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| Charleroi lock on the lower Monongahela |
About 60% of US grain exports and 20% of coal used for electricity is transported by barges through the US canal system according the US Waterways Council*, yet the system of canals is and waterways in general are in a truly decrepit state. The Army Corps of Engineers maintains 12,000 miles of waterways and 241 locks that carry one sixth of the nation’s freight. But the Wall Street Journal reports that 54% of the locks are 50 years old and 34% were built 70 years ago and, like the nations bridges and dams, are crumbling.
The locks are points of constant logjam. In Belle Vernon PA, barges wait endlessly at the Charleroi lock that was built 75 years ago. “The lone functioning lock is set in crumbling concrete. Pieces of steel hang loose, threatening to gouge barges as they pass.”, the Journal reports. Sometimes barges are stuck at the lock anywhere from 2 to 12 hours." says one official. On the Ohio River system a 2500-mile waterway from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi, 80,000 hours were lost in 2009 due to lock failures, almost 30,000 more than 2005. **
The Afghan war’s $7 billion a month is a small fraction of the waste that the capitalist politicians in Washington preside over, yet it dwarfs the $68.2 million that the Obama administration has allotted for ports and local governments after claiming that water transport is the cheaper and more energy efficient method of shifting goods.
The Inland Waterways Users Board suggests a 20-year $7.6 billion expenditure by the Corps to fix the lock and dam system throughout the US. Over that period, if things stay as they are, rather than deteriorate which is the more likely scenario, our tax money spent in Afghanistan over the same period would amount to more than $1.7 trillion, chasing 50 to 100 al Qaeda “operatives”, all that exists of al Qaeda in that country according to the CIA.***. When you add the US deaths and in particular, the more numerous victims of this destructive venture by the US capitalist class on behalf of the corporations, it’s just another example of the complete bankruptcy of capitalism.
I see today that the capitalists are on strike as the US jobs report is not too healthy. The 2007 crisis certainly ushered in a historic new period for US and global capitalism and the US domestic infrastructure has been referred to as the “Third Deficit”. This is an accurate description of the superstructure of a waning superpower as accurate today as 20 years ago when I first heard it.
The endless regional wars, corruption and crises that beset global capitalism are not the product of character flaws on the part of individuals. The capitalist class and individuals within it are driven to their actions by the laws of the system itself; by the laws of the market. Workers are also not exempt from its influences, like the constant need to consume and buy. But our role in the productive process gives us a fundamentally different view of the world; we have different class interests. This is not always so black and white, so clear-cut, as the dominant ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class that controls and owns the means of manufacturing the ideas. But in the last analysis consciousness has a materialist base.
But we can’t dismiss human psychology. “Have the capitalists gone completely mad?” we might ask ourselves and many workers do. In a sense they do go completely mad. They don’t always make the best decisions. They can be overconfident and go too far given the relative passivity of the working class saddled as it is in the US with a leadership that sees society in the same light as the boss. The rapacious thirst for profit, for surplus value trumps all cards and the disparity between spending on domestic infrastructure needed to make the capitalist system function efficiently and predatory wars like Iraq and Afghanistan is an example of their inability to make decisions that don’t lead them to further crisis.
But on the other hand, globalization and the rise of economies like China and India for example (Asian markets in particular) leaves them limited room to maneuver as the world market is getting smaller and smaller given the increased number of players. Competition between nation states is fiercer and tensions are rising daily. Gone is the old bi-polar world dominated by the Stalinist dictatorship and US imperialism. How they miss the relative calm of the bi-polar world
I remember when Stalinism collapsed. There was a mood of hope among many that the money spent in the cold war struggle between the two cold-war giants could be brought home, that is, spent domestically. The Wall Street Journal editorial headline read “We Won” and talked of the critics of capitalism finally recognizing “The way the world really works”.
Maybe if Stalinism hadn’t collapsed under the stifling weight of the parasitic bureaucracy that gave socialism a bad name, the US government could have fixed a few of the locks on the canals.
* WSJ 1-6-10
** I should add that some environmental groups are opposed to increase water transportation saying that it is destructive to wildlife and the impact on rivers has been "devastating". My knowledge of this is limited but I am sure its true. But capitalism will never place environmental concerns above their for profits. The collective ownership of the productive process and how we transport what we produce is the only way to really protect the environment in which we live.
*** Afghanistan: Partition as Plan B Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2011
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