"Experts warn U.S. is coming apart at the seams" & bush ignores the issue

2 billion a week in Iraq and we get this.....

<snip>

WASHINGTON — A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.

None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country's basic operating systems are deteriorating.

"When I see events like these, I become concerned that we've lost focus on the core operational functionality of the nation's infrastructure and are becoming a fragile nation, which is just as bad — if not worse — as being an insecure nation," said Christian Beckner, a Washington analyst who runs the respected Web site Homeland Security Watch (www.christianbeckner.com).

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation "D" for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

"I thought Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm," said Casey Dinges, the society's managing director of external affairs.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003226851_fragile26.html

:sarcasm:

and everybody (that matters) has gone right along with it.

p/s I did see the sarcasm smiley, but he did ignore this looming, and well known, catastrophe for eight years.

who put BushCo into office.

They are the primary threat to national security.

I grew up in Niagara Falls, Ontario and we'd routinely go over to the US side to visit.

Tourists would complain about driving on both sides of the river. On the Canadian side, they couldn't get anywhere fast because of all the damn toursts and the city crew fixing the roads (we called them the teaspoon brigade 'cause they were constantly fixing tiny little potholes). On the US side they couldn't get around because the roads and bridges were a disaster but they didn't care because there was nothing to do see or do.

It is just shocking the differences between the two countries side by side. I LOVED Niagra Falls, Canada, the surrounding area and wish I could have stayed. Niagra on the Lake was just fantastic!

...at the seams. That $1.6 trillion that would fix much of the infrastructure deterioration was given away in Bush's first tax cut for the wealthy. Then another $1.6 trillion has been squandered on war and U.S. imperialist military expansion around the world.

I've made this observation to people I know and they've said I'm crazy but I thought I was just noticing the writing on the wall.

and it is scary how uninformed and/or in denial americans are. The Soviets knew damn well what was happening to them!

:argh:

and said that he's feeling the same vibes here. So, breaking our infrastructure and grinding us into the ground, is it deliberate or not?

I've heard the claim (stupid as it is) that Reagan "brought down" the Soviet Union by forcing them to spend too great a portion of their GDP on their military build-up. Isn't it interesting that what the Republicans (and certain "Centrist" Democrats) have been doing is to force the US to spend too great a portion of our GDP on military costs. It will be ironic if ultimately the imbalance between our own military expenditures and our infrastructure investments causes our infrastructure to fall apart and our country to implode. I see evidence that this is happening all around me -- electricity in our area of Los Angeles has been off at various times over this summer. That never happened before -- at least not in modern times. And mind you we've had no rain, no thunder storms -- there is no reason for it other than a power line is down -- failure of the infrastructure. We don't need to say anything more about the schools. They have been chronically underfunded since the Nixon era. Health care costs are out of reach for more and more people, and emergency health care for the poor is adequate only for non-emergencies.

Sorry, but this problem is one for which every president since Jimmy Carter -- from Reagan to the present and including (Sorry, guys) Clinton, have to share the blame -- as do most members of Congress to the present. No one has dared to speak out on this -- except maybe Kucinich and Feingold -- and a small minority of the members of the House. Meanwhile the rich keep building their mansions and taking their cruises, and the "free market" keeps lowering the working person's wages -- and the only thing holding up our almighty dollar and our right to spend it on made in China junk at the Whale of a Market is our ability to destroy any country that dares to challenge our right to be the masters of the universe. So without our military threat, the dollar is likely to sink and then where is the money to come from to fix infrastructure?

We're caught in a vicious circle. Any politician who does not maintain our military threat will lose the public trust because the dollar will probably fall to next to nothing. But as long as we keep spending on the military at the rate that we are, our infrastructure falls apart. Sooner or later, we will start kicking out governments because they can't deliver needed services.

The only answer as I see it is to tell Americans the truth -- about what keeps the dollar so high -- about the fact that we are all as individuals and as a nation -- living way above our means -- about how much of our resources we are really spending on military and "security" concerns -- about just how bad our infrastructure really is and just how much we need to invest to fix it. And once the truth has been told, the next step is to call for sacrifice. After all, sacrifice built the infrastructure we used to enjoy. It made us a great nation and it can make us great again.

.. actually an established Cold War policy of the US, which predated Reagan. Since Czarist Russia had established essentially no industrial base, the Soviets were always rather behind the West in terms of total productive capacity. One of the Cold Warriors' theories of the arms race was that high military spending in the USSR would limit productive economic growth and maintain a high level of popular discontent around standard-of-living issues.

The Reagan era brought to ascendancy conservatives who shared Grover Norquist's dreams of bankrupting the US Federal government to cripple its power: this accounts for the very large deficits under Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, largely associated with military spending, with the idea that popular discontent could be managed by tighter control of media. This is not a "vicious circle" but reflects a conscious program stretching over a quarter century ...

