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The scourge of domestic violence is overlooked in the fight against terrorism and random gun violence.

At a certain point in my life, I studied shotokan karate with a remarkable teacher, and then, unable to find her equivalent in the San Francisco Bay Area, took up wing chun for a while with a very amusing guy. At that point, I realized that the main threat to my health and well-being was my own stress level and — well, you can see where this is going: yoga. There should be a national equivalent of that little trajectory from East Asian techniques for dealing with others to South Asian techniques for dealing with the self when it comes to real threat assessment: Americans die of lousy health and our lousy healthcare system, of natural disaster, and — at levels unequalled throughout the affluent world — of each other. Gun deaths in the U.S. in 2011: more than 11,000; in Japan that year, seven. From foreign terrorism in the U.S. that year: 0.

Some fears are convenient: terrorism has devoured money and civil rights and government surveillance at a rate that is itself terrifying. And it’s made “security” into doublespeak. In terms of actual American deaths, terrorists are right down there with sharks. (Zero domestic shark deaths in 2011, 12 worldwide.) Some fears are inconvenient: if you look at leading causes of death and injury for women, the terms “terrorist” and “husband” should perhaps be interchangeable. Male violence, much of it by partners and former partners, is the second highest cause of death for women between 15 and 44, worldwide.  And in the U.S., suicide kills more of us than homicide, as Erika Eichelberger points out in her timely piece today.

To acknowledge what really threatens us is to upset two of the most guarded citadels in this country: the military and masculinity.  They are perhaps the same force on different scales.  Armed intervention is imperial machismo in the same way a raging husband or father is the military dictator of a household. Maybe “domestic terrorist” should be twinned with “domestic violence.”  After all, the seldom acknowledged main form of such terrorism in this country in recent decades, anti-abortion violence, fits in comfortably, being an assault on women’s rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination.

At the Republican National Convention in New York City back in 2004, I coined the term “safe dangers” to describe how some perils are too dangerous to name and the way they are instead transformed into more conventional and acceptable dangers. The activists in Manhattan’s streets then threatened the legitimacy and hegemony of the Republicans and brought up unsayable things about our wars, our leaders, and the state of our union. We were a threat.

To acknowledge what kind of threat we were, however, would have meant acknowledging first that we had real power — the power to change the conversation and rock the boat (as Occupy would do, so threateningly, in that same city seven years later). It would mean opening up a genuine conversation, while framing the status quo as a construct of interested parties rather than the natural order of things. Instead, we were essentially reclassified as terrorists or criminals by a mainstream media taking its orders straight from the Bush Administration.

To acknowledge the real lay of the land is always dangerous when rhetoric and reality are out of joint. And are they ever over guns these days! The debate over gun control will never go anywhere as long as the anti-regulation side continues to argue from their inner Clint Eastwood: he who will always be faster on the draw, know just who the bad guys are, and drop them with a shot into a crowd, from a dead sleep at home, in a moment of utter surprise, in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse… Call it the machismo-industrial complex: it sold more than 17 million guns last year, enough to arm every soldier in NATO five times over.

Mere statistics about who actually uses guns on whom just don’t get in their way. (You know, the tiny numbers of intruders actually deterred and the startling number of family members knocked off.)  Nor does testimony from people like gun-carrying Joe Zamudio.  He was the man who came upon a group of people, including his congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, being shot by a lone gunman in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona. Someone had already wrestled the gun away from the killer.

Zamudio almost shot that bystander by mistake.  He wisely hesitated, ended up wrestling the actual shooter to the ground, and then simply lay on top of him.

Not at all like Dirty Harry, that role model for massacre perps — also mostly white guys, speaking of the unmentionable — exacting their own vengeance on a world insufficiently obedient to their idiosyncratic needs and notions. Clearly, we need counters to Hollywood, and militarism, and machismo.  We also need to take stock of the real dangers in our country. That’s exactly what Erika Eichelberger does here. In the immortal words of Pogo Possum, we have met the enemy and he is us. Rebecca Solnit

House of Horrors
Violence on the Home Front 
By Erika Eichelberger

Since the Newtown massacre, visions of unfathomable crazy mass killers and armed strangers in the night have colonized the American mind. Proposed laws have been drawn up that would keep potential mass murderers from getting their hands on assault weapons and high-capacity clips, or that would stop hardened criminals from buying guns. But the danger out there is both more mundane and more terrible: you’re more likely to be hurt or killed by someone you know or love. And you’ll probably be at home when it happens.

