Category: 03 Economy

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SmartPlanet: America’s infrastructure grade: D+

03 Economy, SmartPlanet

smartplanet logoAmerica’s infrastructure grade: D+

The country received a D+ in the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) report card for American infrastructure. That’s somewhere between “mediocre” and “poor,” according to their rating.

Optimists, take comfort: this is actually an improvement; last time the report was published, in 2009, the country received a D.

The ASCE reckons America would need $3.6 trillion worth of investment to bring infrastructure up to speed by 2020, significantly more than the $2 trillion currently dedicated.

Compared to measures spanning water and environment, transportation, public facilities, and energy, inland waterways and levees came in last, both with a D- grade. The backbone of the country’s freight network, these waterway systems have not been updated since the 1950s, and projected investment is stagnant. While levees were said to have prevented more than $141 billion in flood damages in 2011, many of the country’s levees are aging, unreliable, and would cost around $100 billion to repair.

On the brighter side, our railways and bridges earned a C+, the highest marks given out. While the overall number of structurally deficient bridges in the country continues to fall, the average age of the country’s 607,380 bridges is 42 years, and the Federal Highway Administration estimates $20.5 billion would need to be invested annually to eliminate the backlog by 2028 — compared to the $12.8 billion current annual spending.

As rail gains popularity as a viable – and energy-efficient – transport option for both freight and passengers, Amtrak has nearly doubled its ridership since 2000, with a ridership of 31.2 million passengers in 2012. Since 2009, capital investment in railroads has exceeded $75 billion – with investment actually increased during the recession.

Left untended, infrastructure lapses can significantly slow down the economy. Perhaps these grades will help spur investment in the areas that need it most.

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NIGHTWATCH: Cyprus Deposit Raid Crisis Update

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards

Cyprus: For the record. Cypriot lawmakers 19 March overwhelmingly rejected an EU bailout proposal that would have required a tax on deposits in the country's banks. Thousands of demonstrators burst into cheers and applause as their MPs on Tuesday voted down the EU bailout plan aimed at rescuing Cyprus from bankruptcy.

The Finance Minister flew to Moscow to seek Russian assistance to prevent insolvency by Cypriot banks. EU officials reportedly are stunned that the EU bailout scheme was rejected because it would have been paid mainly by Russian depositors in Cypriot banks.

Comment: The action of parliament averted widespread street disorders, at least for now. The Russians or Russian firms have several options for recapitalizing Cyprus as a banking center. If they decline, however, Cypriot banks would not be able to cover deposits, according to analysis in the Financial Times. Cyprus might eventually become the first EU member to be ejected, but for now Nicosia is not burning.

Meanwhile leaders in other European states with weak economies reassured bank depositors that they deposits were “sacred.”

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

See Also:

Europe’s Leaders Run Out of Credit in Cyprus

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Yoda: Singapore’s Lessons for the USA

03 Economy, 04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Health, 11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Got Crowd? BE the Force!
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Singapore’s Lessons for an Unequal America

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

New York Times, 18 March 2013

Inequality has been rising in most countries around the world, but it has played out in different ways across countries and regions. The United States, it is increasingly recognized, has the sad distinction of being the most unequal advanced country, though the income gap has also widened to a lesser extent, in Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany. Of course, the situation is even worse in Russia, and some developing countries in Latin America and Africa. But this is a club of which we should not be proud to be a member.

Some big countries — Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina — have become more equal in recent years, and other countries, like Spain, were on that trajectory until the economic crisis of 2007-8.

EXTRACTS

Continue reading “Yoda: Singapore's Lessons for the USA”

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Dolphin: Chinese Congress Puts Environment on the Table — Major Revolt within Congress, More Reforms Anticipated

02 China, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Health, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government
YARC YARC
YARC YARC

China People's Congress environment surprise

TIM PALMER: In China the fallout is still being felt from an open rebellion over air pollution at the country's annual session of parliament.

It was a dramatic shift for a Congress that's normally seen as no more than a rubber stamp.

Sensing a growing environmental crisis, a third of the delegates rejected a key anti-pollution measure.

Meanwhile China analysts are now expecting major economic reforms from the new administration in Beijing after premier Li Keqiang declared that more sections of the economy needed to be handed over to private enterprise.

China correspondent Stephen McDonell has been covering the closing stages of the National People's Congress in Beijing.

(Ceremonial music)

STEPHEN MCDONELL: China's annual session of parliament, the National People's Congress, has closed with plenty of big vision from the country's new generation of leaders.

