And here in Genesee County our roads suck big time; our incommunications
suck; but most importantly in spite of being 40 miles from the most abundent
and pureglacial waters we are poisoned!
----- Original Message -----
From: "S. Kashdan" <skashdan@xxxxxxx>
To: "Blind Democracy List" <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2016 10:10 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] A Country Breaking Down by Elizabeth Drew
A Country Breaking Down by Elizabeth Drew
The New York Review of Books, February 25, 2016 Issue
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/infrastructure-country-breaking-down/
2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure
by the American Society of Civil Engineers
available at infrastructurereportcard.org
Rust: The Longest War
by Jonathan Waldman
Simon and Schuster, 288 pp., $26.95
Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Norton, 325 pp., $26.95
The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure
by Henry Petroski
Bloomsbury, 322 pp., $28.00
Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath
by Ted Koppel
Crown, 279 pp., $26.00
Allen Brisson-Smith/The New York Times/Redux
Rescue workers gathered below the Interstate 35W bridge in downtown
Minneapolis after it collapsed and fell into the Mississippi River and onto
its banks during evening rush hour, August 2007
It would be helpful if there were another word for "infrastructure": it’s
such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the
crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not)
and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers
of information, in particular broadband (if one is connected to it), and
other unreliable structures. The word "crisis" is also overused, applied to
the unimportant as well as the crucial. But this country has an
infrastructure crisis.
The near-total failure of our political institutions to invest for the
future, eschewing what doesn’t yield the quick payoff, political and
physical, has left us with hopelessly clogged traffic, at risk of being on a
bridge that collapses, or on a train that flies off defective rails, or with
rusted pipes carrying our drinking water. Broadband is our new interstate
highway system, but not everyone has access to it--a division largely based
on class. Depending on the measurement used, the United States ranks from
fourteenth to thirtieth among all nations in its investments in
infrastructure. The wealthiest nation on earth is nowhere near the top.
Congress’s approval last December of a five-year bill to spend $305 billion
to improve the nation’s highway system occasioned much self-congratulation
that the lawmakers actually got something done. But with an increase in the
gasoline tax politically off-limits, the means for paying for it are dubious
and uncertain. This was the longest-term highway bill passed since 1998 and
the thirty-fifth extension of an authorization of highway construction since
2005. Some of the extensions of the highway program approved by Congress
lasted for only three months. The previous extension was for just over three
weeks. Such practices don’t allow for much planning of the construction or
repair of highways and bridges and mass transit systems.
Our political myopia has put us in actual physical danger as we go about the
mundane business of getting about. We let essential structures and
facilities deteriorate or go unbuilt. A politician is more likely to get in
trouble with constituents for spending federal money than for not spending
federal money. Moreover, as a rule Washington politicians, whether in office
for two or four or six years, aren’t keen on spending for something that
doesn’t have a near-term payoff--perhaps a structure that they can dedicate
and even get their names inscribed on.
The water pipes underneath the White House are said to still be made of
wood, as are some others in the nation’s capital and some cities across the
country. We admire Japan’s and France’s "bullet trains" that get people to
their destination with remarkable efficiency, but many other nations have
them as well, including Russia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. A friend of mine
recently rode on the Turkish bullet train and noted that the coffee in his
full cup didn’t spill. Last year, Japan demonstrated its new maglev train,
which, using electromagnets, levitates above the tracks, and can go about an
amazing 375 miles per hour, making it the fastest train in the world. The
fastest commercially used maglev, in Shanghai, goes up to 288 miles per
hour. But the United States hasn’t a single system that meets all the
criteria of high-speed rail. President Obama has proposed a system of
high-speed railroads, which has gone nowhere in Congress.
When it comes to providing the essentials of a modern society, it has to be
said that we’re a backward country. California Governor Jerry Brown, a
longtime visionary, has initiated the building of a high-speed rail system
between Los Angeles and San Francisco; one high-speed rail system scheduled
to come into service soon to carry people between the wealthy cities of
Dallas and Houston will be privately financed. (Shopping and business made
easier.) But not many communities have the means to build their own train.
Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) conducts a
study of where the United States stands in providing needed infrastructure
in various sectors. Though the organization obviously has an interest in the
creation of more construction jobs, its analyses, based as they are on
information from other studies, are taken seriously by nonpartisan experts
in the field. In the ASCE’s most recent report card, issued in 2013, the
combined sectors received an overall grade of D+. In the various sectors,
the grades were: aviation, D; bridges, C+; inland waterways, D--; ports, C;
rail, C+; roads, D; mass transit, D; schools, D; hazardous waste, D;
drinking water, D. No sector received an A. That none of the infrastructure
categories received an F is hardly grounds for celebration.
The ASCE says that the estimated need of support for America’s
infrastructure by 2020 is $3.6 trillion. Total spending at current levels is
estimated by the ASCE to be $253 billion annually and estimated spending
between 2013 and 2020, before passage of the highway bill, is estimated at
$2 trillion, leaving us $1.6 trillion short.
We watched in horror in August 2007 when during the evening rush hour a
bridge in Minneapolis over the Mississippi River collapsed, killing thirteen
people and injuring another 145. In Washington State in 2013 a bridge with
two cars on it collapsed. The ASCE’s 2013 report card said that one in nine
bridges was structurally deficient; that as of 2013 the average age of the
nation’s 607,380 bridges was forty-two years, while the Federal Highway
Administration estimates that "more than 30 percent of existing bridges have
exceeded their fifty-year design life." According to the ASCE, to have safe
bridges by 2028, the US needs to invest $20.5 billion per year, but current
spending annually on bridges is $12.8 billion.
As for aviation, the report said, "The national cost of airport congestion
and delays was almost $22 billion in 2012." Inland waterways, which get
little attention, are, the ASCE says, "the hidden backbone of our freight
network," carrying "the equivalent of about 51 million truck trips each
year." But the waterways haven’t been updated since the 1950s and because
half of the locks, according to the ASCE, are over fifty years old, barges
have to be stopped for hours each day, "preventing goods from getting to
market and driving up costs."
As for ports, critical to the US as a trading nation, a few have been built
by private investment through port authorities--some of these, as has been
apparent in New Jersey, can get enmeshed in petty local politics; but
dredging to accommodate large vessels is paid for in large part by the
federal government and federal spending for that has decreased.
The recently enacted highway bill will make only a dent in the needed
roadway construction. According to the ASCE, 42 percent of American major
urban highways remain congested, costing the US economy roughly $101 billion
in wasted time and fuel annually. As of 2013, the report said, 32 percent of
America’s major roads were "in poor or mediocre condition." As a result of
congestion, according to the ASCE, Americans wasted 1.9 billion gallons of
gasoline and an average of thirty-four hours in 2010, and the cost to the US
economy of wasted fuel was $101 billion. But the mass transit we now have
far from makes up for the road conditions, and isn’t available to an
estimated 45 percent of American households; millions more have inadequate
mass transit systems. The report said that "deficient and deteriorating
transit systems cost the US economy $90 billion in 2010." At the time of the
report, the Federal Transit Administration estimated a backlog of nearly $78
billion in maintaining mass transit.
Perhaps a step forward was taken in a bill passed in 2012, called America
Fast Forward, to encourage local governments to float bonds to pay for
improvements in mass transit. This was the first time that the Obama
administration backed public--private partnerships to achieve federal goals.
It was based on a program developed the previous year for Los Angeles County
that was intended to raise $45 billion to invest in mass transit, in order
to change LA from an automobile-based culture to a community based on mass
transit.
Finally, the level of federal investment in fixing the aging electrical grid
and the pipelines for distributing energy was leading to an increasing
number of power failures and interruptions. This category received a grade
of D+.
