For nearly 30 years, the 400 homes in the Cumberland Cove development in Putnam and Cumberland counties have tried to get water from their wells. Unfortunately, the wells were often dry, or the water was not drinkable. Last week, the families got welcome news. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development announced the City of Crossville would receive over $2 million in the form of a federal loan and grant to provide water service to Cumberland Cove.
In the Diyala Province in Iraq, much of the water infrastructure has been damaged from two years of insurgent activity and violence. The Iraqi government is responding to their needs by clearing canals, digging wells and building irrigation systems?with money from U.S. taxpayers.
The City of Crossville is expected to repay, with interest, most of the $2 million they received in federal funds. We should expect no less from Iraq.
Since 2003, the U.S. has spent nearly $50 billion toward rebuilding Iraq. Now, Iraq has a budget surplus of $79 billion, much of it coming from selling $140-per-barrel oil to U.S. consumers.
Even more ironic, the U.S. is paying interest on some of the Iraqi surplus. A portion of the surplus, over $10 billion, is sitting at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. The U.S. will make nearly $436 million in interest payments on this deposit to Iraq by the end of the year. The money was deposited in the Federal Reserve Bank when banking in Iraq was not possible and was supposed to be used for Iraqi development.
I have long held that Iraq should finance its own reconstruction. The $50 billion the U.S. has spent there could go toward helping other families in rural Tennessee receive water or lowering our $9.6 trillion national debt. Iraq could easily repay the U.S. from the $100 billion in oil revenue expected over the next year.
Something is wrong when the City of Crossville must repay the federal government for money loaned for a water project, and Iraq cannot or will not repay us for work done in the Diyala Province and elsewhere.
?U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon
Get Energy from All Sources
When my parents went to Brazil, in the early seventies, to design manufacturing, they told me Brazil didn’t have gasoline stations, they were all ethylene (fuel made from vegetables). The government had billboards that said they would let you have free land if you paid in vegetables to be made into fuel.
In 1976 I stopped at a Volkswagen/Chevy/Pontiac store to ask them what that weird triangular golf cart-sort-of-looking thing was. They replied it was an electric car, but they are fazing it out because it only goes 35 mph and gas only cost 70 cents a gallon so it cost more to charge it than buy gas.
The ’70s didn’t have the solar technology that we have now.
Why isn’t the world covered with solar panels that we charge our electric car with and 16 wheelers run off ethanol?
I hope Obama causes change! The only thing I don’t like about him is that he is against off-shore drilling. I see his point 100 percent, but think about the fact that every Southern state around the gulf has off-shore rigs?it’s unfair to just protect the north and west.
? Melanie Robinson, ezspanish@yahoo.com
Church Will Bless Many
The Trimbles (who are starting Experience Christian Community, featured in Pulse Vol. 3, Issue 17) are wonderful and good Christians, and anyone with reservations about this church should rest assured they truly care about what they do and the people they do it for.
I believe and hope this church is a new start for many people.
? Dava Conway, dmc3e@mtsu.edu
