Privatizing disaster

I suspected there must be something afoot when talk at the Tea table began about killing FEMA. I'm more than suspicious now. It seems our former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who according to The Maritime Executive, is announcing a 'strategic partnership' with O’Brien’s Response Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of SEACOR Holdings Inc. Bush's company, Old Rhodes Holdings now looks forward to

"helping a broader array of organizations and communities become more resilient through preparation, response, communication and recovery”

says Bush, whom Floridians will remember was the governor through the disastrous hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. How they will remember him is hard to tell and probably depends on whose house and car and boat and livelihood was demolished and how long it was before he got any significant help. As I recall, my neighbors and I felt pretty much on our own, despite Bush's alleged leadership, although FEMA certainly was here with food, water and some generators.

I played a small part in delivering food to those who had no means of getting to a FEMA distribution center -- and there are many such people here -- and also used my amateur radio license to good effect, facilitating communications between Red Cross shelters and government agencies until commercial communications and electric power were restored. The interface between need and help was public and public spirited. It was not corporate, it was neighbor to neighbor working through non profit organizations. It was restaurants sending food to police and firefighters, carpenters and roofers and others helping those who needed it.

The only time we heard from Governor Jeb and his brother, the Commander Guy was when they showed up at Red Cross headquarters for a photo op, disrupting operations for half a day, and when they posed for the cameras handing out a bag of ice for a few minutes before escaping into an air conditioned limo and the Presidential helicopter to fly off to a party in Miami Beach while we sweltered in the dark for weeks and weeks.

"Governor Bush has unparalleled experience in crisis management, as he helped guide Florida through some of the most significant natural disasters in its history"

said Charles Fabrikant, executive chairman of SEACOR Holdings. Unparalleled, of course isn't quite the same as unequaled.

Jeb is a Bush, however and the "strategic partnership" may be about a further strategy than to provide "emergency planning, disaster response, preparedness consulting, crisis communications and regulatory compliance services to corporations and governments" which is what O’Brien’s Response Management, the SEACOR subsidiary in question does. O'Brien's has been picking up people like former Coast Guard Captain Ed Stanton, who was the Incident Commander during hurricane Katrina and the recent BP oil spill. It's funny how oil and the Bush family float to the top. O'Brien Oil Pollution Service being part of the O'Brien family.

So do we have the same people who were so heavily criticized for mishandling that Gulf oil spill soon to be handling more disasters for profit while FEMA goes the way of Social Security and Medicare and the FAA and all those agencies being overwhelmed by the tidal wave of tea?

I don't mean to say that FEMA has always been what it should be or done as well as it should have done, but FEMA sits at the end of a chain of responsibility that leads to the
American public while SEACOR is ultimately responsible to its owners -- and like the former Blackwater owners, they're quite able to ignore questions as to what they did and how much they made by doing it by saying "sorry, we're a private corporation."

I do mean to be suspicious however and I'm aware that evidence of collusion and corruption and various acts of grift, graft and flim-flam are too easily dismissed as "conspiracy theories." Our history is basically a series of conspiracies conveniently mislabeled and when I hear the words, oil, Bush, and disaster used in close conjunction, and when I hear about efforts to privatize yet another not-for-profit health and safety organization, I'm more than suspicious.

People like me, who belong to well organized volunteer groups like ARES, American Red Cross, SATERN and many, many others are used to working with government agencies, not that there isn't some friction on occasion, but the prospect of mercenaries who take orders from corporate CEO's who profit from disaster aid and are motivated to control and monopolize the process, rationing help to maximize private gain, isn't a welcome one. In fact it's infuriating to think about being told what to say and do, where we can go and where we can't go by black uniformed privateers protecting turf and profit and it would tempt me to ignore them and work around them if possible the next time a storm rages ashore and Florida goes dark.

Government injections

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief

___________________

So Michelle Bachmann claims some young girl suddenly got all retarded like, after her "Government injection" of Guardasil. That's not too surprising. I know someone who got loaded on Private Reserve Brandy and voted for Bush, but one thing always follows another and that's enough proof of causation for a desperate liar speaking to the profoundly ignorant and superstitious primitives who listen to people such as she; people who see the rage of gods in every storm, lightning bolt and tectonic movement, who are terrified of mysterious rays and forces and 'toxins' and couldn't pass a 5th grade science exam.

"Government Injections" eliminated smallpox, you know, and would have done the same for Polio and other diseases if we didn't have that other pandemic in America -- ignorance. Perhaps the absence of Government fluorides in our local Republican drinking water would explain all the brown and missing teeth I see at Tea Party rallies and I don't think it has anything to do with too much Lipton's.

