Harry Shearer

Your Money or Your Life

2013-06-10T16:36:30-04:00

I'm writing this post for free. Bad idea. You're reading it for free. Bad idea.

In the debate -- welcomed by President Obama, though it wouldn't be occurring without the leaks he's trying to punish -- over government pursuit of our data, some folks are pointing out, as Sun's CEO Scott McNealy put it most bluntly, "You have zero privacy. Get over it." In this view, the Internet opened the door, the NSA just tiptoed through it.

Yes and no. Every day, we voluntarily upload mountains of data -- our thoughts, our jokes, our activities, our photos -- for at least part of the world to see. If we assume any degree of privacy for that material, we probably shouldn't be allowed to operate a television, much less a computer.

But we send emails to named recipients, we visit websites for our own information or entertainment. Despite the warnings from experts to encrypt everything but our underwear, we do those things with an expectation of privacy. The problem is that we do almost all those things for free.

Yes, we hear the triumphant cry of the early Internet enthusiasts ringing in our minds' ears: Information wants to be free. However, people's time and effort is never free. We donate it, as I'm doing right now, at the expense of something else, like sleeping. And information also wants a pony.

The people whose ingenuity and expertise have made all our online activities possible certainly weren't doing it for free. If you doubt that, check what Sergei Brin and Larry Page are driving these days. And at least since the advent of the web portal, online companies have engaged us in a bargain no less unproclaimed and undebated (if as of now less sinister) than the security-for-privacy deal the federal government has made on our behalf: our "free" activity in return for our transactional data, which is then used to lure advertisers. It's a cliche by now, but no less true for that: If you don't pay for the product, you are the product.

The Googles and Facebooks of the world might -- might -- not be so avid in collecting and storing our transactional data were that information the key to their only way of paying for the servers and Maseratis. If, in short, we paid for what we get on the Internet, the NSA might -- might -- have a lot less to collect on us.

So I'm suggesting, just before I get that nap, that part of the debate the president welcomed should be about how we pay for our Internet activity -- with our money or, transactionally speaking, with our lives.

In Praise of Waste, Fraud and Abuse

2012-08-28T09:40:28-04:00

LONDON -- As we wait to see what effect Isaac will have on the Army Corps of Engineers $10 billion-plus "hurricane risk reduction system" in New Orleans, I can't help thinking about last week's news release from the activist group levees.org. Attempting to find out the rationale behind the Corps' repeated assertions that local officials prevented it, pre-Katrina, from building a more robust system than the one that catastrophically collapsed in 2005, levees.org filed a FOIA request for supporting documents.

What had been on the public record up to then was an admission by Lt. Gen Strock, the only Corps official ever publicly to take responsibility for the disaster (just before he retired), that the allegation may have been based on nothing more than "something I heard." The Corps' response to the FOIA request was a recommendation by the local PR official for the agency to revisit a Corps-sponsored chronology of the doomed "protection system."

"Buried" in there, according to levees.org, was the story of the E99 test. That was a 1985 examination by the Corps of the efficacy of supporting so-called I-wall structures -- straight-line vertical floodwalls -- with sheets of metal driven 17 feet into the soil below. What the test showed was that at that depth, in the swampy soil of southern Louisiana, the I-wall leaned. The Corps chose to interpret that as good enough, and it was walls just like that, with sheetpile driven no deeper, that failed in 2005 (today, sheetpile under floodwalls is driven three or four times deeper).

The activist organization points out that the decision not to use deeper sheetpile saved the Corps $100 million. Of course, the resultant disaster ultimately cost the nation in direct federal money more than $120 billion.

The question that keeps recurring to me is: Was the Corps being evil? Or were they responding rationally to the pressures and incentives of a then-Republican administration dedicated to notions of small government and rooting out "waste, fraud and abuse"?

A profit-driven private sector, we know, has inherent incentives toward efficiency. "Lean and mean" is the goal. Sometimes, as we've seen in our broadcast industry, that has perverse results: tape-delayed Olympics coverage was profitable and efficient, delaying events until the maximum number of eyeballs was available. A similar drive accounts for the complaint aired on the TVNewser website today that network news departments are stretching to cover "two major news stories" -- the RNC and Isaac -- "simultaneously."

Government is, or is supposed to be, different. If efficiency means some people don't get to watch Olympics events live, no big deal. If slashing costs means that two simultaneous big news stories -- imagine that happening! -- don't get full coverage, there's always the Internet. But when government adopts efficiency as its top priority, decisions like the Corps' get made. And people die.

Inspectors general inside federal agencies do, and should, always keep an eye out for outrageous excesses of spending and shortages of judgment and oversight. But a federal government that sends the message to its agencies that nothing is more important than running like a business may end up with something leaner, and meaner, than we need.

Giddy Britain

2012-08-14T00:31:55-04:00

LONDON -- Be careful if you run into Brits for the next little while: They're under a spell. Specifically, they have a bad case of Olympic Fever.

