OROVILLE DAM IS A SYMBOL OF NATIONAL DECLINE

FEBRUARY 13, 2017

Oroville is an imminent disaster as well as a symbol of the larger problem of misplaced national priorities, national infrastructure decline, and its cause: foreign adventurism, government waste and profligacy.


Seventy-five thousand residents of this area have been ordered to evacuate their homes and are now scattered in schools, private homes, and crowded hotels all around Northern California. This disaster is only one example of many which we will experience in the coming years if we continue to ignore the in-not face the facts of our massive infrastructure decline. Our nation's roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, levees, ports, wastewater treatment, solid wastewater treatment, drinking water supply, railroads, inland waterways, airports, train stations are all in decline or collapsing around us. We are a nation with the most advanced military technology. but at home we live in a pot-holed, collapsing "third world nation". .

The Oroville dam, is an example and a symbol of what happens to a nation that ignores the natural decline and aging of its infrastructure. This dam was professionally evaluated a decade ago. At that time the engineers concluded that it was in need of massive repairs, particularly to the emergency spillway (which has predictably failed) but, typically nothing was done in the ensuing ten years. Now at Oroville the state and the nation face the prospect of a massive disaster the result of our failed and misplaced financial efforts.

After fifteen years of senseless and costly war, and the Great Recession, the nation's physical fabric is aged and frayed to the point of collapse. The last two previous administrations spent more than $4 trillion dollars on disastrous military adventurism in the Middle East. Over these years the government spent profligately, racking up half of a trillion-dollar deficits each year on war and military materiel. They ignored the nation's critical infrastructure upon which our wealth and our well-being rested. The predictable result was national decline and massive debt. Ironically much of the wasted national wealth was spent abroad to shore up foreign nations and their infrastructure.

During these years of profligacy abroad, at home the Obama government spent $700 billion dollars to bail out the nation's reckless, mismanaged banks which used the citizen's savings as gambling funds prior to the crash of 2008. The crash was a direct cause of their greed and malfeasance. The Obama Administration cast the average homeowner and their mortgages to the wayside taking trillions of dollars in wealth, retirement funds, and jobs and lost hopes with them. Most egregiously the Obamians failed to prosecute the bankers for their malfeasance. The government simply paid the bills, (with the citizens tax revenue) and moved on. But this lack of prosecution of the evil doers only facilitated an underlying threat--of banks"too big to fail" and the likelihood of a repeat of the Great REcession disaster to occur again.

Now after decades of financial malfeasance, plain stupidity, military adventure and government profligacy we find ourselves a nation with a nearly $20 trillion dollar national debt....a depleted, weakened, dispirited and disillusioned military, collapsing infrastructure (like the Oroville dam) and a divided polity.

What have we wrought of our once proud nation?

Isn't it time to stop the circular firing squad in Washington, put away our guns, end the wasteful counter-productive interventions abroad, and begin to focus our vaunted American energies and inventiveness on rebuilding this nation, its people and its infrastructure. It will take TWO POLITICAL PARTIES working TOGETHER for the common good to accomplish that task. But we weathered the Great War, the Great Depression, WWII, and even the foreign policy disasters. vacillation and stupidity of the recent past.

"It can be done!" (As engraved on the "Resolution Desk" in the Oval Office).