It’s the Rick Berg Way, Not the North Dakota Way

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By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

These financial shows are all the same—just a lot of snakes swallowing each other. Companies, and holding companies—makes your brain reel. -Agatha Christie

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six, or seven, or eight; to hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught… -Oscar Hammerstein II

Tell me the company you keep, and I will tell you who you are. -Claire Antoine Thibaudeau

Shortly after the election of November, 2004, a woman who ran with me for the Legislature from another District as a Democratic/NPLer was advised by a self-appointed big shot from the other Party.

“Why don’t you come over to the Republican Party?  We take care of our own,” he said.

Indeed they do, but their definition of “our own” does not include many people. Not the vast majority of those who vote Republican, and certainly not the rest of North Dakota which includes Democrats, and those either too weary or disgusted to vote.
Too “lazy” to vote would be slightly unfair, since it is inaccurate to describe most people who work as hard as North Dakotans at two and three jobs as “lazy.”

The economic system in North Dakota has been stacked against hard working people from the time of its inception. Great breakthroughs in equity came only when people had enough hope, mixed with anger, to vote for those lonely souls who had the courage at one time and another to oppose predatory bankers, insurance companies, mineral and agri-business corporations.

Since the decline of Kings and monarchial empires, malefactors of great wealth have usually attempted to distract popular anger around the world and in the United States by getting folks to savage each other on the basis of race, religion and family biases.  Like cynical and brutal Romans, and with money now from corporate empires as far away as Bahrain, India and China, the Republican Party has been successful time and again in dividing and ruling Americans, in North Dakota as elsewhere.

Republicans are so used to using these smear tactics that they consider Democratic attacks on their voting record as “negative campaigning.”

Unfortunately, only in periods when hope trumped fear and loathing and focused anger on the real culprits, have Democrats met with sustained success.  The good news is that we seem to have entered such a period in the last two elections, and there are signs that Republican scare tactics, though shriller under reinvention by Tea Baggers, are beginning to turn off many voters—even here.

It is pointless to expect the rest of the country to ever really understand North Dakota, however, since we are the only place where economic egalitarianism broke out within the Republican Party in 1915 in the form of the Non-Partisan League [NPL] and stuck in the form of The Bank of North Dakota and Grain Mill and Elevator.

By the 1950’s, the Rick Bergs, Kevin Cramers, and other Republican greed heads of yesteryear had succeeded in crushing the NPL within their own ranks, and the banner of economic fairness was switched to the Democratic Party of FDR and Harry Truman where it resides today, after a distinguished run of Governors Guy, Link and Sinner and other responsive and responsible Democratic/NPLers at the State level.

No more.

Beginning with Ed Schafer, and accelerating under John Hoeven, the politics of Republican greed and smugness has dominated North Dakota at the State level, but most especially in the House of Representatives, with men like Rick Berg.

North Dakota voters have shown themselves less foolish at the federal level in the past two decades, continually voting in Senators Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan and Congressman Earl Pomeroy. North Dakotans know very well that these conscientious men have delivered time and again for the State, but Republicans have done their best to cover it up by sending Governor Hoeven all over the State to cut ribbons for federally funded projects, while they cut up the pork in Legislative sessions in Bismarck.

Now one of those Republican “butchers” wants to help John Hoeven break up “Team North Dakota.”  Rick Berg’s campaign literature, along with all sorts of unwanted Republican junk mail from all over the country has littered my mail box.

Perhaps Republicans like Berg have so much fat cat money, that they just mail their propaganda to everyone.  Or it could mean that they think that they, and the big corporations they shill for, actually “own,” this country, including the American flag.
Berg’s literature makes it difficult for one to avoid the latter conclusion.

His major mailing piece, “Paid for and authorized by the North Dakota Republican Party,” claims that he, Rick Berg, represents “The North Dakota Way,” with amber waves of grain in the background so that we don’t miss the idea that this is a “good thing.”  Juxtaposed to this heroic stance is a caption of his target, Congressman Earl Pomeroy as representing “The Washington Way,” with a thunder cloud darkening the U.S. Capitol under an ominous streak of lightning in the background so that we don’t miss the idea that this is a “bad thing.”

