This is the second response by Megan to Maria's post. There are one or two gems in here that I think will interest Karen. (Apologies if they don't.) I should note here that these posts all contain a number of links to validate or provide more info on something mentioned, but those links disappear when imported to SI.
I know I'm going overboard, but
The smug tone of this post [link to Maria post doesn't replicate on SI] really chaps my ass--not least because it's wrong about so many things other than its fundamental misunderstanding of American geography.
For example, this passage:
The abundance – of food, cars, roads, tv stations, just about everything a European could imagine, and then some – is probably unprecedented historically, and limited geographically to America. Growing up comfortably middle class in Ireland in the early 1980s, I found it almost unbelievable that T.V. Americans seemed to drink orange joice every day when we had it just for Christmas, went shopping just for fun and could afford to keep their enormous fridges constantly full. (T.V. Americans were forever hanging up the phone without saying goodbye, slamming car doors, and divorcing each other at the drop of a hat, but that’s another day’s incredulity.)
In my own fuzzy-logic way, I’d presumed that the cheapness of every day goods in the US was mostly because of the flexibility of the economy, i.e. the ability of employers to pay low wages, fire at will, offer few benefits, and generally pass on costs like environmental protection or maternity benefits. A few weeks in California cured me. Sure, labour ‘flexibility’ helps. But the cheap price of petrol is more important than I’d ever imagined. As newspapers and coffee breaks filled with doomsday scenarios of paying $6 dollars a gallon for gas, I sat down one day and did the sums.
That’s what we pay in Ireland. Today. Most of the extra cost goes in taxes, and the cost of that affects every imagineable part of life. Paying more for oil makes everything more expensive – getting food to the shops, from there home, cooking it, and cleaning up afterwards. It means more people rely on public transport, creating a policy feedback loop of greater government spending and making more citizens using shared resources every day of their lives. It means we don’t run central heating or (if we had ever needed it) air conditioning all or most the time, and probably just put on another jumper when it’s cold. It means we advertise cars based on their fuel consumption and we don’t have ‘all you can eat’ restaurant buffets. Teenagers don’t have their own jobs and cars, and rely on their parents, the bus or shanks mare to get around. They get it off in parks instead of cars. Not that many people drive to the gym. Until recently, not many people needed to go to the gym either.
Others on CT understand far better than I do the economic significance of America’s globally unique strategy of running a vast economy on cheap, cheap oil. And yet others can discuss how this dependence makes America less and less secure. (And how Amerca’s efforts to secure its own oil supply has made the world less and less secure for the rest of us.) It’s been a simple but revealing insight for me; the myth that America’s economic engine purrs along fuelled by of the virtues of its rather brutal labour market is only partly true. US work places may be dominated by the masochistic ideology of living to work, but the secret of success is simple. America lives or dies on cheap oil.
Yes, more Americans have cars than peoeple abroad. But the idea that Ireland's poverty in the 1980s was a result of expensive oil, rather than a thousand years of colonial dependance, its economic dependance on its former colonial master during the period when said empire had entered a period of rapid economic senescence, a debilitating regulatory and taxation scheme, and the resulting outmigration of many of its best and brightest . . . well, words fail me. Before committing to this position, Maria should have stopped and asked herself how, if cheap oil is the sine qua non of purchasing power, Ireland's GDP has gotten so close to America's on a PPP (purchasing power parity) basis while still producing gas prices high enough to cram the entire population into gas-sipping econoboxes. (I say this as someone who loved the little Renault Megane she drove around Ireland for a week--and whee! wasn't it fun to teach myself to drive manual in a country that is roughly 100% hills.) She might also have noted that the number of passenger cars per capita in Ireland was 217 in 1980, 227 in 1990, and 342 in 1999, which would seem to link ownership of passenger cars to per-capita GDP much more strongly than to the price of gas. This makes sense; while gas is indeed pricey in Ireland, the car we rented went five days of heavy driving on a single tank of gas.
In one way, we are much less vulnerable to high oil prices than Europe, because when oil prices get high, a lot of our oil gets cost-effective to extract, giving a boost to part of our economy, and reducing the volume (though not necessarily the dollar value) of our imports from abroad. When high oil prices hit Ireland, on the other hand, the only option they have is to go out looking for peat to burn.
Nor did we ever really have orange juice every day because we have cheap oil; orange juice was a daily treat for at least middle-class Americans before WWII. We have orange juice every day because we have orange trees in our country, a transportation network that can deliver it without crossing an ocean, and a population rich enough to buy it. The Irish population, on the other hand, didn't have those thinks, so they had milk instead.
But that's quibbling. The main thing I wanted to say is that while there is deadweight loss to the economy from taxing fuel (indeed, the deadweight loss is what the fuel tax is pretty much designed to produce), it is not equal to the entire value of the tax. Much of the fuel tax revenues can be used to offset other taxes, which boosts consumer income. There is a resulting shift in behaviour (people drive smaller cars), but not necessarily a big shift in purchasing power. Orange juice was a luxury item mainly because Ireland was very poor, not because fuel taxes made it too expensive to transport.
A more reasonable reading of history would suggest that government policy decisions after the British pulled out kept Ireland poor despite a very high investment in human capital, and that when those decisions were reversed (in the 1980s in Britain, and in the 1990's in Ireland), the Anglo-Irish economy boomed. Since those policy changes made the Irish and British economies more like the American one, it would seem to me that the "Myth" she claims to have abandoned was in fact more true than the one that she has installed in its place.
