Cravaack might be a Tea Party darling but he’s not the treatment we need to save our economy.

Representative Cravaack’s visit to Ely on June 29th brings up the image of a medical patient surrounded by a health care team trying to decide on a course of treatment while one of the team has the goal of killing the patient. Most government bodies in America need some treatment to recover from right wing mismanagement but neo-cons like the Tea Party and Chip Cravaack are trying to “Starve the Beast.” At the very time when we need active regulation of our financial corporations and public expenditures to create jobs, Chip Cravaack is actually proposing more corporate tax cuts for a group that is paying taxes at historically low levels.

Cravaack’s powerpoint presentation managed to make the transition from propaganda to comedy when he said only the Heritage Foundation had a computer powerful enough to process the economic plan that the neo-cons had in store for America. Think about it. We have computers that can defeat world champions at chess and Ken Jennings on Jeopardy but only a bunch of right wing fruitcakes at the Heritage Foundation have enough computer power to process Chip Cravaack’s treatment for America’s ills. He’s obviously trying to kill the patient.

We need real economic development and economic diversification in Northern Minnesota and Cravaack’s proposal is to open up an acid producing sulfide ore body that will at best produce a few hundred jobs and at worst damage thousands of acres of wetlands.

My wife Pat and I toured some mining operations with the Minnesota Minerals Education Workshop a few days ago and I took note of the changes since I started working in the mines in the late sixties. Bigger machinery. Fewer employees.

Cravaack might be a Tea Party darling but he’s not the treatment we need to save our economy.