Between 2005 and 2010, 60% of all violent injuries in this country were inflicted by loved ones or acquaintances. And 60% of the time those victimizations happened in the home. In 2011, 79% of murders reported to the FBI (in which the victim-offender relationship was known) were committed by friends, loved ones, or acquaintances. Of the 3.5 million assaults and murders against family members between 1998 and 2002 (the last time such a study was done), almost half were crimes against spouses. Eleven percent were against children. But the majority of violent deaths are self-imposed. Suicide is the leading cause of violent death in the U.S., and most of those self-killings happen at home.

Violence Against Women

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US Soldiers in Iraq handle unexploded ordnance. It can only take one "close call" to cause symptoms of PTSD.

“Shell shock,” the psychological scourge of World War I, occurred after “a man has been buried, lifted, or otherwise subjected to the physical effects of a bursting shell or other similar explosive.”  So wrote Charles Myers, an officer in the British army’s medical corps, in his 1940 book, Shell Shock in France, 1914-18. Additionally, he noted, shell shock could result even “when the soldier is remote from the exploding missile, provided that he be subject to an emotional disturbance or mental strain sufficiently severe.” Of course, Myers warned, the effects of shell shock could also appear in those “who have never been near any such exploding missile… or indeed have never come under fire at all.”

Shell shock without the shells or the shock? What in the world did that mean? What did it say about war and those called upon to fight in them?

War-related psychiatric conditions have long been a slippery subject. Soldier’s heart, Da Costa syndrome, trench neurosis, shell shock, war neurosis, acute combat stress reaction, battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — each of these maladies has been a product of its time and each has been all too real, painful, and debilitating to the men and women who have suffered from them.

In his 1919 text, Shell-Shock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems, Elmer Southard — an Army veteran, Harvard Medical School professor, and former director of a unit of the U.S. Army’s Neuropsychiatric Training School — profiled a Russian officer who became afflicted by tremors, was incapacitated by fear that “the Germans were going to break through and capture him [and] shells were about to burst over his head,” and started suffering “hallucinations of shots and the voices of soldiers” that he was unable to distinguish from reality. In February 1915, this officer was medically evacuated, but not from the front lines. He had, Southard explained, never served there nor even “had occasion to visit the line or the trenches.”

In fact, a study of a group of British soldiers suffering from war psychoses during World War I found that just 20% had been under fire.  Late in World War II, a study of Australian psychiatric casualties concluded that 60% had had no contact with the enemy.  Given all of this, it isn’t surprising that TomDispatch regular Jeremiah Goulka’s brief tour in Iraq has continued to affect him years later despite the fact that “he hardly saw a thing.”

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, almost 30% of the post-9/11 veterans — close to 250,000 men and women — treated at V.A. hospitals and clinics have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. To that total, you would have to add American civilian advisors and contractors like Goulka, State Department officials, CIA agents, mercenaries, aid workers, reporters, and others who also bear the psychic scars of America’s recent wars. And then consider all those Iraqis and Afghans, millions of them, combatants and noncombatants — without a veterans’ administration in sight, benefits of any sort, or even the possibility of psychiatric counseling. Consider all those inhabitants of American war zones who have had no choice but to spend not a few weeks, several tours of duty, or even the length of a world war under such stress, but often a decade or more in countries wracked by violence, privation, and distress. Perhaps we need yet another diagnosis to accurately capture the essence of what war has done to them. Neither shell shock nor PTSD seems remotely sufficient. Nick Turse

It Doesn’t Take Much
On Almost Getting PTSD in Iraq
By Jeremiah Goulka

I was one nightmare short of PTSD.

