Of oil spills and elections

The supertanker Exxon Valdez spilled its oily guts into Prince William Sound in Alaska on March 24, 1989. The damage to the Sound and to the livelihoods of the locals who lived there was immediate and catastrophic.

After the usual foot-dragging and denial, Exxon Corporation belatedly spent a lot of money on cleanup there. When things looked normal again it stopped.

But even today, in many inlets around the Sound, if you pick up a rock or dig up a shovelful of beach sand, you'll still see the abundant black guck of Exxon Valdez crude.

Environmental scientists went back there in 2009 and concluded that it would take another 30 years for the environment to really recover.

I was thinking about this because a Chinese coal freighter just ran aground near the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and will probably break up. Of course in a space of weeks the sea will look as it did before. The reef this ship crashed into will not. Reefs can take centuries to recover fully from reef groundings by big ships.

This has a bearing on elections.

Here in America, every two years the voters call their elected representatives to account. In this year's elections, the Democratic Party's legislature and executive branch will be held to account for current high levels of unemployment, housing foreclosures, healthcare costs, government efficiency (or lack thereof), general recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the size of the deficit, doing something about the estimated 12 million citizens of other nations residing here illegally, and the progress of the wars/occupations/recovery of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I believe in holding legislators to account, as do we all. But the current situation bears comparison with the Exxon Valdez disaster. The damage was done in a space of hours. The recovery will have spanned 50 years before it's done.

Publicly held corporations often have a similar problem, with management being forced to work towards each quarterly report even if the issues can't be solved in that timeframe. This distorts businesses, just as elections with shorter timeframes than proper solutions distort government.

This is an advantage dictatorships like China have over us. They can match plans to problems, while we have to match plans to elections--often at the expense of the problems.

This is true of so many things. You can get shot in a second and take months or years to recover...or never recover. Car accidents, ditto. Bank robberies, ditto. Earthquakes, wars. A nasty kid kicking over a building block structure another kid spent half an hour to build.

Hence the saying "sin in haste, repent at leisure."

It took the Republican Party eight long years to do the damage the Democrats are now being given two years to fix--and that's not even taking into account the fact that the Republican minorities in Congress are routinely filibustering over two thirds of legislation and appointments. The Republican belief in swiftly putting things to an "up or down vote" vanished when the Democrats took power.

Republicans say "wait a minute. The recession was caused by Barney Frank!" i.e. forcing banks to make all those subprime mortgages. This has an element of truth, but it's a red herring, because it's Republican deregulation that enabled banks to export the risk of those subprime loans to the general economy, aided and abetted by risk-evaluation organizations in the pay of the financiers making the risks.

It's deregulation that turned the banks into gambling casinos. If banks had had to take full responsibility for bank loans, they wouldn't have made such risky loans. Also--doesn't anyone remember Bush II prattling on endlessly about "the ownership society" ? Now we've become the "foreclosure society."

But however the situation was created, at the moment the Democrats took over in 2008, no democratic (as opposed to dictatorial) solution to these myriad problems could show significant results in two years. Just as, even if Exxon hadn't slow-footed the Prince William Sound cleanup, it would still have taken decades to achieve.

Plus there's an underlying problem that I think is equally the fault of Democrats and Republicans: failure to maintain our nation' s infrastructure--water pipes, bridges, the electrical grid, roadways etc.

This was something that could have been deferred without the problem surfacing in the time between one election and the next, and so the money was stolen at every level, from city to nation, and diverted into expenditures with showy, immediate results.

The problem being that deferred maintenance costs more--much more--than regular maintenance. For example, I had a bicycle once whose chain I didn't lubricate and clean regularly. As a result I had to replace most of the drivetrain prematurely, for over $300. The same holds for roads and bridges and tracks, oh my...

So in addition to Republican major sins and Democratic lesser sins we have bridges falling down and killing people from decades of bipartisan deferred maintenance...and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

And in addition to that we have a very well-financed campaign to make people believe government is always corrupt and ineffective and that virtually all government functions can be done better by for-profit private enterprise. This campaign is financed by for-profit private enterprises. What a surprise.

And right now this campaign is telling people to kick out the people trying to fix the henhouse, and put the foxes back in charge. After all, who knows more about henhouses than foxes?