When to Use the Magic Wands

It is rather amazing that the worst administration every is claiming that oil prices can't be lowered because they don't have a magic wand. The magic wand has just erased all the oil spills from Hurricane Katrina! Why not use it on the oil companies, those big buddies of the cretin in chief, to keep prices low for America? Guess that magic wand only works to turn human beings into gold, missing the point of the Midas legend.

Thanks to Crooks & Liars, I ran across the repeated claims by McCain campaigners, including the candidate, that Katrina caused no oil spills. I particularly appreciate C&L doing the listening for me, I have as much trouble listening to lies from the McCain campaign as I have listening to the lies from the war criminals in the executive branch.

In researching the oil spills, the Wonk Room came up with a couple, one of them the Murphy Oil spill, which I recall seeing covered (pun intended) in the news after the spill. It was a slimey mess, and ruined a small pretty LA town, which made sensational news for a few nights.

There were several stories too from the wetlands around Grand Isle, LA, an area where environmentalists have been working hard to recreate the vast drainage area that used to filter the water draining into the Gulf. It was slimed as well, and I took a particular sorrow from that since I have lots of pictures my parents took as newlyweds, a lovely area to spend time in the old fashioned bathing suits they thought were so daring.

Unsurprisingly, this devastation caused significant spillage, according to the official report prepared for the MMS by a Norwegian firm:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs. [MMS, 1/22/07]

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.” [MMS, 5/1/06]

In addition, the hurricanes caused disastrous spills onshore throughout southeast Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast as tanks, pipelines, refineries and other industrial facilities were destroyed, for a total of 595 different oil spills. The 9 million gallons reported spilled were comparable with the Exxon Valdez’s 10.8 million gallons, but unlike the Exxon Valdez, were distributed throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Gulf Coast states, many in residential areas. The most massive spills included:

– The Bass Enterprises Cox Bay spill of 3.78 million gallons of oil, the largest spill caused by the hurricanes
– The Murphy Oil spill in Mereaux, LA of 819,000 gallons of oil, contaminating 1,700 homes and the local high school

As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2005:

The quantity and cumulative magnitude of the 595 spills, which were spread across four states and struck offshore and inland, rank these two hurricanes among the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

UPDATE: At the Think Progress mothership, Lee Fang notes that conservatives are repeating this false talking point:

– George Will: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill.”

– Wall Street Journal editorial: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill.”

– Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne: “When Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast where we have about 4,000 oil and gas platforms, 3,000 were in the direct line of the storms - the most significant storms we’ve seen ever - and 3,000 of those had to be shut down. We had no significant oil spill. The system worked.”

– Fox News’ Dick Morris: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.”

The magic wand is there, see? Now can we free it up for use on oil prices? Oh, silly, it's already there. The cretin in chief has announced that drilling in ANWR and the continental shelf will be the answer to our oil price crisis. Why, what a surprise, all of the shills on the right wing are making the same claim. Rep. Ralph Hall says it's drill in protected areas or go to war to get our rightful oil.

The right wing has a magic wand indeed, that has turned all their minds to slush, and produces sewage instead of facts.

It's hardly surprising that an opposition movement has sprung up to keep the Bush name from befouling a sewage plant in California. "Bush" would give fecal matter a bad name.

No Surprise Here

Not surprisingly, the Gulf Coast is still trying to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Also not suprisingly, the poor in Mississippi are still waiting for help while their wealthier neighbors and big businesses are grabbing 75% to 90% of the federal relief funds, according to this article in today's NY Times.

Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm.

But so far, the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners, to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state’s insurance system.

Just $167 million, or about 10 percent of the federal money, has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor, mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners. ...

Mississippi is the only state for which the Bush administration has waived the rule that 50 percent of its Community Development Block Grants be spent on low-income programs, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers the program. It is also the only state to ask for such waivers. [Emphasis added]

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (former head of the Republic National Committee)justifies the disparate distribution by suggesting that getting people back to jobs is more important than fixing homes, but his argument is (not surprisingly) specious:

...the state plans to spend $600 million of the federal money to repair and improve its shipping port.

