MOAB hits home — mine and yours

Just to make the power of the GBU-43, aka “Mother of All Bombs,” up close and personal…

Dropped on our Portland neighborhood of HIllsdale, with 8,000 residents, the bomb obliterates every man, woman and child and all structures.

It would leave behind a wasteland.

If this is “conventional,” as in “conventional weapon,” we better rethink our conventions…fast.

A few other results from a search of the web. Two miles from where the bomb hits here in Southwest Portland, victims could be rendered deaf.

That takes us from Hillsdale to the Willamette River to the east, and to the Portland-Beaverton border to the west.

For several miles beyond that victims may suffer bleeding ears, to say nothing of trauma and the loss of family and friends.

Five miles away from the blast, the ground would shake and windows be broken. Question: Could this bomb trigger a massive earthquake?

Then there is the fiscal damage already being inflicted by the development and construction of this bomb. Each MOAB costs $16 million. That doesn’t include the cost of the planes needed to drop it.

To put that number in perspective, Portland Public Schools estimates its budget shortfall for next year to be $18 million, resulting in a projected loss of 70 teachers.

And what are the consequences of accepting the use of this weapon as “acceptable." The military-industrial complex, and our power-mad president, have at the ready so-call “tactical nuclear weapons.”


Russian, by the way, has a similar "conventional" bomb, and we know about the nuclear weaponry of North Korea, whose leader is as unpredictable and crazed as Donald Trump.

Money for Mass Transit from Bombers and Billionaires

On my mind this morning is the future prospect of Light Rail in Southwest Portland, Hillsdale (my neighborhood) and what is called the Southwest Corridor, which stretches from downtown to the towns of Tualatin and Tigard.

Our regional government is leading the effort to bring “High Capacity Transit” to the area. If all goes well, the new transit line would open sometime late in the next decade.

But the whole planning process is going off the tracks.

Yesterday the Southwest Corridor Steering Committee met and decided to slow down the decision-making process and key decisions until the fall.

The committee consists of elected officials from all the areas affected as well as transportation officials from the state and the region. They have to decide on routes (of which there are many options) and mode of transit (Light Rail or big, articulated buses on dedicated lanes).

Here in Hillsdale, we are lobbying the steering committee to put our commercial area on the chosen route. We prefer to be on a tunnel line that connects us with the Oregon Health Sciences University and Downtown.

The sticking point is cost. The tunnel is estimated to cost $2 billion (that’s a “B”).

Before federal gas tax revenues started to drop, the Feds picked up 90 percent of the costs of Portland’s Light Rail projects (we now have five). But the revenue drop as led the Feds to scale their share back to 50 percent.

At the steering committee yesterday one of the members jokingly asked a representative from OHSU whether the big medical complex was in touch with Phil Knight, the deep pocket-billionaire of NIKE fame.

The “joke” was emblematic of how this society is privately rich for the very few and publicly destitute for the many.

I wish this weren’t a joke. Why do we have to go hat-in-hand to billionaires to serve the public good? When will we as a society realize that justice, fairness, and, the general good, can not harbor billionaires?
 
Then there is the disconnect between projects like mass transit and our government’s willingness to throw money at non-productive and/or destructive, murderous weaponry.

The cost of a B-2 stealth bomber was put at $2.1 billion back in 1997. One can only guess what one of these killing machines costs today but the dated cost of just one is more than that of our desired transit tunnel. The tunnel would serve thousands every day. The planes are being “used” (if that’s the right word) in Afghanistan today. Whom are they serving?

When, if ever, will this country get it right?