandle right now, when it gets to Austin, it will be a tragedy."

Mix drought conditions and high winds in an urban-area forest like the cedar-covered hills of western Travis County and the area would be a tinder box of gigantic proportions, Hull said.

Austin Fire Department Battalion Chief Palmer Buck agreed: "It would not be what house we are going to save...it would be what neighborhood are we going to save."

The Fire Department does not have the resources to fight a major wildfire in the hills along Lake Austin or the rugged terrain of the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve area, Buck said. [...]

The 1,800 volunteer fire departments with 40,000 firefighters are the backbone of protection in rural communities. But almost half those departments have budgets of $10,000 or less. Hull said volunteer departments often have old equipment and are not equipped to battle blazes that last days or weeks. [...]

When Sunday's 55-mph winds first fueled the Panhandle fires, the state at first could offer only minimal backup to local fire departments. The Texas Forest Service had a management team in Amarillo and, luckily, had been able to get five large air tankers from the U.S. Forest Service to fly from Albuquerque, N.M., and Ardmore, Okla., to drop fire retardant.

Typically, those planes would be fighting fires in other parts of the country, and Texas would have to rely on eight National Guard helicopters to fly large buckets of water to the fires. The war in Iraq, however, has reduced that option.

"There have been times when none of the helicopters were available," Hull said. [...]

Although state firefighting officials were able to predict the threat of the Panhandle fires because of the projected wind speeds, drought conditions and low humidity, they had no firefighting equipment on the ground to back up local operations. [...]

Part of the problem is the sheer size of the state.

"We're fighting fires all the way from Laredo to East Texas, through the Hill Country, to here in the Panhandle," Hull said. "We're stretched very thin." [...]

A study done by the Austin Fire Department in 2003 showed that about 50,000 homes in Travis County are in either extreme- or high-risk fire zones. [...]

"Texas still has a rural mentality," Hull said. "But with 22.5 million people, we are an urban state, and we have to plan for that urban catastrophe." [Emphasis added]

Sooner or later, it's really going to dawn on us what we've set in motion. Outside, a wind is rising.

Posted by Jonathan at 07:27 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

March 01, 2006

Caught On Tape

Disasters  Politics

AP reports that it has obtained video tape and transcripts of pre-Katrina briefings that show that Bush and Chertoff were warned explicitly that the levees might fail and that New Orleans residents gathering at the Superdome and elsewhere were very much at risk. AP:

In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

Bush didn't ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Linked by secure video, Bush expressed a confidence on Aug. 28 that starkly contrasted with the dire warnings his disaster chief and numerous federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.

A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

"I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

The White House and Homeland Security Department urged the public Wednesday not to read too much into the video footage.

"I hope people don't draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing," presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said, citing a variety of orders and disaster declarations Bush signed before the storm made landfall. "He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times." [...]

"I have kind a sinking feeling in my gut right now," [New Orleans Mayor Ray] Nagin said. "I was listening to what people were saying — they didn't know, so therefore it was an issue of a learning curve. You know, from this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware."

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

Homeland Security officials have said the "fog of war" blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. [...]

Bush declared four days after the storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"...He later clarified [sic], saying officials believed, wrongly, after the storm passed that the levees had survived. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm — and Bush was worried too. [...]

Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him. Neither asked questions in the Aug. 28 briefing.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm," the president said.

A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security's operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina's reach, for a bird flu event. [...]

The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern," Mayfield told the briefing. Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated. [Emphasis added]

FEMA's Mike Brown comes off comparatively well in the AP account, if you read the whole thing. Brown may have been in over his head, but he clearly was a whole lot more engaged than Chertoff and Bush. We all may have fallen for White House spin when we accepted Brownie as the designated scapegoat.

Update: [8:49 PM] Crooks and Liars has video.

Posted by Jonathan at 08:43 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

February 10, 2006

White House Was Informed Of Levee Breach On Day It Happened

Disasters

Congressional investigators have found that the White House was informed of the levee breach and large-scale flooding in New Orleans on the day Katrina hit, contradicting White House claims that they were taken by surprise the following day. NYT:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.

But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department.

"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires."

Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.

White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday. [...]

On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed.

"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview. [Emphasis added]

Is there anything they haven't lied about? Anything at all?

Posted by Jonathan at 01:07 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

November 24, 2005

Do As I Say...

