Most of the US defence budget is spent on logistics for lengthy pointless wars in foreign parts and a great deal is sheer corruption on the part of US Congressmen (“If they’re not millionaires when they get there, they’re millionaires when they leave”… the US Congress is the global gold standard of corruption, as Mark Twain noted). Trump is simply slopping the hogs, with no real increase in US military power, which isn’t what the American public thinks it is… the USA has a second-rate army, backed by an air force that mostly targets civilians and a navy that can insert it anywhere, but not support it beyond a limited coastal zone. Trump’s policy simply underlines that… it’s a salesman’s smoke n’ mirrors, nothing more.
________________________
At this point, it’s a truism that Donald Trump’s rise signalled a fracturing of American political identification. Finally, long-standing religious support for Republican candidates found itself in a seemingly impossible position. One could either… as many did… turn up one’s nose at an immoral candidate, not merely a liar, but a known deviant and coveter of goods. On the other hand, one could go the route of Jerry Falwell Jr and so conflate policy positions with godliness and worthiness as to, at least in the eyes of many, forsake even the veneer of a deeper-than-the-skin piety. Many, I imagine, found themselves in-between. Then, on the other side of the aisle, there was a lack of enthusiasm surrounding Hillary. The centre-left found itself exhausted, and, with Bernie Sanders defeated, many stayed home, or limply threw a bone Hillary’s way, or, as in some Midwestern states, defected to Trump.
We didn’t say it much at the time, but this forecasts something itself foregrounded by the Donald’s campaign slogan… American greatness (if it ever existed) was in notable decline, perhaps on life support. This isn’t merely the nostalgia of the Trump voter, nor is it some recollection of the bygone days of Bush II. Even during George W’s presidency, one could argue that America’s reassertion of its role as world cop was, in reality, a cover-up. How did Shakespeare put it? Right… “The lady doth protest too much methinks”. What were we covering up?
Anecdotally, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Europe, and I must admit that most public services there seem superior to our own. It’s true that much of the architecture and in Germany and England reminds me of something out of a dystopian Spanish textbook, but the NHS took care of me in the UK (at no cost!); German public transit makes NJ Transit and Amtrak look like a rail-line from Ulaanbaatar to Pyongyang (I doubt such exists, but you get the idea). However, these are mere anecdotes. What do the “experts” and numbers say? The American Society of Civil Engineers gave America a D+ in 2017. We got the same grade at their last check-in in 2013. The BBC summed up the report:
The ASCE report says US roads are “chronically underfunded and becoming more dangerous” and assesses that one in every five miles of highway is in poor condition. More than two of every five miles of urban interstates are congested, contributing to an estimated 160 billion USD (9.25 trillion Roubles. 1.09 trillion Renminbi. 10.32 trillion INR. 212 billion CAD. 210 billion AUD. 143 billion Euros. 125 billion UK Pounds) in wasted time and fuel in 2014. Deaths on the roads, falling for years, rose by 7 percent in 2015. There are also problems with the power grid. More than 640,000 miles of high-voltage lines are at full capacity. Most US power lines are from the 1950s and 1960s and are already past their life expectancy. Public transit is also “chronically underfunded”, ASCE said, with a 90 billion USD (5.2 trillion Roubles. 613 billion Renminbi. 5.8 trillion INR. 119 billion CAD. 118 billion AUD. 80.4 billion Euros. 70.3 billion UK Pounds) rehabilitation backlog. US Airports serve more than two million passengers every day, but airport infrastructure and air traffic control systems “aren’t keeping up”, ASCE said, resulting in increased congestion.
A Time article merely took the problem for granted, asking how to fix it, not questioning if a crisis exists. The New Yorker doesn’t sound much more sanguine:
Even more egregious than the lack of new investment is our failure to maintain existing infrastructure. You have to spend more on maintenance as infrastructure ages, but we’ve been spending slightly less than we once did. The results are easy to see. In 2013, the Federal Transit Administration estimated that there’s an 86 billion USD (5 trillion Roubles. 586 billion Renminbi. 5.5 trillion INR. 114 billion CAD. 113 billion AUD. 76.8 billion Euros. 67.2 billion UK Pounds) backlog in deferred maintenance on the nation’s rail and bus lines. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives America’s overall infrastructure a grade of D+, said that we’d need to spend 3.6 trillion USD (208 trillion Roubles. 24.6 trillion Renminbi. 232 trillion INR. 4.8 trillion CAD. 4.7 trillion AUD. 3.2 trillion Euros. 2.8 trillion UK Pounds) by 2020 to bring it up to snuff.
