Some thoughts on MN bridge disaster

Yesterday's events in St. Paul-Minneapolis were an appalling shock to the civic system, but the collapse of I-35 probably didn't surprise everyone. Back in 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a failing grade on the nation's rotting infrastructure, arguing that the U.S. needed to commit $1.6 trillion (and likely much more) toward shoring up our failing highways, bridges, dams, water systems, etc. This recent disaster joins the NYC steam tunnel explosion in making ASCE's case that a dramatic reinvestment must be made before such unprecedented collapses metastasize across the nation.

Back in 2005, ASCE gave the nation's bridges a "C grade," noting:

Between 2000 and 2003, the percentage of the nation's 590,750 bridges rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete decreased slightly from 28.5 percent to 27.1 percent. However, one in three urban bridges was classified as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, much higher than the national average. It will cost $9.4 billion a year for 20 years to eliminate all bridge deficiencies and long-term underinvestment is compounded by the lack of a federal transportation program.

For years folks at the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the National Priorities Project and many other budget and policy analysis and peace organizations have been arguing that the nation's permanent war economy is measurably harming our way of life. The spiritual damage of that commitment is hard to track but the practical impact of our preferential option for the pentagon has been by now well tabulated by the NPP and other groups which each year follow the federal governments declining investments in infrastructure and in human capital like health care and education. Their warnings have been too long ignored even as dreams of an end-of-cold-war peace dividend disspated--first before the juggernaut of the "two war" pentagon policy of the late '80s and '90s and now before the militarized war on terror. As a culture, as a nation, we remain committed to the primacy of military response in crafting our strategic and diplomatic future. Despite the billions piling up in debt that our grandchildren will be shouldering, we had somehow embraced the illusion that our war commitment was cost free, but the trillions spent on defense do mean trillions not spent on dams, bridges, schools, hospitals and more, as a wise Republican president once pointed out. (The same president whose farewell speech makes chilling reading through today's historical filter).

As Eisenhower noted in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [...] This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.