Our leaders don't have the courage to tell us that we can't continue to live this way, because too many jobs, incomes, and votes would have to go with it. They may not have the courage to even face the facts themselves. They may be hostages -- like most other Americans -- to the belief that a drive-in society is the only conceivable way to live, or the best, or simply normative.

The suburban project, which has preoccupied us since the end of the Second World War, can be seen now in light of the gathering global energy predicament as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Having put so much of our post-war wealth into this massive infrastructure for daily living, we are captives of it, subject to a corrosive psychology of previous investment, which does not permit us to imagine letting go of this way of life, or even reforming it.
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What about the x-thousand number of people around America beyond the Gulf Coast who, up until the day after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, were making plans to put in an offer on a new house 38 miles outside of Dallas (or Minneapolis, or Denver, or Washington, DC, etc.)?

What if, all of a sudden, with a full tank in their Ford Expedition costing almost $100, they begin to calculate that living 38 miles from town isn't such a great idea anymore? Surely this is occurring to some potential buyers. We won't really know until the home sales figures come in a month from now. What's more, many of them may decide that a new McMansion in a distant suburb is a bad idea not only for themselves, but an even worse idea from an investment point-of-view, in case they are buying the house just to "flip" it for the expected 10 percent annual rise in value that such houses have enjoyed in recent years.
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Much of the stuff just outside New Orleans, and along the Gulf Coast, was largely post-war suburban fabric -- housing subdivisions, collector boulevards with their complements of fry pits, malls, muffler shops and big box out-parcels. We'd hope that the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana will not undertake to rebuild them they way they were. But the existing template reflects a pattern of property ownership that is not easily changed. The New Urbanists have a good record of retrofitting some of these things. For instance they have had some success in turning "dead" malls into mixed use town centers. But some of this stuff, in particular single-family housing developments, do not lend themselves very well to reform.

Many of the debates over the suburban extravaganza have been framed in terms of the "choices" Americans make. Suburbia, it is often said by cheerleaders like David Brooks of The New York Times, or Wendell Cox of the Reason Institute, represents a favorable "choice" on a big menu that includes city apartment life, or a cabin in the woods, or a soybean farm. I'd argue that the suburban choice is coming off the menu.
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Interestingly, The New York Times ran a front-page headline on September 4 to the effect of, "U.S. Economy Not Affected by Hurricane." This is the thinking now at the highest levels of news gathering among a group I hesitate to label the power elite -- but they do exist, even for those of us allergic to conspiracy theories.

This is why we have such poor leadership: an utter failure of imagination among our leaders, including politics, business and the media.

The hurricane that shredded the Gulf Coast will have consequences, but mainly in accelerating structural problems already present in American society, with its gross imbalances and collectively suicidal economic behavior.

The next thing to look for: If fewer suburban houses are sold because of higher energy prices, the creation of false liquidity in the form of mortgages spun out of thin air will cease. If this stream of false liquidity ceases, the government-sponsored entities who bundle all this debt into tradable instruments will find themselves in trouble. If they go off the rails, the American finance sector will follow like a choo-choo train.

Things could get very serious. And just because of some bad weather.

THE BUSH REGIME has outsourced New Orleans body removal to Kenyon international, a wholly owned subsidiary of SCI Corporation, owned by major Bush contributor and friend Robert Waltrip. SCI and Waltrip were last featured in the Review under the headline: "Bush Buddy Buried Bodies In Bushes Badly."

NOAH BIERMAN, MIAMI HERALD, 2003 - The world's largest funeral home chain will pay $100 million to Jewish families whose loved-ones' remains were mishandled and mangled at two South Florida cemeteries. . . The pay-out closes a class-action suit against Houston-based Service Corporation International on behalf of families with plots at Menorah Gardens cemeteries in northern Palm Beach and western Broward counties. In some cases, cemetery employees disinterred bodies and tossed bones into the woods to make room at the crowded, oversold cemetery grounds. The allegations were particularly appalling to the Jewish cemetery's more religiously observant clientele. Jewish law explicitly prohibits disturbance of the dead. . .

The late Col. Hyman Cohen was buried in 1983 in a spot in the Palm Beach County cemetery reserved for a woman, Frances Gold, of Pembroke Pines. She died six years later. With no room for both bodies, employees dug up Cohen's remains, cracking his vault and throwing some of his bones into the woods. Others were mixed in with Gold's.

JANE SUTTON, REUTERS - It said cemetery workers broke open some burial vaults and dumped the bodies in the woods, and crushed down other coffins to make room for new coffins on top of them. It also alleged that body parts of different people were mixed together when the buried vaults were broken open and that people who bought side-by-side plots were actually buried head-to-toe or on top of each other. The plaintiffs' lawyers said hundreds of bodies were mishandled and that there were some 700 people with claims against the two cemeteries . . . The lawsuit was filed a day after Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth subpoenaed all of SCI's Florida burial records dating back to 1990 as part of an investigation into its business practices.

