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Invitation to the Tea Party Congress
Nov 7th, 2011 | 17 responses
I’ve just spent a week in that earlier America you love so much and, while the absence of politicians was a blessing, I would not recommend living in cold semi-darkness, feebly powered by an emergency generator that eats $100 a day of propane and engine oil (if you can get a delivery) without providing Internet, cable or phone service and, in many cases, enough juice to run an electric range.
Even this weekend, well over 100,000 homes of my neighbors in the Northeast are still that way, evoking questions about the role of private utilities with monopoly power and what government does and doesn’t do to regulate them and even larger questions about investing in the crumbling infrastructure of 21st century America to ease unemployment.
As the emergency dribbles away, there is huffing and puffing from elected officials, but when the power goes out again in this winter’s heavy snows, nothing will have changed.
Throughout this enforced visit to the past, questions swirl about investing in America’s infrastructure as a way of jump-starting the economy.
While we pour so much money into the Middle East, why must millions back home depend for their health, let alone comfort, on poles and wires decades old with connections that break at the fall of a tree limb?
MORE.
17 Responses to “Invitation to the Tea Party Congress”
I’m still waiting for a thread of yours to show up on this site that is in the least sense of the word “moderate”.
I will say, however, that I agree with you regarding the fact that we should be spending the billions going to Iraq and Afghanistan on border security and infrastructure here at home. If you remember correctly, your man Obama campaigned on bringing everyone home from over there. We’ll it’s been over three years. He wants to continue pumping money into those hell holes and just wants us to go deeper in debt to create jobs that they taxpayers would have to pay for. We’ll there are jobs just waiting to be filled and paid for by the oil and gas industry if we would just open up and expand oil and gas drilling.
I think our Congress is bought and sold by the big checks. They’re fighting to appease their special interests. The lobbyists write the policy, Robert. They don’t care about Americans. As long as they get the $$ for their cause, they’re happy. And Congress is aiding and abetting this type of behavior.
JJ, the “moderate” in TMV does not imply that all columnists are moderate. We have quite a few extremists here, including yourself. The trick is to have a good enough mix so the extremists cancel each other out.
JJ, you will recall that it was the much maligned Bush that set the deadline for being out of Iraq for the end of this year. I didn’t agree then, and although I consider myself to be a moderate, I don’t agree now (extreme view?). Obama has done better in the war area than many would have thought, especially for a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He has been a warrior and probably listened to the generals on the war(s) and the military on Gitmo. I am worried that Iraq could be come overrun by Iran and/or civil war or a massacre of the Sunnis and the ordinary guys that helped our troops on the ground.
BTW: many of the “extreme” commenters have some moderate views.
If you consider me a extremist, ShannonLee, you don’t have a clue what a real one sounds like.
dduck…we should have been out of both places years ago. Our troops are being killed and maimed for nothing. It is a dog chasing its tail. We can’t change things over there if we stay for one-hundred years. The religious fights that are going to take place are none of our business.
Just let all of them know that we are going to take the President Truman approach. Monitor them with spies and inclandestine equipment and take out the ones who plot and plan us harm. If collateral damage is part of the results so be it. Our hydorgen bombs dropped on Japan saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the long run. Both theirs and ours.
We do not need to be spending billons on schools, roads and power plants when we are borrowing money from the Chinese. We have no buiness making slimy, crooked leaders wealthy. We do not need boots on the ground to take out the real enemy.
Anyone who buys into “we have to stay” is getting the wool pulled over their eyes. The military industrial complex wants us there, the generals who plan on going to work for them after retirement want us there, and the elected officials who get big money from the military industrial complex insure that we stay there.
You want to see liberals, look at Daily KOS. This is moderate. Seems to me conservatives see everyone to the left of them as liberals. Yes, I am to the left of you. No I am not a raging liberal as a result. You want to see liberals check out Berkeley or SF. There is a huge field to play in to the left of my views.
My apologies to Mr. Stein. Didn’t mean to take this thread so far off course.
Well, JJ, we can agree on one thing-only, you have good manners.
Thanks, dduck. Just wish you were willing to back up your position. You like the wasted money we are pumping into Afghanistan and the wasted dollars already squandered in Iraq? What good has it done? What good will it do? Tell me dduck…were the lives lost in the Kornegal Valley worth it? Why were we there in the first place? Someone finally decided it wasn’t and we pulled back, so why were we there in the first place? There is no legitimate reason for it…unless, of course, you have one I don’t know about. Enlighten me.
Investing in the future is communistic. In America we only care about today’s profit. As Herman Cain would say, don’t have any electricity then blame yourself.
Back to the original post: I, too, am in the electricity-challenged Northeast. Connecticut, especially, has a #failed electrical grid.
But is it the “government’s fault”, or the fault of the electrical utility?
I’m guessing both. The state has not properly regulated this utility, specifically with regards to proper staffing levels and tree trimming (which, I was surprised to find out, actually has to be paid by the state). But the corporation has failed as well.