It didn’t take much, that’s what surprised me.  No battles.  No dead bodies.  I spent just three and a half weeks as a contractor in Iraq, when the war there was at its height, rarely leaving the security of American military bases.

For several years now, Americans have become increasingly aware that a large number of veterans have gotten post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Studies estimate that at least 1 in 5 returning vets — possibly as many as 1 in 3 – have it. Less notice has been given to the huge numbers of veterans who suffer some PTSD symptoms but not quite enough to be diagnosed as having the disorder.  Civilian employees of the U.S. government, contractors, and of course the inhabitants of the countries caught up in America’s wars have gotten even less notice.

The thing is: It doesn’t take much to develop the symptoms of PTSD.  Our idea of what used to be called “shell shock” tends to be limited to terrible battles, not just the daily stress of living in a war zone or surviving a couple of close calls.

This is a story of how little it can take. I hardly saw a thing.

I.

My first day in Iraq ended with an explosion.

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The Enemy-Industrial Complex

How to Turn a World Lacking in Enemies into the Most Threatening Place in the Universe 

By Tom Engelhardt

How do you create an atmosphere of fear without real enemies?

The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration.  Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable.  The coverage in the media has been hair-raising.  The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.

Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn’t count on Guam either.

It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult.  If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment.

In the previous century, there were two devastating global wars, which left significant parts of the planet in ruins.  There was also a “cold war” between two superpowers locked in a system of mutual assured destruction (aptly acronymed as MAD) whose nuclear arsenals were capable of destroying the planet many times over.  Had you woken up any morning in the years between December 7, 1941, and December 26, 1991, and been told that the leading international candidate for America’s Public Enemy Number One was Kim Jong-un’s ramshackle, comic-opera regime in North Korea, you might have gotten down on your hands and knees and sent thanks to pagan gods.

The same would be true for the other candidates for that number one position since September 11, 2001: the original al-Qaeda (largely decimated), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula located in poverty-stricken areas of poverty-stricken Yemen, the Taliban in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, unnamed jihadis scattered across poverty-stricken areas of North Africa, or Iran, another rickety regional power run by not particularly adept theocrats.

All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror.”  We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow.  From our police to our borders, we’ve up-armored everywhere.  We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.”  And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.

Few in this country have found this striking.  Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.

You know that feeling when you wake up and realize you’ve had the same recurrent nightmare yet again? Sometimes, there’s an equivalent in waking life, and here’s mine: every now and then, as I read about the next move in the spreading war on terror, the next drone assassination, the next ratcheting up of the surveillance game, the next expansion of the secrecy that envelops our government, the next set of expensive actions taken to guard us — all of this justified by the enormous threats and dangers that we face — I think to myself: Where’s the enemy?  And then I wonder: Just what kind of a dream is this that we’re dreaming?

A Door Marked “Enemy” and No One Home

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Upset about how your tax dollars are spent? Even worse, it could be fixed.

Recently, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gave a major speech at the National Defense University on cutting military — aka defense — spending.  Hagel is considered a “realist” and so when it comes to such cuts, this is undoubtedly the best we’re likely to get out of Washington for a long time to come.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the best is pretty poor stuff.

The speech was filled with the sort of complaints we’ve already grown used to hearing from the Pentagon about the “deep cuts… imposed by sequester.”  These, Hagel insisted, will result in “a significant reduction in military capabilities.”  (In fact, President Obama’s just released 2014 budget calls for only a miniscule 1.6% cut in the Pentagon’s bloated budget.)  There was also the usual boilerplate stuff about the U.S. global military stance — “America’s responsibilities are as enormous as they are humbling” — and about the “vacuum” we’d create on planet Earth if we reduced it in any way.  As the Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss wrote, “Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it isn’t the job of the United States to go stumbling into every regional conflict, humanitarian crisis, failed state, and would-be terrorist nest that arises. Whatever those things are, they’re not ‘vacuum’ to be filled.”

