{"id":326009,"date":"2017-09-14T12:16:38","date_gmt":"2017-09-14T11:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-wall-cant-keep-out-hurricanes\/"},"modified":"2017-09-14T12:16:38","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T11:16:38","slug":"the-wall-cant-keep-out-hurricanes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-wall-cant-keep-out-hurricanes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wall Can\u2019t Keep Out Hurricanes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Donald Trump loves it when crowds at his raucous right-wing rallies stand and chant in red-faced fury: “Build that wall! Build that wall!”<\/p>\n

So he keeps fanning their fire by promising to wall off Mexico with a multibillion-dollar “big, beautiful” barrier on the border. “We must have THE WALL,” he tweeted in late August<\/a>, promising again that “Mexico will pay for it.”<\/p>\n

The problem with his bombastic promises, however, is that they turn out to be duds. Even Trump knows that building that wall is nothing but PR trumpery.<\/p>\n

In a phone call to Mexican President Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, Trump admitted that Mexico actually wasn’t going to pay a single peso for the offensive border partition. But he begged his cross-border counterpart<\/a> to stop saying so publicly, since Mexico’s adamant refusal to pay was exposing Trump-the-dealmaker as a weakling.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"hurricane-harvey-texas-flood\"<\/p>\n

Port Arthur, Texas underwater (SC National Guard \/ Flickr)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Still, he loudly threatened again on August 21 to “close down our government<\/a>” if Congress doesn’t pony up billions to fund his pet project. But just\u00a0four days later, reality intervened when a mass migration poured across the US border.<\/p>\n

Not a migration of Mexicans, but of floodwaters from the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n

Hurricane Harvey’s biblical level of destruction not only swamped cities and communities all along the Texas-Louisiana coastline. It’s also swamped Congress with a tsunami of demands from GOP state officials for as much as $180 billion<\/a> in federal relief, and that was even before Hurricane Irma hit.<\/p>\n

Ironically, Trump and his gang of anti-big-government congressional zealots were about to cut nearly a billion dollars<\/a> from the federal disaster aid budget when Harvey hit the coast. Now, they’re scrambling to add multiple billions of dollars to that budget just to rebuild what Harvey destroyed.<\/p>\n

Where to get the money? Start by zeroing-out every dime that would be frittered away on that folly of a wall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This piece was reprinted from Other Words<\/a> by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump loves it when crowds at his raucous right-wing rallies stand and chant in red-faced fury: “Build that wall! Build that wall!” So he keeps fanning their fire by promising to wall off Mexico with a multibillion-dollar “big, beautiful” barrier on the border. “We must have THE WALL,” he tweeted in late August, promising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2523,"featured_media":324949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-326009","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2523"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}