Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Infrastructure, finally (7:05 pm)
Obama called for $60 billion investment in infrastructure today in Wisky.
In a speech today at the General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wis., Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama will call for the creation of a “National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank” that would invest $60 billion over 10 years in highways, technology and other projects. It would be an effort, Obama will say, to “rebuild America” and create 2 million jobs in the process.A no brainer, really, for both economic and environmental reasons. I’ve been really confused why none of the front-runners have put out a program like Dodd’s in Congress, especially Clinton, who received considerable praise for both her plans on healthcare and global warming.
Subsidized infrastructure spending is no more “progressive” today than it was when GM’s Charlie “What’s Good for America” Wilson supervised the construction of the Interstate system. It’s no more progressive now than it was under the state capitalist FDR, with Gerard Swope and an army of corporate lawyers and investment bankers drafting his economic agenda.
Infrastructure subsidies are corporate welfare, another example of the general phenomenon of big government subsidizing the operating costs of big business. Subsidies to transportation infrastructure amount, in practice, to subsidizing the corporations most heavily dependent on long-distance shipping against their smaller competitors. Transportation subsidies promote artificially large market areas, artificially large firm size, and economic centralization.
We need to move away from the Galbraith-Chandler model of managerial/technocratic liberalism and toward an economic model closer to Lewis Mumford and Ralph Borsodi: small-scale industry, ideally cooperatively owned, producing for local markets.
That means highways need to be funded entirely with weight-based tolls on heavy trucks. Of course, if you do that, you’ll have a lot less NEED for infrastructure. Subsidized infrastructure, as Ivan Illich pointed out, generates distance between things.
posted by Kevin Carson on 2-19-08 at 3:55 AM