Archive for January, 2009

On the Difference Between Lawyers and Catfish

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

By David L. Brown

Oops, today we learn that the stimulus bill that just passed the House of Representatives won’t allow stimulus money to be spent on imported steel. That’s like slamming the door on world trade, which is going to create a huge backlash from trading partners and lose American jobs through loss of exports. Oh, how wise the gurus in Washington are! (Not).

Here is an excerpt from a news item tonight from FoxNews.com:

U.S. businesses and trading partners are resisting a new “Buy American” provision in the $819 billion economic stimulus package making its way through Congress.

The provision, included in the House bill that passed on Wednesday, generally prohibits the purchase of foreign iron and steel for any stimulus-funded infrastructure project.

The goal is to boost the U.S. iron and steel industries, which have been pummeled by the current recession. Shipments in the steel industry, for example, fell 40 percent last year.

Yet John Murphy, vice president of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said 50 million Americans whose jobs depend on exports would pay the price.

Think this could be a problem? Umm, no — the word “problem” isn’t anywhere near a bad enough word to describe what this will be. And then there is the fact that our steel industry is almost completely moribund and has been for decades. Pittsburgh’s fabled mills have long been shuttered and turning into rust buckets. The remaining mills are generally unable to compete with foreign producer.

Is this what we want to do — attempt to rebuild out-dated industries whose time has come and gone? Revisit the Industrial Revolution? We need to concentrate on developing alternative energy, a cleaner environment, a sustainable economy, not dump billions into developing new steel mills. And even if we should want to do so in order to stimulate the economy, it would take years to ramp up efficient iron and steel production. That’s not likely to contribute to our immediate economic problems until well after the Obama administration is over, if ever (although it is a fact that the economic crisis may go on forever in the post-Peak Oil world). If we continue to sink into a depression without end, what stimulus will it take to create a new steel industry to replace the cheap foreign imports we now enjoy? And, what kind of sense would it make to do so?

Meanwhile, American steel users “benefiting” from the stimulus (which by the time Congress is done will be just about everybody) will be struggling with severe shortages, which means higher prices, inability to produce end products, and ultimately a domino effect sweeping through every steel-using manufacturer down through retailers and to consumers. Meanwhile, steel exporting nations are going to boycott American goods like there’s no tomorrow. They’ll use the cheap and abundant steel to produce more consumer goods at lower prices to sell to each other and everyone except America.

But how important could this be. From what nations do we buy our steel? Glad you asked: Oh, probably nothing all that important: China, India, Mexico, Korea, Turkey, the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, places like that. Heck, there’s no problem with ticking off those countries and causing them to slam the door on our exports is there? Nah! We’ll still be able to export lots of stuff to, er, ah, Antarctica, that’s it. Yeah, Power to the Penguins! And we’ll have no worries because we won’t be able to produce many export items anyway due to shortages and the high prices for domestic iron and steel. So we’ll be able to easily meet and even exceed demand (those Penguins will require some excellent salesmanship to get them to buy those refrigerators, freezers, ice makers and other Antarctica-appropriate export trade items).
Don’t these people in Washington have any common sense about how economics works? Well, apparently not. They are, after all, mostly lawyers. There are many good, honest, hard-working lawyers (I have been privileged to know and work with several of them) but for the most part they are generally not the greatest paragons of wisdom and ethical purity.

Hey, let’s enjoy a lawyer joke to lighten things up in the face of the impending economic doom that is being hatched out in Washington:

Riddle: “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?” Answer: “One is a scum-sucking bottom feeder and the other is a fish.”

That was fun. Let’s have another: “What’s the difference between a dead lawyer on the highway and a dead rattlesnake on the highway?” Answer: “There are skid marks in front of the snake.”

And finally, a faux factoid: “99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.” Heh.

