The projects being discussed here are annual maintenance and emergency repair projects, not grandiose multiyear construction projects.
Its hard to say if the funding hadn't been gutted by the Bush administration it would have made a difference, but I'd sure like someone to investigate.
Levees are a place where "a stitch in time" is an appropriate axiom. If there was a low spot due to sinkage and you get a flood that weak spot leads to water spilling over which quickly washes out a whole section. That looks like what happened in New Orleans.
Chance are if someone had gone around and identified low spots due to sinkage and piled a few feet of dirt or concrete on them they would have held. I don't think a multibillion dollar multiyear project was required to prevent this, just good maintenance and some simple repair work. Maybe it wouldn't have happened anyway but cutting 80% of the funding, which is what the Bush administration did, certainly seriously degraded levee maintenance here.
This article tends to contradict your assertion. It kind of sounds like the corp was in fact going around Louisiana begging for money to do emergency repairs. Not clear if the repairs would have salvaged the levies that collapsed but one was on the canal levee that failed. When it comes to levees the old saying "a stitch in time" usually applies. If you let a crack develop or let it sink, when flood water starts spilling at the weak spot it quickly takes out the whole thing.
"Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:"
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
"The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain."
Why don't you read this and come back and see if you stand behind what you said here.
"Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:"
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
"The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain."
- A key difference is previous administrations weren't squandering $300 billion in Iraq that could have been spent at home instead. Bosnia was way cheap by comparison.
- Its also a classic Bush defender tactic to say, its Clinton's fault or Clinton didn't fix it either. Damn Bush has been in office five years, I'm assuming he doesn't start taking responsibility for anything on his watch until 8 years in right?
- The Hurricane problem in the South wasn't anything like it is now during Clinton's years in office. After last year a thinking executive might have said, rather than squandering money in Iraq or buying biowarfare suits for the fire department in Podunk, Wyoming maybe we better improve our Hurricane preparedness.
You also chose to gloss over all the first part of my post. How the disaster was handled apart from neglecting the levees was 100% the responsibility of the Command in Chief and his agency FEMA. Or do you want to blame their piss poor handling of this on Clinton too.
"Slashdot has moved so far to the left it's sick."
I don't think I'm actually representative of all of Slashdot.... Most of the time I'm pretty Libertarian so from where I sit that wasn't really a leftist post, it was an anti stupid government post:)
"I'm sure the relief effort could have been better and faster."
Well following your logic it doesn't matter what kind of job they do. They just have to do something and people like you will say could have been better, could have been worse.
Fact is disaster relief is a fine art. This team failed Disaster 101. First priority right after search and rescue is getting safe drinking water to the victims. Going 4 days without doing that is complete incompetence. They are to busy holding press conferences telling us what they are gonna do some day when they should have just been getting the job done.
"Blaming the administration for the failure is absurd."
The administration is 100% responsible for disaster management once a place is declared a Federal disaster area and they are called in which I believe they were before Katrina even hit. State and local governments have a big role but in a disaster of this scale its entirely FEMA's job to make things right. They get billions of dollars every year just for that purpose. The have the power to mobilize the entire nation to solve the problem They are an executive branch agency and their chief usually reports directly to the President. The President sat in on the pre Hurricane planning videocons from Crawford, I saw him on the big screen.
You might not like pinning this on him, but it amazes me how Bush fan boys like yourself refuse to hold him accountable for ANYTHING. If Clinton had done the same crap you would probably be screaming bloody murder now instead, while I would be ripping up Clinton for his stupidity just the same as Bush. It isn't politics its incompetence.
" I agree with the reply saying that the local and state taxes should be paying for it. "
Well chances are you are wrong because unless a levee is owned by a city or state its not their responsibility. The lion's share of those levees are built and owned by the Army Corp of Engineers. If that was the case here which I'm pretty sure it is, then they are ultimately the responsibility of the Commander in Chief. In this case, unlike Truman, the sign on this one's desk says:
"Keep that buck away from me cuz it ain't stoppin here".
"Trucks don't instantly appear where you want them."
You can drive a truck across the entire country in less than 4 days. Maybe someone should have called up Walmart in Arkansas. They could have had about 2000 trucks full of food and water there in under 24 hours.
You are just being a pathetic apologist. If there is anything sickening around here its that.
"You don't like the war, you think the arab nations should stay totalitarian terrorists who hate the US:
Nope in keeping with my mostly conservative and libertarian tendencies I think we should be taking care of business at home and spending our $300 billion at home instead of playing musical chairs in places that didn't like Americans before and totally hate them now.
Pretty sure the levies around New Orleans, like most of the levies along the Mississippi, were built by and are in the domain of the Army Corp of Engineers. Not sure anyone else could touch them without their approval. There is a very clear paper trail that the Army Corp of Engineers knew they needed work but couldn't get the money because its going in new weapons, homeland security and the war in Iraq.
They fallibility of the levies has been a source of numerous lengthy articles in New Orleans papers and it was well known they probably wouldn't survive a direct hit by a big hurricane. That concern was escalating last year as the number of hurricanes and their severity was rising at a disturbing level.
Its Monday morning quarterback but if you weigh the obvious value of buying biowarfare suits for the fire Department in Podunk, Wyoming and put money in to improve hurricane readiness in the South in the face of real and immediate danger of real Hurricanes its pretty obvious which was the better place to spend money. Its been obvious to everyone with a brain that squandering $300 billion to Iraq was not a wise decision versus spending it at home.
Well actually ozone depletion and climate change are interconnected. Temperature levels in the Arctic and Antarctic are an essential component in how much ozone depletion there is. There is an interesting article about this at Real Climate. The recipe for ozone depletion is CFC's, specific temperature ranges, sunlight, and especially temperatures when the mix is first exposed to sunlight in the spring, which in Antarctica is September.
Ozone depletion will go up and down depending on temperature so climate change will effect it, though I'm hazy on whether global warming would make the problem better or worse.
One has to wonder, and does anybody know, have China and India banned CFC's yet, both in law and if in law do they enforce it. If they haven't and as fast as their economies are growing they could almost single handedly undo all the work done in the the U.S. and Europe to eliminate CFC's leaking in to the atmosphere.
They've put out a lot of political proclamations in the last day or two to make it look like they are doing something but you can see the situation on the ground and tell they in fact did next to nothing in reality during the first 4 days of the disaster other than the obvious, they did get helicopters in to pluck people off of roof tops. That is the only part of the entire effort that seems to have worked. Only problem is once they were rescued they were dropped in collection areas with no drinking water and are dehydrating.
I heard with interest the head of the Coast Guard describing their work and again search and rescue was great, but much of its resources are going to:
A. Buoy replacement to get commercial shipping flowing again
B. Repairing the off shore oil capacity in the Gulf.
Those things are important, but you can consistently tell the Bush administration is more focused on getting the oil industry back on its feet over keeping thousands of poor blacks in New Orleans alive by getting them fresh water. I certainly want gasoline supplies to stabilize but I imagine I would rather people didn't die of dehydration and from drinking contaminated water because we are busy trying to gettin Exxon and Shell on their feet instead.
