Quick government investment is necessary and sufficient problems are understood, but funding is insufficient due to an overestimation of private

e programs Matt Sledge, 07/27/11 *Deteriorating Transportation Infrastructure Could Cost America $3.1 Trillion,
The Huffington post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/transportation-infrastructurecost_n_911207.html, accessed 4/2/2012]//sbhag The ASCE claims the answer to the transportation problem is simple: Invest more , and quickly . "The problems facing our nation's infrastructure are widely acknowledged and well understood ," said Andrew Herrmann, the president-elect of the ASCE. But that doesn't mean Congress is rushing to fix them. Re-authorization of the transportation bill that pays for most of our highways has stalled. The House Republican outline for a bill would slash one third of transportation funding. The idea behind cutting those funds is that private enterprise could fill the gap .

Presidents can fund their objectives - congress empirically concedes discretionary spending authority and the plan would likely be confidential Pika 02 (Joseph A Pika, John Anthony Maltese, and Norman Thomas, professors of political
science, The Politics of the Presidency, 5th edition, p. 233) In addition to budgeting, presidents have certain discretionary spending powers that increase their leverage over the bureaucracy. They have substantial nonstatutory authority, based on understandings with congressional appropriations committees, to transfer funds within an appropriation and from one
program to another. The committees expect to be kept informed of such "reprogramming" actions.81 Fund transfer authority is essential to sound financial management, but it can be abused to circumvent congressional decisions. In 1970, for example, Nixon transferred funds to support an extensive unauthorized covert military operation in Cambodia. Nevertheless, Congress has given presidents

and certain agencies the authority to spend substantial amounts of money on a confidential basis, the largest and most controversial of which are for intelligence activities.

Next is our employment advantage we dont take a stance on the economy as a whole, but merely think that, in the short term, people need jobs. We think the plan would help these people, and for that reason we will continue: Rampant middle class unemployment Matt Sledge, 12/ 9/2011 *Government Jobs Could Fix Unemployment Crisis, Some Suggest, The
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/08/government-jobs-crisis_n_1137922.html, accessed 4/2/2012>]//sbhags The experience of Brennan and those millions of other Americans who passed through the "alphabet soup" of New Deal agencies, from the WPA to the CWA to the PWA, may point to one possible solution for today's dragging economy: direct government employment on public works programs . Joblessness increased from 3.3 percent in 1929 to 24.9 percent in 1933. For the millions out of work, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal jobs programs, like the CCC, offered hope in an otherwise bleak economic climate. Today, as unemployment sits at 8.6 percent and the nation continues to muddle through its worst period of prolonged joblessness since the Great Depression, some economists and historians say we should look back to the New Deal's infrastructure programs to stem

the crisis. President Obama pointed to that era on Tuesday in a fiery speech delivered in Osawatomie, Kans. "This kind of inequality -- a level we haven't seen since the Great Depression -- hurts us all," Obama said.

