We're No Longer a Country

Three months after Hurricane Katrina, we know that damage is enormous. We know that it will cost billions of dollars to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
What we don't know is where the money will come from.
Louisiana's congressional delegation introduced legislation in September calling for a $212 billion federally funded rebuilding effort; fiscal conservatives scotched the proposal.
Even a more modest request for $32 billion to strengthen Louisiana's flood defenses so they could withstand a Category 5 hurricane; the current standard is Category 3 - has drawn a tepid response from the Bush administration.
"Hopefully that decision will be made sooner rather than later," said Donald Powell, the White House's top hurricane reconstruction official, during a recent trip to Louisiana.
Only the federal government has pockets deep enough to pay for a massive reconstruction effort. But there is a significant difference of opinion over whether and if so, how the government should raise the money.
"This kind of major public works project has to be a state and federal partnership," said Andy Kopplin, excutive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which was created by governor Kathleen Blanco to advance the state's reconstruction.

We're no longer a country, are we? We're no longer one unified whole with a shared history, similar goals and common values. We're deeply divided. Our appointed president has made dividing us the centerpiece of his election strategies, that and vote fixing.

No, we are no longer a country. We're a collection of individual states, a confederacy of states, and every man for himself.

Looks like the south won the civil war after all, and all that blood shed was as unnecessary as the blood shed in Iraq.

Seems like when Georgia and Mississippi bring back slavery, and they will, it won't be an issue for congress or the supreme court, though you know Scalia and Thomas would have no problem with it. It'll be a state's right, therefore a state's choice, toenslave human beings. Pat Robertson and other Christian reconstructionists have sweated the blood of christ for this right.

Yep, after 3 decades of increasingly right wing rule, culminating in the absolute travesty that is the Bush administration, the federal government can only make a "tepid" response to the need to rebuild New Orleans. "Not my problem," a phrase I'm sure the nitwit has uttered all his life, like when he skated on his national guard service, has been uttered in response to New Orleans.

They've spent half a trillion in Iraq and are still spending, but they can't rebuild New Orleans, because that is not part of federal government responsibility. Nope. Unless they can find a way to enrich the business interests that run the country, New Orleans will be left to languish. Because it is all about enriching the ownership class, and nothing more.

The federal government is directly responsible only for preemptive war, torture, eradicating civil rights, enriching halliburton, oil companies, private security companies, defense contractors and other members of the "ownership society". ( Do you think Bush was trying to steal Lyndon Johnsons "Great Society " phrase there, and pollute and distort it into this corporatist bullshit he likes so much? I do.) There is no government obligation to the people.

The extremely troubled right wing "minister" with Bush bumper stickers all over his cars, trucks and suburbans, the slightly effeminate, vaguely hostile one with the 8 kids and the subservient, angry wife, the wife whose conversation is peppered with talk about who should be killed for what sins, yeah, the one who lives down the street, told me a day or 2 after the flood struck that the problem with New Orleans was who was going to pay for it.

At the time I thought, no, the problem is the loss of life and destruction of lives. We'll pay for it as a nation because we must. Boy, was I wrong. There is no must. There is no national imperative other than raking in cash and wielding power. There is no nation any more. What a pathetic, broken place the United States has become.

In a related story, which no one will see as a related story, which I shall post presently, the Dimwit said "Congress needs to pass legislation that will allow us to build and expand refineries," He was giving a speech to workers at a North Carolina construction machinery plant. What this really means is tax payers should pay for oil companies to increase refining capacity. Oil companies took in record profits from their post Katrina gas gauging, but tax payers will be forced to pay them to build new refineries. No wonder Tax payers won't rebuild new Orleans. They can't afford to. They all tapped out from propping up the corporate oligarchy.

