Able Archer

It's not torturous, it's tortuous!

The Associated Press reports Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey will not say water-boarding is torture.

This is what the law of our country has come to: the man who wants to become the top federal law enforcement official refuses to admit an internationally recognized method of torture is torture, because if he does so he would be obligated to prosecute agents of the government who committed such torture. Torture is illegal in the U.S. Therefore, the only way the Bush administration could not be in breach of that law is if it claims behavior it has ordered which is ostensibly torture is indeed not torture. This is its legal strategy. It makes one nostalgic for the innocence of Clintonian hairsplitting.

This is the sort of absurdity that forced the end of Alberto Gonzales’s tenure as head of the Justice Department. Apparently Michael Mukasey sees nothing wrong with it.

Time magazine explains Mukasey’s dilemma:

Mukasey's (and the White House's) problems began during his Oct. 18 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. At the hearing veteran Illinois Senator Dick Durbin asked Mukasey a deceptively simple question: Is waterboarding torture? Waterboarding simulates drowning, and involves constraining a person, restricting their breathing and pouring water on all or part of their face. Some version of it is widely reported to have been used by U.S. interrogators in an attempt to extract information from high-level terrorism suspects in the wake of 9/11.

It is also widely labeled as a form of torture by current and former U.S. military leaders, human rights organizations worldwide and prominent Republicans, including presidential candidate John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham. Torture is illegal in the United States, and Bush and the Administration have repeatedly asserted that they have not and do not torture. But Bush has declined to define torture, and Durbin's question cut to the core of that obfuscation.

Mukasey at first declined specifically to declare waterboarding torture, saying, "I think it would be irresponsible of me to discuss particular techniques with which I am not familiar when there are people who are using coercive techniques and who are being authorized to use coercive techniques. And for me to say something that is going to put their careers or freedom at risk simply because I want to be congenial, I don't think it would be responsible of me to do that." Durbin pressed on, citing cases where Americans and foreigners alike have been prosecuted and convicted for waterboarding. Finally Mukasey said, "It is not constitutional for the United States to engage in torture in any form, be it waterboarding or anything else."

-- Douglas Carlucci

Prudential Center "development" myths

The Prudential Center in Newark is now in use. The Devils played their first game there the other night, and Bon Jovi will clear his band out after another couple of nights. I would like to take the opportunity to briefly explain why the arena never should have been built.

Newark claims two primary economic benefits of the arena: it will create both jobs and tax revenue. This is true, but the benefits can only be judged in the context of the cost of the project to Newark. As the arena prepares to open, its cost to the city has been $311.5 million, including road and ground improvements around the site.

Newark estimates the arena – independent of the other parts of its downtown redevelopment plan – will generate each year $9 million in sales taxes, $750,000 in payroll taxes, and about $3 million in parking taxes, for a total of $12.75 million.

These estimates are based on the assumption that enough people will be willing to part with large amounts of money – for example, the cheapest tickets to the series of Bon Jovi concerts are about $100 and go up to several hundred dollars for the best seats – to fill up all the Devils’s games and concerts. But assuming the estimates are true, it will take Newark a little more than 24 years to make back the money it initially invested in the project. After 30 years, the Devils’ lease will expire and the city will own the arena. Whatever the value of the property will be at that point can be added to Newark’s arena-based revenues.

If all of this works out the way it is supposed to, Newark will at least make back its investment in the arena, and likely come out ahead. In the long run, that would at least justify the initial expense. But the problem is not the possibility that Newark might lose money on the deal. The problem is in analyzing costs and benefits: By building the arena with the Devils, will Newark get the most benefit it could have from spending over $300 million? The city of Newark is not a real estate concern; its primary responsibility is not to turn a profit on construction projects. Its responsibility is to spend its public money in such a way that will bring the greatest long-term economic and social stability to its citizens. In this way, the Prudential Center is a failure.

This is the context in which one ought to consider the second supposed economic benefit of the arena, job creation. Most of the about 1,500 jobs the arena created are low-wage, menial jobs with no benefits, little job security, and slight chances of promotion: these jobs include ushers, janitors, security guards, and concession clerks. Although some of the jobs will be better – someone will have to direct the menial labor – most of them will be of the first variety.

