Senator Warner – Carnival Barker

by Michael Giere

The shameless mediocrity in both character and intellect in the U.S. Senate has long been ready made humor for the late-night TV shows. But Virginia Senator Mark Warner is putting downward pressure on even that low standard.

Some may recall that Sen. Warner made a pile of cash – more power to him, I guess – by using advance knowledge to organize investor groups to apply for free Federal frequencies set aside for wireless phones, way back when. (Regulators have since banned this practice.) This success made his reputation as a savvy business guy, and he parlayed that and his personal wealth into the Governor’s mansion in Virginia, then the U.S. Senate seat. Since then, like his fellow Democrat from Virginia, Sen. Jim Webb, Warner has been positively underwhelming in office. Both of them are like tortillas; they just lay flat no matter what.

But on May 18^th, the hapless Sen. Warner did the nation a favor. He sent out a memo to his constituents that demonstrates yet again that the Congress is filled to the rafters with unimaginative incompetents. Sen. Warner opens his memo lamenting the sad news that a furniture manufacture near Martinsville, Virginia – already a depressed area – is laying off 560 employees and moving its operation “overseas.” Of course, one would expect the rest of the memo to address ways in which to stop this exodus, or similar ones from occurring. If you thought that, you’d be wrong though.

Sen. Warner spends the rest of his predictable, pandering, preening message (without much concern for the 560 newly unemployed) rambling on about the wonderful things he has done for the job ravaged area. He landed $40 million (in stimulus money, what else?) to bring broadband to the area. He “brainstormed” with local officials recently about how to “promote the workforce.” Heck, he is even working in Congress to “unclog the frozen credit” market using – are you holding your breath? – incentives. Yup. Those things.

Curiously absent from the memo is any sign of intelligent life. Here are a couple of questions I had right off the bat. Why is the furniture manufacture closing the doors? What would it take for them not to do so? Where are they going? And when they get there, what economic factors will they benefit from besides, we assume, cheaper labor? What kind of tax issues will be involved?

Moving on from the parochial issues of this specific tragedy for the 560 good men and women of Martinsville, I’d start asking a whole range of different questions. Does the fact that the U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world have anything to do with the stalled job market? Do our impending Health Care changes have an effect? How about intrusive, excessive regulators? The EPA? Well, not to belabor the point, but is seems that this is a “teachable moment” that the Senator missed.

We have basically allowed U.S. industry to be vacuumed out of the nation, leaving whole sections of rural and semi-urban America awash in unemployed and underemployed citizens. The reasons are obvious. We tax the bejabbers out of corporations in the U.S. Unions often bedevil them. Then we regulate them within an inch of their profits. Then we chastise them. And when they move overseas, we allow the countries to which they move to have complete and free access to our marketplace to send back that which we used to make right here. Funny thing, of course, is that we never get the same type of free unfettered access to their marketplaces – but that’s another story that I’m sure Sen. Warner has little curiosity about either. 

I’m not at all surprised that Sen. Warner is interested only in government solutions, of course. That’s how he made his money, after all. I am somewhat surprised that he still has a reputation that he gives two hoots about the good folks in Virginia who are paying the price for globalization – whatever exactly that is. And I am continually surprised by the carnival barkers we send to Congress. Sen. Warner is close to the top of his class in that discipline.