There's nothing in the middle of the road except yellow stripes and dead armadillos
by
Jim HIgh tower


A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1997 by HarperCollins
Publishers.

THERE'S NOTHING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD BUT YELLOW STRIPES AND DEAD

armadillos.

Copyright 1997,1998 by Jim Hightower.  All rights reserved.  Printed in
the United States of America.  No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except
in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews.  For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc."  10
East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or
sales promotional use.  For information please write: Special Markets
Department, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc."  10 East 53rd Street, New
York, NY 10022.

First Harper Perennial edition published 1998.  Designed by Nancy
Singer

This book is manufactured in the U.S. on totally chlorine-free paper
made by Lyons Falls Pulp 6- Paper, and printed with soy-based ink.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as
follows:

Hightower, Jim, 1943There's nothing in the middle of the road but
yellow stripes and dead armadillos / by Jim Hightower.  -- 1st ed.

p. em.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-06-018766-2

1. United States--Politics and government--1993- --Humor.  2. United
States--Social conditions--1980- --Humor.  3. American wit and humor.

I. Title.

E885.H56 1997

973.929--dc21 97-23211

ISBN 0-06-092949-9 (pbk.)

00 01 02 <-/RRD 10987

To William Fletoher Hightower Speak the truth, but ride a fast
horse.

Old Cowboy Saying

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Public acknowledgments can be dicey and even dangerous, since you
almost always leave someone out, thereby leaving them PO'd.  At a big
political function I emceed in Dallas, I tried to acknowledge everyone
in the room who was a candidate for some office or another, from U.S.
Senate to county hide inspector.  Unfortunately, I left out a guy who
was running for the Texas legislature.  Not being too tightly wrapped,
he already believed there was an intergalactic conspiracy afoot to deny
him his rightful place in this august body, and my faux pas convinced
him that I was the diabolical mastermind behind the conspiracy.  He
hounded me for weeks and never forgave me.  Worse, he got elected.

So let me say here that I thank everyone for this book.

Of course, no one writes a book.  One does get to put one's name on it,
but hundreds of friends, coworkers, acquaintances, writers, librarians,
relatives, English teachers, activists, and others have their prints
all over the writing.  I'll not attempt to list you, but thank you.

There is one special one though: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank
you, thank you, thank you ... and many, many more thank-yous to Susan
De Marco

A big thanks, too, to my other coworkers at Saddle-Burr Productions,
especially to Betsy Moon and Cheri Nightingale, as well as to my agent
George Greenfield and to my editor and Big Apple guide Adrian Zackheim,
along with his associates Framji Minwalla and Timothy Farrell--all
folks who were key to making the book possible.

Jim Hightower The Chat 6- Chew Austin, Texas,

INTRODUCTION

We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.

--Renato Ruggiero, 1996

We?  Who is we?  A new constitution--that's big, right?  Will we get to
vote?  Will there be yard signs?  Who the hell is this guy, and is he
serious?

Serious as a snake bite.  Ruggiero, an Italian trade bureaucrat, was
hand-picked in 1995 to head an obscure and downright secretive
international body called the World Trade Organization, based in
Geneva.  Technically, the WTO is the creation of governments, including
ours, but in fact it is the baby of the world's corporate and financial
giants--such names as GM, Chase Manhattan, Nestle, Caterpillar, Credit
Suisse, ADM, Kodak, Nippon, Goldman Sachs, GE, Boeing, Unilever, Exxon,
Monsanto, British Petroleum, and, well, the full club of powerhouse
corporations that now call themselves "transnational."

For the past few years, members of the club have been diligently
separating themselves from allegiance to any national flag, polity, or
people, purposefully erecting a legal fortress around themselves, their
hoards of money, and their financial ambitions.  This legal construct
is the "constitution" Ruggiero referred to.  It is not merely
protection that they seek from their fortress, but a secure place from
which to reign, for they are quietly setting themselves up as a rogue
"government"--one that is unelected, unaccountable, for-profit,
supranational, and sovereign.  The building blocks of their
"constitutional" fortress are the WTO, GATT, IMF, APEC, OPIC, NAFTA,
MFN, CBI, AFTA, MAI, and other jumbles of letters that form the
esoterica of global trade policy.

If Paul Revere were to make his midnight ride in 1998, it is not an
invasion by Redcoats he would warn us about, but the astonishing
assault these global corporate powers are making on our liberties,

economic fortunes, way of life, and sovereignty.  I'm a Texan without
even a pony, so I can't gallop into the night like Revere, but I have
written this book as my own modern-day warning, and as a rallying cry
to fight back.

What the British monarchy of old could not accomplish by force--the
subjugation of the American people--today's new oligarchy of
corporations is achieving by stealth, without even a protest from our
political leaders.  To the contrary, both Bill Clinton's Democrats and
Newt Gingrich's Republicans are blithely opening the doors for the
trans nationals shouting: "Give me liberty ... or give me a PAC
contribution!"

As I write this, another national election is under way for the control
of Congress, yet there is a dumb founding silence from the whole system
about the unbridled power of top corporate and financial executives,
who--among their many other excesses--are almost jubilantly knocking
down the wages and middle-class aspirations of America's workaday
majority.  They are abandoning families and whole communities here as
they flee to exploit the impoverished in Third World nations.  Instead
of discussing these real, practical, and immediate class issues--as
ordinary folks do every day around their kitchen tables, at their
cafes, and in their bars of choice--we get a political season of
silliness: Clinton is darting here and there around the globe
desperately trying to look like a president; Newt's do nothing Congress
is either in recess or deliberating such weighty matters as renaming
Washington's airport for Ronald Reagan; and the media have little time
for any politics not tied directly to Clinton's willy.

Far from serious political or journalistic questioning (much less
criticism) of their frontal assault on the poor and the middle class,
the corporate powers are being widely exalted, hailed as crusaders who
are bringing a God-ordained, market-based order to the world's people.
They are marching onward under the golden banner of "globalization," a
nowhere land in which honey is promised to flow to all if only the
owners and managers of transnational corporations are freed from any
governmental ordinance anywhere--national, state, or local--that they
believe constitutes an infringement on their Holy Right to do business
as they see fit.  Their self-serving concept of globalization gives
their own narrow interest (nothing more noble, by the way, than hauling
off the highest possible profit they can grab) supremacy over all
competing interests around the world, including those of labor, human
rights, environment, religion, democracy, community, and nation.

Such supremacy, for example, can outlaw even a simple effort by your
city government to buy made-in-the-U.S.A. products, or to refuse to buy
any products made with sweatshop labor, or to choose to buy from
hometown suppliers.  Imperious trade tribunals already have been
established with international authority to strike down these acts of
local sovereignty as an infringement on the global trade rights of
corporations.  Too wacky to be believed, you say?  Sorry, Toyota,
Mitsubishi, and other trans nationals are presently pursuing just such
an action through the World Trade Organization against the state of
Massachusetts, which passed a law in 1997 saying state agencies there
will not buy products from companies that do business with the brutally
repressive dictatorial gangsters now ruling Burma.  The corporations
say uh-uh--their global trade rights supersede the legislative autonomy
of the Massachusetts people.  The case is pending before a WTO tribunal
of faceless officials in Geneva.

Their proceedings are not open to the public or the press; a state has
no standing under WTO rules, so Massachusetts cannot present its own
case or even be present; and there is no appeal of the tribunal's
ruling.

Having the WTO is better than a 900 number for the chieftains of trans
nationals who can dial up 900-SMOOCH-ME and have their every corporate
fantasy come true.  Chiquita banana, for example, owned by fat-cat
political contributor Carl Lindner of Cincinnati, is using the WTO
against European nations that now choose to buy their bananas from
their former Caribbean colonies.

He says they must change their laws and buy bananas from his operation
in Central America, even though such a shift could gut the economies of
St.  Lucia and other small island-nations dependent on European
sales--and even though it would likely shift many desperate islanders
into the cocaine and heroin trade.  Talk about bananas!

Oil companies, too, have already been to the WTO and succeeded in
overturning a portion of our Clean Air Act, because its antipollution
standards were ruled too strict and therefore a barrier to the dirtier
oil products the companies ship to the United States from Venezuela.

The rationale for this absolute and absolutely absurd ascendancy of
corporate interest is that ultimately their pursuit of private gain
will produce untold global good by softening the hearts of dictators,
making capitalists of child laborers, generating a worldwide consumer
society based on exports, and giving all of us pie in the sky when we
die.

I was born at night, but it wasn't last night; how about you?  This is
nothing but Ronald Reagan's "trickle-down" nonsense writ large-much
larger than he and his laugh-a-minute "Gaffer curve" lunatics ever
dared attempt.  It is the codification, too, of George Bush's gibberish
about a "New World Order," which he was too inept to implement.

But then along came Bill Clinton, a sheep in wolf's clothing, a "New"
Democrat who is unabashedly obsequious to gray-temp led corporate
executives.  He led the Democratic Party--once the proud political home
of working folks--into an unholy alliance with Republicans and Wall
Street lobbyists, and the next thing you know we were being hit by
NAFTA, GATT, WTO, AFTA, CBI, MAI, and other initials that, if you
scramble them, spell "gotcha" in all the Romance languages.  They sell
these deals by using the high-minded rhetoric of Free Trade!  Jobs!
Exports!  Growth!  Prosperity!  and other come-ons that twinkle and
wink at us like stars in the dark sky, appearing as though we could
almost reach out and grasp them.  But their high-mindedness is a deceit
and the benefits chimerical.  Every one of these trade agreements and
structures rips more economic and political power out of our hands and
conveys it on a silver platter to the elite club of international
speculators, powerhouse bankers, corporate jefes, and other
hustlers--men with smiling lips and squinting hearts.

Amarillo Slim, the legendary poker player, once offered this useful
tip: "Look around the table.  If you don't see a sucker, get up,
because you're the sucker."

Look around America's table.  There sit the Democratic and Republican
parties side by side, not a dime's worth of difference between them,
waving us voters to the table once again for congressional and
presidential elections, while their corporate contributors keep
shuffling the deck and grinning slyly at us--can you win anything in
their political game?  Maybe you are among the 80 percent of Americans
who don't like the economic hand you've been dealt, whose incomes are
flat or even falling.  Hey pal, say the pundits and politicos fronting
for the powers-that-be (whose stack of chips is so high you can't see
their faces), our economy is humming, so there must be something wrong
with you.  You've still got a chance, though, they tell this workaday
majority--a "new millennium" is coming, so ante up, try to cross that
"bridge to the twenty-first century" and become a "winner."  And look,
there's Bill Clinton himself, presiding over the whole casino with his
arms spread wide and his face beaming, proclaiming over and over,
"These are good times for America."

How surreal.  In Clinton's "good times" incantation one hears the
time-warped echo of Herbert Hoover, who tried back in 1928 to sucker
the people with his insistence that Republican prosperity had "placed
the whole nation in the silk stocking class."  The problem with such
gloating presidential pronouncements is that they are patently goofy,
since most folks simply are not experiencing what the Big Man is
claiming for them.  People naturally ask, for example: If we really
were in the silk stocking class, wouldn't we be wearing silk
stockings?

Likewise today, when the Tub Thumpers of the Economic Orthodoxy
(including not only the Democratic President, but also the GOP's daffy
duo of Newt & Trent, as well as the entire coifed chorus of network
news spark lies go on and on about the "boom" in America, most folks
ask: A boom for whom?  Their situation is similar to that of West Texas
dry land farmers watching a line of thunderclouds form on the far
horizon and praying for even a small rain shower on their crops.  They
see bolts of lightning in the distance (Flash: Michael Eisner's 1997
pay as CEO of Disney Inc.  was $575 million.  Flash: Wall Street
brokers are so flush with bonus money this year, they are ordering
$10,000 bottles of wine with lunch.  Flash: Bill Gates built a $40
million new house containing slightly more square footage than Rhode
Island).  Then they feel the rumble of the thunder rolling across their
land (Boom: Corporate profits up!  Boom:

Dow Jones Average up!  Boom: Worker productivity up!).  It's a
spectacular show, but as West Texas farmers have learned the hard way,
thunder ain't rain.

Thunderous boosterism about good times might comfort the moneyed elite,
but it does not fool the folks, certainly not the eight out of ten of
our fellow citizens living in the dry land economy.  In the essays that
follow, I write from the viewpoint of these people, the everyday
working folks I grew up among in Texas, the people I campaigned with
during my "politician period" and championed while in state office, the
people I now encounter through my political travels around the country
and on my national call-in radio show, Hightower's Chat e^" Chew.

My experiences out here--outside the power centers of money, media, and
politics--tell me that our nation is in a very dangerous period,
rapidly approaching a crisis.  Dangerous because the people of the
United States are becoming fundamentally disunited--not because of
abortion or any of the other widely reported disputes over social
issues, but because of raw economics.  The disunity is widening as the
super rich the merely rich, and the affluent (roughly the wealthiest 20
percent of American families, but especially those in the very top tier
of privilege) aggressively and openly separate themselves from the
economic fortunes and goodwill of the many.

Much more than economic stratification and social hierarchy is in play
here, however.  Those at the top are also abandoning America's basic
principle of economic fairness, tearing asunder the powerful, unifying
belief within our diverse population that we're all in this together.
Let me repeat: In this time of highly advertised prosperity, eight out
of ten Americans are falling behind economically.

Nor is there any prospect of their position improving.  Indeed, there
is not even official acknowledgment, much less a policy discussion, of
their situation, for these same people also are being shut out
politically by the two major parties, which have put a platinum price
tag on being a player with them.  When the political ante is a thousand
dollars, the 80 percent majority has no place at the table.

Here's the joker in the deck for those in charge: Where is this
majority to go, and what are they to do?  Is it imagined that so many
will sit still for such treatment very long?  Bear in mind that, for
the most part, we're not talking about poor people.  Our leaders are
well practiced at holding down the poorest one-fifth of our population,
labeling them "welfare cases," riffraff or worse, and hiring ever more
police with ever more police power to contain them in their own
neighborhoods or in prisons.  But we're talking now about four-fifths
of the American people, the true middle class as well as the poor-the
factory workers, back-office clerks, teachers, carpenters, small
farmers, nurses, plumbers, janitors, shopkeepers, data processors,

and all the others who sweat, nurture, plow, invent, instruct, build,
arrange, and otherwise make our country work, sustaining it from the
ground up.  These are folks who earn maybe $20,000-$50,000 a year,
folks with expectations, aspirations, and attitudes.  They know about
the productivity gains U.S. companies are enjoying in the nineties, the
unprecedented new wealth that has been created, the corporate profits
and stock values that have soared--because they helped produce all
this.  Yet practically all the economic benefits generated by the many
have been fork lifted to the top, leaving them stewing in the
realization that their families' middle-class opportunities are being
stiffed.

In the following pages, I am rude enough to call this what it is:

class war.  A devastating class war is raging in America's
countryside.

The corporate media don't cover it, and you can bet that candidates of
both major parties will studiously avoid any mention of it in this
fall's congressional campaigns, because this is not a class
confrontation in which the many are menacing the wealthy few--a turn of
events that would definitely make the nightly news, complete with
fulminating politicians calling forth police to beat back the
aggressors.

Rather, today's class assault has been initiated from the top--a
ruthless war of attrition in which the wealthy few, from their bastions
of privilege on Wall Street and in Washington, are lobbing bomb after
bomb into the lives and communities of the many.

"We are too quiet," I heard John Lewis say in his quiet but forceful
voice to a crowd of attentive people standing around him.

"We need to make some noise."  Lewis is the Atlanta congressman who was
side by side with Martin Luther King Jr.  in the bloody-ugly
confrontations of the civil rights movement in the sixties, but on this
day in Columbus, Georgia, February 1998, he was urging on a downtrodden
group in another struggle, not against the brutish ness of Bull Connor
racism, but against the brutish ness of global corporatism.

Lewis is part of a dissident bunch of Democrats who are making periodic
forays into the countryside this year to meet
informally-personally--with everyday Americans to learn about the local
realities of global theories.  Representative David Bonior of Michigan
heads the group, which was organized by the Ralph Nader-backed Citizen
Trade Campaign, and I was invited to come along for the ride and
broadcast my radio show from the road, which I joyfully did.

These are hardly your typical, lobbyist-financed congressional
outings--we wend our way from urban to suburban areas, from small towns
to farms, traveling aboard a groaning old bus, chowing down on cold
sandwiches and potato salad for our lunch and supper, and staying
overnight in the spare bedrooms of local supporters.

Especially impressive is that these loquacious lawmakers do precious
little speechifying and a whole lot of listening and note taking on our
voyages.  The people do not hesitate to give them an earful.

Outside the gates of a modern but now-closed plant on the suburban edge
of Atlanta, Anna Harris talked with the lawmakers about how she and a
thousand people like her had been kicked off the edge of the global
economy by Lucent Technologies, a $26-billion-a-year giant that makes
telephones and other products.  For twenty-five years she worked for
Lucent, gradually working her way into America's middle class, earning
$15.59 an hour, or roughly $31,000 a year.  She and her coworkers were
highly skilled, efficient, cooperative, and loyal workers.  Quality.
Just like the telephones they made.

Still, Lucent's executives constantly messed with them, saying Mexico
beckoned.  Ms.  Harris and the others were told in the early nineties
to take a pay cut... or else.  They did: "I went back to $13 an hour,"
she told the lawmakers.

"I'm a single parent.  I took a cut in pay to keep my job."  That
reduction sliced $5,000 a year from her middle-class life.

Even this give back did not appease the wanderlust of Lucent,
however.

Shortly after Clinton and Congress rammed NAFTA into law in 1993, the
corporate honchos hitched up the wagons in Atlanta and hauled Anna
Harris's job to Reynosa, Mexico.  In this poverty-stricken border town,
only a stone's throw across the river from Texas, the company pays its
Mexican hires a sub poverty wage of $1 an hour.  They get no benefits,
unless you count the daily ration of one breakfast taco supervisors
hand out to each worker.  Lucent uses their labor; then, thanks to
NAFTA, the company merrily trucks the Mexican-made phones right across
the bridge into the U.S.A."  delivering them to a store near you
without paying any tariff or honoring any quota.

Now in her early fifties, Ms.  Harris finally landed another job months
after being abruptly abandoned by the globally wayward Lucent.  She got
one of those "14 million new jobs" that a crowing Bill

Clinton tells us his economic policies have created.  Hers is at a
Target store, working for $7.50 an hour, though it's only part-time, so
she has fallen plumb out of the middle class back into poverty.
Ironically, in her job at Target, she sells the telephones she once
made.  When Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur asked her if the price is
any lower on those phones now that Lucent pays $1 an hour to Mexican
workers rather than the $13 she earned, Anna Harris's eyes turned steel
cold and she said: "There's no difference in price.  They're selling
them for $80 to $90."

Welcome to the New World Order.

--Jim Hightower, May 1998

CORPORATE WORLD

THEY GET THE GOLD MINE WE GET THE SHAFT

* LOGOS GALORE

Hr FORE!

* NPM MEMO

* GETTING A LEG UP ON CORPORATIONS

* VERNON JORDAN'S DREAM

* HIGH-TECH EXCESS

* HAPPINESS

LOGOS GALORE

They tell me advice books sell, so here goes:

Don't ever buy a pit bull from a one-armed man.

Never sign nothin by neon.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Oh, and one more: Never, ever believe the "conventional wisdom," which
is to wisdom what "near beer" is to beer.  Only not as close.

This is especially true when it comes to our interlocked political and
economic systems, in which the game is about power, and conventional
wisdom is a trick play designed to keep you in your place.

Today's powers-that-be, for example, loudly broadcast that there is no
such thing as "class war" in our society, that the major media outlets
deliver the "news" to us, that environmentalism is an extraneous
concern fomented by liberal "elites," and that we Americans are
overwhelmingly a middle-of-the-road, "conservative" people.

These purveyors of conventional wisdom are putting out more baloney
than Oscar Mayer, hoping to keep America's political debate from
focusing on an insidious new "ism" that has crept into our lives:
corporatism.  Few politicians, pundits, economists, or other officially
sanctioned mouthpieces for what passes as public debate in our country
want to touch the topic, but--as ordinary folks have learned from daily
encounters--the corporation has gotten way too big for its britches,
intruding into every aspect of our lives and altering by private fiat
how we live.

Less than a decade ago, for example, your medical needs from birth to
death rested in the hands of a doctor, whom you chose.

Quicker than a hog eats supper, though, America's health-care
system--including your personal doc--has been swallowed damn-near whole
by a handful of national corporate mutants called HMOs, most of which
are tentacles of Prudential, Travelers, and other insurance giants.

When did we vote on this?  Did I miss the national referendum in which
we decided that remote corporate executives with an army of bean
counters would displace my hand-picked doctor, and would decide which
(if any) hospital I can enter, how long I can stay, what specialists I
can consult, and what (if anything) these medical professionals are
allowed to tell me about my own medical needs?  I know Congress did not
authorize this fundamental shift to health maintenance organizations (a
phrase, by the way, that sounds as warm and welcoming as a lube and
body shop).  To the contrary, Congress in 1994 rightly trashed the
Clinton health-care reform legislation on the grounds that it would do
the exact thing being done to us now: limit the choice of doctors and
put the bean counters in charge.  Only back then we were warned by the
infamous "Harry and Louise" television spots that it would be
government bean counters managing our health.

What irony.  For years the very companies that financed the "Harry and
Louise" ads have flapped their arms wildly to scare us about that old
bugaboo, "socialized" medicine, but while we were looking over there,
they blindsided us with something even harsher:

corporatized medicine, a brave new world in which the Hippocratic Oath
has been displaced by the bottom-line ethos of HMO profiteers like
Richard Scott.  A mergers and acquisitions lawyer who never cared for a
patient in his life, Scott headed the $20-billion-ayear Columbia/HCA
corporation until July 1997.  A far-flung HMO, Columbia/HCA demanded
that its local hospital executives return a 20 percent annual profit to
headquarters, or else.  How did they meet Scott's demand?  By cutting
back on services, on employees, and ultimately on us patients.

One place Scott did not cut back, however, was on his own paycheck.  In
1995, he took a 43 percent salary hike, which meant he drew a million
bucks from the till.  A month.

He is far less generous when assessing his industry's responsibility to
meet the needs of America's sick, lame, and infirm: "Do we have an
obligation to provide health care for everybody?"  this captain of
corporatized medicine recently asked rhetorically.

"Where do we draw the line?  Is any fast-food restaurant obligated to
feed everyone who shows up?"

While it is true that the corporation has long been an economic
powerhouse, since the 1970s it has metamorphosed into something
different and disquieting.  Just as HMOs have seized control of our
health-care system and unilaterally redefined its ethical
underpinnings, so have corporations become the governing force in our
society, reshaping American life to fit nothing more enlightened or
enriching than the short-term profit agendas of these privileged
economic entities.  Everything from our amusements to our government,
from the food supply to the money supply, from language to public
education, from the public dialogue to popular culture--all
corporatized.

In the summer of 1976, while I was visiting with my folks back in
Denison, Texas, my daddy and I were passing a slow Saturday afternoon
together, chatting some, catching bits of the baseball game on TV.  He
was cranked back in his La-Z-Boy and we were sipping a couple of cool
ones when an ad for a national chain of fast-food fish houses suddenly
blared at us from the television, boasting that "Our fish doesn't taste
fishy!"  Daddy blinked a couple of times, turned to me, and said, "I
like my fish to taste fishy," realizing as he said it that corporations
are not beyond tampering even with life's small pleasures.

The true symbol of today's America is no longer Old Glory, but the
Corporate Logo.  No space, no matter how public the edifice or how
sacrosanct, is free from the threat of having "Mountain Dew," "Bane
One," or "Nike" plastered on it.  Not even space itself is
offlimits--one visionary business enterprise is already working on
launching a low-trajectory satellite with what amounts to an
extraterrestrial billboard attached.  It will be programmed to beam
various product logos back to earth from the night sky.  No matter
where you live, from Boston to Bora Bora, you can gaze into the vast
darkness, as humans have for thousands of years, and absorb the natural
wonder of the moon, the Milky Way, and, yes, an orbiting ad for
Mylanta.  Lovely.

If the sky can be corporatized, why not our children's schools?

Kiddos are a huge market--elementary school kids alone spend $15
billion a year from their own allowances, and their parents fork out
another $120 billion buying all kinds of stuff for them, from snacks
and sneakers to such essentials as hair mousse for first-graders and
chocolate-scented perfume by Givenchy.  All this before the teen years,
when hormonally powered consumerism kicks in.

If you think only television hawks these products to our little
nippers, you have not been to a schoolhouse recently.  Ads abound, as
Jack in the Box, Nike, Coca-Cola, and other corporations rush to take
advantage of public-funding cutbacks by offering to help make up a
school district's shortfall.  All they ask in exchange is a little
space on school buses, in the hallways, in the library or gym, on book
covers, on the basketball scoreboard, on the school building itself,
and anywhere else students might see their ads and begin learning brand
loyalty.  What is being sold here, of course, is not space, but access
to something many parents feel a school board has no right to sell:
access to children.

More recently, entire schools have been branded, as various makers of
soft drinks, sneakers, computers and other wares bid against their
competitors to become the "official product" of Bogus T. Malarkey
Memorial Junior High or some such in various school districts across
the land.  This corporate intrusion caused quite a national flapdoodle
in March 1998, when the muckety-mucks of Coca-Cola came to Greenbriar
High in Evans, Georgia, for "Coke Day."  As part of this product
promotion, the cola's marketing executives were invited to address
economics students, chemistry students were assigned to analyze the
sugar content of Coke, and a Coca-Cola cake recipe was used in the home
ec class.  To top it all off, Greenbriar students were to line up in
formation to spell out "Coke," so a promotional photograph could be
taken.

Kids do the darnedest things, though, and senior Mike Cameron had the
temerity and sense of humor (as well as the old-fashioned, 100 percent
American rebellious spirit) to show up for the photo op wearing a Pepsi
shirt.  Pandemonium!  This is disruptive, wailed school officials, this
is insulting to Coke, this is ruining the picture, this is... well,
it's hurting our chance to get cola cash!  For exercising his First
Amendment rights and spoiling the corporate day, Mike got suspended
from school and sent home.  Cooler heads later prevailed, though, and
Mike's suspension was dropped from his record, but not before students
learned that the corporation is a powerhouse in today's schoolhouse,
and it's dangerous to dis the Coke Man.

In case kids miss the corporate handwriting on the walls, advertisers
go straight to the classroom through the mushrooming practice of
providing textbooks, films, videos, computer software, and other
"instructional" materials that also (get ready to be surprised!)

promote the company's products or image.  Writer David Shenk has
reported in Harper's Magazine that one of the most blatant of these
corporate come-ons is the ersatz lesson plan and demonstration kit on
the "scientific method," distributed free to 12,000 schools across the
country by Campbell Soup Company.

Ostensibly designed to introduce youngsters to the ways of science, the
kit invites students to conduct an exciting experiment called the
"Slotted Spoon Test."  What does it test?  Whether Prego spaghetti
sauce is indeed thicker than Ragu.  The lesson materials from Campbell,
which just happens to manufacture Prego, put this question to the
class: "Have you seen the Prego television commercials that use slotted
spoons to compare the thickness of two sauces?

It uses steps very similar to the ones you'll use in the experiment."

How sciency!  Campbell's instructional kit includes a glossy how-to
poster, a slotted spoon, and a coupon good for a big jar of Prego.

Presumably the class is on its own to get the Ragu, but really there is
no need, since the budding scientists are instructed that they have not
done the test correctly unless Prego wins the thickness test.

Campbell's soup is hardly alone in using a lesson plan as a Trojan
horse to get inside the classroom and inside the heads of children.

Hunt-Wesson provides a "Kernels of Knowledge" history package that
lists renowned scientists "who made a difference"--Louis Pasteur,
George Washington Carver, and ... Orville Redenbacher?

Orville's popcorn is, of course, a product of Hunt-Wesson.  Exxon is
also in high schools with a video teaching that the Exxon Valdez oil
spill was not really harmful; chocolate candy companies have a board
game in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades teaching that Thomas Jefferson
himself had spoken about "the superiority of chocolate for both health
and nourishment"; Revlon sponsors a lesson in selfesteem, asking
students to imagine "good hair days" and "bad hair days"; education
about skin comes to kids courtesy of Clearasil;

there is a math "curriculum" that teaches children to count by using
Domino's pepperoni pieces; and some classrooms employ a special
software that teaches reading by getting the kid dos to recognize the
logos of Kmart, McDonald's, Hi-C, and Cap'n Crunch.

These are among some 350 corporations that are disguising their product
pitches as "lessons" that reach millions of students.  This is a
terrific gimmick for advertisers because, as one packager of these in
class promotio s tells its corporate clients, "Coming from school, all
these materials carry an extra measure of credibility that gives your
message added weight."  Fine for them, but for the larger society, this
commercialization of educational materials insidiously perverts the
mission of our public schools from one of teaching citizenship to one
of teaching consumerism.  Citizenship promotes an activist public;

consumerism promotes a passive one--and there you have the deeper
corporate interest in dominating and redefining the public education
system.

Far from fighting this shift, the country's bought-and-sold political
leaders are embracing it, even calling for corporate chieftains to step
in and set national standards for our public schools.  It received
scant media attention, but in March 1996 a National Education Summit
was held for the nation's governors and top corporate executives at the
IBM conference center in Palisades, New York.  President Clinton showed
up at this exclusive tete-a-tete to do a bit of corporate cheerleading:
"I believe this meeting will prove historic," he asserted, and well it
might if the President of the United States so meekly surrenders what
should be a public decision to these narrow special interests.  Clinton
noted that "somebody" must devise new standards for the nation's
schools and hailed IBM, AT&T, Boeing, Kodak, Procter & Gamble, and
others in attendance for stepping up to do the job--never mind that the
corporate agenda for education is one-dimensional, falling far short of
what a national agenda should be.  Stamping out a uniform line of good
workers is hardly the same as preparing young people to become good
citizens, which requires, among other things, nurturing a healthy dose
of skepticism toward corporate uniformity.

What can you expect though from politicians who are wholly corporatized
themselves, dependent on receiving the financial approval of these same
Fortune 500 rulers and totally accepting of the conceit that all things
public are improved by putting a corporate mark on them.  Hell, why not
just privatize the government itself?

Turn the Lincoln Memorial over to Lincoln-Ford so the place can start
turning a buck.

The State of the Union address would seem a natural advertising
opportunity for the "Big Whopper."

Let Barnes & Noble turn the Library of Congress into one of its super
stores putting a Starbucks latte express in the grand foyer leading to
the reading room.

Must the Supreme Court justices wear those awful black robes?  Surely
Ralph Lauren's Polo clothiers could design something more nineties.

The Capitol building itself begs refurbishment as a Disneyland
operation Lobby World with Pluto, Goofy, and the rest of the gang
entertaining us alongside Newt and his scamps.

On April 1,1996, Taco Bell tested these turbulent waters by purchasing
full-page ads in the New York Times and elsewhere announcing:

"Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell."  Proclaiming that this was a move to
help with the national debt, the ad said that the precious American
artifact would "now be called the "Taco Liberty Bell,"" adding that
"While some may find this controversial, we hope our move will prompt
other corporations to take similar action to do their part to reduce
the country's debt."

It turned out to be just an April Fools' joke intended to create a
nationwide media buzz around the corporate name and to launch a new
$200-million ad campaign for the "world's largest Mexican fast food
restaurant."  But, in the company's own words, "thousands of calls
pummeled the Taco Bell switchboard," and talk-radio callers went
ballistic.  Interesting.  Not so long ago the idea of a corporation
buying a piece of America's history and spirit would have been too
preposterous for a stunt like this to work, but today... Indeed, the
National Park Service itself is pushing legislation to create a
corporate sponsorship program that would authorize ten or so "cultural
resource partners" to advertise their association with our national
treasures.  In exchange for donating around $10 million each to the
NPS, Black & Decker chainsaws could be the sponsor of Sequoia National
Forest, McDonald's could run a TV ad in which Utah's Natural Bridges
National Monument metamorphoses into Golden Arches, and Maytag washing
machines could buy the right to use the image of the Old Faithful
geyser.  Too wacky to be seriously considered?  Mattel Toys already is
discussing the idea of buying the rights to market a special Ranger
Barbie--a perky Barbie doll all dressed up in a Park Service uniform.
Wonder if it will be made in the U.S.A.?  No Barbies are.

Both the Clinton Administration and the Republican leadership of
Congress are enthusiastic about the potential for corporatizing these
public resources, not only because it fits with the privatization
mantra chanted by both parties, but also because it makes them appear
to be doing something about our deteriorating network of 374 national
parks.  But raising a hundred million dollars from corporate sponsors
is like trying to fight off a tornado with an umbrella-the backlog of
unfunded repairs and other needs within existing parks now surpasses $8
billion.  What is needed is not a tacky tag sale of America's natural
wonders, but some guts in Washington to provide the public funding
needed to preserve these public treasures for future generations, just
as generations before us did their part.

Which brings me to the ultimate logo opportunity for corporations:

politicians themselves.  After all, corporations own them, why not
brand them?  Have you ever seen a NASCAR race, where the cars, the
drivers, the racetrack, the pit crews, and every other inch of space is
plastered with ads?  A single driver's jumpsuit will have more than a
dozen logos on it, from Gatorade to Clabber Girl baking powder,
Band-Aid to Lovable brand brassieres, AC spark plugs to Zippo Lighters,
Mr.  Goodwrench to Goodyear--and the driver's car is a phantasmagoria
of more decals.

I say we should apply this human bill boarding to office seekers.

In the interest of full disclosure, wouldn't it have been helpful in
the last presidential election to see Bob Dole sporting an R. J.
Reynolds crest on his blazer, a purple-and-orange FedEx hankie in his
breast pocket, the Archer-Daniels-Midland monogram on his shirt cuffs,
a Gallo wine belt buckle, a Citibank gimme cap, the Chiquita banana
seal on his shirt collar, and a club tie dotted with the logos of his
other major sponsors?  Bill Clinton, too, could have been corporately
accessorized by Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Tyson chicken, AT&T, Philip
Morris, Disney, the Lippo Group, and other brands that favored him.
There also should be a rule in Congress that any member speaking for a
bill, either in committee or on the floor, has to wear a windbreaker
with the name of the sponsoring company stitched across the back and
the company logo displayed prominently, if not proudly, on the front.

FORE!

Richard Lederer is the former schoolteacher turned author who has
published compilations of off-the-wall answers students give to exam
questions.  Lederer swears he does not make these up, including this
response to a world history quiz: "Gutenberg invented the Bible, Sir
Walter Raleigh invented cigarettes, and Sir Francis Drake circumcised
the world with a 100-foot clipper."

Ouch.

The corporation has become the Sir Francis Drake of the world of
sports, circumscribing this sphere of our lives with its particular set
of values and changing the way and the reason the game is played.
Indeed, nowhere has the corporate impression on our culture (and on our
children) become more visible than in organized sports.

OK, the corporatization of athletics is not a life-and-death issue, but
in a society that measures a city's big-league status by its major
league franchises, and that has more citizens watching the Super Bowl
than it does voting in the presidential election, the sports scene is
not an inconsequential indicator of what is happening in the larger
culture.

Check out golf (a game described by Mark Twain as "a good walk
spoiled").  The professional golf tour has always struck me as the
ultimate expression of the corporate presence in sports, not only
because the tournaments themselves are unabashedly organized to hype a
company ("AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am,"

"Buick Invitational," "Honda Classic,"

"MasterCard Colonial,"

"Lincoln-Mercury Kapalua International,"

"Shell Houston Open," and "Anderson Consulting World Championship of
Golf," to name just a few), and not only because golfers are walking
sandwich boards (with corporate logos adorning their shirts, shoes,
hats, wristbands, knickers, golf bags, club covers, golf balls,
caddies, and every other salable space), but especially because the
PGA's ranking of top players is determined each year not by the scores
they make, but by how much money they make--Wall Street's true measure
of one's worthiness.

If you harbor any doubt that the corporate identity has thoroughly
consumed the wide, wide world of sports, just give a listen to

Shaquille O'Neal, the basketball star and primo ad pitchman.  In 1996,
after signing a $121 million contract with the L.A. Lakers, he was
besieged by the media asking about the preposterousness of that sum.
Shaq retorted: "I'm tired of hearing about money, money, money, money,
money.  I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi and wear Reebok."

It is encouraging to note that this corporate takeover is not without
its rumbles and stumbles.  The total branding of the '96 Olympics in
Atlanta, for example, was so garish that there was a nearly universal
upchucking by world athletes, spectators, and media alike--not exactly
the image Atlanta hoped to project.  Still, corporate sponsors were
oblivious, relentlessly pushing their presence at every opportunity,
including in the so-called news coverage by NBC.  In one of the
network's syrupy "Olympic Moments" that featured precious-to-the max
profiles of assorted Olympians, Russian weight-lifter Andrei Chermerkin
was used to portray the worldwide triumph of corporate ideology over
communism.  This "moment" showed Chermerkin in the McDonald's franchise
in Moscow, cheerfully chomping into a McBurger and presumably delighted
that "civilization" had at last entered even into the capital of the
old Red Empire.

"Uzhasno!"  he exults.  Only after the Olympics were over and the piece
had been seen by millions worldwide was it learned by network and
McDonald's officials that Uzhasno means: "This is terrible!"

Despite such setbacks, the corporate beat goes on--and is growing
louder and louder, drowning out the games themselves.

Companies that used to advertise their wares on broadcasts of sporting
events now are becoming the event.  Disney Inc."  for example, not only
advertises on sports shows, not only sponsors the events themselves
("Disney World of Golf Classic," among others), not only is a
broadcaster of sporting events (it owns both ABC and ESPN), and not
only has its own sport palaces (it has built the thirty-two-acre,
indoor-outdoor Disney World Sports Complex that will host various
teams, including spring training for the Atlanta Braves), but it also
owns Anaheim's Mighty Ducks of the National Hockey League, owns a
fourth of the California Angels baseball team (and will eventually own
100 percent, once present owner Gene Autry takes his final ride into
the sunset), and reportedly is maneuvering to buy the Los Angeles
Clippers pro basketball team.  This would leave Disney only a football
team shy of achieving the first Ownership Grand Slam in sports ... and
that could be coming soon.

A group of pro-football executives have had discussions with various
corporations and CBS Television about creating a new football league
that would have twelve teams--each one representing not a city, but a
corporation.  Among those named as possible owners are Anheuser-Busch,
Pepsi Co and Federal Express.  I think this is a terrific idea if for
no other reason than it presents the opportunity for some absolutely
great team names!  Instead of "Bears,"

"Panthers," and other ferocious animals, why not some more-descriptive
monikers that truly reflect the fearsome power of the team owners: the
Exxon Oil Spillers, for example, is a natural;

the FedEx Unionbusters rings true; the McDonald's Minimum Wagers says
it all; millions would turn out to boo the Prudential Policy Cancelers;
maybe the GM Job Punters could play in Flint, Michigan; the Monsanto
Cancer Causers would strike terror coast to coast; the Lockheed-Martin
Cost Overrunners is a winner; and what could be more fitting than the
Archer-Daniels-Midland Price Fixers?

THE OLD COLLEGE TRY

Besides hangovers and black-eyed peas for good luck, New Year's Day is
a time for the festive pageantry of the college football bowls!

Actually, the day has been extended to a couple of weeks, and the
pageantry of place--the Sugar, the Citrus, the Cotton, the Gator, the
Alamo, the Orange, the Fiesta, the Aloha, the Sun--has been usurped by
the celebration of the commercial: the Nokia Sugar, the Comp USA
Citrus, the Southwestern Bell Cotton, the Toyota Gator, the Builders
Square Alamo, the FedEx Orange, the Tostitos Fiesta, the Jeep Aloha,
and the Norwest Bank Sun--and in all cases the company gets top
billing. Indeed, some have abandoned any pretense of place or
tradition, going with straight corporate identity-the Car Quest Bowl
and the Outback Steakhouse Bowl, for example (why no logical and
memorable alignments, I wonder, like the Campbell Soup Bowl or the
Ti-D-Bol Bowl?).

Bowl games are the least of it, however, as colleges put their entire
athletic programs, their facilities, their names, and who
knows-what-next up for sale.  Ohio State now plays basketball in the
Value City arena.  Not that the retail chain built the place, but it
simply made enough of a donation to buy the name of the arena.

But the superstar buyers of college athletics are the shoe hawkers.

Reebok has UCLA, University of Texas, and University of Wisconsin, for
example; Converse has its list of client schools, too, as do Adidas
and, of course, Nike--the Gold Medal "Champeen of da World" in logo
proliferation and corporatization of sports.  It is next to impossible
to turn on a televised sporting event without being assaulted by Nike's
check mark "Swoosh" logo, which is emblazoned on players, coaches,
scoreboards, and every other surface in camera's view.  It is so
ubiquitous, such a glaring symbol of the regimenting and overbearing
rule of money over sport that I see it as less a "Swoosh" than a
"Swooshtika."

Nike buys so many college programs--Colorado, Florida State, Illinois,
Miami, Michigan, North Carolina, Penn State, and Southern Cal, to name
a prominent few--that it has a "manager of NCAA relations,"
headquartered in Kansas City, just a short ride down the street from
the offices of this official ruling body of college athletics.

Nike recently even tried to pay the NCAA to let it create (and profit
from) a national college football championship playoff series.

Putting a brand name on the national championship, however, was too
much even for these money-hungry overseers of collegiate sports to
swallow... yet.  Another day, another game.

A short decade ago it would have been unthinkable for reputable
administrators of public institutions of higher learning to slap the
logo of a notorious sweatshop profiteer like Nike on their "student
athletes" and their university, but today it is commonplace.

"Just do it," as the Nike ad instructs.

In 1995 Mark Asher reported in the Washington Post that for about $1.3
million a year in cash, products, and services, Nike owns the rights to
the athletic programs of the University of Michigan.  As part of the
deal, the company provides the shoes, uniforms, wristbands, gloves,
caps, jackets, and other apparel for the players and coaches of all
twenty-three U of M teams, as well as uniforms for the cheerleaders and
shoes for the band.

What does Nike buy for its money and goods?

1. Its "Swooshtika" appears on all the above, giving the company
instant brand-name identity with one of the largest, most successful,
and most often televised college sports programs.

2. A commitment that Michigan's coaches and staff will wear Nike gear
and will advise all the school's athletes "of the advantages" of Nike
products.

3. Promotional appearances by the coaches.

4. Annual participation by the men's basketball team in a Nikesponsored
tournament.

5. Coaches' participation in testing of Nike products.

6. Nike signs on the marquees of both the basketball and hockey
arenas.

7. Full-page color ads in the school's game programs.

8. Nike logo on the university's sports publications and videos.

9. Free retail space in the stadiums and arenas on game days.

10.  Right to design a new logo for the school and to use it on
sweatshirts, caps, and other products for sale.

11.  Right to be the exclusive national marketer of these University of
Michigan products.

In essence, this public university has hired out as a billboard for the
company, corporatizing its name and reputation.

In 1996, Reebok tackled academic freedom itself at the University of
Wisconsin.  Going for the gold, university officials signed away the U
of W name and logo to Reebok in exchange for shoes for its athletes,
despite some campus opposition to dealing with a company known for
paying slave wages to Third World workers.  As in all Faustian deals,
the devil was in the details, including one small-print Satan that
prohibited campus "disparagement" of the company.  The contract
declared that the "university will not issue any official statement
that disparages Reebok," and the "university will promptly take all
reasonable steps necessary to address any remark by any university
employee, including a coach, that disparages Reebok."

"Whoa there," screamed faculty and students alike, "flag on the play,
intentional foul, push 'em back, push 'em back, waaaay back!"

Under pressure from those who do not want to put academic freedom and
free speech up for sale to any old shoe company with a duffel bag full
of bucks, the Wisconsin officials had to back down and renegotiate,
striking the offending language from the contract.

The danger of corporate intrusion is rarely as glaring as in the Reebok
case, posing instead a more subtle but equally threatening shift in
values from public purpose to private profit.  If the bottom line is
your only line, then Nike is your model:

This is a company whose name is used as a verb in Vietnam, where very
young women and girls are employed at sub poverty wages to make shoes
the company then peddles here for $175 a pair; to keep the women and
girls in line, supervisors find it felicitous to strike them
occasionally with one of the company's trademark shoes, thus coming the
new Vietnamese term "to Nike" someone, giving a whole new meaning to
that "Swoosh" logo.

This is a company whose honcho, Phil Knight, concedes that he rooted
for Brazil to defeat the U.S. team in last year's World Soccer Cup game
because--and I quote--"It was a Nike team.  America was Adidas."

This is a company that, right after the '96 Olympic Games, bared its
true sporting spirit by airing an ad that proclaimed:

"You don't win silver, you lose gold," an avaricious attitude that
would make Ivan Boesky, Michael Milkin, Leona Helmsley, and Donnie
Trump wet their pants with envy, just as it disgusts such silver medal
winners as U.S. swimmer Amy White, who said of the ad: "I am insulted
every time I see it.  They are slapping every athlete and every country
that doesn't win gold in the face.  That's not the spirit of the
Olympics."

This is a company that entered a fake team of cross-country skiing
competitors in the '98 Winter Olympics in Japan for the sole purpose of
getting corporate publicity.  Nike recruited two runners from Kenya
(where cross-country skiing is unknown), shipped them to Finland for
several weeks, and paid a reported $200,000 to bivouac and coach them
in the sport's basics.  The company then had the two entered as
"Kenya's team" in cross-country skiing competition in Nagano.  Kenyan
Phillip Boit was pushed by Nike into the grueling ten-kilometer race.
He was not competitive, of course, but Nike didn't give a damn about
such Olympic ideals as individual competitiveness; it was after a
marketing score.  It got what it wanted when Boit finally crossed the
finish line, dead last.  The Norwegian winner of the race happened to
be there, too, and he reached out in an international gesture of
sportsmanship and shook Boit's hand.  What a PR windfall for Nike! This
touching "Olympic moment" was broadcast to a worldwide television
audience, which saw a tired but smiling Kenyan completing the course,
the very personification of the "I can" ads that Nike was running
nonstop during the Games.  Not by accident, Boit was swathed in
corporate "Swooshtikas," just in case the audience missed the crude
advertising connection.  As sports columnist Bob Woznowski so
vehemently put it: "These [two Nike entrants] are not athletes clearing
hurdles to reach their Olympic dream.  These are marketing pawns
financed by well-heeled publicity seekers."  Nike itself retorted with
less than Olympian idealism: "People forget, we are a business, and
part of our objective as a business is to get attention."

THE ART OF THE DEAL

In high school I lettered in a couple of sports, but I never could cut
it in basketball, perhaps because I was short, slow, and clueless.  I
did make the team as a second-stringer back in the ninth grade,
although nearly all my court time was restricted to practice, giving
the A-teamers someone to run around.

It was in a practice session late in the season that I finally realized
I did not have a future in this game.  I was dribbling the ball down
court to the right when I made a pretty good basketball move, whirling
around to my left to drive dare devilishly for the basket ... only to
crash head-on with our team's star, Harold Ballou.  His forehead caught
me right in the mouth, and we both sprawled on the floor.  He was fine,
only a little abrasion, but his thick skull had snapped off my front
tooth and turned my mouth into a bloody, mushy mess.  Yet all the
trainers, coaches, and other players rushed to Harold, encircling him,
patting his hand, and cooing solicitously at him, leaving me on the
side by myself, spitting blood and dazedly groping around on all fours
for my lost tooth, which it turns out I had swallowed.

All these years later I find an allegory for our times in this junior
high collision: Harold-the-Star represents the swaggering owners and
other corporate powers that control today's sports racket; the
solicitous coaches and trainers are our state and local politicians;

and that dazed guy bleeding all over the court is you, the taxpayer.

That the sports world is being wholly corporatized is only the
second-most underreported story in sports; the most underreported one
is that you and I are subsidizing the corporatization.  While every
sport literally is awash in statistics, with our daily newspapers
devoting at least a full page of diminutive, six-point type to
chronicling up-to-the-minute scores, standings, and averages (rivaling,
aptly enough, the amount of type devoted to daily stock market
stats)-the one sports statistic that is never reported is the running
total of taxpayer subsidies flowing to those elites sitting in the sky
boxes.  As Casey Stengel often declared, "You could look it up."

Those corporate-sponsored golf tournaments and bowl games, those Nike
"Swooshtikas" festooned across every stadium, those donations that put
a company's name on a college gym, those companies that bought a piece
of the Olympics in order to be designated the "Official Reconstituted
Meatlike Product" or whatever of the show in Atlanta, and all the other
corporate imprints are being written off by those corporations as
promotional, advertising, and "charitable" expenditures--corporate tax
loopholes that let them quietly slip their multibillion-dollar
sponsorship tab to us.

Then there is the old-fashioned, direct government handout, and no one
has their hands out more than the big shots who own the franchises,
mostly demanding that cities, counties, and states pony up from the
public till to build them shiny new stadiums and arenas with enough
chrome, upholstery, and design gewgaws on them to make a '57 pink
Cadillac look plainer than an old brown Plymouth.

Every sport is playing this game.  Among the ga billionaires presently
receiving or seeking public alms to build luxury houses for their
private enterprises are Ross Perot Jr.  (Dallas Mavericks basketball),
Microsoft's Paul Alien--the eighth richest man on Planet Earth (Seattle
Mariners baseball), media baron Tom Hicks (Dallas Stars hockey), and
Eddie DeBartolo Jr.  (San Francisco 49ers football).

In the September 6, 1996, issue of USA Today, Erik Brady and Debbie
Hewlett wrote an excellent six-page special on the "Stadium Binge,"
which opened with this on-target characterization:

"Remember the rich kid on the block who always threatened to take his
ball and go home if he didn't get his way?  He's been replaced by the
rich owner who vows to take his ball club and leave home if he doesn't
get a new place to play."  To keep the team in town, taxpayers are
asked to build a facility to the specifications of the team owner, the
owner leases said facility for a pittance (or for nothing), the owner
gets to keep all the revenue on everything from ticket sales to the
beer concession, and the owner can walk away from the facility whenever
the mood strikes or a better deal comes along.  There even are deals
that promise to tax local citizens and give the money to the owner if
the team's revenues fall beneath a certain level.  Shouldn't these guys
have to wear ski masks when they walk into city hall?

Still, politicians are eager to appease big business, and they fear
being blamed for losing their city's "major-league status," so they
almost always go along with the blackmail.  Invariably, these
politicians, the chamber of commerce, and the local media dutifully
hail the jobs!  created by subsidizing the team owner, but nearly every
independent economist agrees that this is hogwash, that taxpayers
always lose, pointing out that most of the payroll hailed by officials
goes to players who do not live there in the off-season, and to fat-cat
executives and relatives hired by the owner, with local working stiffs
lucky to get a few part-time, seasonal, minimum-wage jobs.

Despite this, the boom is on!  North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, no
fan of this taxpayer thievery, notes that "stadiums are the only
healthy public housing program we have left in this country."

Brady and Hewlett found that at least forty-five professional sports
facilities were being built around the country at a cost of more than
$9 billion, with four out of five of those dollars coming not from the
owners who milk the profits from these cash cows, but from you and
me--fans and non fans alike.  Worse, the cost of attending a game in
these Taj Mahals has increased to the point that the families of
ordinary taxpayers have been shut out.

Owners don't regret shutting out us "bleacher burns," however, because
they find upscale customers more desirable for their publicly financed
facilities.  They are eager to bulldoze their existing sports houses,
even if these are wonderful places to watch games, and beloved sites
that help define a city's character, because of one thing:

sky boxes--or, as the corporate marketers prefer to call them, "luxury
suites."  Read the stories about each of the forty-five facilities to
be completed by 2000.  The common complaint from each owner was not
that the existing field or floor where the players perform was
inadequate, or that there were too few fans at games, but that there
were either not enough or no luxury suites for preferred clients.

"So build me a new place laden with sky boxes," barks the owner to the
mayor, "or I'll find some politicians in another town who know how to
deal."

The depths of this absurdity have yet to be plumbed, but surely Dade
County, Florida, approached the bottom.  Only ten years ago, the county
completed a pink, art deco-ish, $53-million hall to showcase both the
Miami Heat NBA franchise and the city's NHL franchise, the Panthers.
But Wayne Huizenga, the baron of Blockbuster Video who owns the Heat,
and Mickey Arison, the cruise industry magnate who owns the Panthers,
grew restive: "Not enough luxury boxes!"

"Yes sir," replied the local establishment, and both pouting owners are
now getting new, taxpayer-funded arenas--a $212-million hockey hall for
Arisen and a $210-million basketball chateau for Huizenga, each with
plenty of princely suites they can lease at upward of $100,000 a pop.
Meanwhile, the perfectly fine Miami Arena has gone from pink sports
palace to white elephant in less than a decade, and local taxpayers are
left holding the bag for $38 million in bonds still owed on the
abandoned arena.

We lose more than tax dollars in these rip-offs.  A seismic cultural
shift also has taken place, akin to the proliferation of gated-and
guarded living enclaves for the privileged: sky boxes represent the
economic segregation of the "stands," one of the few remaining social
settings where Americans mingle democratically, where the banker might
sit next to the beautician and the cheers of the CEO mix with those of
the laborer.  Sky boxes, however, now lift the few above the public,
carving out exclusive, glassed-in spaces of conspicuous elitism right
in the middle of the populist rabble.

The Picasso of these high-flying stadium deals is the artful dodger
himself, Art Modell, presently the proprietor of the Baltimore Ravens
football team ... by way of Cleveland.

