Just Like You – Only Way Richer
Change is not the same thing as progress. In fact, change can be the exact opposite. It can be regressive, as we’re now learning from – who else? – Congress.
A flock of tea party-infused Republicans has certainly changed the political dynamic there, and exultant GOP leaders are claiming that they are now the voice of “the People.” But most people won’t find themselves represented by this change, much less see it as progress.
That’s because the newcomers in Congress, whether Republican or Democrat, tend to live high up the economic ladder, way out of touch with the people they’re representing. Indeed, 40% of newly elected House members are millionaires, as are 60% of new senators. While the great majority of workaday Americans are struggling to make it on about $30,000 a year – and having, at best, puny pensions and iffy health coverage – these incoming lawmakers tend to be sitting pretty on accumulated wealth. Their financial reports show them holding extensive personal investments in such outfits as Wall Street banks, oil giants, and drug makers.
Their wealth and financial ties might help explain the rush by the new Republican House majority to coddle the corporate powers. From gutting the Environmental Protection Agency‘s anti-pollution restrictions on Big Oil to undoing the restraints on Wall Street greed, they’re pushing for a return to the same laissez-faireyland ideology of the past 20 years that got our country in massive messes. At the same time, they’re out to kill a green jobs program, bust unions, cut Social Security, defund Head Start, and generally stomp on the fingers of working families trying to hold onto the middle class rungs of the economic ladder.
The change in Congress is taking America backward, not forward – for the new majority literally is the voice of millionaires. And that’s not progress.
Worst of the Worst Contest
An email popped up recently that chilled me to the bone. Just one sentence long, the subject said: “Occasionally, Kansas legislators make Texas legislators look like sages.”
Friends, if that’s true, America is in a heap of hurt. For years I have lived with, dealt with, and reported on the insane asylum that Molly Ivins dubbed the “Texas Lege” – I thought you could not get goofier. In just the past couple of months, for example, I reported that two towering figures in our Lege had been routinely double-billing on travel expenses for luxury hotels, fancy restaurants, and such. In the midst of an ongoing budget crunch, they were illegally collecting tens of thousands of dollars from Texas taxpayers, even as they were demanding that programs to help poor people be slashed. When caught, these goobers essentially said, “Well, gosh, no one told us it was wrong.”
Now that sets a high bar for low IQ, and I thought it also established a low mark for bottom-feeder ethics. However, my Kansas correspondent found a lawmaker in his legislature who is a legitimate contender to top our duo. Virgil Peck is the name. A state rep, he sits on a committee that recently considered ways to deal with a spreading wild boar problem. It was suggested that the solution might be to put sharpshooters in helicopters to thin the roving herds.
That sparked a synapse between Virgil’s two brain cells, and the next thing you know his tongue was moving and these words gushed out of his mouth: “Looks like to me, if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal immigration problem.”
Hoo-boy, that’s Texas-class doofusness, all right! Maybe we need to have a national “State Lege Worst-Off.” Send your nominees to me: info@jimhightower.com.
This article appears in April 22 • 2011.