Er, Uh-Oh

Because of my work on several highly-distinguished digital-tier cable channels, I have certain pieces of knowledge that I probably shouldn't have. Because of the show I edited about the super-volcano under Yellowstone National Park, I know enough to get very freaked out by stories like this:

Yellowstone National Park was jostled by a host of small earthquakes for a third straight day Monday, and scientists watched closely to see whether the more than 250 tremors were a sign of something bigger to come. Swarms of small earthquakes happen frequently in Yellowstone, but it's very unusual for so many earthquakes to happen over several days, said Robert Smith, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah.

"They're certainly not normal," Smith said. "We haven't had earthquakes in this energy or extent in many years."

What Smith is not saying is that the consequences of a big volcanic eruption, which goes hand in hand with the seismic activity. We haven't seen in our lifetime an eruption of the magnitude that Yellowstone would produce; the closest would be Krakatoa in Indonesia in the 19th century, which lowered global temperatures by a couple degrees (the good news) and destroyed crop cycles worldwide (the bad news). Not only would nearby cities like Cody, Wyoming and Bozeman, Montana be obliterated, but especially with an eruption so close to the Midwest, still the bread basket of the world in many respects, the amount of ash dumped on the region would be enough to make it infertile for years, and maybe uninhabitable as the particulate matter gets into the air. The last time Yellowstone erupted, fossil records in Nebraska show that multiple species not known to have lived in North America were wiped out.

Here's a little write-up of the show; you can find some video of it here. Stories like this get my Spidey Sense tingling.

Ike

It kind of snuck up on everybody, but this could be really bad:

...TIDE LEVELS CONTINUE TO INCREASE AS IKE APPROACHES THE UPPER TEXAS COAST...

IKE IS MOVING TOWARD THE WEST-NORTHWEST NEAR 12 MPH. A TURN TOWARD THE NORTHWEST IS EXPECTED LATER TODAY...WITH A TURN TOWARD THE NORTH EXPECTED ON SATURDAY. ON THE FORECAST TRACK...THE
CENTER OF IKE WILL BE VERY NEAR THE UPPER TEXAS COAST BY LATE TODAY OR EARLY SATURDAY. HOWEVER...BECAUSE IKE IS A VERY LARGE TROPICAL CYCLONE...WEATHER WILL BEGIN TO DETERIORATE ALONG THE COASTLINE VERY SOON.

THIS STATEMENT RECOMMENDS ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN BY PERSONS IN THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES OR MARINE AREAS:

BRAZORIA...CHAMBERS...GALVESTON...HARRIS...JACKSON...LIBERTY...MATAGORDA.

...WATCHES/WARNINGS...

IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT PERSONS WHO LIVE IN MOBILE HOMES OR POORLY-BUILT STRUCTURES EVACUATE TO A SAFER LOCATION SUCH AS A WELL BUILT HOME. PERSONS WHO LIVE IN HIGH RISES SHOULD CONSIDER EVACUATING AS WINDS CAN BE AS MUCH AS 20 TO 30 MPH STRONGER AT THE TOP OF A HIGH RISE THAN AT GROUND LEVEL. PERSONS OUTSIDE OF THE MANDATORY EVACUATION AREAS WHO HAVE NOT EVACUATED SHOULD PLAN TO SHELTER IN PLACE IN A WELL BUILT STRUCTURE DURING THE PERIOD OF TROPICAL STORM FORCE WINDS.

These holdouts are exercising very poor judgment. They need to get out of there. The storm surge could be 20 feet or more. Fortunately most people are fleeing, but they're going to be affected somewhat. Ike is almost the size of Texas.

I'm also hearing reports of gas stations bumping up prices, because a number of major oil refineries are due to be flooded and shut down. This obviously shows the need to drill more off the coast and put more pressure on those refineries for our oil needs.

Brace yourself, Houston.