Worse, the workers will be employed by the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which is based in Los Angeles and can be presumed to have little interest in the long-term well-being of Newark. If times get tight, you can bet AEG will not hesitate to lay off however many workers it might take to protect the corporation’s bottom line. Jobs provided by locally-owned and administered companies are less likely to be turned over in such a way. Although they are not absolutely secure, local companies naturally have a closer connection to their workers and the municipal government.

If the purpose of the project was to develop the local economy by creating jobs, Newark could have done a lot better. Three-hundred million dollars is a high price for 1,500 low-level corporate jobs. Alternative programs for job creation are too numerous to recite, but imagine if Newark had used a fraction of the money it spent to build the arena on a loan program for small and medium local businesses. The program could be tied to job creation. For example, if a local clothing retailer applies for a $500,000 loan to expand his store, the terms could depend on job creation: if the business promises to hire 3 additional employees, it can repay the loan with no interest. This is not a specific recommendation, but such a program would bring all the economic benefits of the arena without the disadvantages of a major construction project and jobs administered by a company 3,000 miles away.

Of course, this would deprive public officials of a single building they can repeatedly point to when they want to take credit for “development,” which I suspect is always a strong ulterior motive for funding projects such as the Prudential Center.

The arena also carries on the tradition of wretched urban planning that has plagued our cities for the last half century. The arena’s success will be judged by the number of suburbanites it will bring to the city. The only attention paid to the people who actually live in Newark will be from extra police assigned to the arena to keep the riff-raff away from the wealthy suburbanites, so they’re not afraid to open their wallets. Instead of investing in the infrastructure its people use or the businesses and schools they patronize, Newark’s previous government chose to spend hundreds of millions on a facility made almost specifically for out-of-towners. The ostensible benefit to Newark is low-level jobs with AEG and whatever incidental benefits they might enjoy from the road improvements meant to help suburbanites more easily drive their cars into the city center. It is fair to say most Newarkers have little interest in hockey, and few can afford the high cost of tickets to other events at the arena.

Look at the arena from the perspective of a bona fide resident of Newark, one who lives there and is raising a family there. The city took your tax money to build an arena to attract suburbanites to the city. The point of bringing them there is so they will spend their money in the city; when they spend their money, the city collects taxes. But the city will have to collect taxes for at least two decades before its initial capital investment in the arena is recovered. At that point, the city might use the money for Newarkers: maybe it will build some schools, or a new clinic. More likely, it will just use the money to fund the next fanciful “development” project.

I have a suggestion for the suburbanites still convinced the arena is a positive move for the city. Don’t take the officially recommended routes to the Prudential Center. Don’t take the Parkway to 78, then drive a few blocks through downtown Newark to get there. Take the Parkway to Exit 143A. If you are exiting from Parkway South, make a right on Union Avenue; Parkway North, make a left on Ball Street. Drive a few blocks until you get to Springfield Avenue, then make a right. It is only a few miles to downtown Newark. As you drive and stop at the stop lights, look around. You are in Newark’s Central Ward, one of the most depressed urban neighborhoods in the country. Take a good look, notice a few things. There are plenty of fortune-tellers, but very few clinics. There are a lot of young people, but hardly anywhere but the streets for them to hang out. There are a lot of churches and schools, but last year 104 men and women were killed on these streets. You will notice very quickly that something is deeply wrong. I dare you to say an arena will fix it.

-- Douglas Carlucci

Freedom's Watch Watch, Part One

Fans of the twenty-four-hours-a-day infotainment burlesque of Fox News are probably already familiar’s with Freedom’s Watch. The group is a murky propaganda operation run by Bradley Blakeman, former deputy assistant for scheduling to President Bush.

Freedom’s Watch produced a series of advertisements it began running in late August “to fight the efforts of anti-victory groups that are undermining the war on terror.” That statement is a fair introduction to the group’s mentality, which is based on the usual right-wing syllogism that George Bush equals the war on terror, therefore any criticism of George Bush and his poorly-managed military expeditions shows one’s preference for terrorists.

This is the most obnoxious of their ads:

One wonders how many soldiers – or fathers and mothers of soldiers – are on the board of Freedom’s Watch. I suspect not many.

