Yesterday, Gov. Paul LePage of Maine unveiled his budget proposal for the next two years at a joint session of the State Leg. Remarkable in many ways for what it did and did not contain, this is not what this diary is about, though I'll touch on it.
Paul LePage's real agenda is rolling back the environmental, safety and consumer regulations which have put Maine ahead of most states in the nation over the last twenty years or so.
Follow me over the fold for more...
While sitting this morning at a little Thai restaurant I like on lower Congress Street in Portland, Maine, eating a duck curry, I cracked open the recent edition of the Portland Phoenix (an apt name for a weekly, given the way Portland re-built after the great 4th of July fire of 1866)to find a very interesting article by staff writer Colin Woodward: LePage's Secret Puppeteers: How the Governor Outsourced His Regulatory-Reform Efforts to Corporate Lobbyists. (The Portland Phoenix, Feb. 11-17, 2011)
Now, yesterday, the Governor unveiled his budget proposal for the next two years. What was remarkable about that is the number of things he brought up that were not in this budget, but were to anticipated in the next budget. Some of which, such as exploring 5-year High Schools to improve secondary education, are laudable--especially since the Governor owes his education to being rescued from the streets by a prominent Maine family; he would probably not have ever gone to college otherwise--and some of which is pretty bizarre. His assertion, for instance, that because Maine has an exemplary Medicaid and welfare program, the Federal HCR bill "punishes" Maine for going "above and beyond" which he offered without any kind of evidence as to why it "punishes" Maine but in true LePage style, he called out a Democratic legislator from Waterville (where he was recently Mayor)for smiling at him when he made the remark.
But this diary is not about the budget. It's about regulation. And it is a primer on just how the teabaggers operate, and what their real agenda is.
A little background: LePage, formerly mayor of Waterville and a fire-sale magnate, was elected with 38 percent of the vote in a three-way race with independent and environmental lawyer Eliot Cutler and Democrat Libby Mitchell, who came in third. It should be noted that very few people voted in this election. LePage is, by all accounts a "minority" Governor with an ambitious agenda which includes institutionalized homophobia, tax cuts, and the virtual rape of environmental regulation. He also has a history of volatility (famously telling the Maine NAACP to "Kiss my butt" and then refusing to meet with the national NAACP leadership to kiss and make up) and at least by my lights, summed up his formidable intelligence in the last gubenatorial debate thusly: "Everyone knows a Frenchman in Maine is a Democrat. But the one thing a Frenchman likes better than a Democrat is another Frenchman". Worthy, for sure, of the great Warren G. Harding who was, of course, neither a Frenchman or a Democrat. On live television, he once threatened to physically assault the news director of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. In a word, he makes Sarah Palin look tame. Reasonable, even.
So with this background, let's move on to regulatory reform. Now, my family has summered in Maine for over fifty years, and myself, my cousin and her husband and my uncle are permanent residents today. Back in the '70's, when the paper mills were going strong and dumping everything in the rivers that, as one long-time Mainer once told me "back their ass end up to the tip of every peninsula", there were entire stretches of US Route 1 where you had to roll up your windows to keep out the stench. In fact, that stench is one of my earliest memories. That, and the beaches littered with not only the detritus of sailing cruisers but industrial waste, too. Maine was not a pristene place. But we loved it nonetheless. Maine cleaned itself up, and actually saw to it that these reforms were inforced. No more flushing waste into the bay, or dumping it there, or polluting our rivers, or nonsustainable fishing. And LePage blames the relative poverty of Maine on these reforms. He may have visited Quebec or New Brunswick, but he has clearly never been to Mississippi or East Texas. I'm not sure he knows what he's really doing. Which brings me, at long last, to the article.
Here is where LePage and his fellow tea-baggers seem to be in league: destroying any kinds of precidents of environmental or consumer protection reform in states like Maine which lobbyists for out-of-state (FromAway™) corporations are using to pressure the Federal government to relax their own restrictions on poisons and pollution.
Mr. Woodward points out:
The official copy of the wish list LePage submitted to the legislature has lobbying powerhouse PRETI FLAHERTY BELIVEAU & PACHIOS' distinctive eight-digit document tracking numbers stamped on each page, suggesting it originated not in Augusta [Maine's State Capitol], but at the law firm's offices at Portland's One City Centre.
LePage, and his one-month-old administration, has been busy letting lobbyists for "precident-bashing" write his agenda since the transition team days. Rep. Bob Duchesne, ranking Democrat on the Environment Committee--yep, a Frenchman--told Woodward: "For God's sake, if you're going to stab Mother Nature in the back, at least wipe your prints off before you drop the knife".
The article goes on to note that lots of large business concerns, from Toy Industry Association of America to Merck, PhRMA, Astrazeneca and others--who do not necessarily employ folks or even do business in Maine, have gone out of their way to fund and lobby His Excellency and His administration to effect a "reform" which will help to bring down Maine's precident for reforms that brought us cleaner rivers and bays, lead-free toys and better environmental and consumer laws. The idea here is not necessarily to re-pollute Maine: it is to re-pollute the entire country. And LePage, in his tea-bagging pseudo-populist style, has hooked folks in on the promise of jobs. Many of the de-regulations proposed, however, are not going to bring a single job to Maine. But, it's going to make it easier for rightists everywhere to attack sensible and progressive regulation. This is, I really believe, the real agenda of the LePage's and Palins and others.
The article I referenced can be found
HERE.
Please pardon me for such a long editorial, but I love Maine, and I love it so much better since it has cleaned itself up. I would hate to see us go back to the '70's to help other states to go back to the days when anyone, anywhere, could just dump something in a river.