California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Elon's Folly Contributing to Rocket Fuel Greenhouse Gas Emissions

by John Lawrence

The Starship that exploded soon after launch recently had a methane based fuel. Methane is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Whatever methane remained in the Starship after launch was fully released into the atmosphere after it exploded. Space tourism will cause even more greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. At a time when we should have all hands on deck to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, NASA is going full steam ahead with its space exploration program. The astronauts should be repurposed to fight greenhouse gas emissions not to ramp them up. In an article by Mark Piesing for the BBC, titled The pollution caused by rocket launches we find:

In television, and film, spaceflight is usually represented as having little or no impact on the environment. Yet it should be obvious that rocket engines spew out pollution into the atmosphere, like any form of combustion-driven propulsion.

Perhaps the black carbon, or soot, and other emissions didn't matter when only around 70 commercial rocket launches a year took place. Now that number has doubled; it is expected to increase significantly more over the next two decades due to the growth in demand for services like satellite internet services and space tourism.

At least three scientific research papers have already been published this year [2022] on the impact of rocket emissions on the atmosphere, temperatures, and the ozone layer.

So at a time when planet earth is in peril of remaining a habitable planet for the human species, why are we continuing a quest to fire off rocket ships so we can some day put humans on Mars, an uninhabitable planet? It seems like pure folly. By the time they get humans on Mars, the earth will have become an uninhabitable planet also at the rate we're going. The US government should not be contributing to global warming with its space program at a time when it is professing to be curtailing global warming. If we are to save this planet, much more needs to be done than simply making all cars electric by 2050. Many more power plants will have to be built by then to generate the electricity to power all those electric cars. What kind of fuel will they use for all these new power plants? If they don't have enough renewables by then, it will have to be fossil fuels so what has been gained? Nothing.

People have totally compartmentalized the global warming syndrome. On the one hand they are for eliminating fossil fuels. On the other they go ahead with all sorts of activities that increase their use because alternative green forms of energy are not yet available. I guess it's OK to sacrifice a few neighborhoods to tornadoes here and there as long as we can keep the economy humming. We must not sacrifice the American way of life. Too many people might get upset and vote for the other party. Similarly, we can't restrict assault rifles because too many people would get upset and vote for the other party. So Joe Biden is the perfect President for our times. He understands that he can rub his belly and whistle Dixie at the same time. However, the pace of change in energy creation is much too slow even to counteract the population increases. More people on the planet means more demand for energy, and the fossil fuel industry is only too happy to provide it until renewables can totally take over some time in the future, some time that will be too late for a desperate human species.

Off the Top of My Head

The Problem With Climate and Gun Disasters: They're One Offs

by John Lawrence

Instead of attributing a climate disaster to global warming, victims will say, "I've never seen anything like this, and I've lived here all my life. Gun disaster victims will say, "I didn't think it could ever happen here." If they said instead, when interviewed, "I think guns should be gotten off the streets" or "Climate change destroyed my house and we're not doing enough to deal with it", then maybe there would be a general awareness growing among the population. There is not enough of a groundswell among the public to change anything because most of the public is not affected by any particular incident. If a particular climate or gun disaster raised the price of gas, then maybe something would be done of a preventative measure. The latest gun legislation is a total joke. It will do nothing to prevent mass shootings. One off climate disasters will do nothing to raise the national consciousness especially among conservatives who don't even believe in global warming. Instead they will call a flood a 500 year event, one that will only occur every 500 years. But then it occurs again tomorrow. Floods and fires are an almost daily occurrence somewhere in the world. If they happen outside the country, no attention at all is paid to the event although climate change is a problem for the whole world not just for any particular nation. It is not just restricted to national borders. Gun violence, on the other hand, is just restricted pretty much to the US. Every other country has sane gun laws.

Politicians, especially Republicans, are in it for the money and not necessarily to do any good for the general public which can't pay for lobbyists to bombard them with their point of view backed up with generous campaign contributions. The more a country is run by politicians profiting by virtue of their positions, the less democratic it is because they are representing their own interests which often means catering to the interests of lobbyists and not catering to the interests of the general public, not to mention the interests of nature or the environment. Many politicians, especially the Republican party as it's constituted today, are guided only by self interest in the same way as corporations are required by law to maximize profits for their shareholders singlemindedly without any other considerations like taking into account what is equitable ao far as society is concerned. The only way to defeat this pernicious aspect of democracy is to take the money out of politics and provide incentives in such a way that a politician finds it in his best interests to represent the interests of his or her constituents and not the interests of the entity which is lobbying him or her. Perhaps an advocate for the people should be paid for out of tax money.

Obviously, it's not in the interests of the victims of gum violence to have the proliferation of guns especially assault rifles on the streets. However, since those that have not been affected by gun violence don't see it as a problem, nothing major is being done. As far as they're concerned, it's a problem that only happens to other people. Unless they identify strongly with the victims of gun violence or start to think that it is something that very likely might happen to them, nothing will be done since it only affects a minority of people and democracies supposedly are run by the majority of the people. Since empathy is a relatively weak emotion compared to self-interest, especially in the US where people have been groomed to seek their self-interest regardless of the effect it has on others, seriously restricting the use and proliferation of guns goes out the window.

What is happening to the human race as a result of climate change is happening at such a slow pace that most people would rather maximize their profits now rather than setting aside some of them because they might benefit people in the future when they might not even be an inhabitant of the planet at that time. Again the manifestation of climate change so far has been one offs only affecting a small group in any one incidence of a natural disaster. When climate change gets to the point where sea level rise is affecting a large number of major cities in the world simultaneously, then something might be done only it will be too late. At that point the only thing will be to react defensively rather than having taken action in the past that would have forestalled the present event. People would rather eat their cake right now rather than saving it for the future when they might not even be around to eat it.

Off the Top of My Head

Sea Levels to Rise by 200 Feet if Poles Melt

by John Lawrence

Based on 410 ppm which is the concentration of carbon dioxide right now in the atmosphere, the ice on the poles will go completely away albeit at a glacial pace. Concentrations of carbon dioxide have varied between 100 ppm and 300 ppm for hundreds of millions of years, and earth has gone through hot periods in which there was no polar ice and at least one period where the entire earth was encased in ice. Reliable predictions by scientists show that 410 ppm will guarantee the disappearance of ice from the poles and a 200 foot sea level rise which will wipe out most of the east coast including a total disappearance of the state of Florida. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is continuing to increase. It will continue to increase way above the current 410 ppm. Humans are still pouring billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere year after year. There has been no diminution of this trend. In fact it is accelerating. The world emits about 43 billion tons of CO2 a year. So already there is enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to guarantee that the poles will melt, and the earth will become very hot. And we're still making it worse year after year.

As the oceans warm and the polar ice melts, we are seeing more extreme weather events due to increased water evaporation from the oceans. That increased amount of water in the atmosphere is released in the form of torrential downpours which cause flooding and weather events such as hurricanes. Higher temperatures are also causing droughts and forest fires. Although these events are tragedies for those directly affected, geological history has shown that life can adapt. One of the first major catastrophes the human race will be faced with is the loss of major cities situated close to oceans such as New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Miami and New Orleans. However, humans can adapt to this by just moving further back from the shore lines as sea levels rise wiping out most low lying areas. Of course this will increase anti-immigrant sentiment due to the the number or refugees in the world as humans crowd onto remaining habitable areas. At this stage we will still be better off than Venus which has a runaway greenhouse gas effect and a surface air temperature of 800 degrees F. Its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide.

The lesson here is that it is to the advantage of the human race to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as quickly as possible. This means major changes to our civilization which human beings are reluctant to make especially in democracies which are governed by the will of the people. While most will give lip service to preserving the planet for future generations, in fact they don't want to do anything that will change their lifestyles or inconvenience themselves in any way. Only when war and pestilence force humans to diminish their numbers on the planet will the human footprint get down to a certain size which, along with the adoption of renewable energy systems, will allow the planet to sustain enough habitable land mass for the furtherance of human life at least for some people. How fast we proceed with changing the human ecosystem in terms of greenhouse gas reduction will determine what kind of a planet future generations will be forced to live on. At the very least it will resemble a hot house earth, similar to conditions which existed millennia ago in which the polar regions were tropical swamps.

Off the Top of My Head

According to Biden's BBB Plan, Buyers of Electric Vehicles Would Receive up to $12,500 in Tax Credits

by John Lawrence

So where is this incentive to buy electric vehicles now that gas (in CA) is about $6 a gallon? Now is the time when we need this subsidy, but, alas, the Democrats couldn't even stick together to pass this and other incentives and measures to get off fossil fuels. How about this as an incentive: preventing daily tornadoes in the heartland of the US? As extreme weather gets more extreme, Congress can't even pass programs to combat global warming and the consequent damage that's being done to people's lives and the economy in general. Not to mention the fact that major portions of the population will not be able to get property insurance which is happening right now and will only get worse. If you have a lot of brush around your house, you're an insurance liability. If you live in a flood plain, you're an insurance liability. We are told by people who know that we only have a few years to do something before we can expect catastrophic consequences from climate change and global warming. Yet we are taking our time getting off fossil fuels. There is even regret that we didn't go ahead with the Keystone pipeline.

The New York Times reported:

"In the coming decades, as global temperatures continue to rise, hundreds of millions of people could struggle against floods, deadly heat waves and water scarcity from severe drought, the report said. Mosquitoes carrying diseases like dengue and malaria will spread to new parts of the globe. Crop failures could become more widespread, putting families in places like Africa and Asia at far greater risk of hunger and malnutrition. People unable to adapt to the enormous environmental shifts will end up suffering unavoidable loss or fleeing their homes, creating dislocation on a global scale,[according to a recent UN report]."

We do know the things we need to be doing. It's just that we're not doing them or doing them at such a slow pace that we will still experience the worst effects of climate change. If you think the refugee problem is bad now, climate change will exacerbate and accelerate the refugee problem. People will be fleeing their homes and homelands when it becomes apparent that they can't make a living there. They will be coming to parts of the world where countries are wealthy enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Basically, that means that people will flee poor countries and attempt at all costs to enter rich countries. That's why the US, as the richest country in the world, should be going full speed ahead to transition away from fossil fuels and into a new era that consists of renewable energy production and more environment friendly lifestyles. Instead, Americans are determined to lead lifestyles of maximum consumption right up to the hilt of their financial resources and beyond in a last gasp of over consumption.

Common Dreams reported:

In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the "bleak and brutal truth" about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Pollin, an economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high gas prices exacerbated by Russia's war on Ukraine.

"If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC's findings seriously," Pollin wrote, "it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry."

