Of Choke Points and Checkpoints

Of the 55,710 bridges in the U.S. that need structural reinforcement, only about 1,700 are on interstate highways. That is only 3% of the 56,448 interstate highway bridges. Another 10,000 or so (18% of all interstate bridges) are inadequate for the role they should be able to perform, e.g. they lack capacity. These typically result in traffic choke points.

Photo by Daniel Mennerich

The interstate highway system was built over several decades beginning in the mid-1950's. Back then, its bridges were built to last about 50 years, so the first refurbishment/replacement cycle began about a decade ago and will roll on for the majority of this century. If we were to keep pace with repairs of deficient bridges, deteriorating roads, and anticipated traffic growth on interstates, the maintenance cost would be about $1 trillion over a 30-year period.

DJ T-Rump wants to spend that amount over ten years to upgrade all vital U.S. infrastructure. If $33 billion per year of that $1 trillion is spent on interstates, then a ten-year program would include $670 billion for other areas of infrastructure, e.g. airports, telecommunications, pipelines, docks, and waterways. Which infrastructure to upgrade would be partly determined by builders, who might be asked to pay 18% of the cost to upgrade the systems, later recouping their 18% and more through tolls/usage fees. If the builders foresee insufficient usage, they won't risk bidding the job because their profits depend on the tolls they would collect from users.

One sticky wicket in this scheme is that, according to Ed Rendell, a chairman of the advocacy group Building America's Future, only about 500 of the country's structurally deficient bridges can be tolled. Even assuming all of those are on interstates, 500 is less than one-third of the 1,700 dying interstate bridges. Additionally, Congress would have to repeal a law that precludes charging tolls on interstates. Assuming they would do that, more of the cost to maintain interstate highways would fall on users particularly, rather than on gasoline and diesel purchasers in general, since much of the cost today is funded by fuel taxes. The growing number of hybrid and electric vehicle owners would thus join the rest of us in being charged their fair share of maintaining the system.

The market-driven selection of interstate bridge repairs means that some bridges would not be chosen for repair resulting in abandoned routes, shifting interstate travel to other roadways, and causing choke points. In effect, those choke points could serve as points of entry to regions with toll collection sensors tracking folks' comings and goings. Placed well enough before the choke points, these sensors could alert law enforcement of subjects of interest and facilitate arrests or detentions. These tolled choke points could also serve as border checkpoints, setting the boundaries for our future federated states.

When the Green Party takes over in four to eight years, they may try to magnify the choke point effect . The Green Party favors reduced driving and reversing the practice of more and more road construction. They also want to see more truck freight shifted to rail, which is more fuel-efficient. Cutting down on interstate access would support these objectives. Taken together, using market forces to inform construction decisions and charging directly for usage are steps that should reduce frivolous road trips and expansion of the interstate system. They may also facilitate the shift to a more regionalized economy and possibly even a federated polity.

Consequences of Tearing up the Social Contract

President Donald T Rump's fixation with turning our nation into America, Inc. will spell the end of our current Constitution and lead to a decentralized government more akin to a federation. Several indicators of the direction he is leading us are already popping up. By taking his time with staffing the White House, freezing hiring across most of the federal government, cutting federal regulations, keeping subordinates poorly informed, and hiring a kakistocracy of hatchet-men and -women as heads of departments, President T Rump is weakening the federal government's power both intentionally and inadvertently. During his reign, we can expect to see reductions in government provision of health care, education, food, and housing, all of which will mainly affect the poor. Environmental problems, which Rump largely plans to ignore, will also disproportionately affect poor communities. Little else will remain of the government under T Rump than a security state for conducting commerce.

As President T Rump aggregates all the remaining power of the federal government into a national security state, coercion will be the only tool left in his bag. The vulnerability of the federal government stems not only from a chaotic and unbalanced executive branch, but also from the inward-looking legislature that hangs its hope for the continued consent of the governed on trickle-down economics, i.e. raw capitalism, i.e. catering to the 1%. Even if Congress stirs from their supinity and exercises the 25th Amendment or Rump throws in the towel, the momentum of government's social influence will have been disrupted enough by his term to keep it subdued for years. Congress's days are numbered. Another major episode of the continuing financial crisis would give Rump an opportunity to dissolve that body and introduce a new Constitution. The public won't mind, either, because we have all been waiting for him to drain the swamp, which includes driving out all the alligators lurking in the halls of Congress.

