Europe tries government/industry "partnership"

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It's a fact that Europe has a long history of experience in government/industry "partnership," dating back to Renaissance-era royally chartered corporations up through its 20th century experiments with centrally controlled fascist and socialist economies. But now we have the governments of Greece and Italy, the very cradles of democracy, diving head-first into partnerships that must be the envy of American corporatists:

The question now, in both Italy and Greece, is whether the technocrats can succeed where elected leaders failed — whether pressure from the European Union backed by the whip of the financial markets will be enough to dislodge the entrenched cultures of political patronage that experts largely blame for the slow growth and financial crises that plague both countries.

Some said there was cause for optimism. “First, the mere fact that they have been asked in such difficult circumstances means that they have a mandate,” said Iain Begg, an expert on the European monetary union at the London School of Economics. “Granted, it’s not a democratic one, but it flows from disaffection with the bickering political class.”

To understand the government/industry partnership aspect, you need to know that the new "technocrat" Greek Prime Minster, Lucas Papademos, is an MIT-educated economist who has worked for the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank. Italy's new PM is likely to be "technocrat" Mario Monti: economist and politician, a two-term member of the European Commission, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and international adviser to that most ancient of US democratic institutions, Goldman-Sachs.

Atrios translates this trendy new European "technocrat" phenomenon for regular people:

Well the consensus seems to be we need to just install bankers as the leaders of all the countries, and the only way any of us can survive is if all the richest countries of the world are turned into 3rd world hellholes after the middle class gives all of their money to rich people.

I believe this concept is what is really behind the sentiment expressed by certain celebrity pundits that what American really needs is a billionaire philosopher-king like NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the helm because, after all, he's so rich that he has no reason to seek personal gain from the presidency. Mitt Romney is the poor man's Michael Bloomberg.

The S&P coup

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I want to add a little to my previous post on S&P's implicit threat to blackmail the federal government into adopting a specific piece of legislation (i.e., $4 trillion spending reduction over the next 10 years).

Paul Krugman seems a little skeptical that an S&P downgrade of US debt would be huge deal because, basically, bond traders already know that ratings agencies don't know what they're doing:

The point is that when S&P or Moody’s speaks, that’s not the voice of “the market”. It’s just some guys with an agenda, and a very poor track record. And we have no idea how much effect their actions will have.

I don't doubt that. But to me the important point is not so much what financial traders do with an S&P intervention of this nature, but what the media and politicians will do with it. A ratings agency downgrade of US debt will be presented as something like scientific evidence that we need to finish drowning the federal government in the bathtub now! now! now! It's hard for me to see how our disinformation economy could get any worse---how it could further accelerate America's decline. But my intuition tells me we haven't reached terminal velocity yet. We'll be even closer when the press, the Congress, and the President anoint Wall Street as the new fourth branch of government.

Fourth branch, Third World

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I think that Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, like the few other reports I've seen about the Standard and Poors threat to downgrade US debt to Third World status, just misses the point.

Yes, insane Republican ideology and The Conceder In Chief have done a swell job creating an existential economic threat by tying approval of the debt ceiling to the politics of government spending and taxation. This is the "Worst. Congress. Ever." Blah blah blah.

In journalism lingo, there's a "buried lede" in Klein's piece:

And having upset S&P, appeasing them might not be so simple. Beers repeatedly emphasized that he wasn’t just looking for a number. He was looking for something “credible.” And credible, in his view, was something that both parties had embraced. After all, he argued, deficit-reduction plans have to be continuously implemented over a decade or more, and if there’s not “buy-in from both parties,” there’s no reason to believe that the plan will survive the inevitable changes in political control.

On the one hand, the S&P view is a reasonable analysis. But on the other, sinister hand:

You might ask whether all this matters. S&P got the financial crisis almost entirely wrong — in fact, their analytical errors, alongside those of other agencies, substantially contributed to it — so why should we listen to them now?

But the question isn’t whether S&P should be listened to. It’s whether the market will listen to them.