Like Leon Panetta before him, Hagel, who took a voluntary sequester pay cut, managed to make it sound as if the U.S. military were teetering at the edge of some financial cliff.  He spoke mournfully, for instance, of the Pentagon having “significantly less resources than the department had in the past.” Well… no, as Mark Thompson of Time magazine pointed out, it just ain’t so.

The facts aren’t difficult to sort out, even for those of us who aren’t secretaries of defense.  In a world filled with the most modest of enemies, after those “sequestration” and other planned cuts in the military budget are taken into account, the country would still be spending at levels that weren’t reached in the Cold War years when there were two overarmed superpowers on the planet.  As the Congressional Budget Office concluded last month, “In real terms, after the reduction in 2013, DoD’s base budget is about what it was in 2007, and is still 7% above the average funding since 1980.”

Among Hagel’s more accurate, if disheartening, comments was his praise for the way the U.S. military had, in the post-9/11 era, grown “more expeditionary.”  Back in the nineteenth century, that phrase would instantly have been recognized as code for “imperial” — for, that is, a great power exerting its muscle by policing the far frontiers of the planet.  In ending his speech, Hagel added definitively, “America does not have the luxury of retrenchment.”  So here’s a simple budget-cutting formula for you: if you can’t retrench and become less “expeditionary,” then significant cuts to the military, not to speak of the full-scale national security state, including the homeland-security complex and the intelligence-security complex, simply will not happen.  There’s only one way to cut the national security budget in a meaningful way: downsize the mission.

With tax day looming, we asked TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer to get the number crunchers at the invaluable National Priorities Project to work on what a people’s budget might look like with genuine military cuts in a less imperial world.  Her answer: don’t underestimate the much-ignored wisdom of the American people on where their tax dollars should (but won’t) go. Tom

A Tax Day Plan for Righting the Republic 
Just Doing What’s Popular Would Make Us Healthier, Wealthier, Wiser, and Less Indebted 
By Mattea Kramer

After heroic feats of arithmetic and a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine interpretation of opaque rules and guidelines, millions of Americans will file their taxes by this Monday, April 15th.

Then there’s the bad news.

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Barbara Garson studies the lives of the 99% in our troubled economy.

They call it the “spring swoon.” For the third straight year, the American economy bounded out of the starting blocks, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in January and February. And for the third year in a row, that momentum melted away in the spring like the last traces of winter snow. Employers added only 88,000 jobs this March, the Labor Department announced on Friday, the worst monthly jobs report since June. Economists predicted gains of at least twice as much, and the news fed fears that the economy’s modest recovery might be faltering. And this before we’ve even felt the real effect of the “sequester,” those $85 billion across-the-board budget cuts recently approved by Congress and President Obama.

The biggest cause for concern, however, isn’t actually that anemic monthly job-gain figure. Measuring the job market is, at best, an inexact science, and the number crunchers at the Labor Department could yet revise that number upward (or, god forbid, downward) in time for next month’s report. Here’s the real news, as U.S. corporations rake in record profits (and shift record amounts of money into offshore tax havens): nearly half a million workers “disappeared” last month. Yes, disappeared. The Labor Department tracks what it calls the “labor force participation rate” — wonk-speak for the percentage of people working or actively hunting for a job. In March, that number slumped to 63.3%, the lowest point since 1979. That means there are millions of people out there who have lost their jobs, stopped interviewing or even applying, who have packed it in, given up. The government excludes them when it calculates the main unemployment rate.  They have entered the invisible workforce.

The unemployment rate ticked down from 7.7% to 7.6% in March. Some might cheer that news. Don’t. The jobless rate didn’t dip because the economy improved; it dipped because the government simply stopped counting a half-million out-of-work people as out of work.

In her new book, Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live in the Great Recession, Barbara Garson, who has long chronicled the lives of people for whom bad times began decades ago, focuses on the self-declared members of the “Pink Slip Club.” She memorably journeys across the United States to introduce us to a range of Americans just scratching by in the toughest of tough times, trying to carve out a living with — not being bankers — no government to bail them out. They, like Duane, the man she focuses on in today’s post, deserved so much better. Andy Kroll

Down Is a Dangerous Direction 
How the 40-Year “Long Recession” Led to the Great Recession 
By Barbara Garson

If you had to date the Great Recession, you might say it started in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers vaporized over a weekend and a massive mortgage-based Ponzi scheme began to go down.  By 2008, however, the majority of American workers had already endured a 40-year decline in wages, security, and hope — a Long Recession of their own.