By Faron Kee

Law and order, ever more elusive economic growth, and foreign wars will only work so long to hold the country together. If the various bodies of the federal government were serving the populace well, we could stay united indefinitely, but an authoritarian government that is too poor or powerless to be of any use will be rejected by the masses. In its place, states and regional bodies will come to assume some of the essential roles previously played by the feds. The evaporation of federal relevance will assist in the transition of the U.S. to a federation of independent regions as we exit the fourth turning sometime in the 2020's. It is impossible to predict what those regions will be, but Joel Kotkin has taken a stab at it. Our Constitutional crisis will probably take many years to recover from. As a writer, T Rump will be a poor replacement for T Jefferson.

Stepping on the Gas toward a Clean Energy Future

In a more regionalized economy, the distributed nature of renewable electrical power sources will be helpful to maintaining grid stability. That will be especially important if the country's current three grid system is broken up along regional lines. Base load generation, from thermal, hydro, and nuclear plants will be reduced within the smaller grids because of reductions in fossil fuel usage. The net effect will be less stable electrical grids, but owners of facility/building power sources will enjoy more reliable power than those who are grid-dependent.

Photo by Chuck Coker

The reason fossil fuel usage may decrease is that industry and society are waking up to the imperative of reducing carbon emissions. In a sign that the economics now favor a shift to renewable power, even influential Republicans are lobbying for measures to push for a clean energy economy. Meeting with the head of President Donald T Rump's National Economic Council Gary Cohn, former Secretary of State James Baker represented the Climate Leadership Council (CLC) in their call for a carbon tax, which even T.,Rex supported when he was at Exxon. Maybe Dr. James Hansen and the Citizen's Climate Lobby (CCL) have been clever enough to make the august team of Republicans on the CLC believe that this proposal is their own idea, but it is good to know that there is some bilateral support for it.

The proposal is coming early enough in the ramp-up of the Rump administration that it could be put into play by Cohn, formerly President of Goldman-Sachs which recently made a case to investors that a low-carbon economy is likely (driven largely by disruptive technologies in the electrical and transportation sectors). If it gets no play there, Congress has been hearing a lot about the idea from CCL and will probably be hearing from CLC now, too. The carbon tax could become a Republican-sponsored bill that Congress would be willing to force on the administration. Donald T Rump, in turn, could use an agreement to sign the bill as a bargaining chip to eliminate the Clean Power Plan and other EPA regulations, thereby saving face. Additionally, he would be able take credit for sticking to our Paris Treaty obligations, thus saving him the trouble and international censure from backing out.

For you and I, this carbon tax would mean more income (rebates) but, also equally more expensive energy. Burning fuel, either directly or indirectly, will be like maintaining a smoking habit. The taxes forcing tobacco prices to be so high are quite enough to deter people who know the value of a buck. If the government could also stop subsidizing fossil fuels, they would really be convincing, but that's probably too much to ask.

Making America Small Again

President tRump's intentions for improving the economy may actually include some useful preparation for the "high" of our first turning which is due to begin in about a decade. Assuming this next turning will entail a less complex, more fragmented society, rather than the Great America tRump is shooting for, the @RealGreatDivider may accidentally usher us into a transition to smallness.

Smallness, in this case, refers to the size of corporations. With trade wars and import taxes in the offing, U.S.-owned international manufacturers are going to suffer some setbacks. While these will cost jobs at home, especially in the South and Midwest, small domestic manufacturers will gain opportunities to fill the home market demand for various goods/substitutes at more competitive prices. The big company jobs lost in the process may shift to smaller companies, especially if layoffs provoke more entrepreneurship.

Photo by Jo Morcom

The Small Business Administration will have to play an outsized role in perpetuating that shift to some 700,000 small businesses created every year. Someone who started and ran an outlandish enterprise like World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) could be just right for the job. As one of the few women cabinet officials, former boss of wrestlers Linda McMahon is a good match for the other showman in the room.

