But then maybe it’s just god’s will:

OTTAWA (AFP) — Two ice shelves in Canada’s far north have lost massive sections since August while a third ice shelf now is adrift in the Arctic Ocean, said researchers Wednesday who blamed climate change.

The entire 50 square-kilometer (19 square-mile) Markham Ice Shelf off the coast of Ellesmere Island broke away in early August and is now adrift, while two sections of the nearby Serson Ice Shelf detached, reducing its mass by 60 percent or 122 square kilometers (47 square miles).

Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, which halved in July, lost an additional 22 square kilometers (8.5 square miles).

“These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for 4,000 years are no longer present,” said Trent University’s polar expert Derek Mueller.
…
“Usually the ice shelves would use the winter to recover from the previous summer. They would reform, … but the ice shelf can’t recover in the winter anymore.”

“We have now reached a threshold where (the environment) is too warm for these ice shelves to exist anymore,” he said.

Sarah Palin’s take on the whole global warming thing?

Last month, the state of Alaska under Palin’s guidance sued Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in an attempt to reverse his decision to list polar bears as a threatened species. Palin said that scientists’ predictions that global warming would eliminate the ice where the bears live in summer were unreliable.

Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low by the end of last summer, and satellites now show that the ice has been reduced to a level very close to last year’s with some days remaining before a new winter season begins.

Palin also favors drilling in ANWR and has opposed an initiative that would ban mines from discharging pollution into salmon streams.

Maybe she thinks killing all of Alaska’s wildlife one at a time is just too fucking slow.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

from the Rose Garden, while Cheney and the Cabinet look on (key: DC / Parallel Universe):

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I just finished a good Cabinet meeting, and I want to thank the members of my Cabinet for serving our country. Because I have asked them all to resign, and thereafter I will immediately follow suit. But before we get to that:

We discussed the challenges facing our economy, amongst other things, and we spent time on the high gasoline prices. Every one of our citizens who drives to work or runs a small business is feeling the squeeze of rising prices at the pump, and they expect their elected leaders in Washington to take some common-sense action.

But unfortunately, given the monumental fuck-ups of my administration in just about every arena that touches our economy and our national energy policy, it would be impossible to address any of these critical issues under the current administration.

We inherited a $5.6 trillion surplus when we took office in 2001; the annual budget was also in surplus and, despite the threat of terrorism and ongoing challenges in the Middle East, the world was at relative peace. The United States, at least, was not embroiled in any major, resource-intensive or diplomacy-imploding conflicts. Gasoline cost around $1.50 a gallon, oil was at $20-$25 a barrel, and while wages had yet to catch up with the productivity gains achieved during my predecessor’s administration, most Americans felt a degree of fiscal - and physical - security.

But during the first year of my Administration, we managed to allow the first major, catastrophic, foreign-sponsored terrorist attack on U.S. soil, forcing us to pour military resources we intended for Iraq into Afghanistan; we reversed our rationale for the biggest taxcuts in the country’s history from “good economy - give back the surplus” to “bad economy - stimulate through deficit spending”; and, despite our unanticipated commitments following September 11, we ramped up planning (and spending) for the Iraq Project, which will end up costing the U.S. at least $1 trillion.

It is undeniable that all these massive, fundamental errors of judgment and action have caused great pain for the American people, sacrificing our blood and treasure overseas while our wars, tax policy and anti-regulation madness have struck a near-mortal wound to the nation’s economic health, leaving millions unemployed, underemployed, in bankruptcy and foreclosure, and wondering how they will survive in this new, weakened United States.

It would be nice if it were possible to help the average American by simply addressing the most visible symptom of the life-threatening parasite which has been my administration over the past seven and a half years, saying something simple and blithely mendacious:

“To reduce pressure on prices, we need to increase the supply of oil — especially here at home. So in June, I called on Congress to lift the legislative ban that prevents offshore exploration on the Outer Continental Shelf.”

It might even be politically expedient - and fun - to blame it on the opposition party which has tried to protect the country from our depredations over the past two terms:

“Unfortunately, Democratic leaders in Congress have refused to allow a vote. And now Congress is about to leave for its August recess without taking any action on this vital priority for the American people.

There is now a growing agreement across our country that the government should permit the exploration and development of these offshore oil resources.

Exploration of the OCS would increase our supply of oil here at home. Experts believe that currently restricted areas of the OCS could eventually produce up to about 18 billion barrels of oil. That’s almost 10 years’ worth of America’s current oil production.

Exploration of the OCS would also create jobs for our citizens. Yesterday, I visited the Lincoln Electric Company in Cleveland, Ohio — it’s a business that produces welding products used for offshore exploration. If Congress were to permit exploration of the OCS, it would mean jobs at businesses such as these. American drivers on — are counting on Congress to lift the ban on offshore exploration — and so are American workers.”

It would be so nice to be able to utter such happy horseshit and give the American people hope. But unfortunately, it’s simply not true.

Bringing OCS resources online is going to would not only take time – the oil companies make money by keeping supplies tight, so there simply is not a surplus of drilling equipment for either onshore or offshore oil or natural gas development available — but those same oil companies are holding at least ten thousand permits for millions of acres both onshore and off that they are not exploiting right now. There’s that nasty supply-and-demand bitch raising her ugly head again. Chevron, Exxon and the like can jack up their bottom line by keeping supply to a minimum, and jack up their stock price by holding the millions of barrels in reserve, in the form of permits held in their control, but off the market. Nice work if you can get it.