Yes, that's right. The once-respectable financial rating agency, which is as tarnished by the 2008 economic implosion as any Wall Street investment bank, has made federal legislative politics an evaluative criterion for assessing the full faith and credit of the US government and the debt it issues.

And as a small digression, it's probably worth inserting here that there really is no deficit crisis. The deficit is high-ish in relation to conventional yardsticks, but interest rates are so low (near zero as applicable to government borrowing, in fact), that there is no problem servicing this debt... unless the ceiling isn't raised promptly. The "deficit crisis" is an invention of right-wing politicians, corporate media, and as a johnny-come-lately, President North Star.

But back to the libretto: There is nothing benign whatsoever about what S&P is up to here. They aren't trying to serve as a voice of reason: they're emphatically inserting itself into the political fray with the power of a fourth branch of government, but one outside of federal checks and balances. "You motherfuckers attend to the 'deficit crisis' ," S&P seems to be saying, "or else we'll sic The Market on you." With "you," of course, meaning both politicians and voters. It is an aggressive, unconscionable lobbying assault on behalf of The Corporation---a protection racket that the federal government must now subscribe to with an initial payment of $4 trillion extracted from middle-class taxpayers, the poor, and the elderly. If they pull this off, there will be no end to the racket until we're all living in sheet metal shacks on dirt lots.

The S&P threat gives every politician in Washington enough cover, or terror, to cave in to the demands of the Republican legislative caucus and The Conceder in Chief for "the good of the nation." Once this smelly, syphilitic Wall Street camel has its nose all the way into the tent, S&P might conceivably become as powerful as the Federal Reserve in dictating the grim economic future of America. No accountability; just the perpetual threat to shit everybody else's nest if some warty bankers and corporate chieftains don't like the drift of public policy.

"Hold it! Next man makes a move, the 'nigger' gets it!"

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Today the Standard & Poors "credit rating agency" borrowed a slick comedy move from Bart, Cleavon Little's character in Blazing Saddles. Specifically, S&P made a hollow threat to cut the rating of U.S. Treasury securities this morning---in effect, Wall Street holding a cap gun against its own head---which I assume is supposed to scare the President and the Democrats into doing whatever the right-wing deficit peacocks demand, such as abolishing Medicare and Social Security so rich assholes can have more tax cuts.

Right on cue, naturally, lame duck Senator Joe Lieberman was on my car radio this afternoon spewing turgid nonsense about the existential threat posed by current US debt levels and why it's important to cap federal spending at some absurdly low percentage of Gross Domestic Product. (I can't find a link to this, so you don't have to listen to his putrid, quavering voice here.) Why do I call it "turgid nonsense"? Because like most talk about federal deficits and debt in the corporate media today (including NPR), the somber generalities preached by deficit peacocks immediately break down to gibberish when real macroeconomists insist that the discussion include valid historic data, meaningful contexts, and other scary evidence-based features.

Nobel macroeconomist Paul Krugman, for example, quickly authenticated this S&P stunt as another episode of Wall Street's tiresome Saturday matinee serial entitled Uncle Sam and the Phantom Bond Vigilantes. It's fair to ask why I might put stock in anything Krugman and other neo-Keynesians say. My reason is simple: because his analysis have been consistently correct (i.e., consistently predictive about what would happen to the economy in the future) since I started following his New York Times blog 5 or 6 years ago, around the time he was was warning readers about the runaway US housing bubble and related phenomena. And he always backs his arguments with verifiable economic data and simple numerical models that every economist and most people with a high school diploma can understand.

Tiresome question of the week

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"Why aren't we bombing Bahrain, too?"

It's all over the place. And I'll admit that I, too, have asked it. But rhetorically. Facetiously. It's easy to concoct your own variations on the question: just substitute "Ivory Coast," "Syria," even "Zimbabwe" if you want to get a little obscure.

