Deep Blade Journal

Gordon Brown: “You need either to have an agreement on increased production capacity from the OPEC countries or we’ve got to provide increased production elsewhere”

But there’s a problem… despite high prices, non-OPEC, non-former Soviet Union world oil production is past peak. (Graphic shows date of peak for each country, note US was 1971)

Sounds like the U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown is giving a verbal alert that the notion non-OPEC, non-former Soviet Union oil production is past peak must be tested. Has the failure of OPEC to deliver sufficient swing production after months of market tightness and the recent blow to US oil production from Hurricane Katrina created an emergency that is bigger than even release of contingency stockpiles around the world can handle? Time will tell.

Brown has been at the center of G7 deliberations on the world oil situation. Frustration with Russia and the OPEC countries has been evident for some time on the matter of “transparency” of oil reserves and field-by-field production data. Please see Deep Blade posts here and here for more details.

Meanwhile, Brown should probably explain further that precipitous decline in North Sea production rates has set in since 1999. Please see the ASPO Newsletter for August 2002 for an assessment of oil in the UK itself.

Harvest continues

The salsa turned out great with these tomatoes.

Update Sunday 9/11: Please note that posting was delayed (for both this and the Michael Brown item) because of some sort of “scheduled maintenance” hiccup with Blogger Friday afternoon. This is the first chance I’ve had to reconstruct these posts and get them up.

He’s done

Ooops, FEMA director Michael Brown was just kicked off the Katrina response and sent back to Washington, but not demoted. At any rate, Brownie isn’t “doing a heck of a job” any more.

Normally, the sort resume falsification alleged of Brown by Time Magazine would lead to immediate resignation. But let’s not forget, this is the Bush Administration, where nobody ever does anything wrong. So Brown will be allowed to remain FEMA director, despite these stories.

Here is how Democracy Now! summarized the allegations:

According to Time Magazine, Brown may have fabricated parts of his resume. Brown claimed that he worked in Edmond Oklahoma as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight.” In fact he was an administrative assistant to the city manager. One city official said he was essentially an intern. Brown also claimed that he was once the Director of Christian nursing facility in Oklahoma. But an administrator at the facility told Time that Brown was “not a person that anyone here is familiar with.” In addition Brown claims on his resume that he won a prize for being “Outstanding Political Science Professor” at Central State University. But according to an official at the school, Brown “wasn’t a professor here, he was only a student.” Time reports these revelations raise new questions about how rigorously the White House vetted Brown before putting him in charge of FEMA.

Can’t we just get rid of this guy — send him home to his “stiff margarita” — for good? And let’s not stop with Brown. Chertoff and the rest, including Bush, should get out of the way and truly out of office too, so we can start cleaning up their mess of failed cronyinsm, war, and death they’ve left for us.

Bush spin of history already in full rotation

Shoot, nothing could be the fault of Bush. Here is a bit of the result of this spin I received in an email message today. It comes from a reactionary I know who shall remain nameless:

FYI the Huricane devisted [sic] over 90,000 square miles. Lets put that into perspective. There are 63,000 troops in the area, put one in each square mile and what do you have??? alot of area with no help in it yet. To request that the president quit over an act of nature is well….. your fucking off the wall. Put your money were your cheese dick mouth is…

1-800-HelpNow

To this I replied:

You basically miss the entire argument I make for Bush’s lack of honor and why he should resign. Did you even actually read it? Clearly, nowhere does it argue that an act of nature should chase the president out of office — it’s for the stuff in his control that honor demands his resignation.

Read those refs. I give. This is a story of grievous presidential indifference, ignorance, and failure of leadership on the issues involved in real security. Okay, perspective –if there are only 63,000 troops, there needs to be 630,000 or more. The initial response was slow and too small in everyone’s estimation, even in that of our own Republican senators. Maybe the thing will be gotten control of, but again, in the estimation of every sane observer, it didn’t have to be as bad as it is if leadership in the face of voluminous warning — both in the long term and in the immediate pre- and post-storm days — had been different.

The act of nature was foreseeable, as you can find out by reading the links. The government itself has studied the issues for years, but the administration’s response has been to cut funding and send the Louisiana Guard along with 1/2 of its equipment to Iraq — a crime of staggering proportions as much against international law as it is against America’s real security. That’s impeachable. But I prefer to appeal to the president’s own conception of honor. As I suspect, he doesn’t have any.

Also in response, I asked that these extremely important and disturbing pre-Katrina facts from a Wall Street Journal report and discussed in a piece on Media Matters be considered:

The Journal article also noted the concerns voiced by Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard a month before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. In an August 1 interview with a New Orleans TV station, Schneider had worried that the National Guard equipment transferred to Iraq — including high-water vehicles — would be needed at home if a natural disaster struck:

“When members of the Louisiana National Guard left for Iraq in October, they took a lot [of] equipment with them. Dozens of high water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators are now abroad, and in the event of a major natural disaster that, could be a problem.