In the 1960s, I met a young man about to be discharged from the Army and then, by happenstance, caught up with him again in each of the next two decades.  Though he died two months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, those brief encounters taught me how the Long Recession led directly to our Great Recession.

In the late 1960s, I was working at an antiwar coffee house near an army base from which soldiers shipped out to Vietnam.  One gangly young man, recently back from “the Nam,” was particularly handy and would fix our record player or make our old mimeograph machine run more smoothly.  He rarely spoke about the war, except to say that his company had stayed stoned the whole time. “Our motto,” he once told me, “was ‘let’s not and say we did.’”  Duane had no intention of becoming a professional Vietnam vet like John Kerry when discharged.  His plan was to return home to Cleveland and make up for time missed in the civilian counterculture of that era.

In the early 1970s, General Motors set up the fastest auto assembly line in the world in Lordstown, Ohio, and staffed it with workers whose average age was 24.  GM’s management hoped that such healthy, inexperienced workers could handle 101 cars an hour without balking the way more established autoworkers might.  What GM got instead of balkiness was a series of slowdowns and snafus that management labeled systematic “sabotage” until they realized that the word hurt car sales.

I visited Lordstown the week before a strike vote was to be taken, amid national speculation about whether a generation of “hippy autoworkers” could “humanize the assembly line” and so change forever the way America worked.  On a guided tour of the plant, I was surprised to spot Duane shooting radios into cars with an air gun.  He recognized me and slipped me a note with his phone number.

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Is the Tar Sands Pipeline a "Stonewall" moment for the climate movement? Bill McKibben responds to Time.

At 72, climate scientist James Hansen is retiring as head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies to work even more actively on climate-change issues. Keep in mind that, in congressional testimony in 1988, he first put climate change on the national map.  “It is time to stop waffling so much,” he told the congressional committee members, “and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”  He then went on to suggest a future “probability of extreme events like summer heat waves… and the likelihood of heat wave drought situations in the Southwest and Midwest.”  (Any of that sound faintly familiar a quarter-century later?)  It was, at the time, a startling statement.  Recently, in an email to the members of 350.org, the environmental organization he helped to found, former New Yorker reporter Bill McKibben wrote: “If 350.org has a patron saint, it’s Jim [Hansen]. It was his 2008 paper that gave us our name, identifying 350 parts per million CO2 as the safe upper limit for carbon in the atmosphere.”

That’s no small praise from the writer who, only a year after Hansen spoke up, first put global warming on the map in a popular book, The End of Nature.  He was at least a decade or more ahead of the rest of us, and more recently he’s led the popular charge on climate change and especially, in the last year, on trying to block the building of Keystone XL.  That’s the pipeline slated to bring tar sands, a particularly “dirty” (and in carbon terms, dirty to produce) form of crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast.  Just the other day, as if to provide a little exclamation point on his energetic campaign, during which Hansen has been arrested twice in acts of civil disobedience, a pipeline through which Exxon was already running Canadian “heavy crude” (reputedly a particularly corrosive form of oil) burst in an Arkansas town.  The neighborhood affected, according to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” was left “looking like a scene out of the Walking Dead.”

As a scientist and an activist, Hansen has proven a remarkable figure.  (He will soon be awarded the prestigeous Ridenhour Courage Prize.)  After a February arrest protesting the Keystone pipeline, he told the Washington Post, “We have reached a fork in the road,” adding that politicians have to understand that they can “go down this road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have — tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic — but the science tells us we can’t do that without creating a situation… our children and grandchildren will have no control over, which is the climate system.”

