If you haven’t read Matt Taibbi’s take down of Rick Perry in Rolling Stone, “The Best Little Whore in Texas,” do it now.
For one thing, there’s this bit about how Perry, who is supposedly a genius at retail politics, actually comes across in person:
Liliana Ros, a [Republican] party committeewoman in Florida, shook Perry’s hand during a commercial break at the Orlando debate and promptly finked on him to reporters, offering a pervy description that was missing only the open raincoat and the raging boner. “He grabbed my hand and held on to it,” Ros said. “His hand was so cold, like ice. And he was sweating. He didn’t seem well, like he was in pain or he was sick or something. I don’t know what it was, but something was definitely wrong.”
But mainly, there’s this on Perry’s peculiar brand of anti-government corporate crony socialism:
It’s just after midday, a Monday afternoon, and I’m barreling down a stretch of State Highway 176 in the deadest, hottest part of the Texas desert, a few miles shy of the New Mexico border and about an hour west of the rusted oil wells and Friday night lights of Odessa-Permian. Just before I get to New Mexico, I slow down, hang a right and roll down a dirt road, out of America and into a different country. Rick Perry Country. This is a land neither capitalist nor socialist, but somehow boasting the worst aspects of both systems.
[Another] of Simmons’ companies, NL Industries, has already been caught leaking radioactive waste into an aquifer in Ohio. In a supremely ironic demonstration of how the modern system of payola capitalism works, Simmons is now being paid millions by taxpayers, via the federal Energy Department, to clean up his own mess, moving radioactive waste from his dump in Ohio to the one in Texas.The specific spot I’m looking for is a giant hole in the ground – one of the nation’s largest repositories of nuclear waste. The facility is run by a company called Waste Control Specialists, the creature of a shadowy billionaire named Harold Simmons, who was one of the single largest financial backers of the Swift-boat campaign against John Kerry, donating more than $3 million.
Chew on that for a moment: The Kerry smear campaign was powered in large part by radioactive waste – or, more specifically, by the fat government contracts to store such waste that were swallowed up by Simmons, a supposedly “anti-government” extremist who, naturally, is one of Rick Perry’s biggest supporters.
The Perry-Simmons nuclear landfill is surrounded by giant piles of red clay rising up out of the desert, flanked by huge manmade chasms designed to hold sand-covered drums of sizzling waste. A person entering its gates feels an irresistible urge to wear lead underpants. It’s a terrifying sight, but it’s even more disturbing as a symbol of Rick Perry’s style of government. In Perry’s Texas, state regulation doesn’t work because regulatory seats can be bought, and the free market doesn’t work because connections and influence matter more than competition and performance. The landfill run by Perry’s pals at Waste Control Specialists represents an extreme example of both dysfunctional ends of the governor’s approach to government, a taxpayer-financed hole in the ground that is as extremely unsafe as it is woefully uneconomic. “The WCS plant,” says Lon Burnam, a Texas state representative, “is the ultimate example of Perry’s crony capitalism.”Perry’s great triumph as governor has been the construction of an elaborate political machine, one that operates according to its own separate dynamic, using donations, appointments and favors as currency. In fact, Texas is run much like a Soviet protectorate, with a party boss (Perry) and a Politburo of superconnected advisers to the governor who shuffle back and forth between the public and private spheres (Perry’s chief of staff, Mike “The Knife” Toomey, for instance, jumped from the governor’s office to a job lobbying for Merck prior to the HPV vaccination order), all backed by a somewhat larger Central Committee of big financial donors who are the real “representative” power in the state, much more than the actual state legislature.
Who’s on that Central Committee? It’s not that hard to figure out. Texas has no limit on individual donations to political candidates, which means the governor’s best friends don’t have to hide behind soft money and other back-door channels. In Texas, you can pay your tribute right out in the open.
“The total of hard-money donations to Perry’s three gubernatorial campaigns is $102 million,” says McDonald, who tracks the state’s pay-for-play system on behalf of Texans for Public Justice. “Half of that, $51 million plus, came from just 204 donors.”
So what did Harold Simmons get for his money? A lot.
For starters, a group of Perry appointees on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gave Simmons a license to build his hazardous nuke dump, even after the TCEQ’s own team of scientists agreed that the project was too risky, given how dangerously close it lies to the Ogalalla aquifer, which provides drinking water for seven states.
When I visit the site in September, it has just rained in the area for the first time in a year – really – and there is water all over the place. Rod Baltzer, the president of WCS, insists that the wastewater is being contained and disposed of in a safe, orderly fashion. But it’s hard not to look beyond the dump to nearby Eunice, New Mexico, visible just a few miles away, and wonder about the wisdom of taking a private company’s word that there is no contaminated water running underground to the nearby town. Especially since another of Simmons’ companies, NL Industries, has already been caught leaking radioactive waste into an aquifer in Ohio. In a supremely ironic demonstration of how the modern system of payola capitalism works, Simmons is now being paid millions by taxpayers, via the federal Energy Department, to clean up his own mess, moving radioactive waste from his dump in Ohio to the one in Texas.
All of this is key to understanding Perry, because the WCS landfill so perfectly fits the business model of his key donors. The company leases the land for the dump, meaning that WCS keeps the lion’s share of the profits, while the liability mostly stays with the state. There’s no real regulation to speak of, and many of the state’s decisions appear to have been greased by massive campaign contributions or other favors: The executive director of the state’s environmental commission, for instance, received a job as a lobbyist for WCS not long after helping the firm get its license.
What’s more, the company even got the government to pay for the landfill, lobbying the town of Andrews to float a $75 million bond issue to finance the construction of two new dump sites on the property. And in a final insult, WCS managed to negotiate a loophole exempting it from having to pay school taxes in Andrews. Instead, it offers a few small scholarships a year.
Read the whole article and maybe you’ll come to the conclusion I did that, in a perverse way, it might be better if Perry were to become the GOP nominee, because, unlike milquetoast, ever-morphing Mitt Romney, Perry is so patently bad that he might actually shake moderate independents and whiners on the left out of their lethargy and disaffection and get them up and out to the polls in record numbers one year from today.
The downside to this, of course, is that voters might do as they did in 2000 (sort of) and 2004 and put a meagerly gifted, intellectually stunted and morally bankrupt Texas governor in the White House. That is too risky. Unlike our last president from Texas, who drove the United States to the brink of ruin, Rick Perry would likely push this great country over the edge.
Unfortunately, Perry’s ineptitude and criminality are all too obvious even to his ostensible base of teabaggers, who have run from his candidacy as they would from a leaching nuclear dump. Too bad, as an Obama-Perry race would have been entertaining. Speaking of nuclear waste, just imagine a debate where Obama talks of nuclear non-proliferation and options in dealing with Iran’s weapons development, while Perry stares into a jar of maple syrup.