By Will Bunch, Published: August 31, 2005 9:00 PM ET

PHILADELPHIA Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.

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.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."

The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said."

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.

One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be." Will Bunch (letters@editorandpublisher.com) is senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 when he reported for Newsday. Much of this article also appears on his blog, Attytood, at the Daily News.

Comments of Paris-based Susan George (SG) is TNI Associate Director, Vice-President of Attac France and an active campaigner against the constitution

a former president of France, was named as head of the constitutional convention that produced this document. The members of the convention, 105 of them, were named from above, they were appointed. About two thirds of them were either European or national parliamentarians, but they were not elected by the citizens to do this. Then there were some others supposedly representing civil society. So that's the first criticism: the non-democratic aspect. A constitutional convention is normally an elected body, so that it comes in a sense from the people. This constitution does not come from the people; it comes from an appointed group.

This document contains a lot of policy. It includes a whole chapter on economic policies basically fixing Europe on a neo-liberal framework. That kind of stuff should not be present in a constitution because if the European governments would like to subsequently change that policy choice it would not be possible, it would be anti-constitutional. So that's very dangerous and very easy to explain to people. The inclusion of this whole chapter on neo-liberal policies in the constitution is one of our main points of critique.

Another important criticism is the militarisation of the EU. The document includes key articles saying that the member states of the EU will improve their military capabilities every year. This has been turned around by part of the left, who say that improving doesn't necessarily mean spending more, but if you know where these proposals come from then you get worried. They are the product of a working group which included several representatives of the European military industry, and who want to sell their goods. That's why they were very happy to have these paragraphs in the European constitution.

Part three includes a whole list of policies in every area, agriculture, environment, police co-operation, justice, the central bank, etc. But the main thing is, however, that the objectives of the union define it as an economic space where you have freedoms of movement for goods, services, people and capital, and a space in which competition is free and unhindered. Competition comes into the text 47 times, the word market 78 times, the phrase social progress is not mentioned at all, or once I guess, and unemployment is not mentioned at all.

We have many objections to the content of this document, but the major one is that this text is not amendable, is not revisable. It's not amendable because you need a triple unanimity across all 25 countries. To amend the constitution there first has to be a convention, which has to reach a consensus. Then they hand the baby to the heads of government, who also have to be unanimous in agreeing the proposed changes. Then it goes into a process like the one we are going through now, of either parliamentary approval or referendums, and that also has to be unanimous otherwise the constitution cannot be changed. So it is considered by anybody who has read the thing to be virtually impossible to amend.

Overall, though, our argument comes back to neo-liberalism. When the constitution was handed by the convention to the heads of states and governments, their additions and subtractions made it even more neo-liberal than it was when it came out of the hands of the convention. Perhaps that reflects the governments of Europe as they are today. But it becomes a problem because it is extremely difficult to change this constitution. As the 1793 French constitution says, 'One generation should not subject future generations to its laws.'

People who have actually read the text of the constitution almost always come out of this difficult exercise determined to vote against it, despite the official financial and media propaganda for the yes vote, which says 'its more democratic than what we had'.

Scott Nelson, Getty Images: U.S. Army tank trains in Kuwait in December, 2002. [ related ]

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