Keller @ Large: Fix The MBTA Mess, Gov. Baker
BOSTON (CBS) -- What's that?
You've been left high and dry by the appalling bad-weather collapse of the MBTA, you feel like you've been abandoned by the powers that be, and you are furious about it?
Congratulations! You are absolutely right, and you don't even know the half of it.
Remember the last time you got really badly screwed by the toxic combination of greed and governmental incompetence?
That would be late summer of 2008, when the Ponzi scheme Wall Street and its public-sector enablers had made of the real estate market collapsed, burying the U.S. economy in the rubble.
This is just like that, the end result of abject MBTA and Beacon Hill mismanagement of a transit authority that's been squeezed dry over the years by irresponsible unions, greed-crazed lawyers and payroll-packing politicians, having themselves a party with abundant customer fares and sales-tax revenue they eagerly converted into fat pensions and debt while basic maintenance and proper management were ignored.
The 2008 crash left lots of people with worthless properties and unaffordable mortgage payments; the great MBTA collapse of 2015 leaves us with old engines that can't handle the snow, switches that freeze in the totally-predictable cold, overpriced new engines that fail on delivery, and clueless managers who don't get that while severely limited service is bad, no service is intolerable.
Gov. Baker, you ran as a fix-it guy. Fix this mess, even if you have to jump ugly with a whole lotta people to do it.
We'll have your back, because being assaulted this way by the power structure twice in seven years is too much to take.
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