According to the Washington Post, panic is setting in at the RNC as Donald Trump and Ben Carson continue to top polling in the party’s nomination for president. Insiders are flailing, seeing no path to toppling the two they see as a disaster for the party’s 2016 prospects. The approach of the holiday season will only accelerate the process, believes former Romney 2012 advisor Eric Fehrnstrom. There’s even talk of drafting Romney who appears uninterested:
For months, the GOP professional class assumed Trump and Carson would fizzle with time. Voters would get serious, the thinking went, after seeing the outsiders share a stage with more experienced politicians at the first debate. Or when summer turned to fall, kids went back to school and parents had time to assess the candidates. Or after the second, third or fourth debates, certainly.
Nope. Sorry.
And it gets worse:
The apprehension among some party elites goes beyond electability, according to one Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the worries.
“We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” this strategist said. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?”
Just. Wow. He’d rather have Hillary than Trump or Carson. Now that is patriotism. That anonymous strategist had better hope his name never leaks.
But South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley put her finger on it:
“You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’ ”
Exactly. Except heads up. A candidate fresh off a campaign tour tells me my Tuesday post captured the mood of voters around the district. Candidates identified with the status quo are out of favor — Republican and Democrat. Voters believe elected leaders are not listening to them.
Here in North Carolina, incumbents from both major parties fell in last week’s municipal elections (emphasis mine):
Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain and two town commissioners were booted from office in this week’s elections because of residents’ anger about the state’s plans to widen Interstate 77 with toll lanes, people on both sides agreed Wednesday.
Incumbent commissioner Danny Phillips, a toll opponent and the top vote-getter in the board race, said he believes the election “was a referendum on the toll issue.”
“The citizens wanted to have their voice heard, and they did it through the ballot box,” Phillips said. The incumbents who lost “got complacent and weren’t really listening to the citizens.”
I wrote about that issue here and here. Incumbent Republicans and Democrats lost.
Chapel Hill’s three-term Democratic mayor lost to another Democrat in “a wave of local discontent” centered on overdevelopment (emphasis mine):
A former water resources manager for the state government and longtime citizen of Chapel Hill, the 74-year-old said, “We felt ignored by Mayor Kleinschmidt and the Town Council. It was a gradual turning to CHALT, and eventually people began saying that we need new people.”
Here in Asheville’s city council race (where the sitting council is all Democrat), in a field of 5 Democrats and one Dem-leaning Unaffiliated candidate, the one Democratic incumbent lost his seat. Overdevelopment was also an issue. The surprise winner? An inexperienced novice, the Unaffiliated Brian Haynes. It didn’t hurt that his brother is Warren Haynes, but the mood is the same even here in the lefty Cesspool of Sin. The mood is not just anti-incumbent, it’s anti-establishment. Voters are saying, “Can you hear us now?”
Here’s the thing. For years we have wondered when the GOP’s base would figure out they are being screwed by the very people for whom they so religiously vote? They seem to have figured it out. But that does not necessarily mean they will turn to saner alternatives. Nor does it mean, that experienced Democratic candidates will benefit. As Independent Bernie Sanders shows surprising staying power in the race for the Democratic nomination, will Hillary Clinton’s experience work for her or against her in 2016?
It may take more than a Hitchhiker’s Guide to sort that out.
“New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday alleged that President Barack Obama’s ‘lawlessness’ contributed to recent unrest at college campuses. Over the last several weeks, a number of racially charged incidents prompted protests at Yale University and University of Missouri, putting a spotlight on racism, free speech and student athletics. Asked about the matter while campaigning in Muscatine, Iowa, Christie said it was a ‘product of the president’s own unwillingness and inability to bring people together.'”
Let the master show how you bring people together:
Ernst was being watched closely by allies of the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who saw in her an advocate for their brand of free-market, libertarian-infused conservatism. Operatives affiliated with the Kochs’ political network invited Ernst to the network’s August 2013 gathering of wealthy conservative donors at a posh resort in Albuquerque’s Santa Ana Pueblo.