Anyway, word comes from Huffington Post reporter Michael Roston the group called together conservative Poobahs to have an enlightening conversation on the subject of Iran, Iraq’s recalcitrant neighbor.

There was a rumor the meeting was meant to consider a new propaganda campaign for war with Iran, but Roston, after some diligent reporting, found out the meeting was only a chance for war-fond think-tankers to flex their brain-muscles in front of the group’s leaders, who apparently have several hundred million dollars on hand.

"The general purpose was to have an exchange of ideas," the source explained. "Given that suddenly, this behemoth has emerged, most of panelists wanted to prove their worth to Freedom's Watch, and show off their intellectual heft."

I am sure I can guess the conclusion of the meeting. Whether it will be expressed in a new set of television commercials we will have to wait to see. Keep and eye out and report back to Able Archer. I will write another edition of Freedom’s Watch Watch when they make their “media buy.”

-- Douglas Carlucci

Meadowlands EnCap project collapses in Bergen County

It stinks of leachate in Bergen County. State officials awarded a North Carolina-based company $244 million in public loans to build a golf course and condominiums on the Meadowland’s infamous mountains of garbage in Lyndhurst and Rutherford. In return, the company dumped more toxic waste at the site and built nothing.

Jeff Pillets of the Bergen Record, after reviewing thousands of pages of state documents, tells the pathetic story:

With work at a standstill and the fate of the project in doubt, the famously polluted swamps of the Meadowlands are now more tainted than ever. Instead of cleaning up the dumps, EnCap re-created them.

For the most part, it all happened with the full knowledge and blessing of the state.

The documents show that the Department of Environmental Protection -- over the seven years since the project was proposed -- granted a string of lucrative concessions to EnCap, all negotiated by the developer's team of well-connected lawyer-lobbyists from the Teaneck-based DeCotiis, Fitzpatrick, Cole & Wisler firm.

They won EnCap and its parent company, Cherokee Investment Partners of North Carolina, $300 million in public financing. But their prowess on the environmental regulation front was equally prodigious.

Standards regarding the types of materials that could be used in the remediation were relaxed, turning an expense into $30 million in revenue for the developer.

Health and safety standards that had been enforced on other landfill-closure projects were stripped down or eliminated. The building of houses on a landfill, the venting of dangerous landfill gases, the capping and containment of buried trash, even basic environmental tests – all were subject to negotiation.

Yet, even as EnCap's lawyers were winning breaks, the developer was violating those relaxed standards, breaking promises to the state and cutting corners.

In 2006, EnCap improperly accepted more than 600,000 cubic yards of contaminated material that did not even meet the relaxed cleanliness standards created for the project. EnCap's own engineer found that 78 of 89 samples taken from the material contained excessive levels of arsenic and cancer-causing benzene compounds.

EnCap enriched itself by accepting payment to take soil that could not be dumped legally anywhere else and using it to cap the North Arlington landfills. When it was done creating a foundation of poisoned soil EnCap planned to build a golf course and homes right on top of it. And the citizens of Bergen County would probably never had known any of this if the company had not failed to complete the project despite its massive public subsidies. Today, no houses stand, no golf will played in the Meadowlands. EnCap has only made the area more polluted: not only did it add tons of poisonous soil to the site, but the weight of the new soil is hastening “the flow of millions of gallons of toxic runoff,” according to Pillets.

You Want It, You Got It

New Jersey’s government is a work of art. Only men and women with a subtle understanding of the absurd could consistently spend so much money to act in the exact opposite of the public interest. Well-connected lawyers worked with political appointees at state agencies to eviscerate common standards for capping landfills.

Pillets reports EnCap was allowed to build a cap on the landfill that is 100 times more permeable than it was to have been in the original agreement between the company and the state. Instead of the 60-inch solid walls used in other landfill closings, EnCap was allowed to use plastic sheets – in some cases the sheets extend fewer than 10 feet into the ground. In contrast to the EnCap boondoggle, previous landfill closures have included barriers sunk 50 feet into layer of hard clay to prevent toxic waste from seeping out. State officials allowed EnCap a pass on the disposal of landfills gases, too. This resulted in toxic gas streaming out of the ground “at potentially explosive levels from two areas at the site.”