Lawyers should NEVER be entrusted with creating and administering the law. That should be the job of patriotic American citizens in possession of a firm grounding in science, philosophy, history and economics, none of which seem to appear on Law School course lists. Instead we get a pack of critters who if they weren’t in Congress would be suing people and companies for every imaginable sin and pocketing as much as half or more of anything collected.

And let’s face it, the kinds of lawyers I’m describing are exactly the ones that would tend to go into politics, being greedy egomaniacal morons. And once in office, they surround themselves with, what else? More lawyers. One out of every twelve residents of the District of Columbia is a lawyer, 42,000 of them in all, more per square mile than many other nations have as a total. Washington is like a vast hive of lawyers, something out of a bad horror film such as Night of the Living Dead or a drug-enhanced nightmare.

So, yeah, as long as we’re going to create a new Greater Depression, let’s start out big by sticking it in the eye of our trading partners to create a huge trade war over steel, something we can barely produce any more anyway. That’s smart all right. Bring those foreigners in line right quick, won’t it? Smoot and Hawley will be smiling down from Heaven, er, rather, smiling up from down there below, at the ongoing reenactment of their famous bill that plunged America into the Great Depression by placing huge tariff barriers on imported goods in 1930.

That sure fixed things up, didn’t it? If it hadn’t been for World War II we’d still be in the Depression if Smoot, Hawley and their successors had their way. How soon they forget the past, those who do not read history or ever learn how to think rationally or master common sense. And how fast the nation can fall if it continues down the road it has now set foot upon.

Posted in Economics, Law and Regulatory Issues, Politics, Satire, Irony, and Humor | Comments Off

Congress Critters Wallow in Pork Barrel Trough

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

By David L. Brown

It can be argued that this country got in the trouble it’s in at least in large part through irresponsible government spending, private lending to unqualified borrowers and of course lots of Wall Street greed. So the way Congress proposes to fix it is to, among other things, do the following:

A — Ramp up government spending like a whirling dervish, throwing trillions into Pork Barrel projects many of which won’t kick in for years and therefore cannot help the recession/depression unless it is expected to last for a decade (or forever) but which will help Democrats hang onto their seats until the fat lady sings.

B — Push banks to begin lending money again, preferably to those most needy (i.e., least qualified borrowers).

C — Replace the former head of Goldman Sachs who was heretofore in charge of the Treasury (Hank Paulson) with Timothy Geithner, a guy who cheated on his tax returns and who has immediately appointed as his chief of staff at the Treasury Department Mark Patterson, whose previous job was as Goldman’s lobbyist.

Yeah, that’s gonna fix things all right! Like Joe the Plumber could fix your Rolex. Using a sledgehammer.

The new administration and Democrat controlled Congress seems determined to push through a spending bill totaling more than a trillion dollars when interest costs are factored in, and the lion’s share of the spending won’t even kick in in time to help us out of the present situation. A report by the deputy director of the Congressional Budget Office issued a few days ago included this conclusion:

Assuming enactment in mid-February, CBO estimates that the bill would increase outlays by $92 billion during the remaining several months of fiscal year 2009, by $225 billion in fiscal year 2010 (which begins on October 1), by $159 billion in 2011, and by a total of $604 billion over the 2009-2019 period. That spending includes outlays from discretionary appropriations in Division A of the bill and direct spending resulting from Division B.

The CBO is supposed to be Congress’s own watchdog on spending, and yet it seems clear that these observations will be ignored in the rush to spend money on just about anything, no matter whether it makes sense, will help the economy, or is even sane just as long as money is being spent. And, how convenient that nearly all members of Congress just happened to have a big want list of Pork Barrel projects ready at hand. Just line up at the trough, add your favorite Pork to the bill (which now contains more than a thousand pages) and you’ll assure your job in the House or Senate from now until Doomsday.