Disasters

You can't, as they say, make this stuff up. AP:

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job. [...]

Brown said officials need to "take inventory" of what's going on in a disaster to be able to answer questions to avoid appearing unaware of how serious a situation is.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, critics complained about Brown's lack of formal emergency management experience and e-mails that later surfaced showed him as out of touch with the extent of the devastation.

Kenneth Boulding said, "Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure." In that case, Brown has had one of the world's great opportunities to learn.

Posted by Jonathan at 07:58 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

November 10, 2005

Katrina Diaspora Map

Disasters

ePodunk (via WorldChanging) has a fascinating map depicting the diaspora of the 3.2 million people whose homes were flooded or destroyed by Hurrican Katrina. From the accompanying text:

Hurricane Katrina blew down or flooded the homes of about 3.2 million people along the central Gulf Coast, including 1.3 million in metropolitan New Orleans and 250,000 in Gulfport and Biloxi. A mandatory evacuation order was issued for New Orleans, and authorities scrambled to provide emergency shelter for about 500,000 Americans. Perhaps an equal or greater number were staying with relatives or friends. Katrina caused the biggest mass migration in U.S. history, surpassing the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. In terms of numbers permanently displaced, the only event that might have been bigger than Katrina is the Civil War. [Emphasis added]

With Katrina gone from the news, we forget the enormous number of our fellow Americans whose lives have been uprooted. (Map)

Posted by Jonathan at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

October 23, 2005

Taiwan To Ignore Flu Drug Patent

Disasters  Rights, Law  Science/Technology

With a possible Avian flu epidemic in the offing, Taiwan says it's going to ignore the patent on an anti-flu drug and start producing the drug on its own. BBC:

Taiwan has responded to bird flu fears by starting work on its own version of the anti-viral drug, Tamiflu, without waiting for the manufacturer's consent.

Taiwan officials said they had applied for the right to copy the drug — but the priority was to protect the public.

Tamiflu, made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, cannot cure bird-flu but is widely seen as the best anti-viral drug to fight it, correspondents say. [...]

Several countries have asked Roche for the right to make generic copies of Tamiflu. [...]

"We have tried our best to negotiate with Roche," Su Ih-jen told Reuters news agency.

"It means we have shown our goodwill to Roche and we appreciate their patent. But to protect our people is the utmost important thing," he said. [...]

Officials say they can make their version of the drug more quickly — and at a lower cost — than Roche does. [My emphasis]

Even if you love the idea of patents on medicines, wouldn't it make sense for patent law to include an exception to cover cases where the patent holder is unable or unwilling to produce a patented item quickly enough (and cheaply enough), when that item is essential to the public health? Especially when R&D on new drugs is so heavily underwritten by US taxpayers (through tax deductions and publicly funded research) and the pharmaceutical industry remains one of the world's most profitable industries? When the lives of millions of people are on the line?

[Thanks Kent]

Posted by Jonathan at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

October 18, 2005

Richard Clarke On Bush Administration Disaster Response

Disasters  Politics

Former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke sure has a gift for trenchant criticism. Here he is in the November issue of The Atlantic:

Imagine if, in advance of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of trucks had been waiting with water and ice and medicine and other supplies. Imagine if 4,000 National Guardsmen and an equal number of emergency aid workers from around the country had been moved into place, and five million meals had been ready to serve. Imagine if scores of mobile satellite-communications stations had been prepared to move in instantly, ensuring that rescuers could talk to one another. Imagine if all this had been managed by a federal-and-state task force that not only directed the government response but also helped coordinate the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other outside groups.

Actually, this requires no imagination: it is exactly what the Bush administration did a year ago when Florida braced for Hurricane Frances. Of course the circumstances then were very special: it was two months before the presidential election, and Florida's twenty-seven electoral votes were hanging in the balance. It is hardly surprising that Washington ensured the success of "the largest response to a natural disaster we've ever had in this country." The president himself passed out water bottles to Floridians driven from their homes. [My emphasis]

Clarke goes on to explain how the administration has politicized FEMA and neglected to undertake even the most obvious homeland security preparations. All true, but his own example shows that FEMA is capable of moving when the White House wants it to — i.e., when people at the White House thinks there's something in it for them politically — so FEMA's failure in responding to Katrina isn't simply a matter of an agency that's been crippled. The White House either couldn't be bothered to pay attention as Katrina approached, or they made a conscious decision that it was in their interest to let New Orleans get creamed and then control the reconstruction. And now Karl Rove's in charge of doling out the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of reconstruction money. Funny how that works.