Colonel Qaddafi was a bastard 40 years ago, and he was a bastard 20 years ago, and he was a bastard less than 2 years ago when Senator John McCain was a guest at Qaddafi's Libyan "ranch" and "discussing a military equipment deal" with this "interesting man." (Senators Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman were part of McCain's 2009 entourage.) And now Colonel Q is the facing a new "makeover" to append his previous one. They've probably already labeled the body bag. "They" who? NATO nations, which might in this case be considered client states for most of the "supermajors."

Even if there were a genuine humanitarian impulse behind this North African squirmish, the ways and means are all wrong for many of the reasons you've probably read about, the main one being that nobody outside of an Orwell anthology conducts humanitarian operations with heavy bombers. Libya is a sovereign nation, and it has not committed an international act of aggression against any nation in this new coalition of the willing. Past sponsorship of international terrorism is one thing that makes Qaddafi a bastard, but I'm pretty sure that is not the same thing in terms of international law as committing a current act of war.
But there is no humanitarian motive behind Operation: Odyssey Dawn during this so-called Arab Spring. This week President North Star had to wipe US fingerprints off the whole thing as rapidly as possible to create the illusion to the Arab world that the US did not leave its fingerprints all over the whole thing. I'm not promoting any imperialist "conspiracy theory," but just based on what shows from behind the curtain, the situation appears fairly straightforward: circumstances have put the sustainability of Qaddafi's authoritarian regime in serious jeopardy, so there is an irresistible opportunity to wrest power away from him, complete with a blue-chip "humanitarian" alibi for doing so. Why? Because Colonel Q is de facto boss of Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC). Regardless of which supermajors may now be making money directly or otherwise off Libya's "light sweet crude," it seems certain that all players---including NATO governments---should love to see NOC dismantled in a wave of Bush-style tsunami of peeance and freeance.

"Considering all options"

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The Associated Press, via HuffingtonPost, reports that

the U.S. military warned Tuesday it was "considering all options" in response to dire conditions there that have left people cowering in darkened homes and scrounging for food and rainwater.

So a new Coalition of the Willing implements a no-fly zone over Libya by bombing the shit out of the country. Then, due to the "dire conditions" to which Operation: Odyssey Dawn must have contributed to immensely, the omnipresent "U.S. military" seems to threaten pretty much anything in order to make things all better.

I've already registered my complaint, and Gurlitzer's, about the name given to this humanitarian military initiative. Maybe they should have called it Operation: Hey Kid Stop Hitting Yourself Or I'll Kick Your Ass.

In front of our noses

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In the comments section of last night's post about "Operation: Odyssey Dawn," Gurlitzer observed that the name of this military intervention may be more worrisome than inartful. The name pretty well literally means "the beginning of a long, complicated journey." I wonder whether that amounted to some kind of military Freudian slip or it actually was intended to convey the meaning that Gurlitzer pointed to.

This evening Josh Marshall posted about how many ways this adventure looks like a bad idea to him. As much as liberal-minded people want tyrants like Qaddafi to disappear, and think it's a noble idea to level the "playing field" for his internal enemies, we have many more reasons to reject this kind of thinking: three of the most compelling can be summarized as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Even if the US were the most nobleminded liberal democracy on the planet, it would still not be in our charter to try governing nations that we feel are being run by villains. Where we have national agreement that influencing certain outcomes is in the best interests of global tranquility, then the weapons of choice would be trade, foreign aid, diplomacy, and sanctions. These tools would be applied to help or hinder as required, and executed in the context of a broadly multilateral international consensus. Maybe everyone will be ready for that sometime in the 23rd century.

Another take on Operation: Odyssey Dawn is offered by Duncan Black (i.e., "Atrios"): wars are free, aren't they?! Also, "freedom bombs" may be good for the economy!

Finally, here's a post from Hullabaloo that better gets at the point pertaining to management of the public narrative that I was trying to make last night: they're using centrifuge-grade spin, but the issue is too important to greet with the knee-jerk cynicism we've been conditioned to react with.

Quaint ideas I have

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It seems that I have a mistaken idea of what the term "no-fly zone" means. I'd understood it to mean that our UN heroes would patrol Libyan airspace and shoot down Colonel Qaddafi's fighters and bombers to prevent them from strafing protesters. But evidently it means that the US and British navies bomb the shit out of coastal cities with cruise missiles. And so begins Operation: Odyssey Dawn... which has to be the worst name given to any military operation in world history!

