Guns and Levees

This week’s CounterSpin includes an interview with Will Bunch about the diversion of federal government funding from levee projects in southern Louisiana to the war effort in Iraq:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Woodmor Village Zendo has some interesting things to say about this issue — and many other aspects of the tragedy unfolding along the Gulf coast.

This is a poignant, contemporary illustration of the notion of guns and butter first articulated by Otto von Bismark: the opportunity cost of funding military rather than civilian projects … although I suspect we’ll see an ongoing escalation of involvement by the military — and military contractors — in the days, weeks and months to come.