Here’s a cartoon to illustrate the process:

pigs.jpg

Now there’s a small catch to that “keep your job until Doomsday” program. Doomsday may be coming a lot sooner than Congress Critters think. And like lemmings racing to be first to jump into the sea, they may find they have doomed themselves. If the “stimulus” package (which seems to contain very little actual stimulus) doesn’t work and the nation continues to slide into a deep recession or new depression, the plan might actually backfire. Republicans are apparently ready to vote almost unanimously against the plan, and when it and other shenanigans fail to do anything more than stick taxpayers with trillions in debts, voters might be less compassionate about “Hope” and “Change” next time around.

Posted in Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »

Food Supplies Losing Race to Famine

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

By David L. Brown

How thin is the line that divides world food supplies from famine? This thin: If China were to import another five percent of its total grain needs, it would completely eliminate all grain available in the world’s export markets.

The reason why this is is possible is due to the rapid industrialization of China. Prime farmland is being replaced by roads, factories, houses, and parking lots. Production of wheat, rice and corn is moving to lower quality land, and areas more prone to drought and heat events. Add in the growing number of Chinese, and their desire to consume more calories, and you have an interesting collision of forces.

Of course, I have written here before that I believe China is heading for a fall. The rising new middle class there may soon be a receding one, and industrialization already is slowing due to the collapse of export markets and may soon recede as well. But nevermind, the point of the statement above is to illustrate how vulnerable the Earth has become to food shortages.

The factoid I quoted (from this article on the Seed Daily web site) is merely one example of the forces at work as rising human population meets the declining resources of the planet. There are similar examples everywhere you look. Fisheries have virtually collapsed and trawlers are busy dredging the last living things from our oceans. Tillable land is being converted to uses other than agriculture, while soil erosion chips away at what is left. Resources of fresh water are being pumped from aquifers deep in the Earth, water that is not being replaced. These water sources will eventually run dry, and in fact already have done so in some places (i.e., Saudi Arabia).

The present economic slowdown may be the best news for the world, because it will slow the rising demand for higher standards of living, cause funding for infrastructure projects that gobble up farmland, and generally put a brake on the runaway train that the world economy has become. It may even help slow and reverse the growth of human numbers, which is the root cause of the threats to our ecosystem and the very future of civilization.

Yes, that may seem cold-hearted but it is appropriate on this 200th anniversary year of the birth of Charles Darwin to remember that the future belongs to the fittest, and that Mother Nature wields a pruning knife. Species come and go, adapt and evolve, and natural selection applies to all species including homo sapiens.

I suspect that Nature has never had to deal with anything quite like us, so it is not easy to predict how things will turn out. One lesson I think we can draw from geologic history is that conditions can turn on a dime. We all know the story of the asteroid that ended the Age of Dinosaurs. But more recently we have learned that the Younger Dryas, a thousand year return to Ice Age conditions about 12,000 years ago may have been caused by a comet impact over North America that could have killed off the Clovis human population as well as many of the megafauna that previously inhabited the hemisphere. Similar if less devastating events have happened at regular intervals throughout history. Such comet or asteroid strikes can affect the climate worldwide, creating short term freak cold spells or even, as in the case of the Younger Dryas, a centuries-long return to glacial periods.

Another worldwide effect results from major volcanic eruptions. Just a couple of decades ago we experienced the Mount Pinatubo eruption that cooled the entire Earth for several years. We are presently experiencing cooler conditions due to an unusual number of smaller eruptions during 2008.

Point: Human population and agricultural production is already balanced on the edge of disaster. What happens if even a modest climate-changing event should take place, such as Pinatubo? A reduction of just a few percentage points in world crop yields would be a disaster. A significant drop of 20 or 30 percent would mean absolute calamity. And, any study of history will tell us that such events are relatively common. In the brief period of time since about the end of WWII conditions have remained generally favorable. In the future, historians may consider that a tragedy rather than a boon, because it has allowed humanity to grow far beyond the ability of the Earth to sustain us.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Desertification and Soil Loss, Economics | Comments Off

Free Trade and Globalization: Utopian Dream

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

By David L. Brown

Advocates of expanded free trade through elimination of tariffs and other economic barriers claim that more open trade would benefit people in developing nations. The failure of the ongoing Doha round of trade negotiations among exporting nations is viewed as a tragedy for economically underprivileged people, particularly those engaged in subsistence agriculture.

