Le Show; 2010-02-14

From deep inside your radio, is it loud in here or is it just me? Ladies and gentlemen from New Orleans, Louisiana, where last weekend, about four decades of ghosts were blown out the house in the space of 48 hours. You know about the one that was on TV, but the city also elected a new mayor, and as far as we can tell, a large number of people from every ethnicity and town voted for him. So those ghosts are gone too. And by the way, Ray Nagan, who has been a ghost for four years, you know about the recalls of Toyotas and all the problems they're having. Here's what may underlie that story. Toyotas can't stop, but they can stop regulators perhaps. At least four U.S. and this is from Bloomberg News, at least four U.S. investigations into unintended acceleration by Toyota vehicles were ended with the help of former regulators

hired by Toyota, warding off possible recalls according to court and government records. Christopher Tinto, vice president of regulatory affairs and Toyota's Washington office, and Christopher Santucci, who works for Tinto, helped persuade the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to end investigations, including those of 2002, 2003, Camrys and Solores, sorry, Solores, according to court documents. Both men joined Toyota directly from the highway traffic administration in the last decade. All automakers have employees who handle regulatory issues. Toyota may be alone among the major companies in employing former agency staffers to do so. Spokesman for GM, Ford, Chrysler, and Honda all say their companies have no x highway traffic safety administration people who deal with the agency about defects. Toyota bamboozled in HTSA, or in HTSA, was bamboozled by itself, says Joan Claybrook

and Auto Safety Advocate and former administrator of the agency. I think there's going to be a lot of heat on NITSA over this. In one example of the Toyota AIDS Rolls, Santucci testified in a Michigan lawsuit, the company and NITSA discussed limiting an examination of unintended acceleration complaints, limiting them to incidents lasting less than a second. Well there, that should take care of that. We discussed the scope of the investigations and Tucci testified. NITSA's concerns about the scope ultimately led to a decision by the agency to reduce that scope. You can say it worked out well for Toyota. All four of the probes that Toyota AIDS helped, and were into complaints that the unintended acceleration was caused by flaws in the vehicle's electronic throttle systems. Toyota has denied the system as a problem, and Toyota declined to make Santucci and Tinto available for comment. Well that should settle that. Meanwhile ladies and gentlemen, lessons learned, it's so important, don't you think?

To learn from our mistakes, that's why a diesel-fueled power plant, nearing completion just outside Kabul, this is of course in the ASTOP territory, demonstrates that the US Agency for International Development and its contractors have failed to learn lessons from identical mistakes made in Iraq, despite clearly signed posted advice from oversight agencies, inclusions gleaned from three independent investigations into US Finance Reconstruction of the Afghan Electricity Sector suggests the power plant, which will cost taxpayers almost three times as much as comparable projects may never be used. Nice souvenir though, the Afghanis, could be a theme park, could be a jail, US planners chose to ignore other ongoing Reconstruction projects that were cheaper and more likely to succeed or to pay attention to alternative recommendations from Afghan government officials. Second the planners picked expensive technologies that the city of Kabul could not afford to maintain

or utilize, finally US AID asked for the plant to be built in record time by a complex system of multiple contractors causing the costs to soar, and they don't even say you're welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special edition of the broadcast will be to understand what happened to New Orleans in 2005, the subject of my upcoming documentary The Big Uneasy, and to understand what may still be happening in New Orleans, you sort of have to understand the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and I have a guest coming up who will shed possibly some light on that. Meanwhile, let's see, it's President's Day, it's Valentine's Day, and it's Mardi Gras. What kind of music will we play? Hello, welcome to the show. Let's get up and dance to the President's.

Let's get up and dance to the President's Day, it's Mardi Gras, it's Mardi Gras, it's Mardi Gras. Feel the music.