Asserting that "at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing" a viable climate stabilization program, Pollin made the case that fossil fuel giants should not make any more money from wrecking the planet, nationalization would not be an unprecedented move in the United States, and doing so could help build clean energy infrastructure at the pace that scientists warn is necessary.

The expert proposed starting with "the federal government purchasing controlling ownership of at least the three dominant U.S. oil and gas corporations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips."

"They are far larger and more powerful than all the U.S. coal companies combined, as well as all of the smaller U.S. oil and gas companies," he wrote. "The cost to the government to purchase majority ownership of these three oil giants would be about $420 billion at current stock market prices."

So for roughly half of the defense budget, the US taxpayers could own the oil industry and phase it out at the speed required to save the planet from the worst effects of global warming. Instead we're treated to the Big Oil CEO's defiance that they are not price gouging because prices are set by the world market. Does anyone question why prices have to be set by the world market? No. Obviously, the world market exists to serve the interests of the oil producers, not oil consumers. Maybe the US should get off the world market because we produce enough oil to meet all current consumer demands. So why do we even need the world market? The world market exists to serve the interests of the OPEC nations who won't even open their spigots in a time of crisis, and it exists to serve the interests of the western Big Oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell.

Americans would like to have one more blast of consumption rather than buckle down and do what's necessary to combat climate change, an effort that would be at least as great as the effort and sacrifice put forth to fight World War II. Billionaire's would rather blast off into space than use their money to fight climate change. Their lifestyles are major contributors to the emission of greenhouse gasses. They don't want to be told that they can't overconsume with numerous 27,000 square foot mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. That's the American Dream, or is it. It's soon going to turn into the American Nightmare but probably not for them. They have the resources to escape the worst effects of global warming. Instead the nightmare will be mostly visited on the least among us as well as randomly due to tornadoes, floods and fires.

Off the Top of My Head

Good on President Biden for Using His Visit to the Flood Zones to Give a Tutorial on Climate Change

by John Lawrence

Previously, after a natural disaster no one mentioned climate change. There was much bemoaning and commiserating, but Biden took a different tack. He lectured the American people about climate change and how it contributed to the disasters that had befallen the unfortunate. What's more he said they would continue and get worse unless we undertake to do something about it. No more attributing the disasters to one in 500 year events. That language is totally out the window. No more statements like "I've never seen anything like this my entire life." Get used to it. People are going to see a lot more of these climate disasters from now on. As President Biden said, we can't prevent these disasters from happening on a regular basis, but we can do something about them getting a lot worse. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry is running ads on TV about how wonderful the oil and gas industry is, and they are lobbying their evil little hearts out to get politicians on their side.

“The nation and the world are in peril,” President Biden said after touring storm damage in New York and Jersey. “And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact.”

"Folks — and we have to take some bold action now to tackle the accelerating effects of climate. If we don’t act — now I’m going to be heading, as Chuck knows, as the senator knows, I’m going to be heading from here to Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP meeting [United Nations Climate Change Conference], which is all the nations of the world getting together to decide what we are going to do about climate change. And John Kerry, the former secretary of state, is leading our effort, putting it together.

"We are determined, we are determined that we are going to deal with climate change and have zero emissions, net emissions by 2050. By 2020 [sic] (he meant 2030), make sure all our electricity is zero emissions. We’re going to be able to do these things. But we’ve got to move. We’ve got to move. And we’ve got to move the rest of the world. It’s not just the United States of America.

"And so, folks, this summer alone, communities with over 100 million Americans — 100 million Americans call home — have been struck by extreme weather. One in every three Americans has been victimized by severe weather. The hurricanes along the Gulf, the East Coast, up through this community. And I saw the human and physical cost firsthand, as I said, in Louisiana.

"And, folks, the evidence is clear. Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy, and the threat is here, it’s not going to get any better. The question: Can it get worse? We can stop it from getting worse.

"And when I talk about building back better — and Chuck is fighting for my program, for our program on the Hill — when I talk about building back better, I mean you can’t build to what it was before this last storm. You got to build better so that if the storm occurred again, there would be no damage. There would be.

"But that’s not going to stop us, though, because if we just do that, it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse. Because the storms are going to get worse and worse and worse. And so, folks, we’ve got to listen to the scientists and the economists and the national security experts. They all tell us this is code red.

"The nation and the world are in peril. And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact. They’ve been warning us the extreme weather would get more extreme over the decade, and we’re living in it real time now."

Biden is telling it like it is. The American people are in for a lot more of these climate disasters, and we can't stop them immediately. It's going to take decades to get this problem under control, and that's only if we go full steam ahead by taking measures to get it under control. Meanwhile, there are measures which can be taken to mitigate the costs both human and financial from these climate disasters. People must move out of flood plains and areas prone to forest fires. We must underground utilities so that the power doesn't go out during hurricanes and wildfires. That goes for cell phones and cable TV too. People have to have secure means of communication even during a climate disaster. Building codes need to be upgraded. Water management needs to improve so that torrential rains do not just become runoff that turns into floods. That water is precious and needs to be transported to parts of the country that are in more or less perpetual drought. The power grid needs to be hardened. Transportation needs to be electrified. Power generation needs to use renewable sources, and advanced nuclear needs to be developed. Ways of making steel and concrete need to be developed that don't use fossil fuels and the methods of doing so need to be scaled up and spread throughout the whole world. Agriculture needs to be made organic and factory farms eliminated. It's not enough for the US and the developed world to do the right things. Green infrastructure must be developed and spread to the whole world. We must partner with China in a Green Belt and Road Initiative. They are very advanced in building infrastructure throughout the world. While the US has been fighting needless wars, China has been building infrastructure albeit not green infrastructure. From now on coal fired power plants in India and China need to be eliminated and replaced with renewable energy and advanced nuclear power generation.

Off the Top of My Head

The Monument

by John Lawrence, July 8, 2020

Perhaps replacing a statue of George Washington with a statue of Crispus Attucks, who was a black man and the first casualty of the Revolutionary War, would be an appropriate recognition of American history. Crispus Attucks (c.1723 – March 5, 1770) was an American stevedore of African and Native American descent, widely regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre and thus the first American killed in the American Revolution. The Boston Massacre was a confrontation on March 5, 1770 in which British soldiers shot and killed several people while being harassed by a mob in Boston. Attucks was born in Framingham, Massachusetts. Town histories of Framingham written in 1847 and 1887 describe him as a slave of Deacon William Brown, though it is unclear whether Brown was his original owner. In 1750 Brown advertised for the return of a runaway slave named Crispas.

My own American history on one side of my family goes back to about 1650 when Harman Hendricks Rosenkrans arrived from Bergen, Norway. A couple generations later Col. John B Rosenkrans was able to acquire a 1000 acre plantation in the Walpack area of Sussex County, NJ, on which he had African American and Indian slaves. He fought in the French and American War and later in the Revolutionary War. There is a monument to him in Sussex County which consists of a big boulder on which is a metal plaque near the Old Mine Road. I have never been able to find it, but, if anyone wants to topple it because Rosenkrans was a slaveholder, it would be pretty hard to do. Rosenkrans' life is well documented and his role in American history is as well. The New Jersey Society of the Sons of the American Revolution would probably be upset if it were to be toppled, however.

My American ancestors have probably been in this country for 10 generations. That means that I have about 1000 direct American ancestors of whom only one was a slave holder to my knowledge. At least he was an equal opportunity slave holder keeping Native Americans and African Americans as well. I don't even know who most of my American ancestors even are. I must have thousands of cousins, all but a handful, I know nothing of. My Grandmother, Alice Clark, born Alice Rosenkrans, was in the direct line of Col. Rosenkrans so I would be too. So would be my Grandchildren who are of African American as well as European American descent. So the American situation is very complicated. The plot thickens.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation's third President, is a case in point. He had six children with his wife, Martha, but only two survived to adulthood. Martha Jefferson died a few months after giving birth in 1782, and Jefferson's daughters, and later his grandchildren, became the focus of his domestic life supposedly. Jefferson also fathered six children with his slave Sally Hemings.

According to Wikipedia:

Jefferson became a widower at age 39 in 1782. He never remarried and died in 1826. Sally Hemings was his much younger slave and a likely half-sister of his wife. She accompanied his daughter Maria to France, where they are believed to have started a sexual relationship, and returned with him to Monticello. Most historians now believe that Jefferson had a relationship with Sally Hemings that lasted nearly four decades, until his death, and that Jefferson fathered her six children.

Four of Hemings' children survived to adulthood. In the antebellum period, hers would have been called a "shadow family". Sally Hemings was also the child of a shadow family. Historians believe her father to be John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law, who as a widower had a 12-year liaison with his mulatto slave Betty Hemings and fathered six children with her. These children had three-quarters European, one-quarter African ancestry, and were, half-siblings to Jefferson's wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. Sally Hemings is the youngest child of this shadow family. Issac Jefferson described Sally as "mighty near white ... very handsome, long straight hair down her back."

Of the four Hemings children who survived to adulthood: William Beverley, Harriet, Madison and Eston Hemings—all but Madison Hemings eventually identified as white and lived as adults in white communities. Under the Virginia law of partus sequitur ventrem, because Sally Hemings was a slave, her children were also born enslaved. But the children were seven-eighths European, one-eighth African by ancestry. If free, they would have been considered legally white in Virginia of the time.

Oh what tangled webs we weave. Thankfully, the issue of slavery has finally been settled. DNA analysis proved that Jefferson had six children with Sally Hemings who was half black or, evidently much less than half. Jefferson probably has more descendants who have African American blood than those that don't. The same probably holds true for many other slaveholders. So America is a composite of many races and combinations of races.

Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." At the time of this writing it was more wishful thinking than anything else. Jefferson goes on: "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Jefferson said it best - whenever government is destructive of the ends of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, it is the Right of the People to alter it or abolish it and replace it with a government that is more conducive to their Safety and Happiness. Is the present American government conducive to the most Happiness for most of the people? I doubt it. The French Revolution enshrined "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite". As Americans we've left out entirely "Fraternite" or the notion that "we're all in this together." Instead we've enshrined the notion "every person for themself." Egalite also has been given a very twisted definition. Perhaps we should go back to the original writings of the French philosophes who inspired both revolutions.

Off the Top of My Head

President Trump: "We're All in This Together"

by John Lawrence, March 17, 2020

Does that include the homeless, Mr. Trump? Are the homeless over 65 being asked to shelter in place? Does that mean that they keep their same place on the sidewalk? Does it mean that they social distance 6 feet from the next homeless person? Or does it mean that gatherings of 10 or more in homeless shelters need to disperse? Does it mean we should close down the homeless shelters? Does it mean that NIMBYS who don't want parking lots open to homeless people living in their vehicles need to shut their mouths? We want to know, Mr. President. Youth wants to know.

