NEW ORLEANS--It's a beautiful, warm, sunny Thanksgiving Day in the Crescent City. The Saints are winning, the Hornets--despite stumbling this week--are winning, the oysters (though expensive) are back. There's much to be thankful for here.
But my gratitude this season is directed at three people I've met who have had the extraordinary courage to find out the truth, tell it to the public, and bear the discouraging consequences for their actions. Dr. Bob Bea of UC Berkeley, with his partner Dr. Ray Seed, decided to come to New Orleans right after the 2005 flooding to investigate its causes. Dr. Bea does this for a living. He likes to joke that "my life has been one disaster after another." He formed the Deepwater Horizon Study Group this year, to look into the BP spill with an independent team. He's smart and funny and tough as a ton of nails.
Dr. Ivor van Heerden is a soft-spoken native of South Africa who spent most of the last two decades studying hurricanes, storm surge, and their effects on the unique marshaland and coastline of southern Louisiana. He helped found the LSU Hurricane Center, of which he was deputy director at the time of the 2005 flooding, and with his partners launched another independent study of the causes of that catastrophe after seeing with his own eyes the watermarks on the floodwalls proving that the surge never got to the top, never overtopped the structures, as the Corps of Engineers had claimed. For his efforts at spearheading the LSU team's investigation, he was ultimately fired by the university.
Maria Garzino is a civil and mechanical engineer in the Los Angeles office of the US Army Corps of Engineers. She's got whistleblower status now, so she can't be fired. She needs that protection because for the last four years she's been going patiently up through the ranks, reporting what she learned from her job supervising the installation and testing of the pumps that are key to the "new, improved" Hurricane Risk Reducation System being built in New Orleans at a cost to federal taxpayers of $14 billion. Finally, when rebuffed, ignored, corrected, and subjected to other forms of "get away, kid, you bother me," she reported her findings, and supplied her documentation, to the US Office of Special Counsel within the Justice Department, which re-investigated and validated her conclusions.
These three people, and their associates, had the courage to do the hard work, investigating, documenting, verifying, and then telling the public what they had learned. In an era where popping off one's mouth on a subject one may have no expertise on has become not just the norm but the desired thing to do (at least in the public media), these individuals did the hard work, and then did the harder work of telling us the unpleasant truths about the 2005 flooding--truths that many folks around the country, and in the federal government, still haven't absorbed, understood, and acted upon.
I'm proud to know them, and I'm amazed at their calm persistence in the face of what they've had to handle for the last five years. And I'm profoundly thankful that they care.
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Rseinforcing this theory is the peculiar behavior of the Corps after the floodwalls collapsed,when you would have THOUGHT that they would make every effort to stop the flooding. The OBVIOUS solution, which occurred to many people, incuding engineers,immediately after thenews was announced, was to quickly block the mouths of the drainage canals to stem the disastrous inflow of water into the city, by sinking some kind of vessels in the mouths of the canals,plugging any remaining gaps with whatever was quickly available, and completeling the seal with sandbags.
Why did the Corps refuse to do the only thing, the obvious thing, to save the City? Because they Wanted the City Hall Gang to get its money's worth!
You have offered this barge solution before. Perhaps you could elaborate on it sometime. I'm curious to know which local company had barges standing by?, where were they?, where was the heavy earthmoving equipment?, where was the borrow site for the fill required? knowing that the water was moving through the canal mouth as it filled the City, how would you compensate for that movement?, surely, the water would attempt to scour the bottom and walls of the canal as the barge settles into place, what to do about that? There are many more design and construction details I wonder about. Could you fill in a few of the gaps?
That's a naive way to see the world.
The leveraging, etc...that is really on the margins. It might not seem so, but that's the truth. For example, the estimates range widely, but loss of property values since the peak until now is about 3 trillion. That's an arguable number, but go with it for a second. The world GDP, what they produce in a single year, is 50 trillion. That three trillion is 1/5 of our GDP for a single year. Yes, it hurts...but it is quite recoverable, and not understanding that is hurting our leaders make good decisions.
We have to accept these losses, and assimilate them. To artificially maintain property values and delaying foreclosure are simply lengthening the recovery process. Regulations need to be revamped, and that is a common area of agreement, when you shed the sullen armageddonist you become when even tangentially discussing NO. Tighter lending practices and making housing equity less divisible has to happen even more than now, and The Community Reinvestment Act has to be shed. We need to let the economy recover on its own. Ford did it. Caterpiller and just about any media outlet (with some dummies you probably know all too well at the top) remain successes. And about Europe, maybe they will finally learn that deficit spending/GDP is a road to ruin.
As to foreclosures, Google MERS, Linda Green, and Pooling and Serving Agreements to see what's clogging that market. Some judges are already calling it by its rightful name: widespread fraud in mortgage origination and transfer.
'Nuff said.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ssurge/HistoricalRuns/index.php?loop&large&basin=slosh&parm=2005_katrina#contents
We lie basically to get what we want, to avoid negative consequences and to keep from getting caught. Where are those who want nothing for themselves but to serve Truth
We are losing the thing that makes us human, and we don't even know it. Re
I don't think this is a lie. Was it just thrown it in to make the comment appear fair-minded? Because, imho, it makes the message sound naive rather than fair-minded. And, it changes the effect of the message by trivializing it's central point.
Here's how: When the label "democrats" is applied without its republican counterpart it sounds like democrats are being singled out as the untrustworthy political party. However, democrats are not a homogenous group. Some can be trusted, some cannot--the same is true of all groups and all political parties.
Further, corporations are not people and therefore "they" cannot lie. It's the people who run the corporations who lie. Corporate executives lie. They are the "power-hungry, heartless robber barons who want to reduce everyone without money to a kind of post-modern serfdom." "They" are people, not corporations. "They" are the people who run the corporate system. "They" are the problem. "They" lie for their own power and profit alone. "They" don't care a lick about "US."
This is the ultimate truth that is self-evident in the effects of all of "their" actions upon all of US.
If he was interested in the truth, Dr. Bob Bea would want all rigs safety checked to ensure compliance with safety programs to prevent another catastrophic spill.
http://www.ianrcrane.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=12
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2010/11nov/RIR-101119.php
IF the MIC, SIC AND AIPAC were not running our government America would not be involved in all these insane, stupid wars, IF the SEC has been doing the job they were paid to do then we would not have had a worldwide financial meltdown, IF the U.S. Congress had been doing their job America would not have gotten into that insane war of aggression in Iraq and we'd have gotten out of Afghanistan 8 years ago, IF the FCC were doing their job America wouldn't have had their airwaves taken over by 5 corrupt corporations that created an Orwellian World of liars, IF America was really ruled by laws then we'd have had to build a hundred more jails for war criminals, CEO swindlers, walll street conartists and billion dollar war profiteers, IF tea partiers realized that they were nothing more then Robber Baron Stooges then they might have something intelligent to say, IF the U.S. Government would stop appointing those dimbulbs, nitwits and unqualified loonies to run its billion dollar agencies then lives would be saved and Americans would be spared alot of money, frustration and grief, IF Obama had actually given the American people the CHANGE/REFORM we desperately needed the Robber Barons would no longer be running our government.
Yes, it would be other stupid wars. Anyway, got anything to say about New Orleans, hurricanes or truth tellers?