KCEC Coop, and How to Feel Bad–then Good!
According to a press release posted on the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative (KCEC) website, dated, Oct. 24, 2012, “funding has been reinstated for the $64 million Enchanted Light Fiber Optic High Speed Internet Project.” So we have a lot of sound and fury, meaning little except lost wages, thanks to mismanagement at the Coop.
Indeed, the Coop CEO and his rubber stamp board are particularly sensitive to claims of “mismanagement.” The KCEC whined to the PRC and filed a secondary motion, protesting editorial comments.
In response, the PRC deleted paragraph 11 in their “final” order, which said, “The failure of Kit Carson to promptly inform the RUS of the Commission’s Final Order, particularly the conditions imposed by, I 51, is more than an oversight by management; rather, it demonstrates an abandonment of a fiduciary responsibility to one of its major lenders.”
Still the commission kept paragraph ten in the “final” order, saying, “A letter stamped “October 10, 2012,” from the Rural Utilities Service (RUS), a federal agency providing loan and grant funds for the Project is attached as Exhibit I to the instant Motion. It states that RUS did not receive official nor timely written notice from Kit Carson of the Final Order, contrary to the loan/grant contract between RUS and Kit Carson.”
Anyway you look at the recent brouhaha, the Coop screwed up even as they blamed activists for their own “abandonment of a fiduciary responsibility.” A compliant PRC commission has covered up for the Coop just as the Attorney General covers up for municipal corruption or higher courts in New Mexico cover up for a judicial system that works neither too well nor too justly.
Recent presidential debates featured both empty suits or chairs and included empty talk. Apparently both presidential candidates are trying to cover up “climate change/global warming,” “issues of GLBT rights,” as well as the “drug wars” on our contiguous border with Mexico. Then there’s the minor issue of ignoring historic civil liberties and safeguards against spying, tapping the citizens, while defying the rule of law at GITMO.
Due to Romnesia, nobody mentioned how the current President has extended the Bush administration practice of torture at offshore CIA black sites, promoted the assassination of American citizens, and routinely ignores the deaths of innocents due to drone attacks.
Other than that, how was your evening Mrs. Lincoln?
Unlike politics and the courts, both the National Football League and Major League Baseball have rules. When the NFL referees are found wanting they are fired; see replacement refs and support for the return of the real thing by commentators on both the left and right. You can screw around in the political arena, prevaricate in court, and kill people but don’t mess with football or baseball. Insult a home-plate umpire and your strike zone might shrink.
When your team is in the World Series and nobody gives your Giants a chance, you thrive, as I do what with the winning San Francisco (born in New York) Giants. While the NFL is made for TV—the drama of the week—baseball is more philosophical in the sense of time and space. Both sports have a beginning, middle, and end, as Aristotle said all good drama should. But Baseball evades the modern world’s compulsion to instill the artifice of time. Forget the strivers’ clock. The game is over in nine innings or when one team’s pitcher and/or the defense screws up. But it is played out there on the field of dreams, right there in public, and can be measured and counted. Despite the talking heads and the stats, you’ve still got “to play the game” in time and space today (or Saturday).
So far in the World Series, the Giants have scored on Pablo Sanchez ‘s “Panda’s blasters”—three home runs in the opening game–and scored two runs to zero in the second game, which included the dinky do—scoring without a hit. Among the Giants’ alumni is arguably the greatest player of the game, Willie Mays, the exemplar of excellence, whose memory and presence brings enormous good will to the series in San Francisco, also home to laughter and the Grateful Dead: “Let Timmy smoke, let Panda eat.”
To trope on Plato and Socrates, the election of your presidential candidate might “make “you think yourself happy” but for a Giants’ fan, winning the world series, like watching Willie Mays play, will “make you be happy.” I’m not kidding.