Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

Recommended reading on Louisiana’s receding coastline

  By

Here’s a fantastic piece of long-form journalism by Brett Anderson with tons of incredible graphics and maps (and discussions of inaccuracies of maps) on the shape of Louisiana’s coastline and trying to keep track of it. This coast is continuing to shift quickly — as it has done for millennia — only now people live there, and the land is receding sharply, not re-arranging laterally or extending outward.

According to the U.S.G.S., the state lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000. This is the rough equivalent of the entire state of Delaware dropping into the Gulf of Mexico, and the disappearing act has no closing date. […] An area approximately the size of a football field continues to slip away every hour.

 
One problem is falling sediment levels to replenish the Delta’s land, a result of levees and other river construction projects that artificially constrain the Mississippi River’s course and its flood plain patterns. Another is rising sea levels, due to man-made global warming. Between the two (plus recurring factors like Gulf hurricanes), the state’s distinctive “boot” shape is more and more a historic relic that keeps appearing on maps but doesn’t exist on the ground.

Map: 4,600 years of the Mississippi River Delta moving around the Louisiana coastline due to erosion/direction changes.

Map: 4,600 years of the Mississippi River Delta moving around the Louisiana coastline due to erosion/direction changes.

Ebola is showing unpreparedness of int’l orgs to control disease outbreaks

  By

If you want to consider this Ebola outbreak as a minimal standards stress test for a response by the World Health Organization to a giant flu pandemic (or zombie apocalypse!), the answer is “Yep, we’re all going to die,” according to a huge investigative reporting article by the New York Times last week.

True, U.S. health professionals and others have noted that if Ebola emerged in the United States (or another industrialized nation), it would almost certainly be controlled quickly because of generally greater access to and availability of controlled care, as well as the C.D.C.’s presence. Unfortunately, disease outbreaks and pandemics are far more likely to start in and rapidly spread through developing and underdeveloped nations, which lack both the C.D.C. and plenty of good hospitals. And that’s where the trouble starts.

As the article reveals, the W.H.O. is severely under-staffed and under-funded, with just a fraction of the C.D.C.’s annual resources, despite theoretically advising the entire world. Their efforts to coordinate responses across national lines and even respond at all have been an omnishambles of lateness and ineffectiveness. Some of this is avoidable incompetence, but a lot of it comes back to the money issue. As it turns out, the W.H.O. gets only one-fifth of its annual budget from world governments (who have been cutting back anyway, following the global recession), which is a pretty disturbing testament to just how little governments spend relative to what they could be spending easily. The vast majority of the money comes from private donors, who nearly always bring an agenda with their contributions.

This tends to force the W.H.O. to spend a lot of money on rarer and narrower diseases (or on non-contagious health problems associated with affluent living standards) than on basics like malaria and the like. Moreover, the only time the private donor money goes to help fight disease outbreaks is when the outbreaks are in a developed nation or a non-industrialized country that also has a lot of rich people and business interests. The prime example cited was how money flooded in to help control and suppress the SARS outbreak 11 years ago, because it adversely affected the commerce of wealthy businessmen in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other spots around the region. Once the outbreak ends, so does the cash flow.

Thus, the W.H.O. is underprepared and underresourced to combat disease outbreaks in countries with very low development, very high poverty, and not a lot of glamorous plutocrats willing to throw money at the problem. And since that’s where most of the potential pandemics are likely to break out and spread rapidly out of control, that’s not very re-assuring.

Thanks, budget hawks of the world! Thanks, misguided philanthropists! You are why we’re all going to be eaten by flu-ridden undead hordes.

5 crazy facts from Uganda’s parliamentary debt farce

  By

uganda-flagA new Al Jazeera article takes us inside the Ugandan MP debt crisis that is rapidly devolving into farce. Essentially, the elected members of Uganda’s parliament are massively paid by peer standards but somehow are also, almost across the board, massively in debt.

Interviewees vaguely cited failed business investments as if that were a common affliction of the world’s elected officials. Others cited a need to spend personal money to buy votes to be re-elected to keep the money coming. At this point, the MPs believe the only solutions are a huge pay raise (from taxpayers) or bailout (from anyone willing to buy their support).

Here are the 5 craziest things I learned from the eye-popping piece:

  1. Uganda’s members of parliament, who are part of Uganda’s nearly three-decade-old quasi-democracy, were given a huge bribe pay raise to remove presidential term limits in 2005. They now claim President Museveni — Africa’s 5th-longest-serving leader — is intentionally blocking further pay raises. Why? Supposedly, so he’ll have leverage for future bribery incentivizing along the same lines.
  2. Despite how much money they made already, Uganda’s MPs are making new innovations in greed, spending sprees, and legalized theft of public resources. Debt aside, they now legally earn $7,680/month in a country where the average annual income is $510 and per capita GDP is $558. In 2011, many of them voted themselves $8,000 extra in one-time grants to “supervise government projects.”
  3. The parliament, as an institution, literally started lending money to its own members to help them out. Eventually the non-elected staff cut the MPs off from this source of cash because other creditors were then hounding the parliament to pay off debts or collect loans back.
  4. A Chinese bank actually tried to buy off the whole parliament by purchasing up the debts (probably in exchange for political support later) and giving better repayment terms to the MPs. These members of parliament were so greedy and unwilling to face reality they basically tried to accept this openly corrupt (and unpatriotic?) proposal. They blame the president again for stopping this brilliant plan.
  5. Uganda still has debtors’ prisons! This is where some MPs have already started getting hauled off to, when they fail to make good on their debts, like some sort of Dickensian version of House of Cards.

