No financing for CIA-PIGS project

In this country for the last century we've kinda been in the catbird seat to watch various forms of communism and socialism fail. Luckily our founding fathers were sold on a republican form of government with a free market capitalism. That's the system that built the nation we live in -- the wealthiest and most successful on the planet by a long shot -- until recently.

Recently, we have drifted off into crony capitalism, which pretends to be the real deal, but actually is the government(s) picking winners and losers with an obnoxious combination of taxation, licensing, regulation, and corrupt banking, and autocratic bureaucracy. What's truly pathetic about it is that government almost always guesses wrong. At the federal level, they've invested billions of tax dollars in solar and wind to produce energy for the national grid, despite the fact that they are totally inappropriate for that purpose, while doing their best to punish oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, which are the only practical way to go.

They are pushing for the electric car, even though highly refined petroleum remains the only source of adequate portable energy.

States teetering on the edge of bankruptcy continue to push light rail projects which solve no transportation problems whatsoever, continue to mismanage huge chunks of forest, mineral and wildlife resources to keep their environmental wacko clientele happy (notable exceptions at the moment: North Dakota and Texas), and in our neighborhood just spent a couple of million bucks designing a Columbia River bridge too low to get ships under.

Locally, the PUD next door in Longview is struggling with an unwise investment in wind farms, and the citizenry seems to have been duped into joining the fed's war on coal, working to prevent establishment of a coal export terminal. And, right here in river city, we are about to build a mile long dike to patch a two hundred yard hole (kudos, though to our local leadership, particularly Diking Commissioner Mooers for putting up a spirited fight), and are about to spend sixty grand of taxpayer dollars on a microbrewery at our marina, which should, more appropriately, be bank financed.

But don't mind me -- I'm just mad because I can't get any politician to finance my CIA-PIGS project (Cathlamet International Airport - Puget Island Grass Strip.)

Howard Brawn

Puget Island