The obvious complete failure is FEMA should have requisitioned trucks from all points available and started trucking food and water, especially water to the survivors. Private groups and individuals have started doing it because FEMA failed completely in this most basic obvious part of ANY recovery. They didn't get fresh water in to the disaster area. People can survive a distaster without food for a while but people don't last long without water, and when they get thirsty the drink contaminated water, get sick and die. You would think the Republicans would remember the importance of drinking water from the Terry Schiavo case. You only wish they had placed the same importance on this as they did that. They rush Congress in from all points to pass a pointless resolution about here. Congress hasn't yet reconvened or done anything for New Orleans.
I seem to recall yesterday FEMA saying the supplies were en route but it could easily take four days before they actually started getting distributed because of all the Federal, state and local channels they had to be routed through.
One also has to wonder how much of the National Guard's equipment is in Iraq, for example water treatment plants, water and fuel tankers, trucks in particular. 1/3 to 1/4 of the Guard in the disaster area were unavailable because they are in Iraq, you have to wonder how much of the the equipment vital for disaster relief is there too.
Not sure how it will come out in the post mortem investigation but I saw a post here yesterday in which a study in 2004 indicated the levies in New Orleans were in dire need of repair and the money for their repair had been diverted by the Bush administration from the Army Corps of Engineers to the war in Iraq and to homeland security. If that proves to be the case you can scratch one city thanks to the incompetence of the Bush administration.
"I really love George Carlin's routine on the environment. He make a single statement that really brings it all into focus. Are humans so arrogant that we think we can destroy the earth let alone save it?"
That's a good multifaceted joke but if your point was that humans lack the capability to destroy Earth it's flat wrong. We don't as individuals have the capacity it though the heads of state of the U.S., Russia and China could certainly do it some grievous harm using massive arsenals of nuclear weapons. We probably couldn't destroy it when there was a hundred million of on the whole planet, well there are 6 billion of us now and the planet is positively crawling with people in all the inhabitable corners of the planet. We couldn't destroy it with the technology we had a few hundred years ago, mostly before we began tapping large scale energy sources and the industrial age dawned.
The combination of large numbers and technological prowess have almost certainly given us the capacity to destroy our planet now. You have to look no further than satellite photos to see the extent to which we are deforesting the planet. You have to look no further than the extent to which we have decimated one ocean species after another with over fishing. You have to look no further than the litany of species we have pushed in to extinction, or to the verge of extinction, in the last hundred years.
Its a simple fact of life if population growth continues unabated the human race is going to fill to overflowing ever inhabitable part of the planet and is going to exhaust every resource we depend on to keep all those people alive, oil, water, food, farmable land, fish, etc. I guess at the point we could always turn to Soylent Green and keep going a while longer.
Maybe, though we were leaning toward the possibility that when the appendix was designed God was taking the day off and his dimwitted apprentice was in charge. Not sure if Intelligent Design mandates a minimum IQ requirement for the designer so maybe we could have "of average intelligence design" and "complete moron design". The latter designer is the one who was apparently in charge when most of the people in the Bush administration were drawn up:)
Another interesting question is if your silent majority doesn't watch just cable news or are they tuning out all news.
If its the later you end up in a situation where those people don't vote or they vote badly, or they let their government do bad things because they are indifferent. People who don't stay apprised of world and national affairs are far more likely to:
- Vote for incompetent leaders - Let their incompetent leaders get them in to wars for no good reason - Let their incompetent leaders destroy the economy by, for example, running unsustainable budget and trade deficits
People might be indifferent to news until they find themselves or their loved ones driving around Iraq while people try to blow them up, or they find themselves unemployed or in poverty because the wheels are falling off the national economy at least for everyone except the rich. For example statistics this week show 1.1 million more Americans fell below the poverty line last year. That's 1.1 million people who should have paid more attention to the news and maybe voted in larger numbers.
Well its true the cable news market is a pretty small percentage of the population. Most Americans are increasingly disinterested in news, politics and world affairs and there are a million other things to occupy everyone's time.
Unfortunately the cable news channels do have a lot of influence on the people that make political decisions.
Another issue is most normal people like to watch news that tells them how great they and their nation is and how much better they are than everyone else. They also want news that reinforces their preconceived world view more than challenge it. The psychological term is cognitive dissonance. People don't listen to things they don't want to believe. This fuels rampant nationalism which in turn is a leading cause of misguided wars.
If you did watch news you wouldn't watch for long if you disagreed with what was being said on a consistent basis.
... and Jonathan Klein moved it further to the right when he took over CNN U.S. last fall, pumped by the fact the right wing swept the elections and tightened their grip on power.
Fact is America is moving to the right or at least the right has conned everyone in to think it is. CNN has been getting killed by Fox in cable news ratings so they had two options, try to be completely unlike Fox and try to find an audience or try to be like Fox. Unfortunately they chose the later leading to a situation in which, rather than there being a liberal bias in the American media, like the right likes to rant there is, in fact American news has a growing right wing bias, at least in cable news. Further evidence is all the cheerleading cable news did before and during the war in Iraq, though some are coming to regret the extent to which they were suckered.
A school of thought is liberals aren't getting much of their news from TV and radio any more, and are turning to the Internet more. Right wingers have latched on en mass to right wing talk radio and Fox news, which reinforce their world view instead of challenge it, and its driven their ratings through the roof making it more profitable radio and TV to do more right wing bias. Its created a situation where Americans are increasingly bombarded with right biased news and its most likely pushing American further and faster to the right. It could well be an out of control snowballing that could result in the U.S. being a very far right country in the not so distant future unless a disaster happens that puts Americans off the on the right, like a war in Iraq that goes bad, $6 gasoline, or a hurricane in the South that the Bush administration completely fails to deal with and which results in mass casualties due purely to slow response. You have to wonder if the Bush administration would have acted more swiftly if the people suffering in the South were affluent, white Republicans instead of poor, black Democrats.
Dude you must be replying to someone else's post not mine. I have a world of respect for people that volunteer for Guard and regular military service. I almost wish I had volunteered but when I was of the age the military was a train wreck post Vietnam and no one in their right mind joined it if they had a better option. I did do my part as a defense contractor for years.
I think everything in my post was empathizing with the plight of people who volunteered for part time and emergency service to their country and landed in semi-permanent combat duty.
The only person I rate as "the bottom of society" is one George W. Bush because he is a spoiled rotten rich kid who faked serving in order to duck actual service. He and Dick Cheney are what is known as "Chicken Hawks". They are fond of sending other people's kids to die while they stay home and line their pockets and the pockets of their rich friend through war profiteering. Meanwhile their kids are 10,000 miles out of harms way, and back in the day when their time to serve came, they DUCKED.
CNN international is actually pretty decent. They've started carrying an hour of it in the U.S. at noon Eastern and it is head and shoulders better than the smoldering pile that is CNN U.S. these days. CNN U.S. has been in steady decline for years but it went off a cliff when Klein took over CNNU U.S. last fall, and the Republican's cemented their stranglehold on the country. They settling in to fixation on the sensational murder of the year(Aruba), heavy doses of religion cover, and its corporate strategy that they latch on to one story Americans care about and saturation coverage until you are sick of it to the exclusion of all else (Klein more or less said this and inteview on Charlie Rose).
Not sure you can really even blame it on CNN, I think the disease eating away the American media is the majority of American's want heavy bias to reinforce their preconceptions of the world. That's why Fox News is #1 in cable news. They tell Americans how great Americans are and how pathetic every one else is and thats what Americans want to hear, along with how right the right is and how pathetic everyone else is.
