[Peace-discuss] Matt Taibbi: Tea Party Parasites

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/218982/83512

October 12, 2010 4:16 P.M. EDT | By Matt Taibbi

More Tea Party Hilarity

Quelle surprise! So it turns out that one after another of the Tea
Party candidates is in one way or another mooching off the government.
The latest series of hilarious disclosures center around Alaska’s
GI-Joe-bearded windbag Senatorial candidate, Joe Miller, who appears
to have run virtually the entire gamut of government aid en route to
becoming a staunch, fist-shaking opponent of the welfare state.

Miller’s pomposity and piety with regard to government aid programs
has all along been in line with the usual screechingly hysterical
self-righteousness Tea Party candidates bring to such matters, railing
against Obamacare and other “entitlement” programs and promising to
end the “welfare state.” That makes it all the more delicious now that
he and his family have been exposed for taking state medical aid,
unemployment insurance, farm subsidies, hell, even for using state
equipment to run a private political campaign.

Back in June, Miller was saying this about his Republican primary
opponent Lisa Murkowski, blasting her for supporting a state health
care program:

As you are aware, just last week the Anchorage Daily News reported
that the Denali KidCare Program funded 662 abortions last year.
Senator Murkowski has been a champion of this program, voting against
the majority of her Republican colleagues for CHIPRA (HR 2) in January
of 2009.

Of course it now turns out that back in the Nineties, Miller himself
and his three children (with one on the way; he now has eight) were at
one point receiving assistance via a program almost exactly like the
Denali KidCare program, which is only for low-income earners. Various
reports note that Miller received this assistance after he’d bought a
house and been hired by a prestigious law firm; he also got low-income
hunting and fishing licenses during that time. It’s also come out that
he received some $7,000 in farm subsidies and that his wife received
unemployment insurance benefits.

So now of course Miller, who said he and his family “absolutely” used
Alaska’s state medical program, is backtracking and saying that he’s
not against the modern Denali Kidcare program, only against the
“expansion” of it. But even more telling was his longer answer about
the program, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News:

Miller said what he's advocating is complete state control of the
programs. "That doesn't mean we cut off the programs. That is
ultimately a state decision. And I think there is a use; in fact the
most effective use is probably those programs that help transition the
populations from more of a situation of dependency" to one where they
can be economically independent, Miller said.

You see, when a nice white lawyer with a GI Joe beard uses state aid
to help him through tough times and get over the hump – so that he can
go from having three little future Medicare-collecting Republican
children to eight little future Medicare-collecting Republican
children – that’s a good solid use of government aid, because what
we’re doing is helping someone “transition” from dependency to
economic independence.

This of course is different from the way other, less GI-Joe-looking
people use government aid, i.e. as a permanent crutch that helps
genetically lazy and ambitionless parasites mooch off of rich white
taxpayers instead of getting real jobs.

I can’t even tell you how many people I interviewed at Tea Party
events who came up with one version or another of the Joe Miller
defense. Yes, I’m on Medicare, but… I needed it! It’s those other
people who don’t need it who are the problem!

Or: Yes, it’s true, I retired from the police/military/DPW at 54 and
am on a fat government pension that you and your kids are going to be
paying for for the next forty years, while I sit in my plywood-paneled
living room in Florida watching Fox News, gobbling Medicare-funded
prescription medications, and railing against welfare queens. But I
worked hard for those bennies! Not like those other people!

This whole concept of “good welfare” and “bad welfare” is at the heart
of the Tea Party ideology, and it’s something that is believed
implicitly across the line. It’s why so many of their political
champions, like Miller, and sniveling Kentucky rich kid Rand Paul (a
doctor whose patient base is 50% state insured), and Nevada “crazy
juice” Senate candidate Sharron Angle (who’s covered by husband Ted’s
Federal Employee Health Plan insurance), are so completely
unapologetic about taking state aid with one hand and jacking off
angry pseudo-libertarian mobs with the other.

