Open thread for night owls: Despite the statistics, 'the American commonwealth is ... impoverished'
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Jacob Bacharach at TruthDig writes—The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves: In September 2016, the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh caught on fire. Originally built in 1928 and last renovated in 1982, the bridge carries more than 50,000 vehicles a day anOpen thread for night owls: Despite the statistics, 'the American commonwealth is ... impoverished'
Jacob Bacharach at TruthDig writes—The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves: In September 2016, the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh caught on fire. Originally built in 1928 and last renovated in 1982, the bridge carries more than 50,000 vehicles a day and serves as a main commuter link between the city’s central business district and its populous southern suburbs. Long in a state of questionable repair, it had been an object of particular concern after the spectacular and deadly collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis in 2007. Pennsylvania had—and still has—one of the highest percentages of “structurally deficient” bridges in the nation, and the prospect of a failure of the Liberty Bridge, whose main span is nearly 45 feet above the Monongahela River, was terrifying to contemplate. Nevertheless, it took six years after the I-35W disaster for Pennsylvania’s perennially Republican state legislature to pass a transportation spending bill to free up repair funds. In the interim, increasingly drastic weight restrictions had been imposed in order to prevent, or at least mitigate against, a Liberty Bridge failure or collapse. Even after legislative approval, funding delays pushed the start of the project to 2015, and it was expected to last 30 months. The blaze that engulfed the bridge burned so hot it buckled one of the main support beams, and an investigation determined that the contractor had failed to follow proper fire safety protocols. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined it several thousand dollars. It faced a more substantial penalty of $3 million from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, but then the PennDOT decided to simply waive the fine. There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with “good” insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry. “I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …” This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward. It is true that, as measured by GDP, or by the size of the credit and equity markets, or even just by the gaudy presence of our Googles, Amazons and Apples, the United States is the greatest machine for the production of money in the modern history of the world. But this wealth is largely an abstraction, a trick of the broad and largely meaningless aggregations of numbers that makes up most of what the business pages call “economics.” The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished. Ask anyone who’s compared the nine-plus-hour train ride from Pittsburgh to New York with the barely two-hour journey from Paris to Bordeaux, an equidistant journey, or who’s watched the orderly, accurate exit polls from a German election and compared them with the fizzling, overheating voting machines in Florida. [...] TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES QUOTATION “Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.” ~~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1738 TWEET OF THE DAY xThe bottom line is that in Georgia the will of the people almost certainly isn't represented by the outcome, and in Florida we will never know. Voter suppression works. Which is exactly what the Roberts majority wanted to ensure.— Laurence Lewis (@TurkanaDK) November 16, 2018 BLAST FROM THE PAST On this date at Daily Kos in 2016—Schumer: Ready and willing to work with Trump administration? Really? Mitch McConnell, 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. […] Our single biggest political goal is to give our nominee for president the maximum opportunity to be successful.” Chuck Schumer, 2016: “When we can agree on issues, then we’re going to work with him,” Schumer told reporters. “But I’ve also said to the president-elect, on issues where we disagree, we expect a strong and tough fight. And that’s how the relationship is going to be.” See any problems there? Take a page from the man who put you in this position, Chuck. Listen to Harry Reid: So I say to Donald Trump, take responsibility. Rise to the dignity of the office of the president of the United States instead of hiding behind your Twitter account, and show America that racism, bullying, and bigotry have no place in the White House or in America. That's how you deal with Trump, not by pretending this is just business as usual in D.C. and this is a normal president you make deal with. You fight. You fight to protect the people this election has put in harm’s way. You don’t walk into this with the white flag and olive branch already extended. LINK TO DAILY KOS STORE Read more