Inside of the same piece, Berg is pictured with a farmer amidst those amber waves of grain.  I wonder if that farmer knows that Berg has done everything he can in the North Dakota Legislature to scrap our law protecting family farms and allow farms to be owned by corporations? 

The North Dakota Way?

Ya, sure.

I wonder if North Dakota women were watching when Congressman Pomeroy pointed out that Berg had opposed health legislation allowing treatment for women who had been beaten?  I wonder how many North Dakota women also know that Rick Berg and Al Carlson are part of the Republican leadership in the House that did nothing when State Representative Dave Weiler (R-Bismarck) pleaded guilty in 2009 to assaulting his wife?  Instead of admonishing or disciplining him, that same leadership has actually advanced Weiler, something every North Dakota woman who votes Republican in 2010 will need to think about with shame when the Legislative session begins in 2011.

The North Dakota Way?  God, I hope not.

I wonder how many North Dakotans know that Rick Berg also led the Legislative charge to let banks sell your private financial information to others without your permission or that he supported privatizing social security?  For Democrats like Earl Pomeroy this not only is not the North Dakota Way, it’s not the Washington Way either.

Congressman Pomeroy knows very well that I have not agreed with every vote or decision he has made.  But Democrats, unlike Republicans, do not dismiss those who disagree with them as “treasonous” or “un-American” or “un-North Dakotan.”

What I have never doubted is that Congressman Pomeroy has put his heart and soul into representing North Dakotans, not the corporations and carping prejudices that besiege us.  The same is true of Democratic/NPLers running with him this year.

Unfortunately the Republicans have trotted out old and new wolves in sheep’s clothing.  One exception is Tracy Potter’s opponent for the U.S. Senate who is a sheep in sheep’s clothing.  Nevertheless, John Hoeven is content to run with the wolves.

Jeanette Boechler is running for Attorney General against a man who knows darn well that the newly passed Health Care Bill is good for North Dakota, or I must believe that he does not know a single hospital administrator in this State who is grateful for the work put in by “Team North Dakota” to make sure that the five most sparsely populated States of the Union were accounted for in the new legislation.

Nevertheless, Wayne Stenehjem put his cynical stamp on a strategy to challenge the constitutionality of the new law.  Shameful, even for one of the leaders of a Party with no shame.

Cynthia Kaldor is running for Tax Commissioner against a man who was willing to show mendacious ads on TV about his opponent’s dismissal from WSI four years ago.  Mr. Fong may win his office back again this year, but, short of a public apology to Brent Edison, he will never regain his good name.

Brad Crabtree is running for the PSC against a public official who has shown his vision of a “classless society” with a picture by his office of a little girl of elementary school age giving President Obama the finger [Northdecoder, 7/12/10].  In this pathetically crude manner, Kevin Cramer shows North Dakotans what Republicans really think of those who vote for people like him.

However, of all the offenses Republican executive and legislative leadership have committed against North Dakotans and “The North Dakota Way,” the worst is what they have not done with resources at their command in the past two legislative sessions. The record of opportunities they have squandered is clear enough. 

What Berg and the Republican Legislature should have been doing, when a simple inquiry of conditions west of U.S. Highway 83 could have told them that the oil money was coming in, was to make sure that this particular North Dakota boom was not followed by another bust —to build infrastructure for the future with alternative energies and competing organic agriculture, and value added industries, with capital fused into the publicly owned Bank of North Dakota for investing in these cutting edge industries that anyone in the private sector could have told them were coming if they had bothered to ask.

But Nooooooohhhh!!!  Such far sighted legislation might have offended the Chamber of Commerce and other foreign occupiers of our economy who now use their money to spread lies about the incumbent Congressman, and any other Democratic/NPLer who shows signs of winning.

If it’s fair for the media to constantly show us town hall meetings with pictures of President Obama with a Hitler mustache, it’s fair, and far more accurate, based on their words and actions, to describe Republican candidates like Berg, Cramer, Fong, Stenehjem, and Hoeven, as “economic Quislings,” content to hand over the people of North Dakota to malefactors of great wealth and power who have historically contaminated our land, air, and water, while giving us “the right to work” for menial wages, with the exception, of course, of those who qualify as “our [Republican] own.”

So much for what men like Rick Berg are running for; themselves of course.  It is what they are running FROM that is far more important, and far more compelling for North Dakota voters.

Accountability.

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