Add in the fact that American education and insight in to things like geography, politics, world history is hitting all time lows.
Any news show that actually presented intelligent news in all its complexity and ambiguity will crater in the ratings and go off the air. Fact is most Americans aren't intelligent enough to want or follow intelligent news.
I fully expect the hour of CNN International to get pulled because they criticize America and Americans wont stand for that. They totally ripped Pat Robertson up one side and down the other for being the ignoramus he is, which insured the launch of a 700 club boycott and letter writing campaign to get them off the air waves.
"cindy sheehan has a post about jews who took soldiers away for war in iraq and not being here to stop the looting ( hello posse comitatus) in New Orleans."
Don't think I want to touch most of your rant with a ten foot pole but I think your logic failed on this one.
A rather large percentage of the "soldiers" in Iraq are National Guardsmen. They AREN'T restricted by posse comitatus from domestic enforcement, in fact they are SUPPOSED to respond to and police disasters. Thats what they were for.
In the specific disaster states around 1/3 to 1/4 of their guard are in Iraq so weren't available for call up to help with the disaster. Guard in neighboring states are also somewhat stretched and not as available as they would have been were it not for Iraq. The Guard Military Police are in especially high demand in Iraq and those are exactly the same people who should be patrolling the streets of New Orleans now.
Why are they in Iraq? Because the Bush administration didn't have enough boots to put on the ground in the quagmire and optional war that is Iraq and they didn't want to commit political suicide by starting a draft so they completely twisted the role of the National Guard to everyone's demise. The Guard is to there to play the military role domestically and to extend the military abroad in national emergency, not to prop up a completely optional war for a decade because the Republican's cant face the obvious that they need to either end Iraq or start a draft.
The use of the Guard should, for example, be compared between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. During Vietnam the U.S. had the draft so the Guard turned in to the place were all the well connected white boys served to avoid getting drafted and combat. The Guard for the most part wasn't sent to war in Vietnam. This is why the Bush family pulled some major string to get George W. in to the Texas Air National Guard or Air National Country Club as it was known. The government at great expense trained him to be a glamorous fighter pilot but he had zero chance of seeing combat because he was trained in an obsolete jet, and it appears he barely fulfilled the minimal weekend warrior duties he had.
By contrast the volunteer Guardsmen of today have seen their volunteer service turned in to a quick ticket to multiple year long combat tours in Iraq, with significant casualties, no end in sight, with their family lives and careers ruined, and with much interference in their domestic role for disaster relief in particular.
And I wont even start on the study out last year on the crumbling levies in New Orleans which indicated that the money to repair the levies had been redirected to Homeland security and the war in Iraq by the Bush administration. Scratch one city due to Bush administration incompetence and failure to do "A stitch in time".
Oil is used to produce 2% of the electricity in the U.S. Its statistically meaningless. Gas, Coal, Hydro and Nuclear is where the lion's share comes from.
"( "The other option is a simple recognition that use of fossil fuels is almost universally bad." )"
It is universally bad for to be using it as an energy source in particular electricity generation and ground transportation. We could certainly do better and are eventually going to have to if:
A. CO2 is in fact contributing to global warming
B. Oil reserves are insufficient to satisfy demand especially for gasoline.
C. Oil is going to be practically gone in a few decades without resorting to tar sands which take vast amounts of energy just to tap.
We certainly need fossil fuels for organic chemistry (plastics) for the forseeable future but with abundant cheap electricity from fission/fusion its likely chemical alternatives could be developed. We also have as an option renewable biofuels if someone develops more efficient means for production. If gas hits $4-6 dollars a gallon, and oil $100 dollars a barrel lots of alternatives suddenly become cheaper and better.
I dearly wish we had a colony on Mars simply because it would compell people to learn to live without fossil fuels.
"The last paragraph doesn't make sense either, I'm pointing out that there is no viable alterantive to oil, period."
Well obvious there is we lived without it before and we will have to live without it again when it runs out. Will there be pain yes. There will be a lot less pain if we start working to eliminate the dependence now, instead of waiting until we run out and then saying OOPS! which seems to be your strategy.
At this point you are just highlighting the fact you must work for an oil company or least you sure think and talk like one. "We are indispensible, we can charge you through the nose for out products from now on, and we will suck all the money out of the rest of the economy to line our pockets." We are the worlds biggest and most successful, legalized, crack dealers.
"we can't get our electricity "as easily" from other sources, not even close."
Nuclear is a completely viable option for electricity. It isn't perfect but the risk of an accident in many respects is better than the slow poisoning of the planet with coal fired power plants. Bite the bullet and open the permanent waste disposal site in Nevada and start building pebble beds. Long term actually get serious about fusion research.
If you are going to do in-situ extraction of tar sands which is about the only way to extend oil reserves you are going to pretty much have to put a nuclear power plant in those fields anyway to provide the electricity for the heater.
Solar and wind are in fact pretty viable on a certain scale compared to the soaring prices of natural gas.
The whole problem with your whole approach is you aren't solving anything you are just procrastinating until the inevitable day when fossil fuels run out. Chances are you will be dead so its just your descendants that will have to deal with it, though I imagine you will see and already are seeing some serious wars over control of the oil fields.
"But still, to come back to my original point: people get in boats to leave communist dictatorships to come to the US, not the other way round."
I think you are oversimplifying. People go both ways. People wage multiyear wars to create communist states. Reference Vietnam and the Viet Cong though they were figthing more for Nationalism than Communism. Also the U.S. backed puppets in Vietnam, Diem and Thieu, were more despised than Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh sought to ally with the U.S. after World War II, the U.S. spurned him and pushed him in the arms of the Soviet Union.
Many people in Russia want to return to the old Soviet Union. As bad as it was, people had a somewhat better social safety net than they have now in Russia, the crime and exploitation was somewhat lower too.
" I'd be interested in hearing others hypothesize about this."
Having recently converted to Bushiology I am certain it is due to Intelligent Design. So the simple, irrefutable answer is that it's God's will. We are still grappling with how to explain the appendix.
Why don't you, sir, try to make a coherent argument next time as to why I'm a fool.
Ad hominem attacks like this are usually the tool of last resort of people who are incapable of engaging in intelligent debate or defending their point of view. You are the one who comes across as a fool because you aren't capable of stating why I'm a fool.
Its impossible to weigh or dispute the validity of your assertion when you make no case for why you made it in the first place.
Actually as long as you are talking recent history, not necessarily today, its Argentina? Yep and Chile? Yep. Guatemala? Yep. Haiti? Yep. Nicaragua? Yep. Dominican Republic? Yep. El Salvador? Yep. Columbia? Yep. Panama? Yep. (Noriega was a CIA stooge until they had a falling out).....
The Fascist dictatorship count in the Western Hemisphere is down lately as some of these countries have restored varying degrees of Democracy but its not really any thanks to the United States. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the U.S. also lost some of the incentive for installing anti communist dictators.
"But, this hasn't happened for quite a long time now."
Iraq is pretty obviously regime change by force. If the U.S. gets its way they are going to arrange for Allawi to win the next round of elections because he is the U.S. backed puppet there. It was a set back when he got thrown out in the first round of elections.