Furthermore, lest one think this is merely a product of partisan bias, The Week made it clear that America’s infrastructure looks, well, not so great:
Throughout the election, one of the few points Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could agree on was the country’s need for improved infrastructure… transportation systems, energy, and so on. However, tradeoffs between sustainability and economic growth make it unclear how exactly to proceed. Now, researchers argue that we need to pay attention to what’s keeping us from investing in infrastructure more broadly to create environmentally sustainable infrastructure.
Meeting those challenges may require a new approach. Ilmi Granoff, J Ryan Hogarth, and Alan Miller wrote in a Nature Climate Change perspective:
For the world to meet the twin challenges of improving human welfare whilst preventing the worst impacts of climate change, it’ll need to develop and follow a model of emissions minimising and resource-efficient “green” economic growth. Firstly, scaling up infrastructure investment is a necessary condition for achieving green growth, but not a sufficient condition… it can lock in emissions or efficiency. Secondly, mobilising capital for low-carbon infrastructure investment will have less to do with establishing billions of dollars in “new” resources for low-carbon infrastructure, and more to do with unlocking and decarbonising the trillions of dollars in annual infrastructure investment yet to be deployed under any growth scenario.
Those conclusions stem from several observations about the state of infrastructure spending around the world. Firstly, despite evidence of economic benefits, investment in buildings, roads, and transportation fell in countries like the USA and Germany in recent years, according to an IMF report. At the same time, much of the infrastructure in those countries is starting to crumble. In developing countries, there’s simply less infrastructure to begin with. Of course, this is just to bring up infrastructure. For example, there’s also homelessness. Europe saw a rise in homelessness over the last ten years or so, although the numbers are still dwarfed by those in the USA, where 2014 estimates said that 2.5 million children are homeless, with some reporting general numbers as high as 3.5 million.
Anecdotally, I spend a lot of time in New York City, where the homeless are at once ever visible and totally invisible; whereas, my experiences in Berlin, Oxford, Freiburg, Zürich, and Vienna were (again, at a personal level) very different. In Germany, it’s not uncommon to see quasi-homeless punks on the streets, living with their dogs and travelling in… I kid you not… packs. To my eyes, the level of degradation among the homeless in the EU is much lower [than in the USA], although my experiences might mean nothing. At a minimum, one study (from 2007) had this to say:
The highest rates for lifetime literal homelessness were in the UK (7.7 percent) and USA (6.2 percent), with the lowest rate in Germany (2.4 percent), and intermediate rates in Italy (4.0 percent) and Belgium (3.4 percent). One also finds less compassionate attitudes toward the homeless on many dimensions in the USA and the UK.
Add in our healthcare crisis and epidemic drug use (my high-school graduating class alone has seen four student deaths from opiates since I left) and things, to understate them, don’t look the best for the USA. Trump’s campaign clued us into this fact, even if exactly what he meant by “great again” obscured its reality. The sad truth is that the Bush-era cover-up remains on the books. Only in the realm of foreign policy do we really still pretend to act as a “great nation”. For whatever it’s worth, this veneer may finally come to end, it may finally find its final symptom in, you guessed it, Donald Trump.
I didn’t think we’d impeach Donald Trump; in a way, I still don’t. However, the fact is that we’re now talking about it in earnest. Given a slew of recent gaffes, residual dissatisfaction with Trump as a man and as President, and the fact that he was never all that popular to begin with, the possibility is not now entirely farfetched. Only the total inefficacy of the Democratic opposition and Republican control of both houses of Congress really stand in the way of the beginning of such proceedings. To be clear, I think impeachment unlikely. Nevertheless, were it to come, Trump would likely be the first president successfully impeached (if your own party has to turn on you to get impeachment on the table, things don’t look very good). Andrew Johnson escaped removal by one vote. Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment proceedings. Clinton, of course, handily beat efforts to get rid of him.
