Everyone in Haiti is beginning to fray – the Haitians, the relief workers, and particularly Diane Sawyer who is going to be kicking ass and taking names if they don’t start distributing food and water pretty soon. What she’s seeing is sure hard to watch for all of us. The Washington Post has a really good Satellite Graphic that shows the destruction. You can zoom down and see the problem – roads blocked by debris everywhere.
Last week, I was speculating that a lot of the current anger and blaming going on in American life is coming from a national grieving process over all the losses we experienced during the Bush years [American Lamentations…]. I think I’m right about that. Haiti is bringing up Katrina and 9/11; the underwear bomber brings up 9/11; the Financial Hearings bring up the 2008 Crash, the housing bubble; and so on. It’s like we can’t claw ourselves free and are spitting and spewing at anything that moves.
Truth is that mobilizing a relief effort of this magnitude is hard to do. It’s been three days and we’re close to being on top of it. That’s actually quite an accomplishment. Cool your heels, Diane. Help is on the way…
The official Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — the group that aims to hold a modern version of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, whose investigations set the stage for New Deal bank regulation — began taking testimony on Wednesday. In its first panel, the commission grilled four major financial-industry honchos. What did we learn? Well, if you were hoping for a Perry Mason moment — a scene in which the witness blurts out: “Yes! I admit it! I did it! And I’m glad!” — the hearing was disappointing. What you got, instead, was witnesses blurting out: “Yes! I admit it! I’m clueless!” O.K., not in so many words. But the bankers’ testimony showed a stunning failure, even now, to grasp the nature and extent of the current crisis. And that’s important: It tells us that as Congress and the administration try to reform the financial system, they should ignore advice coming from the supposed wise men of Wall Street, who have no wisdom to offer…
There were two moments in Wednesday’s hearing that stood out. One was when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase declared that a financial crisis is something that “happens every five to seven years. We shouldn’t be surprised.” In short, stuff happens, and that’s just part of life. But the truth is that the United States managed to avoid major financial crises for half a century after the Pecora hearings were held and Congress enacted major banking reforms. It was only after we forgot those lessons, and dismantled effective regulation, that our financial system went back to being dangerously unstable. As an aside, it was also startling to hear Mr. Dimon admit that his bank never even considered the possibility of a large decline in home prices, despite widespread warnings that we were in the midst of a monstrous housing bubble.
Still, Mr. Dimon’s cluelessness paled beside that of Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, who compared the financial crisis to a hurricane nobody could have predicted. Phil Angelides, the commission’s chairman, was not amused: The financial crisis, he declared, wasn’t an act of God; it resulted from “acts of men and women.” Was Mr. Blankfein just inarticulate? No. He used the same metaphor in his prepared testimony in which he urged Congress not to push too hard for financial reform: “We should resist a response … that is solely designed around protecting us from the 100-year storm.” So this giant financial crisis was just a rare accident, a freak of nature, and we shouldn’t overreact.
But there was nothing accidental about the crisis. From the late 1970s on, the American financial system, freed by deregulation and a political climate in which greed was presumed to be good, spun ever further out of control. There were ever-greater rewards — bonuses beyond the dreams of avarice — for bankers who could generate big short-term profits. And the way to raise those profits was to pile up ever more debt, both by pushing loans on the public and by taking on ever-higher leverage within the financial industry. Sooner or later, this runaway system was bound to crash. And if we don’t make fundamental changes, it will happen all over again.
Do the bankers really not understand what happened, or are they just talking their self-interest? No matter. As I said, the important thing looking forward is to stop listening to financiers about financial reform. Wall Street executives will tell you that the financial-reform bill the House passed last month would cripple the economy with overregulation (it’s actually quite mild). They’ll insist that the tax on bank debt just proposed by the Obama administration is a crude concession to foolish populism. They’ll warn that action to tax or otherwise rein in financial-industry compensation is destructive and unjustified. But what do they know? The answer, as far as I can tell, is: not much.
These bankers are hard for me to imagine. My reaction is a little bit different from either Krugman or Obama. I think we ought to simply shut them down by going back to the Glass–Steagall Act exactly as it was when it passed in 1933 – a separation between Commercial and Investment Banks with limits on size and mergers. There’s no reason for them to exist, and plenty of reason to outlaw them. Likewise, I’d like to see the Shad-Johnson Accord which essentially outlawed Derivative Trading in the United States revived. These Bankers don’t need to be reformed or regulated. They need to be eliminated…
The United States said Friday that Haiti’s small airport and other poor infrastructure was preventing all of the current aid supplies from reaching the people who need them. "We have a lot of stuff geared, poised to flow. The limitation right now is the inherent infrastructure in Haiti," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said. Crowley told reporters that Miami-based US Southern Command has determined that Port-au-Prince airport, which has one runway, can handle only 90 take-offs and landings per day. Even that number has not been reached yet, he said. He added that the arrival of the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, which carries 19 helicopters, will give Haiti the equivalent of a second airport.
