THE PORK BARREL CORRUPTION: Keywords: Public corruption, excess public spending, budget deficit, earmarks, the pork barrel, Gavin Newsome, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, the FED, Citizens Against Public Waste.

Politics at the Olde Country Store

 

THE PORK BARREL

“The old general store barrels – pickles, crackers, and pork

Each county and village official took turns to use them as court

And deep in the worn oak staves left their initials engraved

State troopers, marshals, sherifs, judges, mayors and clerks

All came for hot coffee and stew, and had pickles, crackers or pork. 

Old settlers, farmers and ranchers found them a place to shoot bull.

Low price of crops and high prices of feed, urea, nitro, fuel and shoes.

The blacksmith, mechanic, plumber, painter, and printer complained

Their city folk suppliers, vendors and travelling salesmen dealt hard

And all came to sit by the oak barrels of the old general store.

A vote for the keeper for each pickle, cracker and morsel of pork.”

 

A meditation about the budget deficit and corruption by Xuan Quen Santos

 

 

Some time ago, my wife inherited several carton boxes full of old recipe books. Most had been collected from church groups frequented over the years as the families moved during their lives. Selling home-style recipe books has been a traditional fundraising activity for churches in the country towns. Some came from her mother’s, but others had been passed down from older matrons of the families going back several generations. Most had pencil notes on the margins of the recipes that had been followed at one time or another. Peaking from the edges, I also found numerous handwritten recipes. Some had been written on cards, others on the back of grocery lists, and even on some child’s homework pages. One of the books had the surprising present of a few dollar bills kept between pages for safekeeping and were forgotten. Others had clippings of local newspapers with recipes. On the back of a published recipe for cabbage soup, I found a 1905 poem. It had something to do with food, but also with the style of small-town politics. Capsules of bygone days, with many lessons for the present. This is about the famous “barrel of pork”.

 

Barrels and barrels at the old country store

Folklore transmits its common sense wisdom through fables, proverbs, maxims, aphorisms, adages, and legends, among many such literary devices. I am sure you have heard “I’m in a pickle”, “I feel dry as a cracker barrel”, and “the governor’s budget is nothing but a pork barrel”. The central word is “barrel”, and they have to do with the poem and an old recipe. Being in a pickle means being in serious trouble. Dry as a cracker barrel means having nothing to say or add to a discussion. The pork barrel refers to today’s most important political malady: unchecked public spending.

 

            The story is ancient, so old we can’t remember when pickling, salting and brining were discovered as safe methods to preserve fresh food. The next chapter is the barrel, in ancient Germanic languages “tun”, the root of tonel in romance languages, and the origin of the measure of weight we call ton, or tonelada. One old ton was the weight of a tun full of water. Originally built and designed to hold liquids, barrels of oak have many lives. They are also easy to roll and to load on ships with heavy nets. You are probably familiar with how some wines are aged in oak barrels, some of them charred inside. Shipped from mainland Europe to Scotland, once the wine was bottled or consumed, the empty barrels were used to age whiskey. The second use barrels gave the Scottish drink its darker color and sophisticated aromas. Bourbon and more recently tequila undergo the same aging process. Barrels were also used to store and transport dry goods on ships. The ancient Medieval Vikings and Biscayne fishermen travelled to the North Atlantic cod fisheries with dry salt, dry unleavened bread and fresh water in barrels. They survived and came back with salt-dried cod. Barrels with liquids and dry goods travelled with Columbus and Magellan. They made it to America during colonial times. A hundred years ago, salted cod and pork, and soda crackers were still delivered to country stores in barrels. Particularly in the South, many stores still sell pigs feet, noses, lips and ears ready to eat, but now they are stored and displayed in glass jars. Crackers are now the famous “Saltines” and were the first to be packaged in waxed paper bags inside boxes. What about pickles? Before they were pickled in glass jars, they were pickled and stored in oak barrels, or heavy ceramic pots. Pickling in brine, or in   brine and vinegar, with salt and spices are now common fare at picnics, BBQs and tailgate parties. They are likely a common staple in most American refrigerators. That is the literal story of the barrels of pickles, salt crackers and pork.

