Infrastructure

Hurricane Season Is Here, Now

We’re marking the first day of hurricane season by calling attention to two pieces of legislation in Congress that could, with popular support, become enacted and result in jobs and new infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. We’re also wondering when our busy president is going to turn his attention to New Orleans and other communities along the Gulf Coast stricken by hurricanes and endangered by coastal erosion and weakened flood protection systems. We know he’s had his hands full, but we’ve been waiting . . .

National Train Day: All Aboard for a Retro- and Pre-Celebration

Usually we call attention to events before they happen, but today we’re retro-celebrating National Train Day that somehow sped past us like a high-speed Amtrak Acela and was gone before we even knew it was coming. On May 9 the second annual Train Day celebrated “140 years of connecting travelers from coast to coast.” (Cool fact: It was on May 10, 1869, that the ceremonial Golden Spike joined the rails of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah, thus completing the Transcontinental Railroad.) So, we’re celebrating a few weeks after the fact, and more than 11 months in advance of the third annual National Train Day.

Get Congress on Track to Stimulate Mass Transit

Elana Schor at TalkingPointsMemo.com reports that the economic recovery package being considered in the House of Representatives gives “only $10 billion for rail and other public transportation projects, compared with $30 billion for roads.” The Senate Appropriations Committee is considering even less for mass transit projects: $9.5 billion. In a package projected to cost $825 billion, in a nation where public transit has been shortchanged for over a decade, that just ain’t enough. The U.S. spends about $12 billion each month in Iraq. Ten billion is as much as has been given to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (each) in the $700 billion bailout for banks and insurers—and only one-fifth of what Citigroup is getting.

Coastal Restoration Geeks Unite!

If our travel budget were not already AWOL, we would be landing in Lake Charles right about now for the Chenier Plain Symposium Jan. 8–9 hosted by the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. Many of the major people in coastal restoration will be there, talking about some technical but very important topics, such as the function of wetlands in damping down hurricane storm surges and about how Louisiana needs multiple lines of defense.

‘Surrounded by Water’ Now at Historic New Orleans Collection

In New Orleans last week we visited an excellent exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection on Royal Street, “Surrounded by Water: New Orleans, the Mississippi River & Lake Pontchartrain.” As usual with the HNOC, you get the best of archival maps and photographs of Louisiana with detailed explanations, a French Quarter-cum-Oxford University Press approach to any subject they take up.

A Reply to ‘Obama Our Infrastructure Hero’: Letter from a New Orleans engineer/blogger

In reply to “Barack, You’re Totally Our Infrastructure Hero” (below), our friend Tim Ruppert of Tim’s Nameless Blog points out that in fact the infrastructure part of Obama’s economic agenda doesn’t appear till near the end of the plan. Also, the senator doesn’t mention the words ‘Katrina,’ ‘levees,’ ‘flood,’ ‘Corps of Engineers,’ etc. (Tim Ruppert is a New Orleans–born engineer at the Corps of Engineers, N.O., and a past president of the Louisiana chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers.)

Barack, You’re Totally Our Infrastructure Hero!

At a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisc., on Feb. 13, Barack Obama “turned it down a notch” and gave a major policy address that laid out a broad agenda for reinforcement of the American economy. The plan would restore a measure of economic balance and stability, create infrastructure and renewable-energy jobs, and many other necessary and ambitious undertakings. The speech is substantive and shows Senator Obama’s seriousness and grasp of economic reality and possibility. Optimism and realism together. We’re delighted to see at least one of the three major candidates offering serious solutions to infrastructure and environmental degradation (as John Edwards also did). See excerpts from Obama’s speech below the fold.

John Edwards for President 2008

It is not often we wish we lived in New Hampshire (nice place to visit), but we sorely wish we could be there on Tuesday to ‘vote early and often’ for John Edwards. Although we do not at all dislike the prospect of a President Obama, and though the nation would be in good hands if any one of the four Democratic candidates in Saturday’s New Hampshire debate were to win the White House, we have long preferred the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate and former senator from North Carolina. (Edwards/Obama? In what order? The ‘change’ candidates could alternate being president/vice president.)

Grinch Wins Plastic Turkey Award: Pentagon Demands Repayment of Disabled Vets’ Signing Bonuses

Pittsburgh’s KDKA reports that the Defense Department is demanding that thousands of disabled U.S. soldiers return parts of their signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments. They had to go and get blown up so bad the army couldn’t patch them up well enough to push ’em back out on the streets of Baghdad as they do with other wounded soldiers. It is well known that the army has had to resort to signing bonuses of up to $30,000 to attract new soldiers to an increasingly unpopular war (though the army continues to fall short of its recruiting goals).

Celebrate! Good News for Water Works! (A One-Two Punch for The Decider)

Within two days, the two chambers of the U.S. Congress have voted to override the president’s veto of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA)—the first water projects bill in seven years (normally passed every two years), and the first override of a presidential veto since 1998. Today the Senate voted 79 to 14—an overwhelming margin similar to that of the House’s 361 to 54—to authorize spending levels for about 900 projects nationwide, including about $7 billion for Louisiana coastal restoration and flood protection. Bruce Alpert of the Times-Picayune notes, “Congress still must approve individual appropriations to get the work done.”

Endless war, unpopular war—something’s got to give

Never mind the small token troop reductions the president mentioned Thursday night. The Bush administration has no intention of ever withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq-indeed, Cheney and other neocons want to deepen the blood-quagmire by striking Iran (see below)-but something has got to give. The war is costing $10 to $12 billion per month when the nation is already perilously in debt because of massive high-end tax cuts. But we refuse to be told, “No, you can’t have sturdy infrastructure because the money’s tight-we’re at war.” If that were an honest argument, the White House or Congress would move to reverse some of the Bush tax cuts, share the sacrifice. But no.

America’s Infrastructure: And Unto Dust We Shall Return?

Our friends at the American Society of Civil Engineers are concerned like everyone else about the catastrophic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. ASCE is calling attention to the degraded condition of America’s roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, and proposes an Action Plan for the 110th Congress, including the establishment of a National Infrastructure Commission.

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