One of the biggest failures of the Obama administration has been its inability to create a much needed infrastructure bill. It never happened because a Republican congress wouldn’t let anything happen that might look good in the Obama legacy. Should that have been their first consideration? Of course not but the good of the nation has never been the first consideration for the GOP.
Now president-elect Trump, a builder, sees tremendous profit to be made in the infrastructure issue, but he wants to do it for profit, not for the nation. He sees it as a cash cow instead of a jobs issue or national improvement issue and because he does he is destined to turn it into a disaster.
What do I mean by this? Well, the right way to approach infrastructure is for the Federal government to identify projects that need to be done; water supplies, ports, roads, the grid, etc. Once targeted, the government should hire contractors to do the work and finance the projects by tax increases or municipal bonds.
Trump’s way is very different. Trump wants to privatize the business of infrastructure. That is, he wants to have corporations or groups of individual investors finance individual infrastructure projects for a profit. So what’s the difference you say, as long as the job gets done? Well the first difference is that those profits will add to the cost of each project and because there is a profit incentive, costs will be slashed to guarantee the largest profit possible, resulting in a lesser product.
The second problem is that because each project must make a profit, a lot of necessary projects, which by their nature won’t make a profit, will never see the light of day. You can make a profit from a toll road because you can collect tolls into the future, but not a free highway. So many very necessary projects will never come to fruition.
We have already seen that the privatization of prisons has been disastrous. Profit should never play a role in how incarceration is handled. We are already seeing it in our schools where money is being taken from the public school systems to set up charter schools that operate for profit rather than spending that profit to improve the public schools themselves. The basic element of profit is that t takes money from the goal of the project and gives it to investors who usually don’t need it as much as the project does. We can see this on an enormous scale in our health industry where insurance, medical machinery, drug costs and hospital corporations are sucking all the money that should be spent on health care and illness prevention out of the system.
Let’s for once, learn by our mistakes. Let’s try to get the infrastructure deal right. It’s too important for us to screw it up again.
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Fidel Castro died the other day. He was the longest running ruler in the world. Queen Elizabeth has had a longer run but she is really only a figurehead. There was great celebration in Miami but great mourning in New York and Cuba. The celebrants of his death were Batisteros, the children of those who supported and benefited from the reign of the former brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista was just as bad as Castro, maybe worse, but Batista had the backing of American business and the American mob. Don’t forget, Castro first went to JFK for help in overthrowing a horrendous dictator who was killing and torturing his people. JFK refused because he was listening to the sugar, gambling and other American business interests. If he had helped Castro, Castro would never have gone to the Soviets for help. We would have had a friendly leader in Cuba and we would have avoided a big part of the cold war. Sugar, gambling and other corporate interests cost us Cuba for the last sixty years, not Castro’s communist policies. Let’s not continue being stupid about this island 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
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Donald Trump spent a hell of a lot of time yelling that the election was rigged. Then the asshole won. Now it seems that he may have been right. Now we find, that it’s his people who may have been the ones who rigged the election.
Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate has come forward with a challenge to the results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Is it possible that she finally realizes that it was her candidacy and that of the moronic Gary Johnson that cost the Democrats the election, that if even a part of the voters that voted for these two miscreants had voted for Hillary instead, she would have won easily. It still remains to be seen if other irregularities also led to Clinton’s defeat. It would be ironic if rigging by Trump supporters was discovered in the three states involved.
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Multi-billionaire Tom Steyer, speaking on the matter of the fight between fossil fuels and clean energy, recently revealed a very illuminating set of numbers. At most, there are 75,000 people working right now in the coal industry in the entire United States. Just in California there are 550,000 people working in clean energy; solar, wind and geothermal. Clean energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels across the United States and it employs a hell of a lot more people. Why are we still putzing around with these poisonous substances? Yes, lobbyists for the rich are busy filling the pockets of congress but how long are w going to let this fly?
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The Republicans are all babbling about having a mandate. They lost the popular election by over two and a half million votes which means they won by the fluke of our antiquated electoral process. If you really think that’s a mandate you are an imbecile.
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Trump’s cabinet is beginning to look like the Billionaires Boys Club. So he goes before his base at the rally he held in Ohio the other night and tells them that he nominated all these rich guys because they know how to make money. What he doesn’t say is that they know how to make money for themselves and f**k everyone else. These people have never had any interest in making money for anyone but themselves. That definitely means f**k all those out of work or underpaid guys in Trump’s fan base because Mnuchin, Ross and Devos didn’t get to be billionaires by worrying about poor or middle class slobs. They got there by screwing the poor and middle class slobs out of what they had coming to them, just like Trump.
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I have listened and listened and have put up with all the fallacious reasoning and faux pragmatic lobbyist baloney and it’s finally just come to the point where I can no longer stomach those who are selling the fossil fuel bullshit. After a half century of the greedy oil-a-garchs telling us that it just isn’t practical for the inhabitants of this country to ever depend on clean energy I am forced to point to a city that actually does that.
No it’s not New York and quite possibly it may never be New York, especially since the greedy pigs who make their billions by poisoning the land are spending so much of those billions to keep the goal of clean energy from happening. But there is one shinning light in the universe of clean energy and it’s called Burlington, VT.
Every day a 24 car freight train pulls up to the city’s power plant and deposits 1,800 tons of pine and timber slash, harvested within a 60 mile radius of the McNeil Generating Station, which pumps out about half of the city’s electric needs. A hydroelectric plant half a mile up the Winooski River, four wind turbines on nearby Georgia Mountain and by an array of solar panels at the local airport supple the rest of Burlington’s power.
This tidy array of clean energy sources provide Burlington with 100% of its power, something that the fossil fuel lobbyists have indubitably, stated, couldn’t be done. Sure, it’s a small city; population just over 42,000 but it’s the biggest in the state and there are thousands of other cities like this one all across the country, cities with the potential for putting together the same kind of resource package. What does it take to do this? First the will, next the kind of leader like Bernie Sanders who was involved in the process, which started many years ago and third and most important, the belief that all the raging lies they hear from the morally bankrupt, fossil fuel industry are just that – lies!
Basically Burlington, VT has shown this nation what has to be done to take the carbon out of our air, the pollutants out of our rivers and the oil out of just about everything its drillers can reach. There is only one reason for the use of fossil fuels in this modern and threatened world, the greed of those who extract and sell it. If Burlington, VT can flourish off the fossil grid there is no reason why most of the cities and towns across this great nation can’t do the same thing.