'Infrastructure bill'? Hardly. More like a sell-out to woke Fascism, AOC and the 'Green New Deal'
Only 5.6% of Biden's bloated partisan giveaway actually goes to fix or replace roads and bridges, with a good portion of it dedicated to tearing out 'racist highways'
A $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan introduced by Joe Biden in Pittsburgh last week is a wretched mess of bloat, giveaways and Green New Deal-style posturing. It intends to tax-and-spend our way out of the pandemic funk by raising taxes on businesses already battered by lockdowns and spending that money on liberal agenda items that make Democrats feel warm and fuzzy but do little to make America’s infrastructure better.
If you want an object lesson in just how broken this plan is, look no further than the New Orleans neighborhood of Tremé, where Biden would spend federal money to destroy a highway that’s already been built in the name of “advanc[ing] racial equity and environmental justice.”
Or look to Syracuse, New York, where the same thing would happen to a section of Interstate 81.
Or Houston, where an Interstate 45 expansion was paused recently at the behest of Biden’s Department of Transportation because some in the community filed suit against the Texas Department of Transportation making the illogical claim the project is “racist” because it allegedly reduces access to the black community on either side of the highway.
These are the priorities of an “infrastructure plan” that Biden said, in his opening pitch Wednesday March 31, would “grow the economy, make us more competitive around the world, promote our national security interest and put us in a position to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.”
In New Orleans, it would do this by tearing down the Claiborne Expressway. Quoth The Washington Post’s Ian Duncan, the highway, built in 1968, is “an example of a historic inequity that President Biden’s new infrastructure plan would seek to address through billions in new spending.”
Tremé resident Amy Sally has waged a campaign for years to have the expressway, which cuts through a predominately black neighborhood, removed.
Duncan said Sally “struggled to get support from local leaders. Neighbors considered the quest to be wishful thinking.”
In a preposerous move, the Biden cabal wants to cowtow to woke Fascism in New Orleans by completely tearing down the Clairborne Expressway because it cuts through a black neighborhood. (Photo: Pierre Turner/New Orleans Times-Picayune)
“Nobody thinks you can get rid of a highway,” she told The Post.
They do when the president thinks a fund that apportions billions to destroy existing infrastructure in the name of equity is an example of “building back better.”
“I’m floored,” she said Wednesday. “I’m thrilled to hear President Biden would call out the Claiborne Expressway as a racist highway.”
In fact, according to E&E News, the $621 billion that the Biden administration wants to spend on infrastructure is meant to address “historic inequities and build the future of transportation infrastructure.”
Biden’s plan includes $20 billion for a new program that will supposedly reconnect neighborhoods cut off by previous highway construction. It will wastefully spend money on projects the Cabal in the White House claims will “increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.”
Perhaps they forgot to include the phrase, “freedom, truth and the American way.”
The Biden fact sheet making those absurd claims name-checked two highways in particular: The Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans or I-81 in Syracuse. In the case of I-81, color Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York thrilled.
“It is wonderful for Syracuse that President Biden listened to us and included the vital I-81 reformation as a poster child for enlightened infrastructure policy, calling for new investment to help communities pay for tearing down urban highways to reconnect and transform neighborhoods previously left behind,” Schumer said in a statement, according to Syracuse.com.
“The $2 billion plan would reroute highway traffic onto nearby Interstate 481 and rebuild part of Interstate 690 that crosses downtown,” the outlet reported.
The argument is that these highways, though intended to reduce travel times, were built through black neighborhoods.
Biden’s pseudo-infrastructure bill also targets a 3.5-mile elevated section of I-81 through downtown Syracuse, New York. Recently Gov. Andrew Cuomo also endorsed destruction of the highway, both alleging the way it cuts through black neighborhoods is ‘racist.’ (Photo: Marisa Parks/Syracuse Post-Standard)
The paradox, however, is that I-81 and the Claiborne Expressway, part of Interstate 10, were built as part of the massive Interstate Highway System project — mentioned not infrequently by Biden on Wednesday as a polestar for his new infrastructure plan.
For example, he said the initiative is “not a plan that tinkers around the edges, it’s a once-in-a-generation investment in America, unlike anything we’ve seen or done since we built the Interstate Highway System and the space race decades ago.
Biden went on to claim the bill would provide the largest American jobs investment since World War II.
“It’ll create millions of jobs, good-paying jobs, Biden crowed, “It’ll grow the economy, make us more competitive around the world, promote our national security interest and put us in a position to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.”
And it’ll do this by destroying highways to build highways. It’s Keynesian ditch-digging, all in the name of racial equity.
Not that we shouldn’t have seen this coming. In December, Pete Buttigieg, then the nominee to head the Department of Transportation, said on social media that black and brown neighborhoods have been disproportionately divided by highway projects or left isolated by the lack of adequate transit and transportation resources.
“In the Biden-Harris administration, we will make righting these wrongs an imperative,” Buttigieg said.
In early March, we saw the nascent practical effects of this when the Department of Transportation effectively put a hold on the expansion of Interstate 45 in Houston, first by sending a letter to the Texas Department of Transportation asking it to stop the project and then by sending the Federal Highway Administration to sue Texas, as Bloomberg reported.
“Basically we’ve for decades been prioritizing highways over the ability to get around. We need to be smarter about this,” Harris County [administrative] Judge LinaHidalgo said during a news conference, according to Bloomberg. (County judges are basically county executives in Texas.)
“The way we build should not focus on what’s easiest for cars,” Hidalgo said. “It should focus on what improves quality of life. That is not only the right thing to do but necessary to make sure our region remains competitive as the world continues to evolve and we work to address concerns were focused around racial equity.
In a letter to the Texas DOT, Air Alliance Houston said the I-45 extension would have a severe and disparate impact on generational Black and Hispanic/Latinx neighborhoods and Black and Hispanic/Latinx individuals.
Others wrote similar letters, including U.S. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and the community organization Texas Housers, an activist group that spends more time protesting than it does trying to achieve its stated purpose, getting minority families into affordable housing
Those letters are what prompted the federal action from the highway administration, which says it will evaluate concerns raised under Title VI, the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that forbids discrimination on ‘the ground of race, color, or national origin’ in federally funded programs or activities.
The ridiculous labeling of highways and interstates as “racist” is just one absurd aspect of this wasteful, bloated sell-out to woke Fascism and the Green New Deal. ACV will be doing periodic articles on the other nonsense as this ill-conceived bill works its way through the House.