Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Infrastructure
Audio Transcripts
08/08/07
[Start Program]
(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)
Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.
I believe that it was Benjamin Franklin that once penned this little ditty in Poor Richard’s Almanac…
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The magical watchword for these past few weeks is INFRASTRUCTURE! It is the backbone of any operation; any body of government; any social institution. This is what keeps things moving.
And here’s the problem… much like Ben Franklin’s ditty about a missing horseshoe nail, nobody really gives a crap about infrastructure UNTIL it starts to break down! And then we panic about it! We don’t know what to do!
I’m serious about this, folks, because I’ve actually seen it happen repeatedly!
You turn on the news and what do you hear? Air travel delays! Monstrous, unbearable, inhuman delays!
Flights are overbooked, too many planes are at the airport, and all that it takes is a thunderstorm at one of the major cities to turn air passengers across the country into grounded hostages by nameless, faceless air traffic controllers who keep planes locked in position on the tarmac for HOURS at a time! Toilets get backed up, the air conditioning gets turned off, planes run out of food and drink before takeoff… and they can’t go anywhere. They’re stuck. They are literally held HOSTAGE without any legal rights or recourse whatsoever. And all that it takes is a rainstorm to screw things over not just in that city, but for much of the country!
And everybody has a convenient target to point at. There are not enough airports. Too many airlines. Not enough air traffic controllers. Badly outdated computer equipment. But nobody wants to come out and say what the real problem is.
The real problem is that the whole INFRASTRUCTURE for the air travel service is falling apart!
You have too many planes and too many people wanting to fly on them! Big business wants to spend the time and money to build new planes, but nobody wants to pay for and replace the technology needed to keep all those planes from crashing into each other. And the way the infrastructure is set up now for it, many of these airports simply cannot AFFORD to shut down to do that sort of changeover anyway!
And of course nobody wants to say what needs to be done by consumers to force these changes. Nobody except yours truly that is. If you don’t like the travel delays and being held hostage at the tarmac, then STOP FLYING! Stay at home. The fewer people who decide to fly means that there are fewer planes in the air. That gives the airports time to get their act together.
Same thing with DRIVING! The price of gas continues to go up and up and up, and we continue to get raped at the gas pumps, and our gas prices are still supposedly determined by something going on in all of these unstable areas of the world. And I don’t just mean the unstable nations. I’m also referring to the unstable people on the futures market on Wall Street and the dickheads who decided that our nation’s energy resources should be on a hypersensitive hyperactive system of speculation. That’s like giving an epileptic a vial of nitroglycerin and then feeding him nothing but chocolate.
The refineries are over two decades old and NOBODY wants to build a new refinery. The pipelines are even older than that and NOBODY wants to replace those! All it takes is a hurricane in just the right spot and America’s energy resources are shut down! And guess what? We actually SAW that happen in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina!
But we still keep on driving. We continue to buy gas-chugging urban assault vehicles. We continue to complain about the unstable gas prices. The whole INFRASTRUCTURE is coming apart, but we don’t want to do anything about it. We will point fingers at everyone except OURSELVES, because WE are the ones that need to simply STOP DRIVING!
Sleepy little small bedroom towns become big metropolitan areas in just a couple of years. And that actually SHOCKS people! What they don’t realize is that you have these rich developers that see a square inch of grass and they buy it and turn it into a subdivision and mini-mall. And then they repeat the process over and over and over again!
And these developers that make a fortune turning these sleepy little small towns into metropolitan monstrosities absolutely do not give a crap about how that affects the community! You know why? Not their job! That’s the job of the small town politicians who have their heads back in the past when things used to be simple and easy.
I’ve lived in several small towns in my life and I have personally seen the process repeat itself over and over and over again! Everybody thinks that it is neat to have new subdivisions pop up, and to suddenly have five Wal-Mart supercenters in your area, and to actually have a mega-mall… but nobody realizes that when you bring in five thousand new families, each with two-point-five kids, that you have give them power, and water, and sewers, and schools. And you CERTAINLY can’t expect them to all drive the same outdated roads and bridges!
And NOW… hey, speaking of roads and bridges… we now have to deal with that infrastructure problem as well! A major traffic bridge in Minneapolis just collapses out of the blue! Five people are confirmed dead and possibly eight more are missing and presumed dead. Over a hundred people were injured in the collapse. Before that, there was a major steam pipe eruption in New York City. And now, as of the other day, there’s a mine shaft collapse in Utah.
And everyone is looking for reasons, when they simply don’t understand that the reason has been before them all this time. Nobody is watching the INFRASTRUCTURE!
