The Rest of the World is Leaving Us Behind in Infrastructure

[LongTomH]

From Daily Kos: Infrastructure advances in the rest-of-the-world will blow your mind:

While we're "debating" torture, access to basic health care and the veracity of climate change, the rest-of-the-world is simply advancing transformational infrastructure like you would not believe.

In Switzerland, the world's longest rail tunnel -- straight through the Alps -- is about to open.

At 57 kilometres, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which will travel through the Alps between the northern portal of Erstfeld and Bodio in the south, will become the longest rail tunnel in the world once complete, stripping the title from Japan’s 53.85 kilometre Seikan Tunnel.

After reciting the long, long list of achievements in the rest-of-the-world, the author laments our decline:

These developments aren't just cool -- as in fast trains and long distances -- but they herald the end of American economic dominance; they are concrete symbols of our relative decline versus the other great nations -- and regions -- of the world.

All these interlocked developments suggest a geopolitical tectonic shift in Eurasia that the American media simply hasn't begun to grasp. Which doesn't mean that no one notices anything. You can smell the incipient panic in the air in the Washington establishment. The Council on Foreign Relations is already publishing laments about the possibility that the former sole superpower's exceptionalist moment is "unraveling." The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission can only blame the Chinese leadership for being "disloyal," adverse to "reform," and an enemy of the "liberalization" of their own economy.

The usual suspects carp that upstart China is upsetting the "international order," will doom "peace and prosperity" in Asia for all eternity, and may be creating a "new kind of Cold War" in the region. From Washington's perspective, a rising China, of course, remains the major "threat" in Asia, if not the world, even as the Pentagon spends gigantic sums to keep its sprawling global empire of bases intact. Those Washington-based stories about the new China threat in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, however, never mention that China remains encircled by US bases, while lacking a base of its own outside its own territory.

................snip//

The United States is being left behind. We will -- absent major change -- never be able to catch up with the infrastructure of Asia and Europe, given current political conditions in this country. And the most tragic part of this decline is that it's being actively promoted by our leaders.

Remember this? The most honest moment on TV in decades:

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Except for Syria. and Iraq. and Gaza.

And Yemen.
and a few others.

When I think how many bridges/roads/schools we could build for the price of ONE attack drone.

[lpbk2713]

3. The carrier USS Gerald R Ford will soon be commissioned.

It continues to run over budget and behind delivery date. People who should be in the know can't even get together on what the final cost will be but most educated guesses are at around $13 Billion. And that figure does not include the 75 aircraft that will be carried on board. Just one F/A-18 for example costs in the neighborhood of around $29 Million in 2006 dollars, not including ordnance.

[smirkymonkey]

2. One of the things that amazes me when I travel (mostly to Europe) is

that I initially always expected to find them behind the US in day to day technology, however I have found it to be quite the opposite. They are so far ahead of us it isn't funny. We are starting to look more and more third world by the day compared to other developed countries. We just don't value technological advancements that improve human lives. They do. It is very noticeable.