The Leadership Difference

One candidate sees a brewing natural disaster and exploits it by heading down to the danger zone forcing the deploying of all kinds of resources that could be used to save people's lives.

Another candidate offers to mobilize resources and actually provide comfort and aid.

Sen. Barack Obama announced that his campaign would mobilize supporters from his enormous e-mail list to send money or enlist as volunteers once the impact of Hurricane Gustav becomes apparent.

Obama told reporters that his campaign already is coordinating with local authorities. The senator has said he has no plans to go to the region, because of the potential disruption, although Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, are heading to Mississippi today.

"We can activate an e-mail list of a couple million people who want to give back," Obama said. "I think we can get tons of volunteers to travel down there if it becomes necessary."

Calling Americans to service is one of Obama's founding principles.

By the way, seeing Bush and Cheney bug out of the convention was so predictable. If there was a chance of hail in Wichita they would have demurred to "monitor the disaster."

Cat 4

And growing. I have absolutely no faith that DHS and FEMA have the evacuation under control. We're in for more trouble if this hits the Gulf Coast.

Gustav swelled into a fearsome Category 4 hurricane with winds of 145 mph on Saturday as Cuba raced to evacuate more than 240,000 people and Americans to the north clogged highways fleeing New Orleans.

Gustav already has killed 78 people in the Caribbean and the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said it could strengthen even more after hitting Cuba and entering the warm Gulf of Mexico on a projected course for the Katrina-battered U.S. coast.

The people who brought you government as the problem are unequipped to deal with crisis, again. Forget cancelling the RNC. Cancel the Republican Party.

UPDATE: When Joe freakin' Lieberman still has questions about FEMA's effectiveness, that makes me want to sob.

There's a Storm Coming

Well this could be just awful.

Energy companies on Wednesday braced for the worst storm to threaten the U.S. Gulf of Mexico oilpatch since 2005's devastating hurricanes as Tropical Storm Gustav churned toward the heart of U.S. offshore production.

No company had reported output cuts as they began evacuating staff from offshore oil and natural gas platforms, but Shell Oil Co, which has the largest offshore operations, said it may begin shutting output as early as Thursday while it works to evacuate all of its 1,300 Gulf workers by Saturday.

Gustav is expected to morph into a powerful hurricane as it gains strength from the Gulf's warm waters, and about 85 percent of U.S. offshore oil and gas production could be in its path.

By midday Wednesday, weather forecasters were saying the storm could, as did Katrina and Rita, become a catastrophic category 5 hurricane with winds over 155 mph (249 kph) as it crosses the Gulf, which provides a quarter of U.S. crude oil production and 15 percent of the nation's natural gas output.

"We do believe Gustav is going to emerge into the Gulf as a major hurricane, category 3 or better," said AccuWeather Inc Forecasting Director Ken Reeves. "It has a chance for a brief period to be a category 5."

"Whether or not it can produce the same amount of damage as Katrina or Rita remains to be seen," Reeves said.

In addition to devastating the Louisiana coast, including the city of New Orleans, Katrina and Rita shut 25 percent of U.S. oil and fuel production. Gulf energy companies needed months to restore operations close to their full capacity.

This was a business article so the focus was on the oil offshore (hey, I thought Republicans told us that not a drop of oil was spilled during Katrina?), but it's already hitting Jamaica and could be on the way toward New Orleans.

If anything the federal government is even more tattered and incompetent now than in 2005, if only because of a massive case of senioritis. It ought to be recalled where John McCain spent his birthday that year, on the very day that Katrina hit.



But for now, light a candle for the residents of the Gulf Coast.

Photo-Op Buddies

No surprise that President Bush parachuted into Iowa, spending lots of resources and the attention of law enforcement, to "show people that he cares". John McCain, of course, just had to follow him, even though the Governor asked him to lay off:

An aide to Gov. Chet Culver said Thursday that Republican presidential candidate John McCain ignored the governor's request to cancel a campaign visit amid a massive flood recovery effort in the state.

