In Pennsylvania, residents are resisting a corporate takeover of their water system as state lawmakers attempt to change a law that incentivizes privatization.
In Pennsylvania, residents are resisting a corporate takeover of their water system as state lawmakers attempt to change a law that incentivizes privatization.
The state could have done any number of things to make sure a situation like this would never happen in the first place.
Not going to dox myself, but I’ll just say that I’m familiar with how (functioning) state government agencies finance these types of infrastructure projects. Often, it’s not even state money, they get it from the Federal government, and are responsible for administering it according to certain requirements.
In fact, Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided billions of dollars to states for this exact type of project. PA State government failed it’s citizens. Again.
This is a feature of corrupt state government in the US south. They abandon their infrastructure, pocket the cash, sell the infrastructure once it fails or do what Mississippi did and just make fema come in and replace it all.
Corrupt southern states hurt their own constituents for money.
So what is the answer to that?
Clearly representative government simply doesn’t work since even after a revolution, some unscrupulous evildoer can just fake their way into office and repeat the cycle all over again, so what will it take to fix the problem?
The answer was to go back in time and make sure we don’t fuck up Reconstruction.
But what do we do now?
Clearly we need a better way that ensures our basic needs are met and other people can’t simply fuck it up or take them away from other people.
Even typical infrastructure funding ultimately gets money from the EPA. Before it was just NEPA projects, but now we have BIL, ARPA, and WIIN grant projects.
Yeah, I mentioned that. People don’t really have a concept of how much money the federal government is giving to states for infrastructure projects…
I was on site for an ARPA project and the contractor was complaining that Biden never did anything for rural America…
Yeah, the cognitive dissonance is wild. Even in a blue state.