Bridge investment is deficit neutral and extremely efficient - our author is an expert Barry B. LePatner is founder of the New York City-based law firm LePatner & Associates LLP. For three
decades, he has been prominent as an advisor on business and legal issues affecting the real estate, design, and construction industries. The nations leading advisors to corporate and institutional clients, a guru of construction industry reform, with 35 years of experience, bringing a special understanding of the engineering, business, and legal issues attendant to the design and construction processes. He has also served on numerous advisory committees including: the Advisory Board, Society for Marketing Professional Services; the Board of the New York Building Congress; Board of Advisors, Legal Briefs for the Construction Industry; American Institute of Architects Advisory Committee; and the National Academy of Sciences., 11-15-2012 *How $60 Billion in Federal Infrastructure -Spending Can Put One Million People Back to Work, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barry-blepatner/infrastructure-investment_b_2138986.html]/sbhag We've survived the election of 2012. Now what? I propose that it would be a great step in the right direction for our reelected president and all those elected officials returning to or starting out in office to make a serious and tangible investment in our nation by investing in the nation's infrastructure. Our infrastructure has been an issue that our politicians have shied away from tackling for far too long. And that's most likely been the case for two reasons: 1) It is an overwhelming task. 2) No one knows how to fund the needed repairs. For the bold leader brave enough to take on the task of repairing the nation's infrastructure, I have some good news. Yes, it's overwhelming, but you can make it less so by focusing on a part of our infrastructure in truly desperate need of help: the nation's bridge system. And secondly, the 2,000 most dangerous bridges can be repaired without impacting the national deficit. What do we need to get started? Simply the will to make it happen. That's because for the leader brave enough to take on solving this problem, be it the president, a member of Congress, or someone else, it is a win-win situation. Not only would that leader show the bold, forward-thinking leadership that this country needs, you'll be showing a commitment to making a long-lasting, tangible investment in our nation, the very roads and bridges that keep our economy running and play a major role in our national security. You'll also be creating a significant number of jobs when many Americans are desperate to find work, and you'll do all of this without costing the nation a penny. How did the nation's infrastructure get so bad? Today, the average bridge in the United States is 43 years old. Most bridges in the country were designed for a fifty-year life span. The traveling public and the businesses using them every day are traversing tens of thousands of bridges that do not meet acceptable standards of safety and that, without action, will not receive the repairs they need any time soon. There are 7,980 bridges in the U.S. that are both structurally deficient, meaning they have received a "poor" rating, and fracture-critical, meaning they lack support to hold up the bridge if a single component fails. To give you an idea of the significance of these designations, the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis was both structurally deficient and fracture-critical before it collapsed. The main reason our nation's infrastructure has gone untended for so long is a lack of funding. But the reality is, that is just a convenient excuse. There is money for infrastructure investment. The truth is, states aren't required to spend the federal transportation funds they're given on bridge repairs. They can, and do, allocate half of the funding they receive to other projects. Long story short, the money is there; it simply needs to be allocated properly. And here's how to do it. Infrastructure spending can be deficit-neutral. It is absolutely possible to fix the top 2,000 most dangerous bridges without adding a single penny to the deficit. Here's how: Repairing these 2,000 bridges would cost an estimated $30-60 billion and would employ

1.2 million construction workers, providing a great relief to an industry with an unemployment rate of 17 percent compared to the national average of 7.9 percent. One-third of this expenditure (i.e., $13 billion) will immediately be returned to the federal and state governments via income taxes. Much of the rest would be pumped back into the economy through the newly employed construction workers' increased consumer spending. Also, keep in mind the boost that would come to the steel and concrete industries that would be supplying the materials to repair these bridges. At the end of the day, the net cost to the deficit, including recurring sales taxes on the clothing, cars, and other goods purchased by workers, will be zero.

Failure to invest destroys the economy 877 thousand jobs and 3.1 trillion lost in GDP by 2020 Matt Sledge is a reporter for the Huffington Post based in New York. A graduate of Brown University, he was previously the Rhode Island director for FairVote, 7-27-2011 *Deteriorating Transportation
Infrastructure Could Cost America $3.1 Trillion, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/transportation-infrastructure-cost_n_911207.html]/sbhag New tires add up. That's the finding of a report issued Wednesday by the American Society for Civil Engineers, which tallies up the cost of our decaying surface transportation infrastructure, from potholes to rusting bridges to buses that never come. The engineers found that overall, the cost of failing to invest more in the nation's roads and bridges would total $3.1 trillion in lost GDP growth by 2020. For workers, the toll of investing only at current levels would be equally daunting: 877,000 jobs would also be lost. Already, the report found, deficient and deteriorating surface transportation cost us $130 billion in 2010. By and large those costs would not come from the more dramatic failings of America's transportation system -- like the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minnesota -- but more mundane or even invisible problems. The minivan that hits a pothole chips away at a family's income. The clogged highway that drains away an extra half hour of a trucker's day also drives up the cost of shipping for businesses.

Congestion Matt Sledge is a reporter for the Huffington Post based in New York. A graduate of Brown University, he was previously the Rhode Island director for FairVote, 7-27-2011 *Deteriorating Transportation
Infrastructure Could Cost America $3.1 Trillion, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/transportation-infrastructure-cost_n_911207.html]/sbhag Congestion, the report found, is of particular cause for concern. Already, 40 percent of urban interstates have capacity deficiencies. Currently, that costs us $27 billion a year in lost time and other inefficiencies wasted on the roads. By 2020, that number could grow tenfold, reaching $276 billion a year.

