By The River

One of my deeply held beliefs is that the massive tax cuts for the wealthy engineered by George W. Bush and the Republican Congress early in the President's first term have been extremely damaging to the country. Combined with the money being shoveled into the furnace to fund the disastrous and unnecessary Iraq War, the impact has been to leave the United States with insufficient funds to meet the costs of being a modern, civilized nation. This quasi-religious devotion to tax cuts--and the budget cuts that come in their wake--has left soldiers without body armor in Iraq, New Orleans with pitifully inadequate reconstruction dollars, and an entire nation falling behind our economic rivals China, India, Europe and Japan because cutting school taxes has become more important than educating students to meet 21st century economic challenges.

Now comes a story in the Los Angeles Times that shows the depths to which we have fallen because of Bush Administration policies or lack thereof. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, because it doesn't have enough money and is run either by extreme Republicans with their heads in a dark place or by timid bureaucrats cowed by the political apparachiks, has by default let relic looters rampage through the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in the Four Corners region of southwestern Colorado.

This National Monument, created by President Clinton in 2000, is one of the richest areas of Indian pre-history in the West. It has 100 archaeological sites per square mile, and it covers 250 square miles. Guess how many police offiers patrol Canyons of the Ancients to guard against looters. Exactly one, according to the Times. They cite a study released this summer by the National Trust for Historic Preservation that concluded the Bureau of Land Management was "too cash-strapped anbd understaffed" to meet the challenge. Some of the thieves are believed to be people employed at oil and gas drilling operations in the National Monument.

What really got me was this statement by Sally Wisely, Colorado state director of the BLM. She claimed that money alone would not solve the looting problem. "The ultimate answer is an individual stewardship ethic, with every individual understanding what these resources are land what they mean to us. It means people behaving themselves out there and keeping themselves to a higher standard," she told the Times.

Oh, if people would only behave themselves, no banks would be robbed, no old ladies would be mugged on the street, and no drugs would be sold to schoolchildren. Of course, we could hire more police officers to patrol Canyons of the Ancients, but that would put a strain on the severely limited tax revenues brought about by Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. And it might piss off the Texas energy companies so beloved of Vice President Cheney and President Bush himself if we started arresting oil workers sneaking out ancient relics in the back of their pickup trucks.

Ask yourself where you've heard this "more money won't help" rubric before. Think of the desperate, ongoing debate on how to improve the country's schools for the 21st century. Just about everyone who isn't on the payroll of a conservative thinktank will tell you we need better teachers and smaller class sizes. Both of those carry a price tag. Because nothing, nothing, can be allowed to stop the drive by conservative Republicans for lower taxes, they are forced to come up with meaningless drivel like "more money won't help."

If you want to see what life is like with an underfunded government controlled by the wealthy, go to most any South American country except Cuba. The rich do quite well, the poor suffer terribly, and looters carry away relics because the government can't hire enough policemen to patrol everywhere the looters might go. I don't want to go any further down that path than we've already gone in the first six years of the Bush Administration. We had a good country once. We can have one again, but only if we act quickly and vote out the Bush faction in November.