But hey, we're a country (and I use the term loosely) not only infested with idiots and idiocy, but one where there's a good chance someone stupider and with even less integrity than Mark Bachmann's smokescreen wife may slither into high office like one of those young snakes that wriggle under my patio doors.

Speaking of things that creep and crawl, take my Congressworm, Tom 'Looneytunes' Rooney -- please. Tom who keeps showing up on my Facebook page to remind me that Government is not only impotent but incompetent and also tyrannical -- and all without explaining how those things aren't sort of mutually exclusive and more importantly, since he's part of it, why the hell he isn't as much to blame as anyone else who's part of it. Really, I'd be pleased if he'd just follow that other anti-government, moose-eating grifter and simply fly over the cuckoo's nest and drive around the country in a bus and get rich, like some inverted and less lysergic Ken Kesey.

But no, polluted air isn't bad for you, polluted water can't hurt you, unless it has government fluoride in it and besides Florida Governor Rick Scott says we can't afford it because disease and degradation are good for business and bad for 'jobs.' But condoms don't prevent disease or pregnancy, says the gospel of Tea and vaccinations are a genocidal hoax and freedom from disease and unwanted pregnancy will promote teen promiscuity and the gay agenda and we don't need no government health insurance because when we get leukemia or Alzheimers we can go to the emergency room and the taxpayers will pick up the bill and if you can't understand that you're just a libtard elitist and part of the problem.

Cheerleading for a past that never existed

Have I mentioned that RenewAmerica is an unfettered font of feculence? Well, it's true. They don't allow comments on their articles, probably because the sheer weight of the ignorance, stupidity and paranoia expands to fill all available space.

(In the case of some of these columnists, they occasionally reprint their drivel elsewhere, where they do allow comments. But not all of them.)

Case in point: Selwyn Duke. I guess he thinks he looks intelligent, gazing off into the distance (in this case, the distant past) stroking his chin; I think he's contemplating adding more fiber in his diet. But he, for some reason, spewed several hundred words extolling the virtues of this commercial for the "Gung Ho Commando Outfit."

Every toy gun in the commercial looks (gasp!) realistic; there are no sissified colors, no orange plastic piece at the end of the barrel."

(Let's just pretend that the commercial isn't in black and white, OK? That seems like the polite thing to do.)

Yet, in the times that it aired, you never heard of a child being shot after pointing one of these toy weapons at a policeman.

I suppose that, if I was to be completely honest, I have no evidence that his cognitive impairment has a genetic source. After all, one can only imagine the psychological damage caused by a lifetime spent with the name "Selwyn."

My mother always told me not to argue with the mentally challenged, but when did I ever listen to her? And these stories aren't particularly difficult to find.

5-year-old with toy gun killed by officer

(March 5, 1983) A 5-year-old boy locked in his bedroom while his mother was at work was shot to death Thursday night by an Orange County police officer who mistook him for a possible burglary suspect.

The boy, Patrick Andrew Mason, who stood 47 inches tall, was holding a toy gun in his dimly lit bedroom when the officer kicked in the locked door after twice yelling he was a police officer, witnesses said.

The 24-year-old unidentified officer - on the Stanton Police Department 15 months - told investigators he fired his weapon when he saw a "shadowy figure holding a gun" in the room lit only by the flickering light from a television set.

And that's another reason the rule was enacted. Frequently, a cop isn't seeing "a kid with a toy gun," but a "shadowy figure holding a gun." He doesn't have time to assess age, height, weight, or fucking eye color. He's faced with a person holding a gun.

All that, despite Selwyn's assertion that "As for policemen, they could assume that a child wouldn't target them with a real gun." Which is stupid on a number of levels - as a kid, we had a set of brothers living down the street; one of them shot and killed the other, because they were playing with Daddy's gun.

The story I found, by the way, was not, technically, the 1970s (although arguments can be made), when Selwyn claimed he was a boy. But since the rule that toy guns be brightly colored or have an orange plug wasn't enacted until 1992, I'm pretty comfortable with saying he's an idiot.

Dim Bulbs in Congress

If you are diabetic, die quickly!

I should refer, figuratively speaking, to House Republicans; but this time I am talking literally about light bulbs, as TPM reports:

Given Republicans' public disdain for energy-efficient lightbulbs [sic] and the new GOP majority's earlier decision to remove biodegradable utensils and food containers from the House cafeteria, we thought we might have another Styrofoam cup situation on our hands … Energy-efficient lightbulbs -- "the little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones" -- have long been the subject of the GOP's scorn.

