Third World America - Arianna Huffington [41]
Similar stories could be told across the country.
AMERICA’S LEVEES: WHY HAVEN’T THE LESSONS OF KATRINA BEEN LEARNED?
In 2005, even those most determined to deny our deteriorating condition came face-to-face with Third World America as the levees around New Orleans burst during Hurricane Katrina. More than 1,800 people died. For weeks our government seemed incapable of even retrieving the bodies from the city’s flooded streets, much less finding housing and food for those who were evacuated from their homes.
This great American tragedy was not created by the perfect storm of killer winds and driving rain, as President Bush told us. It was a catastrophe that was entirely man-made—produced by our compromised political process.
Like any number of agencies charged with protecting the public, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which author and satirist Harry Shearer has called “the true poster child for federal incompetence,” has lost its way.80 “The Corps,” Shearer writes, “tasked by a 1960s Congress to protect New Orleans from severe hurricanes, failed, by its own standards, and according to its own post-mortem. More independent observers, like the UC Berkeley Independent Levee Investigation Team, had an even harsher verdict. Yet who’s blithely going about fixing that which they screwed up so royally? The Corps. Who’s reviewing their work? If anybody, engineers approved and paid by … the Corps.” Instead of fulfilling its responsibility to build and efficiently maintain the country’s waterways infrastructure, the Corps became yet another tool of a cabal of highly politicized officials using government for their own ends.81 After trying to deflect blame and cover up its shoddy work, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was forced to publicly own up to its systemic failures that led to the disaster that befell New Orleans.
The politicians who prioritize the Corps’s workload and projects and grant it funding are also to blame, swayed as they are by the lobbyists and engineering firms whose contributions earn them the right to “recommend” what projects the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should be pursuing. You won’t be surprised to learn that these projects often coincide with the very same services offered by clients of the lobbyists.
The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates it would cost $100 billion to refurbish the nation’s levees.82 But even harder to come by are the political reforms needed to ensure that the $100 billion would be spent in a way that actually did what it was supposed to.
WIRED FOR FAILURE
Fortifying America’s infrastructure is not just about patching up our antiquated systems. It’s also about laying the groundwork for an efficient and equitable society that can compete with the fast-rising economies of the twenty-first century. This means that, along with repairing our decaying roads, bridges, dams, and electric grid, we have to invest in building the kind of high-tech infrastructure that can keep us in the game in the future.
For starters, we need to kick our high-speed Internet plans into high gear. A robust, broadband-charged, country-wide information superhighway is going to be key to staying ahead of the innovation curve. Over the next ten years, there will be a five-hundredfold increase in the amount of information traveling on the nation’s information superhighway.83 New products coming onto the market—including video conferencing, video on demand, and geographic information systems mapping—will increasingly