dogtown commons

FEMA is appropriately getting criticized (and ridiculed) for staging a fake press conference, with FEMA employees standing in for reporters and lobbing softball questions at the agency’s deputy administrator:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California.

The agency — much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago — arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency’s deputy director.

The questions were predictably soft and gratuitous.

“I’m very happy with FEMA’s response,” Johnson said in reply to one query from an agency employee.

It’s easy to see why government officials might think this is okay, since the press itself so often fails to preserve its independence and skepticism. Many press conferences look more like chummy chats than pointed interrogations. Reporters are often more concerned with developing sources and staying in the good graces of powerful officials than telling readers and viewers what they need to know. The unquestioning and lazy coverage of the march to war in 2002 and 2003 was just one egregious example of how the press fails the public. And that’s when reporters are acting within the ethical norms of the profession.

When the press steps beyond those ethical norms, things get even more pathetic. Many TV stations are willing to broadcast “video news releases” produced by PR firms featuring actors instead of reporters, with no disclosure to viewers that they are watching PR rather than actual journalism. (The White House itself, which quickly repudiated FEMA’s sham news conference, embraced fake news just two years ago, even after the Government Accountability Office warned that such propaganda was unethical and illegal.) And then there are cases like Armstrong Williams, the columnist and commentator who was being paid several hundred thousand dollars by the Department of Education to promote Bush’s education policy.

With reporters acting like dupes so much of the time, it’s no wonder that government officials might think that no one would notice if the press corps was replaced with paid employees at a news conference. (And apparently no one in the press did notice, or thought it was newsworthy, until a Washington Post columnist exposed the phoniness.) And with the reporters acting like saps so much of the time, it’s no wonder that fake news shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are so populat, and fake presidential candidates like Stephen Colbert can poll in the double digits.

Another dramatic photo released by NASA on its website. Each fire is shown outlined in red. In addition to the smoke being blown hundreds of miles over the Pacific, you can see dust from Baja California also being blown by the same high winds:

(Photo was taken on Monday Oct. 22 and is from the NASA website. Thanks to LA Observed for the link.)

I was hoping California might somehow squeak through this season with few major fires, but unfortunately that was not to be. In a companion to an earlier post showing smoke from Northern California fires, here’s an aerial photo showing smoke from the current fires around Los Angeles and San Diego drifting over the Pacific (the photo is also a dramatic picture of California’s topography, with the coastline, the central regions, the Sierra Nevada and the inland deserts all clearly shown):

As Southern California burns and the Southeastern U.S. dries up, the New York Times Magazine had an important article on Sunday about the looming water crisis in the American West. It’s no wonder that the words “apocalypse” and “Armageddon” both appear in the second paragraph of the article. When will we start paying attention to all these smoke signals?

I’m glad that the media are staying vigilant against threats to our nation:

“This is going to be the most amazing blindside in American history,” said Tracy Westen, CEO of the Center for Governmental Studies, a Los Angeles-based nonpartisan research organization. “It’s like a tsunami that’s coming in 2009, and we know it’s coming but nobody is paying attention.”

My God! Scary! What terrifying event is she talking about, which will be the “most amazing blindside in American History”? (Yes, that means it will be a more amazing blindside than the assassinations of Lincoln and JFK, than the 1906 earthquake, than Pearl Harbor, than 9/11, than Katrina, than…)

It turns out Ms. Westen is talking about the switchover from analog to digital television broadcast, which may cause some of the estimated 19 percent of Americans without cable or satellite service to be left temporarily without TV after the switch, unless they upgrade their TV in the next 15 months.

Before you get too alarmed, though, rest assured that our elected officials are duly concerned about this major national security threat:

Many homes may lose complete access to television in the transition. … We cannot allow this to happen — people need television access to get news in an emergency scenario,” said Congressman Joe Baca, D-San Bernardino.

I feel safer already, knowing that Representative Baca is on the case, and that the press is doing its part to scare people into buying fancier new TVs.