I’d love to be able to say, honestly, that this means that the need for congressional action is urgent, and that So I’ve lifted the executive restrictions on offshore exploration; that I’ve done my part. And that this means the only thing now standing now between the American people and these vast oil resources is the United States Congress, but this would be a lie. To say, “The sooner Congress lifts the ban, the sooner we can get this oil from the ocean floor to your gas tank” would be as patently dishonest as all those lies we told to convince you, the American people, that Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to these once-mighty United States.

Some members of Congress rightly say they object to exploration of the OCS, but they are in favor of other actions — such as taking oil out of the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Well, if you agree that we need more oil, it makes no sense to say you’re for draining our nation’s limited Strategic Reserve, but against tapping into the vast resources of the Outer Continental Shelf. Neither action will get us out of our current hole.

But we must stop digging.

America needs to take every reasonable and responsible step we can do to reduce pressure on gasoline and energy prices. That’s precisely what my administration is doing by resigning. As I’ve said, We’re working to expand domestic oil production will not help us in the short term, will be of only moderate help in the middle term, and in the long-term does nothing to address either the ultimate extinction of fossil fuels as a resource, or the potentially life-threatening damage the burning of these fuels exacts on our environment.

And So at the same time that we are announcing our resignation, we’re working to speed the development of new clean and alternative energy resources by strongly recommending to incoming President Pelosi that Vice President Gore be appointed as Energy Secretary in her new administration. We’re certain that an Energy Secretary Gore would immediately push Congress to raisinge fuel efficiency standards, expanding the use of alternative fuels, and investing in next-generation fuels such as cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel. We’re also convinced that investing in new advanced batteries, and plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cells can play a part in this country’s ultimate energy independence and environmental stewardship.

While we’rve been working to expand the use of “clean, safe nuclear power, ” knowing that there is no such thing, my administration has ignored solar and wind power, and focusing instead on another fantasy: “clean coal technology.“ With these steps, we’re instead of enhancing America’s energy security — and increasing the supply of clean, safe energy made right here in the United States of America – we have driven the country’s economy and it’s people to the brink of recession, depression, and desperation.

The time for action is now. This is a difficult period for millions of American families. Every extra dollar they have to spend because of high gas prices is one less dollar they can use to put food on the table, or to pay the rent, or meet their mortgages. The American people are rightly frustrated by the failure of Democratic leaders in Congress my administration to enact common-sense do anything but demand short-sighted, polluting, environmentally dangerous and frankly non-sensical “solutions“ — like the development of the oil resources on the Outer Continental Shelf.

There are now just a couple of days left before Congress leaves for its August recess. Legislation to open up this offshore exploration is pending in both the House and the Senate – I withdraw it effective immediately, and resign. All Democratic leaders have to do is swear in President Pelosi, and allow a vote on the critical issues of how they will begin to repair the economy and environment of the U.S. for its citizens. They should not leave Washington without doing so.

Thank you very much.

A girl can dream, can’t she?

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

Supporters of sustainable resource development are almost a missing link in the left/progressive movement at present. Yet this is a true middle ground that can yield agreement, rather than adversarial relationships, among our likeliest allies. Now – I hope that this doesn’t earn me the nickname of the Supply-Sider of Sustainability, or some such – but I think that the supply/production side has to be embraced, as well as the consumption side, when we try to define the boundaries of sustainability.

25 years ago in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest (my county is 80% GPNF), the timber harvest was on the order of 400 million board feet per year – primarily of Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock. A percentage of that harvest was “old growth” timber, meaning large-diameter logs with a more-dense cell structure and few knots. Environmentalists led legal challenges to this old-growth logging on the basis of harmful impacts to endangered forest species: e.g., the Northern Spotted Owl. Based on federal Endangered Species legislation, the federal courts stopped almost all such logging – almost in an instant. With their legal strategy realized, the environmental organizations then tied up virtually all federal log sales with litigation - or threats to litigate. The ramifications for loggers and forest-related businesses were close to catastrophic.

OK – a side-bar, if you will – the business situation in the early-1980s was generally poor in the U.S., and this was particularly true in lumber-dependent fields. So – to some degree this industry used this time period and this legal embroglio to write off their old, fully depreciated, and worn-out mills and equipment – much of it built in the 1940s. They could blame the environmentalists – and the government – to take the heat off of their managers and owners for loggers’ job and income losses. Then some mill-owners consolidated operations in new or rebuilt plants with CNC milling equipment designed to optimize use of the smaller 2nd-growth and 3rd-growth logs. When their business improved, they were back to work with ¼ of their former mill employees, producing more product per plant. Wow – win-win-win – write off the antique mills; blame the ‘greens’ and the Feds; build new and automate; and, when the market rises, your work force is trimmed in ways that you could not have imagined under the former conditions.

