Minnesota Bridge Collapse: America Is Falling Apart...Literally
The collapse of the bridge
was not related to terrorism
There was no earthquake
or accident that triggered it
This made the disaster
more mundane and more insidious
The death and destruction was the result of
incompetence and indifference
For decades, social infrastructure in the US
has been starved of resources,
even as trillions of dollars have been funneled
into the pockets of a small layer of the population
Hundreds of billions are spent
every year on the US military,
but when it comes to the physical infrastructure
and basic social services,
adequate funds are never available
Capitalism & Catastrophic Failure
How can such things happen? How can it be possible that one minute you're driving home from work, or riding in a school bus with your friends or heading to a baseball game, and the next minute you're plummeting toward the Mississippi River as the bridge you're crossing suddenly collapses?
How, for that matter, can you be hurrying through Manhattan near Grand Central Station and suddenly a subterranean steam pipe explodes, sending a geyser hundreds of feet into the air and leaving a crater big enough to swallow a tow truck?
It's easier to understand disasters if they have proximate causes -- terrorism, earthquakes, tornados. It's much harder to get your mind around what happened during rush hour Wednesday evening in Minneapolis, when a busy downtown bridge across the river simply . . . collapsed.
As U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said at a news conference yesterday, in a pithy statement of the obvious, "Bridges in America should not fall down."
They shouldn't, but it's quite possible that more of them will. We should also expect that more steam pipes will blow, that water mains will burst, that dams will develop worrisome cracks and that sooner or later, probably during a heat wave, much of the country will suffer a crippling blackout.
Infrastructure Is Allowed to Decay
Officials said on Thursday that the collapse of the bridge was not related to terrorism, and there was no earthquake or accident that triggered the event.
Nick Coleman, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, commented that this made the disaster “worse than any of those things, because it was more mundane and more insidious: the death and destruction was the result of incompetence and indifference. In a word, it was avoidable.”
Such official incompetence and indifference occur within a definite context.
For decades, social infrastructure in the US has been starved of resources, even as trillions of dollars have been funneled into the pockets of a small layer of the population.
Hundreds of billions are spent every year on the US military, but when it comes to the physical infrastructure and basic social services, adequate funds are never available.
Minnesota was not so long ago considered one of the more socially progressive states in the country.
Its politics were dominated by the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, the state’s branch of the Democratic Party.
The twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were often cited for maintaining a superior—by American standards—social network, as well as a better-than-average physical infrastructure.
In recent years, the remnants of past reform policies have been abandoned in favor of the “free market” and fiscal austerity dogmas that dominate both the Democratic and Republican parties.
An integral part of the economic and social policies have effectively redistributed the national wealth from the bottom to the top, vastly enriching the uppermost social layers at the expense of the working class.
To the detriment of the material foundations of modern society - roads, bridges, levees, water, electricity - is the removal of virtually all legal restrictions and regulations on the profit-making activities of big business.
This includes the enforcing of basic safety standards and the monitoring of companies that repair bridges.
In the United States, there is no “erring on the side of safety.” Infrastructure is allowed to decay until it must be replaced, an accident occurs, or there is some business interest involved.
This can lead to tragic results. Just last month an underground steam pipe exploded in midtown Manhattan, killing one person and injuring dozens.
In 2003, as a result of an overburdened and under-maintained transmission grid, a major blackout cut off power to large sections of the Midwest and Northeast United States, as well as parts of Canada.
The same tendencies were also present two years ago in the virtual destruction of a major American city, New Orleans, in Hurricane Katrina.
For all the official talk about “securing the homeland,” the American people are more threatened by the neglect and incompetence of the government and the subordination of all social questions to the enrichment of a financial oligarchy than they are by terrorism.
I wonder if they privatised the safety contract work as we have done to our
railways with truly wonderful results..Hatfield ,Paddington...But hey lots
of tax payers money for the bosses and most importantly share holders. Then
pass laws that make corporate manslaughter only applicable to those at the
bottom of the line and we have the perfect model of the market in action.
Don't you just love to see capitalism at it's awe inspiring best