An article in a recent issue of Science magazine questions this. Here is a key paragraph from the piece that appeared in the January 9 issue:

In July 2008, negotiations for a Doha Round trade deal collapsed again, this time over provisions to allow developing countries to protect the livelihoods of subsistence farmers. Premature trade liberalization undermines the policy space necessary for investment and technology policies for development. Further agricultural trade liberalization will undermine food security in most developing countries, many of which have been transformed from net food exporters into net food importers. Contrary to the claims of advocates of agricultural trade liberalization, eliminating agricultural and export subsidies in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development would, at least temporarily, increase food prices in food-importing countries! The supposed gains from agricultural trade liberalization are likely to bring greater benefits to a few rich agriculture-exporting countries, rather than to most of the developing world, let alone the bulk of the poor.

The co-authors are  Jome Kwame Sandaram, Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development, U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and Rudiger von Arnim, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Denver.

The article mentions several arguments about why more open trade would harm poor nations. I’ve pulled a few statements out of the article. They are presented below in boldface followed by my observations and comments.

“The overwhelming volume of trade occurs between nations that are similar.”

This makes sense. Americans may buy Mercedes and Toyota automobiles from Germany and Japan. They have not shown a desire to purchase cars engineered and manufactured in places such as the Philippines, India, Botswana, Malaysia or Uzbekistan, although these and many other nations manufacture automobiles.

Attempting to create a level “playing field” between trading partners that are separated by factors of technology, wealth, consumer demand and tradition is obviously a difficult proposition. Values are different, costs relative, and there is a vast gap in supply-demand factors. According to myth, Manhattan Island was purchased for a bunch of beads and buttons which were happily received by the native Americans living there. Whether or not that is true, it is a fact that Europeans systematically offered primitive  peoples cheap trade goods in return for major concessions of land. Thus was the era of colonialism begun. The natives had no complaint, because they had no concept of land ownership and viewed the receipt of trade beads, cloth, iron axes and such as windfalls.

The situation today is quite different from the days of European expansion, but not entirely different. To expect that the poorest nations of the world can compete economically with the richest and most advanced raises definite questions. An African family might be able to grow two or three acres of corn using techniques not too different from those of centuries ago, while an Illinois farmer might single handedly grow a thousand acres with considerably more success.

Can a rich nation and a poor nation really be trading partners when their products and markets are so vastly different? Or, must they interact in a way reminiscent of feudalism, like master as to serf? Perhaps.

“Offshore outsourcing…can be a threat to the welfare of developed countries.”

The reason American and European countries have moved manufacturing to the Third World is to take advantage of cheap labor. This has left us in a precarious position. For example, a large percentage of the consumer items purchased in the U.S. are made in China. American factories have been closed and their former employees laid off. This has benefited American corporations in that they have reaped greater profits by reducing labor costs. It has benefited American consumers in that they have enjoyed many luxury items at prices they may not otherwise have been able to afford. It has, of course, benefitted Chinese workers and their bosses, creating a growing middle class there. Meanwhile, it has destroyed jobs for many Americans, causing them to end up unemployed or working at much lower paying jobs.

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Posted in Agriculture Issues, Economics, Essays and Opinion, Global Security | 2 Comments »

100-Year Drought Strikes Argentina

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

By David L. Brown

The world is facing a famine crisis and few if any news reports acknowledge the looming threat. Now we learn that Argentina, which has been one of the world’s few remaining food exporters, is stricken with a drought some reckon is the worst in a century. Here is an excerpt from a news story today on the IPS news service web site (read it all here.)

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 21 (IPS) – Severe drought, which is many parts of Argentina is considered the worst in 100 years, has hit the country’s most agriculturally productive region and is expected to cause a sharp decline in grain and meat output.

