Republicans Decide Socialism Is Awesome After Obama Proposes Privatizing Tennessee Valley Authority

 
 If you’re looking for an example of how government can help people and businesses by spending money and making stuff happen for them (aka socialism), you could do a lot worse than the Tennessee Valley Authority. Created in 1933 by a Democratic Congress and enthusiastically executed by American Zeus Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the TVA was transformative for people living in one of the country’s shittiest regions during one of the country’s shittiest times, where everyone had malaria and nobody knew how to farm and nobody had the electrick zoom juice, even. So the TVA fixed all that (pretty much) and then decided to keep hanging around and being awesome to this very day. It’s still run by Uncle Sam and still sells electricity to about 9 million customers without costing a cent in taxes. In fact, the company generates hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-equivalent revenue each year! So obviously our right-wing President Barack Obama has proposed selling off the TVA to the private sector in his 2014 budget proposal, and the socialist Republicans in Congress are hell-bent on stopping him !

We are pretty sure this is one of those times when our prankster-in-chief is just punking Republicans by being like, “Look I’ll propose something that is exactly the kind of thing you’re always howling for me to do, and you’ll reject it like awful toddlers and Wonkette will have a good laugh about it, cool?” And Republicans are like “Yes it is awesome when you make us look like hypocritical children because nobody actually notices and nothing ever changes except more people just start hating “government” and how we “fight” all the time, so by all means, propose away!” It’s win-win, you see.

So who are these socialistic Republicans, and why do they love socialism so much?

federal energy statistics show Alabamans and Tennesseans pay considerably less for power than the national average—earning TVA “the ‘mother love’ of a politically conservative region,” according to former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman.

That would explain why free-marketers like Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) called Obama’s proposal “one more bad idea in a budget full of bad ideas,” saying privatization could lead to higher energy costs for his constituents.

Similar reservations have been expressed by Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) and Representative John Duncan, Jr. (R-Tennessee), who was quoted as saying that privatization is “something that has been proposed in the past and been determined to be a very bad idea.”

What, the government is providing a public good at a lower cost than the private sector!? IMPEACH etc. (Now you know how welfare-slashing, Social Security-privatizing, anti-Obamacare, anti-stimulus (usually) Republicans are able to retain the support of at least 50% +1 of their constituents: Big-picture purity combined with local-issue hypocrisy. Oh, you were not born yesterday, and you know that already? Then go read a book or something, see if we care. Or perhaps this lovely TVA factbook !)

[ allgov ]