MOTHER NATURE'S LAST LAUGH DIMS CLAMOR FOR OFFSHORE DRILLING

By H. N. Burdett

Human ingenuity and modern technology, astounding as they are, can never hope to do anything more than play catch-up with the fearsome bitch goddess, Mother Nature, who routinely plays with a deck full of trump cards.

The familiar din of the "Drill, Baby, Drill" chorus that once greeted on cue the public appearances of that prime wholesaler of right wing red meat, Sarah Palin, has faded into what her faithful followers might wish to become the faintest of memories.

Nor is the prodigious power of nature recently evident solely in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, though that in itself should be reason enough to lower to a whisper the mindless clamor for plowing the ocean's depths for black gold.

It may seem much longer ago, but it was only in April that volcanic ash rising into the atmosphere grounded airliners throughout northern Europe. Despite the inconvenience to countless air travellers, this was relatively tame stuff compared with the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Still, it provided impressive evidence of Mother Nature's propensity for orchestrating paralyzing mischief at her capricious whim and will.

The BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion has made the grounding of those planes quite literally yesterday's news. The latest estimates are that the flow of oil will amount to 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

Today's Tea Partiers don their tricorns, flip back the pages and misread American history to support their ongoing crusade for downsizing government and lowering taxes. By adopting that same revolutionary spirit, anti-drilling advocates, written off as knee-jerk upstarts and alarmist quacks, courtesy of the tireless oil company publicity machines, could recast themselves as Paul Reveres of the environment -- only with far more justification for their claim.

The shrillness of the drilling dunces succeeded in all but drowning out the strongest legitimate argument against seeking oil at the bottom of the sea: we know next to nothing about that into which we are drilling. Scientists have far more knowledge about Mars and Venus than they do about the ocean's depths, an annoying fact easily brushed aside by politicians eager for campaign petro-bucks and their constituents with voracious appetites for more and cheaper oil.

In a 2005 presentation reprinted in a publication of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, David Eyton, then BP's vice president for Gulf of Mexico deepwater development who now heads up the company's research and technology component, expressed confidence in the firm's risk management capabilities. He felt that BP had the expertise and the technology to overcome nature's daunting obstacles to offshore drilling.

At the same time, Eyton did indeed emphasize the need for utmost caution in risk management with this telling observation: "We find ourselves designing floating systems for 10,000 feet of water depth before the lessons of working in 6,000 feet have been fully identified."

When it comes to the quest for more and less expensive energy, lessons are too often learned the hard way. It has been relatively recent, when the need for a reasonable mix of various energy sources seemed the logical path for the future, that the development of nuclear power has returned to the national conversation. The hue and cry for nuclear power plants has been on a three-decade hiatus.

But the nuclear energy cheerleaders, once as loud and witless as the drill-happy pawns of Big Oil's highly efficient propaganda machines, were effectively silenced by a nuclear reactor accident 31 years ago in Dauphin County, on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

On March 28, 1979, there was a partial core meltdown in a pressurized water reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. Investigations determined human factors were at fault, from the flawed industrial design of the reactor control system's user interface to deficiencies in the training of the operators of the equipment.

The Three-Mile Island accident had a severe impact on the global development of nuclear power. In all but two years between 1963 and 1979, the number of reactors increased. But reactors under construction declined every year for the 18 years following the accident. Between 1980 and 1984, a total of 51 American nuclear reactors were canceled.

While the impact of the radiation released as a result of the Three Mile Island accident was heatedly disputed, the TMI plant operator and its insurers paid at least $82 million in publicly documented compensation to residents for "losing business revenue, evacuation expense and health claims." According to anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman, hundreds of out-of-court settlements were reached with alleged victims of the fallout and a total of $15 million was paid to parents of children with birth defects born within close proximity to the plant.

Last week, President Obama announced at his press conference a six-month moratorium on drilling permits, all but daring Republican offshore oil advocates to turn the matter into a midterm election campaign issue. Obama further suspended exploratory drilling off the coasts of both Virginia and Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska, as well as 33 wells under way in the Gulf of Mexico.

If BP can plug the Deepwater Horizon leak and manage a miraculously thorough cleanup, American addiction to oil combined with rational concerns about our dependence on foreign oil may well shorten memories of the Gulf of Mexico environmental tragedy. With the ever willing assistance of Big Oil's propaganda apparatus, the cacaphonous fervor for offshore drilling will resound and once more trump common sense. But Mother Nature has a richly deserved reputation for having the final word and the last derisive laugh. Always.