Recently, there was a striking New York Times portrait of him by Justin Gillis headlined “Climate Maverick to Retire From NASA.”  That word “maverick,” while by no means wrong, might be a little deceptive in 2013, since a maverick is a loner, an outlier, and in climate-change terms these days, there is nothing terribly mavericky about Hansen’s suggestions that climate change is likely to radically transform this planet unless we begin to get our greenhouse gas output under control soon.  These days, in fact, he’s surrounded by a worried mass of scientists.

In Gillis’s piece there was a passage that, despite everything I’ve read, managed to shock me, and I thought it worth citing here before you read TomDispatch regular McKibben’s latest post.  Writing about how early Hansen highlighted the dangers of global warming, and how he was doubted at the time, Gillis added, “Yet subsequent events bore him out. Since the day he spoke, not a single month’s temperatures have fallen below the 20th-century average for that month. Half the world’s population is now too young to have lived through the last colder-than-average month, February 1985. In worldwide temperature records going back to 1880, the 19 hottest years have all occurred since his testimony.”

Think about that for a moment and imagine where we’re still going as greenhouse gases continue to pour into the atmosphere at record rates. Tom

Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the “Stonewall” of the Climate Movement?
And If So, Is That Terrible News?
By Bill McKibben

A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast the “Selma and Stonewall” of the climate movement.

Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the “environmental review” the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline.  And there’s good reason to put pressure on.  After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.

Still, let’s put things in perspective: Stonewall took place in 1969, and as of last week the Supreme Court was still trying to decide if gay people should be allowed to marry each other. If the climate movement takes that long, we’ll be rallying in scuba masks. (I’m not kidding. The section of the Washington Mall where we rallied against the pipeline this winter already has a big construction project underway: a flood barrier to keep the rising Potomac River out of downtown DC.)

It was certainly joyful to see marriage equality being considered by our top judicial body.  In some ways, however, the most depressing spectacle of the week was watching Democratic leaders decide that, in 2013, it was finally safe to proclaim gay people actual human beings. In one weekend, Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia figured out that they had “evolved” on the issue. And Bill Clinton, the greatest weathervane who ever lived, finally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act he had signed into law, boasted about in ads on Christian radio, and urged candidate John Kerry to defend as constitutional in 2004, was, you know, wrong. He, too, had “evolved,” once the polls made it clear that such an evolution was a safe bet.

Why recite all this history? Because for me, the hardest part of the Keystone pipeline fight has been figuring out what in the world to do about the Democrats.

Fiddling While the Planet Burns

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Devastation in Staten Island. Wall Street is learning how to profit more from disasters.

Even if you set aside the man-made environmental disaster that is China (at a cost now estimated conservatively at $230 billion annually), ever more expensive disasters seem to be on the rise globally.  Moreover, thanks to climate change — that is, the greenhouse gases we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere at record levels — the distinction between man-made catastrophes and natural ones is rapidly blurring.  In the United States, we’ve recently suffered a one-two punch when it comes to extreme weather: 2011 now holds the American record for weather disasters that cost $1 billion dollars or more with 14 of them, and 2012 came in an uncomfortably close second with 11.  (You can check out the list here.)  The Swiss Insurance firm Munich Re points out that “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.”  A dubious honor.

And of them all, perhaps the most expensive of recent times, already estimated to have cost more than $50 billion, is the drought that had 60% of the country in its grip last year and has continued relentlessly into 2013, parching the Southwest, the Midwest, and parts of the West.  This, in turn, almost assures another season of “record” wildfires and, according to early predictions, possibly a new round of flooding from late season heavy snowfall in the upper Midwest and especially along the Red River.

In addition, on the billion-dollar bad-news side of things, scientists now believe that the continuing dramatic loss of ice in Arctic waters, which has been heating up that region, is also changing northern hemispheric weather patterns.  It is evidently ensuring more extreme weather in the middle latitudes which helps explain, for instance, Europe’s “frozen spring” of 2013, and will evidently lead to even warmer summers for most of us.

And when we’re talking about extreme weather, extreme events, and disasters, let’s not forget that globally the likelihood of extreme energy events like BP’s massive oil spill in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico is also on the rise.  After all, as Michael Klare has long argued at this site, energy companies are now ever more regularly going after extreme energy in situations of rising danger.  As a result, from the frack zone in the U.S. and the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil to the Arctic seas of Alaska, the possibility of distinctly energy-company-made disasters is on the rise (as, of course, are record oil company profits).

