The
Minnesota Bridge Collapse:
One More Indictment Of
The Profit System
By Barry Grey
04 August, 2007
WSWS.org
The
collapse of the most highly traveled highway bridge in the state of
Minnesota has once again revealed some ugly truths about American society.
Occurring during the run-up to the second anniversary of the Hurricane
Katrina catastrophe, the bridge disaster has once more left people in
the United States and around the world wondering in shock and horror
how it is possible that the richest nation in the world enters the twenty-first
century with a social infrastructure that is thoroughly decayed.
As of this writing, five
people have been confirmed dead from Wednesday’s collapse of the
Interstate 35W highway bridge that traverses the Mississippi River near
the center of Minneapolis, a major American metropolis. An unknown number
of other victims remain trapped in vehicles that plummeted 60 feet into
the swirling currents of the Mississippi, and at least 70 were injured.
Like Katrina, there were
ample warnings. Numerous surveys concluded that the bridge was “structurally
deficient.” Its steel deck truss design, which provides no margin
of safety should any major component fail, was discarded for precisely
that reason shortly after the bridge was constructed forty years ago.
There are 756 such bridges
in the US, and a total of 77,000, 27 percent of the nation’s spans,
that have been designated “structurally deficient.”
Media news anchors, commentators
and editorialists have noted that the Minnesota bridge disaster is a
symptom of a neglected and rotting infrastructure. Many have pointed
to the 2005 report card on America’s infrastructure issued by
the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the country a “D”
and warned of dire consequences unless a crash program were undertaken
to fix the problem. Bridges actually fared comparatively well in the
engineers’ report, with a grade of “C.” The country’s
aviation system, dams, drinking water, electric power grid and hazardous
waste system were deemed even worse, and given a “D.”
But the media reaction to
the engineers’ conclusion that it will cost $1.6 trillion over
five years to repair the infrastructure is to present such a sum as
impossibly high. There is no such questioning of the estimated $450
billion already spent on the war in Iraq or the ongoing weekly outlay
of $1.8 billion, not to mention the $533 billion Pentagon budget or
the $555 billion in tax cuts for the rich enacted by the Bush administration
and Congress in 2001.
What is not broached, let
alone discussed, is why the nation’s material and social foundation
has been brought to such a state. That is not surprising, because the
answers constitute a devastating indictment of the American political
and corporate ruling elite and the profit system which they uphold.
Whatever the specific cause
of the Minnesota bridge disaster, the underlying reason is the indifference,
incompetence and negligence of the government, and the fact that the
US is a capitalist society, in which the accumulation of vast personal
wealth by a small percentage of the population is deemed more important
than the welfare of the people as a whole.
The decay of the material
underpinnings of American society has gone hand in hand with a relentless
assault on social welfare programs and the jobs and living standards
of the working population. It is the product of nearly three decades
of uninterrupted social and political reaction.
This has involved a sharp
reduction in the federal government’s role in maintaining the
nation’s infrastructure. As the Wall Street Journal noted on Friday,
“In the 1960s, the federal government and the states paid roughly
equal amounts to fund infrastructure projects, but state and local governments
bear most of the costs these days, according to the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, a Washington think tank. ‘The commitment
of the federal government has been sharply reduced,’ said Felix
Rohatyn, a former Wall Street banker and CSIS trustee...”
The ruling elite has been
engaged in a systematic drive to dismantle the very limited elements
of social infrastructure and a social safety net left over from the
New Deal programs of the 1930s. These were implemented under Franklin
Roosevelt in the face of the greatest social and economic crisis of
the twentieth century, which included not only the financial collapse
known as the Great Depression, but also the environmental disaster that
produced the Dust Bowl across the Great Plains. The New Deal established
regulatory agencies that placed certain legal restrictions on big business
and created public works such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which
built dams and levees to curb flooding and provide electrical power.
Despite the howls of protest
from Roosevelt’s opponents within the ruling elite, these were
not socialist measures; rather, they were reforms instituted to forestall
a social revolution from below that would threaten the profit system
as a whole.