Setting aside the stupid name for the attack, I do understand the concept of disabling the dashing Colonel's antiaircraft batteries so UN air forces can patrol the skies. But I also understand that Qaddafi's air defense infrastructure is somewhat old and mediocre, and is not considered a high threat to Western nation's superior air power. Cruise missiles are an outstanding modality for causing "collateral damage."

Second-guessing military strategists is not my purpose, though; I'm more interested in the delicate pubic narrative versus the comparatively jarring reports arriving on our computer screens. We're told that the US has been very sensitive about being seen as the ringleader of this military action. In the same HuffingtonPost article linked above, Harry Reid coyly states

"I support the actions taken today by our allies, with the support of several Arab countries, to prevent the tyrant Moammar Qaddafi from perpetrating further atrocities on the people of Libya."

as if the United States has confined itself to cheerleading in the bleachers.

In other news, where the Kingdom of Bahrain and its subjects are concerned, it appears that the United States and European democracies have not even bothered to set up the bleachers. I wonder why.

Tea and crumb pits

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Apropos of the Phil Ochs lyrics The 59er has been sharing with us in the comments threads, most recently here, I think of this doke I saw on the web comic Married To The Sea awhile back:



It's easy to sling around idealism, whether just misguided or cynically manipulative, until we do a few thought experiments about the potential logical outcomes.

In my analysis, the followers are angry, all with more than enough reasons. Based on media coverage (which is what most of us have to go on), most of them blame the wrong people for their problems. They are preoccupied with the "undesirables"---fellow victims, all, incidentally, but living further downhill toward the pit where all the "shit" ultimately rolls---instead of the Nobility. Our homegrown aristocracy busily continues to socially engineer a nation mired in distrust, fear, and absolutism, and Tea Partiers will glide down the slippery slope toward the pit with the rest of us Commoners. So what can I say about these Tea Partiers? Some are earnest but misguided, many are True Believers, and the rest are just "dipshits." The instigators, though, are a whole 'nother class of entities.

Editor's note: I recommend that everyone visit Married To The Sea every day. These shorties who produce this clip art web comic demonstrate to all you geezers out there that there are plenty of "millennials" who know where it's at. They just stay away from our neighborhoods.

It's Bedtime!

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After you kids are done watching this, you need to pop right into bed, and I don't wanna hear another peep outta ya! Because I want to talk with the grown-ups.



"Greedy Humpty Dumpty" is a 1936 Fleischer Studios masterpiece that had a deep impact on my semisolid brain back in the mid and late 1950s. Flesicher cartoons were a major source of kids' fare in the early decades of television, readily available through syndication services to fill local programming holes on independent stations and network affiliates. Most of us who grew up with them assumed that all of them were black and white; even us shorties could recognize that these were "old-fashioned" cartoons as compared with things like Ruff 'n' Ready, Crusader Rabbit, or even Tom Terrific. (Little Me always preferred the old-school cartoons, and I had little use for the modern junk until Rocky and his Friends came along.)

Anyway, little did I know until the 1980s that this short was produced in color. Although color adds a lot to the presentation, the ghostly grayscale rendering on a 1950s 15-inch cathode ray tube produced its own unique impact, almost verging on horror (to my delicate sensibilities, at least). The fully expressed insanity of Humpty Dumpty inside his vault (with cash bags ominously resembling piled skulls), his stupidity, his greed and cruelty---so pointless since he was already The King Of Wealth---that laugh of his, and finally, the fury of the violated sun (echoing the vengeful Old Testament god of the Fleischers)---these images and sounds left a lasting dent in my 4-year-old psyche. Seeing GHD periodically, later while growing up, always gave me a bit of the willies as I experienced them at the time of my premier viewing.