It's not song. Make nobody lose a was the road. And we hear you saying, hey, hey, Can't get by my face Can't get by my face I'm around Bunchic Spy bar Up-down Ludder Don't make no difference, where you are, feel good music, I've been told, it's good

about it, and it's good for your soul, hit it down, hit, hit, hit, hit, pop away, hit, hit, hit, hit, pop away, Bump down, room would air, find school and find no, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, boo Everybody's right, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby

this is Lashoo Show You May Hear Dish'sClattering in the Background because we're in a space where where lunch is served, but I'm taking the opportunity to talk to someone who's work I've admired for a number of years. This week in New Orleans, a lawsuit was filed by a man whose name is familiar to listeners of this program. Dr. Ivor van Herden, formerly deputy head of the LSU Hurricane Center, filing suit against the distinguished university for firing him, allegedly because he spoke in public about his findings regarding the defects in the hurricane protection system that failed to protect New Orleans from a hurricane or from storm surge in 2005, the Katrina event. And my guest is a man who came to my attention for a I think groundbreaking series of articles he wrote for the Washington Post in 2000 on the subject of the United States Army Corps of

Engineers. He's currently working in Miami for Time Magazine, Michael Grundwald, and he wrote what I think stands as the most noteworthy piece of anniversary journalism about the flood of New Orleans, the 2007 cover story in Time Magazine. It was 2007. Yes, it was. Okay, my memory works. Michael, welcome. Thanks so much for having me, Harry. When you were on the Washington Post, way back in 2000, what motivated you to get interested in the subject of the Corps of Engineers? I completely stumbled into it. I just started a kind of investigative beat and I was doing some crazy story about crop insurance. And some guy told me that crop insurance was the worst thing that had happened to America's rivers, except for the US Army Corps of Engineers. And I was kind of like, what do they do to America's rivers? And it sort of began a horrible decade-long obsession right there. So the obsession lasted beyond the the series? It did. I ended up spending a year kind of kicking the Army Corps

around and writing about how they were essentially destroying rivers and otherwise screwing the environment in various ways for supposed economic kind of boondoggles where the economics didn't really add up. And I got into a lot of sort of scandals of how they were kind of cooking the books of their economic and environmental studies to make these projects happen that would kind of keep them busy and keep their congressional defenders happy. And while I was sort of good news story at the end was going to be about the Everglades of Florida where they had helped destroy the Everglades. And now they were in charge of the largest environmental project in history to try to fix the Everglades. And that seemed like a kind of nice possible future for them, a kind of good news story at the end. I went down there in August of 2000, which is not the best time to visit the Everglades. That was my first time there, kind of

said, huh, what's this all about? It turned out to be a lot more complicated. I ended up writing a book about the Everglades meeting meeting my wife in Florida. But so I've really never gotten away from the Army Corps. It's it's remained an obsession for me. When I went on book leave, I told my editors essentially, you know, don't bother me for the next two years unless there's a hurricane heading for New Orleans. And so they didn't until Hurricane Ivan actually was heading for New Orleans. So they called me and bothered me. I wrote a story about how looks like this one isn't going to hit New Orleans. But if a hurricane ever does hit New Orleans, it's going to be the greatest disaster this country has ever seen. The Post Ombudsman wrote that it was the most sensationalist piece of crap journalism he had ever seen. Came back to the Post and they had very nicely asked me to start working on something with a little bit more reader interest than the Army Corps. I think six weeks later Hurricane Katrina hit. And then suddenly it was like, hey, does anybody here know

anything about the Army Corps of Engineers? It's a long way of saying that the Army Corps has been kind of a full employment act for me. Well, as journalism goes, that's pretty good news because a lot of journalists would wish for any kind of full employment act these days. Let's start at the beginning. What is the United States Army Corps of Engineers today? And is it a Corps of Engineers? That's a it's an interesting question. You know, they they're more than 200 years old. You know, they started as a engineering regiment in George Washington's revolutionary army. They built ramparts at Bunker Hill. You know, they've sort of come a long way. They used to I think had six or seven engineers on staff. Now they have 35,000 employees, very few of whom are engineers. They're kind of two parts of the Corps. And one part of it basically works for the Army. They do engineering for the Army. And this is a, you know, not always uncontroversial. You know, this is they approved the Haliburton contracts in Iraq. But essentially, you know, they've they've done really great

engineering for this country for our military. But then there's also this civil works unit, which ends up doing, you know, getting sort of most of the actual work that you that you hear about when you read the newspaper. And you know, this really got going after, you know, sort of with the new deal and even a little before the new deal when there was this idea that we needed a water agency really started after the, you know, the great flood of 1927 was when people started realizing that, you know, and there, of course, was a New Orleans connection right there. There was this feeling that we need to get our our hands on, on America's waters and get them under control. They were really the shock troops in America's war against nature for the next several decades. So now I think you could call them sort of a water resources agency. They still do all kinds of other things. They're they're building schools. They're doing, you know, sewer projects here. And, you know, super fun cleanups there. But essentially they're, you know, they're doing navigation work, which means

