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The same creeping nausea that followed
the CNN 'all clear' sign in New Orleans six years
ago happened again yesterday. Anderson Cooper seemed a little peeved that the
lights didn't go out in Manhattan, but then the remnants of Hurricane Irene
stomped up the Hudson Valley and stalled a while and commenced to rip apart
the Catskills, the eastern Adirondacks, the Mohawk and upper Hudson valleys,
and then almost all of Vermont, not to mention New Hampshire and western
Massachusetts, and I can't even tell you much about whatever's going on in
Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland this morning. Connecticut,
Long Island, and Rhode Island are in there somewhere, and surely there's more
than a few things out of place in North Carolina.
This
is nowhere near Katrina's death toll of over 1800 souls, but the damage to
scores of towns, businesses, houses, and basic civic armature is going to be
very impressive as the news filters in later this week and the disaster is
still very much ongoing Monday, even with the sun shining bright. Towns all
over Vermont and New Hampshire are still drowning. The Hudson River is still
on the rise. The Mohawk River is at a 500-year flood stage and is about to
wipe the old city center of Schenectady, New York, off the map. Bridges,
dams, and roads are gone over a region at least as big as the Gulf Coast
splatter-trail of Katrina.
That
story is still developing. A lot of people will not be able to get around for
a long, long time, especially in Vermont and New Hampshire, where the rugged
terrain only allows for a few major roads that go anywhere. Even the bridges
that were not entirely washed away may have to be inspected before people are
allowed to drive over them, and some of these bridges may be structurally
shot even if they look superficially okay. There are a lot of them. If you
live in a flat state, you may have no idea.
The
next story is going to be the realization that there's no money to put it all
back together the way it was. The states don't have the money. The federal
government is obviously broke, and an awful lot of the individual households
and businesses will turn out to not have any insurance coverage for this kind
of disaster where it was water, not wind, that destroyed the property. I
don't know what the score is insurance-wise along the mid-Atlantic beachfront
towns - but remember, insurance companies were among the biggest dupes of the
Big Bank mortgage-backed securities racket, and when the new claims are toted
up they may find themselves in a bail-out line.
This
is a warning to America that the converging catastrophes of climate change,
energy scarcities, and failures of capital formation add up to more than the
sum of their parts in their power to drive a complex society into a ditch -
no matter what a moron like Rick Perry might say. But, of course, political
ramifications will follow. There will be a lot of pissed-off people in the
Northeast USA. Maybe they'll even start giving the grievance-bloated folk of
Dixieland some competition in the politics of the bitter harvest. Oddly, the
Siamese twin states of Vermont and New Hampshire are political polar
opposites. Vermont, the land of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, and other squooshy culture tropes from the attic of Hippiedom, is about as Left-progressive as it gets. New
Hampshire's license plate says, "Live Free or Die," and that same
draconian mood defines the state's politics: hard Right. It's like a few
counties of Georgia shook loose and drifted north somehow. My guess is that
the political rage will be about equal on both fronts, as folks are left
stranded, or homeless, or without a going business they thought they had only
a day or so ago. And my further guess is that their mood will afford some
insight into the extreme impotence, incompetence, and mendacity of both major
political parties. As I've said before in this space, think of these times as
not unlike the convulsive 1850s, preceding the worst crisis of our history.
Apart
from the fact that the hurricane season is just gearing up, and that a
procession of tropical storm blobs has commenced to pour out of West Africa,
there is that other alternate universe of storms, brushfires, and fiascos
called the fnancial system, which everybody sort of
forgot about over the weekend. Well, it's ba-a-a-ck this morning, too, and the financial weather was
deteriorating sharply last time I looked. You can stick a fork in the Euro
Zone. Bank of America is panhandling for spare change like a dying wino as it
whirls around the drain. Nobody knows what the shadow bets on all this action
is, but you can bet on one thing for sure: the counterparties can't pay.
Oh,
by the way, anybody remember that we had an earthquake here in the Northeast
a few days before Irene rumbled in? Probably not, unless part of your
building fell off. God's wrath, some might say, as we beat our path to a
world made by hand.
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