There are 500,000 homeless Americans living on the streets. Are they being asked to shelter in place? It's ridiculous. Rather than have a crash program to put them into single room occupancy units (SROs), they are not even mentioned, not even considered in the President's speech, nor of those of his "team." The coronavirus should sound a clarion call to do something about the homneless situation. Where do you think a pandemic would spread? Probably among the dense crowding of homeless people in San Diego, Los Angeles and Seattle. Especially places where it has been raining a lot. I saw a policeman stop his squad car in the middle of traffic the other day, turn on his patrol lights and deliver a sandwich to a woman who was sitting alone on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. God bless him! My rider told me that his family were all police and they did that a lot. If so, good on them. I know the police are dealing with the homeless a large part of their time which costs money. Also the emergency rooms. Probably bbetween the police and the emergency rooms more money is spent on the homeless than it would cost to put them in SROs.

A few short years ago there was an outbreak  of hepatitus A among the homeless in San Diego and elsewhere. The Washington Post reported:

The hepatitis A outbreak in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Diego, long considered a model of savvy urban redevelopment, is the extreme result of a booming state economy, now driving up home prices after years of government decisions that made low-cost housing more difficult to build.

Unlike in some other large U.S. cities, the homeless population in San Diego has been rising sharply, outstripping the local government's ability to manage its scope. State lawmakers passed more than a dozen measures in the recent legislative session to address the state's lack of affordable housing, none of which will help resolve the crisis in the short term.

Nowhere is the need more urgent than in this prospering city, where the number of people living on the streets rose 14 percent in the past year, tracing a hepatitis A outbreak that thrives in unsanitary conditions. Health officials believe an epidemic that has infected more than 500 people statewide since March began in San Diego County, where 19 people have died as a result of the disease, nearly all of them homeless.

So the hepatitis A outbreak was an epidemic, a few short steps from a pandemic. Washing stations were provided then, and washing stations are being provided now, but so far nothing much has been done about the homeless situation in San Diego and elsewhere. Measure C on the ballot recently, which would have provided $25 million a year to address various issues dealing with the homeless population, failed because it didn't quite achieve a two thirds majority. It garnered about 64% of the vote while it needed 67% to become law. So close but no cigar. So now what? More hand washing stations evidently.

Governor Newsom has moved hundreds of homeless people into hotel rooms “to get people out of these encampments.”. This was after a homeless person died from the coronavirus. The Mercury News reported:

Officials have also said they plan to distribute trailers around the state where homeless people can shelter or be quarantined. And on Monday Newsom said shelters were working to create distance between beds to help stop the spread of the virus.

California has more than 100,000 residents who sleep on the streets on any given night, including thousands of people in the Bay Area.

“We will overwhelm ourselves if we don’t move with real urgency in this space,” he said.

Newsom said his team had identified more than 900 hotels that could be suitable for housing the homeless. His team, he said, was in the process of negotiating to convert some of them into temporary living quarters for the homeless.

Now that there is some urgency in dealing with the homeless situation, you'd think that the state would move to a more permanent solution or are they waiting for the coronavirus to subside so they can just let the homeless go back to living on the street. By the way, "Officials also said that homeless people would be exempt from a Bay Area-wide order to shelter in place. But they urged homeless people to seek shelter and said local governments should work to make shelter available as soon as possible." Really??

UPDATE:

From Voice of San Diego:

Supervisor Nathan Fletcher also noted the county is working to secure at least 2,000 motel rooms for vulnerable San Diegans – whether they are homeless, nursing home residents or simply don’t have a safe place to stay – who may be awaiting a test result or showing symptoms of coronavirus but not require hospitalization.

As of Monday, Fletcher said, the county had secured 227 rooms and the Regional Task Force on the Homeless is working to obtain more motel rooms for homeless San Diegans who are at risk of coronavirus who have not been referred by a healthcare provider.

The New Normal: Extreme Weather Events on a Daily Basis

by John Lawrence

The media just doesn't get it. Practically every day they are reporting disastrous weather events all over the world, but they never make the connection with global warming or climate change if you prefer. And then they tell us that the last snow storm was "historic" in the sense that we won't see another one like that for at least 100 years. And then there are the hundred year floods. The problem is that the hundred year floods and snow storms are happening on a regular basis every few years, and no one seems to notice that labeling them "100 year historic events" is irrelevant. Just recently we've had floods in Australia that covered an area larger than Texas, tornadoes in Missouri that killed several people and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property, mudslides and floods in California. And then everyone goes to the Federal government for financial assistance. Once they get it they go right back to denigrating the Federal government and calling for "smaller government." They want to shrink the Federal government except when it comes time to call on the Federal government for emergency disaster bailouts. Just this morning the chairman of the San Diego city council was on TV saying how he was going to ask the Federal government for a few million to clean up after the last disastrous weather event.

And as long as these weather events involve "cold" weather, the right wing trots out their criticisms of Al Gore and laughs up their sleeve at "global warming." Even though the globe is warming at the poles, it doesn't mean it's warming everywhere else. Be that as it may, I like the term "climate change" better than "global warming" because it's a more apt description of what's really going on - more numerous and more violent freaky and disastrous weather events. These weather events usually involve high winds whether they are storms, blizzards, tornadoes or hurricanes, and, therefore, are more destructive. There are also increasing amounts of precipitation. Areas not previously flooded are nowadays deluged with inches of rain in a short period of time. Flash flooding is becoming increasingly common. It turns out that changing the gaseous composition of the atmosphere by pouring millions of tons of greenhouse gases and other pollutants into it is a very unwise thing to do. Scientists have determined that 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide is the safe upper limit. Currently, there are 388 parts per million and the trend is upward. We're not having to wait for 50 years to see the destructive effects. They're happening right before our very eyes, but the media won't make that connection.

It really doesn't matter if the globe is warming or not if, by changing the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, the results are that the earth will experience more and more violent and catastrophic weather events on a regular basis. Would the global warming deniers be more pleased if we are coming into an ice age, albeit an ice age with violent blizzards and thunder and lightning snow storms? Because that's the key - not whether the earth is warming, but whether the weather is becoming more violent and destructive.

This is from 350.org:

Here in the U.S., the end of 2010 has been marked by a grim series of winter storms. On the East Coast, hundreds of cities and towns, from the coast of Virginia to the Northeastern state of Maine, have been hit by an intense blizzard that has led to the cancellation of thousands of flights and left public transportation stranded on its tracks. On the West Coast, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in Southern California, as a deluge of rain flooded coastal and inland areas and mudslides destroyed dozens of properties. Quoted in Climate Progress, “Re-insurer ‘Munich Re’, whose natural catastrophe database is ‘the most comprehensive of its kind in the world,’ has said ‘The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.’ To learn more about the link between climate change and extreme weather conditions, check out this recent blog on Climate Progress with Climatologist Ben Santer.   As the planet continues to warm, crippling climactic events, from droughts to blizzards to floods, are only going to become more frequent and more intense. Even so, it’s unlikely that comprehensive climate legislation will be passed anytime in the near future in the United States. Many new members of Congress, backed by the oil and coal industries, are climate deniers and will do what they can to stand in the way of progress; for example, the incoming House Science Chair Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas) was quoted as saying that he saw the BP disaster as a “tremendous” display of our potential to produce energy, so we clearly have a rough road ahead of us.

The mainstream media will go to great lengths to not make a connection between extreme weather events and global warming or climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions. They will pooh pooh the tragedies as people lose their homes and their lives and call for Federal emergency disaster assistance, but will not deal with the implication that perhaps the US government should devote major resources to the effort of renewable energy and getting us off the dependency on oil and gas. The oil and gas lobby wants the dependency on oil and gas to continue. After all that's how they make their money, and they can afford to live in less disaster prone parts of the country where, God willing, the creek won't rise.

And for those who don't want to believe the climate scientists, maybe they would believe the insurance industry instead.

 

Washington, D.C. The Real Haiti Tragedy: Nearly $1 billion in Aid Held Up By One Senator

October 8, 2010

By `

(The Loop21) — While hundreds of thousands suffer without water, electricity, and shelter in Haiti, one man from the privileged comfort of his tax payer supported Washington D.C. office has held $917 million in aid to Haiti hostage. Earlier this year the United States pledged to provide nearly a billion dollars in aid to help rebuild earthquake ravaged Haiti. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed legislation making $917 million available for the rebuilding effort. Because Congress did not spell out exactly how the money was to be spent, a separate authorization bill accomplishing this task was needed. Without the authorization bill the money would not be dispersed.

Using a little heard of device known as the Senate hold, Senator Tom Coburn (R) has blocked this authorization bill from reaching the floor of the Senate, in effect holding hostage well over $900 million needed to re-build earthquake ravaged Haiti.

His justification – a $5 million provision in the authorization bill he considers wasteful. Never mind the fact the provision would fund a Haiti coordinator charged with developing a rebuilding strategy for the country. According to the Associated Press, $1 million a year for five years would be used to pay for the coordinator and a staff of up to seven people.

Rather than waste money, it seems like such a coordinator position would actually save money by ensuring funds were spent according to a well thought out plan.

Nevertheless, Senator Coburn seems fine blocking desperately needed funds over a provision that constitutes less than 0.6 percent of the spending authorization bill.

One can only wonder about the true motives of Senator Coburn’s actions. As a man who so proudly touts his Christian conservative roots, shouldn’t Coburn heed the spirit of his faith – one that calls for compassion and admonishes believers to help those less fortunate than ourselves? As a physician shouldn’t Coburn be more in tune with human suffering?

Coburn’s actions are emblematic of an even larger problem – a hopelessly broken Senate, one in which arcane rules adversely affect the lives of real people. The Senate hold Coburn placed on the Haitian aid authorization bill is a prime example.

Not only does a hold allow a Senator to block legislation from coming to the Senate floor for a vote, but it allows the Senator to do this in complete anonymity. Only investigative reporting by the Associated Press uncovered Senator Coburn as the senator responsible for blocking aid to Haiti.

In a democratic system, a single senator shouldn’t have the power to so cowardly hold legislation, impeding the work of Congress in the process. Yet, Republicans have used holds not only to block legislation but to also prevent the appointment of Presidential nominees.

Senator Richard Shelby (R) earlier this year blocked an unprecedented 70 Presidential appointments. Republican blocks on judicial nominees have been so numerous that a dangerously high 103 appointments in federal district and appellate courts remain unfulfilled.

Just as devastating has been the Republican use of the filibuster, a tactic that forces 60 senators to agree before a bill can proceed to passage instead of a simple 51 percent majority.

Good legislation has repeatedly been stalled or sacrificed at the hand of the filibuster, even when a majority of Senators were in favor of it.

