The worst thing of Bush's speech in Jackson Square that the American people heard it, think it's happening or has happened, and think New Orleanians are asking for more money.
Followed closely by the fact that, though appropriated, it isn't being spent, and when spent, spent stupidly. We are six months away from the next hurricane season and we are still undergoing the assessment process. No permanent repairs have even been designed.
Having been ravaged, the lack of an effort to repair the levees is making us very, very nervous. We know how slowly the COE's wheels grind, we know that Gray has predicted another busy season, and we know we are sitting ducks if the repairs are not made very quickly. Even a cat. 1 or 2 storm next year might be a coup de grace.
And we are acutely aware of the Congressional grandstanding fueled by attitudes across the nation that we somehow deserve to be hammered.
What a world.
Nobody outside New Orleans seems to understand how much of the catastrophe must be laid at the feet of the Army Corps of Engineers.
Isn't that the truth? The COE rightfully had a sterling reputation in the past, one we relied on. I wouldn't trust them to build a tree house now.
No accountability, I guess. If you're immune from accountability, then what motivates you do to anything but cash your paycheck every two weeks?
Accountability is the key to things in both the private and the public sector. It doesn't exist in the federal government's bureaucracy.
I have tried to make the point that we are dealing with the future, not the past, that the city's politics and demographics are going to inevitably change for the better, but most of the posters I have engaged are inflamed by what happened in the imediate post-K. debacle. Get over it, I say, and if you can't, accept the fact that we would not have been flooded except for the negligence of the Corps, which pales in comparison to our foibles.
The post-K debacle is utterly irrelevant to the future; the Corps' negligence is not because it creates a moral if not legal responsibility for the Feds to repair the damage.
There is some thinking among NO legal circles that it might help to sue the Corps, get a judgment in the tens of billions, then let it defend execution on the basis of the 1928 Flood Act's immunity. We'd have a legal judgment concerning the Corps' responsibility that might help the public realize how negligent the Corps actually was. It might help, but I adivse that the mootness doctrine would make such a piece of paper hard to get. We could nonetheless get a judge to issue a scathing opinion detailing the Corps' failures, then dismiss the case. The opinion itself might be worthwhile.
New York after 9/11 came out ok because the area that was hurt was the financial district. People with clout, people who can pull strings and make things happen. Rudy Giuliani, for one.
Oh, we've got clout, too, we just don't know how to use it. A port of NO's magnitude and the oil and gas gives us a lot of clout, a lot more than we think. But we're much too passive around here to fight with bare knuckles as we should. |