Ripple effect Matt Sledge is a reporter for the Huffington Post based in New York. A graduate of Brown University, he was previously the Rhode Island director for FairVote, 7-27-2011 *Deteriorating Transportation
Infrastructure Could Cost America $3.1 Trillion, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/transportation-infrastructure-cost_n_911207.html]/sbhag The civil engineers are, by their own admission, a biased party -- they stand to gain the most from renewed investment in infrastructure -- but they paint a picture of an infrastructure shortfall that would have ripple effects far and wide through society.

Companies, the report estimates, would underperform by $240 billion over the next ten years without additional investment. Exporters, which would have trouble moving goods to market, would send $28 billion in trade less abroad. The cost to families' household budgets, the report suggests, would by $1,060 a year.

Unemployment causes systemic suffering and death Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Kevin Hassett, Senior
Fellow and Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, former served as a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, 05-12-2012, The Human Disaster of Unemployment, http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/the-human-disaster-ofunemployment Long-term unemployment is experienced disproportionately by the young, the old, the less educated, and African-American and Latino workers.While older workers are less likely to be laid off than younger workers, they are about half as likely to be rehired. One result is that older workers have seen the largest proportionate increase in unemployment in this downturn. The number of unemployed people between ages 50 and 65 has more than doubled.The prospects for the re-employment of older workers deteriorate sharply the longer they are unemployed. A worker between ages 50 and 61 who has been unemployed for 17 months has only about a 9 percent chance of finding a new job in the next three months. A worker who is 62 or older and in the same situation has only about a 6 percent chance. As unemployment increases in duration, these slim chances drop steadily.The result is nothing short of a national emergency. Millions of workers have been disconnected from the work force, and possibly even from society. If they are not reconnected, the costs to them and to society will be grim.Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood. Studies have found strong links between unemployment and cancer, with unemployed men facing a 25 percent higher risk of dying of the disease. Similarly higher risks have been found for heart disease and psychiatric problems.The physical and psychological consequences of unemployment are significant enough to affect family members. The economists Kerwin Charles and Melvin Stephens recently found an 18 percent increase in the probability of divorce following a husbands job loss and 13 percent after a wifes. Unemployment of parents also has a negative impact on achievement of their children. In the long run, children whose fathers lose a job when they are kids have reduced earnings as adults about 9 percent lower annually than children whose fathers do not experience unemployment.We all understand how the human costs can be so high. For many people, their very identity is their occupation. Few events rival the emotional strain of job loss.