Among them – legislation to end tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ban on gays in the military, extension of unemployment benefits for the jobless, small business tax cuts, and emergency aid to states to save the jobs of thousands of teachers and public employees.

In fact, by early this year the House of Representatives had already passed 290 pieces of legislation that subsequently stalled in the Senate – a place where legislation and common sense go to die. In the process real Americans facing real problems have suffered.

And where has the media been in all this? It seems they would rather report on the antics of the Tea Party than shine light on a dysfunctional Senate. Are we a culture that would rather hear about Lindsay Lohan’s latest arrest than the inhuman actions of a leader who prevents aid from reaching earthquake victims?

Was Haiti just the “flavor of the month”? Have we so quickly forgotten the human suffering and devastation, moving on to the next item in our 24/7 news cycle?

The devastation in Haiti was a true human tragedy. Yet equally as tragic is a broken Senate whose rules allow politicians to capriciously obstruct legislation that could help millions of people.

Now that you think about it, should we even be surprised Senator Coburn is holding desperately needed aid to Haiti hostage? His own party in the Senate has been holding the American public hostage for nearly two years.

Mozambique's Food Riots – the True Face of Global Warming

Published on Sunday, September 5, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

The violence in Maputo is just the latest manifestation of the crippling shortcomings of the global economy

by Raj Patel

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming. But to see how climate change will play out in the 21st century, you needn't look to the Met Office. Look, instead, to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique's "food riots" to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust economic systems.

 

A boy carries home loaves of bread in Bulawayo, about 400 km (249 miles) outside Harare, April 11,2007. Global commodity speculators continue to treat food as if it were the same as television sets, with little end in sight to what the World Development Movement has called "gambling on hunger in financial markets". (File: REUTERS/Emmanuel Chitate)

The immediate causes of the protests in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, and Chimoio about 500 miles north, are a 30% price increase for bread, compounding a recent double-digit increase for water and energy. When nearly three-quarters of the household budget is spent on food, that's a hike few Mozambicans can afford.

 

Deeper reasons for Mozambique's price hike can be found a continent away. Wheat prices have soared on global markets over the summer in large part because Russia, the world's third largest exporter, has suffered catastrophic fires in its main production areas. These blazes, in turn, find their origin both in poor firefighting infrastructure and Russia's worst heatwave in over a century. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin extended an export ban in response to a new wave of wildfires in its grain belt, sending further signals to the markets that Russian wheat wouldn't be available outside the country. With Mozambique importing over 60% of the wheat its people needs, the country has been held hostage by international markets.

This may sound familiar. In 2008, the prices of oil, wheat, corn and rice peaked on international markets – corn prices almost tripled between 2005-2008. In the process, dozens of food-importing countries experienced food riots.

Behind the 2008 protests were, first, natural events that looked like an excerpt from the meteorological section of the Book of Revelation – drought in Australia, crop disease in central Asia, floods in south-east Asia. These were compounded by the social systems through which their effects were felt. Oil prices were sky-high, which meant higher transport costs and fossil fuel-based fertiliser prices. Biofuel policy, particularly in the US, shifted land and crops from food into ethanol production, diverting food from stomachs to fuel tanks. Longer term trends in population growth and meat consumption in developing countries also added to the stress. Financial speculators piled into food commodities, driving prices yet further beyond the reach of the poor. Finally, some retailers used the opportunity to raise prices still further, and while commodity prices have fallen back to pre-crisis levels, most of us have yet to see the savings.

Is this 2008 all over again? The weather has gone wild, meat prices have hit a 20-year high, groceries are being looted and heads of state are urging calm. The view from commodities desks, however, is that we're not in quite as dire straits as two years ago. Fuel is relatively cheap and grain stores well stocked. We're on track for the third-highest wheat crop ever, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). While all this is true, it misses the point: for most hungry people, 2008 isn't over. The events of 2007-2008 tipped more than 100 million into hunger and the global recession has meant that they have stayed there. In 2006, the number of  undernourished people was 854 million. In 2009, it was 1.02 billion – the highest level since records began. The hardest hit by these price rises, in the US and around the world, were female-headed households.

Not only are the hungry still around, but food riots have continued. In India, double-digit food price inflation was met by violent street protests at the end of 2009. The price rises were, again, the result of both extreme and unpredictable monsoons in 2009 and an increasingly faulty social safety net to prevent hunger. There have been frequent public protests about the price of wheat in Egypt this year, and Serbia and Pakistan have seen protests too.

Although commodity prices fell after 2008, the food system's architecture has remained largely the same over the past two decades. Bill Clinton has offered several mea culpas for the international trade and development policies that spawned the food crisis. Earlier this year, he blamed himself for Haiti's vulnerability to price fluctuations. "I did that," he said in testimony to the US Senate. "I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else." More generally, Clinton suggested in 2008 that "food is not a commodity like others… it is crazy for us to think we can develop a lot of these countries [by] treating food like it was a colour television set."

Yet global commodity speculators continue to treat food as if it were the same as television sets, with little end in sight to what the World Development Movement has called "gambling on hunger in financial markets". The recent US Wall Street Reform Act contained some measures that might curb these speculative activities, but their full scope has yet to be clarified. Europe doesn't have a mechanism to regulate these kinds of speculative trades at all. Agriculture in the global south is still subject to the "Washington consensus" model, driven by markets and with governments taking a back seat to the private sector. And the only reason biofuels aren't more prominent is that the oil they're designed to replace is currently cheap.

Clearly, neither grain speculation, nor forcing countries to rely on international markets for food, nor encouraging the use of agricultural resources for fuel instead of nourishment are natural phenomena. These are political decisions, taken and enforced not only by Bill Clinton, but legions of largely unaccountable international development professionals. The consequences of these decisions are ones with which people in the global south live everyday. Which brings us back to Mozambique.

Recall that Mozambique's street protests coincided not only with a rise in the price of bread, but with electricity and water price hikes too. In an interview with Portugal's Lusa news agency, Alice Mabota of the Mozambican League of Human Rights didn't use the term "food riots". In her words: "The government… can't understand or doesn't want to understand that this is a protest against the higher cost of living." The action on the streets isn't simply a protest about food, but a wider act of rebellion. Half of Mozambique's poor already suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the FAO. The extreme weather behind the grain fires in Russia transformed a political context in which citizens were increasingly angry and frustrated with their own governments.

Yesterday, I reached Diamantino Nhampossa, the co-ordinator of Mozambique's União Nacional de Camponeses (National Peasants Union of Mozambique). "These protests are going to end," he told me. "But they will always come back. This is the gift that the development model we are following has to offer." Like many Mozambicans, he knows full well which way the wind blows.

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

We Need a Grand and Global Alliance...Against the Common Enemies of Man: Natural Disasters!

Gordon Brown

Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Posted: August 25, 2010 08:20 AM by Huffington Post

We can't carry on like this: an emergency of incredible proportions only half funded; vital days used up talking about aid fatigue -- and what we have not done -- instead of urgent need -- what we now have to do.

The Pakistan floods are the world's biggest emergency -- 60,000 square miles under water, 20 million people displaced, 14 million in need of emergency health care, six million short of food, two and a half million homeless. It is a tragedy whose book of names of lives lost, presumed dead, will never be complete. And my abiding image is of the outstretched hand of a young child begging for food that will arrive too late.

Too many are without help and also without hope. And the worst condition of all is sorrow without hope, pain without end, suffering without relief. In my view four steps must be taken urgently. Every country should commit this week to double its aid and offer to match private contributions dollar for dollar. With president Zardari's agreement governments should offer military as well as civilian support to repair the damage. Governments must now agree to pre-finance the Central Emergency Response Fund. We should agree on the need for a new UN civilian reconstruction agency drawing on the world's engineers, builders and public health workers to repair bridges, roads, houses, schools and farms.

Of course I understand that this time the destruction has come not in a few cataclysmic moments or hours, but over many days in a relentless and rising tide of catastrophe. And so this is a tragedy compounded by paradox. For while the scale of the casualties gets greater and greater, the steadily evolving nature of this crisis -- the spreading floods, the constantly higher water levels, the gathering hunger crisis -- have made the sense of emergency seem less.

The crisis did not appear in a flash that shocked the world's conscience; but it must now command the world's most urgent resolve.

We know Pakistan cannot cope on its own. UN agencies, global aid organizations and individual governments have provided food rations for one million of the hungry, and one million of the homeless have some kind of shelter. But the need is so much more and the lives, livelihoods and health of millions more hang in the balance. A crisis this great demands what President Kennedy called "A grand and global alliance...against the common enemies of man."

First the way to help all aid organizations on the ground move more aid further and more quickly is to send a signal of enhanced help now and in weeks to come: to announce both an immediate doubling of aid contributions and that governments will match dollar for dollar every dollar donated privately to the organizations on the ground. Potential donors should be reminded constantly that one payment of $25 will feed a family of six for a week and one payment of $250 could house a family long into the future. And we should not say this once, but over and over. Attention must be paid for as long as the crisis lasts and the recovery takes.

Second, mobilization of the scale of aid we need requires not just civilian organizations, but the armies and air forces of the world bringing not weapons but sustenance. And while they must respect the independence of the humanitarian agencies, only they can provide the heavy lift capacity that is needed. The reconstruction work still to be done in Haiti is not an excuse: a world that can fight so many wars simultaneously can answer two great crises at the same time.

Third we must support the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund with greater backstop reserves to provide immediate help without waiting for the usual whip-round of nations. Because this is not the first nor the last of sudden emergencies, we need to properly pre-fund this agency without delay.

Fourth, schools and hospitals, canals, roads and communications must all be repaired. This requires expertise as well as resources. I have proposed a global reconstruction corps to offer civilian help -- engineers, doctors, builders -- to build homes, rebuild the schools, staff the hospitals and get agriculture and industry moving again. We have set up a British corps -- and a global volunteer corps is more important and imperative than ever. To make it effective on the ground in Pakistan we need of course an agreement with all Pakistani parties that they will use and work with a Reconstruction Corps.

But we do have to ask ourselves one big question: If we cannot be moved to do more when 20 million people are stranded, some under water, all homeless, then when will be do more? If we cannot the answer the summons of a global ethic that, no matter how distant we are all neighbors -- if we cannot see that when we see people dying on our TV screens -- when will we as a global community rise to our shared humanity? In words we have heard before, if not now, when? and where and how?

Is the Pakistan Flood a Harbinger of Things to Come?

by John Lawrence

20 million people in Pakistan are destitute, desperate, homeless and without any means of supporting themselves due to the recent and ongoing flooding of the Indus River. These people, if they survive, will be absolutely dependent on handouts for food, clean water, clothing and shelter for the foreseeable future. It's deja vu all over again. First the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, then the earthquake in Haiti and now this. The frequency of natural disasters is increasing. They are happening all over the earth from the flooding in China to the forest fires in Russia. What's happening?

