The Netherlands has built a complex system of dams and levees to withstand the entire North Sea. These waters have inundated the country in the past, and the people there built to reclaim their land. 60% of them live below sea level. Yet they have never given up. Today, they feel safe. U.S. leaders went to study these dams and levees, to investigate how perhaps New Orleans could be better protected. And then there was nothing. Why?

These Dutch protections extend 19 miles into the sea. Oil drilling off the Louisiana coast typically starts past the 3 mile barrier, and the central unloading and distribution port for all incoming supertankers to the Gulf region, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP-built by a group of major oil and pipeline companies-is less than 20 miles offshore. The Dutch built their system starting in 1927. You are going to tell me that the richest, most technologically advanced country in the world couldn't figure out this technology to protect a city which is typically among the three most vulnerable in the country? (San Francisco from earthquakes and New York from terrorism are the other two.)

If the oil lobby is in any way responsible for blocking such defenses off the coast of Louisiana, each and every one of the business people and politicians responsible for this should be tried and executed for treason. I happen not to believe in the death penalty personally, but I have also come to respect the laws of the United States of America. Louisiana is such a jurisdiction that promulgates the death penalty. Over a thousand people died in Katrina because New Orleans wasn't protected like it should have been. Hundreds of thousands more were affected. Billions of dollars were lost. Most everyone affected was an American citizen. And if this happened all to make a few big cats rich, they should be cursed to see the dead bodies floating in the water every night they try to fitfully sleep; they should smell desperation and panic each time they reach into their wallet to pay for something.

Is this crazy talk? Maybe. But who knows, this might be my Pelican Brief moment. So just watch for my sudden death. I have no reason to take my own life and no enemies who would wish that. Let me just record that now. I'd be more confident I was wrong if most of the Bush White House and its cabinet weren't oil people. I'd be more confident if the two countries the United States recently invaded had not 1) been oil rich (Iraq) and 2) a key nation through which we wanted to run an oil pipeline (Afghanistan). I'd be more convinced if the one country with which America refuse to interact cost companies like Standard Oil millions (Cuba).