1. The documents posted aren’t the Pentagon Papers. They contain nothing people didn’t already know. They say the War in Afghanistan is going badly and was never funded well. No news there.

2. Regardless, these were classified documents and leaking classified documents to unclassified sources is bad. Yet, it was a matter of time. If anyone has been following the Top Secret America series on the Washington Post, you know the Intelligence Community in DC has almost 900,000 people. Holy Jumping Jesus, it’s a government jobs program! And all of those people have been cleared. That’s an awful lot of Trust with a capital-T. If 99% of the people involved are honest and 1% of those people feed information to places like Wikileaks, that’s still 900 people — most of them contractors.*

According to Threat Level, the Pentagon claims it has someone but I would be shocked — SHOCKED — if that was the only person leaking to wikileaks. By a long shot.

3. Why is everyone breathlessly surprised at the rise of rogue media?  Hell, if spammers and phishers can put up renegade sites, run them for a few hours, tear them down, and bring them up somewhere else, why are we so surprised someone with a hard drive can move a PHP wiki?

Really? Surprise? Hosting sites abound — many nicely outside the US jurisdiction. How hard is it to find a DNS server, a LAMP stack, and SCP to upload files? Wikileaks cannot be stopped or killed — and certainly not by some angry words and a shaking finger. If you can hide your millions offshore, you can certainly run a website.

It’s point #3 that gets me — the shock and surprise. I want to Vanna White and say, “The Internet — Let Me Show You It.” What did people think was going to happen when mass communications met guerrilla disclosure and guerrilla journalistic tactics?  Or did we all believe we were going to hold hands and watch FOX News together, forever?

* As a professional security weenie, I have a hard time believing in a mere 1% of dishonesty in contractors.

The President should stop talking and acting on anything else – not the deficit, not energy, not the environment, not immigration, not implementing the health care law, not education. He should make the whole upcoming mid-term election a national referendum on putting Americans back to work, and his jobs bill. Are you for it or against it?

But none of this is happening. The hawks and blue dogs are still commanding the attention. Herbert Hoover’s ghost seems to have captured the nation’s capital. We’re back to 1932 (or 1937) and the prevailing sentiment is government can’t and mustn’t do anything but aim to reduce the deficit, even though the economy is going down.

To which I say: Yes. That. I point to that and say, do that.

I am sadly addicted to the C-SPAN morning call-in show* and every topic, it does not matter what, segues near instantly to “and I do not have a job.” Don’t we have several thousand miles of Gulf Coast that needs to be cleaned? Do we not have idle people who could clean it? Is there not something we can do?

And I am totally for a payroll holiday on the first $20,000 income. Nothing will get money moving faster than a payroll tax holiday.

Anyway. That. Every time I hear Obama talk about anything that is !jobs bill I will get itchy and bitey and ranty. Not that I will ever vote for a Republican after the last decade but I might not be so keen to donate much cash.

Callers on the C-SPAN morning call-in show are the sort of people who would call in to the C-SPAN morning call in show.

Understanding risk is important to understanding what happened in the Gulf and also what happened on Wall Street. For the Gulf, the issues with dealing with risk are simpler to understand: in a straight up but difficult engineering project quantizing and assessing risk is a well-known process, but dealing with mitigating risk is a matter of money. One must pay for the extra layers of protection or reinforcement. Even if risk is properly assessed, it costs money to mitigate the risks. Spending the money to mitigate the risks cuts into profit margins and adds to project overheads. BP made business choices over engineering choices to maximize profits at the expensive of mitigating risk. Destroying the entire Gulf of Mexico is a difficult consequence to conceptualize — it looks awful big! have you seen it? — so the risk of something that catastrophic is pulled off the table and labeled as “ridiculous.” Engineers are over-conservative whiners, anyway, when money can be made.* Risks were taken with the implicit assumption that if something did happen, the US would step in and BP’s liability would be capped.

