Month: May 2010

Cause and Effect

unsolicitedanalysis:

So, of course you lead your rebuttal with two incidents that do not substantiate your argument.

Hey pal, you’re the one that disputed the very existence of a focused and systematic deconstruction of the regulatory apparatus on the part of successive GOP administrations dating back to Reagan and “government is the problem.” Just providing you with a few of the more brazenly obvious examples of said “unheard of” activities that go beyond fostering a merely “cozy” relationship between regulators and industry. The regulations themselves have been weakened through a focused and Bush-administration-mandated lack of enforcement coupled with Congressional oversight turning a blind-eye to what amounts to ignoring a Constitutional mandate that the Executive branch see to the enforcement of the law as it exists, not the law they wish they had. See: Statements, Signing.

On oil:

Proximate Cause: Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches and more robust blowout preventers would be an “undue burden” on the industry

Cause: Blowout valve that was placed was insufficient to seal the bore in event of catastrophic accident

Effect: Essentially unstoppable flow of oil into gulf until some other solution is found

Yes, Dick Cheney was evil!  Except no one knows why the blowout prevention system failed

The old “no one could have expected!” dodge. Uh, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we know exactly why it failed: Among other, more minor failings, even had everything worked perfectly the cutoff device was insufficiently robust to actually cut through the casing and seal the bore with the drilling and lining apparatus still in place.

The Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer had:

  • A dead battery;
  • Leaks in the hydraulic system that would activate the pistons in the [“unforeseeable”] event of an accident;
  • By design, 260 different failures that could require the BOP’s removal and replacement;
  • A useless test component installed, and;
  • Cutting tools that were not strong enough to shear through 10% of the joints in the piping.

You might note that each of these is a case directly addressable by a robust regulator assigned to oversee this activity. Any of these cases is found to exist: the work on drilling stops until they are rectified. The permit to drill can be suspended or revoked. Fines can be levied. None of these listed failures represents some condition that was unknowable or some totally unexpected chain of individually minor failures that led to the disaster. The primary cutoff system was insufficient to cut the bore. It should never have been placed. The regulatory apparatus as directly conceived and constructed by Bush/Cheney was asleep at the switch, a switch which they had furthermore allowed the oil industry to design and install (seeing as the regulatory reports were being filled out in pencil by the industry and “inked” by the regulators. Wonderful; indeed a searing indictment of the very concept that regulation can work. I guess we should just throw up our hands and forget about regulating industry.

But lets get back to your argument:

How do you stop “cronyism?”

How’s about by stopping cronyism? Simply deny the administration authority to undertake widespread replacement of the traditionally non-political, “career” civil service jobs (yes, I know you are shocked, shocked to hear that such a thing took place under Bush). And yes, Congress (lately in the fetid claws of The Democrat) desperately needs to flex its oversight power here; as a rule no administration should be allowed to sweep out what have been historically apolitical, career jobs in favor of putting unqualified hacks in place (that were, in this case, specifically placed to create the auto-affirming appearance of a government of by and for political hacks that is incapable of the simplest services or regulatory oversight). Undermining confidence in the government is/was the stated aim of these moves. And guess what: it’s working.

How do regulatory agencies take responsibility for decision-making that they don’t have absolute power over?  Do you believe in providing them with absolute power?

Give them absolute power. That’s the point of any well thought out regulation, to remove the potentially devastating outcome of precisely this kind of case-by-case, politically charged decision making (recall that BP received a personalized waiver on this project, one which was renewed on an apparently pro forma basis by the Obama administration) and in place of that patronage- and crony-based situation you build an impartial apparatus outside of the two/four/six year political cycle that impartially declares “we will allow BP to drill here, and these criteria will be met; these are the various levels of penalty for the different gradations of wrongdoing, be it accidental or willful. Here is how we will empirically determine compliance, stated in advance, such that BP can plan and act accordingly. In the event of accident, these are the guidelines…” Congress simply needs to find its institutional will to act, reengage its oversight function in a robust way (they are at least holding hearings again…), and ultimately force a broad reform that begins to cure a systemic ill.

Is that really so hard to understand?

Blue Sky

unsolicitedanalysis:

Did Reagan give the incompetent, corrupt motherfuckers in the Interior the gifts, lunches, or sport tickets?  His ghost must have turned their computers to porn.  And he personally instructed them to allow the drilling companies to fill out their inspection reports themselves.

[…]

What you’re doing instead is trying to pin the blame on a minority party for dubiously-documented “systematic weakening” based on a nebulous “anti-government right” with no cited paper trail of cause-inducing failure.

What color is the sky in your world? Two seconds worth of cursory googling:

And, in this instance, Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches for blowout preventers would be an undue burden on the industry:

In secret meetings with the oil company officials in 2001, incoming Vice President Cheney set the foundation for a permissive, welcome mat with the oil industry.

After stocking the Federal government’s Material Management Service with his cronies, this agency reversed an earlier 2000 decision requiring a mandatory accusatorial regulator, allowing BP and others not to install a $500,000 acoustic switch to automatically shut down oil gushers.

Reversed the decision that would have prevented this accident. But, yeah, the take-home lesson here is that sensible regulatory agencies just won’t work. Ever. Nothing whatsoever can be done about it. The market will do all the regulating anyone could ever want. Best thing to do is pretend that no empirical data on the capability of regulation to sensibly manage industry exists and that nothing useful could be drawn from such information anyway. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.

