The World and Everything in It: July 31, 2023

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. Hi, I'm Lori Kastelein from Mount Laurel, New Jersey. And I work as an engineering manager for a transformer and power supply company. I love to listen to World every morning while I get ready for work. I hope you enjoy today's program. God bless.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! A joke posted to Facebook about zombies in Louisiana takes an unexpected turn:

AUDIO: The task force, you know, SWAT team for the Sheriff's Department came in and rained down on me. About 10-12 guys with their weapons drawn.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Zombies, no laughing matter, ahead today on Legal Docket.

Also today, the Monday Moneybeat. Economic growth beats expectations, so does it mean, where taming inflation is concerned, that we’re about to stick the proverbial soft landing?

And the WORLD History Book. One hundred years ago, Calvin Coolidge becomes president.

AUDIO: He was that rare thing, a professional politician who used his mastery to make government smaller instead of bigger.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, July 31st. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: It’s time for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Presidential politics » Republican White House hopefuls flocked to Iowa over the weekend pitching their vision and experience to voters.

BURGUM: We will stop buying energy from our enemies. We’ll start selling it to our allies.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum was one of roughly a dozen candidates who spoke at the 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines.

Ron DeSantis touted his leadership credentials as governor of Florida.

DESANTIS: We enacted the heartbeat bill. We have the number one economy in the country. We have eliminated critical race theory from tour K-12 schools.

Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy said his parents immigrated to the United States more than 40 years ago with almost no money.

RAMASWAMY: I went on to found multi-billion dollar companies while getting married and raising our two sons. That is the American dream.

He said he wants to preserve that dream for future generations.

Trump » Former President Donald Trump also addressed Iowa voters before moving on to campaign in Pennsylvania. He again said the 2020 election was rigged. And he suggested that other candidates now running for president should drop out of the race.

TRUMP: For ‘Ron Desanctimonious’ and so many others that are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans should be using to build a massive vote-gathering operation.

He still has a massive lead over other GOP candidates in polls. But at the same time, Republican voters are split on Donald Trump.

In an average of polls in early voting states, roughly 47% of Republicans back the former president. But so far the other half of the party has not united behind any one alternative.

Trump charges » Meantime, Trump’s legal team is hard at work after special counsel Jack Smith added new felony charges against the former president last week.

Trump legal spokeswoman Alina Habba said Sunday:

HABBA: When he has his time in court and when we get to file our papers, you will see that every single video, every single surveillance tape that was requested was turned over.

Prosecutors allege that the former president and staffers asked an employee to erase video footage at his Mar-a-Lago resort to obstruct the Justice Department’s probe involving classified documents at Trump’s home.

U.S. mother, daughter kidnapped in Haiti » A nurse from New Hampshire who works for a nonprofit group in Haiti and has been kidnapped with her young daughter. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: The nonprofit group El Roi Haiti says Alix Dorsainvil and her daughter were abducted on Thursday. The group runs a school and ministry in Port-au-Prince.

In a statement, the group said “Alix has worked tirelessly to bring relief to those who are suffering as she loves and serves the people of Haiti in the name of Jesus.”

The U.S. State Department says it is aware of the abduction and is “in regular contact with Haitian authorities.”

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

Russia attack » Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the battleground is expanding to Russian territory. His remarks came on the same day that Moscow accused Ukraine of using drones to attack targets inside Russian borders.

The Kremlin said its forces shot down the three drones with two crashing into buildings in Moscow.

Meanwhile U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken says that Washington is confident China is not supplying weapons to Russia for use against Ukraine, but others might be:

BLINKEN: We do have concerns about individual entities providing technology, dual-use technology that can be used, among other things, for drones and other kinds of weapons.

Blinken says The U.S. is looking to China for help in cracking down on those private arms suppliers.

Heat/Weather » More than 70 million Americans are under excessive heat advisories.

Temperatures are expected to hit 105 in Austin, Texas today. But one local resident said that won’t keep him from his pickleball match.

RESIDENT: Bring a towel ice just put it on your neck, you know like get some ice on it and take breaks in between each game. 

Meanwhile Phoenix, Arizona has hit 30 straight days of temperatures topping 110 degrees.

