Avuncular American

Obama: No Crying Over Spilt Oil

Poor President Obama.  All those pundits trying to get him to become the Emoter-In-Chief.  At least Frank Rich in today's New York Times advises him to take a course more in keeping with his character: "Don't Get Mad, Mr. President.  Get Even."

Once the leak is plugged (you see, I'm the incurable optimist), once the cleanup is underway, then is the time for systemic action.  It has to do with oil people embedded in the Interior Department and Monsanto people writing safety regulations in the FDA, and lobbyists in bed with politicians in Congress.

Thanks, by the way, to IdiomsByKids.com for the great illustration above. As we already know thanks to Malia Obama, the kids get it.

No use in crying over the disaster caused by, as Frank Rich calls them, the "corporate corner cutters."  That CCC of corrupt conniving capitalists - as opposed to virtuous capitalists, who really do exist - has to be kept under the thumb of regulators.  But that is for the aftermath, once BP (aided, perhaps, by the US Navy's deep sea specialists) plugs the flood of oil spewing from the ocean's floor.

Meanwhile, deploy the CCC.  You thought that the Civilian Conservation Corps went the way of the Depression and the ensuing New Deal.  Well, you're right.  And wrong.  The CCC lives.

Under a glowing photo of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Conservation Corps, consisting of 3,000 18 to 25 year olds (with over 100,000 alumni since its inception in 1976), is able to deal with many environmental disasters, including

Oil Spills, Search-and-Rescue, and more --There are specially trained oil spill cleanup crews and search and rescue crews.

That is just what we need, at least until the Obama Administration creates and trains a similar Federal corps.  Maybe Arnold will allow Barack to Federalize the CCC - the state needs all the revenue it can get, and BP could be made to pay the bill.

Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida - what are you waiting for?  Write to the CCC's Director David Muraki (david.muraki@ccc.ca.gov). 

Bubba Gump Wept

With due deference to the people at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Restaurant and Market®, and to the creators of Forrest Gump, Bubba, and Lieutenant Dan©, attention must shift - urgently - to removing the millions of gallons of crude that is floating around (or suspended under the surface of) the Gulf of Mexico.

As a good friend in Sarasota Florida reminds me, there is the matter of hurricane season.  Airborne "oil spray" is added to the toxic mix, according to this report.  Now BP can put that on its growing list of liabilities.

While I am no expert on the esoteric world of crude oil and its properties - though I've stepped on my share of it on the world's beaches over the years - I do know about VLCCs.  Very Large Crude Carriers (photo, DNV "Managing Risk"). Or how about ULCCs - the nec plus ultra in crude carriers.

These behemoths can carry some 2 million barrels of crude, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal trade item, there seems to be no particular urgency in whether these giants spend their time in the Gulf or in the North Sea.  It's just a market matter.

Well now, how about the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, MARAD.  Look at their site, and try to find some reference to the unfolding Gulf BP disaster.  For an agency that just celebrated "National Maritime Day," about its historic achievements, how about a little contemporary activism?

Why not commandeer some of these VLCCs and ULCCs to go off Louisiana and pump up some of that sludge, even if it is a mixture of crude oil, golf balls, and seawater?  At 2 million barrel capacity, you can suck it up and sort it out later at the refinery.

In the time-honored Washington phrase that usually gets bureaucrats moving - "DO SOMETHING!"

Cheer Up, Europe: The War's Over

You wouldn't know it, by the looks of the headlines:

"Gloom across Europe as crisis shadow intensifies" Financial Times

"Zeal and angst: Germany torn over role in Europe" Wall Street Journal

"AMB. JOHN BOLTON: We shouldn't rescue Europe" FOXNews.com

Thanks, Ambassador Bolton.  Glad you weren't around during World War II.  And I don't think the Europeans have actually asked the US to rescue them this time.

No, you wouldn't know that today really should be a day of celebration.  65 years of peace across a continent ravaged by two world wars last century.  VE Day - Victory in Europe - never was much celebrated in the United States, which preferred to lump its commemoration of its dead of all wars in May's Memorial Day.

But on this side of the Atlantic, as the BBC On This Day website reminds us, Britons lost no time in celebrating the end of hostilities in Europe on May 8, 1945.  They cheered PM Winston Churchill, "for he's a jolly good fellow."  Didn't keep them, two months later, from voting him out of office.  Gordon Brown shouldn't feel so bad.