McCain toured flood-damaged sites in Iowa on Thursday, including the town of Columbus Junction in the southeast.

Patrick Dillon, Culver's chief of staff, said the governor was concerned that McCain's trip would divert local law enforcement from the flood recovery effort to provide security for McCain.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama canceled a scheduled visit to eastern Iowa last week at the request of state officials.

McCain also opposed funding for flood control in Des Moines as recently as last year.

But he did show up with a camera crew in tow. He "cares." Isn't the first time he's used a backdrop whose funding he called for cutting.

UPDATE: Obama took a whack at McCain on this today.

And just the other day, Senator McCain traveled to Iowa to express his sympathies for the victims of the recent flooding. I’m sure they appreciated the sentiment, but they probably would have appreciated it more if he hadn’t voted against funding for levees and flood control programs, which he seems to consider pork. Well, we do have to reform budget earmarks, cut genuine pork, and dispense with unnecessary spending, as we confront a budget crisis left by the most fiscally irresponsible administration in modern times.

But when it comes to rebuilding America’s essential but crumbling infrastructure, we need to do more, not less. Cities across the Midwest are under water right now or courting disaster not just because of the weather, but because we’ve failed to protect them. Maintaining our levees and dams isn’t pork barrel spending, it’s an urgent priority, and that’s what we’ll do when I’m President. I’ll also launch a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years, and create nearly two million new jobs. The work will be determined by what will maximize our safety, security, and shared prosperity. Instead of building bridges to nowhere, let’s build communities that meet the needs and reflect the dreams of our families. That’s what this bank will help us do.

The larger point is that McCain makes no distinction between "pork" and infrastructure investments that are vital economically. It allows him to demagogue about "reducing government spending" in a blind and morally corrupt way. McCain's America is one where bridges in Minneapolis fall down.

Shiftless And Lazy

The flooding in Iowa all flowed into the Mississippi River, and now it's a floating hazard running downstream, encountering levees throughout the Midwest and breaching them. 19 levees in all have been compromised in cities in Iowa and Illinois. This is going to play out for the entire week, and Bush is back from his European vacation vowing quick action.

This is a disaster, but it's largely a property disaster. Towns on the river are not surrounded by water on all sides, they have plenty of notice, and deaths have been thankfully minimal. Most reasonable people would see this and be happy that this is not the challenge residents faced on the Gulf Coast. Rush Limbaugh sees it and can only see color.

Limbaugh: I want to know. I look at Iowa, I look at Illinois—I want to see the murders. I want to see the looting. I want to see all the stuff that happened in New Orleans. I see devastation in Iowa and Illinois that dwarfs what happened in New Orleans. I see people working together. I see people trying to save their property…I don’t see a bunch of people running around waving guns at helicopters, I don’t see a bunch of people running shooting cops. I don’t see a bunch of people raping people on the street. I don’t see a bunch of people doing everything they can…whining and moaning—where’s FEMA, where’s BUSH. I see the heartland of America. When I look at Iowa and when I look at Illinois, I see the backbone of America.

How must it feel to be so aggrieved that any opportunity to denounce blacks as lazy is taken. Never mind that there was one high-profile black man who was working on the front lines of the floods in the Midwest.



Now I could go ahead and debunk all of Rush's lies. The devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf was orders of magnitude above that of Iowa. Nobody in New Orleans shot at cops. The lurid stories of rape and gang warfare weren't true. But there is no point, really. Because all we're seeing here is a stone racist, convinced of his own biases, assured of his beliefs in how Heartland Americans are real Americans.

These next eight years of a black President are going to put him over the top.

Midwest Katrina?

I'm cooped up in a TV-free office, but is this getting the attention it deserves?

Hospital patients in wheelchairs and on stretchers were evacuated in the middle of the night as the biggest flood Cedar Rapids has ever seen swamped more than 400 blocks Friday and all but cut off the supply of clean drinking water in the city of 120,000.