On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection

Barack Obama… in 1996

Precious Blame

unsolicitedanalysis:

Where was this clarity during the Bush administration? The failure of federal, state, and local regulators/agencies never absolved our previous President.

It was certainly absent if you’re looking for the MSM to provide it. But you’re missing the fact that Bush specifically was in favor of the failure of our federal, state, and local government and regulatory agencies. Need I quote Lord Reagan? I guess I do:

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem

You can’t deny the government a legitimate role in any issue, no matter how large or small, and then expect government to be secretly housing a massive underwater engineering specialty, or to have regulated the offshore drilling industry into essential safety. This is the fundamental disconnect of the current argument, not that that stops the spread of utter nonsense.
Every prior GOP administration has systematically weakened regulations on offshore drilling. These chickens come home to roost and it’s suddenly all Obama’s fault? How? Why? In what universe does that make any rational sense?

And, of course, the anti-government right’s reaction to the crisis? Blame the government. Obama should (apparently) be down there, personally, running the mud shot or at the very least torturing somebody aboard the mud shot injection machine.

Now, of course, were he down there, you get to play the “government meddling is ruining BP’s brilliant plan” card. That’s what I call good policy.

Oilbama

unsolicitedanalysis:

Obama WILL be blamed for the plight of poor MAJORITIES in the Gulf fishing and tourism industries.

Via the unfair, unrelenting criticism that Obama is about to receive – it’s coming, you best believe it’s coming, especially when those businesses die – liberals will atone for that sin.

This is utter nonsense. Look no further than noted asshat David Brooks:
(via chuckmore) for a moment of clarity on this:

“I persist in the belief that unless Barack Obama has a degree in underwater engineering that he’s not telling anybody about, there’s really not a lot, post-spill, he could be doing. Like you, I’m not a huge fan of presidential grandstanding. The idea that the president is the big national daddy who can take care of all our problems is silly.”

David Brooks

Yep

This crisis is the fault of BP and the total regulatory capture on the part of the oil industry. All of which happened over the past 20 years of conservative rule. But, sure, let’s just blame Obama and require “liberal atonement” for an event totally out their purview. After all, everything is always bad for The Democrat.

Team NoKo

Kevin Drum makes a point I’ve wondered after:

[China’s] unwillingness to put serious pressure on North Korea mostly seems to come down to a combination of inertia and a fear of massive refugee flows across the border if North Korea collapses.

But why? There are 23.8 million people in all of North Korea. Even if every living human North Korean crossed the border, you’d be dealing with a rounding error in terms of China’s overall population. That and, as Kevin notes, you’d likely have broad international support once said refugee crisis began to unfold, so it’s not as though China would be alone in dealing with that rounding error.

Like so much surrounding this crap-fest, it makes no sense at all. Well except for the manifold parts that make it clearly bad news for The Democrat.

Whither Transit

muppetpants:

Looks like the streetcars have effectively been killed off after already spending millions.  Good news is unallocated funds will go to building playgrounds in Georgetown!

Uh, no. The economic impact of transit construction is well known:

  • According to US DOT director Norman Mineta, every $1 billion invested in the nations’ transportation infrastructure supports approximately 47,500 jobs.
  • Transit capital investment is a significant source of job creation. In the year following the investment 314 jobs are created for each $10 million invested in transit capital funding.
  • Transit operations spending provides a direct infusion to the local economy. Over 570 jobs are created for each $10 million invested in the short run.
  • Tri-Rail of South Florida expects its five-year public transportation development plan to spawn 6,300 ongoing system-related jobs.
  • New York’s East Side Access project is expected to generate 375,000 jobs and $26 billion in wages.
  • In 2000, the average downtown vacancy rate for cities without rail was 12.8%, but 8% for all cities with rail transit.

Playgrounds: not so much. Terrible, terrible decision with far-reaching, all-bad repercussions for the DC economy.

Whither Transit

Peak Water

This is, perhaps, the most charged sentence ever written on the innernets:

Eventually, [the Ogallala and Central Valley Aquifers in the US, along with a number in China and India, which are being drained at a rate that far exceeds their recharge] will tail off to [reach usage rates] something in the neighborhood of their recharge rate.

Sensible! Except the recharge rate for the Ogallala, which, like all of these aquifers, charged over geologic time frames, is ~0.024 inches per year (in the Texas portion, anyway; Kansas manages a rate approaching 6 inches).
Good luck with achieving a usage rate below that with a population of ~0.5 million folks (per 2000 census) and a large, water intensive agricultural economy (in fact, ~30% of the groundwater destined for agricultural use in the entire US comes from this very same place).
And it’s not just Texas that’s sort of attached to drinking the stuff. The Ogallala services a bunch of population centers right up the red core of these United States. As in: they get their water from it exclusively. Because no other source exists. 82% of those folks in its boundary, which is all of Nebraska, large chunks of Kansas and Oklahoma, and the panhandle of Texas.

Anywho: peak water. Everybody west of the Mississippi better start thinking, hard, about where their water is going to be coming from long term. I, for one, am all for letting the market decide what the price of an acre foot of water ought to be in, say, Nevada. After all, we’ve been underwriting their water-drenched lifestyle via Reclamation and Corps of Engineers projects for decades. We’re told the days of “Big Government” are at an end. Fine. We’ll start with repricing the desert West’s water supply to a acre foot pricing schema that might actually pay for a few of these projects this century and properly move use to the family farmer the damned things were meant to benefit in the first place. Then we’ll see just who wants dread guvmint all up in their grill.