Now I'm getting pissed off.
Louisiana will NOT become a federal protectorate. There will be NO regime change here! We are the soverign state of Louisiana.
Reading today that Bush and FEMA Director Michael Brown are trying to shift blame for this entire situation down to the local level. This is OUTRAGEOUS and do not buy into it!
New Orleans and Louisiana has been screaming for years that this could happen. Why is it that after every hurricane that strikes Florida or the Carolinas National Guard Troops from around the country are on the ground within 24 hours? We have within our limited means been trying to solve this decade after decade, but have never had the resources over the years.
Even this past year, our Congressional and Senate delegations fought for diversion of some of the offshore royalties from the Federal Government to the Gulf Coast states who provide all the logistics and have weathered all of the environmental damages. Bush fought this tooth and nail. As did New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici (who may now rot in hell). For over 30 years we have been screaming as our natural resources were plundered by the Government and Big Oil without the slightest bit of attention for the damages and expenses it was wreaking on the Gulf Coast states.
Louisiana has been losing something obscene - like a football field a day of land to the Gulf of Mexico!
Remember that the federal government spent billions of federal dollars on revitalizing the inland swamps surrounding Lake Okeechobee in Florida. And its loss had NO economic repercussions for the entire United States.
This is a fascinating read and will explain some of what is really at stake here...
Forecasting
GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
09.01.2005
New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
By George Friedman
The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.
But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.
The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.
There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.
The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.
It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.
A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.
It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.
Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a
city right there.
New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.
Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.
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Reading today that Bush and FEMA Director Michael Brown are trying to shift blame for this entire situation down to the local level. This is OUTRAGEOUS and do not buy into it!
New Orleans and Louisiana has been screaming for years that this could happen. Why is it that after every hurricane that strikes Florida or the Carolinas National Guard Troops from around the country are on the ground within 24 hours? We have within our limited means been trying to solve this decade after decade, but have never had the resources over the years.
Even this past year, our Congressional and Senate delegations fought for diversion of some of the offshore royalties from the Federal Government to the Gulf Coast states who provide all the logistics and have weathered all of the environmental damages. Bush fought this tooth and nail. As did New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici (who may now rot in hell). For over 30 years we have been screaming as our natural resources were plundered by the Government and Big Oil without the slightest bit of attention for the damages and expenses it was wreaking on the Gulf Coast states.
Louisiana has been losing something obscene - like a football field a day of land to the Gulf of Mexico!
Remember that the federal government spent billions of federal dollars on revitalizing the inland swamps surrounding Lake Okeechobee in Florida. And its loss had NO economic repercussions for the entire United States.
This is a fascinating read and will explain some of what is really at stake here...
Forecasting
GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
09.01.2005
New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
By George Friedman
The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.
But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.
The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.
There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.
The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.
It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.
A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.
It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.
Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a
city right there.
New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.
Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Sign Up for FREE Weekly Intelligence Reports!
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look into the broad scope of issues monitored by our team of analysts in the
areas of global geopolitics, security, and public policy.
In addition to the Geopolitical Intelligence Report
founder Dr. George Friedman, STRATFOR also offers the Terrorism Intelligence
Report
STRATFOR's Vice President of Counterterrorism and Corporate Security, and the
Public Policy Intelligence Report
Public Policy Bart Mongoven. Have these sent directly to your inbox each week by
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posted by TAG at 8:12 AM
12 Comments:
The fact is, the local level IS the one that is failing. Bush had to ORDER Blank-O to call for the evacuation in the first place. Now he's trying to offer other help, but she keeps refusing it. She's doing too little, too late. Very ineffective in her job.
Pre-edit CNN article quoting Blank-O stating that Bush had to TELL her to order the evacuation. (Note that CNN edited out the reference to Bush later, to avoid giving him credit for doing anything, once it became apparent that the evacuation was actually necessary.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:RGrwXIfpv8UJ:www.cnn.com/rssclick/2005/WEATHER/08/28/hurricane.katrina/%3Fsection%3Dcnn_topstories+president+bush+called+blanco+mandatory+evacuation+new+orleans&hl=en
I am so glad that you point out that the national media is biased regarding Bush, but for whatever reason, feel that they are unbiased on everything else. Pretty astute of you.
This should not get political yet. People are still dying!
yes, T. write on. this nation(we the people, not necessarily the current administration---I hope they AMF--).......this nation will need to support nOrleans for quite some time because....
nOrleans has always supported us, and will again.
we need you mr T , we need your neighbors and
louisiana needs forward thinking men like you. hang in there chief.
take care of self best you can, many lurkers send you vibes for strength.