Not that tRump, himself, isn't pro-small business. The Apprentice cast its competitors in entrepreneurial roles and tRump ostensibly selected winners. Picking talent; it's what he does. So far, he has made a point to reduce regulatory burdens on small businesses and to improve their financial situation through efforts to eliminate Obamacare and increase access to loans. Realizing how intent tRump is on encouraging entrepreneurship even helps explain why he felt compelled to ask for prayers for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Celebrity Apprentice symbolizes the way forward - we need a few million successful "apprentices" in order for small businesses to make up for the disruptions tRump is creating.

Whether these steps will be sufficient to avoid a recession in the next year or two is doubtful


but, it may make something of a recovery possible to a more regional or local, sustainable society. By then, we will be able to kiss tRump good-bye and welcome our country's new Green leaders.

Coming Apart at the Seams

The financial system is commonly seen as the point of origin in scenarios that postulate societal breakdown. Its precarious condition is one of the big causes of our ongoing long emergency. If the wrong thread is pulled in the financial system, the whole fabric of civilization could come unraveled pretty quickly.

When one of those threads was pulled out in 2007, the U.S. and other governments went into crisis mode in order to patch up and reinforce damaged areas. One of the reinforcements was a 2,300-page law known as Dodd-Frank which bankers have wheedled and whined against for the past six years and now have a so-called President who is willing to accommodate them in reforming it. In doing so, tRump could loosen the binding behind the crazy quilt of the financial system. After eliminating safeguards, Congress will try to pass a watered-down version of Dodd-Frank or a new manifestation of Glass-Steagall, but as with the ACA, tRump appears to be mainly in demolition mode. The question is, how far can the financial industry stretch a weakened fabric before splitting the seams?

Splitting of those seams along national boundaries may contribute to fulfilling tRump's isolationist ideals, but, even if the financial fabric remains intact, the likely result of gutting Dodd-Frank is more oligopolization of the financial industry. Lip service is being paid to improving the lot of communities and consumers, (and tRump's friends with "nice businesses") but the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau looks like it will be weakened by the reforms. The argument that Dodd-Frank is disproportionately hurting community banks is weak since that sector has been dwindling ever since 1984, probably due to the same oligopolistic environment that this change would magnify.

Rolling back Dodd-Frank requirements for bank liquidity increases the chances that another bail-out will be necessary to prevent a total meltdown. Strengthening Wall Street banks is the opposite of the direction taken in the Green Party platform. The Green Party solution for banking reform wouldn't merely dismantle a set of rules and replace them with other more or less constraining rules. It would break up the big banks and create a more competitive environment, leveling the playing field for community banks and credit unions.The Green platform has this to say about bail-outs:

Oppose the federal government being the final guarantor of speculative investments. During a financial crisis, if the federal government and/or a central bank must provide relief, it should be given in an equal manner and at the most local level possible, so that benefits are equitably dispersed and burdens are equitably borne. So rather than pouring trillions of dollars into the banking system, they should have provided direct mortgage relief to homeowners suffering the most from the housing bubble and negotiated with lenders to provide partial loan forgiveness.

That would not be possible in the current environment because the global financial system is rife with derivatives making the failure of a major bank unthinkable. The tRumpist reforms would aggravate this further by eliminating the Volcker Rule that limits speculation using a bank's capital. As with Obamacare, the Republicans vow that their replacement version will do a better job at what Dodd-Frank promised, but such promises strain credibility.

Photo by Beverly

Thanks to tRump and the Republicans, it looks like America will suffer an even greater economic divide before people wake up to the better way offered by the Green Party. Instead of playing along by trying to regulate TBTF banks, we should try to break them up before they hurt people again. If we don't dismantle these financial behemoths first, capitalists, in an orgy of greed, will cause it to all come crashing down.

The Greens are Batting Clean-up

If the political pendulum does loft the Green Party to prominence by 2024, it will not be all that glorious. We will have a big mess to clean up.

The ascent of the Green Party, though beautiful to lovers of nature and humanity, will mark a reversal from the myth of perpetual progress that took hold as the industrial and information ages rolled on. Not that the Green Party is terribly Luddite (their platform lauds high speed computing, advanced telecommunications, and the space program, but circumscribes nanotechnology due to several unknown risks). Yet, the Greens' ideology is nowhere near as sanguine over homo sapiens' capacity to evolve as, say, the Singularitarians'.