 

Among the many old family recipes, I found one that motivated this meditation. Farmers that raised hogs in addition to their crops always butchered them when the weather chilled in early or late fall for two reasons. The hogs born in spring had matured, and from then on would only eat with little growth. The cooler weather allowed the butchering process to maintain the meat fresh until the next stages. The hams, shoulders and bacon would go to the smokehouse, or to the salting and drying room. The cleaned skin would be boiled into crispy cracklings and the tallow would be turned into lard. Lesser pieces of meat and fat, and well washed guts, would be turned into sausages and hung by the hams in the smokehouse. The rest, cut into smaller pieces, would go into the pork barrel. Properly prepared and stored, pork meat would be preserved and ready for cooking during the months of winter and spring. How did they prepare the pork barrel? First, clean well the barrel and make sure it holds liquid. Every cut piece of pork is rubbed with salt and packed closely in the barrel to stand overnight. Pieces that still had skin should be placed against the wall. For 100 lbs. of pork make a brine with 10 lbs. of salt, 2 lbs. of saltpeter, dissolved in 5 gallons of clean water. Bring the brine to a boil and cool covered. The next day, slowly pour the brine into the barrel. This allows all crevices to be reached. Fill to the top without leaving any space for air. Place cap on top and weigh down. After a week or two, any piece can be used as regular fresh pork, but only after soaking for a few hours to extract as much salt as possible. I give thanks for refrigeration, for the modern meat packing industry, and for supermarkets. How did the pork barrel get into politics?

 

The answer is in the poem.

 

Anything you needed you could find at the country store

Many years ago, I witnessed the kind of scene described by the verses. While in college, I became seriously interested in a smart young lass. During a holiday festivity she invited me to meet her family. I did not catch on to what that meant, so I agreed. Her parents were living abroad, so her family meant all the rest of her extended family! The Interstate highway system was still under construction, and soon I found myself directed towards an old two-lane national highway winding through the woods. After a few hours we turned into narrower farm-to-market roads. Eventually, they led us to a narrow gravel road. I was puzzled by the many side lanes we encountered as we drove onwards under the shade of tall pines, the rhythm broken only by small steepled churches here and there. All the road signs repeated a handful of last names. She began calling them out; a cousin here, an uncle there, another cousin, a great aunt, two elderly sisters cousins of her mother, several double-first cousins… I began to get worried.

 

We turned into a private road that traveled by well fenced pastures of hay and alfalfa. We could see cattle in some areas and horses in others. We finally arrived at a fine country home at the end of an oak grove. Behind it lay a complex of barns, sheds, silos and ag machines I could not identify. This was Uncle Frank’s family residence, then the patriarch of the Ragley family. Our two-day celebration went by meeting new people, trying small talk, eating too much delicious home cooked country food, and pretending I could understand what everyone was saying. I discovered the new American meaning of the barrel of pork when Uncle Frank took me to his business. He drove us on his truck back to the main road, and then to an important intersection not far from the highway. He was the storekeeper of the general store.

 

Have you heard about the Constable? The cost of gas has gone
up to 10 cents a gallon!

Gas, diesel and oil; hay, feed and seeds; hats, boots, belts, jeans, jumpsuits and overalls; over the counter drugs, old liniments and first aid items; house cleaning products, brooms and mops; hammers, nails and edging tools; thread, buttons and shears; garden tools, hoses and plumbing fittings; candies and bottled sodas long disappeared in cities; cigars, chewing tobacco and cigarettes; lanterns, batteries, pails, ropes and more. I lost track, but the shelves displayed boxes and tins of “store bought foods”; just followed by cans of all sizes and colors. No more barrels of soda crackers, salt pork or pickles; but there was a large glass jar with pickles swimming in green brine full of seeds and spices; there were boxes of Nabisco Saltines and Ritz Crackers; there was Spam and Deviled Ham, sardines and tuna cans. There was an old barrel that served as a table with a box of dominos and a chess board, and two cane chairs waiting for regular players to make their first moves, always invited by the aroma of a freshly made pot of coffee.