A symptom of this country’s dismal record of providing for these civic
essentials is the fairly large number of books published recently that try
to call attention to the infrastructure crisis. Some are more comprehensive
than others. For example a book solely about rust, titled Rust: The Longest
War, by Jonathan Waldman, provides case studies of projects that have been
allowed to rust to death (a steel mill) or to continue with rust in them
(tin cans), or projects that had to be rescued from dangerous levels of
corrosion (the Statue of Liberty).
Magnum Photos
In his very readable book, Waldman assesses the annual cost of rust to the
country at more than $400 billion, or 3 percent of GNP. An official in
charge of the Pentagon’s hardly known Office of Corrosion Policy and
Oversight says that rust is the navy’s number one foe. Rust degrades
automobiles’ brake linings, risking deadly accidents. (Rusty pipes are what
caused the crisis of lead in the water in Flint, Michigan.) Waldman’s
positive news, meager as it is, is that engineers are starting to think more
about the materials they use so as to avoid corrosion. But he accepts the
verdict of an expert who said that "the field remains poorly defined and
inadequately respected."
Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead, by Harvard Business
School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, brings a clear focus to a sprawling
phenomenon: the inadequate care now given to our nation’s modes of
transportation. Her thesis is that we’re stuck. Traffic is clogged, flights
are delayed, trains are late, bridges collapse, public transit breaks
down--and the political system is incapable of making the investments that
would keep these things from happening.
But the book’s comprehensive view of infrastructure is also its weakness: it
leaves the reader somewhat bewildered about priorities. Like others, Kanter
suggests that more projects be paid for through public--private
partnerships. She urges that local communities undertake the big necessary
projects and that they depend less on Congress to deliver funding, which is
all well and good if cities and states have the will and the resources to
invest in large, expensive projects and if they distribute them fairly among
neighborhoods, some of which can contribute little to pay for them.
Kanter argues that we should forget fighting about the gasoline tax to pay
for highway and bridge construction. In fact she advises forgetting about
Congress when it comes to help on these projects. But later in the book she
urges that Congress make a larger investment in the nation’s infrastructure.
She wants us to address more analytically how cities work. Kanter says, "The
American dilemma is politics, not money." But it’s the politics that
produces the money, or not--the degree of the willingness of politicians to
risk riling their constituents by calling for more money to go into projects
whose importance isn’t widely accepted (such as Alaska’s proposed "bridge to
nowhere," which was finally canceled last year) or for projects that benefit
one neighborhood over others. In the end, Kanter points to what we usually
point to when we want difficult things to happen: leadership. "It’s all a
matter of leadership," she writes. If only the problems were that simple.
The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure by Henry
Petroski is a thorough account of how our highway system got to be what it
is. From Petroski we learn, for example, why there’s a white line down the
middle of a road; why even-numbered roads go east--west and odd ones go
north--south. He also gives us the enticing visions of self-healing asphalt
that will fix potholes right away and self-heating concrete. Petroski writes
that "shortchanging our investments in infrastructure is short-changing the
well-being and optimism in future generations and the prospect for economic
growth."
He describes clearly the deterioration of many of the roads we heavily
depend on. Along the way, Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at
Duke, opens our eyes to an important historical point. Though President
Dwight D. Eisenhower is generally credited with our national highway system,
the concept originated with Franklin Roosevelt, who envisioned an
"inter-regional system" and drew up plans for a greatly expanded highway
system, but the plans got bogged down in an argument over whether urban or
rural areas were to be the greater beneficiaries, so it fell to Eisenhower
to implement Roosevelt’s concept.
The title of Ted Koppel’s new book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation
Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, sums up its message. Koppel writes
grippingly about our electrical grid’s vulnerability and the possible
consequences of a major cyberattack on it, which he considers likely. During
the one nuclear near collision the United States had with the Soviet Union,
the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, leaders could communicate with one
another to prevent calamity. But now, according to Koppel, "for the first
time in the history of warfare, small groups, even individuals, can
undermine the critical infrastructure of a state." He offers evidence that
questions the soothing assurances of officials of the Department of Homeland
Security that the electrical grid is "resilient" to attack. The malware in
our adversaries’ computer systems could paralyze the nation, cripple our
defense capacities, and cause major loss of lives. Koppel’s book is as
incisive as it is disturbing.