This guy wins the "Dirty Play of the Decade Award," hands down.  For
years Modell was the lucky owner of one of the most successful NFL
franchises in history, the Cleveland Browns.  In this shot and-beer,
working-class city hard up against Lake Erie, the fans were not merely
loyal to the Browns, but true fanatics, with the diehards in the
end-zone bleachers so raucous and rowdy that the space was proudly
known as the "Dawg Pound"--football at its primal best, with every home
game a citywide civic event.

The city turned out an average of 70,000 ticket buyers a game and
produced the highest TV ratings of any NFL team.  Such fan loyalty made
Modell, a former daytime television producer, wealthy beyond his
wildest dreams.  By 1995 he was the majority stockholder in a football
franchise valued at more than $160 million.  Like all team owners,
though, Modell claimed to be just a civic-minded businessman barely
keeping afloat, poor mouthing that it cost him money to bring football
to Cleveland's burghers.  Financial World magazine, however, pegged the
Modell team's annual profit at $8 million, not counting whatever side
deals, fat salaries, and executive perks he might have taken for
himself.

Not enough, apparently.  With a wandering eye, Art slyly detected a
chance to make a bigger killing in Baltimore, which had lost its own
team to another corporate pirate in 1984 and had been begging the NFL
hierarchy ever since to get a replacement.  Art smelled sky boxes.  But
his dream of reaping riches in Baltimore seemed dashed in the early
nineties, when the NFL announced it was going to expand by two teams,
and the Maryland city was the leading contender for one of the slots.
According to New York Times sportswriter Thomas George, at a closed
meeting of NFL owners to consider each city's bid, one owner
vociferously and successfully opposed an expansion team going to
Baltimore, passionately insisting that the NFL had no business
expanding there and that pro football could not make it in the city,
even "banging his fist on the table for emphasis."

That owner was Art Modell.

Two years later he hijacked his own team to Baltimore.  In 1995, while
Cleveland fans continued faithfully to pack the Dawg Pound for every
Sunday's game, Art was secretly slipping in and out of Maryland to cut
a deal that would rip the Browns out of the hands of Cleveland fans.
This guy has all the characteristics of a dog, except loyalty.  He
finally sealed the deal under the cover of darkness on October 27,1995,
meeting with Maryland Governor Parris Glendening aboard a private jet
on the tarmac of Baltimore's airport.

And what a deal it apparently was.  Despite public money being spent,
details of these payoffs are rarely made public, but various sources
have reported that Modell is getting a $200-million new stadium (with
108 sky boxes!--plus 7,500 premium-priced "club seats") built for him
by the state and leased to him rent-free; he collects the revenues from
all concession sales and parking; he gets a $15-million training
complex; the state has renovated an interim stadium to his
specifications while he awaits completion of his new digs; he received
up to $75 million for moving expenses; he gets a $50 million cash
payment just for doing the deal; and taxpayers will guarantee ten years
of sellouts for the new stadium.

How to pay for this giveaway?  Governor Glendening and the legislature
took money out of state lottery revenues, imposed a new tax, and tapped
other state funds.

"Wait a minute," protested a few legislators, who thought maybe the
school kids of the state might have a more pressing need for these
public moneys than a runaway multimillionaire from Cleveland.  But the
avarice of Art rose to the challenge: "I feel sorry for their
position," he said of the rebellious legislators.

"I feel for the schools," he said, just warming up, "but look at the
positive effect of pro football on a community, the emotional
investment of people at large.  You can't equate that with fixing up
the schools."

THE BOY SCOUT

Debonair dance man Fred Astaire once observed: "The hardest job kids
face today is learning good manners without seeing any."  In today's
corporate climate, good manners are the least of it.  Kids see basic
values like honesty, loyalty, fair dealing, respect, trustworthiness,
responsibility, and team play (each a virtue ostensibly taught by
sports) routinely stiff-armed by the likes of Philip Knight and Art
Modell.  By their ethical standards, the bottom line is the goal line,
and one does whatever it takes to run up the score.

This is a lesson seeping deeper into our culture than we might wish.
This year's top seller of Boy Scout popcorn, for example, is a
thirteen-year-old in Georgia who devised a popcorn-selling strategy
much slicker than the time-honored tradition of going door-to-door or
setting up a table at the shopping center.  Instead, according to a
piece in the Atlanta Journal, this son of a corporate tax accountant
said to himself: "Wait a minute, this is Boy Scouts--there's got to be
a tax deduction."

With his father's help, the lad put together a flier and a sales rap
that he pitched to companies, asking each of them to buy a hundred
dollars' worth of the packaged popcorn to distribute as gifts.
Clever.

If the companies bought the treats to eat, they would get only a $68
tax write-off for each $100 package, subtracting the actual value of
the popcorn from the charitable donation.  But by doling out the
packages to employees and customers as corporate gifts, the popcorn
becomes 100 percent deductible.

Bottom Line: As a result of this tax twist, the boy sold $12,000 worth
of the product--25 percent more than the previous years top sales
boy.

"Basically," this Boy Scout told the newspaper, "the government pays
for it.  And businesses just loved it."

GO PACKERS!

There is another way.  The Green Bay way.

The real champs of the 1997 Super Bowl-winning Green Bay Packers are
not Brett Favre, Desmond Howard, and Reggie White-terrific as they are
on the field--but the team's owners.

The Packers are totally unique in the NFL.  Instead of being owned by
Greedheads like Art Modell, this team is owned by "Cheeseheads"-the
people of Green Bay themselves.  With yellow foam "cheese" wedges atop
their heads and faces painted with the team's yellow-and-green colors,
the diehard Packer fans might appear to outsiders as a bunch of North
Country yahoos, but any given one of them could be a Packer proprietor.
Some 1,900 of the locals, including truckers, barkeeps, merchants, and
bus drivers, own a piece of the Pack, organized back in 1923 as a
community-owned, nonprofit company.  The stockholders draw no profit,
and the locally elected board of directors that operates the team is
unpaid, but all concerned draw great pleasure from knowing that the
Packers are theirs.

What a difference ownership makes.  Not a dime needs to be spent to
hype up fan support, since the team literally belongs to them.  The
town of 96,000 built Lambeau Stadium, owns it, operates it, and fills
each of the 60,790 seats in it for every home game--forty straight
years of sellouts, whether the team is winning or not, and the season
ticket waiting list has 20,000 names on it.

Get this: No ticket costs more than $28, no parking space is more than
$7, there is free parking within four blocks of the stadium, and on
those blustery, bitterly cold, snowy game days, homeowners let fans
park in their garages.

The Packers, which began as the team of the Acme Packing Company, is a
total community enterprise.  Charities run the stadium's concessions,
bringing in volunteers who cook the bratwurst and pour the beer,
earning some $400,000 a year for their groups.

Off-duty police provide stadium security, and are paid overtime by the
team.  If an overnight storm dumps snow into the seats and aisles,
locals simply show up at Lambeau Stadium early with their own snow
shovels and other tools and--without being asked, much less paid--clear
the snow before the crowds arrive.

Green Bay fans and citizens never have to worry that some pirate of an
owner is going to hijack the Pack and haul their team to Los Angeles or
any other big-city market, because Green Bay is the team.

It stands as a shining model of how fans in other cities could get
control of their teams and stop corporate rip-offs.

This is why the other owners in the National Football League have
teamed up to pass a rule specifically banning any future NFL team from
being community-owned.

NPM MEMO

On November 19, 1996, the following internal memorandum was posted on
the Internet, apparently by unnamed disgruntled employees of North Pole
Multinational Inc.

WE DELIVER

MEMORANDUM To: All Employees From: VP Personnel Re: Downsizing

The recent announcement that Donner and Blitzen have elected to take
the early Reindeer Retirement Package has triggered a good deal or
concern about other restructuring decisions here at North Pole
Multinational.

The reindeer downsizing was made possible through the acquisition of a
late-model Japanese sled for the CEO's annual trip.  Improved
productivity from Dasher and Dancer, who summered at Harvard Business
School, is anticipated and should take up the slack with no discernible
loss of service.

Reduction in reindeer will also lessen airborne environmental emissions
for which NPM has been cited and received unfavorable press.

I am pleased to inform you that Rudolph's role will not be disturbed.
Tradition still counts for something at North Pote Multinational Inc.
Management denies, in the strongest possible language, the earlier leak
that Rudolph's nose got that way not from the cold but from substance
abuse.  Calling Rudolph "a lush who never did pull his share of the
load" was an unfortunate comment made by one of Santa's helpers and
taken out of context at a time of year when he was under stress.

As a further restructuring, today's global challenges require North
Pole Multinational to look for better, more competitive steps. 
Effective immediately, the following economy measures are to take place
in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" subsidiary:

The Partridge will be retained, but the Pear Tree never turned out to
be the cash crop forecasted, so we must cut our losses.  It will be
replaced by a plastic hanging plant, providing considerable savings in
maintenance.

The Two Turtle Doves represent a redundancy that is simply not cost
effective.  In addition, their romance during working hours could not
be condoned.  The positions are therefore eliminated.

The Three French Hens will remain intact through next season, although
a cheaper, Mexican alternative is being investigated.

The Four Calling Birds were replaced by an automated voice mail system,
with a call-waiting option.  An analysis is under way by Internal
Security to determine who the birds have been calling, how often, and
how long they talked.

The Five Golden Rings have been put on hold by the Board of Directors.
Maintaining a portfolio based on one commodity could have negative
implications for institutional investors.

Diversification into other precious metals as well as a mix or T-bills
and high-technology stocks appears to be in order.

The S x Geese-a-lay wig constitute a luxury that can no longer be
afforded.  It has long been felt that the production rate of one egg
per goose per day is unacceptable in the face of increased competition
from Pacific Rim nations.  Three geese will be let go, and outsourcing
of this function, including consideration of offshore sources, is under
advisement.

The Seven Svyans-a-Swi'mrmng is obviously a number chosen in better
times.  The function is primarily decorative.

Mechanical swans are on order, and the current seven will be offered
retraining to enhance their out placement

As you know, the Eight Maids-a-Milking concept has been under heavy
scrutiny by the EEOC.  A male female balance in the workforce is being
sought.  The more militant Maids consider this a dead-end job with no
upward mobility.

Automation of the milking process may free the Maids entirely.

They would be allowed to apply as openings occur in divisions where
a-mending, a-mentoring, or a-mulching are needed.

Nine Ladies Dancing has always been an odd number.  This (unction will
be phased out as these individuals grow older and can no longer master
the steps.

Ten lords-a-leaping is overkill.  The high cost of Lords, plus the
expense of international air travel, prompted the Compensation
Committee to recommend replacing this group wilti ten out-o^work
congressmen.  While leaping ability may be somewhat sacrificed, me
savings are significant because we expect an oversupply of unemployed
congressman in the next fewcydes.

E/even Pipwrs Piping and Twe/w Drummers Drumming is a simple case of
the band getting too big.  Substitution of a string quartet, a cutback
on original music, and requiring musicians to provide Mr.  own uniforms
will produce savings that will drojB right down to me bottom line.  In
the long term, digital audio transmission can displace these people
entirely.

Thoitgh incomplete, time-motion studies indicate that 8(Btl<;bte@
dethwtet over twelve days is inefficient.  If we can BSciju
t;in-Hmasupply strategies and drop-ship in one day, ifwanfory costs
wilt fall and service levels will improve.

lastly, it is not beyond the realm of possibility mat deeper cute may
be necessary to maintain NPM's preeminence in the gbbal
gift-distribution business.  Management will do what it must to prevent
further erosion of the profit picture, including scrutinizing our new
"Snow White" acquisition to reevaluate me necessity of having seven
dwarfs when, maybe, two would do.  More on this in a subsequent memo
following the Executive Committee's return from its January retreat in
the Bahamas.

Adapted from an Internet posting, November 19, 1996.

GETTING A LEG UP ON CORPORATIONS

When Yuletide rolls around each year, America is usually blessed with
some terrific news story about a boss-with-a-heart to enhance the
jolliness of the season, giving us all a much-needed chance to wallow
in something positive.

December of 1996 brought news that John To and David Sun, founders of
Kingston Technology in California, had sold a majority stake in their
computer-chip enterprise for one-and-a-half billion big ones.  The
cheerful part is that these suddenly wealthy entrepreneurs did not
merely sack up the money and run--they put $100 million of it into
bonuses and special benefit programs for their 523 employees.

"Fruitcakes," screeched their high-tech corporate peers--"What in the
name of Ebenezer Scrooge are you two up to?"  Nothing.  An amazed media
found that this was no publicity ploy, no tax dodge, no manipulative
management move--it was, simply, sharing.  Sun and To quietly explained
that, see, these creative, hardworking, loyal people at Kingston are
what allowed them as owners to prosper, so the contribution of these
folks should be respected and rewarded.

Odd.

"We want to show you can run a company by putting people first and not
treating them just as expenses."  Odder yet.  But nice.

Aaron Feuerstein became 1995's corporate Christmas story the hard way:
His fabric factory burned down.  He was at a party on December 11
celebrating his seventieth birthday when the call came, sending him
rushing into the night to stand helplessly as Maiden Mills, founded in
1906 by his grandfather, went up in flames.  Thirtyone hundred
good-paying jobs went up with it, and the entire community of Methuen,
Massachusetts, north of Boston, suddenly faced a bleak Christmas and a
dark future.

Feuerstein surprised everyone, however.  Instead of using the fire as
an excuse to ship his whole shebang to Mexico, or to cash out and
retire, he vowed that night to rebuild on the spot.  But here is what
really flabbergasted everyone: He also vowed publicly that he would
keep all 3,100 employees on payroll, with full pay and benefits, while
the rebuilding took place.  Wall Street and its pundits howled in
derision:

"What's gotten into this fool?"  Feuerstein said simply but firmly,
it's the "right thing to do, and there's a moral imperative to do it
irrespective of the consequences."  Then he did it.

True to his word, everyone got paid for December, January, and
February, even though no product was moving.  By March 1996 some
employees were able to start coming back to work on makeshift
production lines, and the rest were put into a training program
Feuerstein set up in a section of Methuen Mall to help them acquire
advanced skills while they awaited reconstruction of the plant.  When
the rebuilt, fully modernized Maiden Mills opened just over a year
later, production already had been restored to pre fire levels, demand
for the factory's fabric was setting records, and 95 percent of the
employees were back on the job.

In an interesting aside, a management professor at the muchoprestigious
Wharton School of Business, having witnessed the rebirth of this
industrial phoenix from his distant ivory tower, later spoke in
wonderment of the owner's commitment to the people of Maiden Mills, as
though Feuerstein had conjured up a completely new, even exotic,
management philosophy: "Employees can be seen as an ultimate
competitive advantage," the professor gushed.

"If you treat them well, they'll pay you back in really hard work later
on."

This is why some say that "Ph.D."  pronounced backward is "Duh!"

To, Sun, and Feuerstein each expressed amazement at the media
hullabaloo over their actions.

"What?"  Feuerstein asked.

"For doing the decent thing?"

Bingo.  Such acts of responsibility are so beyond the norm, so
antithetical to accepted boardroom practice, that when they occur their
very oddity makes them hot-'n'-happening media features.

Indeed, immediately after both of these heartwarming Christmas tales
burst into national news, business analysts rushed forward to dump cold
water on any fantasy that this is the way things should be done or even
could be done in today's complex corporate economy.

Kingston Technology and Maiden Mills, the critics scoffed, are
"privately held" companies, not owned by Wall Street investors as
nearly all major corporations are.  Messrs.  To, Sun, and Feuerstein
could be whimsical with company funds, these scoffers lectured, only
because they were not subject to the short-term profit pressures that
the executives of publicly traded corporations face from their big
investors and Wall Street analysts.  The "corporate system," they
explained, has no room for beneficence toward employees, communities,
or the environment.

None other than Milton Friedman himself, the heavily decorated
establishment economist and patron saint of Wall Street excess, gave
academic credence to such a myopic ideology by asking and answering his
own rhetorical question: "So the question is, do corporate executives,
provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their
business activities other than to make as much money for their
stockholders as possible?  And my answer to that is, no they do not."

So, my question is, if the corporate structure exists only for
stockholders, as Dr.  Friedman makes clear, and since 80 percent of us
are not stockholders, why should the larger public be so permissive
toward this particular business structure, much less allow these
entities to dominate our lives?  You do not have to be the brightest
light on the block to figure out that if the "corporate system" makes
Aaron Feuerstein, John To, and David Sun the anomalies (and, in some
executive quarters, the pariahs) of American business, then it's time
to fix the system.  I know the wisdom of the oft-cited aphorism, "If it
ain't broke, don't fix it," but the equally sagacious corollary to that
is, "If it is broke, run get the toolbox."

Remember Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot's hapless and clueless
running mate in 1992, who opened his part of the GoreQuayle-Stockdale
vice presidential debate that year by posing these two revealing
questions: "Who am I?  Why am I here?"  So, I ask, what is this thing
called the "corporation" and why is it here?  It is time to put this
basic question back into political play.  The corporation has become a
given in our culture, not unlike smog.  Republicans, and Wayne
Newton--it has been with us so long we assume it has always been and
always will be.

Not so.  Even here in Texas, where the corporate logo is almost as
exalted today as the hallowed Lone Star flag, and where state
politicians eagerly play "go fetch" for corporate sponsors, the
ascendancy of big business is relatively recent.  Ours is a state
founded by what the genteel would call your lower social classes:
dirt-poor tenant farmers from the South fleeing debt, mavericks looking
for space to be more maverick, outlaws, rebels, all-around hell raisers
and more than a couple of psychopaths--not sorts to embrace
authoritarian structures or trust amalgamations of money and power.
Quite the opposite--in 1845, the founding constitution of the State of
Texas specifically prohibited the creation of banks!  It also required
anyone wanting to form a corporation to trudge up to the legislature
and get two-thirds of both houses to approve the entity--a hurdle that
was rarely cleared.

Nor was Texas especially quirky on this.  It is not mentioned in the
standard textbooks of American history, but practically all of our
nation's Founders were appropriately anti corporate and at the time of
the Continental Congress, only about forty of these suspect corporate
critters had been allowed to form in our land, and those were kept on a
very short leash.

Like powdered wigs and boiled beef, the corporation is a British
invention, essentially created by the Crown as a legal vessel to amass
the capital needed to exploit the wealth of its American and Canadian
colonies.  Operating on the principle that it takes a dime to make a
buck, the corporation--or "joint stock company," as it was then
known--was a paper structure devised to collect the dimes from English
investors, organize the looting in the colonies, and return the dollars
to said investors.

Of course, looting was nothing new, but this "joint stock" connivance
was a devilishly radical social departure.  For the first time,
ownership of an enterprise was separated from responsibility for the
enterprise.  If an individual business person loots, pollutes, or
otherwise behaves illegally, he or she is individually accountable to
the community for those actions--that is, you can have your sorry ass
hauled into court, be fined, be put out of business, be tossed in the
slammer, or all of the above.  But the corporation is a legal fiction
that lets the investors who own the business skate whenever the
business behaves badly (read: steals, kills, poisons, pillages,
corrupts, and so on), avoiding individual responsibility for illegal
actions done in their name, even when such actions profit them
mightily.  Not only can these aloof owners have their cake and eat it,
too, they can also eat yours and laugh all the way to the bank.

Like letting a cat loose in a fish market, the corporate structure
invites mischief, which is why the powdered wigs on our side of the
Atlantic were so stingy about issuing charters for them and so specific
about what actions the charters authorized.  As Richard Grossman,
author of Revoking the Corporation, and Jonathan Rowe,

 R

contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, have reported in their
investigative writings, the Founders believed that corporate charters
should be authorized only to serve "the public interest and necessity."
Through most of the nineteenth century, state charters typically
limited the corporation to one kind of business, prohibited it from
owning other businesses, strictly limited the amount of capital it
could amass, required the stockholders to be local residents, often
vested part ownership in the state itself, spelled out specific
benefits the corporation had to deliver to the community and even to
particular groups of people (farmers and fishermen, for example) and
put a twenty- to fifty-year limit on the life of the charter.  And,
imagine this, legislatures were not shy about yanking charters when a
corporation went astray from its mission or acted irresponsibly.

What a sensible system!  So what went wrong?

As an old "dicho"--a Mexican maxim--puts it: "Poderoso cabellero es Don
Dinero."  Money is a powerful gentleman.  Just as America's public
leaders clearly saw the dangers of the corporate entity, the avaricious
saw its phenomenal potential to help them make a killing, and they
began early on to lather up politicians with money to try to loosen up
the chartering process.  (Fast-forward to 1985: A Texas state senator
not above using his position to line his own pockets once said to me in
an inebriated moment of candor, "I seen my chances, Hightower, and I
took 'em."  That is about as philosophical as the corporate power grab
gets.) During the Civil War, numerous corporations were chartered to
supply the Union Army, and the commander-in-chief, Abraham Lincoln, did
not find it a positive experience.  In an ominous foreboding of corrupt
practices by today's Pentagon contractors, many of these corporations
delivered shoddily made shoes, malfunctioning guns, and rotten meat.
Honest Abe viewed the rise of corporations as a disaster, penning these
thoughts in an 1864 letter:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and
causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.  As a result of the
war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high
places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to
prolong its reign... until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and
the Republic is destroyed.  I feel at this moment more anxiety for the
safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.

Sure enough, during the next three decades, assorted industrialists and
corporate flimflam artists known collectively as the robber barons were
enthroned, taking hold of both the economy and the government.
Corruption did abound, from state houses to the White House (so much so
in President Ulysses Grant's term that he was compelled to issue a
public apology to the people for the tawdriness of his administration),
and the concentration of wealth in the grasping hands of such families
as the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, and the Morgans
reached proportions unheard of ... until today.

Two major changes unleashed the modern corporation on us.

First was the emasculation of the state corporate charter, removing bit
by bit and state by state all restrictions imposed to protect the
public.  In 1890, for example, a lawyer named James Dill enticed New
Jersey's governor to offer the most permissive charter then available
from any state.  Dill's enticement was both political and personal: (1)
If the governor went along, corporations would come running to Jersey
and gladly pay large chartering fees that would swell the state's
treasury and make the governor look like a fiscal genius; and (2) Dill
would create a company to process the charter applications, and the
good governor would get a piece of this lucrative action.  The governor
seen his chances, and he took 'em.

Thus began a race among the states to see who could give away the most
to lure corporations, which were now multiplying like fleas.

The race to the bottom ultimately was won by Delaware, a DuPont fiefdom
that essentially lets corporations write their own charters and
provides corporate protections from the public, rather than for the
public.  In the April 1996 Washington Monthly, Jonathan Rowe described
the result: "By the time of the Great Depression, Delaware had become
home to more than one-third of the industrial corporations on the New
York Stock Exchange; 12,000 corporations claimed legal residence in a
single office in downtown Wilmington.... By the mid-1970s, half the
nation's largest 500 corporations were chartered in tiny Delaware." The
total physical presence that most of these "Delaware" firms have in the
state is a file folder.

Today the corporate chartering process is so perfunctory that it can be
handled by a phone call.  In the February 1997 issue of American
Airlines magazine, a company that processes corporate charters ran an
ad next to one promoting "Tattoos with Your Logo" and across from one
for "Hair Transplantation" (call 800-NEW HAIR  The chartering outfit
announced in bold type: "You Can Form Your Own Corporation by Phone, in
Any State."

"It's amazing but true," the ad copy avers.

"You know the advantages of incorporating:

Incredible tax breaks.  Protection of personal assets.... You can
incorporate in 8 minutes... over the phone ... for as little as $45....
We can incorporate you in any state and are most famous for our ability
to set you up as a Delaware corporation--the well known corporate
haven."

The other big change came in 1886, when the U.S. Supreme Court
essentially made the corporation bulletproof.  In a stunning and
totally irrational decision made without bothering to hear any formal
arguments (indeed, the learned justices said they did not want to hear
any arguments--case closed, minds shut, go away), the Court abruptly
decreed in a case brought by a railroad company that a corporation is
"a person," with the same constitutional protections that you and I
have, including the right to free speech, which in turn has been
interpreted as the right of the wealthy, the powerful, and the
corporate to buy politicians.

Dr.  Frankenstein could not have done better than the courts and
legislators.  In only a century, the corporation was transformed into a
superhuman creature of the law, superior to you and me, since it has
civil rights with no civil responsibilities; it is legally obligated to
be selfish; it cannot be thrown into jail; it can deduct from its tax
bill any fines it gets for wrongdoings; and it can live forever.

There is a useful saying handed down from the old mountain men: "Never
drop your gun to hug a grizzly."  That's the problem-our politicians
are hugging the grizzly.  In the spring of 1996, with corporate
executives rapaciously whacking jobs and abandoning communities, with
Pat Buchanan stinging the political establishment with his rousing call
to the anti corporate barricades, with even the gray-flanneled New York
Times running a six-part, front-page series tut-tut ting about the
economic and social damage being wreaked by corporate excess--the party
of Teddy Roosevelt and the party of Franklin Roosevelt both sipped
cocktails in the bear's den, way too involved in wheedling for campaign
funds to give a moment's thought to taking any action to tame the
beast.

The two parties could not even bring themselves to debate the issue of
corporate rapaciousness in the presidential campaign.  The ossified
Republican, Bob Dole, mostly expressed befuddlement: "I didn't realize
that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big
issue," the Dolester mumbled just before the New Hampshire primary,
which he lost.  Bill Clinton, on the other hand, the standard-bearer of
the once-proud party of the working class, said that he could feel the
people's pain and that, by golly, he had just the fix for them: He
would convene a White House "Conference on Corporate Citizenship."

He did.  Held on May 16, 1996, the day-long event was no more than a
dog-and-pony show held so the media would cover about a hundred
corporate slicks telling the Prez that, by golly, they felt the
people's pain, too.  Tough turkey, though.  Dwane Baumgardner, CEO of
Donnelly Corporation, did not mention that on the very day he was
sitting there with Clinton and the other conferees clucking their
tongues, his company back in Tennessee was announcing it was shutting
down a plant and punting about a hundred workers.  The only tangible
result of Clinton's conference was the creation of an annual "Ron Brown
Corporate Citizenship Award," named for the former corporate lobbyist
and Secretary of Commerce whose tenure was marked by an energetic
effort to further globalize and eliminate American jobs.  And that was
that.  The President hugged the grizzly, and there was no more talk of
corporate irresponsibility during the campaign.

"Corporations have become the dominant institution of our time,
occupying the position of the church of the Middle Ages and the
nation-state of the past two centuries."  This is not the wail of Ralph
Nader or some other corporate critic, nor is it even a criticism;

it is the wholly approving observation of a new, up-tempo business
magazine called Fast Company.

What are the world's biggest economies?  The United States is at the
pinnacle, of course, and Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and China
are top-ranked as you would expect--but Mitsubishi?  It is number
twenty-two, ranked ahead of Indonesia.  General Motors is number
twenty-six, bigger than Denmark or Thailand.  Ford is thirty-first,
ahead of South Africa and Saudi Arabia.  Toyota, Shell, Exxon,
Wal-Mart, Hitachi, and AT&T each are in the top fifty.

Indeed, Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy
Studies have found that of the one hundred largest economies in the
world, fifty-one are corporations.  Further, the economic growth of
corporations is exceeding that of nations, and their reach knows no
bounds.

If you read the business pages, you will find the captains of industry
unabashedly exulting in their enthronement, declaring their
independence from any social contract or community mores, and from
nations themselves, even the most powerful nations:

"National Cash Register is not a U.S. corporation," CEO Charles Exiey
has announced, "it is a world corporation that happens to be
headquartered in the United States."  Likewise, Unocal Corporation says
it is de-Americanizing by opening a "twin corporate headquarters" in
Malaysia, and other U.S. firms now refer to themselves as multi
domestic corporations."  A shipping executive recently expressed the
prevailing, supercilious attitude of today's corporate peerage when he
proclaimed: "It's a new world.  All bets and all past practices are
off."

Ralph Nader told me about a tense and telling moment at the annual
stockholders' meeting of General Motors in 1996, held in Wilmington,
Delaware (where else?).  The setting was appropriately auspicious, with
the board of directors arrayed like ministers of state across an
elevated platform in a grand ballroom, the GM logo looming above the
proceedings, CEO John Smith in imperious pose at center stage, and row
upon row of stockholders splayed across the floor below.  In the midst
of this pomp and ceremony, a lone stockholder gained recognition to
speak and pose a question.  Noting that there was an American flag on
display to the side of the platform, and observing that GM has
eliminated some 73,000 U.S. jobs while creating almost the exact same
number in low-wage countries in the past decade, the stockholder asked
politely if CEO Smith and all members of the board would rise and join
him in the simple gesture of pledging allegiance to the flag.

There was some embarrassed tittering among the board members, a
scurrying of legal counsels back and forth behind the podium, a bit of
hemming and hawing by the CEO, but the bottom line was no, they would
not.  Reporters were there with their TV cameras and their computer
Power Books recording the moment, but not one whisper of this revealing
exchange made the news.

No single step, no magic fix-it, is going to bring the arrogance of
these elite investors and managers back to earth, but one strong hammer
our democracy needs to have in its toolbox is a corporate charter with
teeth.  Just as the larger community specifies what it expects of poor
welfare mothers, so must we again set strict terms for the much more
generous privileges bestowed on these haughty and domineering creatures
of the state, including making corporate board members and managers
individually responsible for the malfeasance of their enterprises and
reestablishing term limits on each corporation's charter.  Such a
meaningful public charter, along with a straightforward six-word
constitutional amendment that says, "A corporation is not a person,"
would begin to bring the destructive, single-minded profit drive of the
corporation back into balance with the greater goals of our society.

This ain't gonna be easy, to say the least.  As a Republican state
senator from Waco, David Sibley, said about a complex bill he was
trying to maneuver through the Texas legislature a couple of years ago,
"This is harder than playing pick-up sticks with your butt cheeks."
(Now we know what Republicans do behind those closed doors marked
Members Only!) Challenging hegemonic corporate power head-on is made
all the more difficult by the combination of gutless ness and whorish
ness that prevails among our present political leaders.  This is a
struggle that has to be organized and fought with no expectation of
help from those in high positions--not only are the odds against us,
but some of the evens are, too.

On the bright side, people already are focusing on the target,
organizing, and fighting back, with newly aggressive groups like ACORN;
AFL-CIO; the Alliance for Democracy; the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance; the New Party; and the Program on Corporations, Law and
Democracy in the forefront.

And when we think it is too difficult, even impossible, to win such a
battle, it is worth remembering that Americans just like us were here
before ... and have won.  Remember that everything

Lincoln foresaw--enthronement, corruption, aggregation, and
destruction--came true over the next forty years, except the last:

destruction of the republic.  This is because ordinary people rose up
against the corporate giants, the plundering families, and the corrupt
politicians.  In heroic and historic battles from the early 1880s into
the early 1900s, the republic was saved from the overreaching and
overbearing robber barons by the likes of Mary Ellen Lease, called Mary
"Yellin" Lease by the establishment that feared her.  She was popularly
known as the "Kansas Pythoness" for the kind of oratorical sting she
displayed at the founding of the People's Party in Topekainl890:

Wall Street owns the country.  It is no longer a government of the
people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall
Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.  Our laws are the output of
a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.... The
people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus
far beware.

Her war cry to rally oppressed farmers on the Plains was: "It's time to
raise less corn and more hell" She was joined by such leaders as James
B. Weaver, "Sockless Jerry" Simpson, Ignatius Donnelly, and Charles
Macune in the Populist Movement; Samuel Gompers, Big Bill Heywood,
Mother Mary Jones, Joe Hill, Eugene Debs, Clara Lemlich, Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn, and many, many more in the labor movement; W. E. B. Du
Bois among African-American leaders; Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and
Lincoln Steffens in the muckraking press; and thousands more national,
regional, state, and local leaders.

Together they forged a new politics that elected populists, socialists,
radicals, and other noncorporatists to legislative seats,
governorships, and Congress, and while they never elected a President,
they did force both the Democratic and the Republican parties to
embrace their reform agenda, producing the nation's first trust busting
laws, the first wage-and-hour laws, women's suffrage, the first
national conservation program, the direct election of U.S. senators,
and other populist, working people s reforms.

What sparked the success of this grassroots movement was not merely
widespread recognition that things were bad, that the many were being
had by the few, but the realization that it does not have to be this
way, that people themselves can take charge.

Yes, corporations today are conglomeratized, globalized, and more
powerful than any robber baron could have dreamed, but they are not
part of the natural order--they remain an artifice of government.  The
Supreme Court also ruled in 1906 that "The corporation is a creature of
the state.  It is presumed to be incorporated for the benefit of the
public."

When it ceases to be a benefit--declaring itself above the common good
and beyond the common decencies of John To, David Sun, and Aaron
Feuerstein--then we can cease to sanction its incorporation.

As powerful as the corporation seems, remember this: No building is too
tall for even the smallest dog to lift its leg on.

 R

VERNON JORDAN'S DREAM

I was there the day Vernon Jordan gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

By the time he finished, there was not a dry seat in the room.

Jordan is a hell of a guy--smarter than a tree full of owls, he always
has a welcoming smile to greet you, and he can pound a podium with the
best of them.  He had been a savvy and important civil rights advocate
in the 1960s, eventually becoming head of the Urban League, which is
where he first rubbed up against the serious money of Fortune 500
companies, several of which were helping to finance the league.  Vernon
discovered that he looked good in green, and the companies clearly were
impressed with him, so by the 1980s he had made the leap from the
streets to the suites, becoming a savvy and important corporate
advocate.

Ever since, he has been comfortably ensconced in the highpowered
lobbying firm of Washington political doyen Bob Strauss, and he quickly
became a major player among Washington and Wall Street insiders,
helping take care of business for such clients as Philip Morris,
American Airlines, and dozens more.  Next thing you know, he finds
himself a full-fledged member of the corporate class, not only
lawyering for the bigs, but also sitting on the boards of directors
of... drum roll please:

American Express Bankers Trust Corning Dow Jones JCPenney Revlon RJR
Nabisco Ryder Systems Sara Lee Union Carbide Xerox

As Jordan made his way up in the corporate world, he crossed paths with
another corner, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.  The two hit it off,
and Jordan later became famous, then infamous, as First Pal of the
President.  Besides sharing the altruistic goal of helping White House
interns like Monica Lewinsky get jobs, Jordan and Clinton also share
Southern roots, a passion for golf, and, some say, a near-obsessive
interest in sex.  According to a Newsweek report, when Jordan was asked
what he and his buddy Bill discuss on their frequent golf outings, he
said: "We talk pu--y"--and I don't think Newsweek meant puppy.
Whatever, he has long served as trusted family confidant to both Bill
and Hillary, as a behind-the-scenes adviser with unparalleled clout in
the Oval Office, and as a combination of consigliere, financial
rainmaker, and political cheerleader for Clinton.

It was this last role that brought Jordan to New York City in July
1992, where he gave the speech that still burns in my memory.  He was
in the city to help orchestrate the cheering for Clinton's nomination
to the presidency at that year's Democratic National Convention.

Enter from backstage: me.  I was a Texas delegate to the
convention--actually, a super delegate a technical designation that
meant nothing except that my fellow Texans kept referring to me with a
derisive snicker as "Your Superness."  Having been to three national
conventions and been privileged to speak at two of them, I was looking
forward to this one because I had no heavy duties and could mostly just
kick back and enjoy it.  In the Democratic primaries, I had supported
Senator Tom Harkin's failed bid for the nomination, then moved to Jerry
Brown when Harkin bailed out, so I was hardly on Clinton's A-list in
New York.  Indeed, I was one of the few delegates who did not claim to
be an FOB.  (Friend of Bill's), if not actually claiming to have been
his roommate at Oxford (of course he didn't inhale, the room was too
filled with roommates to breathe!).

I was such a latecomer to Clinton's bandwagon largely because I did
know him politically.  As Texas agriculture commissioner during the
family-farm crisis and tractorcades of the eighties, I had visited with
Governor Clinton in Little Rock and tried to get him to take up
leadership of the farmers' cause nationally.  No go.  Just as he now is
from the White House, I found Governor Bill eager to be "for the small
farmers of Arkansas"--as long as this did not require him to do
anything that might actually help them, such as taking on the bankers
who were choking the life out of them or challenging the big processors
that were cheating them.  When it came time to deliver, the guy was all
hat, no cattle.

Still, as we used to say in high school, you don't have to be in love
to dance.  By convention time, Superdelegate Hightower of Texas was
ready to dance with the Arkansas Traveler or anyone else who could
deliver the White House from the clutches of George Herbert Walker Bush
II.  While I knew that Clinton was no FDR, no LBJ, and maybe not even a
Jimmy Carter, I felt that at least he would not push Republican
policies to crush the middle class and the poor.  (OK, so I
underestimated the big galoot, but it seemed a fair assumption at the
time.) As soon as I arrived in New York, though, I knew that something
major had happened to my party.  I opened my delegate's packet and
right there on the official program of the 1992 Democratic National
Convention was this startling proclamation:

HOSTED BY

AT&T, AMERICAN EXPRESS,

NYNEX CORP.  AND TIME WARNER INC.

Great galloping ghosts of Thomas Jefferson, Andy Jackson, and William
Jennings Bryan--was I at the Republican convention?  Now, I had been to
the state fair twice and had been a Texas politician for a decade, so I
did not come to New York a virgin.  I was fully aware that Wall
Street's finest have long had a back street affair with the Democratic
hierarchy, but Clinton's convention took the relationship to a
different level altogether, formally and publicly wedding the "party of
the people" to the bigamist corporate powers that had long ago tied the
knot with the GOP.

This wedding was, of course, about money and access.  The four
"principal sponsors" had put up $400,000 each to headline the '92
convention.  Dozens of others--including Philip Morris, Shell Oil,
Coca-Cola, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and ARCO--had shelled out a minimum
of $100,000 each to become "managing trustees" of the party.

Trustees?  Since when do Democrats have trustees?  I asked around, and
none of the elected delegates I talked to knew there were such
privileged positions, much less that they were for sale to the very
same corporate elites that are kicking the stuffing out of working
families and others who form the core of the party's delegates and
voters.  More infuriating, while Democratic delegates were lucky to
catch a glimpse of Clinton or Gore as the daring duo dashed about town
in their limousine convoys, the trustees were getting major face time
with the two big guys all week, talking policy over eggs Benedict at
small, very private brunches, or just schmoozing one-on-one over
late-night cocktails in the President-to-He's suite.  It was a
foreshadowing of the infamous White House coffee klatches and Lincoln
Bedroom over nights that Clinton would hustle up for big corporate
donors in '95 and '96.

Technically, the convention was held in Madison Square Garden, but
there seems to have been a pre convention that took place inside the
New York Stock Exchange, with major corporations buying shares in the
party as fast and furiously as the conventioneers were now buying
trinkets and T-shirts to take back to Tallahassee, Keokuk, and Tacoma. 
Robert Rubin, who would become a top dog in Clinton's cabinet but was
then a top dog at Goldman Sachs (Wall Street's leading marketer of
government bonds), chaired the Host Committee and had put out a "Buy!" 
signal on the convention.  There even was an "adopt-a-delegate" program
that allowed companies to purchase the right to sponsor entire state
delegations--we Texans were the property of Barnes & Noble, for
example, Florida belonged to Merrill Lynch, Michigan was picked up by
Met Life, both North Dakota and West Virginia were acquired by Pfizer
(take two, they're small), and on down the list.  In addition, every
coffee, breakfast, brunch, lunch, high tea, happy hour, cocktail party,
and any other event involving edibles or potables had its own corporate
sponsor, with several of the company's slicks-in-suits standing around
with forced smiles trying not to get their shines messed up by us
riffraff who were merely delegates.

These were the public gatherings.  The printed schedule of the week's
events also was heavily larded with "by invitation only" functions,
including the R. J. Reynolds brunch at the St.  Regis for Senator
Wendell Ford, the "Baby Bell" phone companies' reception for
then-speaker Tom Foley at Cafe Iguana, the Kerr-McGee break fast at the
Plaza honoring Senator David Boren, the Goldman Sachs soiree (there is
that bond connection again) at the Museum of Modern Art paying tribute
to Democratic governors, the Natural Gas Association's dinner-dance
cruise celebrating the then-chair of the Senate energy committee aboard
the yacht Princess, PaineWebber's romp at Tavern on the Green for
Democratic senators, and--my personal favorite--a gaggle of corporate
sponsors hosting the Senate committee chairs at, appropriately enough,
the Central Park Zoo.

With dozens more of these exclusive events held at New York's most
fashionable watering holes, nomination week was transformed into a
corporate fund-raiser interrupted only briefly by a convention.

We practicing Democrats, who were kept on the far side of the velvet
ropes at these private affairs, were not even allowed to peer into the
goings-on inside, but we could hear plenty of big, wet smoooooching
sounds.  Just the sheer volume of corporate functions and functionaries
had to convince even the most gullible of us delegates that the party
might be over for us.  As blues master Albert Collins put it in one of
his songs: "Too many dirty dishes in the sink for just us two You got
me worried, baby Who made them dirty dishes with you?"

Then there was the train.  Any delegates who felt at all squeamish
about the garish corporate takeover of the convention upchucked on
their shoes when they heard about Victory Train '92.  Congressional and
party bigwigs rode to New York from Washington's Union Station aboard a
specially chartered train ... paid for by corporations and lobbyists.

"Once aboard, you'll be able to roam the train and enjoy the ride with
Members of Congress, Democratic governors and mayors..."  promised a
promotional piece from party headquarters, selling space to lobbyists
for $25,000 and up.

The ride was closed to the media, but Sheila Kaplan of Legal Times
managed to scramble on board and filed this report:

"Although the DNC would not divulge the names of its big-ticket donors,
a stroll through the train revealed that [lobbyists] for many of the
nation's biggest companies had taken the DNC's bait.  Among them:
Stephen Paradise, senior VP for congressional and regulatory relations
of the New York Stock Exchange; Paul Equale, senior VP of government
affairs for the Independent Insurance Agents of

America; Sharon Spigelmyer, manager of federal services for Arthur
Andersen and Co.; and Harry Wiles II, VP of federal affairs for the
Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America."

Pentagon contractors, the Bell phone companies, banking interests, and
others took the joyride, too, imbibing freely from the antique bar car,
snacking from silver platters of munchies, and, mostly, taking
advantage of four uninterrupted hours of access to top lawmakers and
other public officials from whom they needed favors.  As one lobbyist
told Ms.  Kaplan, "What was the most fun was that they were a very
captive audience."

On Wednesday morning of convention week I was to address the breakfast
meeting of the Wisconsin delegation, bivouacked at the St.

Moritz Hotel.  Miller beer was the morning's sponsor, in charge of
bringing home the bacon to the Wisconsinites, though many of the hale
and hearty delegates of this fun-loving state commiserated with me that
the brewer's own product was not on the table--breakfast of
champions.

Three of us were set to speak that morning and, as the time drew nigh,
Vernon Jordan leaned into me and asked if I minded if he went first,
for he had many fish to fry that day.  Not at all, I responded, and am
I glad I did, for it gave me a front-row seat for Vernon's "I Have a
Dream" revelation.

He lit up the room with his personality and passion, going on for some
fifteen, twenty minutes about the virtues of his personal friend, the
"Man from Hope."  I was as mesmerized by Vernon's eloquence as the rest
of the room, applauding as he reached full oratorical throttle on the
do-or-die necessity of putting Clinton in the White House.  Then, in a
sudden, theatrical move, Jordan reached across the podium and pointed.
Was it a teacher he was singling out, a factory worker, a senior
citizen, a child?

No, he was pointing to one of the Miller beer placards that our
corporation-of-the-moment had placed on each table.

"This," Vernon pleaded, "This"--and someone hesitantly lifted a Miller
placard to this powerful man's outstretched hand.

"This," he said, finally clutching it, "is why we must have Bill
Clinton, a Democrat, in the White House.  Miller beer is owned by
Philip Morris, and I represent them in Washington.  I want you to know
that I'm tired of taking my clients in to see a Republican

President, I want them to be able to walk into the Oval Office and be
greeted by a Democrat!"

And you say there is no idealism, no crusading spirit, no dreamers left
in the Democratic Party.  Vernon Jordan has been to the
mountaintop--and I was there when he came down to tell us about it.

I still shiver at the memory.

HIGH-TECH EXCESS

When I was growing up, my folks had a magazine-wholesaling business,
which meant that twice weekly they hauled heavy bundles of every
publication from TV Guide to Playboy to the newsstands, grocery stores,
and other retail outlets throughout the greater metropolitan environs
of Denison, Texas.  When I was about thirteen, once I finally got
enough heft on me to outweigh a bundle, it became one of my family
duties to help load Daddy's panel trucks for the next morning's
delivery.  I was thrilled, because the job also required me to back the
trucks down the alley and into the loading area--my first experience
behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.

The fact that I learned to drive backing up might explain my failure
today to appreciate fully the plethora of blessings showered upon us by
the "technological revolution," the "digital age," the "information
superhighway," and the "bridge to the twenty-first century."

Not that I am anti tech  No, not at all.  True, I have no VCR, CD
player, or even a doorbell, and I am absolutely hostile both to call
waiting and to the use of cell phones in public places (a death penalty
offense, in my opinion).  Sitting on the Internet for hours holds about
as much appeal for me as sitting on the Interstate.

However, twist-off beer caps--now that's progress.  Also, the fax
machine--I worship it.  I have an answering machine, too (and wish
everyone did), a mulch mower, an automatic defroster on the rear window
of my Ford and--check this out--my own Web site
(http://www.jimhightower.com)!

But let's back up a minute.  High tech is getting way out of hand, put
forward as "the answer" by a lot of people who do not seem at all clear
on the question.  We have bad television in this country, for example,
so Wall Street and Washington have worked out a technological plan to
deliver 500 channels of it on new, high-resolution TV screens. Hello?

As Hemingway wrote, "Never mistake motion for action."

Likewise--despite what we are told by corporate hustlers, presidents,
assorted "futurists," PhDs, Newts, Good Morning America, psychics, Bill
Gates (see number one), and other carny barkers of the New Wave--never
mistake technological advances for progress.  I offer the following
three points about parking meters, penises, and peppers in evidence,
and rest my case.

PARKING METERS

Herewith a story of villainy and heroism, starting with the first.

Mr.  Vincent Yost of Philadelphia undoubtedly would disagree that he is
a villain, probably even counting himself in the company of Benjamin
Franklin, Eli Whitney, and Thomas Edison as technological tinkerers who
have improved the human condition.  But you be the judge.  If you
thought nuisance technology surely had bottomed out with the advent of
car alarms and automated phone solicitations, you had not figured on
Mr.  Yost's high-tech parking meter.

I start from the position that the parking meter is not our friend.

It tends to expire most inconveniently, usually resulting in a fine,
but even when we operate within the time limit imposed by the damn
thing, it still amounts to taxing us to park at curbs we have already
been taxed to build.

But existing parking meter technology does occasionally allow us one of
the few, truly triumphant moments humans get in urban life: finding an
empty space with time left on the meter.  When I pull in and find ten
minutes or so gratis, I cannot help but pump my fist and shout, "Yes!
This is my day."

It is this small joy that Vincent Yost wants to take from us.  His
company, Intelligent Devices Inc."  is testing and preparing to market
a new line of fiendish, computerized meters that will use infrared
sensors to erase any time that is left on the meter when a car pulls
out of its space.  Worse, Yost's impudent contraption will not let you
hold on to your parking spot by adding more money to the machine.

Oh yes, you can feed quarters into its maw to your heart's content, but
nary a minute's credit will it register, while it glares defiantly at
you with its single electronic eye.

This "intelligent meter" (Yost's term) also keeps track of how long
your car has been parked at an expired meter.

"No more running up [to a ticketing officer] and saying "It just ran
out,"" brags this pitiless technician, diabolically chortling, "The
meter doesn't lie."  As an added twist of the screw, he makes it easier
for the ticketers to nail you by replacing the subdued red flag of
today's devices with a bright red light.

No way, you say?  Look for it at a parking space near you soon.

Cities make a ton on our parking meter change and fines, and the
prospect of collecting more is like a vision of sugar plums dancing in
the heads of local officials.  Yost has the numbers to excite them--a
test of his smart machine in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania,
jacked up the average weekly take per meter from $12.45 to $44.  This
year he will position 200 of what he impishly calls "ruthlessly
efficient" instruments around the country as demonstration projects
requested by a half-dozen cash-hungry city bureaucracies, from New York
City to Kansas City.

Turn now to the heroine of our story, who is a criminal.  At least that
is the view of the gendarmes of Cincinnati.  Of course, many of
America's folk heroes have been outlaws--Jesse James and Pretty Boy
Floyd come to mind--and now we can add the name of "Ma" Stayton, the
Meter-Feeding Granny.

A sixty-three-year-old grandmother, Sylvia Stayton was headed into a
Kinko's store in Cincinnati's Clifton neighborhood last year when she
noticed that a policeman was poised to write a ticket.

Before he could do the deed, however, Ms.  Stayton slipped alongside
him, asked that he spare the poor soul, and deposited a nickel in the
red-flagged device.  Noticing that the next meter had expired, too, she
stepped over and put a dime in it.  Fifteen cents' worth of kindness.

She said later, "I hope somebody would do that for me."

The officer was not charmed.  He told Ma Stayton that it was a civil
violation in Cincinnati to put money in expired meters, and he asked
for her ID.  She did not give it, thinking he was kidding.  He was not.
He told her she was under arrest.  Thinking he had now gone from
kidding to silly, she started to walk away.  Bad move.  He grabbed her,
twisted her arms behind her back, handcuffed her ... and hauled Granny
to the pokey, where she was booked for "interfering with the duties of
an officer" and tossed in a cell.

Nor did cooler heads prevail higher up in Cincinnati's hierarchy:

"We're not dropping the case because she's a grandmother," snapped the
city prosecutor, who promised to bring down the hammer of the law on
this promiscuous meter-feeder.  The authorities tried to get her to
accept a plea bargain, in which she would admit to guilt but receive no
fine.  Stayton stood her ground, though, saying simply: "I didn't do
anything wrong."  She instantly became a champion to all of us fed up
with being pushed around by machines and the technocratic authorities
who tend them.  A "Free Sylvia" movement swept the city, complete with
a T-shirt picturing her behind bars made of parking meters and the
line, "Guilty of Kindness," emblazoned underneath.  A "Sylvia Stayton
Legal Abuse Fund" was started, and the Gary Burbank Show on radio
station WLW even came up with the ballad of the "Grandma Meter Maid,"
sung to the Marty Robbins classic "El Paso":

The Grandma was adding more time on the meter.

The policeman said "Lady, you're breaking the law!"

But Sylvia ignored him and dropped in a quarter, Down went his hand for
the cuffs that he wore.... It's all great fun, unless you are Sylvia.
She was forced to hire an attorney and face trial on February 5 of
1997.  The city put two prosecutors on the case, and they went at her
like she was Ma Barker the bank robber, not Ma Stayton the
meter-feeder.  So determined were they to make an example of her that
they spared no expense in amassing a legal case that took two days to
present to the jury.  Of course, they only succeeded in making an
example of themselves and Cincinnati (Town Motto: "We go the extra mile
to crush kindness and look really, really, extraordinarily,
supercalifragilisticexpialidouciously stupid").  Sure enough, Sylvia
was declared guilty of interfering with an officer by putting 15 cents
in two parking meters, and the judge slapped her with a $500 fine,
which was more than covered by outraged citizens across the country who
heard her story and sent checks, along with their heartfelt thanks for
standing up for us humans against autocratic parking meter codes.

Sylvia Stayton's name will live on as a heroine of the human struggle,
but the technocracy is relentless: Cincinnati officials have ordered a
test installation of Vincent Yost's parking meters.

PENISES

It seems like only yesterday that technologists of the fashion,
fragrance, and body-enhancing industries pretty much left us men alone,
focusing their dollar-sign eyes solely on the makeover of women.

Now, though, the same fashionists who developed the Wonderbra are
pushing their latest breakthrough, the Super Shaper Brief. Essentially,
these are padded jockeys to enhance the assets of the male bod--undies
with sewn-in, seamless posterior pads to make us guy-types appear to
have firmer, rounder, tighter buns, for $24.95 a pair.  And for you men
who worry that you were shorted by nature, for five bucks extra, Super
Briefs offer an optional snap-in codpiece, or "endowment pad," as they
prefer to label it.

Naturally, men stink.  But a little deodorant and aftershave won't cut
it anymore.  The fragrance industry insists on enhancing the male
smell, so olafactorists (oh yes, there is such a branch of industrial
technologists now) are constantly scouring the globe for new aromatic
ingredients to produce tomorrow's scented sensation.

Calvin Klein's Escape for Men has been such a big seller, say the
scientists who concocted the stuff, because it smells like "birch twigs
sweating in a sauna."  I guess that's better than the smell of "Bubba
sweating in a sauna," but I'm not sure.  The big fragrance news,
however, is the recent discovery of an ingredient taken from a rare
Costa Rican insect that will let us "smell just like ambergris." Great!
Can't wait.  What is ambergris?  I looked it up: "an opaque secretion
of the sperm whale."

At least those enhancements do not hurt, which is more than can be said
for phalloplasty.  The vanity industry that brought our culture the
horrors of silicone implants and other breast enlargement surgeries has
now turned its attention to an essential national need:

"penile enlargement."  Apparently the lengthening operation was first
developed by a Chinese doctor with the almost-eponymous name of Long
Daochao, and was brought to the United States in the early 1990s, where
it nicely complemented a penis-widening process developed in the late
eighties by a Miami doctor whose previous specialty was silicone lip
enlargements.