Take Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY):

"I think there should be some self-examination from the administration on the idea that you favor a woman's right to an abortion, but you don't favor a woman or a man's right to choose what kind of light bulb, what kind of dishwasher, what kind of washing machine."

Speaking of false equivalences, perhaps Wall Street should be required to view an ultrasound of your bank account before they abort the economy.  Here is the most galling part:   Who was president when  “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" was signed into law?  Not current President Barack Obama, but former President George Dubya Bush. Yet, Tea House Republicans want the public to believe that this is another liberal-commie-big-government plot to control your life and your purchasing decisions.  Another clarification:  The Act of 2007 merely establishes an efficiency standard; it does not issue any mandates.

According to a 2010 energy audit, energy-efficient light bulbs installed in Congressional offices will save an estimated $178,000 per year. What the hell!   It’s only taxpayer money, but symbolism can be priceless.

How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb and then lie about the cost of changing it?

Update: How Conservatives and Big Oil are Using a Phony Scandal to Undermine Obama, Clean Energy, and Government Itself (Yes, Virginia: The Solyndra loan was originally pushed by the Bush administration and backed by the ultra-conservative Walton family … who now want to divest themselves of all blame).

Next: Snakes on a Plane (the comments are a hiss).

The Gospel According to Bloggingdino

Now, I know Senator Bernie Sanders is a self-declared soshalist and therefore must be ignored at all costs, but who else can you trust to bring up an indecorous subject like poverty in America?  Just as soon as you can find the time between sips of Chardonnay and truffle-bites, have a look at his Huffpost article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/is-poverty-a-death-senten_b_960598.html.  Nothing so sickens me as the virtual banishment of the very words "poor" and "poverty" from American political discourse.  The only class-based reference permitted is to "the middle class."  Now, most of us know that the term mostly refers to working-class stiffs who are merely deluding themselves about their true standing and prospects in contemporary America, but let's leave that aside since it's a commie idea and we don't want to upset the delicate feelings of any of our dear brothers and sisters the 'Baggery who might stumble upon this Marxist-sociopath den of intellectual iniquity that is the SWASH ZONE.

I'm not in the mood for windy analysis this evening as I just want to watch a Shakespeare DVD and go to bed alongside the Jurassic Watering Hole.  (By the way, director Julie Taymor – who has already done a brilliant modern version of the revenge play Titus Andronicus, has a new production of The Tempest coming out on DVD towards the end of the year, starring Helen Mirren as "Prospera."  That should be excellent – strangely, we don't have enough versions of The Tempest, which is, along with Twelfth Night, among the Bard's most beloved plays.)  So I'll just suggest the following as a dino-scriptum to Senator Sanders' much cleverer post; to America's fond supporters of the nearly taxless megarich and the infinite perfection of The Market, verily I say, 

"Everybody else loves you, but Jesus thinks you're an a**hole" (Matthew 19:24).  

How's that for the perfect bumper-sticker as a riff on the persnickety atheist ones that run, "Smile.  Jesus loves you -- everybody else thinks ..."?  I may be a simple-minded khaki dinosaur, but you gotta admit, I have flashes of almost human insight now and then….

Creativity and the human spirit

Some people have shittier days than you. And still there's reason to hope...

Ron Paul: Liberal

Some people like to dismiss Ron Paul as a simple minded extremist loony. I don't think that's fair and not just because I'm often dismissed with the same simple mindedness by the same simple minds. Yes, I think Dr. Paul does take many things to an extreme point, but you know -- sometimes he's right and sometimes so far to the right that he comes back around the spherical universe and appears on the left.

When he was booed at last night's Tea Party "debate," he was booed as a Liberal, not as the dogmatic, theory obsessed, quasi-anarchist and not-too-bright demagogue he's been portrayed as. He was booed for not bleating and re-bleating the recorded message about why "they" hate us, which, if truth ever be told, isn't for our freedom: a thing which in fact has a larger following amongst Muslims that can be allowed by the Jingoistic braying of the party for which the jackass is not the symbol -- but for the reality.

The reality is and the reality has been that not only al Qaeda but others have hated the US government for interfering in Middle East, for rightly or wrongly supporting Israel, for building military bases in places they see as sacred and for supporting oppressive governments because they were "anti-Communist" and willing to exploit their resources for our benefit.

Who else in the Republican Party is willing to step outside the passion play and challenge the formula: they hate us because we're all good and always good and so we have to hate them -- all of them, all of the time?

“This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and their attacking us because we’re free and prosperous, that is just not true,”

he said last night. But what set the snarling beasts off their feed was

“Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have been explicit, and they wrote and said that we attacked because you had bases on our holy lands in Saudi Arabia, you do not give Palestinians a fair treatment,”

which quite plainly is true.

The Tea Party picture of human and natural events needs to be presented in such high contrast that any smudge of darkness on our pure white character must be erased; there are no grays or colors and one is either the favorite angel of God or Satan's most foul smelling demon. To admit that any of our sacred military endeavors was not waged in defense of our alleged "freedom" puts one on the odiferous side and so yes, the Battleship Maine was blown up by the evil, freedom hating Spanish between bouts of raping American women and God really did want us to have the continent and our conquest thereof was just like the rape of Jericho only slower. It's anathema to suggest that we were not protecting our freedom by killing millions of Vietnamese or destroying Iraq and those who think and those who know must then be devils for suggesting that anything we ever have done might ever have made anything worse for us or anyone else of God's elect.

We have to believe, as we've been told, that "liberals" would have preferred to "psychoanalyze" al Qaeda than to retaliate, that Democrats unanimously voted against the odious Patriot Act when in fact their support was (sadly) unanimous. Facts don't matter and for the Tea Party only feelings matter and the only feelings they have are greed, anger and hate. If you're not unquestionably in support of everything we do; if you don't hate enough and hate whom we tell you to; if you don't think everything we do in anger isn't ipso facto God's will, you're our natural enemy even if you're Ron Paul and even if most people think you're so far right, you're wrong.

This time Ron Paul is right and it's time to question the people who say government is always wrong when they simultaneously say it's always right.

Want to eat? Pee in this, please.

As either of my long-time readers could tell you, I have held for quite some time that South Carolina just sucks. And they keep on trying to prove it.

Latest idiocy: Governor Nikki Haley (R-Obviously) wants to drug test people who get unemployment benefits.



In her words (and channeling her inner teenage cheerleader), "I so want drug testing. I so want it."

But, being a Republican, if the facts don't match the "common wisdom," she's more than happy to make shit up.

"Down on River Site, they were hiring a few hundred people, and when we sat down and talked to them -- this was back before the campaign -- when we sat down and talked to them, they said of everybody they interviewed, half of them failed a drug test, and of the half that was left, of that 50 percent, the other half couldn't read and write properly," Haley said.

Fortunately, the Huffington Post reporter did that thing we used to call "journalism" and asked somebody if she was right.

Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which owns the River Site, told HuffPost he had no idea what Haley was talking about with regard to applicants flunking a drug test.

"Half the people who applied for a job last year or year 2009 did not fail the drug test," Giusti said. "At the peak of hiring under the Recovery Act we had less than 1 percent of those hired test positive."

The River Site doesn't even test applicants. "We only test them when they have been accepted," Giusti said.

I'll give Haley a little bit of credit, though. She got the one thing right.

"That's what we have in South Carolina," she continued. "We don't have an unemployment problem. We have an education and poverty problem."

The rest is crap, but she's finally figured out one of the chief causes of unemployment. I mean, it's a shame that she couldn't have figured it out a couple of months ago, when she tried to slash education funding for the state so badly that the state Legislature, Democrat and Republican, overturned most of her budget and overrode her attempts to veto. But at least she knows it now, right?

Of course, Teabaggers don't care about facts; they care about ideology. Governor Rick Scott of Florida instituted a drug testing policy for unemployment, which didn't do the state a lick of good.

The law, which took effect July 1, requires applicants to pay for their own drug tests. Those who test drug-free are reimbursed by the state, and those who fail cannot receive benefits for a year.

Having begun the drug testing in mid-July, the state Department of Children and Families is still tabulating the results. But at least 1,000 welfare applicants took the drug tests through mid-August, according to the department, which expects at least 1,500 applicants to take the tests monthly.

So far, they say, about 2 percent of applicants are failing the test; another 2 percent are not completing the application process, for reasons unspecified.

Cost of the tests averages about $30. Assuming that 1,000 to 1,500 applicants take the test every month, the state will owe about $28,800-$43,200 monthly in reimbursements to those who test drug-free.

That compares with roughly $32,200-$48,200 the state may save on one month's worth of rejected applicants.

The paper went on to calculate that Florida will save $40,800-$98,400, an amount which will be eaten up in staff hours and other resources in administering the program. Oh, and they're going to spend over a million dollars defending it in court. So, Rick Scott just cost Floridians more money that they don't have. So that's some awesome leadership, right there.

