August Week 5, 2006

On the way to get Mike we were heading South on Hwy 31 just passed Usk. A large fawn ran across the road in front of us, I hit the breaks pretty hard and slowed down enough so that it could get across tha road, about that tome 4 more deer ran right in front of me, I cam to almost a complete stop and a fifth one ran in front of a truck going the other way and veered right loosing it's footing just as I hit it, there was a loud thud and it rolled up the hood of the van till it's feet were straight up then it rolled back down and sprawled on the pavement, the truck had stopped so the deer wasn't hit again... it jumped to it's feet and ran back the way it had come, and we started for the side of the road and had just passed the truck when the same damn deer ran in front of us again... I missed it this time... It did a number on the hood and fender and broke the mounting brackets for the headlight... we will see what Allstate does.

We were late picking up Mike but that was OK by him, he was just glad to see us. We drove to Spokane and we did some shopping and had a leisurely lunch/breakfast. I dropped Christy off for her Physical Therapy appointment and then went to get Christian, his plane was an hour late, since Christy's appointment was for an hour and a half she didn't have to wait long.

The girls were upsetting me by being disrespectful and ungrateful so I went down to the Mini Mart and talked to John for a while... he and I seem to get along pretty good, I think John get along with most folks... he's an old hippie I guess, ex Sewer-pipe Sailor and all around handyman... He van fix just about anything from a truck to a leaky water pipe. He also builds boats...

Christy and I went back top Spokane for the appointment with a Radiologist... we will be getting Radiation Therapy... 5 days a week for 5 ½ weeks... that's going to be difficult since school is starting...

I took a good picture of Monica tonight, she is actually wearing a black knit hat with a 3/4 on brim. Monica is 13 now and I think she is really cute, if only she would laugh more.

Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain

I took Calie and Monica to the Eye Dr. in Colville... Monica is fine, Calie has a stigmatism and needs some fancy contacts... glasses too. I say 'Needs' contacts because she can't see worth a damn and is too vain to wear glasses.

We went to lunch and then Wall-Mart $312 on school supplies & groceries... yuch. I need to find a way to curb my spending a bit...

Mike weed-whacked the hillside... looks OK.

A young man named Jerry, from Texas, drowned in the Box Canyon Dam swimming hole... we don't know the whole story yet, sad business.

Radiation tomorrow we should get our schedule... I am tired, sorry... G'nite

September

Muslims do not fit the fascist profile

Published: Sunday, 27 August, 2006, 08:47 AM Doha Time

By Eric S Margolis

The latest weapons in the West’s intensifying propaganda war against the Muslim World are the noxious terms "Islamo-Fascist"and "Islamic Fascists".

They have become buzz words among America’s far-right neo-conservatives and Christian fundamentalists. President George W. Bush made a point last week of using "Islamo-facists" when speaking of Hezbollah. In Canada, an MP of Canada’s ruling Conservative Party compared Hezbollah with the Nazi Party.

The term `Islamo fascist’ is utterly without meaning, but packed with emotional explosives. This ugly label was first coined in Israel - as was the other hugely successful propaganda term, "terrorism" - to dehumanise and demonise opponents and deny them any rational political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances and demands.

Professor Robert Paxton, in his book The Anatomy of Fascism, defines "fascism’s emotional lava" as: 1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign "contamination".

Fascism demands a succession of wars, foreign conquests and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension. Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors. All successful fascists regimes, Paxton points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex.

None of the many Muslim groups opposing US-British control of the Middle East fit Paxton’s definitive analysis. The only truly fascist group ever to emerge in the Middle East was Lebanon’s Maronite Christian Phalange Party in the 1930’s which, ironically, became an ally of Israel in the 1980’s.

It is grotesque watching the Bush Administration and Tony Blair maintain the ludicrous pretence they are re-fighting World War II. The only similarity between that era and today is the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious hate by US neo-conservatives and America’s religious far right, which is now boiling with hatred for anything Muslim.

There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism.

So too are underground Islamic militant groups ("terrorists" in western terminology). They are either focused on liberating land from foreign occupation, overthrowing `un-Islamic’ regimes, driving western influence from their region, or imposing theocracy. None fit Paxton’s decisive definition of fascism.

