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11 Deeply Alarming Facts About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

Source: Michael Snyder, Guest Post

 

 

No matter what your particular political perspective is, if there is one thing that virtually everyone in the United States can agree upon it is the fact that America’s infrastructure is crumbling.  Previous generations of Americans conquered an entire continent and erected the greatest system of infrastructure that the world had ever seen, but now thousands upon thousands of those extremely impressive infrastructure projects are decades old and in desperate need of repair or upgrading.  The near catastrophic failure of the Oroville Dam is a perfect example of what I am talking about.  We should be constructing the next generation of infrastructure projects for our children and our grandchildren, but instead we are in such sorry shape that we can’t even keep up with the maintenance and upkeep on the great infrastructure projects that have been handed down to us.Once upon a time nobody on the entire planet could even come close to matching our infrastructure, but now our crumbling infrastructure has become a joke to much of the rest of the industrialized world.  Sadly, this is just another symptom of our long-term economic collapse.  We simply are not able to put as much of our money toward infrastructure as previous generations of Americans did, and as a result we have a giant mess on our hands.  The following are 11 deeply alarming facts about America’s crumbling infrastructure…

#1 According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, nearly 56,000 bridges in the United States are currently “structurally deficient”.  What makes that number even more chilling is the fact that vehicles cross those bridges a total of 185 million times a day.

#2 More than one out of every four bridges in the United States is more than 50 years old and “have never had major reconstruction work”.

#3 America does not have a single airport that is considered to be in the top 25 in the world.

#4 The average age of America’s dams is now 52 years.

#5 Not too long ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the condition of America’s dams a “D” grade.

#6 Overall, the American Society of Civil Engineers said that the condition of America’s infrastructure as a whole only gets a “D+” grade.

#7 Congestion on our highways costs Americans approximately 101 billion dollars a year in wasted fuel and time.

#8 According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, over two-thirds of our roads are “in dire need of repair or upgrades”.

#9 In order to completely fix all of our roads and bridges, it would take approximately 808 billion dollars.

#10 Federal spending on infrastructure has decreased by 9 percent over the past decade.

#11 According to Bloomberg, it is being projected “that by 2025, shortfalls in infrastructure investment will subtract as much as $3.9 trillion from U.S. gross domestic product.”

The quality of our infrastructure affects all of our lives every single day.  For instance, we all simply take it for granted that safe, clean drinking water is going to come out of our taps, but recent events have shown that is not necessarily always going to be the case.

Just ask the residents of Flint, Michigan.

Water pipes, sewer systems and water treatment facilities all over the nation are aging and are in desperate need of repair.  Of course the exact same thing could be said about our power grid.  It was never intended to handle so many people, and on the hottest days of the summer the strain on the grid is very evident.

And of course the power grid is exceedingly vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse event, and this is something that I covered in my book on getting prepared.  It has been projected that it would only cost a couple billion dollars to harden the grid against an EMP event, but our politicians refuse to spend the money.

Meanwhile, President Trump is completely correct when he says that our airports look like something that you would see in a third world country.  Most of our airports are at least several decades old, and they are definitely showing their age.

But things are even worse when you look at other systems of mass transit around the country.  While other nations such as Japan and China are investing huge amounts of money into high speed rail, we are doing next to nothing even though what we currently have is absolutely pathetic.

I could go on and talk about our ports, schools, waterways, parks, etc. but I think that you get the point.

President Trump’s instincts are right on the money when he says that he wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure.  Without a doubt, we desperately need it.

The problem is that we are flat broke.

We are 20 trillion dollars in debt, and we are adding more than a trillion dollars to that total every year.

So where are we going to get the money?

It is easy for liberals to say that we should raise taxes, but how much more are you going to squeeze out of U.S. consumers?  Two-thirds of the country is living paycheck to paycheck, and we just learned that U.S. household debt has risen to a grand total of 12.58 trillion dollars.

Once upon a time, America was the wealthiest nation on the entire planet and we could afford to construct bold, new infrastructure projects from sea to shining sea.

But today we have the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world and we can’t even afford to repair what we already have.