One suspects that these MPs, who are the same ones voting through radical anti-gay legislation handed to them by American evangelical activists, are not exactly the brightest lights in Ugandan society. But I suppose that comes with the territory when real governance power is removed from the parliament and transferred to an autocratic executive who has ruled for 28 years. Tends to discourage better candidates from seeking office.

Pennsylvania gov’t admits fracking contamination

  By

Nice to finally have some confirmation that it wasn’t all imagined (as some have insisted to me and others many times):

For the first time, Pennsylvania has made public 243 cases of contamination of private drinking wells from oil and gas drilling operations.

As the AP reports, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection posted details about the contamination cases online on Thursday. The cases occurred in 22 counties, with Susquehanna, Tioga, Lycoming, and Bradford counties having the most incidences of contamination.

In some cases, one drilling operation contaminated the water of multiple wells, with water issues resulting from methane gas contamination, wastewater spills, and wells that simply went dry or undrinkable. The move to release the contamination information comes after years of the AP and other news outlets filing lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests from the DEP on water issues related to oil and gas drilling and fracking.

 
One wonders if there will be any consequences, though, given that the industry has spent massively on the campaigns of favorable state reps and state senators in Pennsylvania to open the way to fracking operations all over the state.

The industry lobby’s response to the disclosure, as reported by the AP/Wall Street Journal, was to fault Pennsylvania rocks for being difficult to work with and to blame the state government for lax regulation on drilling well construction and design (a statement which takes a lot of chutzpah).

Confirmed: Ron Paul’s 2012 team bribed a state senator

  By

After a guilty plea this week, we now have confirmation that Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign bribed an elected official $73,000.

A former Iowa state senator pleaded guilty Wednesday to receiving and concealing payments in exchange for switching his support from one presidential candidate to another in the 2012 election, the Justice Department said.

The former lawmaker, Kent Sorenson, resigned from the Iowa Senate last year after an investigation found that he probably violated ethics rules by taking money from presidential campaigns.

Mr. Sorenson, 42, of Milo, Iowa, had been the state chairman for the presidential campaign of Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, but then switched his support to former Representative Ron Paul of Texas just days before the state’s caucus.

In a statement filed with his plea agreement, Mr. Sorensen admitted that he agreed to switch his allegiance in exchange for $73,000 in payments.

 
Please tell me more about Congressman Paul’s integrity and principles and blah blah blah. Though I suppose that buying elected officials is very free-market and all that.

The fallout began Friday night, as a Paul family insider, Jesse Benton, was forced to resign as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign manager in Kentucky.

Benton has worked in high-ranking positions in Rand Paul’s first Senate bid in 2010 and Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, and he has married into the family, as well. It’s not known whether Benton himself knew about the bribe, but there would be a lot of questions either way, and so he had to go. If he’s cleared, I’m guessing he’ll be back for Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential campaign team, which he had already been slated to join before this scandal broke.

St Louis County: When cops become revenue collectors

  By

Fines and court fees are Ferguson’s second largest source of city revenue, according a report by St. Louis-based ArchCity Defenders (a pro bono legal defense group) that was quoted in an article in Newsweek last week. That has created an extremely strong incentive for police to hassle residents (who are predominantly Black) and, based on the statistics, just about everyone has had a run-in. Worse, this trend appears to match the situation around the wider county:

“Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of 2,635,400,” according to the ArchCity Defenders report. And in 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court issued 24,532 arrest warrants and 12,018 cases, “or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”

Exacerbating the problem, the report says, are “a number of operational procedures that make it even more difficult for defendants to navigate the courts.” A Ferguson court employee reported, for example, that “the bench routinely starts hearing cases 30 minutes before the appointed time and then locks the doors to the building as early as five minutes after the official hour, a practice that could easily lead a defendant arriving even slightly late to receive an additional charge for failure to appear.”

Thomas Harvey, co-founder and executive director of ArchCity Defenders and one of the paper’s authors, says that residents’ perception that the system is unfairly stacked against them gives important context for the depth of the present outrage.

“There are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County that range from 12 people to 50,000 people. Eighty-six of them have their own courts. They have their own police forces,” he explains. “What ends up being the product of all that is just a low-level sense of harassment on a daily basis. The clients that we represent feel that. It’s palpable for them.”

“They resent it because it’s not about public safety,” he adds. “These aren’t violent criminals. These are poor people.”

 
For my interviews with locals who have each had multiple experiences of police harassment in Ferguson, St. Louis County, and the City of St. Louis, please listen to Arsenal For Democracy 96 (open full page or at click the audio bar below).

AFD 96 – Ferguson / NMOS14

Ferguson is particularly notorious, as the report demonstrates, but is far from unique. This is a big-picture story of the area around (and including, to some extent) St. Louis, Missouri.

(hat-tip to Phoebe Loosinhouse on Daily Kos for flagging that part of the article and digging up the cited ArchCity report)

one-dollar-bill-slider

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Jake Tapper asks why police keep massing against peaceful protests in Ferguson

  By

“Now why they’re doing this, I don’t know. Because there is no threat going on, none, that merits this. There is none. Ok? […] There is nothing going on, on this street, right now, that merits this scene, out of Bagram. Nothing. So if people wonder why the people of Ferguson, Missouri are so upset, this is part of the reason. What is this?? This doesn’t make any sense.” — Jake Tapper, CNN, live on the scene. Watch below: