Mista Kurtz -- he dead . . .

Calhoun’s Cannons for June 25. 2010
“. . . A penny for the Old Guy”
              T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

I understand. His war’s going badly, his men are getting killed in greater and greater numbers, and with every mistaken drone strike that takes out another wedding party a thousand clan members in a country of Hatfields and McCoys rise up as new enemies. It’s a tough job. Impossible, really, to nation-build in a corrupt, fundamentalist-ridden, narco-state, run by tribal war-lords, a country that not even Alexander The Great managed to subdue. Or the British. Or the Russians.

And maybe he and his small adoring wannabe staff of groupie-Aides have watched 300 too many times -- “This . . . is . . . SparTA!” – in between running 7 miles a day and eating like an anorexic runway model. It’s the warrior’s ascetic aesthetic. Way cool. I understand.

But Rolling Stone? That magazine’s always been bold and edgy and with Mat Taibbi’s recent breathtaking takedown series on the little piggies of Wall Street, that is the last magazine anyone in a position of power should sit down with to share a bottle of booze and have a gab fest. The story that results will surely rip your head off and hand pieces of it to you in 12 point type.

And a . . . general? A four-star one at that? Gossiping and sniggering with cronies, all dissing their civilian bosses like a 7th grade Mean Girl cat-party? What was he thinking?

Apparently, this was nothing new for General McBlabby, who used the press and very public venues before to break the chain of command and let the world know that he disagrees with civilian policy and that only he and he alone has The Way to solve the unsolvable. And if his civilian bosses aren’t listening to him, well, he’ll just up the ante in a way that can’t be ignored. After all, he’s . . . General McCrystal!

Which makes me think that maybe it’s time that we institute a new rule: Mandatory weekly attendance by ALL elected officials and government appointees and military brass in some sort of 12-step program, one designed to help people Get Over Themselves. Perhaps then we wouldn’t see this constant star-fall of bloated egotists blown off their lofty perches and crashing and burning all around us. It’s getting so the public can’t go outside nowadays without a hard-hat due to the constant rain of falling politicos and now a four-star general.

On the other hand, there was speculation that McCrystal had gone all Colonel Kurtz and was way, way up the dark river. Lord knows it would be understandable in the Mad Hatter Kingdom where killing al Qaida and Taliban allied with al Qaida has now morphed into killing plain old hard-core, bat-shit crazy Taliban who throw acid in the faces of young girls attending school, to killing angry run-of-the-mill Afghan patriots who only ally with the Taliban in order to get foreigners out of their country, joined by Pakistani-supported fighters sneaking across the border to play a deadly dual game for their own purposes. It’s all turned into a nightmare stew in a failed state run by tribal thugs. Dark river, indeed.

The President decisively settled McCrystal’s hash by removing him. He’s free now to go on the lucrative rubber chicken lecture circuit, get a fat book contract, and enjoy a luxurious retirement, even though it is a shame such an outstanding career ended so badly. Afghanistan is not only a human graveyard, it’s also the graveyard of careers as well as nations.

As General Petraeus will likely find out when he takes McCrystal’s place. Petraeus wrote the playbook McCrystal was using: COIN, [Counter Insurgency] a form of district by district “nation building” that can be costly to American soldiers and at this point is not going well in a country that (unlike Iraq) never really had a “nation” to build on in the first place. And if COIN is bogged down now, it remains to be seen whether the new General or his civilian bosses will have the time and will to figure out that Afghanistan is not Iraq and be able to change policy quickly enough to avoid a growing disaster.

One thing is for sure, Colonel Petraeus, a Spartan in his own right, will not be talking to Rolling Stone.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Virginia Hamilton Adair from her collection of poems, Ants on the Melon, The Modern Library, 1999

An Hour to Dance

For a while we whirled
over the meadows of music
our sadness put away in purses
stuffed into old shoes or shawls

the children we never were
from cellars and closets
attics and faded snapshots
came out to leap for love
on the edge of an ocean of tears

like a royal flotilla
Alice's menagerie swam by
no tale is endless
the rabbit opened his watch
muttering late, late
time to grow
old.

Uh, Oh, Ron's Asking Those Pesky Questions, Again

Regarding a recent Tribune story on the Los Osos CSD's settlement of the Taxpayer Watch's lawsuit, Ron Crawford wasted no time asking the Tribune one of his on-point, annoying questions.  Over at http://www.sewerwatch.blogspot.com/   Awwww, and I thought we'd be able to get through one week without the hideous sewer wars commencing.  Ah, well.  The Tribune's coverage of all things sewerish have certainly been, uh, very, very curious, indeed. 

The Tribune also reported that the federal bankruptcy judge approved the settlement of the TPW suit and the CSD's insurance company will pay "the bulk of the money."  Some of the regular Sewer Wars Commenters on this blog have gleefully and adamently declared, of this lawsuit, that the CSD directors named would go to jail!  The Tribune story doesn't mention that, which I know will come as a great disappoint to certain folks. 

Left on the to-do list at the CSD is the breach of contract lawsuit with the state water board & etc.  Now THAT'S the one I really, reeeeellly want to see persued because I'd reeeeeely, reeeeeely like to know exactly who (and when) breached that contract.  I know, I know, that'll never happen.  That info will be forever buried and the community forced to eat it all, or at least most of it.  Too bad. That's the (almost) final and in many ways most interesting part of the whole Sewer Saga.

Oh, a reminder to some readers: mind your manners, now.