They genuinely don’t see the contradiction, much in the same way that
some Wall Street people genuinely can’t see the problem with their
company, say, taking $13 billion in bonuses in the same year that they
accepted $13 billion in state bailouts. You wave a pitchfork at them
with little post-its of the relevant figures taped to the ends, and
ask them to confess – and they can’t, because they literally don’t see
your point.

After all, these bankers will protest, we needed to pay out those
billions in bonuses to stay competitive! It’s not like we’re just
taking the money willy-nilly, like those dreadful people in ratty army
coats who shop with food stamps in the bodega downstairs!

The rationalization continues: If I can’t help my department heads buy
Porsches, they say, the whole system collapses, and the system is
what’s important. It’s not like simply handing out money to people who
can’t pay their mortgages, which of course is real waste. As Berkshire
Hathaway investment titan Charles Munger put it, it’s those people who
have to “suck it in and cope.” But bailouts for companies like the
ones Munger invests in, like Wells Fargo and Goldman, that’s
preserving the system – and we should all “thank God” for that kind of
state aid.

The reason these arguments are inherently ridiculous is that if you
live in America, you have a pretty good chance of being in some way or
another dependent upon government aid. Whether it’s aerospace or
military contracting or farm subsidies or grants in academia, medicine
or the arts… most of us are in some way living off of this spending,
directly or indirectly. Defense spending in particular has been a
primary engine of American capitalism for more than half a century
now. And government subsidies of agriculture and financial services
have begun to rival defense largesse.

All of which would normally make it unfair for any journalist to go
after a politician for taking government aid. After all, pretty much
everybody has in some way or another lived off the government in his
life – whether by working in a firm that takes government contracts,
or attending a state school, or getting into a college thanks to
affirmative action programs, or serving in the military or law
enforcement, or collecting Medicare or food stamps or unemployment.

But these Tea Partyers make themselves fair game with their
preposterous absolutist stance on government. If you call Obamacare
radical socialism and unemployment insurance a parasitic welfare state
program—well, guess what, asshole, you’re going to get rung up when we
find out you had your whole family living off state medical aid and
farm subsidies.

Even beyond that, though, is the way that Tea Party candidates and
activists demonize the consumers of “entitlement” programs, branding
them as lazy parasites who are taking from hard-working folk by
supporting “redistributionist” politicians. You probably heard about
the story of David Jungerman, the Kansas farmer who created a
billboard that read as follows:

ARE YOU A PRODUCER OR A PARASITE?

DEMOCRATS – THE PARTY OF PARASITES

Of course it now turns out that Jungerman himself took over a million
dollars in farm subsidies since 1995.  When asked about the apparently
contradiction, Jungerman offered the Miller defense:

“That’s just my money coming back to me,” Jungerman, 72, said Monday.
“I pay a lot in taxes. I’m not a parasite.”

In Tea Party legend the “parasites” would I suppose be people who
don’t pay taxes, or pay few taxes, and receive government support in
excess of what they pay. Maybe they mean the 39-odd million Americans
(about 1 in 8) who are now receiving food stamps. In the Hobbesian
jungle the Tea Partyers would prefer we all live in, it’s true, most
of those 39 million people (including the just under 50% of all
children, and 90% of black children, who will at some point in their
lives eat a meal bought with food stamps) would indeed be sucking wind
instead of eating cheese.

These are the parasites they’re probably talking about. You know,
children. Meanwhile, a slick grownup yuppie politician with a GI Joe
beard and a breeder wife and eight kids, leeching off the state at
every turn and gunning for a U.S. Senate salary and pension on an
anti-welfare platform, he’s just a hardworking citizen who simply
needed a lift during a “transitional” period. Man, did they break the
mold when they made these assholes.

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

Urge Congress to Support a Timetable for Military Withdrawal from Afghanistan
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/feingold-mcgovern