The Walls Are Falling Around Us

I opposed last year's infrastructure bonds in California, and I still oppose the way in which they were funded, but after yesterday's incident in Manhattan, it's clear that our infrastructure is crumbling and that 30 years of free-rider conservatism is to blame.

Wednesday, in New York, a pipe installed in 1924 finally gave way and ended up killing someone. Imagine that. They built things to last in those days, but I doubt anyone ever dreamed that they would have to last for nearly a century.

Rick Perlstein has been writing about what he calls "E. coli conservatism" for a while over at his blog the Big Con, where, among other things, he's chronicling the increasing incidence of ... sinkholes. That's right, these days it's quite common to be driving or walking along a street in Anytown USA and be suddenly sucked into the ground because of the neglected infrastructure of our towns and cities. You can read about it in local papers every day. Wednesday he wrote:

We've warned here again and again about the decrepitude of our underground infrastructure, about what happens when a nation consecrates itself to no higher domestic goal than the cutting of taxes. New York had a Republican mayor, in fact, who now spends his days boasting that he cut taxes 23 times. Cut spending, too, he's proud to say.

This is the legacy of the past 25 years of neglect. We shouldn't be relieved when we see a huge cloud of smoke and dust and find that it isn't "terrorism." It's a warning as important as a magenta terror alert or the rumblings of Michael Chertoff's gut. There is a price to pay for this free lunch the conservatives have been selling for the past 30 years and the bill is coming due.

America is in desperate need of a massive building program that it can't afford without shared sacrifice. And there's a robust minority political culture that believes everything is fine and we don't have to worry about it as long as we cut taxes. As if such an action will magically transform our infrastructure and make it all shiny and gleaming.

Conservatives would RATHER these things go to hell, so they can blame "irresponsible government" as use it as a pretext for privatization. Only they're the ones who have been irresponsible. As we know, all the privatizers do is rip off the government treasury, whether for work here or in Iraq (and thank goodness for our freshman Senators, who finally want to take a look at the out-of-control Iraq contracting). There's money for conservatives in handing out contracts to friends and allies, but no money in actually DOING THE WORK. We are on the verge of stories like yesterday's in New York all over the country, and something must be done - through the auspices of good government - to ensure public safety.