Meanwhile, Down In The Gulf

More interesting wrinkles coming to light on the gulf oil spill.  One of the more interesting seems to be that if you are spilling X number of barrels, then chemical dispersment is the least harmful way to go. But, if you're spilling Y number of barrels, the least harmful is to leave it alone and get out the booms and start gathering it up -- that dispersment chemicals on Y is waaaaay more damaging. 

In the case of BP, it appears that BP knew they were spilling Y number early on but since they would be fined on the amount of Y and if Y was allowed to remain visible (undispersed) the reality of this disaster would be manifest, so they low-balled the number they gave out to the public/government, used dispersment to hide and make it sort of disappear into an even more lethal, uncontainable, hidden (and unproveable-in-court?) cloud  until it was too late.  

If true, then BP's actions will result in a worse disaster than if they'd come clean in the first place and openly went ahead with best practices right off the bat.  Why they didn't do that is likely because we have set up a system that rewards concealment and punishes honesty.  We'll see the result of that system play out in the Gulf. 

And, if true, maybe we need to think about changing that "system" into one that says, simply, if you lie to us and that lie causes more damage, then we'll take over your company and shut you down, seize all your assets and that's that.  BUT, if you come clean right out of the box, you'll still be responsible for the clean up, but your company won't be seized.  Would that apply sufficient "moral hazard" to companies to do the right -- smart -- thing? 

Yeah, not likely.  Sigh.

Your Sunday Poem

This by Mary Oliver from her book, "Thirst," Beacon Press, 2006.

Praying

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

What I Learned On My Summer Vacation

Calhouns Can(n)ons for June 11, 2010


When I first heard about the Gulf oil spill I was concerned, then alarmed. But after a while, the media started bombarding us with stories about all the Lessons We Have Learned since the blowout started. So I figured I’d better pay close attention in case I needed to learn something new and important.

We were told the only real fail-safe way to shut this well-head down was to drill a second relief well, which will take months. But then, we already learned that lesson some 30 years ago when the Xxtoc exploratory well blew and spewed about 420,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf until it could be capped months later. After that disaster a few countries (but, clearly, not America) learned the lesson and required all offshore deep wells to have a relief well drilled simultaneously with the main well. That way if something goes wrong at the head, relief is just a valve-turn away. But America decided years ago that that lesson wasn’t important and could be ignored.

Then we were told that we shouldn’t worry, that the President had his “boot on the neck of BP” and would make sure they paid for everything and made all the communities damaged by this spill “whole again.” Of course, we were given that lesson way back 1989 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska and spilled 10.9 million gallons of crude all over the place.

Claiming that they would make Alaskan waters “whole,” Exxon’s lawyers really just fought that case in court for years and years while sympathetic judges kept cutting the awards down to slivers and by the time the real lesson was on display – privatize all profits, get Congress to “cap” liabilities and then stick as many of those liabilities as possible onto the taxpayer, and count on dragged-out litigation to whittle judgments and fines down to pennies on the dollar – Americans had forgotten the original incident and it’s final outcome. So, that lesson was an old one and had already been dismissed.

Pretty soon, as the present spill continued to roll on unabated, we were told that one key lesson we were learning here was that BP had a long slipshod record of repeated disasters, from the Alaska pipeline leaks to explosions in refineries, all caused by what EPA special agent Scott West called “ . . . a corporate philosophy that it was cheaper to operate to failure and then deal with the problem later rather than do preventive maintenance.” This record was loaded with lessons available for learning over the years, but, once again, the American public, Congress, and government agencies headed by ex-oilmen and Presidential cronies didn’t think they were useful lessons and so BP ended up with lots of drilling contracts and is now one of the biggest suppliers to the Pentagon to fuel its various wars. No new lessons there.

As Newsweek reported, in 2006 the EPA and the Justice Department decided to briefly learn a lesson from the “two massive BP oil leaks in Alaska caused by corroded pipelines,” and when they proceeded to try to take corrective action – which is what “learning lessons” should be all about – they were told to shut their case down, take a quick, cheap plea and just continue business as usual. When Jeanne Pascal, a lawyer in the EPA’s Seattle office, pushed for BP’s debarment from government contracts, she learned a valuable lesson: “When a major economic and political giant . . . tells you it has direct access to the White House, it’s very intimidating.”

But heck, that lesson is an old one that the American people didn’t think was worth learning in the first place. They’re fine with not understanding that when government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oil Industry, the oil industry will simply do what they like and the American people will cover all costs and suffer all the damages. Hiding oil’s true cost so they can continue to see fake “cheap” prices at the pump is just fine with Americans.

Which means all our present media hype about “learning lessons” from this spill is just more hokum. Americans know all the lessons and have dismissed them all. This present spill will be no different. Congress will make a political dumb-show of faux gruffness, the courts will stick it to a few low-level officials, and BP will count on careful PR and -- thanks to Justice Robert’s Supreme Court -- unlimited corporate political contributions to erase everything from our collective memory in only a few months. Then it’s back to business as usual. No need for corrective rules and profit-reducing regulations; let the market take care of itself.

And for BP, that means about $17 billion in profits a year. So that’s a huge relief! Now we can stop watching news that’s filled with boring “lessons” that we have no intention of learning, pictures of dead pelicans, and interviews with whiny fishermen – boo-hoo, waah-waah -- and can once again relax and go back to watching our favorite TV show: “America: The Biggest Loser.”