As I say, this cartoon is a masterpiece of storytelling, even if it is based on one of the oldest archetypal tales known to human civilization (greed plus covetousness leading to insanity and ruin). With it's cute fairy-tale visual design and insipid toddler-oriented music bed, the story operates on multiple levels according to viewer maturity and perceptiveness. To semi-engaged parents who early learned the babysitting prowess of television, the cartoon was "kid stuff," with its treacly score piping into the kitchen or laundry room before Dad was home from work (or awake on the weekend). To the target audience, GHD was a story with a moral, sort of like the parables they presented to us in Sunday School, but much more entertaining and convincing thanks to the visuals and the absence of plump, warty matrons wasting our morning in a classroom environment.

Many YouTube commentators correctly draw parallels between this cartoon and our present financial sector disaster, and others have pointed out that a sentient 1936 adult may have interpreted this cartoon as social commentary related to the roots of the Great Depression. Myself, I think it also encapsulates much more profound esoteric knowledge---the type that mystery religions conceal behind an infrastructure of myth, legend, history, and pedagogy to occupy followers who are not ready to access deeper levels. I know this may sound pseudo-intellectual, but I feel that "Greedy Humpty Dumpty" rewards repeated viewings, disgorging new details of literary merit and even an allegory of how civilizations and immortal souls fail.

Greedy Humpty Dumpty, Dave Fleischer [Director]; David Tendlar and William Sturm [Animators] (1936, Fleischer Studios), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Businesses do *not* create jobs; please make a note of it

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The title of this post is one of the holiest shibboleths in the rhetorical arsenal of free-market capitalists. I never quite swallowed the associated line and sinker, and about 10 or 15 years ago I slowly started to disgorge the hook. With the stock market and worker productivity continually climbing to all-time highs, I said to myself, why do we so often have unacceptably high unemployment? And why are so many of the jobs that are available crapwork in the food and retail sectors that can't really support one householder, let alone a family? And furthermore, how can anyone claim that burgeoning corporations create jobs when every major acquisition or merger results in 10 or 20 percent of their combined workforces losing their jobs?

This recent Bob Herbert column from the Times is worth a careful read, especially, I think, to people who are confused about economics as reported by the corporate media. Herbert reports on comments by Boston economics professor Andrew sum:

The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent.

In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. And raises were out of the question. The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.” 

What that means, Herbert says, is this: "Many of those workers were cashiered for no reason other than outright greed by corporate managers." And I'll append Herbert by stating my opinion that small businesses (which officially includes companies employing up to 500 people) are every bit as dirty as transnational corporations. Many do it even in good times by keeping the majority of employees working 30 hours or less, so they aren't entitled to full benefits; and also by basically putting them on call instead of giving them a reliable schedule. Those practices are especially egregious in big box stores and restaurants, based on my conversations with people who work there.

"What a surprising development!" we who have jobs may say to ourselves, going straight for the humorous irony angle. But doesn't this information nevertheless make you wonder why this disconnect between worker productivity and full employment isn't reported nationally at least on a weekly basis by the "liberal media"?

The sure knowledge that businesses do not create jobs --- when it transmutes beyond the point between irony and dawning outrage --- leaves a question in its place to answer. If businesses don't create jobs, then what do they create? Answer: profits for executives, period. It has been moving in that direction for decades, and now we're there. Shit: businesses barely even make anything any more --- they sub that out to the Chinese and the Indians (who of course are rapidly learning to sub the making of stuff out to the Fourth World).

Roaring 20s President Calvin Coolidge is often erroneously quoted as having vacuously said "The business of America is business." Even if had said that, as dumb as it is, it might still be thought to convey a generic fact about American corporate and individual industry. Today, not even Silent Cal's alleged dumb remark can hold water. Because today, the business of American is multi-level marketing schemes. Just like Amway. (Don't call them "pyramid schemes" because you might hurt their feelings.)

Incidentally, here's what calvin-coolidge.org tells us that the 30th president really did say:

The quote is really: "After all, the chief business of the American people is business." However, Coolidge goes on to say that, "Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence."

And what are we to make of this statement by Herbert Hoover's predecessor:

We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.