Trump’s demise thus would be a singular event in the history of the USA. So much talk of his removal centres around what comes next… President Pence? The future of the GOP? An effete Democratic Party? This is understandable, but it misses the real meaning of his successful impeachment; such views miss the grander-scale catastrophe afoot. If all we have left to justify ourselves in our “greatness” is stable governance, foreign authority, and a long-fought-for aura of respectability, Trump’s defeat would shake the world loose of all such illusions. We can’t claim “greatness” in any meaningful domestic sense; we can’t really claim it in terms of foreign policy, except insofar as we have waged wildly unpopular wars abroad. With Trump gone, it’d finally rip the veneer away. It’d unmask the USA for what it is… just another country, and, to be honest, not a particularly amazing one at that.
From a Catholic perspective, I wonder if this wouldn’t be a good thing. I continue to think successful impeachment unlikely; I continue to believe that the next four years will look typically Republican, if not with a bit more silliness and absurdity. However, it’s hard not to wonder… if America goes down, what becomes of the jingoism and patriotism so endemic to the Religious Right? The City on the Hill would finally have to come to terms with its rotting sewage, its hordes of homeless, its rusted trains packed with the destitute. Would such actually change the minds of our Christians? Could we return to a godliness divorced from undue patriotism?
One can hope.
17 May 2017
Chase Padusniak
Jappers and Janglers
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jappersandjanglers/2017/05/donald-trump-americas-death-rattle/
Voices from Russia 
Donald Trump: America’s Death Rattle
Tags: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, impeachment, political commentary, politics, United States, USA
Most of the US defence budget is spent on logistics for lengthy pointless wars in foreign parts and a great deal is sheer corruption on the part of US Congressmen (“If they’re not millionaires when they get there, they’re millionaires when they leave”… the US Congress is the global gold standard of corruption, as Mark Twain noted). Trump is simply slopping the hogs, with no real increase in US military power, which isn’t what the American public thinks it is… the USA has a second-rate army, backed by an air force that mostly targets civilians and a navy that can insert it anywhere, but not support it beyond a limited coastal zone. Trump’s policy simply underlines that… it’s a salesman’s smoke n’ mirrors, nothing more.
________________________
At this point, it’s a truism that Donald Trump’s rise signalled a fracturing of American political identification. Finally, long-standing religious support for Republican candidates found itself in a seemingly impossible position. One could either… as many did… turn up one’s nose at an immoral candidate, not merely a liar, but a known deviant and coveter of goods. On the other hand, one could go the route of Jerry Falwell Jr and so conflate policy positions with godliness and worthiness as to, at least in the eyes of many, forsake even the veneer of a deeper-than-the-skin piety. Many, I imagine, found themselves in-between. Then, on the other side of the aisle, there was a lack of enthusiasm surrounding Hillary. The centre-left found itself exhausted, and, with Bernie Sanders defeated, many stayed home, or limply threw a bone Hillary’s way, or, as in some Midwestern states, defected to Trump.
We didn’t say it much at the time, but this forecasts something itself foregrounded by the Donald’s campaign slogan… American greatness (if it ever existed) was in notable decline, perhaps on life support. This isn’t merely the nostalgia of the Trump voter, nor is it some recollection of the bygone days of Bush II. Even during George W’s presidency, one could argue that America’s reassertion of its role as world cop was, in reality, a cover-up. How did Shakespeare put it? Right… “The lady doth protest too much methinks”. What were we covering up?
