Aug 27, 2006 
This goes with the last post, on the failures of conservative ideology –
Chuck McCutcheon writes in The Seattle Times:
A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.
None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country’s basic operating systems are deteriorating.
“When I see events like these, I become concerned that we’ve lost focus on the core operational functionality of the nation’s infrastructure and are becoming a fragile nation, which is just as bad — if not worse — as being an insecure nation,” said Christian Beckner, a Washington analyst who runs the respected Web site Homeland Security Watch (www.christianbeckner.com).
The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation “D” for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.
“I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm,” said Casey Dinges, the society’s managing director of external affairs.
Maintaining infrastructure is one of the big weaknesses of the rightie “free market” religion. That’s becaue there’s no profit in maintaining infrastructure; it’s all cost. Therefore, private companies want someone else to do it. And I don’t blame them; maintaining infrastructure is a responsibility of government. But conservatives don’t want government to do it, either, unless they can make it part of a nice pork-barrel project or award the contract to a campaign contributor. I’ve ranted about this before.
Our crumbling infrastructure puts citizens’ lives at risk. It also makes us more vulnerable to disaster, both natural and man-made.
The Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report that facilities are deteriorating “at an alarming rate.” …
… “There’s a growing understanding that these programs are at best inefficient and at worst corrupt,” said Everett Ehrlich, executive director of the CSIS public infrastructure commission.
Ehrlich and others cite several reasons for the lack of action:
• The political system is geared to reacting to crises instead of averting them.
• Some politicians don’t see infrastructure as a federal responsibility.
• And many problems are out of sight and — for the public — out of mind.
And, of course, our Republican budget deficit means we don’t have the money to fix what needs fixing. One of these days we’re going to wake up and realize we’re not living in a rich country after all.
See also RJ Eskow on “The Third-World-ization of the USA.”
Unrelated: Digby has your Sunday night reading assignment.
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