I've read reports where military expenditures in the Soviet Union topped 14 percent of the nation's GDP. In the US, we hover around the 3 to 5 percent range even now, which simply isn't comparable. Our economy was vastly larger and better able to sustain that kind of spending than the Soviet economy was, but that's not license to say it's wise for the US government to continue spending more money than it can pull in. That's just hurting the value of the dollar if it continues.

it probably makes no difference, but if anyone recalls, when regan came to power, he massively increased the military budget, called the ussr 'evil empire' and so on...the russians reacted by devoting increasd $$$ to its military-it ruined an already stressed system. it would be karma if the usa, after having destroyed countless lives in its greed, now undergoes the same fate (though the terra enemy is so undefined as to be a bogey!)
in fall of 2003, the anniversary of the shootdown of kal 007 passed w/out mention by the pigmedia. the reason is obvious: 911 involved aircraft/atc and secret military exercises, plus an effort to exploit a human tragedy by the pig. most people forget, but the kal007 incident saw the only red alert for nuclear forces since the cuba crisis in 1962. it also cleared the way to unlimited military spending, and massive increases in the us national debt...
http://www.geocities.com/ke007us/

...it imploded from it's own corruption and dry-rot of it's leadership. That is exactly what the United States is undergoing right now, but on a scale which is not 10 times worse, but 100, maybe 1,000 times worse than what happened in the USSR.

Every where you look, decay, corruption, denial and lies. The system is rotten clear through and it began where all dead fish begin to rot, at the HEAD!

will lose another example of how the federal government fails the people.

the goal of the republick party is to plant firmly in the mind of the people that the government is bad.

the repulick party fails on purpose.

The administration intentionally failed to respond and went so far as to prevent citizens from responding to KatrinaBush. And what was the response we heard from the rw? The rw used bush*s failures to say that government isn't supposed to solve people's problems for them. :mad:

When the big East Coast blackout happened a few summers back, the RW spin was that if only we had passed Bush's energy bill, it would have been taken care of.

At the time, it was estimated that to upgrade the power grid would cost $60-$70 billion... or less than a year of what it costs to occupy Iraq. I'm sure it would have created a few million jobs as well.

"tax and spend Democrats" will be the Republican mantra once more. We've seen this shell game time and again, but NEVER on such an enormous scale. We're stuck with fixing their disastrous neglect, and we get the blame.

:grr:

i'd pay good money to see them pigs suffer, if only from ruined highways....

regarding the privatization of energy here in Texas. It said we paid 60% MORE for electricity in Texas above the national average.
I live in rural Texas. Our electric bills are insane. Deregulation was supposed to create market competition, but all that it has done was to create an electricity croney club gouging the working people. That's not how George Bush portrayed it.:sarcasm:
We, too, have had several episodes of our electricity being off without any reason whatsoever.
I suspected that they are rolling blackouts, done without notice hoping nobody in rural Texas would put it all together as to what they are.
Perhaps it is just the destruction of the infrastructure, I don't know.
It would seem that with the plethora of electricity providers in Texas with the outrageous rates that we are forced to pay would be able to update our power lines and delivery system.
My guess is that it will ONLY be done when the state decides to give them a handout to fix it.

Wasn't there an army base that had no funds to pay their electric bill?

the progress of Chaos events in America.

Every new "chaos event" keeps the world's eye off 9/11: that arguably-contrived basis for a phoney "wartime presidency" and the accompanying carte blanche for all the atrocities this gang of "politicians" has unleashed on the Constitution and Democracy. (Shhhh! It's really the military-industrial-complex hiding behind a "political mask" of neoconservatism.)

But their existence is based on fraud...they may suspect they are "found out"...so, a waiting/scheming game proceeds. Speaker Hastert awaits "test-results" as to whether "Bilbray scams" can be utilized this November for those (s)elections that might be deemed necessary to "win" via fraud tactics in order to hold power: Rig a sufficient number of elections, speedily perform Washington,DC swear-ins of the fraud-representative(s) to pre-empt certifications/recounts at the state level, and challenge any competing claims to rightful jurisdiction over "Wee, the People's" election processes.

If Judge Yuri Hofman doesn't cooperate and deliver the desired "test-result" on Tuesday, appeal: Maybe the judges will make another "just this one time" 2000 Gore-Bush intervention. If that fails, consider permitting some new chaos event(s) to unfold -- perhaps even call Saudi cohorts for help. How about instigating chaos at the polls this November by intervening to assure Gideon's e-voting "train wreck" happens?...or perhaps charge "FRAUD!" on the Dems, as Palast claims already is a plan?? -- and then declare some national emergency, enact martial law and have elections suspended...something neocon-perverse to spit on the Constitution (again).

In the meantime, Grover Norquist's plan to keep America weak proceeds...and Halliburton waits in the wings, drooling for its next no-bid contract...to fix the roads.

I wonder if Pappy might have some ideas (orders) to offer his boy on this weekend's "vacation" in Maine?

It would be easier to impose feudalism on a broken nation with no middle class.

Hundreds and hundreds of billions wasted on being able to blow things up, which we don't want to use anyway.

because the soldiers, along with basic needs in the military, are getting the shaft!!!

--is like expecting vegans to cook decent beef stew.