by John W. Whitehead, Rutherford Institute:
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”—Bob Dylan
A water main breaks every two minutes somewhere in the U.S., resulting in contaminated drinking supplies and boil water notices.
One out of three bridges in the U.S. needs repair, endangering hundreds of millions of commuters. More than 42,000 bridges across the country, carrying about 167 million vehicles each day, are in disrepair.
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It is estimated that 300 million people could face power outages across the United States between 2024 and 2028, due in large part to widespread power grid failures.
No wonder U.S. infrastructure received a C- on the Infrastructure Report Card.
America is falling apart.
Collapsing bridges, buckling roads, overheated railways, deteriorating power lines, contaminated water lines, outdated public transportation, overtaxed power grids, aging ports and waterways, unsafe tunnels and highways, and spotty or insufficient telecommunications assets are all becoming frequent hallmarks of the American way of life.
If the nation is woefully unprepared to deal with climate disasters such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts, despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been pledged to shore up the nation’s infrastructure problems, it is because politicians across the political spectrum have failed us.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene makes this failure by the government to put the needs of the American people first painfully evident. Entire towns are under water. Roadways have collapsed or are otherwise impassable. Potable water is scarce. More than 1.5 million households are still without power.
Clearly, our national priorities need to be re-examined.
While the politicians play partisan games with our tax dollars, the nation’s critical infrastructure—both the physical foundations of the nation and the figurative foundations of our freedoms—continues to be neglected and deprioritized in favor of grandstanding, bloated military budgets on endless wars abroad, foreign aid to shore up the infrastructure and military defenses of international allies, and all manner of graft and pork barrel spending.
When all is said and done, the bread-and-circus distractions and sleight-of-hand political theater being trotted out in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms adds nothing of real value to the lives of the average American.
It’s time to fix what’s broken in this country.
For starters, we need an overhaul of the nation’s infrastructure.
According to Time magazine, “Throughout the country, millions of Americans don’t have access to or can’t afford broadband internet service. In excess of 2 million people live without running water or basic plumbing. For too long, the American public has had to carry on while these deficiencies have gone unattended. The political will has been weak or inattentive, the rewards too far removed from electoral advantage.”
In other words, the politicians who dance to the tune of the oligarchic elite aren’t motivated to do anything about our failing infrastructure because they get nothing out of it: no votes, no money, no power.
This isn’t about whether the Republicans or Democrats have better policies.
Indeed, both parties’ priorities are disconcertingly alike: both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
This is about the plight of the American people who continue to be treated like a permanent underclass.
Anyone who believes that this presidential election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naive, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”
When a country spends close to $10 billion to select what is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or queen to occupy the White House, while 38 million of its people live in poverty, and nearly 7 million Americans are out of work, and more than 600,000 Americans are homeless, that’s a country whose priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.
Overhauling the nation’s infrastructure will take a significant amount of money, which won’t happen as long as the U.S. government continues to fund the military industry complex and its voracious appetite for endless wars.