Farther east, heat indexes, which factor in humidity could hit 115 across much of the south and southeast this week.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: cases of government overreach on Legal Docket. Plus, the Monday Mondeybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday morning, July 31st, 2023 and you’re listening to The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Most of the year we bring you cases and controversies before the U.S. Supreme Court. Today and for most of the summer, we’ll bring you disputes percolating in the lower courts.

Institute for Justice is a public-interest law firm that tries to curb abuse of government power. Today, we’ll hear about three cases IJ is currently handling.

EICHER: Case one is out of Louisiana. It arises in March 2020, right when the pandemic and the lockdowns were first bearing down. Waylon Bailey was at home like most everyone else. And he made a joke on Facebook about zombies.

WAYLON BAILEY: I told all my Facebook friends that in the surrounding area that the local sheriff's department was going to shoot the infected on sight, with hashtags referring to World War Z with Brad Pitt, and It originated in China. And in the movie it originated in China. I mean, I thought it was a pretty good reference. (Laughs)

REICHARD: Bailey said he was prompted to do that because a friend’s joke on Facebook had, in his estimation fallen flat.

BAILEY: I don't know, it just wasn't a good joke. So I just kind of, I wanted to one- up him a little bit and I one -up him in the sense of like no one gets really offended while still being funny.

But someone was offended. Really offended.

BAILEY: Apparently the whole Sheriff's Department got offended, so.

Yeah, so what happened next caught him off guard.

BAILEY: It was about two and a half three hours later this, like, the task force, you know, SWAT team for the Sheriff's Department came in and rained down on me. About 10-12 guys with their weapons drawn.

EICHER: Bailey doesn’t have a criminal record or anything like that. A few traffic tickets maybe. But that’s it.

So, how did he process this in real time?

BAILEY: As soon as I see them I was like, Oh, I wonder who these guys are in Wrangler Jeans and bulletproof vests? And I was like, can I help you? I guess I really didn't register right then and there that they were there because I made that Facebook (beep) post. But uh, but yeah, that was, that was it.

REICHARD: I emailed the Rapides Parish, Louisiana’s sheriff’s office for comment. They wrote back in mere seconds, “No comment.” Not surprising really, given ongoing litigation.

But Bailey said he wasn’t shown a warrant or given a reason for his arrest.

BAILEY: While I was in there getting booked and everything I had no idea why I was being arrested or what or what grounds I was being arrested on. I think they were having a hard time trying to figure out what they were going to charge me with, so like they made me wait and answer questions for like an hour before they even took me up there, the FBI booking or whatever though, the handprints and all that stuff that took like two hours. I'm not sure why.

REICHARD: The officers said he’d violated a state anti-terrorism law, although the district attorney later dropped the case.

Still, Bailey felt his rights had been violated. So he brought a civil rights lawsuit in district court, but he lost because the officers were granted qualified immunity. That protects government officials from individual liability unless you can point to a case with identical facts to prove the government officials should have known he was violating the Constitution.

Not likely given these zombie facts.

The lower court also found Bailey didn’t have a free speech right to make the zombie joke in the first place.

EICHER: Now in his appeal, lawyer Ben Field represents him before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Field lists several causes of action on behalf of Waylon Bailey: First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, and Louisiana state law.

BEN FIELD: And for the first amendment, the basic idea is that Waylon wrote a joke on Facebook. And that's protected by the First Amendment. And it's a bedrock First Amendment principle that the government can't arrest you because it doesn't like the content of your speech. The fourth amendment claim is somewhat related to that. And it's the idea that the government has to have probable cause if they're going to arrest you without a warrant. And here the only evidence, quote, unquote, that the government had was protected speech, and that can't be the basis for an arrest.

Field points out the whole ordeal could have been avoided with a simple phone call. The sheriff would’ve learned it was a joke and done something short of rolling out a SWAT team.

FIELD: But we're hopeful here that there's just the the First Amendment principles are so clear that you cannot arrest somebody for a joke that any reasonable officer should have been on notice that that was the case.

As for Bailey, he wants to put a stop to government overreach.

BAILEY: And if this is able to happen so, so easily, and so quickly, you know, it's just going to keep happening to more and more people and it's just not right.

REICHARD: From zombies, to murals, the Institute for Justice has other possible government overreach cases in the pipeline.

This one up in Conway, New Hampshire. It involves a family-owned bakery called Levitz Country Bakery. It had a blank, rather drab facade above its door that local high school art students offered to paint.

Last summer, the students completed a fanciful mural.

