I have, over the past five years, found myself leaping from one party to it's polar opposite - at the same time feeling as if my basic values and beliefs haven't moved one iota. It seems to me that if I can do it, then others can too...we just need to start talking more about the issues that drove that change...so, I give you, without further adieu, Anne Applebaum's piece on welfare for the rich - something I've commented on here and elsewhere - this goes far beyond corporate welfare, something Democrats need to pound home more and expand on. The GOP is engaged in naked class warfare, and have been for years - we need to do the same. Much, much more below the fold...
This is my first Diary, and has a long preamble - please feel free to skip down a few (many) paragraphs if you like. Listening to a windbag isn't mandatory (even if this is a whole site full of 'em ;-) ).
So you know how it is with converts: the harder the come, the harder they fall. As I've noted in comments on other's stories and diaries, I'm a former Republican - a moderate drawn more by libertarian leanings and seduced by the 'get big bother off our backs' call of the GOP - never a social reactionary (indeed, a pretty extreme liberal). At the root, though, I'm a rationalist, and as such a bit of a naive idealist, and that's a lonely place these days in the GOP for guys like Steve Forbes and me.
Indeed, during the 40 years the GOP spent in the hinterland, the party could really play at the "Big Tent" bit - since none of it really mattered - we weren't in power anyway (and make no mistake: the Eisenhower and Nixon presidencies were certainly the hinterland for the heart of our modern GOP; even Barry Goldwater wasn't who they thought he was). As such, the GOP attracted lots of idealists (and ideologues, though they are different creatures, or the word has shifted meaning), and we made nice window dressing.
The real growth in the power of the GOP over the past thirty years is the result of a careful marketing effort. The window dressing provided by idealists and theorists is very much part of that. We now recognize it as an Orwellian twisting of words and being members of the reality-based world, we are apoplectic at the ease with which our fellow citizens are seduced.
Now, however, the party has revealed two true faces, one intellectual and the other emotional. The heart of the GOP, and that part which excites passion, is the remains of the racist south - the segregationist Dixicrats, would be theocrats and Puritan scolds. People with a fundamentally negative view of human nature who look to repression and denial - social reactionaries. It's pretty easy to get riled up about these folks - and they pretty clearly get riled up about the rest of us and our 'moral decay'. Lots is written about them, and they generate a lot of sound and fury. That, of course, is exactly what the intellectual face of the GOP wants.
The intellectual face of the GOP is preoccupied, first and foremost, with finding bigger and better ways of getting rich. Very simply put, all political systems, indeed, all history, is driven by the desire for control of resources. That's the central point in everything - all the Iraqi constitutional squabbling is over oil revenue, the rest they'd have agreed on years ago. Religious wars? Fig leaves for plunder and expansion. The entire point of the GOP's various privatization schemes is to redirect government revenue streams through private hands where they can skim a percentage. The beneficiaries of any unlikely efficiency gains in such arrangements will most surely not be either the taxpayer (who is the consumer) - indeed, at it's most cynical the question becomes, who would you rather benefit by way of government largesse, an army of 'inefficient' government bureaurocrats (all of whom are limited to formal pay bands) or 'private' bureaucrats - people who regularly engage in all kinds of corrupt accounting practices and readily, and often legally, plunder their bureaurocracies? Look for this to be precisely the model employed by Karl Rove in 'reconstructing' Mississippi and Louisiana - I predict plenty of good diary material on that coming down the news pipe. Indeed the government establishment of religion functions as the same play: funnel government money to "faith based initiatives" which are nothing more than "chosen" (pun intended) social reactionary organizations.
However, such things need not simply take the form of overt corruption like this; in fact, a great deal of this government largesse - welfare really - is expended in the fairly 'legitimate' political process - I put quotes around legitimate, because labelling pork as such is a fairly subjective thing - as many folks have noted, one woman's pork (no pun intended) is another's tax dollars "coming home." And here's where we've been losing the marketing war - Reagan's villification of Welfare Queens (apocryphal though they were) was brilliant - why are we not charicaturing and villifying the rich beneficiaries of government largesse? This is more than the 'eco-nazi', 'slacker', 'hippie', 'non-conformist', anti-corporate critique - not that I buy into the legitimacy of those denigrating characterizations, only point out how poisoned they are. No, we need to get serious about similarly characturing, tar & feathering (generally smearing) the country-club rich for living high and mighty off middle class backs.