essentially dredging rivers or otherwise manhandling rivers so that barges can use them. They're, you know, they're pouring sand onto beaches and they are building levees and otherwise trying to protect, you know, Americans and economic, their economic activities from the force of mother nature. That's where, that's where New Orleans came into play. But when we look at the things like the Mississippi River levees that have held for as long as I know here in New Orleans and up river as well, those were built by the Army Corps, right? In many areas, they were a lot of times they were sort of originally built by local levee boards, but ultimately they were taken over by the Army Corps and the Army Corps owns them and should point out that they're particularly the ones down here in really great shape. They'll withstand a category five hurricane partly because the federal government pays for the whole thing. They were authorized and built. It was, it was a very clear line of authority under the

Mississippi Rivers and Tributaries Act, which is less true for some of the hurricane, hurricane levees. So how does a Corps of Engineer project get authorized, designed, built? Tell me a little bit about that process. Well, there's this sort of official process and then there's the real process. I mean, essentially, Army Corps projects have a local sponsor, which usually means, you know, a local levee board, a levee district could be a, you know, a bunch of farmers, it could be a port once they're harbour dug deeper and that's a sort of cost sharing partner. Now, there's supposed to be this whole kind of process set up where the local sponsor proposes something. It goes to Congress, Congress authorizes a reconnaissance study. If they're a reconnaissance study, the Army Corps decides that there's a project there, then they do a sort of more intense

analysis where they're supposed to include, they check whether the economic benefits exceed the economic costs. And, you know, if so, they authorize the project. It goes to Congress. They have the Water Resources Development Act, they're worda as we nerds call it. You're worda nerds. Exactly. And, and if, you know, if everything comes up according to oil, then the Corps will go out and build it. The fact is that these things are done by, you know, these are political projects. They're the definition of pork and that the Army Corps is really the only agency that is funded just about entirely by earmarks. Everything, just about everything in the Army Corps budget is a project that was inserted by a member of Congress. It wasn't requested by the Army Corps officially. It wasn't requested by the Department of Defense. These are all pork-barrel projects in the classic sense. And, the ones that have the most political juice are generally the ones that get funded. Would I be remiss in surmising that there

might be an Army Corps of Engineers project in every congressional district in this country? In most of them, you know, even places where you don't see a lot of water. You'll see Army Corps projects. And, and let me tell you, the Corps is really good about their care and feeding of members of Congress. They spend a lot of time up on Capitol Hill. You'll see, you'll see a lot of green suits when you're up there. Can you, can you be a little more specific about what care and feeding means? Well, I mean, sometimes it just means, you know, they're kind of taking them along on the helicopter rides and making them feel important. But essentially, there's a real symbiotic relationship where, you know, the members of Congress, they like, they like water projects. Water projects are kind of the coin of the realm on Capitol Hill. Because everybody knows that it's a great way to sort of steer dollars into your district and steer contracts to your, you know, your contributors. And to, and really kind of make the, you know, groups like farmers or your local port. You know, it's a way of keeping them

happy with, you know, with, by sending some money their way and sending a project their way. And the Army Corps knows this too. So the classic example is, you know, is sort of port deepening projects where just about every, every major port on the East Coast is located where there's an Army Corps district. And just about every year, even though these ports are all competing with each other, the Army Corps will, you know, will find out that, yes, the economic benefits of deepening the Savannah port or the Wilmington port or the Miami port or, you know, you name the ports all the way at the Jacksonville port. They all seem to make sense every year and they all get funded. And so there's just this incredible race to the bottom where we pour hundreds of millions of dollars into these ports deepening that don't provide any particular economic advantage for any of these ports since they're all competing with each other. But again, it's a way of keeping everybody busy, keeping all the local congressmen happy. And, you know,

it's like Bill Walton always used to say that, right, that activity is not the same thing as achievement. With the Army Corps, there's a lot of activity. They're, you know, their motto is essayons, which is French for Let Us Try. And they like to try stuff. They're not a lazy agency. You said a moment ago that the Corps doesn't officially propose projects to Congress. Are you suggesting that unofficially there's a different way this these projects come to happen? Well, you know, most members of Congress are not engineers. And I would say that it really is a symbiotic process. And that included, and this is where a lot of my work in 2000 was, you know, when a member of Congress says, you know, we want this port deepened, you know, it's up to the Army Corps to then do the analysis and see if there's any economic justification for deepening that port. Have a lot of those in Louisiana where the economics were completely ridiculous, you know, absolutely no cost justification whatsoever.

