The financial costs of the war in Iraq are at a trillion dollars and climbing. Yet here at home there is not enough money to keep up with our aging infrastructure of transportation, bridges and roads. This situation can only get worse with the continued waste of our national treasures being squandered in a wrong, unnecessary and misguided war.
My thoughts and prayers are with those who were injured and with the families and friends of those who lost their lives in the Minneapolis bridge collapse. But I ask, how many more bridges will have to fall before we in this country start getting our priorities right? In my own State of Maryland there are 406 structurally deficient and 997 functionally obsolete bridges (including our infamous double span Bay Bridges source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20093413/ ). A trillion dollars could have fixed a lot of bridges and maybe saved some lives. And as for those Bush Administration tax cuts for the rich - well as the roads crumble and the bridges fall they get to laugh all the way to the bank.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Steve Case and Rationalizing Business as Usual (or How I Learned to Twist the Truth to make Myself Feel Good about Destroying the Planet)
I am unimpressed. In the Washington Post business section this morning there was a story about Steve Case (of AOL fame) building a new "environmentally friendly and culturally sensitive" luxury resort on 650 acres of rain forest in Costa Rica. Case plans to "redefine the luxury resort category by making environmental preservation" a priority at properties that his company will develop.
Just what the world needs, another luxury resort (evidently he plans to develop more of these eco-paradises). And that bit about environmental preservation - just what kind of mental and ethical gymnastics does someone have to perform to term plopping a 650 acre resort into a rain forest as something having anything to do with environmental preservation? Hey Steve! Hello!!!! Aren't we supposed to be preserving the rain forest, not destroying it to create another business opportunity that the world could well do without? I would have been much more impressed had he bought the rain forest and saved it for future generations.
But Steve is rich and can do what he wants. Sounds like business as usual to me. I am sure that Steve feels all warm and gushy inside because he has convinced himself that the way he disrupts an ecosystem is better than the clear cutting done by the likes of a Hilton or a Sheraton. Steve already has hundreds of millions of dollars gained from AOL. But that is not enough for the likes of him, he now has to make millions more destroying rain forests so the rich can have a trendy new way of vacationing while convincing themselves that they are actually helping the environment. Self-delusion must be a particularly popular past time of the rich and powerful.
Just what the world needs, another luxury resort (evidently he plans to develop more of these eco-paradises). And that bit about environmental preservation - just what kind of mental and ethical gymnastics does someone have to perform to term plopping a 650 acre resort into a rain forest as something having anything to do with environmental preservation? Hey Steve! Hello!!!! Aren't we supposed to be preserving the rain forest, not destroying it to create another business opportunity that the world could well do without? I would have been much more impressed had he bought the rain forest and saved it for future generations.
But Steve is rich and can do what he wants. Sounds like business as usual to me. I am sure that Steve feels all warm and gushy inside because he has convinced himself that the way he disrupts an ecosystem is better than the clear cutting done by the likes of a Hilton or a Sheraton. Steve already has hundreds of millions of dollars gained from AOL. But that is not enough for the likes of him, he now has to make millions more destroying rain forests so the rich can have a trendy new way of vacationing while convincing themselves that they are actually helping the environment. Self-delusion must be a particularly popular past time of the rich and powerful.
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