Do we need this?  What happened to the true-life wisdom of the old
blues song, "It ain't the meat, it's the motion"?  Never mind logic,
though; apparently some men are willing to believe that artificial
augmentation will improve their lives--the Wall Street Journal reports
that phalloplasty has become a major profit center for several plastic
surgeons, former hair-transplant entrepreneurs, some urologists, and
... well, who knows?

Practitioners of penile enlargement do not seem to follow standard
surgical protocol, instead openly soliciting with ads in local sports
pages and in such men's magazines as Penthouse, asking customers to
call phone numbers like 1-800-BIG-MALE.  The procedure is not taught in
any university, is mostly performed in private offices rather than
hospitals, is not monitored by any federal or state agency, and is so
risky that malpractice insurers rarely cover physicians who perform
it.

As you might expect, this "medical specialty" presently finds itself
awash in malpractice suits by patients whose complaints range from
disappointing results to impotency.  Still, there are some customers
who claim to be happily enhanced, like Frank Whitehead, a Southern
California entrepreneur who went in for both a lengthening and a
widening job.  He told Journal reporter Lisa Bannon that the makeover
really has put a strut in his step: "Now [when] I go into business
meetings, I'm thinking, "If you guys had just half of what I have.""
(It is said that when someone loses sight or hearing, other senses
increase to compensate for the loss, but I wonder if the converse is
true, if penile enlargement, for example, necessarily produces a
commensurate shrinkage in IQ?  Someone should study this.) Meanwhile,
there are men suffering from a very serious condition called "erectile
dysfunction," resulting in a debilitating and often heartbreaking
impotency.  Once more, though, technology looms to the rescue with a
prescription drug that apparently produces its desired effect on the
male organ in 80 percent of all cases.  Good for science!  This
uplifting news, however, is tempered by certain practical shortcomings,
such as the fact that the drug is not taken orally, but in the form of
a shot.

"No sweat," you say, "I can take a shot."  Sure you can, Big Guy, but
this is not a shot in the arm or even in the tush.  You take this drug
by injecting yourself in the very place that probably would be tops on
your list of places you would least like to have injected: your very
own personal sexual organ.

Imagine the scene: romantic music, lights low, a little wine, she is in
the mood, the passion is palpable, the moment is nigh, and you say,
"Excuse me, I'll be right back."  The next voice she hears from the
bathroom is yours: "Eeeeeeeeeyowwwwwwwwww!"

Well, sniffed an official of the Food and Drug Administration,

which approved this drug in 1995, "It's not an aphrodisiac."

What about men who are perfectly happy with the size, shape, and
function of their apparatus?  Glad you asked.  The technicians (who
never seem to rest) have been at work on something you probably do not
know you have, namely "sperm stems."  It seems that each of us males
produce bazillions of teeny-tiny bits of hyperactive matter called
"spermatagonical stem cells," the thingamajigs that actually produce
our sperm.

So here comes Dr.  Ralph Brinster, a University of Pennsylvania
veterinarian (Did he say "veterinarian"?  Yes, he did), who has been
messing with our stems and, through them, found a path to man's
long-sought, ultimate goal: immortality.  In his lab, the good doctor
has discovered that sperm stems can be frozen today and kept frozen
until needed, at which time they can be thawed out and (this is not a
Monty Python routine, this is true) transplanted into the testes of a
mouse, where they will promptly begin making human sperm again.

What good is this?  Say you are about to die.  You want to "live"
beyond the grave, so you have a milk carton or so of your sperm stems
frozen and stored.  Fifty, a hundred, even a thousand years later, a
woman could decide (for whatever weird reason) that she wants your
baby.  No problem--the technicians can unfreeze some of your stems, pop
them into a mouse's testes to produce some of your sperm, extract said
sperm from said mouse (mouse masturbation being another advance for
which American science is so justifiably proud), artificially
inseminate the woman, and--voila!--you are reborn.

PEPPERS

Cal Ripken Jr.  is a joy to watch as a baseball player.  A cinch
Hall-ofF amer still at it for the Baltimore Orioles, in 1995 he broke
Ironman Lou Gehrig's supposedly unbreakable record of 2,130 consecutive
games played, capping his fabulous night with a home run in his last
at-bat.  He then took a dramatic victory lap around the field to the
thunderous applause of some 48,000 fans in Baltimore's Camden Yards
Stadium and to the heartfelt cheers of millions of us watching on
television at home.

But Ripken really won my heart by something he did not do.  He says he
did not watch the videotape of his record, his homer, and his victory
lap.

"I thought I wanted to look at it right away because the experience was
so great," he told sportswriters a year after the accomplishment.

"But the longer I didn't watch it, the more I felt the need to just
preserve the memory that was in my mind.  I have this special
perception of it, and I'd like to keep it as long as I can."

The real thing can be so good that it needs no technology to enhance
it.  Let the natural event suffice.  But it seems to be impossible to
shoo the engineers off a good thing, even if that thing is the ultimate
food of the gods: the noble jalapeno itself, the zenith of pepperdom.
For centuries nature's own jalapeno has been a staple of Mexican and
Southwestern-U.S. cooking, and now its popularity has swept our
continent--I know, because I have been fed enchiladas ver des in
Milwaukee, huevos rancheros in Amherst, ceviche in Chicago, and pescado
veracruzano in Portland--and I am alive to tell about it.  All of these
comestibles were graced with just the right amount of the pungent,
slightly smoky, and moderately hot jalapeno.

But now come the storm troopers of homogenization, the food
technologists at Pillsbury, Campbell Soup, Pepsi Co Nestle, and Kraft,
who have used their deep-pocket marketing clout to dominate the grocery
shelves and to gain control of more than half of the Mexican-food
market in the world, mostly by snapping up regional companies and
reengineering authentic products to fit sales strategies.

Apparently, to determine the level of "spiciness" in their Mexican
edibles, these marketeers are all conducting their taste tests on
Norwegian-Americans in someplace like Scandinavianville, Minnesota,
where they consider Miracle Whip to be "a little zesty."

The new products of these processors are about as Mexican as
marshmallows.

Indeed, at the Pillsbury Technology Center in Minneapolis, where
engineers actually study things like frijole texture and analyze the
porosity of tortilla chips through electron microscopes, a twenty
member development team for its Mexican-food line includes not one
Mexican or Mexican-American.  Christopher J. Policinski, who believe it
or not is VP of Pillsbury's Mexican-food subsidiary, essentially says
his conglomerate does not care about authenticity, pointing out that
"Internally, in our memos, we always put the word Mexican in quotes."

Especially stinging to us Texans, though, is the betrayal of Pace
Foods, the once-proud San Antonio company that built a salsa empire on
the jalapeno plant.  Pace ran a wildly popular commercial a few years
back featuring a chuck wagon cook who tried to pawn off a wimpy hot
sauce on the cowboys around the campfire.  Where was this godawful
stuff made?  the cowboys demanded.  New York City, was the cook's timid
reply.  New York City?!  the cowboys bellowed in unison, and then one
of them said calmly, but firmly: "Get a rope."

Today, Pace is the property of Campbell Soup, a New Jersey company!

Get a rope, for the Campbellized Pace has emasculated the mighty
jalapeno.  Led by Pace's VP of technology, Dr.  Lou Rasplicka of
Nebraska (need I say more?), the company conducted a top-secret
research project in Hawaii to gringo-ize the jalapeno.  Code-named
"Operation Big Chill" (who comes up with this stuff?), the genetic
crossbreeding project literally removed all the capsaicin from the
pepper, the natural substance that gives the pepper its kick and its
raison d'etre in Mexican cooking.

Campbell's food technicians "machined" the jalapeno with a
"high-pressure liquid chromatograph" that measures the capsaicin bite.
A jalapeno runs about 150 parts of capsaicin per million on average.  A
real hot one is 400.  Campbell's new chili runs zero.  Nada on the heat
index.  The result is a pepper that looks like a jalapeno, but tastes
like a bell.

Pace's hired apologists say this is about choice, "the freedom of
consumers to choose the level of heat in their salsa," the company
president told the New York Times.  Neither he nor the Times noted,
however, that Campbell's does not need a flock of engineers in white
smocks manipulating the genetic heat of jalap enos to make "cool
salsa"--just use less of them in the salsa, or none.

Food historian Sidney Mintz of Johns Hopkins University notes that
no-heat jalap enos are a primo example of how the technocrats and
corporatists of the New World Food Order pretend to embrace a
multicultural America, when they actually are deculturalizing our
country.

HAPPINESS

C. E. Stubblefield made a name for himself in Texas barbeque, no mean
feat in a state where good brisket is worshipped with almost the same
fervor as cows are worshipped in India, a state where every Billy Bob
and Tammie Jo with a smoker and a jar of "Momma's secret sauce" claim
to make the best Q in the known universe, a state where you can find
barbequed goat, armadillo, javelina, hormone free beef, arugula,
catfish, ostrich, craw dads roadkill, tofu, or anything else that might
suit your taste.

Stubb, who was taken to BBQ heaven a couple of years ago, served up his
specialties at his joint located inside Austin's legendary blues house
Antone's, and people came from miles around to enjoy a plate of
whatever the man was dishing out that night.  His reputation was not in
his sauce or smoking technique, not in some marketing gimmick or
franchising, but in him.  Truth to tell, you could get better barbeque
elsewhere, but you could not get a better barbeque experience anywhere
else.  A tall man filled with tall tales, Stubb and Stubb's (he and his
place were one and the same) were pure happiness, just plain fun, and
full of good life.  When Austin writer Don McLeese asked Stubb what
made his food so special, he replied, "I would say it's the people I
love to cook for.  There's a deep separation between cooking for money
and fame, and cooking to make somebody happy.  My secret is I care
about it."

Imagine that.  Cooking to produce happiness.  Imagine this: organizing
work to enhance happiness, governing to promote it, educating to
achieve a higher level of it.  When asked, nearly all of us say that
what we really want from life is "happiness," yet almost nothing in our
entire social structure is set up with happiness as a consideration,
much less a goal--not jobs, for sure; not schools or careers; not the
political system or the consumer economy; not our neighborhoods and
shopping centers; not even vacations, which we mostly spend gasping to
catch our breath for a couple of weeks before plunging back into the
chase ... for what?

Politicians are practiced at promising a chicken (or a tax cut) in
every pot and are adept at asking, "Are you better off than you were
four years ago?"  (both Reagan and Clinton used that one), but when is
the last time you heard anyone in politics ask either you or the
country: "Are you happy?"

It is neither a frivolous nor a new question for American politics.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.

So reads the second sentence of our country's most basic statement of
purpose, the Declaration of Independence, July 4,1776.  The third
sentence declares that when a government fails to secure these
unalienables for the people, then the people have the right to toss
that government and set up another one organized in such a way that is
"most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"Pursuit of Happiness" was not merely a throwaway line by Jefferson,
but a philosophical concept debated broadly at the time and
deliberately chosen by the Founders over "life, liberty and the holding
of property," which was favored by some of the more acquisitive
Founders.  Nor was "happiness" a sly code word for "money"-rather it
meant living a meaningful existence, enjoying participation in
community life, and having opportunities to develop the whole person,
including the mind, the heart, the spirit, and even the funny bone.
Sounds right to me, how about you?  The Declaration also intended that
happiness was for all, not merely for the powerful and privileged.  One
more thing--the Founders' understanding of happiness also included the
community-minded caveat that one's pursuit of it must not encroach upon
the happiness of others, a philosophy utterly alien to the modern
corporate state.

"Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure?"  asked old man
John D. Rockefeller, the profiteer and amalgamizer of the infamous
Standard Oil trust.

"It's to see my dividends coming in."  Now there is a feller with a
stunted sense of fun.

It is way past time for our society to reassert America's third
unalienable right.  The political practitioners continue to debate
modern-day aspects of "life" and "liberty," but as the national
dialogue has become thoroughly corporatized (in politics, in the media,
in the schools and elsewhere), "pursuit of Happiness" has conveniently
slipped out of public conversation.  Any talk of "happiness" today has
been perverted to mean consumption, and "pursuit" has been reduced to
getting a job, no matter how miserly or unhappy.

There is one place, however, where this philosophical issue recently
resurfaced in the mass media, albeit too briefly: in the funny pages.
Working in the tradition of Walt Kelly's Pogo, Bill Watterson's now
defunct but still-wonderful comic strip Calvin <& Hobbes addressed the
big issues, including happiness.  Calvin is a six-year-old terror, and
Hobbes is his "tiger"--a stuffed animal when in the presence of other
people, but a "real" tiger and best buddy when he and Calvin are alone.
In a 1992 strip the two are cleaning up in the bathroom after a joyous
day romping in the outdoors, with Calvin stripping down to get in the
tub.

"Wow.  Look at the grass stains on my skin," the boy says to his pal in
the first panel.  In the second panel, Calvin then declares to an
approving Hobbes, "I say if your knees aren't green by the end of the
day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life."  Now that is talking
my language--unadulterated happiness.

In a four-panel strip in 1995, though, Watterson rendered a corporate
perspective on the same matter.  Panel one shows Calvin waiting
expectantly behind a cardboard box set up as a retail counter, marked:
"Happiness 10C."  In panel two Hobbes walks up and merrily inquires,
"What do you give people for their ten cents?"  Calvin replies
enthusiastically, "A water balloon right in the kisser!"  Panel three
has an incredulous Hobbes asking, "You take their money and then soak
them with a water balloon?"

"Right," says Calvin.  In the final panel, Hobbes asks, "Whose
happiness are we talking about?"  And an exasperated Calvin, throwing
his arms wide and glancing about his cardboard empire, responds, "Who
went to all this trouble?"

In our real-life society, the cardboard empire of the corporation has
been "enthroned," as Lincoln put it, placing our general and individual
happiness at its mercy.  Think about it.  We allow a single, avaricious
special interest to set the conditions of our work, the price of
political and governmental participation, the choice of our news and
entertainment, the focus of public education, the shape and locations
of our "community" enclaves, and much, much more, including the terms
of the social contract that exists to bind us into a united society.
This is dumber than dum-de-dum-dum.  The result shrinks what is
possible from our great country, narrows our reach, locks in a widening
separation of the few from the many and--most assuredly--produces both
a growing unhappiness and, ultimately, an unpleasant uprising by all
those who get that water balloon right in the kisser.

Work is a good place to begin the new pursuit-of-happiness debate.  Why
do we do it?

"Work like a beaver," we're told as children, "and you will get ahead
in life."  But wait a minute--even the most eager beavers only work
about five hours a day, mostly at a fairly leisurely pace, and beavers
are known to take frequent vacations.

Plus, they do work that matters, building sturdy lodges for their
family and community, not repetitively soldering a gizmo into a line of
gadgets destined for a quick trip to the landfill, or processing a
daily load of data that no one needs.  Beavers have a life, not a
job.

Yet everyone from Bill Bennett (the Reagan Republican who has become
the national scold) to Bill Clinton (the Eisenhower Republican who
seems to aspire to become Bill Bennett) talks of the "moral imperative"
of having a good work ethic and of the "inherent nobility" in having a
job.  But if jobs represent nobility, why is the corporate state doing
all it can to reduce working people to peons, shipping out good jobs,
knocking down pay, eliminating benefits, making jobs temporary, and
pissing on any remnant of respect for workers that had been built into
the nation's social contract over the last sixty years?

In 1996, to show Republicans that he could be every bit as stupidly
pious about the work ethic as they are, Clinton proudly tossed
America's welfare mothers into the workplace.  Fine.  Welfare is a
bureaucratic nightmare, and most mothers in the system prefer jobs.

Except there are no jobs for them, and even if there were, there's no
day care for their children and no transportation to get them to work
and back.  Whoopsie-daisy, said Clinton, who apparently had not counted
on complications when he decided to be a moral imperative Republican.
The President of the Greatest Power on Earth then started going around
to meetings with everyone from the clergy to corporate chieftains,
pleading with them to "do the right thing" and hire these hundreds of
thousands of mothers he sent packing from the welfare rolls.  They have
not.  So then, in his 1997 State of the Union address, Clinton proposed
paying corporations up to $10,000 for every job they offer to a welfare
recipient, thereby shifting our welfare money from poverty-stricken
mothers to corporations.

Since then, Clinton (along with the Republican Congress and a gaggle of
pious governors who likewise have pushed "welfare-to work reforms) has
boasted till he was hoarse that this turning over of the welfare safety
net has been one of his finest achievements.

"Welfare rolls are at their lowest levels in twenty-seven years,"
Clinton brayed in his 1998 State of the Union address.  OK, but did
those human beings find work?  He and the rest of the pols do not know,
nor do they ask.  If they did ask, they would confirm what a March 1998
survey by a New York state agency found: Only 29 percent of the 480,000
recipients dumped from that state's welfare programs had been hired
into any kind of job, either full-time or part-time.  This survey even
counted as a "job" any position that paid as much as $100 over three
months.

Let us review what our society has achieved by Clinton's exercise in
puritanical politics:

1. The President gets to claim that he "put an end to welfare as we
know it."

2. Some welfare mothers are getting low-paying, mind-numbing, dead-end
jobs.

3. More mothers are getting neither welfare nor work.

4. Corporations are able to get a fat, new subsidy.

5. Other low-income working people must now compete for jobs and wages
with this influx of cheap, subsidized labor.

6. We have had demonstrated once again that the work ethic has little
to do with work, nothing at all to do with ethics, and everything to do
with the corporation maintaining a tight choke hold on working
people.

If work does not pay, is not interesting, gets no respect, and is
little more than a grind, why work?  This is what Panhandle Jack asked
himself back in 1927, when he chose to become a hobo.  According to
superb storyteller and folk singer Utah Phillips, this old fellow
hoboed nearly all his long life, having sized up the workplace with
this clear-eyed view: "I learned when I was young that the only true
life I had was the life of my brain.  But if [that's] true ... what
sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day
for their particular use on the presumption that, at the end of the
day, they will give it back in an un mutilated condition?"

Granted, not everyone wants to be a hobo.  Most of us have other
ambitions, especially when we are young.  And we have mouths to feed.
So making our way and making a living necessarily put us in today's job
market.  But none of this denies the core validity of Panhandle Jack's
observation, as true today as in 1927.

The great majority of us are employees, including most who call
ourselves "managers" or "professionals."  We take orders.  Not 5
percent of Americans have any real say about their jobs.  This might
seem at first blush a pitiful state of weakness, but doesn't it also
suggest a terrific power?  We are the 95 percent.  The emperor has no
clothes!  As employees--and more importantly as citizens--we do not
have to accept work as it is.  Nor do we have to accept that work is
all there is.

Marxist thinking?  Try Lincoln: "My father taught me to work, but not
to love it.  I never did like work, and I don't deny it.  I'd rather
read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh--anything but work."

We are not taught it in school, but Old Abe was hardly a loner in his
slim regard for the work ethic, which is now handed down to us with
thunderous absolutism, like God handing down the tablets to Moses.
Remember, though, even God rested, and if you think that this Creator
had no sense of fun, I can only ask you.  Why do men have nipples?

Even those hardy immigrants from the Old Sod who came across at great
risk and found their way to the land ofbootstrapism through Ellis
Island were hardly the unblinking worshippers of thriftiness,
punctuality, hard work, obedience, and determined upward mobility
presently portrayed by the powers that so eagerly want this myth to be
our sole role model.  In the 1880s and 1890s, at the height of the rise
of the robber barons, the Victorian work ethic was nowhere near as
popular as immigrant "saloon culture," which was not simply about
drinking, but about family, friends, enjoyment, community...
happiness.

As the fine and fun historian Richard Shenkman records: "It wasn't that
the immigrants were lazy.  It's just that they thought there were often
better things to do with one's time than work."

Despite the efforts to bury this spirit, notice that the most com mon
phrase in today's workplace, no matter how tall the building, is TGIF!
And for all the corporate culture's insistence that everyone get ready
for the exciting twenty-first-century global workplace, do you ever
hear people shouting TGIM?

It is time for the thirty-hour workweek in America.  Break it into five
days of six hours each, or four seven-and-a-half-hour days, or whatever
combination works for you.  It will work for the economy, too (as the
shorter workweek has done for Germany), increasing everyone's
productivity, shrinking both unemployment and under employment and
putting more consumer dollars to work at the grassroots of our economy
(after all, money is like manure--it only works if you spread it
around).  It is also another way, besides wage and salary increases,
for working folks to begin sharing in those economic gains they have
been producing, which now flow almost exclusively to the most
privileged investors and to the CEOs.

Even more important, less-work more-workers allows us to begin taking
back our lives.  Work is killing us, physically and spiritually,
because we spend way too much time there.  It is killing the family and
the community, too.  The forty-hour week?  Gone.  Unionists of
yesteryear fought and died for this social landmark (the bloody
Haymarket Riot of 1886 was about shorter hours, for example), and the
forty-hour limit finally was achieved in the 1930s.  But in the past
couple of decades companies have relentlessly been inching up their
time demands, and families, having to scramble for more hours to
compensate for falling wages, have had no choice but to go along.

The forty-hour week has become a joke--it now averages fifty for wage
earners, and it is common for folks to be in the salt mines sixty hours
a week.

By the way, whatever happened to the lunch hour?  Only 12 percent of us
get a full hour or more for lunch these days.  When companies downsize,
they do not reduce the amount of work to be done-just the number of
employees to do it.  With this heavier workload, something has to give
... and one thing to give is the time for a midday interlude.  Our
average lunch break is down to twenty-nine minutes.

Four out of ten Americans say they really don't take a lunch break at
all--they work right through it or grab a quick snack at the desk.

Economist Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American,

finds that the typical employee is on the job about twenty more
workdays in the 1990s than in 1969, not counting the commute to and
from work, which is up significantly, adding not only to the hours, but
also to that always-important Pissed-Off quotient.  This is the same
period during which eight out of ten Americans have seen their pay
levels drop.  Less income for more hours.  Economists have a technical
term for this: "stupid."

The increasing time strain is especially tough on parents who have
young kids.  With wages tumbling, both Mom and Dad are compelled to be
in the workplace nowadays, just trying to make ends meet, and both of
them have noses-to-the-grindstone more hours than the average worker
does.  Their younger children are in day school, the older ones are
latchkey kids.  Mom and Dad are half-dead by the time they get home,
and dinner is a quick run through McDonald's or some such before
packing the kids off to bed and getting ready for another day.

What a joke it was to see Bill Clinton and George Bush standing side by
side at the White House in 1997 to announce that they were launching a
special, bipartisan campaign to "promote more volunteerism" among the
American people--two weakling Presidents who have had their heads stuck
up their asses for the previous eight years while their corporate
flinders ran rampant over the middle class, leaving a majority of
people so wrung out with work, low wages, and worry that they do not
have a spare minute or an ounce of energy left to volunteer for
anything.

High tech has only increased family stress, because now the boss can
have employees working nights and weekends on their home modems.  Last
winter, for example, my town of Austin had a rare two-day winter storm
with a snow-sleet-ice combination that flat shut the place down--no
school, no shops, no nothing.  Except work.

"Personal computers ... enabled many Central Texans to work from home
Monday without worrying about icy conditions," marveled a business
writer for the local paper.

Now comes the global economy!  Work, work, work.  Train, train, train.
Get in line to cross that bridge to the twenty-first century, says our
President, or you'll be "a loser" (his actual term), adding that we
must "adapt to the exciting new world market" (his actual phrase), in
which we must best our competitors, even if it kills you.  But look!

There is one of our competitors--Germany.  German factory workers are
paid an average of $6.50 an hour more than American workers get, and
Germans work 348 hours a year less than we do.  Why don't we compete
with that?  Also, German employees average five weeks of vacation time
every year.  In Austria, they get six weeks.  The Irish get three
weeks.  We average two.

Americans want more time off.  An official with the Roper polling
outfit told the New York Times that "downsizing of industry did
something fundamental to people's thinking about where they get
satisfaction in their lives.  There is a decline in the belief in work
as a source of satisfaction."  There is a surprise, eh?  A majority of
us now tell pollsters we would even sacrifice some wage increases in
exchange for more time to be with our families and pals, to pursue
other interests, or, hell, as Panhandle Jack advised, just keep our
brains to ourselves for a while.

The thirty-hour week goes to the core not only of how our society
organizes the workplace, but also of who organizes it, and it asks a
bigger question, too: Who owns our time?  The robber barons said they
were the sole organizers and owners of time, but after years of
struggle, working folks won a New Deal sanctioning in law our right to
have a say.  Now, though, the robber barons have crept back.

Michael Ventura, whose column in the LA.  Weekly is always a
thought-provoking read, wrote an especially powerful piece a few years
ago about his life in the job game and how he finally figured out that
by getting two weeks off each year, "it would take me 26 years on the
job to accumulate one year for myself.  And I could only have that year
in 26 pieces, so it wouldn't even feel like a year.  In other words, no
time was truly mine.  My boss merely allowed me the illusion of
freedom, a little space to catch my breath in between the 50 weeks that
I lived but he owned."  Ventura tells of his own Panhandle Jack
epiphany: "Slowly, very slowly, I came to a conclusion that for me was
fundamental: My employers are stealing my life."

CLASS WAR

LET'S CHECK THE COW JONES AVERAGE

* HOW YA DOIN'?

* STATISTICAL WHITEWASH

* THE LION'S SHARE

* HOW DO YOU SPELL "BOSS?"

** RUTH'S BRICKS

* ST.  PETER

** A SHINING CITY ON THE HILL

* THE NEXT BEST THING TO SLAVES

* LABOR DAY

* EARRINGS ON A HOG

HOWYADOIN'?

John Kenneth Galbraith won my deepest respect years ago when I heard
him say: "If all economists were laid end-to-end--it would be a good
thing."

Economists are the voodoo priests of America's established order.  They
are kept well-fed by Washington and Wall Street in exchange for being
brought out of their dark warrens periodically, beady eyes blinking in
the glare of daylight, to assure us that "America is prospering," even
though we Americans are not.  Think about that concept.  We are being
asked to believe the economy is something separate from us, something
more important than the people in it, something we serve, rather than
something that serves us.  If that doesn't make sense to you it's
because it doesn't make sense.

The amazing thing to me is that people who laugh at Gypsy
fortune-tellers take economists seriously.  Our public officials seem
befuddled by the voodoo, basing our country's economic policies not on
what would be good for the people, but on what they are told would be
good for the "economy."  In practically every case, what's good for the
economy turns out to be (big surprise!) what's good for Wall Street.
The media buy into the voodoo, too, monitoring the Street's Dow Jones
Average as though it is America's heartbeat.  Just you try to get away
from the "Dow"--it's on every TV newscast, it runs on radio more
frequently than ads for bug exterminators, it's in every daily
newspaper and makes the front page more often than floods, blizzards,
and hurricanes.  We are constantly bombarded with the Dow, when what we
need to be concerned about as a country is the Doug Jones
Average--how's Doug doing, what's the price of Spam this week, how's
the short-term inventory of durables down at Big Bubba's Pay-and-Go
used-car lot?

What is this Dow Jones Average anyway?

"Dow Soars Higher Than 9,000" blare the good-news trumpets of the
media, telling us that the economy is "whizzing!"  But higher than
9,000 what?  Some of my ex-hippie neighbors in South Austin have been
higher than 9,000 since 1968, but does their altitude tell us anything
we need to know?

In reality, the Dow is an insignificant indicator of what is happening
on Wall Street, much less on your street.  It is an index of the
performance of only thirty of the 2,600 stocks listed on the New York
Stock Exchange, and all the thirty are such blue-chippers as AT&T, GM,
and IBM.  Yet politicians in Washington monitor the Dow religiously, as
if Moses himself were handing down hourly updates.  When Bill Clinton
jettisoned his campaign pledge to launch a much-needed jobs program for
people, he said he did so because he did not want to upset the market,
and the next day the Dow applauded his broken promise with a nice
little uptick in its average.

The Dow is like that--perverse.  When you do poorly, it shoves its
statistical fist in the air with an exultant "Yes!"  One sure predictor
of a happy Dow day is the announcement of a huge corporate firing:

"AT&T to eliminate 40,000 jobs," the New York Times reported on January
2,1996.  "Dow Jumps 60 points," read the next day's headline.

These days, whenever a company dumps another load of workers onto our
streets, it can expect Wall Street speculators to show their approval
by shouting "way to go," immediately bidding up that particular
company's stock price.  For example, just in the first three months of
1998, AT&T's stock roared to its highest level in a year following news
that 15,000 more of its employees were to be fired;

JCPenney shares shot up $1.31 the day it revealed plans to dismiss
4,900 employees; Black & Decker stock climbed $4.50 on news that 3,000
of its jobs would be eliminated; Chase Manhattan stockholders gained
$6.43 a share when the bank announced 2,250 terminations;

and the Money Store, Imation Corporation, Lam Research Corporation, and
United Technologies also were among the companies firing employees and
getting a giddy Wall Street goose in their stock prices.

This phenomenon goes from being coincidence to being dastardly when you
realize that the top executives of major corporations now have most of
their own compensation tied to their company's stock value.  What we
have here is a powerful incentive for executive suite mischief--the
more workers those executives fire.  the more the company's Wall Street
price begins to whiz, and the more the executives get paid.

Sure Wall Street is whizzing, it's whizzing on you and me.

This is why I propose that, instead of the national fixation on Wall
Street's Dow Jones Average, we tune in to the Doug Jones Average, a
real-life indicator of "How ya doin'?"  for the 60 percent of Americans
who don't own any stocks and bonds.  (Faint clatter of teletype
machines heard in background, as the quick-paced, modulated monotone of
the Doug Jones reporter begins):

The Doug Jones Average took a tumble today in a flurry of heavy trading
in the fob-Futures Market.  Major indus trials including AT&T,
Burlington Northern, and Apple Computer announced more than 97,000
additional employee terminations in January, causing market analysts to
predict that last year's record level of 3,100 job losses each workday
would be exceeded this year.  There was a brief uptick in the market at
midday over news that a ball-bearing company in Euchrys, Ohio, was
adding new production workers, but the rally sagged on later reports
that only twenty jobs were available, and the futures market closed
with losses badly outdistancing gains.  Especially sobering to the Doug
was a late report that Eastman-Kodak has dismissed 10,000 more
employees, including its chief executive, terminated because Kodak's
board of directors felt he was not firing employees fast enough.

Checking today's White-Collar Anxiety Indicator, we find it still in
the Red Zone at 117.9 and trending upward as insider information from
IBM has revealed that Big Blue is forcing its software employees to
train recruits from India to do their jobs, with expectation that these
high-tech positions will go abroad to the facility IBM has built in
Bangalore, India.

Turning now to our daily Lunch-Bucket Index, profit taking on BLTs is
causing a consumer retreat.  While tomato prices declined due to
seasonal supply and a surge of Mexican imports under NAFTA, lettuce
prices gained markedly, bacon is up nearly five points, and white bread
is up, too, by three point-seven.  Beer was relatively flat at a
point-two increase.

On the home front the Doug's bottom line was pinched by a three-point
increase in rent, a four-point-eight jump in garbage collection, and a
seven-point zap in cable TV rates.

This just in from our Hollywood Hotline: Disney Inc.

has announced that its latest sequel to 101 Dalmatians will be
downsized.  In an austerity move, fifty of the spotted canines are to
be eliminated from the movie script altogether, and the other fifty-one
are to be replaced by Mexican Hairless Chihuahuas.  The tiny Mexican
dogs will have to have their appearances enhanced by makeup and
computer graphics, but Disney CEO Michael Eisner assured skittish
investors that the added technological costs will be more than offset
by the fact that Mexican Chihuahuas work for pesos and require only 10
percent as much dog food as Dalmatians.

To close on a bright spot, the Bonds Market continues to pay major
dividends, as advances outpace declines.  Barry's batting average fell
eight points in the past month, but is still a robust .344, while his
home run output is up by ten and his 82 RBI now leads the major
leagues.

That's today's Doug Jones Average, for those of you worried more about
the price of socks... than stocks.  Remember, it's not the Dow Jones
Average that matters--it's yours.

STATISTICAL WHITEWASH

All you really need to know about official statistics is that the
Hundred Years War lasted 116 years.

But, hey, who's counting?  (OK, the people who died during those extra
sixteen years might want to be counted, but picky-picky.

Statistically speaking, they were within the margin of error.) Besides,
that war was way back in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
Dark Ages for number-crunching.  Today, using the sophisticated
techniques of statistical science, using those big-honker F-150 LX Crew
Cab computers to process the data, using the Hubble Telescope to peer
light-years into space and see the war before it happened, using actual
PhDs with spinning beanie-cap propellers to make the chronological
calibrations--our proud U.S. Bureau of Great Big Numbers (acronym: US
Bureau of Great Big Numbers) is able to say with absolute precision
that the correct reference should be: the "Hundred Years
(Approximately) War."

They are even less accurate in counting the victims of today's class
war.  Although every morning's paper brings us news that some other
outfit with a name like MegaMultinational Inc.  has drop kicked another
10,000 or so employees through the goal posts of global greed, the
nation's official job statistics stay magically cheerful.

This is especially useful to Wall Street and its toadies in Washington,
because it gives them the political cover they need to fend off any
serious effort to do anything to stop the MegaMultinational Incs.  of
our country from mugging the middle class in broad daylight.  They use
employment statistics like the drunk uses a lamppost--not for light,
but for support.

Each month the Bureau of Labor Statistics rolls the drums, rolls the
dice, and rolls out two official government numbers that are used to
cloak the muggings.  First is the ever-popular, widely ballyhooed stat
that you often see as headline news: "Unemployment Rate Stands at Only
5.4 Percent."

Only?  There are more than a million, three hundred thousand living,
breathing, hard-hit human beings behind each percentage of
unemployment, so we're talking about nearly seven-and-a-half mil lion
of our r 'ighbors and family members caught up in that diminutive
datam.

They are only the tip of the iceberg.  Millions more of the unemployed
don't even become statistics.  The BLS comes up with its official
monthly count by simply calling 12,000 households and, in effect,
shouting: "Hey, is everyone in there either 'employed' or 'looking for
work'?"

Not much more nuance is allowed.  For example, let's say you've been
down and out and trying to find a job for a long, long time--so long
that you've given up the hunt, at least temporarily.

"Are you employed?"  the caller asks.  No.

"Are you looking for work?"  Not this month.  So in the strict
statisticalese of BLS, you are not included in the monthly jobless
picture, even though you are jobless.  The agency does have a name for
you though: "Discouraged Worker."  Isn't that genteel?  There are about
half-a-million discouraged folks out there each month, but they don't
count with the unemployment counters.

Let's keep a running tab: 7.5 million or so "officially" unemployed
plus a half-million or so "discouraged" workers equals 8 million
actually unemployed, so far.

Let's also add in those of you who are down with the flu when the
BLSers call.  You are in the market for a job, but there you are in bed
when they call so you are not technically out "looking for work," are
you?  You don't get counted, either.  Or maybe you do not have a job
and are looking for one, but in a burst of candor, you say to the
surveyor, "Well, I did do a little work on my brother-in-law's house
last week and got a few bucks for that, but..."  But nothing, bucko-as
far as the BLS is concerned, that puts you among the gainfully employed
and drops you from the bad-news bin into the good-news group.  The
government definition of "unemployed" is so narrow that, until some bad
press forced BLS to change its policy recently, those who said they had
been "laid off" were counted as still being employed.  The bureaucratic
rationale was that laid off is just a kind of "suspended employment"
and your company would soon be laying you "on" again--totally ignoring
that, in the vernacular of today's harsh workplace, laid off means you
are kaput, gone, out of here, fired, toast... unemployed.

No one knows for sure how many of the unemployed slip through these
definition al cracks, but a conservative estimate figures that more
than half-a-million a month do.  So this raises our tally to more than
8.5 million Americans with no jobs.

Then there are you proud ones--especially you middle managers,
accountants, engineers, and other college-educated, highly skilled
white collars who suddenly find yourselves holding a pink slip.  For
the first time in your twenty-five- to thirty-year career, you have no
office to go to, and no other company is returning your calls.

Are you unemployed?

"No," you tell the BLS surveyor, "I'm self- employed."  Sure you are,
and there are now more than 3 million of you in your spare-bedroom
"virtual offices" trying to look busy and praying that someone will
call and offer you a real job.  Add this 3 million to the 8.5 million
above, and we are nearing 12 million in the dismal ranks of the
unemployed.

Still, this is not the half of it.  Have you chatted up a waitress
recently?  Chances are she has at least one college degree and is one
of some 20 million Americans who have settled for lower-paying jobs
that make no use of the education, expertise, and experience they
worked so hard to gain.  In this category also are employees hired as
"temporaries" to do the same work as "regular" hires.  The difference
is that the temporaries get lower pay, receive lesser or no benefits,
and generally are treated within the corporate caste system as scuz.
Some companies actually require these untouchables to wear different
colored employee badges that announce their inferiority. Microsoft is
one such company, with as much as a third of its Seattle-area workforce
being temporaries--and being treated like illegitimate children at the
family reunion.  A few Microsoft examples, as reported by the Seattle
Times: temporaries are not invited to the annual picnic, nor can they
attend such company morale boosters as after-hours pizza parties and
dances; temporaries do not get such employee perks as health-club
memberships and the opportunity to purchase company made software at
discounts from the company store; and temporaries are prohibited from
joining Microsoft's athletic teams or even from playing on the
company's athletic fields when the regulars are not using them. 
Although these jobs are designated "temporary," implying a short-term
employment condition with an opportunity to move up, it's not uncommon
for Microsoft and other companies to hold employees in their temporary
status permanently.  There even is a new term for them: "Permatemps."

In addition, about 4.5 million more of us work part-time but want and
need full-time jobs.  Also, toss in the 25 million people (one out of
five workers) with "jobs" that pay under six bucks an hour.

Nearly half of these are minimum-wage employees, which means trying to
make ends meet on barely $10,000 a year.  This is not a job, it's wage
slavery.  Even adjusting these categories for overlaps, it still means
there are around 25 million chronically underemployed and underpaid
people out there--people whose job needs are not being met by our
economy.  Add them to the 12 million jobless, and we've uncovered about
37 million people--plus their families--who grind their teeth every
night over the lack of decent jobs.

Bottom Line: The relevant statistic for assessing (and addressing) our
country's job health is not Washington's trifling 5.4 percent, but the
much grimmer reality that a good third of America's workforce is mired
in unemployment and permanent under employment

Yet our politicians, pipe-smoking editorial writers, and even
Presidents (no, make that especially Presidents) blithely embrace the
official stat and continue skipping merrily down life's primrose lane,
trying to put a Happy Face on an economy that most Americans know is
not working for them.

The blissful complacency of politicos and pundits today is reminiscent
of Calvin Coolidge's in the 1920s, back at the dawn of the Great
Depression.  Asked about rising unemployment across the countryside,
Silent Cal shrugged and said: "When more and more people are thrown out
of work, unemployment results."  (I realize that Coolidge was not the
brightest bulb ever placed in the Oval Office, but surely someone was
fooling with his dimmer switch when he said that.) The official
unemployment stat is only one rose-colored lens worn by Washington,
Wall Street, and the media when looking at the economy.  The second
lens is yet another monthly product of the BLS: the number of new jobs
created.  This one is particularly dazzling to occupants of the White
House, who are always eager to report that their economic policies are
doing a world of good.  It was this job-creation statistic, for
example, that did so much to make George Bush what he is today: a
one-term ex-president.  You might remember that Bush kept insisting in
1992 that "that economy thing" is "great guns,"

"Uptick City," and "don't cry for me,

Argentina," which was Bush-ese for "Why is everyone so darn glum about
the doggone economy when I've created hundreds of thousands of new jobs
for them?"  In fairness to Bush-the-Ex, this is exactly what the BLS
job-creation statistics were showing, leading his advisers to assure
him that the economy was humming.  Unfortunately for poor George, the
statistics bore no relation to the real-life experiences of the voters,
and the more he cited the BLS, the more he sounded like he was full
of

BS.

Oddly, though, the man who capitalized on Bush's gullibility has
stepped into the exact same statistical cow patty.  Within a year of
becoming President, Bill Clinton was crowing about the number of new
jobs he had created, and he has continued to crow about it ever since.
In his 1997 State of the Union address, for example, Clinton climbed up
on the peak of the national barn and let go with this
cock-a-doodle-doo: "Over the last four years, we brought new economic
growth ... creating over 11 million new jobs."

Take a cold shower.  Bill.  Maybe you believe that stuff, but we know
better.  As Will Rogers once put it, "It isn't what we don't know that
gives us trouble; it's what we know that ain't so."  Common sense
should tell Clinton that when corporations are in the news every day
shedding huge numbers of jobs like a mangy dog sheds clumps of hair,
maybe he should begin questioning the accuracy of the job figures he's
fed each morning.

Time for a reality check.  The BLS calculates how many new jobs have
been added in a month by taking another survey, this one a random
sampling of about 10 percent of America's companies.  Aside from the
legitimate question of whether this small snapshot represents anything
approaching an accurate picture of what really is happening job-wise,
BLS totally skews its own monthly number by engaging in a jaunty bit of
hocus-pocus it calls the "bias factor."

What it does is assume that its survey mostly catches larger companies,
thereby overlooking jobs that small outfits might be creating.  To
correct for this presumed bias, the agency simply--abracadabra!-- adds
a hundred thousand jobs or so to its official count each month, jobs
that it guesses are being created by small businesses, even though it
cannot find these jobs in the real world.  They cannot be found because
they are not there.  Small business organizations like the National
Federation of Independent Businesses report that far from adding jobs,
most of their members have been letting employees go.

Another bit of queerness in the BLS stat is summed up by the story of
the guy in a cafe, sitting on a stool at the counter, reading the
morning paper and drinking coffee: "Here's a report that Bill Clinton
has created thousands of new Jobs," he says to the waitress.

"I

know," she responds dryly, "I have three of them."  The survey makes no
distinction between a real Job and the part-time, temporary, low-paying
"Mcjobs" our economy foists on us today.  If you are one of the
millions patching together two or three part-time gigs to make ends
meet (maybe you run a 5 a.m. paper route, work 9 to noon as a paralegal
for some law firm, then grab the afternoon shift at a
7-Eleven)--congratulations!  BLS counts you three times.

On April Fools' Day, 1994, for example, President Clinton hailed the
remarkable news from the BLS that 456,000 new jobs had been created the
previous month.  But John Crudele, the astute financial columnist for
the New York Post, dissected this salutary statistic and found that
112,000 of the jobs--nearly a fourth of the total--did not exist; they
were phantoms produced by the bureaucracy's "bias factor."  More than
300,000 of the rest were part-time positions.

Take a more recent example: "Payrolls Swell by 271,000," trumpets the
New York Times in a February 8, 1997, headline, citing the BLS job
survey for January.

"Job Figures Point to Vigor in the Economy," announces the front-page
headline in the Los Angeles Times on the same day.  These and other
stories use words like "robust,"

"rousing," and "enviable" to break the joyous job news, with one
corporate economist squealing, "Pinch me because this just seems too
good to be true."

It was.  Aside from the usual phantom jobs bloating the bureau's
numbers (a bloat not reported by any of the media), practically all the
actual new jobs counted in the January survey were low-paying,
no-benefit service jobs, with an especially big surge in temporary
work.  Indeed, the BLS report noted cryptically that the big job jump
was magnified by "weather-related factors."  Such as?  Snow.  It seems
that an Arctic storm swept the country in January, even plunging deep
into the South.  The result was a major increase in what your Ph.D.
economists technically refer to as "jobs shoveling snow."

Presumably this activity was the source of the economic "vigor" hailed
by the media.

What we have in America's job numbers is an example of the statistical
art of drawing a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted
assumption to a foregone conclusion.  It's the biggest whitewash since
Tom Sawyer's fence.

THE LION'S SHARE

Being fired is not funny and firing someone is not fun.  I've been on
both ends of the gun.

But it has been at least slightly amusing these last few years to watch
corporate PR flacks devise ever more convoluted phrases to try cloaking
the cold fact that their companies dump millions of good employees on
the scrap heap of economic "progress."  In the media, "downsizing" is
the preferred euphemism for this phenomenon, but it is nowhere near as
inventive as these other dollops of doublespeak applied to the tidal
wave of mass firings:

"Release of Resources" Bank America

"Competitive build down

"Career-transition program" (GM).

"Employee outplacing."

"Schedule adjustments" (Stouffer Foods).

"Reengineering."

"Management Initiated Attrition" (MIA for short).

"Normal payroll adjustment" (Wal-Mart).

"Negative hiring."

And my favorite, "Decruiting."

By whatever name, the motivation behind this assault on the middle
class is nothing more noble than old-fashioned greed.

Company executives kick out and knock down so many because Wall Street
investors and their own boards of directors reward them lovingly for
doing so, and because they now realize no outside force will raise a
hand to stop them--both political parties are in their pockets,
government regulators are sheep in wolves' clothing, and unions have
been roped, throwed, and hog-tied.  Near my home, there is a
drive-through liquor store with the impatient name of Git It & Go, and
that fairly well expresses today's corporate attitude, grabbing all
they can as fast as they can, abandoning any ethical sense that their
destiny is or should be linked to that of their employees or
communities.

What they seem intent on taking is the "lion's share," and, as we're
told in Aesop's fable, the lion takes not merely the largest part of
it, but all of it:

The cow, the goat and the sheep went once a-hunting with the lion, and
they caught a stag.  And when they came to have their part and share in
it, the lion said to them:

"My lords, I want you to know that the first part is mine, because I am
your lord; the second because I am stronger than you are; the third
because I ran more swiftly than you did; and whosoever touche the the
fourth part, he shall be my mortal enemy."

And thus the lion took for himself alone the stag.  And therefore this
fable teacheth to all folk that the poor ought not to hold fellowship
with the mighty.  For the mighty man is never faithful to the poor.

 R

HOW DO YOU SPELL "BOSS?"

"Little bee sucks the blossom," goes the old Western-swing song by Bob
Wills and the Texas Playboys, "but the big bee gets the honey Little
man picks the cotton, but the big man gets the money."

This reality was never starker than it is today--not just in the cotton
fields, but in the corporate fiefdoms of the Fortune 500.

In Austin, Texas, where I live, there was a legendary bar in the late
1970s and 1980s called Another Raw Deal, run by two characters named
Lopez and Fletcher.  Serving longnecks and bodacious french fries, the
Deal was a hangout favored by writers, musicians, lawyers
who-used-to-be-hippies, maverick politicos like myself, and assorted
other riffraff.  (With such a clientele, the bar's washrooms were
graced with top-of-the-line graffiti, including this political offering
in red Marks-A-Lot next to the chrome blow-dryer: "Push here for a
message from Senator Phil Gramm") This roadhouse was a bit of Austin
heaven--a laid-back, beer-soaked, grease-smoke-in-the-air kind of place
where eccentrics were normal, iconoclasts were in the majority, music
and talk were boisterous, drunk was OK, and excess was applauded.  The
Deal's slogan was "Too much is not enough."

Imagine our shock and dismay, then, to learn a decade later that our
slogan--an unfettered whoop of defiance against the established
order--had been expropriated and perverted into a rigid canon of greed
by the established order itself, by guys in Gucci shoes and Pucci ties
who specialize in mugging working-class people.

By the nineties, Austin's Raw Deal was gone, but America's raw deal had
only gotten started.

Do you make $282,000 a year?  Most of us do not.  Less than 1 percent
of Americans make that much, but one who does is Michael Eisner.  He's
head Mouseketeer at Disney Inc."  and his pay in 1997 was $282,000--not
for the year, not for a month's work, or a week's or even a day's.  He
was paid $282,000 an hour.  Plus a car.  This does not even make Eisner
the fattest dog on the porch.  Consider Bill Gates, geek-in-charge at
the monopolistic empire of Microsoft.  According to Internet journalist
Brad Templeton, who maintains a Web site called "Bill Gates Wealth
Index" (http://www.templetons.com/brad/bing.html), Mr.  Microsoft has
been raking in money at the rate of $500,000 an hour, or about $140 a
second.  Templeton says we should think of it this way: If Gates was
striding down the sidewalk and dropped a $500 bill, it would not be
worth his time to stop, bend over, and pick it up.  That four seconds
would actually cost him money!  Eisner and Gates exemplify the wretched
excess in today's executive suites, where pay packages begin at a
million a year, and it can take more than half a billion dollars to be
king of the hill, to rank as the year's highest-paid chief executive.

Not so very long ago, a CEO was considered merely important, much like
the lead mule is important, keeping all of us other mules on the
straight and narrow and pulling the wagon.  In 1960, at the height of
America's industrial might, the chief executive averaged $190,000 in
pay--about forty times what the worker on the factory floor made.

Today, though, CEOs have refashioned their image into economic purebred
stallions who must be pampered, stroked, and fed only the finest,
sweetest, richest alfalfa--separating themselves entirely from the mule
team.  They have reconfigured the corporate structure to establish
themselves as our new moneyed elite with wealth, power, and perks that
royalty would envy.  CEOs now average $7.8 million in pay--326 times
what workers down on the factory floor are paid.

And there's the rub.  It is this disparity that matters, not the fact
that those at the top are getting rich (as Mark Twain put it, "I am
opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the
position").  The chiefs no longer want their share, but the "lion's
share," and they are willingly shoving everyone else away with one hand
while they use the other to grab more and more for themselves.

Meet Robert Alien.  In the early nineties, while he was top boss at
AT&T, he engineered a takeover of NCR computer company, which turned
out to be a beaut of a business blunder.  It cost the phone giant a few
billion bucks--and cost 8,500 former NCR employees their livelihood.
Did Alien get booted, docked in pay, scolded, or what?  Bingo if you
chose "what."  He got a 41 percent pay hike in 1995, lifting him to
nearly $5.5 million a year on Wall Street's greedo-rama chart.  In 1996
Alien took the bloody ax to his own company, lopping off the heads of
40,000 AT&T employees in one blow, a stroke that swelled his own wallet
with another multimillion-dollar pay hike.

The Wall Street Journal, ever solicitous about the care and feeding of
CEOs, moaned in April 1997 that poor little Bobbie Alien had seen "his
1996 bonus slashed 18 percent," due to the company's "disappointing
performance."  The Journal's reference was not to the disappointment of
the 40,000 axed employees, but to the stockholders, who saw their
gamble on AT&T take a 9 percent dip in '96.  Before you reach for a
tissue to dry your eyes over Alien's "punishment," do the rest of the
math: His base salary for '96 actually ticked up a bit, to roughly $1.2
million; add his bonus of $1.25 million (down 18 percent, as reported);
toss in $2.2 million he drew from his "long-term incentive plan," $1.3
million from his existing stock options, $875,475 in "other
compensation," and about $1.3 million in new stock options he was
awarded ... and you could write quite a different headline about
Alien's total compensation in 1996, which came to $8 million plus
change--a pay raise of 45 percent.  When Newsweek's Allan Sloan
confronted him with the ethical pigginess of enjoying a $2.5-million
personal pay increase during the year he whacked so many other human
beings in AT&T's employ, Mr.  Alien responded with a rhetorical
question: "Is it fair?  Hell, I don't know.  I don't make the rules."

But of course he makes the rules, and just you try to change even one
of them.  Every time some shareholder, consumer group, union, member of
Congress, or whoever has the temerity to propose the slightest trimming
of the totalitarian power that CEOs wield in our economy (including
Alien's power to profit personally by inflicting gross pain on 40,000
of his firm's employees), AT&T unleashes the full force of its
lobbyists and lawyers, PACs and PR flacks to crush the rebellion and
preserve the status quo.  These guys have the ethics of grave
robbers.

Meet Lou Gerstner, another CEO who has built a following on Wall Street
because of his fondness for firing IBM employees.  In the name of
streamlining Big Blue, as the once-respected computer company was known
to its loyal employees, he booted some 200,000 of those employees out
the door in '93 and '94.  But somehow his streamlining edicts never
reached the executive suite--Gerstner tripled his own pay in '93, and
by '94 he was wallowing in an annual salary of $2 million, a nice bonus
of $2.6 million, and $7,755,000 more in other compensation.  This
$12-million-a-year "streamliner" is a lot like the submarine commander
in a comedy bit that Bob Newhart used to do: The commander was
addressing his crew just before they embarked on an especially
dangerous mission, telling them in stark detail about the firepower and
ferociousness of the enemy they would soon encounter, conceding that
their chance of survival was nil and that their deaths could be
gruesome.  Still, he urged them on for God and country, concluding by
saying, "Men, my only regret is that I personally will not be able to
come along with you on this mission."

The troops must have stared at that commander the same way IBM
employees looked at Gerstner when they learned not only about his pay
package, but also that he was retaining all nine of the company's
private jets to scoot him to various destinations around the country,
including trips to the three golf courses and country clubs IBM
maintains for him and other executives.  Especially galling to
employees who had been fired just before Christmas was the revelation
that Big Blue spent a ton of cash for a float in the Rose Bowl Parade.
As one employee who had been cashiered after twenty-eight years
expressed it: "They say they don't have any money and then they drop a
quarter of a million dollars to buy a big flower pot."

The icing on Gerstner's cake came in '95, when he did decide to make
some cuts at the executive level--not in the pay of executives, mind
you, but in the pay of their secretaries.  Whacked them back by a
third.  The same week, he turned around and hired a $118,000-ayear
gourmet chef for his executive dining room.  After all, a man works up
a hell of an appetite swinging a budget ax.

