You Talk Castrating the EPA, You're No Friend to the Great Lakes

Last time Congressman Bill Huizenga gave a town hall meeting in Grand Haven, Michigan, he bragged about plans to castrate the EPA or abolish it altogether. Seems to me Russ Harding of the Mackinac Center's ultraconservative environmental Lobbying arm has slipped into his ears.

That's a pity.

After all Huizenga is of one of a very small handful of people in US Congress who represent regions around the Great Lakes shorelines. He SHOULD be safeguarding the Great Lakes from greater pollution, from water diversions, from phosphorous runoff...he SHOULD be aware how vital the Great Lakes are to our way of life...

And yet he's willing to throw it all away for his financiers.

He's talking about abolishing or castrating the very organization that has cleaned up the Great Lakes, and ensured that instances like the Cuyahoga river fire never happen again. He should perhaps learn a thing or two about the Great Lakes and the condition Lake Erie was in before the EPA was established and intervened: shockingly polluted, crushed fisheries, with tributaries so covered in petroleum waste that it caught on fire...SEVERAL TIMES.

You talk about hacking at the the EPA, you are no friend of the Great Lakes.

Perhaps we need to remind Mr. Huizenga that the State he represents is ENTIRELY within the Great Lakes watershed. Dumping toxic substances on the ground in Mt. Pleasant in the middle of the state is STILL dumping toxic substances directly into the Great Lakes.

We along the Great Lakes lakeshore need an advocate for the Great Lakes in DC...not a puppet dancing in lock step with hardline conservative lobbyists who want to abolish protections to the waters we love and our way of life. Mr. Huizenga, so far, hasn't shown himself to be that. He supported the Conservative introduced budget that slashed Great Lakes restoration.

And of these cuts, Bill Huizenga bragged about how he has voted for Every Single one put before him. Every single one. Even if it slices the throat of protections to our waterways that have made places like Sleeping Bear Dunes win awards as the most Beautiful Place in America. The waterways that are a source of employment for so many, a source of respite and peace for so many, a source of food and recreation for so many.

"Low Class" Muskegon Swarms Rep. Huizenga's Office

Vid courtesy of Sean Mullally

My wee boy and I went downtown to join the protest of Bill Huizenga who is known for referring to Muskegon, Michigan as a "Low Class" city. Perhaps we're Low Class because we're the major Democratic stronghold in West Michigan. Or perhaps we're Low Class because Muskegonites WORK with HANDS. The horror.

The boy and I got there early, so to kill some time the wee little boy and I parked at the new splash fountain by the old post office down town. The Alcoa splash fountain between the newly streetscaped Western Avenue downtown and the vast sandlot.

Little history: Back in the 1970's amidst a troubled economy and declining manufacturing base -- Sound familiar? -- Muskegon, Michigan, attempted to reinvent itself -- Sound familiar? -- by turning what was once an open air, standard streetscape with old buildings and shops into a modern, enclosed year-round heated shopping center. A mall! The city literally built a glass roof over the old downtown Muskegon and enclosed it with walls. That worked out fine for a decade or two...but it never made Muskegon the major shopping mecca the planners had expected and by the late 1990s the mall....better known as "downtown Muskegon" was dead. Completely dead.

As it turns out, if you put doors and a lock on your downtown and give it a closing time of 9:00 PM, it has no nightlife. Who could have predicted?

This is running a bit longer than I had hoped...the point is that the mall/downtown completely died and in 2002 and 2003 the city actually bulldozed blocks and blocks of the downtown area...most of it, but for a few of the still functional buildings like the post office, or historic buildings like the old Century Club building.

For years, most of the downtown area has been a sand pit, with developers here and there building new buildings, like the new cullinary arts college.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. To kill time, I brought my youngest boy down to splash around in the new Alcoa childrens' splash fountain, where he ran around with a half dozen other kids. As 4:30 approached we made our way down to US Congressman Bill Huizenga's Muskegon office. He's a Republican. One of the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation's "Magnificent 11" or something like that for his Cut Cut Cut Cut Cut, Slash Slash Slash Slash economic policies.

