I-35W Bridge Collapse Used to Promote North American Union Agenda

The collapse of the route I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, awakened neo-cons around the country. Former military man General Barry McCaffrey and former head of the Department of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, appeared Thursday on MSNBC's Hardball to promote the agenda of the North American Union. Both McCaffrey and Ridge argued that accidents like the one in Minnesota, where a bridge collapsed apparently due to lack of maintenance, meant that the country should look for multiple ways to finance the improvement of the infrastructure around the United States.

While General McCaffrey openly called for leasing the infrastructure and public/private financing as ways to pay for repairs and construction of highways and bridges, such as what state governments have done in Indiana, Chicago and New Jersey, Ridge called for forwarding private financing and to build roads that connected the United States with Mexico and Canada, which is equivalent to the infamous NAFTA highways. McCaffrey also called for more taxation for the use of roads, saying that everyone who used the roads -which he called a service- should be prepared to pay more every time they entered and left privately maintained highways. In the last few years, multiple plans have been entertained to lease Parkways and Turnpikes around the country to companies like CINTRA, which would give maintenance to those structures in exchange for a minimum payment, which gives them the right to charge exorbitant fees to drivers.

If projects like the NAFTA super highways come to pass, Americans would see absurd increases in tolls as the leasing companies would have unlimited authority to charge drivers who use the highways. The plans also contemplate to ban or close access to local roads, so drivers would be obligated to use the privately controlled infrastructure. On the other hand, there are investment companies like Goldman Sachs, that promote the creation of private accounts to collect dollars in order to pay for the rights to lease or own public infrastructure. Representatives of Goldman Sachs act in many instances as counselors to state and local governments at the same time as they meet with foreign companies with whom they negotiate in order to obtain juicy returns for their lobby in regional and national acquisition of public infrastructure.

Meanwhile congressmen Chris Dodd (D) -who is running for the democratic ticket in 2008- and Chuck Hagel (R) appeared later on the show to promote their new initiative to use private investments such as hedge funds to pay for the maintenance and construction of better highways, bridges and local infrastructure. What both congressmen forgot to say is that the state of the country's infrastructure is a result of the irresponsible management of resources by every single administration in the last 20 years, which have used taxpayers' money to fund illegal wars instead of spending it in rehabilitating the country's infrastructure.

The worst of this unfortunate collapse, is that multiple warnings had been given to Minnesotans about the deficient state of the I-35W; which was graded with a D-. At least two reports on the local press and several engineers had warned as early as 1990, of the poor situation in which the bridge was. It seems the very needed repairs came a little too late. The structure collapsed as working crews carried out maintenance on the bridge, which is one of at least 80,000 around the country that failed structural tests. Structural engineer Fred Galambos estimates that a collapse like the one of the I-35W Bridge could be explained by a structural deficiency that might have extended across 1907 feet long bridge, as supposed to isolated segments of it. Galambos also cited the fact that the bridges that connect the most populated cities in the country such as the I-35W and the one connecting Brooklyn with Manhatan date from the 1950's and 1960's.