Last week, a US House of Representatives member from Texas – a Republican – apologized to the CEO of British Petroleum for what the Representative called a “shakedown.” The hapless Texan, apparently bought and paid for by the oil industry, was referring to what the majority of Americans would label “accountability,” that is, the apportionment of a significant sum of money to compensate victims of the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico. Rep. Barton was immediately set upon by members of his own party and later apologized. I assume that oil industry officials were embarrassed to have purchased such a stupid Congressman. (Perhaps he’s still under warranty.)

But beneath Rep. Barton’s over-the-top brown-nosing lies an ideology/fantasy that has also taken root in Minnesota. It is personified by Tim Pawlenty, Tom Emmer, and Michelle Bachmann. It is the misguided dogma that government can do no good and the private sector can do no wrong; it naively believes that market forces are infallible and that all taxation is evil; it harkens back to a mythical age when capitalist forces reigned supreme (in a hazy era before the Great Depression and the New Deal) and citizens weren’t coddled and spoiled by government.

It is the fantasy of supply-side economics and the trickle-down theory that was discredited long ago, but is still embraced by certain sectors of the affluent end of the American population. It is the direct descendant of Richard Nixon’s “politics of resentment”, a calculated strategy that had only one goal: to get Nixon elected in 1968, and re-elected in 1972. In short, Representative Barton’s ideology – shared by Pawlenty, etal – is based not upon a concern about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but upon an old and cynical political ploy bolstered by economic fantasies and bogus readings of history. What else could possibly support an apology to BP?

Peter M. Leschak

Side Lake, Minn.