The Wall Street risk is similar to the Gulf although the damage is in numbers instead of the environment. The risk of actually damaging the world economy is too large of a risk to contemplate. It cannot possibly happen! So we can over-leverage (Lehman Brothers) or create huge bad investments (Goldman Sachs) or insure all these bad investments (AIG) and nothing bad can happen! Because the numbers may be large but they certainly are not as large as the entire economy. Besides, the FDIC insures depositors so what does it matter if a proprietary trading desk loses everyone’s money? Sure the bank might close and the trader might lose their job if things go bad but look at all this money to invest!

Risk is calculable; most risk is known on a certain level. Risk is understood. But risk pays off in large financial reward, so humans wired to seek out large financial reward will pursue the risk. And they have found a way to fob off the downsides.

The core problem we have right now, today, is that risk is a throw of the dice and the system is rigged so if the dice come up snake-eyes the results are socialized. The bigger the risk, the more the downsides are subject to being covered by the Government. “Privatize the profits and socialize the risk.” When the risk is socialized corporations, constantly in the pursuit of profits, will negate any downside to risk to maximize their returns. This is what a corporation does. Without external pressure for culpability for the downsides of risk, a corporation will never mitigate the risk (expensive) in return for profits. If the corporation is not responsible for the downsides of risk, they’ll just rampage.

This is where the Government has a role to play. The Government can do precisely three things to reign in this behavior:

* Regulate. The Government can enforce a standard playing field with a certain floor of risk mitigation in return for safety and assurance. In return, the Government gives its stamp of approval.

* Litigate. The Government can sue in a post-mortem after disaster to recoup the funds used for cleaning up disaster after risk failed to pay out.

* Regulate AND Litigate. Force corporations to adhere to basic standards and then sue for liability depending on how may of these standards were met.

In an ideal world, we want the Government to do #3. We want the Government to be a licensing and auditing body that forces corporations to a certain level of responsibility and litigate for damages to recoup costs post-disaster. They are supposed to be a third party, not-for-profit, objective body that says, “You do X or else.” Today, for these “Too Big to Fail” institutions, we have none of these.** It’s cheaper to lobby/bribe than it is to comply to regulations, and it is cheaper to pay out on lawsuits than apply safety standards to mitigate the risk. Government is not properly funded with auditors to audit everything that needs auditing. Regulations have been continuously relaxed over the last thirty years.

We should be pressing the Government to enforce the same standards on everyone:

* No one is too big to fail, not even enormous banking institutions or car companies or oil companies.
* Assume a “you break it you bought it” mentality.
* Force corporations to build walls between “risky” business practice and routine business practice.
* Fund Government auditing with teeth.

I don’t think we’re going to do any of these because we, as Americans, are so wrapped up in the concept that a lack of regulations == jobs and short term profits that we cannot get off the mark — and it’s simply not true. It’s a PR job done by the corporations.

The core problem is risk. We need to start having a real conversation about risk across the board. It’s an abstract subject but we’re not having it so the big corporations are being allowed to walk away with their risks still being socialized.

* Engineers who are trained to be paranoid doubly-so.
** Small to mid-sized companies are regulated up the wazoo. Don’t get me wrong. It seems that the bigger you are, the less the regulations mean to you because you can cover the costs of the inevitable litigation by finding the change in the seat cushions and you can afford a huge PR media buy to cover your butt.

My instant reaction was to be completely appalled. And thus, I made a comment.

Later I realized the man was simply coughing up the party line and not a new party line for any politician in America. His sin was not to have an original thought — he did not have an original thought — but to accidentally tell truth in a prepared statement on camera. He felt he would have sympathy and cover from the chattering classes. Isn’t this what they all say?