The feds are key they must act first or state budget cuts will destroy recovery JOHNSON ET AL 10 - Nicholas Johnson- graduate degree from Duke University's Terry Sanford
Institute of Public Policy, Director of the State Fiscal Project, which works to develop strategies for longterm structural reform of state budget and tax systems, encourage low-income tax relief, and improve the way states prioritize funding, received the Ian Axford Fellowship in Public Policy, a program financed by the New Zealand government and administered by Fulbright New Zealand. Through this fellowship, he spent six months as an advisor to the New Zealand Treasury and the New Zealand Ministry of Social Development. AND*** Iris J. Lav- created the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative, a network of nonprofit organizations that work on state budget issues. The SFAI network began with 11 state organizations in 1993 and now operates in 31 states with groups in seven other states under development. In 1999, she received the Steven D. Gold award for contributions to state and local fiscal policy. Holds an MBA from George Washington University and an AB from the University of Chicago. AND*** Elizabeth McNicholM.A. in Political Science University of Chicago. Senior Fellow specializing in state fiscal issues including methods of examining state budget processes and long-term structural reform of state budget and tax systems, served as Assistant Research Director of the Service Employees International Union in Washington, D.C. was a staff member of the Joint Finance Committee for the State of Wisconsin Legislature specializing in property taxes and state aid to local governments (Nicholas, Iris J. Lav,Elizabeth McNichol, Additional Federal Fiscal Relief Needed to Help States Address Recessions Impact , March 1, http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2988) There are a number of reasons for these lags in state fiscal recovery.In the last two recessions, the unemployment rate continued climbing for 15 to 19 months after the recession ended and then remained high for a considerable period of time after that. That hampers the ability of state revenues to recover strongly; high unemployment reduces both income tax and consumption tax revenues. In the current economic downturn, unemployment is projected to continue rising in calendar year 2010 and to remain relatively high through 2012 or 2013. Mark Zandi forecasts that the unemployment rate will peak at 10.5 percent in the late spring of 2010 and not fall back to a rate consistent with full employment until 2013. Goldman-Sachs forecasts the unemployment rate to continue to rise throughout calendar year 2010, reaching 10.5 percent in the fourth quarter.[11]High unemployment also affects state expenditures, as Medicaid rolls remain swollen with residents who have lost their jobs, income, and health insurance.As states strive to balance their budgets while doing the least harm to their economies and their residents, they initially draw down rainy day funds and other reserves, sell assets, and postpone payments. The use of these strategies, however, creates holes in future-year budgets that have to be filled. When unemployment remains high in the years immediately after a recession ends, state revenue growth generally is not strong enough to fill these gaps.The tax increases that states enact during recessions often are temporary and expire before fiscal conditions have fully recovered.Timing of ActionBecause of state budget calendars, it would not be effective for the Administration and Congress to wait until the fall of 2010 to consider additional aid to the states for state fiscal year 2011.In most states, the governors proposed budget for fiscal year 2011*12+ is being developed this fall. At the end of calendar 2009 or the beginning of calendar 2010, governors will submit their budgets to their legislatures, to be considered between January and June 2010. Final budgets for fiscal year 2011 will be adopted at some point during that period. Some states, particularly those with short legislative sessions, require the adoption of budgets by March or April.States budget for their fiscal years as a whole, not for six-month periods. The spending cuts and tax increases that states will institute in order to balance their 2011 budgets will be determined based on the states budget projections for all of fiscal year 2011. Those projections will include a significant drop-off in ARRA funds for the final half of the state fiscal year (i.e., after December 2010).Accordingly, many of the actions that states will take to balance their 2011 budgets will be implemented next summer (or in some cases even earlier if budget

gaps have reopened for the current fiscal year). To gain maximum revenue, states that plan to adopt tax increases to help address their looming fiscal year 2011 shortfalls may want to put them in place as quickly as possible. The same applies to spending reductions; for example, many cuts in education spending are likely to take effect next summer, at the start of the 2010-2011 school year.The bottom line is that unless states know that additional aid is coming even if they do not actually receive the dollars until calendar year 2011 they will institute large new budget cuts and/or tax increases by next summer to close the shortfalls in their fiscal 2011 budgets.ConclusionState fiscal assistance under ARRA will end or largely be exhausted by the end of calendar year 2010. Unfortunately, big state deficits are expected to continue through state fiscal year 2012 that is, for another 18 months or so after 2010 ends. If states do not receive additional federal assistance beyond the scheduled expiration of such aid, they will be forced to institute further deep budget cuts and/or substantial tax increases. Such actions would place a drag on the U.S. economy, impeding the recovery and costing many jobs. Such measures also could cause serious hardship for many families and individuals that have lost their jobs and are relying on Medicaid and other key state services to make it through this unusually painful economic downturn.

Maintenance Key Prefer the ASCE Everyone agrees with them we need to increase infrastructure investment Matt Sledge, 07/27/11 *Deteriorating Transportation Infrastructure Could Cost America $3.1 Trillion,
The Huffington post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/transportation-infrastructurecost_n_911207.html, accessed 4/2/2012]//sbhags Underscoring the wider appeal of ASCE's argument, the report received the backing of both labor and business leaders. "Todays report from the American Society of Civil Engineers further reinforces that the U.S. is missing a huge opportunity to ignite economic growth, improve our global competitiveness, and create jobs," Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a release. Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, said in a release that "with a modest increase in investment, we can rebuild a strong economy where business can thrive and workers can afford a place to live, raise a family, take an occasional vacation, pay for their childrens education and have a dignified retirement."