This is only the beginning. EnCap was originally to have used virgin clay to cap the landfill, but it soon determined that would be too expensive. So the company lobbied the state for permission to use “alternative materials” at the site – a code word for toxic sediment from the bottom of local waterways the federal government had determined was too toxic to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean, where it usually puts such waste.

EnCap, however, failed to bid on the dredge contracts. The state DEP, which did everything it could to let the project get out of hand, was disappointed, but not so much it stopped EnCap from bringing in more “alternative materials” to the site – this time, tire chips, bits and pieces of old industrial buildings, and soil from other toxic waste sites. The plan to cap the landfill with virgin clay was more than dead – EnCap announced it would charge contractors dumping such material at the site because it was not set up to process the clay.

Pay-to-Destroy

EnCap was prepared to do what it had to do to get public financing for a project in New Jersey: write checks to the right people.

Among those contributions were $12,000 by EnCap executives, some of whom live in North Carolina, to election campaigns of James Guida, the former mayor of Lyndhurst, one of the host communities for the sprawling development.

In addition to the relatively cheap campaign donations to Guida, the project has generated millions of dollars for well-connected law firms.

McCarter & English of Newark, the state's largest law firm, billed EnCap more than $1.25 million. McCarter and English campaign contributions statewide totaled at least $275,000 from 2002 to 2006.

Parker McCay, a South Jersey firm whose chief executive is Philip Norcross, brother of South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross, collected $400,000 as bond counsel. Parker McCay's campaign contributions from 2002 to 2006 were nearly $1 million, including more than $40,000 by Philip Norcross to the Bergen County Democratic Organization.

Windels Marx Lane & Mittendorf, whose partners include Port Authority Chairman Anthony Coscia, received more than $850,000 for its efforts. Windels Marx gave about $80,000 in campaign cash, including $5,000 to the Bergen County Democrats.

The firms knew how to keep the work coming:

Those firms have donated more than $2.5 million to campaigns of elected officials statewide. In some cases, those officials' support has been crucial to help make the $850 million EnCap project move forward on remediated landfills in Lyndhurst and Rutherford and on an industrial street in North Arlington.

The Record has done a lot of great reporting on this. The archive is here.

No Oil for Blood

Jack Miles explains how the Iraqi government is using its limited influence to push the U.S.-led “multinational force” out of the country, and with it American’s goal of controlling Iraq’s oil.

It is amazing what a struggle it is to see what is right in front of one’s nose, to paraphrase George Orwell. American politicians of both major parties admit the U.S. is too dependent on imported petroleum. President Bush made the point himself when he briefly became interested in alternative energy. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, it invaded the weakest of the nations with large, proven petroleum reserves. Both of those statements are indisputable. Yet to make the logical connection between the two remains a taboo of American politics, even as the war has become immensely unpopular.

Miles explains:

In the twenty-first century's version of the "Great Game" of nineteenth century imperialism, the Bush administration made a colossal gamble that Iraq could become a kind of West Germany or South Korea on the Persian Gulf -- a federal republic with a robust, oil-exporting economy, a rising standard of living, and a set of U.S. bases that would guarantee lasting American domination of the most resource-strategic region on the planet. The political half of that gamble has already been lost, but the Bush administration has proven adamantly unwilling to accept the loss of the economic half, the oil half, without a desperate fight. Perhaps the five super-bases that the U.S. has been constructing in Iraq for as many as 20,000 troops each, plus the ill-built super-embassy (the largest on the planet) it has been constructing inside the Green Zone, will suffice to maintain American control over the oil reserves, even in defiance of international law and the officially stated wishes of the Iraqi people -- but perhaps not.

One does not need to rely on conjecture to figure out the Iraq War was primarily about petroleum. As the state of Iraq has continued to disintegrate over the last year, the only law the U.S. repeatedly and adamantly insisted the Iraq government approve was the oil law it sought to impose on the country. While thousands of Iraqis died in daily bombings and executions, the U.S. government publicly insisted passing the oil law would be the essential measure of “political reconciliation.” That is more than peculiar. It is a revelation. Read the full article here.