From the 1970s on, as the
crisis of American capitalism deepened, the US ruling elite has repudiated
the entire concept of social reform and dismantled, under the banner
of “deregulation,” the previously enacted restrictions on
corporate activities. The result has been a nonstop plundering of society
that has produced an unprecedented concentration of wealth at the apex
of society and a level of social inequality greater than in the days
of the Robber Barons at the beginning of the last century. Fraud, the
worst forms of speculation and outright criminality have become pervasive
in the upper echelons of American society.
The president, George W.
Bush, personifies the incompetence, stupidity and inhumanity that characterize
so much of America’s money-crazed corporate elite. On Thursday,
Bush spoke of the bridge collapse, saying, “We in the federal
government must respond and respond robustly to help the people there
not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge,
gets rebuilt as quickly as possible.”
Who could not but be repulsed
by these empty phrases, two years after Bush promised to rebuild New
Orleans and then turned the “reconstruction” into a profit
bonanza for unscrupulous corporate cronies, with the result that the
worst-hit poor and working class sections of the city remain abandoned
and derelict, and tens of thousands of families permanently displaced?
The American political system
is dominated by a drive to destroy all barriers to the accumulation
of the personal wealth of a financial oligarchy. Taxes are virtually
nonexistent on the principle sources of income of the super-rich, such
as capital gains and other forms of speculation. No matter how dire
the state of the population—health care, education, pensions,
housing—and how decrepit the physical infrastructure, it is virtually
taboo to even propose increasing taxes on the rich in order to address
social problems.
And it is not just the selfish
greed of the rich that is responsible for the decay of the social infrastructure.
The mass character of modern society, its international interconnectedness
and its complexity stand in violent contradiction to the inherently
unplanned and anarchic character of capitalism. The rational and humane
development of the material and social environment is incompatible with
a system in which each capitalist is engaged in a bitter struggle to
obtain the largest possible share of the profits generated by the exploitation
of human labor.
Hundreds of millions of people
in the US rely on complex social systems to provide the essentials of
life: food, water, electricity, transportation, health care, education.
The failure of these systems reduces the population to conditions of
barbarism, as was seen on a mass scale in the Gulf Coast two years ago.
Working people perform the
labor that keeps these systems going, but they have no say in their
operation. These systems are for the most part owned and controlled
by giant corporations, for whom profit, not human need, is the decisive
criterion. Those systems that are nominally controlled by the government,
such as roads and bridges, are likewise subordinated to profit interests,
through the control of the political system by the wealthy elite.
In the case of America’s
bridges, the anarchy and irrationality are palpable. There is no national
plan for the maintenance of the system. Decisions on repair and construction
of vital economic and social lifelines are left to the states and localities,
and oversight is divided between all three levels of government.
The most salient and noxious
expression of the irrational and socially destructive character of the
profit system is the massive concentration of wealth at the very top
of society. According to a recent study, in 2005 the top one-tenth of
one percent of the US population (some 300,000 people) had nearly as
much income as the bottom 150 million Americans.
That the wealth exists to
pay the $1.6 trillion which the American Society of Civil Engineers
estimates is needed to upgrade the country’s infrastructure—and
more—is demonstrated by a few facts. Forbes magazine reported
earlier this year that there are 946 billionaires around the world,
with a combined wealth of $3.5 trillion. Last December, Christmas bonuses
paid to Wall Street executives topped $100 billion. That figure alone
is more than twice the annual federal allocation of $40 billion for
the country’s roads and bridges.
And in 2006, the 25 highest
paid hedge fund managers in the US had an average income of $540 million,
for a total of $13.5 billion. The total subordination of the two major
US parties to the financial oligarchy is demonstrated by the unwillingness
of the Democratic Congress to end the existing tax windfall for hedge
fund and private equity operators, who pay at the 15 percent capital
gains rates instead of the 35 percent top income tax rate.
Events like the collapse
of the Minnesota bridge are exposing the bankruptcy of the political
establishment and the corporate elite, along with their insistence that
the unchecked operations of capitalism are the solution to all of society’s
problems.
This poses the most fundamental
questions before the working class. What are the priorities of society
to be: the social interests of the many or the accumulation of personal
wealth by the privileged few? It is not a matter of pressuring the ruling
elite, or replacing one section of that elite with another. The working
class must organize itself as a political force and make itself the
master of society. This requires the creation of a new political party
of the working class, independent of and opposed to the Democrats and
Republicans, and based on a socialist program.
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