You will seldom see me talking politics here, but this piece of legislation strikes close to home. Those praising this bill are a surprising lot, including many entities in industry. However, I suspect their praise is not so much from a political standpoint as it is from a desperation standpoint--one cannot get their goods to market if the bridges are falling down.

Herein lies the rub. Many revenue generating programs (such as the original bill that built the US interstate system) were allegedly designed to not only provide the capital to build the infrastructure, but beyond that, provide the capital to maintain the infrastructure in perpetuity.

Obviously, that scheme failed, the latest poster child in the Interstate System failures being the I-40 bridge over the Mississippi River at Memphis, Tennessee. Apparently, someone in the regulatory/spending authority circle misapplied the maintenance funds.

So now we need an infrastructure bill, and those affected by poor infrastructure are lining up to praise it.

This reminds me of the scenes I have seen time and time again where pulp and paper mills have been run into the ground by a hot shot, fast rising manager who has placed short term profits over long term maintenance. As guilty as they are of dereliction of fiduciary duty, the boards of directors who have used plausible deniability to allow this to happen are just as guilty.

The latest buzzwords in the board room are ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance). I would like to change this to ESSG--Environmental, Social, Sustainable and Corporate Governance. In this case, however, I would clearly state that "Sustainable" is in reference to fiduciarily sustaining the assets that the shareholders own--no more deterioration by neglect and no more plausible deniability.

Jim Thompson is CEO of Paperitalo Publications.