Ernst later told POLITICO she had no idea “how my name came through those channels.” But her appearance at the event impressed donors and was followed by an infusion of support that helped Ernst win the GOP nomination and, eventually, a Senate seat. It also represented a new phase in the rapid expansion of the Koch-backed political network ― its willingness to become involved in primary fights among GOP candidates — potentially putting it on a collision course with the official Republican Party.
Until now, little has been known about the secretive role played by the Kochs’ donors and operatives in boosting Ernst. The Koch network has focused primarily on policy fights, mostly leaving the spadework of recruiting and nurturing candidates to the party.
But the network’s financial support for Ernst ― detailed here for the first time ― offers the first signs of a move into GOP primaries. The Kochs and their allies are investing in a pipeline to identify, cultivate and finance business-oriented candidates from the local school board all the way to the White House, and Koch operatives are already looking for opportunities to challenge GOP incumbents deemed insufficiently hard-line in their opposition to government spending and corporate subsidies.
The ambitious effort, spearheaded partly by a for-profit consulting firm called Aegis Strategic that’s backed by the Koch network, is one of several ways in which the brothers and their allies are seeking to influence the types of candidates who carry the GOP banner. The network has taken on a vetting role in the GOP presidential primary, offering favored candidates access to its donors and activists. And some within the network have even advocated targeting from six to 12 GOP House members who have run afoul of the Koch orthodoxy on fiscal issues and who are facing 2016 primary challenges, sources told POLITICO
Of course they are. They have a hundred billion dollars between them. They can buy the entire government and still have enough left over to run several countries.
But here’s the thing the article fails to grapple with. Yes, the Kochs are backing people who agree with their economic philosophy. But Ernst didn’t just run on that. She ran as a military hawk (she’s a big veteran, remember) and a hardcore Christian conservative. Check this out. If anyone wants to know if the Kochs are principled libertarians or if they really just care about getting rid of taxes and regulations only need to look at Ernst to figure that out.
It’s great that they’re talking about criminal justice reform and saying harsh things about corporate subsidies. They don’t really care about that either but it’s helpful when they use their lack of principles for good. Still, nobody should confuse what these people believe with anything but economic libertarianism — which translates to unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism, period.
As one who was never terribly enamored of Hillary Clinton’s personality to start with, I grudgingly admit to enjoying her recent near-tears transformation. Plenty of critics concede her rarely seen emotion was heartfelt, but also that it was due to the 20-hour-day rigors of the campaign trail, making her perhaps the only candidate ever to win the New Hampshire primary because she needed a nap. Still, it was refreshing to watch her punch through the icy crust of her own phoniness, so that the molten core of artificiality could gush forth.
Many of my conservative acquaintances weren’t quite as forgiving, however. Clinton, these days, is a stuck record, speaking so often of “change” that she sounds like the medicine-show huckster in Tom Waits’s “Step Right Up” (change your shorts / change your life / change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy / get rid of your wife). But I didn’t notice any change at all in my email inbox in the aftermath of her surprise victory. In fact, it more than ever resembled a nostalgia trip back to 1998, the high-water mark of Clinton hatred.
Messages poured in expressing revulsion and woe, and described resulting adverse physical symptoms, including but not limited to: nausea, dizziness, insomnia, twitching, numbness, abdominal pain, myalgia, cutaneous lesions, and retching. One friend invited me to visit him in Bermuda, where he’ll be relocating. The only silver lining that came my way was an email from the professional dirty trickster and high priest of political hijinks, Roger Stone. It was titled “the good news” and said, simply, “Out of NH C.U.N.T. lives . Gearing up!”
He wasn’t referring to Hillary’s chances in South Carolina. Rather, by using the most offensive word in the English language, the word people employ when the f-bomb has lost all potency (and the word I will henceforth replace with “special flower” so as not to give greater offense), he was referring to the acronym of his spanking-new anti-Hillary 527 group, Citizens United Not Timid (www.citizensunitednottimid.org).
