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Tales from a small town

Short stories about life in a small town. Non-fiction. Great reading.

Friday, December 23, 2005

Communism for the rich

Been having a great time writing about Lindsey and Rebekkah, but chances are good that I won’t finish that tale, unless someone actually requests it. My main purpose for this blog is to inform people about my progress concerning my struggle with local economic development officials.

Just in case you haven’t read any of my previous posts to find out what my beef with the local economic development officials is, please check out a previous post of mine titled “Dirty Little Secrets.”

Last week, there was an article in our paper about how one of our county commissioners was striking back against the local Chamber of Commerce (CofC).

Our local CofC is very powerful. In fact, if you’re a politician or a wanna-be politician, chances are good that unless someone from the “Glories of the Past Committee” (GPC; not it’s real name, but I don’t want these guys to do a search on its real committee name and find this blog,) but chances are good that if someone from the GPC committee of the local CofC doesn’t tap you on the shoulder while you’re on the back-nine of the country club’s golf course, you’re not going to get elected. They really have that much influence.

So, it’s pretty significant that a prominent Republican politician would criticize our local CofC. You see, the local CofC has always criticized the county government by saying they should operate their government like a business. What I think they mean by that is, “Slash your capability to provide critical government services to the point that you can only patrol &/or respond quickly to the rich areas of the county, and don’t worry about the rest of it.”

So, how did the county politician criticize the CofC? He said, “The CofC is always telling us we should operate like a business, but they have a Convention and Visitor’s Department (CVD) that takes 100% of our county’s hotel/motel tax, equaling about $590,000 a year. We don’t have any major conventions of any kind – ever, so what do they have to show for the money they’re bringing in? Can’t they operate like a business and return any money over-and-above expenses to the investor, which in this case, would be the county?” Damn good question if you ask me!!

The significance of this is, there’s never been a public rift between the CofC and it’s puppets before I started writing my editorials. I think people have been afraid to criticize what has always been perceived to be a very powerful organization. Now that one person (me) has started criticizing, it seems like more and more people are jumping on the bandwagon!

Of course, this area has the headquarters of an international tire company – along with one of its factories. Rumor has it, this company is moving the headquarters and the factory out of town. Not only that, we’re also the headquarters of an international oil company. This company’s presence here in this town has been in question since it was originally bought-out in a hostile take-over back in the 80’s, and every time the wind blows, another one of it’s subsidiaries leaves town, making the headquarters building just a little more empty.

This idea of dues-paying members of our local economic development agency limiting who comes into town and who doesn’t, based on whether or not it’s a low-paying company, probably was at one time cute, but it’s cute no more. They’ve got to stop trying to prevent good-paying companies from locating here, in an attempt to limit wage competition between factories here. What that boils down to is, Social Engineering. Social Engineering is a very non-Republican ideal. In fact, Social Engineering is an off-shoot of Socialism.

So, it would appear that the local Republican Party is actually the local Socialist Party (right-wing Socialists though, they may be).

I thought Republican ideals were ones that encouraged governments to provide an environment that fosters competition, not environments that limit competition, right? Is that true, or not true? If that’s true, then our local Republican Party is what Rush Limbaugh calls RINOs, or “Republicans In Name Only.”

These people are pretty smart, because they’ve come to the correct realization that if you screw the poor, no matter how you do it, or how centralized of a source the screwing comes from, you can call yourself a Republican, and Republican straight-ticket voters will just blindly vote for you, no matter how communist (communism benefiting only the rich) but no matter how communist the people of the party may be.

This brings this discussion to a whole new point: Soviet Communism was supposed to benefit the worker. These folks here where I live, have invented a new type of communism: communism for the rich! Ain’t that a gas!