Rural associations estimate that grain production will drop 39 percent and that 1.5 million head of livestock will be lost, while meat and dairy productivity levels among the surviving animals will be poor.

Drought assistance measures adopted by the government of Cristina Fernández include deliveries of livestock fodder, but farmers say the aid is insufficient given the magnitude of the disaster and are now directing their demands towards provincial governments.

The drought extends from the southern province of Río Negro through the central provinces of La Pampa and Córdoba and east and north to the provinces of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, Corrientes, Chaco, Formosa and Santiago del Estero. It has especially hit the entire 600,000 square kilometre pampas grasslands region, considered one of the most fertile areas in the world.

Chaco Governor Jorge Capitanich predicted that in his province, agricultural output will be half of what it was last year. The area planted in wheat and sunflowers is smaller this year, and yields are down due to the lack of rainfall, he said.

And among corn producers in Entre Ríos, losses are estimated at over 80 percent.

Ironically, last year when world food prices soared due to rising demand the Argentinian government placed new taxes on agricultural exports. The argument was that farmers should share their “windfall” with the government. The Economist called the move “economic madness” and “crazy ideas.” It resulted in protests by farmers, who blocked roads to prevent movement of farm produce to local markets.

Now there may be little if any left to export, and perhaps even a shortfall in domestic supply. How fast the mighty tend to fall.
According to climate change models we can expect growing heat and drought in the middle latitudes which include the hearts of the African and South American continents.

A study reported in a recent issue of Science magazine (subscription required) projects that in many parts of the world average summer temperatures will be above the most severe on record to-date.

(more…)

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Climate Change, Economics, Famine | Comments Off

It’s Official—Antarctica Is Warming Too

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

By David L. Brown

As climate change deniers continue to publicize bizarre and unproven statements suggesting that the world is cooling and that global warming is a “hoax,” real scientists continue to discover evidence to the contrary. Most recently, in the journal Nature it has been reported that temperatures have been steadily rising all across Antarctica, as illustrated in this graphic:

1.jpg

As reported on the BBCNews.com site today, the latest data confirms that the continent has been warming in the same manner as the rest of the globe. Data from satellites and ground stations reveals average warming over the past 50 years amounting to 0.6 degrees Celsius. According to the BBC report, the researchers said that “the trend is difficult to explain without the effect of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.”

Here are details from the BBC report, which you can read here:

In the new analysis, a team of US scientists combined data from land stations with satellite readings

“We have at least 25 years of data from satellites, and satellites have the huge advantage that they can see the whole continent,” said Eric Steig from the University of Washington in Seattle.

“But the [land] stations have the advantage that they go back much further in time.

“So we combined the two; and what we found, in a nutshell, is that there is warming across the whole continent, it’s stronger in winter and spring but it is there in all seasons.”

They conclude that the eastern region of the continent, which is larger and colder than the western portion, is warming at 0.1C per decade, and the west at 0.17C per decade – faster than the global average.

The BBC article also noted that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, a floating ice mass 15,000 square kilometers in area, is about to break apart.

The 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed that global warming was occurring over all continents “except Antarctica,” for which there was insufficient data. While the researchers admitted that the warming they observed may include effects from other factors such as natural climate variability, according to the BBC report Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York commented: “It’s hard to think of any situation where increased greenhouse gases would not lead to warming in Antarctica.”

No doubt the deniers will soon come up with some theory to discredit this report, but they are like fish trying to swim up Niagara Falls because responsible scientists continue to verify the very real facts about climate change. When will they give up?

Now they’re claiming the present cold wave in North America is proof positive that global warming doesn’t exist. They ignore several facts, including the well-known fact that it is often cold in the winter. No one has said that winter will become like summer, or even like spring, and yet each time an Arctic airmass moves down from Canada we hear that global warming is a “hoax.”