The U.S. is still quite active in changing governments around the world though most of the focus lately has been in Asia, especially around the edges of the old Soviet Union. Uzbekistan is in the process of expelling the U.S. military from the base Uzbekistan provided to wage the war in Afghanistan, because the U.S. was apparently using to try and destabilize and topple its host government. Removing the curren Uzbek government would probably be an improvement but the U.S. has also gleefully sent people there through Rendition to be tortured.
The U.S. has attempted regime Venezuela at least twice since the Bush administration came to power. The Army got cold feet the first time when they observed the person siezing power was going to install a dictatorship so they restored Chavez to power in 2 days. In 2004 another alleged coup was broken up.
The interesting part form the Wikipedia article:
"In June 2004, a Cuban Miami TV channel broadcasted a program featuring the Florida-based Comandos F4. Rodolfo Frometa, the Comandos F4 leader, said that his group was ready to carry out violent attacks against the Cuban government. Former Venezuelan army captain Eduardo García described the help he received from Comandos F4 to organize similar violent actions against the Chávez government. According to the TV program maker Randy Alonso, the US government would have recently earmarked $36 million to support such paramilitary groups. [7] U.S. officials and opposition figures in Venezuela have dismissed this claim. Alonso went into hiding. Many media reports, and his official website, suggested that he had fled the country."
Another likely case of CIA backed regime change is the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the installation of the pro U.S. Mikheil Saakashvili. The Rose Revolution was painted as pro democracy and pro reform but it looks increasingly like it was just another case of regime change to install a pro American puppet.
The U.S. was also actively involved in the Orange revolution in the Ukraine though certainly they backed the better of the two options there.
U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries and active engagement in regime change continues unabated and is in fact accelerating under the Bush administration.
Sure they are installing people somewhat less bad than the military dicators of old but only slightly so, and they are still frequently manipulating outcomes to the benefit U.S. interests more than the interests of people that live in those countries.
"Or aren't these people rich enough?"
The DOJ was compelled to lynch some rich people in the face of rampant scandal and a public out cry that something be done. Those cases are far more exceptions than the rule. Its noteworthy that George W.'s close friend Ken Lay is still most definitely not in jail.
"Led a military coup against an elected Venezuelan president (unsuccessful, 1992)"
You left out the fact that this President Carlos Andrés Pérez was impeached and convicted on corruption charges in 1993. The fact that Chavez tried to oust him actually made him more popular in Venezuela.
Pérez was a bizarre president.
In his first term he ranted against the International Monetary Fund calling it ""Neutron Bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing.". At the start of his second term he took a $4.5 billion loan from the IMF with all the nasty strings that come with those.
Pérez is actually the one that nationalized American oil and steel interests in Venezuela which presumably put him on America's hit list. You have to wonder if maybe the U.S. wasn't backing Chavez's coup attempt at the time. America HATES it when a Socialist nationalizes American business assets.
"Arrested Roberto Alonso, one of the main opposition leaders, on trumped-up charges"
That one is certainly open to debate and depends on who you listen to. It may also be that he had 55 Columbian paramilitaries on his ranch in Venezuela as part of a new coup attempt in 2004. The right wing government in Columbia is best friends with the right wing government in Washington and they both HAVE been trying to overthrow Chavez. Though its impossible to tell who is telling the truth on this one exactly.
This is the most interesting part of the Wikipedia article on the supposed 2004 coup attempt:
"In June 2004, a Cuban Miami TV channel broadcasted a program featuring the Florida-based Comandos F4. Rodolfo Frometa, the Comandos F4 leader, said that his group was ready to carry out violent attacks against the Cuban government. Former Venezuelan army captain Eduardo García described the help he received from Comandos F4 to organize similar violent actions against the Chávez government. According to the TV program maker Randy Alonso, the US government would have recently earmarked $36 million to support such paramilitary groups. [7] U.S. officials and opposition figures in Venezuela have dismissed this claim. Alonso went into hiding. Many media reports, and his official website, suggested that he had fled the country."
"Maintains a sizable paramilitary militia loyal to him personally, outside the normal civilian and military command and oversight structures"
Uh so, this is not suprising when under constant threat of coup attempts which is Chavez and are high on the Bush administration's list of people it would most like to topple or assassinate. Interestingly the Army that staged the coup against Chavez put him back in power when they realized they guy trying to seize power with Bush administration backing, Pedro Carmona Estanga, was going to implement a dictatorship. Chavez appointed the army officer who lead the coup to his government soon after, pretty crafty.
"If this is true then there is not enough history to determin if the globe has warmmed up much less whether it is abnormal or caused by CO2."
Uhhh. I think I said this in my post if you read it. I'm not saying the link between CO2 and global warming is proved, but it is certainly very much a possibility.
"As soon as you stop demanding all of the products you use, like the Internet, then everyone in New Orleans will stop makeing energy out of oil."
Oooo, your smart. The Internet runs on electricity. Oil isn't used to generate electricity. Electrity is produced from coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric. Louisiana's contribution to generating electricity is natural gas, not oil.
And you might note we could get electricity from hydroelectric, nuclear, solar or wind just as easily as coal or natural gas, then we could still have our Internet and not keep dumping CO2, Mercury, Sulfur and other assorted pollutants in to the air.
Now wasn't that easy.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people can't imagine a world where we aren't poisoning it by burning fossil fuels.
"Cuba and Venezuela live in tons of poverty, much more than the U.S.A. Do you expect me to believe that the leaders of Cuba and Venezuela care about the average citizens health care, education and poverty?"
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about as far as Cuba and Venezuela go. Yes Cuba is poor, its a small island with limited resources and embargoed by the power that dominates its hemisphere. If you had a clue about the reality of Cuba they do in fact have great healthcare and education especially considering their absence of wealth. They train doctors largely at state expense from all over the world and those doctors go back to dirt poor regions that wouldn't have doctors at all were it not for Cuba. They provide university educations to people based on their merit, not on their ability to pay.
Venezuela is in transition from being a Fascist country like Columbia, like most countries in the Western Hemisphere because the U.S. installed Fascist dictators in most of them. They had a tiny moneyed elite controlled all the land, oil, wealth and power and the vast majority of the population was in desperate poverty and near servitude. Hard to say how Chavez will turn out but he is extremely popular among the poor and the poor vastly out number the rich. So you ranters have a problem, you have to pick one and only one:
A. Democracy in which case Chavez is going to win because he is popular with the poor and the poor outnumber the rich
B. Plutocracy and dictatorship where the rich minority control the government but its anything but democratic.
"I personally will take Capitalism and Freedom"
The irony with Capitalism is you have more freedom the more money you have. Its a great system as long as you are well off or are willing to do whatever it takes, mostly screw everyone around you, to get that way. If you've ever been poor I think you discovered there isn't a lot of freedom that counts for much. If you are affluent you get off when charged with crimes, if you are poor you rot in jail. In New Orleans the affluent we mostly free to flee destruction and the insurance companies will buy them new houses. The poor were basically imprisoned there and are bearing the brunt of the disaster, and chances are they couldn't afford insurance so what little they had is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
The projects being discussed here are annual maintenance and emergency repair projects, not grandiose multiyear construction projects.