His sin was to say out loud what we already know: these people posing for the camera and giving us a bit of political theater are all bought and sold by corporations. If their patronizing corporation should suddenly die due to, say, killing off a few States we may or may not have been using* and a chunk of Ocean we sort of liked, then said politician is out of a job. And Joe Barton is very sad indeed because now his corporate masters will not have the cash on hand to pay him. Very sad. He is very, oh so very sorry. Especially as his main backer owned a 25% stake in the well now gushing into the Gulf. That $20 billion escrow fund — not even paid out at once but over years and not even compelled but sort of a gentlemanly agreement! — means he won’t get his payoff and his golf junkets.

The “small people” comment from the other day also told us what we already knew: we’re in a war between Corporations and Democracy. And the Corporations are winning. They control it all. They have managed to get rid of the regulations that may have capped profits and kept people safer. They have pursued profit to the detriment of entire countries — Greece is never going to climb out of its hole. They get what they want when they want it. And here is this guy making it plain to us all just how much he’s in the pocket of the very people he is supposed to be overseeing.

Democracy is losing. Freedom is losing.

People are very tightly controlled. We have to throw out bottles and be subjected to searches at the airport. We have road laws. Employers can read our text messages and emails on the job. And because we are afraid of terrorists we are even more controlled than before — the government can tap our phones, sniff our transmissions, and not even bother to read us our Miranda rights. Terrorism! Terrorism Terrorism Terrorism! If you don’t like this, you’re with the terrorists!

Corporations, though. If we try to hold a Corporation’s feet to the fire, especially something as filthy and polluting as the oil industry, it’s Socialism. Regulate health care? Socialism. Suggest cap-and-trade or carbon taxes? Socialism. Suggest we should get rid of the proprietary trading desk or regulate derivatives? Socialism.** Socialism, socialism, socialism. Don’t control the free market because it is good and perfect and never does anything wrong and self regulates and oh, did you just lose your house and you cannot get health care? And were you in the Florida panhandle and now you’re covered in oil? Sucks to be you. Because if we regulate Corporations we lose our freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedoms!

The corporations are winning and to prove it, a corporation vaporized some States through malfeasance and then used their puppet Congressman to demand an apology for being mean to them. We gasp! The truth, it is an ugly beast.

The only good thing about the Deepwater Horizon spill, the only silver lining, is that cover it gives the the Government to fight back. A teeny tiny bit.

Funny, I wanted to talk about this neat graphic about how energy in the US is used and wasted and how changing to wind power does nothing about the use of oil in the US but I have gotten myself way off topic.

* Are we using Alabama? Did anyone keep the receipt?
** These cries of Socialism are also paid for by Corporations.

I wanted something else out of Obama’s address yesterday. And I’m not certain what precisely. I felt like he was reciting my blog. All the things I wanted was there:

- Hanging the spill around BPs neck like a big, fat, decaying albatross.
- Making it clear that we are past Peak Oil and we have an Issue.
- Making moving to the new source of fuel a point of national pride/Apollo Program-ish.
- And etc.

Here’s the rub. I’m just some jerk who writes on a blog. I can spit out all these things I would like to see — the primary one using this horrible disaster as our “Sputnik” moment to give the entire United States a big jolt of realization that we are losing. Barry is not a blogger. He is President of the United States and I would like something more substantial than words.

I walked away feeling like that’s all we got here: words.

I have been trying not to add my voice to the chorus of “Do Something, Dude” because I know damn well the man is a law professor and now a petroleum engineer but I heard nothing but quibbling pass his lips. I wanted to hear the words “carbon tax.” I wanted to hear that the US is going to start taking over operations because BP is obviously worthless. I wanted to hear something, anything specific. Something to hold on to. Something real.

I know the White House is trying desperately to avoid the Carter “Malaise.” But I want to shake them until beans fall out. The Oval Office is hard core. Why not use the opportunity?

I shake my tiny fist.

Every pundit — right, left, center, on the moon, whatever — is howling for Obama and the Federal Government to do something about the BP Oil Spill. No one has any suggestions what that “something” is, only “something” must be done and it must be done “now.” Would a nice speech plug the hole? Some words keep the horrible pictures of oil covered birds from getting all over the Internet, livelihoods destroyed, and entire states wiped out? We elected a guy who can keep his cool in the face of adversity and here he is, keeping his cool in the face of massive adversity, and we’re flipping out because he is keeping his cool in the face of adversity.

