Constructing the Future.

Image from Skanska USA - Planned LaGuardia Airport

upgrade.

Construction is an industry bound to see sustained solid growth in the both the near and distant future. Of course, as a New Yorker working on a $3 Billion public works construction program, you might say my view is skewed. However, sitting inside the industry, and being cognizant of upcoming trends, allow me to elucidate.

A vision of the New New York Bridge,

courtesy of Tectonic Engineering

We are somewhat lucky in New York, and not least of which, the City of New York, where mega projects happen concurrently in a variety of locations. The major LaGuardia Airport renovation recently began spinning up to the tune of $4 Billion. Large swaths of that money is dedicated to be spent on subcontractors and firms capable of taking on smaller pieces of the larger project. At the same time as the LaGuardia project announced its commencement, Governor Cuomo additionally announced $3 Billion dollars for the refurbishment and renovation of New York Penn Station as a world class transportation hub through a public private partnership.

Lastly, another $1 Billion has been announced for added transportation construction of a third rail line on the LIRR. All of this, of course, is aside from the significant housing construction set to start up as developers activated projects before expiration of the 421-a tax credit, and separate from the New Tappan Zee Bridge (also known as The New New York Bridge) already underway with a total project budget of $3.98 Billion.

But that is just New York. The rest of the country is similarly seeing either the need for, or the current stimulation of the construction industry. The World Economic Forum issued a report in May of this year saying: “ The construction industry serves almost all other industries, as all economic value creation occurs within or by means of buildings or other “constructed assets”. As an industry, moreover, it accounts for 6% of global GDP. It is also the largest global consumer of raw materials,...” That total is significant, making “constructed assets” all the more important.

By way of example of projects soon to come through the construction pipeline: The United States New England region - Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts - began leveraging their collective bargaining power as a triumvirate of entities for the purchase of clean energy megaprojects. The largest offshore wind farm recently concluded its construction just off the shore of

The Deepwater Wind project off

Rhode Island's shore in the Long

Island Sound.

Rhode Island and is producing 30 MW of electricity. Not megalithic on any scale, but Rhode Island is not in need of, for example, the 120 MW necessary for running New York State. Other projects are sure to follow as multistate reforms to our power grids and energy distribution occur. Beyond energy industry refurbishment, nationwide transportation infrastructure currently ranks exceedingly low. An October, 2015 Fortune article cites the Economic Policy Institute finding that roads, bridges, rail, and air transport systems are in direct danger of critical collapse without upgrades and improvements. One plan to utilize $275 Billion in infrastructure banks for seed money to spur infrastructure spending is an idea that promises to grow and sustain the heavy construction industry around the country for years to come. Driving on those upgraded and refurbished roads will be the vehicles of the future, and highly skilled, futuretech constructors will be necessary for either out-of-the-ground development, or wholesale repurposing of existing locations for their production.

These totals and projects are all public institution related and funded. The amounts and directions of projects from the private industry will demonstrate a yawning chasm of difference in their price tags and style. However, the variety and viability of private industry megaprojects will similarly be dependent on transportation, energy distribution, and supply infrastructure meaning that the completion of both have interdependencies. The two things in combination are bound to create a growth opportunity for constructors for years to come.

Call of Duty

Marketing from Call of Duty:
Advanced Warfare. Art imitates life?
Or the other way around? And if these
games train our youth's minds, for what,
precisely, are they being trained?

Four o'clock in the afternoon is normally a lull in the work day. It's an hour or two before most folks normally walk out of their offices, depending on the organization for which you work, productivity has slowed, and there are minor side bar conversations around happy hours and after work activities.

Yesterday, however, turned all of that on its head.

Three lives in rapid succession have been determined of lesser value than those of uniformed 'law enforcement'. Decisions surrounding the cases of Trayvon Martin, Akai Gurley, Michael Brown, and now Eric Garner are to say the least atrocities, if not something more offensive. The wholesale devaluation of one particular race in our country is one of those frequently untreated conditions of democratic dementia deemed unnecessary to treat. Spin doctors have seen it as a kind of nuisance cough: leave it alone and it will go away.

But this isn't going away. In fact, the metastasis of the invading cancer has so completely infiltrated every corner of our society as to make the host system indistinguishable from the infected one. Selma, The Watts Riots, the original March on Washington, the LA Riots, the recent 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Ferguson, last night in New York City and the nation... this is not going away.

Oppression does seem inherent to the human condition. Jews in the ancient world/during the ReConquest/the Holocaust, Christians in the Roman era, non-Christians during the Crusades and Inquisition, Natives during the period of Exploration, Slavery... the subjugation and obviation of entire races of people is a continual characteristic in human history. It would be impossible to make a case that war is not already being perpetrated. Community members die in the streets every day, collateral damage is a marginal cost in the accounting process, and manipulation is so rampant we can no longer be called a Democracy, nor can we any longer call New York City the last bastion of liberalism. We have inarguably and unequivocally registered our discontent, we have assembled peacefully and it has brought us neither relief, nor a redress of grievances, and inexorably, the body count ticks up.

