Pearl River Sitting on a dock by Cowen Bayou, only less than a mile from Pearl River, I’m only about 20-miles from Kiln, Mississippi in Hancock County. Favre is a big name in this area. The front page of the Sea Coast Echo had a story about Eddie Favre, the county administrator retiring after six years. The opinion column was written by the paper’s staff reporter, Cassandra Favre. If you take the exit from I-10, the great interstate that runs from San Diego to Jacksonville, the second exit after you cross into Mississippi from Louisiana gives you a choice. Turn to the south, and you are heading to Waveland and the Gulf Coast beaches. Turn to the north and the next thing you know, you are in Kiln, where a sign used to say, Welcome to the Home of Brett Favre. His parents were school teachers at North Hancock High School, where his dad was also the football coach. Favres have been in south Mississippi, virtually since the French made land along the coast.
In South Mississippi, Brett Favre is a legendary for a number of reasons. He was a great NFL quarterback, especially with the Green Bay Packers where he won a Super Bowl with them and won three consecutive NFL Most Valuable Player awards before retiring with record numbers at the time for his career. He’s still legendary, but now he’s best known as the ultimate welfare recipient, the all-time record holding welfare queen for the ages thanks to his parlaying what appears to be $8 million dollars in Mississippi welfare money for himself and his projects.
The whole concept of welfare queens is a rightwing racist trope that has been used for decades now to make one or two bad apples, and sometimes not even that many, to stand for the desperate mothers trying to care for their children and access their rights to often minimal welfare aid. If there was ever valid poster boy for welfare fraud and a winner in the game of thrones to be the penultimate Welfare Queen, then without a doubt Brett Favre is the winner, even while proving himself a total loser and cad.
Brett Favre hasn’t been indicted yet, but lord knows, I don’t know why not. First, he collected a quarter million from welfare funds for making speeches that he didn’t make. Then, finding how easy it was to cash in on his relationships with Mississippi governors and Republican pols, the haul just got bigger, including siphoning off millions for a volleyball court for his alma mater, the University of South Mississippi, where one of his daughters was playing for the team. None of this is out of character for Favre. His post-NFL career is a minefield of scams and scandals, and even while he was playing, he had more than is share of cringeworthy scandals.
Simple question: How low do you have to be in order to steal money from the mouths of the poor, especially in Mississippi of all places, home of the poorest of the poor in the USA?