Political prosecutions at the Justice Department

Scott Horton has an essential review of the evidence presented at a recent Congressional hearing on political prosecutions by the Bush Justice Department. The proof is overwhelming and there was little effort by the accused to defend against the charges.

From Horton’s article:

Former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, who advised Gov. Siegelman early in his case, described how the prosecutors in Montgomery told him the case was over in 2004 because they had no evidence to make it out. And then, they said, Washington ordered them to go back and put it together anyway. From that point, it was completely obvious that political appointees in Washington were running the case at every step. Laura McGann has a good summary of the Jones testimony here. Note how Jones’s testimony lines up perfectly with the testimony of Republican lawyer Jill Simpson’s account of the intervention of Karl Rove in the case. And note the remarkable failure of the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery, Leura Canary, to appear and contest the charge. Along side her refusal to turn over the documents that would shed light on the case. Indeed, Canary’s own recent conduct condemns her all by itself.

…

An update from the university professors who issued a prior explosive study showing that the Justice Department was bringing cases against Democrats rather than Republicans all across the country. With officeholders roughly equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, the DOJ brought 5.6 prosecutions against Democrats for every one against a Republican. What were the chances of this ratio coming out of random selection? “One in 10,000.” In other words, the deck has been politically stacked and dictated.

…

Perhaps the most astonishing thing is the defense mustered by the Department of Justice. There wasn’t one. Evidently they’ve decided, in light of the problems faced by prior Justice Department officials–who testified there were no problems in the U.S. attorneys scandal and are now hoping to avoid perjury prosecutions–that silence is the best policy.

Read the whole thing here.

-- Douglas Carlucci

Wars could cost $2.4 trillion

From USA Today:

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate scheduled for release Wednesday.

A previous CBO estimate put the wars' costs at more than $1.6 trillion. This one adds $705 billion in interest, taking into account that the conflicts are being funded with borrowed money.

The new estimate also includes President Bush's request Monday for another $46 billion in war funding, said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., budget committee chairman, who provided the CBO's new numbers to USA TODAY.

Assuming that Iraq accounts for about 80% of that total, the Iraq war would cost $1.9 trillion, including $564 million in interest, said Thomas Kahn, Spratt's staff director. The committee holds a hearing on war costs this morning.

What a lynching looks like

Michael Donald, murder victim

This is what a lynching looks like. This is what a noose is for.

In 1981, Michael Donald was tortured and killed in Mobile, Alabama, by two members of the United Klans of America, the same organization that claimed as members the thugs who killed Viola Liuzzo and bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.

Ku Klux Klan propaganda, circa Donald murder

Michael Donald was on his way to the store. He could not have known what was about to happen to him. He was killed by the Klan as revenge for the acquittal of Josephus Andersonan, a black man who was accused of killing a white police officer.

After the acquittal, Alabama Klan leader Bennie Hays said “if a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man.” That night, Hays’s son Henry and James Knowles prowled Mobile for a victim. The two spotted Donald, beat him with a tree limb, cut his throat, and hanged him from a tree near his home. The white police said Donald had been part of failed drug deal. The same night the Klan burned a cross on the Mobile courthouse lawn.

In the end, there was some justice. Henry Hays and Knowles were indicted and convicted for the murder, but only after activists convinced the FBI to take up the case. Hays was executed in 1997. Beulah Mae Donald, Michael’s mother, sued the United Klans of America with the Southern Poverty Law Center as her counsel. The $7 million verdict bankrupted the United Klans of America, finally ending its terrorism.

That is the hideous story of a lynching. It has nothing to do with “political correctness” or “tolerance” or the trite words we use to conceal the facts of racism in this country – the willingness of human beings to kill other human beings because their skin is different.

This is why a humane person ought to be angry when he hears nooses are turning up around the country to intimidate black people, as they have been with terrible frequency this fall.

A noose was found hung on the office doorknob of a black professor at Columbia University. Miles from where I live, a noose was found in the Home Depot in Passaic, New Jersey. In Gurnee, Illinois, a high school junior brought a noose to school. In South Elgin, Illinois, at another Home Depot, workers found a noose hanging near graffiti that spelled the word nigger.

At a Philadelphia construction site a white worker waved a noose at a black worker and said he wanted to hang somebody. Someone sent a racist letter and a noose to the black principal of Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. Another noose was found hanging from a tree in a playground in Ozone Park, Queens. This all happened after the incident in Jena, Louisiana.