As an example, Kopplin points to the costliest public works project in U.S. history ; Boston's Big Dig. The $14.6 billion, 14-year effort buried 7.8 miles of elevated highway in downtown Boston. The federal government pitched in just over $8.5 billion for the project, which was plagued by corruption and cost overruns.
The federal government will have to cover a much larger share of the cost for Louisiana's reconstruction, however, both because the total will be multiples of the Big Dig's cost, and because the state and New Orleans are in the red.
At a recent special legislative session, state legislators grappled with a $1 billion budget deficit by cutting health care services and funding for public colleges. And with more than a million of its residents scattered to the winds, the state will continue to have a difficult time raising revenue.
In September, Bill Clinton advocated increased taxes to pay for Katrina reconstruction and the cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But President Bush has vowed not to raise taxes, or even to roll back the tax cuts he made during his first term in office.
"There needs to be a vision at the federal level; a vision for what the city of New Orleans is going to look like and what's going to happen to the 600,000 households that have been displaced," said Matt Fellowes, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution.
Fellowes advocates enlisting the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the effort to find more permanent homes for the hundreds of thousands of families displaced by Katrina. Even three months after the storm, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had 50,000 families are living in hotel rooms paid for by the government. Another 10,000 families from Louisiana and 18,000 from Mississippi are living in house trailers or mobile homes.
State and local officials insist that residents and business owners are unlikely to come back to New Orleans and many other Gulf Coast communities without a significant federal investment in flood protection and reconstruction. But what is the government's responsibility to people who have chosen to live in one of the country's most flood-prone areas?
The federal government has already committed $62 billion to the Hurricane Katrina relief and reconstruction effort, and spent about one-third of that so far. Absent an increase in taxes or cuts in other federal programs, that money is being added to the federal deficit.
That means people who "live on a mountain in the middle of the desert" are sharing the cost of rebuilding a coastal city below sea level, said Robert P. Hartwig, a senior vice president and chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute. It also means that today's children and their children will ultimately shoulder the burden of paying to rebuild the Gulf Coast.
It isn't fair that taxpayers in safer areas have to subsidize those who choose to live in more hazardous locales, said Veronique de Rugy, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
She warns that too much federal support for disaster victims will foster a sense of complacency. People will have no incentive to purchase flood insurance or hurricane-proof their homes if they believe that the federal government will step in and bail them out after a disaster.
"At some level it makes sense that the federal government should help, but there should be a lesson," de Rugy said. "People who have behaved in a completely irresponsible way by not taking any insurance should lose something."
A number of fiscal conservatives have compiled lists of federal programs that could be cut to compensate for the $62 billion already committed to Katrina relief and reconstruction.
Scholars Steve Slivinski and Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute suggest taking the knife to farm subsidies ($21.1 billion), energy research and subsidies ($6.2 billion), community development grants ($5.4 billion) and the U.S. Agency for International Development ($4.7 billion), among other programs. On her list, de Rugy offers up employment training and services ($5.4 billion), vocational and adult education ($1.9 billion), state grants for child support enforcement ($4.3 billion) and a $9.6 billion chunk of NASA's $16.5 billion budget.
Though she has no expectation the federal government will actually take her recommendations, de Rugy said, it should.
The federal government has traditionally played an important role in rebuilding after disasters elsewhere. But there is some sentiment that the federal government has a unique responsibility to New Orleans and other communities on the lower Mississippi, because many of the things that make the region so vulnerable to hurricanes are the direct result of things Washington has done for the welfare of the country as a whole.
For example, the gigantic levees along the Mississippi, under federal control since 1879, have benefited farmers in the Upper Midwest by providing an economical means of exporting grain. But they also direct sediment that used to settle in the coastal wetlands of Louisiana out into the Gulf of Mexico. Without a reular supply of mud, the coastal wetlands have gradually been devoured by waves and rising sea levels.
The Louisiana coast has lost up to 40 square miles of marsh annually in recent decades. Because wetlands partially absorb storm surges, that has made southern Louisiana even more vulnerable to hurricanes.
Louisiana also provides the nation with oil and natural gas, which keeps the cost of those fuels down by limiting the amount that must be imported. But pipelines, drilling rigs and refineries take their toll on the local environment by damaging wetlands and causing pollution. In addition, pumping oil out of subterranean formations causes them to compress, which makes the ground sink even lower.
"Louisiana has sacrificed its coastline so those people in North Dakota can have fuel oil, so they can drive their vehicles," said Craig Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University.
Several pieces of legislation have been submitted to Congress that would give Louisiana and other coastal states a cut of the federal tax revenue from offshore oil production. Under current rules Washington gives states half of the revenue it collects from drilling on federal lands, but that applies only to onshore oil wells. If he policy were extended to offshore production Louisiana could earn $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion annually.
"That provides a very appropriate source to pay for this," Kopplin said.