Cantor Nixes Auto Jobs To Boost Virginia Aid

GOP Raids Job-Growing Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program for Disaster Relief Money

Drunk from their succession of hostage-taking victories, smug in their certainty that every dollar in America should end up in their grasping manicured hands, the GOP Tea Party kicked plundering America into an even more unconscionable high gear.

During Monday's CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential grandstanding, Tea Partisans hooted and cheered when Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) if an uninsured person needed intensive care, whether society should "just let him die."

Two days later, Tea Party hero House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), standard-bearer for the push to offset hurricane and earthquake spending by plundering other programs, moved to ax $1.5 billion in so-called Section 136 loans from a successful Bush-era program that funded new plants and retooling to build energy-efficient cars so he could hand the money to his wealthy home-state cronies.

Cantor figured the best thing for America was to dismantle a program that had already created more than 40,000 American manufacturing and construction jobs so his hooting, cat-calling Tea Party constituents could add lavish extensions to their Virginia McMansions.

"By introducing a plan to gut Section 136 loans, House Republicans have shown that they don't care about manufacturing jobs in places like the Greater Detroit Area," said Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI). "We should fund recovery efforts in Eric Cantor's district, but not at the expense of programs designed to address the economic disaster that hit Michigan and other manufacturing states."

Obviously, a Tea Party movement eager to plunder Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and abandon millions to misery and death outside the locked doors of hospital emergency rooms wouldn't bat an eye to plunder a successful jobs program that put food on the tables and roofs over the heads of those same millions they'd already condemned to misery and death.

And, as though that were not outrage enough, Cantor and his Tea Party minions sought to cancel out $1.5 billion in loans to the auto industry to fund permanent giveaways to themselves.

"It's outrageous that House Republicans are pushing a plan that would drive advanced technology jobs overseas, and that they are trying to ram it through by attaching it to disaster relief," Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) told the Detroit News.

The $1.5 billion Cantor and his cronies would devour was nearly half of the $4.1 billion remaining out of $25 billion originally slated in 2008 to rebuild the American auto industry so it could manufacture the fuel-efficient cars and trucks competitive in the 21st century. The money, among other successes, moved production of the Ford Focus from Mexico to Michigan, the Nissan Leaf from Japan to Tennessee, and helped launch Tesla.

And, on top of creating tens of thousands of jobs, rebuilding an American component supply chain industry, and revitalizing a moribund manufacturing base, the auto industry was paying back the loans with interest.

When Cantor and his Tea Party cronies got through with the ten-million-dollar makeovers stacking extra stories and stables and tennis courts onto the Virginia McMansions of 1,500 of their closet friends and contributors, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies weren't about to repay American taxpayers for their largess. Cantor and his Tea Party cronies weren't going to return the Carrera marble counter tops or the gold bathroom fixtures or the solid Tanzanian Mpingo-wood decks.

Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were going to deport the Spanish-speaking wage-theft victims who rebuilt their McMansions, close the gates, and sic the dogs on any uninvited Americans who might venture near their wrought-iron fences.

Behind those wrought-iron barriers, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were going to sip champagne from their Baccarat crystal flutes and revel in the unprecedented opulence bought at the expense of tens of thousands of American jobs. In a double win-win, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were going to shriek and howl that President Barack Obama had yet again failed to create jobs. In a double win-win, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies, having killed a government program that had been creating tens of thousands of jobs, were going to scream and shout that there was no such thing as a government program that created jobs.

And, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were, once again, going to tell Americans the only way America was going to revive its moribund economy was by electing more Tea Party cronies and lavishing them with more tax breaks, subsidies, giveaways, McMansion expansions, Carrera marble and gold fixtures, solid Tanzanian Mpingo-wood adornments, and Baccarat crystal amenities.

And Americans, poor, stupid, gullable and unwaveringly dedicated to the hypnotically-implanted conditioning applied by so many GOP-trained evangelical brainwashers that square-jawed, blow-dried, botoxed, collagen-injected right-wing populists flashing empty capped-tooth smiles were their saviors, and that scruffy, long-haired, nerdy, tie-dyed, city-dwelling, Nobel Prize-winning, often non-white progressives were evil godless witches and trolls, would robotically vote Republican and march lockstep to their collective doom as Cantor and his Tea Party cronies laughed and jeered them on.

Cantor and his wealthy, indolent Virginia Tea Party cronies shouldn't get a single thin, red cent to pile extra bathrooms and tennis courts and swimming pools onto their lavish estates. The Tea Party zealots that incessantly, obsessively espoused Ayn Randian Objectivist self-sufficiency seemed to always be the ones incessantly, obsessively, plundering taxpayers to fund their opulent lifestyles.

The Eric Cantors pillaging job-creation funds for McMansion expansions and the Michele Bachmanns (R-MN) pillaging Medicaid and farm subsidies to fund facelifts and tummy tucks seemed incapable of making money in any way except by stealing it from taxpayers or bilking brainwashed sycophants who shelled out for their mind-numbing books and DVDs and t-shirts and bumper stickers.

Such was the nature of Tea Party denizens who would destroy American jobs and the American economy for personal gain. Such was the nature of Tea Party zealots who would condemn millions to sickness, misery and death to plunder Social Security and Medicare.

Such was the nature of evil.