EDITORIAL: Holier than thou at constituents’ expense?
According to an editorial, “[Joe] Sestak should follow the lead of U. S. Rep. Joe Pitts, whose 16th District includes Lancaster County. Pitts hasn’t asked for an earmark in years after coming to the conclusion that the earmark process is deeply flawed.”
“Flawed” or not, earmarked funding is the way that a portion of the taxes paid locally are returned for local project. The concept is that locally elected officials have a better sense of how the money should be spent than bureaucrats in Washington, D .C.
So who is Pitts to deprive our community of funds for libraries, public health, schools and other important community services to which we are entitled?
Legislators should serve their constituents, not be blinded by some utopian aspiration. Sure, work for reform. But let’s not turn our back on our fair share!
I agree with your concept in some regards. If the money is there and will fill an absolute need then yes.
BUT IMO
There is a problem with this thinking.
As I check out agency after agency I hear them state shamelessly “If we don’t use those funds they will be returned and we won’t get them next year”.
WOW – Run a for-profit corporation with that strategy and see how it works! OK so we didn’t sell as many B-widgets this year and so there was no profit but lets make sure we spend just as much as last year or our department might get cuts. No, if A-widgets are where its at let B-widget department close before we loose more money on a useless department- right?
So these county, local, state and fed funds go to agencies which 1st; rationalize their existance by generating #’s which sound alarms and 2nd; primarily posture to expand and never contract even long after their services have ceased their value to the taxpayers.
So we have more government reaching into every area of our lives because it 1) They justify how we need them. 2) Once funded they do all they can to assure growth and prosperity to those who work in the agency. Obviously, often these individuals are not exactly balanced in their opinion or perspective. While I could cite my investigation into the HRC over the past six months the domestic violence agencies are a great example so I’ll use that.
Now they have defined abuse as things like, not giving the female as much money as she wants to shop “economic abuse” they call it or making faces, or looking mean at a woman or throwing a warm dinner roll and missing by only inches (actual PFA claim) or wearing a Tshirt that said “My anger managment class really pisses me off” (another actual claim).
They will certainly never run out of “need” for their services now will they? In fact they have made clear they think many women don’t understand when they are being abused so they have to “educate” them to the new definitions so they can “help” them out of abusive relationships and save some dinner rolls.
Oh well – That’s my rant on this one.
Our Congressman, Joe Pitts, is not evaluated on what he brings home to his district but how dependable he is for the corporate & GOP political interests who put him there, albeit not without the help of a co-dependent, plantation mentality, electorate.
Pitts gets a 92% lifetime rating from the voice of business interests, the American Chamber of Commerce, and a 5% lifetime rating from the AFL-CIO. This is far from the balance we have a right to expect from a person who is supposed to represent the entire community . . business and working people.
The Pitts record is, sadly, just additional evidence of the local rule by wealth/power that we have seen in the Hotel & Convention Center story. Tragically, this Lancaster County experience seems to be only a microcosm of our entire nation. When will we learn the power of money and media to manipulate?
Just like the corporate hired thugs of the early union busting days, we have the same leg breakers today serving the same people, but using ever more effective tools and technology to corrupt persons and institutions to sell out our American experiment with representative democracy. The power of money and the power of ignorance have combined to virtually destroy it. The final chapter in this story, almost complete, is the brutally effective tool of money and power to move jobs around the globe to teach labor its final lesson.
Icon of our future? Yesterday I bought a “York Peppermint Patty” made in Mexico. When the corporate manipulators tell us that we cannot even manufacture a peppermint patty competitively in the USA, we have reached a certain bottom in the manipulation of the American worker.
Ordinary workers cannot depend on Joe Pitts’ 5% to help them at all. Still, many will vote for him. Sad.
Joe Pitts should certainly be defeated but much more than he is to blame for what is happening to our country.