Employment is on the brink of recovery but will remain stagnant unless further stimulus is passed best economic analysis says little blips are insignificant Alan Krueger, The White House, 1-4-2013 *The Employment Situation in December, White House,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/04/employment-situation-december]/sbhag While more work remains to be done, todays employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression. It is critical that we continue the policies that are building an economy that works for the middle class as we dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession that began in December 2007. With the passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act earlier this week, more than 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses now have certainty that their income taxes will not rise. Additionally, unemployment insurance was extended for two million Americans who are searching for a job, and companies will continue to receive tax credits for the research that they do

and continue to have tax incentives to accelerate investment in their businesses. By allowing income tax cuts for the top two percent of earners to expire, this legislation further reduces the deficit by $737 billion over the next decade. It is important that we continue to move toward a sustainable federal budget in a responsible way that balances revenue and spending while protecting critical investments in the economy and essential support for our most vulnerable citizens. Todays report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that private sector businesses added 168,000 jobs in December. Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 155,000 jobs last month. The economy has now added private sector jobs for 34 straight months, and a total of 5.8 million jobs have been added over that period, taking account of the preliminary benchmark revision. In 2012, private businesses added two million payroll jobs, taking account of the preliminary benchmark revision. The household survey showed that the unemployment rate was unchanged at 7.8 percent in December. The unemployment rate in November was revised from 7.7 percent to 7.8 percent as a result of BLSs annual update of seasonal factors. The labor force participation rate was also unchanged at 63.6 percent in December. Over the last 12 months, the unemployment rate has decreased by 0.7 percentage point as a result of growing employment, and the labor force participation rate has been essentially unchanged. According to the establishment survey, in December employment rose notably in the health care and social assistance industry (+55,000), restaurants and bars (+38,000), construction (+30,000), and manufacturing (+25,000). The manufacturing sector has added jobs in 30 of the last 35 months, gaining half a million jobs over that period, the most for any such period since the late-1980s. Payrolls rose in both residential and nonresidential construction jobs. Retail trade lost 11,300 jobs, following gains totaling 161,300 over the previous four months. Government lost 13,000 jobs in December, mostly in local government education, which lost 11,500 jobs. The local government education sector has now lost 294,400 jobs since its recent peak in November 2009. As the Administration stresses every month, the monthly employment and unemployment figures can be volatile, and payroll employment estimates can be subject to substantial revision. Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available..

projects help those hurt by the downturn budgets and employment transportation costs absorb one out of every seven dollars of income Treasury Department, March 23, 2012 *A NEW ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF INFRASTRUCTURE
INVESTMENT, A REPORT PREPARED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY WITH THE COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS]/sbhag IV. How Infrastructure Investment Affects the Middle Class For the average American family, transportation expenditures rank second only to housing expenditures. As can be seen in Figure 1, the average American annually spends more on transportation than food , and more than two times as much as on out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. Given how much Americans spend on transportation expenditures, public investments which lower the cost of transportation could have a meaningful impact on families budgets. Reducing fuel consumption, decreasing the need for car maintenance due to potholes and poor road conditions, increasing the availability of affordable and accessible public transit systems, and reducing fuel consumption by making better use of the land would benefit Americans and allow them to spend less money on transportation. Figure 1. 19 Middle-Class Americans Are the Biggest Beneficiaries of Improved Infrastructure For the 90 percent of Americans who are not among the top decile in the income distribution, transportation costs absorb one out of every seven dollars of income. Transportation expenses relative to income are almost twice as great for the bottom 90 percent as they