This is the heir to the MI-2 Pete Hoekstra congressional district. He sort of inherited it because he's part of one of the Dynastic West Michigan families. A set of families whose parents and grandparents made money and build businesses in West Michigan...and whose children feel a sense of entitlement having inherited their position and wealth. Huizenga has proceeded to slash funding for womens' health, for Great Lakes restoration, he voted for the Medicare Killing Ryan plan.

My boy dragged his hopping frog toy down the sidewalk by a green string until we eventually joined a crowd of people outside of Bill Huizenga's Muskegon office. People continued to pour in. By the time my son and I had to leave I had counted over 150 people outside the office yelling "LET US IN! LET US IN! LET US IN!" and "WE NEED JOBS! WE NEED JOBS! WE NEED JOBS!"

Just an average Wednesday in a city with nearly 11% U3 unemployment, ruled by hyperconservative elites.

Bill Huizenga's Surefire Way to Hamstring the US Economy

Went to a town hall tonight to listen to Congressman Pete Hoekstr...er...I mean Bill Huizenga...the new Michigan Second Congressional District Congressman.

It was quite a display of cognitive dissonance.

On one hand, Huizenga lamented how an inability to take on debt hampered the growth potential of the business he inherited. For some reason he couldn't use older equipment as collateral to secure some loans, and that caused a problem.

Apparently a lack of financial fluidity can hamstring business.

But Huizenga doesn't carry that lesson over to the United States, though he tries to shoehorn the country into the same mold as a business.

He has no trouble hamstringing the United States of America with a constitutional amendment to keep a balanced budget.

While small businesses nationwide are suffering because they can't take on the debt they need to grow, Huizenga seeks to deny the United States access to credit as well with a balanced budget amendment.

Perhaps Huizenga's experience with the business world is lacking considering his largest holdings were handed to him.

Anybody who HAS, in fact, started up a business with no safety net would be well aware that debt is a fact of life for many small businesses. That in fact without the ability to secure debt...even large businesses are unable to retool and grow.

A "balanced budget" amendment for a business would mean death to a business as surely as it would mean death to our nation...an inability to invest in growth or start up ventures in both cases leads to stagnation. Even successful start-ups go for years before reaching true profitability. Many operate forever with large debt loads. It was debt that allowed Ford to stay afloat, keep from needing a Federal bailout, and retool its operations to emerge once again as a strong, profitable Michigan car company.

Hell...that's one of the reasons the latest economic crisis has been so bad. Banks aren't lending. Businesses aren't able to take on the debt they need to retool, reinvent, and grow.

Huizenga's economic theories would strangle the US economy forever, just as surely as as stagnant lending has ham-strung the global private sector economy.

Scores of people took to the microphones to ask Bill Huizenga about his intractable stance on raising revenue and his willingness to take from average Americans while asking nothing at all from the wealthy Hizenga, Prince, and DeVos families. To his credit he didn't restrict the questions and he answered ever singe one. But in the process he showed himself to be woefully disconnected from the needs of his district and the needs of his nation.

One very stark point came along when he talked about his insurance policy, which has been provided for him at taxpayer expense for nearly twenty years. There stood an elderly man at the microphone telling Bill Huizenga about the massive bill he received for his wife's surgery. Huizenga's response was a fluid tangent that essentially extolled the virtues of being a Federal or State representative with health insurance while demonizing insurance because he feels that Americans are unaware of the costs of medical care...certainly not the uninsured...certainly not the old man who had initiated the conversation...

and then Huizenga proceeded to talk about how many times he took his children to the emergency room on his tax payer funded health insurance then proceeded to talk about eviscerating...er...I mean "saving" Medicare for future generations, and scrapping our new strides in universal health care.

Frankly, it was all very hard to stomach.