Republican Want to Have It both Ways.

That is what Republican congressmen want, and so do their voters.  Yep, those small town salt of the earth types, the farmers and ranchers, the oil and gas drillers, the coal companies, and the property owners with big dreams - they want it both ways.  They tell themselves and anyone who will listen, that if we leave them alone, and keep taxes low - and reduce regulations, we’ll make the economy hum.

That’s their story, and they are sticking too it. 

But it’s a lie.

We think of farmers as very independent.  And they are independent in spirit.  But many of them get some form of crop support (cash payments for commodity crops like corn, sugar and cotton).  Then there is crop insurance.  Crop insurance helps them through the bad times, and with the recent years of drought, crop insurance has been a godsend – but, and it’s a big but, the insurance is really our money.  Insurance agents sell the stuff, and insurance companies administer the claims, but its our tax money that is being paid out as cash when Farmer Brown’s soybeans wither in the dry heat. 

All this may be fine, but just don’t tell me you want to be left alone.   The farmers sound like teenagers who whine about being treated like an adult but then wants more of dad’s money to go to the mall, and wants to borrow the car.

Even our lonely ranchers in the dry western deserts want to graze their cattle on out land.  They pay for the right to do so, but the grazing does more harm to the land than the US earns from the grazing fees. 

Oil men are another group of supposedly independent spirits.  Still, they ache to drill on public land, and if you have even seen a drilling rig, you’ll know former habitat will never be returned to what it was.  With the oil men are the frackers, greedily destroying the groundwater for private gain.  Even if fracking does not pollute the groundwater directly, the water that is used for fracking is a public health concern.  For you see, they use lots of water, add poisons too it, and then when the fracking is done, this water is even dirtier (saltier too) and must be dumped somewhere.  So far, down a deep well is the only cheap way – and even deep wells are problematical – since we lose millions of gallons of water in an era where we will be running out of water (if the warming trend continues).  As for old fashioned water treatment?  Its not really effective.  So we have a set of highly independent spirits who get miffed when the rest of us want them to clean up their mess.

By the way, when they do harvest the gas and oil, they want to move it on pipelines that run over public lands and public rights of way.  Yep, that’s right.  It is always about private profits and public pain.

The coal men are more of the same.  (And don’t get me started on the clean coal canard – there is no clean coal!).  Coal is dirty and so is the process of mining it.  Old fashioned underground mining produces piles of slag that leach poisons into the ground water.  Surface mining may be worse.   The mining industry pays big money to whine about the EPA – but if you dumped a cup full of mercury into your neighbors garden, you’d go to jail.  Dump tons of mecury in the air and groundwater (other poisons too) and conservatives hail you as the spirit of America.

And what about those rural landowners who have a big dream about a stretch of farmland that is achingly close to the interstate.  They see a big score, and get pissed when anyone wants them to proceed carefully.  Of course, they want to used gas tax money to connect their piece of land to the highway – and to pay for the development, they want to have the sales tax money from the new project dedicated to repayment of the bank loans used to fund the project.  (Yes, that’s how it’s done). 

As for the small town whose downtown is ruined when the new mall goes up?  Well fuck ‘em – they are all just lazy whiners!  (We also pick up the tab for the mall’s poorly paid workers – we do this on the front end, through Medicaid and on the back end when we cover the cost of uncompensated care.)  And as for Obamacare – our “entrepreneurs” think it will ruin America, as if their low wages didn’t ruin it already. 

Yep, they all want to be left alone, except when they don’t.

Here is a “Tea Party Star”  Kristi Noem from South Dakota – in September 2012, whining about the farm bill.  

I hope she votes yes when the rest of the Sandy aid package comes to a vote.   And when the next round of debt ceiling talks come up…. Well don’t get me started.