Its hard to say if the funding hadn't been gutted by the Bush administration it would have made a difference, but I'd sure like someone to investigate.
Levees are a place where "a stitch in time" is an appropriate axiom. If there was a low spot due to sinkage and you get a flood that weak spot leads to water spilling over which quickly washes out a whole section. That looks like what happened in New Orleans.
Chance are if someone had gone around and identified low spots due to sinkage and piled a few feet of dirt or concrete on them they would have held. I don't think a multibillion dollar multiyear project was required to prevent this, just good maintenance and some simple repair work. Maybe it wouldn't have happened anyway but cutting 80% of the funding, which is what the Bush administration did, certainly seriously degraded levee maintenance here.
This article tends to contradict your assertion. It kind of sounds like the corp was in fact going around Louisiana begging for money to do emergency repairs. Not clear if the repairs would have salvaged the levies that collapsed but one was on the canal levee that failed. When it comes to levees the old saying "a stitch in time" usually applies. If you let a crack develop or let it sink, when flood water starts spilling at the weak spot it quickly takes out the whole thing.
"Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:"
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
"The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain."
Why don't you read this and come back and see if you stand behind what you said here.
"Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:"
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
"The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain."
Two points:
- A key difference is previous administrations weren't squandering $300 billion in Iraq that could have been spent at home instead. Bosnia was way cheap by comparison.
- Its also a classic Bush defender tactic to say, its Clinton's fault or Clinton didn't fix it either. Damn Bush has been in office five years, I'm assuming he doesn't start taking responsibility for anything on his watch until 8 years in right?
- The Hurricane problem in the South wasn't anything like it is now during Clinton's years in office. After last year a thinking executive might have said, rather than squandering money in Iraq or buying biowarfare suits for the fire department in Podunk, Wyoming maybe we better improve our Hurricane preparedness.
You also chose to gloss over all the first part of my post. How the disaster was handled apart from neglecting the levees was 100% the responsibility of the Command in Chief and his agency FEMA. Or do you want to blame their piss poor handling of this on Clinton too.
"Slashdot has moved so far to the left it's sick."
:)
I don't think I'm actually representative of all of Slashdot.... Most of the time I'm pretty Libertarian so from where I sit that wasn't really a leftist post, it was an anti stupid government post
"I'm sure the relief effort could have been better and faster."
Well following your logic it doesn't matter what kind of job they do. They just have to do something and people like you will say could have been better, could have been worse.
Fact is disaster relief is a fine art. This team failed Disaster 101. First priority right after search and rescue is getting safe drinking water to the victims. Going 4 days without doing that is complete incompetence. They are to busy holding press conferences telling us what they are gonna do some day when they should have just been getting the job done.
"Blaming the administration for the failure is absurd."
The administration is 100% responsible for disaster management once a place is declared a Federal disaster area and they are called in which I believe they were before Katrina even hit. State and local governments have a big role but in a disaster of this scale its entirely FEMA's job to make things right. They get billions of dollars every year just for that purpose. The have the power to mobilize the entire nation to solve the problem They are an executive branch agency and their chief usually reports directly to the President. The President sat in on the pre Hurricane planning videocons from Crawford, I saw him on the big screen.
You might not like pinning this on him, but it amazes me how Bush fan boys like yourself refuse to hold him accountable for ANYTHING. If Clinton had done the same crap you would probably be screaming bloody murder now instead, while I would be ripping up Clinton for his stupidity just the same as Bush. It isn't politics its incompetence.
" I agree with the reply saying that the local and state taxes should be paying for it. "
Well chances are you are wrong because unless a levee is owned by a city or state its not their responsibility. The lion's share of those levees are built and owned by the Army Corp of Engineers. If that was the case here which I'm pretty sure it is, then they are ultimately the responsibility of the Commander in Chief. In this case, unlike Truman, the sign on this one's desk says:
"Keep that buck away from me cuz it ain't stoppin here".
"Trucks don't instantly appear where you want them."
You can drive a truck across the entire country in less than 4 days. Maybe someone should have called up Walmart in Arkansas. They could have had about 2000 trucks full of food and water there in under 24 hours.
You are just being a pathetic apologist. If there is anything sickening around here its that.
"You don't like the war, you think the arab nations should stay totalitarian terrorists who hate the US:
Nope in keeping with my mostly conservative and libertarian tendencies I think we should be taking care of business at home and spending our $300 billion at home instead of playing musical chairs in places that didn't like Americans before and totally hate them now.
Pretty sure the levies around New Orleans, like most of the levies along the Mississippi, were built by and are in the domain of the Army Corp of Engineers. Not sure anyone else could touch them without their approval. There is a very clear paper trail that the Army Corp of Engineers knew they needed work but couldn't get the money because its going in new weapons, homeland security and the war in Iraq.
They fallibility of the levies has been a source of numerous lengthy articles in New Orleans papers and it was well known they probably wouldn't survive a direct hit by a big hurricane. That concern was escalating last year as the number of hurricanes and their severity was rising at a disturbing level.
Its Monday morning quarterback but if you weigh the obvious value of buying biowarfare suits for the fire Department in Podunk, Wyoming and put money in to improve hurricane readiness in the South in the face of real and immediate danger of real Hurricanes its pretty obvious which was the better place to spend money. Its been obvious to everyone with a brain that squandering $300 billion to Iraq was not a wise decision versus spending it at home.
Well actually ozone depletion and climate change are interconnected. Temperature levels in the Arctic and Antarctic are an essential component in how much ozone depletion there is. There is an interesting article about this at Real Climate. The recipe for ozone depletion is CFC's, specific temperature ranges, sunlight, and especially temperatures when the mix is first exposed to sunlight in the spring, which in Antarctica is September.
Ozone depletion will go up and down depending on temperature so climate change will effect it, though I'm hazy on whether global warming would make the problem better or worse.
One has to wonder, and does anybody know, have China and India banned CFC's yet, both in law and if in law do they enforce it. If they haven't and as fast as their economies are growing they could almost single handedly undo all the work done in the the U.S. and Europe to eliminate CFC's leaking in to the atmosphere.
They've put out a lot of political proclamations in the last day or two to make it look like they are doing something but you can see the situation on the ground and tell they in fact did next to nothing in reality during the first 4 days of the disaster other than the obvious, they did get helicopters in to pluck people off of roof tops. That is the only part of the entire effort that seems to have worked. Only problem is once they were rescued they were dropped in collection areas with no drinking water and are dehydrating.
I heard with interest the head of the Coast Guard describing their work and again search and rescue was great, but much of its resources are going to:
A. Buoy replacement to get commercial shipping flowing again
B. Repairing the off shore oil capacity in the Gulf.
Those things are important, but you can consistently tell the Bush administration is more focused on getting the oil industry back on its feet over keeping thousands of poor blacks in New Orleans alive by getting them fresh water. I certainly want gasoline supplies to stabilize but I imagine I would rather people didn't die of dehydration and from drinking contaminated water because we are busy trying to gettin Exxon and Shell on their feet instead.