Meet John W. Teets.  He heads Dial Corporation, maker of such products
as Dial soap, Breck shampoo, and Brillo cleaning pads.  This gentleman
prides himself on his corporate cost-cutting prowess, unflinchingly
slicing hundreds of employees at a time from the payroll and decreeing
that everyone who remains must lead a Spartan existence.  Except for
him.  Teets built a red-granite, twenty-four story Taj Mahal of a
headquarters building in Phoenix, far removed from Dial's factories and
rank-and-file employees, and far above the penny-pinching pieties he
preaches.  This fellow is a living example of the old adage: The higher
the building, the lower the morals.  His own top-floor office boasts
marble floors, mahogany paneling, antique furnishings, and Chinese
rugs.  Asked by the New York Times about this posh environment, Teets
feigned modesty and pointed at the digs of another corporate big
spender: "I like Ronald Perelman's office better--he's got more
antiques."

Antique envy aside, Teets can sit high atop Phoenix in his finely
feathered nest, preening himself and counting the eight-and-a-half
million dollars a year he takes in pay.  And when he grows weary of the
Sun Belt, he can summon one of the jets the company maintains for him
and fly off to the bright lights of the Big Apple, where Dial keeps a
well-appointed apartment for him overlooking Central Park.

Teets has been especially stern about the way employees use company
funds--he wouldn't want a dime diverted for a personal call on the
office phone, for example, or any paper clips being taken home by a
secretary.  Yet, in 1995, he got Dial to put $10 million of the
corporation's money into the Arizona Diamondbacks, Phoenix's new
major-league baseball franchise in which Teets happens to have a
personal stake.  Asked about the ethics of funneling ten million Dial
dollars into his personal venture while he cut jobs and demanded
austerity from others, Teets regally responded: "I am retiring in a
couple of years and I've got to be thinking about what I'm going to be
doing.  We're talking about futures here."

Messrs.  Alien, Gerstner, and Teets are typical of the aloofness, even
imperiousness, that characterizes most of the elites who now rule
America's corporate economy.  Michael Eisner, for example, the
$100,000-an-hour man, chopped the health-care plans of the low paid
minions who work in Disney's theme parks, apparently oblivious that his
own extravagant pay was more than the annual health care premiums of
all those employees combined.  Nor did Eisner seem fazed by the
stunning hypocrisy of gutting their meager medical benefits while
protecting every bit of the gold-plated Cadillac coverage the company
provides for him and his loved ones.

This is one reason that so many at Disney and elsewhere have noted that
"boss" spelled backwards is double-S-0-B.

It is common to assail members of Congress and other Washington
politicians for being out of touch with everyday reality, but they are
regular Joe Six-Packs compared to these CEOs.  Check out Alexander
Trotman, big boss at Ford, who has never in his entire career as an
auto executive bought a car.  He has never experienced such joys as
hassling with a sales rep on price, trying to decipher the warranty,
getting the thing insured and inspected, making payments, taking it in
for service and getting one of those blow-your-socks-off repair bills.
At Ford, you see, a car just "magically" appears for those on the
executive track--it is always gassed up, tuned up, washed and waxed,
and has that "new-car smell."  And when the newness begins to wear off,
another new one "magically" appears.  Trotman told the New York Times
that while he has never personally been a customer, "I know a lot of
dealers, and I don't see why I have to buy a car to get in touch with
the dealer-customer relationship."

Even in the rare cases when CEOs get bounced, the experience is one
that an average working stiff would beg to have.  The platinum
parachute ofN.  J. Nicholas Jr.  illustrates the point.  Ousted in 1992
as president and co-chief exec of Time Warner because of poor
performance, he received:

A lump-sum severance payment of $15.8 million.

A $600,000-a-year pension.

Continued health-care coverage and other benefits Stock options worth
$8 million.

Another $5 million worth of Time Warner stock.

An office, secretary, and $6 million life-insurance policy for two
years after his firing.

$250,000 a year through 1999 as an "employee," even though there is
little or nothing for him to do.

King of the executive suite Golden Parachutes so far, though, is
Michael Ovitz, the number two Mouseketeer at Disney.  Recruited by
Michael Eisner, Ovitz spent about a year on the job before the two
Mikies agreed it was not working between them.  By many accounts the
brevity of Ovitz's tenure was exceeded only by its failure--they say he
was lousy at the job.  Instead of a kick in the ass, though, Eisner
dipped into corporate funds and gave Ovitz a payout of about $130
million for his trouble.  The joke going around is that at Disney
headquarters, instead of taping a "Please kick me" sign on the backs of
unsuspecting colleagues as a joke, company vice presidents now tape
"Please fire me" signs to their own backs.

Wait a minute--don't corporations have governing bodies, boards of
directors, to monitor such self-indulgence and bring these CEOs down to
earth?  Yes indeedy, that is the theory, but guess who mostly sit on
corporate boards?  Other CEOs.  And most of them are old school chums
or golfing buddies of the executive whose excesses they are supposed to
oversee.  When John Teets of Dial Corporation had that $10 million of
corporate funds put into his baseball venture, for example, he did so
with the blessing of his board of directors--nine out of eleven of whom
were hand-picked by him.

If chumminess alone won't make a board compliant, cash might, and
plenty of it is being tossed around in the form of board fees and other
freebies.  These payments work like hushpuppies, the little fried balls
of cornmeal, sugar, and onion served with catfish and other Southern
delicacies, first concocted by cooks on hunting trips to be tossed to
the dogs to "hush up" their yelping.  Today a dough much richer than
cornmeal is routinely fed to corporate board members--in a 1996 survey
of the 200 largest industrial corporations, Forbes magazine found that
these "watchdogs" averaged $700 an how in board fees.

That will buy a lot of hushpuppies!  At IBM the fees amount to $91,000
a year for each member; at General Electric they get $ 132,000 each;
and Compaq computer pays $274,000 a year.  Just for a few days' work.
Plus, 70 percent of the companies provide lavish pensions for their
directors, worth up to $100,000 a year.  If that still isn't enough to
keep a watchdog fat and sleepy, companies also toss out other tasty
tidbits to stop any potential yelping--General Motors directors, for
example, get a new Cadillac every three months, while directors of
United Airlines can fly anywhere, anytime--first-class, for free.

To bring some measure of accountability to CEO pay, shareholder groups
recently have demanded that internal "compensation committees" be
established to review performance and dispense the rewards to those at
the top.  No problem, say executives like Lowell "Bud" Paxson, who is
the top guy at the telecommunications giant that bears his name.  In
1997, he was honored to learn that his compensation committee had seen
fit to award him a generous bonus of $1,875,000.  Guess who was on the
committee?  Paxson himself!  Who else served?  No one--he was the sole
member.  Talk about cronyism.

Can't you just imagine that committee meeting?  Bud: "I move we give
Bud a fat bonus."  Bud: "I second that."  Bud: "All in favor say
aye."

Bud: "Aye."  Bud: "Let the record show the vote was unanimous."  Bud:

"Drinks for everyone in the house!"  Not bad work, if you can get it.

Curiously, both these executive suite excesses and the insistence on
harsh austerity for everyone else in the company are brought to us
under the same banner: "global competitiveness" (Translation:

Japan made me do it).  Never mind that Japan, Germany, France, and some
of our other major competitors in the "new global economy" pay higher
wages to working people, provide far better benefits, and generally
treat workers with much more respect and sense of partnership than
American CEOs (thereby rendering specious the corporate argument that
knocking down our country's working class is a competitive necessity),
let's deal here with that self-serving notion that "too much is not
enough."

The last time I checked, Japanese executives were still beating the
bejeezus out of our overstaffed CEOs, and they were doing it without
being fed a number six washtub full of cash each morning.  The
highest-paid Japanese executive is Hiroshi Yamauchi, head of the
Nintendo company.  He makes just over $6 million a year--plenty enough
to put sushi on the table every night, but nowhere near the
embarrassment of riches heaped on American executives.  Only six
Japanese CEOs take more than a million dollars.  Honda's top man, for
example, gets $632,000; Cannon camera's CEO gets $584,000;

Kobe Steel's gets $436,000; and Japan Air Lines' CEO gets $391,000.

Remember that ratio of U.S. execs typically getting 225 times the
average pay of a factory worker?  In Japan, the top pay is thirty-two
times greater.

Now here is something that will make you laugh till you cry: If a
Japanese corporation has a poor year, the CEO takes a pay cut!

Imagine!  Not a little symbolic slap on the wallet, either--more like
35 percent.  And (grab your socks now, you won't believe this) if it is
a really bad year, like maybe so bad that the company has to let some
workers go, the CEO resigns.

"When company results are down," a Hitachi honcho told Business Week,
"managers have to take responsibility."

Imagine.  Maybe it's all that torn they eat.

Years ago chewing gum baron Philip Wrigley said: "There are highly
successful businesses in the United States.  There are also highly paid
executives.  The secret is not to intermingle the two."  I think he was
on to something there, so here is a proposal to help get the American
economy back on the right track: Instead of continuing to let these
corporate executives export our jobs and futures to Third World
countries that pay between a nickel an hour and 50 cents an hour for
labor, while the same executives fatten themselves like a hog on
steroids, why don't we import some of those half million-dollar-a-year
CEOs from around the world who have shown they can run successful
companies without running over their own employees and destroying the
middle class?  If American industry must become "lean and mean" to
compete in the twenty-first century, let's start at the top.

RUTH'S BRICKS

Let me introduce you to Ruth Shaver of Mesquite, Texas.

She worked for Safeway for twenty-two years until one day in July 1986,
when something called "Kohlberg Kravis Roberts" dropped out of the sky
and took over her company... and her job.

KKR is a firm of Wall Street pirates that specializes in raiding
corporations.

Armed with more than $4 billion in junk bonds, they leaped on Safeway
and claimed it as their own--three gentlemen who would not know how to
bag a line of groceries if their lives depended on it suddenly owned
the country's biggest supermarket chain.

Four billion dollars is a hell of a debt load to carry, even for
pirates, so to lighten it, KKR immediately began ripping up big pieces
of Safeway's assets and throwing them overboard.  Believe it or not,
this is what passed for good business sense in the eighties.

Among the assets they chunked was the entire Dallas division of the
company--141 Safeway stores, along with 8,814 Safeway people.

Barn!  Out the door.

Ruth Shaver was one of them.

No one was a more cheerful, dedicated, loyal, and capable employee than
Ruth was for Safeway.  She checked groceries, bagged them, stocked
shelves, trained others, and helped remodel stores.  She took great
pride in her work and had the kind of attitude that caused customers to
ask for her by name, and if she was checking, they'd wait in her line
even if it was longer than the others.  For a lot of people, Ruth
Shaver was Safeway.

Over the years, she worked her way up to wages of $12.06 an hour, about
$24,000 a year--not enough to summer in France, but enough to buy a
small slice of middle-class America.

With no notice, though, or fare-thee-well, her store was abruptly
closed and she was dumped.

"They left me high and dry," Ruth says.

Because of her union's contract, she did get a small severance payment,
but it lasted only a few weeks, after which she was stretched to the
breaking point.  Of course, she had begun looking for work immediately,
but she was one of 8,800 people put on the market at once, and the
Dallas job market in the late eighties was already a disaster.

It took her seven months to land another job--not one at twelve bucks
an hour, but $5.70, plummeting her from that middle-class income of
$24,000 to under $12,000 a year.  At these wages, she couldn't keep up
the payments on her Buick, so she lost it, along with her good credit
rating.

But Ruth is a scrapper.  She got an old clunker of a car and began
struggling back.  After a couple of years, she was working two jobs-she
would leave her trailer house at 10:30 p.m. for the night shift at a
warehouse, get off at 7 a.m."  then drive across town for an 8-to-noon
part-time position at a local grocery store.  Ten years later, she is
finally working full time again at a grocery store, and is up to $10.85
an hour.  Also, she now drives a '90 Hyundai, though she had to buy it
in her son's name since her credit was shot, but even that is beginning
to recover--she recently got a Penney's charge card.

Like Ruth, the 8,813 other Safeway employees were a long time finding
other jobs (a third were unable to find employment for more than two
years), and when they did get jobs, practically everyone had to swallow
pay cuts of 30 to 60 percent.  Four committed suicide.  The divorce
rate among these families has been epidemic, and the former employees
have suffered an abnormally high number of heart attacks.

On the other end of the Safeway takeover, though, the picture has been
a whole lot brighter.  Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George
Roberts each enjoyed personal incomes of more than $40 million the year
they bounced Ruth and her coworkers.  Henry Kravis has become one of
the 400 richest people in America and often gets his picture in the
society pages partying with Oscar de la Renta and the high-hat fun
crowd in New York City.  He was cochair of New York's "Bush for
President" finance committee in '88.  But don't pigeonhole him as an
unbending Republican--in that same year, he was a major contributor to
Senators Bill Bradley, Lloyd Bentsen, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and
other Democratic lawmakers up for reelection.  (Call me a galloping
Trotskyite if you must, but am I the only one who suspects this
financial cross-pollination by the Kravises of our country is the
reason neither party ever does anything about their piratical ways?)
Then Mr.  Kravis took the plunge that so many superfluously wealthy
corporate marauders take: He became a "philanthropist."

Not a modest one, of course--Henry wanted full credit and a major
public fuss made over him, and you can be assured he grabbed a full tax
deduction for his generosity.  He donated $10 million to New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art.  In return, the museum named a wing of its
building after him.

So Henry Kravis got the glory as well as the gold.  But, you know,
there are bricks in that wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that
belong to 8,814 Safeway employees, including Ruth Shaver, who still
lives in a trailer house in Mesquite, Texas.

 R

ST.  PETER

There must be a Republican gene.

How else can we explain the astonishing fact that Republican
politicians from Warren Harding to Ronald Reagan and on now to Newt
Gingrich have been so consistently committed to the preposterous notion
that the answer to poverty is charity and that the only way to increase
charity is first to increase the fortunes of the wealthy.

"If ye truly want to help the poor," goes the dogma of Republicanism,
"first provide tax breaks, subsidies, and other incentives to spur the
blessed rich to do what they do best (which is to amass greater and
greater wealth unto themselves), then put ye your trust in the
charitable nature of these good and wealthy souls."

There are at least a couple of snakes under that log.  First, every
time we have tried this trickle-down philosophy, we have indeed made
the rich fabulously richer, but somehow or other, the poor have always
ended up getting trickled on, figuratively speaking.

Under Reagan, for example, millionaires made out like bandits, but
their charitable natures did not expand, they shriveled.  Not since the
Roaring Twenties had the incomes of the rich risen so dramatically, yet
the level of contributions by millionaires to charities during the
eighties fell from more than 7 percent of their income to less than 4
percent, and precious little of that went to poor folks.  The
preponderance of charity from elites goes to universities, museums,
churches, and other prestigious and powerful institutions.

The second and more fundamental flaw in the "let them eat charity"
philosophy is that it is a miserable and miserly substitute for
developing a real economic policy that gives people the tools they need
to build and maintain middle-class life--basic tools like stronger
labor laws, health care for all, true educational opportunity,
affordable housing... There is a third flaw, too, and it really sticks
in my craw.  Too much of the "charity" bestowed by the wealthy comes
from those who are not really charitable at all.  They have built
fortunes on the backs of people to whom they pay poverty wages, then
they want public applause for donating a fraction of a percent of that
ill gotten fortune to the poor--like the spectacle of John D.
Rockefeller himself in his later years, going around doling out dimes
to children.

I'll tell you what St.  Peter thinks about trickle-down.  This is a
story that old Earl Long used to relish telling when he was governor of
Louisiana:

A rich man died and tried to get into heaven.  As you know, though, one
doesn't just waltz through the Pearly Gates, no matter who you are. No,
no--you must present yourself to the Angel standing outside, and that
Angel reviews your life while St.  Peter listens, then St.  Peter
renders judgment on whether you get to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

So the Angel looked over this rich man's life, shook his head, and
said: "Why, you never did no good for nobody no way; why are you even
standing here?"

"Now wait a minute," the rich man said, "I have given to charity.  Why,
in 1933 I came across a poor widow who needed food and I gave her a
nickel."

"So?"  the Angel asked.

"Well, then there was that time in 1943, I saw a beggar man on the
street, and I put a nickel in his cup."

"Maybe so," the Angel said, "but that doesn't make up for a lifetime of
greed."

"But don't you see," the rich man pleaded, "I have a consistent pattern
of philanthropy.  In 1953, filled with the Christmas spirit, I came out
of my bank, walked right over to the Salvation Army kettle, and put a
nickel in there."

The Angel turned around to St.  Peter, threw open his arms, and asked,
"What in God's name are we going to do with this man?"

St.  Peter scowled and said in his thunderous voice: "Give him back his
15 cents and tell him to go to hell."

A SHINING CITY ON THE HILL

I still have a glorious memory of my earliest encounter with a
merry-go-round, way back when I was but a tyke.  This particular
carousel was a part of a small penny arcade and amusement park at
Burn's Run Beach on Lake Texoma, near my hometown of Denison.

I'm sure now it wasn't much of a whirligig, as merry-go-rounds go, but
you couldn't have told me that then.  I was dazzled by this marvelous
spinning contraption, its glittering lights, its blaring calliope
music, its swirling horses, camels, and other critters--even a yellow
and green seahorse!  My eyes grew larger than 50-cent pieces, my heart
drummed faster than the music, and my entire life's ambition at that
moment was nothing less than to get on board and ride, ride, ride.

Good old American capitalism strikes me in much the same way today,
pulling us--as well as so many immigrants from around the world--toward
its irresistible sparkle and razzmatazz.  Oh for a ticket to ride on
such a fantastic, twinkling system!

There, though, is the sticking point.  One of the least acknowledged
oddities about our capitalist society is that so very, very, very few
of us are.  Capitalists, that is.

I do not mean ideologically, but tangibly.  How about you?  Do you have
much capital to speak of--capital being the wealth to invest so that
your investments might spin out more wealth for you to invest, which
would spin out still more ... and on and on, round and round, spinning
faster and faster on that phantasmagoric merry-go-round?

If you are like most of us, what you have is your take-home pay, a
house (mortgaged), a car or possibly two, a life-insurance policy,
maybe a small pension or savings account, a closetful of clothes, a
shelf of good books, a full set of Tupperware, your bowling ball, some
socket wrenches, and the complete recordings of Engelbert Humperdinck.
This does not a capitalist make.  It would not take much more than a
good yard sale to cash you out, and even then you would barely cover
your debts, much less be in a position to do lunch with Donnie Trump.

Warning: Statistics Ahead, Next Three Paragraphs.  Us middle classers
mostly own no stocks and bonds, investment properties, businesses, or
trusts.  More than two-thirds of our "wealth" is tied up in our homes,
with about 20 percent more in life insurance, checking accounts,
savings deposits, and other small-potato holdings.  For us, wealth is
our safety net, a little something to fall back on, rather than a power
lever to rocket us upward to higher and higher levels of... well, of
capitalism.

This is what makes us different from the super rich--the wealthiest 1
percent of American families who are worth more than $2.3 million each.
These fortunate ones put less than 7 percent of their wealth into their
homes (which still gives them houses with more square footage in linen
closets than our houses have in bedrooms); instead, more than 80
percent of their savings go into stocks, real estate, and other
investments that pack a powerful financial punch and steadily return
big bucks to them.  These are the genuine capitalists.  There are only
some 600,000 of these families in our entire country, but they own 46
percent of all the stock in America, 54 percent of all the bonds, 53
percent of all the trust accounts, 56 percent of all the business
equity, and 40 percent of all the investment real estate.

Add to this wealthiest 1 percent of families the next-wealthiest 9
percent (those whose net worths are $346,000 to $2.3 million each)--and
you have pretty well lassoed all of our country's practicing
capitalists.  This top 10 percent of our population owns 89 percent of
the stocks, 88 percent of the bonds, 89 percent of the trusts, 90
percent of the business equity, and 80 percent of the investment real
estate.  These privileged few have attained this astonishing level of
wealth concentration the old-fashioned way: They got our government to
give it to them.

If poverty is its own punishment, wealth is its own reward, bringing
not only comfort, social status, and raw economic power, but also
tremendous political advantage, including the ability to buy
politicians (OK, maybe they don't actually buy them, but they damn
straight take out long-term leases on them).

When Ronald Reagan was President, he described America as "a shining
city on a hill."  What an elegant phrase!  But what he didn't mention
was that you and I--the workaday majority--would not be living in that
shining city; no indeed, our place was well down the side of the hill
toiling in the shadows, doing the drudge work to sustain the sumptuous
lifestyles of those at the top.  The few have always had the most in
our country, but in the past two decades, Reagan, then George Bush, and
now Bill Clinton--along with loyal, cheering congressional majorities
forged among both political parties--have teamed with America's most
privileged and powerful citizens to create an unprecedented rise in
this wealth inequality.  They have done it by gaily dismantling our
nation's progressive tax policies, contorting our country's regulatory
policies, rigidifying and channelizing monetary policy, diverting our
spending policies, and perverting America's trade policies.  All of
their reengineering and deconstructing has resulted in massive,
unprecedented loads of cash and economic power being hauled out of our
neighborhoods up to the top of the hill.

One final load of statistics: In the eighties and nineties, practically
all of the new economic wealth that we generated as a people-some $12
trillion worth of gain--went into the pockets and portfolios of the
wealthiest 20 percent of us.  Indeed, nearly two-thirds of the overall
increase in the American people's net worth went to that handful of
super privileged citizens, the wealthiest 1 percent.

This is such a phenomenal fact, such a staggering accumulation of
wealth in so few hands, that it absolutely begs for a bar graph.  I
have done my best to avoid imposing such wonkishness on you, and I
apologize in advance, but I simply cannot help myself this time.

Here goes (sorry):

SHARE OF AMERICA'S GAIN IN WEALTH, 1983-89, BY WEALTH CLASS

NEXT RICHEST 9%

NEXT RICHEST 10%

YOU (BOTTOM 80%) | 1.2%

Source: Edward N. Wolff, New York University, editor of Review or
Income and Wealth

Professor Edward Wolff, whose recent book Top Heavy documents the
stunning rise of America's wealth inequality, says that figures since
1989 indicate that the top 1 percent are now taking 68 percent of the
total increase in household wealth, so "the super rich are moving away
from the rest of the population at an even faster pace in the '90s."

During the Reagan regime, the Reaganauts referred to their policies as
"supply side economics."  Now we know what that means:

Their side gets all the supplies.  Just twenty years ago the 600,000
super rich families held 19 percent of America's total wealth--add up
the value of every household's cash, stocks and bonds, cars, liquor
cabinet, lava lamps, VCRs, everything... and they owned 19 percent of
it.  Fast forward to today.  They now own more than 42 percent of,
everything.

THE NEXT BEST THING TO SLAVES

At last U.S. industry has figured out how to compete with Third World
wages right here at home.  Hire prisoners!  No need to mess with the
want ads, employment agencies, or job fairs to find cheap workers, just
bustle on down to your state prison and cut a deal for some convicts.
Since 1990 thirty states have contracted out prison labor to private
companies.

JCPenney, Kmart, and Eddie Bauer are getting such products as jeans,
sweatshirts, and toys made by prisoners in Tennessee and Washington
State.

IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell computer all get circuit boards made
by Texas prisoners.

Honda has had car parts made in Ohio prisons, McDonald's has uniforms
made in Oregon prisons, AT&T has hired telemarketers in Colorado
prisons, and Spalding gets golf balls packed in Hawaii prisons.

California's correctional system has become a one-stop hiring hall for
corporations: San Quentin inmates do data entry for Chevron, Macy's,
and Bank America Ventura inmates take telephone reservations for TWA
(yes, this does mean callers are unwittingly giving their credit card
numbers to criminals, and, yes, there have been "incidents"); Folsom
inmates work for both a plastics manufacturer and a brass faucet maker;
and Aveala inmates run an ostrich-slaughtering facility for an exporter
that ships the meat to Europe.

Who says American industry is losing its ingenuity?  These
freeenterprisers not only get labor for minimum wage and less from the
state, but they also provide no health care, no pensions, no vacations,
none of those other frills that pampered softies on the outside are
always crying about.  Plus these jailbirds always show up on time for
work, they don't call in "sick" to go to a ballgame, if they talk back
you can have 'em thrown in solitary, and they darn sure won't be
joining some pesky union.  I tell you, it's the next best thing to
having slaves--maybe better, since the company doesn't even have to
feed and house them.

Oh, and here's the best part of all: You can slap a made-in-theU.S.A.
label on every product they make for you!

Convict-made goods are expected to reach nearly $9 billion in sales by
the end of the decade as the prison population swells, as more
companies discover the scam, and as more state politicians learn to
cash in on it.  Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, never one to pass up
a chance to exploit someone's misery, has been especially adept at
huckstering his state's prison force: "Can't find workers?"

a state mailing asks corporate executives all across the country.

No problem, proclaims the brochure, "A willing workforce
waits"-conveniently incarcerated for you in Wisconsin.

Most companies pay the minimum wage, but many get away with paying far
less--AT&T, for example, paid only two bucks an hour for its imprisoned
telemarketers, and Honda got its convict made car parts from the Ohio
prison at two-and-a-nickel an hour.

The prisoners typically get to keep only 20 percent of the paycheck,
with the state government grabbing the rest, which is why the states
are all for it.

Participating firms everywhere sing the praises of this locked-up
labor.  In an article in Nation magazine, Bob Tessler of DPAS company
in San Francisco gushes: "We have a captive labor force, a group of men
who are dedicated, who want to work.  That makes the whole business
profitable."  That, plus the fact that California taxpayers also give
Tessler a 10 percent tax credit on the first $2,000 of each inmate's
wages.  Wow, cheap prison labor and a subsidy--if that won't restore
your faith in the working of the free market, nothing will!  It is such
a steal of a deal that Tessler has shut down his operation in Mexico,
moving his data processing work inside San Quentin.

"Here we don't have a problem with language, we have better control of
our work and, because it's local, we have a quicker turnaround time."

LABOR DAY

There is at least one of everything in New York City, so it was no
surprise at all to encounter a long-haired, thirty-something fellow in
jeans and T-shirt wending his way silently down Broadway through the
morning rush-to-work crowd, holding aloft a hand-lettered message on a
big piece of cardboard.  Still, I noticed that even jaded New Yorkers
winced at the punch this guy's cardboard threw at them as they hurried
to the office:

Consume Watch TV Be $ilen+ Work Die

Ouch.  But rather than wince, why not pick up on number three?

We will continue to consume, watch TV, work, and die--but we do not
have to keep silent as the powers-that-be cut the incomes and security
of the workaday majority, cut back on our health care and pensions, cut
corners on job safety, and ultimately cut out on the middle class
altogether.

There is no need for this class war.  America is not suffering--we are
in high cotton!  Our economy is spinning out more wealth than ever;
worker productivity is the highest in the world; corporate profits and
stock prices are at astonishingly high levels; executive pay is an
embarrassment of riches.  Yet 80 percent of us are barely getting along
and seeing more and more of our opportunities closed off.

Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being
kicked.

What America's economic elites really have severed is the essential
American idea of all-for-one-and-one-for-all--that if we work hard, if
we are loyal and creative, if we help raise the tide, we'll share in
the gain.  This is the "social contract" that holds us together, not
merely as an economy, but as a society.

Bear in mind that this contract was not "awarded" to us--we demanded
it, fought for it, bled and died for it... and won it.  The forty-hour
week, overtime pay, the very idea of a minimum wage, collective
bargaining, social security, Medicate and Medicaid, pensions, and all
the rest that so many families have taken for granted for so long came
against the wishes and the bitterest opposition of the powerful.

Even Labor Day.  Schools do not teach it and history books ignore it,
but even getting a simple holiday for workers required an epic
struggle.  For most people, Labor Day is just a time to hit the pool or
the mall, fire up the grill for an evening cookout, do some
twelve-ounce elbow bends through the day to stay limber, and maybe
toast the bosses for getting the day off.

Toast the bosses?!  Holy Joe Hill, the bosses did not give you the day
offl Hell, they damn near choked on their fine whiskey and swallowed
their big cigars at the mere mention that there should be a holiday
celebrating the principle that workers create wealth.

To the contrary, Labor Day was a bottom-up creation, our first national
holiday put on the calendar by ordinary people.  Dauntless Matt McGuire
of the New York City carpenters union was the one who first proposed
that on September 5,1882, all labor unions in the vicinity should make
"a public show of organized strength."  This was no bid for a day at
the beach, either.  People were working twelve hour days, six days a
week, for a daily wage of $2, and this parade of unionists was the shot
across the bow of the Gilded Age tycoons, declaring an all-out fight
for an eight-hour day at fair pay.  In support of McGuire's proposal,
the New York Central Labor Committee unilaterally declared September
5,1882, to be a workers' holiday, and called on working people to march
right through the heart of the city and on into the battle for
fairness: "We are entering a contest to recover the rights of the
workingmen and secure henceforth to the producer the fruits of his
industry," trumpeted their official call to arms.

And they came.  Defying bosses and risking both their jobs and their
personal safety, thousands of bricklayers, longshoremen, jewelers,
carpenters, typographers, cigar makers and others marched in rank and
file with bands blaring, banners streaming, and fierce pride proclaimed
in their every step.  From City Hall up Broadway to

Union Square they proceeded, 4,000 strong, then across Seventeenth
Street to Fifth Avenue, where they turned north.  This was a sight hard
to imagine: row after row after row of $2-a-day laborers, six abreast,
tramping straight up what was then the most ostentatious corridor of
wealth and power in America.  Reporter Richard Hunt described the
scene: "They passed August Belmont's house; they trudged on past the
tonish Brunswick Hotel; past the uptown Delmonico restaurant; past the
elegant new Union League Club; past the mansion of Vincent Astor.  Mrs.
Astor--along with many of her millionaire neighbors--was in Newport for
the season.  Nonetheless, if the consciousness of capitalism was not
penetrated, its precinct was."

The spirit of the day was so powerful and the march was such a
rip-snorting success that New York's labor committee resolved to
observe the first Monday of every September as "Labor Day."  Bosses
railed against this usurpation of authority and forbade it,
editorialists declaimed it as ruffians on parade, politicians denounced
it as anarchy and rank ingratitude to employers.  Still, the workers
took off.  Within a dozen years, workers in twenty-five states had
appropriated this same day as their own, using it as a symbol of their
determination to gain a better share of their own productivity.  By
1894 the movement's strength was such that Labor Day was sanctioned by
an act of Congress and signed into law by Grover Cleveland.  The people
had taken their own day off.

A hundred years later, the powers-that-be again want to deny us the
gains of our productivity.  They have amassed so much of our society's
money and power that they now feel free to decouple their fortunes from
the well-being of the rest of us, kicking down the whole structure of
middle-class opportunities we Americans have built up since the days of
the robber barons--a structure that our very society is built on.

In its place they supplant our hard-won social contract with a
corporate ethic of "I got mine, you get yours,"

"Never give a sucker an even break,"

"Caveat emptor,"

"I'm rich and you're not" ... "Adios, chump."  Even more perniciously
they tell us that we don't matter in their newer, braver economic
world.  By word and deed they say:

"We can make you compete with Third World wages, reduce you to
temporary and part-time status, force your family to work two or three
jobs to make less than one wage earner used to bring home, and treat
you as disposable--because you don't matter."

"We can deny you health coverage, loot your pension, price both college
education and home ownership beyond the reach of you and your children,
and make your whole family downwardly mobile--because you don't
matter."

"We can devalue the minimum wage, compel you to work sixty-hour weeks,
eliminate overtime pay, make a mockery of collective bargaining, and
even take back that Labor Day if we choose--because you don't
matter."

The "you" includes not only you the low-skilled worker, but also you
the highly skilled machinist, the college-educated computer programmer,
the teacher, the professional engineer, the architect, the mid-level
executive ... you, the entire middle class.

It is said that the rich and the poor will always be among us.

Perhaps so, but it is not assured anywhere or in any time that the
middle class will always be among us.  Quite the contrary, a middle
class is created only through great struggle by the people themselves,
organizing, communicating, connecting, rallying, demanding, striking,
marching, fighting, agitating, and undertaking all the other untidy
activities that have been required throughout our history for ordinary
people to make gains--and to hold them.

The powers-that-be do not want us thinking like this.  Be silent!

But as happens periodically in our country (1830s, 1880s, 1920s), the
rich are not merely getting richer in the 1990s, they are getting
ridiculous, and we have to fight for our economic freedom.  This will
not be done or us, only by us.

From time to time, I have been jumped by apologists for the status quo
who get right in my face, shouting, spewing spit, and demanding to
know: "What is it you want anyway?"  Fair question.  I want what
working people have long wanted:

More schoolhouses and fewer jails.

More books and fewer arsenals.

More constant work and less crime.

More leisure and less greed.

More justice and less revenge.

In fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.

This list is from a speech by Samuel Gompers, founding president of the
American Federation of Labor, in 1893.

EARRINGS ON A HOG

My friend Verne Newton once attended the official lighting of the
National Christmas Tree.  Each year, several thousand people in our
nation's capital bundle up and trek over to the Ellipse, the small park
immediately south of the White House, where they stand in the cold
until the tree's lights are flicked on, then they leave. Washingtonians
are fairly easily amused.

Verne reports that on the night he attended there was a jolly crowd
waiting expectantly in the December darkness, all eyes trained on the
shadowy hulk of what he took to be at least an eighty-foot-tall,
eighty-year-old ponderosa pine hacked down and hauled in all the way
from someplace like Extremely Tall Trees, Montana.  Next to the
towering pine was a small platform on which the President, the First
Lady, the First Dog, and a whole mess of picture-perfect children
collected.  The crowd had been waiting for more than an hour, but at
last everything was about ready for the Leader of the Free World to
press the button that would suddenly emblazon every branch of this
noble ponderosa with electric Christmas color.

As the joyous moment approached, Verne thought he heard someone behind
him call his name.  Reflexively he turned his head, but he recognized
no one, and he just as quickly turned back for the lighting of the
tree.  Too late!  In that instant of turning, the button had been
pushed and the tree was lit.  Verne was there, but he missed it.

It occurs to me that a lot of conservatives must have had a "Verne
experience" when it comes to observing the workings of our economy. Say
to them, as I have in my political travels and talk-radio
conversations, that the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are
getting taken, and quite often they'll curl their lip and snap back
with this verbal sneer: "Why, you're just trying to start a class
war."

Too late for that, Limbaugh-breath!  Maybe you missed it, but that
button was pushed a long time ago.

You want class warfare?  Check out how corporate lobbyists have
conspired with their hired hands in Washington to hold down the minimum
wage, which exists as our society's income floor, a base level of pay
that says, "This is how we value people who work."

Forget the PR crap put out by low-wage employers that the only
Americans toiling for the minimum are a few suburban teens grabbing
extra spending money by working at the Whataburger after school.  Not
so.  Eleven million Americans are employed at this bottom-level pay,
and nearly two-thirds of them are adults, most trying to support
families.

Just as important, the wage structure for millions of others is built
on this floor.  Raise the floor, and those making one, two, or three
bucks above the minimum end up benefiting, too, making the minimum wage
one of the best tools we have for spreading the gains of worker
productivity.

Candidate Clinton pledged boldly and unequivocally in his 1992 run for
the presidency to lift the $4.25-an-hour floor that holds so many
families in peonage, asserting that poverty ought not to be the reward
for work in our fabulously wealthy economy.  Good for him!

Unfortunately Clinton operates like a light bulb not screwed into its
socket very tightly; he occasionally flickers with brightness, but you
never get any steady light.  No sooner had he settled into the big
chair with the presidential seal on it than he abandoned those
families.

Yeah, yeah, he did make mention of raising the wage in his first State
of the Union message, but it was all a pose--he never even sent a bill
up to Capitol Hill, despite the fact that his party controlled the
Congress and that 75 percent of the public was in favor of a major
minimum-wage boost.

What spooked Bill?  Wall Street.  Goldman Sachs, Bear Steams, and the
other big bond houses hold way more sway in Clinton's White House than
do the houses of the working poor.  These are generous contributors to
Clinton, they have allies like Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin
positioned inside the administration, they have lobbyists like Vernon
Jordan who are close pals and golfing partners with the Prez, they have
key congressional leaders in their pockets--and all of these voices
gave the same single word of advice to Clinton in 1993: "jittery."
Major Wall Street investors, they advised the President with all the
solemnity they could muster while saying something so patently silly,
would be "jittery" at any effort by him to lift wages, and the very
mention of it could precipitate (gasp!) a decline in the Dow

Jones Average.  Showing the same steely-eyed firmness that would
characterize the rest of his presidency, Bill said, "Oh, OK."

And that was that, until three years later, when his reelection
campaign was under way.  In the spring of '96, responding to rising
public anger that working folks were being trampled by unbridled
corporate greed, Bill decided to toss the dogs a pork chop, and
suddenly Candidate Clinton was back, talking once more about the moral
imperative of raising the minimum wage "to make work pay."

But not much, mind you, nowhere near a living wage and not even enough
to lift a full-time worker out of poverty.  With much fanfare and
garlands of self-congratulation, he and the Republican Congress
approved a boost of--ta-ta-tala, tala, tala: 90 cents.  And even this
parsimony has been phased in over fifteen months, spending a year at
$4.75 an hour before finally reaching its full flowering of $5.15 an
hour.  Clinton privately told a couple of labor leaders that he would
like to have done more, but he did not want to risk making Wall
Street... well, jittery.

Wall Street can relax.  Clinton's big 90-cent increase still leaves
minimum wage workers getting less in buying power than they got in
1956, when Ike was President.  Try buying a slice of the American dream
on Clinton's minimum wage, which pays about $860 a month gross for
full-time work:

A month on clinton's minimum-wage budget

Rent: $350 for even a rundown nothing-of-a-place Utilities: $50 just
for gas and electric, no phone Household: $200 to put groceries on the
table, buy toilet paper, soap, sheets and towels, cleansers, and other
essentials Transportation: $50 to get back and forth to work, assuming
a bus or subway even goes there; way more if you need a car; and this
does not count any errands, visits, etc.

Personals: $50 for clothing (including work uniforms, which employees
have to buy or rent), haircuts, cold medicines, etc.

Taxes: $50 just for social security, not counting other federal, state,
and local taxes, or even fees for garbage pickup, etc.

Subtotal: $750

This leaves $110 for the rest: child care, medical care (don't dare get
really sick, because you don't have any insurance, and emergency rooms
cost a week's wages just to talk to a nurse), education or job
training, amusements (no cable TV, no movies, no ballgames, not much of
nothing), a home computer for your child, vacations (ha!) ... and what
about Christmas and your child's birthday?  It makes you ache, inside
as well as out.  As one lady put it, working for minimum wage--even
after Bill's Big Boost--"leaves you feeling like you've been ironing
all day on a low board with a cold iron."

In his January 1998 State of the Union message, 01' Bill waxed
rhetorical once again about raising the minimum wage, giving it a
one-sentence plug as "a simple, sensible step to help millions of
workers struggling to provide for their families."  Good line, but once
again, weak follow-through.  His proposal was to raise the wage by only
another buck.  Even if it happens (and Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and
their Republican majority pointedly sat on their hands and glared
stony-faced at Clinton as he delivered his rhetorical gesture), it
would mean that someone working full time still would be mired in
poverty, grossing just over $12,000 a year, minus payroll taxes and
other deductions.  Six years into his presidency, at the height of his
popularity, and Clinton still would not spend a couple of political
chips to honor his 1992 campaign promise that the reward for work would
at least be higher than the poverty line.

You want class warfare?  Washington's corporate lobbyists are not
nicknamed "cockroaches" for nothing--they swarm in the dark, feed on
anything that hits the floor, and consider no act too low.

While Clinton and the Congress were passing their miserly minimum-wage
hike last year, the roaches were climbing on the legislation like it
was birthday cake, scurrying off in the dark with some $21 billion
worth of corporate gimmies from a bill ostensibly intended to help the
working poor:

A "clarification" of tax law was tucked into the bill, allowing
newspaper conglomerates to classify their carriers--the minimum-wage
folks who deliver your morning paper--as "independent contractors."
This allows the Murdochs, Coxes, Dealeys, Hearsts, and other
billionaire publishers to avoid paying social security, unemployment,
and other benefits to those minions whom they so hypocritically hail in
an annual editorial on Newspaper Carriers Day.

U.S. multinational corporations snuck in a loophole eliminating taxes
on income they make from their foreign factories, thus giving them yet
another tax incentive to move more of our factories and jobs abroad.

Corporate raiders like Henry Kravis, Ron Perelman, and others who
conduct hostile takeovers of corporations, then fire the employees and
plunder the assets of the takeover targets, got a great big goodie from
the minimum-wage bill, too.  These pirates pay billions of dollars in
fees to investment bankers to finance their job-destroying raids, but
now-thanks to a "technical correction" jammed into the wage bill--those
banking fees will be tax-deductible.  Even more fun, Congress made the
deductibility retroactive.

At the White House signing ceremony for the minimum-wage bill, Clinton
surrounded himself with low-wage workers for a photo op, but
off-camera, it was the Wall Street powerhouses who had the broadest
grins.

You want class warfare?  It's bad enough that top corporate executives
hold down everyone's wages and fire working people right and left while
they scamper over the hill with $5-million-ayear, $50-million-a-year,
$150-million-a-year paychecks in their pockets, but to make the deal
even rawer, Washington forces you and me to subsidize the salaries of
these profligates.  No matter how extravagant, every dime of the CEO's
salary, bonus, extra compensation, and perks is deducted from the
corporation's tax bill.

If you pay your teenagers to mow your yard twice a month, do you get to
deduct this expense from your taxes?  No, you do not.  If you did, you
undoubtedly would pay them $100 or $1 million, or as much as you could
for each mowing because, well, why not ... the taxpayers are covering
it for you.

Once again, Bill Clinton's light flickered on and he expressed his
determination to do something about runaway greed in the executive
class.  In his first State of the Union speech, the fresh young
President stood tall at the national podium and dared to suggest that,
as an egalitarian gesture, he would restrict a corporation's tax
write-off to "only" the first million dollars of a CEO's swollen
salary.

"Great God Almighty," every chief executive shrieked in unison from
top-floor suites all across America, "fetch a rope and call the hounds,
there's a Bolshevik loose in the White House!"  Even before Clinton
completed his speech, the phone calls were made, lobbyists were hired,
and the "Save the Millionaires" campaign was launched to try to stop
this act of "cheap populism," as they quickly branded the new
President's proposal to tighten their loophole.

They took this frontal assault on their class privilege very
personally, with top executives themselves getting involved in the
fight for the preservation of fat paychecks.  As reported in the
Washington Post, the serious squawking took place in some of those
out-of-the way places where the concentric social circles of the
Washington and Wall Street elites overlap.  Scene 1: A black-tie dinner
at a Florida resort, where some of the nation's biggest industrialists
flock to spend February, fleeing the northern winter.  Letitia
Chambers, a White House aide, is cornered by a covey of the well-heeled
ones:

"Why are you picking on us?"  demanded the wife of one of the well
over-a-million-dollar-a-year executives, her face flushed a bright red.
Scene 2: A dinner of top business executives in New York the night
following Clinton's address.  The honchos of American Express, RJR
Nabisco, Loews Corp."  AIG insurance, and other giants are there,
moaning and groaning directly into the ears of Robert Rubin, then the
head of Clinton's National Economic Council and now the Treasury
Secretary.  These were good ears to moan into, since Rubin himself had
been a $26-million-a-year man at Goldman Sachs before joining the White
House--he could feel their pain.

Rubin smoothed ruffled feathers and cooed soothing words: "That's not
the real Bill Clinton."

Apparently not.  He quickly dropped the idea, never talking publicly
about it again.  In April a couple of mid-level monkey wrenchers from
the Treasury Department announced a "revised proposal":

Instead of capping deductions at a million bucks, the administration
would allow full deductibility as long as the executive's pay was
attached to some vague performance goals set by the corporation's board
of directors--sort of like getting a note from your mother saying it's
OK for you to keep looting the treasury.

Clinton officials explained they backed off because they didn't want to
"meddle improperly" in the private sector's business.  Do we look like
we have sucker wrappers around our heads?  No one was talking about
meddling with the amount a corporation pays Mr.

Big--pay him a king's ransom as far as I care, but do not take it out
of the taxpayers' pockets.  That is the public's business.

The President's abrupt turnaround reminds me of the young, duded-up
city slicker who sashayed into a blacksmith shop and began to poke
around, claiming to know quite a bit about the cowboy life.  The
bemused blacksmith was hammering out horseshoes, pulling red-hot pieces
of iron out of the fire, striking and bending them into shape, then
tossing them into the coal ashes, still sizzling.

The city slicker stepped over, reached knowingly into the ashes, and
picked one up ... immediately dropping that finger-singeing sucker.

"Hot?"  the smithy asked with a smile.

"Nope," the young dude said through clenched teeth, "it just don't take
me long to look at a horseshoe."

You want class warfare?  It raged full-tilt behind the scenes of
Washington's infamous balance-the-budget imbroglio of the 104th
Congress.  In public view, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton appeared to
be in total, absolute, fundamental disagreement over every dime of
federal spending, going at each other like a couple of blustering
schoolboys in a playground shoving match.

BILL: You're trying to kill Medicate.

NEWT: Am not.  You just want to scare old people.

BILL: You're the one scaring old people, and children, too--you want to
take school lunches away.

NEWT: Do not.

BILL: Do too.  Besides, I can cut the budget better than you can, you
blow-dried twit.

NEWT: Oh yeah?  Well, I can cut it to nothing in seven years.

BILL: But you're cheating because you're using "funny numbers" to make
it balance.

NEWT: It's you that's unbalanced, you hillbilly... Boys, boys, hold on!
While the two of them drew all the media attention to their squabbling
over how much was or was not actually getting cut from Medicate, food
stamps, college loans, and other people's programs, there was
practically zero discussion of a more significant question: Who was not
getting cufi At all.  Not cut by Republicans, or by Democrats.

We were offered a clue just before Christmas of 1995 when a strongly
worded, double-trunk newspaper ad ran all across the country in the
midst of Bill and Newt's partisan tussle: "Without a Balanced Budget
the Party's Over.  No Matter Which Party You're In," the headline
asserted.  Declaring that "America must begin to live within its
means," the ad sternly called on Clinton and Gingrich to set
partisanship aside, suck up some political courage, and get on with
making the deep and painful cuts necessary to balance the budget, even
if this meant whacking popular entitlement programs like Medicate . The
ad's ninety-one signers claimed to be a bipartisan bunch united by "our
common concern for America's future."

There was our clue.  Anytime anyone buys two-page ads in USA Today, the
Washington Post, the New York Times, and other pricey venues to assert
their selfless concern for America, do not take your eyes off them for
a single second, do not even blink, because they're trying to steal
something from you.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about a certain
visitor, "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our
spoons."

Who were these ninety-one selfless patriots?  Major corporate
executives, every one of them.  What chutzpah, what hypocrisy!

Count your spoons because, from A to Z--from AT&T to Zenith-these are
the very CEOs who spent the entire budget right in the back rooms of
the Capitol and the White House, secretly waging a guerrilla war
against the middle class and the poor.  They made certain that all of
Washington's budget balancing would be done on our backs, none on
theirs.  They don't want us to know it (and the media do a fine job of
keeping their secret), but federal spending on corporate welfare far
exceeds spending on human welfare, and these welfare kings" made sure
that neither Bill's nor Newt's balanced budget would touch even a dime
of the $200 billion or so a year Uncle Sugar ladles out to them in the
form of subsidies, special tax breaks, and outright giveaways.

Giveaways like the $85 million a year you and I pony up for something
called the "Market Promotion Program" of the Ag Department, paying for
the overseas advertising campaigns of major agribusiness corporations:
McDonald's has taken $1 million;

Campbell's Soup, $1.5 million; Fruit of the Loom, $2 million; M&M
candies, nearly $4 million; Pillsbury, $9 million; Gallo, $16
million;

and on down the list.

Members of Congress who rant and rave about as little as a dollar's
worth of waste in the school lunch program continue to shove bales of
our tax dollars into this dark orifice.  Remember that amusing animated
ad on television of the dancing California Raisins?-cute as could be.
These raisin marketers were given $3 million of our tax funds to run
their clever ads in Japan and convince the delighted Japanese to buy
the shriveled fruit.  But they ran the ads in English.

Despite the hue and cry for America to begin living "within its means,"
the corporate handouts through this Market Promotion Program not only
were blessed in Newt and Bill's negotiated budget deal--they were
increased by a third.

While Gingrich and Clinton fussed loud and long about how deep to cut
Medicate, they had a quiet gentlemen's agreement to keep larding the
budget with corporate goodies, including those that directly subsidize
class warfare.  There is the Puerto Rican subsidy, for example, which
encourages U.S. firms to move our jobs to the Caribbean by giving cash
to companies for each Puerto Rican job they create.  Mucho cash--it
averages $27,000 per year for every Puerto Rican hired, which is two to
three times more than the worker is paid.  Payment is based not on
wages, but on the profits a firm makes.  (I realize this does not make
sense, but I don't think it's intended to make sense.) Drug companies
have found this particular goodie especially savory, and they have used
it to move thousands of U.S. drug manufacturing jobs to the
island--Johnson & Johnson has been given $50,000 for every job it moved
to Puerto Rico under this program, Bristol Myers Squibb has received
nearly $75,000, and Pfizer has been given $156,000.  That is per
worker, per year, costing us a total of a couple of billion bucks
annually to subsidize our own job loss.

Do you think timber giants like Weyerhauser should be cutting down
old-growth trees (up to 1,000 years old) in our national forests?  Not
only are they, but they're also getting a $5-billion-a-year subsidy
from us to do it.  More than half the tall timber they fell in public
forests in the Pacific Northwest is shipped off to Asia as raw logs and
pulp, where those nations employ their own people to turn our timber
into finished wood products.  Why aren't we keeping such skilled,
well-paying wood-milling jobs here for our people?  Neither Clinton nor
Gingrich bothered to raise this question as they quietly and quickly
agreed not merely to continue this $5-billion timber company rip-off,
but to jack it up by another billion.

You want class warfare?  The tax code is full of it, giving breaks to
corporations and the well-connected, meaning they escape taxation, and
more of America's tax burden falls on you and me.

What does this sentence mean to you?

"For purposes of clause 1, material terms of a contract shall not be
treated as contingent on the issuance of an FCC tax certificate solely
because such terms provide that the sale price would, if such
certificate were not issued, be increased by an amount not greater than
10 percent of the sales price otherwise provided in the contract."

It means Rupert Murdoch and the Chicago Tribune company get a great big
tax break.

This bit of gobbledygook involves the sale of some Murdochowned
television stations to the Chicago Tribune's parent company.

A bill that would have specifically denied tax breaks for such
transactions was sailing through congress until--wait a minute!--our
congressional leaders learned that the Murdoch- Tribune deal was
cooking and that both parties wanted a tax subsidy for it.  So the
lawmakers who were so intent on stopping these subsidies scrambled to
make a special exception for this one.  The language was snuck into the
bill with no public debate, no vote, no press, no fuss.

Slam, barn, thank you ma'am.

According to after-the-fact news reports, this one sentence delivered a
special tax break worth somewhere between $30 and $63 million (which
would make it just over a million dollars per word, if you're counting)
to the Australian media baron, who just happens to

 S

be Newt Gingrich's political supporter and a big-league contributor to
Republican congressional campaigns.  The slick legislative maneuver
also would deliver a $13-million tax break on the Tribune company.

The Senate initiator of this fifty-nine-word lube job was Carol
Mosely-Braun, a Chicago Democrat.  Bipartisanship at work.

Such tax favors were laced throughout both Clinton's and Gingrich's
budgets, including a brand-new loophole big enough to shove a whole
Fortune 500 corporation through it.  This one affects a few hundred
tax-dodging firms that formerly manipulated the tax laws so masterfully
that they avoided paying any share at all of our nation's taxes, no
matter how huge their profits.  In the first half of the eighties, for
example, AT&T piled up $25 billion in profits, but paid zero in taxes.
Correction: The phone company's accountants found so many loopholes
that we taxpayers actually paid AT&T $631 million in tax rebates during
this period.

To stop this nonsense.  Congress passed the "Corporate Minimum Tax" in
1986, requiring at least a token payment from these loophole Houdinis.
But they still managed to jiggle the system and pay a far lower federal
tax rate than you do--for example, in recent years, Texaco has paid
under 9 percent of its multibillion-dollar income in taxes; Chase
Manhattan, 1.7 percent; Texas Utilities, 1.9 percent; and Ogden
Corporation, 0.1 percent.  But at least they paid something.

Even this dab was too much for these fine citizens, though, so while
the media had us watching Bill and Newt's noisy squabble over how much
to cut the school lunch program, their lobbyists went behind the lines
in Congress and quietly snipped the Corporate Minimum Tax in half.

This will pull some $8 billion a year in corporate tax payments out of
the treasury.  That would have bought a lot of school lunches.

Republicans in Congress claim this corporate tax avoidance will "free"
AT&T and the rest to put that $8 billion into job-creating investments
for America, but there is no requirement that they do so, or any
evidence that they will.  Our experience is to the contrary--they will
use it to fatten their own wallets and those of their already wealthy
shareholders, and they will use it to invest abroad, moving more
capital and jobs out of our country, away from the reaching hands of
our middle class.

When those ninety-one CEOs ran their pious newspaper ad expressing
their "common concern for America's future," our nation's chief
crusader for common sense, Ralph Nader, sent a personal letter to each
of them.  He congratulated them on their call for everyone to make
budget-cutting sacrifices and gave them a chance to join in the fun.
Listing ten specific corporate welfare programs that cost us taxpayers
$51 billion, Nader's letter included a pledge card for them to sign. It
read:

To help balance the budget, I have identified the federal subsidies and
tax expenditures that currently benefit my corporation and selected the
subsidies and tax expenditures that my corporation agrees to begin to
forego immediately.

How many takers do you think Ralph got?  Right.

