Last night while watching the utter mess that is the Mississippi Delta on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I felt a combination of gratitude at my own good fortune at being in a dry house with electricity, air conditioning, and flush toilets; combined with guilt at my own good fortune when the lives of so many have been ruined beyond repair. And they're living in a country in which the sentiment of its leaders are "I got mine and fuck you."
Yesterday the President of the United States was a-pickin' and a-grinnin' on a guitar with the presidential seal on it, before flying back to Washington by way of Texas so he could spend one more night on vacation -- when he was planning to return on Friday anyway. While the very National Weather Service satellite was accurately predicting the monster storm to within On Monday, Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes, who no doubt makes a tidy living perpetrating the "Fuck the poor" sentiments of the right, boasted that "last year, when there were two hurricanes, and I got a new roof, I paid my part. My private insurance company paid the other part. The federal government and taxpayers paid no part."
Except that insurance in coastal areas is subsidized by the federal government using -- you guessed it -- tax dollars.
But in Fred Barnes' world, federal insurance to rebuild the swimming pools of rich people is money well-spent, but federal relief to people who have lost all of what little they had in the first place is welfare. Just like corporate bailouts are OK, but Social Security isn't. This is how the right thinks.
I've put up a button linking to the Red Cross' donation page in the sidebar. I hope you'll all use it. I have no great love for the Red Cross. I have no great love for MOST large nonprofits, with their high overhead and administrative costs and their tendency to plow entirely too much back into more fundraising. But right now the choice is either the Red Cross or a bunch of religious organizations, and frankly, I don't want to even take the CHANCE that my money might go to a group that might deny a sandwich to someone who was rescued from a roof yesterday if he doesn't say he accepts Jesus.
Right now cold hard cash is what seems to be needed, and it's going to have to come from people like you and me, because you can bet your life that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Fred Barnes and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of their ilk aren't going to be opening THEIR wallets.
Please don't forget that it was this Administration which cut funding for flood control projects in the Delta because of cost pressures stemming from the Iraq war -- cost pressures that didn't result in better equipment for soldiers, but DID result in huge windfalls for Halliburton and KBR -- windfalls the exposure of which are the cause of Bunnatine Greenhouse's demotion at the Army Corps of Engineers.
Over a million people in the United States are devastated today because the Bush Administration wanted to shovel more and more and more of YOUR tax dollars into the pockets of military contractors like Halliburton -- and demanded NO accounting from them.
The Bush Administration didn't cause this hurricane, and there's no guarantee that the levees in New Orleans would have held without the funding cuts. But there's no doubt whatsoever that the cuts in the Army Corps of Engineers budget for flood control in this area directly contributed to the situation reaching the doomsday scenario that early reports had led us to believe had been avoided.
And for those who don't care about a bunch of poor and black people waiting for rescue on their roofs, or died trapped in their homes, there's this to chew on:
Hurricane Katrina kept energy production all but paralyzed yesterday in one of the nation's main oil-and-gas hubs, shuttering refineries, raking offshore oil platforms, closing pipelines and raising fears that oilpricescould reach debilitating heights in the coming weeks.
By midday yesterday, 615 of the 819 oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico -- three-quarters of the total -- had been evacuated, according to the Department of the Interior. Oil production dropped by nearly 92 percent, or 1.4 million barrels a day. And natural gas production was down 83 percent. The storm halted barge traffic on the Mississippi River, preventing crude oil from reaching upriver refineries unaffected by the hurricane.
Energy companies warned it will take several days before they can assess the damage to their major facilities in Louisiana, Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. But trading of crude oil climbed to a record $69 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange before settling back to close at $67.20, up $1.07 from Friday. Future contracts on gasoline deliveries jumped as much as 24 cents a gallon, and pump prices could rise as much as 15 cents by week's end, some analysts said. Natural gas prices leaped 15 percent while heating oil jumped more than 4 percent.
"It's a pretty big hit," warned John Felmy, an economist at the American Petroleum Institute. "There's no question there will be some very real market impact."
[snip]
Damage to operations in the Gulf could push oil prices to $80 a barrel by the end of September, a level that would rival the inflation-adjusted prices of the early 1980s, when oil shocks helped send the economy into recession, said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy research specialist at Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
[snip]
But the prospect of extensive damage sent economists scrambling to lower their economic growth forecasts for the second half of the year. Global Insight Inc., a Massachusetts economic forecasting firm, outlined a best-case scenario in which Katrina pushes average gasoline prices to $3 a gallon for two months and shaves a half-percent off economic growth in the final three months of the year. But the firm's worst-case scenario has oil nearing $100 a barrel, gasoline at $3.50 a gallon and a recession possible by year's end.
[snip]
"There is a real sense of foreboding about the economy now that Katrina has struck with full force," wrote Bernard Baumohl, executive director of the Economic Outlook Group LLC, a forecasting firm in New Jersey. "This storm will be the most devastating ever for the U.S. oil and refining industries."
It remains to be seen just what the impact will be on the overall economy. A quick scan of various news sites this morning leaves me with the impression that everyone's trying to put the best face on the situation. But with this kind of cutback in refining capability, it seems to me that we could be looking at the gas lines of the 1970's occurring again -- a return to the days when you'd have to get up at 4 AM to be the 20th car in line by 5 AM.
Add the increase in gasoline prices to the increase in both heating oil and natural gas, and throw in the increase in prices for transporting food, the increase in prices from building supplies, soda bottles, other packaging, and just about everything else that uses plastic (which is petroleum-based), and toss in an already-spiralling deficit, and we have the potential for this country to be in a world of shit by the end of the year.
And what were the commercials for during the breaks on Countdown last night?
GMC Yukon SUVs.
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