Then there's this:
And then you see what’s happening in New Orleans. Where a natural disaster has shone the light on what’s ugly and usually hidden in American life; the inherent and unconsidered racism, the casual brutality, the values that prize property above people. You see people being blamed for being poor. You see black people penned in like animals and made to live in their own filth. You see in America people dying of thirst. Of thirst. You see people pushed beyond civility, beyond reason, beyond any imaginable breaking point, to be met with gun fire and the self-serving response ‘there, do you see how these people really are? It’s the war of all against all down there.’ You wonder what the Christian right might have to say, and fear it’s not ‘whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me’, but rather; ‘devil take the hindmost’. Which he clearly did.
There is a war of all against all in America. But it’s not limited to Mississippi and Louisianna. The myths that have held the poor in check are now exposed. The callous disregard of this administration for the poorest and weakest Americans is now on display for the world to see.
In some ways, we’re not surprised to see this selfishness and wickedness exposed. After all, what did you think has been going on in Iraq for the past couple of years? Or what do any of us think is going on in Niger, in Sudan, or in any of the nameless places of boundless human suffering that we just aren’t interested in hearing about? The main difference in NOLA is that it’s harder to control the reporters, and the people suffering speak English and they expect to be heard.
This is one of those jaw-dropping, cheek-slapping, "did they really say that?" statements that make me wonder if I'm living on the same planet as the people whose blogs I read. Comparing New Orleans to Darfur? Why not the Gulag? Or the Holocaust?
I am second to none in my horror of what happened in Katrina, and I too was shocked that such a thing could happen in America. But to compare inept emergency management to a deliberate campaign of raping and killing members of an ethnic minority reveals a moral imagination so beggared as to be useless. And to imply that it happened because George Bush hates black people and cares more about Wal-Mart's stock of televisions than he does about the occupants of the 9th Ward is simply grotesque. There have been colossal screw-ups from the level of the police department all the way up to the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and some of those are Bush's fault for appointing the people he did. But to suggest that this is part of some sort of campaign against the poor, organized or otherwise, is ridiculous. The worst you can say about George Bush's poverty policy is that it is unambitious; despite liberal rhetoric, he done very little at all in the realm of poverty policy, for good or ill.
Many, perhaps even most, of those who died or were stranded amidst the floodwaters suffered because they were poor. But their poverty interacted with the disaster in a complicated, nuanced kind of way--the sort of way that we're constantly being told that left-wing intellectuals are better at understanding than those redneck slobs on the right--not in a simple, "the government doesn't care what happens to the poorer and darker skinned" sort of way. Despite what you may believe about us, when Americans hear that there are thousands and thousands of dead bodies trapped in the attics where they drowned, Americans care enough to scare the bejeesus out of our elected officials, even if the skin on those bodies happens to have more melanin than average.
The (black) mayor of New Orleans did not botch the evacuation plans because he just didn't care whether folks in the 9th ward drowned, nor did the governor of Louisiana and the Feds waste time on a jurisdictional pissing match because they figured that rescuing poor people just wasn't that important. No one was worried about the looters because Americans "prize property above people"; they were worried about the looting because the looters had started to do things like steal hospital generators that were powering the area's sole satellite uplink. If you canvassed the entire country, you would find precious few who think that goods from Target, or even a private home, are more worth protecting than human lives.
Whatever the Bush administration should have done with the levees with the benefit of perfect hindsight, my understanding of the system is that even had Bush entered office day one with strengthening the levees his highest priority, the vagaries of engineering and modern bureaucratic controls means that they wouldn't have even broken ground on the improvements yet. Moreover, it is simply ludicrous to say that Bush's decisions about Army Corps of Engineers funding were made with regard to the income or race of the people who lived in New Orleans. Once again, this is a big country; we don't just have the one city. If Bush, the HHS secretary, or the head of FEMA, even knew that the topology of New Orleans put the poor at greatest risk I would be mightily surprised, as my acquaintances who lived in New Orleans for extended periods of time did not realize that until the flood came. The people who should have known that--Lousiana's (Democratic) congressional delegation--probably didn't think about it either, at least if their decision to grab money from levee improvements for pork-barrel projects can be understood.
And to make gratuitous cracks at the Christian right, when so many of their churches have been the first in line to shelter refugees despite the fact that we all know they hate black people, is just gross ignorance. A few conservatives may have said "There, do you see how these people behave?", but many more of them have opened their wallets and their homes to strangers in need of shelter. That one could even imply such a thing, when the previous record for charity giving before Katrina was held by Americans pouring out donations for the brown-skinned victims of the pacific tsunami . . . well, I'm too much of a lady to respond.
I don't know what sort of poor decision-making process led New Orlean's mayor to draw up an evacuation plan that acknowleged that 100,000 people would fail to evacuate, and leave it at that. But I can be pretty certain that it was a run-of-the-mill decision error of the sort that even the enlightened citizens of Europe might make, such as improperly assessing the risk of a low-probability event, and not a callous calculation that the lives of the poor were irrelevant. Smug Europeans would be well to investigate this possibility, for it is all too easy to look at disasters elsewhere and sigh gratefully that it can't happen here, only to find much too late that it can and did.
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