I asked myself the honest question: “What should the Federal Government do?” That lead to the more interesting question: “How did we get here?” And I came up with my friend, the bullet points.

How We Got Here:

1. We are approaching a condition called Peak Oil. The easy to reach oil fields are tapped out so oil companies, to keep up with the insatiable demand for dead plant pumped out of the ground in the form of fuel and profits, must venture further and further afield.

2. While venturing further afield, oil companies must take on great amount of risk.*

3. Mitigating risk is extremely expensive. It requires stricter regulation, third party validation and audits, expensive engineering solutions to ensure safety. Knowing a little bit about Six Sigma is helpful to understanding what BP was attempting to avoid. Mitigating great amounts of risk to drill safely costs great amounts of money.

4. Risk analysis, risk mitigation, business continuity and disaster recovery are all basic business processes that BP should have undertaken, and likely did, but decided instead to socialize the risk to privatize the profits.** They had two major disasters prior to this one: a major Alaska oil spill and a Texas refinery explosion. Neither caused the slightest hardship for BP, so “big dangerous risks” meant “the Government will cover the costs of cleanup so we’re good.”

5. Third party audit and validation through licensing is one of the few ways to force dirty companies to be good citizens. Otherwise, see #3, above. Mitigating risk meeting requirements is very expensive.

6. It was cheaper, during the Bush Administration and into the Obama Administration, to simply bribe auditors and staff Interior’s audit and compliance department with lobbyists than it was to mitigate the risk on the rigs.

7. Certainly it was on the Obama Administration’s list to audit and reform the Department of Interior, but it was somewhere below the Euro imploding, the Financial Crisis, 10% unemployment, North Korea, Iran… he is not a bored man.

Big risks + no risk mitigation + cutting corners + socialized penalty for failure + no third party oversight == BOOM.

This brings us to “the Federal Government needs to DO SOMETHING.” So far the Government has:

1. Provided extensive financial assistance. (This was reported in the Economist at length but not in the US papers, which was weird.)
2. Deployed the Coast Guard.
3. Deployed the Navy.
4. Fired people in the Department of Interior.
5. Provided all the scientific and engineering logistic support they can.
6. Opened up civil and criminal cases against BP which may or may not be helpful.

The Federal Government does not have petroleum engineers or the equipment to go undersea and plug the leak. Nor do they own the rig, the equipment, or the wreck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. They must rely on BP, who has the equipment on the scene, to cap the leak before the Federal Government can unleash assistance to start the unbelievably massive cleanup. The Government can make some suggestions and keep people away while BP tries to work, but reality is that they cannot actually do anything.

And this is deeply frustrating because BP is incompetent.

This brings us to: What should Obama Do Now? I cannot see anything he can do right now. Walking along the Louisiana Coast looking frowny might make for some okay media coverage but the reality is, until the well is capped and the oil stops spewing, he can not do anything except provide some optics.

What do I think the Government should do once the well is capped and cleanup has begun? Here are my suggestions, and take them or leave them, but this is all I have:

1. Reform the Department of Interior from top-down. Fund and mandate all third party government regulations and audits. Put the screws down on licensing. Force the oil companies to pay to mitigate risk.

2. Pull BP US’s leases until they go through a complete safety audit. Yes, it will spike oil prices but we can no longer afford to socialize the end result of ignored risk. Force the company to have a hand their own risk and force them to pay enormous financial penalties.

3. Start a Manhatten Project/Apollo Space Program for getting off oil. Make it the #1 National Priority. Make it a point of National Pride. Run commercials. Run op eds. Show dead birds 24/7 on TV. Run anything to get the public turned in that direction. If Congress cannot figure out a way to pass funding, find it in the already allocated Defense Budget. God knows, that Defense Budget is mammoth. Do anything, anything at all, for funding a massive initiative to get us away from the death by dead plants. And do it now. We should have done it 10 years ago.