 

We sat on a corner framed by two well-worn rockers arranged around a sizable empty can of Community Coffee that sat on the floor. I answered my interrogator, who as the elder of the Ragley family was making sure I would be OK for his niece. In between the questions two things took turns to catch my attention. The coffee can began to receive his frequent deposits of chewed tobacco, and an endless parade of friends, clients, vendors and more cousins came by our corner to pay their respects, give some news, or ask for a favor, that is, before they walked their way to the register. A sheriff came by and gave his report. He was married to a granddaughter. Everybody was offered coffee, so was I. I took a cup of what looked like tar, and so strong that I thought for a moment the spoon of sugar was standing on its own in the center of the cup. I survived the investigation and must have been approved, for his final words sounded positive, but I wasn’t sure. As we got up to leave, he said, "When you get married you need to get you some chains. When she gives you any trouble, you just rattle them chains.”  It took me a few years and many more visits to celebrate in family reunions to figure out that the gruff Uncle Frank really had permission from his sweet wife to say such things.

 

One other fact was also evident. His voice in the community counted. His advice was followed. His opinions influenced others. The free coffee, stew, pickles, crackers or salt pork were one more reason to come to the old country store. Common problems were aired, discussed and some form of action decided. Voters carefully inform themselves before they vote.

 

Porch, rocking chairs and politics: real democratic process at its best

        

The barrel of pork is no longer, but its message remains. It was at the old country stores that the real political life of communities happened. Many towns grew around the country stores. They often served as post office and community bank. The owners served as notaries and Justices of the Peace. They also served as centers of communications and political clubs. The use of the phrase "pork barrel" to describe questionable or clearly corrupt public spending dates after the Civil War. It used to refer to any excess detected in how governments spent the people’s money. Things began to happen as soon as the Federal Congress discovered that it could bribe the voters with what they had first taken from them. After visiting the expanding United States in 1831, the famous French politician Alexis De Tocqueville, published his impressions in 1840 in “Democracy in America”. He had these words of advice after living through three revolutions in France. “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money”.

Bi-partisan collaboration in corruption

Congressmen discovered it, and corruption in public office has become a descriptor of politics. Since then, the pork barrel refers to expenditures on projects of questionable value that the U. S. Representatives and U. S. Senators push through for their benefit during elections, as they claim they are “bringing home the bacon”, another well-known phrase. Politicians running for re-election always brag about “the money they have brought back to their constituents”, something their opponents that are running for the first time can’t do. They are also used during the negotiations behind doors between politicians that have publicly pretended to be opponents. “You vote for my project, and I will vote for yours”. Parties use the process in a grand scale. The party in government punishes the districts that favor the opposition and showers the ones that they want to keep in their voting roles. There is now so much information that has been gathered about the voters that it is now done at the level of ZIP codes. Ask the county supervisors and city mayors how they distribute the investments in “public works”. There is a name for this type of corruption that does not stop until the governments go broke. It is called “hitting the bottom of the barrel”.

It is not corruption now. It is monetary policy

Feeding from the “pork barrel” has a name. They are called “earmarks”. An earmark is a substantial budget item tagged along an important Act of Congress, usually budget decisions, but not always, and they are for the benefit of a single constituency. They are always hidden among the thousands of pages of the proposed legislation that is made public on the day of the vote and nobody has time to find what was approved. Citizens Against Public Waste (www.capw.org) is the private watchdog that monitors “pork”. According to them, “A ‘pork’ project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures.” They publish the “Annual Congressional Pig Book”. CAPW estimates that between 1991 and 2023, pork barrel projects totaled almost 112,000 earmarks costing taxpayers almost $ 400 billion dollars. This corruption is not partisan. Politicians from all pigsties go to the trough. Conservatives that claim to be fiscally responsible are not exempt. Even champions (in public) against government waste have added their favored town or college with some free money.

Boston's Big Dig and Alaska's Gravina Island bridge are scandalous examples of pork barrel spending.

