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<<He ought to look into what this requires before he promises such a thing.>>He already knows - - it's a fraction of what the U.S. has blown in Iraq. Although, it wouldn't benefit the same kind of people that Iraq benefits.
I think the significance is, when it's only black Americans lives at stake, nothing gets done.When oil's at stake (or in your insane version of events, the "freedom" of the Iraqi people, which makes even less sense) the sky's the limit.
First time I ever heard that oil was a major factor in the New Orleans problem and I think it's pretty far-fetched. The rigs are offshore and the refineries and holding tanks can certainly be rebuilt (if they were ever damaged, they probably already have been) and secured without making a dent in the problems of the people of New Orleans. There has been virtually no recent press coverage of oil-supply problems related to the flooding of New Orleans, and so I think it's a pretty safe bet that if this ever HAD been a problem, it has long since been resolved.
Which, I hope you realize, is a totally different issue from the fate of the people of New Orleans.
I'm confident that accommodation could be built for all the port and refinery workers without affecting more than a few percentage points of the general population. Worker or dormitory communities are built all over the planet, in terrain much more difficult than New Orleans.
Wandering a little off topic, aren't we? You originally raised the oil issue to prove that New Orleans' rebuilding was also an oil-related issue, and so Bush's neglect of the problem couldn't be caused by his contempt for or indifference to the black citizens of the city.Can we at least agree that New Orleans' rebuilding in no significant way involves the oil industry and its problems, and that Bush's indifference is explained by the facts that (a) oil is NOT involved and (b) poor black people ARE involved?
'A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the US auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if US corn and soybeans don't get to the markets. The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The US transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities - assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be. The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of US-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities. There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial - is manageable. "http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090605R.shtml