Many of you have heard by now that Bay Bridge, one of the nation's busiest commuter bridges which links Oakland and San Francisco has been closed indefinitely due to the collapse of a bracket last night.
Traffic is snarled, commuters are angry, taxpayers are fuming and questions are being asked about how we got into this mess. One columnist suggests that the shoddy workmanship that led to this failure is a symptom of the "Outsourcing, free trade and globalization" which are the "the hallmarks of the Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and the Clinton administrations."
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As Benjamin has pointed out:
The point is less about the current mishap but about all the questions that now arise about the entire Bay Bridge retrofit project.
The steel fabrication for the project which was essentially outsourced to Chinese steelmakers.
As Benjamin points out, in doing so, the Bridge apparently sacrificed not only American jobs, but quality control. The project has been riddled with reports of defective welds, inferior quality control.
The snapped bracket also raises questions about all Chinese outsourced products:
It raises questions about the relentless pursuit of "free trade" over US jobs and industry: cheap and unregulated overseas labor over highly regulated and fair wage American labor.
One failed bracket raises questions about everything because one more failed Chinese or American component could be tragic. The one failed bracket is the "shiny object of the day" obfuscating the much larger issues. It is is no different from dog food, toothpaste or infant formula.
To be fair, the Bay Bridge project is also a symbol of political dysfunction in the Bay Area. Squabbling over the design largely by former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, have led to monumental delays and five fold increases in the costs of this project.