VE Day on May 8 is a public holiday in many European countries, though at places like NATO HQ, where some of the losing countries of the war are now major players, it doesn't do to mention the war.  So we have instead the celebration of the postwar peace, embodied in Europe Day, May 9, celebrating 60 years since Robert Schuman sketched out what has since become the European Union.

If only the general mood matched the upbeat Euro-phoria of the Europe Day poster gallery.  It's hard to find committed Europhiles, especially in places like the British Conservative Party, which just may be poised to take over the helm of what is already a Euro-sceptic nation.

Even on the continent, the angst and gloom is general: in Greece, the epicenter of the latest financial-fiscal crisis, it has erupted into violence.  Here in Brussels, a city whose name is synonymous with the EU, not even Europe can appear to help a country seemingly bent on endless separatism in a slow "death of a thousand cuts."

Too bad Europeans don't see the BIG PICTURE.  Which is, 65 years of peace, the product of an alphabet soup of interlocking institutions: NATO, EU, COE, OSCE, OECD.  These "supranational European bodies" might bore you to death with their endless diplo-speak of collective security, single currency, subsidiarity... but these weighty words keep the swords from being rattled.  If you can't make out the Euler diagram (click on image below) of these overlapping institutions, check out this excellent Wikipedia graph.

"Jaw-jaw is better than war-war," Winston Churchill is reputed to have said.  The European Union does talk to excess, at times, but 65 years of jaw-jaw is better than 6 months of war-war.  Europe, count your blessings, do the necessary, and keep that stiff upper lip in the face of a little currency crisis.  It's important, but seen in perspective, pales when the alternatives to collective security are considered.

There is strength in numbers.

The Right to Dry Atop Tangier

Tangier, Morocco is known for many things - commanding view of Gibraltar from the African side, birthplace of Tangerine traveler Ibn Battutah, as an "International Zone" from 1912 until Moroccan independence in 1956.  However, despite a very impressive wind power farm in the distant hills, it may not come to mind as a poster child for environmental awareness or alternative energy.  Until this:

My closeup taken on our host's rooftop does not do the scene justice.  Peer above the drying dishcloths and you'll see a sea of - antennas and satellite dishes, yes - laundry, flapping in the brisk breeze.  Tangier's outskirts might be sinking under the weight of all the concrete as it awakens from its decades-long torpor, but at least the inhabitants of the ancient medina are saving on clothes dryer electricity bills.

Stop for a moment.  Did you ever smell laundry dried outside by your mother or grandma?  Think back and sniff the freshness.  Tangier's laundry has it, because there they have the Right to Dry.

I was so busy thanking my lucky stars about being able to fly back to Europe through the volcano cloud that I let Earth Day pass without comment.  Before we left Morocco, local newspapers were already gearing up, with schoolchildren and civic groups preparing to plant trees.  Essential work there, where ancient trees are not safe from property developers.  Even business groups have sounded the alarm over the seemingly unending urban sprawl.

But back in the medina, the flapping of the sheets, the gurgling of the fountain in the courtyard, the distant throb of car ferry engines, the coast of Spain a reminder of Al-Andalus... for a while, you are taken back in time.  Some human activities don't require high fossil fuel consumption.  Just a little mint tea, as the sun sets over the Strait.

Earth Day is important, but it's what we do the Day(s) After Earth Day that is vital.

It's still not too late to plant that tree...

IMBY - Farms and Factories

Are the days of the family farm and the local factory a thing of the past in the Western world?  Well, I hope not, otherwise what will we all do, just "service" each other?

Can't expect the Chinese to supply us with both manufactured goods and food, or can we?  I guess it's hard to say no to Chinese made toys, but I draw the line at basic foodstuffs.  Don't want melamine in our milk, do we?  But in manufacturing, whole categories of products - I'm talking about things as essential as appliance motors, not just toys - are almost exclusively made in China.

The withering away of the industrial base is a growing concern in industrialized countries like the United States and France, where President Sarkozy laments "de-industrialization."  In the US, Charlie LeDuff wrote about the dying days of a former auto-manufacturing Midwest town in "End of the Line," a Mother Jones photo-essay.

As dire as the industrial scene in the West may be, let me add another major concern: the death of agriculture.  Well, not really, but the death of the family farmer for sure.  In Paris, the focus this week has been on the annual "Salon d'Agriculture," where farmers show off their prize cattle and you can taste fresh produce and other marvels from France's rich production.  A nice show.

