All Fall Down: America the Crumbling

[unhappycamper]

All Fall Down: America the Crumbling
by Stephen Pizzo | Aug 3 2007 - 9:32am


I wonder how many of those Minnesota commuters were listening to news on their car radios as they approached the I-35W bridge Wednesday afternoon? Those who were probably had just listened to GOP members of the House urging their Democratic party colleagues to hurry up and pass legislation re-authorizing the "Terrorist Surveillance Act."

~snip~

Maybe that's what the victims thought was happening as the bridge collapsed under them Wednesday -- that "the terrorists" had struck again. After all, since 2001 terrorism has been about the only threat to American's safety, lives and wellbeing this administration mentions -- and they mention it often.

So, as those poor folks dropped 65 feet towards the Mississippi below, surely they must have figured that was the cause of their pending misfortune - terrorism.

Those who survived the fall quickly learned that it wasn't terrorism at all. What killed or almost killed those Americans wasn't al-Qaead but al-George and his administration's neglect, mismanagement, misdirection and mis-allocation of our nation's attention, priorities and resources.

The day before the I-35W span collapsed we learned that the war in Iraq will eventually drain the US treasury of somewhere between $1 to $2 trillion dollars. Not a dime of that will be available to perform critical, and already too-long delayed, repairs to the tens of thousands of bridges and overpasses that carry tens of millions of Americans every day.

~snip~

Wednesday's disaster wasn't terrorism. Al-Qaeda didn't take down that bridge. Nor will al-Qaeda bring down who knows how many other bridges, killing who knows how many more Americans in the years ahead. No it wasn't. The "terrorist" this time wasn't al-Qaeda. It was the Bush Administration, and Congress' misplaced priorities that killed those Americans Wednesday. It was the product of the fatal combination of imperial hubris, military/industrial primacy and the blind greed military spending it fosters once it gets on a roll.

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[Tempest]

1. We're paying for bridges in Iraq to get fixed

Doesn't that count for something?

[kestrel91316]

5. We're fixing bridges there so we don't have to fix them here.

[Tempest]

6. LOFL!!!!

Damn, I wish I had thought of that.

[ChicagoRonin]

2. The movie "Brazil" (1984)

Anyone remember this film? One of the subplots was that city infrastructure was badly run and maintained, and that disasters were blamed on "terrorists" even though civil incompetence was the real culprit.

[slackmaster]

3. Japan is so lucky we bombed the crap out of it in World War II

Most of their stuff isn't old enough to be falling apart yet.

[malaise]

4. Tax-cut death toll

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/tax_cut_death_toll?tx=3
<snip>
This year two Democratic Minnesotan legislatures passed a $4.18 billion transportation package. Minnesota's Republican governor vetoed it because he had taken a no-new-taxes pledge, Grover Norquist-style. That's just what conservative politicians do.

The original bill would have put over $8 billion toward highways, city, and county roads, and transit over the next decade. The bill he let passed spent much less.

Now four people are dead, and counting.


http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2007/08/02/6220/