They're giddy because nothing bad happened at the Games, because the British team won a lot of medals -- and, oh yes, because the weather was sunny and warm for most of the fortnight. Out of such modest pleasures -- and the solid entertainment afforded by the BBC's live, non-stop, all-you-can-eat televising of the events -- they have forged a temporary suspension of mordancy, skepticism and crankiness that normally form the iron triangle of British national character.

They have, based on personal conversations with Londoners and with the outpouring of rhapsodical praise from the media, bought whole-heartedly into the premise of the event's slogan, "Inspire a Generation" -- so much so that if the motto had been "Making Golden Coins Fall From the Sky," more than half the populace would be standing out in the garden today with outstretched buckets.

That "inspiration" is thought to take many forms. Some, particularly in the political class, prefer to believe that the Games have imbued the country with a healthy dose of optimism, drive and can-do ambition -- in short, to have turned the Brits into Yanks. To a certain extent, they're right. Never again can British people indulge their amused condescension at the American penchant for flag-waving. In case you didn't notice, the stage for the closing Olympic ceremony was a gigantic Union Jack. Between the Queen's Jubilee and the Games, the country itself has been festooned with more flags -- gigantic, tiny, and in between -- than decorate the dreamscapes of Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan and David Petraeus combined. Even while heading for your gate at Heathrow, you would have encountered a giddy volunteer avid to hand you a paper flag and urging you to wave it "furiously."

For lots of other folks, there's a sincere belief that two weeks of watching televised athletic competition will solve Britain's social problems. The rush to retailers, reported by as sober a paper as The Guardian, to buy cycles and rowing machines, doesn't make Brits envision garages a year hence filled with rusting equipment; rather, they see young people eager to emulate hard-working athletes instead of vapid reality-show "stars." One can hope that way, but one might not want to bet that way. An early test will come in two weeks, when the Notting Hill Carnival, now feared by many white folks in the neighborhood as the setting for opportunistic crime, manifests instead an outburst of innocent and joyous running and leaping. We are all Usain Bolt!

David Cameron's government, reading the polls and listening to call-in radio, is exploiting this feeling by calling for mandatory competitive team sports in all primary schools, so as to teach the unique lessons of that experience. My childhood may have been unique, but all such a regime would have taught me was to hate school.

Intense temporary events like the Games are almost designed to trigger such popular fevers. New Orleans during the two weeks of Carnival undergoes a similar crescendo of benign craziness, but the event, being annual, leaves not a mental trace the following morning, except the desire to do it again a year later. But the British media have stoked the fires of this fever relentlessly. Once it became clear there would be no cockup and no scandal, the words "wonder" and "magic" flowed like a river of gobsmacked mush not only from the tabloids but from staid "serious" papers and from the "Olympic broadcaster," the Beeb. In the latter case, the teenage-crushness of the coverage can be partially explained as a reaction to the onslaught of criticism the Corporation got for its Jubilee coverage as crass and ignorant.

But in Monday's special commemorative editions of the papers -- Print Lives! -- one could read analyses in which, between the "wonder" and the "magic," one could learn that, thanks especially to the opening ceremony, 50 years of nagging post-Empire doubt as to Britain's role in the world had been resolved. Its role is to be creative, wacky, and self-deprecating. Tell that to the Iraqis and the Afghans. They thought Britain's role in the world was to be America's war poodle.

We'll soon see whether the "legacy" projects -- new neighborhoods in the long-blighted Stratford area, the shiny and endless new luxury mall adjoining the Olympic stadium, and the school sports regime -- pay off the bloated cost to the public budget of this fortnight festival of fun and national pride. Perhaps they will, or perhaps the Athletes Village retrofitted with kitchens will not become the hot new urban address, and the Prada and Gucci stores in that Westfield mall will have been replaced by discount outlets by the time Rio welcomes the world.

In the meantime, do be gentle with the Brits. They can't help themselves. They've partied hard, and the hangover has not yet arrived.

Could New York Be More Wrong About New Orleans?

2012-05-28T18:47:14-04:00

LOS ANGELES -- As most anybody knows who cares about newspapers, the absentee owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune have announced plans to quit daily print publication of the paper, turning to a Wednesday-Friday-Sunday schedule, giving rise to my new name for the publication: The Sometimes-Picayune.

I say "absentee" owners because Advance Publications, which I now refer to as Retreat Publications, is headquartered in New York City. They devised this Sometimes strategy in Ann Arbor, Mich., apparently, and are also rolling it out at three of their were-dailies in Alabama.

In David Carr's NYTimes piece, the media writer asserts that, given the relative lack of advertising on, say, Mondays, the use of resources to gather the previous day's news is "uneconomic." Ad Age's story quotes an Advance official as saying that the company is "not clinging to this rigorous orthodoxy that the only way to serve a community is to print a newspaper seven days a week."

Okay, let's point out a couple of facts. The Times-Picayune, unlike the other newspapers in Advance's little experiment, has the highest market penetration of any daily in the top 50 metro areas -- meaning 60 percent of New Orleanians read, or at least receive, it in print. And New Orleans has a markedly low Internet penetration rate -- according to the Kaiser Foundation, 36 percent were unwired as of 2010.

So Advance is telling those loyal print customers: buy a computer.