In 2023, NPR described the Boston highway project: “Whether it's high-speed rail or highway reconstruction, infrastructure projects in the U.S. are often associated with high price tags and lengthy timelines. Perhaps no project captures this better than Boston's Central Artery Tunnel project, more commonly known as the Big Dig. It's the nation's most expensive highway project. And it took more than two decades to plan and build”. It was initially scheduled for completion in the late 1990s and budgeted at a cost of $3 billion. The project wasn’t completed until 2007, and its cost ballooned to $ 22 billion. Democrat Bill Clinton was President during the approval process. Boston and Massachusetts have been democrat enclaves for decades and are home to a large number of colleges and schools that promote socialism.

In 2008, CNN carried this note about the Alaska’s Gravina Island Bridge: “The proposed $400 million span that would have connected the (tiny) coastal city of Ketchikan to its airport on Gravina Island died after it became a symbol of congressional excess. But the three-mile access road that was built on the island is ready for residents to take a drive to nowhere.”  The project had been promoted by Republican Governor Frank Murkowski, but was cancelled by his successor, Governor Sarah Palin. The road cost $ 26 million and was already contracted and under construction when she took over. Ketchikan Mayor Bob Weinstein calls the road, which was paid for by federal tax dollars, “a waste of money that could have been used to fix his city's roads and sidewalks”.

The San Francisco Federal Building completed in 2008 after delays and costs overruns, was renamed “Speaker Nancy Pelosi” in her honor recognizing the many projects that over her long tenure in the House of Representatives she had helped fund from her powerful position. News cited her projects to combat drug addiction and the HIV-AIDS epidemic, homelessness, education through sports, mental health and crime prevention, among others totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. San Francisco is not known for success in any of those areas.

The high-speed super train from nowhere to nowhere in California, Democrat's pride and shame

The biggest pork scandal in California is the High Speed Train from Nowhere to Nowhere. In 2019, Nick Zaiac reported in the R Street Institute that the project was halted: “Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the railroad will never reach Los Angeles or San Francisco. What should have been a $15 billion project was going to cost at least $77 billion. And while Newsom made the call, cost-overruns of this magnitude were going to render the project a failure regardless of whether trains ever run in the Central Valley. The end of California’s high-speed rail dream highlights the challenges of attempting to manage railroads through politics.”  The failed project was re-started as soon as the Biden-Harris administration took office. Its cost has risen to $ 110 billion. Of the nearly 500 miles, only about 120 are in some stage of construction, but not a single mile is operational.

While the pork barrel politics at the old country stores are still an expression of local community democratic preparations for exercising the power of votes, the elected pork barrel politicians corrupt the elections trying to buy votes by gas-lighting the voters with visible expenditures. We should never forget that whatever bacon they bring home, it was first taken from us and only a small part is being returned.

I highly recommend reviewing the “Annual Congressional Pig Book” published by the Citizens Against Public Waste, CAPW. Make sure you are sitting down and have something to prevent your blood from boiling.

Ronald Reagan once said, "The first pork-barrel bill that crosses my desk, I’m going to veto it and make the authors of those pork-barrel items famous all over America". Most state governors have what is called “a line item veto”. It allows them to cancel projects that are clearly pork barrel expenditures.  This power has been denied to the President of the Federal Government. I suggest you read the following record of the intervention in Congress by State Representative Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), who in May 14 of 2008 exposed the excesses of the use of earmarks for clearly corrupt purposes.

https://justfacts.votesmart.org/public-statement/344444/pork-barrel-spending

What has made it easy to justify the massive amounts of public money that are like a giant wave into a stable economy is the pseudo-science of New Economics, also known as Keynesianism. It is the Law now, it governs the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, and it is disguised under the veil of “monetary policy”. The pork barrel projects are the most popular way for politicians to contribute to execute monetary policy when the mandate is to “stimulate the economy”. It does not. It creates inflation which sooner or later leads to a recession. They also promote public corruption, not only on the public officials that hope to gain votes with the projects, but also on the public which become complicit in accepting gladly the “free money giveaway” that is implicit in projects that are not really economically justified. It destroys the American work ethic, and the moral standards expected in public service.

            If you think we are in a pickle, if you feel your wallet is as dry as a cracker barrel, it is likely because we are getting near the bottom of the barrel of pork.