Pax Obama Stars in Rebirth of a NationTransportation Infrastructure Key to New Job Creation
Tubular Rail and Personal Rapid Transit Systems Ready to Help
by John Michael Spinelli
Columbus, Ohio: The approximately 200 years of sustained peace and prosperity that a series of Caesars orchestrated for Rome and its Mediterranean empire was called Pax Romana. During this time political leaders spread a style of civilization that included marvels of engineered infrastructure. Towering stone aqueducts flowed precious water from mountains to cities. Engineering and building elevated stone guideways over land, through valleys and across rivers was technically possible and politically desirable.
As Rome was the marvel of the ancient world, so to has America become the marvel of the contemporary world. But the land of the free and home of the brave has been beaten and battered of late in mind and body. During the last eight years the nation watched as bridges and levees collapse, allowed to do so due to a combination of the infallible faith in the power of the market by some and the ideologically view of government as an obstacle not a partner by others, who now need to backtrack given the colossal failure of their view of the world and how it works. The state of the union is clearly ready for an extreme makeover, lead by investment in basic infrastructure, which we now know will include increased attention to and funding for modern transportation infrastructure that may not look like the railroads we've come to know.
Pax Obama
On Election Day this year Americans voted for a change from pre-emptive warring and dysfunctional economics. Barack Obama won't be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States for weeks yet, but its clear from his statements on how he intends to create 2.5 million new jobs in two years, that basic infrastructure will be the backbone of an effort to show America still has what it takes to adapt to and lead during times of change.
Addressing his plans to create jobs during his first term, President-elect Barack Obama said: “It will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jump-start job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.”
The street-level community organizer mocked by many during the primaries for his thin executive resume and paucity of legislative accomplishments, is showing he again has the intellectual judgement and political chops to lead a nation out of its modern-day slough of despond. If successful, the next four or maybe eight years could be dubbed Pax Obama, in honor of showing America, working for the common good rather than the private shareholder, still has what it takes to be invest in and build long-lasting, affordable, efficient and effective infrastructure that will wean America away from total dependence on autos.
We know that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to work America out of the ravages of the Great Depression through a series of programs dubbed the New Deal. "We are planning to ask the Congress for legislation to enable the Government to undertake public works, thus stimulating directly and indirectly the employment of many others in well-considered projects," said the man who the nation subsequently elected twice more in his radio address of May 1933 out-ling the basics of the New Deal.
Should Detroit's Big Three automakers eventually receive emergency funding from Congress, they and others should heed Roosevelt's explanation government's role in their operations: "It is wholly wrong to call the measure that we have taken Government control of farming, control of industry, and control of transportation. It is rather a partnership between Government and farming and industry and transportation, not partnership in profits, for the profits would still go to the citizens, but rather a partnership in planning and partnership to see that the plans are carried out."
With alphabet-soup program names like WPA (Works Program Administration) or CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp) or TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) that put jobless Americans back to work building infrastructure like roads, bridges and dams among other systems, Roosevelt explained to the nation through his now-famous fireside chats how government could do things the private sector couldn't. In an uncomfortably curious similarity to today's economic meltdown, Roosevelt made his New Deal announcement only eight weeks after his first inauguration in 1933, explaining to his radio listeners of the time how he would tackle the banking crisis of the early 1930s and what he would do to put America -- whose unemployment rate reached as high as 25-30 -- back to work again. But we now know from history that as noble, well intentioned and inventive as Roosevelt's New Deal programs were, it took an event the scale of a world war to really get America working again. Under aPax Obama, a Third World War should be untenable.
One giant distinction between the trying times of the 1930s and the economic cliff diving we're experiencing today is that President-elect Obama says he will extricate the nation from reckless war or choice not engage is another one on the scale of WWII. The need to improve and expand on our infrastructure now is all the more important to pursue as we wind down from warring, because it becomes maybe the only way to create the scores of thousands of middle class jobs the nation needs to spend their hard-earned incomes on goods and services, adding more jobs along the way.
Infrastructure Funding Tsunami Building
A Pax Obama allows a tsunami of infrastructure spending to build at sea. The coming wave of interest in and planning for big infrastructure investments will crest with Obama's first budget and crash as it hits the streets in spending in 2010.
One idea simmering in the national stew pot about how to approach the need to update, modify or build new infrastructure is the notion of a national investment bank. Obama says he'll follow through on his campaign promise to create a national infrastructure bank that would not just raise money and invest in the nation’s infrastructure, but would also bring a measure of coherence to the myriad projects that need to go forward.
While basic infrastructure funding for car-centric services like roads and bridges will increase -- the auto lobby is still powerful even though the companies they represent are failing -- the new focus will be new and updated transportation infrastructure connecting cities and regions in ways that reduce or obviate the need to get there by car. Newer more innovative technologies are ready to prove themselves in reality and in the market place. People are likely to opt for fast, flexible, affordable, safe and clean-energy systems that just a few years ago conventional wisdom would have said wasn't possible.
Pax Obama could usher in an era of planning that if done moderately successfully would show that, while at a psychic nadir in its history, America can still renew and rebuild itself to keep current and prepare for its future. Officials of the International Olympic committee may just designate Chicago for the 2016 Summer Olympics, first to reward Obama for being the kind of president the nation and the world believes he can be when compared to his predecessor, and second to give team USA a chance to show how it can re-adapt aMegacity like Chicago, a former railroad and meat-packing center now home to Obama, and make it over in style, design and function as a region ready to face its Olympic future.
Rebirth of a Nation?
The big question now for America is can it use its advanced technology and engineering know-how to do for ourselves today what Ancient Rome did for itself two-thousand years ago, when it built towering stone waterways that amaze us with their longevity of structure and function. Human hands long ago placed one stone upon another over scores and sometimes hundreds of miles to build a gravity-fed system that showed how the dream of civilization could turn into reality.Pax Obama appears ready to demonstrate the nation is strong enough to take on our own concept of ourselves and the rest of the world, which isn't waiting around for America to get its act together.
Bob Herbert of The New York Times sees investing in infrastructure of all manner as critical to buying up and otherwise sinking nation and says "we'll only have 
eight years of Barack Obama, but that may be enough time to kick start a moribund US economy." A call to arms is sounding to rebuild America's failing infrastructure with updates, replacements or brand new systems like Tubular Rail and Personal Rapid Transit 
Systems, two innovative and complimentary systems whose build out costs are far less than conventional steel wheel-on-rail systems. But as Herbert stated, "with so much federal money soon to be available for infrastructure projects, it’s crucially important to spend the money as wisely as possible. Ultimately, we face a future of mass transit strained beyond capacity, planes sitting on tarmacs, slow traffic and wasteful sprawl, ports that lack the capacity to operate efficiently, and increasing numbers of bridges and dams that are obsolescent and dangerous to the public health and safety.”
With no new world war to put America back to work, Herbert opined that "we’re never going to get out of this economic fix if we can’t swing open the doors to millions of new jobs. Infrastructure investment is one of the keys to that objective."
John Michael Spinelli is a trained and certified economic development professional and former Ohio Statehouse government and political reporter and business columnist. He is Director of Ohio Operations for Tubular Rail Inc.
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