Looking across the business landscape in this country, I see our big businesses are basically failing. Sure, they have some bravo bean-counting, but beyond that, they provide low quality products and are disinterested in customer service (I won’t even mention the general contempt for employees). This shows up in airlines, software companies, electrical utilities, oil companies, and even in chain restaurants and nursing homes. The Apples are the exception, most corporations are making or selling the cheapest of the cheap, not providing good service to their customers or their employees, or being generally unethical while paying their executives untold millions.
Here’s where I think big business has gone off the rails: the MBA. MBAs are basically ruining American business.
The MBA (cheap and easy-to-get) teaches all the numbers aspect of business: how to cut costs, how to outsource, how to cheapen the value of a product, how to defer maintenance and cover the difference with insurance, etc..
But the MBA does not, and will not, teach quality, or teach good employee management (simple things like R.E.S.P.E.C.T.), or teach customer service. These are not deemed as “valuable”. Only dollars are valuable, and the MBA is taught how to squeeze out a dollar.
There once was a time when folks would work in the trenches before elevating themselves to managerial or executive positions. These were people who cared about their product first, and then their business second. Not any more. Now these positions are handed out to MBAs who are out of touch with the products or services the company sells. So we’re stuck with a slew of American corporations that have basically abandoned the consumer, the country, and even their own product.
The way business is run in this country is as much of a #fail as our government.
Both “extremist” and “moderate” have grossly left-biased misuses here.
Another voice chiming in from the Northeast… in my case, New Hampshire. We lost power for 5 days. We ran on a generator pretty much exactly as described in the original post.
Yes, it does look as if CT is in the toilet in terms of this utility (and town tree maintenance as well). The thing is, though, that if you live in a forest, trees are going to fall down sometimes. And if there’s a freak snowstorm during peak foliage, the oaks are going to break and topple.
You (or your town) can trim trees until the cows come home, but unless you plan on leveling the landscape, this kind of thing is going to happen. Because we have the power lines above ground (for the most part).
Our power company — which only services part of the state — estimates it would cost $3.5 billion to bury the lines in this area alone. And we are a small, lightly populated state. The costs can only be exponentially higher elsewhere.
Yes, we have massive infrastructure needs in this country. We also have an enormous population out of work — many millions of whom are drawing unemployment funds.
It seems to me that we ought to be able to put those two statements together.
Myself, I’d like to see a Public Works program to address some of these tremendous needs.
Polimom…great observation of your situation and the root cause.I think that we would all like to see improvements made to our country’s infrastructure, and all would like to see jobs added. The difference in opinion obviously lies with how we pay for all of this.
I am not for Obama’s job bill because we go deeper in debt. I am for bringing all the troops home, not only from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from South Korea, Japan, Italy and other foreign places. We no longer need troops on the ground to monitor what’s going on, and we have means of quickly retaliating should the need arise. The funds now allotted to house and feed soldiers in far away places could pay for new roads, bridges and underground utilties and the jobs they would create.
JJ — Downsizing the military is often held out as a way to reduce federal overhead. And as a general principle, I agree with you.
In terms of our current economic / jobs situation, though: Have you considered what the massive influx of suddenly unemployed (former) troops would do to the economy?
The ones who are from reserve units go back to their jobs, that by law are held for them. The others remain on active duty and are deployed along our borders until their terms of service are up. Start drilling and you have jobs open up for them and private enterprise is writing the paychecks…as opposed to Obama’s job plan where we, the taxpayers, go deeper in debt to make payroll.
Barky, that’s a pretty good summation. This country’s had a problem where Theories are given more credence by leadership (whether political or business) than practical realities and hard experience is.
Placing MBAs in positions of responsibility before they’ve had a chance to develop practical experience is a great example of that, and I would submit to thee, that it started with the Roosevelt Administration, and got supercharged with the “Hide from the Draft in College” culture of the 1960′s, which generated a surplus of degreed individuals that led to a buyer’s market in the white-collar sector for employers seeking a more educated or cultured management class.
Why? because it’s a lot less demanding intellectually to get an MBA, than an Engineering or Science degree-in Engineering, at least, your answers have to work, whereas an MBA degree doesn’t require getting answers that work, so much as answers that sound ‘right’ in theory.
It creates an “Ivory Tower” in business-at the bottom levels, you still have to generate answers that work-but from about the second level up to the level of the Executive end, there is a huge ‘culture gap’, which is the fundamental problem that nearly killed General Motors and made the bailout an attractive option-GM had 43 levels of management between line and executive-which leads to a situation where the people ostensibly running the company have no idea what’s going on in the factory, or on the distribution lot, or, I would argue, in the market that generates the cash that funds their bonuses.
A similar problem exists in Government-too many layers, most too isolated from the delivery end to do much good (although, sadly, not isolated enough to prevent doing harm)…and why not? Big Business and Big Government have the same fundamental problems, the only real difference being the scale of the problems.
Malinvestment, Misallocation of Resources, an “Open Chequebook” mentality at the top and a failure to understand “Value Added” concepts while trying to implement the theory are all commonly held between the biggest corporations, and our Federal Government.
In both cases, they fail at serving the Public, while costing the public’s time, money, and life energy.
The term, by the way, is “Educated Idiots”-lots of knowledge of theory, little understanding of practice or consequences.
There are a LOT of educated idiots in the management sectors of both Government, and Business.