This, of course, all boils down to advertising. While maybe a third of the year's Mondays have news New Orleanians really want to read -- what happened in Sunday's Saints game -- advertisers aren't particularly interested in reaching them on that day.

Where have all the advertisers gone? In New Orleans, as elsewhere, classified advertising has moved online. That onetime cash cow ain't givin milk no more.

But another dominant advertising segment has suffered a different fate. Metro dailies' front and living sections used to be fattened with ads from competing department stores. That's right kids, there used to be more than one or two in each city. They were locally owned, they competed like crazy, and they honed their brands and announced their sales in full-page ads that marched through the dailies, daily.

What happened? Consonant with the conservative economic philosophies of most newspapers' editorial boards, the department stores merged, allowed themselves to be bought up by outside firms like Federated and Macy's, and slowly shrank in number. Did any local newspaper oppose the sellouts of local retail icons like Bon Marche in Seattle and Marshall Field's in Chicago? In Los Angeles, May Co, Broadway, Bullock's, Robinsons, I. Magnin's, and Ohrbach's once competed in the pages of the Times. They're all gone. And the Times' pages are now about the size of the Weekly Reader.

Maybe newspaper owners, beguiled with the premise of buying out or killing their own competition, just thought monopolies were a good idea for retail, too. In any case, we, the readers, were the product -- eyeballs for advertisers. As the advertisers disappeared, we became less valuable. We're now only worth something three days a week.

So it's "uneconomic" to produce Monday's paper. At least in the current crappy economy. But newspaper reading is a habit; we've been told that for years. The Michigan Plan depends on New Orleanians learning a weird new habit -- look for the paper on the three days advertisers think are important. On those other days, where will we turn for our news? And why shouldn't that place be our new news habit?

It's possible that a locally-owned newspaper would have come up with such a goofy scheme ("Hey, folks, read about yesterday's Saints game the DAY AFTER TOMORROW!"). And I've always given the TP's NYC ownership great credit for supporting the paper during the dark days of the flood and its aftermath, when every day's paper was uneconomic to produce.

But I can't help feeling the way I did when the NBA's David Stern engineered the deal that turned this year's Hornets into last year's Clippers (complete with urging us to vote for Chris Kaiman for the All-Star team) -- New York has shafted New Orleans.

Don't Demonize Political Opponents, Infantilize Them

2011-11-19T16:42:01-05:00

Last week in New Orleans, James Carville and Mary Matalin hosted a day-long conference on "Taking the Poison Out of Partisanship", the latest in many attempts to get the partisan voices lowered in what passes for political discourse in this country.

But I wasn't there, I was traveling. And In one of my innumerable trips through airports this year, my thoughts were momentarily distracted from observations about junk-touching and the fading glories of first-class jet travel by the sight of a baby. I'm not a parent, so other peoples' children are not always a source of ineffable joy, but this was one of those baby's faces that could make Attila the Hun say "Awwww".

Walking down the jetway, I mused that one key to the charm of the young in our species, among others, was the role of the eyes. Apparently, we're born with the size of eyes we'll have throughout life; it's the rest of the body that grows around them. So the young have what appear to be outsize eyes with which to gaze lovingly at us, carrying the crucial age-old message: "Don't eat me".

It's a characteristic seized upon, to great profit, by Walter Keane who, in the decades before Thomas Kinkade became the Painter of Light (TM), was America's reigning king of kitsch art. Keane painted children and animals with exaggeratedly outsized eyes, and the work sold like hotcakes; hotcakes filled with corn, but hotcakes, nonetheless.

And, in an entirely different context, this characteristic -- the big eyes typical of the very young -- has been one of our culture's ways of dealing with the Feared Other. You need look no further than "ET - The Extra-Terrestrial" to see an example of how the frightening prospect of the alien from outer space -- depicted as monstrous in a series of movies from the 1950s through the 1980s -- had now been dealt with far more satisfyingly, by being infantilized.

So here we are, in a time of fiercely mean politics, when Right and Left compete to demonize each other ever more ferociously for ratings and donations. Americans are, according to Carville and Matalin (among others), wearying of the noise and the rancor. We're hearing renewed calls for lowered voices. But opponents still need to be diminished, so what to do? Here, in a modest photo gallery, is my suggestion: don't demonize 'em, ET 'em.

The Two Things Obama Got Wrong

2011-09-05T16:03:42-04:00

August. The month that Democrats seem to think doesn't count. Think John Kerry in 2004. Think Barack Obama the last two years. Somebody had better look at Washington Democrats' calendars and circle August in red. It might help.

This August, in addition to the media swoonfest over Michele Bachmann's meaningless Ames straw poll victory (which even the media polpundits admitted was meaningless), there have been new signs that the economy is swooning, too. Pinch me if I'm dreaming, but isn't it 2009? It must be, because the president is about to deliver a major speech on jobs.

