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Considering the 15 comments on the Penn Station Rebuild the public has lost interest in forever building project for the dinghy building that is the home of transportation in New York City. The latest is that the federal government has taken over at the urging of NY Governor Kathy Hochul who persuaded DJT to do it. This means state funds of $1.3 billion will be saved and DJT asserted federal authority over the project with Amtrak as owner of the Penn Station planning this out. Construction will begin in 18 months at a cost of $7 billion. The previous estimate was $6 billion. A similar situation is seen for the dilapidated bridge in Baltimore that took years to get the project off the ground as one plan was ditched for another 3 years after the bridge disaster. At this rate the bullet train projects between Ahmedabad and Mumbai will be repeated across many Indian cities before Penn Station is rebuilt, before Baltimore Bridge is rebuilt.

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Why no new infrastructure building plan is in place in the US for decades as China, now India build new infrastructure every day with a Master Plan. The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March 2024 in the Baltimore, Maryland area. There was much hand wringing at the time and president Biden also stepped in with help. The Washington Post says 2 years later no plan is in place to build a new bridge. The cost keeps going up from $1 billion to $1.9 billion and up again to $5.2 billion, with the dates shifting 2028 to 2030. Maryland received $2.6 billion insurance payments for the damage to the bridge by a ship, yet the project is stalled in disagreements with different parties involved. Even in the streets of New York, the pedestrian pavements in Brooklyn and other places are so dilapidated but no one seems to care. Suggesting that New Yorkers are also numb to infrastructure being bad as it is, just as Mumbai residents were in the old days before infrastructure became a daily priority in India in recent years, following China's example. ...

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Unilever of London/Amsterdam merges its food business with McCormick of Baltimore, Maryland.

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In this exceptional piece Galston says institutions such as Johns Hopkins University in the Baltimore area have to do more to integrate their activities with the city in the way Carnegie Melon University and other institutions helped revive Pittsburgh. Pittsbugh suffered a hollowing out of manufacturing with foreign competition, population decline and unemployment reaching 17%. It suffered economic decline in a way that happened in Detroit over the last decade. A concerted effort by the city's political, economic and nonprofit leaders is credited with making Pittsburgh one of the most livable cities, and reviving industry around new innovation. The unemployment rate in Pittsburgh is 5.4%. Galston acknowledges that Baltimore is 63% black, and Pittsburgh 26%, yet race is not the only factor, and Galston points out the need for Baltimore to work diligently to build on its educational and medical technology assets to build a new future for the city.

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Francis Scott Key bridge that crosses outer Baltimore harbour collapses, a sign of the neglect of aging infrastructure. Priorities that were ignored by previous administrations pursuing star wars, and wars in the mountains and deserts of the Middle East since 1980, reversing decades of progress since FDR/Truman set the path, Eisenhower that built the Interstate Highway System, Kennedy/LBJ that set the path to the New Frontier that was lost in the distance. US president Biden said the federal government "would pay the entire cost of reconstructing the bridge" and it would be done "as soon as humanly possible."

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Prof. Lasson of the law school at the University of Maryland, teaches civil liberties. He provides perspective on the situation in Baltimore by giving a brief history of the city, and going over the history of Catholics, Jews and black people in the city as they struggled to assert their rights. Thurgood Marshall did not apply to the University's law school because he feared he would not be accepted. He went on to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. The 1857 Dred Scott decision before the Civil War was written by Roger Tany, who was from Baltimore. Maryland was a slave state before 1865. The law library at the law school of the University of Maryland now has Marshall's name.

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Friedman looks at the situation for inner city kids in cities like Baltimore. Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, tells him most of these kids suffer from a lack of parenting. Duncan says, that with the lack of parents around them, the only presence round the clock is that of gangs which make an influence on these kids. One solution discussed is using the boarding school option to save these kids from the pernicious influences around them in the absence of adequate parenting. Other experts suggest tackling the source of the problem by economic revival of these communities. As a separate article in the NYT (Patricia Cohen, May 24, 2015) shows this is not easily done- black communities depended heavily on public sector jobs which were hit hard in the last decade, as the hollowing out in manufacturing was also hitting these communities and the industrial labor force. Blight such as that in Detroit from bankrupt cities unable to provide public services has added to the strains on these neighborhoods. William Galston (WSJ, May 6, 2015) points to the revival of Pittsburgh, and says cities such as Baltimore could do more with their medical technology and university assets. ...

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A cargo ship hits Francis Scott Key Bridge which crosses outer Baltimore harbour and the bridge collapses on March 27, 2024. Pictures capture the bridge actually collapsing right in front of our eyes, a reminder of the infrastructure building that was neglected for so long during a period of foreign wars in remote mountains and deserts of the Middle East, and a period of tech and other monopolies where corporations paid less in taxes than teachers, nurses and childcare workers, both depriving the government of needed revenues for nation building infrastructure, and needed investments in manufacturing, health, education, reversing climate change. A period of neglect and lost decades which president Biden and a bipartisan group of Congressman are only now reversing with no time to lose.

