Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald has an interesting article on West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, onetime "Exalted Cyclops" of the Ku Klux Klan and currently the longest-serving senator in American history. The article summarizes what the author delicately refers to as Byrd's "discomfort with racial issues" (which, as the article points out, continued long after he left the Klan in the 1940s, and even after he eventually denounced the KKK and apologized for having been a member). It also makes some worthwhile points about Byrd's later career as the Senate's King of Pork:
[Byrd's] top priority hasn't changed in a half-century: shoveling pork into his home state.
Is that so terrible? Byrd once promised to be "West Virginia's billion-dollar industry," and he has more than kept his word, dotting his state with the Robert C. Byrd Bridge, the Robert C. Byrd High School and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, where academics can research how Congress came to give West Virginia six technology centers, two community centers and about two dozen additional projects named for Robert C. Byrd. . . Byrd savors his reputation as the King of Pork. His memoir details hundreds of his earmarks in loving detail, along with gleeful tales of moving Navy and Coast Guard offices to his landlocked state. Appropriately, he moved the Bureau of the Public Debt to West Virginia, too.
That is why Byrd was named "West Virginian of the 20th Century," and is revered as the savior of an impoverished state. But even after Byrd's half-century of largesse — new prisons, new labs, new subsidies for fish farms, dairies and steelmakers — West Virginia is still an impoverished state, ranked 49th in per-capita gross state product. "Those earmarks haven't solved West Virginia's problems," says Michael Hicks, an economist at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. "I'm trying to be careful here — I like my job — but after 40-odd years, we're still at the bottom of every economic indicator." Byrd was ahead of the curve on welfare reform, complaining as early as 1965 that "relief has become a way of life for some people." But he never noticed that relief could become a way of life for his state. West Virginia is now a ward of the federal government, dependent on Robert C. Byrd.
The kind of Jim Crow racism that Bob Byrd supported for many years is today largely a relic of the past, even if less virulent and more subtle forms of racial prejudice persist. But the culture of porkbarrel spending that he exemplifies is alive and well in both parties on Capitol Hill. Perhaps the sorry history of West Virginia can help persuade people that there are better ways to achieve prosperity than becoming a "ward of the federal government" dependent on the likes of Senator Byrd.
Even Coca-Cola was "a more zestful and invigorating drink when I was a boy."
Can't disagree there, particularly if he meant Coke with its original, ahem, invigorating ingredient.
There are at least two causal mechanisms. First, if politicians can get themselves reelected by means of pork, they have less incentive to push for policy changes that will promote real economic growth - especially if those policy changes might go against the interests of politically powerful groups. Second, businesses that benefit from government handouts - including pork - face many of the same kinds of perverse incentives as welfare recipients.
And you can also go after him for his relatively recent comments on race, such as in the Tony Snow interview a few years back.
But the KKK stuff is something that the right wing brings up all the time, usually in response to Byrd's complaints about how the Bush Administration is violating the Constitution. I just don't see it. It is an unfortunate reality that the KKK was once quite a bit more popular than it is now, and people like Hugo Black were members of it. At this point in his life, Byrd has amassed enough a Senatorial record (longest tenure in history!) that the KKK stuff is simply not relevant to his service in the Senate.
And while the right obsesses about Byrd's youthful KKK membership, they distract attention from the fact that Byrd has made forceful and largely correct arguments about the unconstitutionality of key Bush Administration actions. Indeed, I'd say that's even more important that the pork issue; it's certainly way more important that the KKK issue.
Is the argument here that, if pork makes a politician popular, then he'll be less accountable and have more leeway to do what he wants on everything else? I don't think that holds together very well. First of all, pork is just a means to a safe seat in Congress in this argument, so it shouldn't hurt economic growth any more than anything else that increases a politician's popularity or protects incumbents. Second, we're talking about a Senator here, so we're talking about federal policy changes that promote economic growth in the Senator's state more than in other states. It doesn't seem like those would be very common. And, it seems like a politician who tries to bring pork to his state would also push for these policies, even if he did he did have leeway.