(For more on the administration's response to Hurricane Frances in Florida, see this. For more on the Katrina reconstruction slush fund, see this, this, this, and this.)

Posted by Jonathan at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

September 21, 2005

Rita May Be Rude Awakening

Disasters  Peak Oil

Oil industry insiders are calling Hurricane Rita, now one of the most powerful hurricanes on record, a possible "worst case scenario" for Gulf coast oil production and refining. Current projections of Rita's path would rip right through an area packed with oil intrastructure.

Here's what an oil industry insider told The Oil Drum:

The worst tracks are those which put landfall between Freeport and Sabine Pass Texas. There are 3 tracks that cross just offshore of the TX/LA border. Those 3 tracks all let the storm hit more rigs and platforms than the tracks that have landfall farther south. The big concentrations of platforms are in the West Cameron, High Island, Galveston, and Matagorda Island offshore areas...Landfall just east of Houston's center will be right up refinery alley. Another bad spot is right up through Port Arthur and Beaumont — another big refining center...Most of our big plants are in the stretch of coastline between Freeport and Sabine Pass.

Click the links for Freeport, Galveston, and Port Arthur. Zoom out to see where these cities are in relation to the Texas coast. Then go here to view a map that shows the projected storm tracks according to various mathematical models. At the time of this writing, most of the tracks are pretty much a direct hit on the areas called out as critical by the oil industry insider. Not good.

Bloomberg:

"Rita is developing into our worst-case scenario," said John Kilduff, vice president of risk management at Fimat USA in New York. "This is headed right into our other major refining center just after all the damage done to facilities in Louisiana. From an energy perspective it doesn't get any worse than this." [...]

"This has the potential to be a real powerful storm, and after the damage caused by Katrina nobody's taking any chances," said Justin Fohsz, a broker at Starsupply Petroleum Inc. in Englewood, New Jersey. "There are a lot of refineries in Texas. Even if it misses the offshore platforms there will be disruptions due to the evacuations." [My emphasis]

Reuters:

Valero Energy Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Bill Greehey said Hurricane Rita's impact on U.S. crude oil production and refining could be a "national disaster."

Valero became the largest U.S. refiner earlier this year when it completed the purchase of Premcor Inc. Valero operates refineries in Port Arthur, Houston, Texas City and Corpus Christi, Texas — all potentially in the path of Hurricane Rita.

"It's going to be coming across the (U.S.) Gulf (of Mexico)," Greehey said. "There's a lot of oil platforms, oil rigs, (natural) gas platforms, gas rigs. It could have a significant impact on supply and prices, and then, depending on what it does to the refineries, there are still four refineries that are shut down. So this really is a national disaster." [My emphasis]

If Rita hits the critical portion of the Texas coast as a Category 5 hurricane, we're all going to get a rude awakening. Think of it as a preview of our future: Peak Oil and global warming-induced freak weather, all in one horrifying package. See also this hair-raising article from the Houston Chronicle from last February. If Rita's a direct hit, the US economy is going to be in big trouble. For real.

Landfall is still several days away. Let's hope Rita veers off and we dodge the bullet. For now.

Posted by Jonathan at 09:08 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

September 18, 2005

It Failed Miserably Before, So Let's Try It Again

Disasters

A year ago, Naomi Klein wrote in Harper's about the Washington neocons' failed experiment with radically unfettered capitalism in Iraq:

The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. [...]

The theory is that if painful economic "adjustments" are brought in rapidly and in the aftermath of a seismic social disruption like a war, a coup, or a government collapse, the population will be so stunned, and so preoccupied with the daily pressures of survival, that it...will go into suspended animation, unable to resist. As Pinochet's finance minister, Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo, declared, "The dog's tail must be cut off in one chop." [...]

The tone of Bremer's tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country's borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was "open for business."

One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq's non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. [Bremer] announced that these firms would be privatized immediately...It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Bremer's economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, he enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations... [My emphasis]

The failure of these policies was as dramatic and all-encompassing as the policies themselves. At least $8.8 billion was stolen outright, tens of billions more were lost to corruption and incompetence. Everything that was broken in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion remains broken.