But this August has been bad for the Obama administration primarily because the liberal knives have finally come out for him, with the maraschino cherry on top being the backdown on ozone regulations at month's end. Drew Westen's attack at the beginning of the month, and Jon Chait's rejoinder at the end, seem to have bookended this debate, at least for New York Times readers. But, not to brag, I've been off the Obama bandwagon almost since before it had Michelins. In mid-March 2009, back around the time he gave the big jobs speech (not), I started criticizing him here for (a) doubling down in Afghanistan; and (b) ignoring the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' announcement that they were choosing the "technically not superior" solution for a part of the new protection system for New Orleans. Obama fans here pelted me with digital spitballs, on the grounds that "his plate's so full" and "he'll get to it."

And now, here we are. Oddly enough, the president's plate has just gotten fuller. What's with that kitchen staff? And the intervening two years have shown me -- and yes, commenters, I know, I'll get back to doing cartoon voices just as soon as this post is completed -- that this president has committed two profound strategic blunders.

One is based on the circumstances he faced on taking office. The economy was in a shambles. When that happens in this country, history tells us there's a big wave of populism that sweeps through the population most severely affected by economic turmoil. Sometimes it's left-wing populism; sometimes it's right-wing populism. I think the president had the moment, and the option, to select which direction that populist wave would break. Had he gone left-wing populist, directing the anger of Main Street at -- to quote Teddy Roosevelt -- the "malefactors of great wealth," it's quite possible that he could have cornered the market on populism. Leaving that field vacant opened a big market for right-wing populism, which conveniently swooped in, in the form of the Tea Party. Yes, I'm suggesting that Barack Obama, not the Koch Brothers, is primarily responsible for the rise of the Tea Party.

The second strategic blunder has to do with misunderstanding his opposition. What was it about Mitch McConnell saying in 2009 that his primary goal was the defeat of President Obama that President Obama didn't understand? When your adversary is hell-bent on denying you any victories, making conciliatory policy moves towards them is quixotic and self-defeating. Example: adopting Mitt Romney's (and many other conservatives') model for market-based insurance "exchanges" in his health-care plan merely allowed the opposition to demonize a previously conservative policy, thereby moving the argument to the right. It didn't earn him the votes of (almost extinct) moderate Republicans, nor the ardor of centrists. It merely allowed another set of policy options to be labeled "socialist." Drew Westen decries this as the failure to understand bully politics. I'd go simpler, based on my own experience as one of the shortest white guys to play street basketball in NYC: if you get into a game that surprises you with its free use of elbows and other apparent deliberate contact, with the determination of both teams to cheat on the score and argue every foul and out-of-bounds call, you're ill-advised to call "time" and say, "Hey, guys, I do happen to have a copy of the rules here...." You play the game you find yourself in, and you rev up your elbows.

The truly sad thing is that, for this administration, the whole year is August.

I can't wait till 2010 and that big jobs speech.

"Katrina" Plus Six

2011-08-28T17:37:58-04:00

NEW ORLEANS--So now we're at the six-year anniversary of the event which everyone calls Katrina, even though, as has been explicated in these pixels many times, the flooding of this city was, in the words of a co-author of one of the two independent investigations of the event, "the greatest man-made engineering catastrophe since Chernobyl." Obviously, that was written before Fukushima, but, still, C'byl is heady company in which to find oneself.

What most people think they know is that, post-Katrina, "the levees have been fixed." And that could be said to be true. To get Clintonian for a moment, it all depends on what your definition of "fixed" is. In monetary terms, while somewhere near a billion dollars was spent on the system that catastrophically failed in 2005, killing thousands of people, the new system "completed" on June 1 of this year -- even though the US Army Corps of Engineers admits it's not really finished -- has cost upwards of eight billion dollars. So it's got to be eight times better.

It's bigger. The sheetpile -- metal panels that undergirded the concrete walls that sat atop the levees -- is now driven 64 feet into solid soil, instead of, as before, 17 feet down into swamp muck. The system of gates that now stride across the mouth of Lake Borgne is a billion-dollar construction job all by itself. (Of course, it costs a billion dollars to build a mile of LA freeway these days, which is one reason they're not building any more of those.)

But at the heart of the new system is a set of hydraulic pumps. If a hurricane near New Orleans is accompanied by lots of rain (these things are known to happen), the city's own, quite famous, pumps will move the rainwater to three "outfall" canals built for that purpose. From there, the water would normally flow into the adjacent Lake Ponchartrain. But the Corps' new system features gates that close off the lake from the canals to prevent storm surge water from entering the canals. (It was that storm surge that, though it reached nowhere near the tops of the floodwalls, precipitated the failure of those "protective" structures 6 years ago.) So the rainwater has to be pumped out of the canals into the lake.

Those new hydraulic pumps, according to a whistleblower inside the Army Corps of Engineers who supervised the testing and installation of the pumps, have design defects. Her finding, supported by an independent engineer reporting to the US Office of Special Counsel, is that those pumps will fail in a hurricane situation, leading the rainwater to rise in the canals above the new, low "safe" level, at which point the old defective floodwalls, never fixed, may fail again.

That's part of the story we tell in my film, The Big Uneasy, about the 2005 disaster and its aftermath. Here's what's happened lately: this spring, the Corps of Engineers, which has taken to calling those defective pumps "temporary" -- with a 5- to 7-year life span -- signed a $675 million contract with a bidder to provide new "permanent" pumps. They would, the Corps announced, be installed within three years.