Meanwhile, French TV and radio news reports from the countryside feature farmers in tears, wondering how they will be able to survive the fall in prices for their products.  Adult children raising livestock at a loss, only able to live thanks to their parents' pensions.  Thousands of new rural applicants every month for unemployment compensation or welfare.

Part of the problem stems from the whole NIMBY complex, where communities more interested in aesthetics and real estate values make a mixed economy impossible.  In the US, I have seen wealthy communities zone away the possibilities for even private schools to be established in their midst, let alone a muddy farm or a small workshop.  How many people in suburban America have been denied their right to dry laundry in the fresh air, no matter how energy efficient it is?

IMBY - In My Back Yard - is the name of a program from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) which helps homeowners calculate the amount of renewable energy they could produce for a given investment.  In the UK, the Energy Saving Trust (EST) provides an array of useful programs.

Though it won't save the farmers, the "Food Not Lawns" movement might at least get people to reduce the enormous waste of soil and water - not to speak of time and energy - that green grass lawns represent.  Turn your yard into a mini-farm.  Urban farming activists were given a boost by Michelle Obama's White House garden initiative, but still must face opposition by purists trying to uphold zoning regulations.

And given the advances in soundproofing, pollution filtering, and eco-friendly building materials, how much sense does it make to oppose mini-industrial zones close to the very residential areas which cry out for employment opportunities?

At the Paris agriculture show, little kids who grow up on packaged food from the supermarket marvel at the wonders of the temporary urban farm.  Without vegetable gardens, farms, and factories in our midst, we too are increasingly divorced from the reality of the essentials of our existence.

Get out into the mud, visit a farm, a factory, give the browser a break.  See where things are made, where food grows.  A reality show, one that should not be produced exclusively in China.

Governance: Trying Times in Eunomia

Eunomia, as defined in the blog of that name, means "the principle of good order."

It's well worth a look - The Economist calls its author Daniel Larison "a thoughtful paleoconservative."  Appropriate enough, given his role as contributing editor of The American Conservative, where his blog appears.  After years of equating conservatives with the messianic "neo" variety, it's refreshing to consider that their "paleo" precursors had many common sense attitudes, especially as concern US imperial tendencies.

As opposed to that other Greek word, utopia, eunomia is more attainable, at least intermittently.  Oxford's definition - "a political condition of good law, well administered" - at least gives politicians something to aim for.

"Governance" is one of those euphemistic (those Greeks again) words that you might have come to dislike from their overuse, a bit like "wellness" (thank God we're not debating "wellness reform").  Governance is usually preceded by the adjective "good," for you wouldn't want the opposite.  Development circles are awash with jobs for governance advisers, where professionals from aid-giving countries spread their knowledge in places with a need for better government.

But wait a minute: as with many such well-meaning efforts, isn't this often a case of "do as I say, not as I do?"  Many of these governance advisers hail from places like the US and Europe, where there are numerous examples of governance gone astray, of eunomia tending towards dystopia.  Just look at the craziness reigning in the US Congress.  Which brings me back to the old time conservatives.

Might country club Republicans, paleoconservatives, and realists of all sorts have more in common than we think with pragmatic Democrats and moderate progressives?  Might they be equally appalled at the rise of the Tea Party and the resurgence of extremists like the John Birch Society, as described yesterday in Frank Rich's NYT column "The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged."  If anything, Tea Partyers will steal Republican votes, as we are starting to see in places like Texas.

On this side of the Atlantic, while sane European leaders attempt to deal with the economic dystopia of non-eunomic Greece, out surges a loony from the British UKIP Party, Disparaging Farage, crudely attacking the EU leadership and the countries from which they hail.

It's a bit too Pollyanna-ish to see the upside of all this, but the whole point is that the UKIPs and the Tea Parties are not really interested in governance.  They revel in their capacity to outrage.

In the US, it should be evident to serious Republicans that to get too close to the barn burners threatens their own ability to govern.   Does it help or hurt their cause that a Republican Senator is single-handedly holding up unemployment compensation, including his own constituents'...?

If eunomia is too highfalutin' a concept of governance, how about these two: civility, and civics?

A Country Is a Terrible Thing To Waste

Apologies to the Ad Council and the United Negro College Fund for my deforming their long running "A Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Waste" ad campaign.  But the sentiment fits my message.

Further mea culpas to nationalists in both the United States and Belgium for what I'm about to do.  But I care deeply about both countries, being a citizen of the former and a resident of the latter.  Both have the potential to be greater than their current national selves, and both are suffering from an institutional malaise that causes the national machinery to break down - literally, in the tragic case of the train accident this week outside Brussels.