As many as 10,000 townspeople driven from their homes by the rain-swollen Cedar River took shelter at schools and hotels or moved in with relatives.

About 100 miles to the west, the Des Moines River threatened to spill over the levees into downtown Des Moines, prompting officials in Iowa's biggest city to urge people in low-lying areas to clear out by Friday evening. The river was expected to crest a couple of hours later.

"We are perilously close to topping the levees," said Bill Stowe, public works director in the Iowa capital, population 190,000. He added: "It's time to step out of harm's way."

Only two deaths have been reported so far, but without clean drinking water in Cedar Rapids and the potential for topped levees in Des Moines the situation is, pardon the pun, fluid. There's a local report at this blog and also Iowa Independent. I was out in Des Moines last September and made some friends there, so I hope they're OK.

More broadly, I have to agree with Matt Stoller here. Storms and disruptive weather events like this are catalyzing. They actually do shape opinion if organizations bother to make the proper connections. In this case, the main environmental groups are not.

None of these stories mention climate change, yet, as Joe Romm points out, extreme downpours are exactly what the NOAA found is increasingly common in the last fifty years, with "a 20 percent increase in "very heavy rain events", and these fit with global warming prediction models. Romm goes on to point out that "2007 saw the second most extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC's Climate Extremes Index."

So one would think the press would cover global warming in the context of extreme weather. Of course journalists don't. But is this a media problem? Yes, but it's not just a media problem. I looked at the home pages and press pages of the Sierra Club, NRDC, Environmental Defense, the League of Conservation Voters, and Al Gore's We Can Solve It. The Sierra Club is asking for higher mileage standards on cars, NRDC is discussing lead and growing support for action on global warming, the League of Conservation Voters brags about its recent endorsement of Gabrielle Giffords, Environmental Defense asks for lower gas prices, and We Can Solve It puts its new ad front and center.

So yes, the media isn't tying the Iowa floods to global warming. But then, neither are the major environmental groups. As these extreme weather events become more common due to global warming, there will be more competition to tie these events to climate change policy action, a sort of Shock Doctrine in reverse. One interesting irony is that Iowa is ground zero for these floods, and it was in Iowa where none of the major environmental groups backed a candidate - Ed Fallon - calling for a moratorium on coal versus conservative Democrat Leonard Boswell that wants to continue tax breaks for oil companies. Gore, of course, endorsed Boswell, and he and Tipper maxed out to him.

You shouldn't expect people to put two and two together if the leading voices remain silent.

Quake Lake Shake And Bake

It's kind of a masterwork of engineering that Chinese soldiers were able to divert water to lessen the imminent danger of flooding to over a million residents. But they had to divert it through the destroyed city of Beichuan, and survivors had to wash their possessions and even the corpses of their neighbors fly by in the process.

Tuesday's flooding brought more heartache to the displaced. Many said valuables were now lost for good.

"It began flooding early this morning," said shop assistant Zhu Yunhui, 37, who lost loved ones in the quake and said she had kept many tens of thousands of yuan in her home. "Now we can never go back. This is heartbreaking."

Damage in Beichuan from the tremor was so extensive that authorities have decided to rebuild the town at a site dozens of kilometers away and to make the original county seat an earthquake memorial.

The brutal efficiency of this effort is intriguing. China has literally buried the past, washed it away, and rebuilt for the last few decades, so in in many ways it was a symbolic event.

World Report

• This Zimbabwean election is poised to end in violence and tragedy. The runoff between ruler Robert Mugabe and challenger Morgan Tsvangirai is set for later in the month. And already Tsvangirai has been arrested and detained before being set free, and US and British diplomats have also been detained. They're trying to suspend all NGO work in the country under the suspicion that aid workers are undermining the ruling party. This kind of paranoia combined with brute force never ends well.

