News & Views You Can Use
Oct 6, 2004
City Pages
Your Tax Cuts At Work
"Starve the beast" is a popular strategy among radical conservatives. The idea is to restrict: to gradually reduce the amount of money the governmental agencies spend. Eventually, those agencies will shrink, shrivel and atrophy, and freedom (i.e., fewer taxes) will ring, just like the song says. The problem with this approach is that the government's ability to respond to crises, say a 9/11, a rapid succession of hurricanes, or escalating violence in a mismanaged invasion is also diminished. Further, the government's ability to fulfill its everyday responsibilities shrinks, also.
One strategy for starving the beast, paradoxically, is to bury funding cuts in massive, convoluted bills. Look at House Resolution 5041, for instance. Go to www.thomas.loc.gov and enter HR 5041 in the search engine for bills. You'll see that HR 5041 is a massive bill composed of 123 separate websites, each dealing with regulations and allocations for funding the Veterans Administration, Housing and Urban Development and sundry "independent agencies." About 90 to 100 links down the list, there's a website for funding the Environmental Protection Agency.
On that website, funding for Clean Water State Revolving Funds (Clean Water SRF) is cut by 37 percent. Clean Water SRF supplies funding to municipalities and communities to process waste water.
The House passed the bill, and its passage had rather dire implications for Georgia. According to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's website, Georgia will receive around an $8.3 million dollar cut in clean water funding. The House also approved the President's budget for freezing safe drinking water programs.
When the bill went to the Senate, the funding was restored. HR 5041 is now in committee.
A decrease of $8.3 million dollars doesn't seem like much - a reduction of a couple of bucks a year for every person in the state. Considering the amount of water we use, it's a mere, uh, drop in the bucket.
But when we look at local needs, the problem takes on an imperative one misses when talking about national budgets, philosophies of government and partisan aspirations. We have to look at specifics, local usage and the quality of the water before we can determine if the glass is half empty or half full.
According to a July, 2002 report by the Northeast Georgia Regional Development Center, the issue isn't the amount of water in the glass, but the relative threat to the quality of that water. The report was compiled in compliance with a 1996 amendment to the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act. Each state was required to submit an Implementation Plan to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by May 6, 2003. These plans detail each state's Source Water Assessment Plans (SWAPs). Georgia's plan was submitted on January 29, 1999, and became effective on May 1, 2000.
The SWAP prepared by Northeast Georgia Regional Development Center examined Athens-Clarke County's source water: the Middle Oconee River, North Oconee River and Sandy Creek.
The good news is that, as of 2002, all three sources of our drinking water had a susceptibility score of MEDIUM (their caps, not mine). The score does not address water quality, but instead calculates the number of factors that could possibly pollute it. The report went on to identify "284 potential point and non-point pollutant sources within the 3 water supply watersheds." Some of the pollutant sources identified were, appetizingly: mobile home parks, agricultural waste lagoons, wastewater pump stations, poultry processing plants, corporations and "non-sewaged areas."
The report calls for a series of actions on the part of local government to "ensure a safe, reliable drinking water supply." Among those recommendations: "… [G]rowth must be kept to a minimum [yup: that'll happen] especially in each watershed's inner management zone… Roadway expansion, new road construction, industry relocation and residential subdivisions through the area will need to be planned, managed and routed well to keep from posing significant risks to these watersheds."
Note the use of the passive voice: will need to be planned. Someone will have to do it; someone will have to pay for it.
Not sure who; not sure how.
This is where the U.S. House's 37 percent reduction in Clean Water funding becomes rather dire. The Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund (Clean Water SRF) specifically makes loans and grants to states, municipalities and communities to develop facilities to manage water. Over the past 16 years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Clean Water SRF has made more than 14,200 loans that total over $47 billion dollars. These funds have "rehabilitated aging sewer plants, minimize[d] raw sewage overflows, and reduce[d] stormwater runoff."
The Clean Water SRF, in brief, addresses the processing of waste water. The GERDC study was funded by the Safe Water Drinking Act, which addresses water purification issues - the quality of drinking water.
The Clean Water SRF would be a likely candidate to fund the kinds of projects that the Northeast Georgia Source Water Assessment Project calls for. Certainly, a reduction of $8.3 million dollars in funding for FY 2005 (proposed by the Bush Administration, rubberstamped by the House) would affect any ongoing plans to implement the study's findings. Georgia received $22.6 million in FY 2004. The U.S. House reduced that amount by $8.3 million in Clean Water SRF funding. Considering that state government is obliged to a 20 percent match, Georgia stands to lose $10 million in funding that specifically addresses clean water.
However, to date, there appear to have been no efforts to act on the study's findings. Joe Tichy, project manager for Northeast Georgia RDC, retired, says that he is unaware of any proposals to implement the study's recommendations. Tichy said that the Georgia Environmental Protection Division had discussed funding issues and possible subsidies from the federal government, but that to his knowledge, there were no plans to address the study's findings.
Additionally, a source with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division said that a $10 million cut in funding would have an impact on Georgia because "Clean Water SRF is funding quite a few projects throughout the state." The spokesperson could not quantify the level of impact.
So, there it is. Our water supplies have a MEDIUM susceptibility, and the U.S. House of Representatives has acted to limit - by 37 percent - our ability to address that susceptibility. The Senate restored the funds, but the HR 5041 is in committee, and I'm not sure what will emerge.