You'd think such colossal failure might lead the ideologues to reexamine their assumptions, but of course you'd be wrong. Klein:

Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder. [My emphasis]

Which brings us to the real subject of this post — not the reconstruction in Iraq, but the reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The ideologues are at it again. WSJ (via Digby):

Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

...In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims' right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction. Yesterday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would offer sweeping protection against lawsuits to any person or organization that helps Katrina victims without compensation.

"The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot," says Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who leads the Republican Study Group, an influential caucus of conservative House members. "We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was."

Many of the ideas under consideration have been pushed by the 40-member study group, which is circulating a list of "free-market solutions," including proposals to eliminate regulatory barriers to awarding federal funds to religious groups housing hurricane victims, waiving the estate tax for deaths in the storm-affected states; and making the entire region a "flat-tax free-enterprise zone." [...]

Republicans, meanwhile, say they will also press for a new round of energy concessions, including incentives to rebuild and expand offshore drilling and clear the way for new refineries that were dropped from a 500-page energy bill that passed last month.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton of Texas and Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe are working on bills that would encourage refineries to build new plants and expand existing ones by rolling back environmental rules and making it easier for refineries to navigate regulatory channels in Washington. [...]

The National Petrochemical & Refineries Association would like lawmakers to reduce the depreciation period from 10 years to five years in order to stimulate investment. Some refineries are talking about reviving an effort to get liability protection for producing the fuel additive methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE. Both were dropped from the earlier energy bill at the insistence of Democrats. [My emphasis]

They call themselves conservatives, but these people are as reckless and radical a bunch of bomb-throwers as has ever governed in this country. Conservatism ought to imply a desire to moderate the pace of change, to err on the side of careful consideration before deciding on a course of action. It ought to suggest a generally sober and deliberative approach to governance, but these "conservative" ideologues are all about shooting wildly from the hip, betting it all on one throw of the dice. They are a disaster from which we may never recover. Best case: we'll be cleaning up their mess for decades to come.

Posted by Jonathan at 03:17 PM | Comments (3) | Link to this  

September 16, 2005

Looking More Like A Third World Country Every Day

Disasters

From Immanuel Wallerstein (bio), via James Wolcott:

The entire world has been following with stupefaction the incredible performance of the U.S. federal government's response to the physical and human disaster of the hurricane Katrina...The general reaction has been to ask how could the government of the richest and most powerful country in the world have reacted to this disaster as poorly as, or even much less well than, governments of poor Third World countries? The simple answer is a combination of incompetence and decline. And the results of this disaster will be a further diminution of respect for the president within the United States and a deepened skepticism in other countries about the United States's capacity to put action behind vacuous rhetoric. [...]

When El Salvador has to offer troops to help restore order in New Orleans because U.S. troops were so scarce and so slow in arriving, Iran cannot be quaking in its boots about a possible U.S. invasion. When Sweden has its relief planes sitting on the tarmac in Sweden for a week because it cannot get an answer from the U.S. government as to whether to send them, they are not going to be reassured about the ability of the U.S. to handle more serious geopolitical matters. And when conservative U.S. television commentators talk of the U.S. looking like a Third World country, Third World countries may begin to think that maybe there is a grain of truth in the description. [My emphasis]

For decades, everybody thought the Soviet Union was a mighty superpower. Then the Iron Curtain parted, and it turned out the USSR was little more than a Third World country with a First World military — or at least the appearance of a First World military.

Desperate to keep up appearances — in the military and in other things — the Soviets spent their way into bankruptcy, until what looked from the outside like an almighty colossus turned out to be nothing but a hollowed-out rusting hulk. And one day it just simply collapsed. Nobody thought it was possible, and then it happened.

At the current rate, guess who may be joining them. We keep up appearances by going further and further into debt, but the rest of the world isn't going to keep lending at this pace forever. Nothing about the US government these days seems likely to inspire confidence among its creditors: who wants to lend money to idiots? One day — perhaps sooner rather than later — creditors may pull the plug. Then the house of cards will collapse in a pile.

Everybody will again be surprised, but the signs are all around us.

Posted by Jonathan at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

September 15, 2005

The Mother Of All Slush Funds V

Disasters

In case you think it's over the top to suggest that Katrina reconstruction funds are being treated as the personal piggy bank of the Bush political operation, consider this little bombshell from today's NYT:

Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government... [My emphasis]

Karl Rove, who knows exactly nothing about disaster recovery and reconstruction.

