Bob Herbert: "Risking the Future"

[muntrv]

I wonder what it will take to get this country serious about repairing and rebuilding its crumbling and increasingly obsolete infrastructure.
The catastrophe in New Orleans didn’t do it. Yes, that was an infrastructure tragedy. As the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in his remarkable book, “The Great Deluge”:

“What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

And the spectacular rush-hour collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, which killed 13 people, was not enough to get us serious.

Not even the terrible economic downturn that has gripped the country — a downturn that could be eased by a truly big-time surge of infrastructure investment — has been enough to get the leaders of the country to do the right thing.

We’re rushing to bail out the banking industry for what? What kind
SEE MORE AT LINK BELOW
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/opinion/03herbert.html?_r=1&th&emc=th