...especially if those policy changes might go against the interests of politically powerful groups.
This seems contrary to the accountability argument. The politicians that have the most incentive to give way to powerful interest groups are those who are politically vulnerable. If someone's Senate seat is safe, that means that he's protected from those with political power, including interest groups.
Second, businesses that benefit from government handouts - including pork - face many of the same kinds of perverse incentives as welfare recipients.
This second argument makes more sense - in a pork-filled environment, businesses will direct more efforts towards getting pork and less towards being productive and profitable in the market. However, for many kinds of pork it seems like the distortions would be small relative to the amount of pork. At least they would not cause the economy to grow slower than it would have without the pork, since profit-maximizing firms would dedicate themselves to pork-free endeavors if those were more profitable than pork-seeking.
English is not my first language but I'm pretty sure, nonetheless, that the last two 'thats' in your post ought to bee 'thans'. As to the importance of Senator Byrd's musings about con law, relatively to the pork issue -- well, you could be right but only when you think that tax money will be squandered anyway, if not on his pork then elsewise.
If Byrd were a Republican, would you--and others--be so quick to dismiss his ties to the KKK? Given what happened to Trent Lott, I find that highly, highly doubtful.
Strom Thurmond, a Republican (eventually), was a segregationist for a long time until he recanted. While I'm pretty sure he was not a Klansman, he still didn't seem to catch too much grief in later years over his outspoken anti-Civil Rights platform of the 1950s.
Besides, the period of time under consideration here kind of defies our tidy party affiliations. My grandfather, one of the earliest Republicans in the state of South Carolina, would often say how all the Klansmen were Democrats (and yes, they burned his yard and such because he belonged to the wrong party). When you reminded him that EVERYONE was a Democrat down south in those days, he would just mutter how terrible them damn Democrats are. I can say, based on talking to the old timers before they died, Klan membership was pretty unacceptible in the state of SC for a Republican. If you wanted money or support, you had to turn in your bedsheet; the Democrats of the day were not so discriminating.
i disagree, and im a democrat. byrd's presence in the democratic party is a stain on the party, and we should kick his sorry ass out. nonetheless, it bears repeating that its the republicans, not the democrats, who raced to reject the legacy of the 64 act and open their big tent to southern racists en masse. which party works to ban burning the american flag while defending the use of a racost symbol of treason by southerners? its not the democrats.
Profits, grit your teeth now, create jobs ,growth, and more profits. Ugly to some but that's how it works.
I'm surprised Byrd hasn't funded a few pyramids.
2) The state nevertheless continues to rank at or near the bottom on the usual economic indicators
3) The voters of WV nevertheless continue to re-elect Sen. Byrd, presumably at least in part in the expectation of continued pork barreling.
Conclusion?
Pork barreling is a bad thing, equivalent to giving a man a fish rather than teaching him to fish, but if the voters of WV want a bad thing, to be given fish rather than fish themselves, then that's what they get.
Has the author of the post ever heard of segregation? Have any idea when Loving v. VA was decided? The voting rights act? Just clueless in a very depressing way.
And on to WV. Has the author ever heard of the coal industry? What happens when a State's economy is based almost solely on people removing something from the ground and puttin it on a railroad car? For some modern analogs - look to Nigeria or Iran.
West Virginia is finally starting to attract industry and now relies on tourism more than coal. But until the 1980s this wasn't so.
Trying to blame Byrd for this is just absurd and demonstrates an ignorance of history and economics.
Has the author of the post ever heard of segregation? Have any idea when Loving v. VA was decided? The voting rights act? Just clueless in a very depressing way.
Since I've actually written articles about the segregation era, this is a pretty stupid charge. Sure, there was plenty of racism to go around in the 1940s, but even at that time membership in the KKK indicated a commitment to segregation far greater than that of the average white person - even in the South. Moreover, as the article notes, Byrd's support for racism and Jim Crow extended far beyond his time in the Klan.