When I speak of our long-term economic collapse, this is precisely the sort of thing that I am talking about.  We have clearly been in decline for a very long time, and anyone that would suggest otherwise is simply not being honest with you.

Source: 11 Deeply Alarming Facts About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

Greenwald on DNC: Pelosi and Schumer Leading Collapsed Party of Shills

Source: Zero Hedge

Glenn Greenwald appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Wednesday for yet another truth bombing after The Intercept co-founder, attorney, and author penned an article on the deeply flawed DNC’s inability to cope with loss. As Greenwald and others have pointed out since the election, Democrats seem to have a major problem with introspection. I get it – admitting fault means being wrong, and for a party built upon emotionalism and condescending moralization instead of facts and common sense, being wrong strips the self-righteous DNC of the one argument they’ve built their entire platform on; we’re right because we say we are.

From Greenwald’s article:

 A failed, collapsed party cannot form an effective resistance. Trump did not become president and the Republicans do not dominate virtually all levels of government because there is some sort of massive surge in enthusiasm for right-wing extremism. Quite the contrary: This all happened because the Democrats are perceived — with good reason — to be out of touch, artificial, talking points-spouting automatons who serve Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the agenda of endless war, led by millionaires and funded by oligarchs to do the least amount possible for ordinary, powerless citizens while still keeping their votes.

Source: Glenn Greenwald Tells Truth About DNC: Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer Leading Collapsed Party of Shills

Air pollution linked to 2.7 million premature births a year. #auspol

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As many as 2.7 million premature births a year – 18% of the global total – can be linked to outdoor air pollution, a study in Environment International found

jpratt27

Air pollution linked to 2.7 million premature births a year

Policymakers should tackle particulates at source to prevent infant deaths and lifelong disabilities, say researchers

Traffic fumes, slash-and-burn farming and open wood stoves are raising the risk of babies being born before they are ready.

As many as 2.7 million premature births a year – 18% of the global total – can be linked to outdoor air pollution, a study in Environment International found.

When women give birth at less than 37 weeks, their offspring are more likely to die in infancy or suffer from learning difficulties, hearing and sight problems through their life.

“This study highlights that air pollution may not just harm people who are breathing the air directly – it may also seriously affect a baby in its mother’s womb,” said Chris Malley, lead author of the study.

Previous research, mainly in the US and Europe, has…

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Former EPA Senior Scientist Confirms Fluoride Lowers Children’s IQ

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In 2012, a major Harvard study found that public water fluoridation poses a risk to the developing intelligence of children, essentially lowering the IQ of those in communities with public water fluoridation. This study invigorated the public debate on this issue, yet, fluoridation continues, despite the known risks, and all the while, scientific evidence continues mounts in the case against fluoride.

Openhearted Rebel

By Alex Pietrowski, Waking Times

Ostensibly, the purpose of adding the fluoride to public drinking water supplies is to improve dental health in the community, yet even the U.S. Government had to modify this claim by lowering the national fluoride levels in 2015, citing increases in dental fluorosis.

In 2012, a major Harvard study found that public water fluoridation poses a risk to the developing intelligence of children, essentially lowering the IQ of those in communities with public water fluoridation. This study invigorated the public debate on this issue, yet, fluoridation continues, despite the known risks, and all the while, scientific evidence continues mounts in the case against fluoride.

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Chlorine in drinking water first linked to heart attacks and stroke in the 1960s & now cancer … so why is it still in our drinking water?

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Numerous studies are showing a link between chlorine intake and cancer, heart attacks and other negative health effects. So why is it still in our drinking water?

Rangitikei Enviromental Health Watch

Look at the independent research people. Water supplies world wide are producing negative health effects with major scares going on. Chlorine is the new sticking plaster for all the polluted waterways. However it is carcinogenic. We are being slowly poisoned. Many families will not know this, and many if they do know, will not be able to afford to filter it out. See our Water pages and share this information. 
EnvirowatchRangitikei

(NaturalHealth365)

Numerous studies are showing a link between chlorine intake and cancer, heart attacks and other negative health effects.