• Speaking of fearful dictators, in Burma the military junta has rejected the aid of US Navy ships, leaving up to a million people still without adequate food or water in the wake of the cyclone. Meanwhile, the country has gone so far as to detain an activist comedian named "The Tweezers" for the crime of trying to help out cyclone victims. That's a humanitarian disaster beyond all reason, and a telling reminder of the tragic intersection between natural disasters and despotic governments.

• Here's a nice interview with the world's most notorious nuclear proliferator - A.Q. Khan, under the scourge of house arrest at his elaborate villa in Pakistan. He claims in the interview that he was doing the bidding of Pakistan by selling nuclear secrets to the likes of Libya and North Korea. That just shows the stupidity of trying to work with Pervez Musharraf, the head of the government during Khan's selling spree.

• I've been sitting on this one for a couple weeks, but haven't had the time to go into it. Basically, the British have been laundering money through a weapons maker called BAE and creating a giant off-the-books slush fund that has been used to finance covert ops with Britain and the United States in the lead. The Saudis were at the head of this, through former US Ambassador Prince Bandar. It's looking pretty clear that these bribes from the Saudis to BAE funded covert ops. The story is labyrinthine, but Marcy Wheeler's on it.

• There may be nothing sadder than the plight of the Baghdad Jews. This is a sect that has direct roots back to Abraham, and in the strife of the Iraq occupation they've been almost completely wiped out.

• Maher Arar was a Canadian citizen who US officials detained after 9/11 and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured. Now the Justice Department is investigating the incident, but I hold little hope that they will reach any actionable conclusion. What's sad is how stories like Arar's are NOT the exception. Also sad is the number of investigations that this branch of the DoJ, the Office of Professional Responsibility, has on their plate.

• And the story of the day is the retelling of how the Defense Department was duped by Iranian intelligence into advancing the cause of exiles, which led to the Iraq war.

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The proper response to unbelievable misconduct of this kind is to stop any investigation into it.

You should read the whole sordid story. It involves neocon crackpot Michael Ledeen, an old Iran-Contra hand named Manucher Ghorbanifar, and basically a bunch of idiots at the Pentagon taking these stories at face value. The stories that have come out JUST THIS WEEK about the war are enough grounds for impeachment.
•

Tragedies In Asia

These natural disasters in nearby nations in Asia continue to have worse and worse effects. In Burma the death toll has risen to over 125,000 and the fear is that aid is trickling in so slowly, thanks to the paranoid military government, that a "second wave" of deaths from disease and starvation is imminent. In China, earthquake victims continue to be found, the death toll is approaching 15,000, and Chinese troops are desperately attempting to fill a crack in a large dam that, if breached, would overwhelm yet another city.

Amazingly enough, the quietest disaster happening in Asia could be the most far-reaching, as the second most-powerful party in the Pakistani government, Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League, has vowed to quit the cabinet, which could lead to instability in the most dangerous trouble spot in the world. Sharif's issue is that the Pakistan People's Party has not yet moved to reinstate the judges fired by Pervez Musharraf, and that the ruling party is making poor use of their power. This could blow up in a hurry. And right now, it has to be on the back burner due to the mass loss of life to its north.

A Disaster A Day

It certainly feels like it:

One of the worst earthquakes to hit China in three decades killed nearly 9,000 people Monday, trapped about 900 students under the rubble of their school and caused a toxic chemical leak, state media reported.

The 7.9-magnitude earthquake devastated a hilly region of small cities and towns in central China. The official Xinhua News Agency said 8,533 people died in Sichuan province and more than 200 others were killed in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing.

Xinhua said 80 percent of the buildings had collapsed in Sichuan province's Beichuan county after the quake, raising fears that the overall death toll could increase sharply.