“The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission,’ said Lt. Colonel Pete Schneider with the LA National Guard.

“Col. Schneider says the state has enough equipment to get by, and if Louisiana were to get hit by a major hurricane, the neighboring states of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida have all agreed to help.”

According to a September 4 Washington Post article, the three neighboring states cited by Schneider were also hit by Katrina and therefore were too “overwhelmed” to provide such resources to Louisiana:

“State officials had planned to turn to neighboring states for help with troops, transportation and equipment in a major hurricane. But in Katrina’s case, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida were also overwhelmed, said Denise Bottcher, a Blanco spokesman.”

Would all that stuff come in handy now? (See also the Phyllis Bennis interview from today’s Democracy Now! on war-depleted disaster aid.)

There is much, much more just in the basic timeline record, and comparison with other US disaster responses — particularly in Florida during the election year of 2004. Randi Rhodes on Air America has an excellent batch of links today. The extreme overpayments in the saturation response to those Florida hurricanes, particularly Frances, was not in many cases even related to hurricane damage!

Hurricane Frances hit South Florida Labor Day weekend [2004], 100 miles north of Miami-Dade County, but Sun-Sentinel reporters found that the federal government approved $28 million in storm claims there for new furniture and clothes and thousands of new televisions microwaves, refrigerators and other appliances. The Federal Emergency Management Agency paid for new cars, dental bills and a funeral even though the Medical Examiner recorded no deaths from Frances. In an ongoing series of reports, the newspaper also found FEMA inspectors were given only cursory training and attributed damage to tornadoes - there were none recorded in the county - and in six instances listed “ice/snow’’ as the cause. The reports have prompted calls for investigations by federal and state officials and the beginnings of an inquiry by the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel]

Before the administration’s rotating machine chops up all of history on this many-fold disaster, I implore readers to keep a firm grasp of what really happened and who knew what and when by reading

1. A timeline of government response to Hurricane Katrina;

2. Timeline of Hurricane Katrina from Wikipedia; and

3. Hurricane Katrina timeline

Bush matriarch: “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they want to stay [in Texas]”

As Froomkin points out, this is a modern “let them eat cake” moment.

Contrary to the classist perspective displayed by Mrs. Bush, it strikes me that what is really happenning is that the people displaced from New Orleans are beginning a life-long struggle for their right to return to their homes.

This bears careful watching. I don’t know if some analysis heard recently on Pacifica Radio will turn out to be correct — that the first moves in rebuilding New Orleans will be a massive takeover of poor neighborhoods for casinos, stadiums, malls, and upscale housing.

Is a historical parallel the Palestinian struggle for right of return to homes lost to Israeli occupation, as a peceptive listener comment broadcast today on the kpfa morning show (see time code 01:16:20 in the audio file) points out?

How long will it take on the down side?

Up $0.50 or more last week following Katrina

Now that the volatile futures price for gasoline has dropped $0.84 from its peak last week given a mad global scramble to release emergency supplies, how long will the bad boys pictured above take to fall? It’s always slower on the down side. Is profiteering involved?

The tenuous situation in world oil enables a great deal of profit taking on events. There are some years left where prices will fluctuate, with temporary price crashes even possible. Afterward, however, as world oil production clearly enters a permanent monotonic decline, the sky will be the limit on gasoline.

I just can’t predict exactly when that time will come. However, seeing the current situation, I am reminded of the exchanges I had with the fine Middle East affairs blogger Juan Cole, who wrote in January 2004 that “Petroleum costs around $25-$30 per barrel, and is likely to go on doing so for decades.”

Though I greatly respect Juan Cole, I doubted this at the time. Is it not clear, after the crude price has reached and maintained a level double Cole’s thinking, that the world is not as awash in extra oil as many academics and financial analysts just a short time ago thought it was?

Honor requires nothing less

The game is over. President George W. Bush with his band of thieves and hacks should resign immediately so that the lost honor and confidence of this once-great nation can be restored. For the sake of our country, Bush just needs to realize that his utter failure of leadership — his nakedness, revealed for all to see by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and his lack of timely response — demands nothing less than the immediate end to his administration.

Cheney should resign first, followed by appointment of a non-neocon Republican to the Vice Presidency. I don’t care who this would be — Hagel, McCain, or even Olympia Snowe would do — just so it isn’t one of the moraless Bush-oriented radical, warmaking, statist neocons in the mold of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and current supporting cast. Then that person would become president upon the resignation of Bush.

The building case against Bush due this hurricane — all of the bad policy that preceded it, and the criminally slow reaction too it for days afterward — should put the cap on an administration that has willfully steered this country and the world towards disaster and ruination. Blow after blow have come and continue to come. Next it will be an energy crisis. Then more war. Then another natural disaster for which we are left utterly unprepared by profligate wars and irresponsible tax giveaways to the president’s rich friends.