As Prof Andrew Bosworth notes in an incisive essay on so-called Islamic fascism, "Islamic fundamentalism is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism necessary for fascism".

However, there are plenty of modern fascists. But to find them, you have to go to North America and Europe. These neo-fascists advocate pre-emptive attacks against all potential enemies, grabbing other nation’s resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police controls, and curtailment of "liberal" political rights.

They revel in flag-waving, patriotic melodrama, demonstrations of military power, and use the mantle of patriotism to feather the nests of big business, colluding legislators and lobbyists. They urge war to the death, fought, of course, by other people’s children. They have turned important sectors of the media into propaganda organs and brought the Pentagon largely under their control.

Now, the neo-conservatives are busy whipping up war against Syria and Iran. Italy’s late fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, would have understood and applauded.

Wal-Mart and Woods’s Law

by Christopher Westley

DIGG THIS

One proof of Woods’s Law – that someone will eventually call to curb or abolish any market innovation that benefits the poor – can be seen by studying Wal-Mart. Here is a company that unquestionably increases the purchasing power of the poor, thus improving the poor’s standard of living and while helping the poor live more independent, autonomous, and (I would argue) virtuous lives. It’s heroic. So, following Woods’s Law, it is predictable that Wal-Mart is attacked by disparate and disgruntled – but well-funded – groups to force it to unionize its labor force and provide benefits to its workers above and beyond whatever benefits the firm and its employees would agree to voluntarily.

That these groups are funded by unions who extract money from members under the threat of force raises moral questions that are not my focus today. Still, I wonder how much more effective Wal-Mart could be, and by extension how much better off the poor would be, if it didn’t have to divert resources to combat their efforts.

A report issued by the research firm Global Insight last November identifies another economic benefit that occurs when Wal-Mart opens a new store in a community. In a broad study of the economic impact of Wal-Mart on the U.S. economy, researchers found that on the county level, Wal-Mart "serves to stimulate the overall development of the retail sector that leads to an overall positive impact (in terms of retail employment) for the counties in which Wal-Mart has expanded." (You can download the 64-page report here. It discusses many more areas than retail employment.) In other words, just as Southwest Airlines forces competition to become more efficient in those markets it enters (this known as the Southwest Effect), so does Wal-Mart affect the structure of county-level retail employment (the Wal-Mart Effect). Again, as a result of this activity, the poor benefit.

Wal-Mart’s economic effects on the U.S. economy, in the aggregate, support this point. According to the report, in 2004, Wal-Mart was

responsible for 210,000 net jobs, a level of total factor productivity (general economic efficiency of the economy) that is 0.75% higher … than it would have been. Nominal wages are 2.2% lower, but given that consumer prices are 3.1% lower, real disposable income is 0.9% higher than it would have been in a world without Wal-Mart.

It seems contradictory, in light of this, that today’s world with Wal-Mart includes the establishment of a Communist Party committee in two of its Chinese stores, a concession the firm probably thinks is necessary if it is to be allowed by the Chinese government to establish a larger market presence there. (It currently has 60 stores in China.) This news, followed a week after it was announced that Wal-Mart would recognize trade unions in China, has been called a double-standard by a spokesman for Wal-Mart Watch, one of the firm’s union-funded detractors. "Wal-Mart's applying a complete double standard here," said Nu Wexler. "Why are they [sic] comfortable with it in one country and fighting it in another?"

Wexler is right. It is a double-standard, but one forced on it by the State. Because economic laws are universal, this policy will have the same harmful economic effects that unions have in the U.S. People will go unemployed because they can’t find work at the union wages. Many of them will then become dependent on, and supporters of, the party in power. Unskilled workers will remain unskilled because they will be denied the opportunity to develop the skills plus the work ethics and values that are only learned in the workplace. Prices will exhibit upward pressures as the firm tries to recoup costs incurred both complying with union regulations and proving that it is complying with union regulations.

By fighting unionization in the United States, Wal-Mart does have a double-standard being forced upon it. All this proves, however, is that for groups like Wal-Mart Watch to force the unionization of Wal-Mart’s labor force, they must agitate for the U.S. government to be a little more like the Chinese government than it already is.

