The Good Samaritan Paradox

ToTheBathtub
StranglemaniaVille


Jim Elve, who I have a lot of respect for, has written a post about Frank Stronach I never thought we'd see.

Essentially, Jim describes how the Man from Magma and patriarch of Canada's political version of Veruca Salt is going the extra mile to help folks who have been left homeless by the hurricane on the Gulf Coast.

"In addition to numerous auto parts plants in Canada and the US, Stronach is also owner of some horse race tracks and has a training facility in Palm Beach, Florida with dormitories. At his own expense, he has airlifted over 200 refugees to the facility where he is feeding and housing them."

Elve then gives background on his wife's good experiences working for Magma and Stronach's future plans to help out further by providing land for medium-term trailer court accomodation for the displaced.

In the end, even I must admit that Stronach, a man who has previously been involved in some less than overtly socially responsible endeavours like supporting Austria's ultra-rightist leader Jorg Haider, is doing the right thing.

But it is not my intent to fully dissect Mr. Stronach's ultimate motivations here.

What I'm really worried about is the fact that the response of Mr. Elve and folks like him, heck folks like me, to this kind of stuff is potentially very dangerous.

Why?

Not because we shouldn't help get it done because, of course, we have to.

But, if at the same time if we start to find ourselves buying into the premise that individual citizens and groups can step in and do the really big jobs when big government inevitably fails, then I fear that people like Tom Delay, Grover Norquist and, yes, even Gordon Campbell have won.

Here's Norquist, the man who has long said his job as Neandercon Ramrodder is to shrink government, at least in terms of programs that actually help people as opposed to those that help corporations, to a size where he can easily strangle it in the bathtub, on one of the opportunities that natural disasters present to the Cheney Administration and his cowed Congress (warning, pdf):

MEMORANDUM From: Grover G. Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform
To: Members of the United States Senate
Date: 09/02/05
Re: Death Tax Repeal/Katrina
In light of this week’s tragic hurricane in Louisiana, some politicians have suggested that tax cuts in general and death tax repeal specifically should not move forward. This is a similar argument which was made following the Iraq War and the 2003 tax cut. That analysis turned out to be very wrong......

In other words, always strike while the iron is hot because when people are distracted by disasters and troubled times that is when it is easiest to jam the knife into the withered corpse of a government formerly known as 'By The People, For The People', and twist it hard.

Now, there are some that might say I am completely off base here, and that the work of good people like Frank Stronach proves it.

But the thing to realize is that even with his vast, indeed almost unlimited, personal wealth Stronach has so far only helped a few hundred with their most basic needs.

Even if we are extremely generous that is less than 1/1000 of those affected. And it does not include long term rectification of health, transportation or housing infrastructure or the huge panapoly of social services that will be required to get an entire city back on its feet.

And so my point is that only the collective will of the people can handle such a huge undertaking.

Which, of course, is what real governments are really for.

That's what FDR's New Deal, which Mr. Cheney's sock-puppet has so cynically invoked numerous times recently as a smokescreen for the latest round of corprocraptic cronyism soon to be dubbed as 'trickle-down entitlement' programs, was really all about.

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Note: You can see the extremes of the positions on this score by perusing the comments to Jim's post. But, again, most of them involve discussions/expositions of the true intentions of Mr. Stronach, rather than a discussion of the big picture. I think this is important, because if progressives can frame arguments on health care, peace keeping, contracting out, education or all manners manners infrastructure in terms of what really works (ie. responsible government programs with strong oversight) and what really doesn't (ie. cost-plus no-bid contracts and no risk/no capital investment privatization of the people's assets) then we can make headway and shed the counter-productive coatings of slime that is inevitably generated when one spends all of one's time and energy rubbing up against the slime merchants in an effort to expose them for what they really are.
Update: The cynics amongst us, having seen what happened in Iraq, might actually think the apparent absence of a plan to deal with trouble might actually have been the plan in NOLA. Which, of course would just be crazy talk, right? Except, then along comes stuff like this.

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