Month: September 2005

A lot of people seem to have gotten their hopes up over the California legislature’s recent passage of a bill to legalize same-sex marriage. Schwarzenegger, who’s been sitting on the fence, now promises a veto. This will disappoint many. But if you were governor, pushing your agenda via an increasingly unpopular initiative process, having called a special election which will cost local governments an estimated $45 million, would you dare act to overturn the “people’s will” as expressed in proposition 22?

Even as a monogamist heterosexual, I don’t accept the premise that government should be involved in marriage, be it for heterosexuals, homosexuals, monogamists, or polygamists. Marriage is a religiously defined institution, and each religion should be free to marry whom it wants under the circumstances of its choosing. Yes, there will be abuses. But deal with the abuses as abuses; don’t confound them with marriage.

It is a measure of the divisiveness of this particular president, that the squabble over a less than impressive response to Katrina’s devastation has devolved into a blame game, even as relief efforts continue. An article points to White House damage control efforts.

“They can’t do that,” Jane Bullock, who had a 22-year career at FEMA, told the Los Angeles Times, referring to Bush administration attempts to shift responsibility to state and local officials. “The moment the president declared a federal disaster, it became a federal responsibility. … The federal government took ownership over the response.”

That the response to this disaster has been so poor causes some concern:

Newt Gingrich, may have summed it up best of all, in an interview with the Financial Times: “If we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?”

Wired News carries an article on rising casualty counts and insurance costs from natural disasters, saying “statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe.” The population is growing, so it is less surprising that “[m]ore than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous two 10-year periods, U.N. officials reported at a conference on disaster prevention in January.”

In the 1970s, only 11 percent of earthquakes affected human settlements, researchers at Belgium’s University of Louvain report. That soared to 31 percent in 1993 to 2003, including a quake in 2003 that killed 26,000 people in Iran, whose population has doubled since the ’70s.

The expanding U.S. population “has migrated to hazard-prone areas — to Florida, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, particularly barrier islands, to California,” noted retired U.S. government seismologist Robert M. Hamilton, a disaster-prevention specialist. “Several decades ago we didn’t have wall-to-wall houses down the coast as we do now.”

The way America builds too often invites disasters, experts say — by draining Florida swampland and bulldozing California hillsides, for example, disrupting natural runoff and magnifying flood hazards.

“We’re building our communities in ways that aren’t compatible with the natural perils we have,” [Dennis S. Miletti, a leading scholar on disaster prevention] said.

The more advanced the nations, the bigger the blow may be. Terry Jeggle, a U.N. disaster-reduction planner, cites the New Orleans levee system — dependent on pumps that run on electricity produced by fuel that must be transported in. One failure will lead to another along that chain.

I honestly don’t know what to make of this. The first story is a story that won’t go away, insisting that the World Trade Center was destroyed through a controlled implosion. There are lots of stories that won’t go away, whether or not they have merit:

A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush’s first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is “bogus” and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, “If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an ‘inside job’ and a government attack on America would be compelling.” Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, “It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.”

A significant portion of this argument seems to be missing. Reynolds cites a “full range of facts.” But I haven’t seen what those “facts” are; even if I had, there is a strong possibility that, particularly with modern structural engineering, I wouldn’t be able to evaluate them. But you’ll find some skepticism on these claims, including this:

I am a practicing structural engineer. I have an undergraduate degree in civil engineering, I also took 5 or 6 graduate level structural design courses, and I have plenty of experience in the structural design field. Trust me when I say there is no truth to these theories. All of my co-workers and colleagues agree. I could systematically go through and refute or explain away nearly every “point” Morgan Reynolds attempts to make, but I won’t waste time on that. It is glaringly obvious from his prose that he is not familiar with how a building is constructed, steel design, stress analysis, or load transfer. Maybe he can easily fool a semi educated lay person, but he isn’t fooling me. Hundreds of real experts conducted their independent detailed investigations (yes they did analyze the collapsed structural elements before they were recycled as well as the patterns of smoke leaving the building and all other evidence) and came to the same conclusion… ASCE (America Society of Civil Engineers) and Leslie Robertson (the original structural engineer) are among them. Yes, the ASCE Report was created in conjunction with FEMA, but ASCE is an independent organization made up of thousands of the most credible and ethical engineers we have. I was a member myself for many years and you could not convince me that they would be part of a cover-up.

Bottom line:

The most damaging thing was the explosion which blew the fireproofing off of the steel framing. (Fire proofing is typically sprayed on to steel framing to reach a certain thickness. This is to protect the steel which begins to lose strength as it heats up.) The problem was that although the fire proofing was fine for typical building fires (electrical fires, etc.) it was not blast resistant. The force of the explosion blew off all of the fireproofing in the surrounding areas.

