Of late I sometimes feel like I’ve slipped into some French absurdist play, we Up is Down, and we chop down tree to save forests. Thats when I’m glad to encounter politicians, and policy hacks, doing what they do best, lieing, and covering up, though the bald faced, total lack of any attempt at coherence does seem to suggest that not only satire, but rhetoric is dead.

Dead Salmon

In the last few days, more then 10,000 Chinook salmon (an endangered species) have died in the Klamath river, the largest die off of its kind, due to water levels being reduced to illegally low level in an agreement promoted and feted by the president personally. Federal officials, while not conceding that administration policy had anything to do with the die-off, said they would [immediately] reverse an earlier policy and begin releasing water from Upper Klamath Lake. A simliar drama is also playing out along the Trinity river, were we spent last weekend, and locals are more very unhappy, and very clear on where the water went. Potato farmers, trying to grow potatoes in the Southern Oregon desert. ### Boarded Up Banks

That the officials could both immediately flip-flop on their policy while denying any responsibility, feels very similiar to the message we heard coming out of the IMF this week. Horst Köhler seemed unable to make up his mind whether we should be cheered by the fact that IMF was committed to undergoing radical re-structuring to hault the global recession (by sending $30 billion in loans to Brazil, who doesn’t need it, in order to keep a leftist government out of power), or we should be cheered that their current policies are so wonderfully successful that G7 economies were “sure to strengthen in coming months.” (the policies that have been so wildly successful in Argentina) Why are successful irrigation schemes which don’t kill fish being cut to save fish? Why are successful international monetary policy being scuttled to save the economy? (Is this what Horst means by smarter globalization?)