And on to WV. Has the author ever heard of the coal industry? What happens when a State's economy is based almost solely on people removing something from the ground and puttin it on a railroad car? For some modern analogs - look to Nigeria or Iran.
There are lots of states (e.g. - Texas) and even countries (e.g. - Norway and Canada) that have large extraction industries and have done well economically. West Virginia's problems cannot be attributed solely to the coal industry.
Finally, I never argued that Byrd was solely or even primarily responsible for the state's problems. I only said that his pork barrel projects had failed to promote genuine economic progress and the he and the state could have gotten better results by pursuing different policies.
Yes, avoiding large-scale projects that infuse capital into local economies are sure killers of a strong, vibrant economy. That's why Southern California was just killed by the aerospace defense contractors in the 50s and 60. Just think what a wonderful vibrant economy Southern California would have today had things been different.
And that's why all enlightened Senators and Congressmen do everything they can to prevent federal dollars from flowing into their state.
What a joke.
Norway and Canada - if WV had the enlightened social policies (what you might call socialism) that those countries have, things would have been different there, too.
My example here would be the impact of domestic military bases on local economies in the US. Frequently, they create more urban or suburban blight than anything else, and do foster an unhealthy dependency on government spending. Cities in California that were dependent on such bases, and which saw their bases closed down a decade ago, are generally doing much better now than they were with the military bases. Why? The military pays low, so the soldiers did not infuse much cash into the local economy, and obviously were not there to start businesses. Mostly, the bases supported bars, fastfood places, and other small businesses that didn't generate high-paying jobs (I won't mention illicit businesses that also flourished around bases). And, many soldiers were frequently poor, and relatively uneducated (high school diploma or equivalency, at best), and they only stayed in the military for a few years. When they left the service, at age 25, with 2 or 3 young children, and settled into the neighboring community, they and their families often went on some form of government assistance (food stamps, if not welfare) to help make ends meet, and thereby exacerbated or contributed to the poor economic conditions of the towns in which the bases were located.
However, when the bases were shut down, many larger manufacturing businesses moved in, and urban renewal began. You can see this "urban renewal" effect in many parts of California. I think the areas that have not rebounded are in remote parts of the state, away from the urban markets.
So, I would agree, in part, that West Virginia might be worse off if it is so highly dependent on federal government spending.
As for Southern California's aerospace industry, yes inducstry contributed to economic growth in Southern California, but so did (and, I would argue, to a much larger extent) the entertainment industry, the real estate development industry, banking and many other private businesses that located there after WWII. Also, the aerospace industry pays well, in contrast say to the US postal service or military, which are likely more of the "pork" projects that Byrd attracted to W VA. I think the aerospace industry picked SoCal to locate because of that region's excellent public and private engineering schools (CalTech, UCLA, USC).
Unfortunately, it's always relevant in some way nowadays, what with the importance of racial politics and the blatant hypocrisy by some of it's high priests. I didn't hear many Democrats outraged over blatantly racist charicatures of Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice, the 'race traitor', 'Oreo', and 'Uncle Tom' slurs hurled against black conservatives, 'white n*****s', the quasi-acceptability of ugly racists like Louis Farrakhan, etc. -- but John McCain speaks at Bob Jones and suddenly it's 'I can't believe I even considered voting for him', or Arnie quips about 'girlie men' and the legislature start whining about gay bashing. Uh-huh.
There's stuff like this every month, and given that Byrd's a high-profile and very vocal target with a past that should've sunk any other politician -- remember that it was David Duke's Klan past that killed him, not his then-agenda, and that they tried to tar Arnold by intimating that his father was a Nazi. If the outrage that accompanies every racial slight, real or imagined -- 'George Bush doesn't care about black people', police shootings of young black thugs, 'they stole the election', Cynthia McKinney's defeat -- was genuine, then Byrd would be long gone, or at least marginalized. He isn't, and that's worth remembering.