Anecdotally, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Europe, and I must admit that most public services there seem superior to our own. It’s true that much of the architecture and in Germany and England reminds me of something out of a dystopian Spanish textbook, but the NHS took care of me in the UK (at no cost!); German public transit makes NJ Transit and Amtrak look like a rail-line from Ulaanbaatar to Pyongyang (I doubt such exists, but you get the idea). However, these are mere anecdotes. What do the “experts” and numbers say? The American Society of Civil Engineers gave America a D+ in 2017. We got the same grade at their last check-in in 2013. The BBC summed up the report:
A Time article merely took the problem for granted, asking how to fix it, not questioning if a crisis exists. The New Yorker doesn’t sound much more sanguine:
Furthermore, lest one think this is merely a product of partisan bias, The Week made it clear that America’s infrastructure looks, well, not so great:
Meeting those challenges may require a new approach. Ilmi Granoff, J Ryan Hogarth, and Alan Miller wrote in a Nature Climate Change perspective:
Those conclusions stem from several observations about the state of infrastructure spending around the world. Firstly, despite evidence of economic benefits, investment in buildings, roads, and transportation fell in countries like the USA and Germany in recent years, according to an IMF report. At the same time, much of the infrastructure in those countries is starting to crumble. In developing countries, there’s simply less infrastructure to begin with. Of course, this is just to bring up infrastructure. For example, there’s also homelessness. Europe saw a rise in homelessness over the last ten years or so, although the numbers are still dwarfed by those in the USA, where 2014 estimates said that 2.5 million children are homeless, with some reporting general numbers as high as 3.5 million.
Anecdotally, I spend a lot of time in New York City, where the homeless are at once ever visible and totally invisible; whereas, my experiences in Berlin, Oxford, Freiburg, Zürich, and Vienna were (again, at a personal level) very different. In Germany, it’s not uncommon to see quasi-homeless punks on the streets, living with their dogs and travelling in… I kid you not… packs. To my eyes, the level of degradation among the homeless in the EU is much lower [than in the USA], although my experiences might mean nothing. At a minimum, one study (from 2007) had this to say:
Add in our healthcare crisis and epidemic drug use (my high-school graduating class alone has seen four student deaths from opiates since I left) and things, to understate them, don’t look the best for the USA. Trump’s campaign clued us into this fact, even if exactly what he meant by “great again” obscured its reality. The sad truth is that the Bush-era cover-up remains on the books. Only in the realm of foreign policy do we really still pretend to act as a “great nation”. For whatever it’s worth, this veneer may finally come to end, it may finally find its final symptom in, you guessed it, Donald Trump.
I didn’t think we’d impeach Donald Trump; in a way, I still don’t. However, the fact is that we’re now talking about it in earnest. Given a slew of recent gaffes, residual dissatisfaction with Trump as a man and as President, and the fact that he was never all that popular to begin with, the possibility is not now entirely farfetched. Only the total inefficacy of the Democratic opposition and Republican control of both houses of Congress really stand in the way of the beginning of such proceedings. To be clear, I think impeachment unlikely. Nevertheless, were it to come, Trump would likely be the first president successfully impeached (if your own party has to turn on you to get impeachment on the table, things don’t look very good). Andrew Johnson escaped removal by one vote. Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment proceedings. Clinton, of course, handily beat efforts to get rid of him.
Trump’s demise thus would be a singular event in the history of the USA. So much talk of his removal centres around what comes next… President Pence? The future of the GOP? An effete Democratic Party? This is understandable, but it misses the real meaning of his successful impeachment; such views miss the grander-scale catastrophe afoot. If all we have left to justify ourselves in our “greatness” is stable governance, foreign authority, and a long-fought-for aura of respectability, Trump’s defeat would shake the world loose of all such illusions. We can’t claim “greatness” in any meaningful domestic sense; we can’t really claim it in terms of foreign policy, except insofar as we have waged wildly unpopular wars abroad. With Trump gone, it’d finally rip the veneer away. It’d unmask the USA for what it is… just another country, and, to be honest, not a particularly amazing one at that.
From a Catholic perspective, I wonder if this wouldn’t be a good thing. I continue to think successful impeachment unlikely; I continue to believe that the next four years will look typically Republican, if not with a bit more silliness and absurdity. However, it’s hard not to wonder… if America goes down, what becomes of the jingoism and patriotism so endemic to the Religious Right? The City on the Hill would finally have to come to terms with its rotting sewage, its hordes of homeless, its rusted trains packed with the destitute. Would such actually change the minds of our Christians? Could we return to a godliness divorced from undue patriotism?
One can hope.
17 May 2017
Chase Padusniak
Jappers and Janglers
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jappersandjanglers/2017/05/donald-trump-americas-death-rattle/