The guy sounds like a fucking Obamunist to me! I say we dig him up and lynch him! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Irony, presumably unintended

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Herein please find a special educational supplement concerning proper use of the term "irony," intended for Big Rock Head specifically and the greater Fifty50 community generally, courtesy of the Iowa "Tea Party" via TPM. You see, BRH, the irony of the scene depicted below is that President Obama is in fact a moderate, centrist U.S. President while mainstream Republican Senate "leaders" such as John Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Judd Gregg, John Cornyn, and Tom Coburn are right-wing radicals who thrive on the bitterness of fearful, naive "Real Americans" who they trick into believing that the unemployed and chronically impoverished people just have it too darned easy in life while our wealthy elites need even more tax relief than George Bush gave them 9 years ago.

A casual reading of any impartial 20th century history text will reveal that both Hitler and Stalin derived unheard-of totalitarian powers in part by aligning corporate management and strategic objectives (and financial interests) with those of their respective party apparatus. The differences in tactics of Hitler and Stalin were essentially irrelevant considering the enormity of the results they achieved, such as continual wars of aggression and industrial-scale mass murder. Can any of my shorties out there in Fifty50Land think of any examples from our modern times that resemble the Nazi and Communist merger of corporate, political, and military interests to prey on the fearful and naive? Do tell.

Editor's note: the photo above is by Deb Nicklay and copyrighted by the Associated Press and the Globe Gazette (http://gazetteonline.com/) in Iowa, U.S.A. Fair use is claimed for purposes of social commentary and community education. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Freedom Muffins?

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In the comments thread of my most recent edition of Wise sayings, our friend from across the Atlantic, Mr. Barry Coidan, posted a preemptive and seeming defensive comment about Americans (me in particular?) blaming Brits for the super-awesome oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico. In my case that actually wasn't so, and I in fact agree pretty much 100% with Mr. Coidan's comment because let's face it: BP is not a Merrie Olde Company run by and for a jolly bunch of droll, quick-witted Limeys, but a global multinational energy corporation that is no more or less profit-crazed, ruthless, and unethical than any of the other five "supermajors" such as, say, ExxonMobil, Chevron, or ConocoPhillips. (U!  S!  A!    U!  S!  A!)

There's probably no news in this here Mobile Press-Register report (Mobile, Alabama, that is) about the spill that you don't already know if you're even halfway following the saga. But take a look at the comments thread, such as this one from the appropriately named "yellohamr":

The British are no better at fixing oil leaks than fighting the Germans. American will half to bail tham out of both.

Yes, perhaps the hapless Brits will half to depend on American Halliburton, everybody's favorite American oilfield services corporation, with headquarters in good old American Houston, Texas, America, to bail tham out! You remember: good old American Halliburton whose Chairman and CEO works and lives in Dubai, UAE, "to Focus [the] Company’s Eastern Hemisphere Growth." I wonder if the United States has an extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, it seems like Barry C. was justified in his prophetic defense. Americans can be expected to trade in their Freedom Fries for Freedom Muffins. Starting in the Deep South, predictably.

Plan C (From Outer Space)

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I guess we all can rest a bit easier tonight. According to Reuters, BP has a cunning new plan to plug their deepwater runaway gusher in the Gulf of Mexico:

"They are actually going to take a bunch of debris -- some shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that -- and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up to stop the leak," U.S. Coast Board Admiral Thad Allen told CBS News.

That's right, Ladies and Germs. Golf balls. And shredded tires, too. Sounds like a plan.

According to the Reuters report, BP also is drilling a relief well in order to stop the leak by relieving oil pressure at the well head, "but that could take three months." No, I don't feel like multiplying 90 days times 210,000 gallons per, either....

