Description désolée d’une superpuissance du tiers-monde

Les commentaires et les observations s’accumulent sur la situation infrastructurelle intérieure des USA, cela notamment depuis la mise en évidence des énormes archaïsmes et déficiences de fonctionnement à l'occasion du désastre de Katrina en septembre 2005. John Gapper, commentateur du Financial Times, évoque le 7 mai le décrépitement des infrastructures intérieures des USA, avec les effets sur l’économie.

«If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

»That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.

(...)

»There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two.

»First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough – broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year.

»Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better.

»Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s as it built the interstate highway system – at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record.»

Gapper est pessimiste quant aux réactions à attendre des pouvoirs politiques face à une telle situation. Peu d’hommes politiques en sont conscients aux USA. Gapper cite l’exception du gouverneur de Californie Arnold Schwarzenegger, venu en France pour voir comment fonctionne l’avenir, en un décalage ironique mais sans surprise par rapport auxlégendes sur l’American Dream courant dans les salons parisiens et libéraux: «As it happens, I heard a similar lament from Mr Schwarzenegger at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles last week. He recalled a recent visit to France during which he travelled with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, on the country’s new high-speed train. “I could not believe we were going at 350km an hour,” the erstwhile film action hero marvelled.»

A la base de cette décadence accélérée dans un des domaines, l’économie et la puissance infrastructurellre, sur lequel l’Amérique fonda sa puissance, il y a la question du pouvoir. Sa dispersion, son “atomisation” et son absence de volonté jusqu’à la paralysie, son encalminage dans un système de communication qui interdit de même penser à des décisions volontaristes dans des domaines électoralement peu populaires, une base financière et économique en complet effondrement à cause même de cette attitude d’abdication politique, tout cela semble bien interdire tout espoir sérieux de redressement. Même Gapper nous fait part de son scepticisme: «At times I wonder whether the world’s biggest economy has the will to solve its challenges or will end up wandering self-indulgently into the minor economic leagues. I expect it will get serious when the crisis is too blatant to ignore, but it has not done so yet.»

Mis en ligne le 9 mai 2008 à 8H29