Which brings me (finally dear reader) to the story that prompted this. I've been spouting about this in snippets for a while, but Anne Applebaum's Op-Ed in the WaPo, "Back to Trent Lott's House" gets right to it, more succinctly and better than I do:
But it's also true that many people build houses along the water because it makes economic sense to do so. Houses or apartments with ocean views command higher prices. Beachfront property owners can demand higher rents. Beachside businesses -- casinos, hotels, restaurants -- spin money. And, best of all, the risks of owning beachfront property -- risks from floods, hurricanes and erosion -- are covered by other people. Federally subsidized flood insurance programs and state-subsidized beach "re-nourishment" programs ensure that taxpayers -- rich, poor, local, national -- pay for damage to property built close to the water. To put it differently, Lott's house was on the beach because you and I paid for it.
The only reason it makes economic sense to build in these locations is that the risk is covered by someone else! And she cites an even more egregious misuse of the public dollars:
One North Carolina beach community, Emerald Isle, has collected millions of dollars in state and federal money to combat erosion -- even though some 80 percent of Emerald Isle's new artificial beach is privately owned and inaccessible to the public, which paid for it.
And, this begets a rather vicious feedback loop...
beach developers tend to be disproportionately wealthy and politically influential, and therefore unusually good at fighting zoning laws and grabbing subsidies. Even after Hurricane Andrew forced Florida to establish stricter building codes, the owners of hot Florida Panhandle real estate managed to get a raft of exemptions for their region.
Now, I had family in South Miami when Andrew came through - they lived in a older section, built well before the 20 year hurricane lull and before the notion of government largesse was well established - consequently their house was built to a code (at a time when the codes were actually enforced) that let them pass through that with only one cracked window - hit by a neighbor's shingle (the loss of which was the only damage the neighbor sustained). Homes to the North and South were utterly wiped out - all much newer (and shoddier) construction. And, in true political fashion (to be fair, Dems have been guilty of this sort of thing too)...
Lott himself used his political clout to force an Army engineer out of his job after the man had the temerity to suggest that Mississippi stop building casinos along the flood-prone coast. Twenty of those casinos were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and the 16,000 people who worked in them have lost their jobs and probably their homes as well.
This is the feedback loop established under a 'privatized' government system. The behavior of the folks who build in these locations, under the economic circumstances we have now - circumstances which are largely created by government largesse - and big "L" largesse as opposed to the small "l" largesse which creates the concentrated ghettos called housing projects so readily villified by the right!
This is exactly the kind of "vote buying" which 'conservatives' (since well before the GOP existed - Whigs and Nativists really started it) which Democrats have been accused of in our political system. It's part of the slander of the Democratic party that they simply buy the votes of poor people by throwing government entitlements and giveaways at them, like AFDC and HUD - programs that George Will and James Q. Wilson accuse of ultimately harming the people they seek to help. I suppose we ought to cut off developers before they build again and hurt themselves!
So, if you've made it this far, congratulations and thank you! As I said: I suddenly find myself aligned on the opposite side of the political spectrum, in a time of "values" politics - and yet, I feel my values are common American values, which haven't changed in the slightest. I do believe in self-reliance, self-actualization, etc. I am still appalled by parasites living off the government - just as Rush would tell me I should be. It is well past the time when the Democratic Party, or Progressives at the very least, need to turn the cold hard economic idealism of the Right on the policies of the Right - to "take back" those values (and not the culture war distractions - we don't really want misogyny and bigotry anyway - they can KKKeep those) and demonstrate why we're the party who's policy implementation of those values is truer (and, if, unlike me you're religions, more "Christian").
Thanks for Reading - Montepelier is James Madison's house - I live about 8 miles away - I am an ardent believer in civil liberties. AFAIK, both spellings are accepted.