Back to sustainable harvest – the old logging days, where clear-cut was followed by replanting (somewhat rigorously applied on the federal forest lands), had created plantations of 2nd and 3rd growth forests. In the intervening years of little or no logging, these plantations have been putting on more than 60 million board feet of growth in my (Skamania) county’s share of the federal forests per year – according to silviculturists who work for the federal Forest Service. I suggest that a minimum of 50 million board feet of this annual growth can now be harvested with essentially no negative impact on these forests. (In addition ‘thinning’ operations are needed to improve forest health, increase forest-land biological diversity, and reduce fuel. This activity would substantially increase actual harvest for some years to come, just in order to ‘catch up’ with the suppressed operations from the last 18 years.) Going forward, some of the ’surplus’ (growth minus harvest) might be mapped into the remaining ‘wilderness’ forests to enlarge their range, which would in any case continue to be off-limits to logging.

There are other questions/issues associated with this argument, but these are exactly the true province of democratic politics – i.e., the negotiation of threshold levels of agreement between competing interests. For instance, does a clear-cut per se cause harm to the forest ecology? I say ‘definitely not’. Either by harvest or via fire, open space (meadows) will be formed. Elk, bluebirds, voles, coyotes, huckleberries, balsamroot daisies, indian paintbrush, and a host of other organisms depend on the meadow. Douglas Fir is a pioneer species, not a climax species –no meadows, after awhile, Doug Fir becomes an endangered species.

There are other points/issues for scientific study and political negotiation. Does fire suppression in the forest create conditions for worse harm? What roles should salvage and thinning harvests play in the ‘reserves’ (e.g., wilderness, endangered species habitat)? The point for this discussion is that sustainable logging should be – or could be – the rubric that will allow adversarial factions to find a solution, if not quite common ground.

OK – this is just one example of the Sustainability issue/question. It’s a large part out here in the Pacific NW, but maybe it doesn’t resonate for you. But the concept should. Sustainability is the pivot point for a real political alliance between environmentalists and labor.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

Evidently New Orleans isn’t done getting the shit kicked out of it by the U.S. commerce & government/Mother Nature tag team:

NEW ORLEANS — The Coast Guard closed a 12-mile stretch of the Mississippi River at New Orleans after a collision early Wednesday a tugboat pushing one barge and a 600-foot tanker.

Nobody was injured, but more than 419,000 gallons of heavy, almost tar-like fuel oil spilled from the barge, said Lt. Cdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.

The double-hulled tanker Tintomara was loaded with about 4.2 million gallons of biodiesel and nearly 1.3 million gallons of styrene, but was not leaking, said Michael Wilson, president of ship management company Laurin Maritime (America) Inc. in Houston.
…
The fresh water intake for New Orleans’ west bank is below the spill but the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board has enough water stored to last a day to a day and a half, spokeswoman Marcia St. Martin told WWL-TV. The intake for the east bank is above the site, she said.

Sounds like the good old days.

Oil covers water like paint covers a wall: one gallon will cover about 350 square feet.

419,000 gallons of oil = 146,650,000 million square feet of coverage.

That’s almost 3,400 acres - all covered in heavy, tar like, caustic sludge, coming to rest on beaches and bridges and levees, to be worn and ingested by birds and fish and gators and eagles and even humans.

But sure, Sen. McCain - let’s drill for more oil in and near our sources of food and agriculture and clean drinking water! What could possibly go wrong?

FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

If you’re fucked by Big Oil, you wait 20 years for compensation.

If you are Big Oil, you spend $800 million to save $2 billion, when over those twenty years you’ve made half a trillion dollars in profit:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday slashed the $2.5 billion punitive damages award in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster to $500 million.

…
Justice David Souter wrote for the court that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses, about $500 million compensation.
…
A jury decided Exxon should pay $5 billion in punitive damages. A federal appeals court cut that verdict in half in 1994.

The Supreme Court divided on its decision, 5-3, with Justice Samuel Alito taking no part in the case because he owns Exxon stock.

Exxon has fought vigorously to reduce or erase the punitive damages verdict by a jury in Alaska four years ago for the accident that dumped 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. The environmental disaster led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine animals.
…
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens supported the $2.5 billion figure for punitive damages, saying Congress has chosen not to impose restrictions in such circumstances.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also dissented, saying the court was engaging in “lawmaking” by concluding that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses.

“The new law made by the court should have been left to Congress,” wrote Ginsburg. Justice Stephen Breyer made a similar point, opposing a rigid 1 to 1 ratio of punitive damages to victim compensation.

Those $800 million legal fees have got to be the worst return on investment Exxon’s gotten in the last two decades - only 150% profit! But of course, saving money wasn’t really the point, was it?

Nope. The point was to tell any current or future plaintiff against Exxon that we will fight you until your grandchildren are dead and buried.

I’m too disgusted to write more, but if you want further details on this travesty, I wrote about the arguments in the case before the Supremes here.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

are condemned to 20/20 hindsight.

From the WaPo today:

As the Cedar River rose higher and higher, and as he stacked sandbags along the levee protecting downtown Cedar Falls, Kamyar Enshayan, a college professor and City Council member, kept asking himself the same question: “What is going on?”
…
Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn’t really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.

“We’ve done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions,” he said. “Agriculture must respect the limits of nature.”

From FOCUS, March 22, 1994 (after the last “500 year flood” in 1993):

As Europeans settled - and cleared - the Mississippi River basin, it is unfortunate that they did not follow the example set by the Indians. Indeed, each time the Mississippi River flowed out of its banks onto its flood plain, the lesson had to be relearned: the Mississippi’s use of its flood plain would not be denied.