BayouUp-
I have been following your Blog since you first pposted on SA that you were staying there through the storm. Outstanding coverage. I need to buy you several drinkls the next time I am down for a GYA event. Even though we live half-way across the country, my wife and I are still members of FYC. (Our j24 'trailer trash' is the class 'd' boat in the last couple of challenge-cup races. As I said---I owe you at least a round of drinks.
As for your outrage.... keep it coming. I grew-up at the other end of the Mississippi waterway, in one of the northern-most towns in the Louisiana purchase: Stillwater, MN. It's the northern-most navigable port on that part of the system. The Delta Queen puts in there every time she gets up to the top of the waterway.
My home town would not be there if not for New Orleans - 1000 miles away.
We have a duty to rebuild New Orleans. (With improved levee / pumping systems too.)
I like to think it would be a New Orleans plus ... same as before only better.
Take care and keep up the great reporting.
-Mark
The National Guards of Florida and the Carolinas, like the Louisiana National Guard, work for the Governor of their state. Ask your Governor why her Guardsmen were not asked to do anything but provide some generators, no protection, food, water, evacuation, communications, just power.
Save your strength -- this battle will be fought another day. Get some rest and stay safe.
The troops could not move until the storm was downgraded to a Tropical Storm. They headed for Mississippi, remember, Monday evening, people were dancing in the streets in N.O. rejoicing they had dodged another bullit. The majority of the feds had to be redirected when the levee broke, and N.O. nightmare began.
i fear this issue may split the nation
unfucking belivable that people are dying in our great city, and all we are focusing on at our darkest hour is whose fault it is. Let us try to help those in need and then afterward we can argue whose fucking fault it was as to how our great leaders got caught with their pants (or skirts down). Save your poltical bullshit for another time
Excellent article and being a south Louisiana resident many years ago with a great deal of family in south Louisiana, I agree completely that the city needs to be rebuilt exactly where it is.
I also share the immense frustration that the government has failed utterly in its efforts to relieve New Orleans and tried to shift blame. Micheal Brown, the head of FEMA, has shown himself to be an incompetent retard only capable of issuing platitudes and not doing the job. Bush did and continues to do nothing it seems except issue statements at press conferences. Mayor Nagin is atleast screaming for help to whoever he can and not just sitting around wondering what to do.
I've been following this blog with great interest and hope that you recover fully along with everyone in your community. I plan to give blood this week at school. Good luck and know that New Orleans and southern Louisiana is loved and I will support all efforts to restore it. God Bless.
Greg Thibeaux
Atlanta, GA (but Cajun at heart)
Georgia Tech Senior
The Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana has been given more money in Bush's 5 years in the White House (1.9 billion) than any other state. (California is next with 1.4 billion and they have 7 times the population) Clinton didn't come close to funding the corps with that much money. But state senators like Mary Landrieu didn't spend the money on catagory 5 levees even though they have been preaching to the choir about it forever and all sorts of public service anouncements have been bantied about about it. They instead spent the money on pork projects like dredging the MRGO when it had virtually no traffic even though a bogus corps study showed that traffic would INCREASE on it! More money for the businesses owned by constituents that helped get her re-elected. One 192 million dollar deepening project was rejected by the corps own economic feasibility study that had strong data that showed it was money being wasted. But Mary secretly tucked lanquage into an emergency spending bill for IRAQ that told the corps to redo the language to show the study supported the construction. She cooked the books to bring home the bacon and reward more pork to those who got her re-elected. It's never been about what's right for the state and the people with her but just politics as usual and Louisiana politics at that. It runs in her family. Yet she continues to blame Bush for the failures after the storm. Please show me one piece of legislation that crook proposed that would have allotted money for the building of cat 5 levees in La. You can't because there is none. Only pork projects with the money given to the La. Corps of Engineers which is the most of any state. And Blanco turned the Red Cross away from bringing in supplies to the Superdome before the storm because she did not want to encourage MORE PEOPLE TO COME to the dome. Yet she also blames the present administration. Hypocrite.
1.5 billion...hmmm...how about 16 billon for the Boston "big dig" and it leaks...we ask for that to restore the Wetlands...our naural resouces are far more important to the entire nation...migratory birds think so...blackened fish, salty oysters think so as do all americans when the fill thier cars with gasoline..citizens of New Orleans and the Bayou think so...we are important and what a pity Washington waited and had to listen to the Tempest...200 billion is a hard lesson for the entire nation...when the Cajuns have been talking for decades...ask a fisherman...then a scientist...ask those close to the land , close to nature and they know...listen up America...read Holding Back the Sea....Bayou Farewell...Saving Louisiana...read Rising Tide...
www.marshmission.com...learn what they learned in a year in the marsh....learn about our disappearing wetlands as well as you know about the Amazon...we need to honor the wetlands and make oil companies accountable for thier damage...Granny and the Gang
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