Lawyer Field takes it from here:

FIELD: So part of the mural has pictures of donuts, and there's a sunrise and it's really quite lovely and quite beautiful. And it was a great experience for the high school kids. But the town of Conway said, “Oh, no, that mural isn't a mural. Instead, it's a sign that violates the zoning code.” They said that because the store sells donuts, if a donut is part of the mural, then it becomes a sign and it's too big for the zoning code, and therefore you have to tear it down.

EICHER: So the owners of the donut shop sued the town of Conway.

The town’s lawyer couldn’t speak to us in time for this story, but he did send along the answer to the petition he filed.

Basically, the town argues this is a zoning matter, not a free speech case. The zoning ordinance defines a sign as something that identifies the purpose of a business to communicate information to the public. Here, you see donuts, you see a muffin, cinnamon roll, a big chocolate chip cookie. The city says the “mural” screams out: “this is a bakery.” Therefore, the shop must meet the requirements of the sign ordinance, particularly the part about size. And by that definition, this one is way too big, like four times what the ordinance allows.

REICHARD: It does look delicious, though. I’ll point that out!

The third and final lawsuit we’ll talk about today deals with what the city of New York calls the unauthorized practice of law.

Reverend John Udo-Okon helps people respond to debt collection lawsuits. He works with a nonprofit called UpSolve to assist people in filling out the required forms.

Lawyer Field explains:

FIELD: And so that they get their day in court to explain why they actually did pay the debt or the debt isn't valid, or whatever it may be. And it's just, you know, adults talking to each other about how to fill out this form and respond to these lawsuits. But New York says, No, that's illegal. That is the unauthorized practice of law.

So Reverend Udo-Okon sued the Attorney General of New York, seeking an injunction. That office did not respond to my email asking for comment.

But Udo-Okon argues the First Amendment protects him in giving people guidance on responding to debt collection lawsuits. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people in New York City are hit with these demands and many people just don’t know what to do.

For the most part, these aren’t the sort of traditional debt collection cases such as if you don’t pay off your car lease.

FIELD: Instead, it's some third party buys up a bunch of consumer debt, and brings a whole host of lawsuits. It's possible that the person who's paid it off, it's possible that that isn't actually legitimate. But it's really daunting when you get this notice saying that, you know, there's this lawsuit against you to figure out how to represent yourself. And obviously, for most people, it's just too expensive to hire a lawyer, especially if it's for some small consumer debt. And New York fortunately has a form that, you know, that people can fill out to respond to these kinds of lawsuits. But even that is complicated and has legal jargon on it like laches.

The thing is, most of these lawsuits are successful even if they’re without merit. That’s because defendants who don’t know what to do just don’t show up in court. But when a defendant does show up, collectors often give up instead of trying to prove the debt.

So practical advice is needed. Lawyer Field explains:

FIELD: These are just adults talking to each other, giving advice. You know, if it were illegal to do that, then all of the meddling aunts of America would be in jail. And the district court agreed with that straightforward analysis and said, “Yeah, it's unconstitutional to apply the unauthorized practice of law rules in a way that prevents this kind of just, you know, adults having it giving advice to each other.

Reverend Udo-Okon did win an injunction against the city, but then the city appealed. So that case is ongoing, as well.

In researching all this, I ran across the story of Philadelphia licensing tour guides. To the thinking of some people, the city wanted to make it illegal to talk about the Liberty Bell and the Constitution without a license from the government.

No matter what you think about the irony in that, the legal principle is worth thinking over. Robert McNamara from Institute for Justice put it this way:

MCNAMARA: About why the legal principle mattered. And the real answer was that in a world where the Internet was increasingly part of people’s lives, more and more people are going to earn a living by talking. More and more people are going to earn a living by giving advice to each other and selling their advice. And if the First Amendment doesn’t apply to that kind of speech, we’re going to live in a very different world and a much less free world.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Alright, time now to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David is head of the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group. He is here now, David, good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: Alright, well, really strong economic growth report last week, David Q2 GDP gross domestic product of 2.4% for the quarter. We're talking about April, May and June. That number coming from the Commerce Department last week. It beat expectations, it built upon that 2% figure for the first quarter. But is there anything in the GDP report from last week, David, that gives you any pause? I mean, does anything in it make you doubt the Wall Street Journal headline I saw over the weekend saying that the US economy is sticking the soft landing?

