Sunday, May 23, 2010

California, Illinois, New York, etc. Take Note.

The contours of the disaster in The Gulf of Mexico are expanding almost as fast, if not faster, than the vast British Petroleum generated oil slick itself. I expect that Louisiana's mildly defiant maneuver, which I view as appropriate and justifiable, to become the norm going forward as more and more states begin to recognize that when it comes to emergencies, and matters of life and death, The Feds are either purveyors of benign neglect, looking out for someone else's interests first, i.e. corporate ones, or worse, simply intransigent and adversarial.

22 comments:

Thai said...

High or weight is a spectrum: there are only so many truly short or tall or thin or fat people in the world.

The same is true of competency

Edwardo said...

Would that it were only a question of competency.

Thai said...

LOL!!!

well said and I humbly stand corrected

Thai said...

But I'd still take the feds over LA government any day of the week on either competency or other grounds. ;-)

Edwardo said...

The LA government will be relying on, I imagine, a similar set of actors to the ones that The Feds have employed so far, though, in my view, the state of Louisiana, which clearly has a lot more skin in the game than Uncle Sam, will likely be tackling this problem with a far greater sense of urgency than we have seen so far. We'll see how they fare.

Edwardo said...

Case in point.

http://www.wwltv.com/news/local/JP-officials-commandeer-BPs-hired-boats-in-Grand-Isle-94668304.html

"A representative for Jefferson Parish Emergency chief Deano Bonano said they requested immediate action after oil moved into the marsh passes and onto the beaches in Grand Isle.

He said more than 40 boats were sitting idle while he watched the oil rush into the passes."

Thai said...

As long as this is the right thing to do (and I really don't know). Will commandeering these boats do anything substantive?

This seems a classic tragedy of the commons issue and since I'm not there I can't comment.

I think Katrina proved just how incompetent LA can be.

The big issue is to plug the leak. This other stuff is nothing but theater.

Thai said...

If the boats are idle and using them can do something meaningful then they should do it so don't misunderstand me.

Do you know if they really can do anything?

Thai said...

First do no harm...

Edwardo said...

It may not, but then one would like to think that no resource was being spared in the meantime.

Thai said...

True

The problem with conversations like this is one can come off as being heartless when nothing is further from the truth.

It is kind of like your response when I asked you about Afghanistan and 911

Did the war accomplish anything or was it just a lot of spending with little good to show for it?

Responses like "...one would like to think that no resource was being spared" are true on the one hand, and on the other can be said about a great many things and can be the genesis of a lot of wasted spending.

This is just as true for health care or education or anything similar at some level.

Only you have to ask where the resources are being taken from.If they really help, let's do it, it they don't then we are burning fossil fuels.

... And wasn't this all caused by the need to acquire fossil fuels in the first place? ;-)

Of course if we don't spend it we look like we don't care and/or we are bad guys/stingy/greedy corporate types during a major crisis and what good is that for social cohesion?

It is the reason we throw away so much good money on such low value stuff.

And again, and I don't really know, if it really does help the local ecosystem, then we should do it

I have no answer for all this...

Edwardo said...

What, pray tell, did I say about Afghanistan and 9/11 ?

Unless I was in a drug induced stupor I hope I would've said that Afghanistan was a scam of a war.
But then, long ago, General Smedley Butler observed that war is a racket.

Thai said...

War is a racket?

I guess at some level "yes", but so too is the Mafia and yet it exists despite all wishes to the contrary.

Indeed, I seem to remember that organized crime now accounts for 15% of world GDP.

Why not have equal frustration with for organized crime? Indeed, based on relative % racketness, organized crime deserves three times the vitriol as "war" as it is a racket three times larger.

But "yes", the gist of your comment centered around the fact that you felt Afghanistan was not "high value" spending.

Edwardo said...

Thai, you've really wandered into serious bullshit territory now with the following comments.

"I guess at some level "yes", but so too is the Mafia and yet it exists despite all wishes to the contrary.

Indeed, I seem to remember that organized crime now accounts for 15% of world GDP.

Why not have equal frustration with for organized crime? "

-Because I don't vote for organized crime figures to run my government, at least not knowingly. That's why.