Now, if you do the math, the national rate of drug use is about 8.9 percent of the population aged 12 or older. (The majority of those users are 18 or older, but that's like math and stuff, so screw that.) Now, if only 2-4% of the people applying for unemployment are drug users, that means that the unemployed population is actually using less drugs than the rest of America. (Maybe because they can't afford them - that might make sense...)

Obviously, Governor Haley can't do simple logic.

Thanks Rick

I didn't listen to the President's speech Thursday night, partly because I had a meeting to attend and partly because I've ceased caring. Of course not listening to the president's ideas about reviving the economy by putting people to work seems to a matter of pride in this part of the swamp and one squints when asked "didja listen to to President?" with that certain tone. The proper answer is of course, "hell no!" Why should I care about a country wherein this sort of idiocy is called "patriotism?"

Of course I didn't listen to Rick Scott, our Governor/Medicare Fraudmeister either -- hell no. I save such things for later and I prefer to read that kind of news rather than to be waterboarded with it. That way I can take a deep breath when I read that before the speech, he snarked that there wouldn't be anything for Florida in it and my TV was safe from having my foot through the screen when I read that it's likely he'll turn down 7.5 Billion allocated to improve and upgrade our infrastructure. That's money that would employ a lot of people who would spend their income in Florida and make Florida more attractive and accessible to the tourists upon whom our economy depends.

It wouldn't be the first time Ricky has turned away an opportunity. He refused to accept 2 billion to build a high speed rail line - you know the kind of thing other countries we feel superior to have. The kind of thing that, once again, would boost tourism and tax dollars. Oops - I used the magic word tax and Rick doesn't like taxes. Of course he doesn't like employment and he doesn't like the President and isn't about to let him do anything about employment because the only way to get out of a recession is to make sure the state doesn't take in a dime and to fire so many employees and cancel so many necessary projects that hardly anyone has enough income to require them to pay any taxes.

And then you cut costs more which puts more people out of work which means they spend less and so less gets made and companies go out of business and fire more people so there are still fewer with any money to buy anything -- and by and by everything gets better. Don't get it? you must be a liberal, or so the Teabrains tell me and I'd rather argue with a toadstool than with the kind of fungi and pond scum that make up that seething ferment. I mean, who can afford to care any more?

Suppressing Voters' Rights in the Fascist Republic of Wisconsin

In follow-up to my last post, A Damning Indictment of the GOP by a Former GOP Staffer, I quote Mike Lofgren again - this time on Republican efforts to suppress that most sacred and sacrosanct of American traditions - the right to vote:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote … This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy … was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican.  As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans.  Racial minorities.  Immigrants.  Muslims.  Gays.  Intellectuals.  Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base … 

Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful:   Subversives.  Commies.  Socialists.  Ragheads.  Secular humanists. Blacks.  Fags.  Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

In the Fascist Republic of Wisconsin, voter suppression has entered the execution phase. Under a new law, all citizens are required to show a form of photo ID to exercise their right to vote, and the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has been tasked with issuing the new cards.

However, the DMV instructed all employees, in this memo, to provide free ID cards only if people ask for the fee to be waived.  If citizens don’t ask, the charge is $28.  Why keep secrets from the public? To charge a fee is tantamount to …

A POLL TAX

… which is a violation of Federal voting rights laws. To avoid having their precious Jim Crow knockoff struck down in Federal court, state officials have decreed: “Let there be subterfuge!”  More than a scam, the new law is designed to place extra burdens on seniors, minorities, and students - those who vote for Democrats more often than Republicans - to suppress turnout.  Furthermore, the new law gives GOP snakes more wiggle room to game the system, as Lofgren explains:

… in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies …

At least one honest and forthright state employee was not about to let a good con job go unpublished. Chris Larson, an employee in the Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS), sent an email to all DSPS personnel notifying them of the fee waiver.  Here is the actual email sent by Larson:

Do you know someone who votes that does not have a State ID that meets requirements to vote? Tell them they can go to the DMV/DOT and get a free ID card. However they must ask for the free ID.  [A] memo was sent out by the 3rd in command of the DMV/DOT. The memo specifically told the employees at the DMV/DOT not to inform individuals that the ID’s are free. So if the individuals seeking to get the free ID does not ask for a free ID, they will have to pay for it!!  Just wanted everyone to be informed!! 

REMEMBER TO TELL ANYONE YOU KNOW!!  ANYONE!!  EVEN IF THEY DON’T NEED THE FREE ID, THEY MAY KNOW SOMEONE THAT DOES!!  SO TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!”

Hours later, Larson was fired.