WHO NEEDS FOREIGN TERRORISTS? WE’VE GOT REPUBLICANS!
The collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis-St. Paul cut especially close to me because I have two kids who live in Minneapolis. One of them was out of town at the time, and I knew the odds were long on the other one having been harmed, but I was very happy to hear his voice on the phone. He had been nowhere near the bridge.
The thing about this kind of an event, though, is its longevity. That bridge didn’t just fall. It is fallen, and it will remain out of commission for at least a couple of years. Meanwhile, everybody in the Twin Cities is going to have to figure out how to work around that missing link, and wonder about the durability of whatever other bridges they use, because the big news out of the I-35 collapse was that it may not be unique for long. It turns out that there are about 70,000 bridges in this country that are in about the same shape, and that the American Society of Civil Engineers, not known for being a bunch of radical hotheads, has been talking up this number, and the estimated 190 billion dollars it will take to fix them, for quite a while. The I-35 bridge has been on the “repair or replace” list since 1990.
But the bridges are just the tip of the iceberg–there’s highways, water treatment and sewage plants, schools–the whole American commons is in disrepair. The engineers estimate it will cost 1.6 trillion dollars over the next five years to fix everything back up to standards.
Hey, we all put off repairing things. I fixed the tail light lenses on my truck with tape for a couple of years until a cop stopped me late at night because the plastic was flapping in the breeze and shining bright light in his eyes and that was an excuse to pull me over and see how I smelled, which was just fine, thank you, no vapors of any kind coming out of the cab of my truck, nosir. But, I digress….
Now, a hundred and ninety billion dollars is a lot of money–it’s almost forty percent of what we’ve spent in Iraq so far. And 1.6 trillion is about four times what the war has cost. It’s really a lot of money. And that is where we start getting to the roots of this problem.
One major root is the “no new taxes” mantra. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty made that part of his platform, and last Spring he vetoed a five-cent per gallon gas tax increase that would have funded, among other things, bridge repairs. Herr, Bush, likewise, jawed down a motion among Democrats to raise the gas tax back in 2005. As a result of this and, doubtless, other negligence, the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which had about $23B in it when Bush took office is nearly empty now, and will likely be exhausted by next year. Now, 23 bil is nowhere near 190 bil, but at least it was something. Congress actually passed a $286B transportation measure in 2006, but somehow there wasn’t quite enough money in there for bridge fixing. I guess the Repugs wanted the bridges to take personal responsibility and fix themselves, eh?
“No new taxes” was also the mantra that encouraged negligence of the New Orleans levee system, another catastrophe that just keeps on happening. With more attention to conservation and maintenance and less corporate welfare and military adventurism, neither of these tragedies, which have directly impacted far more Americans than the attack on the World Trade Center, would have happened.
What’s next, guys? Giving the Iraqi insurgents 190,000 AK-47s and pistols? Oh, yeah—already done that. Who needs foreign terrorists? We’ve got Republicans running the country!
The cool thing about this kind of terror is that it really is random and unpredictable and unstoppable. You just neglect it all and see what collapses next–and hope you’re not on it when it does. In fact, you don’t even think of it in those terms. That really lets you off the hook. You think of yourself as an advocate of “privatization,” and blame bridge failures and levee failures and medical care and social security failures on the ineptness of the public sector, conveniently ignoring the fact that the public sector is inept because you’ve been starving it to death by cutting taxes on those who benefit the most from this country: its corporations and its richest citizens.
You act as if “insufficient funds” was an inherent problem of government, and advocate privatizing America’s infrastructure–roads, bridges, water systems, health care and social security–as the answer. Yessir, private corporations are models of integrity and efficiency. Just look at the insurance companies, the oil companies, look at Enron–well, don’t look at Enron, it’s not there any more anyway. DO NOT LOOK AT THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. DO NOT LOOK AT THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. DO NOT LOOK AT THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN….HOLY SMOKES, BATMAN, IT’S DICK “DARTH VADER” CHENEY!
Excuse me… I don’t know what came over me. Anyway, you talk about privatization and making America “an ownership society” and all this kind of red, white, and blather, and just conveniently ignore the fact that for-profit corporations are corporations for profit first and whatever else second, and that with the onus of maximizing profit and executive salaries added onto whatever else they are supposed to do, they will be inherently less efficient–not to mention less responsive to the public they serve–than a government agency that is owned by we, the people of the United States.
But this public/private ownership question is only one root of the two roots of this decaying infrastructure problem. The deeper root, the deep green root, is this: We thought the gravy train was going to go on forever, and so we painted ourselves into a corner with individual, private transportation. When I was a kid and they were starting to build the interstate highway system, I looked at the huge cuts and fills that were being made to create the straight, wide roads and realized that we were altering the landscape for millennia. Blissfully ignorant of the imminence of peak oil, I nevertheless wondered, even then, if these marvels of engineering would become the stuff of myth in a few thousand years.
Later on, I watched this country’s financial decline begin in the early eighties and I started thinking of the maintenance of the Interstate Highway System as a huge millstone tied around America’s neck, as maintenance costs increased and tax revenues dwindled. I saw the presumption that owning an automobile was necessary for full participation in American life as an insidious form of fascism—you have to pledge a percentage of your money to the auto manufacturers and gas companies, as well as pay income taxes—we are forced to support corporatism or suffer the consequences of immobility, inconvenience, and isolation.
Now we’re beginning to reap the foolishness we sowed with making private cars the primary form of transportation here in America. Our economy was built on the supposition that oil would always be cheap and plentiful. It is no longer cheap, and soon it will no longer be plentiful, either. Last year, when oil prices hit a record high, the Israel-Hezbollah war was raging and there had just been a major spill at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope. This year, when that record was broken, there was nothing in particular happening. Where will oil prices go the next time there’s a crisis? Further, production has dropped from the 2005 peak of 85 billion barrels a day—the forecast is that by next year we will be about 10% off that, at about 78 billion barrels a day, while demand just keeps on rising.
This is not a crisis that can be solved by ethanol production or electric cars or more nuclear power plants or so-called “clean coal”–tell it to the West Virginians! Some oreo politician spouting the feel-good “politics of hope” is just playing the other side of the coin to Cheney/Bush’s politics of fear, and neither one is in touch with reality. Amory Lovins recently said in Grist magazine, that he thinks that public policy is the least effective way to change the dynamics of our system. He holds out great hope for the private sector. I hope he’s right, because we are already in a train wreck of massive proportions, and there’s way too much inertia in government to make the changes we need to go through. Perhaps the current credit/stock market collapse will merely clear away the flim-flam and allow us to focus on real cultural transformation. Don’t count on it. And try to stay off bridges during rush hour. By the way, here in Nashville, there are three bridges on I-24 and on I-40 that are considered to be in about the same shape as the I-35 bridge. The good news is, they are mostly bridges that cross streets, and none of them are Cumberland River bridges. That’s good news?
music: Will Kimbrough, “I Lie“
