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Seth Grossman appearance on WPG Radio. 6.28.Colossal Failure Forgotten and Normalized. DRPA (Delaware River Bay Authority) was created in 1962 to build a 17 mile Bay Bridge-Tunnel from Cape May to Lewes Delaware. The ferries were supposed to be temporary!
Delaware Memorial Bridge tolls were doubled to pay for it. Where did the money go?
Zohran Mamdani, NYC Mayor?
Mamdani is the future. We Boomers taught our children to hate America. When we are gone nobody will know the wonderful things our country did.
Islam. Sharia Law.
Eustace Mita, Ocean City
What are kids learning?
Cost of College
A lot of times, the most important issues are buried in the back of the newspaper. And sometimes the most important stories are not published at all. Two weeks ago, we had a classic example.
The article in the Press of Atlantic City last began, “Joel Coppage of Wilmington, Delaware will become the sixth executive of the Delaware River Bay Authority, the DRBA”.
Click here for the link to that article: Wilmington man tapped to lead DRBA starting in July
That’s the agency that, runs the Delaware Memorial Bridge, both bridges there, the Cape May Lewis ferry, and five local airports. Why is this important? It seems almost normal that you have this very expensive, very political government agency running these ferries, running the bridges and running the five airports. But why this agency was created in 1962 in the first place? They don’t even mention it. And because they don’t even mention it, you have no idea what a colossal waste and failure this whole agency is. Do you know the story of it?
JOHN DEMASI: No. I don’t.
SETH GROSSMAN: Back in 1960, Virginia started building a 17 mile Bay Bridge-Tunnel to connect, the bottom of what’s called the Delmarva Peninsula to Virginia Beach.
If you take the ferry from Cape May down to Lewes, Delaware and start driving south towards Virginia Beach, you have a nice drive, and then you go over this 17 mile bridge tunnel, and then you end up in Virginia Beach. And that 17 mile bridge goes over the Chesapeake Bay. Well, construction on that Bay Bridge Tunnel, which was a marvel of engineering at the time, began in 1960.
Before they built that Bay Bridge Tunnel, Virginia had ferries going back and forth from the bottom of that peninsula to Virginia Beach.
So in 1962, New Jersey said this is a great idea. When Virginia finishes building its bridge, they’re going to have those ferries. So lets buy those Virginia ferries. Let’s run between Cape May, New Jersey and Lewis, Delaware, which is also a 17 mile gap. And let’s do exactly what Virginia did.
Let’s run those ferries temporarily, and lets double the tolls on the Delaware Memorial Bridge. And let’s use the money from doubling the tolls to build our own bridge from Cape May to Lewis, Delaware. It’s the same distance. We can use the same engineers, and almost the identical plans. And that was supposed to start in 1964.
So in 1964, Virginia finishes its bridge. And, and we get their ferries. And then what happens? We double the tolls of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, but we never build our own bridge tunnel between, Cape May and Lewes Delaware. We just keep running the ferries. They’re collecting all this extra money from doubling the tolls on the Delaware Bridge.
What did they do with the extra money? They built an amusement park. They bought five airports. They did all sorts of things. They did everything except the one thing they were supposed to do.
And now 63 years later, we’re still paying double the tolls on everything. Not even a plan for a 17 mile bay bridge tunnel to Lewes, Delaware. Today, nobody even knows that’s why they created the agency to begin with!
JOHN DEMASI:Wow. What a story.
SETH GROSSMAN: Well, it gets even better. Virginia, which built the original 17 mile Bay Bridge Tunnel, used tolls to pay back the cost of building it in about six years. So what does Virginia do with the extra toll money their collecting? In 1997, they build a second Bay Bridge Tunnel, the same 17 miles over the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. And the costs of building that second bridge tunnel in 1997 in $800 million.
And just to give you an idea what’s going on here in New Jersey, New Jersey, a few years later, we replace two draw bridges between Somers Point and Ocean City. Its a total distance of three miles. And New Jersey spends $400 million to replace two draw bridges to cover a distance of less than three miles!
So basically, Virginia built a 17 mile Bay Bridge Tunnel, over treacherous open water for the for on for just twice the cost of, New Jersey replacing two draw bridges to cobber less than three miles building a three mile bridge between Somers Point and Ocean City. . .
That’s the real problem. This is a perfect example of everything wrong with government in New Jersey today. Even worse, nobody knows this. Nobody pays attention to it.
But every time you go over that Delaware Memorial Bridge, every time you take that Cape May Ferry, you’re paying a lot extra to pay for this government agency that never even started to do the job it was created to do 63 years ago!
It’s all going for salaries and wages and contractors and pensions, paying off debt, and all that stuff, but not a penny is going for why they created the agency in the first place. And that’s a problem, and no one talks about it.
JOHN DEMASI: Why didn’t they, end up building the bridge in in ’67?