are for the top 10 percent. Figure 2. Providing high-speed rail and improved public transportation would provide middle-class families with more options to save time and money, so that they can retain more of their income for other purposes and spend more time doing what they want, rather than spending time getting there. One study concluded that individuals in a two-person household who ride public transportation and eliminate one car save, on average, almost $10,000 annually.34 Improved 34 American Public Transportation Association, Transit Savings Report, July 14, 2011. See appendix 1 for cities with greatest savings. <http://www.apta.com/mediacenter/pressreleases/2011/Pages/110714_Transit_Savings.aspx>. 20 accessibility to public transportation systems will also help protect household budgets against the impact of rising fuel costs over time . For example, research has estimated that between 2000 and 2009, median income households living in neighborhoods with diverse transportation choices and regional accessibility experienced a $200 per month savings in average transport costs, compared to similar households in less location efficient areas.35 Moreover, improving our nations transportation system can save middle-class families money by reducing the costs associated with congestion and the additional automobile maintenance caused by poor road conditions. One study found that poor conditions of roads cost the average motorist who drives in cities on a regular basis over $400 a year.36,37 Another study by the Department of Transportation finds that $85 billion in total investment per year over the next twenty years would be required in order to bring existing highways and bridges into a state of good repair.38 As Gramlich and others have found, these fix-it-first investments will save money for most American families. Infrastructure Investment Creates Middle-Class Jobs Spending on infrastructure generates demand for products and services from a variety of industries. For example, road building not only requires construction workers, but also grading and paving equipment, gasoline or diesel to run the machines, a variety of smaller hand tools, raw inputs of cement, gravel, and asphalt, surveyors to map the site, engineers and site managers, and even accountants to keep track of costs. Data from the Commerce Departments Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) provide insight into how a dollars worth of demand for some broad categories of spending is divided among the supplying industries. Analysis of data from the BEA 2010 annual input-output table and related data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on the composition of industry employment suggests that 61 percent of the jobs created by investing in infrastructure would be in the construction sector, 12 percent would be in the manufacturing sector, and 7 percent would be in retail trade, for a total of 80 percent in these three sectors. Using BLS data on the structure of occupations in those industries, and the distribution of wages for those occupations by industry, nearly 90 percent of the jobs in the three sectors most affected by infrastructure spending are middle-class jobs, defined as those between the 25th and 75th percentile in the national distribution of wages. 35 Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, Center For Neighborhood Technology, February 28, 2012. 36Americas Roughest Rides and Strategies to Make Our Roads Smoother, Sept. 2010. <www.tripnet.org/urban_roads_report_Sep_2010.pdf>. 37 See appendix 2 for a chart of 20 urban areas where costs are the highest. 38 Department of Transportation, 2010 Status of the Nations Highways, Bridges and Transit: Conditions and Performance Report. 21 Further analysis suggests that the jobs created by investing in infrastructure are not only middle-class jobs, but also are concentrated in occupations and industries that have been disproportionately affected by the recent economic downturn. Overall, the unemployment rate among those who would be put to work by additional investment in infrastructure has averaged approximately 13 percent over the past twelve months, more than one and one-half times the current national unemployment rate.39 Figure 3. One example of this can be found in Lincoln, Nebraska. Most people would never guess that an investment in improving the New York City transit system would create middle-class manufacturing jobs in Lincoln. However, that is exactly what happens every time New Yorks MTA or

Metro North buys a rail car made at the Kawasaki factory in Lincoln. This factory, Kawasaki USAs largest manufacturing plant, employs over 1,000 workers. The plant was established in 1974 as a consumer products center and expanded in 2001 to build rail cars. The vast majority of new M-8 rail cars ordered by New York Transits Metro North System (340 out of 382) are made in this plant, meaning that most of the folks who commute from Connecticut to 39 Treasury calculations using most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 22 New York City by rail have ridden or will ride on a car made in this plant. 40 This is another example of the geographic diversity of benefits which comes from investing in infrastructure.

Our decision process fights desensitization, alternatives legitimizes structural violence creates psychological priming for the worst atrocities of war Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 4 (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @
UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to this anthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Dalys version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US inner city to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the little violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of small wars and invisible genocides (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of genocide into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by ordinary good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution

of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the small wars and invisible genocides to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are invisible genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieus partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of normal social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglias notion of peacetime crimes - crimini di pace imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on illegal aliens versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal stability is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied strangle-holds. Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the normative socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamins view of late modern history as a chronic state of emergency (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other total institutions. Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and,

of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to pseudo- speciation as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peacetimes that precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by symbolic violence, the violence that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes. Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early warning signs (Charney 1991), the priming (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the genocidal continuum (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable social parasites (the nursing home elderly, welfare queens, undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization