What will be the fate of New Orleans? That’s the question, and it’s also an example of how our illustrious leader follows through on most of his plans and promises. From a meaningful reform of Social Security, a relatively simple problem because it only required putting a stop to the theft of payroll tax surpluses and the creation of a real trust fund, to the grand plans for a New World Odor – Bush talk is almost all hot air with no substance or follow through that’s helpful to the people of this country.

The most recent example of this was Bush’s return stop-off in Panama. After being shot down in Argentina with his plans for expanding free trade with South America, Bush needed some good publicity and positive phot-ops. He went to friendly Panama to get it and then he came home to add his support to a republican candidate for governor of Virginia. Both events were dramatic failures.

In Panama, Bush said that “we do not torture” and claimed he supports widening the canal. Apparently, he forgot that China holds a fifty year lease on this passage between the seas, that the Japanese estimated costs of rebuilding the antique locks at $80 billion in early eighties dollars, or that it was his father who ordered the almost total destruction of Panama City in order to uproot one man, Manuel Noriega, a little more than a decade ago.

Shortly after hurricane Katrina, Bush brought his own generators to backlight the St. Louis Cathedral in the famous Jackson Square of New Orleans while he delivered a speech promising that the entire Gulf Coast would be rebuilt bigger and better than ever and that the federal government would pay most of the costs.

In this speech, Bush said; “There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again … the work that has begun in the Gulf Coast region will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”

Today, he’s trying to weasel out of that promise by telling us that local governments must first decide what they want to do. And the whole thing will likely become just as bogged down as New York City's rebuilding a few blocks of ground zero even though the city got a ton of money from Bush and Congress.

The Storm Recovery Commission, meeting in Baton Rouge, is having trouble deciding what must be done, but along with other experts agrees that the City of New Orleans must be protected with a better levee system. According to Andy Kopplin, executive director of the recovery authority, “having Category Five hurricane protection in New Orleans is essential for its long term recovery.” With about 350 miles of levees involved, they put the costs for this part of the rebuilding at a conservative $20 billion.

As I’m writing this, it’s the second week of November, more than two months after hurricane Katrina hit east of New Orleans and the levees broke. In the month of October, the Bush administration borrowed $94.4 billion pushing the national debt past $8 trillion. But what the hey, that was after borrowing practically nothing in the month of September because the government’s fiscal 2005 year ended on the last day of that month and Bush wanted to show that he’s serious about cutting the deficit in half before he leaves office.

Can you believe that? After running up the national debt an average of fifty billion a month for eleven months, Bush pulls back in the last month and ends the year at $553.6 billion in new debt. That’s almost fifty billion less than the previous year’s $594 billion, a record that he would have topped if he hadn’t put borrowing off for a month. Of course, he’s right back on track now. Do you think New Orleans is going to see any of this money?

According to the New York Times, during the first week of November “President Bush submitted a spending request to Congress that included $1.6 billion for the repair of levees and wetlands, and an additional four and a half million to study the possibility of a levee upgrade.” Are these some sort of matching funds against the amount of money raised by George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton in their continuous television appeal to the “generosity and compassion” of the American people?

Now, we’ll have a committee studying the “possibility” of levee repair or rebuilding. Isn’t that nice?

Without a doubt, the levee problem falls directly on the shoulders of the federal government and the federal Army Corps of Engineers who built it or supervised hired contractors. The Corps has always been in charge of these levees. And let’s not forget that immediately after his first visit to New Orleans, Bush asked Congress for $62.5 billion and put Karl Rove in charge of rebuilding. Now we have a banker from Texas appointed to the task so you would think that we might at least have an accounting of where any money is going, but don’t bank on it. It’s not even possible to tell where the extra Social Security money they steal every month is being spent.

And you can’t blame the Army Corps for the entire levee problem. During the seventies, the Corps wanted to build these dykes to withstand a Category Five hurricane but was shot down by environmental groups who said it would have an adverse effect on surrounding wetlands and other environmental factors.

In other words, it became a pay-me-now or pay-me-later situation against the inevitability of a strong hurricane hitting the area. We are now at the pay-me-later stage with a monstrous task staring us in the face.

This task is not going to be solved by jazz musicians, ragtime piano players, artists, restaurants, gift shops, hotels, Mardi-Gras or casinos in a city made famous by pirates who took what they could get while relying on their surroundings to protect them. Pirates who had to pull their bulky canon laden square riggers upriver against the Mississippi current, built their homes and warehouses on the first “high ground” they found, and helped Andrew Jackson fight against British authority that was their common enemy or nemesis.

Like the sailors who built homes in Key West and the islands, these buccaneers built wood structures without someone to enforce minimum construction codes and they built them to withstand the fury of winds and seas that they knew only too well. After all, they had their booty to protect.

At the time, pirates like Jean Lafitte would have had to be geniuses with a sextant to tell that this “high ground” was still one or two feet below sea level. That they were risking floods from a sea that lay more than a hundred miles southeast of their hideout, a hideout that was surrounded by marshlands.

Today, these men-of-the-seas have been replaced by political buccaneers who still don’t have any building codes, but have expanded development in all directions away from and for different reasons than those that built the small French Quarter and required levees to hold back the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. In many ways, New Orleans resembles a Hollywood movie set with the historic nostalgia to entertain tourists and, if you wander more than a block or two away from the French Quarter, St. Charles Street or the university campuses behind it, you’re in the shantytowns of the servants.

It’s still one of the nation’s greatest seaports with nautical mile marker 97 close to the base of Canal Street, making it 111 statute miles by the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, and the river current is still there making it an excellent way to send grain and other products downriver by barge from tributaries that include the Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and many other rivers spread like veins throughout the heartland.

But it’s also a long and expensive trip to import goods like oil from the mouth of the river to this city so far upstream. The time and costs of bringing goods upstream is something shippers do not encounter in Gulfport, Biloxi, or Mobile where the new Tombigbee river canal connects to the Ohio River. And to the west, you’ve got the deep water ports of Galveston and Port Arthur, part of the Houston area, to bring in ships in jig time and with minimal effort.

Do you really believe that George W. Bush is considering these factors when he’s got booty to plunder in the Middle East? While steadfastly maintaining his war course, and given his past behavior on reform promises, it’s more likely he just hopes the problem of rebuilding New Orleans will disappear, get bogged down in various committees, or at least fade from the attention of the news media. Don't count on anything meaningful happening.

Do you think I'm being a little hard on our President? If so, then think about this. Social Security was his top reform objective and all he ever had to do was freeze the surpluses coming in until it was accomplished one way or another. Did he? The Beltway Bandits walked off with $86.7 billion of your retirement money last year, fiscal 2005. Now the subject is on the back burner, but the scam continues unabated.