Just keep the trains from hitting each other

How so, you may ask?  As soon as news of a head on collision between two commuter trains hit the press, questions started to be raised: was this another example of linguistic confusion between traffic controllers?  Was this a "black day for Flanders," the scene of the accident, as the head of the Dutch-speaking region said?  No, not just Flanders, for there were probably as many or more Francophone wallons on the trains, part of the massive daily national exchange of populations across the "linguistic frontier."  But everything in Belgium is eventually linked to the thorny linguistic community question.

If anything, the breakup of the national train service into several entities, with crucial responsibility for infrastructure and security spun off to a company that holds no responsibility for making the trains run on time, is probably at the root of the problem.  But the political finagling underlying the breakup of something that had been a coherent whole is apparent: the newspaper photo captions identifying the supposedly technocratic bosses of the several entities that comprise the Belgian train system carried the political affiliations of each.  They are party creatures, carefully selected to reflect the correct ideological and linguistic balance.  But can they run trains?

Governments are supposed to govern, no?

Across the pond, meanwhile, political science dictionary writers are going to have to come up with a new term that goes beyond gridlock.  Terminal hold?   Rigor senatis?  Fili-busted?  Republicans appear to only know how to say no, and Democrats appear unable to understand that more than fifty percent of anything is a majority.

Blame games are for losers, and as Democrats and Republicans trade charges over their collective inability and/or unwillingness to get a move on, the Chinese, who have neither Republicans or Democrats but just Commie-capitalists, get to play Monopoly by themselves.  Monopoly over much of the world's industrial production and creditor to their biggest customer for cheap goods, the United States.

This, and the long term standing of the world's oldest democracy is what our elected officials should be dealing with.

With Belgium's regional and linguistic tensions always present in debate on the future of the country, the threat of division is never far away.  The "Belgian compromise" is legendary in Europe, where at the 11th hour a Belgian middle way is found to save the EU deliberations on sometimes obscure issues.  But domestically, this compromise has tended to compromise chances for good governance.  Cutting the train system into parts, insisting on a four-lane highway because the other region has one, proliferating parliaments to create jobs for politicians - you can compromise your way into a dysfunctional state.  Remember, Solomon only threatened to cut the baby in half.

In the US, at least no one other than a few fringe Republicans is calling for the breakup of the union.  Nostalgic for "American empire?"  We need to be taken down a peg or two if we think we can continue indefinitely in our unsustainably wasteful, greedy, consumerist ways.  But American democracy is quite another thing.  If today's politicians so disgust the citizenry that voters leave the business of elections and elective office to the crazy fringe, then the world will have lost very much indeed.

A country is a terrible thing to waste.

 

Store Your Containers in Haiti

Matthew Price, BBC Port-au-Prince, 12 February 2010:

In just a few weeks, by the end of March, or in April, the rainy season will begin. Some 700,000 people are living out in the open, in makeshift shelters. The luckier have found old and rusty corrugated iron roofs. Others huddle under bed-sheets strung between wooden poles. Shelter is, according to aid agencies, a monumental challenge.

As Haiti marks the one-month anniversary of its devastating earthquake, attention turns to shelter before the rainy season.  Matthew Price goes on to report the additional misery that a pre-season deluge caused in the shanty town.  However, as the Clemson University SEED Project (image) has shown, the solution is at hand:

Shipping containers are designed to carry massive amounts of cargo and withstand extreme weather conditions making them a logical housing component.  Completely constructed of steel... [they] resist overturn when exposed to winds up to 140 mph.  Without modification a 40 foot shipping container has 304 square feet of floor space and eliminates problems associated with insects, fire, and hurricanes.  With modification a 40 foot shipping container can be a safe, comfortable, and environmentally friendly home for numerous local inhabitants who would otherwise have less.

Okay, combine Clemson's research (begun, according to Science Daily, in response to hurricane damage) with this fact: even though the worldwide recession has hit the container shipping business badly, and traffic is down a massive 10 percent last year, container ships continue to be built.  See "New Ships Idle, Waiting for Cargo to Fill Them," Matthew Saltmarsh, New York Times, 15 January 2010:

... shipbuilders are expected to deliver 371 container ships this year and 127 in 2012, according to Alphaliner. The container fleet will grow 14 percent in 2010 and almost 10 percent next, meaning that even more ships will be competing for cargo.

