- I wonder how many of those Minnesota commuters were listening
to news on their car radios as they approached the I-35W bridge Wednesday
afternoon? Those who were probably had just listened to GOP members of
the House urging their Democratic party colleagues to hurry up and pass
legislation re-authorizing the "Terrorist Surveillance Act."
-
- "It is absolutely vital at the time of a heightened
threat environment to realize the present system simply is not as responsive
as it needs to be in terms of providing the flexibility and speed in acting
on actionable intelligence," pronounced White House spokesman, Tony
Snow.
-
- Maybe that's what the victims thought was happening as
the bridge collapsed under them Wednesday -- that "the terrorists"
had struck again. After all, since 2001 terrorism has been about the only
threat to American's safety, lives and wellbeing this administration mentions
-- and they mention it often.
-
- So, as those poor folks dropped 65 feet towards the Mississippi
below, surely they must have figured that was the cause of their pending
misfortune - terrorism.
-
- Those who survived the fall quickly learned that it wasn't
terrorism at all. What killed or almost killed those Americans wasn't al-Qaeda
but al-George and his administration's neglect, mismanagement, misdirection
and mis-allocation of our nation's attention, priorities and resources.
-
- The day before the I-35W span collapsed we learned that
the war in Iraq will eventually drain the US treasury of somewhere between
$1 to $2 trillion dollars. Not a dime of that will be available to perform
critical, and already too-long delayed, repairs to the tens of thousands
of bridges and overpasses that carry tens of millions of Americans every
day.
-
- In 2005 the American Society of Civil Engineers reported
that $1.6 trillion is needed over a five-year period to repair American's
crumbling bridges, highways and other critical public infrastructure.
-
- We didn't, we haven't and we likely won't do that. Instead
that money is being spent to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, much of which
will either be promptly blown up by Iraqis themselves or simply left to
rot.
-
- U.S. Overseers And Iraq Rebuilding Failures
-
- International Herald Tribune -- July 26, 2007: The report,
issued Wednesday, is the first of a planned series of audits of Western
contractors that have received large slices of the roughly $40 billion
in U.S. taxpayer money that has been spent on the troubled program to rebuild
Iraq. Previous audits have looked at individual projects but never the
performance across Iraq of a single contractor. (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/26/news/bechtel.php
- Full Story)
-
- Meanwhile, back here at home, a giant 83-year old steam
pipe blows leaving a huge crater in the middle of a New York City street,
a 40-year old bridge in America's heartland collapses during rush hour,
our air traffic control system can just barely operate, saddled by failing,
antique computer systems and a shortage of runways. Meanwhile air passengers
become accustomed to sleeping on cots at terminals as an ever-growing number
of flights are delayed or canceled.
-
- Over at the NOAA another day of reckoning looms. Even
as global warming threatens more Katrina-type hurricanes, there are lno
replacements being readied for America's aging fleet of weather satellites.
-
- I'm not going to belabor the point. You get it. The bottom
line is that you are more likely to be killed or injured on American soil
by a falling bridge or plane or by falling into a giant sink hole than
by a terrorist. And not just a little more likely, but exponentially more
likely.
-
- As I write this I am waiting to hear what George Bush
is going to say about Wednesday's bridge collapse in a scheduled morning
news conference. We know what he would have said had a terrorist flown
a plane into that bridge. He would have come out swinging, demanding that
we "connect the dots," to discover how such a thing was allowed
to happen. He would also use the opportunity to demand more money to fight
terrorism and support for proposals to trim back more of our domestic rights
so he can protect us from just that kind of threat.
-
- And, we'd likely go along with him too. He is certainly
not going to suggest we need to "connect the dots." on Wednesday's
bridge collapse, because those dots lead right to Oval Office and Congress.
-
- Wednesday's disaster wasn't terrorism. Al-Qaeda didn't
take down that bridge. Nor will al-Qaeda bring down who knows how many
other bridges, killing who knows how many more Americans in the years ahead.
No it wasn't. The "terrorist" this time wasn't al-Qaeda. It was
the Bush Administration, and Congress' misplaced priorities that killed
those Americans Wednesday. It was the product of the fatal combination
of imperial hubris, military/industrial primacy and the blind greed military
spending it fosters once it gets on a roll.
-
- How ironic that it was Dwight D. Eisenhower who championed
and built America's interstate highway system back in the 50's.
-
- The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, popularly known
as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, was enacted on June
29, 1956, when a hospitalized Dwight D. Eisenhower signed this bill into
law. Appropriating $25 billion for the construction of 40,000 miles of
interstate highways over a 10-year period, it was the largest public works
project in American history to that point.
-
- The money was handled in a highway trust fund that paid
for 90 percent of highway construction costs with the states required to
pay the remaining 10 percent. It was expected that the money would be generated
through new taxes on fuel, automobiles, trucks and tires. It is said he
drew six lines (three vertical and three horizontal) on a piece of paper
and told his people to base their freeway system on it.
- (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956>Full)
-
- It was also as Eisenhower who, on leaving office tried
to warn us of the danger created at the nexus of politics, business and
the military.
-
- "In the councils of government, we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by
the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power exists and will persist."
-
- Eisenhower was, of course prescient. We ignored that
warning and so it has come to pass. The proof lies among the bodies and
wreckage of the I-35W bridge. What Ike could not foresee was that this
ascendant military-industrial complex would end up also destroying the
crown jewel of his administration -- our national highway and transportation
system.
-
- Anyway, that's the way it is. So rather than stockpiling
duct tape and plastic to protect yourself from a terrorist attack, it might
be wiser to stock your cars with a helmet and life preserver for yourself
and each passenger.
-
-
-
- Bush/Cheney Is Not Government - It Is A Form Of Looting
- Comment
- Dick Eastman
- 8-4-7
-
-
- "American Society of Civil Engineers estimated
that $1.6 trillion would put the nation's infrastructure back into good
shape. Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz produced a study
a few years ago suggesting the Iraq war costs would exceed $2 trillion.
Additionally, we find that the super-rich have awarded themselves more
than $1.7 trillion in tax cuts. ... 2001 Nobel economics laureate George
Akerlof called the Bush administration, "the worst government the
US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history, 'This is not normal
government policy. What we have here is a form of looting.' "
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