[…]
Stone wants everyone to understand the mission of the organization, simply and elegantly captured in its artwork, which Stone shows us. It features a red inverted triangle at the bottom of which, is a blue triangle with a white star in the middle. At first glance, it kind of looks like the Puerto Rican flag, or Captain America’s martini glass. Stone designed it himself, and on second glance, it’s meant to whisper, not scream, “special flower.”
It was nothing more than a t-shirt scam, of course. And it inevitably failed to catch on when Clinton came in second and much more lucrative racist appeals against Obama came into vogue.
But you can tell from the Weekly Standard’s amused attitude that had it gone the other way we would have been treated to some truly memorable misogyny. If Clinton pulls it off this time I think we should be prepared. Judging from what we’re seeing already on the right, they haven’t become any more enlightened.
Roget Stone is flogging a new Hillary Clinton hate book. Until recently he was formally advising Donald Trump. And guys like Bill Maher have him on their shows and treat him as a loveable scamp. So that little t-shirt scam certainly didn’t make him a pariah. I’ll guess he’s got a lot more where that came from.
Oh hey, the media has finally discovered that the right is obsessed with immigrants
by digby
I’m so loving the mainstream media’s newfound awareness that the Republican Party is obsessed with immigration. Sheesh.
They really need to listen to talk radio once in awhile. This is a conversation between Laura Ingraham and David Brat, the man they all insisted won because Eric Cantor failed to fix the potholes in his district, not because this guy hammered him on immigration:
Laura Ingraham: Are you a man who would separate a child from her mother or father and isn’t that a hard-hearted approach and a way that you’ll never grow the Republican Party or the conservative base. I mean it’s so mean.
Brat: You hit it on the head, that is the crux of the issue and Eric Cantor is acting exactly like Obama and the Democrats basing public policy on emotion rather than reason. Just for starters, “making life work?” I mean the day you think the federal government and Caesar should make your life work, you’ve got a fundamental problem on your hands and you need to go re-read history books. Whenever you trust the federal government, federal governments do not love, they are incapable of love, so this emotional pitch that Caesar is going to take care of children is just completely irrational. Our founders knew much better. They wanted a contest of 50 states. And on the point you make about the passage of this great founding principle that children should not be punished, does that apply to all children across the globe that they somehow receive a right to be US citizens? And if that were true, that would mean all future DREAMers have a right to amnesty as every immigration law is bypassed and permanently void if you follow Eric’s logic.
I think you referred to it in the news, I know Mark Levin did last night, the Washington Times reported 60,000 kids are expected to cross the border at 225.00 a day per child., and big business gets the cheap labor that’s what they want, Eric Cantor’s their guy, but who has to pay the 225.00 a day per kids who are coming over the border in what some are calling a humanitarian crisis because Eric Cantor is sending all the wrong signals? … He wanted to put illegal immigrants into our military, which makes no sense. You’ll have non-citizens in one of the most key positions in our society, serving in the most honored spot.
This is how they talk all the time. In public. It’s no secret. And yet until Donald Trump decided to reinstate “Operation Wetback” they pretended it wasn’t happening.
People talk about the right wing bubble and the left wing bubble. I think the real problem is the Village bubble.
A University of Missouri doctoral student plans to continue research for her dissertation on the effects of the state’s recently imposed 72-hour waiting period for abortions, despite a state legislator’s push to block the research, the student told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.
“I stand by my research project,” Lindsay Ruhr said Wednesday. “I feel that my research is objective, and that the whole point of my research is to understand how this policy affects women. Whether this policy is having a harmful or beneficial effect, we don’t know.”
State Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Columbia, Missouri, who chairs the Missouri state senate’s interim Committee on the Sanctity of Life, sent a letter in late October to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood — one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars,” according to a copy of the letter posted to HuffingtonPost.com. Schaefer called for the university to hand over documents regarding the project’s approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions. Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.
