Word: flood-control
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...letter obtained by TIME, Bush's Environmental Protection Agency moved to block a $220 million Army Corps of Engineers flood-control project in the Mississippi Delta, laying the groundwork for the first EPA veto of an Army Corps project since 1990. And the project is arguably the most ecologically destructive Army Corps boondoggle on the books today, which is saying something. It would build the world's largest hydraulic pump to protect a sparsely populated area dominated by soybean fields from Yazoo River flooding, and it would drain or degrade enough wetlands to cover all five boroughs of New York...
...pump is officially a flood-control project for poor Delta communities, but more than four-fifths of the economic benefits calculated by the Corps would go to flood-prone farmers who already collect gigantic subsidies to grow soybeans on marginal land. And the federal government is on the hook for the entire $220 million bill, because Mississippi Republican Senators Thad Cochran and Trent Lott slipped through a provision waiving local cost-sharing rules for the project...
Bush vetoed the measure because of its Bizarro World price tag, which split the difference between a $14 billion House version and a $15 billion Senate version with a $23 billion consensus bill. Defenders say it has been seven years since Congress approved flood-control projects, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has championed the bill. But the corps already has a more than $50 billion backlog of unfinished projects, and investigations had exposed its dysfunctional habits--wasting money, draining wetlands, cooking its books to justify boondoggles--long before its bungling drowned New Orleans. Still, corps projects are a form...
...Depression, calling it "a temporary solution to deal with an emergency." But in Washington, the emergency has never ended. The government still gives farmers your money--more than ever over the past decade--along with research projects to expand their yields, restoration projects to clean up their messes, flood-control and irrigation projects to protect and enhance their land, visa programs to supply them with cheap labor, ethanol mandates and tariffs to boost their prices, and tax breaks by the bushel...
...years. While many, including several potential jurors who came before State District Judge Jerome Winsberg earlier this week, believe the Manganos are responsible for the deaths, there is a growing consensus that blame for all post-Katrina woes lies at the feet of the federal government, which built the flood-control system that was supposed to protect South Louisiana's low-lying areas in the first place. The defense maintains that the Manganos thought it better to offer shelter to residents rather than put them through the trauma of evacuation, and that they were so confident that the nursing home...