The United States is also trying to build a make-shift heliport near the main airport in Port-au-Prince to help deliver water, food and medicine. Delivering by sea is also a challenge. "For the moment, for large ships the port is unusable," Crowley said. "We’re looking at assets in the Dominican Republic," which is on the other side of the island shared with Haiti, he said. He also recalled "we’re using Guantanamo as a staging area" to send in supplies. Guantanamo is a naval base on the island of Cuba, where a field hospital is treating 24 Americans who were seriously injured in the quake.
Most of the healthy people are being evacuated through the neighboring Dominican Republic. Some 846 Americans have already been evacuated from Haiti, and 160 others will leave later Friday, Crowley said. He said another five Americans have been confirmed dead in addition to one on Thursday. Around 40,000 to 45,000 American citizens live in Haiti, and the number of dead among them is likely to increase, he said.
It’s getting hard to watch as people’s frustration begins to mount over the logistical and communication problems in Haiti. The aid is pouring in, but is not yet being distributed widely because they haven’t got a way to get it where it’s needed because of the badly damaged infrastructure throughout Port-au-Prince. Watching, one wants to scream at the television set, but clearly the problems are not that simple. Many of the world’s best experts on disaster relief are on the ground in Haiti trying to get things moving. It’s hard to watch, but I expect it’s much harder to live.
Watching CNN’s non-stop coverage of the cataclysm in Haiti isn’t easy, but it’s too compelling to turn off. I think it’s going to be easier to watch tomorrow because the massive amount of aid flowing into the country might finally begin to be distributed to the people that need it. That’s been the frustrating part, seeing planes landing at the airport filled with supplies then flashing to the reporting in the city where people are still on their own some 50+ hours after the disaster. I’ve gotten so used to the rubble and bodies in those reports that it’s become almost "normal," but then some picture pops up of a five story building that looks like a stack of pancakes with bodies sticking out, and the reality of what happened there wells up again. It’s different from the Tsunami in that they had roads when the water receded. Haiti’s infrastructure has essentially disappeared altogether as the buildings collapsed into the roads. This video from a street cam recorded the earthquake as it happened. It’s short, but through the shaking, it shows the dust beginning to rise from the collapsing buildings.
Friend Carl and I have been discussing the topic of Resiliency, a big topic in the field of trauma right now – and he’s involved in developing a psychometric to try to quantify it. The term arose from the observation that there is a wide variability among individuals in their vulnerability to traumatic events. One of the things that strikes me watching this footage is how calm the Haitians are in the face of all the carnage. The streets are lined with bodies; there’s no food, water, or shelter; medical care is slim to absent; and yet they seem to be caring for themselves and each other remarkably well. They have no way of knowing how much aid is heading their way, yet they are adapting in a surprisingly orderly fashion. I think anyone watching who is used to seeing people in this kind of situation would say that the Haitians are quite Resilient.
Several things might explain why. It’s the poorest of places, so subsistence living is an everyday reality there. Most Haitians live on $1 – $2 dollars a day. Likewise, the country has a history of environmental diseases, wars, and dysfunctional governments. As everyone points out, living in Haiti is something of a trauma in the best of circumstances. And they’ve already had their share of natural disasters.