I'd do without drinking water if I could. As it stands, I'll continue to drink Athens-Clarke County water, but in doing so, I'll have to remember the only thing of value my mother ever told me: "Put that down. You don't know where it's been!"
Sam Prestridge is a writer living in Athens.
Last Week's Scorecard
Athens-Clarke County Animal Control responded to 86 calls.
10 complaints of animal cruelty
1 bite case
14 complaints of barking dogs
12 citations for ordinance violations
42 animals impounded
34 dogs
4 cats
1 iguana
2 rabbits
1 woodpecker
29 dogs placed
8 adopted
9 reclaimed
12 turned over to other agencies
ACC Animal Control press release for the week of Sept. 23 to Sept. 29.
Terrorists Get Attention
"INHUMAN," screamed the cover of the New York Post in reaction to the latest beheading video to come out of Iraq. "BUTCHERS," added the late edition. But that's too easy. The men who slit American engineer Jack Hensley's throat are human beings. So let's consider them as fellow humans with strategy in mind, and look at how the current rash of teledecapitations began.
Muslim extremists have been sending us a message for more than a decade. That message can be summarized as "Leave us alone." Quit funding a right-wing Israeli government that drops American-made bombs on our Palestinian brothers. Stop arming corrupt, despised autocracies across the Muslim world - in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, to name a few - so that we can overthrow them. Let us liberate ourselves. We'll decide whether we prefer secular, modern societies like Turkey, medieval fundamentalists like the Taliban, or something in between. It's our choice, not America's.
Leaders of Al Qaeda and like-minded groups know that a polite letter to the editor, a boycott of American goods, or even a high-concept ad campaign wouldn't convince the United States to pull out of the Middle East or Central Asia. Too much oil is at stake. And no other country or group of countries is powerful enough to make us do so. Terrorism, the time-honored tool of the disenfranchised and powerless, seems the only potential equalizer to those who seek to take us on.
From the standpoint of the jihadis, the retail approach - blowing up as many people as possible - has been a failure. Headlines were impressive, but the big bombings' practical effect on policy has been nil. Americans barely noticed when Osama & Co. blasted our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Two hundred twenty-four people died and over 5,000 were wounded, but just twelve were American. And East Africa is far, far away. President Bill Clinton fired off cruise missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan, and the editorial pages of American newspapers remained devoid of calls for reconsidering our involvement in the Arab world. September 11 did spark such a discussion, but it was immediately overwhelmed by a wave of righteous indignation that the Bushies channeled into wars against Afghanistan, Iraq and the American Constitution. The big question - should we be over there at all? - was not seriously asked or considered.
Pakistani militants stumbled upon a quintessential truth of marketing with the 2002 killing of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl: personal tragedy plays to a bigger audience and moves them more deeply than mass murder. For the vast majority of Americans who neither live in New York nor lost a friend or relative, the horrors of September 11 were all the more abstract for their incomprehensible scale. Four hundred people died last year from secondhand smoke, but that's just a statistic. You know Laci Peterson; you've seen and heard her laugh. Three thousand dead, the commercial center of the nation's largest city vaporized - it's too big, like some terrible disease or flood in China that kills vast numbers. But Pearl was real, individual, knowable - one guy, murdered, videotaped right to his grisly end. Four months after 9/11 and three after the invasion of Afghanistan, his gruesome murder finally forced the American public to pay attention to the extremists' message. "Maybe we shouldn't be over there," people started wondering.
Iraqi resistance groups took note. "What they do is behead Americans so they can get on the TV screens," Bush says. He's absolutely right. Cutting off the heads of a wide range of the "average folks" of the war situation - truck drivers, journalists, people who might be working to feed their families or might be war profiteers - gets past network censors the way images of dead Iraqi civilians can't, and penetrates all the way to the horrified minds of viewers.
It's impossible to imagine what people beheaded by the Iraqi insurgents went through during their final days. It's painful to even try. "You are living with your executioner, who's having pictures taken both before, during and after the beheading. That increases the horror," says Daniel Gerould, author of Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore. Yet, as undeniably disgusting as these killings are, the Iraqis are conveying their message to us far more economically than we're conveying our message to them.
Our response to their "Leave us alone," of course, is "No." Beginning with the slaughter of the free-fire "Highway of Death" at the end of the Gulf War, continuing throughout the '90s with routine bombings of civilians and sanctions that blocked medicine that could have saved thousands and culminating with a 2003 invasion with a death toll well into the tens of thousands, the United States has been far more extravagant with expending Iraqi lives then Iraq's beheaders have been with their targeting of individual Westerners.
Just this week, Knight Ridder newspapers reported, the Iraqi Health Ministry - part of the Allawi puppet regime - announced that 3,487 Iraqis have been killed and 13,720 injured by American forces since April 5. "While most of the dead are believed to be civilians," wrote Nancy Youssef, "the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher… Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians."
Whatever our intentions, and in part thanks to our tactics, Iraqis are increasingly hostile to the U.S. "I think [we] lost the hearts and minds [of Iraqis] a long time ago," says University of Michigan Shiite Islam specialist Juan Cole. Since July, meanwhile, cutting the heads off of about 20 foreigners has given the Iraqi resistance the results it wants: fewer Americans support the war or believe it's worth the cost. Twenty versus three thousand - it's rough calculus but easy arithmetic.
Ted Rall is the author of two new books, Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right and Generalissimo El Busho: Essays and Cartoons on the Bush Years.
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