[…]
A spokeswoman for the university (MU) expressed support for Ruhr’s academic freedom, but appeared to distance the school from the research.
“A doctoral student in the School of Social Work is completing research at Planned Parenthood as part of her dissertation,” university spokeswoman Mary Jo Banken told Al Jazeera. “She is employed at Planned Parenthood. She receives no scholarships from MU; nor is she the recipient of any grant money for this research.”
If you want to see real suppression of free speech, this is it:
[The]Committee on the Sanctity of Life, sent a letter in late October to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood — one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars,” according to a copy of the letter posted to HuffingtonPost.com. Schaefer called for the university to hand over documents regarding the project’s approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions. Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.
I’ve written a about the right’s ongoing crusade to interfere with research andthe doctor patient relationship on guns and abortion before. I realize that it’s really icky when students get all PC and everything but I wish that some of our liberal defenders of free speech would pay a little bit closer attention to the way the government under conservatives is actively engaging in censorship. It seems to me that’s a bigger problem.
I must confess that I’m a little bit surprised that so few journalists seem to have been familiar with “Operation Wetback” or that Donald Trump had been extolling its virtues on the campaign trail for months. I guess they don’t actually listen to what he’s saying.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll reveals that Donald Trump is viewed as the GOP candidate Republicans trust most to handle immigration. What’s more, the margin by which they prefer him is extremely wide, and it’s grown substantially since he entered the race in July:
In the debate on Tuesday, Trump reiterated the plan which half of Republicans in the U.S. support. He promised to build a wall along the nearly 2,000 mile border and to make Mexico pay for it. He also once more committed to rounding up and deporting all illegal immigrants. As he has in the past, he referenced President Eisenhower’s program from the 1950s, fatuously insisting that it must be “nice” since everybody “liked Ike,” even as he assiduously avoided calling the plan by its name: “Operation Wetback.”
Here’s Trump’s exact quote from the debate:
Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. “I like Ike,” right? The expression. “I like Ike.” Moved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back.
Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.
(LAUGHTER)
Dwight Eisenhower. You don’t get nicer. You don’t get friendlier. They moved a 1.5 million out. We have no choice. We have no choice.
The hearty laughter at that reprehensible tale certainly confirms those poll findings. He sounds as though he speaking of animals not human beings. And it would cruel to do that to animals.
Under questioning from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe,” Trump explained that he would have to create a “deportation force” to round up all these people, and has said before that it would have to include a number of American citizens, the children of these undocumented workers, because we can’t be expected to take care of them. Also, it would be cruel to separate families. Just like Ike, he is so gosh darned nice.
When Trump made his comments during the debate Chuck Todd tweeted this:
We don’t know if Todd included himself in that group but it’s a sad comment on journalism if any reporters didn’t know about Operation Wetback and even sadder that they didn’t know that Donald Trump has been saying this throughout his campaign. It is part of his standard stump speech, nothing new about it at all. I mentioned it here. The Washington Post reported on it back in September:
In Mexicali, Mexico, temperatures can reach 125 degrees as heat envelops an arid desert. Without a body of water nearby to moderate the climate, the heavy sun is relentless — and deadly.
During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were “dumped” after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home.
This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they would have to return to America. But the tactic also proved to be dangerous, as the migrants were left without resources to survive.
After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.
At another drop-off point in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants were “brought like cows” into the desert.
Among the over 25 percent who were transported by boat from Port Isabel, Texas, to the Mexican Gulf Coast, many shared cramped quarters in vessels resembling an “eighteenth century slave ship” and “penal hell ship.”
These deportation procedures, detailed by historian Mae M. Ngai, were not anomalies. They were the essential framework of Operation Wetback — a concerted immigration law enforcement effort implemented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 — and the deportation model that Donald Trump says he intends to follow.