This is it. This is the last great warning we will get. We must change.

* BP keeps using this excuse that this enormous risk was “too remote to be quantifiable.” This is bullshit.
** Sound familiar? There’s a trend…

Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, the new GOP Candidate for the open Senate seat in Kentucky, went on NPR and Rachel Maddow (and other, lesser-known places) and articulated his pure Libertarian position on the Civil Rights Act. He does not believe the Government should interfere with private enterprise and tell privately held companies who they can hire or who they can do business with. Thus, turning away black people from the Woolsworth’s counters is okay. He wouldn’t personally go to Woolsworth’s if they did but if Woolsworth’s didn’t want to serve black people or hire black people simply because they’re black, he’s good with that because Government does not have a right to interfere with private free markets and individual freedom.

People started digging and discovered — amazing! — Rand Paul’s very internally consistent Libertarian philosophy right out of the Fountainhead. Surprise!  A guy named after Ayn Rand is a devotee!*

I’m a little disappointed he’s now backing off on his statements. It’s too bad. I love Victoriana! His platform is great for 1880! Yay 1880! Yay Steampunk!

His articulated position is not one of racism  — and I sincerely doubt he is a racist — but he is standing on ideology on a specific position: to be Truly Free, men have the right to be terrible to the rest of mankind without Government interference on their own recognizance and should pay whatever price society exacts. The problem is both a lack of context and a lack of history. First, society doesn’t exact a price from racial discrimination. Otherwise we wouldn’t have needed the Civil Rights Act.** Second, the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s upheld this purely Libertarian notion of freedom on multiple occasions in all sorts of areas — you can thank the Supreme Court of the 1880s for the whole Corporations are People nonsense. Most notably, Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) upheld the distinct rights of private enterprise (and, granted, the state, since this was about segregation laws in the state of Louisiana) to segregate at will. Hey, the decision says, black people can go make awesome stuff just like white people. You’re just not applying yourself! Stop your whining and go make awesome stuff! What do you mean you can’t get a bank loan to start a business or buy a house or… The opinions are online and pretty entertaining reads. This was overturned by Brown vs. Board of Education which lead to the Civil Rights Movement and we are where we are today.

The problem is, in the real world of big-time politics in a system where whomever builds the biggest coalition between different voting blocks wins, running on an pure theoretical ideology based on a science fiction novel is going to run into operational problems. Purity of Ideology rarely gets one kissing babies and hugging old ladies and giving speeches at the VFW hall so he’s doing well to get this far. I am surprisingly cool with his internally held convictions and his loyalty to his internally consistent ideology — when he’s not busy running from it. It’s great that he at least has one which puts him above other politicians. He simply shouldn’t be surprised when people, after listening to him, go: “…. what? Can you say that again?”

* Maybe he got his copy from someone on Mad Men!
** This is the core point I think Dr. Paul missed. There’s all sorts of things to unpack here but the 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the passing of the Civil Rights Act was not exactly a free market paradise and ultimately, the Government forced down a fairness as part of the rules of the road. Agree or not, this was the point.  We gloss over the 1870s-1910, the core of this period, in our history books.  Perhaps deliberately.

But it’s not just the incredibly lax overview of the deep water oil drilling industry where the Government gleefully hired oil industry lobbyists to fill key roles in oversight and licensing organizations and simply didn’t bother to do any inspections. This is one of many places where the cheap cost of business in the name of “free-enterprise” is passing on horrors to not just us but to everyone on the planet — it’s the agricultural industry and energy and mining and manufacturing where, in exchange for ‘cheapness’ we get a worse world in lax oversight and pollution and horrors. We not only enable these spills but we subsidize them.,

It’s time we, as Americans, start paying for our messes.

