Tom Delay?

[angelofdeath]

i hear you. today is the biggest government ever. conservatives are traditionally for a strong separation of power. modern liberals have taken this stance, when bush came to power. which is commendable, but hypocritical, when thier hero is FDR.

 

i think ALL government subsidies should be cut, not just corporate. ALL of it.

[tabloid-]

what about the elderly and the dissabled? Who should look out for them? What about soldiers returning from war.... who pays their war related hospital bills... post discharge?

[angelofdeath]

the same way they were taken care of for 140 years prior to welfare. family, friends, churhces, communities etc etc. if they cant/dont want to work. "poor" is a mis-nomer anyway. most poor people today have cell phones, air conditioning, etc.

 

the main reason is, an intrusive, centralized central state was a fear of the framers of the constitution and every american. the states allowed it to perform very few tasks. feeding and clothing the population is not one of them.

soldiers should be taken care of in my opinion, but once discharged, its over. after all providing defense is constitutional.

[KaBar2]

We have rambled pretty far afield from the topic (Tom DeLay) but these subjects are tied to DeLay in a very real way. Tom DeLay championed two causes for two different reasons. He supported all the so-called "right wing" causes ("anti-Big Government", anti-gun control, anti-abortion, pro-school prayer, pro-school vouchers, pro-traditional family values, anti-gay rights etc.) but he did so in order to wield the political power that gave him to line the pockets of his powerful buddies in the business world. Tom DeLay opposed several things that I support. For one, he fought Light Rail in Houston tooth and nail because his powerful friends did not own the land and the businesses that would get a big economic boost from the Light Rail lines. He supported the MASSIVE reconstruction of the I-10 Katy Freeway that runs west from downtown Houston because his buddies own the Katy Prairie, and are building luxury homes out west of Houston as fast as they can drive the nails.

 

It's a fight between the heavy construction companies that build the freeways, hungry for that Tax Dollar, and the real estate moguls who bought up rice fields west of Houston twenty years ago (and more) for a tiny fraction of what that land is worth today as luxury "enclave" homes. These are the same people that secretly helped bankroll desegregation efforts in Houston in the late 1950's and early 1960's. As minorities moved in to those previously all-white neighborhoods, prices fell through the floor and the whites panicked, selling their homes for a pittance and fleeing west.

 

One of the things they then did was engineer a huge freeway (Hwy 288) from downtown south to Freeport (on the Gulf of Mexico) right through the middle of one of these previously white-but-now-black neighborhoods. They condemned the land by eminent domain, and paid the black homeowners a pittance for the land.

 

Their goals had to do with MONEY and DEVELOPMENT. They wanted everybody driving their own cars, so they could move them from place to place by manipulating desegregation. If all the rich white folks were living in a nice, clean, all-white neighborhood with excellent streetcar service (a la the late 1930's-1940's) they would not only not buy a new home in the suburbs, but they would fight like tigers to keep white neighborhoods exactly the way they were.

Along came the Civil Rights movement, and the demonization of the whites who preferred segregated housing, schools, etc. They "block busted" white neighborhoods. Did they target the wealthy white millionaire's enclaves like River Oaks? Of course not. They targeted the white working class suburbs built after WWII, like South Park, South Houston, and parts of Pasadena. Within five years, the white population was streaming out of these neighborhoods, prices were cut to the bone, and middle-class black families were streaming in. As the neighborhoods became increasingly more affordable, the low-income black famlies began to move in, bringing all the problems of the ghetto with them, and the middle-class blacks began to move. They couldn't sell their homes, because the market was bust, so they rented them out and moved to the next white neighborhood targeted for "block busting," Missouri City. The people who rented these homes were really low class folks, and within ten years (1975) all-black South Park (which was like "Leave It to Beaver" when I was growing up there) looked like something out of "Boyz in the Hood." Gang warfare, drugs out the ass, gang tags EVERYWHERE, schools completely out of control. This neighborhood had streets named after famous WWII battles (Tarawa Street, Okinawa Blvd., Anzio Street, Remagen Street, etc.) and the cops now dubbed it "The War Zone." It was gunfire, robberies, fires, stolen cars, etc. all night every night.

[KaBar2]

I just lost a huge chunk of this post^^^ somehow. Boy, that pisses me off.

 

Okay. Tom DeLay, part Two.

 

When the post-WWII white neighborhoods were block-busted by NAACP and the left wing of the Democratic Party, the whites sold out and moved "farther out" away from the city centewr, into brand new neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were not segregated by deed restriction, the way that the old ones were, but with all the now-very-affordable housing around in the block-busted neighborhoods, why would any middle-income black family choose to pay "too much" to live in a 99% white suburb? Outlying cities sprouted new neighborhoods, in Conroe, in Montgomery (serious Klan center), in Pasadena (this city had a Klan Headquarters building on Red Bluff Road, a major traffic artery) in Four Corners, and Crosby, in Pearland, in the NASA/ Clear Lake Area and in Missouri City and Sugar Land, southwest of Houston in Fort Bend County.

 

Fort Bend County has been one of the fastest-growing areas in the U.S. for fifteen years. Tom DeLay was an insect exterminator, a "roach ranger." He went into politics because he saw an opportunity to harness some of the tremendous resentment over the massive changes happening in the Houston area. The people who had lived in those "block-busted" neighborhoods moved out into this ring of suburbs around Houston. They felt like they had been royally fucked by the Democratic Party. Prior to 1965 or so, the Republicans could not have elected a dog catcher in Texas. Texas was a solidly Democratic state, and had been since 1876 (the end of Reconstruction in Texas.)

 

DeLay and his Republican cohorts gained power fast. The white folks who inhabited areas like Sugar Land were PISSED, and they intended to regain their power rapidly. DeLay had huge business interests behind him. They really did not care how DeLay went about it, but they wanted him to bring home the bacon. His combination of churchy, Christian anti-abortionism, anti-gun control, pro-"family values", anti-big government sounded good to the suburbs. Once he got elected, he gathered more and more power every year, until he became essentially unstoppable politically.

 

DeLay's big mistake was thinking that he was so powerful that he was untouchable. That wasn't true. Also, he twisted plenty of Republican arms over the years, and a lot of those guys resented being pushed around. When he got in trouble, they weren't exactly sorry.

 

People like me were annoyed with DeLay's blatant do-what-is-good-for-the-big-shots behavior. He's not so much a bad person as he is a person who became mose or less amoral. He is only a front for bigger and more powerful interests, and when he is no longer useful to them, they will drop him like a hot potato and send in another of their marionettes.