Then the Army Corps tends to go back to the drawing board. And comes up with ways of rejiggering its numbers. And often it does come out with somehow to get those benefits exceeding the cost by, say, you know, 1.07. You'll see a lot of projects like that. And there's, you know, officially any project where the cost is less than the benefits, they're authorized to do it. So you'll see a lot of 1.03, 1.05. And there's nothing that says the Army Corps is supposed to set priorities that say, you know, protecting the city of New Orleans is more important than, say, you know, digging the red river for barges that have never materialized. Any authorized project can get funded. And that generally does not have to do with national priorities, but with who's on the appropriations committing. When you were doing the series, did you have any sense of what proportion of proposed projects the

Corps ever found not economically beneficial and therefore said shouldn't be built? Well, it's a, they actually, there's a very large percentage of projects that they, that they don't build, a very mini-school percentage of politically wired projects. They end up building the Big Boondoggles. The biggest one in 2000, what I was writing about was the, you know, the Upper Mississippi, Upper Mississippi, they wanted a bunch of locks and dams. New locks and dams there. It was going to cost a billion dollars. The chief economist did crunch the numbers, found that it was a completely ridiculous project, so they got a new economist. They fortunately, for me, continued to see the old economist on all their emails where they were saying, we need to cook the books to come up with a justification for this project. It was one of the rare, rare projects where actually people got in some trouble. But today they've, you know, since they went back to, they had to go

back to the drawing board with their billion dollar project. So now they've come back and it's now a $10 billion economic and environmental project, which is quite likely to get funded because it has political juice. And again, that's, these, these are capital hill projects in general. They're not decided by the engineering or the economics. You mentioned environmentalism started to creep into the description of a core project or two. When I first began paying attention to the core as a resident of Los Angeles, whose river they had turned into a concrete ditch, the core was core and notorious for ignoring the environmental consequences of their projects. That was sort of out of their can, almost as a matter of policy. That's changed, hasn't it? I think that's true to a certain extent. You know, old cultures die hard. I think the way to think of, think of the core is, is is an agency that works for clients. Now, for most, most agencies, their clients are the taxpayers, their clients are

the government. And for the Army Corps, when they're working for their military, their, their client is the military. And I think that's one reason you haven't seen a lot of scandals with Army Corps military projects. But with these civil works projects, there's always been a little bit of difficulty figuring out who the client was. Now, traditionally, it's been their local sponsors, these levy districts, these ports, guys who want, you know, who want the dirt move, to want the, you know, the cementeds who, who want their project, you know, who aren't thinking about the bugs and bunnies, who aren't thinking about, you know, the coastal marshes that are protecting a city, they want something built so that, you know, they want to see the jobs, they want to see the traffic. Now, for some of the, you know, in the Everglades, you see the Army Corps has a new, a new client, it's supposed to be the environment, a national park. And theoretically, at least if you, you know, look years ahead, you would hope that they would realize, hey, you know, this is where our future is, nobody wants us to build dams anymore. We can push a dollar, anyway, Congress wants us to,

you know, let's, let's green ourselves up. And certainly the rhetoric has been there for a few years now. And you'll see a lot of really good environmental people at the core. That said, the leadership is still usually responds to their kind of traditional constituency, which is, you know, the Farm Bureau, the ports, the dredging contractors. And there's a real clash going on inside the core, you know, it's, you know, it's been at a crossroads for years, you know, it's still at that crossroads and the voices inside the core, who have often been my best sources, you know, who are saying like, hey, you know, we need to get out of the 19th century here and, and build projects that will actually, you know, deal with a sustainable geography, you know, you're starting to hear more of those voices. And you're even hearing, hearing the words at the top. It's been a little bit tougher getting them to, to actually live up to their words.

More with Michael Grumall. A little bit of moments from now here on the show. Happy President's Day. Happy President's Day. Happy President's Day.

Happy President's Day. Happy President's Day. Happy President's Day.

Happy President. Happy President's Day. Happy President's Day.

Happy President's Day. Happy President's Day. Happy President's Day.