BAHNSEN: Well, I mean, obviously, it's still too early to know that we will stick the soft landing because some of these things can move. But the case for a soft landing, the case for avoiding recession has been picking up and we've talked about this quite a bit. I think that at this point, there is probably a greater chance of sticking a soft landing, avoiding a recession, than not. And I wouldn't have necessarily said that a few months ago. Of course, there is still the risk of this Fed tightening, which has gone on too long, too fast and too far, and may not even be over yet. There is a risk of it into 2024 breaking something. But for various political reasons, I'd be skeptical that they will let that happen. So I do believe that just in terms of how economic growth is measured, we should remember, of course, that saying a quarterly read of 2.4% is annualizing that quarterly read. So it's easy to get confused thinking, Well, gosh, if we're growing 2.4 per quarter, that means we're growing almost 10% a year. But no, it's it's a quarterly read that is doing the annualization in the math. But nevertheless, if all of that growth, Nick, had come from things that I think are more temporal, a big sugar high of government spending or inventory buildup, I'd be a little less sanguine about it. But there was a meaningful pickup in non-residential fixed investment, which is business investment. Granted, much of that was from some of the Biden administration spending of last year in the infrastructure bill and some of the Clean Energy spending and some things like that. And we could disagree with some of it and believe it to be ill advised. But nevertheless, it is still having an impact into the economic growth right now.

EICHER: Well, yeah, I'd like you to dig into that business investment component of the GDP measure this go round, David, because as I look at the various buckets that make up GDP, business investment was the biggest factor. It was higher even than consumer spending. And I know you really look to that, you look to business investment as a sign of healthy economic growth. So dig into that a bit.

BAHNSEN: Well, it's really important to remember that the reason I believe business investment is more important than consumer spending is not merely because any number of things can cause consumer spending. It's because there is absolutely nothing for a consumer to ever spend money on if a business hasn't first invested. This is just a simple law of economics that dictates much of how I approach the field. And it comes from a creational theology that recognizes that production has to precede consumption, and that God made us to work before he made us to rest and enjoy and that one man's or woman's production must precede another man or woman's consumption. And this is a tautology, it is just self-attestingly true. So there's a real economic point here behind that. But even beyond that, I would say that consumption is something that I take for granted in the American ethos, that we are a society of people that really lack very little incentive to consume. There's a real natural predisposition to enjoy food, and beverage, and travel, and convenience, and amenities, and apparel, and so forth. So consumption doesn't seem to take a lot of arm twisting, you may have noticed. Production is the area in which we've been more, I think, stunted for quite some time. And there are healthier ways to incentivize production and there are less healthy ways. But just in terms of the raw data, there's no question that the business investment last quarter picked up, and I will be hopeful that can be a good offset to some of the other economic challenges that we'll have in the quarters ahead.

EICHER: But on the issue of consumption, David the PCE did come out last week personal consumption expenditures, the inflation gauge that the Fed prefers to use to try to steer toward 2% consumer price inflation, that number hit 3%. That's down from the previous month, down from the month before that, and the month before that. Can't the Fed now kick back and say, "Hey, job well done, we're finished"?

BAHNSEN: Well, I don't understand the presumption in the question that they can steer this, that they are the ones controlling inflation. And so that, you know, the question is rooted in the way that much are in the media, and certainly the Fed themselves are talking about it, as if the Fed controls inflation. But see, I do not believe that we're thinking about this correctly to believe that the need to get inflation down comes from destroying jobs. And that's what the Fed is saying as well. There's just too many people employed. And there's too much what they call labor slack. And wages have grown. And so we got to kind of go out and, and hurt some people in order to get inflation down. And I think it is a very unfortunate understanding of the way economics works. Ultimately, if the interest rate is set at an artificial way, too low, too high, then you're going to get if it's too low malinvestment in excess of activity, it shouldn't happen. And if it's set too tight, you're going to contract activity. But none of those things have to do with inflation, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, right. And so this is the problem I think we face right now is that the Fed has taken on a task that is outside of their purview, and using tools that are outside of what are needed in the moment. And even within the period where clearly they had interest rates way too low for way too long. Now to counter that by going way too high, for way too long, just simply exacerbates a reckless boom and bust cycle with a Fed that is constantly either over cooling or overheating economic conditions. And I think that it is totally unnecessary. And that the way to get inflation down is to have a level of production of goods and services that meets the needs in the society and that those things are self clearing over time. And that's how markets work. And I do not believe that there is any question inflation is headed lower, when you see the rapid disinflation that we have had. And when you see the fact that even at a 3% reading, it is assuming that shelter or housing has inflated over 8%, which it has not, there's a significant lag effect that is embedded in that data. And so I believe that the Fed is well aware that when you X out that lag effect, they're annualizing at their 2% target now anyways. And here's the thing there. They have trillions of dollars of real people's money in real financial markets, telling them that as five year inflation expectations priced into what they call the tip of market, the treasury inflation protected securities, are showing inflation expectations of 2%. That's the real number, that trillions of dollars is priced in. So I think the Fed is way behind the curve here. And I'm hopeful that they will get out before too much damage is done.