Though the expansion will increase employment here, historically very few port jobs have gone to low-income residents.

Some critics contend that the main interest of state leaders in spending community development dollars is to help big businesses like shipbuilders and casinos and the port.

And that's just fine with the current administration which apparently has taken Jesus' statement that "The poor you will always have with you" as a blueprint for governance.

Sausage Making

After a good night's rest, I am slightly less depressed over the passage of an Iraq War funding bill that did not contain a time table for withdrawal of US troops, but just slightly. Still, I did manage to find enough energy to look into what else that funding bill contained, and it wasn't a complete disaster. Among the provisions was the hike in the minimum wage. From today's NY Times:

By a vote of 348 to 73, the House approved the measure as part of a deal on Iraq spending. Less than two hours later, the wage increase was approved in the Senate, where it was combined with a bill providing more money for the Iraq war. That vote was 80 to 14.

The measure would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour from $5.15 in three stages over two years. The bill includes $4.84 billion in tax breaks for small businesses. They have made a case, supported by Republicans and the White House, that the wage increase would be a burden for them.

The raise in the minimum wage was way over-due. The last hike was ten years ago, under President Clinton's tenure. By my calculations, that means that when the new law is fully implemented, full time workers will now be able to earn $15,600 per year. That certainly doesn't keep a family of three out of the poverty level, but at least it provides a national floor on wages.

The bill had some other goodies in it as well. Airlines get to dick around with their pension plans, which ought to make Wall Street happy. Oh, and somebody remembered the Gulf Coast:

The bill includes $6.3 billion more for areas damaged by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, $600 million for health insurance for children in low-income families and $3 billion for aid in farm disasters.

Ironically, it was a Republican who complained about the inclusion of these provisions in the bill, ironic because the GOP slipped in those kinds of "add-ons" on a regular basis in the 109th Congress, often in the dead of night, so that the congress critters could never be certain just what a bill they were voting on contained. Here's yesterday's complaint:

Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio and the House minority leader, criticized the wage provision along with a set of domestic spending measures attached to what was viewed as “must pass legislation.”

“We’ve got a host of issues that don’t deserve to be put on the backs of the military,” Mr. Boehner said. “It’s a sneaky way to do business.”

Why, yes. Yes, it is. If the President doesn't like those provisions (although their inclusion was undoubtedly part of the negotiations with the White House), he can always veto the bill, right? At least the Democrats let the Republicans know about those provisions, something the last Congress wasn't too good about.

Doing Business With The Government

Bidding successfully on a government contract can be difficult when the specifications for the contract are lifted directly from a competitor's catalog. Companies bidding on an Army Corps of Engineers contract to provide drainage pumps for New Orleans faced that hurdle after Hurricane Katrina. From an AP report:

When the Army Corps of Engineers solicited bids for drainage pumps for New Orleans, it copied the specifications - typos and all - from the catalog of the manufacturer that ultimately won the $32 million contract, a review of documents by The Associated Press found.

The pumps, supplied by Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla., and installed at canals before the start of the 2006 hurricane season, proved to be defective, as the AP reported in March. The matter is under investigation by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

In a letter dated April 13, Sen. David Vitter, R-La., called on the Corps to look into how the politically connected company got the post-Hurricane Katrina contract. MWI employed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Bush's brother, to market its pumps during the 1980s, and top MWI officials have been major contributors to the Republican Party.

While it may not be a violation of federal regulations to adopt a company's technical specifications, it is frowned on, especially for large jobs like the MWI contract, because it could give the impression the job was rigged for the benefit of a certain company, contractors familiar with Corps practices say. [Emphasis added]

It's bad enough that the Army Corps of Engineers copied the specs, typos and all, directly from MWI's catalog, thereby pretty much ensuring the winning bid, but the Corps then proceeded to make things even worse when the problems with the pumps were discovered:

The Corps withheld about 20 percent of MWI's contract price - including an incentive of about $5 million to deliver them by June 1, 2006 - until the flaws have been resolved. But the Corps also spent $4.5 million for six additional MWI pumps for use in troubleshooting the defective ones. [Emphasis added]

I guess that showed the errant company the Corps was serious.

