Tornado Alley (PROG)

[My Dime]

Blunt, Big Government, and Global Warming
David Corn

This morning I was listening to C-SPAN radio and heard a wonderful juxtaposition. First, I encountered a portion of an interview with SEIU leader Andy Stern. A minimum-wage worker had called in and was talking about the difficulty he had living on $5.15 an hour. Such pay was not enough, he explained, to afford rent ($300 a month), a car, car insurance, and food. With pain in his voice, the caller said he was considering food stamps, but he said was doing all he could to avoid taking a handout. It was a poignant moment. Stern, who had been talking about the need to boost the minimum wage, pointed to the call as evidence that the powerbrokers of Republican-controlled Washington are out of touch with the lives of millions of hardworking Americans like this fellow and have done little to address his needs: a higher minimum wage, health insurance, and retirement security.

Moments later--after catching Jane's Addiction on a classic rock station--I returned to C-SPAN and found temporary majority leader Roy Blunt, who is running to be permanent majority leader (since Tom DeLay has abdicated that throne). He had been speaking to students at Georgetown this past weekend. If you think politics doesn't make a difference, Blunt told them, go look at a newspaper from 13 years ago. Back then, he claimed, the folks in control--the Democrats--we're talking about tax hikes, not tax cuts, and growing the government, not growing the economy. While he was on campus, Blunt should have taken a history lesson. The Clintonites were at that point talking about imposing modest tax hikes only on the rich to address the deficit left over from the Bush I years, and they claimed this would lead to economic growth. And--due to their actions or not--years of economic growth did follow

Blunt went on to say, Look, how things turned around once GOPers took control in the 1994 elections. We passed welfare reform. We passed legislation banning late-term abortions. We passed health savings account. At this point, I wished that the caller to the previous show was in the audience. Would any of these measures have helped him? He didn't need welfare, and he had no money to purchase a health savings account.

Blunt joked--well, sort of--that in the conservative stretch of Missouri where he comes from people believe the federal government should only be responsible for defending the nation and for delivering the mail...and they have their doubts about the mail service. Why not let private entities and nongovernmental public institutions (like schools) address people's needs? he asked.

Now how many lobbyists do you think have had their needs addressed by Blunt, who, by the way, had an affair with a tobacco lobbyist whom he later married? Blunt, for instance, quietly slipped a pro-tobacco provision into a national security bill. I suppose helping Big Tobacco rates somewhere between repelling foreign invaders and delivering Christmas cards on Blunt's to-do list for the federal government. And he has raised much money from lobbyists, who tend not to hand out funds for nada in return.

It's fine to be a government-stinks conservative. But as we've seen in the Abramoff scandal, many rightwingers piggishly grab whatever federal money and contracts they can for their districts and, worse, for the clients represented by lobbyists who fund their campaigns. They love Big Government when they can pillage it.

Listening to Blunt, I thought of yesterday's front-pager in The Washington Post, which reported,

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

This is nothing new. For years, climatologists have been worrying that a "tipping point" is fast approaching--beyond which the planet would change drastically and remedies would be beyond the reach of the human societies that have caused this change. (Hollywood weighed in with The Day After Tomorrow.) As the Post noted, three possible changes worry scientists most: the breakdown in the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps temperatures moderate in northern Europe, coral bleaching that can destroy fisheries around the globe, and a significant melting of ice at the poles that would drastically raise sea levels--to such an extent that lower Manhattan could be flooded away.

Now, I would ask Blunt, what private institutions, what nonprofits should be dealing with an issue of this size and reach? If this ain't a job for the US federal government--working with other national governments--what is? But few members of Congress--particularly the Republican leaders--are willing to do anything to deal with this potential problem.

I'm no seer, but it could be that a few decades down the road, George W. Bush's nonaction on global warming will be seen as more of a folly than his invasion of Iraq. In June 2001, after Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto accord, he said, "My administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change." In February 2002, he said he would "address" the issue of global warming. But can anyone with a straight face suggest Bush has been a leader in addressing climate change? No, he has fibbed his way through this issue. His message: don't worry, pass the sunscreen. And the leaders of other countries have not called him to full account for doing so.

But back to Blunt: is there any doubt that he has spent more time helping the tobacco industry than pondering how to thwart global warming of this magnitude and impact? Yes, he's been putting Big Government to good work.

http://www.davidcorn.com/