Well, consider this: If the world has, on average, warmed by 1 degree Celsius what would that mean for winter weather? Well, assuming (and this is not true but just accept it for simplicity’s sake) that all warming is equally spread out, that means that a cold wave today should be 1 degree C. warmer than a similar event in the past. In other words, if it got really frosty back in 1950 and hit minus 40 degrees C. (that’s also minus 40 degrees F. by the way), this year a similar cold wave would only drop the thermometer to minus 39 degrees C. Hmm, not exactly balmy is it?

We should also take into account that there were numerous volcanic eruptions during the past year, all around the world. None equaled the big one of Mount Pinatubo that cooled the Earth for several years by injecting particulates into the upper atmosphere, but taken as a whole they are definitely having an effect. I notice the kind of orange glow in the morning and evening twilight that was so familiar in the years immediately after Pinatubo, clear signs that the air is not clear.

The best thing to do with climate change deniers is to ignore them, for like spoiled children it is attention that they seek. Nevertheless, I shall continue to write about these subjects so stay tuned.

Posted in Climate Change, Melting Planet | Comments Off

Misleading Questions About Climate Change

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

By David L. Brown

The climate change deniers are in full bay these days. It seems I can’t read a blog or even a news article without seeing the phrase “global warming hoax.” Somehow this phrase has “gone viral,” as they say. Whether it is merely a social phenomenon or part of a deliberate campaign funded no doubt by the usual suspects, ExxonMobil et al., remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, the drumbeat of denial is growing louder with each day, and seems particularly strident now that the incoming Obama administration has made at least some promising moves in the direction of taking climate change seriously. The appointment of John Holdren as director of the Office of Science and Technology is particularly noteworthy. He is one of the leading voices on the subject of global warming, over-population, and energy dependence.

Dr. Holdren is an eminent scientist, but that does not mean that some newspaper columnist who probably never took a college-level course in science and wouldn’t know a quark from a quart of gin can’t tear into him as if he were some empty suit such as a U.S. Senator.

One Jeff Jacoby, a writer for the Boston Globe, has written a piece titled “Questions for Obama’s Science Guy” (you can read it here). In true Yellow Journalism style (the only kind we seem to have anymore), Mr. Jacoby sets forth a series of “gotcha” type questions. Thanks to his own ignorance or unwillingness to research his subject, Jacoby fails to recognize that there are good answers to his questions. This reminds me of the “journalistic” technique of asking embarrassing but ill-founded questions, then shouting down the subject when he/she attempts to answer. In the medium of a newspaper column, of course, the victim doesn’t even have a change to respond—at least, not the way “journalism” is practiced today.

Many years ago when I studied journalism at what was then acknowledged as the world’s leading J-School, we were taught things like “check your facts, then check them again;” “always get both sides of the story;” and boring stuff like that. Gee, journalism was sure lacking in entertainment value back in those days, wasn’t it? Oh, wait, we didn’t classify journalism as entertainment back then, did we?

Anyway, since Dr. Holdren was not given the chance to answer the “gotcha” questions, I will attempt to answer for him. To conserve space I will condense the questions from Mr. Jacoby’s diatribe, which are in italics. Go to the link above to read the questions in their entirety. Here goes:

1 — You were long associated with population alarmist Paul Ehrlich, and joined him in predicting disasters that never came to pass. What have you learned from the failure of these prophecies to come true?

My response: We have learned that it is very difficult to predict future time scales. The population “bomb” did not explode as early as Erlich and Holdren thought it would for a number of reasons. One of the biggest factors was the unanticipated success of the so-called Green Revolution, which increased agricultural production particularly in the Third World, allowing the populations in poor countries to continue to expand. Another factor was that America and other nations pumped up their farm production and shoveled the over-production out into the world as “food aid.” It was a sham way of rewarding farmers while appearing to be humanitarians. That, too, was unanticipated and surprising. Both these factors were temporary “fixes,” only staving off the time when the Devil arrives to present his bill. The populating bomb will explode, in fact it is exploding now. Erlich and Holdren were wrong only in their estimated timeline. Incidentally, to call the esteemed Paul Ehrlich a “population alarmist” is an unfair slander. Like Thomas Malthus, Dr. Ehrlich will be proven correct in the not so distant future.

