In the country, our best years economically were from the 1940s into the 1970s, when we had the best public works - we call it infrastructure today - in the history of the world. Highways, bridges, water and sewer, community colleges and medical research. We don't do that the way we used to.
We will rebuild our country with American workers, American iron, American aluminum, American steel. We will create millions of new jobs and make millions of American dreams come true. Our infrastructure will again be the best in the world. We used to have the greatest infrastructure anywhere in the world, and today, we are like a third-world country. We are literally like a third-world country. Our infrastructure will again be the best, and we will restore the pride in our communities, our nation.
America has the best doctors, the best nurses, the best hospitals, the best medical technology, the best medical breakthrough medicines in the world. There is absolutely no reason we should not have in this country the best health care in the world.
Secretary Clinton, right from day one, wants to do real investment in public works and infrastructure, building highways and bridges, building airports, to doing what we need to do that way which lifts the economy up, undoubtedly.
We need a national infrastructure bank to rebuild our crumbling highways and water and sewer systems, thereby putting additional people back to work.
When I say infrastructure it's not just roads and bridges and subways - it's also housing. It's also schools and fire departments and water departments and sewer departments. That's all infrastructure and it's all important. Little by little this country is crumbling and everyone knows it.
We know the surface temperature of the Earth is warming. It has risen by .6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. There was a warming trend from the 1890s to the 1940s, cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s, and then sharply rising temperatures from the 1970s to today.
In America, we have an infrastructure that's so bad, our roads, our highways, our schools, our tunnels, our bridges. Look at our bridges. Half of them have reports that they are in serious danger.
We've got to make sure that we rebuild the infrastructure in America, because we used to be - have the best bridges, the best roads, the best airports. And now, when you go to China or you go to Europe, you see that they are outstripping us in terms of infrastructure. And if we put people back to work, that would be good not only in the short term, but it would also lay the foundation, the framework for long-term economic and job growth.
Community after community is rising up, ranchers, developers, environmentalists, and local commissioners, all saying this is not the best use of our public lands. It is a story that is largely unknown in the rest of the country. It is a disturbing and community-destroying example of domestic imperialism being waged against people in places deeply connected to the public lands that are our public commons. The Bush energy policy is a short-term strategy based on corporate greed instead of a sustainable vision of what best supports local economies and healthy ecosystems.
I say we have not even had the decency to maintain the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us - our roads, our bridges, our wastewater systems, our sewer systems; by the way, those weren't Bolsheviks, those weren't socialists that built those things for us - much less build the infrastructure we need for the 21st century.
No longer will we allow the infrastructure of our magnificent country to crumble and decay. While protecting the environment, we will build gleaming new roads, bridges, railways, waterways, tunnels and highways.
There's what I'll call best practices and then there's reality. Based on our research over the past two to three years, there are significant differences in performance results that companies are experiencing with their security programs. There are some common things that are done very well among the best-class enterprises suffering the least amount of breaches and damages. But even having said that, there's probably no way to defeat a serious security threat today and it wouldn't matter what the tool is. The only way to do that would be to unplug the computers.
Considering community support and cost-benefit analysis, I have supported earmarks for projects of high public purpose involving such areas as higher education, alternative energy, transportation, medical research and military infrastructure.
What mothers need, as well as fathers, spouses, and the children of aging parents, is an entire national infrastructure of care, every bit as important as the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, broadband, parks and public works.
Bridges are burning all around us; bridges to responses that might have mitigated the already brutal (and just beginning) ravages of Peak Oil; bridges to reduce the likelihood of war and famine; bridges to avoid our selectively chosen suicide; bridges to change at least a part of energy infrastructure and consumption; bridges to becoming something better than we are or have been; bridges to non-violence. Those bridges are effectively gone.
Taxes are how we pool our money for public health and safety, infrastructure, research, and services-from the development of vaccines and the Internet to public schools and universities, transportation, courts, police, parks, and safe drinking water.