You want class warfare?  Just before Christmas of '96, Treasury
Secretary Robert Rubin, the most influential voice in the Clinton
Administration, issued a decree banning the use of the phrase
"corporate welfare" by administration officials.

These guys are like three-year-olds who believe that if they squeeze
their eyes shut real tight, we can't see them.  That is delightful in a
child.  Less so in a leader.

You want class warfare?  The high society of Wilson, North Carolina,
demonstrates how bone-deep-stupid classism can get.

Organizing themselves into the Wilson Appearance Committee (WAC!),
these leading citizens set out to combat what they consider one of the
South's greatest scourges: Tacky Porch Furniture.  It seems that
certain of your lower classes have been giving the upwardly mobile town
of Wilson an undesirable image by moving their old living room sofas or
their tattered La-Z-Boys out onto their front porches, then being so
presumptuous as to plop themselves thereon just pretty as you please,
and commencing to wave or even speak to passersby.

To deal with this creeping couchism, WAC worked itself into a high
state of ordinancy and, in the Year of Our Lord 1998, flat outlawed
unauthorized porch furniture.  Not that these WAC-worthies are anti
porches or even anti-porch furniture--you just have to have the good
taste in Wilson, please, to purchase a $1,000 wicker set or some other
proper settee capable of winning approval by the WAC Porch Police.

Deborah Thompson is one of the newly outlawed porch sitters in Wilson,
and she can't see what the fuss is about.  She knows that her vinyl and
chrome couch is not going to make House Beautiful, but "this is not
junk," she says.  Indeed, it is her connection to her community.

Ms.  Thompson told the New York Times that she doesn't have a social
calendar, or even a car, but she can--or she once could--sit out on her
porch and socialize.  She's not bothering anyone, especially not those
WACers who live across town.

"I watch the cars go by, and I say 'hey."  I sit there to keep from
sitting in the house.

It gets lonely in the house," she says.

You want class warfare?  The powers-that-be are telling America's
middle-class workers they should not worry about the outflow of
manufacturing jobs because their future is in the "knowledge
industry"--programming new software for Microsoft, generating
interactive computer technologies for Disney, and engineering new
systems for IBM.  But hold your horses.  These same companies are
presently pushing legislation in Washington that would let them bring
more low-paid, foreign workers into the United States to take these
very jobs.

Already, 65,000 immigrants from India, Russia, and other countries are
coming into our country each year under special H-1B, high-tech worker
visas to take these jobs, yet all the High Lords of High Techdom are
pressing both the Clinton White House and the Republican Congress to
nearly double the annual quota of H-1B visas.  If you think they just
pulled that number of visas out of thin air, note that the Commerce
Department recently reported that our computer industry will need
138,000 programmers, engineers, analysts, and other "knowledge workers"
each year for the next decade.

Under the industry's bill, 125,000 of those would be filled from
abroad.

Well, yes, say lobbyists for the megabillion-dollar computer giants,
but there simply are not enough Americans up to snuff on high-tech
skills to fill our needs.  Bull stuff.  Never mind that both industry
and government have been pledging throughout the nineties to make sure
that today's graduates are prepared for these "jobs of the future," the
fact is that good of' U.S.A. programmers, engineers, and such are
available, qualified, and ready right now to take the 65,000 jobs
currently being claimed by the foreign nationals  But here's the rub:
Yes, the Americans have the skills, experience, and problem-solving
ability the industry needs, but thousands of them are forty to sixty
years old and command good salaries.

Why pay those middle-class salaries when you're Bill Gates or some
other big dog who gives big bucks to both parties and can get big
favors done for you in return?  So tens of thousands of U.S. computer
professionals are sitting idle today because Washington has dutifully
opened the gates of selective immigration, allowing Microsoft and the
rest to flood the job market with H-1B imports who are paid a third to
a half less than the going rate, then using the foreigners as a tsunami
to knock down the salary scale for the whole industry.

If it was only a matter of finding homegrown talent, Tom Cox would have
been snatched up quicker than a frog snatches a fly.  He's in the hot
high-tech market of Austin, Texas, where computer executives wail
ceaselessly that the pool of skilled American labor has gone bone-dry.
Yet Cox is toting a resume heavier than he is, including thirteen
years' experience as a top-flight computer programmer and fluency in
eight computer languages, from COBOL to Java.  But after knocking on
corporate door after corporate door, all this forty-five-year-old
programmer has gotten is a fat file of rejection letters.

As he told the Austin American-Statesman, if the companies don't want
to hire Americans like him, they should just say so, "But they should
quit complaining about a labor shortage, because there are plenty of us
out here who can do the job."

People like Cox are being denied the opportunity to "do the job" from
coast to coast: Alan Ezer of Queens, New York, has up-to-the moment
skills and ten years of computer engineering experience, but after
sending out 150 resumes over the past couple of years, he has been
granted only one interview, and no job; Jerry Kowaleski, fifty-eight,
is a major semiconductor talent who served thirteen years as a project
manager for Texas Instruments, and served more recently as manager of a
state-of-the-art semiconductor facility in Thailand, but he has spent
the past year trekking from one company to another in a fruitless job
search; and Bard-Alan Finlan is a forty something computer engineer in
San Diego with the requisite abilities and credentials to be hired in
that high-tech hot spot, yet he, too, has gotten nothing but the
runaround, including almost comical treatment at various high-tech "job
fairs," which he described to Copley News Service: "You take a pile of
50 resumes and give them to the same companies you gave them to six
months earlier at the last fair.  They have someone sitting behind a
desk smiling at you.  They give you a nice plastic pen and a balloon,
and you move on to the next desk."

You want class warfare?  Cynthia Chavez Wall could have told you about
it.  But she is dead now, one of the war's casualties.  Ms.  Wall was a
single mother who worked at a textile factory near Hamlet, North
Carolina, for thirteen years.  She was making $8 an hour until she was
abruptly fired one day for not coming to work, having stayed home to
care for a daughter, who had come down with pneumonia.

Desperate for a job, she hired on at Imperial Food Products, even
though it paid her only $4.95 an hour.  She cut up and prepared chicken
parts that were sold to fast-food restaurants.  She often went home
with her hands bleeding from the cuts she inevitably got trying to keep
pace with constant demands to speed up the process.  She worked up
against fryers with oil heated to 400 degrees; no air conditioning, no
fans, and only a few small windows.  She found it hard, sweaty,
dangerous, hellish work.  She got thirty minutes for lunch and two
fifteen-minute breaks.  Complaining about any of this got you nothing
but fired, and Ms.  Wall had to have a job, so she just had to take
it.

Then on the morning of September 3, 1991, women in one area of the
plant began to yell, "Fire!"  Flames flared and smoke billowed
throughout the building, which had no sprinkler system, no evacuation
plan, and only one fire extinguisher.  As the fire spread quickly,
panicked workers raced to the exits, but the people shoved on the
closed doors to no avail.  All but the very front doors had been
padlocked from the outside.  Company executives later said they did
this to prevent chicken parts from being stolen.  Trapped, twenty-five
of the ninety employees died in the flames.  More than fifty others
were burned or injured.  Cynthia Chavez Wall's body was found at one of
the doors.

"Horrific Accident!," wailed the media.  But it was no accident.

These people were effectively placed in a death trap by their
employers--a death trap that had never once in its eleven-year
existence been inspected by safety officials, though it was regularly
visited by U.S. Agriculture Department inspectors checking on the
quality of the chicken meat.  Earlier in the year the North Carolina
legislature had rejected proposals to toughen the state's safety
regulation, even though the system is so lax that the average North
Carolina workplace is inspected once every seventy-five years.  Under
Reagan and Bush, Washington, too, had cut back on the number of federal
inspectors, leaving us even today with fewer than 1,200 to check out 7
million American work places

It gets scant media coverage and practically no political attention,
but Cynthia Chavez Wall's deadly experience is no anomaly.

More than 10,000 working people a year (about thirty every single day)
die on the job.  These are not gentle deaths--they are buried alive in
trench cave-ins, blown to pieces in refinery explosions, scalded to
death by pipe ruptures, asphyxiated by chemical spills, and otherwise
unpleasantly terminated.  Ours is the deadliest workplace in the
industrialized world.  Other industrial nations simply do not put up
with such corporate laxity, imposing safeguards that would prevent a
majority of the death sentences our executives hand down to 10,000 of
our people year after year.  These deaths are the tip of the
iceberg--hundreds of thousands of us also die each year from the
long-term effects of our jobs: cancer, brown lung, radiation poisoning,
and other diseases.

Two years after Ms.  Wall died, two years after the media had scurried
away to the next "big story" and the politicians had held their
hearings and moved on, a watchdog group called the Government
Accountability Project revisited Hamlet and the surrounding area.

Imperial is no longer there, but the group found that in other poultry
plants, nothing has changed.  Assembly-line speedups continue to cause
excessive injuries, stifling heat and oppressive working conditions
remain, ill and injured employees are forced to stay on the line or be
fired, and, yes, doors are still locked from the outside.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Washington, Vice President Al Gore and
his crack team of "reinventing government" experts have so thoroughly
reinvented the Occupational Health and Safety Administration that now
(Author's Safety Warning: Do not read any further unless and until you
are securely seated) poultry processors are allowed to inspect
themselves.  Of course, they are asked to report any safety violations
that they find to OSHA.  Imagine how pleased Cynthia Wall would be with
this Kafkaesque turn of the screw.  The Republicans have an even
screwier approach to worker safety--they have begun the elimination of
OSHA's enforcement power altogether, intending to make it nothing but
an advisory agency that consults with companies that might be
interested in instituting voluntary safety programs.  Thanks to this
bipartisan retreat, OSHA has become more lapdog than watchdog, with the
number of workplace inspections down by 43 percent since 1995, the
number of serious citations down by 64 percent, and the number of
workers covered by OSHA protections down by a third.

When Al Capone ran booze in Chicago during Prohibition, he observed,
"When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it
on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it's called 'hospitality.""
Likewise, today's CEOs, Wall Street speculators, bond investors, and
their assorted agents in government do not care to have their
collective actions against us middle-classers and poor folks referred
to as "class war."  Too, too tacky.  So they employ all sorts of
comforting euphemisms ("global competitiveness" is the current rave)
for rationalizing any and every act that takes from us and gives to
them.  But it is class war, and no matter how they try to pretty it up,
it's like putting earrings on a hog--they just can't hide the
ugliness.

THE MEDIA

LIKE CATS WATCHING THE WRONG MOUSE HOLE

* LIBERAL MEDIA, MY ASS

* THE DAY TED KOPP EL LEFT TOWN

* TALES OF THE TUBE

* THE REAL MEDIA BIAS

* SYNERGY

* THE PEOPLE ARE REVOLTING

*k ALTERNATIVES

LIBERAL MEDIA, MY ASS

Let us now praise the liberal media: Rush Limbaugh, George Will,
William IF.  Buckley Jr."  John McLaughlin, G. Gordon Liddy, Joe Klein,
Linda Chavez, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthhammer, Robert
Novak, Arianna Huffington, Paul Gigot, Cal Thomas, Michael Barone, Bob
Grant, William Safire, Lally Weymouth, Fred Barnes, Ken Hamblin, David
Gergen, James Glassman, Pat Buchanan, Bay Buchanan, Kenneth Adelman,
Armstrong Williams, John Sununu, Ben Wattenberg, Peggy Noonan, Tony
Snow, Lynn Cheney, Richard Perle, Joseph Sobran, Robert Samuelson, Go
Gritz, Roger Ailes, Walter Williams, James J. Kilpatrick, Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, Mona Charen, Brit Hume, Oilie North, Mary Matalin, John
Leo, Thomas Sowell, Bernard Goldberg, John Stossel, Michael Reagan, P.
J. O'Rourke, Jerry Falwell... Liberal media?  Give me a break.  Sure,
there are the delicious bon mots of the untamable Molly Ivins, Bob
Herbert's pointed and poignant writing every week in the New York
Times, Barbara Ehrenreich's insightful essays in Time, but contrary to
popular misconception, there is a deplorable paucity of actual
liberals, much less progressive populists, with access to a national,
mass-market megaphone of any kind, either in print or on the air
(especially few on the air).  So the public gets very little day in and
day out to counter the cacophony of voices peppering them from the
right.

It is a demonstrably goofy notion that America's media machine is a
hotbed of Stalinesque liberalism that spews a steady stream of lefty
propaganda from every laptop and lavaliere mike in the land, yet this
is a hobgoblin that top Republican politicos have been quick to
embrace.  Newt Gingrich has been especially cranked up on this theme,
whining during the 1996 elections that "the bias in the media is so
overwhelming that all the voters hear is the liberal background noise."
Bob Dole, too, went around grouching that "We've got to stop the
liberal bias in this country.  Don't read that stuff.  Don't watch
television," even though he had been endorsed by nearly two-thirds of
the nation's newspapers.  Winner of the 1996 "Golden Goofy," though,
was Little Stevie Forbes.  Despite having inherited his own
multibillion-dollar media conglomerate and having his own liberal
bashing column in a mass-market magazine that bears his own name, this
'96 GOP presidential wannabe still cried a river during the Republican
primary about being mistreated by that old standby, the "liberal
media."

Newt tilted even farther over the edge back in the opening days of his
speakership, when his star was ascendant and his ego was at full bloat.
In March 1995 he urged newspaper owners to clean house, declaring that
every newsroom in America was a viper's nest not merely of liberals ...
but of outright socialists.  Socialists at the Dallas Morning News7 The
Wall Street Journal7.  USA Today7 The Peoria Journal Star7.  The
Pflugerville Pflag7 The (Insert Your Paper Here)?

Name these red devils, Mr.  Speaker, name them!  Of course, he could
not.  As Mike Kelley, a reporter with Austin's daily paper (a distant
outpost of the far-flung Cox empire), noted: "I don't even like car
pooling

But the "liberal media" chant makes a good, hot-button campaign
schtick, so Newt, Bob, and Little Stevie played it for all it was
worth, and then some.  Each of them tried to buttress their assertions
by thumping various podiums with what they considered a terribly
damning survey of Washington reporters, a high percentage of whom
identified themselves as--hold on to your hats!--Democrats.

None of the GOP complainers whispered a word about the political
leanings of the handful of executives who really run America's media
show: the general managers, advertising directors, managing editors,
publishers, and owners.  And while the study on reporters was widely
covered, the supposedly liberal media raised no alarms at all about the
Tory bias of the bosses.

By trotting out the tried-and-true liberal bugaboo, Newt and the rest
divert public attention from those who own and run today's media
combines.  Ideologically, this establishment arian clique is
inseparable from what it is structurally: Cold, Calculating
Corporatist.  This group is happy to be either Republican Corporatist
or Democratic Corporatist, whatever it takes to perpetuate and extend
their domain. At heart, they are devout disciples of the Holy Global
Corporate Orthodoxy, distilled to this three-pronged metaphysical
essence: Money... More ... Now.  This is a secular theology once
expressed to me in folksier terms by a West Texas land baron: "I don't
want all the land, Hightower--just all that's next to mine."

"Corporate media" no longer suffices as an umbrella term for today's
multinational, multimedia constructs.  The news is no longer in the
hands of news companies, much less in the hands of news people.  Check
the latest conglomerate framework of television, for example: NBC is a
wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric, CNN has been swallowed by
Time Warner, CBS is under the thumb of Westinghouse, and ABC is now
just another product of Disney Inc.

So what--with cable TV there is plenty of room for broadcast diversity,
right?  Check again, Little Nellie Sunshine.  Between them, the Big
Four also own the Financial Network, TBS, TNT, Headline News, CNN
International, Cinemax, HBO, Comedy Central, E!"  Sega Channel, CNBC,
Court TV, Bravo, American Movie Classics, MS/NBC, A&E, History Channel,
Disney Channel, ESPN, ESPN 2, Lifetime Network, Touchstone Television,
Buena Vista Television, The Nashville Network ... and even the Cartoon
Network, among others.

National broadcasting, though, is just one piece of the media industry
that GE, Time Warner, Westinghouse, and Disney have in their tentacles.
There is a good chance your local TV stations are owned by these
conglomerates, too, and they own the licenses of dozens of radio
stations.  Westinghouse/ CBS alone owns eight radio stations in
Chicago, seven in New York City, six in L.A."  eight in Dallas, and
eight in San Francisco--among many others all across the country,
giving this one company control of more than a third of the entire U.S.
radio audience. Some also own satellite systems, computer networks, and
cable TV franchises.  They own major newspapers, national magazines,
and book publishers (including the Bookof-the-Month Club), making them
a power in the print industry as well.  Add their extensive holdings in
movies, records, theme parks, and sports franchises, and you'll find
that a big slice of your information and entertainment dollars is going
to just these four.

Liberal media?  Bear in mind that broadcasting is not even the main
business of the conglomerate holders of our news networks.

General Electric, for example, is the country's second largest builder
of nuclear power plants and has been a major builder of nuclear bombs.
It is also a bank and a major credit card company, the second largest
producer of plastic in the United States, one of the biggest weapons
makers and arms dealers in the world, a leading stockbroker on Wall
Street, a high-ranking Pentagon contractor, a purveyor of insurance and
medical services, and a top manufacturer of everything from locomotives
to light bulbs.  With $70 billion a year in revenues, GE has the
world's fifty-fifth largest economy--larger than the total economies of
such nations as the Philippines, Iran, Ireland, Pakistan, New Zealand,
and Egypt.

Whatever else this monolith might be, one thing it damn sure is not is
left wing.  One chronicler of the company observed it was "so obsessed
with conservatism that it was not unlike the John Birch Society."  GE,
you might remember, is the outfit that sponsored Ronald Reagan as host
of the General Electric Theater television series in the fifties.  In
addition, Reagan was directly on GE's payroll as its PR spokesman for
eight years, 1954-1962.  His "job" was to make radio broadcasts and
travel the rubber-chicken banquet circuit, speechifying against
commies, unions, corporate taxes, welfare, social security, and all
things liberal.  It was this sustaining sponsorship that made Reagan
the voice and darling of right-wing Republicans, solidifying a core
constituency that propelled him into the governor's office in
California and ultimately into the White House.

(Lesson Number 14,367G(3)ii on How Politics Works, Entitled
"Sponsorship Has Its Privileges": Once the Gipper was safely ensconced
in the Oval Office, his old pals from GE came calling, and Reagan's
Federal Communications Commission soon began loosening its regulatory
grip on television licensing, including making a specific change that
allowed General Electric to buy NBC.  You see, GE is a convicted felon.
Not once, but many times it has been convicted of such felonies as
bribery, defrauding us taxpayers, and committing gross environmental
and financial crimes.  If you had such a rap sheet, you would not be
deemed fit to hold an FCC license.  But on December 10, 1985, the
commission relaxed its fitness restrictions, ruling that felonies would
count against a conglomerate buyer of media properties only if the
company's top executive had been found guilty of the wrongdoing.  The
very next day GE waltzed through this tailor-made loophole and bought
RCA, then the parent of NBC, for $6.2 billion.) In addition to owning
NBC, General Electric also sponsors the McLaughlin Report, the
inside-Washington gang bang on liberals,

which airs on both NBC and PBS.  GE does not sponsor any liberal or
populist counterpart to McLaughlin's weekly diatribes, and it does not
allow any remotely leftish news programming on its own channels--NEC,
CNBC, and MS/NBC.

Nor does GE look kindly on any of its media subsidiaries probing the
deeds of the parent.  Larry Grossman, president of NBC News for the
first few years of GE's proprietorship, has related that he literally
felt the heavy hand of conglomerate ownership--GE boss Jack Welch poked
a finger in his chest and fairly shouted at him: "You work for GEl"
Grossman, who later was fired because he balked at the executive
suite's meddling ways, soon learned that working for GE means sticking
to the company line.  A few for-instances:

In the 1987 stock market crash CEO Welch told his news division not to
use the phrase "Black Monday" for fear that it might dampen the
company's stock prices.

Bossman Welch also insisted that Today show weatherman Willard Scott be
allowed to plug GE light bulbs on the air.

A 1987 NBC documentary on nuclear power was so pro nuke that it could
have been produced by the industry's PR office, complete with a glowing
intro by NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw.  Neither Brokaw nor the
documentary mentioned that GE makes a killing in the business of
building these power plants--a conflict of interest so glaring that
offended NBC journalists took to calling the network the "Nuclear
Broadcasting Company."

On November 30, 1989, NBC's Today show aired an investigative report
about bad bolts used by GE and other firms in building airplanes and
bridges ... except that viewers never saw or heard any reference to GE,
since all mentions of NBC's parent were surgically removed by network
officials.

For three nights running in June 1990 NBC Nightly News broadcast a
gushing series about a new machine to detect breast cancer.  The
network spent fourteen minutes of airtime on it--the equivalent of War
and Peace in TV time, where major news stories are lucky to get two
minutes.  In none of those fourteen minutes was it mentioned that GE
makes these particular machines.

In March 1994 NBC's European cable network canceled a human rights
series called Rights 6- Wrongs after it injudiciously produced a show
featuring poor working conditions in factories in Mexico--factories
owned by GE.

Liberal media?  Tune in Crossfire, CNN's nightly show that celebrates
itself as one television venue where left and right can bare their
teeth and go at each other with no holds barred--a kind of verbal mud
wrestling for news junkies.

This program was built on a cast of heavies from the right: Pat
Buchanan, Robert Novak, Fred Barnes, John Sununu.  And on the left?
Michael Kinsley.  Good grief.  Michael Kinsley?  It was like sending
Tweety Bird into a cockfight.  Nice guy.  Bright guy.  But at best a
squishy corporate centrist who makes Bill Clinton look like a standup
guy for the working class.  Kinsley's idea of class is the class of
'72, the year he graduated from Harvard.  Isn't Kinsley the writer who
opined in Time magazine back in '89 that there should be a movement to
draft Margaret Thatcher as America's President?  He is.

Mercifully, Kinsley resigned the "left's" chair in 1996 to accept a
sinecure at Microsoft, putting his faint "liberalism" in the employ of
one of America's leading monopolists.  At last, though, this meant
there was a chance to put someone in that seat who has real teeth to
bare.  Crossfires producers led progressive activists to believe that
they were serious about wanting a contender, a true progressive
scrapper to join the show, so names were submitted.  A number of us
pushed hard for Jeff Cohen, the founder and director of the highly
regarded group FAIR--Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting.  Jeff is
smart, scrappy, knowledgeable, experienced, articulate, and an
unabashed progressive, plus he met a key criterion for the job: He was
willing to do it, willing to spend a significant portion of his life in
televised shouting matches with the likes of Novak and Sununu.

Such is the price of show biz.

The show's producers ran Jeff through the hoops, gave him a couple of
tryouts, made positive noises about his professionalism, insisted that
he was a finalist, and generally built up the boy's hope.

Then they discarded him like a used hankie.  It seems that all they
really wanted, from the get-go, was someone to defend Bill Clinton.

That's it.  Bill Clinton is as far left as the corporatized media is
willing to allow the televised right-left dialogue to go, even on
Crossfire, considered the loosest political format on TV.  No Jeff
Cohen, who would push the show's right-wing gang to the wall on the
job-destroying impacts of NAFTA, on welfare for the privileged, on
big-money corruption of the two-party system, on the crushing of
America's middle class, on the growing health-care gap between those at
the top and America's workaday majority, on ... well, on the broad
range of kitchen-table issues affecting the people--issues that no
Clinton defender can hammer, since the President either has gone along
with Gingrich Republicans on these issues, or has actually led the
fight.

One other issue, too, that undoubtedly dashed any hopes Cohen might
have had: the conglomerization of America's media.  You can just hear
the WN/Crossfire muckety-mucks saying, "Holy Ed Murrow, this guy might
take a poke at us.  Freedom of speech can go too far.  Cohen can't be
trusted.  Next!"

Instead of Cohen (or Christopher Hitchens, Barbara Ehrenreich, or any
of several other tried-and-true progressive candidates who would have
brought fire, fun, and political integrity to the show).  Crossfire
meekly went with corporate convention, choosing Geraldine Ferraro,
another cautious, big-business Democrat.  Whatever small spark she
might have added was thoroughly dampened by the fact that she was
planning from the start to run in the '98 senatorial race for
Republican Senator Al D'Amato's seat in New York, meaning she was not
about to say anything or take any positions on television that might be
offensive to her corporate backers.  Crossfire's "debate" was perfectly
safe in her hands.

OK, her name has some marquee value that Cohen's doesn't, but then
Crossfire announced it would name a second host to bolster the left's
ranks on the show.  And the winner was: Bill Press.  Hardly a household
name, even in his own household, but another safe choice for the
powers-that-be.  Press was California Democratic Party chairman at the
time, totally dedicated to the big-money corporate politics that
dominates the party, and, as he wrote to members of the Democratic
Finance Council when he was chosen, "thrilled to have the opportunity
to defend Bill Clinton and his agenda with my co host Geraldine Ferraro
every night on Crossfire" In case you are not quite clear on what that
agenda might be,

Press explained to the Los Angeles Times that Clinton represents a new
Democratic effort to reposition the party away from a defender of the
have-nots and into a party for the haves: "We have to reshape our
agenda and stress the issues that appeal to the haves, like welfare
reform and maybe some marginal kind of health reform, but no big,
global thing," said Crossfire's latest liberal hope.

On February 19,1995, Ruth Johnson of Caldwell, Texas, sent this letter
to the editor of the Austin American-Statesman.

LIBERAL MEDIA.  YOU'RE KIDDIN'.

This reminds me of the boxer who took on the champ, because of much
insistence from his trainer.  After the first round, he came back to
his corner with a busted lip and his trainer patted him on the back and
said, "You're doing great," then shoved him back in when the bell
sounded.

Following the second round, he staggered back to his corner with a
black eye and a busted cheek and his trainer said, "You're doing great,
he hasn't laid a hand on you."

With this, the boxer replied, "Well, you'd better keep an eye on the
referee, 'cause somebody is beatin' the hell out of me."

THE DAY TED KOPP EL LEFT TOWN

In 1979 I stepped down as editor of the Texas Observer to enter
politics, thereby making the only downward career move one can make
from journalism.

Still, it was worth doing.  As I explained in my farewell column,
"Sometimes, writing about the bastards is not enough," so I set out
across the expanse of Texas to run against them instead, challenging
for one of the establishment's "proprietary" offices--the oddly named
Texas Railroad Commission, a position that had long been in the pocket
of the utility, trucking, and oil industries it regulates.

The state's media dismissed my chances, mainly because I was running
against a well-funded and skilled incumbent whose political temperament
was summed up by his nickname: "Snake."  So I was not altogether
surprised to get a chilly reception late one afternoon when I met with
the editor of the Bonham Daily Favorite.

"I've been following you," he told me, squinting his eyes much like a
junior high principal might when addressing an unruly student, "and I
can tell you that your attacks on the utilities and oil companies won't
get you anywhere here.  The people of Fannin County are conservative,
and you're just too radical for them."

Even though I felt in my gut he was full of it, I was a bit downcast as
I left his office and headed to my next meeting, at the home of a
leader in Bonham's African-American community.  He had assembled half a
dozen other community leaders, and I told them about my lecture from
the editor, asking if I was wasting their time and mine in Fannin
County.

"Oh, I know that man," my host said.

"Every morning I get up and pour myself a bowl of Post Toasties and
read that man's paper.  That way I go to work with nothing on my
stomach and nothing on my mind."

We proceeded to organize in Fannin County--and carried it with 60
percent of the vote.

Like the editor in Bonham, the national "insider media" in Washington
and New York sit aloof from the experiences of ordinary citizens,
largely condescending about the political sensibilities of everyday
folks.  Those who decide what to report ("All the News

That's Fit to Print," as the New York Times so modestly asserts on its
masthead) suffer from what we progressive Texans used to call "Morning
Newsitis."  In my days as a practicing politician, the Dallas Morning
News was less a newspaper than the official mouthpiece of the Dallas
establishment.  Its big business and right-wing slant made it
journalistically gimpy, incapable of even looking into communities
different from its own.  As a result, the News missed or ignored so
much of what was going on in the city that we dubbed it: "The Dallas
Morning News: If It Happened in Dallas, It's News to Us."

Ted Koppel gave the nation a stupendous display of Morning Newsitis on
August 13,1996, the day he left town.  The town was San Diego, the day
was day two of the Republican National Convention, and Koppel, the
super-sparkly of ABC's Nightline show, was piqued because, he
exclaimed, no news was happening.

"This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event,"
proclaimed the Emperor of Late-Night News, and off he swept, home to
Washington, his battalion of producers, camera people, sound
technicians, makeup artists, publicists, and perfumers scurrying
alongside him.

Granted, the quadrennial gatherings of both the Republican and the
Democratic parties have become minutely scripted, self congratulatory
made-for-TV extravaganzas, with all the substance, importance,
sincerity, and drama of the Miss America contest.  But these national
conventions are showcases not merely for the pols, but for the pundits
as well--not unlike the symbiotic relationship of cows and cowbirds. So
the networks assemble all their stars, keeping them prepped and
powdered, ensconcing them high above the convention floor in
multimillion-dollar sky box studios.  The stars then use the
conventioneers and the speaker's podium as background noise and visuals
for their own pontificating.

Koppel was not the only media show horse embarrassed to be a part of
the scene.  Tom Brokaw of NBC Nightly News penned a cathartic mea culpa
for Newsweek after the Republican convention, confessing that "In San
Diego, I laughed aloud when the only breaking news we were able to
report one night was that New York Gov.

George Pataki would deliver the nominating speech for Jack Kemp.

That received serious, extended analysis when in fact it would have no
impact whatsoever--on anything.  It was just another example of the
self-importance of journalists and politicians alike--and we wonder why
so many people hold us both in such low esteem."

Well, yes, but hey, Ted and Tom--call me old-fashioned, but whatever
happened to the journalistic principle that news is something one has
to go find, rather than sitting around moaning that it's not being
handed to you?  Yes, the proceedings inside the convention halls were
mostly non newsworthy non events  So: Get the Hell Out of the Hall!

The media are like cats watching the wrong mouse hole  Had Tom and Ted
really wanted a story in San Diego, they could have taken their mikes
and cameras just a short stroll down the street to a hotel marina where
the Quiet Heart was docked.  Aboard this seventy five-foot yacht they
would have found Representative Tom DeLay, the Republican whip, known
in Washington as the "Hammer" for his less-then-subtle technique of
raising money from corporate lobbyists in need of legislative favors.

Throughout 1995 and well into 1996 the Washington media were riveted on
the ideology and personality of Newt Gingrich and his "revolution," as
embodied in the Loudspeaker's widely ballyhooed "Contract with
America."  Stripped of its rhetorical bells and whistles, though, it
really was a Contract with Corporate America--a veritable wet dream of
such long-held fantasies as gutting environmental protections,
eliminating worker-safety rules, widening tax loopholes, preventing
consumer lawsuits, and granting more corporate subsidies.  Newt's
"revolution" was not motivated by ideology but by raw politics, fueled
by the old quid pro quo of corporate cash-in and
corporate-benefits-out. The man in charge of collecting the cash was
the third-ranking Republican in the House leadership, Tom DeLay.

A former pest exterminator, this Houston-area congressman proved good
at ledgers, literally keeping book on the 400 largest corporate PACs,
listing the amounts and percentages of their campaign contributions
that went to Republicans and Democrats, and labeling the PACs as
"friendly" or "unfriendly," depending on how heavily they gave to the
GOP.  If your corporation or industry group wanted a piece of the
revolution, your lobbyist had to "go see Tom," who would whip out his
book and examine your campaign-giving history right on the spot.  If it
was not up to snuff, you had to make it right--that is,; art shoveling
checks into the designated Republican pockets until Tim said, "OK."
While Newt pledged publicly to end business as usual in Washington,
DeLay's job was to implement a behind-the-scenes plan of business more
than usual.

At the San Diego convention, Koppel, Brokaw, and other media heavies
could have given viewers some up-close-and-personal shots of the key
players in this slimy system.  They could have stationed themselves at
the private landing strips to catch top congressional Republicans
deplaning from corporate jets.  They could have driven up Interstate 5
to the Torrey Pines Golf Club, where AT&T hosted a private outing for
Senator Orrin Hatch, House budget committee chairman John Boehner, and
a host of other GOP duffers, including our man DeLay.

Then they could have traipsed after the Hammer as he rode in his limo
back to the marina and bounded aboard the Quiet Heart.  Reporter Damon
Chappie of Roll Call, a probing little paper that covers Capitol Hill,
did track DeLay to the yacht and found the story that Koppel and Brokaw
ignored.  There was the Republican whip, decked out in white polo shirt
and aquamarine shorts, making merry with a boatload of' friendlies
sipping gin-and-tonics, enjoying a lavish spread of hors d'oeuvres, and
"talkin' revolution."  This would have made an excellent television
moment, don't you think, a revealing vignette of money and power
rubbing up against each other--in their shorts, no less!

If Tom and Ted were too busy to catch the cocktail event on Quiet
Heart, they could have caught DeLay on board the High Spirits for a
breakfast fund-raiser he hosted for still more favor-seeking lobbyists,
or on the Renown, yet another yacht he used during convention week for
even more corporate fund-raising.  The breakfast event on High Spirits
would have been perfect for TV, co hosted as it was by Nick Brookes,
the CEO of British tobacco peddler Brown & Williamson.  Given that
Republican nominee Bob Dole proved such a standup guy for the nicotine
industry throughout his presidential campaign, and that late in the
campaign he also flogged Bill Clinton mercilessly (and deservedly) for
being in bed with foreign-money interests, the British tobacco
connection to Dole's San Diego convention would have been both an
entertaining and an informative bit of journalism.

OK, investigative journalism can be tiring, since it involves, well,
investigating, but it's not like DeLay was laying low, trying to hide
from the probing eyes of media sharpies.  To the contrary, as he dashed
from yacht to yacht, he giddily exulted to Roll Call's reporter, "We're
raising money like crazy!"  On Tuesday night he even staged a garish
yacht-fest, docking all three luxury boats at the marina, where he
loaded them with lobbyists and members of Congress.  Then he set sail
across the harbor to Coronado Island for an evening of schmoozing and
boozing at a posh restaurant.

Wouldn't it have been great if Tom and Ted had loaded their camera
crews in a couple of speedboats and roared off in hot pursuit?

The two news stars could have donned yellow slickers and stood in the
bows of their boats, courageously thrusting their microphones at DeLay
and his gang of special-interest pirates.  Now that's TV!  And news.

But Ted was packing, and Tom was drafting his News-week piece, so all
the public saw were more talking heads inside the convention hall.

TALES OF THE TUBE

Ralph Kramden: Look, Alice, it ain't just the money.

There's another reason I don't want no television in this house.  It
changes people.

They stop usin' their brains.  They just look.  When people get
television, they stop readin' books.

Alice Kramden: Well, it can't change us.  We don't even have a book!

Ralph: All right.  All right.  I'll get you a book!

The Honeymooners From Primetime Proverbs

In politics, television has more than changed us, it has become our
reality, more real in fact than life itself.

This was brought home to me in 1989 when I began my reelection campaign
for state agriculture commissioner and was in the West Texas hamlet of
Paducah for a little fund-raiser thrown by some area farmers, lawyers,
merchants, and such.  Thirty or so folks gathered in the home of one of
the farmers, chatting amiably, enjoying a couple of beers and grazing
on the usual Texas campaign spread of chips and hot sauce, queso and
tamales.  Then, around 6-ish, the hostess asked us all to convene in
the living room, presumably to hear me offer a few thousand well-chosen
words and show myself witty, wonderful, and wise, well worthy of their
$25-a-head contribution to my political prosperity.

But no!  As I shuffled into the living room behind the group, pondering
just the right snappy line to open my comments, I hear the hostess
saying, "Rather than hear Jim speak, we were able to tape the show that
60 Minutes ran on him recently, and we're going to play it for you." So
there I stood, the actual candidate, live and in person, cooling my
heels for fifteen minutes, while my supporters turned their backs on me
and gaped at my electronic image, far more impressed by it than by me
in the flesh.

Actually, I learned about "television reality" a decade earlier when I
first ran for office and found to my dismay that even ardent supporters
did not consider me a real candidate unless and until they saw me on
the tube.  This credibility threshold is even more rigidly demanded by
the media gatekeepers themselves--to give you coverage as a "real"
candidate, television assignment editors and the big-city press insist
on knowing how much coverage you have received, a Catch-22 that helps
explain why so many political candidates are loo pier than a dry-land
farmer in a four-year drought.

To have a prayer in politics today, we underfinanced populists
(probably a redundancy there) must become adept at drawing free TV
coverage, and/or hoard enough of our meager purse to buy one or maybe
two TV spots toward the end of the election.  These paid ads obviously
are not enough to shift any undecided voters, but are bought simply to
buck up the spirits of those already for you--"Hey, Nadine, come on in
here right now!  01' Hightower's got himself a tee-vee ad, look at
this!"  We would even mail notices to our supporters, alerting them to
the schedule of our lonely ad: "Be sure to catch our sixty-second spot
to run at 5:17 a.m. next Thursday on Channel 11's Early Bird Farm
Report, and call all your friends, too, and ..."

I have to tip my hat to Paul Wellstone, though.  He gets the Emmy for
Best Use of an Ad Campaign That Never Aired Anywhere.

Wellstone is the out-and-out liberal college professor and all-around
fine human being from Minnesota who ran a hard scrabble, seat-of
the-pants campaign in 1990 and won a U.S. Senate seat.  Paul's "media
strategy" was to do a Michael Moore-style TV ad in which he and his
camera crew went in search of his opponent, a multimillionaire
Republican incumbent who had an ethical rip or two in his senatorial
toga and refused to debate this hard-charging challenger.

The ad was a winner--pointed, humorous, and memorable.

Problem was, Paul had no money to pay the TV stations to run the damn
thing.  So what he does is call a press conference and show it.  The ad
is so funny and telling that it gets airtime all over Minnesota,
nailing his opponent and thrilling his supporters, who, at last, see
him on television.

In 1976 I used the media's own tube fixation to my political advantage.
I was national coordinator for the presidential campaign of the
populist U.S. senator Fred Harris (I like to brag that I made Fred what
he is today--a professor at the University of New

Mexico).  Nonetheless, we had our moments in that campaign, and one of
them was in the Iowa caucuses.

The '76 Democratic primaries were crowded with challengers, including
Mo Udall, Scoop Jackson, Birch Bayh, Sargent Shriver, Jerry Brown, and
a couple of others, but this was Jimmy Carter's year, and he was way
ahead of us in Iowa.  Our task, however, was not to beat Carter, but
only to "beat media expectations," to run better than the pundits
thought we would.  As luck would have it, the media, with their usual
dismissal of under funded populists (there's that redundancy again) had
ranked Fred beneath "other" in their preelection pontifications.

This played perfectly into my Machiavellian "strategy" of placing third
or fourth in this first-in-the-nation vote, thereby getting a media
boost from stories that would say, "... and Fred Harris did
surprisingly well in Iowa, running ahead of expectations..."  This
could help our fund-raising and energize our supporters as we headed to
the New Hampshire primary.

Fred's populist message, humor, and dynamite speaking style drew a good
response in Iowa, and despite having practically zero money for TV ads,
we felt he would run third or fourth in the Monday night caucuses.
There was a problem though: The caucuses were a new creature in
presidential politics back then, and there was no computerized
statewide system to gather the results from hundreds of these citizen
gatherings and report them quickly to the national press corps, which
operates on East Coast time and had a 9 o'clock deadline to get
anything in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest.  So
we faced the age-old question: If you do "surprisingly well" in the
Iowa caucuses and the media aren't there to report it, does it make a
noise?  Not in today's media-centric politics.

So, with our field coordinator Barbara Shailor and our media
coordinator Frank Greer (it was a populist campaign, so everyone was
called a coordinator, a snappy title that helped us forget we weren't
being paid real money), we came up with our own reporting system.  From
hundreds of precincts across Iowa, our precinct coordinators were
instructed by Barbara to jump on the phone the instant they had results
and relay them to our storefront headquarters in Des Moines.  Frank had
quietly notified key media players that ours would be the only place in
all of Iowa where they could get vote tabulations in time for their
deadlines, and sure enough they took the bait (like fish snapping at
nightcrawlers, sports reporters and political reporters are two species
that find any promise of numbers an irresistible lure).

But how to make our numbers credible?  Simple: television.

If I, as the campaign chief of one of the contestants, had brazenly
tried to hand out results phoned in from our own partisans, well...
even the national press corps, though used to spoon-feeding, might have
balked.  Luckily, though, our storefront office (with a long front room
and a small back office) was just right for our plan.  We put a curtain
over the door between the two rooms, put Barbara in the back with a
bank of phones and a clerk at a computer.  In the outer room we put a
TV screen on a fold-up table and stationed Frank beside it.  On
election night, as calls came in from the caucus meetings to Barbara's
phone bank, she would pass them to the clerk, who typed them into the
computer, which was connected to nothing but the TV screen some twenty
feet outside the curtain.  The numbers spewed onto the screen, and
Frank was there, ever so helpfully, to interpret them for the assembled
media.

What a sight!  There stood big-name reporters from all the brand-name
news outlets, excitedly eyeing the tabulations as they flashed on the
screen and compulsively jotting notes in their pads, just as though
these were "official" results.

We were able to put up tabulations from maybe 20 percent of the caucus
meetings before the media's deadline, and while we did not in any way
mess with the actual results from the caucuses, they were our numbers,
and these were the ones reported.  The next morning, while other
campaigns were still waiting for the state party to provide official
results, news stories across the country read, "... and Fred Harris ran
surprisingly well in Iowa ..."  What a difference a television screen
makes.

Lest you think campaign coverage since 1976 has become one whit more
sophisticated or dedicated to digging out anything remotely connected
to real news, I invite you to peek inside 1996's first presidential
debate in Hartford, Connecticut, between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.
This peek is courtesy of Clan Perkins, the marvelous editorial
cartoonist who works under the nom de plume

Tom Tomorrow, and who had the surreal experience of watching the media
watch the debate.

Most of the journalists who covered this widely hyped event were not
actually allowed inside the Bushnell Theater, where the two debaters
faced off, but instead were corralled many blocks away in a specially
arranged "media center," viewing the thing on TV.

Amazing.  Hordes of political reporters traveled from as far as 3,000
miles away at great expense to watch the debate on television, which
they could have done at a local bar back home.

Not that they were without libations in Hartford.  Perkins reports that
the media center was catered courtesy of Philip Morris, which also
doled out to the media-ites all kinds of trinkets from the company's
subsidiaries, including toy whistles shaped like the Oscar Mayer weiner
mobile "limited edition" boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese containing
noodles shaped like Democratic donkeys and GOP elephants, and even
handy reporters' notebooks festooned with the P-M logo. Perhaps sheer
gratitude for the grub and the toys accounts for the failure of any of
the major-media attendees to mention in their reports the irony that
Philip Morris, a major corrupter of the political and legislative
processes with its millions of dollars in self-serving contributions to
both political parties, was this night's official keeper of the
media.

The "news" from the Hartford debate also was catered.  Once Clinton and
Dole had done their bit and the TVs were turned off at the "Philip
Morris media center," spinmeisters from the two parties (no Perot or
other third-party people were allowed within shouting distance of the
place) suddenly appeared in the room, strategically placed so these
supposedly self-respecting journalists could mob them and be told what
to think about what they had just seen on the telly.

There were George Stephanopolous, Haley Barbour, Donna Shalala, and
others--take your pick.  The place looked like some bizarre political
bazaar, as each of the partisan spinners had an aide standing beside
him or her holding aloft a laminated red sign emblazoned with the
spinner's name.  Each was quickly surrounded by a swarming mass of
card-carrying, professional reporters intently shouting such
penetrating questions as: "Who won?"

This sad demonstration of big-league political journalism did not let
up even after the spinners had spun their webs and departed the hall.
Here is Clan Perkins's personal narrative of the final scene:

"As the crush of people around me begins to lighten, I see that there
are now reporters interviewing reporters.  Someone from a local radio
station interviews me.  I realize I have fallen into the belly of the
beast, this strange, self-contained world of political reporters who
travel around in packs, are spoon-fed press releases, spend a frenzied
hour gathering sound bites like children on an Easter egg hunt, and
call it all news."

THE REAL MEDIA BIAS

I won Marty Nolan's respect in 1976, when he was covering the
presidential campaign for the Boston Globe.  It was not my strategic
brilliance or my witty political repartee that impressed him--it was
the place I took him to lunch.

Actually, he was taking me, putting our tab on the Globes account, but
I got to choose the restaurant--a nice little gesture he made to all
the campaign managers that year.  The other managers clearly were
sharper than I, though--Marty mentioned as we sat down that the others
had all chosen the most expensive restaurant they could think of.  Me,
I met Marty at the Post Pub, a working class bar and grill where we
each had a Ballantine Ale and a bacon burger as I recall, and, of
course, fries.  Good grease, as we say in Texas.

Marty was ecstatic--apparently he was sick of escargot in burgundy
sauce, and this pub was his kind of joint.

The surprise is not that I was there, but that a media big-leaguer was.
Alas, Marty Nolan and a few others like him are the exceptions,
throwbacks to a time, not all that long ago, when nearly all the news
was the product of rumpled working stiffs who pounded a beat, drew a
modest paycheck, ate lunch at pubs, drank after hours at places with
names like Shorty's, and identified with other working folks.

Today, though, most of our news is just another consumer product of the
conglomerates that control the media machinery, delivered to us by an
upscale caste of finely tailored, college-educated journalists and
managers who drink at exclusive clubs like the Headliners or the
Uptown, never darkening the door of shot-and beer joints like
Shorty's.

The gatekeepers of our news, like the politicians who claim to
represent us, have moved out of our neighborhoods and now are among the
wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, identifying a whole lot more with
the hoity-toity than hoi polloi.  Personally, they care less about the
affordable-housing crisis than they do about making sure the
deducibility on vacation homes is protected; they see NAFTA in terms of
a dinner party discussion about free-trade ideology, not as an imminent
threat to their jobs and wages, as it is for

America's middle class; to them, universal health care is a political
issue, not something you actually need right now, or fear you will need
next year.  Their world--and consequently their worldview--is widely
separate from the workaday majority's.  As a result, the masses get a
daily news feed that is neither of, by, nor really for the masses-those
75-80 percent of Americans who do not have a college degree, who are
paid less than $50,000 a year, who are not enjoying the present
"prosperity" that both the politicians and the media keep talking
about, who believe that Washington serves corporations and the wealthy
and does not give a fat fig for folks like them, who are looking for a
third (or fourth or fifth) political party, and who either are not
voting or are voting against the system.

The true media bias in our country is not to the left or to the right,
but to the top.  It is a bias that filters our news through the lens of
the privileged and leaves most families feeling as shut out of the
public debate by the elite media as they are by the elite politicians.
It is also a bias that often reveals the news presenters to be
embarrassingly out of touch with terra firma.

One such moment came on September 17, 1992, when Diane Sawyer used her
Prime Time Live pulpit to scold a single mother who was trying to keep
her family together by working two piss-poor, part-time jobs while also
taking a monthly welfare check of about $600.  Since this poor mom was
"employed," Ms.  Sawyer preached, she was not entitled to welfare and,
indeed, was "gouging the taxpayer."

On a roll, the TV Lady told the Welfare Lady: "You know, people say you
should not have children if you can't support them."

Now Diane Sawyer, whose ABC contract puts something like $7 million a
year into her finely feathered nest, is paid more each and every day
than that mother makes in a whole year, and if it is taxpayer gouging
that concerns her, how about a report on the assorted loopholes that
the privileged cut into the tax code so pampered ones like Ms.  Sawyer
can have their accountants shelter income for them, shifting her tax
burden onto the backs of the middle class?

If she wants to interview a real welfare moocher, her Prime Time Live
partner Sam Donaldson would be fun!  He is knocking down about a
million-and-a-half a year with Disney/ABC plus getting paid $25,000 to
$30,000 a pop to give speeches to insurance executives and other
corporate groups.  He has become such a wealthy news man that he can
afford to moonlight as a gentleman rancher near Ruidosa, New Mexico,
where he raises sheep.  Actually, he does not raise the sheep, he has a
ranch manager and a crew of hired hands to do that.  And while
Donaldson does own the Chavez Canyon Ranch, a big part of his spread
actually is state land, some 2,300 acres of which he leases for the
subsidized rate of about a buck an acre, roughly eight to twelve times
cheaper than the going rate for leasing private ranch land in the
area.

In addition to enjoying cut-rate grazing, courtesy of New Mexico
taxpayers, Sam the Sheep Man also has rummaged in the pockets of us
federal taxpayers, taking about $100,000 in subsidies for his ranch's
mohair production.  Even stranger, Uncle Sam protects Sam's sheep from
coyotes and other critters.  You read it right:

We protect this millionaire's sheep.  He signed up for a little-known
freebie that sends government-paid hunters and trappers out to his
Chavez Canyon Ranch to kill any predators they can find, thus letting
Sam and his sheep sleep better at night.  According to Citizens Against
Government Waste, a watchdog group, the U.S. Animal Damage Control
Program has dispatched agents out to Donaldson's spread 412 times in
the past five years, killing seventy-four coyotes and three bobcats at
a cost of tens of thousands of dollars.

I don't know about you, but I cannot find words to express to Congress
how grateful I am that it is cutting back on Medicate, Head Start, job
training, and other federal spending so our tax dollars can now go to
such essential national needs as killing coyotes on Sam Donaldson's
ranch.  This is an absurdity that caused longtime New Mexico
environmentalist Pat Wolff to cry out in exasperation: "It's outrageous
to expect taxpayers to pay government agents to kill wildlife on public
land leased by a millionaire TV star playing rancher."

The arch-browed TV personality, always sensitive to the slightest
perception of impropriety in the actions of others, sniffs that his
subsidies are simply a matter of entitlement.  He told the Albuquerque
Journal that he has a right to all the taxpayer dole he can grab: "The
government helps ranchers and farmers and businesses of all kinds.  If
it is in existence and I am eligible to use it, I'll use it."

SYNERGY

My heart was racing faster than a new sewing machine that August
morning, 1967, when I reported for my first day of work as a
legislative aide to U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas.  Barely
twenty four bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I strode down the magnificent
marble halls of senatorial power and prestige at 8 a.m."  swung into
Yarborough's suite of offices, walked back to my assigned desk crammed
in a corner of the legislative office, took a deep breath ... and
marveled that I was actually here, a country boy only two years out of
North Texas State, now in a position to influence a United States
senator, to write laws, to--oh golly--make history} Part of the duty of
each legislative aide was to respond to constituent mail on issues in
our particular bailiwick.  On my first morning of my first day I opened
my folder and took out my first letter, ready to engage in the weighty
matters of state with this honorable citizen who had taken time to
write to his senator.  It was addressed:

"Dear Peckerwood."

So much for my illusions about being involved in statesmanship.

I recalled that "Dear Peckerwood" salutation on August 4, 1995, the day
the U.S. Senate passed the Telecommunications Deregulation Act.  This
monster of a bill promised to unbridle America's media giants so they
could merge and become even gi anter giants, thereby allowing them to
increase telecommunications competition, deliver more consumer choices
in both print and broadcast journalism, lower prices, create millions
of new jobs, put a chicken in every pot, stop dental plaque in its
tracks, and build a bridge to the twenty-first century.  Wait, that
last one was Bill Clinton's reelection promise, or was it?  Never mind,
none of it was true anyway.

We quickly got the gi anter giants--cable powers merging with broadcast
networks, networks merging with show-biz empires, telephone companies
merging with one another and then re merging with the already-merged
cable powers, show-biz empires, and broadcast networks.  The diagram of
the electrical circuitry inside the space shuttle cannot be as complex
as the organizational charts of these hydra-headed media giants, which
are still absorbing one another and becoming more gigantic by the
moment.

This only makes me want to shout: Hey, peckerwoods, where are all those
benefits we were supposed to get from this?  Since the bill passed, our
phone and cable rates have gone up; instead of new jobs, each merger
has produced massive job cuts (in 1996, after Ted Turner's cable empire
merged into Time Warner, he fired 1,000 employees, including his own
son, for chrissake--he took Ted IV to dinner right after the merger and
told him, in these exact words:

"You're toast"); since companies that used to compete have merged,
there's less competition, not more; and not even the industry still
claims that merger mania has produced more news choices for us, much
less better journalism.

Far from presenting a new diversity of viewpoints on the airwaves or
digging into meaty stories that the pre merger media missed, the new
amalgamations are into what they call "synergy."

This is a 50-cent word that the dictionary defines as: "I.  combined
action.  2. the cooperative action of two or more muscles or the
like."

You would define it as: "I.  shameless self-promotion.  2. stupid."  In
practice, what synergy means is that one division of the conglomerate
scratches the back of another division, and vice versa.  For example,
only eleven days after Disney took over ABC, the network's Roseanne
show just happened to feature a two-part episode of the show's
characters going to Disney World!  In case Roseanne viewers missed the
subtlety, Disney World also advertised on the show.

Follow the bouncing ball: A Disney ad sponsored a show about a Disney
theme park, all of it airing on a Disney network.  Disney, Disney,
Disney.  Synergy.

Our daily news gets caught up in this synergistic fun, too.  In 1996,
for example, Disney World gave itself a week-long party in Orlando to
celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary.  Broadcasting live that week
from the Florida amusement park was Good Morning America.  Not
coincidentally, GMA is the morning news report of ABC, which itself is
owned by Disney.  To make it seem more "newsy," the GMA crew broadcast
a special feature about a new ride at Disney World, dutifully reported
by ABC's science editor.