Flooding is directly attributable to global warming whereas earthquakes are not. However, the results have been the same in Haiti and Pakistan: large numbers of basically poor people, urbanized in the case of Haiti and rural subsistence farmers in the case of Pakistan have been devastated and turned into basket cases dependent on the charity of those more fortunate. However, after the huge response to the Haiti debacle, compassion fatigue has set in in the case of Pakistan.

Two out of three of these disasters were triggered by earthquakes which, so far as we know, have nothing to do with global warming. But flooding definitely does. The earth's warming atmosphere absorbs more water which causes not mere rain storms but deluges. Flash flooding as well as prolonged downpours are becoming more common. This is probably the most common form of havoc that global warming will continue to wreak. And we can expect this situation to become even more dire since most of the world's population lives close to a river. Civilization developed this way because human beings are dependent on a source of water for their crops and for drinking, cooking and bathing.

In addition to flooding, global warming also produces warmer atmospheric temperatures which, when combined with higher wind velocities, dry out forests making them more susceptible to fire. So we can expect more forest fires as time goes on. Warmer ocean temperatures produce more powerful hurricanes and weather becomes more violent in general producing more and more powerful tornadoes. All these kinds of weather and climate related activities with the exception of earthquakes are related to global warming. And the amount of carbon in the atmosphere which causes global warming continues to increase. As of July 2010 it was 390 parts per million and increasing, well above the value of 350 parts per million thought safe by scientists.

This was reported 21 August 2010 by Voice of America:

More than 127,000 people have been evacuated in northeastern China following severe flooding that has already claimed at least 1,400 lives this month. China's official Xinhua news agency reported Sunday that in Dandong city alone, located on the rain-swollen Yalu River which separates China from North Korea, more than 94,000 residents were evacuated amid widespread power and communications failures.  At least 5,100 residents have been evacuated from affected areas in North Korea. Downpours since Thursday have led to flash floods that swept away homes about 100 kilometers northeast of Dandong, killing four people.  Weather forecasters warn up to 25 centimeters more rain could hit the area in the next 24 hours. Flood-related incidents in China this year have claimed nearly 4,000 lives - victims who are either confirmed dead or have disappeared in the torrents.  Chinese emergency officials say the casualty toll from massive mudslides earlier this month in Zhouqu County in northwest China's Gansu Province stands at 1,434 dead, with 331 people still missing.

When combined with overpopulation, massive disasters produced by global warming affecting very poor or subsistence level people will take their eventual toll on the earth's demographics. Either large numbers of people will just die or migrate or be bailed out by more affluent people with a consequent drain on their resources. As it is, even without any recurrent natural disasters, a billion of the world's people don't have access to clean drinking water and even more are without  adeqate sanitation. Furthermore, those that do have access to clean water sometimes have to travel miles to get it.

Nearly 2 billion people live in water-stressed areas of the world and 3 billion have no running water within a kilometre of their homes. Every eight seconds a child dies of a waterborne disease, in every case preventable if their parents had money to pay for water. And it is getting worse as the world runs out of clean water. A new World Bank reports says that by 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by more than 40%, a shocking prediction that foretells of terrible suffering.

Flooding only decreases the availability of clean drinking water. It is water that is lost to humanity's use as it ends up uncontrolled in the oceans.

According to the US Geological Survey, floods were the number-one natural disaster in the United States in terms of the number of lives lost and property damage in the 20th century. On June 12, 2010, dozens of Americans were killed after a flash flood occurred at an Arkansas campsite. On August 18, 2010 flash floods deluged Tennessee. On August 9, 2010 heavy rains brought flash floods to Iowa leaving thousands without power.

Natural disasters occurring in developed countries don't cause the destitution of millions of people because there are resources available in surrounding areas. However, the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is still being recovered from. Destruction of infrastructure and the devastation of private property though brings disaster to those affected. In more vulnerable parts of the world, however, natural disasters can cause mass devastation and cause mass migration to urban areas because of the loss of subsistence farming. This increases the population density of urban slums.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis recounts the possible horrors produced by the increasing urbanizatrion of former subsistance farmers as they move into big city slums. And he doen't even take into account that natural disasters will be a contributing factor. In Haiti, after the market was flooded with US rice, Haitian farmers wre no longer able to make a living and became part of Port au Prince's urban slum population. Bill Clinton has subsequently apologized for policies of his administration which produced this debacle. This compounded the disaster produced by the earthquake.

So what's the denouement? There will be increasing natural disasters produced by global warming. They will cause massive human crises when they occur in poor or developing countries. Mass migrations from rural to urban areas will only increase the slum populations of the world as there will not be enough jobs created to support formerly subsistance farmers. Natural disasters will cause more widespread havoc in both human terms and property damage than terrorists could ever cause, but the increasing dislocation of people will add fuel to the fire of terrorism. Instead of spending massive amounts of money on the military-industrial complex and militarism, those amounts will be required in order to recover from natural disasters. Mother Earth will take her revenge and command those resources. Maybe the lesson will be made clear: we're all in this together at least when it comes to planet wide natural disasters.

Nations Have Compassion Fatigue When It Comes To Pakistan Floods. First Haiti, Now Pakistan. It's a Disaster a Day!

Why The Unfolding Disaster in Pakistan Should Concern You

by Robert Reich

Thursday, August 19, 2010

The human tragedy unfolding in Pakistan right now demands our full attention.

Flooding there has already stranded 20 million people, more than 10 percent of the population. A fifth of the nation is underwater. More than 3.5 million children are in imminent danger of contracting cholera and acute diarrhea; millions more are in danger of starving if they don’t get help soon. More than 1,500 have already been killed by the floods.

This is a human disaster.

It’s also a frightening opening for the Taliban.

Yet so far only a trickle of aid has gotten through. As of today (Thursday), the U.S. has pledged $150 million, along with 12 helicopters to take food and material to the victims. (Other rich nations have offered even less – the U.K., $48.5 million; Japan, $10 million, and France, a measly $1 million. Today (Thursday), Hillary Clinton is speaking at the UN, seeking more.)

This is bizarre and shameful. We’re spending over $100 billion this year on military maneuvers to defeat the Taliban in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. Over 200 helicopters are deployed in that effort. And we’re spending $2 billion in military aid to Pakistan.

More must be done for flood victims, immediately.

Beyond helping to prevent mass disease and starvation we’ll also need to help Pakistan rebuild. Half of the nation’s people depend on agriculture for their livelihood, and a large portion of the nation’s crops and agricultural land have been destroyed. Roads, bridges, railways, and irrigation systems have been wiped out.

Last year, Congress agreed to a $7.5 billion civilian aid package to Pakistan to build roads, bridges, and schools. That should be quadrupled.

While they’re at it, Congress should remove all tariffs on textiles and clothing from Pakistan. Textiles and clothing are half Pakistan’s exports. More than half of all Pakistanis are employed growing cotton, weaving it into cloth, or cutting and sewing it into clothing. In the months and years ahead, Pakistan will have to rely ever more on these exports.

Yet we impose a 17 percent tariff on textiles and clothing from Pakistan. If we removed it, Pakistan’s exports would surge $5 billion annually. That would boost the wages of millions there.

That tariff also artificially raises the price of the clothing and textiles you and I buy. How many American jobs do we protect by this absurdity? Almost none. Instead, we’ve been importing more textiles and clothing from China and other East Asian nations. China subsidizes its exports with an artificially-low currency.

If you’re not moved by the scale of the disaster and its aftermath, consider that our future security is inextricably bound up with the future for Pakistan. Of 175 million Pakistanis, some 100 million are under age 25. In the years ahead they’ll either opt for gainful employment or, in its absence, may choose Islamic extremism.

We are already in a war for their hearts and minds, as well as those of young people throughout the Muslim world.

Right now, Islamic insurgents are using the chaos as an opportunity, attacking police posts in Pakistan’s northwest while police have been occupied in rescue and relief work. Meanwhile, lacking help and losing hope, many Pakistanis are becoming increasingly hostile toward President Asif Ali Zardari.

And, of course, Pakistan has the bomb.

What can you do? Government efforts are important but so is private giving. Check the New York Times’s Lede blog for organizations providing disaster relief. The Oxfam website has lots of good information about who’s doing what, and how effectively

Maude Barlow: 'The World Has Divided into Rich and Poor as at No Time in History'

Published on Friday, July 2, 2010 by Democracy Now!

 

As world leaders gathered in Toronto for the G20 summit last week, leading activists from around the world joined thousands in Toronto’s Massey Hall to oppose the G20 agenda. Among those who spoke was Maude Barlow. She heads the Council of Canadians—Canada’s largest public advocacy organization. She’s founder of the Blue Planet Project. This is a part of what she had to say.

MAUDE BARLOW: On the eve of this G-20 gathering, let’s look at a few facts. Fact, the world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in our history. The richest 2% own more than half the household wealth in the world. The richest 10% hold 85% of total global assets and the bottom half of humanity owns less than 1% of the wealth in the world. The three richest men in the world have more money than the poorest 48 countries. Fact, while those responsible for the 2008 global financial crisis were bailed out and even rewarded by the G-20 government’s gathering here, the International Labor Organization tells us that in 2009, 34 million people were added to the global unemployed, swelling those ranks to 239 million, the highest ever recorded. Another 200 million are at risk in precarious jobs and the World Bank tells us that at the end of 2010, another 64 million will have lost their jobs. By 2030, more than half the population of the megacities of the Global South will be slumdwellers with no access to education, health care, water, or sanitation. Fact, global climate change is rapidly advancing, claiming at least 300,000 lives and $125 billion in damages every year. Called the silent crisis, climate change is melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban centers. Almost every victim lives in the Global South in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and not represented here at the summit.

The atmosphere has already warmed up a full degree in the last several decades and is on course to warm up another two degrees by 2100. In fact, half the tropical forests in the world, the lungs of our ecosystem, are gone. By 2030, at the present rate of extraction or so-called harvest, only 10% will be left standing. 90% of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practice. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise, there is no blue frontier left. Half the world’s wetlands, the kidneys of our ecosystem, have been destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate 1,000 times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian science, we are headed toward of biodiversity deficit in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than nature can replace them with new ones. Fact, we are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, two million tons of sewage and industrial agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water. That’s the equivalent of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of waste water produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. We are minding our ground water faster than we can replenish it, sucking it to grow water guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities who dump an astounding 700 trillion liters of land-based water into oceans every year as waste.

