Political Irony

Jesse Kelly, who is a GOP candidate for Congress in Arizona attended a campaign rally hosted by a local Tea Party group. During the question and answer session, Kelly was asked about the recent salmonella outbreak, which sickened 1,300 people and led to a recall of half a billion eggs. The outbreak was traced back to a producer in Iowa, who had a stunning 20 year record of health, safety, labor, and other violations. We’ve also recently seen 29 miners killed in a mining disaster caused by a mining company that willfully ignored safety laws, and even the Gulf oil spill, where BP has been responsible for 97% of all flagrant safety violations in the last three years.

So, given that we are seeing more and more disasters caused by a small number of companies, would Kelly support a law that gave the government the power to shut down companies that willfully, flagrantly, and repeatedly break the law.

I would think that even Tea Party members would be in favor of law and order. If you break the law, and especially if you break the law repeatedly, you will go to jail. Shouldn’t the same thing apply to a company? For a company, going to jail means being shut down.

But what I find especially ironic is how Kelly answered the question, or more accurately, didn’t answer it. Here’s the dialog:

Question: Given the salmonella outbreaks that we have seen every three weeks, with the chicken industry, with pesticides and what not that they put onto spinach in order to get the salmonella. We have rules and regulations. However there is no rule mandating that they be enforced. Is there some way when you’re in Congress that you’ll have a bill passed that says instead of having companies voluntarily change, mandate that they must change or give them the ability to shut ‘em down and that goes for mining companies or anyone who has hundreds of violations against ‘em.

Kelly: Here’s the thing with that point, that’s the first time I’ve ever had that question. Congratulations on being unique. First shot out of the box, no ma’am. I do not believe that what we’re lacking right now is a lack of regulations on business. […] You could literally go spit on the grass and get arrested by the federal government if you wanted to right now. […] More regulation, more federal control, giving Nancy Pelosi more power, is not the solution right now.

Q: Who’s protecting us?

Kelly: That’s the thing, ma’am, it’s our job to protect ourselves. Because no one else is going to look out for your best interests except for you. […]

Q: Am I supposed to go to a chicken farmer and say I’d like you to close down because all of your birds are half dead?

Kelly: I’ve not heard a lot about that recently, obviously there’s a new thing that comes along every day. But I know this, every portion of our economy that is heavily regulated doesn’t have fewer disasters, it has more.

Kelly essentially changes the subject, saying we don’t need more regulations. But the question they asked was not about having more regulations, the question was about enforcing existing laws and regulations.

The current situation is like having laws against murder and theft, but having no way to enforce the law. Companies are expected to voluntarily comply with the law. Isn’t this like asking people to give themselves tickets for speeding, or (more apropos to Arizona) asking illegal aliens to kindly please leave the country? But according to Kelly, it is up to you to make sure that you don’t buy eggs with salmonella, or work for a company whose mine is going to collapse and kill you.

Kelly even manages to get in a swipe against Nancy Pelosi. So according to Kelly, enforcing the laws against illegal businesses gives Pelosi more power, but enforcing laws against illegal aliens is a high priority. That’s hypocrisy.

You might want to call this “E Coli Conservatism“. If we are going to pretend that corporations are people and give them rights like free speech, shouldn’t they also have responsibilities like not breaking the law, injuring, or even killing people? When people break the law, we remove them from society. When companies break the law, we should remove them from business.

Three Republican candidates — Meg Whitman, Rick Scott, and Linda McMahon — have collectively spent $243 million dollars of their own money on their campaigns. Yes, almost a quarter of a billion dollars. That’s more than the combined spending during this election of the US Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, and major union the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

But what’s ironic is that none of these candidates are ahead in the polls. Whitman’s $141 million (and that doesn’t include contributions) got her 8 points behind Jerry Brown for the California governorship, while former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon has spent $41 million — more than twice as much per voter as Whitman — but is trailing by 18 points in her run for Connecticut Senator. Only Scott — a former health care executive at a hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare fraud — is competitive in his bid to be the governor of Florida, after spending $60 million of his own money.

© Joel Pett

One of the original founders of the tea party movement says that the Tea Party has been “hijacked” by the very people it was protesting.

You can tell how far away he is from what is now called the Tea Party, because he still has a sense of humor. Karl Denninger declared that he “ought to sue” anyone who uses the name Tea Party “for defamation”, but then added “Yeah, that’s a joke. But so are you. All of you. Especially Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, and the douchebag groups such as the ‘Tea Party Patriots’.”

