Is Socialism Destroying The US Power Grid?

Anyone who watched the 2016 presidential race and ensuing battles knows that Hillary Clinton stole the Democrat nomination from Bernie Sanders, with the help of the Democrat Party headquarters.

Apparently allowing an avowed socialist to run for the highest office in the land was too much even for the Democrats. But that might be changing; not fast enough for Bernie, but for some younger socialist politicians.

Even so, there’s really not much difference between the Democrat Party and socialism anyway. When Hillary Clinton was asked by reporters to describe the difference between being the Democrat Party and socialism, she couldn’t give them an answer. Neither could Bernie Sanders for that matter.

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That’s because there really isn’t much difference between the two. For the past century, Democrats have become more and more socialist and pushing more and more of a socialist agenda. Enacting Obamacare during Obama’s first term as president was merely one more step along the socialist road. According to some, it was a step that was intended to fail, so that Democrats could “fix” it by instituting true socialized medicine.

It seems that bad ideas just don’t go away. Socialism has been tried before and it has never worked. Of course, those who support socialism always find excuses for this, such as the Russians being too “backwards people” to make socialism work. But then, it hasn’t worked in any other country, including here in the United States.

The Problem with Socialism

Socialism has many problems. One of the key problems is that it deincentivizes people from doing a good job. If you’re not going to get anything extra for going the extra mile, then why bother going that mile? As the Soviet workers supposedly said, “As long as they pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”

But the bigger problem isn’t the people, it’s the government.

Socialism operates under a top-down economic model, where the government makes demands on the economy, not the consumers. Central planners determine quotas for all products and services and command that those quotas be met. Those who can’t meet them are called “wreckers” and punished for it. This leads people to lie on their production reports, which means that the bureaucrats who are making the decisions don’t have any idea of what’s going on.

This actually happened in the now defunct Soviet Union, where the productivity reports that the Politburo received about the economy were all false. Nobody wanted to report the truth, as it would cost them their position, their privileges and perhaps even their life. So the members of the Politburo continued to make demands of their economy and the reports they received showed that those commands were followed to the letter.

Only they weren’t.

To make up for this failure in accomplishing anything concrete, socialist politicians are big on symbols. Since they can’t provide people with their basic needs, they turn to distracting them with non-issues. In the Soviet Union, they use the arts and sports to distract the people.

The average person on the street knew as much about classical music, ballet, poetry and the opera as a music major does here in the United States.

The old Soviet Union was highly competitive in sports as well. They put more effort into preparing their athletes for the Olympics than any other country in the world, with the government sponsoring those athletes, providing them with above average accommodations, food and other necessities. They were looked up to as heroes of the Soviet Union.

The masses are easily distracted by these symbols, as they are much more interesting than their humdrum lives. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the masses of the Soviet Union, the masses in Nazi Germany or the masses of low information voters here in the United States.

Bringing that Home

Here in the US, the news media is in clear collusion with the Democrat Party, working as their propaganda machine. One of the things they do in this office is to tell the people what they are to be outraged about each week. This is merely another manner of keeping the people distracted from real issues that need to be taken care of.

The Democrat Party has become the party of hate and opposition. Their current platform is more about opposing President Trump than anything else. Anything he wants to do is automatically wrong, in their eyes, and is opposed on that pretext, regardless of whether or not it is good for the country.

But Trump isn’t really a conservative, as some have tried to say. He’s a businessman. That makes him pragmatic. He’s looking for solutions to problems which work; not for ideologically pure solutions. Sometimes he finds those on the left, but usually he finds them on the right. That’s more because those on the right have a greater tendency to look for real solutions, rather than party ideology, than those on the left.

So we can count on Donald Trump to do whatever he thinks is best for the country as a whole. That means best for business, best for workers, best for the economy and best for the average citizen on the street. At the same time, we can count on the Democrat Party being against anything that Trump wants to do, whether or not it is good for the country.

Let’s Apply that to the Grid

Our aging electric grid is the single most vulnerable part of our infrastructure, while it is also the single most critical part. Without electric power, none of the rest of it matters, as everything would come to a standstill. So, for example, even if our roads and bridges were perfect, there would be no traffic moving on them, because there would be no fuel for the vehicles to burn.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has long held that the nation’s infrastructure was in trouble, including the electric grid. Literally trillions of dollars need to be spent to bring out infrastructure up to snuff, with over a trillion dollars worth of upgrades needed to the electric grid alone.

But these upgrades aren’t happening. Part of that is due to all the red tape required to get permission from the various government agencies, to build new power plants or run new transmission lines. The regulatory agencies, most of which are Democrat created and Democrat run, do more to get in the way of any meaningful progress, than anything else. Building new nuclear power plants or coal-fired power plants is all but impossible under today’s regulations.

President Trump’s team is working hard to undo the damage that these regulatory agencies have been doing to the infrastructure and the economy, but they are fighting an uphill battle. The federal government is permeated with “deep state” operatives, whose loyalty is to the Democrat Party and not to the government or to the nation as a whole.

Every initiative that Trump has undertaken to help shore up our electric grid and protect it from attack has met opposition from Democrats. The most recent such attack has been against his infrastructure initiative, where he wants to invest $200 billion into the infrastructure, as seed money to get industry to invest a further $1.5 trillion. Yet Democrat lawmakers are against this, saying that instead he should walk back some of the tax reform that is helping to stimulate the economy.

At this point in time, the only way that Trump’s infrastructure plan can make it through Congress is for Senate Republicans to use the nuclear option and go for a simple majority. But then, that’s the only way that they can get anything through the Senate, with the current Democrat opposition.

Democrat Socialists and their RINO friends aren’t interested in doing a thing to protect the grid from EMP either. Every bill which has been introduced to harden the grid against EMP has been blocked by these groups, since it doesn’t show any immediate results, which they can point to in order to get reelected. This is nothing more than the swamp protecting itself.

The Future of the Grid

Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential elections, we could just about kiss the electric grid goodbye. Former President Obama’s war on coal and war on the petroleum industry in general caused great damage to these industries. While they are recovering under the current administration, it is only a matter of time until they come under attack again.

Socialist governments can’t maintain anything, as has been seen over and over again. Venezuela, once one of the richest nations in South America, has become an impoverished nightmare under socialist rule. Those who can are now moving off the grid, as they can no longer count on the government to provide even that basic need.

Here in the United States, Puerto Rico is a largely socialist territory. As part of the country, they are forced to obey federal law. This includes our minimum wage laws, which are impractical on the island. Because our laws require businesses to pay Puerto Ricans more than anyone else in the Caribbean, businesses choose to take their jobs elsewhere, causing massive unemployment on the island.

In turn, this lowers the number or skilled workers available in Puerto Rico. Those with skills are better off moving to other islands, where they can find work. The island is facing a literal “brain drain” as their best workers move to the mainland United States or to other islands in the Caribbean.

Being part of the United States, unemployed people in Puerto Rico receive American entitlement benefits. Their Food Stamps, Social Security benefits and even Pell Grants are all based on the rates here on the mainland. Yet their cost of living is considerably lower. So the people of Puerto Rico are discouraged from working and encouraged to live off the government dole.

Remember Hurricanes Irma and Maria? Both of those hit Puerto Rico, giving it a one-two punch in 2017, wiping out their electric grid. More than six months later, the majority of the people were still without power, especially those who lived outside the major cities. Socialist governments can’t maintain anything well, and the people of Puerto Rico were depending on the socialists in their government to repair and maintain their electric grid.

Once again, it’s all about symbols, but in this case, it was negative symbols. The politicians who were getting in the way of repairing Puerto Rico’s electric grid were the same politicians who were hiding food sent by the US government, so that they could get on television, stating that President Trump didn’t care about their plight. They were more concerned about making him look bad, than they were about helping their own people.

As long as socialists have this sort of attitude, they will spend more time, effort and money in obstructing any real progress, than in taking care of people. If we leave our grid in their hands, we can count on paying too much for electricity, which we won’t be able to count on.