The
Presidents Priorities: State Of Marriage Took Precedent Over
State Of Louisiana
By Jason Leopold
04 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
Why
is President Bush more concerned with the state of marriage than the
state of Louisiana?Thats what the New Orleans City Business paper
asked in early February, a couple of weeks after Bushs State of
the Union address, in which the president called for a constitutional
amendment banning same-sex marriages, upon learning that Bushs
budget proposal recommended slashing $34 million from the New Orleans
district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, leaving the city with
a $581 million shortfall for flood control and coastal erosion improvement
projects.
Despite more than
four hurricanes that have whipped through New Orleans since 2002, leaving
a trail of destruction in their wake, and personal pleas to the president
by Louisianas local and state officials to provide much needed
funding to rebuild the states rapidly disappearing wetlands, the
Bush administration declined, shifting its prioritiesand federal
fundsinto its foreign policy initiatives.
Bush said Thursday
no one expected the levees in New Orleans to break after Hurricane Katrina.
There were warnings.
Coastal erosion
[is] swallowing Louisiana whole at a rate of a football field every
30 minutes, said the Feb. 14, 2005 story in New Orleans City Business.
The erosion has
a direct impact on New Orleans' ability to absorb the blow of a storm
like [Hurricane] Katrina. For every 2.7 miles of wetlands, storm surges
are reduced by about one foot, said Sidney Coffee, executive assistant
to Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, in charge of coastal activities,
in an interview with MSNBC.
About 1,900 square
miles of wetlands have disappeared from the area since the 1930s, and
the receding continues at a rate of about 24 square miles per year.
Most of the erosion in Louisiana is blamed on the levees, which faithfully
steer all the water from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. That
prevents occasional flooding, keeping area residents above water most
of the time. But one unforeseen consequence of the levees has been to
cut off wetlands from their life force.
How is losing
vast tracts of valuable state property less important than the nebulous
goal of somehow trying to restrict immigration? the New Orleans
paper asked.
Bushs domestic
priorities were dwarfed by the war in Iraq and the so-called war on
terror.
The lack of federal
funding became so dire that last November Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco,
at the urging of Louisiana levee districts, considered suing the federal
government for a larger share of the $5 billion in royalties from offshore
oil and natural gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico just so the state
could pay for the work needed to repair its deteriorating coast.
A lawsuit, the levee
district said, would grab the nations attention and advance the
issue of coastal restoration in the federal court system as opposed
to being bogged down in legislation on Capitol Hill. The money from
the Gulf of Mexico is, after income the Internal Revenue Service brings
in, the second largest source of revenue for the federal government.
Blanco said that
every year state officials plead with lawmakers to fund ongoing projects
to preserve whats left of the coast and to help fund other endeavors
to replace whats no longer there. Yet every year the state is
shortchanged which threatens the very existence of historic cities like
New Orleans.
Lawmakers included
the proposal in the national energy bill. The legislation called for
carving out $540 milliona 10 percentroyalty from oil and
gas revenue at the Gulf of Mexico on top of the $800 million or so Louisiana
already receives from drilling revenues to fund the coastal restoration
project. In June, the Bush administration took the unusual step of sending
a letter to House and Senate negotiators advising them to kill the revenue-
sharing plan in the final version of the energy bill. It was.
New Orleans resident
David Morris was none too happy when he got the news, particularly because
a majority of Louisianans voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004.
President Bush has
just told Louisiana to go jump in the Gulf, Morris wrote in a
June 17, letter to the Times-Picayune. This is our president,
Louisiana. We helped him win his second term in office, and this is
how he thanks us. Our dwindling coastline just isn't Bush's concern.
Nor is the prospect of New Orleans under 20 feet water.
Jason Leopold is
the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the
spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website
at www.jasonleopold.com for updates
© 2005 Jason
Leopold