Carville -- "...time to draw a line in the alluvial mud."

By John Ballard

This op-ed by James Carville at nola.com is worth reprinting.

Henry Ford once described history as "one damned thing after another." And he didn't even live in Louisiana.

Much has been made of my outburst toward the Obama administration on May 26 on "Good Morning America" when I exclaimed, "Man, you got to get down here and take control of this! Put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We're about to die down here!" But those emotions had been percolating below the surface like the crude that threatens our way of life today.

But while it is important to note that the tepid response to this catastrophe is unacceptable, it is also essential that the rest of the country understand that this feeling of neglect has festered amongst South Louisianians for generations. It's just one damned thing after another, so the anger rising out of the Gulf is not new.

For too long, the federal government and industry alike has simultaneously abused and neglected, patronized and plundered, and now polluted the people of Louisiana. And our plight is now a national emergency.

For decades, massive engineering projects across the country have made us more vulnerable. We lose a football field of land every 38 minutes. Since World War II, we've lost wetlands the size of the state of Delaware. I bet Joe Biden would be screaming on national television too if it was happening on his turf. Or if the Hamptons lost 16,000 acres a year, you bet there'd be a Million Hedge Fund Managers march on Washington to demand action.

We feel ourselves ever more vulnerable due to the nonstop degradation of our wetlands, which serve as our first line of defense against hurricanes and powerful storm surge. Their loss has everything to do with activities across the rest of the country, starting with the deprivation of natural sediment that the Mississippi River should carry to its mouth and dump at the Gulf of Mexico to nourish our barrier islands.

Then the oil companies dredged canals in the marshlands in an attempt to grow an industry that now provides the country with more than 30 percent of its domestic oil and natural gas. Salt-water intrusion killed the marsh. These marshlands provide jobs for tens of thousands of fisherman in an industry that provides over 30 percent of this country's domestic seafood supply.

Add that to the fact that we have not seen a single penny of royalties for oil produced more than six miles off our coast. We assume all of the risk, produce seafood and oil and gas, with none of the reward. Yes, $165 billion of royalties have gone to the federal treasury that could go to help repair this pressing issue.

But there's more.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, federal judge Stanwood Duval Jr. found that the Army Corps of Engineers had displayed "gross negligence ... insouciance, myopia, and shortsightedness." He continued, "The corps not only knew, but admitted by 1988, that the MRGO threatened human life." And yet, nothing was done about it until recently.

And then BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster hits us with the deadliest combination imaginable of corporate greed and governmental malfeasance. We've been lied to by BP at every turn, from oil flow estimates to the existence of plumes to health effects.
There's also the blatant malpractice and corruption in the MMS. Free meals, cushy seats at sporting events, and other gifts from the folks they were trying to regulate seemed to cloud the judgment of too many MMS officials to be bothered with protecting the interests of our residents and our way of life.

So we've had two monumental, mostly preventable man-made disasters in five years which brings us to the moment where I said on television the thing that every person who lives south of the I-10,/I-12 corridor agrees with.

We've been abused, neglected and exploited for too long.

And to be brutally honest, part of my frustration is a sense of personal shame that I have known this was going on for a long time and I was ineffective in making Louisiana's case in my years in Washington.

But let me say that it's now time to draw a line in the alluvial mud. We want our fair share of oil revenues now so that we can protect ourselves. And we want to be treated like we matter.

We're not whiners. We produce oil and gas and produce seafood and allow goods to flow freely to the heartland. We assume the risks with little reward.

In the end, whatever past transgressions by the country towards us or whatever our failures to articulate our plight have been, we should be reminded of the words of Admiral Lord Nelson just before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, "England expects that every man will do his duty." And in this, the most critical hour in our region's long, tortured, and yet glorious history, let's remind ourselves that Louisiana expects every person to do their duty.

This is a struggle for the preservation of our culture, way of life and the land we love.