Harry, you entirely missed the point of Karen’s
posting. She reported a significant instance where the cost of the invasion and
occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan DID cut back improving the New Orleans
levees. At this point those adventures have cost the US citizen well over
$120 BILLION. Perhaps money grows on Georgist trees, but in the real world it
doesn’t.
You cannot escape the moral implications of your support for
those adventures by saying they have had no impact on domestic infrastructural
maintenance or improvement.
Lawry
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Harry Pollard
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005
3:52 AM
To: 'Karen Watters Cole';
[email protected]
Subject: RE: [Futurework] Gone
with the Water
Karen,
Infrastructure
is the last thing that any politician cares about – unless it comes up as
a pork amendment to another bill.
This
has been true for decades. It doesn’t need a war as an excuse.
There
are apparently thousands of roads, bridges, and suchlike, in need of work
because they are getting dangerous – or are dangerous. After the war, I
fear that little will change.
Harry
********************************
Henry
George School
of Social Science
of Los Angeles
Box 655
Tujunga CA
91042
818
352-4141
********************************
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005
7:53 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [Futurework] Gone
with the Water
Arthur wrote: I agreee that
Bush has not been of much help. But the lack of attention to
infrastructure is part of the consumer culture. Bush is just carrying on as
have previoius Presidents.
From the article in
Editor & Publisher about the
9 times the New Orleans newspaper wrote about flood control measures being
restricted by budget cuts due to the Iraq war spending:
“When flooding from
a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the
Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next
10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent
$430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50
million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained,
even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic
Basin increased dramatically and the
levees surrounding New Orleans
continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow
of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that
the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security
-- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the
Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a
reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
…In early 2004, as the cost of the
conflict in Iraq soared,
President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said
was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according
to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson
Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune:
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to
handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the
price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we
are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for
us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project
manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee
Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now
unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is
sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't
stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have
isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that
we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another
$250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie
had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property
taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not
paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season
was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back
this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding
for New Orleans
in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a
hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4
million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was
needed to see what New Orleans
must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the
money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost
about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About
$300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the
state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order
the New Orleans
district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer
includes the needed money, he said."
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But
now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge
and levee job right at the 17th
Street Canal, site of the main breach on
Monday”.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313
