Leo W. Gerard is the president of the United Steelworkers union and vice president of the AFL-CIO. He cross-posted an essay today at Daily Kos and Alternet from the USW blog. It attracted far fewer readers than it deserved, which is why I am excerpting it below. Don’t let your eyes glaze over because the subject is infrastructure. Gerard cogently addresses our need to arrest the decay in key elements of what makes us a civilization as well as to modernize and innovate for the future. He contrasts this with the rot of a different kind contained in Donald J. Trump’s profiteering infrastructure proposal:

[...] The Wall Street Journal reported last fall that to raise the private funds, Trump planned to give massive tax breaks of 82 percent of equity to investors that help pay for infrastructure repair. For citizens, that’s a crappy deal – giving Wall Street control over public assets in addition to being forced to fork over the taxes that rich investors will not pay. That financial alchemy creates poison, not gold. In addition, there is no profit in many types of infrastructure that need repair, like schools and hospitals. A corporation can’t collect tolls from children entering their elementary school each morning. [...] In other cases, the profits reaped are outrageous. After Chicago sold its 36,000 parking meters to Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street bank doubled the parking rates and charged the city tens of millions annually for meters Chicago took out of service for street repairs, mass transit stops and safety. A city inspector general report on the deal says Chicago under-priced the meters by nearly $1 billion when former Mayor Richard M. Daily signed the 75-year contract in 2008. The bank is expected to make back its $1.15 billion investment by 2020, giving it 60 more years to rake in pure profit on the backs of Chicago taxpayers who paid to install the meters and who feed them daily. That’s gold for Morgan Stanley, grief for taxpayers. Another part of Trump’s financing plan is to shift infrastructure costs to states and towns. This also cheats too many citizens. Sure, some places high on the hog like Silicon Valley might be able to afford that. But too many will be left out. That’s because large numbers of cities and states are facing fiscal crises. [...]

TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES

QUOTATION

“Here is an important point: Only two and a half percent of the land in this country is protected. Not only are we being fought in trying to extend that two and a half percent to include other important or fragile areas but we are having to fight to protect that small two and a half percent. It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save our environment. Our worst enemy is the person the President designated with the responsibility of managing the country’s environment: James Watt. No wonder it is a monumental battle.”

~Ansel Adams, Playboy magazine, March 1983

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At on this date in 2011—Santorum accuses Romney of turning Massachusetts into a socialist state:

Looks like Rick Santorium isn't going to quit attacking Mitt Romney over the similarities between his health care plan in Massachusetts and President Obama's health care reform plan. On Tuesday, Santorum said his biggest difference with Romney was over "ObamaCare" and Romney's mandate, saying that Romney's plan "violated" the "fundamental principles" of American capitalism. On Wednesday, he took things a step further, comparing Romney's plan not just to "Obamacare" but also to socialism: There is going to be rationing of care simply because the 15-member commission is required under Obamacare to reduce reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals which of course — we see it in Massachusetts, you see it in every socialized medicine country, where government runs the health care system, when they do that, it leads to lines, which leads to rationing. Santorum's alternative? The Ryan Plan. So he'd just stop providing health care coverage to seniors, forcing them to get insurance in the private market—if they can find it. That way, there'll be no rationing. After all, you can't ration what you don't have.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The “counterpuncher” manages only a weak swat. Armando has some more thoughts on Comey. Did Trump even know about our base in Qatar? The latest reconciliation obstacle: abortion, of course. Rep. Chris Collins loves bragging about insider trading.

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