Xi Jinping told some 3,000 delegates what an honour it was for him to be president and he was talking up the so-called “China dream”.

(Sound of Xi Jingping speaking)

“China is a great nation with great creativity,” he said, “We created this Chinese culture and we will be able to expand our path towards Chinese development.”

But a third of the delegates listening to him had just staged a large revolt on the floor of the Great Hall of the People over pollution.

When it came time to endorse the members of a key committee overseeing environmental protection and resource conservation, 850 delegates voted no and 120 abstained.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Dolphin: Chinese Congress Puts Environment on the Table — Major Revolt within Congress, More Reforms Anticipated”

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Penguin: Banks Confiscating Percentage of Depositors Cash in Cyprus, Collapse of Banking Across Europe Possible

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption, Government
Who, Me?
Who, Me?

Facing Bailout Tax, Cypriots Try to Get Cash Out of Banks

ATHENS — In a move that could set off new fears of contagion across the euro zone, anxious depositors drained cash from automated teller machines in Cyprus on Saturday, hours after European officials in Brussels required that part of a new 10 billion euro bailout be paid for directly from the bank accounts of ordinary savers.

The move — a first in the three-year-old European financial crisis — raised questions about whether bank runs could be set off elsewhere in the euro zone. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the president of the group of euro area ministers, declined early Saturday to rule out taxes on depositors in countries beyond Cyprus, although he said such a measure was not currently being considered.

Although banks placed withdrawal limits of 400 euros, or about $520, on A.T.M.’s, most had run out of cash by early evening. People around the country reacted with disbelief and anger.

Read full article.

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Berto Jongman: Fukushima, Chernobyl, and the Frog in Boiling Water — An Anthropological Perspective on the Deceived, the Forgotten, & the Dying

03 Economy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Earth Intelligence, Government
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Fukushima isn’t Chernobyl?  Don't Be So Sure

by SARAH D. PHILLIPS

CounterPunch,  Weekend Edition March 15-17, 2013

The March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami caused the deaths of approximately 16,000 persons, left more than 6,000 injured and 2,713 missing, destroyed or partially damaged nearly one million buildings, and produced at least $14.5 billion in damages. The earthquake also caused a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s eastern coast. After reading the first news reports about what the Japanese call “3.11,” I immediately drew associations between the accident in Fukushima and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 in what was then the Soviet Union. This was only natural, since studying the cultural fallout of Chernobyl has been part of my life’s work as an anthropologist for the past 17 years. Knowing rather little about Japan at the time, I relied on some fuzzy stereotypes about Japanese technological expertise and penchant for tight organization and waited expectantly for rectification efforts to unfold as a model of best practices. I positioned the problem-riddled Chernobyl clean-up, evacuation, and reparation efforts as a foil, assuming that Japan would, in contrast, unroll a state-of-the-art nuclear disaster response for the modern age. After all, surely a country like Japan that relies so heavily on nuclear-generated power has developed thorough, well-rehearsed, and tested responses to any potential nuclear emergency? Thus, I expected the inevitable comparisons between the world’s two worst nuclear accidents to yield more contrasts than parallels.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Fukushima, Chernobyl, and the Frog in Boiling Water — An Anthropological Perspective on the Deceived, the Forgotten, & the Dying”

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Paul Craig Roberts: When Truth is Suppressed Countries Die

03 Economy, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts

Over a decade during which the US economy was decimated by jobs offshoring, economists and other PR shills for offshoring corporations said that the US did not need the millions of lost manufacturing jobs and should be glad that the “dirty fingernail” jobs were gone.

America, we were told, was moving upscale. Our new role in the world economy was to innovate and develop the new products that the dirty fingernail economies would produce. The money was in the innovation, they said, not in the simple task of production.

As I consistently warned, the “high-wage service economy based on imagination and ingenuity” that Harvard professor and offshoring advocate Michael Porter promised us as our reward for giving up dirty fingernail jobs was a figment of Porter’s imagination.

Over the decade I repeated myself many times: “Innovation takes place where things are made. Innovation will move abroad with the manufacturing.”

This is not what corporations or their shills such as Porter wanted to hear. Corporations were boosting their profits by getting rid of their American employees and replacing them with lowly paid foreigners. Porter’s job was to reassure the sheeple so that no outcry would materialize against the greed that was hollowing out the US economy.

Now comes a study conducted by 20 MIT professors and their graduate students that concludes on the basis of the facts that “the loss of companies that can make things will end up in the loss of research than can invent them.”

Read full article.

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