Approaching the dam is a lot like approaching Las Vegas itself - the dry desert heat suddenly gives way to this humid wash of air, a sign of the excess water displays in the city, and of the Colorado river itself, trapped in narrow Black Canyon. Then you see the gigantic power line towers that stick out at an angle over the river, guiding the massive electricity cables up over the lip of the canyon to set them on a path parallel to the ground, carrying power to multiple states.
As if that isn't incredible enough to look upon, you eventually wend your way around the two lane black top to see the top of the dam itself, which looks rather thin at first glance, until you realize this is just the top of a massive 700+ foot tall structure that is 660 feet thick at its base. The word "awesome" is much overused in American culture, but this thing easily qualifies.
The interior is as impressive as the exterior, with marble floors and Deco accents all over the place. It is an industrial construct of absolute beauty.
Hoover Dam was constructed both ahead of schedule and under budget. We could argue all day about the environmental effects of American dam building generally, worker safety in the 1930s, our water use policies, and electricity consumption, but the thing itself is a major work of human engineering, capital, and will.
Flash forward to 2010. A tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey to double the rate of passenger travel between those two destinations (for which current carrying capacity is already over taxed) that has been in the works for 20 years has suddenly ground to a halt because the new governor of New Jersey, a fiscal charlatan named Chirs Christie, has decided his state can no longer afford its share.
I'll let the estimable Bob Herbert put it in words I never could:
The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It’s losing its soul. It’s speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough.
The railroad tunnel was the kind of infrastructure project that used to get done in the United States almost as a matter of routine. It was a big and expensive project, but the payoff would have been huge. It would have reduced congestion and pollution in the New York-New Jersey corridor. It would have generated economic activity and put thousands of people to work. It would have enabled twice as many passengers to ride the trains on that heavily traveled route between the two states.
The project had been in the works for 20 years, and ground had already been broken when the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, rejected the project on Thursday, saying that his state could not afford its share of the costs. Extreme pressure is being exerted from federal officials and others to get Mr. Christie to change his mind, but, as of now, the project is a no-go.
This is a railroad tunnel we’re talking about. We’re not trying to go to the Moon. This is not the Manhattan Project. It’s a railroad tunnel that’s needed to take people back and forth to work and to ease the pressure on the existing tunnel, a wilting two-track facility that’s about 100 years old. What is the matter with us?
The rest is well worth reading, as Herbert ties this sort of rudderless leadership to the present unemployment emergency, about which no one seems willing to do the heavy lifting to solve the problem. 80 years ago government created agencies to contract with companies and individuals to build a modern infrastructure, much of which we still enjoy today, crumbling as it may be, and to simply put people to work to give them spending money and some small, precious shred of dignity. These days, we determine the right amount of stimulus to jolt the economy back into gear, then cut it in half before even considering whether to enact it. We have become beholden to an ideology that proclaims government is incapable of doing anything at all useful, and when the proponents of that ideology take power, they make sure that view becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the ideology of the modern Republican Party, which was carried out quite efficiently during the W. years, when people were appointed to head agencies overseeing the very sectors of industry from which they made their many millions, regulations were slashed, discarded, or simply ignored, and a form of maximalist capitalism known as "got mine" was allowed to run untethered by sanity or prudence.
As a result, the electorate, the alleged party of opposition which now holds power, and the media have bought the idea that this sort of thinking is true, that, at default, government is evil and always incompetent if not down right criminal, and thus can never be part of the solution to major national problems such as those we have been facing for the last three years. It is a poisonous, false ideology, and it is destroying our country's ability to do anything useful for anyone who isn't already stinking rich.
3 comments:
Something truly ironic is the willingness of my hometown, Oklahoma City, to pass a major public works initiative in the heart of the downturn. Now, that effort has debatable elements (sales tax based; convention center; downtown focus; etc.), but it recognizes that strength comes from a strong foundation. Also, it strikes me as ironic that, amidst all of our partisan rancor, local politics seems to provide the ripest opportunity for people to reach across ideological lines and work for a common cause.
