Here in this age of austerity, it’s fashionable to point out that the world just doesn’t work the way it did when John Maynard Keynes was the talk of the town. You just can’t find any shovel-ready projects, so weighted are they by environmental impact reports and the other red tape of 21st century life. But this neglects an entire area where construction work is needed: maintenance. I know from living in Los Angeles that there are enough potholes to keep a small army of workers in business year-round.

Because we didn’t have enough to worry about, the Federal Aviation Administration could shut down Friday, if Republicans insist on including certain controversial provisions into a short-term extension.

Commentators are starting to figure out that the battle over Wisconsin public employee rights, couched by Gov. Scott Walker as an argument over the budget, has nothing to do with the budget. And we’ve discussed that in this space. You have the 200 legislative policy items stuffed into the bill; the cuts to Medicaid and centralizing control of the program in the hands of a Heritage Foundation writer who called for states to drop it; the measure allowing for no-bid contract sales of state-owned heating/cooling/power plants; and on and on

Scott Walker began his “fireside chat” broadcast live across Wisconsin last night by saying how much he appreciated the passionate, civil debate happening in his state, and that he respects everyone who chooses a career in government. Then he said that outside agitators were infiltrating Wisconsin and that state workers could either lose all their bargaining rights or lose their jobs.

So it wasn’t quite a reconciliation.

I noted yesterday that Rick Scott returned $2.4 billion in high speed rail money to the federal government, which would halt a planned project for an intercity link between Tampa and Orlando. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has dealt with this before with respect to Ohio and Wisconsin (there are those two states again), and he simply redistributed the money to states who wanted it. However, in this case, Florida Congressional leaders, Democrats and Republicans, are scheming to get the deal done anyway.

Environmentalists are not enthused about the prospects of meaningful climate legislation for the rest of President Obama’s first term. They may be able to eke out some legislation on oil spill response, a weak renewable energy standard (though Lindsey Graham’s introduction of nuclear power into that debate puts that in peril) and some renewables and energy efficiency tax incentives, but in the main you’re not going to see much of anything out of Congress that would really bring down carbon concentration in the air.

That effort moves to the regulatory agencies now. The EPA already plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which could lead to retiring many old coal-fired power plants. And now, they are teaming with the Department of Transportation to deliver new rules on fuel economy that could reach pretty sharply high levels.

When I was a child, I became fascinated by the Interstate Highway System. On family trips, I would sit in the backseat with my Rand McNally road atlas, carefully charting the passage of each town, exit, and rest stop. At home, I would spend hours pouring over the maps of all 50 states, memorizing the numbering system and dreaming of one day travelling on each and every Interstate across the country.

Our love affair with our cars has also been fueled by the devious actions of a few major corporations. The once ubiquitous electric streetcar was driven into the ground by colloboration of Big Oil and Big Auto. It wasn’t a fair fight.

In the coming months, there will be a series of articles on the Seminal called “Driven to Destruction.” It will unearth some of the sordid history of how the country became so car-dependent, how this dependency has become harmful in so many ways, and how we can begin to move forward to a more sane and sustainable system of transportation.

Carjacked joins a hefty body of literature critiquing our automotive transportation system, including my own work Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, released in 2000. Do we need another critique of car culture? My answer is a resounding yes. While such books all tell us about the problems cars cause and about better, greener, more economical and socially just approaches to transportation, what they say gets swamped by the ongoing tsunami of marketing messages that coax us to embrace automobiles. As the authors of Carjacked write, this relentless marketing leads us to “take the car for granted as a social good, which renders it nearly invisible as the source of a range of problems.”