What the Green's are keen on is sustainability, which will be precious after we finish ravaging the land, sea, and sky in our final turning of this secular cycle. Our current trajectory will put us in poor stead for the start of the next one. As we wrap up the fourth turning, we are likely to undergo disintegration rather than reorganization, fragmentation rather than evolution, ending up with a less rather than a more complex society. Greens favor a more agrarian society, rather than the heavily industrial agriculture that now dominates. Foreseeing the inevitable collapse ahead, they see some disintegration as desirable, though it ultimately diffuses their power structure. The way it is going, however, we will have a lot of pieces to pick up once we take over.

Photo by Michele Bighignoli

The tipping point for this crash landing is likely to come from one or more of the five causes of collapse identified by Jared Diamond. The trumpists are driving each one of these (more or less) in the wrong direction:

• Environmental Damage - ignoring scientists, gutting agencies, and revoking regulations will accelerate damage to ecosystems which are already under duress.

• Climate Change - denial and cancelling our part of the Paris agreement will put the world well over the 2 degree temperature increase. With the ice caps melting, the positive feedback from permafrost methane releases could already be enough to make our own contribution negligible.

• Hostile Neighbors - Mexico is not happy with us, will be charged somehow for the border wall, and will lose some or all of NAFTA provisions.

• The End of Help and Support from Friendly Neighbors - Canada is not aligned with tRump's rejection of Muslims. Were he to pay Canada a visit, as is customary on a President's first foreign trip, he would be besieged with protesters. The way tRump has been abusing other allies, he will likely piss off Trudeau in short order.

• The Failure of Leaders to Find Constructive Responses to Problems and to Give Meaning to a New Reality - Make America Great Again is a regressive theme, not compatible with the new reality of limited resources and growth. 

The point is, if anything is important at this stage in our history, it is that we smooth our descent and transition to a sustainable path in as many ways possible, all the while resolving the ongoing crisis. TRump is wholly focused on a resolution of the crisis at the expense of sustainability, while aggravating all of the major factors leading to our society's near-term collapse. He will be remembered as a scourge on our civilization.

Greens are On Deck

Green Partiers were not in the audience, but The Charles Koch Foundation CEO Brian Hooks said something that should be very encouraging to them at the Koch network semi-annual retreat last weekend. After describing how Barack Obama's election to President was a backlash against the failures of the George W. Bush administration, and Trump's election a backlash against Obama's failures, he predicted that we could see the same thing amplified after the Trump administration debacle. Hooks said,

 “If things don’t get better, then we should expect history to repeat itself. We should expect that the political pendulum will swing with even more force to the other direction the next time. With people even further to the left than Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren! There are people right now who are prepared for the next four years to be a failure, people who cannot wait to be there to address the frustrated American people and introduce them to their own vision of radical hope and change. So the stakes are extremely high.”

The Libertarians/Kochists will certainly not be on the rise when the pendulum swings from right to left. That leaves the Green Party as the most likely party to succeed the Trumpists in four or eight years!

Aside from pondering the political pendulum on my own before Brian Hooks described it so well, another reason I put great hope in our next presidential turnover is the theory of the secular cycle of American history described in the 1997 book, The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. After the current fourth turning, which should end with the tRump administration, we will begin the secular cycle anew. The resolution of the crisis of the current phase will set us up for the beginning of the next 80 to 100 year secular cycle. Our next 20 to 25 year phase (the new cycle's first "turning") should be far less turbulent.

There comes a galvanizing event in a fourth turning which unifies national resolve and the problem we then join together to solve serves as a proxy for all of the major ills and threats facing us. To me, it looks like climate change could become that nexus, even within the span of tRump's presidency. Something worse than Hurricane Katrina, perhaps, would bring climate change to the fore. The Green Party would rapidly rise in esteem.

Photo by peterkreder

Then again, it doesn't have to be climate change that gives the Greens their turn at bat. The Green Party also holds very antimilitaristic ideals. Should we become involved in a devastating war (as all of our fourth turning forefathers have), the nation may afterward turn utterly away from militancy and bring the Greens in for assurance that our national security policy will embrace pacifism.

Whatever culminating problem the fourth turning involves, the Green Party platform offers hope through a banner of solutions showing how we would endeavor to serve the nation in crisis and in calm. When the time suddenly arrives for Greens to assume the mantle of leadership, having stepped up, advocated, and participated in shaping our democracy, let us finally be ready to govern.