The obvious complete failure is FEMA should have requisitioned trucks from all points available and started trucking food and water, especially water to the survivors. Private groups and individuals have started doing it because FEMA failed completely in this most basic obvious part of ANY recovery. They didn't get fresh water in to the disaster area. People can survive a distaster without food for a while but people don't last long without water, and when they get thirsty the drink contaminated water, get sick and die. You would think the Republicans would remember the importance of drinking water from the Terry Schiavo case. You only wish they had placed the same importance on this as they did that. They rush Congress in from all points to pass a pointless resolution about here. Congress hasn't yet reconvened or done anything for New Orleans.
I seem to recall yesterday FEMA saying the supplies were en route but it could easily take four days before they actually started getting distributed because of all the Federal, state and local channels they had to be routed through.
One also has to wonder how much of the National Guard's equipment is in Iraq, for example water treatment plants, water and fuel tankers, trucks in particular. 1/3 to 1/4 of the Guard in the disaster area were unavailable because they are in Iraq, you have to wonder how much of the the equipment vital for disaster relief is there too.
Not sure how it will come out in the post mortem investigation but I saw a post here yesterday in which a study in 2004 indicated the levies in New Orleans were in dire need of repair and the money for their repair had been diverted by the Bush administration from the Army Corps of Engineers to the war in Iraq and to homeland security. If that proves to be the case you can scratch one city thanks to the incompetence of the Bush administration.
"I really love George Carlin's routine on the environment. He make a single statement that really brings it all into focus. Are humans so arrogant that we think we can destroy the earth let alone save it?"
That's a good multifaceted joke but if your point was that humans lack the capability to destroy Earth it's flat wrong. We don't as individuals have the capacity it though the heads of state of the U.S., Russia and China could certainly do it some grievous harm using massive arsenals of nuclear weapons. We probably couldn't destroy it when there was a hundred million of on the whole planet, well there are 6 billion of us now and the planet is positively crawling with people in all the inhabitable corners of the planet. We couldn't destroy it with the technology we had a few hundred years ago, mostly before we began tapping large scale energy sources and the industrial age dawned.
The combination of large numbers and technological prowess have almost certainly given us the capacity to destroy our planet now. You have to look no further than satellite photos to see the extent to which we are deforesting the planet. You have to look no further than the extent to which we have decimated one ocean species after another with over fishing. You have to look no further than the litany of species we have pushed in to extinction, or to the verge of extinction, in the last hundred years.
Its a simple fact of life if population growth continues unabated the human race is going to fill to overflowing ever inhabitable part of the planet and is going to exhaust every resource we depend on to keep all those people alive, oil, water, food, farmable land, fish, etc. I guess at the point we could always turn to Soylent Green and keep going a while longer.
LOL!
:)
Maybe, though we were leaning toward the possibility that when the appendix was designed God was taking the day off and his dimwitted apprentice was in charge. Not sure if Intelligent Design mandates a minimum IQ requirement for the designer so maybe we could have "of average intelligence design" and "complete moron design". The latter designer is the one who was apparently in charge when most of the people in the Bush administration were drawn up
Another interesting question is if your silent majority doesn't watch just cable news or are they tuning out all news.
If its the later you end up in a situation where those people don't vote or they vote badly, or they let their government do bad things because they are indifferent. People who don't stay apprised of world and national affairs are far more likely to:
- Vote for incompetent leaders
- Let their incompetent leaders get them in to wars for no good reason
- Let their incompetent leaders destroy the economy by, for example, running unsustainable budget and trade deficits
People might be indifferent to news until they find themselves or their loved ones driving around Iraq while people try to blow them up, or they find themselves unemployed or in poverty because the wheels are falling off the national economy at least for everyone except the rich. For example statistics this week show 1.1 million more Americans fell below the poverty line last year. That's 1.1 million people who should have paid more attention to the news and maybe voted in larger numbers.
Well its true the cable news market is a pretty small percentage of the population. Most Americans are increasingly disinterested in news, politics and world affairs and there are a million other things to occupy everyone's time.
Unfortunately the cable news channels do have a lot of influence on the people that make political decisions.
Another issue is most normal people like to watch news that tells them how great they and their nation is and how much better they are than everyone else. They also want news that reinforces their preconceived world view more than challenge it. The psychological term is cognitive dissonance. People don't listen to things they don't want to believe. This fuels rampant nationalism which in turn is a leading cause of misguided wars.
If you did watch news you wouldn't watch for long if you disagreed with what was being said on a consistent basis.
... and Jonathan Klein moved it further to the right when he took over CNN U.S. last fall, pumped by the fact the right wing swept the elections and tightened their grip on power.
Fact is America is moving to the right or at least the right has conned everyone in to think it is. CNN has been getting killed by Fox in cable news ratings so they had two options, try to be completely unlike Fox and try to find an audience or try to be like Fox. Unfortunately they chose the later leading to a situation in which, rather than there being a liberal bias in the American media, like the right likes to rant there is, in fact American news has a growing right wing bias, at least in cable news. Further evidence is all the cheerleading cable news did before and during the war in Iraq, though some are coming to regret the extent to which they were suckered.
A school of thought is liberals aren't getting much of their news from TV and radio any more, and are turning to the Internet more. Right wingers have latched on en mass to right wing talk radio and Fox news, which reinforce their world view instead of challenge it, and its driven their ratings through the roof making it more profitable radio and TV to do more right wing bias. Its created a situation where Americans are increasingly bombarded with right biased news and its most likely pushing American further and faster to the right. It could well be an out of control snowballing that could result in the U.S. being a very far right country in the not so distant future unless a disaster happens that puts Americans off the on the right, like a war in Iraq that goes bad, $6 gasoline, or a hurricane in the South that the Bush administration completely fails to deal with and which results in mass casualties due purely to slow response. You have to wonder if the Bush administration would have acted more swiftly if the people suffering in the South were affluent, white Republicans instead of poor, black Democrats.
Dude you must be replying to someone else's post not mine. I have a world of respect for people that volunteer for Guard and regular military service. I almost wish I had volunteered but when I was of the age the military was a train wreck post Vietnam and no one in their right mind joined it if they had a better option. I did do my part as a defense contractor for years.
I think everything in my post was empathizing with the plight of people who volunteered for part time and emergency service to their country and landed in semi-permanent combat duty.
The only person I rate as "the bottom of society" is one George W. Bush because he is a spoiled rotten rich kid who faked serving in order to duck actual service. He and Dick Cheney are what is known as "Chicken Hawks". They are fond of sending other people's kids to die while they stay home and line their pockets and the pockets of their rich friend through war profiteering. Meanwhile their kids are 10,000 miles out of harms way, and back in the day when their time to serve came, they DUCKED.
To qualify that should be BBC > CNN U.S.
CNN international is actually pretty decent. They've started carrying an hour of it in the U.S. at noon Eastern and it is head and shoulders better than the smoldering pile that is CNN U.S. these days. CNN U.S. has been in steady decline for years but it went off a cliff when Klein took over CNNU U.S. last fall, and the Republican's cemented their stranglehold on the country. They settling in to fixation on the sensational murder of the year(Aruba), heavy doses of religion cover, and its corporate strategy that they latch on to one story Americans care about and saturation coverage until you are sick of it to the exclusion of all else (Klein more or less said this and inteview on Charlie Rose).
Not sure you can really even blame it on CNN, I think the disease eating away the American media is the majority of American's want heavy bias to reinforce their preconceptions of the world. That's why Fox News is #1 in cable news. They tell Americans how great Americans are and how pathetic every one else is and thats what Americans want to hear, along with how right the right is and how pathetic everyone else is.