Happy President's Day. This is the show we continue now with our conversation with Michael Grumwald, author of a five-part investigative report on the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the Washington Post. Let's talk a little bit about how this thing actually works once a project happens. First of all, what percentage of the Corps of Engineers is military? Oh, it's a, you know, a few percent, you know, it's a, it's overwhelmingly civilian agency, probably, you know, 96, 97 percent. Wow. And so now when a project is approved and they decide to build it, who actually does the work?

Well, the work is usually done by contractors. Now, the Army Corps itself really has lost most of its sort of actual building capability. They're usually designing the projects. They're overseeing the, the, the contracts. So they have a lot of engineering expertise and a lot of really good expertise. But the actual work of usually, you know, putting, putting shovels in the ground is usually done by this, you know, vast army of contractors, which is another sort of interest group that's, that's lobbying, you know, the Army Corps to do what it does. But they used to build stuff, right? Sure, sure. They used to build stuff. The Army Corps used to be really the nation's engineers. And it's, it's sort of as they've been spread across the country like peanut butter. And, you know, so you sort of have these, I've forgotten how many districts there are. But, you know, in every district you've got one, maybe, you know, a colonel, maybe a lieutenant colonel that's sort of running the show.

And, and other than that, you've got project managers, guys whose job it is to just sort of, you know, dull out the contracts that are often not competitively bid. And there usually aren't too many contractors capable of doing this stuff. And often those contractors are former Army Corps guys. But really the agency has become more of a sort of oversight agency. And, frankly, a sort of policy-making agency in conjunction with its real bosses in Congress in terms of sort of deciding, you know, they're the ones that decide what the agency is going to do. And then they're in charge of overseeing what gets done. Okay, let me bounce a couple of stories that happened, I think, in the same week in about 2006 off view and get your sense of what, what this tells us. In spring of 2006, the New Orleans Times picking you and reported that the debris removal, the actual flood debris removal in New Orleans, that was a job that had been contracted to the Army Corps of Engineers at a price. And I'm going to make up these numbers, but these are sort of reflective of what they reported.

72 dollars, a ton for removing the debris at the prime contractor level. And by the time it got down four or five levels to the guy who actually was running the truck that was picking up the stuff in the street, he was getting paid like five dollars a ton. The same week the Washington Post reported on a story of what happened to the medical clinics that the United States was supposed to be building in Iraq. And their story was that the same thing was happening. At the top, the Corps was paying the prime contractor a high figure for building these clinics several levels down. The people who were actually piling up the bricks were getting a fraction of that cost. And so no more than 25% at that point, at least of the clinics that have been promised were built. Are those just two anomalies? Well, there's an old joke inside the Corps, which is, you know, we may be expensive, but at least we're slow. And I think there's, you know, it's not an anomaly. There's no question that the Corps has never...

I think it's fair to say that in all the water resources projects that I've reported on, the Corps has never had one come on under budget. You know, this is not an agency that does cheap. That said, and I don't mean to duck the question, but from my way of thinking at least, you know, the Corps, you know, before Katrina, you know, although they were slow and although they were expensive, they at least had this reputation for competence. What's really always fried me about the Corps is not so much that they were, you know, too expensive or hosing local laborers, or even that they weren't open enough, you know, the kind of a lot of the common criticisms of the Corps. To me, the problem was that they were doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing. They were doing stuff that made no sense for public policy in the United States of America. You know, they were pushing economic projects that were not going to help the economy. They were pushing environmental projects that were going to make the environment worse.

And I've always thought that if the Army Corps could just get rid of the absolute bone doggles, could stop doing the wrong thing, that they really... There's a lot of really good talent there. There are a lot of people who can do, you know, do things that can help the country, and there's a lot that we need done to our waters. They're an easy target because they're expensive, but lots of federal agencies are expensive, and they're certainly their contracts are often a shambles. But I think that's true of other agencies, too. What's really sets the Corps apart, and what I think the reason that the City of New Orleans went underwater five years ago, is that you have this agency that has been doing things that make a vulnerable city more vulnerable. And that you don't see from other agencies. You don't really see them making things worth. You don't see them actually destroying the natural defenses. You don't see them actually building projects that encourage people to live in harm's way. And you don't grant it, although the Army Corps's work up and down the Mississippi has had some positive effect, and it's made it possible to have cities like St. Louis. It's also really throttled the Mississippi River, and has essentially destroyed the Delta, and has led very directly to what you see in Hurricane Katrina.