We have roads and bridges all across America that are crumbling. We have water and sewer and steam and power lines in our major cities that are old and they are breaking down and either the cities can’t afford to replace them or they’re not in a position to where they can be replaced. The City of Atlanta actually decided that it was cheaper for the taxpayers to pay millions of dollars in court fines instead of fixing their deteriorating sewer system, and now it will cost taxpayers millions more to do both. So we have deal with sinkholes and continual potholes… because it’s easier for us to simply throw a patch on them than to do what is needed to really fix them. Nobody wants to be diverted fifteen miles out of their way and construction crews certainly don’t like working at 3am so as to not inconvenience the commuters.
THAT is what it has become, folks… a matter of CONVENIENCE!
Hey, speaking of infrastructure… look at our economy! The neo-cons continue to utter this mantra about how much the economy has grown, but let’s look at what has been behind it. We had low interest rates – because of the recession in 2001 – fueling this huge push for people to buy houses. EVERYONE needs to buy a home! That’s the mantra, and I’m still hearing that crap from people today! Mind you, these are the same people who told me that I should sell my car once I paid the car loan off, just for the sake of getting into a new car loan. Everyone needs to buy a home! Oh and don’t worry, there are PLENTY of people willing to help you get that home loan so you can buy that home. Sure you’ll be in debt for thirty years, but, HEY, you’ll have a HOME!
People took advantage of the rising housing prices and low interest rates to refinance their homes. THAT is where the extra income came from for many middle-class Americans. It wasn’t because of better jobs. It was because they refinanced their homes.
Well guess what? Not all of those loans were good ones. Some folks ended up with a loan that started to get more and more expensive once the interest rates went back up. There are plenty of folks right now who are finding their payments have grown right out of their means to pay them. In the next few years you’re going to hear more and more talk about bankruptcy and foreclosures, and what folks don’t realize is that our government has CHANGED the bankruptcy laws and CHANGED the banking laws to better protect the institutions so they will continue to get their money.
Personal savings are as low as they were in the 1920’s, while personal debt is running extremely high. We are all putting our futures on credit, and I’m certainly no exception. We hear about low unemployment numbers, but do you REALLY know what they represent? I certainly know, but do you? We hear about new jobs being created, but how many of them were really temporary jobs to begin with? These things are NOT discussed in the ten-second soundbytes that the media give out, and they CERTAINLY are not mentioned by the neo-cons. If all you know is that our economy is doing well without figuring out HOW it got to be that way, then you won’t know when it will start to break down.
It’s all about the infrastructure.
Look at our government. We have a government that is more interested in passing new laws than in enforcing old ones. Sure it’s ego-driven… these grifters and shysters simply want to have THEIR NAME on these things… but they don’t even have the courtesy of revoking the old laws to make way for the new ones! You have redundancy on top of ever-expanding overlapping government agencies on top of more redundancy.
You have a political party that makes promises that they later refuse to keep, and another party that has become so corrupted with power and money that we wouldn’t trust them to babysit a well-fed turtle, much less the whole country! Their own infrastructures are breaking down, and nobody seems to realize it and nobody wants to pick an alternative.
Let’s get brutally honest here… there is infrastructure crumbling all around us, both figuratively and literally!
And at some point you gotta give a damn about it! At some point you have to swallow your pride and swallow your egotism and actually DO something to get it fixed!
There are only two times to fix up the infrastructure: BEFORE it becomes a problem and AFTER it becomes a problem. Fix it before it becomes a problem and you may piss people off and you may have to spend some tax money on something other than yourself. But fix it AFTER it becomes a problem and you not only piss off EVERYONE, but you may also have to deal with the loss of life BECAUSE of it… AND the cost of fixing it afterwards will be infinitely MORE expensive.
Just take a trip over to Minnesota, New York, or Utah if you need an example of that.
(Computer – some stuff)
(Fade Music In – “Who am I” by Peace Orchestra)
Did you ever wonder how the Roman Empire finally collapsed? This was THE great empire that conquered much of Europe two thousand years ago and set the stage for much of the Western society. It started as a republic, transformed into an empire, and it lasted for approximately one thousand years.
You know how it fell? It collapsed upon itself. It couldn’t protect its outposts, it couldn’t protect its citizens, and it couldn’t afford to keep all of their advances going. It failed to maintain its infrastructure.
I know this will piss off the neo-cons, but America is pretty much the modern-day version of the Roman Empire. We like to think of it as a noble republic, but, come on, we do take on that imperial tone at time.
The point I’m trying to make is this… if we want to outdo the Roman Empire, then we have to make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes that they did. We have to maintain our infrastructure. We have to remember that even the best of governments can be lost… all because they forgot to maintain their supply of nails.
(Pause)
Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!
(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)
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