Then, last month, the General Accountability Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- insisted that contract be invalidated. There were two reasons for the move: one, the Corps' successful bidder had just recently left the employ of... the Corps of Engineers, and was, according to the GAO, privy to information about the bid that he could successfully exploit to the detriment of competing bidders; and two, in the task of evaluating the bidder's technical capability to perform the contracted work, Corps officials had, according to the GAO, spent "less than five minutes." Less than five minutes. The OJ jury took longer than that.

Now, because of the quashing of that contract and the need to rebid the job, the Corps dolefully reports the project may be delayed by a year. So, the permanent pumps, by the Corps' usually optimistic schedule, will be installed at least two years after the expiration of the lifespan of the temporary pumps. Good luck with that.

Additionally, the levee authority responsible for looking over the Corps' shoulder on the West Bank of New Orleans says a Corps levee there seemed to contain a certain number of quite sizable logs -- strange for an agency which is cracking down on communities coast to coast for having any vegetation on their levees. And, an investigative committee of the American Association of University Professors, after a two-year inquiry, has concluded that Dr. Ivor van Heerden, who led one of the two independent investigations into the 2005 flood, was fired by Louisiana State University in retaliation for his public discussion of his team's findings, which were quite critical of -- the US Army Corps of Engineers.

One bright note to report in this update. The Corps, which had trademarked the slogan "Building Strong," has now taken to signing off its correspondence with the expanded slogan, "Building Strong and Taking Care of People!" (exclamation point theirs). Like the "hurricane protection system" which failed so catastrophically in 2005 that its very name has been expunged, the Corps's best handiwork appears to be in the engineering of words.

USA 3.0

2011-07-03T18:38:00-04:00

LONDON -- As I write this I'm flying back to America, specifically New Orleans, to celebrate July 4 by watching fireworks over the Mississippi River. I say that right up here at the top to establish my Yank bonafides. In addition, my parents sought out this country as a refuge (one denied, it should be noted, to many of their equally desperate compatriots), so I've never stopped being grateful that, at least for them, for that special moment, the golden door was open.

But we're three trillion dollars down, the latest reports say, in trying to -- to what? Protect ourselves? Export freedom? Make the world safe for our oil interests? It's hard to know. This America 2.0 would be impossible for the Founders to recognize, even with folks running around with the banner of the Tea Party. After all, the Founders, slave-owners mostly, wouldn't see themselves in Michele Bachmann's characterization. Nor would they recognize a country that thinks nation-building in the graveyard of empires is the spunky little republic they established.

On this Independence Day, though, I just want to mull over for a moment the latest meme from the conservative meme factory (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Newt Gingrich's third marriage): American exceptionalism. This phrase has just recently crawled out of the poli-sci books and into our semblance of a national discussion. And it fascinates me. It's so important for so many Americans to believe that we're... special, and not in the special-ed sense.

So let's look at the record for a moment. Yes, we've had a civil war. Yes, we attempted genocide of the indigenous population. Yes, we've had slavery. That list certainly sets us apart from the run of nation-states. The riposte will come, "but we don't seek territory." Meaning that Puerto Rico and Guam, for God's sake, and, for a long time, the Philippines, just attached themselves to us like so many little charming barnacles?

So what makes us exceptional? Most Tea Partiers will tell you it's the existence of a written Constitution. So that puts us in the category of... most of the nations in the world, with the exceptions of New Zealand, the UK, and Israel. Morocco has a written Constitution. So does Myanmar, apparently. That's almost as amiable a set of companions as the countries that agree with us about the death penalty. Google that.

Yet we clearly need to see ourselves as exceptional, as freer than, say, the Scandinavians, or the Australians, or -- happy Canada Day, everybody! -- the Canadians.

Here's my guess as to why we need to see ourselves as not only swell, but different: if we weren't somehow unique, the Good Lord would have had no reason to shine and focus, like a divine laser beam, His blessings upon us. He'd have said, let's give plenty of arable land to the Brazilians and the Africans, and let's give spectacular scenery to the Aussies, and let's give mineral resources to the Chinese, and -- oh, wait.

Sarah Palin, leading the parade, has learned to emphasize "American exceptionalism" in her speeches, and those who scoff at the notion are supposed to be regarded as the modern equivalent of Communists, or witches. Well, this is a remarkable country, and it was even more remarkable before the financial sector bought every available politician. I revel in the freedom to say what I want here, although I did choose to come to London to do a TV pilot so I could be far freer to do the show I wanted to do than I ever could be in LA.

As we slide into the coming multi-polar world, pols will increasingly be chest-beating about reclaiming the time when America ruled the earth. I'm sure that the more presentable triceratops made similar speeches as the curtain was coming down on their hegemony. I frankly think a world where the Chinese do the nation-building in the backwaters will usher in a better America, a USA 3.0 that may actually be, in a certain way, exceptional.

If that's not the way to bet, it's the way to hope.