Reynolds, it would seem, should know better. I’m not inclined to dismiss a professor at Texas A&M out of hand. So I am mystified.

The second story draws me in by criticizing media coverage:

“It’s like the Nazis removing dissent without using the Gestapo,” said [Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Reagan] whose articles are circulated widely on the Internet and appear regularly in the American Free Press, an alternative publication. “Most publications, like the Washington Times, for example, will not print anything critical of Bush, his strategies and, definitely, anything seriously opposing the war is off base.”

Roberts seems to be using the first story as an example:

Roberts said the recent statements made by Reynolds, however, reveals just how flimsy and unbelievable the government story comes across.

“This is not some kind of conspiracy nut or kook talking. He is a man with extremely qualified credentials, whose opinions I respect,” said Roberts referring to Reynolds’ comments which have been highly publicized across the country.

“The real story is not Morgan Reynolds or myself, but why have so many former Republican conservatives and top ranking officials who disagree with the neo cons been systematically run out of Washington? And, also, why is the media so intent on covering up the Bush-neo con agenda and all the mistakes surrounding it?

We already know about the Bush administration’s preference for ideology over empirical evidence. We already know about the media simply laying down prostrate before the Bush Administration. What we don’t know about are questionable claims, salacious because they are made by somewhat credible Republicans and conservatives against the Bush administration, but with weak backing. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might suspect this whole thing is a Karl Rove-style plot, seeking to lure Liberals into advocating positions which would undermine their own credibility.

But not being a conspiracy theorist, I’m simply mystified.

An article in Canada’s National Post begins:

The despair and lawlessness that gripped New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina this week have seared the soul of Black America.

The families who were stranded on rooftops or forced to swim for their lives as their city was engulfed by the floods were almost all black.

The looters who ransacked and terrorized neighbourhoods were almost all black.

The bodies that lay rotting and unclaimed all week on the waterlogged streets were almost all black.

The thousands of refugees who sought shelter and found only despair in the Superdome were almost all black.

Salon.com has carried a series of articles accusing Bush of cutting flood control project funding for New Orleans despite a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warning that a hurricane hitting New Orleans was among the top three catastrophic disaster risks the United States faced. All true. But FactCheck.org reports that the Army Corps of Engineers project would only have shored up levees and made other improvements to a design rating for a category 3 hurricane.

The multi-decade project involved building new levees, enlarging existing levees, and updating other protections like floodwalls. It was scheduled to be completed in 2015.

Katrina was a category 4 hurricane when it hit. And while others, notably “the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., the former chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency” foresaw a levee breach as a possibility, the Corps mostly did not. But FactCheck.org notes that flooding “from water washing over the levees” was foreseen.

Would a completed project have fared better against the hurricane which hit? Possibly, but the Corps “insists that Katrina was just too strong, and that even if the levee project had been completed it was only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane.”

There are other reasons to blame Bush. Sidney Blumenthal, in his article also mentioned “[t]he Bush administration’s policy of turning over wetlands to developers…. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot.” But a 2002 Congressional report “estimated that 80% of the total loss of coastal wetlands in the United States has taken place in [Louisiana].” If 80% had already been lost in 2002, most of the damage had probably already been done before Bush the younger came into office.

And, of course, the Bush administration has ignored warnings about global warming, which many believe intensified the storm. Here again, global warming began before Bush came into office; while his attitude towards the scientific evidence has been wholly irresponsible, one cannot blame him for all global warming.

There are some points which do stick. This was a foreseen disaster.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) report from before September 11, 2001 detailed the three most likely catastrophic disasters that could happen in the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a strong earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane strike in New Orleans.

Joe Conason points to “the downgrading of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from a Cabinet-level agency to a neglected sideline of the Department of Homeland Security,” essentially emasculating the federal goverment of its ability to respond to these kinds of crises. In addition, while Bush can’t be blamed for all the wetland destruction and all the global warming, he has done nothing even to halt the damage being done. So while we can’t really blame Bush for Katrina, we can certainly hold him responsible for a series of policies, which Katrina has proven wrong. And the right wing is also wrong to once again silence debate, this time on environmental policy, in the name of patriotism.

Honest political debate over how and why we lost the great city of New Orleans, according to the latest dictates from the right, means “an excess of recrimination,” “finger-pointing” and “villain hunting.” Such a “vulgar” exercise risks overshadowing our normal national unity and generosity in confronting disaster with “divisiveness” and “partisanship.” We are piously advised instead to do good and find common ground, to “be humble, compassionate and helpful.” Thus speak the sages of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal.