POLITICS

HARRY REID HELPS CRUSH FARMER TO BENEFIT CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTORS

WASHINGTON POST - In the summer of 2003, shoppers in Southern California
began getting a break on the price of milk. A maverick dairyman named
Hein Hettinga started bottling his own milk and selling it for as much
as 20 cents a gallon less than the competition, exercising his right to
work outside the rigid system that has controlled U.S. milk production
for almost 70 years. Soon the effects were rippling through the state,
helping to hold down retail prices at supermarkets and warehouse stores.


For three years, starting in 2003, a coalition of milk companies and
dairies lobbied to crush an initiative by a maverick Arizona dairyman.
Hein Hettinga chose to work outside the rigid system that has controlled
U.S. milk production for almost 70 years. The milk lobby said he
presented unfair competition because he chose to operate without federal
price control. Hettinga fought back but was outgunned on the Hill. In
March, Congress passed a bill that effectively ended his experiment. . .


Last March, Congress passed a law reshaping the Western milk market and
essentially ending Hettinga's experiment -- all without a single
congressional hearing. "They wanted to make sure there would be no more
Heins," said Mary Keough Ledman, a dairy economist who observed the
battle. . .

In the House, Devin Nunes, a new Republican member from California's
Central Valley, introduced a bill to close what he called the
"regulatory loophole" that let Hettinga ship unregulated milk into
California. . . In Nunes's first run for Congress, in 2002, he pulled in
$130,000 from dairy interests, second only to President Bush among
federal candidates, election records show. Nunes's bill and Kyl's
amendment initially went nowhere. So Kyl, a conservative Republican,
found an unlikely ally in Reid, then the Senate's fiercely partisan
Democratic whip.

Reid was no newcomer to dairy issues. Nevada's population was growing
faster than its dairies could supply milk, so prices tended to be high.
Milk plants that had to import milk from far away thought they could get
it cheaper if they did not have to pay regulated prices. In 1999, Reid
helped them out. He slipped an amendment into a spending bill exempting
milk plants in the Las Vegas area from federal pricing rules.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/09/
AR2006120900925.html

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SCHOLAR FINDS HUEY LONG GOT IT RIGHT

CLAY RISEN, NY TIMES - In their book "The End of Southern
Exceptionalism," Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and
Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the
South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of
race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South
transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national
economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This
class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best
represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites,
however - and here's the surprise - even those in areas with large black
populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the
90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional
voting.). . .

To give just one example: in the 50s, among Southerners in the
low-income tercile, 43 percent voted for Republican presidential
candidates, while in the high-income tercile, 53 percent voted
Republican; by the 80s, those figures were 51 percent and 77 percent,
respectively. Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer
ones didn't. To be sure, Shafer says, many whites in the South
aggressively opposed liberal Democrats on race issues. "But when folks
went to the polling booths," he says, "they didn't shoot off their own
toes. They voted by their economic preferences, not racial preferences."
Shafer says these results should give liberals hope. "If Southern
politics is about class and not race," he says, "then they can get it
back."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html?ex=
1323406800&en=cc919b768ba4d540&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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