In other words, we’re now on a planet where extreme disaster seems ever more normal and, when it comes to the weather, such extremes can increasingly be considered man-made or at least human-influenced.  It’s important to keep in mind as well that what’s a catastrophe for many of us always turns out to be the main chance and a profit center for at least a few of us.  As Steve Fraser, TomDispatch’s historian-in-residence (who tells tales of American history you never learned in school), reminds us, there’s a backstory to the way genuine disasters are never disasters for everyone and it couldn’t be more relevant to our increasing catastrophe of a world.  (As a tiny example, consider that each horrific oil spill means more oil company dollars flowing to lobbyists and to Congress — and so yet more high times on Washington’s K Street.)

With that in mind, sit back and let yourself be enveloped in the great fires, earthquakes, and floods of our past history, and those who profited from them.  Tom

Making Disaster Pay
From the San Francisco Earthquake to Superstorm Sandy, How Capitalism Stacks the Deck on Disaster
By Steve Fraser

In 2007, a financial firestorm ravaged Wall Street and the rest of the country.  In 2012, Hurricane Sandy obliterated a substantial chunk of the Atlantic seaboard.  We think of the first as a man-made calamity, the second as the malignant innocence of nature.  But neither the notion of a man-made nor natural disaster quite captures how the power of a few and the vulnerability of the many determine what is really going on at ground level.  Causes and consequences, who gets blamed and who leaves the scene permanently scarred, who goes down and who emerges better positioned than before: these are matters often predetermined by the structures of power and wealth, racial and ethnic hierarchies, and despised and favored forms of work, as well as moral and social prejudices in place before disaster strikes.

When it comes to our recent financial implosion, this is easy enough to see, although great efforts have been expended trying to deny the self-evident.  “Man” did not bring the system to its knees; the country’s dominant financial institutions and a complicit government did that.  They’ve recovered, the rest of us haven’t.

Sandy seems a more ambiguous case.  On the one hand, it’s obvious enough that an economy resting on fossil fuels played a catalytic role in intensifying the storm.  Those corporate interests profiting from that form of energy production and doing all they can to defend it are certainly culpable, not the rest of mankind which has no other choice but to depend on the energy system we’re given.

On the other hand, rich and poor, big businesses and neighborhood shops suffered; some, however, more than others.  Among them were working class communities; public-housing residents; outer borough homeowners; communities in Long Island, along the New Jersey shore, and inland as well; workers denied unemployment compensation; and the old, the sick, and the injured abandoned for days or weeks in dark and dangerous high-rises without medical help or access to fresh food or water.  Help, when it came to these “disadvantaged” worlds, often arrived late, or last, or not at all.

Cleaning up and rebuilding New York City and other places hit by the storm will provide a further road map of who gets served and whose ox gets gored.  It’s ominous, if hardly shocking, that Mayor Bloomberg has already appointed Mark Ricks of Goldman Sachs to the business-dominated team planning the city’s future.  Where would this billionaire mayor turn other than to his fraternity brothers, especially in this era when, against all the odds, we still worship at the altar of the deal-makers, no matter their malfeasances and fatal ineptitudes?

Still, it is early days and the verdict is not in on the post-Sandy future.  However, an incisive analysis by sociologists Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg of what happened after the 9/11 attacks in New York and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina offers some concrete forebodings.  Everyone knows that, as soon as Katrina made landfall, the racial divisions of New Orleans became the scandal of the month when it came to which communities were drowned and which got helped, who got arrested (and shot), and who left town forever.  To be poor in New Orleans during and after Katrina was a curse.  To be poor and black amounted to excommunication.

Gotham and Greenberg prove that, post-9/11 and post-Katrina, reconstruction and rehabilitation was also skewed heavily in favor of the business community and the wealthier.  In both cities, big business controlled the redevelopment process — and so where the money landed and where it didn’t.