The congressionally approved methods of paying for the recently passed bill
to spend $305 billion over five years on building and repairing roads,
bridges, and mass transit systems reflect the difficulty of finding ways to
pay for infrastructure projects--or what are called in Washington lingo the
"pay-fors." The obvious approach of paying for roads with the proceeds of
the gasoline tax, as has been done in the past, has been overtaken by the
recent rampant and mindless anti-tax fever, with the result that the gas tax
hasn’t been raised since 1993, when it was set at 18.4 cents per gallon--and
wasn’t indexed for inflation.
Had inflation been taken into account, the gas tax would now be 30.1 cents
per gallon--almost twice what it is now. When the tax was first imposed the
price of gasoline was around $1.00 per gallon. After some periods when it
was higher--usually due to shortages and Middle East wars--the price is
again unusually low. According to the AAA, it’s now below $2.00 in forty-one
states. The highest recent price was $3.91 in May 2011. Gasoline taxes in
the United States are lower than in any other country except Mexico.
Europeans pay the highest gas taxes in the world, from $6.00 to $10.00 per
gallon. (Progress in making cars more fuel-efficient results in the gas tax
bringing in less than it otherwise would.)
With the gas tax paying for only a portion of the $305 billion cost of the
latest highway bill, members of Congress were creative in finding the funds
to make up the difference. Perhaps the most troubling method they came up
with was raiding the funds held by the Federal Reserve system in case of an
emergency need for liquidity in the economy, or to rescue a bank--it’s
referred to as the Fed’s "rainy day fund." The Fed, not at all happy about
its emergency fund being tapped to pay for a program irrelevant to its
responsibilities, issued a statement saying, "Using the resources of the
Federal Reserve to finance fiscal spending...infringes on the independence
of the central bank and weakens fiscal discipline."
Though this procedure wasn’t without precedent, it went much further than
anything previously enacted in placing a limit on the Fed’s surplus. The
highway program will obtain additional funds through a reduction in the
amount of the dividends the Fed pays to banks (which own stock in the Fed).
These provisions amount to unprecedented intrusion in its activities. The
Fed is supposed to be independent from political interference but now the
Republicans want to draw on and control its resources for their own
political purposes.
Other sources of funds to pay for the highway bill are to be derived from
selling millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
which has been used in the past for various purposes, including sales to
decrease the deficit. The Republicans blithely assume that the oil would
sell at about double the current price, and they also nurture the hope that
putting the IRS’s job of collecting delinquent taxes in the hands of private
collection agencies would result in more federal income that could be put
toward improving highways and other transit projects. (Should these fantasy
funds materialize, other agencies might also have uses for them.)
The very notion of federal responsibility in building the nation’s
infrastructure wasn’t widely accepted in the nation’s early years. Henry
Clay, with his "American System" to tie American states together through
infrastructure payouts, is considered the architect of the idea, prominent
in the first part of the nineteenth century, that there should be federal
support for "internal improvements" in the forms of roads and canals in
order to enable farmers to get their goods to markets. Clay saw
infrastructure projects as a way to connect the country and foster
communities that might otherwise die out for lack of transportation to and
from them. Abraham Lincoln was an advocate of the same thing for the same
reasons.
Andrew Burton/Getty Images
President Obama delivering remarks on infrastructure in the United States
near the Tappan Zee Bridge and the construction of its replacement,
Tarrytown, New York, May 2014
But the federal role was vastly increased by Franklin Roosevelt’s
determination to rescue the American economy from the Great Depression: this
led to a number of projects, including the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA),
a project to lift the economy in a particularly hard-hit region that then
pioneered producing clean energy. The New Deal also created the Rural
Electrification Administration (REA), inducing cooperatives to provide
affordable energy to areas that private business felt weren’t worth serving.
Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) gave millions of unemployed
workers jobs in constructing public works including highways, bridges, dams,
parks, and public buildings. (Controversially, it also put artists and
writers to work.) President Eisenhower understood Clay’s original point of
binding the country together through public projects when he picked up on
Roosevelt’s nascent plans for a grand highway system. Government, industry,
and universities laid the basis for our technology industry, and a federal
system of connecting universities with a research project of the Pentagon
led to the Internet.
But today no great vision guides our policies for building and maintaining
the arteries of transportation--ports, dams, and bridges--as well as the
electrical grid, even the broadband system. Such far-seeing government
measures as Roosevelt and Eisenhower championed are inconceivable now.
President Obama’s stimulus program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act, signed into law in 2009, provided a little over $800 billion to, as the
White House put it, "jumpstart" the economy by creating jobs and also, the
White House said, to make "a down payment on addressing long-neglected
challenges." But members of Congress in both parties held down the amount
that the federal government was to spend on helping the economy recover.
Only three Republican senators voted for the program and no House
Republicans supported it.
This was the first legislative demonstration of the Republicans’ intention
from the outset to oppose everything Obama tried to do. But Democrats,
nervous about being labeled as "spenders," told the White House not to
submit a request for what could end up costing a billion dollars. Many
assumed that, as usual, Congress would raise the amount of money in the
bill, but contrary to custom the Senate lowered the amount approved by the
House. The House had promised some funds for social programs unrelated to
stimulating the economy. And the emphasis of the stimulus program was on
generating an early payoff, lots of jobs being created quickly to combat the
recession. The preference was for "shovel-ready" projects rather than
longer-term ones. While this was understandable, especially with limited
funds, a Democratic senator told me, "We missed a major opportunity."
President Obama has continued to call for increased investment in
infrastructure, earlier this year requesting an expenditure of $478 billion,
and the Republicans have continued to oppose him. In his final State of the
Union speech, the president called on Congress to "put tens of thousands of
Americans to work building a twenty-first-century transportation system."
Hillary Clinton recently proposed an investment of $275 billion over five
years for roads, bridges, expanded broadband service, public transit,
airports, freight trains, and water systems. This is a modest plan in the
light of the country’s infrastructure needs. (Bernie Sanders has called for
a program costing $1 trillion over five years, which the Clinton campaign
derides as too expensive.) But Clinton’s plan was adequate to win her the
endorsement of two important construction unions: the Laborers’
International Union and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.
Missing from Clinton’s program was an answer to the vexing matter of how to
pay for it. Most would be paid for by federal spending; Clinton also said
she would fund some of her infrastructure program through "business tax
reform." This is understood to mean using the taxes that would be paid by
corporations that would bring their profits back from overseas in exchange
for a federal tax discount--a one-time source of new funds.
The problems are that this "repatriation" scheme has yet to be approved by
Congress and if it’s to be part of a large tax reform bill there’s no
telling when or whether it will be enacted; moreover, proponents of other
programs also have their eye on the same potential sums. Clinton suggested,
as President Obama had, the establishment of an investment bank, using the
proceeds from a proposed re-authorization of the Build America Bonds program
that was supposed to be part of the stimulus, but Obama’s proposal for this,
too, has been stuck in Congress. Donald Trump also talks about a stimulus
program but he hasn’t yet said how he would pay for it.
The arguments in favor of a major American initiative for fixing and
building our infrastructure are entirely convincing: this would improve the
country’s physical condition and create jobs for the middle-class sector
that’s been most hurt by the recession and has lost out in the widening
income gap. If an infrastructure program were done right these jobs would be
around for a long time. We might even become an optimistic country again.
But it’s going to take more than "leadership." It may require even more
widespread paralyzed traffic, the collapse of numerous bridges, and perhaps
a revolt in parts of the country that have inadequate broadband. In other
words, we may well need to incur more chaos and ruin and even deaths before
we come to our senses.