The global mining industry sucks up another 800 trillion liters which it also leaves behind as poison and fully one-third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. Nearly three billion people on our planet do not have running water within a kilometer of their home and every eight seconds, somewhere in our world, a child is dying of waterborne disease. The global water crisis is getting steadily worse with reports of countries from India to Pakistan to Yemen facing depletion. The World Bank says that by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40%. This may sound just like a statistic, but the suffering behind that is absolutely unspeakable. Fact, knowing there will not be enough food and water for all in the near future, wealthy countries and global investment pension and hedge funds are buying up land and water, fields and forests in the Global South, creating a new wave of invasive colonialism that will have huge geopolitical ramifications. Rich countries faced by food shortages have already bought up an area in Africa alone more than twice the size of the United kingdom. Now I don’t think I exaggerate if I say that our world has never faced a greater set of threats and issues that it does today. So what are the twenty leaders who have gathered here, some already here and the others coming in tonight, what are they going to talk about over the next two days? By the way, their summit costs $1 million a minute. By the way, we figure it’s going to be closer to $2 billion when it’s finished and the annual budget to run the United Nations is $1.9 billion. I assure you, they are not going to tackle the above issues in any serious way.

The declarations have already been drafted, the failures already spun. Instead, this global royalty who have more in common with one another than they do with their own citizens and are here really to advance the issues and interest of their class are also here just to advance the status quo that serves the interest of the elite in their own countries and the business community or the B-20, the new term, a community that will get private and privileged access to advance their free market solutions to these eager leaders. The agenda is more of the bad medicine that made the world sick in the first place. Environmental deregulation, unbridled financial speculation, unlimited growth, unregulated free trade, relentless resource exploitation, tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to Social Security and a war on working people. In other words, savage capitalism. Now let’s look at our own country here and the assault that has been launched on the work of generations of Canadians toward a just society. Stephen Harper’s government has cut the heart out of any group that dissents, from First Nations people, to women, to international agencies and church groups like KAIROS, Alternative, and the Canadian Council for International Cooperation.

AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow, one of the major speakers at the event at Massey Hall on Friday night. Three thousand people packed-in to the Toronto event. This was at the same time the G8 and then the G20 met. Between 900 and 1,000 people are believed to have been arrested, the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. Among them, many journalists. More than a billion dollars it’s believed were spent on so-called security, the most expensive security event in Canadian history. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. You can get a copy of today’s show at our website, democracynow.org. You can go there for our coverage of Toronto when we were broadcasting from there last Friday. I’m Amy Goodman, back in a minute.

Oil Companies Go All Out to Save Walruses in Gulf of Mexico

by John Lawrence

Not only did BP's detailed emergency response plan for the Gulf of Mexico call for saving walruses, why so did Exxon Mobil's, Conaco Phillip's, Chevron's, Shell's and virtually every other oil company drilling there. You wouldn't think there was so much concern about the Mexican Walrus, but evidently there is.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mass.) took the companies to task for devoting substantially more of their plans to laying out its media response -- complete with pre-prepared press releases -- than on how it would limit the environmental damages caused by a spill. "It could be said that BP is the one bad apple in the bunch, but it appears they have plenty of company," Stupak said. Markey and Waxman both pointed out that four of the five companies noted in their Gulf spill-response plans how they would protect walruses, which do not live in the Gulf of Mexico. "It's unfortunate that walruses are included, and it's an embarrassment that they were included," Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said after being pressed by Markey early in the question-and-answer portion of the hearing.

Well, the explanation for this series of embarassments is really quite simple. All these oil companies outsourced their emergency response plans to the same company. That company, after being paid quite well I would assume, then went to their Xerox machine and simply copied the emergency response plan that they had already prepared for drilling in the Arctic. Then they simply Xeroxed it again and again as each company requested an emergency response plan. It only makes sense that each emergency response plan for the Gulf would be virtually identical. But not that an emergency response plan for the Gulf would be identical to one for the Arctic Circle!

But wait that's not all. All these emergency response plans contained the name and phone number of a man whom it was really, really important to call in case they got themselves into any kind of oil spill trouble. Only problem was that the emergency response plans for 2010 didn't adequately explain the fact that this man had been dead for five years. I assume his phone had been disconnected. You see it really is all about profits and not at all about safety. The oversight to oil company drilling, the MMS, was set up by James Watt, a Reagan appointee, whose philosophy, when it came to regulation, was "the hell with regulation, let the oil companies do anything they damn please." Is it any wonder then that BP has gotten itself into such a fine pickle? All their sought after profits are going flying out the window as they have to pay for this and they have to pay for that.

And it looks like all those anti-regulation guys who also got it passed through Congress to limit oil companies' liability to $75 million have gone down in defeat due to the enormity of the disaster because BP agreed today to put $20 billion in escrow to pay off economic claims. Bush and Cheney tried to put off the financial collapse of 2008 until the Democrats took over in 2009 but their timing was a little off. The collapse actually occurred during the tenure of their own administration. They were luckier with the Gulf disaster. All their anti-regulatory rhetoric and appointees didn't result in disaster until Obama took over. Therefore, as their logic goes, we should blame Obama. They set up the disaster; now it's Obama's job to clean it up, and, furthermore, to take the blame for it. And the blowhards of the right are doing everything in their power to stick Obama with the onus.

The oil administration of Bush and Cheney did everything in their power to favor oil company drilling and the continued use of oil for energy even though Carter had warned 30 years ago that that wasn't such a good idea due to the fact that we have to buy most of our oil from abroad and due to the fact that putting more carbon into the atmosphere is accelerating the pace of global warming. He installed solar panels on the roof of the White House which were peremptorily taken down by Ronald Reagan as he proclaimed Morning in America. We Americans shouldn't have to worry about such things as global warming. Let the gas guzzling resume, said Reagan.

Only now the chickens are coming home to roost in the form of flash floods caused by unheard of quantities of rain falling in a short period of time. This is directly attributable to global warming. The increased ferocity of storms and tornadoes can be attributed to global warming. The warmer the atmosphere the more precipitation there will be. The warmer the atmosphere, the higher wind velocities there will be. Put those together and you have a formula for increased destruction of life and property which we have seen recently in Nashville, Oklahoma City a campground in Arkansas and elsewhere. And it's all directly attributable to oil, the oil Carter wanted to phase out and the oil Reagan, Bush and Cheney gloried in.

If Carter's warnings had been heeded, we would be well on our way to a solarized America, an America in which wind power and other forms of alternative energy would be replacing oil. Instead, because we listened to Reagan, Bush and Cheney, America is losing its lead in green technology to China and other countries while we are reaping the whirlwind of natural and manmade disasters. And it's all about oil. The President must proclaim one area after another disaster zones and give them emergency Federal aid. That alone is breaking the budget. While scores of people are being killed by natural disasters and hardly any by terrorists, we are spending trillions on chasing a few al Quaeda stragglers and in the wrong places I might add. It's like that old song, "Looking for love in all the wrong places." We're looking for al Quaeda in all the wrong places. Hey, wake up. They're actually in Yemen, Somalia and America, and they're not killing Americans at anywhere near the same rate that natural and corporate funded disasters are. Maybe we should spend the money we're now spending on the military-industrial complex more wisely.

And now the US is too poor to invest in solar and wind energy. That must be left to private enterprise which isn't much interested. The oil industry has tons of lobbyists whose purpose in life is to see that oil remains the chief source of energy in the US and that the oil industry continues to receive subsidies and tax breaks when it should be paying royalties for every barrel drilled. Obama gives lip service to mass transit, high speed rail and solar and wind industries. But he is too poor and the US is too poor to do anything about it, and, besides, the oil companies want to keep things just the way they are until they figure out how to monopolize solar and wind energy. Then they might be interested in transferring over. Good luck with that.

Will Obama Use the Gulf Oil Spill to Demand a Shift to Alternative Energy?

Published on Sunday, June 6, 2010 by TomDispatch.com

If There Was Ever a Moment to Seize

Will Obama Stand Up to Big Energy in Deeds as Well as Words?

by Bill McKibben

Here's the president on March 31st, announcing his plan to lift a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling: "Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy."

Here he is on May 26th, as political pressure starts to really build over the hole in the bottom of the sea that BP somehow seems unable to plug: "We're not going to be able to sustain this kind of fossil fuel use. The planet can't sustain it." Still, he added quickly, there's no need for any dramatics: "We're not going to transition out of oil next year or 10 years from now."

And here is the president last Wednesday, after yet another gimcrack solution at 5,000 feet under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico had gone awry, and real anger at the administration's lackluster performance crested: "[T]he time has come to aggressively accelerate [the transition from fossil fuels.] The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future."

The question is: which one is the real Obama? Has he really been transformed by the oil spill in the Gulf, or is he merely trying to ride out the public reaction with stronger words? I think the answer is as murky as the water off Mobile. We don't know because so far it's all words -- the closest he's come to specifics is that pledge that we won't be off oil in a decade.

Which, of course, is true. Ten years from now, we'll still be using oil -- many of the people who bought new Fords this year will still be driving them in 2020. Exxon will still be in business. But this realism didn't necessarily preclude him from saying so much more than he did. Had he chosen to, he could have declared: "Ten years from now, America will be using half the oil we do today and producing ten times as much solar power." That would have been stirring. That would have put something on the line.

He could, in other words, have done what President John F. Kennedy did, when he found himself with a 10-year timetable. In a special address to Congress in May 1961, JFK urged that America commit itself to the goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." He demanded of Congress "a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs."

A year later, at roughly the same stage in his presidency as Obama is in his, Kennedy took to the stage at Rice University, having just toured nearby NASA labs. There, he gave a great speech. (If you think Obama has a masterful speechwriting team, compare his flabby remarks in California to Kennedy's slightly shorter gem.) Its core went like this:

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone."

Now, let's catalogue the differences: Kennedy had the Cold War to help him, along with an accelerating economy and a strong congressional majority. Obama presides over a fragile economy, a fractious Congress, and must deal with a lunatic right that, at the last Republican convention, came together around the slogan "Drill, Baby, Drill."

Not only that, but the challenge he faces is so much tougher. The Apollo mission was technically complex, but in a sense the very opposite of our energy challenge: a moon shot meant focusing all our energy on three guys and a rocket, while an energy revolution would mean, in essence, landing all of us on a different planet, one where we no longer need the fossil fuels that are currently the engine for our economy. So, advantage Kennedy. In addition, no organized interest was fighting the space shot -- if anything, big corporations were lining up for a piece of the action.

Still, as Andy Revkin recently pointed out in the New York Times, there is "every reason to think a contemporary president could articulate how this remarkable juncture in human history, as infinite aspirations butt up against planetary limits, can be met with a grand, sustained effort."