And then on top of all that, they were screwing up the levees. So to me, like the problems with the Army Corps are so sort of fundamentally and policy-based, as opposed to execution-based, that there's been, to the extent there's been anybody looking at the Army Corps since Katrina. Most people have just said, oh, it's a scandal. FEMA was too slow. When the real scandal is, here's this federal agency that caused the disaster. And not just by making crappy levees, although they sure did that, but by having bad priorities for all these years. I mean, the one statistic that stands out above all others is that the Army Corps of Engineers was spending more money in Louisiana than any other state before Hurricane Katrina. It was just spending it on crap. It was spending it to spend $750 million to build this new lock for the New Orleans Industrial Canal that isn't going to support any barge traffic or ship traffic, just a stone's throw from these levees that were in flimsy condition. So not to get on my high horse again, but I wish that there was more of a focus on the kind of public policy aspects of the Corps. How can we get this agency to really focus on national priorities?

And I'm sorry to say that when I wrote these stories in 2000, I remember thinking, gosh, nothing's changing. What's it going to take? Some kind of national catastrophe to reform this agency? Well, it turns out that even in national catastrophe, there's still there's no prioritization of core projects. You know, there's no focus on trying to, you know, to move the core in a real eco-friendly direction. Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have really made an effort to try to focus the core on the sort of high priority stuff. But they're constantly, you know, every time they put out a budget and zero out all the boondoggles, they get overridden by all the porkers in Congress. I wasn't aware that the, either administration was trying hard to change this. Certainly at the, particularly at OMB, which, you know, is the sort of agency everybody likes to hate because they're the ones who say no. So when it comes to the Army Corps, an agency that has been crying out for no for decades, they've, you know, a lot of the projects that everybody knows is a stinker, including the guys at the Corps.

And I've quoted their emails where they call it dogs and pigs and oinkers. Those projects still get funded year after year because locally people like them. The Bush administration tried to zero out those projects and the Obama administration has continued to try, but they've had very limited success. Now the Bush administration actually succeeded in killing a couple of Army Corps projects. This preposterous jetties they were building in North Carolina that came out, they were supposed to be for the fishing fleet out there. It came out to something like $450,000 per boat. You know, they managed to kill that. They were going to build the world's largest flood control pumps in the Yazoo Delta. $200 million for a project that wasn't going to help anybody. They finally managed to kill that. It was going to kill 200,000 acres of wetlands. You know, these projects die hard.

You know, I'd like to see some more of them die. And the more you see those projects die, the more the Corps will start to realize like, hey, our bread is buttered on things like fixing Louisiana's coastal wetlands. And maybe restoring the Everglades. One of the things aside from your series that got my attention about the Corps even before what happened in New Orleans was the state of the salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. And the fact that the environmentalists were saying, and it's a complicated issue, obviously, the environmentalists were saying the profusion of dams on the Columbia and other rivers were basic. We're basically wiping out the salmon. Clearly, there's a hydroelectric industry that depends on those dams. But it seemed to me that the fiercest resistance to doing anything about those dams was the agency that built them. I think that's certainly true. And there's a certain cultural aspect to that. But it wasn't, you know, but they weren't coming up with it on their own.

It was because the farmers who used those barges, and those are, that's who the Corps uses their clients. The best example is the Missouri River, which has not had barged traffic in ages. But the barge industry likes it because they get to keep some barges there. And the farmers love it because it's their way of keeping down prices, keeping the rail industry from jacking up prices. They can always say, oh, well, maybe we'll use those barges if you get your prices too high. And meanwhile, there's this incredible thriving recreation industry on the Missouri River that you think would be a real economic player. It's something like comes out to like $200 million a year versus I think $5 or $6 million for the barge industry. So you think even if you're just going to do this on straight economics, you know, you would stop managing the Missouri River for barges, which is what they do. They're managing it as a river again, which would be great for the endangered species as well as the recreation industry. But these, you know, the sort of old ways of doing things are just too strong.