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THE QUINTESSENTIAL PRAGMATIST

by H. N. Burdett

I'll Never Forget It: Memoirs of a Political Accident from East Baltimore. Marvin Mandel with Jeremy Lott. The Maryland Public Policy Institute, 2010.

Baschert is Yiddish for a concept that literally translates as "destined" or "inevitable" and it can be positive or negative. There is no one to whom baschert is more applicable than Maryland's first and only Jewish governor, Marvin Mandel, the subject of this collection of anecdotes -- some amusing, some disarmingly wise, a few even poignant -- that will have to serve as his biography while a work of greater depth, detail and gravitas begs to be written. But when some Hopkins or University of Maryland scholar undertakes that formidable and worthwhile challenge, this slim volume in Mandel's own unequivocal words will be an invaluable source.

Mandel clearly has no qualms about describing himself as a "political accident" and actually relishes recounting how he stumbled into, rather than gloriously ascended to, progressively higher offices in a political career spanning nearly three decades.

It all began when, following his discharge from the army in the wake of World War II, Mandel began practicing law in Baltimore. He was approached by a city councilman about running for one of the then three seats on the Fifth Legislative District Democratic State Central Committee. Assured that the job was like being on a corporate board of directors "where you don't have to do anything," with classic Mandelian deadpan and a touch of Groucho Marxian syntax, he replied: "Okay, if I don't have to do anything, I'll do it."

He was subsequently elected to the committee, which basically functions to recommend to the governor individuals to fill vacancies left by elected Democratic officeholders should they occur in the district. Two years later such a vacancy occurred. But there was a problem. Mandel's two fellow committee members were beholden to rival political bosses, each of whom had his own candidate for the coveted open seat in the Maryland House of Delegates.

The decision was now Mandel's to make. But not wanting to antagonize either of the political leaders, he abstained. And he continued to abstain until an editorial in the Baltimore Sun took him to task for ill serving the Fifth District by denying it full representation in the General Assembly.

The committee called a meeting to settle the matter once and for all. Consequently, Mandel made his first ever visit to Annapolis: to take the oath of office as the newest member of the Fifth District's delegation to the lower chamber of the state legislature.
Soon afterward, Mandel's baschert kicked in again. The Speaker of the House named him to the powerful House of Delegates Ways and Means Committee, which holds hearings and evaluates each bill requiring an expenditure of state funds, then reports them favorably or unfavorably to the full House of Delegates.

In due time, Mandel joined a coup to depose the chairman of this major committee. The coup failed and Mandel's punishment was his removal from the panel. He told me later that the committee to which he was then assigned had not met in something like three years. It was then that the accidental delegate from East Baltimore set into motion his lifelong political credo of not getting angry but getting even.

Each bill introduced by the Ways and Means chairman promptly had an amendment attached, courtesy of Mandel. Amendments require a bill to be held over for 24 hours. On the next day, the chairman's bill would have another amendment to be considered. The chairman got the message and invited Mandel to rejoin his committee. Mandel humbly accepted.

When the committee chairman was elected Speaker of the House, Mandel succeeded him as chairman of Ways and Means, which, of course, could not have happened had he not resorted to his endless amendments ploy during his exile.

A succeeding house speaker was indicted by a grand jury in connection with information he had allegedly withheld regarding savings and loan companies he represented that had become the targets of an investigation. Governor J. Millard Tawes had someone in mind to serve as the new speaker. But House Judiciary Chairman Thomas Hunter Lowe called the governor's attention to a parliamentary rule mandating that a speakership vacancy be filled by the Ways and Means chairman. Mandel's baschert had shifted into overdrive.

On January 7, 1969, Mandel was the beneficiary of the crowning baschert of his political career. On that day, Ted Agnew, Maryland's hands-down most notorious political accident, resigned the governorship to assume his duties as Vice President of the United States under Richard Nixon. At that time, the Maryland Constitution had no provision for a lieutenant governor to succeed a governor who had resigned or was incapacitated. The document instead decreed that the new governor was to be elected by a joint session of the Maryland General Assembly. The legislature proceeded to do what would have been highly improbable had there been a statewide election: the lawmakers overwhelmingly elected Marvin Mandel Governor of Maryland.