Especially because Kennedy was taking a flier, there was no one demanding he go to the moon, and no real penalty for not even trying. (Lots of people thought we could have spent the money better close to home.) Obama, however, has no choice. The planet's future (and his legacy) will, in the long run, be defined by his response to global warming, which is clearly the greatest problem humans have ever faced.

Forget the Cold War. Last week, new satellite data showed that this summer's melt of the Arctic is already ahead of 2007's record pace. We're in the middle of a Heat War, and we're losing badly. Globally, we've just come through the warmest winter on record, and it seems all but certain that 2010 will set a new record for the hottest calendar year. Every week we seem to see record deluges somewhere: May began with crazy flooding in Nashville and ended with inundation in Guatemala. Last week saw the warmest temperatures ever recorded in Asia and Southeast Asia.

So far, Obama's barely broken a sweat on climate change: a few paragraphs in a few speeches. Now, the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf offers him the best chance he's ever going to get to go to work. The president could stand on the Louisiana shore and say: "Bad as this is, it's only a small and visible symbol of the greater damage we do each day simply by burning coal and gas and oil. If that black gunk now washing up here had ended up safely in the gas tanks of our cars, it would nonetheless have done great damage. It's all dirty, every last drop and lump."

The president already has the podium he needs to start turning history, which means more than merely pushing for the climate and energy bill introduced last month by senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman -- a prime example of baby-step politics. As with his health care bill, on energy matters, too, the administration and its envoys sought out in advance the industries most likely to raise a fuss and cut the deals those cartels wanted. Just as big pharma knew it wouldn't face negotiated drug prices, so big oil and big electricity have been assured that there will be no serious opposition to their business model.

The bottom line: if you neglect all the offsets and loopholes, we're aiming for a 4% reduction in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2020. Make your blood stir? Obama's not proposing real solutions to real problems; he's ticking off items on a list. He got a health care bill, and just maybe he'll get an energy bill (though that's an increasingly slim "maybe"). But we don't need the bill, we need the thing.

I'm putting this all on Obama, even though it's clear that he can't do it by himself. He'd need a movement to make real progress. That's the tragedy, though: he's already got a movement. He was elected with millions of us sending him money, knocking on doors, standing in snow banks with signs. He commands a standing army (albeit one that's growing rusty from disuse and a little demoralized).

And it's not just here. Across the world, we at 350.org were able to organize giant demonstrations last year -- 5,200 of them in 181 countries, what Foreign Policy called "the largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind." We did it the way Kennedy did, by rallying people around a hard goal instead of an easy one: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide which, according to NASA scientists, is the most we can safely have in the atmosphere. Since we're already past that point -- at 390 ppm -- we need to work harder than we could ever have imagined. We really do need to get off oil in the coming decade.

But to have a chance we need a leader. We need someone to stand up and tell it the way it is, and in language so compelling and dramatic it sets us on a new path. On this planet of nearly seven billion, at this moment in history, there's exactly one person who could play that role. And so far he hasn't decided.

© 2010 Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of many books, including his latest: Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. His other books include, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and The End of Nature.  McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and cofounder of 350.org.

It's Obvious: They Don't Know What They're Doing

by John Lawrence

Does anyone doubt that the biggest oil spill in human history was caused by deregulation? Or the biggest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression? Or, well we could go on and on. With BP essentially unregulated and Wall Street essentially unregulated, with six lobbyists for every Congressman, with corporations promising Congressmen lucrative jobs when they exit Congress, does anyone doubt that the government has been sold to the highest bidder?

Now that BP has fouled the Gulf of Mexico for generations, they are whistling dixie as they fail to come up with a solution for "plugging the damn hole." Obviously, they don't know what they're doing, nor does anyone else know any better. If BP's knowledge and technology is insufficient to come up with a solution, no one else's is any better. So we're essentially at a loss as to what to do while the oil surges forth on an hourly basis. It should be easy: just go down there and plug the damn hole. But the hole is a mile down under the ocean where the pressure is 2000 pounds per square inch. No one is volunteering to don a wetsuit or scuba gear to be let out of a submarine to stick his finger in the dike.

Instead we're treated to the fix du jour. If this one doesn't work, BP will come up with another one. With obvious criminal negligence on BP's part, we're treated to the spectacle that we have to trust the criminal to fix the problem of their crime much as we had to trust Goldman Sachs ex-employees to fix the results of Goldman Sachs' crimes. But who else has the knowledge or the wherewithal? Not the government evidently. Any government employee including the President makes peanuts compared to Wall Street take home pays. So basically they can buy and sell the government. They have more money; they have more knowledge; they have more power.

When one Senator can hold up the passage of a bill or even for the debate to start based on some arcane rule about unanimous consent, you don't even need the filibuster to halt progress of any kind. So the whole system is dysfunctional, based on selling out to the highest bidder and the promise of a lucrative lobbying job on your way out. Money runs the government; money runs the country; money runs the message which implores us to ignore what is really happening and adopt some fiction about "freedom" instead. The only ones really free are the billionaires whose goal is to further enslave the hoi polloi with each passing year. Even the pension fund managers are their dupes. When securities are peddled to CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the world, and one hedge fund manager shorts them making $3.7 billion on one trade while the hapless pension fund manager loses his shirt on our behalf, something is wrong. When a Wolf Pack can short a whole country and drive its citizens to penury making billions for themselves in the process, something's not right. Fortunately, China had to step in to save the US stock market and the euro.

The following article is recommended reading:

Published on Thursday, May 27, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Trusting the Scorpion: BP, the Legacy of Republican Hypocrisy and Democratic Cowardice

by John Atcheson

The progressives are up in arms over the oil spill.  Like a scene from Frankenstein, the good citizens are storming the hydrocarbon castle with torches ablaze, and pitchforks held high.

Some demand stricter regulations, some a wiser energy policy, but they're all focused on tarring BP with this heinous crime against nature.  Especially now that Obama is starting to get some blame.  An inordinate amount of energy is being spent on how we can use this event to "message," with the emphasis here on assigning the blame to BP.

It would be nice to get stricter regulations; certainly a wiser energy policy would be good.  But focusing on blaming BP is missing the point.  Of course they cut corners; of course they're sleazy.  It's what they do.

But they can do it only because we let them.  The whole thing is reminiscent of the fable about the scorpion and the frog.  If you've forgotten, it goes like this:

 A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog, afraid of being stung, refuses at first, but when the scorpion points out that if it were to sting the frog,  the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well, he relents. Yet when they reach the middle of the river, the scorpion stings him. As they are sinking,  the frog asks why, and the scorpion explains, "I'm a scorpion; it's what we do."

The hydrocarbon castle we would storm is but one building in a vast city as dark as Mordor.

That's why focusing on blaming BP, even in hopes of getting a saner energy policy, is such a waste - it's like worrying about a case of the sniffles (albeit a very bad case) when you've got end stage cancer.  Was Exxon - the mot profitable company in history last year -- not blamed for the "Exxon-Valdez?" Did it change anything?

Here's the grim reality: the oil spill is merely a symptom of a much deeper problem, one that is our fault, because for the last 30 years we've been trusting the scorpion.

The fact is, Reagan had it backwards. Government, it turns out, is often the solution and unconstrained private industry the problem.  Many of us knew this, but few have had the courage to stand up to Reagan's dangerous, but popular, fantasy, then or now. 

Indeed, when the history of the last three decades is written, it will be a story of epic hypocrisy on the part of Republicans, enabled by abject cowardice on the part of Democrats, with consequences that created a legacy far more tragic and irreversible than even this horrendous oil spill.

There may have been a few conservative ideologues who actually believed the small government, magic market mantras spouted by the likes of Reagan, Grover Norquist (I simply want to rduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub) William Kristol and assorted industry-funded think tanks, but they were few and far between. 

The real reason this philosophy spread was because it was politically expedient, it was backed and funded by powerful interests who made campaign contributions, and few had the courage or conviction required to confront a fantasy that told people they didn't have to pay for the services they demanded.

Across our entire economy and society we are now reaping the harvest of that hypocrisy, and the fruits of that cowardice. 

To any remaining acolytes of Reaganism, the track record stands in stark rebuke.

The evidence mounts every day.  The BP oil spill, yes.  But also The Big Branch coal mining disaster; the sub-prime disaster; the AIG and various other Wall Street disasters; the growing income disparity between the rich and the rest of us; a global thermostat set on self-destruct; a globalized economy as volatile as a vial of nitro-glycerin - everywhere you look, you see more proof that the conservative mantra of small government and uber-free markets has completely failed. 

If one examines the record, it's pretty clear that Republicans and conservatives (effectively the same thing) never really cared much about small government.  In fact, government grew rapidly under Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. The only time since Carter that government growth subsided was under Clinton.

Doubt that?  Here's the numbers.

If you rank all Presidents since Nixon by the number of government employees per 1000 citizens, here's what you'll find: Reagan tops the list with the most, and Bush II is next. Clinton, on the other hand, had the smallest government by number of employees.  The story is much the same for deficits: Reagan increased the federal deficit as a per cent of GDP by 10%, Bush I by 13%, and Bush II by an incredible 20%.  In contrast, Clinton lowered it by 10%.

Of course there are lots of ways to slice and dice the statistics, but any honest look at the numbers comes up with the same conclusion - Reagan, Bush I and Bush II talked about small government but presided over dramatic growth in the size of government, while Clinton actually made progress in reducing the size of government. 

And rather than having the courage to actually cut popular services, Republicans cut taxes and raised deficits to continue providing them, while making it virtually inevitable that someone, someday would have to shrink government - hopefully enough to drown it in the bathtub.  Ironically, Democrats - only slightly more interested in delivering good government than amassing power than Republicans are - did most of whatever spending cuts did happen.

So, if small government wasn't really the goal for conservatives, what was? 

Simple: weak government.  Government that couldn't constrain the vaunted private sector - the font of all good things according to conservatives' public pronouncements - the font of campaign contributions in reality as Paul Krugman pointed out in a recent column, and Thomas Frank noted in What's the Matter with Kansas?. 

And while Clinton made real progress in constraining government growth, he signed onto the Conservative notion of eviscerating government.  It was Clinton's economic team, after all, which led the charge to rescind the Glass Steagall Act - the jewel in the crown of financial deregulation, and the source of much of our misery now.  It was Clinton who  ended welfare and proclaimed the era of big government to be over.

It wasn't just Clinton. Democrats quickly became complicit in this epic hypocrisy. They formed the DLC and went after corporate campaign contributions, they triangulated, they became split-the-difference Democrats, adopting much of the conservative playbook, and legitimizing more of it.

Aside from the obvious ethical and moral issues, the problem with this strategy is that when the policy, philosophy or system fails, the triangulator owns a big share of the catastrophes that failure creates.

