The White House has quietly signaled its opposition to a 72-mile levee system in south Louisiana proposed to protect about 120,000 people who have watched the Gulf of Mexico creep ever closer to their homes as the coast erodes.
Our considerate friends in the White house want more delays so that the environmental impact of the proposed levees can be further studied. And, yes, there are legitimate concerns about the project, but the Bushies couldn't give a sh*t about any of that. Trust me. For them, a study is simply a way to run out the clock. (And even if the study gets finished, they'll happily ignore it or rewrite its conclusions if they don't believe it furthers their interests.) It's like this:
Costly manned spaceflights to Mars? Sure, full steam ahead!
Piles of dirt to protect S. Louisiana? Whoah! Slow down there, Monsieur Turbo! We need to do more studies to see how this might affect your precious wetland ecosystems. You wouldn't want to lose those, now, would ya?
The article continues:
[The White House position paper] also calls for reducing federal financing for broader coastal restoration to $500 million and forcing the state to pay 50 percent of the overall costs, which Vitter labeled "a raw deal for Louisiana." The Blanco administration has estimated that restoring the coast, which is eroding through manmade and natural forces at a rate of 30 square miles per year and lost an estimated 217 square miles because of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, would cost in excess of $14 billion.
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Just over a year ago, a conservative Republican who attends my church took out a quarter page ad in the Times Picayune, and published an open letter to the people of New Orleans. He urged everyone to vote in favor of consolidating the levee boards. He said he was convinced "in his heart" that if New Orleanians demonstrated their willingness to reform the levee boards, then President Bush would start supporting Category 5 flood protection.
Yes, friends, he really believed that would happen. Of course, that was back when people down here thought there was a chance in hell of getting Category 5 protection. Little did they know that the Bush administration had told officials like Senator Vitter that they didn't even like the term Category 5. The Bushies found it "unhelpful". Mind you, the term wasn't "unhelpful" because the Bushies thought it was scientifically fuzzy, or anything like that. Hell no. The Bushies didn't fancy "Category 5" because the term itself framed the issue of flood control in a disadvantageous way. It conjured up thoughts of maximum protection, and they didn't want it associated with Louisiana. Either they didn't want to pay for Category 5 protections, or they didn't want Louisiana to have them. So they instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to study it to death, and leave the problem to some other President.
In the aftermath of Katrina, Rita, and their response to the Federal Flood, the Bushies didn't want to answer questions such as "Should America invest in Category 5 flood protection for Louisiana, or Category 4, or Category 3? Should we protect America's Wetlands and the Gulf Coast's oil/gas infrastructure with Category 5 levees and coastal restoration, or only build up to a weak Category 3 level and hope a Cat 4+ storm never hits?"
Yes, my Pelicans. It really was true. Two months after Katrina, South Louisianans of all political stripes were united in favor of Category 5 protection. Plenty of businessmen I knew expected it. They thought it would be the natural response to what happened. But, somehow, nowadays you never even hear about it. "Category 5" has vanished from the conversation. At best, it's viewed as a distant dream, a high hope. No one even mentions Category 4, either. It's another forgotten fantasy.
And today, yet again, we have to fight with the Bush Administration over funding for WEAK CATEGORY 3 FLOOD PROTECTION that will serve an area that handles 18% of the nation's petroleum, and 25% of the nation's natural gas. Can you believe that? This is an $887 million investment that will help protect an area that supports over $100 billion worth of oil/gas infrastructure*, and the Bushies are skeptical. Remember, since 1992, the Morganza project has been studied, pre-engineered, opened to public comment, designed, redesigned... And then, Terrebone parish and the State of Louisiana decided to start construction on the project because they deemed it too critical to wait for Federal funds. They started building prior to Congressional authorization because they felt it was too damned important! Waiting was not an option. And now, the Bush administration opposes the project and says it wants to ... do more studies.... and "properly coordinate" it with other projects... and other crapola they don't really care about. The real objective is to wait... and wait... and run out the clock (so the team that outspent Lyndon Johnson can argue that they were fiscally prudent in their final years, and kept their promise to cut the deficit in half, and control spending... etc.)
These are the same folks who feel it necessary to repeatedly remind us that they've spent Umpteen billion trillion dollars to rebuild the Gulf Coast. They tell us again and again that our New Orleans levees are "even better" than the poorly designed ones that catastrophically failed 18 months ago. Then they patiently explain the need to further study a WEAK CATEGORY 3 LEVEE PROJECT that will protect the fastest disappearing land mass on earth! Unbelievable. The Bushies only seem to act with urgency when they want to sell a war of choice, or discredit an uppity veteran who served in a previous war of choice. When it comes to rebuilding-- anything-- they're useless.
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Say, where the F*CK was this Scientific Imperative when the Bush Adminsitration PROPOSED restoring Iraq's wetlands in 2004? That project didn't have to wait for a study; it got immediate consideration. Hell, if the Bush administration had "studied" Iraq half as much as they want to study Cat 5 flood protection for Louisiana-- we might not be in the quagmire that we're in!!
Everyone should be rioting in the streets! Even conservatives! How the hell can an administration boast about spending $120 billion on storm recovery, and leave Louisiana wide open to future hurricanes and federal floods?
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* By the way, do you find it curious that Big Oil isn't making a bigger stink about these issues? Shouldn't they at least be complaining more loudly about this (since allocating some of their billions in profits to pay for the accelerated wetlands loss they caused is apparently out of the question.)
Labels: Bush, coastal loss, flood protection