Believe me, we're aware of this. Stevens has not only funneled huge amounts of federal money into the state, he's badly pissed of a lot of people while doing it. The theory, at least, is that there are a lot of parties itching to stick it to us when he retires. Valid? Who knows.
Me, I roll my eyes when people start talking about all the projects he's brought to the state. Sure, we have a thousand Ted Stevens projects all about, for which we only paid a small fraction of the cost. And you know what? For every Ted Stevens project, there are a dozen Robert Byrd projects and Dan Rostenkowski projects and Trent Lott Projects and Jim Wright projects and Tip O'Neill projects that *we* paid for. Whoop de doo, some bargain. Stevens isn't a statesman; he's just a skilled and long-lived politician. So what? In the end we're all poorer for it.
- Alaska Jack
Byrd's powerful and courageous speeches opposing the Iraq war - at a time when opposing the war was considered unpatriotic and extremist - demonstrated that the man has managed to retain some principle and some intellectual independence.
This is more than can be said for most U.S. senators.
After that I couldn't feel contempt for the King of Pork again.
Now that you mention it, I can't recall specific instances, but I'm almost certain you could unearth them with some cursory research. Obviously, he needn't renounce his Klan past, b/c he wasn't in the Klan. As for segregationist views, I would almost put a C-note on him having said "I support desegregation" somewhere in the Congressional record.
As the above post suggests, Strom had a, um, complicated view of race. He learned fairly early that black folks' votes could be bought off as easily as whites' and actually had a decent relationship with blacks in SC that was the result of a lot pressing the flesh and kissing babies...and patronage. Let's not forget that he integrated his staff before a lot of colleges in the South integrated their football teams. He was a pretty smooth operator...I guess one would have to be to survive that long in DC.
The same could be said of the man's work with the KKK. Surely he stood on principle and some intellectual independece (the KKK was never so popular) in being part of that group. Yet that doesn't seem to be a good reason to like the guy. Quite the contrary
I'm a staunch conservative, and I agree about Byrd. If his membership had been more recent and he hadn't publicly repudiated it, it would be another thing. It's long-enough ago, however, that I think that his record over the past, say, thirty years is sufficient repudiation by itself. By the same reasoning, I though that Pete McCloskey's Holocaust denial and anti-Israeli statements were recent enough and done at a late-enough age that he needed to repudiate them publicly.
The fact that left-wingers call Justice Thomas, Secretary Rice, etc., "Oreos", "Uncle Toms", etc., has no relevance. It's wrong for the left-wingers to do that, and it's, I think, wrong for my fellow conservatives to bring up this fact from Sen. Byrd's distant past.
According to Wikipedia's entry on the KKK:
Byrd was a go-along, get-along good ol'boy 60 years ago, but so was virtually everyone who wanted to be involved in Southern politics. Isn't this like saying membership in Al Qaeda was a sign of independence in Afghanistan?
David Duke is a really bad example. He may no longer be in the Klan, but he is still an unreformed racist.
No, but intitutionalized racism and the support of it was necessary to get anywhere in elected politics in the south until black people were actually able to vote in the late 1960s. Remember, it is only in the last couple years that some southern states are finally getting around to prosecuting murders of black people and freedom riders by the Klan in the mid-1960's. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of murders and lynchings by the Klan and associated just in the years after World War II that were never even investigated, let alone prosecuted. Between 1880 and 1965 there were nearly 5000 documented lynchings in this country, many of them were social events that brought out the entire white population of the town. Not one person was ever prosecuted for any of those.
And as for Strom Thurmond. He never renounced his past. He just took that old southern attitude of "those were the old days, we'll remember the good things about them and ignore the bad and never admit we were wrong or did anything wrong (even if I did rape an underage maid)".
"I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,"
-Howard Dean, Chairman, Democratic National Committee
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