Okay: shipping industry, meet container warehouses, meet aid agencies.  It's a perfect storm.  Meanwhile, the weather report for Haiti predicts heavy rain.

Memo To Washington: Try Burying Power Lines

It's not just Washington, and it's not just electricity cables.  Everywhere in the United States, whether the prevailing weather extremes are winter storms, fall hurricanes, or intermittent tornadoes, the answer is the same: plant wooden telephone poles along the street, run your critical infrastructure wiring over them, and hope for the best.  19th century technology at its best.

This weekend in Washington, it's same old, same old: hundreds of thousands of people deprived of heat, electricity, and communications.  And it doesn't have to be that way.

This winter in Brussels has had its share of snowfalls, though nothing like Washington's current blizzard.  But one thing we didn't have to worry about on our street (photo), or for Brussels as a whole, was power lines collapsing under the weight of snow or ice.  They are buried, you see, along with other utilities like telephone cables, water and sewage pipes, etc.

Belgium's no poster boy for governance, what with its multiple parliaments, record-breaking numbers of civil servants, and yearlong gridlock in forming governmental coalitions.  But on such matters as the permanence of basic infrastructure, they have thankfully reached the conclusion that streets might just as well have conduits for power lines that are put there to stay, rain or shine.

I fear that in the US, we live for the present, and the notion of investment for infrastructure is as quaint as Dwight Eisenhower's potholed Interstate system.  Investment is now equated financial instruments therefore with Wall Street, and we know where that took us.  Just look at the appalling state of the State of California, where Peter Schrag in the September 2009 Harper's painted a picture of a citizenry that has voted its way to ungovernability, starving even education - talk about investment in a critical area - of tax funding.

This may not be the weekend to rub it in, but hell, Washington, it's been like this ever since we lived there more than three decades ago, when I wondered how the underground Metro system could break down because of snow (of course, I learned that it's the above-ground parts that are the problem).  And another period of Washington residence in the late '90s, when power outages during snow/ice storms had us heating thawed food on a camp cooker inside our frozen apartment, probably in violation of a bunch of city ordnances.

As with so much else, couldn't Washington show the country that there's another way to organize urban living?  By amortizing, maybe, part of the annual billions of dollars of storm damage that is due to downed power/phone lines by simply burying them under Washington's pretty tree-lined streets.

So, after the big dig-out is over, how about trading snow shovels for the other kind, and maybe creating some employment for sustainable infrastructure of the most basic kind?

Lessons In Governance, Haiti To Capitol Hill

"The Price (and Potential) of Failure" is the title of the BBC World Service's excellent economic program Global Business with Peter Day (listen to the podcast).  The segment's title may put you in mind of the challenge facing the US Democratic party (more on that later), but in fact Peter Day is interviewing author Clare Lockhart, head of the Institute for State Effectiveness, about the challenges facing failed states, especially in light of the Haiti earthquake.

The Institute's diagram (click to enlarge) lists the "Ten Functions of the State," which Lockhart admits sound slightly statist/Stalinist, but are actually just attributes of good governance.  The kind of things - "effective infrastructure, regulated market, investment in human capital" - that you'd like to see whether you're in Haiti or in Harrisburg.  The kinds of things we Americans like to preach to Haitians, Iraqis, and Afghans - "national military controls a monopoly on the means of violence" - then balk when someone proposes gun control at home or limits to sales of military hardware abroad.

The lack of effective governance in Haiti is now answered with massive US deployment of its military, the only state institution capable of moving huge amounts of material under crisis conditions.  But the US military "monopoly" on rapid disaster deployment is simply due to its success in securing unlimited state spending on military hardware and personnel.  It's a choice, one that in other countries might be moderated by funding of civil defense - shown to be quietly effective in international relief efforts in Haiti.

Haitians have impressed aid workers with their stoicism in the face of utter disaster, but their stoicism is born of generations of constantly lowering expectations of their own government's capacities.  Americans still expect more of their government(s), though they sometimes want to deprive their "public servants" of the means to deliver services (see California's various Propositions, and the Reagan ethos of government as the problem).  At a minimum, they want governance from their government.

The United States is not yet a failed state, though many of its elected officials appear hell-bent on taking us down that road.  Republican legislators apparently plan to continue to say "no" to all Democratic proposed bills over the next three years, and Democratic Representatives and Senators appear to be frozen into inaction despite their large majorities in both houses of Congress.

Failed states don't all look like Haiti or Somalia.  Failure to reach your potential is still failure.