A Letter From New Orleans: Year 6 of a 5-Year Lifespan

2011-06-02T14:34:48-04:00

NEW ORLEANS -- It's righteously hot at the beginning of June, a time for this area to take an involuntary intake of breath, if not a full-on gasp, before getting on with finding some shade. June 1 is the official start of the hurricane season. No whistles blow, no bands play, but the news media are full of stories about the onset of "that time of year." I've just finished taking a ride on a stretch of road that brings back memories of a previous hurricane season: the so-called "twin spans" of I-10 across Lake Pontchartrain, which were shattered and scattered like the toys of an angry child during the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina, are still, just now, undergoing the finishing touches of rebuilding.

This is a notable start of hurricane season for another reason. June 1 was the Corps of Engineers' self-imposed deadline for the completion, in name if not in fact, of their renamed Hurricane Risk Reduction System (the previous name, the Hurricane Protection System, was too ironic for the Corps, given the ghastly failures of that system during Katrina). Parts of the system are yet to be completed, or started, but the Corps is proud to say, in press release and soundbite alike, that "New Orleans has never been safer." Coming from an agency which, according to two independent forensic investigative reports (ILIT from UC Berkeley and Team Louisiana from LSU), bore primary responsibility for the death and devastation in 2005 that nearly drowned this metropolitan area, that's mild reassurance indeed. The conclusions of those two reports share an interesting distinction: both were never publicly rebutted in detail and both were widely ignored by the national news media.

So, how safe is New Orleans? John Barry, author of Rising Tide and a member of the East Bank Levee Authority (there's one for each side of the Mississippi River), zeroes in on the central fact of the "100-year protection" project for which the Congress has given the Corps somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 billion so far, with more to come:

But 100-year protection for a major city is the lowest standard of protection in the developed world. The Dutch and Japanese protect urban areas against a so-called 10,000-year flood. So our 100-year protection is not exactly something to brag about.

One other fact as we crank up the air conditioning and celebrate the achievements of an agency whose previous failure here was not followed by a single instance of punishment, sanction, or disincentive for future failure. Take the Corps at its word, for a moment, if you dare. The hydraulic pumps installed at the three places where canals empty into Lake Ponch are temporary, says the Corps, with about a five-year lifespan. (This conflicts with documentation we've found and displayed in my film about the subject, in which the Corps originally projected a 50-year lifespan for the pumps, before a Corps engineer reported that the devices in question repeatedly failed their testing, after which they were installed anyway. But we're taking the Corps at their word, remember.) Those temporary pumps have now been in place since June 1, 2006. That means, as of now, protective structures with a five-year life span are in year six.

If, like the Corps, you thought your pumps were temporary and life-limited, you'd want to be letting the contract for the replacement, permanent, this-time-we-really-mean-50-year-lifespan pumps before, say, now. But that's why you're not the Corps. The agency just announced the awarding of that contract in April, and it estimates the project will be completed in three years.

Of course, if the Corps' estimates of project completion were always correct, the Hurricane Protection System that failed in 2005, and had not yet been completed even then, would have been up and running by the mid-1970s.

But again, let's take them at their word. By the Corps' own estimate, pumps with a five-year lifespan will have been a crucial part of what keeps New Orleans from flooding again for nine years.

Just keep repeating: Never. Been. Safer.

General McChrystal's New Job: How Tone-Deaf Is This Administration?

2011-04-11T19:10:49-04:00

The news reports about General Stanley McChrystal's new position, "leading a three-member advisory board... to help service members and their families," don't fail to mention the mildly scandalous Rolling Stone article that got the General relieved of command in Afghanistan. That just makes it sound like the president, criticized by McChrystal in offhand comments to a reporter, doesn't hold a grudge.

What many of these stories fail to recall, however, is the general's prominent role in a far more scandalous affair: the coverup in the death of Pat Tillman. Here's one account of the matter from the New York Daily News:

I do believe that guy participated in a falsified homicide investigation," Pat Tillman Sr. said.

McChrystal likely knew within 24 hours of Tillman's demise that the professional football star-turned-star Army volunteer had been killed by friendly fire.

Yet, he endorsed a recommendation that Tillman receive a posthumous Silver Star for valor in the face of "devastating enemy fire." He would later say he "didn't review the citation well enough," describing it as "poorly written."

The program McChrystal will lead doesn't receive any federal funds, so this is not about money. But how tone-deaf do you have to be to appoint a man tainted by the cover-up of the friendly-fire death of a hero as head of an advisory panel helping service members' families? The juxtaposition almost seems like a bad joke. So what is it? Lack of institutional memory, or Google skills, in the White House? A desire to "look forward," the well-ingrained habit of the Obama administration to ignore misdeeds of the past (e.g. waterboarding, the Corps of Engineers' failure in New Orleans, etc.)? Or just an unlucky push-pin stabbed in a familiar name?

Talk about your unforced errors.

What the New Census Data Can, and Can't, Tell Us About New Orleans

2011-02-15T16:14:08-05:00

NEW ORLEANS -- The 2010 census figures about New Orleans made news (here, here, and here, for example), but the stories all came out at the height of the uprising in Egyptian cities, so you may have missed them. But, since they were all written from within the conventional narrative of the 2005 flooding (big storm, natural disaster), you certainly missed the more disturbing implications of those numbers.