This was not the first deportation program in America, of course. During the Red Scare of the early part of the 20th century the government deported numbers of those they determined were “subversives.” But we started deporting Mexicans in large numbers starting in the 1920s, and it didn’t stop for decades.
They didn’t call it deportation, though. They called it “repatriation,” and it happened under programs first enacted by Herbert Hoover, FDR and under various state and local officials during the 1920s and 30s. It was driven by the varying needs of the agriculture business and the political necessity for scapegoating at times of economic distress. One of their methods in these instances was to make frightening announcements of pending raids and arrests in order that the immigrant labor would “self-deport.” But the raids actually took place with harassment, beatings, family separation commonly used as methods to create terror among the population.
In 2005, California became the first state to offer an official apology for this inhumane policy. The federal government has never bothered.
There’s more ugly history at the link, some of it quite shocking.
I noticed this morning that Luke Russert and Tamron Hall both refused to use the word “Wetback” when describing Eisenhower’s program. This is a big mistake. People need to know exactly what they called Donald Trump’s “nice, humane, ‘I like Ike'” program. It brings the reality of what he’s talking about right home. His voters won’t care. They probably like it. But normal people will recognize it for what it is.
First Read this morning decides that Rubio is the frontrunner on the establishment track but they fret that he can’t really win because he’s not ahead in Iowa or new Hampshire. Why?
Remember, in this modern political era, every GOP nominee has won EITHER Iowa or New Hampshire. Right now, he’s standing in third place in public polling in both states – behind both Trump and Carson.
Think about that for a minute. They build a whole analysis around it. It goes on for paragraphs. They look at his chances in Iowa or New Hampshire from every angle. They wonder if his problem is that he has no geographical ties to either state. But at no point do they question this fatuous insistence that because every GOP nominee in the modern era has gone on to win the election won one or the other it must mean that it’s an immutable law of nature.
And obviously, it isn’t. It’s entirely possible for someone to win the presidency without winning one of those states. Indeed, one explanation as to why this has happened in the past is that the eventual winner has always had some regional tie to one of them. Unless they are also suggesting that it’s an immutable fact that any Republican must have such a regional tie, that would be the explanation.
Anyway, it’s idiotic. If Carson or Trump were to win each of those states they are saying it’s inevitable that one of them will go on to win the nomination. Do they believe that? I doubt it.
This is the sort of Russertian beltway analysis that will drive you nuts if you take it too seriously. Obviously we have no idea if Rubio can win the nomination at this point. He’s hardly breaking double digits and Cruz is right on his heels. Speculating about it under those circumstances is a parlor game at best anyway. But assuming that a candidate cannot win if they don’t win Iowa or new Hampshire is ridiculous, no matter who it is.
Remember, it wasn’t long ago that these same people insisted that no Senator could win the presidency because none had done it since 1960. Guess what?
Short film about carbon dioxide, acidification of the oceans, and a request to support a lawsuit that forces the EPA to regulate CO2 under the Toxic Substances Control Act (source)
Alternate title: “They’re building like there’s no tomorrow—and they’re right!”
When this excellent piece came out in Rolling Stone — “Goodbye, Miami” — I studied it carefully with an eye to digesting it for people with less time to read it than I had. Looking at the problem in Miami is a gateway drug to looking at the problem in all of south Florida. But there’s an easier way to see both. This article in Vanity Fair, “Can Miami Beach Survive Global Warming?” looks at just Miami Beach, the high-priced, brand-name town built on the sandbar that fronts the city of Miami itself, and it sees all of the same things.
All of these small “islands” comprise the city of Miami Beach. In the distance, upper left, is the city of Miami on the Florida mainland across the Biscayne Bay. For a map, see here.
Everything that could go wrong in Miami and south Florida can go wrong in Miami Beach, and will likely go wrong there first. Let’s take a quick look via Vanity Fair. As you read, note the following:
That the bedrock on which the region sits is porous and permeable to sea water, unlike Manhattan, which sits on granite and marble.