SETH GROSSMAN: That’s the question nobody ever answers. Probably because, in New Jersey with all the unions and all the politics and all the politics and all the payoffs, it would cost us three or four or five times more than Virginia to build the same thing. So maybe they just said, well, we’re not even going to try. But I’m sure in your audience, you probably have some engineers or old timers who remember this. Maybe one of them can call in and tell us.
But the fact that we don’t even talk about it, is one of the reasons why we have this corruption and mismanagement where nobody is held responsible for anything. Every year, we pay a fortune for tolls, we pay a fortune for taxes, we pay a fortune for all these hidden fees. We have all these politicians, who get elected and reelected in spite of these failures because they have all the money and the patronage of these authorities.
That’s what we do at Liberty and Prosperity. We talk about the big important issues that nobody else talks about. And nothing’s going to change until other people who have the money and influence that we don’t start paying attention.
JOHN DEMASI: Wow. Well, that’s a lot to talk about right there.
SETH GROSSMAN: Meanwhile, everybody is talking about New York City where Zohran Mamdani, won the Democratic Party primary election to be mayor of New York.
And, of course, he’s a 33-year-old immigrant who just became a citizen, I guess, eight years ago. His parents moved to Uganda in Africa when they were persecuted in India. They came to America after being persecuted in Uganda. His parents became successful and wealthy here. His father is a professor at Columbia University. His mother is an award-winning filmmaker. Mamdani attended elite private schools. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
In 2010, Mamdani went to Bowdoin, a leftist private school in Maine. There he started a chapter of Students for Justice for Palestine. Since then, he’s been telling everybody how much he hates America, hates Israel, hates privileged whites and so on. Mamdani says everything about America is wrong and needs to be changed. Mamdani wants the government to control the economy. He wants a $30 minimum wage. He wants the government to outlaw rent increases. He wants price controls. He wants the government to run the supermarkets. He says we have to shift the city tax burden so that richer, whiter neighborhoods pay more.
That’s who he is. And yet he wins the Democratic primary election in New York. And, according to the betting odds, the the bettors, the gamblers are saying he has a 73% chance of becoming the next mayor of New York and winning in November.
One of the reasons for that is the opposition is split four ways. You have, the current mayor, Eric Adams, who’s going to run as an independent. You have, Curtis Sliwa, the Republican who is still wearing his goofy red beret from thirty years ago.
JOHN DEMASI: Gee, really yeah.
SETH GROSSMAN: That old Guardian Angel look is ridiculous today. Andrew Cuomo, even though he lost, says he might run again, and there’s another candidate. So if the opposition is split three or four ways, then Zohran Mamdani is going to walk right in.
So, you know, a lot of people are saying, well, that’ll that’ll be great because, you know, we’ll see what a total failure he is. We’ll see how he destroys New York and, and then, you know, we’ll throw him out. And anyone who says something like that really doesn’t know history because people said the same thing about the communist in Russia. When the communist took over Russia, the first people said, oh, they’ll screw up the economy. People go hungry. People go broke. People have new jobs, and they’ll throw those communists out, you know, within a year. And, of course, it didn’t happen because, one thing the communists and the socialists are very good at, whenever they cause misery, whenever they fail, whenever they don’t keep their promises, they are experts at blaming somebody else for it. So the communist would blame, you know, the, the reactionaries. They blame the old timers. They would round them up. They put them in prison. And so once these guys get in, they never get out. They always say, you know, one man, one vote, one time.
And and they said the same thing about Hitler and the Nazis in the nineteen thirties. You know, people said, oh, yeah. Let Hitler get in. We’ll see what a total fool he is, and he’ll screw up the country. Same thing. Hitler takes over. He does screw up the country, but he he, blames everybody else. He blames the Jews. He, you know, locks up the opponents.
So it’s going to be very dangerous when this guy gets in.
JOHN DEMASI: Yeah. And and people yeah. You also forgot, free bus fare and, free counseling, free psychological counseling for everybody. You you forgot that.
SETH GROSSMAN: Oh, and I also forgot the part about, no police have social workers instead of police. Yes. So you so you could reason with the criminals. Yeah. So what happens is they they promise everything they get in. And when you have high crime, whenever you have, you know, disaster, there that you go to the to your government run supermarket, you know, so you don’t have to pay high prices and there’s no merchandise in the store, because there are shortages. But what they’ll do is they’ll say, well, that’s all the racists that are causing this, and, and we have to lock them up. It really gets ugly because they again, they’re they don’t know how to produce, but they know how to throw the blame. Yeah.
So so so you ask yourself, well, so why are so many people falling for this? First you have immigrants from these, Islamic countries. They have been taught since childhood that Islam is the only true religion, and that they have a duty to make the whole world submit to Sharia, that is Islamic Law. So one guy will have four wives, will have 16 children, and all of them will vote for whoever the imam tells them to vote for. And right now, the imam is telling them to vote for candidates like Zohran Mamdani.
You also have immigrants from these poor, miserable socialist countries who have been taught since childhood that their countries are poor because rich Americans rob their countries with colonialism.