This occurs when chlorine byproducts trigger harmful free radicals in the body and inhibit other cellular processes. While drinking water with chlorination causes the most damage, cooking and bathing with it can also expose you to negative health effects.  Keep in mind, the lungs and skin can be just as sensitive as internal organs.

Showering in chlorinated water poses…

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The Assassination of Julius Caesar: Parallels with Trump

The Assassination of Julius Caesar

Michael Parenti (2012)

Film Review

In this presentation, Michael Parenti discusses the fraudulent history we are taught about the late Roman Republic. In particular, he focuses on the popular resistance movement that led to the rise of the Populares in the Roman senate in the second century BC. The revolt of the Roman proletariat was largely a reaction to the privatization of Rome’s collective agricultural lands as latifundia (plantations owned by Roman aristocrats). Historically there was no private land ownership in Rome until thugs hired by aristocrats drove the peasants off their land around 200 BC.

Parenti starts by demolishing the myth promulgated by mainstream historians that Rome was a republic. The Roman senate was a self-appointed oligarchy. For the most part Roman senators paid no taxes though. Instead they loaned money at interest to the Roman government (sound familiar?). The lower classes, in contrast, were heavily taxed.

The first great Populares to serve as consul was Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC. He and his brother Gaius, who succeeded him, fought for land reform to break up the latifundia and redistribute them to the landless. Despite their aristocratic background, all the Populares consuls challenged a Roman economic system that was rigged in favor of the elites All were assassinated by aristocratic death squads.

Julius Caesar would be the last Populares consul, and he, too, would be assassinated in 44 BC. Among the reforms he enacted were

Lowering interest and fines on debts
Building exceptional public libraries to be used by all Roman citizens
Guaranteeing freedom of religion to Roman Jews
Ending the practice of forcing people with unpaid debts into slavery
Introducing a democratic constitution
Creating state jobs in Rome and the colonies for the unemployed
Ending Cicero’s* witch hunts and extrajudicial executions

The aristocrats in the senate, who detested Caesar because he threatened their wealth and privilege, responded by labeling him a brutal tyrant and assassinating him. Ironically the emperors who succeeded him were far more tyrannical. Yet the senate aristocrats supported them as they protected their wealth and privilege.

What strikes me most about this presentation are the clear parallels with the current period, with the liberal elite and intelligence establishment portraying Trump as an unspeakable fascist tyrant based on little evidence other than his rhetoric. I’m aware that much of the liberal establishment is justifiably frightened of the ultraconservative bent of Trump’s appointees. However most of the strident anti-Trump rhetoric seems over the top to me.

For me the two main ways the parallels break down are 1) the absence of a genuine reform movement from below similar to the Roman resistance movement that led to the formation of the Populares 2) the absence in Trump of the towering intelligence, charisma and military and political ingenuity that Caesar displayed. Trump’s lack of political experience raises the vital question whether he or his conservative cabinet will be in control. Despite his promise of numerous populist reforms, I’m extremely skeptical whether the prominent conservatives in his cabinet support them.

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul on Michael Flynn’s Resignation

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Two excellent commentaries from the left (the true left – not the CIA infiltrated faux left) and right. Kucinich has an especially strong reaction to the illegal wiretapping of Flynn and the desire of the military intelligence complex to disrupt Trump’s rapprochement with Russia.

Stop Making Sense

The first video features former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich during his appearance on FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria. The second video features former Republican Congressman Ron Paul in conversation with Daniel McAdams. Both men, who often came together when serving in the U.S. Congress, give their views on Michael Flynn’s resignation and the who is most likely to benefit from the scandal. (Fox Business/Liberty Report)

The Leakers Who Exposed General Flynn’s Lie Committed Serious — and Wholly Justified — Felonies
After Michael Flynn’s Resignation, Surveillance Defenders Suddenly Care About Wiretap Abuse
Trump and Spicer Blame Russia Scandal on ‘Illegal Leaks’ Rather Than Lies by Senior Officials
Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
Pence learned Flynn had misled him after Washington Post story
Trump knew for weeks Michael Flynn misled over Russia contact
White House was warned about Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russia, say sources
What Did Trump…

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Nixon Advisor: War on Drugs Invented to Crush Anti-War and Black Movements

By Carey Wedler at theantimedia.org

In 1994, a former Nixon policy adviser admitted the War on Drugs was waged not to keep Americans safe, but to crush dissent. According to John Ehrlichman, who served time in prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, the Drug War was intended to disempower anti-war and black rights movements in the 1970s.

