Today’s Topic: Nothing Worth Doing is Free of Pain
I try to catch as many of the Sunday morning political pundit shows, but sometimes us little people have to say something too.
In terms of America’s decaying infrastructure I’ve weighed in previously when the last Northeast power failure brought forward a George W. Bush promoting a rebuilding of our power grid to keep the system up and running. Now one would assume that once the President speaks publicly and emphatically on a topic, something would get done.
However, nothing has been done and nothing is going to get done. The bridge collapse the other day in Minnesota isn’t going to change anything either.
The problem isn’t in the design of a system but the effort of corporate America to keep their taxes low enough to use infrastructure without putting anything into the pot for rebuilding the same systems corporate America is degrading on a scale larger than all of the American public together.
One can see a couple of bathrooms in a home housing 4 or 5 individuals, and the economics and planned degradation of the infrastructure works well with the designed systems. But when corporate America steps up with 12 stall bathrooms multiplied by 4 per floor per gender and holding a building encompassing 40 or whatever floors, the underlying system was never designed for such a large strain.
Interstate road development was primarily accomplished under President Eisenhower, and for all practical purposes nothing has been added to our Interstate system, only maintained, and at that maintained at the lowest level possible.
In a New York Times editorial about our infrastructure the recent steam eruption which occurred seemed to take precedent in the evidence, but no one seems to remember multiple times the citizens of Washington, D. C. were assaulted by sewer covers being blown up in the air. And that was YEARS ago.
Now I’m not trying to say that DC has more problems than New York City. What I’m trying to point out is that we have had numerous events pointing to a degradation of our basic infrastructure, such that someone should have stood up and offered some type of solution way before now. At the least someone who chooses to run for national office should have reasonable expectations of beginning work on our infrastructure within his/her term of office.
And there is only one way that I can see to even get the press space enough to bring the subject forward, which is to make corporate America pay a tax that equates to the needed efforts to upgrade our infrastructures, not just use them. Currently the public is paying the greatest portion of support for the infrastructure, which only equates to maintenance. Corporate America continues to build on that infrastructure without paying the consistently rising costs for the use of that infrastructure.
In terms of building new corporate spaces developers have had to foot the bill for developing road systems to access those buildings, along with the non-treatment water runoff systems and extensions to the power grid. However, the increased demand produced by the growth of buildings using the infrastructure of both the power grid and the waste treatment systems has somehow fallen by the wayside.
In the DC area, a lot of this concern for failing 40 year old infrastructure should be applied to the new 400’ tall bridging systems recently completed in the "mixing bowl" at I495/395/95 in Springfield, VA. If this system wasn’t built to withstand the daily grind around DC and will ultimately require the investment of multibillion of dollars to rebuild in 20 years or so, then we have an even more serious problem.
Some of the problems associated with what we are seeing right now is a direct result of a government that has continued to pander to big business, offering numerous tax incentives for moving to a specific location to even producing even less proficient output then for which their own systems are designed.
A good example of the last of these tax incentives is how the original incentives for farmer subsidies was based on not having farmers flood the market with corn when everyone else was growing corn, etc. The problem is that the subsidies didn’t end when large Agri-business started holding more farmable land than the small farmers of America, and those subsidies have paid for an entire industry that today kills off those same small farmers the subsidies were designed to protect.
So how does this play into the infrastructure today?
Actually, that’s pretty easy. Within those same subsidies, which grew to the large scale Agribusiness, we have major problems that exploit our ailing infrastructure while it is also assaulting our environment.
The Agribusiness uses 90% of petroleum based nitrates to encourage growth in the fields, of which the run-off is allowed to get into the environment of small streams, concentrating in larger rivers, and further concentrating in large bodies of water where a majority of our seafood spends its time growing into maturity.
But that isn’t by any means the whole problem. It is just a part of A problem. When corporations concentrate their work force in one geographical location there are increases in gasoline consumption with the associated increase in hydrocarbon emissions, but there are other long term noticeable problems, like summertime oil expulsion from roadways that not only ends up untreated into our water runoff systems but these factors cause numerous accidents from quick summertime rains and the surface oils causing hydroplaning. So our infrastructure design isn’t just dumping particles of tire wear and oil into our environment, but causing accidents which add to the overall cost of insurance.
Now to get back to the Sunday political pundit shows, where I just watched Pat Buchanan suggest that America’s infrastructure problem was due to a $2.1 TRILLION trade deficit because of rampant consumerism.
Now how I view this is somewhat different than Mr. Buchanan. First of all, for those people who have virtually no more money than is necessary to supply anything but the absolute minimal levels of existence, well, we can’t blame consumerism on them. The amount they consume is of such a small amount as to become nil in any economic equations. As far as I can see, this is just an effort to export the concept of the 80’s "welfare queen" to blame all average income Americans.
So where does one put the 45 million individuals who are not consuming such necessities as being covered by insurance? The answer is that they are consuming a large portion of non-recoverable expenses because they have no insurance and yet receive treatment. And yet, even today, we see donation sponsered Christian hospitals charging higher than insurance costs to those that were told they would receive treatment on a compassionate basis.
Where are the multigenerational farming families daily losing their farms a part of the consumption problem supposedly generated by average Americans?
And as much as someone might want to think that the beginning of this blog and this portion of the blog don’t have a relationship to each other, let me make this clear.
We are at a point in our society where corporations create the products and sell them by creating a need that most people don’t understand but accept because we should be able to trust corporations.