The politics are just too tough. And change has just been too hard. And so, you know, no matter how much I bang my spoon on my high chair, you know, the story runs. It's outrageous. It's obviously outrageous. Nobody really denies that it's outrageous, but nothing really changes. Let me ask you a political question. In the 2008 presidential campaign and in the run-up to it, we heard a lot about earmarks. We heard a lot about people denouncing earmarks and pledging to end earmarks and how bad earmarks are. And I don't recall anybody ever in those speeches or denunciations of earmarks ever mentioning the phrase Army Corps of Engineers. Well, I mean, you know, the devastating power of earmarks can sometimes be overstated. There's a lot of wasteful projects that aren't earmarks, and there are some earmarks that are perfectly good projects. That said, if you want to, you know, if you want to tell a story about why earmarks are bad that doesn't involve the words Jack and Abramoff, you know, the Army Corps of Engineers is a pretty good place to start.

Because it's just the classic example of this iron triangle between the industries that benefit from these projects, you know, the federal bureaucracy that builds it, and these members of Congress that sort of also subsist on them, where nowhere is the national interest taken into account. The thing about, you know, a project that is not a earmark is that it has to go through a certain process, a certain congressional process of going through hearings, a federal agency that presumably has some kind of national mission, you know, has to request a project like, you know, a project like that. Somebody in the executive branch, whether it's in the Pentagon or in the EPA or, you know, the interior department has to say, hey, this is a project that will help us achieve our mission. Well, these are just congressional, you know, add-ons. This is just some guy in Congress wants to help some friend in his district, and that's the way this stuff gets funded.

And then it's like, take the project to the Army Corps, they'll figure out a way to make the benefits look like they're greater than the cost, and you do that by inflating the benefits and pretending the costs are a lot lower than they're going to be. And then, you know, you throw them all into this big log rolling bill with, like you mentioned, you know, you've got a project in every district, so everybody votes for it. And then all the projects pass, and then the ones that have powerful appropriators get funded, and there's no national water resources strategy. It's democracy, you know, you could say that this is the kind of grease gun that makes Congress work, right, like that you'd never have any compromise if you couldn't throw somebody a water project in order to support your bill. That's making the best possible case for it, but it's not good government, and it's the reason that a major American city ended up underwater. You know, when you look beyond the specifics of, you know, where they cited the levies, and what happened to the coastal marshes, and, you know, what the engineering was, and where the Mississippi River Gulf outlet was, you know, to what extent that was a hurricane highway.

Ultimately, this was a tragedy of priorities, and the earmark system is all about local priorities and parochial priorities, and not national priorities and important priorities. When I was preparing to meet with you, I tried to retrieve your five-part series from the Washington Post archives. It doesn't seem to be there. I'm sorry to hear that. I'll have to talk to my old friends at the Post. They're having tough times over there these days. You know, it was a fun series to do, and I felt like, you know, while I was doing it, it was really my introduction to Washington in many ways. You know, that's how I learned how Congress worked, and while I was doing it, I had this feeling like, I'm covering incredible stuff. You know, this is like, you know, heads are going to roll. Stuff is going to change. You know, I've got the emails, and, you know, it turned out that it's not that easy.

It ended up being, and I'm sort of embarrassed about it, because it ended up being really good for my career. You know, it was really kind of sexy piece of journalism, and I hope it may be helped keep the Army Corps from getting worse. You know, at the time, one of the things I uncovered was they had this program growth initiative, which was they had the secret PowerPoint, which was about how they were going to double their budget. And I interviewed the guy at the Pentagon who was supposed to be overseeing the Army Corps, and his quote was, oh my God, my God, I have no idea what you're talking about. So it was really the ultimate symbol of this sort of agency out of control, and I think it did end up sort of reigning in their kind of ambitions to take over the world. But they certainly have not reformed themselves, and I thought that would happen, and that's been an instructive lesson to, you know, a journalist who thought he was hot stuff. So I can't point people to Google the series, but I can't point people to your book on the Everglades, the swamp.

And thank you for shedding some light on an agency that shed something else all too often. Well, thank you, Harry, and I hope your show really brings it to people's attention. Hopefully you'll do a lot better job than I did. Yeah, we're going to make them change, probably by Monday morning. Michael Grunwald, thanks again. Thanks so much, Harry. And now, the apologies of the week. It's so sorry. Police in Britain have launched an investigation after a Scottish rugby fan exposed himself on a live BBC television show. He dropped his kilt on Friday evenings, news program on BBC Wales today, ahead of Scotland's clash with Wales. The program's editor said BBC Wales today is a live program, and unfortunately one rugby fan got carried away with a moment. We sincerely apologize for any offense caused.