Westen and Baca probably would probably be shocked to hear that some Americans don’t have a television of any kind. That’s right — no television at all! How can people even survive such privation? And I wonder if it has occurred to Baca that you can’t count on having electricity in an “emergency scenario,” and that his alarmism would be better directed toward making sure people have hand-cranked or battery-powered radios.

But silly me, I almost forgot that the Declaration of Independence says that we are endowed with “certain unalienable rights,” and among these are life, liberty, and uninterrupted television.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a good article by Tom Steinbach and Mike Howe of the Greenbelt Alliance summing up clearly and succinctly how technology, transportation, and smart development are all pieces of the puzzle as we face a future of population growth, rising energy costs, and climate change. It could have included more discussion of mass transit, but the sad reality is that most people do drive everywhere, and will for the foreseeable future, so the focus on drivers is understandable in a short article like this.

Unfortunately, their article appears side-by-side with an article by Joseph Perkins of the Home Builders Association of Northern California. Perkins makes some valid arguments, pointing out that the best way to bring down housing prices is to increase supply. That is just basic economics that many anti-development activists would rather ignore. But instead of dealing with all the interconnected issues described by Steinbach and Howe, Perkins argues solely against “no-growth, anti-housing” activists. Worse still, his proposed solution to the housing shortage seems to rely exclusively on increased sprawl and development of open space that is currently off-limits:

Bay Area environmental groups argue that most of the home building and development that occurs between now and 2030 ought to be confined to the 16 percent of the region’s land area that already is developed.

They suggest that most of 1.5 million additional residents expected in the Bay Area over the next quarter century can be accommodated by smaller-scale, infill housing development.

But that requires a suspension of disbelief. Just last year, in fact, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Design issued a report cataloguing every single infill parcel in the state that could be considered a realistic candidate for development.

If housing were built on every single one of these infill parcels, including those here in the Bay Area, they would yield only a quarter of the new housing needed to keep pace with population growth.

So even under the most optimistic scenario, three-quarters of the Bay Area’s future housing need is going to have to come from green field development. The region is going to have to zone an additional 2 to 4 percent of its acreage for home building (which would leave the region 80 percent undeveloped).

Bay Area environmentalists refuse to accept this reality. In fact, a consortium of local environmental groups actually proposes that the region add an additional 1 million acres of land to the inventory of permanent space over the next three decades - about the same time the Bay Area will be adding those 1.5 million new residents.

Imagine that: a consortium of environmentalists “actually proposes” keeping more of the Bay Area from becoming car-dependent suburbs and strip malls — how ridiculous! Meanwhile, Perkins says nothing about transportation, nothing about energy, nothing about climate change, and nothing about housing density. His only solution seems to be to keep building and building on ever-increasing amounts of land.

These are complicated issues that require a sophisticated balancing of environmental, economic and political factors. There is plenty of room for serious debate about how to deal with a growing population, a shortage of housing, and looming environmental and energy crises. But caricaturing all environmentalists as “no-growth, anti-housing” activists who “refuse to accept reality” isn’t useful, and neither are one-dimensional solutions to complex problems.

(Photo above by R80o (Mark Strozier) on Flickr)

Thomas Friedman devotes his entire New York Times Op-Ed column on Wednesday to Van Jones of Oakland’s Ella Baker Center:

The Green-Collar Solution

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Van Jones is a rare bird. He’s a black social activist in Oakland, Calif., and as green an environmentalist as they come. He really gets passionate, and funny, when he talks about what it’s like to be black and green:

“Try this experiment. Go knock on someone’s door in West Oakland, Watts or Newark and say: ‘We gotta really big problem!’ They say: ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta really big problem!’ ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta save the polar bears! You may not make it out of this neighborhood alive, but we gotta save the polar bears!’ ”

Mr. Jones then just shakes his head. You try that approach on people without jobs who live in neighborhoods where they’ve got a lot better chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than a melting glacier, you’re going to get nowhere — and without bringing America’s underclass into the green movement, it’s going to get nowhere, too.

“We need a different on-ramp” for people from disadvantaged communities, says Mr. Jones. “The leaders of the climate establishment came in through one door and now they want to squeeze everyone through that same door. It’s not going to work. If we want to have a broad-based environmental movement, we need more entry points.”