That the cost to shore up just this one city’s water, drainage and sewage system is almost half a billion dollars. That’s for Miami Beach alone, not the whole of Miami.
That the distance above sea level of most of the land is negligible.
That the wealth of the entire city, including residential property, depends on the perceived value of its seafront property.
That the residents are optimistic about surviving global warming.
Multiply that multi-million-dollar cost to shore up the drinking and sewer problem by more than ten to get the cost to keep the drinking water salt-free for south Florida:
Construction costs alone will run about $6 billion to desalinate just one-third of the water used for southern Florida.
All of the pieces of the problem are present in just this one microcosm, Miami Beach. From the Vanity Fairarticle (my emphasis throughout):
Can Miami Beach Survive Global Warming?
In the summer of 2013, one of the leading candidates in Miami Beach’s mayoral race, a businessman named Philip Levine, released a TV commercial that showed him kayaking his way home through traffic in a Paddington hat and a plastic poncho, accompanied by his boxer, Earl, who was kitted out in a life jacket. “In some parts of the world,” Levine said in the spot, “going around the city by boat is pretty cool. Like Venice. But in Miami Beach, when it rains, it floods. That’s got to stop. Because I’m just not sure how much more of this Earl and I can take.”
Miami Beach does indeed have serious water issues. In the hundred years since it was incorporated as a city, it has repeatedly been pummeled by major storms, one of which, the Great Hurricane of 1926, wiped out buildings, tossed ships ashore, and remains, in adjusted dollars, the costliest hurricane in American history. Essentially a long, narrow barrier island, Miami Beach is surrounded by and infused with water. Biscayne Bay (which separates the city from its larger neighbor, Miami) lies to the west, the Atlantic to the east, and a large waterway, Indian Creek, cuts through the city for much of its length.
Compounding the city’s vulnerability to major weather events is the worldwide phenomenon of sea-level rise. Due to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of ice sheets and glaciers in the Earth’s far latitudes, the global mean sea level is rising. How fast and how much is a matter of debate, with such federal agencies as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projecting, on the low end, eight inches of sea-level rise by the year 2100, and, on the high end, as much as six feet.
But Miami Beach, a low-lying city to begin with, is already feeling the effects of sea-level rise. Every time there’s a heavy rain, the locals brace for flooding on Alton Road, the main north-south thoroughfare of the city’s west side, as well as on smaller roads in the area, such as Purdy Avenue, where Levine filmed his commercial. The city’s bay side is more susceptible to flooding than its ocean side because it lies lower, less than two feet above sea level in some sections, and was built on cleared swampland that still wants to be what it used to be: a mangrove swamp.
On top of all this, Miami Beach must contend with a fairly new phenomenon that has come to be known locally as sunny-day flooding, in which Alton Road and its neighboring streets are awash in water even when no rain has fallen. This is a consequence of southeast Florida’s geology. Unlike, say, the island of Manhattan, whose bedrock is composed of hard, relatively impermeable marble, granite, and schist, Miami Beach and its neighboring towns sit upon a foundation of porous limestone. When the tides are at or nearing their seasonal highs—the highest, which occur in March and October, are known as king tides—seawater surges inward from the bay and the ocean, bubbling up through the limestone and infiltrating the sewer system. The very drains and gutters built to channel water off the streets function in reverse, becoming the conduits through which water gushes onto the streets.
About the cost to deal with the rising water:
[Mayor] Levine models himself after Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor from 2002 to 2013—as a first-time officeholder whose wealth and outsider status allow him to bypass an entrenched political culture of intransigence and inaction. After he took office, in November of 2013, Levine fast-tracked a program to install electric pumps along Alton Road and other prime flooding spots on the city’s west side so that, during a storm surge or high tide, the pumps can be switched on, suctioning water off the streets and out into Biscayne Bay.
