Most of us are still a bit vague about where all that money is going to be cut from the federal and state governments of the United States. Perhaps some of the cuts will come out of the bloated military budget, thereby reducing the threats that our troops around the world are subject to, and at the same time also generate. Certainly many who actually serve in the military would welcome such a reduction in spending.<\/p>\n
But we need to start thinking about a new and unprecedented security threat on a global massive scale: the United States without safety protocols and effective inspection regimes for the vast range of dangerous materials collected over the last sixty years.<\/p>\n
The United States is a pile of chemical waste dumps, aging nuclear power plants, nuclear materials\u2014and weapons\u2014storage facilities, oil rigs, oil pipelines, mines (active and abandoned), armories and any number of railroads and highways that require an enormous investment to maintain safely.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There is every reason to believe that a big chunk of this massive budget cut is going to come out of the less visible inspection,\u00a0maintenance\u00a0and repair programs that are quietly carried out at the Federal and state level to address the serious security issues described above. If those budgets are slashed, and inspections and security is cut to the bone, we can look forward to massive security threats within our borders that have nothing to do with Taliban and or Al Qaeda. But dwarf them in terms of the scale of potential damage. Unfortunately, the industries and constituencies concerned with such safety inspections do not hire the most expensive lobbyists and rarely show up in the press. Inspectors and experts cannot be expected to defend themselves in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n
We need only to remember the ongoing crises born of the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the failure of infrastructure at the time of Hurricane\u00a0Katrina, and the disaster unleashed when a tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant in Japan on March 11, 2011 to get a sense of the scale of the risk involved. A few more major industrial or infrastructural disasters in the United States will be enough to bring us the country to its knees and end the age of American internationalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most of us are still a bit vague about where all that money is going to be cut from the federal and state governments of the United States. Perhaps some of the cuts will come out of the bloated military budget, thereby reducing the threats that our troops around the world are subject to, and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9296425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[184,786,68971,62332306],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-essays","category-international-relations","category-today-in-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9296425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/green-liberty.org\/circlesandsquares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}