Add in the fact that American education and insight in to things like geography, politics, world history is hitting all time lows.
Any news show that actually presented intelligent news in all its complexity and ambiguity will crater in the ratings and go off the air. Fact is most Americans aren't intelligent enough to want or follow intelligent news.
I fully expect the hour of CNN International to get pulled because they criticize America and Americans wont stand for that. They totally ripped Pat Robertson up one side and down the other for being the ignoramus he is, which insured the launch of a 700 club boycott and letter writing campaign to get them off the air waves.
"cindy sheehan has a post about jews who took soldiers away for war in iraq and not being here to stop the looting ( hello posse comitatus) in New Orleans."
Don't think I want to touch most of your rant with a ten foot pole but I think your logic failed on this one.
A rather large percentage of the "soldiers" in Iraq are National Guardsmen. They AREN'T restricted by posse comitatus from domestic enforcement, in fact they are SUPPOSED to respond to and police disasters. Thats what they were for.
In the specific disaster states around 1/3 to 1/4 of their guard are in Iraq so weren't available for call up to help with the disaster. Guard in neighboring states are also somewhat stretched and not as available as they would have been were it not for Iraq. The Guard Military Police are in especially high demand in Iraq and those are exactly the same people who should be patrolling the streets of New Orleans now.
Why are they in Iraq? Because the Bush administration didn't have enough boots to put on the ground in the quagmire and optional war that is Iraq and they didn't want to commit political suicide by starting a draft so they completely twisted the role of the National Guard to everyone's demise. The Guard is to there to play the military role domestically and to extend the military abroad in national emergency, not to prop up a completely optional war for a decade because the Republican's cant face the obvious that they need to either end Iraq or start a draft.
The use of the Guard should, for example, be compared between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. During Vietnam the U.S. had the draft so the Guard turned in to the place were all the well connected white boys served to avoid getting drafted and combat. The Guard for the most part wasn't sent to war in Vietnam. This is why the Bush family pulled some major string to get George W. in to the Texas Air National Guard or Air National Country Club as it was known. The government at great expense trained him to be a glamorous fighter pilot but he had zero chance of seeing combat because he was trained in an obsolete jet, and it appears he barely fulfilled the minimal weekend warrior duties he had.
By contrast the volunteer Guardsmen of today have seen their volunteer service turned in to a quick ticket to multiple year long combat tours in Iraq, with significant casualties, no end in sight, with their family lives and careers ruined, and with much interference in their domestic role for disaster relief in particular.
And I wont even start on the study out last year on the crumbling levies in New Orleans which indicated that the money to repair the levies had been redirected to Homeland security and the war in Iraq by the Bush administration. Scratch one city due to Bush administration incompetence and failure to do "A stitch in time".
"Oil isn't used to generate electricity."
Oil is used to produce 2% of the electricity in the U.S. Its statistically meaningless. Gas, Coal, Hydro and Nuclear is where the lion's share comes from.
"( "The other option is a simple recognition that use of fossil fuels is almost universally bad." )"
It is universally bad for to be using it as an energy source in particular electricity generation and ground transportation. We could certainly do better and are eventually going to have to if:
A. CO2 is in fact contributing to global warming
B. Oil reserves are insufficient to satisfy demand especially for gasoline.
C. Oil is going to be practically gone in a few decades without resorting to tar sands which take vast amounts of energy just to tap.
We certainly need fossil fuels for organic chemistry (plastics) for the forseeable future but with abundant cheap electricity from fission/fusion its likely chemical alternatives could be developed. We also have as an option renewable biofuels if someone develops more efficient means for production. If gas hits $4-6 dollars a gallon, and oil $100 dollars a barrel lots of alternatives suddenly become cheaper and better.
I dearly wish we had a colony on Mars simply because it would compell people to learn to live without fossil fuels.
"The last paragraph doesn't make sense either, I'm pointing out that there is no viable alterantive to oil, period."
Well obvious there is we lived without it before and we will have to live without it again when it runs out. Will there be pain yes. There will be a lot less pain if we start working to eliminate the dependence now, instead of waiting until we run out and then saying OOPS! which seems to be your strategy.
At this point you are just highlighting the fact you must work for an oil company or least you sure think and talk like one. "We are indispensible, we can charge you through the nose for out products from now on, and we will suck all the money out of the rest of the economy to line our pockets." We are the worlds biggest and most successful, legalized, crack dealers.
"we can't get our electricity "as easily" from other sources, not even close."
Nuclear is a completely viable option for electricity. It isn't perfect but the risk of an accident in many respects is better than the slow poisoning of the planet with coal fired power plants. Bite the bullet and open the permanent waste disposal site in Nevada and start building pebble beds. Long term actually get serious about fusion research.
If you are going to do in-situ extraction of tar sands which is about the only way to extend oil reserves you are going to pretty much have to put a nuclear power plant in those fields anyway to provide the electricity for the heater.
Solar and wind are in fact pretty viable on a certain scale compared to the soaring prices of natural gas.
The whole problem with your whole approach is you aren't solving anything you are just procrastinating until the inevitable day when fossil fuels run out. Chances are you will be dead so its just your descendants that will have to deal with it, though I imagine you will see and already are seeing some serious wars over control of the oil fields.
"But still, to come back to my original point: people get in boats to leave communist dictatorships to come to the US, not the other way round."
I think you are oversimplifying. People go both ways. People wage multiyear wars to create communist states. Reference Vietnam and the Viet Cong though they were figthing more for Nationalism than Communism. Also the U.S. backed puppets in Vietnam, Diem and Thieu, were more despised than Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh sought to ally with the U.S. after World War II, the U.S. spurned him and pushed him in the arms of the Soviet Union.
Many people in Russia want to return to the old Soviet Union. As bad as it was, people had a somewhat better social safety net than they have now in Russia, the crime and exploitation was somewhat lower too.
" I'd be interested in hearing others hypothesize about this."
Having recently converted to Bushiology I am certain it is due to Intelligent Design. So the simple, irrefutable answer is that it's God's will. We are still grappling with how to explain the appendix.
Why don't you, sir, try to make a coherent argument next time as to why I'm a fool.
Ad hominem attacks like this are usually the tool of last resort of people who are incapable of engaging in intelligent debate or defending their point of view. You are the one who comes across as a fool because you aren't capable of stating why I'm a fool.
Its impossible to weigh or dispute the validity of your assertion when you make no case for why you made it in the first place.
I hope it made you feel good though.
"Argentina? Nope. Chile? Nope"
.....
Actually as long as you are talking recent history, not necessarily today, its Argentina? Yep and Chile? Yep. Guatemala? Yep. Haiti? Yep. Nicaragua? Yep. Dominican Republic? Yep. El Salvador? Yep. Columbia? Yep. Panama? Yep. (Noriega was a CIA stooge until they had a falling out)
The Fascist dictatorship count in the Western Hemisphere is down lately as some of these countries have restored varying degrees of Democracy but its not really any thanks to the United States. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the U.S. also lost some of the incentive for installing anti communist dictators.
"But, this hasn't happened for quite a long time now."