We're starting to see the impact of natural disasters on areas which have no infrastructure to manage natural disasters. The cyclone in Burma is causing a public health catastrophe. But Burma public health system was already in crisis, being one of the worst countries on Earth for water-borne diseases. Simliarly, China is experiencing a mass loss of life in this earthquake because massive development and substandard oversight has resulted in a bunch of buildings that weren't retrofitted for earthquakes in any way. There simply isn't enough money in the world for every nation on the planet to be fully prepared for a spate of disasters. And while this earthquake has little to do with global warming, the increased storm activity we've seen all over the world (including here at home) does have a link to an increasingly erratic climate, and so we're likely to see more mass-casualty events because the storms are hitting in unusual places or places where there's no way to cope with them.

Tragic Disaster Assistance

The military leadership in Burma is choking their own citizens, and while I understand the need to keep politics at the cyclone's edge and not act in a divisive manner by insulting the government whose help you need to administer aid, their behavior has been atrocious. First they started confiscating aid shipments, causing the UN to stop sending them (they've recently changed their minds). Then they allowed a US cargo plane in the country, but basically wanted everything dropped off at the docks. They've continually refused travel visas to aid workers. And now it appears that the boxes of aid they are sending out have the generals' names plastered on them.

Despite international appeals to postpone a referendum on a controversial proposed constitution, voting began Saturday in all but the hardest hit parts of the country. With voters going to the polls, state-run television continuously ran images of top generals including junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, handing out boxes of aid at elaborate ceremonies.

"We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region," said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.

"It is not going to areas where it is most in need," he said in London.

There's going to be a second catastrophe as those in most urgent need of supplies and medical care don't get them in time. The military government is failing its people and doesn't seem to have much concern over it.

A Tragedy That Will Grow Worse

The military junta in Burma, fearful about their grip on power, is resisting international aid.

Desperate survivors cried out for aid on Thursday nearly a week after 100,000 people were feared killed by Cyclone Nargis, as pressure piled up on Myanmar to throw its doors open to an international relief operation.

The United States was awaiting approval from the ruling junta to start military aid flights, but the U.N. food agency and Red Cross/Red Crescent said they have finally started flying in emergency relief supplies after foot-dragging by the generals.

Some were bashing Bush for calling the junta a junta and making them less likely to cooperate, but I don't think words are the holdup here. The leadership just went through riots in the streets last year and cut the country's communications off. Disaster can breed independence movements and they are fearful of global intervention. Bush's approach wasn't going to help or hurt. You're talking about 46 years of military rule.

I'll tell you who could help - Chevron. They could threaten to pull up stakes if aid isn't delivered in a timely fashion. They are the only US corporation working inside Burma and they have a responsibility to at least do something positive with that privilege.

The NYT has more.

60,000 Dead

My word.

BANGKOK, May 6 -- The number of dead and missing in the Burma cyclone soared past 60,000 Tuesday amid signs the toll will rise even higher, as much of the disaster zone remained flooded by seawater, threatened by disease and out of reach of an international relief operation that is taking shape.

What I heard today is that Burma is 190th among 191 countries in incidents of water-borne disease. So now there's flooding all over the country, with 60,000 dead bodies in the water, maybe more? This is approaching a nightmare, and I have no confidence that the paranoiac military junta will be able to manage this situation, and certainly they won't allow anyone else to do so.

Just horrific.

More Dead In Myanmar

The tragedy in Myanmar is so widespread that the country is asking for outside help. For context, Myanmar was battered during the tsunami and resisted outside help.

"YANGON (AFP) - Myanmar said Monday more than 10,000 people died in the cyclone that battered the impoverished nation, whose secretive military rulers made a rare appeal for international help to cope with the tragedy.

Reeling from the weekend disaster, which also left thousands missing, the Southeast Asian country once known as Burma -- one of the world's poorest -- warned that the staggering death toll could still rise further.

'There could be more casualties,' said Nyan Win, foreign minister of the military junta which has ruled the country with an iron fist for decades, and normally puts tight restrictions on aid agencies from the outside world.

'We will welcome help like this from other countries, because our people are in difficulty,' he said."