ROBERT BRYCE, SALON, SEP 29, 1999 - In recent months, SCI stumbled into the national media spotlight thanks to the presidential race. In March, Waltrip and SCI were named as defendants in a whistleblower lawsuit in Texas that involves allegations that presidential front-runner George W. Bush intervened on SCI's behalf to help stop an investigation by the state's regulatory agency. Waltrip and SCI are big financial contributors to Bush, and Waltrip is also a personal friend of former President Bush, endowing the Bush library with $100,000.

SCI has powerful friends in both political parties. Former Rep. Tony Coelho, chairman of Al Gore's presidential campaign, sits on SCI's board of directors. It's a lucrative job. According to the company's proxy statement, SCI pays Coelho $21,000 per year just to sit on the board and an additional $6,000 for each meeting he attends. Coelho also owns more than $450,000 worth of SCI stock.

Despite those influential friends, a number of troubling specters are creeping up on the company. Tort lawyers, consumer advocates and regulators are all taking aim at the Houston-based death care giant. Plaintiff's lawyers in Florida are suing SCI, claiming the company sold an exorbitantly expensive funeral to an elderly, mentally incompetent widow. In Washington state and Texas, lawyers are suing the firm, maintaining it has mishandled corpses. Company shareholders have filed a class-action lawsuit, alleging SCI officials withheld troubling earnings data that caused the stock price to dip.

Consumer advocates are constantly taking swipes at the company. Karen Leonard, the head of the Sebastopol, Calif.-based Redwood Funeral Society, who worked as the late Jessica Mitford's research assistant on her last book, "The American Way of Death Revisited," has become one of the country's leading critics of SCI. She claims SCI has "made price gouging state of the art.
"They've been able to take the emotions that make people spend more - guilt and fear of death - and have played those like an orchestra and have made tremendous amounts of money. They are taking advantage of consumers on all fronts, by secrecy, by their ability to control regulations and their ability to give money to politicians."

As radical environmentalists continue to blame the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation on President Bush’s ecological policies, a mainstream Louisiana media outlet inadvertently disclosed a shocking fact: Environmentalist activists were responsible for spiking a plan that may have saved New Orleans. Decades ago, the Green Left – pursuing its agenda of valuing wetlands and topographical “diversity” over human life – sued to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from building floodgates that would have prevented significant flooding that resulted from Hurricane Katrina.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Barrier Project planned to build fortifications at two strategic locations, which would keep massive storms on the Gulf of Mexico from causing Lake Pontchartrain to flood the city. An article in the May 28, 2005, New Orleans Times-Picayune stated, “Under the original plan, floodgate-type structures would have been built at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur passes to block storm surges from moving from the Gulf into Lake Pontchartrain.”

“The floodgates would have blocked the flow of water from the Gulf of Mexico, through Lake Borgne, through the Rigolets [and Chef Mentuer] into Lake Pontchartrain,” declared Professor Gregory Stone, the James P. Morgan Distinguished Professor and Director of the Coastal Studies Institute of Louisiana State University. “This would likely have reduced storm surge coming from the Gulf and into the Lake Pontchartrain,” Professor Stone told Michael P. Tremoglie during an interview on September 6. The professor concluded, “[T]hese floodgates would have alleviated the flooding of New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina.”

As the Times-Picayune wrote, “Those plans were abandoned after environmental advocates successfully sued to stop the projects as too damaging to the wetlands and the lake's eco-system.” Specifically, in 1977, a state environmentalist group known as Save Our Wetlands (SOWL) sued to have it stopped. SOWL stated the proposed Rigolets and Chef Menteur floodgates of the Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Prevention Project would have a negative effect on the area surrounding Lake Pontchartrain. Further, SOWL’s recollection of this case demonstrates they considered this move the first step in a perfidious design to drain Lake Pontchartrain entirely and open the area to dreaded capitalist investment.

On December 30, 1977, U.S. District Judge Charles Schwartz Jr. issued an injunction against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lake Pontchartrain hurricane protection project, demanding the engineers draw up a second environmental impact statement, three years after the corps submitted the first one. In one of the most ironic pronouncements of all time, Judge Schwartz wrote, “it is the opinion of the Court that plaintiffs herein have demonstrated that they, and in fact all persons in this area, will be irreparably harmed if the barrier project based upon the August, 1974 FEIS [federal environmental impact statement] is allowed to continue.”

