Should The Tennessee Valley Authority be privatized?

[nickshepDEM]

Poll question: Should The Tennessee Valley Authority be privatized?

The issue came up today in my Int'l Business class, so I thought I would get some of your thoughts...

Tennessee Valley Authority

[Jack Rabbit]

1. Can the free market deliver water and power better than the government?

Ask a Californian about deregulation. The answer isn't no, it's hell no.

[nickshepDEM]

3. We were discussing the issue today in my Int'l Business class, so...

I thought I would get some thoughts from DU.

[SharonAnn]

Privatizing utilities causes rapid increases in utility rates and

deterioration of the utility infrastructure. Surely we have enough cases of this to clearly show what happens.

Also, TVA is in charge of flood control and managing all the reservoirs (lakes) of the Tennessee Valley. This covers much of Tennessee, parts of Alabama and Kentucky.

Also TVA has an economic development role for the TVA area.

Can you imagine a private company doing these things? They couldn't make money at them so they wouldn't do them.

[antigone382]

2. Hell no.

This state is full of very poor people who are barely scraping by. We can't afford the increase in price that would accompany the privatization of TVA. I love my electric cooperative, and believe me, if this administration tries to take it away from the people of Tennessee, there will be hell to pay come election time. Tennessee ain't red enough for them to get too comfortable.

[shance]

4. The core of the word, privatization, means "to deprive".

Privatization is essentially a white man's dream because it is lawlessness where they have all the control.

Notice that is essentially the white privileged male calling for all the privatization.

[RazzleDazzle]

5. Oh, sure. Let's just give away everything to corporations

Then we don't have to have a government at all.

:sarcasm:

I'm disgusted by the very question.

[guidod]

6. Sure, give it to WAl MART...

[Ignacio Upton]

7. Well, they couldn't privatize Social Security

guess they now have to go after another New Deal program. The right-wingers, the corporatists specifically, STILL hate FDR after 70 years, and the fact that White House officials were writing memos during the Social Security debate detailing how it was their first opportunity in 70 years to change the political climate of Social Security, is in no way surprising. Anyone who tries to privatize the TVA will probably get thrown out of office, that is if our side reminds the voters that the GOP hates the New Deal and economic fairness.

[brentspeak]

8. Privatization of public services: The great con game

Look no further than at what happened in California: all the state's electrical grids other than those that covered Sacramento and L.A. were privatized, after which everybody's rates went sky high. Then came the blackouts. But here's the catch -- though the energy companies saw record profits during the blackouts, they still raised the rates. And when Bush refused to cap wholesale energy prices during the blackouts, guess who cleaned up? Enron. You can thank Republican Gov. Pete Wilson for initiating the corruption, along with some prominent Democrats in the California assembly who were just as bought-and-sold by the energy companies, and voted 'yes' to Wilson's deregulation of California's energy utilities.

Meanwhile, Sacramento and L.A., whose electricity was still owned and run by the municipalities, saw no increase in their electrical rates.

Now, of course, we see what's happened to the U.S. military because of privatization: costs for support and equipment have doubled and even tripled because Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have given buddies Halliburton and friends blank checks to (very poorly) run even basic services like food preparation and laundry when those things have always been taken care of by the military itself. And everyone in the country should know by now how hundreds of millions of our dollars have been doled out to shady merc contractors and propaganda think tanks.

Plus, there's the issue of missing $8.1 billion designated for Iraq that no one in the White House wants to talk about.

They don't want to talk about the single greatest accounting mystery in the history of the civilized world? Gee, I wonder why not.

The words 'privatization' and 'deregulation' should be quickly added to list of synonyms for the words 'corruption' and 'theft' in all current and future English thesauruses.

[WestSeattle2]

9. Well stated! Privatization\Dereg = corruption and theft.....n/t

[mopinko]

12. here in chicago

union janitors were fired, and cleaning services for public buildings was privatized. under the guise of being a woman owned business, a mob family got the contract to clean up after chicago festivals. the only reason that this was really a problem was that they lied about being womaan owned. that was really the only rule that was broken.

[dogman]

10. First I need to know,

does it serve any Blue States?

[mopinko]

11. .