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Denmark based Maersk is the link that connects Asian exporters to the US and Europe. It measures its container ships in size by TEU's a TEU being  20 foot container boxes, 20 foot equivalent units being standard. The Dali container ship had 4700 40 foot container boxes that was built for 10,000 TEU's. When Japan was the large exporter getting Toyota's into Long Beach it was 6400 TEU's , with China now sending BYD E vehicles it is now as large as 10,000 TEU's. In the future with India sending its exports under a resilient supply chain to the US it is 20,000 TEU's. What we don't see are these ports such as Long Beach and Hamburg (in which China has ownership stake) which are increasing capacity for taking in exports from Asia. It has reached these volumes only in one direction from Asia, which president Biden is trying to reverse by building factories at home for resilient supply chain and for jobs and a future for American workers. The Dali 4700 containers that hit the bridge at Scott Key in Baltimore also were figuratively hitting America's own manufacturing base, and its workers and communties built around factories, across the Nation. ...

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Different perspectives on the "zero tolerance" policy implemented by Martin O'Malley when he was Mayor of Baltimore during 2000-2006, are described here by WSJ's Laura Meckler. O'Malley sees the policy as having reduced crime in the city, yet David Simon a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, who created the HBO series 'The Wire,' sees this differently. The HBO series was critical of the Mayor and painted a less flattering picture of the city, showing city leaders and institutions not tackling the real problems facing the city. Following the riots in Baltimore the conflicting versions of progress and lack of progress are emerging. Simon says the pressure on the police to show reduced crime led to arrest of people for minor offences.

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The NYT's Scott Shane talks to residents of Baltimore and the neighborhoods where a community center and CVS store were set ablaze. Baltimore has suffered from economic decline as the city's major employer Bethlehem Steel closed its plant, and fewer industry jobs remained to sustain poorer neighborhoods. Incarceration, drug use, crime, all have taken a toll as more residents left the city for the suburbs. Unlike Detroit which has the auto industry, and dilapidated buildings are gradually being replaced with newer structures, Baltimore has only one large employer, John Hopkins University and its medical complex. Economist Basu says the loss is felt more deeply because efforts were being made to give new life to poorer neighborhoods, and because the rest of the country will now have a different impression of the city reducing outside investment.

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Days after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore's outer harbor, a key part of the industrial and jobs infrastructure in Maryland, this WSJ report shows 8 other bridges in the same dilapidated condition and at risk of collapsing. The eight bridges are- The Verrazano Narrows Bridge  NY-NJ,             The George Washington Bridge NY-NJ, The Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland- San Francisco Bridge in California, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state,  the Lewis and Clark Bridge and the St. Johns Bridge in Oregon. Note that all but one are older than Scott Key built in 1977, and all have "fracture critical" elements according to their WSJ report, meaning that even the failure of one steel component in tension could cause a collapse. Jennifer Homendy, chair of NTSB safety authority doing the investigation into Scott Key says that there are 17,000 bridges in the US that are fracture critical, showing how much of US infrastructure is aging and in need of investment that is today being sucked up in mad sprees of venture capital investing in startups, and in misallocation of capital, that contribute little to the ease of living, to jobs and essential infrastructure for the American people.                  ...

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McGurn reminds readers that LBJ's war on poverty started not from a inner city area but from a poor white home in Martin County, eastern Kentucky. This has fostered the same degree of dependency in Martin County, eastern Kentucky, as it has in inner cities in the U.S., says McGurn. He also compares South Korea in the sixties, emerging from years of neglect under Japanese occupation and following this with the devastation of the Korean War, and pulling itself up in the next three decades to the point where it is a modernized economy with high living standards. Strong families, education, a strong work ethic, are vitally needed ingredients for building strong communities. Economic opportunity is another ingredient. In Baltimore the loss of the steel industry, and in Martin County the loss of jobs in coal mining, have reduced economic opportunities. How to put all the ingredients together is the challenge for decisionmakers.

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For a city that suffered from the loss of steel mills of Bethlehem Steel, loss of Western Electric and General Motors, loss of jobs becoming part of rust belt America, the collapse of Francis Scott Key Bridge is a big blow. The port has come to a standstill and the loop expressway around the city of Baltimore is without a key section. The city's port was the last remaining industrial infrastructure, the fifth busiest on the eastern seaboard, and the largest for shipment of trucks and cars. Now this is gone and shipping diverted to other ports. Alec Mac Gillis looks at the people of the city and the sense that a part of them is now gone, the view from the port gave people a sense of being home.

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A look at the views of candidates running in the U.S. presidential election of 2016 on mass incarceration. Benie Sanders, Democratic Senator from Vermont, says the situation worsened for incarceration during the Clinton years when a policy of building prisons and increasing law enforcement was adopted. The 2.2 million persons in prison today are double that for the years before the early 1990's, said Sanders. Under president Clinton the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was passed creating tougher penalties for drug offenders, and putting $30.2 billion for more police officers and new prisons. Hillary Clinton called for putting "an end to the era of mass incarceration." Adding in other remarks that missing African-American men means "missing husbands, missing fathers, and missing brothers."