Mr. Jones, who heads the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, which helps kids avoid jail and secure jobs, has an idea how to change that — a “green-collar” jobs program that focuses on underprivileged youth. I would not underestimate him. Mr. Jones, age 39 and a Yale Law School grad, exudes enough energy to light a few buildings on his own.

The rest can be read here (for free, but registration is required). Most of the column consists of quotations from Jones spelling out his vision of how smart environmental policy can be used to foster economic development in our beleaguered cities. Jones has been getting a lot of attention lately in the environmental and mainstream press for his efforts to reframe the way people think about social justice activism and the environmental movement. It’s nice to see that powerful policy-shapers like Friedman are starting to pay attention.

Jones is one of several young, energetic and charismatic leaders who are reinvigorating and redefining urban environmentalism, among them Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx, the winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award who is also mentioned briefly in Friedman’s column. And along with stars like Jones and Carter, there are growing numbers of less prominent activists and citizens who are combining environmentalism with urban activism, the urban agriculture movement being one example. Silly politicians aren’t doing very much these days, so it’s good that others are taking the initiative to deal with some of the problems of Oakland residents.

Environmentalism and urban activism are usually seen as being distinct movements, and even in conflict with each other. Sometimes they can be. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing what problems we are going to address — neither the environment nor the desperate state of large swaths of our cities can be ignored, and these efforts to tackle problems holistically are promising steps in the right direction.

A headline in Monday’s Washington Post:

Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled

A headline in Monday’s New York Times:

An Internet Jihad Sells Extremism to Viewers in the U.S.

So much for “we’re fighting them there so that we don’t have to fight them here.” That never really made any sense, but this pair of headlines appearing the same day really drives the point home. Our war in Iraq isn’t preventing terrorists from fighting us at home — on the contrary, our war in Iraq is being used as a recruiting tool by Al-Qaeda, and the message is appealing not just to alienated young men in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but also to some alienated young men right here at home. As the Times article, by Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet, says:

Mr. Khan, who was born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Queens, is an unlikely foot soldier in what Al Qaeda calls the “Islamic jihadi media.” He has grown up in middle-class America and wrestles with his worried parents about his religious fervor. Yet he is stubborn. “I will do my best to speak the truth, and even if it annoys the disbelievers, the truth must be preached,” Mr. Khan said in an interview.

While there is nothing to suggest that Mr. Khan is operating in concert with militant leaders, or breaking any laws, he is part of a growing constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of Al Qaeda and other groups, a message that is increasingly devised, translated and aimed for a Western audience.

Terrorism experts at West Point say there are as many as 100 English language sites offering militant Islamic views, with Mr. Khan’s — which claims 500 regular readers — among the more active. While their reach is difficult to assess, it is clear from a review of extremist material and interviews that militants are seeking to appeal to young American and European Muslims by playing on their anger over the war in Iraq and the image of Islam under attack.

The ability of Al Qaeda to attract sympathizers and even foot soldiers in the U.S. is disturbing, but it’s not a surprise. It was completely predictable that the invasion of Iraq would be a propaganda goldmine for Al Qaeda, which is one of many reasons that so many of us fought against the march toward war in 2002 and 2003. As unsurprising as the increase in “homegrown” terrorists and fellow travelers is, the whole Times article is really worth reading. It’s the best account I’ve seen yet of the inside workings of the terrorist propaganda machine, and it traces one young American’s path from nonviolent Islam to a jihadist ideology and an active role in spreading terrorist propaganda on the internet.

I hope people in Washington are taking note. The article is a reminder of what should have been obvious all along: a “war on terrorism” that relies almost exclusively on hunting down and killing terrorists will be counterproductive. This “war” will only be won by waging a better propaganda war than Al Qaeda wages, and by prudently weighing the long-term ramifications next time our leaders have an urge to start bombing a Muslim country.