This is how it works when gangsters rule.

Posted by Jonathan at 03:17 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  

The Bridge To Gretna

Disasters

Last Saturday, I quoted New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who said that after New Orleans was flooded there was only one way out of the city — via the Crescent City Connection bridge to Jefferson Parish — but that Gretna police blocked the bridge and turned people back at gunpoint.

Here is another account, from the Independent:

A Louisiana police chief has admitted that he ordered his officers to block a bridge over the Mississippi river and force escaping evacuees back into the chaos and danger of New Orleans. Witnesses said the officers fired their guns above the heads of the terrified people to drive them back and "protect" their own suburbs.

Two paramedics who were attending a conference in the city and then stayed to help those affected by the hurricane, said the officers told them they did not want their community "becoming another New Orleans".

The desperate evacuees were forced to trudge back into the city they had just left. "It was a real eye-opener," Larry Bradshaw, 49, a paramedic from San Francisco, told The Independent on Sunday. "I believe it was racism. It was callousness, it was cruelty."

Mr Bradshaw said the police blocked off the road on the Thursday and Friday after Hurricane Katrina struck on Monday 29 August. [...]

...Mr Bradshaw spoke with a senior New Orleans police officer who instructed them to cross the Crescent City Connection bridge to Jefferson Parish, where he promised they would find buses waiting to evacuate them.

They were in the middle of a group of up to 800 people — overwhelmingly black — walking across the bridge when they heard shots and saw people running. "We had been hearing shooting for days. What was different about this was that it was close by," he said.

Making their way towards the crest of the bridge they saw a chain of armed police officers blocking the route. When they asked about the buses they were told their was no such arrangement and that the route was being blocked to avoid their parish becoming "another New Orleans". They identified the police as officers from the city of Gretna.

The following day Mr Bradshaw said they tried again to cross and directly witnessed police shooting over the heads of a middle-aged white couple who were also turned back. Eventually, late on Friday evening, the couple succeeded in crossing the bridge with the intervention of a contact in the local fire department.

Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna police department, said he had not yet questioned his officers as to whether they fired their guns.

He confirmed that his officers, along with those from Jefferson Parish and the Crescent City Connection police force, sealed the bridge and refused to let people pass. This was despite the fact that local media were informing people that the bridge was one of the few safe evacuation routes from the city. [...]

Mr Bradshaw and his wife were evacuated to Texas and have since returned to California. They condemned the authorities, adding: "This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary Texans.

"Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist... Lives were lost that did not need to be lost." [My emphasis]

Outrageous.

Posted by Jonathan at 01:01 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this  

The Mother Of All Slush Funds IV

Disasters

WaPo reports that Bush is about to unveil a new funding bill for Katrina reconstruction that will cost more next year alone than the entire cost of the Iraq war to date. Note this:

Bush and Republican congressional leaders, by contrast, are calculating that the U.S. economy can safely absorb a sharp spike in spending and budget deficits, and that the only way to regain public confidence after the stumbling early response to the disaster is to spend whatever it takes to rebuild the region and help Katrina's victims get back on their feet. [Emphasis added]

Josh Marshall comments:

Regain public confidence in who? [...]

What's driving this budgetary push is not a natural disaster but a political crisis, the president's political crisis. The White House is trying to undo self-inflicted political damage on the national dime.

You don't have to be a conservative or a budget-hawk to be deeply worried about what's happening here. It's not even a matter of the dollar value in itself, though this country has already been pushed to the budgetary edge and just doesn't have an infinite number of hundreds of billions of dollars it can spend.

Intentions are everything. Intentions dictate actions and actions have consequences. The two can never be teased apart. [...]

If there's nothing else this decade has taught us it is that there was never and never could have been any Iraq War separated from the goals and intentions of those with their foot on the accelerator. Anything else is just a sad delusion. That's why the whole mess is as it is now: fruit of the poison tree.

Same here.

Maybe you want to spend $200 billion on rebuilding the Delta region too. Fine. Something like that will probably be necessary. But don't fool yourself into thinking that what's coming is just a matter of a different chef making the same meal. This will be Iraq all over again, with the same fetid mix of graft, zeal and hubris. Cronyism like you wouldn't believe. Money blown on ideological fantasies and half-baked test-cases.