I guess that begs the question: does a common enough cause exist anymore to unite America (or at least enough of America to get the majority, however slim, moving in a unified direction)?
Local politics are at once more supple and more bought and paid for than even at the national level. This doesn't mean nothing useful can ever get done, but it does mean that too often the compromises almost make the original project not worth doing. I've seen this in action in your sister's city of employ.
Nationally, things have reached a point last seen in 1995 only more virulent this time around. One party has decided that the other is simply not legitimate wielders of government power, though that power was gained through fairly won elections. Short of taking to the streets with guns this is about as extremist a position as a national party can adopt, especially when you consider how dully centrist Obama and most Democrats actually are politically.
Consider how much the Republican party at the national level has pushed the idea of interposition and nullification. Those two words were made quite famous in a speech given at Washington in 1963, and the fact that certain governors and Congressmen and Senators have begun attempting to use those same justifications for ignoring the legally created and passed law of the land is not only disgusting, it is fundamentally anti-democratic.
Consider how readily they have courted those who, just a few years ago, members of all parties would consider not just extreme but downright insane.
And our good friend, Senator Tom Coburn, has proven himself a close friend to the Tenthers, who, as a group, are both remarkably racist and remarkably uninformed about American history and the Constitution, though they lay exclusive claim to both.
In the shorter run, there is no hope of compromise in our national politics - none whatsoever. The minority party considers the majority party to be wholly illegitimate - that leaves no room for serious negotiation nor compromise. Note that every major bill has included ideas Republicans insisted be part of the legislation, then unanimously voted against those same bills. They are actively rooting and working for failure in order to gain electoral advantage, and it is hurting actual living people. Millions of them.
It is why there will be a record amount of money spent on the interim elections, and I expect the 2012 presidential election to cost five to ten times what the previous one did, which itself set a new record.
In the longer run I really don't what to think anymore. We've just been through a period where government regulators, Congresses of the mid-late 1990s, and the financial sector and other finance related businesses conspired to create an environment where they could literally do as they pleased, invent fictitious business transactions, and make billions of dollars doing so, even though more than a few of them knew the cliff was nearby and the accelerator was jammed to the floor. They made off with the vaults of cash, wrecked the economy, put millions of people out of work (some of them perhaps permanently), held the federal government hostage with the threat of their own firm's potential collapse in order to secure guarantees, and then paid themselves record bonuses.
And nothing has changed. The weak regulatory changes do not alter the conditions that precipitated the last crisis, and remember, those who engineered it profited mightily, so for them, there is literally no downside. And now we have this ongoing foreclosure mess getting much worse, where institutions are routinely foreclosing on properties they can't even prove they actually hold the note for.
Government has been effectively captured. It is bogged down in two incomprehensible wars it is not winning, spending itself broke doing so while kowtowiing to the obscenely rich who are waging a propaganda war over a 3% rise in their top marginal tax rate, a rise brought about by legislation championed by their patron saint, W., and is sun setting only now so they could avoid having to actually fund all of those tax cuts back in 01 and 03, instead adding it to the national debt and blaming the other party. Amazing, but they get away with this shit, day in and out.
The naked hatred very rich people in America display toward the rest of the citizenry is really quite something to behold, and as the income inequality gap continues to widen at an accelerating pace, their hatred and contempt become ever more palpable and cisible. It is truly astonishing.
This country has become quite literally psychotic, and I hold little hope of any sort of sane solution. I think a second crisis is imminent, and will destroy what was left after the first, and then the shit will really hit the fan.
What that will look like is anybody's guess, but when you consider the outright theft and wholesale criminality of the last ten or so years (and I include the wars, torture, rendition, and so forth) that has gone almost entirely without legal redress, you have to wonder if the average American citizen has become so inured to the situation that they, like cows to the slaughter, will accept almost anything as long as they are assured it is "normal."
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