Pity the Poor Watchdogs…And Ourselves

In the last 10 years we have seen the levees break in New Orleans and the financial system break in the USA and around the world. In both cases a number of human beings saw it coming, but in both cases a far greater number of human beings exhibited willful blindness and belligerent, stubborn resistance to heeding the warnings. Such behavior all but guaranteed maximum disaster when the time came.

What has changed since then? A few things, actually.

The Good News

Certain watchdog agencies actually have changed.

For example, Standard & Poor’s, previous purveyor of rosy ratings, has since been braving the backlash and dishing out ratings downgrades all over the place, including against the mighty United States Treasury. And how about the recent downgrades of nearly half the Eurozone:

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services made it official late this afternoon. The credit-rating agency is stripping unlucky France of its AAA credit rating, knocking it down by one notch to AA+. Also getting knocked down one notch each were Austria, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia. S&P gave even worse news to Italy, Spain, Cyprus and Portugal, marking down their debt ratings by two notches each. That downgrade kicked Cyprus and Portugal all the way to “junk” status, where Greece already resides. Ouch. <source>

Moody’s, the other major credit rating agency, has also been busy issuing downgrades:

Moody’s has downgraded the credit ratings of nine Portuguese banks, citing increased asset risk resulting from their holdings of Portuguese government debt, the impact of austerity measures and strains on their liquidity. Moody’s also downgraded 12 UK banks on Friday. <source>

Meanwhile, along the Mississippi river, the Army Corps of Engineers last year declared a whole lotta levees “Unacceptable”:

…the corps has declared 10 percent of the levees in a new database of 2,200 federal levee systems “unacceptable,” including those protecting people in Dallas, Sacramento, St. Paul and Tulsa, Okla. About 80 percent are rated “minimally acceptable,” with many of those under orders to correct problems or risk falling into the unacceptable category. Just 9 percent of the levees in the database have been declared “acceptable.” <source>

You got that last statistic? Only nine percent of the levees are considered “acceptable”. In other words, the Corps is not screwing around and sugar coating anything.

The Bad News

You can guess what the bad news is…  Some people still don’t get it.

When the Army Corps of Engineers declared last year that the levees here were “unacceptable,” it kicked up a storm of protest from officials and residents of the broad Mississippi River flood plain… <source>

A storm of protest?

I can almost imagine such people screaming “LIE TO ME, LIE TO ME!”

So strange, humans are. What excuse do such “officials” offer up for their ridiculous objections?

…officials here said they believed that the corps was trying to shield itself from the embarrassment that followed Hurricane Katrina by issuing expensive and unreasonable requirements and oversight.

Oh, I see,it couldn’t be that the Corps is telling the truth — oh no, it must be that the Corps has psychological and emotional reasons for saying the levees are in bad shape. Right, that makes a lot more sense than the notion that infrastructure has decayed over the last 100 years…

Two Americas

Democrats like to promote the idea that there are two Americas: a rich one and a poor one. This class warfare has always been malicious and unsupported by the facts.

But perhaps there are two Americas after all, namely the one that is willing to face reality and make the hard choices, and the one that chooses hallucination, denial, and infantilism. If we can keep the former bigger than the latter, we will survive.