"Your Town is Next"

From Antifa commenting in Moon of Alabama :

Your Town Is Next

The central thread of the New Orleans situation is that there for years there wasn't enough money for protecting the city. So no protection was in place when disaster arrived.

The engineers charged with protecting the city from hurricane flooding saw their budgets slashed again and again since 2000, leaving them at the last to beg for emergency funds all this year for fixing just the weakest levees. The very levees now leaking billions of gallons of dirty water into the city.

No dice, said the Bush people. Iraq. 9/11. War President. It's hard. Vacation. Terry Schiavo. Vacation. 9/11 is hard.

Seeing a community heartlessly stripped of its ability to protect, feed or fend for itself makes you wonder -- what has Bush stripped from my community? What have we lost right here since 2000? Education, National Guard, police, gas prices, Medicaid, Medicare, Parks & Recreation, flood control, emergency preparedness?

What's been taken from my town, in the night, when no one was looking?

The Bush gang has been quietly stealing from all of us, to give to the rich, to run a war of aggression on behalf of their oil company cronies.

This is a bustout, town by town, across this country. A mafia crew is running the White House, siphoning off our assets to their pals, feeding upon America, running up debts for our grandkids to cope with.

It's catching up with New Orleans right now.

Your Town Is Next.

This is a comment on an excellent post by Billmon :

...media reports paint an picture of almost biblical desolation -- of pillars of smoke rising from fires that can't be as fought because there's no pressure in the water mains; of the risk that corpses from the city's vast above-ground cemeteries might be exhumed by the floodwaters and sent drifting through streets transformed into canals; of snakes, alligators and a three-foot shark -- yes, a shark -- spotted swimming in the fetid water.

Add in the raw waste from a hundred backed-up sewer lines, the rotting food from a hundred thousand kitchen refrigerators and the industrial filth of one of the country's largest ports and petrochemical centers, plus the corpses, dead animals, debris and the mosquito eggs -- many of them no doubt already hatching -- and you've got the makings of a first-class public health nightmare. Stew in the sun and the heat of a Louisiana September for a week or two, and watch the nightmare become a reality...

The big problem, or so I've read, is that while the river and the lake keep getting higher as sediment settles on their bottoms -- half a continent's worth, in the Mississippi's case -- the ground that New Orleans sits on keeps sinking lower -- in part because the same levees that keep the water out also prevent fresh layers of silt and mud from being deposited to offset natural subsidiance. As a result, the city is sinking at a rate of three feet per century -- about eight times faster than the world average. Which means the levees have to be raised steadily higher, and the pumps have to work steadily harder, to keep it dry.

Now that the worst has happened, many pundits, particularly on the left, are pointing to the budget cuts that have hamstrung the Army Corps of Engineers in its endless battle of New Orleans:

"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..."

...But the bigger story behind the drowning of New Orleans is what it reveals about the longer-term consequences of America's lunatic environmental priorities. For nearly 160 years, private industry and governments alike have been chopping and channeling the Mississippi and its tributaries -- turning rivers into drainage ditches, riverbanks into Maginot Line-style fortifications, and wetlands into factory farms. This has created the same self-defeating spiral that doomed New Orleans -- the rivers rise, the riverbanks sink, forcing the levees higher and higher, until some of them are now as tall as four-story buildings.

There's no future in this -- and for Southern Lousiana, home to about 40% of the wetlands in the entire continental United States, the future is now. Without the silt and mud that the Mississippi once spread liberally across the entire network of sloughs and bayous that flow to the sea, the Gulf of Mexico is not-so-gradually munching its way north -- even as the federal government spends millions each year to dredge the main shipping channels of sediment:

"Up to 35 square miles of Louisiana's wetlands sink into the Gulf of Mexico each year. To date, an area the size of Rhode Island has been lost. In some places, the coastline has retreated 30 miles..."

...even Dick Cheney might want to think about the effect the destruction of South Lousiana could have on his beloved energy industry. The infrastructure -- drilling platforms, ports, shipyards -- that supports something like 20% of all U.S. oil and gas production is being left further and further out to sea:

"As executive director of the Greater LaFourche Port Commission, [Ted Falgout] manages the country's largest transportation hub for offshore oil and gas drilling. There are 600 offshore drilling platforms within 40 miles of the port.

"The road connecting Port Fourchon to civilization, Louisiana Route 1, sits four feet above sea level for its final 18 miles. If a hurricane were to wash it away, nearly 20% of the total U.S. oil supply would be jeopardized. Gasoline prices might triple, Falgout warns."

Now, thanks to Katrina, the hidden costs of all those decades of insane policies are being made visible to the entire world.

...The real lesson of Katrina, though, is that the scenes we've been watching in New Orleans could be repeated in many other places in the decades ahead, if the worst-case scenarios generated by the global climate change models become realities.

It's easy, even for reasonable people, to disregard those scenarios. The worst case, after all, doesn't usually happen. But the flooding of New Orleans, like the destruction of Pompeii, is a graphic demonstration of the fact that sometimes the worst case (or something like it) does happen, especially when it is preceded by years of willful ignorance and blind self interest.

If the worst case for global climate change comes to pass, the environmental and economic losses will dwarf, many times over, the costs of Hurricane Katrina. They'll also reduce into insignificance the price tag on the Kyoto Treaty -- which itself may be too little, too late. If Shrub really thinks that doing something about climate change would "wreck the economy," he should spend some of his unused vacation time thinking about what just happened to New Orleans.