What is the infrastructure? It is the network of roads, bridges, tunnels, electrical wiring, gas pipes, sewer systems, telephone lines, all the underlying basic structures and frameworks needed for the country to run properly….It is like the skeleton, the bare bones, out of sight support system we all take for granted but is vital to our society’s daily way of life…And it is crumbling into more and more of a state of disrepair every single day…
Everybody talks about it, but nobody seems to ever do anything about it…I remember when Obama was first running for President, he promised to help ease the recession by hiring out of work people to work on this country’s infrastructure, to fix, repair and modernize these crucial elements of our country….Apparently this well meaning and much needed campaign promise fell prey to political infighting as well as budgetary constraints….
According to my Google sources: “Engineers estimate that it would take a $2.2 TRILLION investment over the next 5 years to bring the infrastructure back into a state of good repair…The reality is that all discretionary spending in the budget is less than ¼ of that amount.”…
It just confirms what I have already suspected….We as Americans cannot seem to agree on ANYTHING these days….We have a marked tendency to look the other way, to delay, to procrastinate, to put off dealing with issues that we need to confront…It is the ostrich syndrome, the let somebody else do it attitude, the lack of initiative, vision and will power…
President Eisenhower created the interstate highway system in 1956, and it has served us well all these years, connecting various regions of the country in a sleek, efficient, timely fashion…The Hoover Dam was built in 1935, and it is a vast hydroelectric complex that produces power that control floods, and provides irrigation water….The Golden Gate Bridge, was built over 3 miles of raging water and surging currents, and it was completed in 1937…
My question is, why were all these mammoth projects so quickly and easily done back then? It seems to me that we as Americans have lost the capacity to do anything on such a large scale today…In fact, I believe that if these massive enterprises had not been completed back then by our forefathers, we would never be able to duplicate them today!
I pick up the paper here in San Francisco today and see that PG & E (The Pacific Gas and Electric Company, that basically controls California power,) has been slapped with a fine of $1.6 billion for a gas explosion that killed 8 people, injured dozens and destroyed an entire neighborhood of 38 homes, all caused by their negligence and lack of oversight….
Anybody who saw the movie “Erin Brokovich,” starring Julia Roberts, is familiar with P G & E’s conviction for poisoning well water by improperly dumping industrial waste in rural California communities into the ground as far back as 1952, although PG & E bitterly contested the allegations at first…

The P G & E top executives cavalierly admit to mismanagement, lack of oversight and proper adheral to safety procedures in this tragic and eminently avoidable “accident” in San Bruno, but then arrogantly wants to pass the cost of these self caused, in house fiascoes on to the rate payers, to make the common person pay for the expense of these fines caused by mismanagement, NOT the shareholders, so their corporate big shots can make their usual inflated salaries and annual bonuses…..
It seems like not only can we do anything new, like build a state highway system, a Hoover Dam, a Golden Gate Bridge these days, we cannot even properly maintain the existing infrastructure that we DO already have in place!…
What will it take, a series of accidents like the gas explosion in San Bruno all over New York, Boston, Los Angeles to wake up and shake up our elected representatives to the urgency and immediate necessity of overhauling, retro fitting and upgrading our infrastructure? Unfortunately, i think that is the bare truth…I think we have lost, for whatever reason, the capacity to think ahead, to dream great dreams, to plan for the future….We cannot even properly maintain our own past accomplishments!
Please pass the word people, things are not going to fix themselves, potentially fatal problems will not just go away because we ignore them, all of these public regulatory agencies should be forced by us, the voters, to address these problems before they implode into the inevitable crises they will become…
Let’s try to pressure our elected representatives to do their damn jobs and protect the health, welfare and safety of the common people before it is too late!…Every little bit of pressure on state regulatory agencies helps….Become involved, because we are ALL involved!
The time is NOW, and NOW is the time…There are a lot of things in the world we cannot control, but corporate waste, pollution and corruption are not untouchable facts of life…These fat cats, the 1% no doubt, again need to have their golden cages rattled, and somehow forced to contribute to this vital problem of repairing the infrastructure before everything comes tumbling down….
Because like in the children’s poem, if we delay much longer, as Humpty Dumpty said: “All the kings horses and all the kings men, could not put Humpty Dumpty together again!”