In many ways, the hurricane season of 2008 was the cruelest ever experienced in Haiti. Four storms – Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike – dumped heavy rains on the impoverished nation. The rugged hillsides, stripped bare of 98% of their forest cover thanks to deforestation, let flood waters rampage into large areas of the country. Particularly hard-hit was Gonaives, the fourth largest city. According to reliefweb.org, Haiti suffered 793 killed, with 310 missing and another 593 injured. The hurricanes destroyed 22,702 homes and damaged another 84,625. About 800,000 people were affected–8% of Haiti’s total population. The flood wiped out 70% of Haiti’s crops, resulting in dozens of deaths of children due to malnutrition in the months following the storms. Damage was estimated at over $1 billion, the costliest natural disaster in Haitian history. The damage amounted to over 5% of the country’s $17 billion GDP, a staggering blow for a nation so poor
The year 2008 was only one of many years hurricane have brought untold misery to Haiti. Hurricane Jeanne of 2004 passed just north of the country as a tropical storm, dumping 13 inches of rains on the nation’s northern mountains. The resulting floods killed over 3000 people, mostly in the town of Gonaives. Jeanne ranks as the 12th deadliest hurricane of all time on the list of the 30 most deadly Atlantic hurricanes . Unfortunately for Haiti, its name appears several times on this list. Hurricane Flora killed over 8000 people in 1963, making it the 6th most deadly hurricane ever. An unnamed 1935 storm killed over 2000, and Hurricane Hazel killed over 1000 in 1954. More recently, Hurricane Gordon killed over 1000 Haitians in 1994, and in 1998, Hurricane Georges killed over 400 while destroying 80% of all the crops in the country…
In fact, many of the emergency crews converging on Haiti have already been there before in response to these recent Hurricanes and floods. So is resilience related to previous experience with traumatic situations? Surely that is a factor of some kind. A major element of traumatic experience is unexpectedness. For Haitians, disaster is not unexpected. Another factor is commonality of experience. People whose trauma is solitary such as rape victims seem much more vulnerable than people who are suffering together as in a natural disaster like this. Soldiers, for example, are more resilient together than when they are alone. But previous experience with trauma and hardship isn’t the whole story. In World War I when traumatic illness first came to the world’s stage, it was obvious that the longer a soldier was in the combat theater, the more likely he was to develop traumatic symptoms. That observation has been recently reconfirmed with our troops in Iraq/Afghanistan. The incidence of P.T.S.D. rises dramatically in troops with multiple deployments [much worse…].
But does the observation that the Haitians are adapting to this dramatic situation even have anything to do with what is implied by the concept resiliency – something like an immunity to traumatic experience? There are plenty of soldiers who function quite well in combat, only to come home to be plagued by traumatic symptoms. We call traumatic mental illnesses – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Resiliency is not a term that refers to how a person responds when they are in traumatic situations. It refers to what happens afterwards. Do they develop symptoms later – often long after they are out of the situation? In fact, some previously traumatized people do better in subsequent traumatic situations. It’s "peacetime" where they have their difficulties.
It’s hardly the time to talk about studying resiliency in the Haitians. Right now, their seeming resourcefulness in the face of this disaster is something to admire and respect, not a focus for medical research. But somewhere down the line, it will be important to look at the psychological aftermath of this event. Most of what we know about traumatic illness comes from "mass trauma" – natural disasters and wars. When large numbers of people experience the same thing, it’s easier to sort out the factors that determine the long term consequences.
Did he really say that? I guess so. I checked his web site. He’s not even ashamed he said it. For Rush Limbaugh, the deaths of thousands of Haitians in a natural disaster is just fodder for another hateful rant against American government and President Obama.
Said Rush:
This will play right into Obama’s hands. He’s humanitarian, compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, "credibility" with the black community–in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It’s made-to-order for them. That’s why he couldn’t wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.
What kind of world does this nincompoop live in, that this nonsensical musing pops out of his mouth? What makes him see things through such an ugly prism, at a time when the bodies are still being dug from the wreckage? And then this oaf went on to discourage Americans from making contributions to the Red Cross because, via foreign aid, "we’ve already donated to Haiti – it’s called the U.S. income tax."
I expect all of us hope that with this piece of outrageous Limbaugh poison will put a dent in his influence, but we’ve wished for that before. I’m not always sure what aspect of the mental life of his fans Limbaugh plays to. Certainly this example is openly racist, and deeply contemptuous. I know that Limbaugh’s scripts are put together by his staffers, but he’s the person who dusts them with his unique brand of sarcastic venom. If you look at his web site right now, it has been changed frome earlier in the day to reflect his usual kind of defense to the criticism he’s been getting:
I’m over refuting Rush, but I do want to comment on one particular piece of this malarkey – "Media Tweaked: "Light-Skinned" Remark Pinned on Rush, Not Reid." This is a favorite ploy of the Limbaugh staff. After weeks of ranting about Harry Reid’s comments about Obama’s light skin and accent, Limbaugh now raves that people didn’t react when Reid commented on "light-skinned" but take offense when he does it. First, people did react to Reid. Second, Rush’s comment was contemptuous racism, Reid was stating relief that Obama was more electable. But those things don’t really matter. What matters is that the Limbaugh Staff invariably turns criticism of Limbaugh into his martyrdom, and deflects attention away from the his behavior. I’m not going to bother to read "The truth about what Rush said about Obama and Haiti." I’ve read enough of Rush’s truths for a lifetime. But I do have something to say about "Rush Did Not Say ‘Don’t Make Donations to Haiti’." He actually said a lot more:
RUSH: We’re going to start in Raleigh, North Carolina. Justin you’re first today. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Mega Rush Baby dittos. My question is, why did Obama in the sound bite you played earlier, when he’s talking about if you wanted to donate some money, you can go to WhiteHouse.gov —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — to direct you how to do so. If I want to donate money to the Red Cross, why do I need to go to the WhiteHouse.gov page and —
RUSH: Exactly. Would you trust that the money is going to go to Haiti?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Would you trust that your name is going to end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Absolutely right.