It would be comforting to dismiss each incident as an imitation of the previous incidents, but would you believe that? There is a latent anger in this country, a sense that things are not getting better. While our politicians have invested so much of their energy talking brightly about the future that to mention any doubt is considered impolitic, the real people who make up the population – not the money men who can afford to believe their smiles or the party hacks who live off the government, but the working men and women – see the end of American manufacturing and the rise of an economy that only pushes money around. It is an economy that creates immense wealth, but not for them. The fortunate few can buy what they want, pushing housing and education prices out of the reach of the working class. All the workers get is anxiety and a hollow promise from opportunistic phonies that America is only getting better.

Where does the anger and frustration go? Are the nooses an extreme manifestation? Social uncertainty and chaos cause individuals who feel marginalized or persecuted to in turn marginalize and persecute the nearest and most vulnerable other; since the beginning of this nation, whites have made blacks that other. Although de jure racism is mostly gone in this country, our society never confronted the process that created it.

Our national leaders are occupied still trying to justify a years-old military occupation in the middle east. Other political issues are pushed to extremes; we debate the problems of our day not as though we might come to some compromise we can all live with, but as though each and every issue is about absolute morality and the meaning of life.

I am not writing this to make a big point, or to give an answer to my questions. All I want is for people to consider when bad cultural habits might turn into cultural pathologies.

-- Douglas Carlucci

Iraq tries to placate Turkey

A report in the Manchester Guardian seems to clear up the situation in northern Iraq. The newspaper reports the Iraq government has promised to "do all it could" to stop PKK fighters from launching attacks across Turkey's border.

But [Iraq Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari] fell short of committing Iraqi troops, or the peshmerga fighters of the Kurdistan regional government, to oust the PKK fighters as Turkey has been demanding.

Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish region, has said his forces would stay out of any fighting between the Turks and the PKK. Iraq has said its army is too busy fighting elsewhere in the country. Any military offensive by Iraq would need US troops, who have been reluctant to attack the PKK.

But they are now reported to be considering an attack in coordination with the Turkish military.

"If there is an attack, it will be a joint Turkish-US affair, with rockets or from the air, and the Iraqis won't be consulted," said a senior political source in Baghdad last night. (Emphasis mine.)

This is the first time I have read the U.S. might participate in the attack. The quote is anonymous and unspecific, so I would not take it as definitive. I will update as I learn more.

UPDATE

Turkish newspaper Sabah reports the following (from the English edition; grammar is a little rough):

Prime Minister Erdoğan gave the US Minister of Foreign Affairs Condoleezza Rice the message to either, "hand over the PKK terrorists' ringleaders or to work together with us in this operation."

Erdoğan, who spoke to Condoleeza Rice during the terrorism summit, said: "if you do not want the Turkish army to hold a cross-border operation, then you should hand over the terrorists as soon as possible." Rice, who requested a few days, said: "if you carry out a cross-border operation at this point, it will damage the Armenian bill as well as our common interests."

Professor Juan Cole's analysis at Informed Comment:

Although the US says it cannot control the PKK because it has few troops in the north of Iraq, this excuse neglects another reason that the US is essentially coddling a terrorist group that is killing fellow NATO troops. The fact is that the PKK is being coddled by Massoud Barzani and his Peshmerga, who could stop them hitting Turkey if they so desired. The other fact is that the US only has one really reliable ally in Iraq, which is the Kurds, and their paramilitary or the Peshmerga is the only element in the new Iraqi army that fights with any spunk or initiative. The US cannot afford to alienate Barzani or the Peshmerga; hence it is forced to try to wheedle Turkey into inaction in the face of a rather dramatic set of provocations.

-- Douglas Carlucci

California burns

An image from a NASA satellite of smoke from the southern California wildfires blowing over the Pacific Ocean.

Half a million people have fled the wildfires in southern California. It is estimated 2,000 homes have already been destroyed. It is hard to imagine the long-term consequences of this.

Of course, a large part of the problem is building on vulnerable land. That, however, is the story of many American metropolises, as we learned during Hurricane Katrina about New Orleans.