My older brother works in the nuclear power industry. Most of his jobs have been with investor-owned nuclear power plants; however, he did have a job at a coal-fired municipal plant (a dirt burner, as he calls it). This article is not about energy or the environment or even my brother. It’s about partisan politics and an observation my brother made after working for both municipal plants and investor-owned utilities (government & industry, respectively).
What my brother observed, and here comes the key to all our problems… we need both. Regulators can look investor-owned utilities in the eye and say, “How come you need to charge more for electricity when the municipal plant can charge a lower rate with double the number of people working for them?” Meanwhile, city officials can look municipal boards in the eye and say, “How come you need to hire more people when the investor-owned utilities can produce the same amount of power with half the staff?”.
So there it is. We need both. Industry keeps government in check. Government keeps industry in check. We need Republicans. We need Democrats. We could use a lot less name-calling and finger pointing, however. I can’t remember where I encountered the concept of religious extremism being self-reinforcing. May have been in a Sunday service. I tend to remember concepts and not details. Regardless, religious extremism results when a person’s beliefs are threatened. The natural response is to fight that extremism because, no doubt, an extreme position on most anything is going to be offensive. And since people fight the extremist, the extremist gets reinforcement that his beliefs are under threat, and so on, ad infinitum. I see similarities with gun control, climate change, immigration, supply side economics, and the designated hitter (it ruins the game, by the way).
Thus, we need each other, yet we hate each other. A relationship like that is bound to be self-destructive (which reminds me of congress). So now what? I read an article recently on effective protests. Historically, successful protests have been single issue: for instance, repealing Jim Crow laws & women’s suffrage. We can’t do it all, and trying to do it all achieves nothing. I tried reflecting on what hot button issue rises to the top of my list. I was able to narrow it down to two: reducing our impact on the environment and repealing Citizens United (the decision by the Supreme Court that corporations are the same as people). Since dark money from the Citizens United ruling enables corporations to purchase our elected officials and undermine all the things I care about, I’m leaning towards that issue topping the list. My brother whom I mentioned earlier had a profound statement concerning Citizens United … I’ll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one of them.
—Joe Criscione, President