TVA the odyssey
September 27, 2009
A personal note of thanks and a bit of updating for those who are recent readers of my website, http://norsworthyopinion.com …
Several of you have inquired about my motives, my agenda if you will, of writing about the TVA. Here’s a condensation of why.
It all started when we lived in Sheffield, Alabama several years ago. I had visited the Muscle Shoals area of north Alabama as a federal representative for HUD some 40 years earlier. I was shocked to see what I had remembered as “the shining city on the hill”, a prosperous, growing community. It was a shambles.
While I spent many years as a fed, most of my life’s experiences have been in the private sector as an entrepreneur. My wife and I ran a small commercial print shop, our last business, until we closed it about ten years ago.
In Sheffield, using my management and investigative skills, I started asking questions; inevitably it came down to TVA as the culprit; how TVA had left the area with an over-paid labor market (Davis-Bacon) and no jobs. The people were not too happy about it.
I began writing the local paper, the Times Daily in Florence, about the TVA and they even published a column where I recommended the dissolution of the TVA. They promised follow-up columns but that never happened, perhaps because of the paper’s ownership (NYT).
I engaged in the paper’s forums (an experience) and decided to expand my commentary to a website. It is there where I have received the most activity, many thousands of visits, and for which I now want to thank you. Thank you for reading my views of the TVA, even those who disagree with them. The basic issue with me is that the TVA is a federal government agency with supra powers unlike any other. TVA has tried to act differently because of some wording in the 1933 TVA Act and the charge by FDR for TVA to have the power of the federal government with the nimbleness of a corporation. It was a fatuous charge and an impossibility to carry out.
TVA with its long and sordid tale now in its 76th year seems intractable, impossible of reform as it continues its wastrel ways. It just sold 30 year bonds for $1.5 billion just to refinance existing debt. Their financial structure is unsupportable when measured by any other investor-owned utility.
Personally, I have no interest in any utility or other agenda that may be in opposition to TVA or for its positions, e.g., environmental or anti-nuclear. I do know that TVA is anti-competitive in America’s market place and I am very pro competition. I am not a member of any political party, nor am I affiliated with any organization for or against the TVA. In other words, my quest is to seek the truth and to reveal it.
So the remaining answer to why I continue to write about the TVA is just something inside me that tries to correct what I believe to be a longstanding anomaly to our Constitution.
The present administration gives little clue as to the direction it wants to take the TVA; my gut feeling is that it wants to expand the TVA to incrementally nationalize the electricity industry and to have at least “little TVA’s” as once advocated in the 30s. For other, deeper meanings, please read my writings and you tell me why I do this. I do have the satisfaction in knowing that I have made a difference, and that is a good feeling. I know that others have picked up the same theme and will continue to step forward and work until the job is done.
Presently, I am working on an analysis piece of where TVA is apt to be heading. Others have been providing me with information to support my contention that executive pay and bonuses are way out of line from other federal employees with far more responsibility. And that TVA’s bonus culture has been the root cause of many management misjudgments.
Ernest Norsworthy
tva@norsworthyopinion.com
http://norsworthyopinion.com