There are 118,000 fewer African-Americans in New Orleans than in the previous census. We know that approximately 100,000 of them were evacuated in the wake of the catastrophic flooding of the city. "Evacuated" means they were loaded onto planes, trains and buses, essentially given a one-way ticket to a destination unknown to them until they arrived.

Now for what we don't know. According to Allison Plyer, of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which makes it its business to collect all available statistical information on the area, we don't know where those 100,000 people are now, whether (as Barbara Bush famously predicted) they're happier in their new environs or whether they ache to come home. No public or private entity has thought it important to track those folks who were so suddenly uprooted. We have better information about the movie preferences of minor-league ballplayers than about these survivors of a major catastrophe.

Now to the implications. The flooding of New Orleans was "the greatest man-made engineering catastrophe since Chernobyl", according to the co-leader of one of the two major forensic engineering investigations into the disaster (Google ILIT report from UC Berkeley, as well as the Team Louisiana report from LSU). Culpability for the flooding rests not with Mother Nature -- 20% of New Orleans flooded during the city's most serious previous brush with a major storm, 80% flooded in 2005 -- but with the US Army Corps of Engineers, according to those two reports, and to the decision of a US Federal judge in the only lawsuit stemming from the flooding to go to trial. The reports blame four and a half decades of design and construction mistakes and misjudgments. The Federal judge blames conduct rising to the level of "criminal negligence". As a result, 20% of the population of a major American city has gone...we don't know where.

And recent information available to that same part of our government indicates that Sacramento, California, may well be next.

And the entire official population of Washington, D.C., persists in its silence, and inaction, on this subject.

ADDENDUM: Some more things we do know. According to a couple of sources, housing agencies in New Orleans are, or have been, receiving a large number of requests for assistance in returning to the city. Post-flood, rents in New Orleans have risen by a third, while most public housing was demolished. After a long wrangle, federal government assistance, with many complications, was made available to compensate homeowners, but very little was done to compensate landlords. Hence, far more owner-occupied housing has been restored than rental housing.

The President's Panacea for Business Regs: The Cost-Benefit Ratio

2011-01-19T14:43:39-05:00

NEW YORK -- Not content with having crafted a recovery plan that helped banks and financial services firms recover far more nicely than other folks, President Obama has reached out to the rest of the business community with a plan for all federal agencies to reexamine their regulations, the Washington Post reported.

Red tape stinks, of course. Just ask the hundreds of thousands of New Orleans citizens who had to jump, dance, and pirouette through federally-mandated hoops to even hope to qualify for compensation for the damage and destruction caused by the 2005 failure of the federal "hurricane protection system." And any federal agency, like any other organization, can benefit from a brisk and clear-headed review of its policies and regulations, clearing out the outdated and the unnecessary.

Buried in the Post story on this initiative, however, are these words that should set off warning bells:

Agencies "must consider costs and benefits and choose the least burdensome path."

This sounds so reasonable, so -- to use the current cliche, common sense -- that it might seem unobjectionable. Balance costs and benefits. It's objective. Almost, pardon the expression, scientific.

Unless you've had some experience with one federal agency that has long used "benefit-cost ratio" as a supposed guide to decision-making: the US Army Corps of Engineers. Take one example -- the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO), which the Corps built (over local and environmental objections in the 1950s), and which a federal judge has ruled (in a landmark case) was responsible for much of the 2005 flooding on the eastern side of New Orleans and all of St. Bernard Parish.

As outlined in the book Catastrophe in the Making by, among other authors, the late William Freudenberg, the Corps' practice in this case, as in many others, is to exaggerate, sometimes wildly, the supposed future economic benefits of a construction project. At other times, as when the Corps opposes the local community's preference for the so-called Option 2 plan for permanent improvements on the outfall canals whose walls failed catastrophically in 2005, the Corps is believed to exaggerate the costs of a project it doesn't want to build.

And, as documented in The Big Uneasy, the Corps is also known to claim that emergency conditions prevented it from conducting benefit-cost analyses when, in fact, a Corps whistleblower pointed to documented evidence that precisely such an analysis existed.

The Corps may be unique among federal agencies in its willingness and ability to, let's be gentle, massage the benefit-cost analysis process. Or it may be typical. But any such analysis of regulations, especially when it concludes that safety regulations pose excessive burdens on businesses, should be taken with at least the minimum daily requirement of sodium chloride.

Who's Illegitimate? The Presidents. Who Says?

2011-01-11T20:48:37-05:00

If mental disturbance is, as it seems (and as I discussed in my last post), at the root of the shootings in Tucson, that leaves another question: what's at the root of all the rancor about political rancor?

Sure, some of it is outrage that outrage on the other side may have a political motive. But, let's be grownups: what do politicians, and their acolytes, ever say on any subject that doesn't have some political motive? There is something deeper going on now, some undercurrent that's more turbulent than the normal jungle-ball ethos of American politics. It's been with us now for almost two decades, and there's no sign that it's going away.

