Reply #5: What younger DUers don't know is the GOP seeks TVA's destruction.

[newswolf56]

The destruction of TVA -- breaking it up and privatizing it -- has been a primary Republican goal since TVA was created as part of the New Deal. The GOP motive -- ultimately (as always) the corporate/fascist motive -- is twofold: destroying one of the world's most successful examples of socialism, and amassing the huge profits to be made through the breakup and the subsequent rate-hike exploitation of the former TVA consumers -- consumers who at present (again thanks to the economic justice inherent in socialism) pay the lowest, most fair electrical rates in the nation.

Reagan attempted to reduce TVA personnel to the point the agency's operations would become dangerously inefficient (and infuriating to its customers), but this failed -- largely due to the defiance, fierce determination and high morale of those TVA workers who weren't downsized. Two decades earlier, Goldwater pledged to sell it, and a few years before that, the Republicans perpetrated both the Dixon-Yates scandal (Eisenhower's attempt to force TVA to purchase privately generated power and thereby force up its rates) and a price-fixing scheme by major TVA suppliers to force TVA to pay maximum, higher-than-market prices for its transmission wire, transformers and dynamo parts. In this sense, the hostile scheming TVA has faced over the years is a textbook demonstration of capitalism's intrinsic evil: a microcosm of the relentless malevolence with which capitalism has sought to destroy socialism world-wide.

Once TVA was completely self-supporting, but a succession of Republican administrations have maliciously manipulated and abused the agency's budget to the point the GOP can now claim TVA is operating under a huge deficit, and on that basis will raise electricity rates "to make them competitive" -- the same as private power rates (i.e., possibly as much as 200-300 percent higher than TVA customers now pay). Then the Republicans will use the resultant outcry to build support for selling TVA to private investors: another Enron in the making.

My knowledge of TVA comes from the fact I covered the Appalachian South for several years. During that time I met TVA workers at all but the topmost levels, and despite my journalistic skepticism, concluded TVA folks are some of the finest, most dedicated humans on the planet: the very archetype of the serve-the-people ethos that makes socialism work. Thus even the lowest-ranking TVA employees pose a major threat to the Republicans and their schemes for national and global corporate/fascist omnipotence.

Note in this context that Americans (even far too many Democrats) reject socialism because they assume the viciously tyrannical welfare bureaucracy is typical of all government agencies -- and assume too the vindictive, sociopathically careerist social-workers (who despise welfare recipients but still hypocritically proclaim "progressive" beliefs) are typical of all government employees. Too bad Americans who reject socialism can't spend a few days -- even a few hours -- in TVA country seeing what socialism has achieved, and around TVA people witnessing how they work: an experience that for many would be a genuine eye-opener.

Which is of course another reason the Republicans want to destroy TVA -- and unless we take back Congress next year, and the White House in 2008 -- the Republicans will surely succeed. In fact I think these appointments will be TVA's death knell unless the Democrats win next year and in 2008. And even then it may be too late.

Not only is the impending death of TVA a political atrocity of the worst magnitude. It also makes me profoundly sad: I had my earliest and most compelling "so this is socialism" moment viewing Norris Dam for the first time at age 10 -- the magnificent combination of natural beauty and human achievement literally raised the gooseflesh on my arms, and nothing before or since has ever made me more proud to be an American, or more proud of my own socialist heritage.