Nor would the flood-plain settlers or the upland farmers learn the principle of watershed unity that actions upstream could have an impact on areas far downstream. Thus in the uplands, forests were cut, prairies plowed and wetlands drained as tens of thousands of westward moving settlers converted the land to agricultural production.

Unknowingly, they began the process which ultimately led to the Great Flood of 1993 as well as earlier floods: as the land was cleared, precipitation ran off the land into the rivers faster and in greater quantity than before - the natural vegetation was no longer there to slow and retard runoff. Thus there were not only more frequent floods but floods of greater magnitude.

And we still haven’t learned.

This current flood, and the 1993 deluge, and the federal flood of New Orleans following Katrina all have the same source: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ maniacal fight to control the Mississippi River as if it were a man-made canal.

It started out innocently enough: drain farmland (capitalism!) and save lives. But, it was not without hubris: We’re Americans, and Nature must bow to our greatness!

So, the projects grew. And the greater the commercial benefits of the Mississippi and its tributaries, the bigger the Corps budget became. The cycle became self-perpetuating: levees, dikes, and channels and locks are built to drain farmland and create a riverborne highway to carry all that grain - and the diesel, gas, fertilizer, chemicals, and anything else you can put on a barge or into a shipping container. And when the river floods because you’ve removed the river’s (and land’s) capacity to absorb cyclical high precipitation events, your budget gets even bigger because you’re also the agency responsible for FLOOD CONTROL.

The irony - and shortsightedness, and plain insanity* - of our dealings with the Mississippi and its environment are overwhelming:

As we drain the farmland, and channelize the Mississippi and its tributaries, we deny that farmland the alluvial replenishment it needs, requiring more and more chemicals to produce the crops for which the farmland was drained in the first place.

And, without those alluvial deposits and the water they hold, the farmland along the Mississippi and its tributaries begins to subside, making it even more vulnerable to flooding.

The fortification of the Mississippi’s banks, and the engineering structures that kept the River from changing course and maintaining an equilibrium with its banks and bottomlands, channeled and speeded up the River, making it less capable of absorbing extreme weather events like the unusually high rainfall totals of this May, June 1993, and the rain that fell north of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina moved inland.

This fortification also steals necessary replenishing soil deposits from the Mississippi Delta, allowing storm surges and flooding further inland, and in turn allowing each storm that hits the area to carry more and more of the delta away;

And, as the delta is carried away, salt water from the Gulf creeps in, killing the freshwater wetland vegetation that holds what is left of the delta in place.

So what should we do?

We can start by looking at the Corps’ re-naturalization of the Kissimmee River in Florida. As they’re doing with the Kissimmee, the Corps needs to de-channelize the Mississippi as much as possible, and allow for seasonal flooding by buying out farmland and creating the riparian wetlands that have been drained over the past 150 years. Where possible, we should allow floodwaters to reach and replenish farmland. And to pay for it all: charge user fees to agribusiness, barge operators and others who benefit from commercial navigation and irrigation/flood control improvements on the river.

I’m not a geotech engineer - but the losses we’ve seen in life, property and infrastructure due to two “500-year” floods in 15 years are proof enough that the billions we’ve spent to harness and tame the Mississippi haven’t worked. We need to do something different.

We’ve tried engineering for more than 100 years. Why don’t we try backing off, and trusting mother nature, for a few?

*doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

which is the biggest?

LIE #1: We’re not allowing the poor oil companies enough access to federal lands (coastal):

President George W. Bush was to call Wednesday on Congress to end a decades-old ban on offshore oil drilling, as a way to tap new energy sources to combat soaring gasoline prices.
…
Bush’s statement comes one day after Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for the federal government to scrap the 27-year-old US moratorium on offshore oil drilling.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Bush and McCain are too stupid to know the difference between a ban and a moratorium, but here goes: there is a lot of drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of California. Many of the Gulf wells were actually taken off-line when oil prices dropped in the late 1980s because it simply wasn’t economically viable.

What there has been since 1981 is a moratorium on new drilling. And this moratorium has not been the result of rabid environmentalists’ demands, but the demands of California’s and Florida’s tourism industries (proof: the ban has been instated/continued by the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Administrations).

California and Florida are #1 and #2 in terms of destination vacation states, with Florida earning more than $50 billion annually from tourism-related sales tax revenue alone. That is a golden goose neither state wants to sully with oil slicks and tar balls.

It’s safe for Bush and McCain to crow about offshore drilling, though, because it accomplished their three primary goals:

• looking busy (”I’m doin’ somethin’ about them high gas prices”;

• taking the P.R./political pressure off the record-profit-making oil companies by furthering the lie that this is a supply problem (remember how Bush failed to get the Saudis to “loosen the taps”?);

• calling for something that they know is politically DOA, so no harm/no foul to either their primary constituency (oil companies) or their secondary constituency (the tourism industry).