That'll teach the Welsh. Data line Lancaster, California, recent comments by the mayor of Lancaster have generated a religious controversy. An Islamic group claims the mayor improperly used his office to promote Christianity. The mayor met with local religious leaders this week and apologized for his remarks. Lancaster mayor Art Rex Paris, a couple weeks ago, had described the city as a Christian community. We're a growing Christian community and don't let anybody shy away from that. I need Lancaster residents standing up and saying we're a Christian community and we're proud of it, he said in his speech. His comments to strong reactions from religious groups. Some say they think the mayor's remarks excluded non-Christians. But now religious leaders are supporting him and gathered to clear the air after Paris were apologized for his remarks. When he said he wanted to grow a Christian city, I thought what he meant was he wanted a moral and ethical city, said Rabbi David Hoffman. Yeah, that's what he meant. That's clear to all, isn't it?

The day after the New Orleans Saints claimed victory in the Super Bowl. Another confrontation involving the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts was brought to an amicable conclusion in nearby Livingston Parish. His first school day after he was sent home from high school for wearing a Colts jersey. Brandon Frost received apologies from principal Steve Vampran for a situation that had, quote, been blown out of proportion. Unquote, he apologized for the way he handled it said Frost to visit principal. Frost also apologized to Vampran for wearing the blue jersey while other students wore black and gold, the Colts of Saints. I guess that's all behind us now. North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams apologized this week for comments he made about Haiti. Earlier in the week that led to some trouble, our massage therapist told me, quote, you know, coach, what happened in Haiti as a catastrophe? What you're having is a disappointment, Williams said.

I told her that depends on what chair you're sitting in. It does feel like a catastrophe to me because it's my life. Unquote, I guess his team's losing. I'm just drawing that conclusion. Williams' clarification read on February 1st at my weekly radio show I made a comment about a colleague telling me that Haiti was a catastrophe. We were just having a difficult season. I said that does put basketball in perspective. However, at a press conference, I referenced a comment again, but I neglected to say that puts basketball in perspective. In no way am I equating the tragedy in Haiti with basketball. I'm sorry that my statement at the press conference made it seem like I was comparing the two. People of Haiti are suffering through unimaginably difficult times. I know very well. We are just playing a game. Marvel Comics, Captain America, about a super patriot who fought Nazis, Nazis. Nazis in World War II and chased flag burners during the Vietnam War is one of the longest running comics in American history. Marvel recently is apologized for having a story aligned too closely to the politics of the moment.

Well, infiltrating a right wing anti-government militia group known as the Watch Dogs, Captain America, encounters mobs of what appeared to be Tea Party protesters. Uh-oh. Respond to the outrage that ensued. Marvel editor Joe Cassada said he could absolutely see how some people are upset about it. It said there was zero discussion to include a group that looked like a Tea Party demonstration. There was no thought that it represented a particular group. Tea Party Nation Founder Johnson's Phillips says the apology sounds less like a genuine we're sorry than it does. A sorry we got caught statement. I guess they're still waters to settle there. Ciudad Juarez, Mexico is the next deadline under heavy guard president Felipe Calderón visited that embattled border city this week and apologized to parents for having suggested that the recent killing of their teenagers was part of a confrontation between rival gangs. Parents sorrow was compounded by suggestions that the young people were targeted because of gang affiliation and assertion later discounted. I give the parents my heart most, my most heartfelt apologies if any of my words offended them or the memory of their children Calderón told civic and business leaders.

After his private meeting with parents let me be clear they were exemplary teens, athletes, students, good students, the type of kids we all wish others would be. Here's one for the books. The IRS has apologized. Brent Ryan, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year, has received an apology from the IRS for a tax lien that became an issue in his campaign. Finally, Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, this week apologized to South Korea for the more than three decades when Japan ruled over Korea calling the time, quote, a tragic incident. He made the rare apology during a joint news conference with the South Korean Foreign Minister. I believe it was a tragic incident for Koreans when they were deprived of their nation and their identity. Okada said, I can fully understand the feelings of Koreans who were deprived, I feel we must never forget the victims. The apologies of the week ladies and gentlemen, the copyrighted feature of this broadcast.

The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year. The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year. The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year.

The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year. The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year. The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year.

The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year. The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year. The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year. The Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, a tax consulting executive, spent more than $1 million in an unsuccessful run for Dallas City Council last year.