EICHER: Well, David, so it's interesting. I cannot remember hearing this particular word from the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in some time, and I'll play some tape here in just a moment. Jay Powell gave a press conference after the central bank decreased interest rates again last week, he uses that term that you used, disinflation, listen:

JEROME POWELL: The overall resilience of the economy, the fact that that we've been able to achieve disinflation so far, without any meaningful, negative impact on the labor market, the strength of the economy overall. That's a good thing. It's good to see that, of course, it's also you see consumer to consumer confidence coming up and things like that, that will support your activity going forward.

EICHER: All right. So the Fed for the 11th time since last March, raised the fed funds target interest rate to between five and a quarter and five and a half percent. These rates are now at 22. year highs. But, David, what do you make of the Powell statement?

BAHNSEN: Well, look, the year over year inflation number a year ago was 9%. And the year over year inflation number a year later is 3%. And along the way, it's gone down every single meeting. And so whether or not you use the term disinflation, the math doesn't lie, right. We've obviously had disinflation. And if you're looking at goods, we've had deflation. If you're looking at producer prices, we've had deflation. So the issue has never really been what the data shows. I think the data is rather empirically obvious. The question is what the Fed wants to do with the data. And I do continue to have a somewhat political, skeptical, cynical view, that I just simply don't believe that they will go into an election year still maintaining this hawkish high and mighty perspective, I can't believe that they will want to overpress. And so when he says we've gotten disinflation and not destroyed jobs, it sounds to me like he's projecting, getting to a soft landing narrative where they can do a victory lap, but I thought they were gonna do that six months ago, and I thought that should have done it six months ago. So if I'm wrong here, then I guess I'll have to be a lot less cynical in the future politically, because it's a very poor idea for the Biden administration to adopt the phrase Bidenomics. And I'll point out that the Treasury Secretary, this administration was herself a former Fed Chair: Janet Yellen. If in fact, the Fed intends to continue raising rates going into the election year. I just don't believe it's going to happen.

EICHER: Alright, David Bahnsen, founder managing partner and Chief Investment Officer at the Bahnsen Group. His personal website is bahnsen.com, his weekly dividend cafe, where you can find that at dividendcafe.com. David, thank you so much, and I hope you have a terrific week.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, July 31st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Next up, the WORLD History Book…just two stories today. The great flood of 1993 is one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history—we’ll take another look in just a moment.

EICHER: But first, an unexpected job promotion for Vice President Calvin Coolidge. Here now is WORLD Radio Executive Producer, Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER: On August 2nd, 1923, Vice President Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace are on vacation at Coolidge’s family farm near Plymouth Notch, Vermont. The farm house has no electricity...and a phone that only occasionally works. The couple goes to bed early. But a little before midnight, they are awakened by a loud knock at the front door. A moment later, Coolidge’s father calls up to Calvin to come down. President Warren Harding is dead.

Coolidge gets dressed. Prays with his wife. And in the early morning hours of August 3rd, is sworn into office by his father John Calvin Coolidge Sr. He’s a Vermont notary public and justice of the peace. By the light of a kerosene lamp, Calvin Coolidge becomes the 30th President of the United States. As it’s 2:47 in the morning, President Coolidge goes back to bed.

With the 1924 election just around the corner, many expect Coolidge to be a lame duck President. But on his train ride back to Washington he begins to plan how to build upon Harding’s most important policies. He believes he can. His first order of business…limiting the government itself.