LIE #2: We’re not allowing the poor oil companies enough access to federal lands (inland):

WASHINGTON (May 29, 2008) – More than 44 million acres of public lands are leased for oil and gas development, according to a new Wilderness Society analysis of Interior Department data. The analysis points to an explosion of drilling on federal lands, with 7,124 drilling permits (APDs) issued in 2007, a new record for the Bush Administration. Nationwide, the leasing is outstripping the oil and gas industry’s capacity to drill, as industry is drilling on only a quarter of the leases they hold.
…
Summary: Applications for Permits to Drill (APDs) Approved by BLM, 2001-2007

Colorado: 2,909
Montana: 843
New Mexico: 7,606
Utah: 2,955
Wyoming: 18,613
Rocky Mtns: 32,926

We’re not stopping them from drilling. The oil companies are enjoying the benefits of locking up leases (to keep them away from their competitors) while at the same time limiting production to keep prices artificially high.

Nice work if you can get it.

But again, calling for new drilling makes Bush & McCain look like they’re doing something about the problem while covering for the oil companies and pushing back against those nasty environmentalists who want to take away your SUV and force you to ride the bus with stinky homeless people.

LIE #3: Those dirty fucking hippies are keeping our poor oil companies from building new refineries (to make gasoline out of all that oil they’re not producing from their federal leases):

Everyone know there hasn’t been a new refinery permitted in the last 30 years.

You know why?

No one has applied for one.

Again, it’s supply and demand, baby: keep the supply in check and you can charge whatever the hell you want, and keep those profit margins fat.

The truth of the matter was explained by no one less than BP’s chief executive: “[refinery] margins over the last 10 to 15 years have not been high enough on average to justify building a new refinery.”

Sure, they’ve applied for expansions to existing facilities - it’s so much easier (and cheaper) to expand the ones grandfathered in under the old environmental and safety rules; building new ones would just cramp the oil companies’ style. And expansion permits aren’t hard to get: it takes about 5-12 months. Contrast that to the two years it took my company to get a permit to build a dry, non-flammable, non-hazardous storage warehouse in Portland.

So, the next time you hear someone blame the environmentalists for high gas prices, ask them why oil company profits are at an all-time high when production costs have stayed flat and production capacity has not been maximized.

Then ask them why in the world they would ever vote Republican.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

4 Comments

• At June 18, 2008, The OddBlog wrote:

  Bush Asks for Lift on Drilling Ban...

  President Bush today asked Congress to lift a 27-year ban on offshore drilling in order to lessen America's reliance on foreign oil sources......

• At June 19, 2008, Kudzu Fire wrote:

  Drill here. drill now. Pay less.

  People who opposing drilling are Marxists who hate capitalism in general and the US in particular. If you are an American, they hate you and they they hate your job.

• At June 19, 2008, slim wrote:

  So, Kudzu, what makes you think that the oil companies want to drill more? The fact that they're holding tens of thousands of permits they're not drilling now, or the fact that they refuse to crank their refineries up to capacity?

  Keeping folks like you snowed is how they make their money. How in the world can they keep the price at $140/barrel if they increase supply?!

  Just wait and see how fast that Iraqi oil comes on the market - something tells me those Iraqi facilities are going to need years, and maybe decades, of upgrades before they can come online. Just like all those ENRON generating facilities in California were shut down for maintenance during the rolling blackouts. Maintenance .... riiiiiiiight. We're all Grandma Millie now.

  But, by all means, keep bending over - Exxon and BP and Shell and Chevron need to do something to keep busy (since they're not drilling...for oil). And it's hard to vote against your own interests when you've got your hands around your ankles.

• At June 20, 2008, Jamie wrote:

  These might be lies, but getting two free tacos when showing your gas receipt isn't. With gas becoming more and more expensive, Jack wants to help you fill your stomach. Bring any gas receipt to Jack in the Box next Thursday, June 26th, and get two free tacos. No gimmicks, no hidden fees, no purchase necessary-just two free tacos! Great deal right? You don't believe me?

  Check out:

  http://jackinthebox.com/twofreetacosday/index.php?Campaign=MW-TFT-B

  Don't keep it a secret either. Let all your friends know if they like taaaaacos!

Barging shut down on the Mississippi, grain prices shooting even higher, and rail traffic embargoed through the Midwest throughout the peak summer grain season:

The worst flooding in the Midwest in 15 years has closed 300 miles of the Mississippi River to commercial traffic. Several bridges and unknown miles of railroad track have been damaged or washed away.
…
Barge traffic is expected to resume in two to three weeks as water levels drop and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reinstalls electrical equipment that had been moved.

The Mississippi River is the main channel for grain flowing from Midwest farms to the export terminals at the Gulf of Mexico. The river transported 68 million tonnes of farm goods in 2006, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Mississippi also moved 48 million tonnes of petroleum products and 5 million tonnes of coal.
…
The railroad’s east-west line across southern Iowa and north-south through St. Louis are out of service. About 50 to 60 trains a day are affected.
…
“Their equipment is completely under water,” said a grain trader at an elevator that ships corn and soybeans by rail. “They have no idea if it will work — or even if it’s still there. Some of these bridges may not be structurally sound anymore. It’s going to be a mess for months.”

Thank heavens for the Army Corps of Engineers, or where would we be? [/snark]

According to the book River Basins and Coastal Systems Planning Within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Congress put significant funding into the Corps’ hands after the 1993 floods on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (the last “500 year flood event” that was somehow only 15 years ago):

In March of 2002, Brigadier General E.J. Arnold reported that the MR&T project was 87 percent complete physically. He also estimated that the nation had invested about $10.8 billion for planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the project and that the accumulated savings in flood damages totaled more than $258 billion.