Author Dan Baum wrote in the April edition of Harper’s Magazine that in 1994, he spoke with now-deceased Ehrlichman, who frankly explained why President Nixon pushed prohibition:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This approach was, in fact, not new in American government. Henry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics — a precursor to the DEA — saw drugs and marijuana as a race-based threat. He often perpetuated bigoted notions not about about African-Americans and heroin, but weed:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others,” he famously said. He also claimed “[r]eefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” With regard to war, Anslinger insisted marijuana “leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.” Though Anslinger was found to be dishonest — his department was caught fabricating figures in an attempt to prove prohibition stopped drug use and to prove marijuana was unhealthy — his basic prejudiced notions persisted for decades.

Whereas Anslinger reigned from the 1930s to the early 1960s pushing racist, anti-marijuana propaganda, the modern drug war, launched in 1971, was all but certainly a pointed attempt to quell popular uprisings. With the baby boomer generation actively opposing the war in Vietnam (along with behemoth figures in the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X speaking out against it), the government needed an avenue to neutralize that dissent.

Intense African American rioting in cities across the country, first over institutionalized racism and then over the assassination of King in the spring of 1968, drew the iron fist of police forces and the National Guard. Shortly after, the United States government acted swiftly to crush the uprising: it passed the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which both ramped up police presence in the United States and instituted gun control; many rioters had brought guns to protest, often against police brutality. The ‘anti-crime’ bill was passed two months before tens of thousands of anti-war protesters descended upon the Democratic National Convention.

The War on Drugs, as Ehrlichman admitted, was a thinly-veiled effort to clamp down on the inherently anti-authoritarian features of both anti-war and black movements. Only three years after the federal government cracked down on riots, Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs — and it proved effective at attaining the goals Ehrlichman shared with Baum in 1994.

As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, has explained:

“People are swept into the criminal justice system — particularly in poor communities of color — at very early ages … typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes. [The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they’re released, they’re relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement … Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you’ve been branded a felon.”

The federal government did not need to make as great as an effort to associate marijuana with the anti-war movement. Anslinger had already declared that marijuana turned people into pacifists, a reality that appeared to parallel the burgeoning anti-war movement. . .

Source: Nixon Advisor Admitted War on Drugs Invented to Crush Anti-War and Black Movements

United States FBI spies on environmentalists

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The FBI is investigating political activists campaigning against the Dakota Access pipeline, diverting agents charged with preventing terrorist attacks to instead focus their attention on indigenous activists and environmentalists.

Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video from the USA says about itself:

14 February 2017

The FBI is investigating political activists campaigning against the Dakota Access pipeline, diverting agents charged with preventing terrorist attacks to instead focus their attention on indigenous activists and environmentalists.

The Guardian has established that multiple officers within the FBI’s joint terrorism task force have attempted to contact at least three people tied to the Standing Rock “water protector” movement in North Dakota.

Read more here.

Related articles



[image error] The F.B.I. Is Reportedly Investigating Dakota Access Pipeline Protestors As Terrorists


[image error] Photographer Mico Toledo documents the defiant protestors of Standing Rock


[image error] Kellyanne Conway referred to a terror attack that never occurred as a catalyst for Trump’s immigration ban


[image error] More fake news: No, the Trump administration is not going to remove all vaccine-related information from the CDC website, but that doesn’t mean science advocates shouldn’t worry [Respectful Insolence]

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Trump Silent on TiSA (TPP on Steroids)

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Email from Trade for People and Planet Team:

Dear Corporate Greed Resisters,

The Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) is currently being negotiated among 50 countries with the objective of expanding on the existing General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

While President Trump has had a lot to say about the TPP and NAFTA, he has not offered public comment on TiSA, which thus far has major provisions to deregulate and privatize the international service economy, including the financial industry and big data.