The candidates for the Republican nomination for President seem to be competing for the “most hawkish” award, from John McCain’s “joke” about “bomb Iran” (sung to the tune of “Barbara Ann”) to Mitt Romney’s statement that he we should “double Guantanamo”. This might be a politically smart way to get votes, but it’s a frightening and dangerous way to approach the problem of terrorism. Rudy Giuliani, who should know better than any of them the consequences of Islamic radicalism, has chosen foreign policy advisers like Michael Rubin, one of the geniuses behind the Iraq debacle, and Norman Podhoretz, who is distinguishing himself by arguing more vociferously than anyone else that we should start bombing Iran.

I walked the dog to the Sausal Creek trail off El Centro yesterday, as I sometimes do when I have the time for a longish walk, and I took a few pictures while I was there. It’s a beautiful little canyon in between residential neighborhoods, but it feels more secluded than it actually is, because of the depth of the canyon, the burbling creek masking city noise, and the heavy vegetation blocking views of the houses overlooking the canyon. Dimond Canyon is about as undeveloped as Oakland gets on the West side of Highway 13. It’s a little piece of wildness that never quite got gobbled up by the city as it grew.

More photos and text below: (more…)

There’s one thing I haven’t seen mentioned in the coverage of Eric Erik Prince’s testimony to Congress yesterday. Prince is the founder and CEO of Blackwater, the security contractor that is under so much scrutiny for its role in Iraq. Some of the criticism of Blackwater has been that taxpayers are paying more to Blackwater that it would cost to have the same job done by the military itself. This came up in Prince’s testimony:

He also disputed the math that concludes security contractors cost far more than American forces to protect U.S. diplomatic personnel. In its report, Waxman’s committee said Blackwater charges the government $1,222 each day for a single security contractor, which works out to $445,000 on an annual basis. That’s six times the cost of a U.S. soldier, the report said.

Prince said there’s a large amount of expensive training for military personnel that the government pays for, but is not calculated in these unflattering estimates of what his company charges.

“That sergeant doesn’t show up naked and untrained,” Prince said.

Prince’s argument is that Blackwater needs to train and equip their employees, so any comparison should include the cost of training and equipping U.S. soldiers and marines, not just the cost of their salaries. This sounded somewhat plausible at first, but then I remembered something — most Blackwater contractors are former members of the most elite US armed forces (Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, etc). So in fact Blackwater hasn’t borne most of the costs of training their employees — in fact, it’s just the opposite: the US military is spending a huge amount of time and money training these elite troops, then Blackwater is hiring those people away and charging the US Government large amounts of money for their service.

So Prince’s argument is really nonsense — not only is Blackwater not paying many of the costs of training their employees, but in fact American taxpayers are further subsidizing Blackwater by training the people who go on to work for the company. To get a sense of how much training these troops get at taxpayer expense before they go on to work at Blackwater, see this job announcement at Talking Points Memo, which outlines the minimum experience of job applicants:

Please do not apply if you do not not meet these basic requirements.

· 8 years of Military service with qualifications in one of the following: US Navy SEALS, Army Special Forces or Rangers, Marine Force Recon, Air Force PJ or CCT

· Must have or be eligible for US Government Secret Clearance. Must be a US Citizen!

· Must have a minimum of one year experience in Iraq or Afghanistan

For Prince to claim that his company, rather than American taxpayers, is paying for the training of his employees seems quite disingenuous. I wish someone at the hearing, or someone in the press afterwards, had pointed out how little sense his defense actually made.

There was a spot on the local news about Bush’s veto of the bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), which offers health insurance to children whose families who are not poor enough to qualify for medicaid, but who are not rich enough to afford private insurance. The TV story briefly profiled one child in the program, and his father said that getting his kid into S-CHIP was “like winning the lottery.” Similar sympathetic profiles of S-CHIP recipients must be showing on TV stations all over the country right now.

Regardless of the merits of the S-CHIP expansion bill Bush vetoed today, members of congress who voted against the bill must be watching these stories on the news around the country and shaking in their shoes with fear. I haven’t closely followed the political wrangling over this bill, but after seeing that spot on the news and imagining the plentiful supply of sympathetic families who can be shown on the news or used as props by politicians, I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of “no” votes become “yes” votes by the time the Democrats bring up the bill again to try to override Bush’s veto.