It also proves that the effects of Woods’s Law are relatively harmless, except when governments get involved on the side of those calling for the repeal of market innovations. When that happens, violence is introduced where it previously did not exist, and as always, the poor suffer more than they otherwise would.

Chris Westley [send him mail] teaches economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

Christopher Westley Archives

HURRICANE EXPERT THREATENED FOR PRE-KATRINA WARNINGS

A Greg Palast special investigation for Democracy Now!

Monday, August 28. From New Orleans.

DON'T blame the Lady.  Katrina killed no one in this town.  In fact, Katrina missed the city completely, going wide to the east.
 
It wasn't the hurricane that drowned, suffocated, de-hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week.  The killing was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with faulty levees.  Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White House.
 
Here's the story you haven't been told.  And the man who revealed it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell it.
 
Van Heerden isn't the typical whistleblower I usually deal with.  This is no minor player.  He's the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center.  He's the top banana in the field -- no one knew more about how to save New Orleans from a hurricane's devastation.  And no one was a bigger target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the information.
 
Here's what happened. Right after Katrina swamped the city, I called Washington to get a copy of the evacuation plan.
 
Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood.  Whatever: no one can find it. 
 
That's real bad.  Here's the key thing about a successful emergency evacuation plan:  you have to have copies of it.  Lots of copies -- in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first responder.  Secret evacuation plans don't work.
 
I know, I worked on the hurricane evacuation plan for Long Island New York, an elaborate multi-volume dossier.
 
Specifically, I'm talking about the plan that was written, or supposed to have been written two years ago by a company called, "Innovative Emergency Management."
 
Weird thing about IEM, their founder Madhu Beriwal, had no known experience in hurricane evacuations.  She did, however, have a lot of experience in donating to Republicans.
 
IEM and FEMA did begin a draft of a plan.   The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars.  Apparently, the IEM/FEMA crew didn't know that 127,000 people in the city didn't have cars. But Dr. van Heerden knew that.  It was his calculation.  LSU knew where these no-car people were -- they mapped it -- and how to get them out.
 
Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA.  They wouldn't touch it.  Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden's position.  This official now works for IEM.
 
So I asked him what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor.
 
"Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That's the bottom line." The professor, who'd been talking to me in technicalities, changed to a somber tone.   "They're still finding corpses."
 
Van Heerden is supposed to keep his mouth shut.  He won't. The deaths weigh on him.  "I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."
 
Van Heerden had other disturbing news.  The Hurricane Center's computer models showed the federal government had built the levees around the city a foot-and-a-half too short.
 
After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been "overtopped" for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the levees would have held, and the city would have been saved.
 
He had taken the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush's doorstep.  "I myself briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House."  The response:  the university's trustees threatened his job.
 
While in Baton Rouge, I dropped in on the headquarters of IEM, the evacuation contractors. The assistant to the CEO insisted they had "a lot of experience with evacuation" -- but couldn't name a single city they'd planned for when they got the Big Easy contract.  And still, they couldn't produce the plan.
 
An IEM press release in June 2004 boasted legendary expert James Lee Witt as a member of their team.  That was impressive.  It was also a lie.  In fact, Witt had nothing to do with it.  When I asked IEM point blank if Witt's name was used as a fraudulent hook to get the contract, their spokeswoman said, weirdly, "We'll get back to you on that."
 
Back at LSU, van Heerden astonished me with the most serious charge of all.  While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would drown.
 
Van Heerden said, "FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o'clock that the levees had breached… They took video.  By midnight on Monday the White House knew.  But none of us knew ...I was at the State Emergency Operations Center."  Because the hurricane had missed the city that Monday night, evacuation effectively stopped, assuming the city had survived.
 
It's been a full year now, and 73,000 New Orleanians remain in FEMA trailers and another 200,000, more than half the city's former residents, remain in temporary refuges.  "The City That Care Forgot" -- that's their official slogan -- lost a higher percentage of homes than Berlin lost in World War II.  It would be more accurate to call it, "The City That Bush Forgot."
 
Should they come home?  Rebuild?  Is it safe?  Team Bush assures them there's nothing to worry about:  FEMA won't respond to van Heerden's revelations.  However, the Bush Administration has hired a consulting firm to fix the failed evacuation plan.  The contractor?  A Baton Rouge company named "Innovative Emergency Management." IEM.