The cost of the program is huge, in the range of $400 million—for perspective, nearly the size of the city’s annual budget. So far, the results have been encouraging. In October of 2014, with just a handful of the 80 or so planned pump stations installed, the streets stayed dry during the season’s king tide, and, this season, the results have been much the same. Still, Levine told me, “We don’t declare victory. It’s one small step in a long war that we know we’re facing.”
Note that they’ve only just started installing the planned 80 pumps. And yet, wealth and optimism dominate the story. Who is Mayor Levine? A “self-made multi-millionaire who earned his fortune in the cruise-ship business.” And he’s leading a Michael Bloomberg-style building boom:
For all the sober talk about grave and ongoing environmental challenges, it is apt that Miami Beach has a self-styled Bloombergian mayor. For, curiously, at the very same time that some climate scientists are questioning whether the city will even survive into the next century, Miami Beach is going through an economic and building boom that evokes nothing so much as Bloomberg-era New York at its most sparkly and flash. In the last 12 months alone, the city has added more than 2,000 hotel rooms, many of them under impressive imprimaturs. Tommy Hilfiger is refurbishing the historic Raleigh hotel, and Ian Schrager has given the 50s-era Seville Beach Hotel a luxury redesign and a new name, Edition Miami Beach.
Which leads to a collision of ideas. Midway through the article, that collision is expressed this way:
Given the sheer amount of money, labor, and faith invested in Miami Beach, you get the sense that this hundredth-birthday boom just might be the one that will stick. But then, there is still the disquieting and unavoidable subject of sea-level rise. How can these two huge, concurrent phenomena, seemingly at odds, be reconciled?
Harold Wanless, chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami and South Florida’s most prominent climate-change doomsayer, was emphatic when I put that question to him: “They can’t be.” The developers, he said, are “building like there’s no tomorrow—and they’re right!”
And the city’s response? The article quotes the mayor on that:
Nevertheless, as a pro-business Bloombergian, Levine sees no cognitive dissonance between fighting the seas and embracing the developers. The construction keeps the economy thriving, and the inflow of real-estate and hotel taxes helps pay for environmental initiatives—not just the pumps but also the city’s plans to elevate 30 percent of Miami Beach’s streets, replenish its oceanside dunes, heighten its existing seawalls, and create new urban greenspaces that will absorb water and carbon dioxide. By Levine’s estimation, these moves are buying Miami Beach 50 years, during which time, he is convinced, scientists will develop ingenious new ways to combat the problem.
“If, 50 years ago, I had shown you an iPhone and an iPad, and how FaceTime works, you would have thought I was insane,” Levine said. “So, 10, 20, 30 years from today, humankind will come up with amazing, innovative ideas that will create an even greater level of resiliency for coastal cities.”
There’s more in the article, but it’s more of the same.
Two Bottom Lines
Miami Beach is an economic collapse waiting to happen. If that house of cards falls, what’s the fate of mainland Miami itself, and south Florida as a region? I’ll leave you to decide. But in a storm-filled area, change can come suddenly. Even if it doesn’t, look just at the cost to maintain drinking water derived from an aquifer that’s porous and open to a rising sea. Six billion dollars is the estimated cost for south Florida, per the Rolling Stone writer. What if that cost doubles? At some point people will simply refuse to pay it, and move instead.
When that starts to happen, when people abandon the area for whatever reason, it’s over down there. We and they are sitting on a powder keg, whether it blows up quickly or slowly.
I have two bottom lines from this. People don’t have to say OMG and freeze. It’s still not too late to act (though that clock is ticking).
One way to act is to use force to create change. One way to use force is to use the courts. RICO and Martin Act investigations and prosecutions of Exxon and other fossil fuel companies count as force. Helping the lawsuit mentioned in the video above also counts as an attempt to use force. From their GoFundMe page (my emphasis):
I am a retired US EPA scientist. Last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a petition I filed with the Center for Biological Diversity under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The petition asked EPA to stop ignoring the effects of CO2, which is not only altering our climate in dangerous ways, but is also causing the acidification of the oceans…and that’s killing corals, fish, other marine life and presents a danger to human health.
