Do you not think there might be a correlation between the 2-3 Billion dollars we spend EVERY DAY on the Iraq Debacle -- it is not a war -- and the lack of funds to repair the levees? And we have been burning cash up at that rate for about four years!!!
Belle and I just completed a journey by car from Louisville KY, where we participated in a trade show, through Kentucky -- the Jim Beam Distillery and Bowling Green -- and Tennessee -- historic Franklin and the Orthodox Church there that once was Baptist (bursting at the seems now) and then Jackson TN (not Mississippi), an hour or so east of Memphis, -- and Shreveport LA where we visited with an astonishingly "successful" Orthodox priest who was, for most of his life, a Lutheran missionary in China. It took us about a week to drive back to Houston, having flown to Louisville. I have to tell you that the state of the Interstate Highway system between Louisville and Houston, about 1100 miles -- through western KY, middle and east TN, southern AR (including Little Rock and Hope and Texarkana) is worse than appalling -- a national embarrassment. We witnessed the same last summer on a drive from Dallas through eastern Oklahoma, western Arkansas, and southern Missouri. Cracked pavement, pot holes, dangerous shoulders, poor signage, unmarked lanes, were only the tip of the iceberg of the obvious neglect and decay.
In my business I deal with people who repair bridges. Gentleman, our bridges -- federal, state, and local are collapsing. Numerous studies in the past decade or so have documented this in lurid detail. For those of us in the business the Minneapolis bridge catastrophe was no surprise. And I deal with people who maintain pipelines -- gentleman, brace yourselves for one catastrophe after another along the transmission lines that link the oil and gas fields of Texas and Canada to refineries, etc., across the continent.
Most of this neglect is a function of the failure of the Federal government to fund and regulate proper transportation corridors for people, goods, and energy. Funding and regulation are, of course, in part a function of political will. The Bushies might have done nothing for 8 years in every respect had the till been full. But it has been emptied into Mesopotamia -- trillions of dollars! -- and we have almost nothing to show for it, politically, diplomatically, economically, etc. So, to turn the aphorism on its head, were there a will, there was no way, Jose.
New Orleans levees? Give me a break! Bush and Cheney hide, McCain remains imPalined, hunkering down and hoping (praying? -- I doubt he knows how) that the Katrina trauma does not repeat between now and the election and remind everyone in vivid terms of the neglect and incompetence he and his party represent.
Peter Petkas
No comments:
Post a Comment