Deborah James, Director of International Programs for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has clearly outlined Trump’s likely incentives to continue with TiSA negotiations. She reminds us that Trump is not against corporate-driven trade agreements. So you can bet that corporations are actively lobbying in Washington for deregulation and privatization, which Trump and his cabinet are actively seeking to implement domestically. Finally, TiSA is focused on services and not necessarily manufacturing, meaning that opposition from manufacturing workers may be lower as the agreement is focused on the service economy.

Here is where things gets scary. Team TiSA – a consortium of multinational financial, logistics, and big data corporations – are looking to set severe limits on how governments can regulate economies domestically while providing strict investor rights provisions. Deborah James outlined ten aspects of TiSA that have been accepted by all parties or are under negotiations that could have significant consequences:

Companies are expanding the category of “services” in order to make it all-encompassing so that the agreement could apply as broadly within the economy as possible.
Offshoring and outsourcing of jobs and downward pressure on wages could greatly accelerate as TiSA would lock in labor, tax, and regulatory arbitrage.
Not only would TiSA promote offshoring of jobs, but it would also greatly expand domestic “inshoring.” Foreign contractors (say from Japan) would be able to bring in workers (say from Philippines) to conduct work inside a consumer country (say the United States) on terms well below the minimum local pay and standards.
The TiSA does not include a labor chapter, and in fact the draft texts only mention labor rights once.
Preventing governments at the national, state, and even municipal levels from supporting local business and local employment.
The principle of “technological neutrality which TiSA negotiators take as a given would have immeasurable job impacts particularly with regard to the “gig” economy. So if a country opened its market to passenger transport services, it could not apply new and different rules to Uber than to traditional taxicabs.
Job loss as a result of privatization would increase as publicly owned utilities would have to compete under the same rules as private companies, reducing the benefits of public ownership, resulting in the elimination of jobs that inevitably follows privatization.
The financial services text of the TiSA is the closest thing imaginable to a guarantee of another job-killing financial crisis. If the draft texts were accepted, the TiSA would constrain governments from implementing most of the regulations that are recognized, both domestically and internationally, as essential to prevent another global financial crisis.
Workers would have to shoulder even more of the tax burden as corporate tax evasions would accelerate.
The TiSA could potentially be used as the basis of a foreign company’s claim against the United States.

For more details on each point, read Deborah James’s entire article here.

The jury is still out on what the actual contents of the agreement will be under the new administration. However, we do know that the TiSA has been and continues to be a notably secretive agreement with no transparency or public participation. Check out this article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to learn about their proposals to create inclusive and transparent trade negotiations.

We also know that Congress gave the presidency Fast Track authority under Obama, and this authority has been inherited by President Trump. According to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch Director Lori Wallach, this means that “Congress has empowered Trump to unilaterally launch NAFTA renegotiations or create bilateral deals with Mexico and Canada; determine the contents, sign and enter into deals before Congress gets a vote; and then write implementing legislation and force congressional consideration in 90 days with amendments forbidden and Senate supermajority rules suspended.” This applies to TiSA as well and is why we were so adamant about pressuring Congress to reject Fast Track in the first place.

Please take a minute and resend this email to 2-5 people. The people need to know what is behind TiSA!

Join our weekly National People’s Agenda Call next Wednesday, Feb. 22 at 9pm EST/ 6pm PST. We need to work together to stop TiSA from passing and to fight the consolidation of the global deregulatory and privatizing machine.

Click here to register for the call.

More Links

TISA Leak Reveals 10 Key Threats to Commonsense Financial Regulations by Ben Beachy, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
TPP and TTIP are not dead: now they’re called the Trade In Services Agreement by Pete Dolack in The Ecologist
Leaked TISA Safe Harbor Proposal: the Right Idea in the Wrong Place by Jeremy Malcolm, Electronic Frontier Foundation
The new TTIP? Meet TISA, the ‘secret privatisation pact that poses a threat to democracy’ by Ian Johnston

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