Riding on the City of New Orleans.

Who's to blame?

Interestingly, the Army Corps of Engineers is being sued for $77 billion dollars for the failure of the levees and the subsequent disaster to the City of New Orleans. CNN posts a poll, so far showing that 63% of respondents (voluntary readers of CNN) are not in favor of making that award, 37% favor. These results always bother me, as for the most part there are only two choices given, while in reality there are many different alternatives.

The award can be lowered, which is most likely the actual result expected by the city; however, asking for the maximum figure means that lowering the award would leave a larger amount in the end.

The Army Corps of Engineers can sue its planning consultants and its contractors for their failures. Although it is the body in charge of the total building project that formed the levees, failures in analysis of soil type (evidently the muck wasn't up to the amount of cohesion it was supposed to exhibit), inadequate total power to withstand Mother Nature on the part of the actual levees, steel and concrete not being of strength enough to resist the forces of the storm, ongoing maintenance of the levee walls and their underpinnings, all of these enter into the performance of the levees during Hurricane Katrina.

Then there's the force of the storm. Katrina was cataclysmic in every way, and not only hit with great force but then turned and dumped on the city again in its massive hit on the whole area, inundating the whole delta.

Then there's the inability of the city to sue the several areas of government itself. Given chance after chance to upgrade the levees, Congress did not allocate and the state did not request the huge structural upgrades, and maintenance, that it would have taken to meet the disaster of a storm like Katrina. Reasonably, though, would that be a foresight that one expects of the various government bodies - until after the event, anyway?

Rehashing like this makes the whole exercise of cleanup after Katrina into an exercise in disfunction. A city has been destroyed, many lives lost, tens of thousands of lives (455,000 is the pre-flood population) uprooted. Now what that event comes to is haggling over points of the level of he-said they-said.

So does 63% of your CNN audience coolly say 'get over it' and turn the Army Corps of Engineers into a sympathetic victim of unreasonable tort? Okay, maybe that's wording this vote in wingnuttia language. And at this point the wingnut is reminding us that Clinton didn't fund the construction so that's why this maladministration failed the people of New Orleans.

When a poll like this presents two choices, the poll taker has to play a role. Symbolically choosing to give New Orleans what it asks assumes that you make amends to the ultimate level. Symbolically choosing to protect the defendant, the Army Corps of Engineers, requires you to judge New Orleans as asking for more than it deserves.

The Corps designed the levee system that was supposed to protect the low-lying city of New Orleans. But after Katrina stuck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, steel-and-concrete levees eroded and failed in several areas, flooding about 80 percent of the city with water up to 20 feet deep.

By now even I am asking, well, what do you choose? I don't know. Now I've failed as a pundit. Sometimes you have to admit, you aren't the final authority. I've made a lot of contributions to the city, and to individuals uprooted by Katrina, some of them here in our area.

We're riding on the City of New Orleans. And we'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Something's Missing

Pundits, bloggers, and editorialist will spend today parsing last night's State of the Union speech. Every detail, every nuance, every eyeblink will be reviewed. Every policy initiative will be examined from every possible angle.

I wonder how many electrons or ink pots will be expended on what the President didn't mention, didn't even allude to: New Orleans, Katrina and Rita, the Gulf Coast. It's as if that horrible August never happened, or if it did, didn't have long lasting consequences.

As far as I know, the levees haven't been fully repaired, nor has the lower Ninth Ward been rebuilt. The people in Mississippi scored a victory of sorts with one of the major insurers in a settlement which will pour millions into that state to rebuild after Katrina, but the agreement appears to be limited to Mississippi.

The agreement does not apply to New Orleans, where the failure of the levees left much of the city underwater for days. Lawyers and insurers say no similar settlement talks are in progress there.

The second biggest clusterfuck of the Bush regime and not even a head nod in that direction.

Shameful.