From Neglect to Active Destruction

Ashley Morris is forced to bring out the heaviest verbal artillery again as word comes down that the feds are giving the finger to Entergy.

You know, I don't normally have many kind words for power companies, particularly those fighting the bad fight for privatization (one of the dumbest phenomenons of the past two to three decades has been truly a blind faith in market-based solutions for everything. There's a term for people who believe such things: idiots). But this paragraph speaks volumes:

New York's power utility, ConEdison Co. of New York...received $250 million in federal aid after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers. Like Entergy New Orleans, the New York utility is a subsidiary of a much larger utility holding company, Consolidated Edison Inc., which was not required to foot the recovery bill for its subsidiary.

When it suits them, Team Bush and their Congressional cronies are more than willing to spend like there's no tomorrow. So, one is forced to conclude that there must be a reason for their insistance on NOT wanting to restore NOLA. In fact, things are so bad displaced residents resorted to buying an ad in Roll Call. And the administration's response to the electric utility might has well have been a bathtub full of water and a small appliance (guess you'd need a generator, too).

So, why DOES this government insist on killing the city? I'll let you draw your own conclusions. However, given that this is Team Bush ultimately running the show, we can be sure of several things, one being that they'll ALWAYS opt for short term political gain over long term national interests. In other words, they'll probably ignore--at their peril--the essential need for a city like New Orleans to be where it is, as this article from Blake points out (and, of course, a shout out to Oyster for linking to it).

And damn, it'd be nice if, like Morris suggests, they were forced to freeze in the dark.