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First Look At Tornado Damage In New Orleans; 1000s Without Power
First Look At Tornado Damage In New Orleans; 1000s Without Power
As the sun comes up Wednesday morning in New Orleans, many folks are waking up to vast amounts of destruction after a tornado touched down on Tuesday night.
Local news WDSU reports a tornado ripped through parts of St. Bernard Parish, which borders New Orleans to the southeast. It demolished homes and businesses, flipping vehicles and killing at least one person.
Rescuers have been working non-stop, searching through the suburban parish for missing people. St. Bernard Parish President Guy McInnis said the tornado caused widespread damage.
“A tornado touched down this evening in the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East communities shortly before 8 p.m. CST. The New Orleans Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness has activated the Emergency Operations Center in response to the tornado. As of now, there have been no reports of casualties or significant damage to Orleans Parish,” said Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
“Our partners at Entergy are working to restore power to the 8,000 customers impacted. Residents should avoid all travel that isn’t essential, to provide an opportunity for the professionals to handle this situation,” Cantrell said.
Fox News’ Mitti Hicks posted heartbreaking images of the destruction from St. Bernard Parish.
Another first look at the tornado damage.
The Waiting Is The Hardest Part
Man, what an awful stretch of events.
When I penned last week’s article on tragedy, little did I expect something as horrible as the Las Vegas massacre would immediately follow. And nearly lost in the headlines was the untimely passing of rock legend, Tom Petty, one of my all-time favorite musicians. Sure can’t wait for this week to be over…
In memory of Tom, I’ve been listening to a lot of his and the Heartbreakers’ best hits. The lyrics to one song in particular, The Waiting, well-captures an important message today’s investors should take to heart:
The waiting is the hardest partDon’t let it kill you baby, don’t let it get to you
Those waiting for the financial markets to experience some sort (any sort!) of pullback have been waiting a long, looong time. How long?
- It has been over 100 months (more than 8.5 years) since the current bull market began in April of 2009
- It has been 15 months since the last (and very brief) drop of 5% in the S&P 500
- This past September saw record low volatility, including a stretch now claimed to be “the most peaceful days in the history of the markets”
- Since last year’s presidential election, at which point the markets were already considered dangerously overvalued, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up over 20%
- As of this article’s publishing, the Dow, the S&P and the NASDAQ are all trading at record highs
Or, to put it visually:
The stock market is now 70% higher than it was at the previous bubble peak immediately preceding the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.
Reflect for a moment how painful the crash from Oct 2008-March 2009 was. How much more painful will a crash from today’s much dizzier heights be?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Quarter Century Of Monetary Voodoo
A Quarter Century Of Monetary Voodoo
A Witless Tool of the Deep State?
Finance or politics? We don’t know which is jollier. The Republican presidential primary and Fed monetary policies seem to compete for headlines. Which can be most absurd? Which can be most outrageous? Which can get more page views?
Politics, led by Donald J. Trump, was clearly in the lead… until Wednesday. Then, the money world, with Janet L. Yellen wearing the yellow jersey, spurted ahead in the Hilarity Run.
“Cautious Yellen drives global stocks near 2016 peak,” reported a Reuters headline. The story itself was a remarkable tribute to the whole jackass money system.
At first glance, “cautious Yellen” would seem incongruous with stocks rising to “near 2016 peak.” Caution normally means playing it cool, not encouraging speculation.
But it wasn’t so much what Ms. Yellen said that sent stocks racing ahead. It was what she hasn’t done. And she hasn’t done exactly what we thought she wouldn’t do. That is, so far this year, she has not taken a single step in the direction of a “normal” monetary policy; our guess is that she never will.
Why not? Is it because she is a witless tool of Deep State cronies? Is it because her economic theory is silly, superficial, and simpleminded? Or is it because she and her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, have done so much damage to the normal world that there is nothing to go back to?
A coo-coo for the stock market…
“Cautious Yellen drives global stocks near 2016 peak,” reported a Reuters headline. The story itself was a remarkable tribute to the whole jackass money system.
At first glance, “cautious Yellen” would seem incongruous with stocks rising to “near 2016 peak.” Caution normally means playing it cool, not encouraging speculation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Stunning Drone Footage Of The Midwest Flooding Wreaking Havoc On US Oil
Stunning Drone Footage Of The Midwest Flooding Wreaking Havoc On US Oil
According to Bloomberg, the floods have killed at least 20 people and shut hundreds of roads across Missouri and Illinois, according to AccuWeather Inc. Rain-swollen rivers will set records in the Mississippi River basin through much of January. Fifty miles (80 kilometers) of the Illinois River remain closed, according to the U.S. Coast Guard, as well as five miles of the Mississippi River.
Additionally, the Coast Guard issued a high-water safety advisory for 566 miles of Mississippi River between Caruthersville, Missouri, and Natchez, Mississippi. It also instituted high-water towing limitations near Morgan City, Louisiana, for vessels heading south that are 600 feet or shorter, it said in a statement.
And while water levels have started to recede in some areas, closures and restrictions remain in place for safety, said Jonathan Lally, a spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard. “The high water is kind of moving in a big glob and it’s on its way down,” he said Friday in a telephone interview from New Orleans.
The impact of the flood has hit farmers, with hog producers in southern Illinois calling other farmers, hoping to find extra barn space to relocate pigs. Processors are sending additional trucks to retrieve market-ready pigs, she said. In one case, an overflowing creek took out electricity and made roads impassable, causing 2,000 pigs to drown.
But the flood’s most adverse economic impact may be on oil, which may see an even greater increase in stockpiles as a result, pushing the price of oil even lower.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina
(Photo: Eric Gay/AP)
For me, the road to This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate begins in a very specific time and place. The time was exactly ten years ago. The place was New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The road in question was flooded and littered with bodies.
Today I am posting, for the first time, the entire section on Hurricane Katrina from my last book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Rereading the chapter 10 years after the events transpired, I am struck most by this fact: the same military equipment and contractors used against New Orleans’ Black residents have since been used to militarize police across the United States, contributing to the epidemic of murders of unarmed Black men and women. That is one way in which the Disaster Capitalism Complex perpetuates itself and protects its lucrative market
This material is free for reproduction.
From the Introduction:
I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African-American Southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did.
Bypassing Big Oil’s Alliance with Government
Bypassing Big Oil’s Alliance with Government
In his almost 30-year career as an advocate for environmental justice, Louisiana attorney Stuart Smith has fought many of the biggest energy companies in the world and has come away victorious in his fair share of cases.
Smith tells the stories behind these cases in Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America, a new book that is part memoir and part legal thriller. With energy companies acquiring even greater leeway to do as they please, Smith believed now was the right time to show the public how he successfully used the courts to gain some justice against corporate wrongdoers.
The book’s legal dramas take place primarily in the oil patch of the Gulf Coast states, where companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron spent millions of dollars defending themselves in cases brought by Smith and his fellow plaintiffs’ attorneys. One energy industry behemoth feared a loss in a single case brought by Smith in a small town in Mississippi would establish legal precedent and wind up costing the industry considerably more money down the road.
“Part of me understood exactly why they fought. We were looking to establish a brand-new area of environmental law, one that could gain a small measure of justice for workers and other citizens who’d been poisoned all across the oil patch of the Deep South and could cost Big Oil hundreds of millions of dollars,” Smith writes.
As a storyteller, Smith fills the book with intrigue and suspense, often leaving the reader to wonder how he and his outgunned colleagues will be able to claim a legal victory on behalf of their underdog clients.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