To be sure, Mandel's extraordinary political journey had its share of negative baschert. There was his bizarre decision to announce by press release that he was seeking a divorce from Barbara Oberfeld Mandel, whom he had married when he was 21 years old and was the mother of their two children. The release was issued on an Independence Day weekend, perhaps suggesting Mandel's penchant for irony. Barbara proved that she, too, knew a thing or two about getting even rather than angry by refusing to move out of the governor's mansion. It was the governor who sought lodgings elsewhere. Though the new living arrangements of the state's first couple might have violated the state constitution, Maryland's attorney general had no stomach for pressing the issue.

And there was the matter of Mandel's indictment, followed by Maryland's trial of the century, his conviction and sentencing to a federal lockup in Florida -- all stemming from the "crime" of "mail fraud and racketeering," which the Supreme Court of the United States later ruled did not exist. Mandel is quietly adamant that most of the public outside of the legal community may not comprehend that there is a clear distinction between a pardon and a commutation of a sentence. President Reagan commuted Mandel's sentence; he did not pardon the former governor. "By accepting (a pardon), you are admitting you have broken the law, which I did not do," Mandel writes. "That's why Gerald Ford always insisted that by pardoning Nixon, he was passing judgment."

In sum, when Mandel adds up his lifetime score of positive baschert and subtracts the negatives, despite the torment and anguish associated with the latter, over breakfast in an Annapolis bagel emporium, the 90-year-old former governor tells me, "I've had a good life."

When the definitive biography is finally written, it will show that the kid from East Baltimore -- so shy that he delivered his bar mitzvah speech from halfway up the stairs inside of his family's Oakmont Avenue home, then immediately ran to his room rather than face the celebrants downstairs -- spearheaded the transition of a state long dominated by its rural outreaches into perhaps the most progressive political entity below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Future state historians may find themselves bewildered by how much was achieved by this quiet, confident politician's politician who emphatically was not cast from the mold of such legendary progressives as Teddy Roosevelt and Fighting Bob LaFollette. Mandel had more in common with the title character in Woody Allen's film, Zelig, who always just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Moreover, Mandel eschewed ideology and seemed to believe first and foremost in two precepts: that politics is the art of the possible, and in his own ability to see that the possible happened.

By taking salient parts from the failed draft Maryland Constitution, crafted in 1967 by some of the best minds in the state, Mandel led the effort to overhaul a creaky state government into a streamlined modern paradigm. Though he is East Baltimore to the core, he did it with his strongest support coming from the state's rural bastion of conservatism, Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Marvin Mandel will be remembered by those who served with and under him in the legislature and as governor, as well as the press that covered him, for getting things done; he was the quintessential pragmatist. In today's climate, when straying from the party line is viewed as heresy, when camaraderie, cooperation and compromise have been replaced by the politics of polarization, there are many worse things to be called.

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OPEN LETTER TO AMERICAN VOTERS: REALITY CHECK AMID TURBULENCE

by H. N. Burdett

The Obama administration is catching flak from the left and the right simultaneously on pretty much any issue one can blindly yank out of the fedora, yet it just keeps putting its head down and charging forward.

From the right, the remarkably disciplined contingents of Republicans in both Houses of Congress have made the dubious strategic choice to be counted against whatever the administration wants by threatening filibusters, tacking on crippling amendments, or merely voting in lockstep opposition.

From the left, there is seething resentment that the administration time and again gives away too much in failed attempts to court bipartisanship and winds up getting nothing at all in return.

Most progressives feel they could have carved out a better deal on health insurance, forgetting, of course, that more than 20 votes by conservative Democrats -- enough to make the difference between winning and losing the bill -- were at stake.

In other words, what was widely viewed as the administration's capitulation to Republicans with no quid pro quo, was actually capitulation to right wing congressional Democrats who fretted along with their conservative brethren across the aisle about a shift to socialized medicine.

The health insurance bill recently enacted by Congress is, in fact, a shining example of the existing and increasing politics of polarization in Washington that can be expected to inevitably spill over to states and cities.

To those of us who have watched for decades with dismay and disdain the feints, the parries, the false starts and the ultimate failure after failure of health insurance to move beyond Square One, the mere existence of this law is nothing short of a minor miracle.

Certainly the bill President Obama signed is not the legislation many of us would have preferred. There are legitimate questions concerning whether it is reform at all, rather than a restructuring of the health care insurance industry, which it indeed more closely resembles. But those who contend that it would have been better had we stood pat and done nothing are plain and simply wrong.

Some 32 million Americans who did not have at least minimal health insurance must acquire it, or pay a fine, and this is certainly Change with a capital 'C'. And if it is still found unaffordable, the federal government will pick up the tab.