Synergy works in reverse, too, keeping items out of the news that
owners do not want covered.  Freelance investigative writer Mark Dowie
experienced this recently when he got "moused" on a story he was
preparing for Los Angeles magazine.  According to a chronicle of his
saga in the Nation, Dowie was assigned to do a lengthy article on the
powerfully conservative Chandler family, which owns the Los Angeles
Times, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, and many other
publications, as well as lots and lots of land in L.A.

and throughout Southern California.

Family patriarch Otis Chandler was not charmed by the attention, but
Los Angeles was an independent journalistic product, so reporter Dowie
kept doing what real reporters do--digging into the story.  While he
was digging, though, Los Angeles was sold.  To Disney.

Next thing Dowie knew, a new editor was at the helm of the magazine,
and his piece on Chandler had been axed.  Disney's new editor told
Dowie that it "just didn't fit."

Didn't fit what?  Dowie did not get an honest answer until a year
later, when he read in another magazine that Otis Chandler was bragging
he had killed the story with a single phone call.  Chandler said that
just before Disney bought Los Angeles (the magazine, not the city...
not yet), he called the top dog at Disney, Michael Eisner, and asked
him: "Do you realize you're going to do another-- another--piece on the
Chandlers?"  According to Otis, Eisner replied, "Don't see why."  And
that was that.

Spiking specific pieces is not the worst damage done to journalism by
these conglomerations.  Far more threatening is their corporate
consensus--a sort of unspoken gentlemen's agreement--on what merits
(and, more significantly, what does not merit) mass media attention,
giving this handful of for-profit, private entities awesome control
over our democratic discourse.

"Not to worry," the media ministers assure us, asserting they are
citizens, too, and that they take their responsibilities seriously.

"Besides," they say, slapping the table as if this shuts the case,
"we're competitors; if one of us doesn't cover a story, another of us
will jump on it and beat the others' brains out!  That's how
competition works."

So, where were these "competitors" during the passage of the
Telecommunications Deregulation Act itself?  This was the most far
reaching piece of legislation of the 1995-1996 Congress, affecting
people more profoundly than Bill Clinton's widely covered welfare
deform bill, for example.  At issue were not merely our monthly
telephone bills and our television fare, but the very dissemination of
news and information that a free citizenry must have.  This bill
represented a powerful extension of the old reality that freedom of the
press is limited to those who can afford to own a press.

Where were ABC, CBS, NBC, TBS, Fox, or any of the other television
"competitors" on the need to lay this big honker of a bill out for "We
the People" to examine?  Sure, it got some coverage in the print media,
but nowhere near commensurate with the magnitude of the changes it
posed, and what coverage it did receive was mostly relegated to arcane
articles in the business section, or cast as an internal industry flap
between the long-distance phone companies and the "Baby Bells," the
local phone companies.

Where was the media on the biggest story in modern times about the
media?  Industry apologists say that the story was too complicated, too
difficult (especially for television) to make understandable, too
boring for people to follow.  This from an industry that devoted hours
on television and miles of column inches in newspapers and magazines to
explain the DNA match ups between O.J. Simpson's blood-flecked socks
and the bloody glove found behind his house, an industry that put all
its technical wizardry and all its reportorial skills to the task of
making DNA science comprehensible, an industry that put hundreds of
reporters and expert analysts on the story and even moved its network
anchors out to "Camp O.J. " adjacent to the L.A.

County Courthouse so they could all broadcast live from the scene.

Why did they not apply a tenth, a thousandth, a ten-thousandth of this
media horsepower to a story that seriously matters?

Where was the media?  Hiding the story, that's where, because their
conglomerate chieftains and chieftains-to-be were poised to make
billions from passage of the legislation, and they were not about to
risk getting the public involved.

Indeed, the Westinghouse buy out of CBS, which was announced just
before the passage of the Telecommunications Act, was illegal under the
law then in effect.  It could only become legal if this tailor made
telecommunications bill passed, so one of the biggest media mergers in
history literally was hanging in the balance.  Where were CBS's
competitors?  Why did no one report this slime-covered,
special-interest, conflict-of-interest piece of stink?  It is a gross
case of journalistic malpractice.  With investment bankers, Wall Street
speculators, merger consultants, corporate lawyers, and assorted media
executives standing by to cash in on the merger frenzy, this was not an
industry interested in trusting democracy by reporting the news.

Neither was it interested in trusting its own reporters.  According to
EXTRA!"  the excellent newsletter of Fairness and Accuracy In
Reporting, ABC News planned a report in 1995 on the stock holdings of
Representative Thomas J. Bliley--stocks that revealed embarrassing
conflicts of interest with his position as chair of the House commerce
committee.

"Whoa there, back off, Bubba," came the alarmed cry from ABC's top
echelons.  Bliley, you see, was chair of the committee handling the
telecommunications bill, and he did not take kindly to journalistic
snooping, so he simply rang up ABC's chief lobbyist in Washington. That
would have been that, except a brave soul at ABC threatened to blow the
whistle on the suppression, so a story did air, albeit a thoroughly
watered-down version of what the news division had planned.

If one of the media "competitors" had really wanted to scoop the others
and present a dynamite story on the special-interest rewrite of
telecommunications law, all it had to do was point a camera down
practically any hallway in Congress, which swarmed throughout 1995 with
lobbyists for Disney, GE, Fox, Cox, Time Warner, TBS, TCI,
Westinghouse, and every other media powerhouse, all of them urging
lawmakers to ram this stinker through before the citizenry could get a
whiff of it.  Or they could have caught Michael Eisner, Ted Turner, and
other jefes of the new conglomerate journalism coming out of the White
House, where they had been tending to Bill Clinton, keeping him
properly greased and on track.  Or they could have run a delicious
series focused on the $40 million that the industry gave to lawmakers,
Democrats and Republicans alike, to pass the very legislation that its
"news" divisions were hiding from us folks.

Here was an Emmy Award-winning opportunity for someone, a chance for
the media to shine.  But all the "competitors" took a pass.

The gentlemen's agreement assured that there were no telecommunications
on the Telecommunications Act itself, and we can expect more of the
same on other big issues, where the financial interests of the
conglomerates supersede the public's interest.

THE PEOPLE ARE REVOLTING

February 1996: Another political upstart rallies a ragtag army of
followers and strikes the imagination of millions of America's
political outcasts.  Tapping into our country's deep and spreading pool
of populist anger, he could be trouble.  Quickly the flustered
establishment rushes out its media sharpshooters, who start firing
wildly at the upstart: "wacky,"

"simplistic,"

"misleading,"

anti corporation "nonsense,"

"perverse."

Whew!  All these shots were taken in a single six-inch New York Times
editorial following Pat Buchanan's startling second-place finish in the
1996 Iowa caucuses.  So many invectives, so little space--to your
thesauruses, media writers, reload and fire, for the infidel Buchanan
is charging full-tilt at the Holy Walls of the Established Order!
Indeed he was, hurling fiery bolts of outrage at NAFTA, the Fed,
excessive executive salaries, the New World Order, and other vulnerable
buttresses of America's economic hierarchy.

Then, a week later, Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary and, oh,
Katy Bar the Door, the media went into full, Code Red assault: Newsweek
ran a cover article with a dark, two-page shot of Buchanan's face
glowering at the reader and a bold-type headline warning "Extreme
Measures"; the prissy establishment arian George Will opined on the air
and in print that with Buchanan, "Conservatism gets soiled"; even Rush
Limbaugh, the 800-pound gorilla of the Republican power elite, rumbled
onto the air the day after the New Hampshire victory, wailing at his
listeners: "I'll tell you something, you are being manipulated in a way
that I find very bothersome.

Pat Buchanan is not a conservative.  He's a populist."

Well, actually, Buchanan is not a populist--he is a xenophobic
millionaire right-winger and Washington insider who, even while bashing
Wall Street and the global money lords, had AT&T, GM, Wal-Mart, China
Light & Power, Westminister Bank of London, and other offensive stocks
in his personal portfolio.  But he had learned to strum some true
populist chords, and this is why he was both scoring big numbers at the
polls and scaring the bejeezus out of the Big Boys.  Hence their
all-out bombardment.

America's corporate establishment and the mass-market media,

now one and the same, would not have been the slightest bit perturbed
had Buchanan kept his wrath (and that of his followers) focused on
"Mexican border-crossers, welfare cheats, uppity women, baby killers,
homos, big gubbmint liberals.  Godless schoolteachers, dark-skinned
people taking white people's jobs" and all the rest of his standard
litany of horrors, because all of these are social issues that pit the
powerless against the powerless.  Buchanan himself had been especially
skilled at this bitter art from the early 1970s when he penned
poisonous prose for Spiro Agnew and on into the 1990s during his tenure
as the right's near-rabid attack dog on CNN's Crossfire.  But in the
'96 campaign.  Pat discovered the working class--the deep angst among
America's majority about their falling living standards, the global
squeeze on wages, and the rising inequality in the land of "justice for
all."  Suddenly Buchanan was talking poignantly and convincingly about
the Great Unspeakable in American politics: class.

His message was, as Limbaugh detected, recoiling at the thought,
populist.  Plus it was succeeding, even in the Republican primary,
surely the least fertile soil there could be.  This made those at the
top nervous as a pig in a packing plant, and there was only one thing
to do: Kill the messenger.

The same thing was done to Ross Perot in '92, and the media's guns
would again turn on him in '96.  Focusing on the messengers, though,
missed the real story.  The significance of both the "Perot Phenomenon"
and the "Buchanan Phenomenon" was never the two candidates, but the
phenomenon, the fact that there is a seething mass of Americans
shouting at the establishment's tone-deaf, two party system, "You are
unadulterated horse-hockey!"

Even though Perot and Buchanan are two terribly flawed political
buckeroos--ranging from ludicrous to loopy on some issues, mostly
wearing the cloak of populism rather than being populists-they drew
powerful support, not because their supporters were nuts, duped, or
even "supporters," but because both were the handiest two-by-fours that
folks had available for whacking Washington and Wall Street upside
their thick heads.  The media portrayed Buchanan and Perot as "using"
working-class resentment, but I can tell you from my political travels
and my conversations on talk radio that the exact opposite is true--the
people were using the candidates.  These two messengers were easy
targets for the media, but there will be other messengers tapping ever
more effectively into the volatile, powerful, and growing American
majority that Washington and Wall Street, the two parties, and the
media want to pretend is not there.

From the moment the polls closed on the '96 elections, the media went
around plastering little yellow Happy Face stickers on the results,
proclaiming confidently that people really are satisfied with the way
things are, that there really is not that much anxiety anymore about
corporate downsizing, that big-money corruption of politics really did
not bother voters all that much, that populist appeals really do not
work, and that things really are perfectly OK.

Really.

On This Week with David Brinkley, the tightly bow-tied George Will
pronounced that the issue of downsizing was so much nonsense,
"magnified" by political opportunists operating under the misguided
notion that "it is the job of the corporation to be a mini welfare
state."  Likewise, Newsweeks head-in-the-sand economist Robert
Samuelson intoned that workers' insecurities were "exaggerated" in the
election.  Typical of the postelection analyses was USA Today, which
asserted matter-of-factly that Clinton had won because "This year the
economy is generally regarded as good."

Oh?  By whom?  By Al Neuharth and the other $1,000 suits running USA
Today, for sure, but who else?  Well, the paper reports, "Most voters,
53 percent in Election Day exit polls, think the country is moving in
the right direction.  Clinton got credit for that."  Even accepting
that the 53 percent, feel-good number is accurate, it still suggests
that the other half of exiting voters do not think America is heading
in the right direction.  There was no mention of them.  Nor did USA
Todays analyst mention that more than half (100 million plus of
eligible Americans took a whiff of Bill and Bob on Election Day and
said, "I don't think so," skipping the voting booth altogether, making
1996 the lowest turnout since 1924 and the second lowest since 1824.

This nonvoting majority is a long way from thinking everything is
hunky-dory, as polls have made clear and as any visit to any
workingclass hangout in the land will make even clearer.  You can add
to them the 9 million voters who cast their ballots for Perot, Ralph
Nader, Harry Brown, John Hagelin, Howard Phillips, and other
third-party candidates.  Also add in the 15 million Clinton voters who
told exit pollsters that they were not voting for him, but against the
others, only going for Bill because he was the "best of a bad lot."

Connect the dots of these 125 million voters (nearly two-thirds of
those eligible) and you will not find a picture of a smiling, satisfied
electorate, but a brooding civic rebellion.  The breadth and depth of
this disaffection from the two-party establishment is the most profound
political story of the decade, but the media overseers are either too
far above it to notice, or too incorporated within the establishment to
be willing to dive into the story (with the admirable exception of the
Philadelphia Inquirer's ten-part series by Donald Barlett and James
Steele).  Confronted with the fact of a historically low turnout in
'96, the response of the media establishment was typified by one N. Don
Wycliff, editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune: "I don't see
that there's a huge problem here.  People aren't engaged in the process
because there are no compelling issues driving them to participate.  It
would be different if we didn't have peace and prosperity."

ALTERNATIVES

Back in the sixties, when my friend Martha broke the news to her of'
daddy that she was going to leave her family home in the Greater
Metropolis of Houston and head for the bright lights of New York City,
he was not at all keen on the idea.

"New York," he grumped, "why in the hell do you want to go to New
York?"  She told him that the city was full of culture and she wanted
to experience it.

"Culture?"  he bellowed, "We've got culture right here in Houston."

He paused for a second, then said, "Hell, we've got culture out the
ass."

Finding the real news these days is a lot like Martha s youthful
yearning for culture--sometimes you have to leave home to find it,
especially if your "media home" is restricted to the networks and the
conglomerate press.  The good news is that good news is
available-reliable, informative, unconstrained media sources that offer
more than the minimum daily feed of officially sanctioned information
bites, sources that actually tell you who is doing what to whom ... and
why.

The Utne Reader, the Nation, Mother Jones, In These Times, National
News Reporter, and Progressive are only a handful of the dozens of
popular periodicals on the national scene that routinely root out
economic, political, and social stories that the establishment media
ignore, belittle, or bury, and these periodicals are just the start of
an honest, probing journalism that can also be found on the radio, in
newsletters, via video, on the Internet, and elsewhere.

If you want to hear the viewpoint of someone besides Henry Kissinger
about our government's corrupt China policy (Kissinger is a man who
makes a bundle as a consultant to corporations doing business in China,
by the way--a gross conflict of interest not generally disclosed by
big-media interviewers who fawn over this shameless money grubber when
he speaks in his role as a former secretary of state); if you're
interested in knowing that local citizens are battling polluters in
community after community, day after day--and winning;

if you want to know what someone besides a pipe-smoking Wall Street
economist or a boneheaded congressman thinks is needed for economic
growth and prosperity; if you're curious about what the

CIA does between the times it's startled to find yet another double
agent within its own headquarters building; if you wonder whatever
happened to the farm crisis that was such hot TV a decade ago (did it
just disappear when the cameras went away?); if you have heard whispers
about the success of "living-wage" campaigns across the country, but
cannot find them mentioned on the nightly news; if it would alarm you
to learn that your tax dollars are financing the School of the
Americas, a torture academy for Latin American dictators ... indeed, if
you want to know much of anything that's truly juicy in our country's
economic and political doings, and if you want to get the information
in a clear and timely fashion so you can act on it, do not count on
"THE MEDIA."  Instead, turn to "the media," those scrappy, sassy mags,
rags, and wags steadily pounding out real news and inconvenient truths
that inform you, even while they discomfort the privileged and
powerful.

These range from long-established urban periodicals like the Village
Voice in New York to upstarts like the Progressive Populist out of
Iowa, from such venerable institutions as Consumer Reports to such
fresh newsletters as the two-page Rachel's Environment d- Health
Weekly, from such national TV programming as Planet Central to the
make-your-own programming of local "access" TV, from Pacifica Radio to
Alter Net--and on into the boundless resources of the World Wide Web.

There even are a couple of mavericks dwelling inside the belly of the
beast itself, still existing within the conglomerate media, though
overwhelmed by the daily drone of corporate conformity that surrounds
them.  On the telly, for example, is C-SPAN, the marvelous invention of
Brian Lamb, whose simple and subversive idea was to point a camera at
official proceedings, click it on, and leave it there, letting us see
the whole show without edits or "expert" commentary.

C-SPAN has radicalized hordes of citizens who have, with their own eyes
and ears, seen and heard the making of public policy, gradually
recognizing that the system is largely in the hands of self-important,
prattling fools, stooges for special interests--"Sweet Jesus," many a
citizen has whispered, as reality unfolds on C-SPAN, "my senator has
the IQ of a dust bunny."

A second bastion of journalistic integrity lurking within the confines
of corporate media is the small space most newspapers set aside each
day for the Last True Sons and Daughters of America's Revolutionary
Pamphleteers: editorial cartoonists.  I rank Tom Toles in Buffalo, Tom
Tomorrow (AKA Clan Perkins) in San Francisco, Jules Feiffer in New
York, Clan Wasserman in Boston, Nicole Hollander in Chicago, Herb Block
in Washington, Ben Sargent in Austin, the duo of Gary Huck in
Pittsburgh and Mike Konopaki in Madison, Ted Rail in New York, Signe
Wilkinson in Philadelphia, Steve Brodner in San Francisco, Matt Wuerker
in Portland, and other maestros of the 'toon craft as the best
journalists in America, far ahead of any of the byline stars on the
front pages.  Not only do these cartoonists get the story right, going
straight to the heart of it and skewering the bastards, but they even
draw a picture of it for us!

Then there is the rambunctious bad boy of the media: talk radio.

It has none of the intellectual cachet of print media, none of the
sparkliness of TV, none of the hip ness of the Internet--yet none of
these combines the intimacy, accessibility, affability, passion,
bolster ousness, and pure plebeian punch of talk radio.  Like a good
corner bar, it is there and ready for you--you can get your regular
shot of talk on commercial stations, on public and community stations,
via short-wave sets, directly from the satellite, on the Internet
(http://www.audionet.com) and even through what is called piebald
syndrome (an actual physical phenomenon that occurs when a couple of
your dental fillings next to each other act as miniature radio
receivers).

The radio itself is so affordable and portable that it has become
ubiquitous in our lives.  You might not realize it, but if your family
is typical you have at least five radios, not counting molars.  Forty
million Americans tune their sets to political talk shows with some
regularity.

I often hear progressive politicos complain that people won't come out
to meetings anymore.  Well, go where the people already are.  Millions
of folks wake up to talk every morning, drive to and from work with it,
hang out with it at home, keep it on while at work (cabbies, nurses,
mechanics, construction crews, farmers, restaurant workers, truck
drivers, you name it)--and there even are radios you can take into the
shower with you, which is more than I care to know about you.

Strangely, many liberals alternately fear and scoff at this lively
medium, which they equate with Rush, G. Gordon, Oilie & Gang.

Yes, the medium presently is dominated by right-wing hosts, including
noted criminals and kooks like Liddy and North, but (1) it does not
have to be, and (2) this does not mean the listeners themselves are
rabid rightists.  Take Rush.  Obviously the biggest bull in the
business, but if you rendered the BS out of him he would fit in a
matchbox.

Talk-radio listeners largely know this.  Surveys show that only about a
third of his own audience agrees with him on most of his positions,
about a third mostly disagree with him, and the other third are just
shopping.  The diehard Limbaugh "dittoheads," who have been the focus
of much fear mongering in the media about rampant mindlessness among
talk-radio regulars, amount to no more than 10 percent of his
audience--about the same percentage of Americans who approved of Newt
Gingrich's "Contract with America."  Indeed, the recent slippage in
Rush's radio ratings is the direct result of his identification both as
Newt's national cheerleader and as Wall Street's chief apologist (it
has been widely reported that talk listeners and callers tend to be
antigovernment, but it is rarely noted that they are equally down on
the corporate chieftains who are stomping on America's middle class, as
Rush is learning the hard way).

The popularity of talk radio has nothing to do with right-wing hosts
and everything to do with the simple fact that it is about talking.

This is where ordinary folk hang out, hoping to get some answers, try
out some ideas, shoot the breeze, mouth off, have a conversation, hear
different (even strange) theories, laugh, cry, and enthusiastically
kick the stuffing out of the establishment.

Larry Goodwyn, the eminent historian of American populism who now
teaches at Duke, has expressed America's civic yearning in this
touching phrase: "Our country is lonely."  Lonely because grassroots
people are ignored and dismissed, both politically and economically.

People want to talk.  But where?  The political process makes a mockery
of talking with people.  In the last election, both Bill Clinton, with
his totally scripted-for-TV bus caravans, and Bob Dole, in his hokey
"Listening to America" sessions with carefully screened audiences, were
interested in people only as stage props, not as real-life humans
worthy of being heard.  The major media outlets are even more aloof,
talking down to people, not the slightest bit interested in what they
are saying back.  Ted Koppel even stoops to mocking

Americans' town meeting tradition, holding occasional electronic
sessions that have no town and no meeting, featuring the same nine
"experts" who are always chattering away on national television, and
cutting off any impertinent (and, therefore, important) questions from
the audience, which again is there strictly to serve as a prop.

No wonder so many people tune in to talk radio--it is about the last
place where the vox populi matters.  Rather than pointing fingers at
this medium, liberals and progressives of every stripe should be
embracing its audience and finding ways to become the medium.

These are, after all, the "folks," most of them everyday working people
who are mad as hell and ready to kick some serious butt.  If we are not
talking with them, then we cede the turf to the Limbaughs, whose
schtick is to blame all the problems on "feminazis,"

"tree huggers," and "bedwetting liberals."  Surely we are smart enough
to counter such juvenile nonsense, aren't we?

In 1994 Bill Clinton called me for advice, which I freely gave, and he
just as freely ignored.  I have not heard from him since.  I was
hosting a weekend talk show on ABC Radio at the time, and he called me
at my office to bemoan the daily tongue-lashing he was taking from the
likes of Limbaugh, wondering how I thought he could combat it.  By
going on talk shows himself, I responded, pointing out that talk radio
is not some hostile planet, but a place where he, with his gift of gab,
would do well with the audience, no matter how big a jerk the host
was.

Later I sent a note to my friend Harold Ickes, then a White House
political operative who was close to Clinton, recommending that the
President ditch that stilted five-minute radio message he broadcasts
every Saturday morning (a format launched by the Gipper, who was a
master at reading a script) and instead do a one-hour call-in show of
his own, a format much more suitable to Clinton's of' Southernboy talky
style.  He would have been good at it, and what a stunning political
coup it would have been, completely outflanking and discombobulating
his right-wing radio berators by going directly to their audience and
winning a bunch of them over.  Plus he would have learned a lot--who
knows, getting a weekly dose of real life from Betty in Baltimore and
Tom in Tupelo might even have turned him into a Democrat and made him a
halfway decent people's president.

But he did not.  He did appear on a few talk shows, including mine
once, but his major tactical approach to radio was to berate it,

whining that it was shrill, mean, paranoiac, and dangerous, apparently
oblivious to the fact that by chiding the medium he was also chiding
its listeners ... and losing them.  So much for my influence in the
White House.  Shortly after my note, the Democratic Party began holding
training sessions to teach activists how to discredit right-wing talk
hosts.  Of course, Limbaugh and others got copies of some of the
training materials, howling, huffing, and hooting for weeks about the
scaredy-cat Democrats.  What a waste.  Far better had the party held
sessions to teach activists how to get their own talk shows.

Not that it is easy for a liberal, a green, a feminist, a populist, or
any other brand of overt progressive to get on the air, but then it has
never been easy for us, especially now that conglomerate ownership is
sweeping up stations and networks wholesale.

I had my own experience with the stifling nature of media
conglomeration in 1995 when I made an unscheduled trip to Disney World.
My ABC weekend show had been airing for about a year, blasting the
powers-that-be and preaching the populist gospel, when Disney Inc.
announced on Tuesday, August 1, that it was buying my network. Suddenly
I was the property of Mickey Mouse.  On Friday of that same week the
Senate passed the new telecommunications rip-off law, effectively
opening a new and exclusive gold rush to a handful of communication
conglomerates, authorizing a race to seize monopolistic control of
America's mass-market news and information sources.  On Saturday I went
on the air and blasted both the Disney takeover and the
Telecommunications Act, which Disney had lobbied furiously to pass.

"I work for a rodent," is how I opened my Saturday show.

Turns out the mouse doesn't have much of a sense of humor, and there
was an abrupt chilling in the network's enthusiasm for my program.

Even though ABC had until then been committed to the steady growth of
the show, even though we had built a bigger audience than the mighty
Limbaugh had amassed at a comparable point in his show's development,
even though we were adding sizable new markets at the time (Denver and
Oklahoma City had just signed up in July, for example) and even though
there were numerous advertisers available to back the show--I was
suddenly moused, literally kicked off the air shortly after my
anti-Mickey, anti merger broadcast.

There is an old gunfighter's tombstone in Arizona that reads: "I was
expecting this, but not so soon."  I have to concede that all of us
involved in producing my show were rather astounded that hidebound,
totally corporate ABC had allowed a fire-breathing populist on the air
to start with.  Knowing that our broadcast could be shortlived, we had
decided from the get-go to give the audience a full dose of populism,
to speak the truth as we know it (which, by the way, is why I had to
take on the Disney buy out of the network, intemperate as it is to piss
on one's own hierarchy--but having pounded the podium regularly over
other corporate power plays, I could not credibly have ignored this
whopper).  So we were hardly shocked to find our plug pulled, though it
does stand as a chilling reminder of who is now in charge of the
public's airwaves.  Today's big-money owners are perfectly willing to
have liberals on the air talking about welfare, Hillary's hairdos,
abortion, Whitewater, prayer in the schools, and other social cultural
disagreements, but the one thing that Big Money does not want discussed
is Big Money.  Big surprise.

Periodically in our country, concentrations of economic, political, and
media power become so great that democracy itself is stifled, and in
such times it is the "alternative" media--the outsiders, the rebels and
mutts of communication--that move to the front, connecting people,
clarifying issues, giving perspective, pointing the way, focusing folks
on action, speaking truth to power, and making the difference.

Thomas Paine and the other pamphleteers of the 1770s and 1780s were the
alternative media of their time.  Likewise, in the 1870s and 1880s, the
populist movement of tenant farmers, urban laborers, and other
grassroots forces found its way around the robber barons and the
baronial press of that age by communicating through an alternative
media of their own creation, including a network of more than 1,000
local newspapers (the Reform Press Association), such large-circulation
magazines as the National Economist and the American Nonconformist, and
a speakers' bureau of 41,000 "lecturers"--41,000 trained speakers who
on any given night could spread out across the countryside and bring
home the true news of the day.

So here we are, another hundred years down the road, facing an
economic, political, and media concentration that is more powerful than
ever, with Disney's muscular mouse and his conglomerate brethren having
achieved a choke hold on our country's mass-market news machinery.  But
just as the pamphleteers and populists refused either to shut up or to
be shut out, so is the spunky, innovative, entrepreneurial spirit of
alternative media loose across the land again, already hacking new
paths of communication around, over, under, and through the latest
conglomerate media blockages.  Truth will out.

My momma taught me long ago that two wrongs don't make a right, but I
soon figured out that three left turns do.  Within a year of getting
kicked in the butt by Mickey's little yellow shoe, I was back on the
air, thanks to the three-left-turn ingenuity of United Broadcasting
Network.  With ownership by a group of investors who are strong
proponents of America's working families, including the United Auto
Workers union, the very structure of this commercial network gives it a
freedom of populist expression that none other has.  Its
programming--including my two-hour daily talk show-airs on hundreds of
commercial stations coast to coast ("from Maine to Maui," as we enjoy
pointing out), competing directly against Rush and the rest for the
hearts and minds of the millions of listeners tuned in to mass-market
radio.

What about advertisers, though?  How can UBN rely on Exxon, GM, and
other major sponsors to back a show like mine that routinely pops them
upside the head for crushing workers, consumers, and the environment?
The network doesn't.  It does accept some product advertising, but
mostly UBN is a radio marketer of madein-the-U.S.A. products--like a
home shopping channel on television.

It buys the products directly from manufacturers and sells directly to
listeners.  Want a Regal "La Machine" food processor, a Creative
Playthings swing set, some Oneida silverware or stainless flatware, a
Hoover Steam Vac, a Roadmaster "Flexible Flyer" hardwood sled, a Rival
"Crock-Pot," a Lionel train set, an Oster adjustable hair clipper, a
Mountain Classic twenty-one-speed bike, a White Mountain six-quart ice
cream freezer--all made in America?  Call 800-888-9999 to get UBN's
"Project USA" catalogue, which lists these and hundreds of other items.
Not only are they all made by American workers, 70 percent of them are
union-made, and all of them are price-competitive with what you find at
the mall, putting the lie to the self-serving claims of such ethically
challenged outfits as Nike that they simply must have their stuff made
by nickel-an hour workers offshore in order to compete.

By putting its made-in-the-U.S.A. principles to work as a marketing
niche, UBN has found a way to finance its populist programming.

Three left turns.

In 1988 I was to give a prime-time speech at the Democratic National
Convention in Atlanta.  I had carefully crafted my little gem of a talk
and was ready for the moment, but I was nervous about the TelePrompTer,
having never used one.  These magical gizmos, used by Presidents and
others for "Big Speeches," electronically display one's peroration in
moving type on two glass panels in front of you, allowing you to read
your speech without the audience knowing you are reading.  To the TV
viewers and the crowd in the hall, you appear to be a brilliant,
extemporaneous orator who needs not a single note to expound so
eloquently.  Makes one wonder how William Jennings Bryan did without
one of these things.

My concern, of course, was that I would be midway through my address,
shining magnificently in the nationwide beam of the TV lights, and ...
boink... my electronic text would blink off.  The convention planners,
however, who insisted that all of us prime-timers use these
speech-cheaters, assured me that they work perfectly and that I should
not give it another thought--"Don't even bring your notes to the
podium," they said, "we have fail-safe backup systems that guarantee
the TelePrompTer will not crash."  Well, they had run conventions and I
had not, so who was I to question them?

The night before I was to have my big moment in the spotlight, Jim
Wright, then the Speaker of the House and a terrific speechmaker, was
on the podium having his moment--which did not seem to be going well.
From my seat in the audience, I noticed that he was rambling and seemed
to be telling old political war stories rather than delivering one of
his usual well-polished jewels.  I ran into him later that night and
learned what had happened.  He told me that things had started
splendidly as he mounted the podium to the acclaim of thousands of
cheering Democrats.  He turned to one side of the great hall and waved,
he turned to the other side and beamed, then he turned to the
TelePrompTer to begin, and, sure enough, the speech was there and
electronically ready for him.  He began speaking the opening line,
"When I was but a small boy back in West

Virginia ... "--before he realized that it was Senator Robert Byrd's
speech on the TelePrompTer.

Needless to say, when I got my turn at the podium, I had my handwritten
notes tucked securely in my pocket.  Never trust those in charge to put
the right thing on the screen, on the air, or in print for you--always
have alternatives.

POLLUTION

"STATUS QUO" IS LATIN FOR "THE MESS

WE'RE IN"

* THOSE DAMN ENVIRONMENTALISTS

* WRESTLING THE WORLD FROM FOOLS

* NIMBY

* SCIENCE

**- HOGS, TURKEYS, AND MAD COWS

** UNCLE BEN

* TIME MAGAZINE IS KILLING US

* COMING CLEAN

THOSE DAMN ENVIRONMENTALISTS

They say if you get up in the morning and swallow a live toad, nothing
worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

My toad for November 9, 1995, was this news item I found buried deep in
the sports section of the Austin American-Statesman:

MERCURY ADVISORY

The Texas Department of Health has issued a warning concerning
consumption of large-mouth bass and freshwater drum from several lakes.
The warning also includes white bass and their hybrids from one lake.

The recommendation is that adults consume no more than two eight-ounce
servings per month of drum or bass from Caddo Lake, Cypress Creek, Sam
Rayburn, Toledo Bend and B. A. Steinhagen lakes.  Children should eat
no more than two four-ounce servings per month.

The white bass advisory is for Steinhagen Reservoir.  The health
department says adults should eat no more than eight ounces per month
and children no more than four ounces.

Elevated levels of mercury were found in the listed fish after tests
were run on a number of East Texas lakes.  Officials can't pinpoint a
specific source of the mercury.

Let's see now, was that four ounces of large-mouth from Caddo, or eight
ounces of white bass from ... where?  What do they mean by
"children"--under sixteen, under twelve, what?  Mercury.  That's a
heavy metal right?  Shouldn't this be on the front page?  And what in
darkest hell do they mean, "Officials cant pinpoint a specific source
of the mercury"?

We are poisoning ourselves.  More accurately, we are allowing a handful
of profiteers to poison us.  You do not have to be Rachel Carson to
realize that letting this go on will suggest to the generation of the
twenty-second century (if there is one) that the collective IQ of us
twentieth-century Americans was a couple of digits dumber than beef
jerky.

Still, the polluters, their protectors in Congress, their hirelings in
big science, and their mouthpieces in the media join in a raucous
chorus of scoffs every time anyone raises an objection, claiming any
protest as nothing more than frivolous meddling by "those damn
environmentalists," whom they caricature as a motley mix of
professional worrywarts, half-batty bird watchers, and over aged flower
children.

But hold your DDT-PCB-DBCP-CFC-2,4,5-T horses.

"Those damn environmentalists" are not just a fanatic fringe--they are
really "us damn environmentalists"--you, me, and Willie Nelson.

In 1987 Willie Nelson testified on my behalf at a hearing in the Texas
legislature.  I was state agriculture commissioner at the time, and one
of my statutory duties was to regulate the use of pesticides,
which--foolish me--I actually attempted to do.  As Woodrow Wilson once
said: "If you want to make enemies, try to change something."

Texas is one of the largest ag-chemical junkies in the country,
consuming 40 million tons of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides
each year.  This toxic stuff saturates our soil, runs off into our
water supplies, gets onto our food and into our bodies.  So in 1984 I
began a program of curbing some of the grossest abuses--requiring, for
example, that vulnerable farm workers and nearby neighbors be notified
before any field was sprayed, and that they be informed about exactly
what chemicals were being used.

Such a hullabaloo you never witnessed.  The corporate ag establishment
(led by the Chemical Council and its comic sidekick, the Farm Bureau)
squawked like a banty rooster choking on a peach pit.

What a racket they made, wailing that these "radical regulations" would
outlaw farming as we know it and cause mass starvation in

Ethiopia, if not in El Paso.  In every rural county they nailed my mug
to the wall, put a political bounty on my scrawny hide, and howled that
they would get me in my '86 reelection run.

They missed me that time, though, which only made them madder, more
devious, and more determined.  Enter Bill Clements, a Republican and a
practicing dooms who was elected governor that year (during his
campaign, he had tried to appeal to Mexican American voters by letting
it be known that he was taking Spanish lessons, which led me to blurt,
"Oh good, now Bill will be biignorant").  So, this peeved Republican
was more than willing to help the ag establishment try to exterminate
me through legislative action.  They concocted a scheme in the '87
legislative session to move authority over pesticides from my
department to another agency, where they could control it again.

Hence the Big Hearing.  They had hoped to use their insider connections
to muscle this change through the legislature quietly and quickly, but
we took the ploy public, rallying ordinary Texans against it.  From all
over the state, people wrote, called, and even traveled to Austin to
oppose any effort to dilute our tougher regulation of pesticides.

They came not just from the Sierra Club but from such unexpected places
as Republican clubs in Dallas.  So many showed up for the hearing that
it had to be moved to the floor of the House of Representatives, where
we were ready with our surprise leadoff witness, Willie Nelson.

Willie, of course, is a renowned picker-singer-songwriter, but in
Texas, at least, he is bigger than that--he's about as close as we get
to true-life redneck heroes.  His sixty-odd years have taken him along
some mighty rough roads, and his hard-traveled, up-against-the-
establishment, honky-ton king success is just the kind of thing to
endear him to maverick Texans.  To top it off, his Farm Aid benefit
concerts have made him a genuine grassroots champion for the family
farmer, so we had just the right guy going for us.  His statement that
morning was short and sweet:

My name is Willie Nelson and I'm here to talk for our Agriculture
Department.

I'm here because I used to hunt rabbits up in Hill County--I understand
we have some people from Hill

County here today [cheers].  Me and my dog used to hunt rabbits around
Abbott, Hillsboro, Itasca, West.  Four or five years ago, I was up in
Itasca visiting my cousin, Cecil Wilcox, and we were out walking around
over the cotton fields.  I said, "Cecil, where are all the rabbits?" He
said, "I ain't seen any rabbits in years over here," and I said, "Why?"
He said, "Pesticides."  I said, "Well, if pesticides will kill
rabbits, won't they kill people?"

I was telling this to Bill Polk over in Dripping Springs, about the
rabbits, and he said, "Well, have you noticed that we don't have any
horny toads around either?"  And I said, "Come to think of it, we
don't, I haven't seen any in years."

And he said, "Well, you know horny toads eat red ants, and when they
run out of food they disappear, and we were killing red ants with
pesticides."

So I'm here today to represent the rabbits and the horny toads.

The committee, which included a bunch of toadies for the governor and
backroom buddies of the chemical lobbyists, didn't move.

For what seemed like ten minutes, they sat there all slack-jawed,
staring at Willie, eyes blinking slowly--not knowing whether to
question him, thank him, or just go bowling.  One thing had dawned on
all of them, though: Stopping pesticide regulations was not going to be
as easy as the lobbyists had told them it would be.

After Willie did his number, after farm workers described being sent
into fields while crops were still dripping with pesticides, after
various farmers said they thought pesticide use needed more control,
after some Republican mothers told about the afflictions their children
had because of toxic chemicals--no member of the committee would even
make a motion to support the governor's bill removing my pesticide
authority.

The polluter establishment wants us to believe that environmentalism is
the domain of elites, that the Great Unwashed majority is much too
preoccupied with scraping together a living to spend time worrying
about such prissy concerns as factory emissions and oil spills.  Just
get government the hell out of the way, they say, so developers can
build, factories can roar, money can be made, and the marketplace can
work its magic in solving both our economic and our environmental
problems.

The purveyors of this conventional wisdom intentionally overlook the
common sense of the ordinary American.  There is a solid, unshakable
and highly agitated environmental majority in our country--people who
are not at all interested in some phony tradeoff between their
families' environmental health and their economic health.  They want
unpolluted water, air, land, and food, period.  This is a majority
sentiment not only among the bean sprout eaters, but also among the
snuff dippers of our country.  Such folks are not likely to belong to
the Audubon Society, most would not call themselves
"environmentalists," and they probably know more about the PTA than the
EPA--but they damn sure know pollution when it hits them.  These are
the "pollutees," and they are sick of the platitudes and pussyfooting
they get from politicians when it comes to protecting their families.

I'm talking about the family in the $60,000 cookie-cutter house in the
farthest-out suburban development, right next to the cotton fields,
noticing that their roses died after the sixth spraying this summer,
remembering that the neighbor's cat died about the same time last year,
and beginning to connect this to the recurring rash and cough their
youngest child has.

I'm talking about the working stiffs in the plastics plant who have
learned that they can expect to die ten years earlier than normal
because of where they work, at the same time they've learned that their
company is cutting their health benefits, looting their pension, and
lobbying to kill OSHA.

I'm talking about conscientious mothers who carefully wash the fruit
they give their children, but now find out that washing cannot
eliminate the toxins and that the government's pesticide-residue
standards fail to take into account that children's bodies are much
more susceptible to chemical damage than are adult bodies.

I'm talking about farm families, too, sitting at the kitchen table in
the predawn light, talking about the herbicide they are about to spray,
concerned by reports that traces of it are now in their groundwater,
and wondering if this stuff has anything to do with the tumor the
doctor just found in dad's groin.

I'm talking about folks who pack up the kids for a weekend getaway at
the shore, the lake, the springs, or the river, only to find they
cannot go in the water or eat any of the fish.

The vox populi is unambiguous, as poll after poll has shown year after
year.  A recent ABC News/ Washington Post survey, for example, asked if
people thought the federal government has gone "too far" or "not far
enough" to protect the environment.  Only 17 percent say "too far," and
70 percent say "not far enough."

Newt Gingrich's environmental wrecking crew has learned about the
depths of this green sentiment the hard way.  Fueled by the hubris of
their 1994 electoral takeover of Congress and by a gusher of campaign
money from polluters, the Republican-controlled 104th Congress locked
arms with corporate lobbyists in a highly publicized assault not only
on the laws and agencies, but also on the very idea of environmental
protection.  With exuberant cries of "Unfetter the Marketplace" and
"Whack Big Government," they went after the budget and authority of the
EPA and every other government office that stands between unbridled
corporate whim and us.  Apparently these goober heads actually expected
wild applause from a grateful public, but instead folks were widely
appalled.  After a year of the GOP's assault on the Environmental
Protection Agency, for example, a Harris Poll found that 86 percent of
us believe an aggressive EPA is needed today as much as or more than
when it was created back in 1970.  More stunning to Newt & Gang was
that 76 percent of Republicans felt this way.

Meanwhile, in related polling news, public approval of the job being
done by Newt's Congress had fallen further and faster than that of any
Congress in history, and Newt's own approval rating was lower than that
of mad cow disease, prompting his handlers to make him start wearing a
paper bag over his head.  Indeed, Republican pollster Linda DiVa ll
reported in 1996 to her GOP clients in Congress that their party's
environmental assault was disdained not only by Democrats but also by
Republicans and independents.

Her polling found that "55 percent of Republicans do not trust their
party when it comes to protecting the environment," leading her to
conclude, "Our party is out of sync with mainstream American
opinion."

So did Newt back off?  Nah.  He's too tight with industry lobbyists and
too hungry for industry campaign contributions to do that.

Instead, party leaders advised their members to begin visiting zoos and
engaging in tree plantings back home to bolster their environmental
image.

I didn't want to be the one to break it to Newt and the GOP, but
political tree plantings are as useless as putting lipstick on a
pig--no one is fooled, and they are damn sure not going to kiss that
pig.

 R

WRESTLING THE WORLD FROM FOOLS

The Bible declares that on the sixth day God created man.

Right then and there, God should have demanded a damage deposit.

Included in the deal, says Genesis 1:28-30, was that man was to "rule
over" the fish, the birds, the critters that move on the ground, the
seed-bearing plants, and the whole kit and caboodle that Mother Nature
has to offer.  Now, "rule over" allows at least a couple of
interpretations.

First is the one celebrated in church sermons and on Earth Day, which
is to consider ourselves the stewards of this bountiful paradise,
accepting responsibility for the nurturing of things great and small.
The other is the one actually practiced by those in charge, which is:
"It's ours!  Everything!  God gave it to us.  Grab it all, gobble it
up, pave it over, make it pay or piss on it, get out of our way you en
viro-weenie or we'll poison your dog."

The latest manifestation of this God-gave-it-to-me ethic is about the
loopiest rationale for greed since the divine right of kings.  It is
called the "Takings Movement," which holds that if the public and its
government do not allow a property owner to pollute at will, then the
same public and its government must pay said property owner cash money
not to pollute.  Say what?  Yes, they insist, the Fifth Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution means that if Big Belcher International acquires
property next to you and is subsequently prevented by government
regulation from building a toxic waste incinerator there, this
government action amounts to a "taking" of BBI's private property, and
we taxpayers owe them for the money they would have made incinerating
toxic waste.

If the Mafia tried to run a racket like this it would be the subject of
an FBI strike force, seven or eight grand jury investigations, and a
whole new round of Godfather movies.  But since the takings racket is
being run by a higher class of mob, with proper Wall Street addresses,
it has already been sanctioned by law in twenty states and is one of
the prizes Newt Gingrich slipped inside his "Contract with America" for
his corporate contributors.  As Andy Young, former mayor of Atlanta,
once stated, "Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do
it."

Of course, the real takings are not being done by the government, but
by the same Big Belcher Internationals that are pushing this sophistry.
The good news is that in the face of such polluter arrogance in our
national and state capitals, ordinary folks have begun doing their own
"takings"--taking charge of their environmental destinies by taking on
the polluters at the community level.  As Patti Smith sings in her
hard-rocking anthem: "The people have the power The power to dream, to
rule To wrestle the world from fools."

Sure, you say, nice sentiment, but show me on what planet this is
true.

Planet Earth, for one--not the whole planet, obviously, but in
thousands of locales around the globe, where fed-up locals are grabbing
down-and-dirty speculators and spoilers by the short hairs and turning
them every which way but loose.  In our country this is not being done
by groups that the TV networks or Washington politicians or even the
big brand-name environmental organizations pay any attention to, yet
they are, collectively, making the most significant progress against
polluters.  They do not have multimillion dollar budgets, do not
publish beautiful photo calendars, and do not have professional
lobbyists. They are much scruffier, scrappier, and passionate, with
in-your-face names like JAWS, GASP, WOW, SOS, WARN, SOCK, and WAR. 
These are groups that pop up when something happens that causes
hardworking, perfectly peaceful, average citizens to get hot as hell
and spontaneously combust.

Mary Hernandez is one such.  A thirty-five-year-old insurance auditor
and mother of three, she lives in a working-class neighborhood on the
east side of my town, Austin, Texas.  A proud mom, she often bragged
about her son Antonio growing up to be President.

But then he began to get sick a lot, and she began to wonder if he
would grow up at all.  Talking with neighbors, Ms.  Hernandez learned
that a lot of people in her area, especially children, were chronically
sick with such ailments as nosebleeds, headaches, nausea, dizziness,
asthma, and rashes.

Odd.  The neighbors told others and began comparing notes, looking for
a pattern to their illnesses.  Then they realized the one thing they
had in common was right in front of them: All lived within a few blocks
of a fifty-two-acre tank farm where Exxon, Chevron, Citgo, Texaco,
Mobil, and Coastal States owned and operated forty-three massive
storage tanks holding 10 million gallons of gasoline.  Eighty percent
of the gasoline used by Austin motorists sat in their little
neighborhood.

About this time, another east Austinite, Sylvia Herrera--a mother of
two children who was in graduate school at the University of Texas and
had done research on the health problems of people exposed to
industrial toxins--came across an item tucked quietly in the classified
section of Austin's daily newspaper giving "public notice" that Mobil
was seeking a state permit to expand its tank farm operation and to
continue emitting toxic chemicals into the air.  To continue what?!
This was the first time the people had any knowledge that poisons were
being released right in their midst.

Herrera, Hernandez, and dozens of other increasingly agitated neighbors
promptly joined forces in a new grassroots group called PODER.  The
acronym stands for People Organized in Defense of the Earth and its
Resources, but the name gets attention in the community because poder
is the Spanish word for "power," and that is what these people were
after--the power to stop the poisons.  Not only were their own homes
exposed, but so were three small groceries where they bought food for
their families, and so were two elementary schools--one within 400 feet
of the tank farm and another within 1,000 feet.

First they gathered information, going door-to-door to build a more
thorough record of illnesses and going to libraries and agencies to
learn what was coming out of these forty-three storage tanks.

"I didn't even know what benzene was or what it could cause, but I sure
do now," Mary Hernandez says.  What she learned is that it can cause
leukemia, among other cancers, and that some of the early symptoms of
benzene poisoning are headaches, dizziness, and nausea--precisely what
her son was experiencing.

Then they learned something that is always somewhat shocking to people,
even in these cynical times: The government agencies they assumed were
protecting them, were not.  Records at the Air Control Board revealed
that state, city, and county health officials had known about the
benzene problem for some time and were "concerned," but never mentioned
it to the neighborhood.  A writer for the Polemicist, an Austin
alternative newspaper, dug into files at the state Water Commission and
found that there had been a history of spills and leaks at the tank
farm, but no one in the neighborhood was ever notified.  The agencies
knew, the oil corporations knew, everyone knew except those who most
needed to know--the people living next door.

The members of PODER set out to take their government back from the
polluters and make it work for them.  They held weekly organizing
meetings at the neighborhood library; they got a resident from each
street to serve as block representative to get information out quickly
and to mobilize people; they enlisted an African American community
coalition called EAST to join the fight; the principal of the area high
school demanded a meeting with Texaco;

the PTA petitioned the state agencies to test for contamination of the
air, water, and soil around the schools; residents started writing
letters to agencies and elected officials--suddenly the neighborhood
made itself a blip on officialdom's radar screen.

Then, in one stroke, the blip became a force to be reckoned with.

PODER invited elected officials and the media to take a "Toxic Tour" of
their neighborhood.  This put the tank farm and PODER on the political
map, and things began to happen in a hurry:

March.  Prodded by the publicity and by suddenly awakened politicians,
state agencies that had been curtly dismissing the neighborhood's
complaints and had earlier denied there even was a problem, begin
testing and quickly find that (well, my, my!) the spills and leaks have
indeed spread in plumes from beneath the tank farm into the
neighborhood, creating pools of poison that contaminate yards, creeks,
and wells.

April.  The Water Commission orders the companies to clean up the
contamination.  The Air Control Board finds numerous violations,
including non functioning pollution-control equipment.  County tax
officials devalue the worth of all homes within a quarter of a mile of
the tank farms by as much as 60 percent.  Homeowners sue the oil
companies for, in essence, "taking" their property values from them.

May.  The Department of Health finds that 68 percent of the families
surveyed in the neighborhood reported health problems consistent with
exposure to toxins.  The Austin

American-Statesman reviews county medical records and finds that 64
percent of all bronchial pneumonia cases come from this one
neighborhood, as do between a quarter and a half of various other
respiratory and stomach disorders.

Escalating the fight dramatically, County Attorney Ken Oden launches a
special investigation into criminal and civil wrongdoing by the oil
companies.

June.  In an unprecedented agreement with the Air Control Board, the
companies agree to reduce toxic emissions by two-thirds.  The county's
top health official declares the tank farm an "unacceptable health
risk" and says it should be removed.

August.  Chevron announces it will close its terminal.  In a PR stunt.
Chevron offers to donate its building at the site to the community for
a health clinic.  PODER says thanks but no thanks to a health clinic on
property soaked in poison.

September.  Mobil, Texaco, and Coastal States say they will leave, too.
County Attorney Oden intensifies his investigation, and the grand jury
subpoenas Exxon documents.

October.  Citgo announces it is out of there, leaving only Exxon.  Oden
sues Exxon for pollution violations.

November.  PODER and other neighborhood groups launch a citywide
boycott of Exxon stations and products.

January.  Mobil and Coastal States are the first to keep their word,
announcing that they have closed their facilities permanently and will
proceed to dismantle their tanks and pipelines, as well as begin
cleanup work.  Exxon says it has no plans to move and is committed to
"continuing to operate as we have in the past."  The consumer boycott
of Exxon continues, as does Oden's investigation.

February.  Neighborhood residents, joined by Austin environmental
activists, announce plans to travel to Houston to picket Exxon
headquarters.  Four days later Exxon announces that in the face of
"prevailing negative sentiment in the Austin community and the
likelihood of lengthy and costly litigation," it, too, will close its
fuel-terminal operations in the neighborhood and pay a $19,000 fine for
air pollution violations.

Susana Almanza, cochair of PODER, said of this year-long fight:

"People have learned that they may not be rich, they may not be
politically connected, but that they do have a voice--and they can make
things happen."

She is right.  Environmentalism is not just about protecting our
environment, but also about exercising our power.  It is about Mary
Hernandez joining with her neighbors in PODER and daring to confront
Exxon, Chevron, and the other corporate powerhouses that, aided and
abetted by our own government, are taking from us, and taking and
taking and taking.  The takings will not stop until we stop them.  As
Mary Hernandez said after helping wrestle her small piece of the world
from fools: "Our kids were sick.  Somebody had to do something."

NIMBY

Sometimes patriotism asks too much, even of such flag-waving,
proud-to-be-American patriots as the corn, cattle, and cotton farmers
on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle.

Farmers tend to be optimists in a pessimistic business, and more often
than not they will hunt for the bright side of most anything that is
thrown at them.  My Aunt Eula, who farmed, was like this--if three
bales of hay fell out of the loft and knocked her flat, she'd stagger
back up, dust herself off, and say, "Well, it could've been four."  In
the Panhandle, this yeomanly optimism is reflected in the names of
their towns--names like Sunnyside, Dawn, and Happy (Official Motto:
"The Town Without a Frown").

One bright winter day back in the eighties, though, an announcement was
made at an Amarillo press conference that did bring a frown to Happy
and to just about all the weathered faces of the Panhandle's
hardworking people.  They watched that evening's news in dismay as
federal officials, standing with beaming representatives of Amarillo's
chamber of commerce, revealed that the lucky locals were to be the
beneficiaries of a multibillion-dollar, job-creating, pride-instilling,
red-white-and-blue federal construction project.

After a nationwide search, neighboring Deaf Smith County had been
deemed the very best place there could be to serve as the "high-level
nuclear waste repository" for the entire United States of America,
forever and ever, amen.

It was a simple matter of geology and technology, the feds explained,
noting that some splendid salt domes about a mile beneath Deaf Smith
County's rich soil would be perfect for storing waste from Three Mile
Island, Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, and every other atomic
waste-producing source in the country.  The engineers would simply bore
some wide shafts down to the domes, carve out some storage space, and
then, for the foreseeable future, trainload after trainload of nuclear
nasties would arrive daily and be deposited.  Perfectly safe.  Trust
us.

Sure, thought the farmers, about like a chicken trusts Colonel Sanders.
To get to the salt domes, the shafts would have to be drilled through
the Ogallala Aquifer--the chief source of water for the whole Panhandle
and the largest freshwater aquifer in the United States, spanning eight
states.  Did these brilliant scientists know about the geological
fissures, faults, and seismic activity in the area?

(Turns out they did not.) What market in the world was going to want to
buy corn, cotton, and cattle raised above a nuclear dump?