Iraq is pretty obviously regime change by force. If the U.S. gets its way they are going to arrange for Allawi to win the next round of elections because he is the U.S. backed puppet there. It was a set back when he got thrown out in the first round of elections.
The U.S. is still quite active in changing governments around the world though most of the focus lately has been in Asia, especially around the edges of the old Soviet Union. Uzbekistan is in the process of expelling the U.S. military from the base Uzbekistan provided to wage the war in Afghanistan, because the U.S. was apparently using to try and destabilize and topple its host government. Removing the curren Uzbek government would probably be an improvement but the U.S. has also gleefully sent people there through Rendition to be tortured.
The U.S. has attempted regime Venezuela at least twice since the Bush administration came to power. The Army got cold feet the first time when they observed the person siezing power was going to install a dictatorship so they restored Chavez to power in 2 days. In 2004 another alleged coup was broken up.
The interesting part form the Wikipedia article:
"In June 2004, a Cuban Miami TV channel broadcasted a program featuring the Florida-based Comandos F4. Rodolfo Frometa, the Comandos F4 leader, said that his group was ready to carry out violent attacks against the Cuban government. Former Venezuelan army captain Eduardo García described the help he received from Comandos F4 to organize similar violent actions against the Chávez government. According to the TV program maker Randy Alonso, the US government would have recently earmarked $36 million to support such paramilitary groups. [7] U.S. officials and opposition figures in Venezuela have dismissed this claim. Alonso went into hiding. Many media reports, and his official website, suggested that he had fled the country."
Another likely case of CIA backed regime change is the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the installation of the pro U.S. Mikheil Saakashvili. The Rose Revolution was painted as pro democracy and pro reform but it looks increasingly like it was just another case of regime change to install a pro American puppet.
The U.S. was also actively involved in the Orange revolution in the Ukraine though certainly they backed the better of the two options there.
U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries and active engagement in regime change continues unabated and is in fact accelerating under the Bush administration.
Sure they are installing people somewhat less bad than the military dicators of old but only slightly so, and they are still frequently manipulating outcomes to the benefit U.S. interests more than the interests of people that live in those countries.
"Or aren't these people rich enough?"
The DOJ was compelled to lynch some rich people in the face of rampant scandal and a public out cry that something be done. Those cases are far more exceptions than the rule. Its noteworthy that George W.'s close friend Ken Lay is still most definitely not in jail.
Your kidding yourself or tryi
"Led a military coup against an elected Venezuelan president (unsuccessful, 1992)"
You left out the fact that this President Carlos Andrés Pérez was impeached and convicted on corruption charges in 1993. The fact that Chavez tried to oust him actually made him more popular in Venezuela.
Pérez was a bizarre president.
In his first term he ranted against the International Monetary Fund calling it ""Neutron Bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing.". At the start of his second term he took a $4.5 billion loan from the IMF with all the nasty strings that come with those.
Pérez is actually the one that nationalized American oil and steel interests in Venezuela which presumably put him on America's hit list. You have to wonder if maybe the U.S. wasn't backing Chavez's coup attempt at the time. America HATES it when a Socialist nationalizes American business assets.
"Arrested Roberto Alonso, one of the main opposition leaders, on trumped-up charges"
That one is certainly open to debate and depends on who you listen to. It may also be that he had 55 Columbian paramilitaries on his ranch in Venezuela as part of a new coup attempt in 2004. The right wing government in Columbia is best friends with the right wing government in Washington and they both HAVE been trying to overthrow Chavez. Though its impossible to tell who is telling the truth on this one exactly.
This is the most interesting part of the Wikipedia article on the supposed 2004 coup attempt:
"In June 2004, a Cuban Miami TV channel broadcasted a program featuring the Florida-based Comandos F4. Rodolfo Frometa, the Comandos F4 leader, said that his group was ready to carry out violent attacks against the Cuban government. Former Venezuelan army captain Eduardo García described the help he received from Comandos F4 to organize similar violent actions against the Chávez government. According to the TV program maker Randy Alonso, the US government would have recently earmarked $36 million to support such paramilitary groups. [7] U.S. officials and opposition figures in Venezuela have dismissed this claim. Alonso went into hiding. Many media reports, and his official website, suggested that he had fled the country."
"Maintains a sizable paramilitary militia loyal to him personally, outside the normal civilian and military command and oversight structures"
Uh so, this is not suprising when under constant threat of coup attempts which is Chavez and are high on the Bush administration's list of people it would most like to topple or assassinate. Interestingly the Army that staged the coup against Chavez put him back in power when they realized they guy trying to seize power with Bush administration backing, Pedro Carmona Estanga, was going to implement a dictatorship. Chavez appointed the army officer who lead the coup to his government soon after, pretty crafty.
"If this is true then there is not enough history to determin if the globe has warmmed up much less whether it is abnormal or caused by CO2."
Uhhh. I think I said this in my post if you read it. I'm not saying the link between CO2 and global warming is proved, but it is certainly very much a possibility.
"As soon as you stop demanding all of the products you use, like the Internet, then everyone in New Orleans will stop makeing energy out of oil."
Oooo, your smart. The Internet runs on electricity. Oil isn't used to generate electricity. Electrity is produced from coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric. Louisiana's contribution to generating electricity is natural gas, not oil.
And you might note we could get electricity from hydroelectric, nuclear, solar or wind just as easily as coal or natural gas, then we could still have our Internet and not keep dumping CO2, Mercury, Sulfur and other assorted pollutants in to the air.
Now wasn't that easy.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people can't imagine a world where we aren't poisoning it by burning fossil fuels.
"Cuba and Venezuela live in tons of poverty, much more than the U.S.A. Do you expect me to believe that the leaders of Cuba and Venezuela care about the average citizens health care, education and poverty?"
You obviously have no clue what you are talking about as far as Cuba and Venezuela go. Yes Cuba is poor, its a small island with limited resources and embargoed by the power that dominates its hemisphere. If you had a clue about the reality of Cuba they do in fact have great healthcare and education especially considering their absence of wealth. They train doctors largely at state expense from all over the world and those doctors go back to dirt poor regions that wouldn't have doctors at all were it not for Cuba. They provide university educations to people based on their merit, not on their ability to pay.
Venezuela is in transition from being a Fascist country like Columbia, like most countries in the Western Hemisphere because the U.S. installed Fascist dictators in most of them. They had a tiny moneyed elite controlled all the land, oil, wealth and power and the vast majority of the population was in desperate poverty and near servitude. Hard to say how Chavez will turn out but he is extremely popular among the poor and the poor vastly out number the rich. So you ranters have a problem, you have to pick one and only one:
A. Democracy in which case Chavez is going to win because he is popular with the poor and the poor outnumber the rich
B. Plutocracy and dictatorship where the rich minority control the government but its anything but democratic.
"I personally will take Capitalism and Freedom"
The irony with Capitalism is you have more freedom the more money you have. Its a great system as long as you are well off or are willing to do whatever it takes, mostly screw everyone around you, to get that way. If you've ever been poor I think you discovered there isn't a lot of freedom that counts for much. If you are affluent you get off when charged with crimes, if you are poor you rot in jail. In New Orleans the affluent we mostly free to flee destruction and the insurance companies will buy them new houses. The poor were basically imprisoned there and are bearing the brunt of the disaster, and chances are they couldn't afford insurance so what little they had is gone.