The examples of cover-their-asses lying, spinning these lies, and covering up with phony photo ops have been rampant. I’ll reference just one sample of the testimony here, the appearence of Jefferson Parish, LA president Aaron Broussard, interviewed by Tim Russert on Sunday’s Meet the Press. If you have not heard this, go straight there and watch the video. It broke my heart in a thousand pieces. How could the Bush operation be so cruel?

Bush is utterly unprepared and uninformed about the issues that led to this tragedy. PBS Now had a pretty good explanation of the whole situation in South Louisiana in a report they originally broadcast three years ago. Go take a look at that and tell me that a president who now can say, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” deserves to call himself commander-in-chief.

This administration is utterly lost in the face of a disaster where the enemy is bad policy. When nature applies its inevitable corrective, Bush is lost with nobody to bomb. Bombing normally is Bush’s only solution. But all he’s left with here is a desperate collection of black people who he has shown every willingness to shoot. Meanwhile, Hannity and O’Reilly fan racist flames with exaggerated, out-of-perspective orientation towards reporting “looting” (or, if the people are white, “searching for food and water”).

Furthermore, I can’t express the failure of Bush’s national security state any better than Steve Gilliard, who writes:

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn’t work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE’s [Meals Ready to Eat] once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell.

You’ll just have to read this post for full effect. With total justification, Gilliard is on fire.

Of course I will not be holding my breath waiting for the president to resign. Likewise, I will not wait around for Mr. Bush to show me that there is one ounce of honor behind that smirky face.

Weeds

This is what we get for 18 days of inattention

On the plus side, there was a nice basket of perfect ripe tomatoes waiting for us upon return from our midwest trip. But the weeds ran hellishly. I’ve gotten a lot of them out now, so it looks much better in there.

Please see Jerome a Paris for analysis

Natural gas price spike may portend trouble worse than the gasoline situation

Take a look at this post at Booman Tribune. Deep trouble from the Gulf states disaster is building on a whole range of energy and economic fronts. As usual, Jerome surveys the situation with clarity and intelligence.

I’ll make just one comment: The natural gas situation could be very serious if during the cold months pipeline pressures drop and/or electricity production is “California-ed” in the manner of 2001. The latter problem would arise if power producers cannot collect enough from consumers to cover their gas bills — noting that most new electric generation installed during the last 15 years has used “clean” natural gas.

Yikes.

Family visits, rest, peace & quiet, vintage baseball, fireworks, festivals, and wonderful photography opportunities contrast with the weight of war and disaster of the last three weeks

1860-rules baseball game — my old mates on the Bruno Volunteer Fire Department invite me to come back and play each year

Bottle gentian, a somewhat unusual wildflower seen August 27 in Banning State Park, Pine County Minnesota

South shore of Lake Superior last Sunday during “magic hour”

Tiny remnant of Katrina greets us as we return home

Posting will resume now after our 18-day trip to Midwest. We really went on vacation. I got pretty much away from the computer for two weeks. This was very healthy. But the break was tempered by the weighty matters of the world that fell during this time.

Our problems and expenses seem tiny compared to the suffering due to the Gulf Coast hurricane. While for us gas pushed $4/gal in Canada, and broke $3/gal in some parts of Maine as we returned, an unimaginable tragedy unfolded for people 2500km to the south. I can’t even find the words to express the horror and nightmare I know is happening.

The shockingly inadequate hurricane response of the Bush Administration is born of years of bad security priorities. Bush was three days late in declaring the mobilization he finally got around to calling for yesterday afternoon. A political hack heads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And I think this remark Mr. Bush made in an interview today with Diane Sawyer of ABC News reveals the true concern for Real Security of the horrifically ignorant W:

I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.

Just last Sunday, the Washington Post carried a story saying exactly the opposite: “Experts have warned for years that the levees and pumps that usually keep New Orleans dry have no chance against a direct hit by a Category 5 storm…”

Directly related to lack of Real Security on the homefront was the heart rending yet hopeful Crawford, Texas encampment led by Cindy Sheehan, made a Gold Star Mother by Bush’s Iraq war. Does Camp Casey represent a sea change on Iraq? Time will tell if policy will be dislodged in any significant way. The thing that sickens me, however, is the utter lack of leadership from the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton, for example, is nearly equivalent to Bush on these matters.

I’ll close by mentioning that while in Askov, Minnesota. I had the opportunity to speak with both the brother and sister-in-law of Matt Lourey, a dedicated American serviceman killed in Iraq last May.

In closing, here are some remarks from Minnesota State Senator Becky Lourey, Matt’s mom and now also a Gold Star Mother (who represented us well during the six years we lived in Minnesota), given in a Camp Casey interview. I saw this Democracy Now! interview over a friend’s satellite dish while we were in Minnesota:

we’ll stand behind Cindy. And I do believe that the dialogue can move this issue forward, because it seems to me that it’s very, very wrong when a leader who makes life and death decisions is insulated from the people who suffer the consequences of those decisions.