Who wants to live atop a nuclear dump?  Do they think everyone out here
just fell off a turnip truck?

At a packed meeting in the courthouse in Hereford, a federal man
attempted to dismiss the people's concerns as so much hysterical
know-nothingism, asserting calmly that nuclear engineers and public
officials far more knowledgeable than they had approved of the scheme,
adding that Amarillo's business leaders and daily newspaper backed it
fully, and commenting that he was certain that the great majority of
Panhandle people were for it, too--after all, America!  needed this
repository, and the people of this area would surely want to do their
patriotic duty, as they had done so often before.

"Stop right there," thundered a voice from midway back in the crowd. It
was Carl King, a corn farmer and the kind of guy who flies the Stars
and Stripes on his tractor, his pickup, his house, and his gimmie
cap.

"Patriotic don't mean being stupid," Carl bellowed, his entire bald
head flushing red with emotion.

"We don't care if you put that crap in the Statue of Liberty and try to
send it out here, WE

DON'T WANT IT!"

Raucous applause and huzzahs for Carl.  The fed fellow didn't realize
it, but the deal was dead right then and there.  It took a few more
years, a lot of citizen agitation, and a couple more votes in the
Congress, but there is no nuclear waste repository in the salt domes of
Deaf Smith County today.

Industry and government do not like people like Carl King.

"NIMBYs," they snarl at Carl and any of us who dare to stand up and
say: Not In My Back Yard.  Like we are the ones being irrational
here.

We are told that the NIMBY attitude is anti progress anti science and
anti civic  Obstructionism for obstructionism's sake.  Whether they are
trying to locate a waste dump, a lead smelter, a landfill, a plastics
plant, a toxic incinerator, you name it--they tell us that it has to go
somewhere, that not everyone can be a NIMBY, and that if it is not to
go in our neighborhood or town, then exactly where do we suggest they
put it?

It is really tempting to tell them, isn't it?

One place you can be certain it will not be placed is in their
neighborhoods.  You can drive all day long through Beverly Hills, River
Oaks, Nob Hill, North Shore, Grosse Pointe, White Plains, West Palm
Beach, Highland Park, or any of the other enclaves of the wealthy and
not see a single pit, smokestack, terminal, or other sign of
"progress."  If NIMBY is so bad, why are offending facilities Never In
Their Back Yards?  NIT BY

Pollution is a class issue.  If it spews, burbles, oozes, blasts,
emits, gushes, radiates, or otherwise does something unpleasant and
dangerous, it is located in working-class, rural, minority, or
low-income communities--usually in places with some combination of the
four, places with little political or economic clout.  If you are poor,
your chances of having Mr.  Pollution as a close neighbor are one in
six.

Minorities are especially hard-hit--60 percent of African-American and
Hispanic-American families live in communities with at least one toxic
waste site.

And--in an Amazing Coincidence that never fails to baffle
authorities--such neighborhoods also tend to be the ones that show up
on maps depicting cancer clusters, concentrations of birth defects, and
other environmental health problems.

In today's world of arrogant and willful polluters, compliant
government, and vapid media coverage, what they derisively refer to as
the "NIMBY Syndrome" is far from irrational--it is the only sane
response.  The problem is not the people, it is the insanity.  Why do
we continue to make all these poisons if there is no safe place to make
them, and no safe place to store the waste?  Nuclear power, for
example, is not a necessity to anyone but the grossly subsidized and
heavily indebted nuclear power industry.  There is no shortage of
alternative energy strategies (including conservation) that are
cheaper, safer, and generate no toxic waste problems for us or our
progeny.

The old vaudeville joke teaches us something here: A guy goes to the
doctor and says, "Doc, it hurts when I do this," stretching his arm
behind him in an unnatural motion.  So the doctor says, "Well, don't do
that!"  It is a stupid joke, but not as stupid as nuclear waste.

NIMBY is simply nature's way of saying, "Don't do that."

SCIENCE

When I was a barefoot nubbin of a boy growing up in the early fifties,
one of my most joyous summertime moments was when the town sprayer came
chugging down our alley, spewing out a great, billowing fog of DDT.
From two or three blocks away, other kids would sound the gleeful
alert--"Sprayer's coming, sprayer's coming!"--signaling my brother and
me to bolt from the house and join them.  A whole gaggle of us would
then run whooping and hollering right along behind the sprayer,
blissfully enveloped in the mist, gulping lungsful of the stuff as
though it were laughing gas, instead of poison.

No one mentioned to us, our parents, or even to the guy driving the
sprayer that this mosquito spray had even a whiff of danger to it,
unless of course you were a mosquito.  Quite the opposite, we were
flat-out told by the high priests of industry, government, and science
that DDT was our friend, another miracle from the beakers of modern
science.  We trusted them.  The fifties were like that--Ozzie and
Harriet and an unblinking trust in America's scientific beneficence, a
time when we eagerly believed in the broadly advertised promise of
"Better living through chemistry."  So any raised eyebrow by a neighbor
busybody about allowing kids to play in the spray would be met with
"Aw, it can't hurt the little squirts.  And I haven't seen a mosquito
bite on 'em in days."

Since that innocent time, hundreds of thousands have learned the hard
way that prolonged exposure to this organochlorine interferes with
human hormones and causes birth defects, reproductive maladies, and
cancer, especially breast cancer, which now kills 50,000 women a year.
One of the highest rates of breast cancer in our country today, for
example, is found on Long Island, New York, where potato farms were
regularly and heavily doused with DDT in the fifties.  This chemical
has since been banned in the United States, but there is no escaping
it.  It takes hundreds of years for DDT to break down in nature.  So it
lingers still in our yards, riverbeds, lakes, fish, birds--and in us.

The lesson here is that science is not truth, and it often errs.  The
one word you never want to hear your dentist say while elbow-deep in
your mouth with sharp tools and screaming drills is: "Oops."  But that
is exactly what happened with DDT--the "oops factor."  This is not
something that Established Science or those who profit from it want to
discuss, but it affects us at least as profoundly as do the successes
of scientists.  From DES to lUDs, from Agent Orange to nicotine, from
Love Canal to Silicon Valley--what was touted as scientific truth only
yesterday turns out to be wrong today.  Oops.  Sorry if this caused you
any discomfort or death.

As Texas commissioner of agriculture for eight years, I regularly
encountered Ph.D.-flaunting scientists from ag colleges and industry
who absolutely insisted that each of the thousands of insecticides,
herbicides, and fungicides on the market was there because humankind
could not survive without it and because each one had been so
rigorously tested for human safety that they would gladly swig a
cocktail of pesticides in front of the Alamo at high noon.  It was a
level of true belief rarely seen outside cults, and I finally came to
the conclusion that they had, indeed, been sniffing too much of the
stuff in the lab.  Nothing else could explain such detachment from
reality--a reality that includes this frightening saga: Way back in
1972, Congress instructed EPA to reassess the safety of 590 chemical
compounds that are the active ingredients in some 18,000 pesticide
products.  It had been discovered that many of these compounds had been
approved for use on the basis of bad data, so Congress ordered a
retesting program, giving our environmental protectors five years to do
this urgent job.  But they ran a little behind ... and they still are.
So far, twenty-five years later, EPA has completed the reassessment of
only 152 of the ingredients.  This leaves 438 of them untested, but
still on the market, still being put on crops, still drifting through
the air and running off into streams, still working their way up the
food chain ... into us.

There is one newspaper column I always try to catch.  It is a daily
itemization of ten or so curious facts, quotes, oddities, and tidbits
that are assembled and wonderfully presented by L. M. Boyd, a wily word
smith based in Seattle.  With some of his more astounding "facts,"
though, Boyd attaches a clever qualifier: "Interesting if true."

No more credulity than this should ever be given to the pronouncements
of Established Science, especially when it is stepping forward to
sanction some particular profiteering scheme of natural resource
plunderers, poisonous product manufacturers, or toxic waste handlers.

As one fully credentialed but honest scientist confides:

"Putting an awful lot of stock in our theories is not a good idea.

Science is about being wrong."

Yet those who make environmental policy in Washington and most state
capitals today are out to deify "science" and to give certain of its
bishops a privileged position at the policy table.  In Newt Gingrich's
Congress, there is a feverish ideological crusade among both Republican
and Democratic Party conservatives to install panels of scientists at
the top levels of environmental and public health agencies, and to
route all policy decisions through them.  Should the EPA license a
toxic waste incinerator in Columbus, Ohio, right in the midst of homes
and schools?

"We can't have environmental hysterics drive a big economic decision
like this," the polluters' politicians say.

"Such decisions should be above politics.  Let the white-smock boys
handle it in an unbiased and factual, scientific sort of way."

"Unbiased and factual" on whose side?  On industry's side, of course,
since practically all the scientists these lawmakers seek to impanel
are pro-whatever-industry-wants.  For example, attached to the '96 Farm
Bill is an amendment creating the "Safe Meat and Poultry Inspection
Panel."  Composed of seven scientists, the panel was given broad powers
to review decisions of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety
and Inspection Service.

The department had just promulgated some new regulations requiring
industry to modernize its antiquated method of protecting us consumers
from tainted meat.  Believe it or not, the method in use amounted to
nothing more sophisticated than "poke and sniff"-some geezer would poke
a finger in each batch of hamburger or into the carcass of a chicken,
sniff his finger, and declare: "Nope, 'tain't tainted."  About 5
million of us consumers get sick and more than 4,000 die each year from
eating burgers, chicken, and other meat that supposedly '"tain't
tainted," learning the hard way that the old techniques do not detect
such microbial contaminants as .  coli 015?"H7 bacteria.  This is the
exotic, virulent, and totally nasty pathogen that made more than 500
people in Seattle convulsively and horribly ill in 1993, killing three
children, after all had chowed down on hamburgers at a Jack in the Box
fast-food joint.

There was such a roar of public outrage over this E. coli 015?"H7

outbreak that even the Department of Agriculture, the long-kept
mistress of the meat industry, was forced to take some reluctant steps
toward reform.  Not right away, of course--it took USDA three years and
about a thousand more .  coli deaths to produce its new set of
sanitation and testing rules for meat processors.  But at long last, in
the spring of '96, the modernized standards were ready to be
implemented and (0, Progress!) to stop our own hamburgers from killing
us.

But: "Halt!"

"Stop it right there!"

"Do not take another step!"  At the behest of some industry
powerhouses, here came a clown car filled with congressional ninnies
waving their oversized monkey wrench called the Safe Meat and Poultry
Inspection Panel.  With SMAPIP tossed into the regulatory mechanism,
the new microbial testing requirements were held up for several more
months, and all future USDA food safety rules have to be funneled into
this new bureaucratic meat grinder.

Delay meant more deaths--the statistics were clear on this.  Yet
congressional leaders trumped this concern with a statistic of their
own: 41 million.  That is the number of dollars put into congressional
campaign coffers by food corporations during the decade leading up to
the SMAPIP amendment.  This cash, plus millions more to hire teams of
Washington lobbyists, has created what the Center for Public Integrity,
a watchdog group, calls one of Washington's "most effective influence
machines," and it has prevented any significant food safety legislation
from coming out of either the House or Senate agriculture committee in
this ten-year period.  Among the meat processors fueling the influence
machine with more than half a million bucks each in campaign
contributions are Cargill Inc."  Tyson Foods, and ConAgra Inc."  and
among the big recipients of meat industry money is the head of the
House himself, Newt Gingrich, who swallowed a quarter of a million big
ones.  Lawmakers got their money, and industry got its SMAPIP.

Good luck with your hamburger, because what Congress did by creating
this "scientific" panel was to give Tyson, IBP, Hormel, Jack in the
Box, and other corporate meat purveyors official control of the
process.  Their amendment explicitly allows scientists paid by the meat
industry to serve--indeed, five of the seven members of the panel must
be animal-health scientists rather than human-health experts.  In the
first place, this is the equivalent of putting a veterinarian in charge
of your child's health.  Far more dangerous, though, is that
animal-health scientists are notoriously subservient to the very
industry from which we are trying to protect ourselves, the industry
responsible for so many E. coli, salmonella, and other deadly outbreaks
from tainted meat.

It will come as no surprise to you, then, that the Clinton
Administration's final meat inspection rules were far less bold than
the Ag Department's press release proclaimed them to be on July 6,
1996.  "Meat Inspections To Be Tougher," headlines happily exclaimed
the next day, but "tougher" turns out to be so squishy that the
industry can continue to produce meat with the exact same level of
contamination it contained before the rules.  For example, prior to
July 6,1996, one out of every five chickens and one out of every two
turkeys on the market were contaminated with salmonella.  After July 6
one out of five chickens and one out of every two turkeys still come
with salmonella.  The only difference is that the industry's bad-bird
rate is now officially sanctioned in law.  And while "poke and sniff"
testing has indeed been replaced by high-tech, microbial analysis that
can detect E. coli 015?"H7, you still might want to char the hell out
of your burgers, because USDA's "tough new regulations" provide that
the industry itself, not government inspectors, will do the testing.

Panels like SMAPIP have become shams, lending an aura of scientific
objectivity when they actually are little more than legalized
mechanisms for installing foxes in hen houses  Corporations can brashly
put their own in-house scientists on these panels, or they can be
slightly more foxy by having university-based scientists take the seats
at our government's policy table.  Do not be snookered by the
appearance of independence bestowed by the cap and gown of these
academicians, though--even scientists employed at our public
universities commonly work under research grants awarded by food
processors, moonlight as industry consultants, and are paid to sit on
corporate boards.

Just like politics, too much of modern science follows corporate money.
Jobs, contracts, honoraria, prizes, publications, and other awards are
carefully parceled out to PhDs who walk the line.  Not only does this
growing dependency tarnish the integrity of science,

but it also corporatizes our nation's scientific agenda.  For example,
with so much public concern about toxic chemicals messing with our
cells, genes, and hormones, why does it receive so little scientific
inquiry?  Consider breast cancer.  Thousands of scientists in
companies, universities, foundations, and government agencies are
studying the hereditary and dietary causes of this epidemic disease,
yet it is conceded that as few as 30 percent of breast-cancer cases can
be traced to these causes.  The other 70 percent of cases are widely
suspected to be caused by manmade poisons in our environment, yet there
are not a handful of scientists looking into this.

Why?

Because practically no money and even less professional prestige is
awarded to anyone who wanders off the well-beaten academic path into
this wilderness, and because a hostile corporate and political
hierarchy lurks out there, eager to devour juicy adventurers who dare
suggest a link between chemicals and disease.  If you are a scientist
with enough smarts to spell C-A-R-E-E-R A-D-V-A-N-C-EM-E-N-T, you look
at a potential study of, say, organochlorines and birth defects, and
you ask yourself: "Will Monsanto fund this?  What journal will publish
my findings?  Who will pay an honorarium to present a paper on it? Will
it lead to a promotion, a consultancy, what?  Hmmmm, why bother?"

Then there is the "we are science and you are not" school of elitism so
deeply embedded in Establishment Science.  This charming attitude shuts
down even fully credentialed scientists who happen to have a stray,
unconventional idea, and it shuts out the uncredentialed mavericks who
just might be onto something.  Throughout my tenure as Texas
agriculture commissioner I encouraged the mavericks, largely because
they seemed to have ideas that actually worked, which distinguished
them markedly from the chemically addicted PhDs of aggie land and the
innovation-impaired agents of the government's agricultural extension
service.  Better to be degree less than clueless, it seemed to me.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted, common sense is "genius dressed in
its working clothes," and I came across a lot of genius out in the
countryside, every bit of which was having to butt heads with the
official order.  Buddy Maedgen, a third-generation farmer near Eagle
Lake, Texas, was one of these commonsense geniuses.  He and his family
had farmed conventionally for years, until the mid-eighties when they
began to notice some alarming side effects to the pesticides they were
putting on their crops: calves dying, chemical drift killing other
crops, a farm worker's family getting sick.  It led Buddy to begin
experimenting with nontoxic pest control methods and ultimately to
build one of our country's few in sectaries--a facility for raising
insects that are natural predators of the bugs that are agricultural
pests.  The idea is simply to let the bugs duke it out--bugo a bugo.

For example, he bred warehouse pirate bugs that could be released in
grain elevators to kill the insects that infested and ate the grain.
The warehouse pirate bug has a very brief lifespan and dies shortly
after doing its helpful work; its remains are then easily sifted out
before the grain goes to the mill.  The entire process is cheaper,
safer, and more ecologically sound than the standard process of
periodically dousing the stored grain with chemicals to kill the grain
eating pests.

Buddy found eager customers ... until the bug police stepped in to stop
him.  The Food and Drug Administration declared that adding insects to
a grain elevator amounted to "food adulteration" under federal rules,
even if the beneficial bugs do sift out in the process.  Adding
chemicals however, was not adulteration according to the feds, because
science had established a "residue tolerance level" for the
chemicals--an amount of pesticides that the scientists promise is safe
for us humans to swallow.  Never mind that the government's
pesticide-residue data range from flawed to falsified, here we have
presented to us a fine sample of the unnatural logic of official
science: Better to have a pest control system that leaves you eating
trace amounts of pesticides than one that "just says no" to the
chemical makers and gives you perfectly uncontaminated grain.

But the PDA had spoken, and suddenly Buddy's bugs were outlaws.

That would have been that, another solid victory for "science" and the
insecticide industry it was fronting, except for one thing:

People balked.  Buddy's customers wrote letters and made calls.  My
office began rattling some cages, and a couple of U.S. senators got on
the FDA's case, too.  Then CBS's 60 Minutes put a fifteen-minute
spotlight on the bug brouhaha, which caused a national uproar of
pro-Buddy political support.  Finally, after a four-year fight, enough
public pressure was applied that FDA had to back off its silly
scientific posturing and succumb to common sense.  At last Buddy's bugs
had a federal license to do what they do naturally.

This was but a hiccup, however, in industry's determined campaign to
install their scientists at the wedge point of environmental decision
making.  In setting policy, intoned former EPA administrator William
Reilly, "Sound science is our most reliable compass."

Nonsense.  Even if he meant truly independent science, as opposed to
corporatized science, which he did not, sound science is our most
reliable science, nothing more.  Scientific findings are certainly a
legitimate consideration in dealing with pollution, but so are
political findings and, for that matter, so are culture, folk wisdom,
and good old-fashioned American suspicion about what the powers that-be
are trying to do to us.

Rita Carlson is no scientist.  She is a homemaker and an environmental
hell raiser  She did not want to be a hell raiser but pollution has
made her one.  Until recently she lived twelve blocks from the Union
Carbide plant in Texas City, located on Galveston Bay at the Gulf of
Mexico.  Each week 200,000 pounds of toxic chemicals spew from this
massive plant.  There are eight such chemical factories in Texas City,
and twenty-nine others in neighboring communities along the bay. Nearly
a third of the nation's chemical products-from plastics to
pesticides--come from these twenty-nine plants.

Alarmed by illnesses in her family, Carlson began her own investigation
and found a cancer hot spot in Texas City.  On one street of twenty-two
homes, seventeen families have cancer.  In some houses, both husband
and wife have cancer.  Cats die of cancer here.  Children have kidney
transplants and others have holes in their sinuses eroded from
breathing the polluted air.  Carlson has a tumor in her sinuses and her
son has abnormal lymph glands.

She helped organize the community to fight for pollution controls,
earning the enmity of both industrial and public officials, who branded
her a hysterical agitator.  The fight goes on, although Carlson herself
has had to move away to try to save her family's health.

"They say we are only screaming women," she comments.

"I

think the reason you see a lot of women more involved in environmental
issues is because it's the women who have to rock the sick babies at
night."

HOGS, TURKEYS, AND MAD COWS

Gib Lewis, a former speaker of the Texas House whose tenure primarily
will be remembered for his endless ability to mangle the mother tongue,
once observed during debate on a bill: "There's a lot of uncertainty
that is not clear in my mind."  If you knew Gib, you would know how
true that was.

In fairness, though, the Gibber is not the only one unclear about
actions of the Texas legislature--a place that former member Bob
Eckhardt described as "Built for giants, inhabited by Pygmies."

(Under pressure, Bob later apologized.  To the Pygmies.) But even the
most hardened watchers of the biennial legislative mayhem practiced by
this menagerie were stunned in the '95 session when a majority of
members rose up on their hind legs and voted aye to a bill making it an
actual crime to disparage food.

Isn't it good to know that murder, rape, hate crimes, and other heinous
acts are a thing of the past so that, at last, our legislators can
focus on such pressing criminal activity as ... food disparagement?

Are you guilty yourself?  C'mon buster, confess: I bet you have
badmouthed Brussels sprouts in your time, or maybe you have ridiculed
raddichio, cast aspersions on asparagus, or pooh-pooh ed prunes.

OK, it is not the idle maligner at the dinner table that the food
industry is out to gag, but the journalists, the consumer and
environmental groups, individual pure-food advocates, and anyone else
who dares to raise public questions about the safety of the industry's
products and processes.  Say a mad-as-hell group called MOM (Mothers
Offended Mightily) springs up in East Jesus, Missouri, to protest some
industry practice that they fear is doing harm to their
children--residues of methyl bromide on strawberries, synthetic bovine
growth hormone in milk, irradiated bananas, E. coli bacteria in frozen
hamburger patties, just to name a few of the real-life risks families
face in the modern meal.

Already industry lobbyists in Texas, Ohio, Alabama, Arizona, Idaho,
Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and
Georgia have rammed through disparagement laws that would let corporate
lawyers sue MOM and haul these ladies into state court for doing "harm"
to the reputation of the industry's edibles.

Instead of the burden of proof being on food manufacturers to show that
their chemical, genetic, and other tampering with our food supply is
safe, these ludicrous laws put the burden on MOM to prove beyond a
shadow of scientific doubt that methyl bromide, synthetic BGH, and all
the rest are unsafe.  It is a form of legalistic intimidation that says
to MOM: Either spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and
experts and endure a lengthy trial in which the rules are stacked
against you ... or shut up and eat your dinner.  Even though four out
of five Americans today tell pollsters they are "very concerned about
food safety," these food disparagement laws free companies to do their
damnedest to our dinner, then defy us even to question their madness.

One who did defy their madness, challenge their dippy disparagement
laws, and pretty much rub their noses in their own mess was someone
they stupidly picked on themselves: the Queen of Daytime TV, Oprah
Winfrey!

On her talk show in April 1996, a guest noted that Oprah's viewers
would gag if they knew that America's corporate beef barons were
feeding a disgusting mix of rendered cow parts to cattle, adding that
this ration was creating a form of mad cow disease in our food
supply.

A startled Oprah declared that this news flash "just stopped me cold
from eating another burger: I'm stopped."

That day, cattle prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange took a 2'/2
percent tumble, and next thing you know--yippie-ti-yi-yo!-here came a
whole posse of corporate cowboys shooting from the lip and demanding
Oprah's hide!  Led by Cactus Feeders Inc."  a Las Vegas-based
corporation that is among the world's largest feedlot operators, these
boneheaded buckaroos thought they had Ms.

Winfrey dead to rights on a disparagement violation.  So off they
galloped to the courthouse in Amarillo, Texas, claiming that she had
engaged in a flagrant hamburger harangue and caused the "Oprah Crash,"
costing them millions of dollars.  We'll lasso this little Chicago
lass, they thought, drag her down to the Texas Panhandle where beef is
big business, pick us a dozen tumbleweed-tough locals to serve on the
jury, and shut her mouth for good about contaminated beef.

They might as well have walked out and hugged a cactus as picked on
Oprah.  In January 1998, she strode into Amarillo as full of smiles and
strong attitude as she brings to her daytime show-which, just for good
measure, she also brought with her, broadcasting from the Feedlot
Capital of the World for the six-week duration of the trial.  Beef
might be king, but Oprah is queen, and the people of Amarillo nocked to
her side.  Not only did they scramble to get tickets for her show (even
the mayor said that he really hoped he'd get to meet her, and that his
wife was going to her show), but more importantly they understood that
these bigshot feedlot financiers were talking nonsense when they
claimed that her honest statement on television had anything to do with
cattle prices: "People that buy and sell cattle are not at home
watching Oprah Winfrey," noted a commonsense local standing in line for
her show.

After a ton of testimony was brought against her (including that of a
former USDA official who was paid more than $25,000 by the feedlot
operators to castigate her), the jury needed only seven hours of
deliberation to exonerate her completely.  After the verdict, juror Pat
Gowdy told the press: "We felt that a lot of rights have eroded in this
country.  Our freedom of speech may be the only one we have left to
regain what we have lost."

It was indeed a bright day for our First Amendment rights against the
small-mindedness of corporate powers that want to stifle individual
freedoms.  Unfortunately, the judge did not give the jury a chance to
decide on the constitutionality of the Texas food disparagement law,
having ruled midway through the trial that it simply did not apply in
this case.  So the Texas law, and a dozen others like it across the
country, is still on the books, still threatening those who oppose the
food industry's madness.  Next time, you can bet the industry won't
pick on someone with deep pockets and a television audience of 20
million viewers.

Still, I have no doubt that these laws will be struck down in due time
by the Supreme Court (based on a strict interpretation of the First
Amendment's Anticlowning Clause).  The laws are not a testament to
corporate strength, but to pathetic weakness.  They reveal just how
touchy and vulnerable today's industrialized, conglomerated, massively
centralized, high-tech food producers have become to any public
scrutiny of their manufacturing methods.

HOGS

"Old MacDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o/And on that farm he had a hog,
e-i-e-i-o."

But it's not Old MacDonald delivering your bacon these days.

He's been shoved out as more and more hog production is falling under
the control of conglomerates with names like OMcD Inc., which control
production from semen to supermarket.  These computerized meat
factories do not have "here a hog, there a hog" running around a
barnyard, but more than 100,000 porkers a year jammed together on the
concrete floors of hog warehouses that stretch longer than a football
field.

Hogs (how shall I put it?) ... excrete.  A lot.  Muy, muy mucho manure.
Pound for pound, they generate nearly twice as much waste as beef
cattle do.

This output is not a problem when, say, a thousand farm families in a
wide region have a hundred hogs each.  The manure of these 100,000 hogs
can easily be handled by the families, whose farms are spread across
several counties and can absorb the waste.  But put all those hogs in
one place and you have beaucoup stink, not to mention contamination and
health problems.  Think of one hundred houses in a large, suburban
neighborhood, each one with a family cat.  This is fine.  Now think of
the weird cat lady who keeps one hundred of them in one house.  You see
the problem.

But confined hogs pose a worse problem because of the volume and
poisonous content of their waste.  In the crowded building where these
animals spend their short lives, they are constantly fed to add quick
bulk and send them to slaughter ASAP, with computerized machines
steadily and automatically dispensing to each hog a diet heavy in
protein, artificial growth stimulants, antibiotics, and other
additives.  It is a diet that generates millions of gallons of watery
waste loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus and laced with copper, zinc,
and other heavy metals, along with other chemical additives that poison
the soil and water as they accumulate.

Not to worry, say all the OMcD Incs."  we drain all that urine, feces,
and whatever into giant lagoons right on our own property, and we
comply with all the state and federal environmental laws that pertain
to our confined-feeding operations.

Sounds swell, except that the states and the feds have practically zero
regulations that pertain to these huge hog factories, largely because
pork has plenty of political muscle that it flexes early and often to
prevent lawmakers from doing anything to protect people, even when the
community is endangered.  For example, folks around Richlands, North
Carolina, raised a stink for months about the sickening odor and swarms
of flies emanating from Oceanview Hog Farms Inc."  a massive facility
situated just off the New River, which flows directly into Wilson Bay
and on into the Atlantic.  But no one in charge did a thing to
help--not the county officials, not the governor, not the congressional
delegation, not the EPA: "Nothing we can do," they all said, "Goodbye
and good luck."

Unfortunately they got bad luck.  After a heavy rain in June 1995
Oceanview Inc."s eight-acre waste lagoon burst open at one corner, and
a putrid tide of hog excrement flowed knee-deep across the highway,
flooding homes, a churchyard, soybean fields, and everything else in
its path, then it poured into the New River.  As the bumper sticker
says, "Shit Happens."  Twenty-five million gallons of it in this
case--more than double the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The raw, reddish-brown stinking sewage spread all the way down the New
River, from Richlands to Wilson Bay, seventeen miles, killing every
fish, plant, and other speck of life that existed in the river.

Oceanview Inc."s spill is the worst so far, but hardly the only one.

In the six months following it, five other major lagoon spills occurred
in North Carolina alone, totaling more than 30 million gallons.

This does not count hundreds of leaking lagoons or the farm managers
who deliberately and illegally dump their hog slurry into the nearest
river.  In North Carolina in just one summer, 1995, some 10 million
fish were killed in the state's rivers, 364,000 acres of bays and
marshes were closed to shell fishing, and hundreds of fishing and
tourist businesses were shut down--thanks to hog pollution.  In
addition this nonstop flow of waste constantly threatens people's
drinking water with contamination by the parasites, bacteria, viruses,
and nitrates it contains.

Water pollution, though, is not the half of it.  A plague of flies
breeds in these lagoons, and when they swarm there are so many of them
that they form living, buzzing clouds, forcing everyone indoors.
Another by-product of hogs is acid rain, created by the hydrogen
sulfide and other gases emitted in unimaginable volume every second of
every day from the hog houses and lagoons.

But the worst is the stench.  Oh, the odor!  The smell spreads for
miles around these factories.  It is not merely a horrible stink, but a
sickening one, a stink that literally sticks to you--your clothes,
skin, hair, nostrils--and you cannot wash it away or get away.

Ask Julie Jansen.  In 1989 she and her husband, Jeff, bought a
beautiful eight-acre place near Olivia, Minnesota, an hour west of
Minneapolis--a wonderful spot to raise their six children.  And with
six kids and eight acres, why not bring in some more children, so she
opened a day-care center in her home.  Five years later, though, two
hog factories were built about a mile away, and her dream place became
a nightmare.  The whole family began suffering nausea, dizziness,
blackouts, chronic headaches, recurring sore throats, nosebleeds, and
constant fatigue.

"The kids won't go outside and play when the stink is bad," Julie told
U.S. News (^ World Report.

"We can't barbeque, hang clothes on the line, sit outside and enjoy the
garden.  We keep the windows and doors shut, the air conditioner
running, but the smell gets in the carpet, the curtains, the furniture.
When it gets really bad, we spend the night in a motel.  I've had to
close my day-care business because nobody wants to bring their children
here.  We'd like to sell the house and move, but who would buy it?"

Welcome to Hog Hell.  You need not travel to Minnesota or North
Carolina to experience it, either, because these malodorous factories
are headed to your state, too.  Already they are in Illinois, Iowa,
Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, and they are
spreading fast as idiotic public officials (who invariably live far
away and upwind) provide the special tax breaks and outright subsidies
that make hog factories lucrative investments.  In recent years foreign
syndicates have discovered that they can take advantage of both the
subsidies and the lax environmental regulations on these enterprises to
come to America and make a killing in pork.  Way up at the top of the
Texas Panhandle, for example, outside the town of Perryton, an outfit
called Texas Farm Inc.  got government subsidies to build a massive hog
network that explodes the previous concept of "huge," planning to house
2 million oinkers in its facility.

"Texas

Farm" is not Texan at all, but Japanese.  It is a wholly owned arm of
the giant Nippon corporation, which is happy to exploit this rural
county like a Third World colony, producing pork on the cheap, leaving
us with the mess and the health problems, while it exports all the meat
back home to Japan's high-dollar market.

TURKEYS

Mark Twain noted, "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries
disappear and life stands explained."

One of nature's creatures that has no doubt whatsoever about the
complete madness of us Homo sapiens is the turkey, the once proud
forest bird that now finds itself rather grotesquely reconfigured by
geneticists to suit the marketing ploys of poultry processors.

Years ago, you see, the industry learned that many consumers prefer the
white meat of the breast.  If white breast meat is in demand, thought
the marketers, eyes twitching involuntarily, why not have engineering
make us a turkey that has lots of white breast meat, maybe even a
humongous amount of white breast meat, maybe so much that these turkeys
could get jobs at Hooters?

Hence, your Butterball.  Today's typical supermarket turkey is twice
the weight it was thirty-five years ago, and most of that increase is
in breast, which now swells out to near basketball size.

This has made the turkey breast lover happy, but, alas, it has
destroyed the sex life of turkeys themselves.  It is a simple matter of
physics--with such breast protrusion, the male literally is unable to
reach the female, sexually speaking--and for a while, it looked like
the clever breeders had bred themselves right out of business.  To deal
with this avian sexual dysfunction, the turkey technicians first tried
to devise a kind of kinky mechanical solution: They built little
saddles to strap on the females so the toms could ... well, mount up.

This did not work, and it was looking like the BTTI (Big Time Turkey
Industry) was at a dead end.  Then a couple of California poultry profs
perfected the precise practice of artificial turkey insemination.

Henceforth, turkeys did not have to mate, because we humans could do
that for them, so let the mutations multiply!

And so they have.  It is not the red, yellowish-brown, and green
feathered turkey of Pilgrim fame that we find plucked, trussed, and
frozen in the sl ermarket today, but a single breed of "white"
turkey.

Ninety percent i. if the half-billion turkeys sold in the world each
year are derived from only three breeding flocks that are maintained on
secretive, highly guarded farms surrounded by chain-link fences.

Owning these three flocks, and thus controlling the world market of
breeding turkeys, are Merck & Co.  (the pharmaceutical giant based in
New Jersey), Booker PLC (the British food conglomerate), and British
Petroleum (the world's fourth-largest oil company).

All three flocks are of the white breed, assuring such dominant
commercial growers as ConAgra Inc.  (owner of Butterball) that each and
every one of their turkey chicks will uniformly develop those pumped-up
breasts.  But such genetic uniformity has its ugly side.

Not only can these hapless birds not mate, they also are bred to be so
heavy and are so disfigured that they can barely walk more than a few
feet, and many cannot even stand on their own two drumsticks, so they
spend their abbreviated lives mostly squatting in the sawdust of dimly
lit turkey houses, jammed wingtip to wingtip with hundreds of their
genetically altered siblings.  This breed cannot survive on its own, so
the birds must pass their entire existence in environmentally
controlled buildings, where machinery automatically dispenses a steady
ration of feed that is rich in artificial growth stimulants, but often
denies them such basic minerals as iron.  (To create "a whiter white
meat," iron is eliminated from the diet because it imparts a healthy
reddishness to turkey flesh and, well, this is not what the marketing
department ordered.) Confined, crowded, and genetically manipulated to
meet industry's convenience, these unfortunate creatures are
unnaturally vulnerable to infections and disease.  Indeed, the world's
population of white turkeys is so limited in genetic diversity that an
outbreak of some virulent, mutating bacterium is always a threat to
devastate the entire breed in a flash.  Industry's answer? Antibiotics.
And more antibiotics.  And when the bacteria adapt to these, get
yourself some more powerful antibiotics.

Such farms have become pharmacies and, as one turkey producer notes,
today's corporate "pharmer" operates "with syringe in hand," applying
dose after dose of drugs, day in and day out.

Factory-produced animals now receive an average of about thirty times
more antibiotics than people do.  But since residues of these drugs can
end up in the meat, you can end up as doctored as the turkey, getting
an unexpected dose of the bird's antibiotic mix with every bite of
Butterball you take.

What you bite into, by the way, is not the savory richness that turkeys
naturally have, but the synthetic blandness of mass production.

Marian Burros, the cookbook author and food columnist of the New York
Times, conducted a blind taste test of nine turkeys just before
Thanksgiving last year.  The favorite by far, she reported, was an
organically produced turkey--rich and meaty.  Staggering in for last
place was ConAgra's Butterball--"Tastes like chemical stew," was the
judgment of the tasting panel.  No wonder.  In addition to its bizarre
breeding and factory raising, the poor bird is injected after slaughter
with vegetable oil, water, salt, emulsifiers (mono- and diglycerides),
sodium phosphate, anno to color, and artificial flavor.

No butter, in case you are wondering; more like a partially
hydrogenated Oilball.

Add to this the stuffing problem.  Cooks are now warned by the
Department of Agriculture not to stuff their Butterballs.  Because the
birds are so breast heavy, having been genetically loaded with the
quicker-cooking white meat, the roasting process is not always long
enough to heat the stuffing to a temperature adequate to kill the
bacteria--giving an unhappy meaning to the term "chef's surprise."

A more appropriate use of these torqued-up turkeys might be the one
enjoyed by the fun-loving gang down at DT's Saloon, just outside
Cleveland.  They bowl with them.  A length of floor adjacent to the bar
has been marked off as a bowling lane, wooden pins are set up at one
end, and DT's happy imbibers go at it, slinging ten- to twenty-pound
frozen butter-"balls," still in their plastic wrappers, down the
lane.

MAD COWS

Years ago General Motors decided to promote its Chevy Nova in Puerto
Rico, so it developed an enthusiastic advertising effort to persuade
the people of this Spanish-speaking island to rush out and buy the
fabulous new car: La Nova!  Problem is, in Spanish, no va means "It
does not go."

I always wondered what happened to the creative team that came up with
GM's "It does not go" promotion.  I assumed they had been bound and
gagged, placed in an old Nova, and sent to the scrap metal yard, where
giant crushers compacted them and the car down to approximately the
size of a pack of Juicy Fruit.  But now it occurs to me that maybe they
got away with it after all, changed their identities, and became
federal bureaucrats in charge of our nation's food safety regulations.
How else can we explain the fact that whenever America confronts a
crisis of contamination in our food supply, the response from those
running our regulatory mechanism is always "NoVa"?

Consider the distressing case of cow cannibalism.  The story begins in
the fall of 1986 in Kent County, England, where veterinarians first
began detecting cattle infected with BSE, or bovine spongiform
encephalopathy--which quickly became known popularly as mad cow
disease.  BSE is an infectious, incurable, neuro degenerative
affliction that gradually rots a cow's brain, literally causing the
animal to lose its mind--then it dies.

But what lifts this beyond the genre of "sad cow story" is that
BSE-infected cattle are sent to slaughter long before they show any
outward symptom of the disease.  And since existing methods of meat
inspection cannot detect the malformed proteins that carry BSE, the
infected beef is cut, chopped, ground, packaged, and shipped to market
with a nice "Grade A Approved" sticker applied by the government's
unknowing inspector.  The nation's unsuspecting consumers then swallow
the government's assurances and, possibly, a deadly dollop of odorless
and tasteless BSE.

"Oh pish, posh, and poppycock," sputtered England's Keepers of the
Official Order (KOO) when critics there sounded consumer alarms back in
the '80s.

"Mad cow disease is just that," they blustered, "a cow disease, not
transferable to people at all, and certainly not to properly bred
Englishmen.  Stiff upper lip and all that, old boy."

In 1986 there were seven BSE cases reported in England.  The next year,
413; the next, 2,185; the next, 7,136; the next, 14,180; the next,
25,025 ... and upward and upward--at least 160,000 British cattle known
to have BSE by 1996.  Still the KOO kept insisting: "No problem,"
denouncing as alarmist left-wing balderdash the desperate warnings by a
courageous few scientific critics that a BSE-epidemic was in the making
and that humans would die.  In the time-honored tradition of
officialdom everywhere, British agriculture minister John Gummer even
resorted to going on the telly in 1990 with his adorable four-year-old
daughter to chomp hamburgers together.

"It's delicious," Minister Gummer officially pronounced between
munches, and a nation of viewers silently responded: "You're a
blithering idiot, John."

He is an idiot.  The human equivalent ofBSE is CJD--CreutzfeldtJakob
Disease--a 100 percent infectious, brain-wasting, fatal dementia that
produces a truly horrific death.  Supposedly a rare disease, CJD cases
suddenly began to rise in England in the early 1990s, doubling in the
next four years.

"No connection," the KOO sniffed.

Then came the day of reckoning, March 20, 1996.  The minister of
health, who had previously been adamant that mad cow disease posed no
danger whatsoever to humans, appeared ashen-faced before the House of
Commons to report that weller ahem, ah ... oops!  The minister
confirmed that ten new cases of a variant CJD had cropped up, including
a cluster of them in Kent County, and that mad cow disease, having been
transferred to the victims through hamburgers and other beef products,
appeared to be the cause.  In Glasgow a professor of neurology
overseeing a young girl's affliction said flatly: "She has BSE-pattern
CJD and picked it up through hamburgers."  He added, "The potential for
developing this disease must reside in millions of the population,
because I am sure there are many people who have eaten infected
meat."

The scale of the epidemic is as yet uncertain, because if you eat a bad
hamburger and are infected with CJD, you will not know it for years.
The disease can incubate in your body for between ten and fifty years
with no outward sign of trouble--then, whammo, your brain is riddled
with holes, your nervous system comes apart, you become demented, and
you die.  Painfully and grotesquely.

There is no way of knowing how many Brits have already consumed
contaminated meat, but just as the number of BSE cases has risen
dramatically since 1986, so are the number of CJD cases expected to
rise from 1996 forward.  Dr.  Richard Lacey, one of England's top
microbiologists and the country's most insistent scientific critic of
the KOO's fatal policy of denial on BSE, correctly predicted years ago
that the first human outbreak of mad cow disease would occur in 1996,
and he now forecasts that more than

5,000 British people a year (and perhaps as many as a half-million a
year) will be dying of it in the next century.  Dr.  Lacey declared,
"This is one of the most disgraceful episodes in this country's
history.

The government has been deliberately risking the health of the
population for a decade."

How now, mad cow?  How did BSE become epidemic and migrate from bovines
to us bipeds?

Through cannibalism.  Cows are natural herbivores--contented,
cud-chewing vegetarians that gladly would pass their days grazing a
field of grass, or sustaining themselves with nothing more complex than
a bale of hay.  But modern agribusiness has no patience with a cow's
natural rhythms, insisting instead that tens of thousands of them be
jammed together in feedlots and massive dairy factories, where they are
force-fed a diet heavy in fat and protein "supplements" to goose up
their milk and meat production.

Through these supplements, industry has turned natural herbivores into
carnivores, for the supplements are made from ground up animal parts,
including brains, spinal cords, spleens, tonsils, tails, odd bits of
flesh, grease, nerve tissue, blood, bones, and other offal left over
from the slaughtering of cattle.  In other words, industry has been
feeding cows to cows.  There was a delicious twist during the Oprah
Winfrey mad cow trial when a witness for the feedlot operators
attempted to deny that "cows are eating other cows."  He lamely tried
to tell the jury that eating such cow parts as rendered bone and meat
is not the same as a cow actually eating a cow.  But in her subsequent
testimony on the stand, Oprah reduced his argument to BS, saying: "I
have to tell ya, to me, whether it's ground hamburger, whether it's
powdered, whether it's cow tea ... it's still eating ground cow."

The remains of sheep, goats, and other animals susceptible to their own
forms of BSE also have been put into the rendering vats, melted down,
and processed into protein pellets sold as cattle feed, as well as feed
for hogs, chickens, household pets, and other animals.

What industry and government have known, but not shared with the rest
of us, is that the rendering process does not kill BSE.  Indeed, little
does kill it--BSE-infected matter drawn from its victims has remained
infectious even though it was bombarded with radiation, soaked in
formaldehyde, or baked at 700 degrees.  This virulent disease is
delivered directly to live animals through the cannibalistic protein
supplements they are fed.  As little as a teaspoon of feed rendered
from diseased cattle can transmit BSE to others.

One cow leads to another, and before you know it you have a BSE
epidemic, a CJD outbreak, an angry and alarmed public, a devastated
beef and dairy industry, and a disgraced government.  Britain finally
banned the industry practice of feeding rendered cow parts to cows in
1989, but animals born before then are suspect, so the government is
now embarked on a campaign of mass incineration, a nasty, five-year
project of bovinicide that will cost taxpayers more than $3 billion,
and cost some 5 million innocent cattle their lives.

All of this has occurred because modern agriculture's profiteers tried
to beef up their beeves and their profits with a quick dose of
cannibalism.

One bit of irony to come from industry's attempt to convert herbivores
to carnivores is that the resultant disease and public health scare
converted masses of British carnivores to herbivores.  For months beef
went untouched in supermarkets, meat disappeared from school
cafeterias, fast-food burger joints advertised "Foreign Beef," tofu
sales were suddenly hot--and the public was not bothered by any more
appearances on the telly by agriculture ministers munching meat and
mumbling inanities.

But this is not merely a saga of mad cows and Englishmen.

Across the big drink, American cattle feeders, dairies, and factory
farms have been practicing cow cannibalism on a far more reckless scale
than the Brits, and our public health protectors have been in even
deeper denial about the high price we consumers are paying for
agricultural industrialization (including the likelihood that an
American version of BSE already is loose in our herds and a possibility
that related-CJD is loose in our population).

As independent ranchers have been pushed aside by corporate feedlot
managers in the cattle business, and as "old Bossie" has become nothing
but a number in a dairy industry run by faraway corporate bosses, the
use of slaughterhouse waste to feed America's beef cattle and dairy
cows rose precipitously.  Currently, of every cow that is hauled to
slaughter, about 14 percent of its weight ends up as protein
supplements fed back to other cows.  Sheep offal goes into the mix,
too, even though American sheep are known to carry

"scrapie," the same form of spongiform encephalopathy that figured
prominently in England's BSE epidemic.

Then it gets ugly.  In addition to using slaughter waste to make feed
supplements, the other stuff that goes into the renderers' vats would
gag the witches of Macbeth.  Like roadkill.  Yep, that plastered
possum, that dead armadillo in the middle of the road, that deer caught
in the headlights--all fodder for cattle feed.  Dead cats and dogs find
their way into the vats, too.  For example, the city of Los Angeles
sends 200 tons of euthanized cats and dogs to an L.A. company called
West Coast Rendering every month.  Also tossed in is a category of farm
animals delicately referred to in the industry as "4Ds."  These include
cattle, hogs, sheep, and others that are "Dead, Dying, Diseased, or
Disabled."

Got one of these on your farm?  Call the renderer--the American Feed
Industry Association estimates that nearly 400,000 tons of 4Ds are used
each year to make animal feed.

Does feeding this mad brew of animal flesh and body fluids back to cows
pose any health hazards in our country?  Is a pig's butt pork?

As the late Dr.  Richard Marsh, professor of animal health and
biomedical sciences at the University of Wisconsin, so plainly put
it:

"We have all the risk factors.  Just because [mad cow disease] hasn't
been diagnosed doesn't mean we're not somewhere in the cycle.  It's
obvious.  I mean, we have [the disease] in our sheep and we feed sheep
to our cattle.  What's the argument about?"

Elvis answered that one for us long ago: "Money, honey."  Beef is a
$60-billion-a-year industry here, milk does $29 billion, the animal
feed industry rings up $20 billion and the rendering companies haul in
3 billion bucks a year selling their particles of yuck to the animal
feeders and to the pet food companies.  Unlike consumers, these people
have real power at the USDA, PDA, APHIS, CVM, EPA, USPHS, and all the
other nonsensical scrambles of Scrabble tiles that pose as the public's
regulatory protectors against industrial abuses.

It was no surprise, then, that American officialdom rose as one to
defend the purity of our beef and dairy industries when that nasty bit
of BSE business hit the English.  As if to prove that the Brits have no
patent on Goofiness in High Places, the sitting Texas agriculture
commissioner even darted out on April 4,1996 (barely missing April
Fools' Day, darn it) to do his best imitation of British ag minister
Gummer's hamburger-munching routine.  At a hurriedly assembled press
conference, the Texas commish chawed on a big chunk of smoked brisket
for the TV cameras and, through greasy lips, pronounced it "delicious"
and "safe," thereby convincing most viewers that the poor fellow
undoubtedly was suffering from a well advanced case of mad something.

Not that U.S. officials were caught unaware by the BSE flare-up.

In 1989, when the British banned cow cannibalism, the ever-vigilant
U.S. Department of Agriculture took a bold bureaucratic stand, too:

It appointed a committee.  Verrrrry quietly, so as (shhhhh) not to
disturb the consuming public.  Dubbed the "BSE Consultants Group," its
members are drawn from the National Cattlemen's Association, National
Milk Producers Federation, American Sheep Industry Association, and
National Renderers Association.  Notice there are no consumer groups
listed.  To this day no consumer advocacy organization has been asked
to be part of the BSE discussions.

However, thanks to a Freedom of Information action by the Pure Food
Campaign, a consumer watchdog group, we can get a glimpse of USDA's
deeply felt concern on this critical issue--concern for protecting the
industry, that is.  In a 1991 USDA memo that the group unearthed, the
ag agency acknowledges the possibility that the disease "is present in
the U.S. cattle population," then notes that if government was to
"prohibit the feeding of sheep and cattle-origin protein products to
all ruminants" it would minimize the risk of spreading the disease.
But, the memo concludes, "The disadvantage is that the cost to the
livestock and rendering industries would be substantial."  True to
form, USDA imposed no ban.

Far from it.  Instead of protecting the public health, the agency drew
up a contingency PR plan to protect the industries' image if and when
mad cow disease breaks out in our country.  In a second memo with the
unusually candid title of "1991 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy Public
Relations," our so-called public protectors warn that "agriculture is
vulnerable to media scrutiny [on] the practice of feeding rendered
ruminant products to ruminants and [on] the risk to human health."
According to the memo, USDA staff had analyzed British press clips to
determine what "strategic errors" they had made and to help industry
here "avoid public relations problems such as have occurred in the UK."
The memo chastised British officials for even trying to keep track of
CJD cases, for example, because

"This appeared to legitimize concern about a link between BSE and human
health."  The memo's finest flourish of PR flackery, though, is its
pitiable effort at language control: "The term 'mad cow disease' has
been detrimental.  We should emphasize the need to use the term 'bovine
spongiform encephalopathy."" Amateurish as this whitewash seems, the
conventional media has swallowed it whole.

"Federal officials are confident that the mad cow disease found in
Britain has not occurred in the United States and that existing
policies are adequate to protect the beef supply," asserted the New
York Times lead paragraph, unquestioningly, just one week after British
officials had been forced to admit that the exact same assurances they
had been giving their public for years were untrue.

To know the truth, one had to be reading articles in the alternative
press, especially the work of Joel Bleifuss in In These Times and, more
recently, of John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton in their scrappy
newsletter, PR Watch.  There you would have learned about the
contrarian findings of Dr.  Marsh.  This highly regarded research
scientist died in March 1997, but not before his uncompromising work in
the labs and in the field caught the industry and government in their
self-serving lies about mad cow disease, and not before his sharp,
insistent voice of scientific protest had punctured every PR balloon
they had floated about this deadly issue:

Industry/ Government BSE does not exist in the United States, and we
maintain a thorough program of testing cattle herds to make certain
that an outbreak never occurs.

Dr.  Marsh: The government's testing program has only been in existence
for five years.  In that time there have been as many as 500 million
cattle in the United States.  A total of only 6,000 of them have been
tested for this disease.

Even then, officials have asked the wrong diagnostic questions, looking
only for brain damage identical to British BSE cases, ignoring the
likelihood that the American version presents different symptoms.

Industry/ Government We have even tried to replicate the disease by
exposing U.S. cattle to a version of it, but they simply did not go mad
a la the bovines of Britannia.

Dr.  Marsh: The American strain of BSE shows different symptoms but is
just as deadly-instead of madness, the diseased U.S. cows simply fall
down and die.  A team of scientists, including me, have proven this in
USDA-sponsored tests in Iowa and Texas, injecting cattle with brain
matter from infected sheep.  Sure enough, the cows fell down and died.
BSE-infected cows, then, could be part of the 100,000 cattle a year
that die from a phenomenon known as "Downer Cow Syndrome."

Industry/ Government Well, maybe so, but no Americans have died from

BSE.

Dr.  Marsh: How do you know?  The Centers for Disease Control did not
even bother tracking cases of Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease in our country
until April 1996, after the outbreak in England.  Even now, the Center
only checks on CJD cases in five states, and the "checking" they do in
these is woefully inadequate.

Choose your own expert, but I go with Dr.  Marsh.  Indeed, more and
more medical studies of dementia suggest that some of the 4 million
Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease are actually suffering
with CJD, which has remarkably similar symptoms.  It is now estimated
that there could be as many as 40,000 cases of CJD in our country
today--not the 250 or so cases claimed by officialdom.

Still, Washington denies and dawdles.  Despite the urgent pushing by
Dr.  Marsh and others for government to get serious about protecting
the public health, the regulators and industry have been so tight you
couldn't get them apart with a crowbar.  In 1992, for example, Marsh
called on the Consultants Group to expand its research focus on BSE to
include Downer Cow Syndrome, but the

Group refused, saying that it had "agreed that the current efforts are
on target for the needs of the livestock and rendering industries...
and that changes in the research direction are not appropriate at this
time."  Even after the British epidemic, USDA officials stayed hunkered
down like cows in a hailstorm, refusing to take the obvious step of
banning cow cannibalism, as first suggested five years earlier.  A
report from the April 1996 Consultants Group meeting says it all: "The
cost of banning ruminant feed now versus later depends on risk factors
which should be determined by science, not emotion."

Whose science?  The science of the corporate interests dominating the
Consultants Group, of course.  Anyone else's science is, by definition,
"emotion."  Based on the industry's "science," the BSE panel decided
that, in response to the manure pile of evidence built up by the
British disaster, maybe a nice voluntary ban on cow cannibalism in this
country would be enough to convince us emotional consumers that
everything is just hunky dory.  So, in the spring of '96, the Clinton
Administration's official response to the real-life threat of BSE was
to sanction an industry promise that it would police itself.

One wonders, are they stupid, or do they just think we're stupid?

Consumer protection through volunteerism is no more effective than a
Jell-0 doorstop--even the top scientist for the Renderers Association
conceded to the Boulder Weekly a few weeks into the highly publicized
"ban" that he could not think of a single company that was complying
with it.