It should be noted that NPR is reporting that relief organizations haven't yet been allowed inside the country, although World Vision already had a small group there and they have begun to operate emergency services.

This plays into the food crisis as well, because the area hit the hardest is full of rice paddies. Myanmar exports rice to Sri Lanka. Also, the World Food Program is coordinating relief efforts, which means a further strain to their resources.

The last number I heard was 22,000 dead. (I also don't put it past this government to add those monks murdered in last year's riots on to the top of the piles of bodies.)

I cannot say if relief money will actually get through, but here's a link.

UPDATE: Think Progress is right, any member of the Bush family trying to lecture anyone about the "inept" response to a natural disaster needs to shut their damn mouth.

Cyclone

Not only is a natural disaster killing 10,000 humans a terrible event, but we have so little information coming out of Burma that the number could easily be higher, and the brutality of the military junta doesn't yield much hope that they'd be looking out for the well-being of their people, or that they wouldn't take advantage of the chaos to suppress dissent even further. What a terrible situation.

UPDATE: If the money for aid is coming out of the World Food Program, as is being reported, that's really terrible because the WFP is completely underfunded in trying to deal with the global food crisis.

The Grass Is Always Greenspan

The bottom is starting to drop out of the housing market.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sales of new single-family U.S. homes fell 8.3 percent in August to a 795,000 annual sales pace, its slowest rate in over seven years, while the inventory of homes dropped, a Commerce Department report showed on Thursday.

Analysts polled by Reuters were expecting August sales to fall to an annual rate of 830,000 from July's previously reported rate of 870,000, which was revised to 867,000. The August sales pace was the slowest since a 793,000 rate in June 2000.

Some analysts blamed new, tough mortgage standards for part of the sales decline.

"A lot of people who were close to making deals or actually in contract to buy found it more difficult to get financing," said Michael Bizenov, president of Sterling National Mortgage, Sterling Bancorp in New York.

Meanwhile, the supply of unsold homes is at an 18-year high. All of which is happening while Alan Greenspan is hawking books and sipping cocktails.

Alan Greenspan says there's nothing he could have done about the housing bubble. Monetary levers are too crude to do any good, and the least worst option is to let the bubble collapse on its own and then pick up the pieces afterward.

Maybe so. But that still doesn't explain why Greenspan cheered on the bubble back in 2004.

Greenspan, of course, not only loved the housing bubble, but loved the Bush tax cuts before deciding that they weren't working for the larger economy. Apparently Greenspan the author isn't acquainted with Greenspan the Republican hack.

By contrast, Naomi Klein's new book is really interesting:

Meanwhile, the book that should be in the spotlight is The Shock Doctrine.

It's a brilliant dissection of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism," an economic philosophy born half a century ago at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. It holds that the best time to institute radical free-market policies is in the aftermath of a massive social crisis, such as a terrorist attack, a war, or a natural disaster like Katrina.

Klein shows how the crony capitalists running the Bush administration saw post-invasion Iraq as the perfect proving ground for all their pet free-market policies. The fantasy was that a privitazied and corporatized Iraq would become a free-market utopia that would spread the gospel of the market throughout the Middle East. Democracy would reign, and Halliburton and Bechtel would stand supreme.

After the tsunami in Southeast Asia, there was a land grab. After Katrina in New Orleans, developers tried to eliminate prevailing wage. The plan is seeing disaster as opportunity. And Klein hammered Greenspan on Democracy Now about all of this, including his curious line that we had to get Saddam out because he could have held up the world's oil supply.

Are you aware that, according to the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal for one country to invade another over its natural resources?

Amen.

Blaming the Victims

In 2005, you saw the Bush Administration blaming Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana for her performance during Hurricane Katrina, while at the same time they were criminally negligent in providing federal assistance. Now they're trying the same thing in Kansas.

The White House fought back Tuesday against criticism from Kansas’ governor that National Guard deployments to Iraq are slowing the response to last week’s devastating tornado.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said the fault was Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’.