Biographer Amity Shlaes from a 2013 Hoover Institution video interview:

SHALES: Government for the sake of government isn't always beneficial for the constituents. It just makes everyone feel good. And there's a wonderful letter to his father and Coolidge writes to his father: “it's better to kill a bad bill than to pass a good one.” And that's very counterintuitive today. But he saw himself as protecting the voter.

President Coolidge is a life-long conservative politician. Unlike most of his contemporaries though, he doesn’t seek the lime-light. He’s quiet and reserved with a dry sense of humor so he’s nicknamed “silent Cal.” But he’s outspoken about the limited role of government…as can be heard in this August 11th, 1924 speech from the White House Grounds:

COOLIDGE: I want to cut down public expense. I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industries. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can we establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people. We are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.

Coolidge easily wins reelection. During his presidency, he restores public confidence in the White House. His foreign policies are a mixed bag, but his domestic policies are strong. He is an advocate for civil rights and oversees granting Native Americans citizenship. Economically he is focused on returning the country to its pre-war footing.

And for Amity Shlaes, that’s his most significant accomplishment: successfully cutting the nation's debt and its budget.

SHALES: Coolidge is a professional politician. Today, we tend to say that's bad, we're cynical about it. But he was that rare thing, a professional politician who used his mastery to make government smaller instead of bigger.

President Calvin Coolidge serves one and half terms, and chooses not to run in the 1928 election as he thinks spending nearly 10 years in the White House is just too long.

Next, August 1st, 1993.

REPORTER: That house is starting to go. Oh, Jeff, it's unbelievable.

Breaking coverage from KSDK channel 5 News.

REPORTER: There it goes. Just now lifted off the foundation and it's just crumbling. In the rapid and the violent waters here that are coming.

Millions watch on television as homes are swept away by the raging rivers.

REPORTER: We've watched the silos go. We've watched the barn go. We've watched a shed go. And now the house itself has been lifted off the foundation by these floodwaters. It's just unbelievable.

Heavy spring and summer rains across the midwest lead to a “500-year flood” along the Missouri and Mississippi river basin. Some areas get more than 10 times their usual rainfall over a period of just a few weeks. By August 1993, many towns along the river are completely underwater. Gerald Resnick is a reporter with KRCG channel 13 television news:

REPORTER GERALD RESNICK: Of the 130 homes in Cedar City. 80% are heavily damaged. Dozens no longer exist. This graveyard of homes is testimony to the power of the Missouri River.

On August 1st, the Mississippi River crests at 49.6 feet in St. Louis, nearly 20 feet above flood stage. When the waters recede, the scope of the damage is staggering—exceeding $10 billion dollars along 745 miles of river. The human toll is heartbreaking.

RESIDENT: I'm not going back there's nothing to go back to the trailer is destroyed. I grew up in that trailer as a child. And now it's gone. It was just given to me in February as an inheritance. I know I have nothing left.

Nearly 50 people die in the flooding. Shipping along the Mississippi River is shut down for weeks. The flood waters destroy thousands of acres of famer’s crops. Many businesses never recover. State Representative Gracia Backer:

REPRESENTATIVE GRACIA BACKER: This is many, many years of people's lives and people's work, washed away and covered in mud. It's the extent of the devastation is truly profound.

But in the face of such a trying crisis, thousands of everyday people step up to help their neighbors. On August 12th, 1993, President Bill Clinton signs the flood relief bill in Missouri. He begins by recognizing 19 representative volunteers for their selflessness and bravery. Audio here courtesy of the Clinton Presidential Library.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Because of their efforts lives were saved and larger disasters were averted. They are mothers and fathers, business owners, police officers and neighbors. But in this time of crisis, they risked their lives to save children and parents, to pull people from troubled waters or trapped vehicles, to feed the hungry, to provide water to people who literally could not have had safe living conditions otherwise. And most importantly, a lot of them are committed to staying involved in this for the long haul.

Another devastating flood hits eastern Iowa fifteen years later. It’s a more localized event, but the damage is significantly worse for the state. However, officials acknowledge that the lessons learned during the 1993 deluge made them much better prepared, and no lives were directly lost in the 2008 flood. River cities had built stronger and taller levies and had protected their domestic water and sewage treatment plants.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Donald Trump faces a superseding indictment over documents at Mar-a-lago. We’ll talk about that and Hunter Biden with an expert on law and politics. And, WORLD’s Classic Book of the Month for August. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist say: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? Psalm 27, verse 1.

Go now in grace and peace.

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