This is the great failure of the New Deal, which the Republicans have been trying to kill since Richard Nixon and had greater effect under Ronald Reagan.
It is one thing to implement strategies that effect an entire population, but it is another to make certain that the policies prescribed by those strategies are truthfully and straightforwardly explained to the people. FDR didn’t think one could educate the masses and still implement a startling policy which supported the ultimate rebirth of America. Yet somehow he felt that the Marshal Plan needed explaination to the American public.
Whilst the Marshal Plan succeeded, the New Deal only had the benefit of the lower income Americans and thus became fodder for the current day Republicans who desired to end the New Deal and demand an explanation to "their" America.
Under this guideline then I’d have to say that this government for the last 50 years has a lot of explaining and teaching to do in order for the people to actually realize how we got to the place where when I flush my toilet I’m actually spending my money so that corporate America doesn’t have to spend a penny when 1000 of their employees flush the toilet.
Under this guideline then the government would have to explain why we have fish kills from extreme nutrient runoff and yet no government agency is responsible for ending the cause of the fish kills, thus killing off a non-related industry and putting hardworking fishermen out of business from lack of product.
And yet they flush their toilets too and it costs me money.
Under this guideline the government needs to explain why personal taxes go up when public projects are encouraged and yet tax incentives and subsidies are supplied to those corporations our taxes are being used to support, often without our knowledge.
The biggest fallacy corporate America presents to the public is that they are indeed supporting the growth of the infrastructure based on their investments in fiber-optic networks or greater flexibility in their providing content, just in time inventory control that really means "its about damned time" which causes one to buy more toilet paper when they finally find it, and other types of hype having nothing to do with the basic installed infrastructure upon which almost all Americans depend.
The fact is that I want to know just how much better I’m going to be able to flush my toilet down the fiber-optic cable.
I mean whilst I’m paying for a service whose company income doesn’t pay a cent per thousands of flushes from their corporate headquarters, then where is my improved infrastructure?
My guess is that none of these companies even try to flush their toilets down the new high-speed fiber-optic cable, and somehow I can’t expect to be able to use the sewer for my Internet connection. They get paid for one and use the other, I have to pay for both.
Come on, Pat. Is this what you would really call rampant consumerism? High-speed Internet so that you can do work and you pay for it, which is perfectly fine. Want to use the toilet? You pay for it, which is perfectly fine. The company that supplies you the high-speed Internet gets paid. And when the thousands of employees flush the toilet per minute the taxpayer pays.
To me it looks like the downfall of America.
Warren Buffet recently spoke of paying taxes on a PBS broadcast with Bill Gates at Harvard, I believe, and he mentioned that he paid 17% in taxes on his income and his secretary paid 30% on her income.
So if you look at it right Mr. Buchanan, I’m paying more for you to take a shit in your home and your office than you are, and when you speak on television I’m apparently getting some shit again.
But somehow it’s my fault because of my rampant consumerism.
Until corporate America pays their full way the United States will continue to have a trade deficit that has nothing to do with rampant consumerism as much as it does with incentives and subsidies to those same corporations. When a corporation moves its manufacturing offshore is it the consumer’s fault? No, it is a desire to make prices cheaper to create rampant consumerism.
When Congress gives corporations incentives and subsidies involving billions of dollars, which pay these same corporations for NOT PRODUCING a product, is that the consumer’s fault?
No, but such actions largely contribute to higher costs.
And when corporate America doesn’t have to pay for the usage of the American infrastructure and yet gets the full benefit of a single individual’s income, is that the consumer’s fault?
No, but shit has always flowed downhill, as Mr. Buchanan already knows.
Like the title of this article says, "Nothing worth doing is free of pain." It’s about time corporate America started feeling some of the pain.
When State Farm can deny a policy holder indemnity payment on their premiums based on water damage to their home during a hurricane, one has to wonder just where the fuck State Farm thought the water came from in the first place.
Yet State Farm pays pennies per thousand of flushes when I pay the same for one flush.
When Haliburton can rip off the American people for tens of millions of dollars and still get paid their next invoice, all the while paying pennies on the thousands of flushes and I pay pennies per flush, then where is the waste you point to as rampant consumerism.
When I pay extremely high prices for beef because the corn market has moved to providing lesser quality corn for ethanol, and yet the Agri-business corporate headquarters pay pennies per thousands of flushes and I pay pennies per flush, where is the rampant consumerism?
And if you really want to point fingers, rampant consumerism comes largely from the top 10% of wage earners in this country, all of whom are getting exceedingly good tax rates and who happen to own some part of the majority of corporations within America, then I’m not only paying for the flushes of the toilets of corporate America, but I’m paying for the individual flushes of those who own and operate those corporations.
When the bulk of the income to maintain the status quo of the infrastructure comes from me and people like me, then where does the expansion and/or redesign of the infrastructure come from?
Corporate America has an unfair advantage and yet somehow Pat Buchanan suggests that the problems we face in the next 20 years are specifically because of rampant consumerism on the part of the average person.
Well, Pat, if it comes down to people shopping at WalMart because it is inexpensive thus allowing those without a DVD player to buy one, then just remember that 200,000 people lost their jobs so that the DVD player was cheap enough because the jobs went to China via concepts you advocated 20 years ago.
By the way, Pat. Have you finished your lessons in Chinese yet?
2:58:52 PM 
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