"Indeed, based on relative % racketness, organized crime deserves three times the vitriol as "war" as it is a racket three times larger."

What are you smoking, and did you acquire it from an organized crime operation? I hate to break it to you, but what organized crime takes out of my pocket, and the damage they do to the social fabric of the nation, pales in comparison to the toll taken by "government." Government is in quotes, because our "government", as we know it, is essentially a mechanism that exemplifies the worst of The Mussolini Fascist business model. On that note, Afghanistan is, to some greater or lesser degree, almost certainly about controlling the heroin trade as well as diverting our attention, and, of course, keeping sales up in the death merchant business.


But "yes", the gist of your comment centered around the fact that you felt Afghanistan was not "high value" spending.

Not for you and me it isn't. It is a racket. An enormous profiteering racket that only a select few benefit from. General Butler understood this overriding tendency very well as did Eisenhower. Unfortunately Ike didn't see fit to warn us of the Military Industrial Complex until he was leaving office. I wonder why? In the meantime, when The Mafia gets into the war business, let me know and I will direct my outrage in their direction.

Thai said...

Is there anything that government does you do agree with?

Edwardo said...

In theory, I'm all in favor of "government", but we are living during a time in history when government has become profoundly corrupt. We have institutionalized skullduggery presently. The sooner we acknowledge it and act, the better. All else is thumb twiddling or pampleteering aka blogging.

In general, I'm in favor of governments that hew to taking care of the basics, and don't move into the dreaded realm of social engineering. Stick to the basics of civic life that need attending which involve, among other things, policing the powerful to ensure that the private sphere doesn't do what it ineluctably tends toward which is exploiting the less powerful.

Debra said...

Edwardo, government has moved into the areas that we, the citizenry have left vacant for quite some time now.
We have been happily chomping our cud, buying our stuff, and funding our PRIVATE pension plans and everything else private while the government has been quietly, and WITH OUR CONSENT, acquiring the power to make us.. SAFE.
I think that man is a rather paradoxical, or should I say, oxymoronic creature.
AT THE SAME TIME he has become, in our Western society, a little individual atom (dixit Okie's link in the jungle, and I agree) he has become a little atom nestled there in the mass that government counts, weighs, measures as it pleases. And controls.
We're going to have to figure out a way to create higher levels of complexity than the individual in order to avoid the unpleasant consequences of being... the mass.
Think about it...
Nothing like statistics to create... the mass.
And the mass is the quintessance of a fascist society, in my book. Mass, or masses ? You know what I mean.

Edwardo said...

Deb wrote:

"Mass, or masses ? You know what I mean."

The middle word in masses is ass. And we are all massholes. Sorry, Deb. I couldn't resist that bit of silliness.

Deb also wrote:

"We have been happily chomping our cud, buying our stuff, and funding our PRIVATE pension plans and everything else private while the government has been quietly, and WITH OUR CONSENT, acquiring the power to make us.. SAFE."

I think we've been nervously chomping, but that's a minor quibble. As the man said, "The price of liberty is vigilance", and many of us have been busy with other things while our metaphoric cheese has been eaten and/or processed with substances that aren't good for us.

As for higher levels of complexity than the individual, perhaps, but complexity, I would argue, is probably our undoing us since it creates so many points of vulnerability that tend to bring down the entire edifice. CDS anyone?

Thai said...

By the way, apparently this issue of whether to commandeer boats to help is not clear at all as there is both a shortage of materials for the boats to pull and the materials they are using are not always so effective.

What a tragic cluster fuck

Thai said...

As for the bullshit over organized crime, I think you missed my point.

If ANYONE wastes resources, they are waster

Now we can talk about "if you want to waste yours, fine but you will suffer the consequences" but in a world where we bail each other out for doing this, we still all loose.

I was not referring to voting. I was referring to the fact that resources are still being wasted and this waste means we all pay more for the resources we do legitimately obtain.

Thai said...

And I agree with you Edwardo that complexity is not always our friend.

Edwardo said...

I know you weren't talking about voting, but as you juxtaposed the ill effects of racketeering by organized crime with the various ill effects committed (in criminal fashion) by governments, who garner their power via different means, and purport to operate on a very different plane than organized crime syndicates, I think my retort was valid.