But he also still has plenty of anger. He continues “Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!”

Go read Denninger’s rant. If this was what the Tea Party stood for and was fighting for, then I would sign up.

Remember Dylan Ratigan from the other day — speaking truth that elicited stunned silence on the Morning Joe show? Watch this segment of his talking about the hijacking of the Tea Party movement and what can be done about it:

David Michael Green has a brilliant rant about the Tea Party. Here are (too many) choice quotes, but the whole (fairly short) article is worth a read.

It’s ironic, to begin with, that the ones who are bitching loudest today are precisely the people who created the mess we’re in.

The astonishing irony here is that they’ve had their way with economic policy in this country for thirty years running. And, excuse me, but now they’re pissed off at the results?

Taxes today are a mere hint of what they used to be, just as the right has insisted must be the case. For the rich especially, top marginal income taxes have come down from 91 percent to 35 percent. But, of course, even that doesn’t include earnings on capital gains, a giant portion of their income, which is now at 15 percent. Nor does it include the estate tax, which has now disappeared entirely.

On trade, previously existing barriers and protections for domestic industries have been eviscerated almost completely, so that for much of the world today, it’s a single market for products and capital. Labor? Not so much. What a shock, then, that America’s good jobs – especially in manufacturing – are now all located in Mexico. Or at least they were, until even those became too expensive and got moved to China and India and Vietnam.

The story is the same in the domain of labor relations, where the playing field has been slanted massively in the direction of capital, starting with Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. The upshot of these rule changes and enforcement laxity has been that the portion of union-protected jobs in America has shrunk from about 35 percent to about 7 percent, with precisely the results for workers that you’d expect.

With deregulation, too, we’ve seen massive changes as well over the same period, across industries far and wide, not least of which includes the repealing of Glass-Steagal and the unleashing of Wall Street. The right insisted – and still does – that this is great news for the economy. History begs to differ.

The result, of course, has been economic devastation far and wide. The rich have gotten massively richer, the rest of us are sinking, the federal debt has skyrocketed, our jobs have been exported to China and India, Wall Street has plunged the global economy into the toilet, corporations like BP do whatever they want without fear of consequence, and the United States is imploding as a great power. These are not coincidences, either. And now here comes the great irony: the same people who have been getting their way on the economy for thirty years now are just absolutely livid about what they themselves have created! They’re just completely enraged at the product of their own politics.

A second great irony is the extent to which the tea party bozos are being manipulated by elites like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch and the likes of Dick Armey. The very people who created the public’s economic insecurity in order to get rich off of it, are now channeling the resulting rage into support for more of the same.

Another pretty serious irony is that the tea partiers are likely about to gain some substantial power, but have no solutions to the problems they perceive. … Unless, of course, they’re prepared to slash Social Security and Medicare spending. Which they’re not. When the New York Times ran a poll on tea partiers back in April, it found that they tend to favor the generic idea of cutting government programs. Just not the only ones that really matter. Some were unable to reconcile the competing concepts: “‘That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?’ asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. ‘I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.’ She added, ‘I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.'”

The only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: ‘No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.'”

I notice that nobody running for Congress this year is specifying just how they’d kill the deficit. They want to cut spending, and they say they can, but they can’t see any rush in specifying how they’ll do it. That can wait til after the election. Republican duplicity and hypocrisy.

What would it look like if Obama didn’t have to pay for Bush’s wars based on lies, didn’t have to pay for Bush’s prescription drug plan, didn’t have to pay for Bush’s tax cuts, didn’t have to pay for stimulus funds to rescue the country from Bush’s Great Recession, and didn’t have to pay interest (one of the biggest items in the federal budget) on the money that Bush and Reagan borrowed previously? Most likely, it would look like it did on January 20, 2001, the day that Bush came to office, and the United States was running the greatest surplus ever in its history.

So here we stand. The people who created endless disaster as far as the eye can see are now completely beside themselves in outrage that someone is spending a few dollars to clean up the mess these same folks have made by convincing America to follow their policies over the last thirty years. They want big changes, right now, even though they can’t quite specify what they want – other than changes that won’t hurt them, personally – and even though these changes would do absolutely nothing to solve the current problems facing the country, and would in fact probably exacerbate those.