{"id":347610,"date":"2018-02-10T08:38:34","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T07:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-gop-infrastructure-plan-worse-than-nothing\/"},"modified":"2018-02-10T08:38:34","modified_gmt":"2018-02-10T07:38:34","slug":"the-gop-infrastructure-plan-worse-than-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-gop-infrastructure-plan-worse-than-nothing\/","title":{"rendered":"The GOP Infrastructure Plan: Worse Than Nothing?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<p>Mark Twain is widely credited with having said: \u201cEverybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, the credit ought to go to Twain\u2019s friend and co-author of <em>The Gilded Age, <\/em>Charles Dudley Warner<em> \u2013<\/em> but so what?\u00a0 It is a timely quip.\u00a0 <em>\u00a0<\/em>And if we substitute \u201cinfrastructure\u201d for \u201cweather,\u201d we have a spot on description of the state of play in what is likely to be one of the major \u201cissues\u201d heading into the 2018 midterm elections.<\/p>\n<p>Were Twain alive today (he would now be 183 years old), he or Warner could still say the same about the weather; we are no closer now to doing anything about it on a day-by-day or weekly basis than we were when they were around.<\/p>\n<p>One thing has changed, though: nowadays we \u2013 that is, everyone less ignorant and deluded than Republican lawmakers, Donald Trump, and other assorted climate-change deniers \u2014 knows that anthropogenic global warming, a bi-product of profit driven-industrial development, sometimes makes weather conditions dangerously, even catastrophically, more turbulent than in Twain\u2019s and Warner\u2019s day.<\/p>\n<p>The entire capitalist class, the politicians who serve them, and wide swathes of the general public are complicit \u2013 not because they too are climate change deniers or because they don\u2019t care about the end of life on earth \u201cas we know it,\u201d but because they see no advantage to themselves and others they care about in calling for far-reaching changes.<\/p>\n<p>The situation is&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/02\/09\/the-gop-infrastructure-plan-worse-than-nothing\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Twain is widely credited with having said: \u201cEverybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, the credit ought to go to Twain\u2019s friend and co-author of The Gilded Age, Charles Dudley Warner \u2013 but so what?\u00a0 It is a timely quip.\u00a0 \u00a0And if we substitute \u201cinfrastructure\u201d for \u201cweather,\u201d we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-347610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}