The courts will have to determine the constitutionality of requiring people to purchase health insurance from a private carrier and whether or not the much cited "precedent" of requiring automobile insurance constitutes a valid basis for comparison. A glaring difference is that one can opt out of the latter by simply not driving, but the alternative for opting out of health insurance is clearly unacceptable, if not horrendously extreme.

There is doubt, however, concerning how vigorously private insurance companies might want to contest the constitutionality of the law, considering how preoccupied they will be by writing all of those federal government-guaranteed new bare bone health policies.

But the bigger picture is that the United States has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into conformity with all other industrialized nations, which do indeed have health insurance for all of their citizens.

Single payer government health insurance would have been more in line with the so-called more developed world. But when the health insurance industry was invited to participate in writing the bill, the red flag went up that single payer was out of the window. The last has not been heard about single payer health insurance in the United States; it is destined to fly right back into the window, the only question being how soon.

In capitalism -- how can we phrase this delicately? -- money talks. And the United States has advanced, or at least stretched, capitalism to its optimum, some would say beyond its limits. Here money not only talks, it dominates the conversation.

Despite the credit card industry making a mockery of what was once the crime of usury, despite the despicable criminality perpetrated by the Milkens and Madoffs, despite the necessity to bail out our nation's once thriving, impossible-to-be surpassed automobile industry and the bailout one-by-one of our most revered financial institutions, American capitalism survives and there was never any real question that it would.

Once upon a time in the wild and woolly west, bandits could gallop into town on horseback and rob a bank by waving a pistol in the frightened face of a teller. During prohibition, gangsters backed up their heists of bootleg whiskey supported by tommy guns. But the take on the best days of the desperadoes of Dodge City and Capone's gang in Chicago was mere chump change compared to the hauls of their contemporary counterparts in their three-piece suits who don't need six-shooters or automatic weapons, though Ivy League MBAs are sometimes useful.

The recent Wall Street implosion, which saw financial houses and car manufacturers sink into the morass of their own poor judgment and insatiable appetite for ever more obscene accumulations of unearned wealth was not as much a failure of capitalism as it was a failure of its gatekeepers.

Legislation is now required to impose strict rules and regulations on the way once-revered financial institutions conduct their business and the provisos must be backed by serious enforcement to ensure that they toe the line.

There are those who will insist that capitalism can only work when it has no constraints whatsoever, that the market must be completely, totally unfettered for it to seek its own level.

The problem with this thinking is that it runs counter to the very genius of the Founding Fathers who saw this country as one governed by the rule of law.

The more devious capitalists comprehended the problem and proceeded to wrap themselves in the flag, hiring the best politicians, preachers, publicists and promoters that money could buy to convince the public that anything-goes capitalism is as American as apple pie. Therefore, anyone suggesting that capitalism must be reined in and abide by rules and regulations along with the rest of society can be expected to be called socialists or communists by those who have been brainwashed so thoroughly that they often enough campaign and vote against their own best interests.

Jefferson's admonition regarding the price of liberty applies as well to what is needed to save Wall Street from itself: eternal vigilance.

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THE GREAT BORDER FENCE DEBACLE

President Obama inherited from the Bush administration a border security program "replete with vast technology problems accompanied by outrageous cost overruns and missed deadlines" by the the main contractor, says a report by the Center for American Progress.

CAP charges that the Bush administration "proved it had learned little from earlier failures to control undocumented immigration along the border stretching back more than a decade, and showed it had a poor handle at best on government contracting at the then new Department of Homeland Security.

DHS signaled its discontent with the mismanaged cost-overriden technological component of its border enforcement strategy by freezing work on the "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border "pending a full assessment of its usefulness," according to the report.

At the same time, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered the redeployment of $50 million of Recovery Act funding to other "tested" commercially available security technology, including mobile surveillance, thermal imaging devices, ultra-light detection, mobile radios, cameras and laptop computers for pursuit vehicles, and remote video surveillance system enhancements.

More than half a dozen critical reports of DHS's Secure Border Initiative, or SBI, a program to control undocumented immigration and major drug trafficking operations primarily along the U.S.-Mexico border, but also across the United States, have been issued.

Between the fiscal years 2005 and 2009, more than $3.7 billion was spent on SBI. The initiative called for:

• More agents for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents under DHS.


• Expanded capacity to detain and remove undocumented immigrants.


• Increased enforcement at worksites, stepping up fugitive operations and updating contracts with state local law agencies.


• Upgrading ports of entry and enhanced spending on steel fencing along the border.