In a spat reminiscent of White House finger-pointing at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco after the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, Snow rapped Sebelius for not following procedure to find gaps and then asking the federal government to fill them.

“If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it,” he said.

That's one of those, whaddyacallit, um... damn lies. And Sebelius has a lot of support in Kansas, so I don't think this one's going to work.

* Dec. 30, 2005: Sebelius writes to Rumsfeld requesting new equipment. “The Guard was critical to responding to recent blizzards and floods in Kansas, yet its ability to respond to similar situations is being diminished by a lack of equipment,” wrote Sebelius. Included with her letter was a list of equipment Kansas had lost to the Iraq war. [Kansas City Star, 1/21/06; Topeka Capital-Journal, 6/29/06]

* Jan. 23, 2006: Sebelius personally urges Bush to increase National Guard funding. In an one-hour motorcade ride in Kansas with Bush, Sebelius expressed concern about “a reduction of National Guard troop strength in its next budget.” Bush assured her he was “dealing” with the shortages. [Topeka Capital-Journal, 1/24/06; Kansas City Star, 3/11/06]

* June 28, 2006: Sebelius sends Army Secretary list of equipment lost in war. In a meeting with Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, Sebelius told Harvey that the state had lost about $140 million in National Guard equipment to the Iraq war. Her office then sent him a list of the lost equipment. [Topeka Capital-Journal, 6/29/06]

* Sept. 5, 2006: Sebelius lobbies for replacement of National Guard equipment sent to Iraq. “Kansas’ congressional delegation, Sebelius and governors from around the country have been lobbying the Pentagon for increased funding to replace National Guard equipment that has been left in Iraq or damaged beyond repair after repeated use in war.” [AP, 9/5/06]

* Feb. 27, 2007: Sebelius pushes White House and Congress for more funding. “Now the Guard needs Washington’s help,” Sebelius said in press conference on Capitol Hill. “The President and Congress need to step up to the plate and give our Guard members the support they deserve.” [Press Release, 2/27/07]

Apparently this wasn't filed in triplicate on the proper T&S report, that's Snow's excuse for blatantly stretching the truth.

This is extremely simple. National Guard equipment belongs in the states, and doesn't need to be asked for. When disaster strikes, and it strikes unpredictably because it's a disaster, that equipment is needed immediately. It's not a situation that you can remedy with a formal request. The states need their own disaster preparedness program immediately. It's thuddingly stupid to suggest that a Governor didn't ask for anything so it's her fault for not being able to clean up after a natural disaster.

Mahablog has more.

A Thousand Words On the Media

This is maybe as embarrassing as it gets for cable television. They send a reporter to Greensburg, Kansas to track down what's happening "on the ground" in the aftermath of the vicious tornado that wiped out the town, and... he ends up reading news out of the newspaper. On TV.

They did this on the local news in 1957. This is 50 years later.

And actually, I'm glad there's a visual confirmation, because this is all most cable news producers do before they feed words into the mouths of their anchors anyway. CNN was probably too cheap to send a producer out there for this empty suit, so he had to read the paper. On the air.

Unlimited resources, the full weight of corporate synergy behind them, and this is what CNN delivers and calls it news. Part of it is tight budgets, but most of it is laziness. And a complete atrophying of the principles of newsgathering. A couple reporters on the teevee understand that, you know, talking to a couple people and figuring out the real story might make a more compelling angle than READING THE WICHITA EAGLE LIVE. Not this guy.

I don't think there's any more iconic an image about what is wrong with our media than this one.

CNN: the most trusted name in reading other people's news.

...one could counter-intuit this and say "Isn't this what bloggers do?" The answer, of course, is "No," and any blogger who does this consistently is actually liable under plagiarism laws. The other thing is that 99.9% of all bloggers aren't paid to produce the news. This guy, the guy who's reading the newspaper on the air, is.