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Posted in Climate Change, Politics | Comments Off

Mexican Border War Heating Up

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

By David L. Brown
One of the major problems facing the United States today is the fact that our First World nation is bordered by a Third World state, Mexico. The problem is magnified by the fact that Mexico is in the process of collapse, on the path to becoming a failed nation such as Zimbabwe or Somalia. The seriousness of this problem is hinted at by this excerpt from an Associated Press story today:

Feds Plan ‘Surge’ if Mexico Drug Violence Spills Into U.S.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

EL PASO, Texas  —  If Mexican drug violence spills across the U.S. border, Homeland Security officials say they have a contingency plan to assist border areas that includes bringing in the military.

“It’s a common sense extension of our continued work with our state, local, and tribal partners in securing the southwest border,” DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said Friday.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who described the contingency plan in an interview with The New York Times this week, said he ordered specific plans to be drawn up this summer as violence in Mexico continued to mount.

The plan includes federal homeland security agents helping local authorities and maybe even military assistance from the Department of Defense, possibly including aircraft, armored vehicles and special teams to go to areas overwhelmed with violence, authorities said.

Kudwa would not give specifics on the so-called “surge” plan, but said it does not create any new authorities.

In the last year, more than 5,000 people have been killed and police and military officials have become common targets for violent drug cartels who are fighting with each other and the government for control of lucrative drug and human smuggling routes across Mexico.

More than one-fifth of the deaths have occurred in Ciudad Juarez, the hardscrabble border city just across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

The ongoing drug wars just on our border are as bad as Afghanistan and Iraq, probably worse. A few weeks ago I saw a news item stating that for an entire 24 hour period there had been no murders in Tijuana. That was so unusual that it was considered to be news worthy of being reported in the U.S. press. At least, as this article indicates, our homeland security department is beginning to treat the problem with the seriousness it deserves.

There seems to be no end in sight and the problem just gets bigger. The Mexican government is corrupt to the core and completely unable to control its territory. I have news for the writer of that AP article, and that is that the Mexican war is already spilling over our borders. For example, there have been reports that growing numbers of Americans are being kidnapped here in our their own country and taken across the border to be offered for ransom. So far, the media and government have mostly downplayed cross-border crime such as this.

The more it is tolerated, the more it will be encouraged. That kind of criminal violence will continue to spread until we take strong action to secure the border and remove those Mexican criminal elements who are already here. The idea that it is politically incorrect to identify and deport illegal immigrants is national suicide.

We are witnessing a worldwide epidemic of collapsing civil law, a problem that will continue to spread, and a significant example is taking place right there on our very own southern border. Mexico is a failing state, just as surely as those in Africa. The northern tier of Mexican states from the Gulf to the Pacific is already in almost the same situation as Somalia, with drug lords and corrupt military and police engaged in civil and gang warfare, right on our own border.

The story calls this “drug violence.” That is over simplification. This is much more than that and as the world economy sinks, Mexico begins to suffer widespread famine, unemployment there becomes endemic, and the crime worsens, what will those tens of millions of starving and desperate people just to our south do then? Stay there and starve or be killed? Move to Zimbabwe? Ask their friends the Chinese to let them move there?

Um, no, as is traditional down there in Old Mexico they’ll be coming north to the Land of the Formerly Free and the Home of the No Longer Brave. To join the millions of their fellows who are already here. And we better start now if we want to prevent our nation being overrun by tens of millions of economic and environmental refugees.

Posted in Conflict and War, Global Security, Population Issues | Comments Off

A Realist Looks at the Year Ahead

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

By David L. Brown

Good morning everyone. If you woke up this morning (as I presume you did since you are reading this) you were probably surprised to learn that we have entered a New Year, Anno Domini 2009. I certainly was, but then these things have been sneaking up on me for a long time so I should have expected something like that.

