This past Friday, I was standing on the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis at a Laborers rally to push for massive infrastructure investment as a way to create jobs, and rebuild the country. In an obvious way and a less obvious way, standing on the bridge spanning the Mississippi gives one a clear understanding how, on the one hand, infrastructure–such an unsexy word to many–advances progress and, on the other hand, the bankruptcy of the Republican Party’s economic vision (if you can use the word "vision") for the country. It is a vision of an economic bridge to utter collapse.

   The obvious. If you look downriver from the bridge, you can see this:

It is the rebuilt 1-35 bridge. On August 1st 2007, the original bridge <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge">collapsed</a> during rush hour, killing 13 people.

    Here is a part of the story that gets lost in the disaster.  Just a month before the collapse, <a href="http://nexus.umn.edu/Courses/ce5212/Case1/articles/gas_tax_case_study.pdf">according to a study</a>, Minnesota ranked 36th in the nation–a very low gas tax of 38.4 cents per gallon, compared to the highest gas tax of 62.8 cents in California.

   Then-Gov. Tim Pawlenty TWICE <a href="http://35wbridge.pbworks.com/w/page/900783/Veto%20Override%20-%20Transportation%20Funding">vetoed</a> a transportation bill, including the <strong>second veto just months before the collapse</strong>, because of a provision to raise the gas tax–the May 2007 bill would have hiked the gas tax 7.5 cents.

   By the way, the support for the gas tax hike was bi-partisan–because there were actual "moderate" Republicans who were disturbed by the crumbling of the state’s infrastructure. Referring to Pawlenty, Republican Rep. Ron Erhardt,  who was one of the sponsors of the bill, <a href="http://citypages.com/databank/28/1393/article15756.asp">said</a>, "We were quite happy…because we got a bipartisan plan passed. The leadership in this party has dropped the ball on funding transportation issues, just because somebody, a big somebody, signed a no-new-taxes pledge."

   Pawlenty vetoed a THIRD bill–after the collapse–but his veto was overridden in a bi-partisan vote in February 2008. After the override vote in 2008, the two Republicans in the Senate and six Republicans in the House voted who cast "yes" votes with the Democrats <a href="http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2008/03/18/1184/the_override_six_chastised_by_gop_leaders_theyre_feeling_confident_about_re-election">were removed from the party’s leadership</a> and the Taxpayer League of Minnesota targeted the Republican override voters with a “wanted” poster on its website. The vote to override ended four of the state house Republicans political careers: two opted to retire rather than face right-wing anger, one lost a bitter primary fight and a fourth ran and lost as an independent rather than compete as a Republican.

    That is the Republican vision: Pawlenty (whose economic plan has been called <a href="http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view_post.php?content_id=15205">"stunning in its vapidity"</a> by The Financial Times) and other national Republicans would promote falling bridges and dead people as a more acceptable policy than paying a bit more in taxes.

    The other piece that is forgotten: Democrat Jim Oberstar, who had represented Minnesota’s 8th congressional district, was also the chair of the House Transportation Committee. Oberstar introduced a bill–you know, a dreaded earmark–that funneled a minimum of $250 million to begin the process of replacing the bridge. The bill passed the House unanimously on August 3–just two days after the disaster.

    In 2010, Oberstar was defeated for re-election by a Tea Party Republican, Chip Cravaack who ran, in part, on a platform attacking Oberstar’s prowess in dispensing earmarks like the one that rebuilt the 1-35 bridge (which was, by the way, built so it could accommodate light rail in the future), created jobs and helped people get to work more efficiently.

    But, the view from the Stone Arch Bridge gets even more interesting. The bridge sits right at the nexus of a spot where large flour mills used to operate on either side of the Mississippi. Minneapolis was the <a href="http://www.millcitymuseum.org/flour-milling-history">"Flour Milling Capital of the World"</a>. Those mills employed thousands of people.

You can see those now-empty structures on either side, including the giant Pillsbury mill:

The flour did not just come down from the heavens–though I’m guessing some Republican candidates might argue for divine intervention. No, the flour was brought to the mills by trains…you know, infrastructure.

    The mills did not run by command from the Almighty. No, that was left to the dams and network of turbines built by harnessing the Mississippi at the St. Anthony Falls. Check this view looking north from the Stone Arch Bridge and you will get a feel for what was possible:

You can see the Mississippi flowing to the right. To the left are a set of locks. Until the Army Corps of Engineers built two dams and a series of locks–INFRASTRUCTURE–between 1948 and 1963, you could not navigate further north up the Mississippi.

All that INFRASTRUCTURE–GOVERNMENT SPENDING–created jobs and the economic activity that the Republican “free marketeers” seem to love so much. Government can act because it has the interests of the people in mind–while, today, corporate executives would rather sit on a trillion dollars in cash and pay themselves huge salaries.

If today’s leaders of the Republican Party had been in charge in the 19th Century and in the early and mid-part of the 20th Century, and presuming also that the same cowed mindset infected the Democratic Party, there would have been no power for the flour mills in Minneapolis and people would never have been able to move boats above the St. Anthony Falls.

The true economic bridge to nowhere.