In the coming years, we will continue to see groups and elected officials funded by the big cable and telephone companies try to delegitimize any public sector investment in Internet networks. We have already endured a year of mostly-frivolous charges against BTOP and BIP stimulus programs. At times like this, it may be helpful to look back to other times in history when the federal government engaged in a new program to build essential infrastructure.
This comes from Earl Swift’s excellent The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. Please buy it at a local bookstore, not from Amazon.
In fact, the committee did turn up some rotten business. In New Mexico, investigators found that contractors ran roughshod over road officials, exhibiting “open contempt” for construction specs and quality controls as “a continuing course of conduct over a period of almost ten years.” They got away with it, Blatnik’s people found, because the state didn’t know enough to object; its highway department was managed by unskilled laborers who had been advanced up the ranks without a lick of training. Some state men testified that they didn’t know how to test roadbed materials, so they OK’ed all that came before them. Their boss admitted he wasn’t schooled on how to do this work until after it was finished. The committee discovered on stretch of highway that was in the act of collapsing even as New Mexico officials signed off on it.
The bureau stopped payments to New Mexico until it got itself together, and did the same to Massachusetts and Oklahoma.
There will be mistakes and we will undoubtedly find a case of fraud or two. That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t be making these essential investments. And don’t even get me off on all the far worse shenanigans of big private companies… Adelphia and Qwest are toward the top of that list.