We have 60 days [ending roughly November 30] to file a civil suit to force EPA to comply with TSCA and regulate CO2. The courts seem like the only avenue available to address these two existential risks before it’s too late. This account is to help pay for that litigation….
By any definitions, carbon dioxide falls under the Toxic Substances Control Act, but the EPA refuses to recognize that. The lawsuit would use the court to force them to reverse course.
Another way to act, this time to educate, is to join the call for a World War II-style mobilization of national resources — to ask the government to stop fiddling, smell the fire, and start putting it out starting now. There’s a pledge and petition at ClimateMobilization.org that you can sign and work to implement. At some point, emergency mobilization will be the only choice.
How soon is too soon to put on the brakes? How late is too late to start? We’re not these people yet. Time to help stop the car?
The earlier the nation starts that process, the more it can accomplish. That Thelma-and-Louise moment could come a lot sooner than anyone is saying. Is the time to stop … now? For more, see the second half of this Virtually Speaking episode, in which digby and I discuss exactly this issue.
For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.
Uh, that’s fewer philosophers, Marco. He’s wrong about those pay levels, of course, as philosophy major Matt Yglesias observes. But being factual wasn’t Rubio’s point anyway. Reality having a left-wing bias and all.
For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized liberal arts education. Or education in general.
Anyway, the philosophers are speaking out. The New York Times consulted Cheshire Calhoun, chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association and a philosophy professor at Arizona State University:
Ms. Calhoun notes that philosophy is not about toga-wearing thinkers who stroke big beards these days. Rather, she says, the degree denotes skills in critical thinking and writing that are valuable in a variety of fields that can pay extremely well.
While some universities have cut back or eliminated their philosophy departments, and the job prospects for academic philosophers are notoriously bad, Ms. Calhoun argues that students who pursue undergraduate philosophy degrees tend to have a leg up when applying to graduate school. The notion that philosophy means “pre-poverty” is a misnomer, she said.
At Salon, Avery Kolers, philosophy professor at the University of Louisville pushes back at the notion that market price is any measure of social worth:
… What kind of person would assume without justification or explanation that an endeavor (or a person’s) value, derives solely from the amount of money it can make?
A market economy is a tool for securing human welfare and promoting human freedom. It may or may not be effective at those things, but either way, that’s what it is: a tool. Sadly, the contemporary Republican Party has elevated that tool into a religion, bowing before it and disparaging those who don’t.
But here’s the thing: Rubio (or my recruiter, for that matter) could have made the exact same point using religious studies or theology as an example of a pointy-headed field of study we should not be subsidizing. Church gigs on average pay even more poorly than philosophy, I’m pretty sure, and why should taxpayers be encouraging private religious training?
I have a philosophy degree myself, as I’ve mentioned before:
I grew up thinking that education was its own reward. In college, I studied, philosophy, art, drama and science. Yeah, I waited tables and traveled for awhile. After college, I was appalled at the attitude of many customers. They’d ask if I was in college. No, I told them, I’d graduated. Next question: What was your major?
When I told them, their eyes went blank. “But what are you going to do with it,” they’d ask. You could see the gears going round in their heads. How did that (a philosophy degree) translate into *that* as they mentally rubbed their finger$$ together.
Then again, there were those two suited, young businessmen dining on their expense accounts one evening at Table 29.
“Tom, where have you been? Haven’t seen you here lately,” one asked as I approached their table.
I told them I had taken the summer off for a solo, cross-country trip. I’d driven out to Los Angeles, then up the coast and as far as Alaska. I had just come back to work.
They looked at each other and you could see it in their eyes: What the hell are we doing?
Life’s not always about size (of your paycheck).
Today I design factories for a living. When I’m finished doing my job, other people get jobs making products in this country.
Funny thing, this little video on our attitudes on cost and worth just came over the transom last night:
