Letters to the Editor
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Sink(hole) or Swim
Digby:
I'm delighted to find you in the War Room here at Salon!
The tax cut(to benefit the top earners)and neglect policy outcomes are now self-evident in gutted governmental agencies, total and catastrophic failures to assure safe roads, safe food, potable water, breathable air, and swim-able waters.
What hasn't quite made it to the average person's radar is that the country isn't at a start-over position, but rather, it is much further behind than the original starting point.
Our workers are overworked and underpaid. They have less access to affordable essential healthcare. They eat preservative, fructose and fat-laden finger foods on the run, while chained to desks or uncomfortable work positions for long stretches of time. They breathe in exhaust and particulates for hours every day while commuting to jobs at far distances from their homes.
The average citizen's bootstraps are cracked and worn and are in danger of breaking.
I believe that the sink(hole) or swim self-help against all odds policy references the surplus population of yore - the poorhouse and the prison populations are flourishing.
Mr. Scrooge and Mr. Marley were so progressive and ahead of their time!
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Once again, the euro-example
New York's steam explosion does not surprise me. There have been an unending series of water main breaks, electrical failures, etc., over the past few years here. Yet the mayor praises the power company and chides people for dumping on them. In my neighborhood (in NYC!), the power was down for days a couple of years ago, and the media only found out about it because people called TV stations and newspapers with their cell phones.
I live part-time in a small medieval city in Italy. It's old, in other words. My street dates back about 600 years. Last year, the city repaved the street--but it did much more. It looked like subway construction as workers stripped off the asphault, and then replaced water mains, sewer lines, and electrical and gas conduits. (Btw, you don't see overhead power and cable lines there) Then they meticulously replaced the old surface with new paving stones. Not quite cobblestones, but bigger and smoother.
This is in Italy, folks, where people think that nothing works. (And the country rates no. 2 in health care delivery, too...) But in the U.S., we can't summon up the will to spend in infrastructure. Never mind transportation, etc--this is public health and safety.
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I hope the Democrats can clean up the mess without just getting blamed for hard times
Yes, there's quite a bill coming due. Thanks to the Republican policies and the money spent on the invasion of Iraq, tax cuts, or just flat out misplaced we don't have the money to pay for it anymore.
What happens when an average taxpayer has a massive bill come due and can't afford to pay it due to too much debt? Why, you have to borrow more money! What happens when you can't borrow anymore and you can't pay what you already owe? Bankruptcy!
We are so fortunate that the Chinese government is such a forgiving creditor! I'm sure they'd never leverage that debt to get their way in a dispute.
Personally, I'm hoping that if disaster strikes this country that the public remembers that the politicians who will most want to use that disaster to gain more power are the ones who brought about said disaster.
Naturally, the Republicans will blame Liberal Democrats for any such catastrophic failure of the institutions the GOP worked so hard to undermine.
We'll be really lucky if sinkholes and blown pipes are the worst that happens.
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Sinkholes and Sewers are beneath the Banana Republicans
The infrastructure issue is one that particularly bugs me. Anymore, I really believe the whole GOP enterprise was a con game from the get-go, without ever intending to deliver anything by way of the private industry (the so-called magic of the marketplace -- poof, watch those public dollars disappear!), so much as it was to privatize as much as they could get away with, and figure if they axed enough taxes on those at top, they'd end up with a powerful enough lobby of people who'd fight to keep those tax cuts, or perhaps would threaten capital flight if they found their tax rates going up. Class war, Banana Republican-style!
The important goals for the reactionaries were to dismantle the public sphere, get at that money by way of tax cuts, and count on it never being rebuilt again (and fighting it if anybody tried to, the whole austerity at home thing, while they ship out billions abroad). I really think they don't care about actual governance, administration, or problem-solving -- certainly not about infrastructure (unless we're talking building golf courses on public land or something). All the talk of the efficiencies of private industry is just lip service to get gullible, greedy, or cynical people to support it. I keep looking at the airline industry and wondering when the benefits of deregulation will ever be realized. Hah!
No system is perfect, but at least with public money, the public has a say in it; once something's privatized, they're accountable to who, exactly? Their shareholders, and nobody else. That's a diminishment of democracy, not an enhancement of it. The GOP political paradox of less freedom equals more choice.
At some point, sensible Americans are going to have to take a step back (hopefully NOT into a sinkhole) and decide that becoming a banana republic is bananas, no matter what the Banana Republicans say.
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Shine the light!
Thank you for posting on this subject! This is an experience that most US citizens experience, but somehow never connect to the the bleeding of state budgets due to politics and corruption in state and federal government, since Reagan years at least.
I'd like to see real data on budgets, infrastructure spending, shifting of priorites away from services, exploding healthcare expenditures due to obesity and smoking, along with a study of how the departments of city planning, an honored profession in Europe, has been bought off long ago by business interests and Republican cronys. Who is writing on these subjects?
This also brings up for me the subject of local politics, as I see my old neighborhood being cut up into "enterprise zones" where huge hotel, retail and condo installations are shoe-horned into tiny areas abutting already congested highways. Despite the overwhelming opposition of the neighborhood, the project is going through, accompanied by a sneering (expensive) website making fun of the neighbors who are fighting the project. Developers rule in Atlanta, one reason why the city has turned un-livable. Where are the local representatives who will fight the unstoppable force? Big money wins over citizenery, no matter how ill-conceived, poorly-planned, overbuilt and short-term. How is that like representative government?