| This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
TOP |
Tuesday, June
1, 2010
It's an Oil Spill, Not the End of
the World
Today is full of dismaying news. First, the hole isn't plugged. In
fact, while President Obama was telling us that the maneuver to fill the
pipe with driller's mud would have a 60% chance of plugging it, the
operation had been called off, apparently by the people who have their boot
on BP's neck. The government has given the Attorney General orders to make
sure the boot stays in place. The effect of that on actually plugging the
hole isn't known, nor is it known whether the AG will go to Louisiana, where
I am sure more lawyers are needed.
Not that I am carrying any brief for BP. I don't know the whole story --
I doubt anyone does -- but all the evidence I have seen points to BP always
taking the cheapest course even when the cost differences involved are a few
million to tens of millions of dollars in operations that bring in billions.
Of course managing economic risks is part of what capitalist ventures do.
The problem here is that the consequences of failure are borne not merely by
the capitalist venture, but by all of us. It's another case of thr rewards
of success going
to the private venture, while the cost of failure is borne by others. We've
seen a lot of that in the past few years. Both the Creeps and the Nuts like
that sort of "gamble."
We all know how the Creeps played with Credit Default Swaps and such. The
Nuts do it a bit differently but the results are the same. The Nuts, for
example, insisted on minimum wages for Samoa; that ran the cost of fish
processing up, so a number of canneries closed their Samoan operations and
moved to other places in Asia where there is no minimum wage. Now the Nuts
are sending a few tens of millions to Samoa to bail out the collapsing
economy. The economy wasn't in collapse until the fish processing plants
closed eliminating one of the major job sources. Of course that's small
potatoes compare with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac injecting more and more
money into the housing market, buying up bundles of junk mortgages and using
those piles of junk bonds as security to borrow more public money to inject
into the housing market. Meanwhile the Nuts insisted that we spread housing
ownership around, meaning that finance companies should ought to make loans
to nearly anyone who wanted in on the American Dream of housing ownership.
Which of course led to the sob stories about the gardener with a $40,000 a
year "stated" (i.e. not verified or even documented) income being able to
"buy" a $450,000 house that, after the collapse of the bubble, turned out to
be "worth" about $200,000; now the poor chap is being foreclosed and
evicted. It's the end of his Dream. Etc.
Decoupling risk from consequences didn't work too well in keeping the
economy going. How well has it worked with deepwater oil drilling?
Actually, a lot better than it did with the housing market. We've heard a
lot about the terrible damage from the oil torrent, and it is certainly
frightening; but it turns out not to be quite so big in the context of other
oil spills. I first heard that this morning on the Rush Limbaugh show. Rush
is seldom my primary source of information, but this morning he gave his
source, Dr. Roy Spencer, whom
we've recommended here in the past.
Limbaugh shows Spencer's chart on his web page, and it's instructive.
Yes, it's a disaster, but it's not large in comparison with previous -- even
frequent -- disasters. This isn't the end of the world as we know it. The
torrent has to be stopped, the oil has to be contained, the hole has to be
plugged, and the longer that takes the worse it will be, but the Persian
Gulf recovered from the world's worst oil spill (deliberate at that) and the
Gulf of Mexico will recover from this one.
That doesn't excuse us from the obligation to learn more about containing
these disasters, and my recommendation is that every oil pumping operation
should be subject to a separation tax devoted to funding the creation of
Civil Defense organizations, a recovery force of specialists, and research
and development of recovery methods. I'm no great fan of bureaucracies, but
sometimes they are necessary. Fire Departments are bureaucracies. Volunteer
fire departments work in some places, private fire fighters have been
advocated by strict libertarians, but I'm quite pleased with the Los Angeles
Fire Department. I gather that New Yorkers are fond of the NYFD; and indeed
mot places I go seem happy with the local fire departments. But that's
another discussion about details: the most important thing needed for the
future is to re-create Civil Defense, not just for oil spill containment but
also hurricanes, earthquakes, twisters, etc.