For example, back to the BP oil disaster.  Just weeks before it occurred, in a classic triangulation, Obama announced that he supported off-shore drilling.  Because he failed to take a stand then, he couldn't avoid taking some of the blame for the spill.  Had he made Republican deregulation an issue and opposed offshore drilling rather than cratering to the drill-baby-drill crazies - had he stood on principle - he wouldn't be in a defensive position, trying to pass off blame and criticism to BP.  Rather he would have made deregulation the issue, and he'd be leading a popular charge against a broken regulatory system and a failed political philosophy, putting conservatives in a defensive position. 

That's right, because of political cowardice and a too-clever-by-a-half strategy, the Obama administration is fending off blame for something Republicans, conservatives, and the drill-baby-drill crowd fought to put in place.

And this is just one example of a dynamic that has dominated politics since Reagan. 

You can't confront Wall Street when you've set up Goldman Sachs South in the US Treasury and the White House, stocking it with the very folks who created the problem.

You can't confront Health Care crazies when you've made back room deals with big Pharma, and preemptively ceded the victory to private industry. 

You can't confront the collapse of the educational system, if you've advocated tax cuts.  Look at California, which was at the vanguard of the tax cutting frenzy.  Their educational system went from number 1 in the country when Reagan took over to number 47, now. 

You can't get out of illegitimate and ill-advised wars when you've given them legitimacy.  Come on.  Does anyone really believe the US has a strategic stake in Afghanistan?  And even if you did, does anyone believe that occupying the hapless country with conventional military forces is the way to deal with it?  Let's face it, we doubled down on this war because Democrats thought it would be the best way to inoculate themselves against the dreaded "soft on defense" epithet.

In fact, Democrats have been so ready to run from name calling it's as if they're wearing track shoes and poised in starting blocks, the better to sprint from their convictions at the first whiff of a meanie. 

They've been so eager for power, that they stopped thinking about why the want it - it became an end, not a means.

If we'd been willing to stand on principle for the last three decades, we might have lost a few elections, but at least the debate would be framed, the battle lines clear.

And when the inevitable failures from the conservative hypocrisy came, Tea-partiers might have been pouring into the streets demanding that the rich pay their fair share of taxes and the corporations quit exploiting humanity and the planet so that a few CEOs might buy an extra 25,000 square foot vacation home in Barbados.  Indeed, they might even be demanding that government fulfill its role as guarantor of a civil society.

Now, instead, no one believes government has a role.

Bottom line: we're not having the debate this country so desperately needs to have because for decades, we've run from that debate, and to do so now would be to expose the full depth of that cowardice.   

That's why watching liberals and progressives falling all over themselves trying to figure out how to fix the blame on BP is such a tragedy. Even if they succeed the root cause of the disaster remains, and far more serious issues go unaddressed.

We are now fording difficult passages - as dangerous as any this country has ever faced - and until we confront the larger conservative failure, we will do so with the scorpion on our collective back. 

The countless failures of Reaganism are laid out like stepping stones across this broad river we must ford. 

We can see, on the other side, shimmering in the distance, the promised land - a land in which citizens run government, not corporations; in which the wealth of our collective endeavors is shared among us all, not ceded to the top 1%; a land in which we treat nature with the care and reverence our very survival demands, not as a spare parts shed and waste pile; a land in which government is the way we come together to meet the great challenges of the 21st Century, not a punch line to a cynical and manipulative speech given by corporate lackeys posing as politicians.

The choice is clear.  We could treat each of the national disasters facing us as discreet entities, in which case we attempt to swim the river with the scorpion on our back.  Or with a little courage and a little integrity, we could confront them as symptoms of the larger failures of conservatism that they are, in which case we simply step across the stones before us to reach the other side.

We have no choice.  Conservatism's failure is complete, the consequences of not confronting that failure too dear.  The time is now; cowardice is no longer an option. All we lack is a leader with the courage to take the first step.

Mr. Obama, will you be that leader?

John Atcheson's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several wonk journals. His last article for Common Dreams was "Fear, Ignorance and the Summer of Our Discontent" on 10/4/09. He is currently at work on a fictional Trilogy that centers on climate change.  Atcheson's book reviews are featured on Climateprogress.org. Email to: [email protected]

Death Toll: Natural disasters 29 (and Counting), Man Made Disasters 36, Terrorists 0

by John Lawrence

With the proliferation of natural disasters like the recent Nashville, Tennesee, floods and man made disasters like the oil rig explosion and the West Virginia mine explosion taking a far greater toll on American lives than terrorism, maybe it's a good idea to reevaluate our priorities. Natural disasters are far more likely to account for more casualties going forward than terrorism is, and we should be prepared for them instead of considering each one some kind of rare event or Act of God that no one could have anticipated or predicted. Massive snowstorms and rainstorms which produce massive flooding are becoming normal events due, no doubt, to global warming. Global warming results in more moisture in the atmosphere. In fact water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased about 5% over the 20th century and 4% since 1970. Monster snow storms like Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse which hit Philadelphia and Baltimore this winter are caused by excess moisture in the air due to global warming. Although global temperatures have increased they are still cold enough to produce snow and ice storms. 

There are also an increased number and size of tornadoes like the one that hit Yazoo City, Mississippi, on April 24 that left 10 people dead. Disaster preparedness needs to be put on a par with anti-terrorism measures because natural disasters are causing far more deaths and destruction of property. And after each disaster, the Federal government has to step in and provide relief. That means that the taxpayers are on the hook for increasing amounts of money which is only borrowed and added to the national debt because not enough is budgeted for these increasingly more common events. President Obama announced after the oil rig disaster that British Petroleum would pay the full amount for the cleanup which is expected to reach $10 billion, but subsequently it has been pointed out that, because of a loophole in the law, actually BP is only on the hook for $75 million and guess who bears the rest of the cost? The US government aka the taxpayers. No wonder national deficits are increasing. While record amounts go to the military industrial complex each year, far too little is budgeted for the events that actually take the worst toll on American lives - natural and man made disasters. While record precipitation is bad for areas prone to flooding, it actually has produced something beneficial for California - large snow packs in the Sierra Mountains from which emanates California's water supply.

As far as man made disasters are concerned, most of them are caused by deregulation. Stricter regulatory standards might have prevented both the mine disaster in the Upper Big Branch mine and the oil rig disaster. Both companies fought off stricter safety standards which would have cost them more money to implement. Massey Energy had a panoply of violations which it managed to evade paying any penalties for or correcting do to loopholes in the law which allowed them to continue violating as long as they challenged them in court. British Petroleum lobbied against systems which might have provided a more fail safe shut off of the gushing oil. Now they will undoubtedly get out of paying for it due to another loophole in the law no doubt placed there by oil company lobbyists.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for both terrorism and natural disasters, has to have its budget beefed up while at the same time decreasing the military budget. There needs to be a realignment between the US' actual needs for protection and its imagined needs. As natural disasters take an increasing toll, the monetary cost (hundreds of millions in property damage from the Nashville floods alone) needs to take prority over military spending. The cost of cleaning up natural disasters cannot just simply continue to be added to the defict and the national debt. BP will probably tie up their portion of the responsibility for the oil rig disaster in court with the result being that taxpayers will foot most of the bill. Exxon Mobil tied up the Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound and over 20 years later has not paid the full amount for the aftermath which was court ordered. Exxon Mobil has dragged its feet in paying the costs of damages to local fishermen while making record profits for itself. The original amount of punitive damages to be paid to the fishermen was $5 billion. That amount was reduced to 4 billion, raised back up to $4.5 billion, then cut to $2.5 billion, then further reduced to $507 million. A Supreme Court ruling is expected soon on whether Exxon should pay interest on this payment after 20 years of waiting. BP will likely use the courts to leave taxpayers holding the bag for the spillage in the Gulf especially since we have belatedly found out that the law limiting their liability is on their side.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil made record profits in 2007 ($40.61 billion) and 2008 ($45.2 billion) as it continued to shortchange Alaskan fishermen. It also paid no US taxes in 2008.

Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS: Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

So US corporations (and no doubt BP will follow suit) continue to make record profits while dumping any losses on US taxpayers just as Wall Street bankers did. While other countries such as Norway tax the profits on oil drilling 50% thereby generating profit for the national treasury, the US foolishly just gives away the oil leases so that all profits go to the corporations while the majority of the losses are paid by US taxpayers. No wonder the US has an immense national debt! And global warming produced natural disasters (unbudgeted for) will only continue to get worse adding even more. While the Times Square bomber didn't manage to kill a single person and was caught immediately thanks to excellent police work by the FBI and others not to mention citizen vigilance, which helped to prevent an event which could have produced a number of casualties, the casualties and property damage due to excessive precipitation and high winds continues to mount. Do we have our priorities straight when we continue to allocate billions to the military-industrial complex and paltry amounts to Homeland Security? Homeland Security in addition to being responsible for terrorism and natual disasters is also reponsible for protecting our borders against illegal immigration. Although illegal immigration continues to take its toll on American society, relatively paltry amounts are allocated to it while fantasy wars of aggression continue to be fought abroad. And the cost of supporting over 1000 military bases on foreign soil continues to mount.

The Homeland Security budget for 2010 is $55 billion while the miltary budget is about $1 trillion - orders of magnitude greater. US budget priorities are totally out of whack. While good intelligence and police work has done much to protect US citizens from terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only increased their liklihood due to killing of civilians and stoking the fires of resentment towards the US who are considered to be foreign invaders. Protection against terrorist attacks which have killed very few US citizens and caused very little property damage compared to natural disasters primarilyshould consist of defensive not an offensive measures. The Times Square bomber was caught in part due to a fingerprint database. His finger prints matched those left on the Nissan Pathfinder. A national ID card including links to a fingerprint database would do more to prevent terrorism than the combined efforts of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force because terrorists are just as likely to be American citizens as foreign citizens. And it would identify people in the country illegally at the same time. A national database of student visa holders would have prevented the 9/11 attacks since a lot of them had overstayed their student visas. It can be shown categorically that defensive measures can and will prevent future attacks at a fraction  of the cost of military adventurism which is only increasing their liklihood.

But the real wild card here - and something which can bankrupt the US unless it's figured into the annual budget - is preparedness for natural disasters. Increased moisture in the atmosphere caused by global warming will continue to produce massive rainstorms, snowstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes, increased casualties and billions of dollars of property damage, much of which will be borne privately by American citizens who will become destitute in the process. As if the recession in and of itself weren't enough to devastate the middle class! The US hasn't even recovered from Hurricane Katrina 5 years ago! The US can expect to be devastated by ongoing natural disasters. In order to prevent a fiscal disaster as well we have to budget and plan for them.