You could come up with a hundred reasons why that's true. But at root intentions drive all. You'll never separate this operation or its results from the fact that the people in charge see it as a political operation. The use of this money for political purposes, for what amounts to a political campaign, tells you everything you need to know about what's coming. [My emphasis]

I've noted before that we can expect the money to be controlled by the Bush political operation. And when you are in a position to dole out several hundred billion dollars to friends and allies, that buys a lot of power. Who knows, maybe that even buys Jeb the White House in 2008.

This is how it works when gangsters rule.

Posted by Jonathan at 10:42 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  

September 13, 2005

Racism As Fear

Disasters

Recent polls show an enormous divide between how blacks and whites view the Katrina disaster. Some 2/3 of blacks think race was a factor in the government's poor response; some 3/4 of whites think it wasn't.

How could so many whites think race (or race and class together) wasn't a factor? Could it have been any more obvious? I suppose a lot of people don't want to admit to themselves, let alone to a pollster, that they and people like them are racists; that's part of the explanation. But Digby may have hit on a subtler answer:

[T]hroughout, I've heard many good people insist that race is not a factor. They seem to think that racism is only defined as an irrational hatred of black people. It's not. It also manifests itself as an irrational fear of black people. [My emphasis]

People with an irrational, racist fear of blacks probably don't grasp even now that their fear was irrational and exaggerated out of all proportion. They see the world through a powerfully distorting lens. And so they think it was objectively justified that the entire black population of an American city (women, kids, families) was held prisoner in life-threatening conditions because of the reputed actions of a tiny minority. They think it was justified, so it wasn't racism.

Think again.

Posted by Jonathan at 09:08 PM | Comments (6) | Link to this  

September 12, 2005

EPA Senior Analyst: New Orleans Toxicity "Worse Than Love Canal"

Disasters

Last week on NPR's On Point program, Senior EPA Policy Analyst Hugh Kaufman said that the post-Katrina pollution in New Orleans is "worse than Love Canal". And Kaufman is someone who knows whereof he speaks. He's been with the EPA since its founding and is probably the agency's most senior expert on toxic waste and environmental disaster response.

Still, the toxicity of the waters flooding New Orleans has received little discussion of real substance in US media. Britain's Sunday Independent reported on it yesterday, however. Excerpts:

Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analysed. "Inept political hacks" running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work. [...]

Other US sources spelt out the extent of the danger from one of America's most polluted industrial areas, known locally as "Cancer Alley". The 66 chemical plants, refineries and petroleum storage depots churn out 600m lb of toxic waste each year. Other dangerous substances are in site storage tanks or at the port of New Orleans. No one knows how much pollution has escaped through damaged plants and leaking pipes into the "toxic gumbo" now drowning the city. Mr Kaufman says no one is trying to find out.

Few people are better qualified to judge the extent of the problem. Mr Kaufman, who has been with the EPA since it was founded 35 years ago, helped to set up its hazardous waste programme. After serving as chief investigator to the EPA's ombudsman, he is now senior policy analyst in its Office of Solid Wastes and Emergency Response. He said the clean-up needed to be "the most massive public works exercise ever done", adding: "It will take 10 years to get everything up and running and safe."

Mr Kaufman claimed the Bush administration was playing down the need for a clean-up: the EPA has not been included in the core White House group tackling the crisis. "Its budget has been cut and inept political hacks have been put in key positions," Mr Kaufman said. "All the money for emergency response has gone to buy guns and cowboys — which don't do anything when a hurricane hits. We were less prepared for this than we would have been on 10 September 2001."

He said the water being pumped out of the city was not being tested for pollution and would damage Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, and endanger people using it downstream. [My emphasis]

This administration cares nothing about results. They care only about appearances. And the toxic pollution in New Orleans is something that people can't see on their TV screeens. So the Bush administration's response will be to try to pretend it isn't there. Let somebody else deal with it, someday.

FEMA has already shown us what kind of a disaster results when a President puts political hacks in positions of reponsibility requiring real technical, scientific, or specialized management expertise (the kind of expertise a guy like Hugh Kaufman has). EPA is another such Bush administration disaster. In the case of the EPA, though, the disaster will occur in slow motion and last for many, many years, poisoning and killing God knows how many more people in the process.

Posted by Jonathan at 08:54 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this