Rio de Chicago. Today I'm taking a break and celebrating the Chicago World Music Festival by attending two concerts of my favorite Brazilian guitarist-songwriter Celso Fonseca. First is a free lunchtime concert at the Chicago Cultural Center and later tonight is a concert at Chicago's great eclectic venue, the Hothouse.

Fonseca is a bossa nova artist of impeccable taste, who has worked with such acclaimed Brazilian musicians as Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, Vinicius Cantuaria, Gal Costa, and Virginia Rodrigues. This is his first solo US tour and he will be accompanied only by his guitar. According to his site, in the next few days he'll also appear in Columbus, Miami, Oakland and LA. His two US releases include Natural and the new Rive Gauche Rio, both of which are in highest rotation in Skimbleland.

If you enjoy mellow, subtle, intimately rich music, it doesn't get better than Celso Fonseca.

{ 10:48 AM }

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Bush vacation photo album. At Cryptome, a collection of photographs of Katrina's dead victims.

{ 9:45 AM }

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The prophet of profit: Seth Glickenhaus. One of my pet themes is that, contrary to their traditional image, Republicans are actually quite bad for business. In the past I called attention to nonagenarian Seth Glickenhaus, the esteemed multibillion dollar money manager whose firm has consistently delivered superior returns, and whose opinion on the present direction of the economy was not complimentary to the current administration.

Last week the 91-year-old was revisited by Sandra Ward in Barron's. His answers to her first two questions set the tone right away:

What about the economy and the stock market?

Let me list the negatives for the economy and the stock market, and then I'll address the pluses. The first negative is the huge military spending, both for peace purposes and war. Under a $400 billion-plus budget for a peacetime army, they are building a new fighter plane that is totally redundant and unnecessary and will cost us eventually hundreds of billions.

We don't get goods and services that are really important in our defense. That's true of the new submarines we are building in Connecticut and elsewhere, as well as the new aircraft carriers.

What would be more necessary?

A portion of it could be spent in better defense. Training young people in foreign languages is an area in which we are sorely lacking. That could make us much stronger by improving our intelligence and ability to infiltrate terrorist groups. The war itself is a war that occurred without any planning. The public is becoming increasingly disaffected with it, because we don't see any purpose in keeping our soldiers there. We are obviously unable to train the local people. We are spending huge sums every day to maintain the war, and we don't get any worthwhile goods or services or other offsetting asset.

Roughly 41 million people lack health care in this country. Some of the money spent on defense could be spent for that.

Then there is our school system, which is well below average, relative to the rest of the world. Any country that has a mediocre or worse school system is not going to be successful economically in the future. We should be paying teachers vastly more. We should only hire people to teach who are in the first third of their class, who not only know their subject matter, but also can inspire children to want to learn. Those people are not going into education today. They are going in to the law. They are going into engineering. They are going to Wall Street.

There is a dearth of public housing, and it takes eight to nine years between the time you apply for an apartment and you get it.

By inundating us with paperwork from the SEC, the government is failing to help businesses.

Then there's the greenhouse effect and global warming. Neglecting global warming is going to have the most incredible economic consequences -- mostly bad. Our farm areas will eventually be too warm to produce wheat and corn. The South will be even hotter.

Seth, you have raised many of these concerns in our past interviews.

I certainly have. But I do it because we as a country are very proud that our gross national product is up 4% or whatever on an annual basis. This is a great misstatement of the well-being of our economy. It doesn't take into consideration our depletion of capital, or the depletion of minerals, the depletion of fish, the depletion of raw materials or businesses that no longer exist. It gives a false picture. All it reflects is the amount of sales. If they sell oil at a higher price, why, that goes into the gross national product. The fact that you are using up an asset isn't accounted for. The disparity of income that has grown between the very wealthy and the poor is creating a bad situation.

It shocked me to see the July savings rate went into negative ground in the United States. That implies people are digging into their savings to maintain their spending. In other words, they are not only going into greater debt, but there is no offsetting savings. This is a great negative and eventually will catch up with us.

It's puzzling that so few Wall Street gurus think as holistically about the economy as Seth Glickenhaus. Training young people in foreign languages as a technique of national defense would be infinitely more effective (not to mention cost-effective) than what passes for "war on terror" defense policy now. Housing, healthcare, the educational system — all of these contribute to the labor/capital infrastructure which is where both jobs and wealth are created.

Seth Glickenhaus phophetically and unambiguously said in June 2003, just weeks after Bush's flight-suit "Mission Accomplished": "The public thinks we won the Iraq war and that it is over. They don't realize we are going to keep more troops in Iraq than we thought. The deficit will grow. We are not going to win the peace. Iraq is so divided internally it makes Afghanistan look like one unified group. Do you think soldiers know how to straighten out a country? They know how to make war. Do you think the State Department has the people and the training to help the country rebuild? Do you think we have anything like that? No, of course not. "

The best investment managers have both feet firmly planted in the reality-based community. Long live Seth Glickenhaus!

{ 10:12 AM }

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Clown college dropouts. This is exactly how the Bush administration would have protected citizens from a major terrorist attack (WSJ):

WASHINGTON – As the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped down yesterday, government documents surfaced showing that vital resources, such as buses and environmental health specialists, weren't deployed to the Gulf region for several days, even after federal officials seized control of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

[...]

...FEMA's official requests, known as tasking assignments and used by the agency to demand help from other government agencies, show that it first asked the Department of Transportation to look for buses to help evacuate the more than 20,000 people who had taken refuge at the Superdome in New Orleans at 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 31. At the time, it only asked for 455 buses and 300 ambulances for the enormous task. Almost 18 hours later, it canceled the request for the ambulances because it turned out, as one FEMA employee put it, "the DOT doesn't do ambulances."

FEMA ended up modifying the number of buses it thought it needed to get the job done, until it settled on a final request of 1,355 buses at 8:05 p.m. on Sept. 3. The buses, though, trickled into New Orleans, with only a dozen or so arriving on the first day.

Hours before FEMA realized that it needed buses, Jonathan L. Snare, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, said he was prepared to offer the full resources of the agency to help protect the safety and health of workers responding to Katrina.

Health and safety experts play an important role by testing the environment at a disaster for toxins, disease and pathogens. They then advise rescue workers about needs for protective clothing for themselves as well as for the people they are trying to move from harm's way.

The National Response Plan gives OSHA responsibility to coordinate efforts to protect and monitor disaster workers and victims from environmental hazards.

But the part of the plan that authorizes OSHA's role as coordinator and allows it to mobilize experts from other agencies such as NIH wasn't activated by FEMA until shortly before 5 p.m. Sunday. The delay came despite repeated efforts by the agencies to mobilize.

Attempts by officials at NIH to reach FEMA officials and send them briefing materials by email failed as the agency's server failed.

"I noticed that every email to a FEMA person bounced back this week. They need a better internet provider during disasters!!" one frustrated Department of Health official wrote to colleagues last Thursday.

By Friday, experts and officials from NIH, the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency began to make frantic calls to the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress, demanding that the worker-safety portion of the national response plan be activated.

No reason has been offered by either FEMA or the Department of Homeland Security for the delay in activating OSHA's role.

Some Homeland Security officials are already starting to acknowledge significant weaknesses in the national response plan, which was completely disregarded at times during the crisis.

Server failures and bounced-back email — just what you want to see from FEMA in a crisis.

Farsighted FEMA individuals with backup NetZero and HotMail accounts might have saved dozens.

{ 7:35 AM }

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Wake-up call from the Post. "He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read."

{ 7:03 PM }

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