Ecological 9/11? [updated]

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The headline of this post employs a gimmick that I generally despise, namely the glib sensationalization of pretty much everything for the purpose of a catchy "hed." But in fact this thought is seriously occurring to me. BP is officially clueless about what to do now that the giant cofferdam* has failed to contain the gusher. Even if it had worked, I'm guessing the leak has already exceeded the size of the Exxon Valdez, and probably by a lot. Reporting I've heard about the rate of leaking have been ambiguous (i.e., conflicting or vague numbers about the leak rate), but the Alaska disaster involved about 11 million barrels gallons if I remember correctly. But, as I say, the most feasible idea for capping this thing has failed.

Now consider the reason why the cofferdam solution failed, as reported in the linked story from ThinkProgress above: frozen methane. BP had accounted for running into methane ice and had addressed it through engineering. But they found it forming either in much greater quantities or at a much faster rate than projected. Worldwide there's a lot of this stuff lurking way deep in oceans --- giant deposits of methane gas frozen into enormous slushy masses called clathrates. My senior science advisor has told me in the past that methane clathrates are pretty much benign, ecologically, unless they warm up enough to re-enter their gaseous phase and bubble up through the briny deep into our air supply. Methane, as it happens, is a much more efficient greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, meaning ton for ton it traps much more heat than CO2. And guess what can help those clathrates evaporate --- global warming! Ding! I do not know how much methane is venting from the wellhead or how long it will remain frozen in the gulf, but it's not a stretch to say that this spill may have a potentially serious impact on the atmosphere as well as the sea.

Also consider what might happen if the spreading slick were to find its way into the Gulf Stream. I don't know how likely it is that the gulf currents will take this sludge around Flordia and up the East Coast, but it certainly seems like something to be concerned about.

NIMBYism may sometimes, or often, be a hypocritical kneejerk reaction that people have against land or resource uses they would fully support as long as it's not in their back yard. But there are plenty of things that everyone has a right to expect will not happen in their back yard. What happens when a pernicious development happens in the back yard of, say, 5 or 10 or 50 million people? Here's what: Republican Governor Schwarzenegger flipflops without sweating a single bullet. And every law of politics says he was completely correct even though, uncharacteristically, it was also the right thing to do.

Finally, consider just how big this back yard really is when you take into account (1) ruined livelihoods, (2) fatal damage to coastal ecosystems and biodiversity, (3) ruined oceanfront real estate, and (4) destruction of aquaculture and seafood resources. Oh yeah: don't forget skyrocketing energy prices as the good folks at Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips and Chevron and Saudi Aramco (and, yes, BP) go for the jugular of the oil-consuming public to extract the greatest possible return on investment in this holocaust.

The real impact of September 11 for most of us (i.e., those of us who weren't killed, maimed, traumatized, or crazed with grief for someone who those things did happen to at one of the Ground Zeros) was that popular sentiment was manipulated by very bad people into support for two illegal, disastrous wars and one unitary surveillance state. And that act of terrorism --- as spectacular, amoral, and gut-churning as it was --- had no concrete impact on the vast majority of Americans (until our teenagers started killing and being killed overseas, and our civil liberties at home began slumping like a mudslide). I wonder what socio-political witches' brew might start fermenting if the dirt-cheap shrimp disappear from Red Lobster and the sunrise reflects from an oily sheen off Cape Cod.

Update: part of the ambiguity about leakage rates I noted above probably relates to the fact that the media sometimes refer to barrels, sometimes to gallons, and other times to tons. The Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons, not 11 million barrels --- my apologies. The unit conversion for 1 barrel is 42 gallons, meaning that if the leakage rate figure stated here (8th paragraph) is correct, that means roughly a quarter-million gallons ooze in each day. There are two unknowns: one is how long this will go on; the other is whether BP is lowballing the leakage rate for purposes of public appearances. So is the really a possible "Ecological 9/11"? We have to hope not, but the answer is directly related to how many "back yards" are trashed and how many bank accounts are strained as a result.
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* I get to use this word because I've actually written about cofferdams in the past... so there!

What's the matter with Kansas? [updated]

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Gulf of Mexico tutorial here.

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Update: I pasted the wrong link into the first graf, which naturally confused everyone who clicked through. I have replaced that link to a later post explaining myself. Sorry peeps.