[Mb-civic] Corruption as Usual - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Corruption as Usual

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, September 28, 2005; Page A21

Two hurricanes have now hit Louisiana, wreaking terrible destruction. 
New Orleans continues to flood. Hundreds of thousands of people are 
scattered across the country, many in shelters. Given the scale of the 
calamity, surely it's time for Louisiana politicians to stop, assess the 
damage and work out the most rational way to help their state recover. 
Surely this is not the time for the government to write blank checks, 
for legislators to get greedy about unnecessary canals in their 
districts, or for federal agencies to launch projects that make future 
flooding more likely. Surely this is the time to spend money wisely. Right?

Wrong -- and if you thought otherwise, then you, like me, are still 
learning how deeply corrupt America's legislative branch has become. 
Most of the time, members of Congress don't accept cash bribes in 
unmarked envelopes. Most of the time, senators don't pay for their 
daughters' wedding receptions out of government slush funds. Most of the 
time, American politicians don't put their ill-gotten gains into 
numbered Swiss bank accounts or get the Mafia to launder their money. 
But corruption comes in many forms, and in this country it comes in the 
dull-sounding, unglamorous, switch-off-the-television form of 
infrastructure appropriations.

Exhibit A is the Louisiana congressional delegation's new request for 
$250 billion in hurricane reconstruction funds. As a Post editorial 
pointed out yesterday, this money -- more than $50,000 per Louisiana 
resident -- would come on top of the $62.3 billion Congress has already 
appropriated, on top of the charitable donations, on top of the 
insurance payouts. Among other things, the proposal demands $40 billion 
of new Army Corps of Engineers spending, 16 times more than the Corps 
says it needs to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane. 
Despite the fact that previous Corps projects drained Louisiana's 
coastal wetlands, thereby destroying what could have been a natural 
buffer against at least some of the Rita and Katrina storm surges, the 
proposal calls for a suspension of environmental reviews. Despite the 
fact that Louisiana spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water 
projects that turned out to be unnecessary, or even damaging, the 
proposal makes it possible to suspend cost-benefit analyses.

In its scale and sheer disregard for common sense, the Louisiana 
proposal breaks new ground. But I don't want to single out Louisiana: 
After all, the state's representatives are acting logically, even if 
they aren't spending logically. They are playing by the rules of the 
only system for distributing federal funds that there is, and that 
system allocates money not according to the dictates of logic, but to 
the demands of politics and patronage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701435.html?nav=hcmodule
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