What If Houston NEEDED to Evacuate 4 Million?

Where the hell has all the "War on Terror" money gone in the past 4 years?

Houston traffic, in anticipation of Hurricane Rita and made all-the-more anxious by recent coverage of Hurricane Katrina -- is at a deadly stand-still. The mayor of Houston perhaps said it best this morning when he said that the highway parking lots would be "death traps" if Rita were a direct hit.

How the hell can this happen over 4 years after 9/11? With all the talk of terrorism against chemical plants or potential dirty bombers, how can emergency planners and politicians not be prepared for a mass evacuation of an entire city?

It seems that money could have been well spent on automatic traffic flow systems that would allow planners to reverse traffic flows with a virtual throw of the switch. Gates could swing entrances shut and open access to contraflow lanes. Instead, it took over 12 hours for a request to be made and then fulfilled, and even then, hapless planners and politicians worried aloud about just "shifting traffic north" unless their eventual exits and stays upstate were measured and planned.

This, after four years since 9/11.

Inexcusable at all levels. Government in the U.S. is broken. Who will fix it and when? Like Houston, the country is simply out of time.

There Shall Be No More Bribes!!* (Facilitation payments still OK.)

In the subscription Wall St Journal, more lunacy upon lunacy with the article, "Multinational Companies Unite to Fight Bribery." One should be suspicious of any headline that makes multinationals sound like super-heros.

At issue is a NEW (yet again) pact not to accept bribes in foreign operations. Of course, doing so is already illegal for U.S. Corporations and subsidiaries under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

My favorite quote is on the jump, "Signers say joining the agreement...steps up their public responsibility by inviting accountability." --Yes, of course corporations think that *inviting accountability* is a good business practice. Witness how many times they ask for independent investigations and announce adverse results of internal inquiries.

So then there's this paid schmoe: "'It can work against you just as quickly, if you're not committed to it and [don't] practice what you preach,' said Mr. Boeckmann of construction giant Fluor." Yeeeeeees, that's right... the public is sooooo concerned with how no-name goliath stealth corporations conduct themselves in obscured market places. Hey buddy - ya ain't no Martha Stewart, baby, so get off it.

[Additional 8/7:] Let's just acknowledge reality and call a spade a spade. Other countries don't have FCPA. Some other countries don't even have a problem paying out a few actual, common-sense call-it-like-yo-momma-saw-it, ...BRIBES. This puts the U.S. at a criticial competitive disadvantage as almost any working Houstonian knows from the world of energy, though it's not restricted to that world.

Can we please be grown-ups about this in the legal world and not have to go through the embarrassing charade of actually making the business of bribery an issue of VOLUNTARY compliance? Since nobody who needs to compete plans on voluntarily complying, can we please dispense with the saint-making machine here and just let working people make an honest living by competing in the real world without making them feel like criminals just because they're Americans?

If a person really wants to outlaw and stop bribes, fine - I invite them to study the issue among multinationals much further if they already haven't - but fine. Let's just do what we can to untie American hands and make whatever act we're calling "bribery" illegal just-the-same for every country in the world - with some kind of real enforcement mechanisms and body. I would be all for it.

But then again, on my more cynical days, I'd think to myself, "If the bribes are already so far and wide so as to be structural in any economy, those bribes would just find new handlers and new ways of being handled -- but the money would still flow." And that's not my cynicism. That's just the nature of markets. Which is to say, of course, it's just human nature.

Taming Markets

Amazon.com has replaced its homepage to the Red Cross fund for victims of the Asian tsunamis -- the death toll of which is now being reported at over 114,000 as rescuers are able to gain access to more remote villages.

As has been said many times, these numbers are just beyond comprehension. The best attempts fall into a certain navel-gazing kind of mind-limit.

This reminds me of a time when I was able to ask at a presentation a question of then-COO of Continental Airlines Greg Breneman what his airline could do for humanitarian purposes that perhaps fit comfortably within their business model (excess flight capacity, etc.). I was in college. He seemed offended by the question and waxed philosophical (in the most generous of senses) about communism and free markets -- it was wholly incoherent.

But Amazon.com has just demonstrated an action about which I was asking, and one to which I think many responsible world-citizens aspire. If only more companies thought with such a mindset.

This kind of public/private action can seize across a personal psychology that too often is enabled by our markets and that even depends on the circumscription of events such as world tragedy and social problems. So perhaps even more than just the dollars Amazon.com can raise through its action is the blending of market and public mindset that its consumers will encounter, even if briefly.

Because if the death of over 100,000 people in a disaster of any kind can't transcend the so-called private market sphere, can anything?

[BTW: Word is that the site received 48,000 contributions in its first 24 hours online.]

How Long Has This Been Going On?

[originally posted November 2004] Usually I don't like to speak on issues that are already well-covered, but the economic position of the U.S. right now is a topic that cannot be spoken of enough.

With real estate and talk of currency troubles (aka: interest rate watch), we are watching like hawks these issues. Builders all around many metro suburbs are speculating with relatively cheap money, and banks are loading their balance sheets with really shaky things like "100% loans" (like an ARM with a balloon payment/refi instead of an adjustment). It looks scary. Moreover, it can happen like dominoes -- one big entity makes a move, and everyone (foreign financiers of U.S. debt) starts second guessing.

The Moderate Fringe

Thanks to Brad DeLong for leading me to this eloquent piece from Paul Musgrave about the progressive agenda and the plight of the rural U.S.

The tragedy of rural American life has gone mainly unmentioned, even as some of us have waxed rhapsodic over, say, the exportation of McDonald's to Asia. Why are we more concerned with the loss of "authentic" cultures in Thailand or Indonesia than with those of rural America?

Having interned in a declining rural area of western Massachusetts in grad school, I've become keenly attuned to the haunting silence of drowning rural cities. Paul hits the nail on the head.