From The ANSWER Coalition

A Proposal for Nation-Wide Protests
“Turn Up the Heat in 2007″

Here’s the first (of many to come)

Bush will be speaking at the graduation ceremony of the Coast Guard Academy on Wed. May 23rd. Join with students, soldiers and veterans, impeachment and anti-war activists to protest. Transportation is being organized regionally from Boston, Cape Cod, New Haven and New York City. ANSWERCT.org for more information.

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Yesterday, the Bad Craziness post here on the Virginia Tech slaughter mentioned that 33 dead happens every day in Iraq. This sparked comments and calculations about the Iraq homicide rate, and how stratospheric it is. Turns out, it’s much higher than even the blood-drenched US Civil War. And we’re still recovering from that war…

From Joe Hartley

Using the raw numbers of 33 dead, and extrapolating it out to a year, I get just over 12,000 deaths, almost 4 times the number of deaths from 9/11/2001.

That calculation, horrifying as it is, is incomplete because (1) the number is less than the Iraqis lose each day, and (2) there is no correction for the different population sizes of the two countries.

The US has just over 300 million people; Iraq at its best has 25 million (probably less due to the unreported out-migration of the middle-class and those who can afford it, but lets give the Bushies every numerical benefit of the doubt). That’s a 12:1 difference in population, so the violent deaths would have to be increased to 144,000 per year to get a comparable figure. That’s a lotta deaths by violence; does anybody have a figure on the yearly homicides in the US?

Even that figure understates the deaths, since 33 is much lower than the average deaths in Iraq that get reported. My impression is that the average is about 63-67 per day, but let’s call it 50, again, so that we can understate the horror. This reduction does nothing to understate it, however, since it increases the yearly number of deaths to 219,000. Could America survive such a wave of killings? It certainly places the resiliency of the poor Iraqis in perspective.

DJ adds

According to a Justice Department table, homicides in the U.S. in 2004 totalled 16,137 (5.5 per 100,000), down from a high of 24,704 in 1991 and a high rate of 10.2 in 1980. For comparison, Joe’s numbers suggest a rate of 876 per 100,000 in Iraq.

Consider that during the Civil War, the U.S. incurred an average casualty rate of 500 casualties per 100,000 of population over the course of the war, by far our deadliest war. But that was primarily combatants; the Civil War did not produce civilian casualties in the numbers that post-modern warfare does.

The Iraq numbers don’t include those who died because there’s no medical treatment or the water is polluted or they got caught in a cross-fire or any number of other ways to die or be killed in a country that is a disintegrating war zone.

No one ever recovers from war. Or from lone psycho gunmen.

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Increasing droughts, floods, heat waves, infectious diseases, storm surges on coastlines, and water shortages are predicted for the US and Canada as a result of global warming. The most threatened areas in the US are the Southwest, California, Alaska, the Atlantic coast, and the Gulf Coast. That’s about half of the country geographically and way more than half in terms of population.

Plus, the changes are happening faster than anticipated and water could become scarce.

Also on Monday, 11 retired U.S. generals and admirals said that worldwide water shortages caused by global warming were a “serious threat to America’s national security” and might drag the U.S. into fights over shortages of natural resources.

Hmmm, the only place the US could get extra water from is Canada… Be scared Canada, be very scared. And tell me, why a water shortage elsewhere would “drag” the US into a fight is something explicable only to imperialists, but then, they’ve never needed much excuse to invade other countries anyway.

What happens when major US cities become seriously impacted by heat, drought, floods, and disease? It won’t be business as normal anymore. Nor will it be a short-term thing that will somehow reverse itself in a year or so. What will the impact be to Los Angeles or Houston when they have serious long-term water shortages?

Increased temperatures means more use of air conditioning, which in turn means that more electrical power is needed. In Los Angeles, the grid is already maxed out during summer heat waves. Captain,the engines canna take it much more.

Conservation on many levels is what’s needed. Smarter appliances that use less power. CFLs instead of incandescents. Mandated cutbacks on water use. No, you can’t have a gorgeous green grass lawn if you live in a semi-arid desert. Lawns are water pigs. Ditto for golf courses in deserts (and there are hundreds of them.) Shut them down. Low mpg gas hog passenger cars? Ban them.

Much of the coming needed changes will have to be government mandated because business and people won’t do it voluntarily. That’s just the reality of what’s coming.

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Nearly 900 Californians a week are losing their homes because they can’t afford to pay the mortgage — up from about 100 a week a year ago — providing fresh evidence that the housing market’s troubles are nowhere near over.

Home prices could well drop because of this, with some saying it could also trigger a recession.

It’s not just California either, The Housing Bubble Blog has a daily litany of the troubled real estate markets nationwide. Adding to all this is the outright fraud, which Bubble Markets Inventory Tracking cheerfully expounds upon, naming names, and detailing the transactions.

Ain’t capitalism wonderful, with greed and exploitation ruling the day. And yes, many of those who signed up for one of those negative amortization ARMs with an artificially low rate expecting real estate prices would rise forever so the house would just be their little unending piggy bank were just as greedy as the exploitative mortgage brokers and predatory bankers.

Dunno, guess I was insufficiently greedy to exploit all of that. My condo in L.A. doubled in value in three years, and when Sue and I got married, the house kept going up in value. It never even occurred to us to pull out money from it because, well, you do have to pay it back. Oh that…

There’s this bizarre notion that home equity is somehow free money. Pay off your credit cards debts! Yeah, and pile on the mortgage payments, and hope the value goes up so you can do it again. It’s like a hamster going faster and faster on a treadmill, one day it will collapse from exhaustion.

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