America's Physical Decline
America's Physical Decline
The Physical Decline of America is a Policy Choice
As US infrastructure continues to collapse it will only add to the dysfunctional society that the American public is growing increasingly familiar with.
On June 11th another vital piece of American infrastructure came crashing to the Earth when a fire damaged section of the I-95 roadway collapse, shutting down traffic in multiple directions.
Americans live not only with an increasingly precarious personal financial and saftey situations, but in a country where physical infrastructure is failing on a massive and ever-worsening scale. The neoliberal state is more concerned with giving infrastructure contracts for minor projects, like bike lanes in minority neighbourhoods, to Black owned businesses than it is with making sure the 46,000 structurally deficient bridges get repaired.
Each year the American Society of Civil Engineers puts together a ‘report card’ on the nation’s infrastructure. The cumulative grade in the most recent report was a terrible C-, while roadways received an even lower grade of D.
According to the report, over 43% of the American roadway system is in poor or mediocre condition. Over 17% of all travel done in the US by vehicle is on these poor roadways, less than 42% of which fall into the ‘good’ category as regards condition.
Another major poor grade is the D given to the nations dams and levees which protect 11 million people in the United States. Levee failures are common and sometimes catastrophic, as was witnessed during the May 2020 failure of the Edenville Dam in Michigan. This particular failure forced 10,000 people to relocate from their homes in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While every level of American government seemingly ignores the massive and systemic infrastructure problems at home, they are very much conerned with massive infrastructure projects in foreign nations and to the benefit of foreign peoples.
The US government has given tens of billions of dollars to the Jewish state, a state which has used that money to build out one some of the most comprehensive urban fabrics and public transit systems in the world. George H. W. Bush gave Israel 12 billion dollars in 1992 for these projects, while domestically he signed legislation to rip up railways and other infrastructure.
The American state can also find plenty of money to supply Ukraine with electricity infrastructure and other equipment in the midst of a war, and private US enterprise will even donate too!
The number of powergrid failures in the United States has doubled since 2014 and the overall reliability of the grid is at an all-time low. While on an individual basis Americans experience more electricity interuptions now than at any point since 1930.
The neoliberal Washington based empire can find any number of dollars and donations to fund a proxy war in Ukraine, but is content to allow Americans to live in darkness.
The American state under its current configuration, obsessed with foreign intervention and domestic abuse of native-born Americans, exists solely to service the neoliberal agenda, and not the American population, let alone the founding population.
Americans should ask themselves why their political class denies them world-class infrastructure and services (often declaring them to be socialist) while simultaneously spending untold billions to fund these services in Israel, Ukraine, Africa and further afield.
Yet neither the American state or capitalist class seem to care about the state of the American PowerGrid, roadways or levees.
The United States faces a 2.6 trillion dollar infrastructure spending gap over the coming decade, a gap which has grown by 359 billion dollars since 2017.
Even when the government steps in, such as the 550 billion dollars of spending passed in the bi-partisan infrastructure bill, it maintains an anti-White stance. Over 40% of this spending was allocated to historically disadvantaged (read minority) communities, despite several of the most native-born states such as Michigan, Maine and Idaho and New hampshire ranking among the worst in the nation for infrastructure quality.
The American state has 3 billion dollars to spend on refugee resettlement, 6.4 billion to spend on “refugee entrant assistance” and 309 million dollars to spend on illegal immigrants who cannot meet their own immigration court costs.
Not to mention a further 62 billion dollars set aside for special outlays for African Americans, not counting welfare and other services.
States make policy based on their immediate priorities, and the American state’s last priority is for safe high quality infrastructure for its population.