CALLER: That’s the point.
RUSH:Besides, we’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the US income tax.
CALLER: Rush, my mother was going to be on a missionary trip. She was going to leave at 4:30 this morning to go to Haiti with our church.
RUSH: That’s another point, too. Churches —
CALLER: No government money, Rush.
RUSH: Exactly right. Look, there are people that do charitable work every day in Haiti. It’s not as though — like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it’s our fault. Reverend Wright, it’s our fault, there’s no excuse for such poverty when there’s a nation as rich as we are so close. There are people that have been trying to save Haiti just as we’re trying to save Africa. You just can’t keep throwing money at it because the dictatorships there just take it all. They don’t spread it around, and even if they did they’re not creating a permanent system where people can provide for themselves. It’s a simple matter of self-reliance. Nobody takes that approach down there because this has always been a country run by dictators and incompetent ones at that.
He says that Obama is running a money scam on Whitehouse.gov, would keep the money donated to the Red Cross, and then add your name to his campaign’s mailing list. And, by the way, sending money to Haiti is a waste of time because the Haitians are corrupt [like the Africans][and Reverend Wright]. Let’s face it, to Rush, all black people are just no good. I think Rush Limbaugh is a real racist, the kind that used meet in the swamps and lynch people. I expect that, when it’s all said and done, that’s his appeal – to the racist elements in America. His rants about the Haitians probably reflect his feelings about all Black Americans as well. Recall his comments during his brief career on ESPN as a sportscaster. "I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well,” Limbaugh said. "There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team." But his racism has flowered with the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. The kind of attack documented above is repeated daily. I doubt this particular piece of insensitivity and hatefulness will do much to his influence. The people who listen to him go for that kind of thing. It may make it more awkward for the Republicans in Congress to see him as an asset.
It’s really not very hard to be Rush Limbaugh [or at least on Rush Limbaugh’s Staff]. Just look at the news and find out what President Obama has done in the last 24 hours [if there’s not much there, move on to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or any other Democrat]. Now look at the list of Talking Points to see which ones to apply to the news you’ve picked:
OBAMA ALWAYS LIES
OBAMA IS VERY LAZY
OBAMA HATES AMERICA
OBAMA APOLOGIZES ABOUT AMERICA
OBAMA IS A BLACK RACIST
OBAMA IS A COMMUNIST
OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST
OBAMA IS A FASCIST
OBAMA IS A MUSLIM
OBAMA WANTS TO TAKE OUR STUFF AND GIVE IT AWAY TO DO-NOTHINGS
Then take your news story and see how to fit the Talking Points into it:
OBAMA TOOK THREE DAYS TO TALK ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS BOMBER We nailed him to the wall for being slow to talk about the Christmas Bomber [OBAMA IS VERY LAZY, OBAMA HATES AMERICA, OBAMA IS A BLACK RACIST, OBAMA IS A MUSLIM]. So we can contrast that with his rapid response to the earthquake in Haiti.
OBAMA RESPONDED QUICKLY TO THE HAITIAN CRISIS Since OBAMA ALWAYS LIES and OBAMA IS VERY LAZY, we can make his quick response into something OBAMA APOLOGIZES ABOUT AMERICA, OBAMA IS A BLACK RACIST, OBAMA IS A COMMUNIST, OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST, OBAMA IS A FASCIST, and OBAMA WANTS TO TAKE OUR STUFF AND GIVE IT AWAY TO DO-NOTHINGS.
OBAMA IS SENDING AID TO HAITI Easy. OBAMA IS A BLACK RACIST, OBAMA IS A COMMUNIST, OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST, OBAMA IS A FASCIST, and OBAMA WANTS TO TAKE OUR STUFF AND GIVE IT AWAY TO DO-NOTHINGS.
OBAMA ASKED AMERICANS TO DONATE TO HAITI OBAMA HATES AMERICA, OBAMA IS A BLACK RACIST, OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST, and OBAMA WANTS TO TAKE OUR STUFF AND GIVE IT AWAY TO DO-NOTHINGS.