If the Greens prevailed, it was not because the forces of common sense did not make a compelling case. SOWL’s account reveals that during the course of the trial the defense counsel, Gerald Gallinghouse – a Republican U.S. Attorney who acted as a special prosecutor during the Carter administration – felt so strongly that the project should continue that he told the judge he would “go before the United States Congress with [Democratic Louisiana Congressman] F. Edward Hebert to pass a resolution, exempting the Hurricane Barrier Project from the rules and regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act because, in his opinion, [this plan] is necessary to protect the citizens of New Orleans from a hurricane.” Despite this, the judge ruled in favor of the environmentalists. Ultimately, the project was aborted in favor of building up existing levees.

However, the old plan lived on in the minds of those who put human beings first. The Army Corps of Engineers as recently as last year had publicly discussed resuming the practice. The September-October 2004 edition of Riverside (the magazine of the New Orleans District Army Corps of Engineers Public Affairs Office) referred to this lawsuit and project. Eric Lincoln’s article titled, “Old Plans Revived for Category 5 Hurricane Protection,” stated:

In 1977, plans for hurricane protection structures at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass were sunk when environmental groups sued the district. They believed that the environmental impact statement did not adequately address several potential problems, including impacts on Lake Pontchartrain’s ecosystem and damage to wetlands.

Ultimately, an agreement between the parties resulted in a consent decree to forego the structures at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass…The new initial feasibility study will look at protecting the area between the Pearl River and Mississippi River from a Category 5 storm….

The article added, “[A]lternatives that would be studied in the initial feasibility report are: Construction of floodgate structures, with environmental modifications, at Rigolets and Chef Pass.” The Times-Picayune recorded last May, “the corps wants to take another look [at building the floodgates] using more environmentally sensitive construction than was previously available.” This time the Army Corps of Engineers would modify the original plans because of the environmentalists. However, the project was already delayed more than two decades because of the environmentalists’ lawsuit. If begun immediately it would take another two decades to complete: a 40-year delay caused by the Green Left.

...these floodgates environmental activists sued to prevent from being constructed may have kept a flood from consuming the city to the extent it did in the first place. The current programs aimed at reinforcing existing levees [that the enviroweenies suggested as an alternative - B] would only prove effective against a level three hurricane; they were not adequate for a level five storm like Katrina. Moreover, they did not fortify the specific areas the government sought to protect, to keep Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the entire city, which everyone knew posed a danger to a city below sea level. In other words, this plan would have saved thousands of lives and kept one of the nation’s greatest cities from lying in ruins for a decade.

At a minimum, such a plan would have staved off a significant portion of the disaster that’s unfolded before our eyes.

Worse yet, the environmentalists’ ultimate decision to reinforce existing levees may have actually further harmed the Big Easy. There is at least one expert who claims the New Orleans levees made no difference – in fact, they contributed to the problem. Deputy Director of the LSU Hurricane Center and Director of the Center for the Study Public Health Impacts by Hurricanes Ivor van Heerden said, “The levees ‘have literally starved our wetlands to death’ by directing all of that precious silt out into the Gulf of Mexico.”

Thirty years after its legal action, Save Our Wetlands boasts, “SOWL's legacy lives on and on within the heart and spirit of every man, woman, child, bird, red fish, speckle trout, croakers, etc.”

New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

This city counts 188,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.

New Orleans puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New Orleans' cheerleaders—both natives and beignet-eating tourists—are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New Orleans to its former "glory."

I can't wait till the grifters and thugs that run NO get thier hands on the billions that will be poured into the re construction effort.

If you think Katrina was a disaster wait till you see this! - TF

By increasing the value of shoreline property and encouraging rampant development, the trend toward privatizing formerly public space has contributed in no small measure to the damage storms like Hurricane Sandy inflict. Tidal lands that soaked up floodwaters were drained and developed. Jetties, bulkheads and sea walls were erected, hastening erosion. And sand dunes — which block rising waters but also profitable ocean views — were bulldozed.

It didn’t have to be this way. In 1967, Bob Eckhardt, a first-term congressman from Texas, came to Washington determined to do for the nation what he had done for the Texas coastline. As a state legislator, Mr. Eckhardt had passed the nation’s first open beaches law, the Texas Open Beaches Act of 1959, which defined all land below the vegetation line as belonging to the state for use by the people.

Rather than a departure, this bill was a restoration of the ancient right of the public to the foreshore — a right dating from Roman civil law that was incorporated into English common law, transported to the American colonies and finally preserved in the new nation in what came to be known as the Public Trust Doctrine. Sadly, each state interpreted that doctrine differently. While on the West Coast, a strong tradition of public beach access prevailed, along much of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, and especially along the crowded Northeast corridor, states tended to adopt a very narrow interpretation. Some states maintained that the Public Trust Doctrine covered only the public’s right to fishing and navigation, and still others largely ignored it.

While Mr. Eckhardt’s bill was, in the truest sense, conservative, its effects on the Texas coastline were nothing short of radical. The fences and jetties that beachfront property owners had constructed to restrict public access were dismantled. In some instances, buildings were torn down. Slowly, the beach returned to a more natural state.