Of course, this was just after Katrina, and the Corps was at pains to show that it hadn’t just had its thumb up its ass for the last decade.

To cut the Corps a little slack, $10.8 billion is a pittance when you consider the size of the Mississippi River Drainage Basin and what’s at stake in terms of lives, property, homes and commerce:

And when you consider that we spend that much money in Iraq every 3 weeks.

But perhaps if the Corps wasn’t so focused on maintaining its fiefdoms, and keeping the Mississippi so channelized - and cut off from its natural course - that flooding is an absolute certainty, perhaps it could focus on the solutions that would protect both the rivers and the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on them.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

But it’s nothing to cheer about:

Officials in Des Moines, Iowa, have ordered a mandatory evacuation as a second levee in the city fails under the cresting Des Moines River.

Early Saturday morning, the river breached a permanent levee, flooding a nearby high school. Crews rushed to set up a temporary sand levee, but the rain-swollen river pushed through that barrier hours after it was erected.

As flood waters flow toward a residential area, people in more than 250 homes have been ordered to leave. Many residents in Iowa’s capital city have already left following an earlier voluntary evacuation request.

Meanwhile, 100 miles east in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Cedar River is beginning to recede, but hundreds of city blocks are under water. Much of the city’s drinking water is polluted and 10,000 people have left.

Back in January of last year, the Corps indicated that at least 146 U.S. levees were at risk of failure:

After “further study” the Corps whittled the list down to 122; but since that list included none in Iowa and at least two have failed so far, how many more than the 122 listed (pdf) are at risk?

During the present flood, at least one levee has been breached by floodwaters in both Indiana (listed levee) and Illinois (unlisted levee), and more have been overtopped - a failure not incorporated into the Corp’s at-risk list.

Many have been saying that health care needs to be the first item on an Obama administration’s agenda; others have said alternative energy and dealing with rampant oil speculation needs to come first.

While these are both important - and any “first” on the domestic agenda should go hand-in-hand with a safe and sane pullout from Iraq - putting together a WPA-type massive infusion into fixing the public infrastructure of this country would have such wide-ranging benefits that nothing should take precedence over it.

If we put the funds we are currently spending in Iraq into public works investment, we would attack unemployment and the stagnating economy while keeping jobs in the U.S. and getting employer-based healthcare to millions more Americans who would have full-time employment. The trickle-up from this employment would strengthen the service sector and the market for goods, and would help put back to work the hundreds of thousands of construction workers who have been idled by the housing crash.

Yes, we need to make universal, single-payer, non-employer based health insurance a priority. And yes, we need to spur the growth of the green economy so that jobs are created in the private sector and the public sector does not need to incur the debt necessary to support the U.S. economy. And, yes, letting the Bush tax cuts expire must also be a priority to pay down the debt and get the deficit under control.

But there is no question that there is at least $1 trillion in infrastructure investment desperately needed now; and since not fixing our highways, bridges and flood control will lead to catastrophic losses of life and property that will tap our national resources even further, there could be no better beginning to 2009 that a program to rebuild this country from the ground - and levees - up.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

Me (Vancouver WA):

My parents (Bradenton FL):

My sisters (Charlotte NC):

My brother (Atlanta):

My sister-in-law (Maryville TN):

My aunt and uncle (Mt. Pleasant MI):

J.’s Aunt (Plymouth MN):

My other sister-in-law (Pleasant Hill CA):

Sure, California looks nice, if it weren’t for the drought.

The tornadoes that are going wild across the Midwest may mean we have a lighter hurricane season this year.

But boy scouts are dying and people are being made homeless across the country, while FEMA still hasn’t learned the lessons of Katrina.

It’s beginning to look like the dustbowl turned inside-out: horrific economic times, and people losing their homes and livelihoods not only foreclosure and recession but to extreme weather as well. It’s just mostly wet, instead of bone-dry.

Economics professor Dr. Ravi Batra believes the U.S. goes through approximately 30 year economic cycles; while the oil crunch feels like the 70s, what we’re seeing in the greater economy looks more like the 1930s.

If BushCo wasn’t so keen on privatization and fattening up the war profiteers, the meatgrinder wars we’re running might actually help the economy.

But this is no WWII, and George Bush is no FDR.

So all we’ll end up with as this cycle runs its course are more poor, more homeless, greater economic stratification, thousands of dead, and tens of thousands of wounded Americans coming home to a country too fucked up to help them get back on their feet.

Sure, those stimulatin’ checks may give the economy a temporary bump (proving, in passing, that tax cuts should go to the bottom and not the top if what you’re really after is economic stimulus). That is, if you even get your stimulus check: states are confiscating them left and right to cover unpaid tax liabilities and child support, delinquent student loans and other outstanding debts.

But like everything else BushCo does, this is about campaigning, not governing - a short term bribe in an election year designed to get you to like the GOP just enough not to throw the bastards out come November.

As the man says, we won’t get fooled again.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

Image via Wikipedia

David Sirota has a new, hopeful book called The Uprising about the beginning of a people’s movement in this country that will result in real change coming to America.

America has learned the hard way that if we ignore our government, our government will ignore us. Real, positive change seems to have become anathema to anything taking place in Washington, D.C.

With spiraling energy costs, inflation, a declining housing market, war and occupation without end, erosion of individual liberties, environmental degradation and many other deep seated problems, a new era of positive change is desperately warranted.