"Unite for Justice" From the
Ferguson Decision rally
11-28-2014. Photo Credit:
 David A. Brezler 

Where, then, is Spartacus? Where is that sorely needed paladin who will unite the clans of the oppressed and lead them forward to shake the very foundations of the oppressor state? History is rife with examples of whole systems that evolved only as a result of the collective, a unity of groups who previously might have been - to say the least - uneasy towards each other banding together to throw off the yokes of oppression. Marching in the streets, chanting inciteful slogans, and waving standard bearing banners is not unimportant. However, it is temporary, and the powerful are not apt to decide for change as long as they can count on paid  security and continue to change the channel.

We must create a much stronger movement, a much more strategic answer, something infinitely stronger than just ‘sea change’. The power structure from bottom to top must be entirely disrupted, and disbanded, from how funding is controlled to how politics is controlled, to how housing, food, and health is controlled. The often quoted "a system cannot protect those it was never designed to serve" could not be more true than at this very moment. Any system that presupposes as a base part of its structure inequities, impoverishment, and the devaluation of human life is not a system built on lasting precepts. We know this from studying the last several times empirical enterprises attempted global control. In fact, we should be asking if these are qualities intrinsic to the economic and political structures we have in place. Just how much of an ideal is this Enlightenment Era experiment before we go exporting it about the globe? 

ALL lives matter. More than simply a new political party to languish by the wayside and eventually be co-opted into the current status quo, we need an entirely new system. We require a system where elitism is not bread as an inherited trait into our culture. That ethos reigns whether the elitism expresses itself in Sports, Wall St., Education, or Community Organizing. Shut it down, shut it all down. Those fanaticisms that transform normally thinking, critical individuals into perpetuators of disparateness and exclusivity cannot persist.

Our only way forward is as a singular, cogent, incisive unit with the survival of Humanity as our central, unifying cause. Let us not be so caught up in the demonstration of our discontent that we forget to forge fruitful new pathways, and become the tomorrow we were meant to see.

People's Climate March Occupies New York City Streets.

Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez,
Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman,
& State Senator Liz Kruger at Sunday's
People's Climate March.
Photo Credit: Office of the AG

Today's multinational People's Climate March was, by all accounts, a raging success. Well attended by both state and local legislators, the crowd was estimated at roughly 400,000. Spurred on by the environmental/climate change organizing nonprofit 350.org, anticipatory signage had been widely visible for weeks in advance in subway cars, on bust stops, and the only place where one of the stylized displays likely belonged but never made it was onto one of the stories tall jumbo screens in Times Square, right along the parade path.

What is uniquely interesting regarding this year's march is the fact that big business, in stark contrast to previous years, seems to be getting directly on board the bandwagon. Indeed, they have funded some of their own weighty brass instruments playing in all their oom-pa-pa glory directly in the face of every single climate science denier - legislative, religious, think tank, or Koch Associate.

Multilingual signage from
The People's Climate March.
Copyright 350.org 2014 

The collective of Keurig, Coca-Cola, and Heinz (along with others) respectively released major statements this year indicating in no uncertain terms that climate change threatens their respective bottom lines. Price Waterhouse Coopers, LLP - the globally known accounting firm - in an historic move released the estimate in its 'Low Carbon Economy Index' report that we are 20 years away from total system collapse. Not to be solely the harbingers of the current power structure's paradigmatic, perfunctory passage into the past, they also laid out clear pathways to a sustainable energy future. All possibilities are entirely functional and market ready now.

It turns out that, in the end, all of the dilettantes and dismissed detectives of the day of our denouement were correct: Viewing the Amazon, the Canadian Boreal Forest, or any other old growth forest as "overburden" to be removed in search of limited resource fuel that is itself a pollutant will inevitably overburden us with unimaginable lasting effects. Not even the entirety of the world's billionaires combined can afford a second planet. Likewise, we ought to have done this conversion long ago.

  The face of the matter is this: we have designs, strategic plans, available funds, space, popular support and acceptance, intellectual capacity, and either readily available or constructible infrastructure to create new world-wide power supplies. What we ought to be doing between now and 2016 is using every tool at our disposal, citizen collectives, micro-grids, vehicle upgrades, alternative fuels, public transportation...to signal market shifts - wholesale - away from fossil fuels. Vote with your dollars and respond with 'the fierce urgency of now.' Even Mayor De Blasio, in a recognition of the imperative of defining survivability in the 21st Century, ordered energy efficiency targets for buildings across the city. We finally arrived at the point where the 'future generations' for whom the resolution of such issues has been deferred is now us. We are the ones for whom we have been waiting, let us not be found wanting.