Anyway, Happy New Year.

Now it’s time for the completely de rigueur Review of the Past Year, followed by Predictions of Things to Come.

First, let’s review a few highlights from Star Phoenix Base during the year just ended.

On January 2, 2008 in an essay titled “Looking Ahead to a Very Different Future,” I wrote: “Most predictions of the future rely on the old tried-and-true (and desperately false) technique of looking backward, then extending the trendlines of the past into the future. In some cases that has worked, but the technique has little chance of accurately predicting the future from our present position. The reason is that we are reaching the end of an era of rapid growth built on depletion of non-renewable resources.”

We wrote about ethanol and how turning food into fuel was a terrible mistake. We wrote about the climate change denial that has become even more strident in recent months. We noted the likely return of inflation and even its evil twin stagflation. And we hammered several times on the mistaken economic assumption that any commodity that is depleted will be replaced by something just as good.

In June I predicted a financial crisis that would probably lead to a new Great Depression. That may have seemed extreme back then, but how about today? Oh, wait, no problem, the government bailouts will surely prevent anything like that from happening. (Nevermind that investors have lost trillions of dollars and the world’s capital markets have declined by nearly 50 percent. That can’t be important, can it?)

In early July I predicted the impending demise of General Motors, writing: “the entire American auto industry seems to be in a downward spiral from which there may be no return. But it is almost inconceivable how fast the bad news has been coming.” Yeah, and it kept coming didn’t it?

In September I suggested that the financial crisis could be bad news for the “financial elite,” the ultra-rich. Didn’t seem likely those smart people would get caught off-base…until along came Bernie Madoff, the new Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to…well, we aren’t sure where the money went.

Also in September I wrote about how “insourcing” was bringing manufacturing and jobs back to the U.S. More on that later.

In October I stated that “Much of today’s ‘money’ is a phantom, something that exists in computer networks and can flit around the globe at the press of a key. It is a fiction, a mere cloud of bits and bytes, and there is where the trouble starts.” We have seen that playing out at defunct or struggling financial institutions around the world. We have been living on the back of an imaginary economy where money isn’t real, but something based entirely on trust. There is an old saying of Ronald Reagan’s, originally used in the context of Soviet disarmament: “Trust, but verify.” Too many people trusted that their “money” actually existed, and too few verified. Again, Bernie Madoff is the poster child for what happened. One might expect that Bernie was not the only charlatan loose in the financial world and I expect that far more examples will emerge.

Also in October I wrote about the freeze of international trade due to the credit crunch. We don’t hear much about that, but it is a huge and growing problem. More on that below.

In November I shook off my previous mode of thinking, pessimism, and embraced realism. That was a liberating decision. You can read my thinking on this in the essay titled “Realism: The Emerging New World Order,” November 28, 2008. I concluded with this:

We see our once and future leaders acting as would-be saviors of the old world order advocating putting trillions of dollars into failed institutions in the apparent hope that if only those outdated corporations and other entities can be put back on their feet, things will return to “normal.” Well, here’s a hot tip: There is no more “normal” any more. “Normal” fell out of the nest some while back and was replaced by its evil twin, “Abnormal”. The idea that we can somehow transform the “abnormal” present back into the “normal” world we once knew is an impossible dream, a vain hope, and a disaster in the making. No, Humpty is well and truly broken and to spend trillions trying to glue and patch and stitch him back together is a foolish and pointless exercise in futility.

Notice that in my new “realism” mode I was not saying that everything was hopelessly screwed up, but only that mistakes were being made. That change would have to take place. That’s the realist’s view, to see things as they are and to reject wishful thinking.

So there’s some background on what was discussed here during the year just passed. What do I see in the year ahead? Well, I would surely like to put on a Pollyanna persona and tell you that all the dark clouds are going to blow away and the bright Sun shine through on a new day of happiness and prosperity for Humankind. I really wish I could, but as a realist I cannot because the facts dictate otherwise.

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