FDR’s TVA – can BHO top it?
February 14, 2009
If you want to see a current-day result of FDR’s New Deal, look no farther than the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA. Yes, after 75 years and outliving most of FDR’s alphabet soup federal agencies TVA whimpers along and perhaps is the worst living example of a bad Depression era policy gone terribly wrong.
I speak from years of researching the TVA and its ramifications from its constitutionality (never settled by the Supreme Court) to its anti-competition (a corporation in sheep’s clothing with the power of the federal government). Then they called it creeping socialism. It wasn’t creeping; it was and is the nationalization of a large part of the South’s electricity production.
When the TVA stakes out a new territory, now consisting of 80,000 square-miles, it claims sovereignty over it. In a recent pollution case against the TVA, however, a federal judge has thrown out much of its implied protection from suits (the Tennessee governor said about the Kingston dam disaster that TVA has been provided too much “deference”).
The TVA Act of 1933 is the most unusual anomaly of the Constitution; so unusual in fact, that I call it a parallel federal government. There is none other like it in the federal system.
The TVA sets it own rules and then enforces them, all over any objection of any of the seven states it operates in. They have exclusive control over their electricity rates to the chagrin of many of their users; no complaining to a governor, a public service commissioner or mayor. They have no control over the TVA, a federal agency.
The combination of a 20% rate hike and a huge increase in the CEO’s salary last year got the ear of some congressmen and even the Senate held a hearing in January over TVA’s apparent dilatory action in the Kingston “catastrophe”, as TVA CEO Tom Kilgore now calls it.
The agency tried to soft-peddle it at first which only adds to TVA’s untrustworthiness.
TVA presents the good case even as it did 75 years ago – do we want nationalized utilities in the U.S.? (Cars? Banks? Insurance companies? Mortgage companies?, etc.)
For more of my comments about the TVA see http://norsworthyopinion.com
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net