Let’s bring it on America.

Sirota on Colbert

I plan on reading this book soon but if anyone beats me to it, please let us know what you think of it here on d4v.org. Thanks.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

1 Comments

• At June 2, 2008, bushtool wrote:

  Sirota on CNN

There are some sick fucks in this country with some serious entitlement issues:

Officials are investigating the deaths of six sea lions who appear to have been shot Sunday after climbing onto traps in the Columbia River.

Wildlife officials said that the bodies of the sea lions were discovered at noon Sunday on two floating traps just below Bonneville Dam.

“In each of the two traps were three dead sea lions,” Brian Gorman, regional spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said.
…
Four traps were installed near Bonneville Dam in an attempt to protect endangered salmon.
…
Both species are federally protected. Washington and Oregon have been authorized to trap California sea lions, then relocate the most serious predators. More than 60 of the California sea lions have been branded as frequent offenders eligible for removal.

Because, you see, we humans built the dams that devastated the salmon runs, so now we have to punish the sea lions for doing what comes naturally.

And for some fuckwits, trapping and relocating the sea lions wasn’t punishment enough - especially when the river fishing season was cut short and the ocean fishing season was canceled all together because our fucking dams kill too many fucking salmon.

Because those salmon are ours, goddamn it - dead or alive - and no glorified circus act is going to keep us from our god-given right to hunt and pillage.

And ranch on public wildlands without fear of wild animal predation:

The Bush Administration unilaterally de-listed the wolves of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming from the Endangered Species list on March 28, and since then at least 37 wolves have been slaughtered despite continuing bans on hunting in Idaho and Montana - and ongoing litigation to stop the de-listing by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Wyoming’s wolf management plan classifies wolves outside of the northwestern part of the state as predators, which allows unlimited, year-round shooting of them. Only in a small portion of the state where a string of federally designated wilderness areas surround Yellowstone National Park does Wyoming classify wolves as a trophy species.

In this area, the state will manage wolves through a set hunting season, which will include hunting quotas.

Idaho and Montana’s wolf management plans classify wolves as a game animal anywhere they roam. With last week’s delisting of wolves, hunters in these states may be able to pursue the wily predators as soon as this fall.

To ranchers, wolves are nothing but parasites; to others, they are objects of fear and loathing despite the non-existence of even a single report of human predation by a wild wolf in North America.

According to the NRDC, “The death toll could be even higher [than the 37 reported] since kills are not required to be reported immediately, and ‘shoot and bury’ tactics mean that some kills might not be reported at all.”

For some Americans (like Bush and Cheney), Manifest Destiny is not a history lesson, but a raison d’être. Their manhood is dependent on subjugation and violence, whether toward land that is unsuitable for ranching (all of the federal lands West of the Mississippi produce less beef than the state of Missouri alone), individuals that seek to protect that land, or the wildlife that has lived upon it for eons.

But according to the Bible, only humans matter, and Christian humans at that. The rest is here for us to consume or destroy.

And so slaughter is justified, in Wyoming and Iraq.

The ugly daily fight for ground in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City unfolded Saturday at a small mosque next door to a hospital, damaging the hospital and a number of its ambulances, and near a group of children who were wounded as they gathered tin cans to sell for salvage.

The missiles that hit close to the Sadr General Hospital were American. After a night of clashes in the neighborhood, the Americans fired at least three “precision-guided munitions” at the small building next door to the hospital…

Haider Abbas, 10, was brought to the hospital with what appeared to be a gaping hole in his back and shrapnel injuries across his stomach. The boy screamed and whimpered in pain, barely able to answer a doctor’s questions.

“My friend brought me to the hospital, but we had to leave the other wounded kids behind,” he said. “The Iraqi Army refused to allow them to be evacuated, but my friend took me anyway.”

The doctor, Abdul Rahman Hadi, said the boy was bleeding internally. “He needs surgery quickly,” Dr. Hadi said. “The irony is that not one of his relatives has come because he is an orphan.”

Another victim of that attack, Ahmad Yahya, 31, whose leg was broken, said the Iraqi Army had blocked evacuation from the area of the attack. “I was with a group of about 15 children who were collecting the empty cans or the trash in Jamila,” he said. “I don’t know why this happened.”

Because the U.S. is run by rapacious cowards. It’s a cyclical feature of life here in the good old U.S.A.

If you’d like to voice your opposition to Congress, at least so far as wolf poisoning is concerned, you can use the NRDC’s form here.

You can voice your opposition to the slaughter - and any plans you might have for boycotting Wyoming’s tourism industry until it stops - to Wyoming’s Democratic governor Dave Freudenthal here.

Our son L. is desperate for a trip to Yellowstone, but that will have to wait until Wyoming comes to its senses.

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

3 Comments

• At May 13, 2008, Pat wrote:

  A lot of jumping to conclusions and painting with a very broad brush going on here.

  I'd take your son to Yellowstone. You will enjoy the trip and he will learn how wolves made an improvement to this natural environment. Unfortunately, there has been some spillover and some hard and difficult choices had to be made. Kind of like at our local humane society but much less so in the numbers involved...

• At May 15, 2008, slim wrote:

  I will take him to Yellowstone, just as soon as they stop killing wolves.

