Marsha Blackburn Blames Nashville's Strained Power Grid On Minorities And 'Wokeness'

As a telecom policy reporter for many years, I can't tell you how many times I saw this same cycle play out: a politician calls for broad and mindless deregulation of the telecom sector, claiming this will result in vast new innovations and empower entrepreneurs.

Telecom monopolies then exploit this lack of oversight to calcify their monopoly power structure and exploit the lack of even rudimentary oversight.

Prices soar, customer service sags, product quality erodes, and exploitation abounds. People suffer, and all the folks that mindlessly cheered for zero oversight (especially "free market libertarian think tankers") are absolutely nowhere to be found when mass, avoidable suffering occurs.

And if they do acknowledge the mass suffering and dysfunction their greed (dressed up as an intellectual ethos) caused, they'll almost always blame it on the most vulnerable.

The latest case in point: Nashville's power grid isn't handling the recent cold snap very well after years of energy sector deregulation. As we've seen in other states like Texas, large power utilities like Nashville Electric Service didn't adequately harden their networks for climate change, while at the same time working hand in hand with captured politicians to neuter state oversight.

When the network gets strained, people die. And Republican (and many Democrat) politicians immediately try to deflect blame away from their choice to pander to industry. Like, for example, Republican Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, who this week blamed the outages on minorities and wokeness:

"Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who is running for governor, alleged on X that the utility company “was so focused on woke policies and DEI that it failed at its most basic responsibility: keeping the power on.”

What I think annoys me most about folks like Blackburn (aside from the mass suffering and fatalities their policies cause) is the raw half-assedness of their stage play. Any competent reporter can easily look at Blackburn's record of pandering to industry with terrible policies and legislation ghost written by her biggest campaign contributors to reveal she's not a reliable narrator.

A functional press would explain to readership that the predominant Republican policy priority is destroying all functional oversight of highly consolidated corporate power. Not NBC, which goes on to promote the claims by Blackburn and other local Republicans than DEI classes were responsible for the company not trimming trees near outage-prone electricity lines:

"Michael Lotfi, the deputy state director of Americans for Prosperity Tennessee, a conservative group, who has been without power since Jan. 25, sees the DEI classes and more targeted tree trimming as symbols of misplaced priorities.

“It’s certainly not a conservative value to leave the trees hanging around power lines that will fall during a storm,” he said.

The implication here is that Nashville's power companies failed to adequately trim the trees around power lines because they were too busy being nice to women and minorities. It's a transparent, lazy lie, and you'll notice our corporate press is utterly incapable of challenging it (this will be a recurring theme here).

It's a central Conservative value to obliterate oversight of corporate power and then deflect blame for the problems your self-serving ideologies onto the marginalized people most impacted by your bad decisions (as in telecom, these power issues are most common in low income and minority neighborhoods companies see no incentive, or pressure, to adequately serve).

Step one: deregulate everything and destroy all regulators so nothing functions in the public interest under the pretense this "aids innovation" and "empowers entrepreneurs." Step two: blame poor people and minorities when nothing works. Use the infighting you created as cover for your own corruption.

Mindless deregulatory corporatism is this country's prevailing ideology.

Strip mine the country while pursuing quarterly growth, obliterate oversight then turn your eyes to the opposite horizon when people suffer as a direct consequence of your unpopular, self-serving policies.

Fascists love it, "free market" libertarians love it, Centrist dems love it, and even this new wave of "abundance" influencers love it. And our press, increasingly owned by the planet's richest, shittiest people, help sell the facade.