• Building a 'vertical fence' under the so-called SBInet advanced technology program to increase the detection of illegal trafficking of narcotics and people.

SBInet was intended to improve security between ports of entry and where the physical fencing is not in place by installing remote video surveillance camera systems and sensors as well as adding aerial assets such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Boeing, a major defense contractor and commercial airline manufactuerer, was selected by DHS's Customs and Border Protection in September 20006 to lead SBInet. Boeing beat out three other large contractors -- Lockheed Martin, Northrop Gruman and Raytheon, as well as Ericsson Inc., the Swedish telecommunications giant -- to win the three-year contract with three additional one-year options, despite misgivings about its lack of experience with border conrol issues.

Concerns about Boeing proved prophetic. Just before Napolitano's decision to reassess SBInet, DHS estimated the 'virtual fence' would be fully deployed along the southwest border in 2016 -- more than a decade after it was first announced and seven years after the original contract for the program expired.

The GAO reported last year that SBInet's delays required DHS to rely on existing equipment, rather than using the new technology. The more modern equipment has had numerous problems, among them, poor camera clarity during bad weather and mechanical failure with radar that leave it unable to spot intruders.

Federal auditors followed up with a critical report, observing that from March 2008 to July 2009, more than 1,300 defects were found in the SBInet system, and new problems were being discovered at a faster rate than repairs could be made.

Additionally, about 70 percent of the procedures to test the system were rewritten as they were being executed, prompting a letter from DHS to Boeing asserting that testing changes appeared to be designed to pass the test rather than qualify the system.

While DHS has been challenged to improve its oversight over Boeing, it also has missed some of its own deadlines, particularly those surrounding the troubled SBInet.

Mark Borkowski, the DHS official in charge of the project, acknowledged at the start of 2010 that he would be unable to meet a promised March 2010 deadline to the House Appropriations Committee for turning over an initial portion of the project in Arizona to the Border Patrol.

In its most recent audit in March 2010, GAO stated that the long-delayed first two "blocks" of the system are now scheduled to be handed over to the federal government this fall, if Customs and Border Protection approve the timeline.

"At the current rate of 28 miles of SInet technology every 4. 5 years, it would take 320 years -- or until the year 2330 -- to deploy SBInet technology across the Southwest border," said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, chairman of the Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism, during a hearing to receive GAO's study. "That statistic would be comical if the subject matter were not so serious."

Other members of Congress and some experts in the field of homeland security and technology are also openly skeptical that a solution is coming soon.

"It is hard to be optimistic," said Rep. Mark Souder, R-Indiana, at a September 2009 hearing. And when Rep. Christopher Carney, D-Pennsylvania, asked at a hearing if the taxpayers have gotten what they paid for, a senior GAO official answered, "No."

Nor are DHS border challenges exclusively technological.

The department also is charged by Congress with building a physical fence covering one-third of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, an ambitious project the costs of which have risen from $3.5 million a mile to $6.5 million a mile.

Another form of fencing aimed at keeping out vehicles has also risen in cost, from $1 million to $1.8 million per mile, and GAO officials say the impact of both types of fencing has not been adequately measured.

"We have yet to see whether or not this fencing has increased border security and justified its costs," says Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-California, the past chair of the House Homeland Security Committee's panel on border issues.

These concerns have been shared by many members of Congress, as well as by Napolitano, who first opposed the fence while serving as governor of Arizona, a position she held before she was named Secretary of DHS.

Even though the Obama administration has worked around the prominent SBI setbacks and pushed forward with increased staffing, major construction, and revised detection and removal procedures, the focus on the costly border fences and SBInet play into the political hand of opponents of comprehensive immigration reform.

Congress received in February the Obama administration's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2011, which included a sharp funding cut for SBI, budgeting $574.17 million, down from $800 million it got the previous year.

No one expects the physical fence alone can keep out illegal immigrants, which is why SBInet remained so important despite its numerous failures to meet the benchmarks for success that it promised at its start in 2005. Questions from Congress and government auditors regarding the usefulness of the physical and 'virtual' barriers erected along the southwest border will continue.

This is the challenge facing the Obama administration and DHS. Richard Stana, the top GAO official overseeing border issues, told an El Paso radio station that 2010 is a crucial year for SBInet. "If it doesn't work in 2010," he said, "then there's going to have to be some serious thinking about where to go, and what options exist."

"I hope the department is working on Plan B," Cuellar said as he pushed for some form of technology strategy during the March congressional hearing, "because those of us along the border have waited long enough for a security solution that works."

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