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he won a large electoral vote victory but just a popular vote plurality thanks, in large part, to a third candidate in the race, Ross Perot. And thus began an attack on Clinton's presidency, ranging from murder rumors to impeachment, that was based on this fact: his opponents could never quite allow themselves to believe he was legitimately elected.

Anybody who lived through the Nixon or Reagan years, or the Carter years, for that matter, had seen furious opposition, founded in many cases in deep loathing of the occupant of the White House. But it never occurred to those opponents to suggest that Nixon, Reagan or Carter were anything but the legitimately elected president of the United States.

Flash forward to the 2000 election. Florida. Bush v. Gore. A conviction by Democrats that George W. Bush was not really, legitimately the elected president. He'd lost the popular vote. The Florida recount had been lawyered up and judged over. The war was bad, the post-9/11 behavior was often atrocious, but before any of that had occurred, a lot of Bush's opponents were convinced in their bones that he was illegitimate. That, as much as the Democrats' favored accusation -- our opponent is dumb (hello, "chimpy") -- flavored the anti-Bush world view for eight years.

And now, President Obama. Clearly elected, clearly legitimate, except for -- well, it started with birtherism, the insistence that he wasn't really born here. Other observers have linked that persistent charge to fear of The Other (first black president, after all). But there have followed all sorts of Manchurian-candidate fantasies, all based on the notion that we, the people didn't put this man in office. Illegitimacy -- not in the "bastard" sense, but in the sense that an electorate normally, however grudgingly, grants legitimacy to the product of the system -- has become the new currency of presidential opposition.

Its popularity, as a review of this little history will suggest, is not in its effectiveness: both Clinton and Bush won second terms. But it is a psychological Rubicon. Once it's crossed, an entirely different landscape of vituperation makes itself known. That's where we live now. A call for civility in a world where each party now feels the deep wound of having had its successful candidates delegitimized is likely to be as successful as ordering a Manischewitz spritzer in a Beirut bar.

Why There Are So Many Mentally Ill Among Us

2011-01-10T11:02:18-05:00

NEW ORLEANS -- In the race to "explain" the Tucson shooting, the sprinters have been those who've found the cause in the rhetoric of one side or the other of the political spectrum. Close behind them have been those who see once again the folly of a society, almost unique in the civilized world, that views gun possession as a birthright.

Now comes another view, at least from me. This country has had toxic political rhetoric since its birth pangs, and there has undeniably followed in the past two centuries an occasional outbreak of political violence. But now we're being told that toxic political rhetoric is dangerous, because of its possible effect on the less rational, more mentally unhinged folks among us. So, maybe it's time to ask this question: Why are they among us?

In the bad old days, this nation had a system of mental hospitals -- sad, dreary institutions in which the unhinged were quite often warehoused, sometimes for life. The worst of them were exposed as "snake pits," cruel and uncaring, and a reform movement sprang up. We should, we were told (by, among others, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan), close down these shameful institutions, and return the patients to their communities, where a system of community-based mental health clinics would administer care that was, well, more caring.

So we closed down the mental hospitals. And we neglected to set up community mental health clinics. And suddenly we had a crisis of homeless people, many if not most of whom were mentally ill.

And now we have this: a society where we're being lectured to temper our political rhetoric lest we inflame the crazies to acts of violence.

This moment is, of course, perhaps the worst possible moment to remind ourselves of our unfulfilled pledge to the mentally ill, that promise that warehousing would be replaced by accessible, community-based care. We don't have the money. We could call off our adventure in Afghanistan and we would have the money, but I don't advise holding your breath about that one.

I'm the last person to advocate re-instituting the old system. I personally helped get someone who was involuntarily, and improperly, committed to such a hospital out, when I was working for a state legislator. But the least we can do is acknowledge, amid all the fun finger-pointing, that we all, Dems and Reps, libs and cons, have failed the mentally disturbed among us. And the bill continues to come due.

The News Doesn't Sleep -- Except on Weekends

2011-01-09T18:57:37-05:00

NEW ORLEANS -- Back when Princess Diana died, it was already happening. Now it's gotten much worse.

"It" is the thinning out of news -- especially broadcast news -- ranks on the weekends. Princess Di's horrific accident happened on a Saturday, just like the shocking shooting incident in Tuscon. "News happens", to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, and it also happens on weekends.

Yet news organizations, and the bean-counters who run them, have consistently made two decisions in recent years. First, it's cheaper (and more ratings-productive) to hire bookers to Rolodex in vituperative guest yakkers than it is to hire reporters; Second it's cheaper (screw the ratings!) to have far fewer employees working on Saturdays. Sundays get a few more humans, to produce the yak shows.

Could this trend have anything to do with the egregious error NPR -- and then Reuters -- made in jumping to the conclusion that Rep. Giffords had been killed in the assassination attempt? A few more hands on deck might have led to better reporting. At least, that's going to be my assumption, unless proven otherwise.

But, rest assured: As with the aftermath of the Diana story, broadcast media will swarm-cover this story in the week to come. By next Saturday, the newsrooms will be manned by another skeleton shift.