Levees Not War

President Obama with Homeland Security Council president John O. Brennan (left), DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, and FEMA administrator Craig Fugate. FEMA photo by Bill Koplitz.

We’ll Take Some of That “Socialist Overspending”

It was good to see the president on Hurricane Season’s eve being briefed by new FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Homeland Security Council president John Brennan on preparations for the upcoming season. We are relieved that the president has appointed serious professionals in these critical positions, as we are encouraged by his nomination of Jo-Ellen Darcy to oversee the Army Corps of Engineers. But we want more of Mr. Obama’s attention—and more of his “socialist overspending” for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: for the rebuilding of shattered communities, the reinforcement of the flood control systems, housing and education of citizens displaced by flooding resulting from breaches in federally built levees, and so on.

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The New York Times and other sources have reported on the biblical quotations that adorned the cover pages of Pentagon intelligence briefings sent to the Bush White House (“Therefore put on the full armor of God. . .”) in a GQ profile of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Not good, especially when the Muslim world had already heard Bush describe the War on Terror as a “crusade.” In our view, however, Draper’s most distressing revelation is that days after Hurricane Katrina, when tens of thousands of victims were in desperate need of rescue and medical care, Rumsfeld refused to deploy a fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters at Hurlburt Field Air Force Base in Florida—only 200 miles from New Orleans—who were waiting for go orders. Indeed, when Bush tried to drag cooperation out of him, Rumsfeld only grudgingly relented. A nice touch when 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded after the failure of the federally (Army Corps of Engineers-) built levees. From “And He Shall Be Judged” in the June 2009 issue of GQ, by Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush:

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“The situation could not be more serious. It is inexcusable and irresponsible to get bogged down in distraction and delay while millions of Americans are being put out of work. It is time for Congress to act. . . . This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis.”
—President Obama, Feb. 6, 2009

All week we’ve been wondering Where are the f—ing Senate Democrats?! It’s as though the camera hogs have turned into groundhogs, frightened of their shadows, leaving Obama to do all the heavy lifting on the American Recovery and Investment Plan, better known as The Stimulus.

We’ve tried calling a half-dozen senators’ offices to find out why Reid, or Durbin, or Schumer—usually so eager for the spotlight—have been camera-shy, but for some reason the lines were busy. Why haven’t the Senate Democrats been pushing back against the GOP’s flood of distortions and exaggerations? They should be out there explaining—simply, directly, using the same honest and memorable phrases over and over—the need to invest in public transportation and other infrastructure, helping homeowners avoid foreclosure, extending unemployment benefits and food stamps, and helping states pay Medicaid and education expenses so they don’t have to cut vital programs. Many senators, we know, are busy hashing out the details of the stimulus package, but we want to see the Democrats compete for air time with the Republicans, who have at least been showing up for work on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CNBC, and everyplace else with a camera. (See “GOP Outnumbers Dems 2 to 1 in Cable News Stimulus Coverage” and “Dems Acknowledge They’re Being Outworked on TV, Vow to Fix.” And Daily Kos points out that, “adding insult to injury, a number of the Democrats who appeared are opposed to the stimulus bill.”)

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“For every $1 billion we spend on transportation infrastructure, we get a 6-times multiplier effect and between 25,000 and 30,000 jobs created. . . . The Chinese are spending $600 billion over the next two years on infrastructure—while we are told we can only spend $40 billion?”

—Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) to the House of Representatives

Q: Why are Democrats bowing to Republican demands for tax cuts ($300 billions’ worth in a $825 billion package)—and cutting badly needed appropriations for the Army Corps of Engineers / infrastructure / mass transit projects to win unobtainable “bipartisan” support for the stimulus bill?

Elana Schor at TalkingPointsMemo.com reports that the economic recovery package being considered in the House of Representatives gives “only $10 billion for rail and other public transportation projects, compared with $30 billion for roads.” The Senate Appropriations Committee is considering even less for mass transit projects: $9.5 billion. In a package projected to cost $825 billion, in a nation where public transit has been shortchanged for over a decade, that just ain’t enough. The U.S. spends about $12 billion each month in Iraq. Ten billion is as much as has been given to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (each) in the $700 billion bailout for banks and insurers—and only one-fifth of what Citigroup is getting.

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Illustration by Andrea Dezsö in The New York Times.

An excellent Op-Ed piece by Alex Prud’homme in the Feb. 27 New York Times explains the nation’s critical need for infrastructure reinforcement, as seen in Hurricane Katrina and recently in a flood in Nevada. (See “Floods in Nevada?” in In the News, left column.) The U.S. is threatened by dangerously inadequate levees, he says, and Congress must allocate funds for the Corps of Engineers to do its job: “We need to reinvigorate the Army Corps of Engineers and give it a mandate to build and maintain a coherent, robust, nationwide flood protection system—as opposed to the ineffective, piecemeal measures that failed so catastrophically in New Orleans.”

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Mardi Gras parade float, Knights of Momus, 1907.

November 8, 2007

We haven’t had much practice lately at reporting good news, but we’re happy to re-learn: Within two days, the two chambers of the U.S. Congress have voted to override the president’s veto of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA)—the first water projects bill in seven years (normally passed every two years), and the first override of a presidential veto since 1998. Today the Senate voted 79 to 14—an overwhelming margin similar to that of the House’s 361 to 54—to authorize spending levels for about 900 projects nationwide, including about $7 billion for Louisiana coastal restoration and flood protection. Bruce Alpert of the Times-Picayune notes, “Congress still must approve individual appropriations to get the work done.”

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Mark Schleifstein in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, 2005. In the background is a barge that broke through the breach in the wall of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal into the neighborhood during Hurricane Katrina, Aug. 29, 2005, crushing the front end of a school bus (far right). Photograph by Ellis Lucia, courtesy of the Times-Picayune.

Mark Schleifstein joined the Times-Picayune in 1984 as an environmental reporter after five years at the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi. Since 1996 he and his Times-Picayune colleague John McQuaid have written numerous major environmental series for the paper, most recently in January 2006. Schleifstein and McQuaid won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their series “Oceans of Trouble: Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?”—a comprehensive eight-day series about the threats to the world’s fish supply, including the effects of coastal wetlands erosion on fish in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998 the Picayune published their series “Home Wreckers: How the Formosan Termite Is Devastating New Orleans,” a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer.

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Our friends at the American Society of Civil Engineers are concerned like everyone else about the catastrophic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. ASCE is calling attention to the degraded condition of America’s roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, and proposes an Action Plan for the 110th Congress, including the establishment of a National Infrastructure Commission.

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