That’s all of them. This one is easy. Now for the tweaking. Throw in Venezuela and Cuba not sending any aid. Be sure to make Obama look like a goody-goody who is really motivated to get the black and liberal goody-goody votes. Throw in a little racism at the end. Okay, it’s show time:
RUSH: Here’s President Obama speaking about Haiti this morning in Washington at the White House. He held a press conference. Now, I want you to remember, it took him three days to respond to the Christmas Day Fruit of Kaboom Bomber, three days. And when he came out after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn’t want to do it. He comes out here in less than 24 hours to speak about Haiti…
RUSH: Oh, this is what he lives for. He lives for serving those in misery. Now, don’t misunderstand here, folks. I don’t have the whole press conference, but I wonder did he apologize for America before acknowledging we are the only people on earth that can possibly help ’em out down there in any significant way? By the way, I’ve checked it out, Cuba has offered nothing. Venezuela has offered nothing. They have nothing to offer…
RUSH: So the country that he runs around the world apologizing for, the country that he has chip on his shoulder about, he now turns to as its president and asks people who have lost their jobs because of his policies to donate to WhiteHouse.gov to the people of Haiti, and we will do it. We are the most charitable and the most generous people on the face of the earth. Each and every time a natural disaster like this happens, we step up. We are there. "Despite the fact we’re experiencing tough times here at home, I would encourage those Americans who want to support the urgent humanitarian effort -" You know, I have been to Haiti way back a long time ago when it was a cruise ship stop, Port-au-Prince. And I’ve seen pictures of Haiti. It is a devastatingly poor place and nothing has ever changed. And right across a mountain ridge in the middle you’ve got the Dominican Republic, which is like night and day. It’s like night and day. And what’s the one common factor?
That place, Haiti, has been run by dictators and communists, and how long is it going to be before we hear Obama and the left in this country say that what we really need to do is reinstate the communist Aristide to the leadership position down there to coordinate putting the country back together? The Haitian economy is entirely dependent on foreign aid. They produce nothing. Zilch, zero, nada. And it’s been that way for the longest time…
RUSH: Yes, I think in the Haiti earthquake, ladies and gentlemen – in the words of Rahm Emanuel – we have another crisis simply too good to waste. This will play right into Obama’s hands. He’s humanitarian, compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, "credibility" with the black community – in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It’s made-to-order for them. That’s why he couldn’t wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.
I’ve been watching the coverage on the earthquake crisis in Haiti this evening, which makes one aware of the dire straits of the country even without this new disaster – poverty, disease, deforestation. It’s really a depressing state of affairs. It puts me in mind of something I’ve been thinking about more and more since I retired six years ago and began to do more world traveling. Our discussions of global warming or the related issue of dependence on fossil fuels focus on things like renewable energy sources, fuel efficient automobiles, new as of yet undreamed of technologies. But we don’t talk much about the most basic of things – population control. Living in the U.S. where we are so well appointed, even in the midst of a big financial crisis, our view of things is skewed by our fortunate circumstances. But if you go where I’ve been lately [China, Peru, Mexico, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania], one’s perspective changes dramatically.
There are simply way too many human beings in the world already, and the numbers are rising geometrically. Cities like Beijing, Mexico City, Chung King, Cairo, Nairobi, are clogged with smog, traffic, and oppressive overcrowding. And the left hand side of that graph above is ominous. For example, Haiti has a fertility rate approaching 5 and an infinitesimal GDP. This, to me, is the central problem of the world right now – population control. It doesn’t matter how small we make our cars or how well we harness the wind if we don’t actively control population growth. And as the graph above shows clearly, it’s the poorest countries that are breeding like rabbits, compounding their own problems at a suicidal rate. The very idea that our government discouraged birth control for the last eight years except for abstinence only programs may be worse than all the other Bu$hCo atrocities combined. Here are a few graphs to ponder related to this issue:
Gross Domestic Product [wealth] by country
Fertility Rate by country
Population Density by country
And as for Haiti, any long term solutions to her problems involve a dramatic effort in the area of birth control.
Everyone in Haiti is beginning to fray – the Haitians, the relief workers, and particularly Diane Sawyer who is going to be kicking ass and taking names if they don’t start distributing food and water pretty soon. What she’s seeing is sure hard to watch for all of us. The Washington Post has a really good Satellite Graphic that shows the destruction. You can zoom down and see the problem – roads blocked by debris everywhere.