  We should understand the importance of predators in environmental balance. And we should not allow ranchers, who have the privilege - not the right - to graze their cows and/or sheep on our public lands to kill any animal that has not attacked or shown aggression toward a human.

  It's just another example of how we humans - and particularly Americans - thionk we have a right to everything, regardless of the cost to any other species.

• At May 15, 2008, Pat wrote:

  To my knowlege no wolves are being killed within the boundaries of Yellowstone. I wouldn't miss the family opportunity.

  Got to leave! I see I have some yellow jackets flying around the backyard. Should I set out a trap now or wait awhile ... perhaps until my grandson gets stung? Hopefully, he is not allergic...

Post from: Democracy for Vancouver

First, from The Conservative Nanny State author Dean Baker:

According to the oil industry, they have their refineries running flat out, producing all the gas they can. This means that the price is determined on the demand side.

We have a fixed amount of gas entering the market, the question is simply what price clears the market. In this context, if we reduce or eliminate the gas tax, the price doesn’t change, the lower tax will simply allow Exxon and other oil companies to keep more profits (unless of course they were lying about running their refineries at capacity).

Since most people do not have much familiarity with economics [especially Senator McCain - s.], the media should be informing the public about the impact of Senator McCain’s proposal.

Second, the federal gas tax is only about 20¢ a gallon, the tax break wouldn’t do a helluva lot to help people deal with prices that have more than doubled since Bush took office, and are predicted to hit $4 a gallon by summer.

Third, what happens every time a tax is “cut”? Even if it’s supposed to be a temporary tax cut, all tax cuts are treated by the GOP as permanent, and any attempt to sunset tax cuts or revive taxes after a “holiday” like McCains leads the Republicans to howl “TAX AND SPEND DEMOCRATS! NEW TAX! TAXES BAAAAD!” like stuck pigs (with their noses firmly in their troughs). Case in point, Bush’s “10 year” tax cuts which the GOP is now desperate to make permanent before the November elections:

Republicans on both sides of the Capitol assailed Democratic plans to let some of the massive tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 expire, saying that would amount to the largest tax hike in U.S. history.

The tax cuts were designed to expire because otherwise no reasonable legislator - or American - could have swallowed what the tax cuts would do to the national debt if they were permanent. (You think the estimates of the Iraq War debt are bad now???) But of course, the Republicans knew they would start screaming - just like they are - once the tax cuts threatened to sunset as they were designed to.

And the final reason McCain’s gas holiday idea sucks? It does nothing to address the problems of global warming/greenhouse gases, dwindling fossil fuel deposits, fucked up pipelines and politics in Iraq, OPEC giving us the finger, CAFE standards that are ridiculously low even after they were raised this year (35 mpg by 2020 is a sick joke), and oil companies lying their asses off about refinery capacity.

Address those problems, Johnny-boy, and then come talk to us about a tax holiday.

Schmuck.

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I wasn’t that surprised to see it in The Columbian, but I was disgusted that even the hosts on KPOJ have been referring to the Earth Liberation Front wackos who torched those McMansions up in Woodinville as terrorists.

E.L.F.’s actions are doomed to failure: burning a few model homes won’t stop sprawl or conspicuous consumption, any more than torching a few SUVs will change the tax code to make Hummers as unaffordable as they are ridiculous. But whatever the E.L.F. is, it is not a terrorist organization: its purpose is not to use violence and threats to intimidate or coerce an entire populace for political purposes.

Not unlike Luddites trashing mechanized looms, members of the E.L.F. are vandals, deliberately, mischievously and maliciously damaging and destroying property which the E.L.F. sees as a blight on the landscape and/or a direct threat to the environment.

The houses which the E.L.F. destroyed in Woodinville were empty. Only rarely do the actions of the E.L.F. (or other monkeywrenchers such as Tre Arrow) injure actual human beings.

I am by no means defending these vandals, but I do I understand their frustration with a country in which the corruption of the political process and the dilution of our democracy have made it all but impossible to implement the kinds of environmental protections which could slow global warming, preserve access to fresh, potable water, and protect other species from countless (and thoughtless) human depredations.

Back when I was in high school, I used to break my friend’s cigarettes in half or throw out her lighters - something that pissed her off enormously. I wasn’t trying to threaten her into quitting, I was just trying to make it much more difficult for her to smoke.

Destroying property, when that property itself is the source of offense, is vandalism, pure and simple. The E.L.F. was not firebombing construction offices during business hours in order to terrorize the builders.

BushCo and the various extractive/resource intensive industries that are the most frequent targets of this type of vandalism want to turn the vandals into terrorists, not only to weight the hammer of the law and to make people fear and hate environmentalists, but to make violence to humans and damage to property equivalent in the public mind. When property and profits are as sacrosanct as human life, corporations can do whatever the hell they want to protect their bottom line, no matter who gets hurt.

Individuals have already been severely devalued in this country, particularly by this administration. We must push back against this kind of defining down of terrorism. When property and profits receive the same protections as people, what follows the kind of corporatist dictatorships that allowed torture and murder for the protection and expansion of banana plantations in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s.

It should be obvious that people are worth more than bananas - or even oil profits; but Bush and Cheney are working hard to make it impossible for you to tell the difference.

So, by all means, investigate the Woodinville arsons, and prosecute the perpetrators. But don’t call it terrorism.

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