And of course, you have our “woke’ young people who came out of our colleges. Most of us Boomers, us older folks get our news from TV. Republicans watch Fox News, One News Nation, and the Democrats watch the TV Network news like ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, or cable news like CNN and MSNBC.
Most of the younger Americans get their news from Instagram, from YouTube to TikTok. And if you see what’s what they’re posting there, you know, see the most outrageous lies. Far worse than anything you see on CNN or MSNBC.
But these kids don’t know they are lies. They think they are getting the truth, and that we Boomers are watching all the lies on network TV. And one of these things they are saying is that even if Mamdani and his socialists don’t win this time, they will win later when we Boomers are dead.
They say that over and over again. Those Boomers keep beating us by a little bit now, but those Boomers will soon be dead. Then we are going to be running the country.
And, you know, sadly, that’s true. They are going to be running the country because we Boomers have not, taught our kids how to think critically, and we never taught our children the truth about our country.
Think of what we’ve taught our kids in schools and colleges and in almost every Hollywood movie since, Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman? Remember that one?
JOHN DEMASI: Yeah. It it’s always the same.
SETH GROSSMAN: This is what we taught the last three generations of American kids. The whole world lived in peace and harmony and cared for the environment until five hundred years ago. And then you had a bunch of Christian, heterosexual white men in Europe, white and crazy. They abused women, enslaved blacks, genocided the Indians, started a whole bunch of wars and poisoned the planet.
So as far as our kids are being taught in college, even in Stockton University, at Rowan, and, you know, not just in Harvard and Columbia, it’s payback time. It’s time for a coalition of, of all these, oppressed victims of women, blacks, gays, transgenders, Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants to destroy the patriarchy of white Christian heterosexual men, and it’s time for them to take over. And why do they believe that?
Well, they were never taught how those Christian white men, they made the world a much better place. They invented machines, productive farming. Before, Europeans brought civilization, science, and technology to America in Europe and the rest of the world, starvation was normal. Genocidal wars were normal. Before the Europeans got to America, the Apaches were wiping out other Indians. The Powhatan Indians were wiping out people. The Iroquois wiped out the Huron, including the last of the Mohicans. Slavery was normal. Rape was normal. Most children died before they were 10 years old because there was constant famine and disease. Twenty percent of all women died in childbirth. That was normal.
But our kids are never taught about how much better the world is, because of our Christian, European, Western civilization. How can they know, if we Boomer parents, send our kids to schools and colleges where they are never taught this stuff?
JOHN DEMASI: Yeah. That’s a that’s a problem.
SETH GROSSMAN: I remember when I when I was a kid that my favorite books were those little orange biography books of guys like Carnegie and Ford and, Thomas Edison. These were people who started out with nothing. And they invented, they created, they spent years and years of hard work to make the world a better place, but you won’t find the biographies of any of those people, in our schools today because they don’t advance that leftist political agenda.
JOHN DEMASI: Yeah. That’s a shame. Really is.
SETH GROSSMAN: This is a main goal of Liberty and Prosperity. Every week, we talk about the need to start teaching this stuff to our kids again. And there is an urgency. We are running out of time. If we don’t teach our children better than what we’ve taught them so far, when we Boomers are gone, aside from who’s going to fly the planes, who’s going to make things work, who’s going to show up at work on time, who’s going to teach the children?
So we need to do this. But there’s another side to this, and I don’t have time to explore it this morning. But we Boomers also forget how we choked off the opportunities for our young people. Think about our grandparents. I remember growing up hearing stories of them and of so many people who started out poor and worked their way into getting rich. They started out working for nothing in a factory. But they learned the business. Then they’s have a store. And they’d have the store in front, the family would live in the back of the store. With all of our zoning laws today, that can’t happen anymore.
It used to be somebody would rent a store, they’d open up a restaurant, open up a business. Now you need permits. Now you need so many parking spots for every customer you have. So the only people who can afford to build anything new today are your chains like your McDonald’s and your Starbucks, or the wealthy like, like your Eustace Meade, just to build a hotel on the site of another commercial business. Look what look what he’s going through. Think of an ordinary person who just wants to, you know, open up a beauty salon or wants to open up a restaurant or a retail store.
Then you realize that they don’t ahve any of the opportunities that we and our parents and grandparents had. So besides what they learn from school, college, Hollywood and the media, they see how the whole system is stacked against them.
Why do kids today need a mortgage size loan to go to college? We Boomers paid for a year in a state college with a summer of work on the Boardwalk! Why why can’t kids today have a decent house or apartment for 25% of their income like we did. Our kids today can’t even afford to pay an electric bill without government help. The doctor bill, you know, you go in if you don’t have insurance, you know, you the the doctor bill is like, $400 for ten minutes. But if you have insurance, then it’s only, $50.
Anyway, get the details at libertyandprosperity.com. We have a lot of work to do and we need a lot of help. So please help libertyandprosperity.com.
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