Solving America's Employment Problems
As the fragment below from Bob Herbert's column suggests, our national infrastructure is in a mess. A way to begin to fix it and to provide much needed jobs would require our borrowing money to repair our ancient and failing water systems.
Budget cuts are the last thing we need now -- although they seem to be the program of both parties. In the meantime we risk pollution of our water supplies by private enterprise abuses and lack of public intervention. The disasters in Pakistan and Haiti should be lessons for us. People are dying from flooding and pollution. Ours is less obvious, but it is there. Here in NYC our sewer and water drains are a single system. Whenever we have heavy rains our latest sewer treatment operation in West Harlem dumps all but solid junk into the Hudson which we may need somewhere along the line to supplement our water supplies from upstate, should we be hit by a drought or pollution of them!
Needless to say we have wasted our monies on pointless wars rather than fixing our problems on the home front. We shall all suffer from the consequences -- even our super rich taking over our nation now.
Help!
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[From Bob Herbert's Op-Ed today]
As Charles Duhigg reported in The Times last March: “For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.”
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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Ed Kent [blind copies]
Budget cuts are the last thing we need now -- although they seem to be the program of both parties. In the meantime we risk pollution of our water supplies by private enterprise abuses and lack of public intervention. The disasters in Pakistan and Haiti should be lessons for us. People are dying from flooding and pollution. Ours is less obvious, but it is there. Here in NYC our sewer and water drains are a single system. Whenever we have heavy rains our latest sewer treatment operation in West Harlem dumps all but solid junk into the Hudson which we may need somewhere along the line to supplement our water supplies from upstate, should we be hit by a drought or pollution of them!
Needless to say we have wasted our monies on pointless wars rather than fixing our problems on the home front. We shall all suffer from the consequences -- even our super rich taking over our nation now.
Help!
*********************************
[From Bob Herbert's Op-Ed today]
As Charles Duhigg reported in The Times last March: “For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.”
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent [blind copies]
posted by Ed Kent at 6:49 AM
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