If you want cheap ethanol…
If you want to fill your enormous SUV with gas…
If you want expensive foreign wars…
If you want cheap hamburger at the supermarket…

It’s time to pay for it. It’s time to stop hiding the costs of things and bring them scurrying out into the light like hunting for cockroaches.

But because we clearly do not have the political will to enforce and tighten regulations on corporations because they dump money into our electoral system, it’s time to do what we, as Americans, do best: put the screws to regular people. Force the people to pony up for all the cheap things in life. Make gas at the pump cost $5, $6, $7. Only when people have to pay for the costs of “drill, baby, drill” will they make demands for change.

I have precisely three requirements for a carbon tax:

1. It be painful.
2. That it be clear when you are being charged in big bold letters on your food, your energy bills, and at the gas pump.
3. The money collected go only to paying all the subsidizes, to pay for our foreign wars, to pay for the cleanups of all the pollution and hazardous waste that our Fine New American Citizens, the Corporations, have foisted upon us. With, preferably, a website to track it.

I know this will never happen. Our backboneless government will only backdoor the screws to the people so people do not see a clear line between malfeasance from government (no oversight) and corporations and cold, hard cash. But I can wish…

So I come out in favor of a carbon tax. A great big one. A great big fat juicy one. Because only when we hit people in the pocketbook will people even begin to wake up and see the price of these decisions.

And one other thing: if corporations want to be treated like citizens and have the full run of the Constitution, I believe “jury of their peers” is in there, too. It’s time to start charging corporations as a whole with criminal charges. Imagine if a person or small group had destroyed the Gulf of Mexico. Follow that thought.

Mayor Bloomberg points out, reasonably enough, that if someone is placed on the terrorism watchlist/no-fly list, that person should be denied when going through the background check to purchase a firearm. Makes a certain amount of sense, yes? If the FBI thinks you shouldn’t fly, maybe you shouldn’t buy a gun or explosives to cause mass havoc on the ground.

But NO!

The same cast of idiots who want to strip accused terrorists of their citizenship and drag them off to camps to torture them would never think to deprive these same people of their Second Amendment Rights. Because dammit, that potential terrorist can have all the guns he (or she) wants until he or she converts to a real terrorist and kills people! And at that point we remove all their rights, except the Second Amendment one, and torture them until they tell us where they got the guns, which may or may not be “Meijer.*”

Now, granted, there is a serious argument about innocent people on the terrorist watch list who may be deprived of their right to own a vast collection of firearms. And supposedly these people don’t fly and would only realize this when they went to buy a gun. That doesn’t make the suggestion less reasonable. It exposes a need for transparency into this terrorist watch list and an appeals process to get off it.

This hurts my head.

* If you’re a Michigan terrorist. But we don’t talk about those cuz they’re not brown.

Just because a citizen is unpopular or commits unpopular acts does not mean you may strip the man of his citizenship and deprive him of his lawfully and constitutionally granted rights. We did not strip citizenship from John Wilkes Booth or Charles Guiteau or Leon Czolgosz or Lee Harvey Oswald (who was himself assassinated) or Timothy McVey or Sirhan Sirhan or the guy who shot up Fort Hood or anyone else who has done anything reprehensible. Unlike our Times Square bomber, these guys carried out their plans to fruition. Are these not all terror acts of one sort or another?

Are our elected representatives so craven and fearful of some ‘other’ across the ocean that they will not stand proudly and tall behind Due Process and the US Constitution? Do they truly wish to strip a citizen of their citizenship as standing accused and not yet convicted?

We are better than this.

Update: Joe Lieberman is writing some fancy pants bill to strip people of their citizenship based on what Joe Lieberman wants to see in citizens. What a coward.

I, now, am penning a bill to strip whiny US Senators of their citizenship for sucking. I want to move to Connecticut just to vote against him when he’s next up.

Scalia argued in the Hamid case that a policy of ‘denaturalization’ would force the US Constitution to support a suspended habeaus corpus which he would never support.