We can be dismayed that the hole is not plugged (the Top Fill attempt
apparently was stopped by the US government, perhaps for good reasons); but
at least we know this isn't the worst disaster of the Gulf and isn't the end
of the world as we know it.
==
For an anti-BP ramt (and some juicy rumors)
see Mail.
============
The other dismaying news is from the Middle East. Of course most news
from the Middle East is dismaying. It needs analysis, which I'll get to in a
bit. First some news from Chaos Manor.
Thursday we are off to the Carolinas for the
ConCarolinas convention. This
morning the vet examined Sable and she's in good condition, recovering
nicely, so the house sitters won't have to work too hard taking care of her.
We always have someone stay over in Chaos Manor when we're both away. We'll
be back Sunday night. I don't know how much work I'll be able to do keeping
this place up while we're on the trip. This has been a year in planning, and
we haven't been to an East Coast convention in some years. (I know that
Charlotte isn't really on the coast.) Anyway we're looking forward to the
trip and seeing our eastern friends. Sable is up to a mile
walk in the mornings, which is good for us as well as for her. She's back to
her job of making sure these humans get exercise, and I suspect some of the
last month's funk has been that we didn't get out much. We've been taking
Sable out for the past few days, and it's sure helping me recover from
whatever I got last month. Today after getting Sable home from the vet I
took another mile walk to the barber shop, and while that's tiring, it seems
to have done me good.
It shouldn't be a surprise that vegetation isn't a good
thing.... =================
The Israeli Fiasco Presumably all
my readers are aware of the Israeli forcible boarding of the Turkish flag
ferry boat that was part of a flotilla of ships bringing food, school books,
and other "humanitarian aid" to Gaza. The
boarding action was resisted, the boarding party felt itself in danger,
and after either Israeli fire or an exchange of gunfire, nine of the
flotilla passengers were dead and others were wounded. Egypt in protest has
opened the border between Egypt and Gaza. Turkey, formerly Israel's only
real ally in the Middle East, has withdrawn its ambassador and made other
hostile diplomatic rules -- and promises to send more blockade runners.
It was predictable and predicted from the moment that the
"humanitarian" flotilla sailed out of Turkey (and other countries) for
Gaza that some sort of martyrdom event was in the cards. Turkey isn't known
for its fanaticism, but there are reasons for that. Anyone who has studied
the history of the Turks would know that it has produced dedicated and
courageous soldiers. Since Mustapha Kemal the Turkish military has been
secular, but the nation is visibly moving toward dedication to Islaam. This
is hardly the first re-conversion of the Turks. Kemal Ataturk was able to
substitute devotion to the nation -- nationalism -- for dedication to Islam
and to abolish the Caliphate. Over time nationalist fervor has been waning,
in part due to the contempt of the intellectual classes; but as nationalist
fervor wanes, Islamic fervor has grown. It was predictable that some of that
fervor would find its way into the "humanitarian relief" flotilla that
sailed with the announced intention of breaking the Israeli blockade of
Gaza. The Israeli response was strange. The flotilla -- which
included some small ships, but also a large 600 passenger ferry -- was
warned away. Israel ordered the ships to put into the Israeli port of Ashod,
where the cargo would be inspected, contraband seized, and genuine
humanitarian cargo transported to Gaza. It wasn't made clear who would pay
for that transportation. Israel justifies the blockade because Hamas
controls Gaza, and Hamas is named as a terrorist organization by the US,
Canada, the European Union, and other nations. The US is, or was, in a
declared war on terror, which presumably means on terrorist organizations.
Israel is in a declared state of conflict with Hamas. I say
it that way because under the laws of war blockades are legal during a state
of war. The right of blockade has been recognized for a long time. There are
conditions: it can't, for instance, be a "paper" blockade. It must be
enforceable and enforced. But under international law, actions taken during
enforcement of a blockade are explicitly not piracy or piratical acts.
Human rights activists and journalists have blasted Israel after its
violent Monday morning carnage on the aid convoy en route to the besieged
Gaza Strip and likened Tel Aviv's move to a pirate attack on the high
seas.
"The unprovoked attack on the aid flotilla happened in international
waters and Israel had no legal basis to control the area and the aid
convoy could bring whatever they liked. The humanitarian aid was just a
small fraction of what Gaza needs," American Journalist, Henry Norr told
Press TV on Tuesday.
Thus the question of whether Israel has the right of a
belligerent to conduct a blockade will be central to the "defense" against
the charge of piracy. I put "defense" in quotes because it is extremely
unlikely that there will ever be any kind of World Court or other
international judicial body hearing or trial in this matter.
There is also the question of effectiveness: is the interception of seagoing
vessels justified, given that the Egypt/Gaza border is entirely porous?
Egypt has opened the border in protest of the latest incident, but in fact
that border was open before: there is a sophisticated tunnel system. Some of
the tunnels have rails. They are large enough to admit missile parts. The
Israeli blockade has made it difficult to get rockets and rocket fuels and
warheads into Gaza, but they still get in. While this has no effect on the
international legality of the blockade -- Germany traded freely with Sweden
during World War I while the British enforced a strong blockade of Germany
-- it should figure in Israeli calculations of cost and effectiveness. If it
costs enough to enforce the blockade, and it's not stopping the accumulation
of weapons in Gaza, is it worth the cost, fuss, bad press, and the
alienation of Turkey? Note that Israel isn't blameless here.
Israel retains a monopoly on much of the energy -- fuel oils, gasoline, and
electricity -- that flows into Gaza, and powerful interests in Israel want
to keep it that way. They make lots of money out of this, and they have
powerful lobbyists. Blockades and scarcity drive up prices and profits. The
terrorists don't really care about this. They'd denounce Israel no matter
what the Israeli policies might be. More neutral observers find it unsavory
at best, and are influenced by the practices. Israeli
policies are somewhat limited because Israel has real democracy, complete
with Iron Law bureaucracies, voting blocs, powerful lobbies, and all the
other accouterments. Terrorists don't have such concerns. Hamas is popular
in Gaza -- few doubt that it would lose in genuine and open elections -- but
in fact it doesn't depend on public opinion in Gaza, and some of its orders
come from other places including Iran. The United States is
technically a democratic republic but has been moving closer to democracy
for decades. US politics being what they are, the pro-Israeli bloc is
powerful in the United States. For a long time most of the pro-Israeli vote
went to the Democrats and thus was less important to the Republicans, but
after the conversion of the Commentary intellectuals from democratic
socialism to neo-conservatism there was a movement in Republican circles to
try to win pro-Israeli votes and beyond them "the Jewish vote." That latter,
stubbornly, has remained with the Democrats; but many Republicans have hopes
for a shift. This is the background to the current crisis.
Israel strategy is important to the survival of Israel. It's easy enough for
American intellectuals -- including me -- to come up with advice for the
Israelis, but we don't live within rocket range of enemies who have no
compunction about firing unguided missiles in the general direction of
cities, suburbs, and schools; nor are we surrounded by enemies who have
vowed to exterminate us. One of Aesop's fables concerns a
fox who chased a rabbit. When the fox failed to catch the rabbit, his
friends laughed at him. The fox answered "I was running for my dinner. The
rabbit was running for his life." I am very critical of many Israeli
policies. I fumed at some of those policies and practices when I visited
Israel, and I wonder if some of the needless irritants did not greatly
contribute to the collapse of the good times when we could take a bus from
Jerusalem to Jericho, then up the Jordan Valley to the Sea of Galilee; when
much of Judea and Samaria was open to tourist travel. That all ended, and
while I'm pretty sure it ended because of Arrafat's greed, I can see that
some of the Israeli practices may have contributed -- perhaps greatly
contributed -- to the popularity of Arrafat, which was, after all, built in
large part on hatred of Israel. I left Israel convinced that
I don't know how to run that country, and I am very glad that my life and
that of my family do not depend on my figuring out what to do. I'm only
running for my intellectual reputation. ================
Tuesday TOP
Current Mail
|