"Voluntary bans don't work very well in a free-market enterprise," he
deadpanned.

There is a band in Austin called Two Nice Girls.  It is a four-girl
band.  That's a fun joke for a band, but the joke is on us when it
comes to the halfway mentality of those in charge of protecting public
health.  Actually, the craven compromises of the Clinton Administration
are not even half-good, much less nice, for they so often compromise
the well-being of our families for nothing more noble than an extra
nickel's profit to a handful of special interests.

Especially insulting is that these compromises, as in the case of cow
cannibalism, are for things the corporate interests do not even need.

In July 1993, for example, the Food Chemical News reported that a
spokesman for the National Cattleman's Association admitted to the

BSE Consultants Group that "his industry could find economically
feasible alternatives to the 15 percent of feed now supplied by animal
protein."  So why didn't they do so?  Because, reported the News, "the
association does not want to set a precedent of being ruled by
'activists."" Great.  We get exposed to deadly disease just to satisfy
the political agenda that an industry group is running against consumer
activists.

Four years after that memo the games are still being played, even
though something happened late last year that finally forced our
"protectors" in Washington at least to pretend they are doing
something.

On October 24 British scientists reported that they had found a protein
in the brains of humans who had died from CJD that was almost identical
to the mad cow protein, providing alarming scientific evidence that the
cow disease appears to have jumped to humans, directly challenging the
cascade of claims by industry and government that this was not
possible.  At last, then, in January 1997, the Food and Drug
Administration took the long-overdue step of proposing a government ban
on cow cannibalism.

Do not sigh with relief just yet, though.  Note the verb: proposing.

This does not mean imposing or otherwise actually doing something.

On June 5, five months after the proposed ban, the FDA quietly issued
its actual rules on feeding rendered mammal parts to the mammals we
humans eat.  The "ban" turned out to be greasier than a rendered wart
hog thanks to the slick lobbying of the meat and rendering industries
and thanks to the Clinton Administration's infamous obsequiousness to
corporate interests:

First, the PDA's ban on feeding cow tissue to other cows is only a
partial ban.  It exempts the blood and gelatin (derived from hides) of
cows, even though both are suspected by World Health Organization
scientists of carrying the deadly proteins that create the disease.

Second, the "ban" also specifically exempts pigs, meaning their
rendered remains can be fed to cows, even though there is increasing
evidence that America's pork herds could be infected with their own
form of BSE--a sort of mad pig disease.

Third, while the rule says no rendered cows or other ruminant animals
can be fed to cows, protein pellets made from these ruminants--even
those known to have BSE--still can be made and fed to pigs, chickens,
fish, pets, and other animals, thus providing a clear path for BSE to
enter the food chain.

Fourth, there is no way to enforce the ban against feeding these cow
pellets to cows.  Anyone can buy the pellets.  Yes, they are labeled
"Do not feed to cattle," but that is no more of a deterrent than signs
at the seashore saying "Do not feed the seagulls."

As Dr.  Michael Hansen, a research associate with Consumers Union, puts
it, "Given the difficulties of reversing a [BSE-style] epidemic, it
seems to us the best course is to take all necessary steps to keep one
from getting started."  Thank you.  Why don't we put him in charge of
the FDA?  The only sure way to prevent a menagerie of mad meat diseases
from sweeping our country is to place a flat ban on the rendering of
any mammal into feed for any animal used for human food or even for pet
food (that is unless you plan to heat the spoons you use to dish out
Fluffy's and Fido's chow to 750 Fahrenheit).  In other words, stop the
cannibalism, and stop it where it can be enforced--at the renderers'
vats.  Anything less is playing Russian roulette with the health of our
families.

Some jokester once claimed that stupidity is not terminal because it
produces antibodies, but anyone who takes a look at what our
industrialized civilization is producing in the way of hogs, turkeys,
and mad cows can get a glimpse of terminal stupidity in full roar.  The
industrialists and money managers of modern agribusiness have
fabricated a factory-food system that messes with Mother Nature
something awful.  It would be one thing if their madness produced
better or cheaper food for us, but it does not.  Indeed, in terms of
our health and our environment, your family and mine are only beginning
to reap the bitter fruit of their methods.  No longer is dinner a safe
bet, and no longer can public authorities ignore the bizarre and
virulent parasites, the aggressive carcinogens, the estrogen mimicking
chemicals, and other unwelcome additions to our food supply.  These are
hardly inadvertent or uncommon occurrences rather they are inevitable
by-products that industry has built into its production system.

It would be comical, were it not so pathetically tragic, to see our
public officials keep trotting out with stern advisories for us
consumers to cook meat thoroughly as a "precaution" against E. coli
015?"H7 or to scrub our strawberries with warm water and soap in the
vain hope of cleansing them of pesticide residues and exotic
bacteria.

What they have done to dinner is beyond the remedies of home ec
instructors.  It is the industrial processes themselves that must be
confronted--and changed.

As Kin Hubbard, a turn-of-the-century wit, put it: "If the government
was as afraid of disturbing the consumer as it is of disturbing
business, this would be some democracy."

UNCLE BEN

Apparently my Uncle Ben Fletcher was a fool.

Actually he was my great-uncle, already an old man by about 1950, when
I first recall my brother and me visiting him and Aunt Emma on their
little truck farm outside Weatherford, Texas, due west of Fort Worth.
At the time we had no idea Uncle Ben was a fool, and we probably would
have jumped anyone who said he was.  In our boyish innocence, Jerry and
I thought Uncle Ben was clever as could be--he was brimming with
pranksterish fun, always had a story to tell, could pitch washers like
nobody's fool, never dressed in anything tighter than bib overalls,
raised everything from chickens to watermelons (and a family, too) on
that thirty-acre hard scrabble plot, was blessed with a quick and
exuberant laugh, and plainly enjoyed life.

By the standards of modern agriculture, though, he was a fool of a
farmer, failing to make use of the full arsenal of petroleum-based
inputs and chemical products today's agribusiness employs to maximize
profits.  Still, this failure and fool did manage to make a crop, as
did his neighbors, supplying the whole area with a terrific variety of
succulent fruits, flavorful meats, fresh vegetables practically
bursting with nutrition and taste, rich milk and cheeses, hearty
grains, and ... well, a cornucopia.  God, the food was good!

And no one who bought it had to wonder or worry if any of it contained
such contaminants as pesticide residues and genetically engineered
hormones, because Uncle Ben and the others raised this abundance
without a trace of chemicals.  Imagine.  The fools simply did not know
any better.

Farmers have been taught a lot since then, of course.  In only a
generation, Uncle Ben's plow was replaced by the chemical sprayer as
the apt symbol of agriculture.  Thanks to the introduction of synthetic
fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides, instead of a
hundred Uncle Bens nurturing crops on thirty acres each, we now have
one farm operator managing 3,000 acres... and trying to manage the big
bank debt incurred to underwrite such high-tech production.

This is a result that agricultural economists (who have the collective
vision of dung beetles) cite in their learned journals, lectures, and
chemical company consultancy reports as the very model of agricultural
"efficiency."

Theirs is an efficiency that conveniently factors out what is known in
the jargon of economists as "externalities" (Literal Translation: big,
ugly numbers that would cause our equations and conclusions not to add
up, therefore we shut our eyes tight as can be and pretend they are not
there).  But in your and my real-life environment, unlike in their
Economics World externalities are hard to ignore.  For example, the
sheer volume of chemicals being used in their "model of efficiency"
crops up in the most unpleasant ways, costing far more than our good
earth, farmers, and progeny can stand to pay.  Since the mid-sixties,
pesticide use on farms has doubled, with nearly a billion pounds of
active ingredients now being applied each year.  Another 4 billion
pounds of "inert" chemicals are added to the pesticide mix, too,
including known cancer causers and other toxics, though we are not told
which ones are in which blend (not only does federal law allow
pesticide makers to keep their list of "inert" ingredients secret, but
also a $10,000 fine can be levied against any federal employee who
spills the beans and discloses what killer chemicals are used as
"inerts").  This total pesticide dosage of 5 billion pounds a year on
farms is twenty pounds for every man, woman, and child in America. Good
grief, we consume only about five pounds of butter per capita, and
eight pounds of coffee (and the health patrol gives us a hell of a
tongue-lashing for this excess), yet there goes agribusiness merrily
peppering our dinner with twenty pounds of poisons apiece.

We pay for this--in taxes, in illness, in health-care costs, and in
suffering.  For example, farm pesticides run off into our drinking
water--nearly a hundred different pesticides are now found in the
groundwater of forty states, contaminating the essential liquid of life
for 100 million of us.  Our taxes have to be increased to try to filter
out some of these toxics before they reach our taps, then we have to
pay even more dearly for the crushing health costs--monetary and
otherwise--of the poisons that are not filtered out.

Frontier communities had a quick and certain remedy for anyone who
poisoned the town's well: They hanged the son-of-a-bitch.

Today, though, when the ag economists draw up their efficiency
equations, well poisoning is not even marked down as a cost charged to
the poisoners--instead, it's dismissed as an "externality."  Did people
get breast cancer?  Did the pesticides run off into the bay and shut
down the fishing industry?  Was a farm worker's baby born with birth
defects?  Hey, pal, stuff happens, life ain't fair, not our fault, get
out of the way of progress ... and if you're so prissy about poisons,
maybe you oughta start boiling your water.

Of course, boiling water to eliminate poisons would be as ineffective
as the poisons are proving to be against the pests.  It turns out that
bugs, weeds, and other agricultural pests are amazingly adaptable--some
500 species of insects have already developed genetic resistance to
pesticides, as have 150 plant diseases, 133 kinds of weeds, and 70
species of fungus.

Yet, like General George A. Custer--who on his last morning on earth
shouted encouragingly to his troops: "On to Little Big Horn for glory.
We've caught them napping!"--the industry urges farmers to charge
dead-ahead, to apply ever more poisons and ever more poisonous poisons.
Ever more expensive ones, too, now costing farmers $8 billion a year,
not counting the cost of spreading them.  While the pests are adapting
and surviving this chemical onslaught, farmers are not--ironically,
thousands are killed off financially each year by the escalating cost
of the very pesticides that were supposed to make them so efficient.
Worse, thousands of farmers, farm workers, and rural residents die
prematurely each year, victims of their prolonged exposure to
agriculture's "chemical revolution."

Old Texas Saying Number One: "If you find you've dug yourself into a
hole, the very first thing to do is to quit digging."  The good news is
that farmers everywhere are eager to quit digging, but like people
hooked on drugs, they find themselves caught up in a culture of
chemical use, with everyone from the government to the banker pushing
more chemicals on them.

Old Texas Saying Number Two: "Where there's a will, there are at least
a thousand wonts."  Try to change and you are up against the whole ag
system.  Start with the extensive rural network of traveling agents for
Monsanto, Dow, and the rest who constantly make their rounds, pushing
poisons from county to county and from farm to farm.  Go to the public
agencies--the county extension office, the federal farm research
station, or the state ag college--for advice or help, and you'll find
them singing hosannas for whatever is indus try's pesticide du your.
Ask about organic production and they treat you like you walked in
wearing a pink tutu.  Politicians are no help, because practically all
of them take money from the pesticide peddlers, so they are always
Johnny-on-the-spot to defend even the industry's worst excesses and
insist that chemicals are nothing less than manna from heaven.  Then
there's the Farm Bureau, a blowhard agribusiness bureaucracy that
falsely fronts as the "national representative of farmers" (most of its
members live in big cities).  The bureau not only preaches pesticide
use relentlessly, but is in the pesticide business itself.  Or go to
the real power in a rural community-the bank--and you'll get a hard and
quick lesson about the industry's grip on agriculture.  When farmers
seek crop loans from banks and federal lenders, they are handed
applications that include a promise that they will follow a detailed
schedule of applying chemicals to their land.  No poisons, no loan.  No
loan, no farm.  Gotcha.

Still, despite the pervasive power of the chemical industry, despite a
nay-saying, foot-dragging, brain-dead agricultural establishment,
change is coming--inexorably and with accelerating speed.  Agriculture
is and will continue shifting to low-chemical use and eventually to
organic production because of two irresistible forces: you and
farmers.

First, the collective "you"--consumers, the public, the market.

All together now: "We don't want your damn poisons in our food, in our
water, in our babies!"  It is not merely a few sprout-eating exhippies
who feel this way, but the mainstream, the center, the majority--even
Republicans, for God's sake.  Pollsters confirm that nine out of ten of
us are demanding what the trend-trackers have dubbed the Clean-Food
Diet, which is described in the New York Times as "foods free of
artificial preservatives, coloring, irradiation, synthetic pesticides,
fungicides, ripening agents, fumigants, drug residues, and growth
hormones," as well as foods that are "processed, packaged, transported,
and stored to retain maximum nutritional value."

By far the biggest surge in food marketing is toward clean food and
natural products: Organic product sales doubled from 1989 to 1994 and
now are rising by more than 20 percent a year; overall, the sales of
natural products topped $11 billion in 1996; the number of
natural-foods supermarkets went from 195 in 1991 to 858 in 1995, and
most conventional supermarket chains are now compelled by consumer
demand to carry lines of organic foods; organic cotton clothing and
linens are becoming all the rage, mass-marketed not only through
upscale, en viro-trendy catalogues, but also at Kmart and JCPenney; and
if you think the market has nowhere else to go, let me be the first to
inform you that a Texas company wants to pamper you with Organic Cotton
Toilet Paper.  Who says we do not live in exciting times?

"Hrumph," grump the hidebound heads of ag-biz, "organic farming is
nothing but a bunch of froufrous on farmettes, refugees from
Haight-Ashbury trying to get you gullible consumers to buy a basket of
spotted, bug-infested tomatoes they brought to town in their
graffiti-flecked '65 VW bus.  Turn farming over to organic producers
and half the world will starve, because these dips cannot-repeat
not--produce the massive yields that our Miracle of Modern Agriculture
turns out every day, God bless America and the Chemical Manufacturers
Association, end of discussion."

Of course, their adamancy is rooted in the sterility of their
argument.

It is an argument they are doomed to lose because of the second
irresistible force propelling us toward an organic future: farmers.

As happens to power establishments everywhere, agriculture's long ago
began sniffing its own BS and believing it to be perfume, so it has
lost touch with terra firma and those who farm it.  To get back in
touch, and to see where agriculture is headed, they could do no better
than to visit Jim Crawford--one of America's real organic farmers.

He doesn't hail from Berkeley, as would befit the establishment's
stereotypical profile of an organic producer.  Crawford comes from just
outside Muleshoe, Texas.  As the name suggests, this Panhandle town
(population 4,842) is in unabashed, unrelenting farm country, with
surrounding towns branded with such names as Hereford, Earth, Spade,
Bovina, and Lariat.  It is a no-nonsense place where folks are not much
given to trendy frou-frou, and I can attest that Jim Crawford is a true
son of the place, with more John Wayne in him than John Lennon.  A
fourth-generation Panhandle farmer, he graduated from Muleshoe High,
got an ag degree at Texas Tech just sixty miles down U.S. 84, then
returned to Muleshoe to apply what he was taught in college, which was
to apply layer after layer after layer of synthetic fertilizers and
pesticides to his 900 acres of corn and cotton.  He did this for
seventeen years, until he concluded in the late eighties that he had
had all the conventional wisdom about

"how to farm" that he could stand: Jim was on the brink of broke.

With his spreadsheets on the kitchen table and his red pencil in hand,
he saw that his costs were only going to keep going up and the price of
his crops was not, so something had to give, or he had to give it up.
Right then and there is when Crawford became an organic farmer--not
through some Earth Day epiphany, but through a hard eyed examination of
the bottom line.

It dawned on him that generations of folks before him had farmed
successfully without all those chemicals he was using, so maybe they
knew something worth knowing.  He began to talk to old-timers, check
out books, make calls to what the experts dismiss as "oddball" groups,
and generally to study the possibilities--all of which led him to
discover that the solution had been right under his nose all the time:
manure.

With more cattle than people, the Muleshoe area has beaucoup manure,
and Jim's self-education project was teaching him that plowing
composted manure or other organic matter into his fields literally
would restore life to soil that had been killed with repeated
poisoning.  The manure begins putting back microbes, minerals, and
other natural elements, while also improving the soil's "tilth" so it
retains moisture and holds plants more firmly (no small task on these
high plains, where the wind blows so constantly that you are advised
not to go chasing after your cowboy hat if it blows off, just turn
around and a better one will be coming along behind you).

Organic farming is not simply a matter of doing away with chemicals;
indeed, farming organically is more complex and difficult than farming
chemically, because it requires an understanding of how soil, plants,
and pests interact, and it puts a priority on strengthening the soil
and nurturing it.  Far easier just to nuke the pests, plants, and soil
with some 2,4-D and let the devil take the hindmost.  At its core,
organic farming recognizes that agriculture is the art and science of
cooperating with nature, rather than always trying to overwhelm it.

Crawford started his shift from synthetics to organics on his corn
crop.  The first year, just as the snickering nay-sayers of ag-biz had
predicted, he got only half the yield he used to get.  But the next
year, as his manure applications began to work their natural wonders,
his yield was nearly back to what it had been, plus he was not spending
money to buy chemicals and spread them.  Less snickering.

By the third year his soil was getting plenty stout and his corn yield
was one-and-a-half times better than what his neighbors were getting
the chemical way.  End of snickering.  Plus his corn crop used only
half the water others required, and his premium-quality corn earned him
a premium price.  The snickering was replaced by area farmers stopping
by, digging their boot heels into his plowed field, and saying:
"Manure, huh?"

Uncle Ben was no fool... just ahead of his time.

FMIf MAGAZINE IS KILLING US

In McAUen, Texas, way down at the southern tip of the state, you will
find the unofficial monument to the paternalism, hubris, and greed of
such old Anglo families as the Bentsens, Shivers, and Neuhauses.

For decades, up until the mid-seventies, these feudalistic patrons
pretty much ruled the economy, politics, and teeming Mexican American
majority throughout the Rio Grande Valley.

There is no brass plaque on their monument--it is simply a nondescript
twenty-story bank tower, distinguished solely by the fact that it
thrusts so phallic ally out of the region's flat, coastal plain and is
visible for miles.  This macho edifice was built in the late seventies
by Doc Neuhaus, reigning patriarch of his family's fiefdom.

He put it up just at the time the valley's old-family structure was
coming down--indeed, old Doc himself went to his eternal reward shortly
after his "skyscraper" was completed.  To this day it stands out in the
valley, looming above all beneath it.  But instead of standing as a
lasting testament to his stature, the structure is mockingly referred
to in the now-ascendant Mexican-American community as "Doc Neuhaus's
last erection."

Our civilization's last erection may be in sight, too, if we do not
finally confront the paternalism, hubris, and greed of the chemical
industry, which has had its way with us for way too long.

Confronting this poison-spewing Goliath is not merely a matter of laws
and regulations, but of changing the way we think about chemicals,
challenging the corporate orthodoxy that insists they are essential to
modern living.

Excuse a momentary lapse into techno-neediness, but let me say this to
you: "organochlorines."  This is not a term you hear on the nightly
news or in political campaigns, yet it embodies a reality with far more
destructive impact on your life than, say, the "recidivism rate" of
criminals, just to name one technical phrase the system chooses to
teach us.

You are not likely to know the organochlorine family by name, but they
know you and have an up-close-and-personal presence in your daily life.
To give you a quick marker for what we are dealing with,
organochlorines were first produced on a large scale in World

War II to make poison gas.  Since then some 11,000 different offspring
of this chlorine family of chemicals have been created for industry to
use in making everything from paint to plastics, pesticides to paper.
All 11,000 are toxic: DDT, so deadly that it is now banned in our
country, though it remains extensively in our environment, is an
organochlorine; so is dioxin, the killer by-product of everything from
Agent Orange to hazardous waste incinerators; so are PCBs and vinyl
chloride--the basic ingredients of plastic, both known to cause cancer
directly; so is Atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in
North America, a known causer of breast cancer and a major contaminator
of our lakes, rivers, and groundwater; so are CFCs, the
ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons; so is chlordane, another cancer
producer widely spread to exterminate termites in homes.

The chemical industry literally pours a toxic stew of these industrial
chlorines into our environment, producing about 40 million tons of them
worldwide each year--so much of so many that no matter where you live,
you are eating, breathing, and drinking them every day, and your body
is contaminated with them.  They have been delivered through air
streams, fish, ocean currents, migratory birds, and other means of
travel into ecosystems absolutely everywhere on our globe--even polar
bears in the farthest reaches of the frozen Arctic are now contaminated
with them.

The human health impacts of these nasties are only beginning to come
home to roost.  Despite the fact that this family of chemicals has
massively and suddenly permeated our lives and invaded our bodies,
government has rarely even studied what they do to us, much less raised
a hand to stop them.  From the medical studies that have been
conducted, however--both public and private--we know that
organochlorines are a universal nightmare, possibly the most
destructive thing we humans have yet conceived to do to ourselves, our
progeny, and our planet.  Already it has been confirmed that
chlorinated industrial chemicals cause awml things to happen inside us:
cancers throughout the body, birth defects, genetic mutations,
suppression of the immune system, impaired reproduction and childhood
development, infertility, hormonal changes, and toxicity to the brain,
liver, kidney, skin, and other organs.

Thousands of these compounds, all manmade and most of them highly toxic
even in the tiniest of doses, persist in the environment for decades,
many for centuries.  They readily enter the food chain, working their
way quickly from the simplest organism to the most complex,
concentrating in the fatty tissues of animals, and becoming more
concentrated and potent as one animal eats another, which brings them
to us: 177 organochlorines have been identified in the fat, blood,
mother's milk, semen, and breath of us humans, and hundreds more are
known to be present, but are yet to be specifically identified.

"Shoot," you say, "I've been eating fish from right below a Dow
Chemical discharge pipe for twenty years, and I ain't dead yet."  But
absorbing organochlorines is not like an Agatha Christie character
unknowingly taking a teaspoon of barbiturates in warm milk just before
bed and then ... croak.  The effects of chlorides in your body may not
show up for thirty years.  These killers and mutators are never flushed
out of bur systems, so even infinitesimal amounts-too small themselves
to seem harmful--gradually build up to a critical mass that does cause
us gruesome harm.  Worse, we adults pass them directly to the next
generation--they cross through the placenta to embryos, they are sucked
up by breast-feeding babies, and they damage our genes, which are then
passed along in sperm or ovum to our offspring.

Yet, ludicrously, science, government, industry, and media are paying
far more attention to the "crisis" of computer viruses than to the
awesomely destructive power of these invasive human poisons.  It is a
case of willful stupidity, and it proves again that if our national
leadership had a brain cell, the poor thing would die of loneliness.

Do you know someone with breast cancer?  Who doesn't?  It kills 50,000
of our mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends in the United States
each year--more than half a million worldwide.  The disease is
increasing rapidly in practically every industrialized nation and is
predicted to top a million deaths a year by 2000, making it the number
one killer of women.  Little-Reported Fact: People with breast cancer
tend to have very high levels of organochlorines in their bodies.

Conversely, women exposed to unusually high levels of organochlorines
(such as chemical workers, farm workers, and professional golfers) tend
to have unusually high rates of breast cancer.

Anyone with an IQ higher than sushi might take these interesting
juxtapositions as like, uh, well, you know, like a clue that maybe,
just maybe, the world production of a couple of billion tons of
organochlorines over the past fifty years has something to do with the
world's 60 percent increase in the number of breast cancer cases in
that same period.  After all, a standard rule-of-thumb that doctors use
in diagnosing diseases is: "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses."

Women are being trampled by a thundering stampede of organochlorines,
but the cancer research establishment is refusing to listen to the
hoofbeats.  Instead the establishment is going around blaming women
themselves for breast cancer--"It's your fatty diets," they scold, "or
your genes or your estrogen levels"--while warning women to get
mammograms early and often ("Early detection is your best protection,"
chirps one of their ubiquitous ads).

Nothing wrong with early detection, but how about at least an ounce of
prevention, a little focus on the real causes of this epidemic?

In lucid moments, even the establishment concedes that no more than 50
percent of breast cancer cases (and cancer groups say no more than a
third of the cases) can be attributed to diet, family history, and
hormones, so why do they refuse to look at the obvious?

Because the cancer establishment is beholden to the chemical
establishment, and often they are one and the same.  Case in point:

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Few do-good events in our country are more favorably received by
America's corporate chieftains, media moguls, and politicians than
BCAM.  When October rolls around, the Breast Cancer Awareness
organization rolls out a blockbuster saturation-ad campaign imploring
women everywhere to "get a mammogram now."

This annual October media blitz has become the "official response" by
America's powers-that-be to the spreading scourge: Every governor and
mayor proclaims "National Mammography Day" (text of proclamation
conveniently distributed by BCAM), every local media outlet produces
heart-wrenching feature stories about victims of the cancer, the First
Lady dutifully implores citizens to embrace the BCAM message, the
postal service distributes millions of special breast cancer awareness
stamps, politicians of all stripes pop up at cancer hospitals for photo
ops where they promise more public funds to find a "cure," companies
like Estee Lauder show their solidarity with the awareness movement by
handing out hundreds of thousands of pink ribbons to employees and
customers (satin, embroidered, or enameled ribbons are available in
bulk by ordering directly from BCAM's handy "product catalogue"),
dietitians offer low-fat recipes while admonishing women to eat
healthy, and there is generally a month-long, tongue-clucking sermon
from those-on high instructing women to be responsible and, well...
take care of themselves.

Awareness Month, however, offers not one whisper of doubt that anything
or anyone other than women themselves and "fate" are responsible for
what is happening to them, that there is something out there actually
causing this horrible disease to erupt.  Peruse all BCAM's expensive
and artfully prepared materials, all its promo kits, pamphlets, press
releases, posters, radio spots, print ads, and videos, and you will
find no suggestion that there is a manmade chemical connection to what
is happening to women.

To understand this studied silence, follow the money.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a front that was conceived, funded,
and launched in 1985 by a British conglomerate with a name that could
come straight out of a Batman comic book:

Imperial Chemical Industries.  But this $14-billion-a-year
multinational behemoth is all too real.  It is among the world's
largest makers of pesticides, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and paper.

"Organochlorines R Us" could legitimately be its slogan, though
"Pollution R Us" would also fit--one of its Canadian paint
subsidiaries, for example, has been held responsible for a third of the
toxic chemicals dumped into the St.  Lawrence River.

For whatever reason, the conventional media has never questioned where
BCAM gets its money, or at least it has never reported that a great big
gooey, pulsating conflict of interest is controlling just how little
true "awareness" is broadcast during breast cancer's official month.
Instead, only those outside the circle of established
legitimacy--agitators like Greenpeace and uncompromised investigative
reporters like Monte Paulsen of the Detroit Metro Times--have had the
journalistic gumption to lift the log and look at the uglies squirming
under it.  It is not a pretty sight, but there it is--as Paulsen wrote
in the Metro Times back in May 1993: "ICI has been the sole financial
sponsor of BCAM since the event's inception.  Altogether,

the company has spent 'several million dollars' on the project,
according to a spokeswoman.  In return, ICI has been allowed to
approve--or veto--every poster, pamphlet and advertisement BCAM
uses."

In 1993 one of Id's corporate chunks, called Zeneca Group PLC, split
off, taking with it the pharmaceutical and ag-chemical divisions of
ICI, as well as the Breast Cancer Awareness Month division.

Zeneca remains the sole funder of BCAM and retains complete control of
its message.  Zeneca (which, in a touch of bitter irony for breast
cancer sufferers, employs the corporate slogan, "Bringing Ideas to
Life"), was one of the gooiest parts of ICI.  For example, it was named
in a 1990 lawsuit by our federal government for dumping DDT and PCBs
into the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors.  It is a
multibillion-dollar producer of pesticides, including acetochlor, a
cancer-causing, chlorine-based herbicide that by itself brings home
$300 million a year to the corporation.

It gets gooier.  Zeneca's pharmaceutical arm is also the maker of
Nolvadex, the leading drug used in breast cancer treatment.

Nolvadex is a highly controversial drug--it does not cure existing
breast cancer, but it can help stop it from spreading in some women who
are diagnosed early; however, it can also cause blood clots, uterine
cancer, and liver cancer in those who take it.

"Hey, life's a bitch," seems to be Zeneca's attitude, as it pockets
almost half-a-billion big ones a year in Nolvadex sales.

What a racket this company has going!  It makes billions selling
industrial organochlorines linked to breast cancer, it finances its
BCAM front to divert public attention from cancer causes to cancer
detection, then it sells Nolvadex to those who are detected.

Meanwhile half-a-million more women will die of breast cancer this
year, and more will die next year and the next, while BCAM gaily
distributes pink ribbons.

Organochlorines are not just about women, though.  Check it out, guys:
You are not half the man your father or grandfather was.  I don't mean
in character, courage, or achievement--I mean in pure macho, the
bottom-line essence of ballsiness: your testosterone and sperm levels.
Dozens of scientific studies around the world confirm that sperm counts
today average half of what they were only forty years ago, and that the
younger you are, the lower your count is likely to be.  Moreover, since
1950, there has been a tripling in the number of men who have so few
sperm that they are rendered infertile.

Worse, what few sperm we have left are not in the shape they once
were--there has been a dramatic rise in the number of misshapen and
"sluggish" sperm.  Here is a humbling fact to ponder: The average man
now produces fewer normal sperm than a hamster does.

Need I point out that hamsters have much smaller testicles than men?

We might wish that this is simply a temporary problem caused by
too-tight Jockey shorts or too much time in a hot Jacuzzi (yes,
chemical industry scientists actually have been trotted out to advance
such "theories"); alas, however, tests have been done and these
"lifestyle" factors have zero impact.  Scientists free to look for real
causes, on the other hand, keep coming to the same conclusion:

Exposure to and ingestion of organochlorines--even in minuscule
amounts--messes mightily with our reproductive apparatus.  Men with low
sperm counts have been found in several studies to have significantly
higher concentrations of organochlorines in their semen.  Also, men
exposed to high levels of organochlorines by their jobs have
significantly lower sperm counts.

We are not alone in experiencing the damage.  From toads to terns,
fleas to whales, there are reproductive deformities in all creatures
that find themselves mired in a world poisoned with mirex, dioxin, DDT,
and all the other cousins of the synthetic-chlorine family.

The chemicals not only cause cancer (by the way guys, testicular cancer
has tripled in the past fifty years, too), they also act as "endocrine
disrupters."  Our endocrine system is the one that regulates the flow
of our hormones, which in turn control our whole biological process,
including the formation of genitals and the desire and ability to "get
it on."  By "disrupted," we are talking about alligators with missing
or half-sized penises; about eagles that no longer soar sexually,
having lost any desire to mate and nest; about male rats that become
hermaphrodites; and about a startling increase in the number of boys
born with undescended testicles, malformed penises, testosterone
imbalance, and infertility.  Sheesh--and you thought Lorena Bobbitt was
scary.

So, fellows, which is of greater concern to you: the condition of your
"apparatus," or the whiteness of toilet paper?  There is a choice,

 R

because effective, economically feasible, clean, safe alternatives
exist right now for every major use of organochlorines.  For example,
paper.  To get that totally white, whiter-than-white effect that is
promoted by most U.S. producers of magazines, tampons, books, cigarette
paper, corporate letterhead, coffee filters, government memos, paper
towels, academic reports, and other disposables.  International Paper,
Champion, and nearly every other U.S. paper maker uses chlorine-based
compounds to bleach their wood pulp.  Unfortunately the industry's
"pure white" results in an impure earth, since the process dumps 700
million pounds a year of a thousand different organochlorines into our
waters, making paper mills the number one source of organochlorine
water contamination in America--a contamination that cannot be filtered
out.  Paper makers use more chlorine compounds than any other industry
except PVC plastic manufacturers, and paper mills use them for no other
reason than to make paper whiter.  I have to repeat that fact because,
even as I write it, I cannot absorb the bottom-feeding depths of
stupidity it entails:

Our society is employing some of the most destructive elements yet
invented, chemical elements that literally change our biological
essence, for no nobler purpose than whitening paper.

Not only do these carcinogenic, mutagenic discharges pollute our water
and everything in it, but the process also permeates our paper products
with the poisons, many of which can then deliver a tiny toxic hit
directly to us consumers every time we consume them (tampons, diapers,
polystyrene coffee cups, toilet paper, white coffee filters, and
bleached milk cartons are among those known to leach their toxic
compounds).  Do not think that buying recycled products gets you off
the chlorine hook, either, since nearly all of them started as
chlorinated paper and still retain the compounds, plus--in an act of
willful dopiness--most of them go through a second bleaching just to
freshen up the whiteness of the product.

Nor is the contamination over when you toss chlorine-bleached paper
away.  The compounds leak from landfills into our groundwater or are
spewed into our air by waste incinerators.  Indeed, the EPA has found
that incineration of the products causes a chemical reaction that
actually manufactures more dioxin and other organochlorines.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and chlorines to us.

It is folly to keep trying to throw this stuff away, because there is
no "away."  Far better for the industry simply to do away with chlorine
bleaching altogether, since alternatives are readily available.  One
option is to produce off-white paper, as is being done with more and
more print and writing papers, or even to shift to brown paper
products, as is happening with coffee niters, napkins, and paper
towels.

But if it is bright, shiny "white!"  the producers insist on having,
they can have it.  Several nontoxic pulp bleachers, including oxygen
and hydrogen peroxide (yes, the antiseptic your sweet granny put on
your childhood cuts), can produce such high brightness levels in paper
that you would not notice any diminishing of the whiteness from paper
bleached by killer chlorines.  This is not a theory but a growing
practice.  Some forty pulp mills in Europe and Canada, as well as a
couple of mavericks in the United States (see box, next page) are
producing such paper, and the world demand for their clean products is
zooming.

As an added bonus, it is cheaper for the pulp industry to use these
bleaching alternatives, so paper products need not cost a farthing more
once the conversion is made and is in mass production.

In other words.  There is no consumer or economic reason to keep using
chlorines to make paper.

Still, the U.S. industry keeps poisoning us, our progeny, and our globe
just to whiten paper.  Why?  I can only refer you to the conclusion
drawn by some of America's top academic analysts of managerial behavior
(we are talking PhDs here, so pay attention): The industry is run by
boneheads.

Eliminating chlorine bleaching is naturally and vehemently opposed by
ICI/Zeneca, Dow, Olin, Occidental, Bayer, and other major multinational
makers of these chlorine chemicals.  As we know from long experience
with outfits like the Mafia and the Medellin drug cartel, no combine
that draws billions from distributing deadly substances will let such
silly niceties as morality interfere with their profiteering.  So, on
the question of doing away with chlorines, go ahead and mark down the
position of the chemical producers as "Fuck you."

You can also comprehend the bonehead up-the-butt defiance of most
American pulp makers, since there is an initial conversion cost

 R

LOUISIANA-PACIFIC TURNS GREEN

What do a group of hang-loose, Northern California surfers have in
common with the Brooks Brothers suits in a Fortune 500 corporation like
Louisiana-Pacific Inc.?

The Pacific.  A few years ago, the water off the California coast at
Samoa gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "surf's up," since the
ocean there was damn near boiling with acrid chlorine effluent being
piped right out of an L-P pulp mill that regularly made the list of
"Ten Worst Polluters in the United States."  The scrappy surfers and
the $3 billion company soon had something else in common: the
courtroom.  L-P was sued by a host of mad-as-hell wave jockeys for
assorted violations of the Clean Water Act--a suit that led to a
consent decree in which L-P agreed to pay nearly $3 million in fines
and, astonishingly, to stop using chlorine to bleach pulp at the Samoa
mill.

While the rest of the industry has defiantly dragged its filthy feet to
prevent any real change in its chlorine habit, suddenly here came L-P
out of the blue, saying it would go whole hog, converting this mill to
a process known as TCF, or Totally Chlorine-Free.

This was no small commitment, since the cleanup and conversion cost L-P
about $ 120 million, since the whole industry was in a price slump at
the time, and since technological pioneers always encounter an
abundance of kinks, bugs, and unpleasant surprises down the untrodden
path.  Among the unpleasantness confronted by this North American
pioneer were poor-quality pulp in its first runs, a $30 million loss
during 1992 and 1993, some layoffs, and a testy relationship with L-P's
pulp peers.

By 1994, though, L-P was getting the hang of it, the while- ness and
strength of its product were being hailed by customers worldwide, all
225 workers were back on me job, and the Samoa mill had logged a $ 10
million profit.

L-P's success puts the lie to the petulant insistence by other industry
leaders and lobbyists that TCF is nothing but an attempt by en
viro-freaks to destroy Free Enterprise and me American

Way of Life.  Chlorine-free technology works economically and it
definitely works environmentally.  In 1995 California health officials
were able to lift a ban on eating fish or shellfish caught in the ocean
or the bay around L-P's mill.  Also, with the mill's dioxins and other
killer chlorine pollutants eliminated, it is "cowabunga" time once
again for the surfers of Samoa.

The company now is moving to be the first pulp maker in the world to
eliminate completely the discharge of any waste water from the
bleaching process by installing a state-of-the-art closed- loop
recycling system.  Already L-P has cut its discharges of bleaching
waters by 80 percent, reduced its energy use, eliminated toxic sludge,
and dramatically improved worker-safety conditions.

Whether the industry likes it or not, the newly clean waves now being
enjoyed by the surfers along the coastline of L-P's Samoa plant are the
wave of the future.  Forty pulp plants in Scandinavia, Germany, and
other European nations have converted to TCF paper, which already has
captured a third of the European paper market.  Japan is demanding the
same level of paper purity, and the demand for TCF paper in our country
will rise rapidly, too, as our public becomes more informed about the
deadly impact of chlorine contaminants.  Although Washington, D.C." has
its head in a chlorine cloud (ERA, for example, stilt refuses to buy
any of L-P's clean paper for the agency's internal use, claiming that
such a purchase would "send a political message"), such cities as
Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Seattle, and such states as Oregon, Vermont,
Maine, and Massachusetts have passed ordinances calling for their
governmental agencies to purchase no<hlorine paper products.

Industry lobbyists in Washington grump that L-P is trying to be
"greener than thou," but as L-P environmental operations manager Kirk
Girard states matter-of-factly: "We are paying attention to our
customers.  With an eye to the regulatory environment and the market,
we took what we thought was a shrewd economic decision."

Louisiana-Pacific's leap into eco-friendly technology is the direct
result of the company's commitment to green--the spending kind of
green.

that will dent" their bottom line in the short run.  Even though
conversion will pa) handsomely for them in the longer run, American
CEOs are more nearsighted than Mr.  Magoo.  Do not count on common
sense from them, much less vision.

Far less understandable, though, is the shameful pussyfooting of major
paper users--like the Time magazine empire.  Time Inc.

absolutely gobbles paper, ingesting nearly 50 million pounds of it
weekly and regurgitating it in the refined form of Time, Sports
Illustrated, People, Fortune, and the whole mess of other slick
periodicals under its corporate wing.  As one of the biggest buyers of
paper in the world, the company does not merely have the market clout
to reshape the practices of paper producers, but it has used this clout
in the past.  In 1990, after postal rates jumped for magazines, Time
Inc.

demanded paper in lighter weights than then existed.  Quicker than a
finger snap, the industry delivered.  In 1994, when Time Inc.  took the
lead among major publishers in using some recycled paper in several of
its magazines, Time's chief paper purchaser proudly boasted in print:
"In the past there simply was not enough recycled paper available to do
this.  But because we are such a large buyer, we were able to help
create a significant supply by asking for it."

This ability to make a difference in the marketplace just by asking for
it is what prompted Greenpeace in 1991 to press Time Inc.

to lead the way in demanding stock that is free of chlorine
bleaching.

Imagine the astonished gasps of delight in the entire environmental
movement when the company publicly replied that it was doing just that:
"We at Time take this problem seriously," the editors intoned in a
special public response to Greenpeace in the magazine's January
20,1992, issue, "but we are limited by the availability of paper
produced without the use of dangerous pollutants.  Most of our paper
suppliers are far along with their plans to eliminate chlorine-based
pulp.  We will use this alternative paper as soon as it is practical to
do so."

There it was!  Time would turn the tide.  Two thumbs up, three cheers,
four aces, high fives all around!

Ultimately though, all we got was the finger.  According to the Wall
Street Journal, the corporate higher-ups in the Time Warner
conglomerate squelched the environmental initiative of its editors.

Even though the technology to produce totally chlorine-free white paper
has long since been available and is being widely used to produce an
abundance of this "alternative paper," and despite Time's public
promise to switch to the process five years and thousands of tons of
unnecessary chlorine pollution ago, the industry leader still refuses
to get off these toxics.

Not only did Time Inc."s executives renege, but they also tried to
cover it up with a coat of green wash pointing out in a self
congratulatory letter to readers in the April 4, 1994, issue that it
had asked its suppliers to begin using a "different" kind of chlorine
to bleach the pages of Time.  The company's move, though, is no more
effective than a smoker switching from Marlboro to Marlboro Lights in a
self-deceiving attempt to prevent cancer.  Called chlorine dioxide,
this "different" organochlorine compound is just Chlorine Lite--it does
produce fewer dioxins, but it still produces a deadly amount of them,
and it still results in hundreds of other carcinogenic and mutagenic
substances flowing from pulp plants directly into our water.  In fact,
chlorine dioxide not only contains dioxins, but its use in paper making
causes a chemical reaction that actually makes more of them.

Lest you think that Time Inc.  could not afford to switch (a claim that
the $4-billion-a-year publisher never has made), nontoxic paper today
is competitively priced with the poisonous varieties, and such small
American glossies as Scuba Times now use the clean paper, even though
they have none of the deep-pocket resources of the Time Warner
conglomerate.  (Go to your newsstand and compare the paper quality of
Scuba Times with Time, which you'll find to be equal, then reflect on
the fact that the sticker price is the same for both magazines.) Time
Inc.  has the wherewithal to stop paper companies from killing us, but
to date it lacks the courage of its own editors' convictions, cravenly
backing off, apparently unwilling to butt heads with chemical and paper
companies that also happen to be advertisers.

It should be noted here, in a parenthetical burst of full consumer
disclosure, that this very book is printed on paper, and book
publishers have hardly been Earth Firsters when it comes to cleaning up
their pulp.  The book industry, now dominated by such conglomerate
owners as Rupert Murdoch (owner of HarperCollins and now owner of a
piece of me as author of this tome), Viacom, Bertelsmann, Hearst,

and our old friend Time Warner, goes through more than a million tons
of paper every year, and practically zilch of it is the clean stuff.

It occurred to me, then, that if I am going to box the ears of Time
Inc.  for not doing its part to stop this senseless poisoning, surely
in the name of journalistic integrity (not exactly a high hurdle),
HarperCollins would want to use chlorine-free paper for my book.  I
unleashed Betsy Moon, my research "department," to determine if such
book paper was available.  Her inquiries led her to upstate New York
and the Lyons Falls Pulp & Paper Company, which has a solid reputation
in the environmental community for advocating the use of TCP
paper--Totally Chlorine-Free.  My Department of Betsy asked an LFP&P
official if the company could supply a major publisher's needs if the
publisher specified it wanted only TCP paper.

"Yes."  Is the quality of the TCP paper equal to the chemically dosed
variety?

"Yes."  Is the TCP paper price-competitive?

"Yes."  Has any major New York trade publisher ever requested TCP?

"No."

As luck would have it, though, LFP&P is a major supplier to
HarperCollins, so my HE man, senior vice president Adrian Zackheim,
made a couple of calls and--bingo!--you have in your hands one of the
very first trade books from a New York publishing house printed on
clean paper.  So even if my ideas don't rub off on you, at least no
chlorines will, either.

If only Time's executives had the commitment and common sense of
Zackheim.  Or, for that matter, if only the chief executive of the U.S.
of A. had such a standup attitude.  Guess who is the biggest buyer of
paper in the world?  Uncle Sam.  Surely the federal government in all
its majesty could use the awesome swath it cuts in the paper market to
do what needs to be done.

Enter Our Shining Knight of Papyrus, Bill Clinton.  In its infancy, the
Clinton Administration innocently attempted to do the right thing by
switching the kind of paper public agencies buy.  The move came in the
fall of '93, when VP Al Gore was causing a media flurry with his
"reinventing government" shtick.  An executive order was drafted that
mostly dealt with buying recycled paper, but down in Section 503 was
this small sentence: "Each agency shall establish goals for procurement
of totally chlorine-free paper products to be achieved by 1995."

Oh, man, did the pulp hit the fan!  The Chlorine Chemical

Council, the American Forest and Paper Association, and a whole
hornet's nest of CEOs and lobbyists from every global corporation
making or using chlorine bleaches swarmed the White House in a fury,
and Clinton quickly went over the hill.  (Not everyone knows it, but
the President is a long-suffering "thixotrophic."  This is a pathetic
physical condition commonly seen in such substances as mayonnaise and
catsup, which exist as solids until a little heat is applied to them,
then they turn to liquid.) On behalf of our children, Clinton had a
historic chance to face down the handful of companies that are
saturating our globe with these poisons, simply by being firm about the
kind of paper government buys with our tax dollars.  Instead, the
Leader of the Free World let the companies dictate our government's
paper purchases.  Then to try saving a little environmental face,
Clinton resorted to the last refuge of political scoundrels everywhere:
He called for a study.  As part of legislation to rewrite the Clean
Water Act, the President proposed a federal study of the impact of
organochlorines on human health.  In the spring of '94, though, under
fierce lobbying by the industry and with no serious push from the White
House, even Clinton's weasel of a study was quietly snuffed out.

Clinton's EPA weaseled out, too.  Since the Reagan years, our
anti-pollution agency had been studying the problem of chlorine
bleaching and considering regulatory solutions.  After hemming and
hawing throughout Clinton's first term, and after deliberately
postponing a decision until after the 1996 presidential election (no
need to arouse the citizenry in an election year), the agency finally
announced its new regulations on May 20 of this year.  Far from
outlawing these killers, EPA chose to side with Time magazine and the
other chlorine polluters, adopting the weakest standards that were
under consideration--standards proposed by the industry itself to
switch to the Chlorine Lite technologies.  Passing up the opportunity
to end this totally unnecessary pollution, our environmental
"protector" has done nothing but spray perfume on it, allowing industry
to continue creating and releasing chlorinated pollutants that will
accumulate in the earth's ecosystem and steadily sicken, mutate, and
kill millions of us.

As David Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!  puts it, "The
Earth is not dying, it's being killed."  It is time to confront the
industry-imposed assumption that all these compounds are somehow
essential and that the role of government is merely to pick technical
nits over whether the allowable residue level for chlorine number 6,374
should be 0.10 parts per million or 0.01 parts per million.

No level is safe.  The goal of public policy should not be to regulate
organochlorines, but to replace them, and to do so with all deliberate
speed.  After all, the chemical is not the end, but the means; it is
not the benefit, but a cost.  As Seneca, the great Roman author of
tragedies, wrote nearly 2,000 years ago: "Our posterity will wonder
about our ignorance of things so plain."

COMING CLEAN

What is the "dry" in dry-cleaning?

You get a whiff of it every time you rip off the thin plastic slipcover
from your dry-cleaned blouses, suits, and such.  That slightly sour,
gassy aroma that wafts from them is pere, or, more precisely,
perchloroethylene.

This organochlorine-based solvent definitely will get the spaghetti
sauce out of your favorite jacket.  But, like the Texas officials who
had the brilliant idea of importing Brazilian fire ants in the 1950s to
try to get rid of cotton boll weevils, the solution can be worse than
the problem.  With pere, the spaghetti sauce vanishes, but the solution
itself can cause central nervous system damage, reproductive disorders,
miscarriages, kidney and brain damage, and increased risk of several
kinds of cancer.

A little spritz of pere to clean your pants might not seem like much,
but there are 27,000 neighborhood cleaners in America cleaning millions
of pairs of pants and pumping out 250 million pounds of perca year. It
has become one of the most prevalent toxic contaminants in the air of
America's cities.  Especially vulnerable are those who work in these
establishments and those who live next door to or above them--in New
York City, for example, 60 percent of dry cleaners are on the ground
floor of apartment buildings, and studies have found that these
apartment dwellers have an increased risk of cancer, thanks to the
steady dose of pere in their air.

Do you bring it home in your cleaning?  You betcha, albeit in very
small amounts.  But these small amounts add up, since once pere's
chlorine contaminants enter your body, they are never flushed out,
building up steadily in your fatty tissues.  A 1995 study by Consumers
Union finds that just wearing, say, a newly dry-cleaned jacket and
blouse every week can cause you to inhale enough pere over the years to
make a measurable difference in your likelihood of coming down with
cancer.

So do we have a choice between cancer and going around with spaghetti
splotches on our clothes?  We do, and it is called wet cleaning

This is another back-to-the-hiture answer, bringing up-to-date the
methods we used before our society rushed pell-mell to embrace the
"miracle of chemistry."  Essentially, wet-cleaning involves (and I
apologize here for having to resort to technical jargon): washing
clothes.  I do not mean Just dumping the whole load in a tub with
20Mule Team Borax, but customized washing and drying.

This requires having skilled employees.  Contrary to dry-cleaning, in
which most of your soiled garments are simply tossed in the pere
machine, wet-cleaners closely inspect each piece for the kind of dirt,
sweat, and stains it has.  Depending on the degree of soiling and the
kind of fabric, the employee then applies the appropriate solution from
a lineup of cold water, hot air, biodegradable soaps, hydrogen
peroxide, organic shampoos, pressurized steam vacuuming, plain old
salt, and other nonhazardous cleansers.  Various washing techniques are
employed, from spot cleaning to hand washing and different methods of
drying also are used, including drying cabinets and old-fashioned
hang-drying.

Wait, you say, my clothes have labels that shriek, "dry-clean
only"!--what am I to do?  Forget it.  These labels are no more to be
obeyed than mattress tags that warn, "Do not remove under penalty of
law."  Practically every fabric can be washed by someone trained to do
it right.  Indeed, the most common reason we take clothes in for
cleaning is that they get a tad rank from our own perspiration, and
nothing beats water for removing sweat.  Your dry-cleaners don't tell
you, but they often use water, too, mainly because pere is not good at
cleaning sweat, blood, or urine.  Professional wet-cleaners not only
can get your clothes cleaner, but their hands-on process also leaves
your clothing in better shape.  As you probably have experienced, dry
cleaning can harm fabrics over time, since it repeatedly saturates them
with a chemical solvent that takes the natural oils out of fibers,
rendering them brittle and lifeless.

Wait again, you say.  Doesn't all of this attention to each garment by
skilled workers jack up labor costs and raise my price?  Yes and no.

Wet-cleaning puts a premium on training employees to be knowledgeable
about fabrics and highly proficient at handling them.  This definitely
means better-paid employees--not a bad thing, I say.  But your price
should not rise, because the cost of buying, installing, and
maintaining wet-cleaning equipment is way less than the capital costs
of dry-cleaning, and there is no expensive pere to buy or dispose of. A
joint industry-government study found that wet-cleaning facilities
require 41 percent less capital, and yield 5 percent higher profits and
a 78 percent higher return on investment.

Turning conventional wisdom on its head, such wet-cleaners as Ecomat
and Aquaclean in Manhattan, the Green Cleaner in Chicago, Carriage
Cleaners in Atlanta, Atomic Cleaners in Beaumont, Cleaner by Nature in
Santa Monica, and dozens more across the country are substituting
skilled labor for capital, and it is paying off all around:

The shops are profitable, the product is top-quality, employees make a
living wage, prices are competitive, customer satisfaction is high-and
there is zero pere in the air.

POLITICS

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE IN WHO'S MOTTO

KNOW WHAT'S WHAT

* MY DADDY AND OTHER MUTTS

* I HATE LOSING WHEN WE WIN

* POLITICAL MATH

* ADVICE

** CAMPAIGNING

** CHURCH

* THE DAY JIM BOB DISCOVERED

DEMOCRACY

* LOOK UP

* DADDY'S PHILOSOPHY

MY DADDY AND OTHER MUTTS

Several years ago I boarded a plane at New York's La Guardia airport to
fly to Dallas.  We were taxiing into position for takeoff when the
plane abruptly pulled off the runway.  The pilot popped on the intercom
to tell us--in his best good of' boy, captain's voice--that everything
was going to be okey-do key "Folks, ah, our gauge up here shows that
our number three engine is out, so, ah, we're just gonna taxi her back
to the gate and have 'em replace the gauge.  Shouldn't take more than a
jiffy, so, ah, sit back and we'll have you on your way real
quick-like."

Whoa, did we passengers ever scramble off that plane!

I recall the captain every time I hear some High Priest of the
Conventional Wisdom trying to fiddle with our gauges of political
reality, hoping to convince folks that everything is running smoothly
when we know better.  One example of egregious gauge tampering is
telling us that the American people are "conservative."

The system--political and economic--counts on your sitting still for
this one, meekly accepting that any idea too progressive for, say, Bill
Clinton (like a national jobs program, public financing of elections,
or single-payer health care for all) is an idea that's simply beyond
the fringe, waaaaay too hot for the American people to handle,
politically wacky, DOA, a nonstarter, and--as movie mogul Sam Goldwyn
once said in dismissing a movie idea--"In two words:

Impossible."  The result is a shriveled public debate tolerant only of
viewpoints ranging from the conservative corporatism of Clinton's White
House to the kooky extremism of Gingrich's Congress.

Never mind that this leaves most of us out, the political cognoscenti
are always there to police the boundaries of conventional wisdom.  Tune
in to any of the political yak shows on TV and inevitably there will be
some overpaid and under-IQ-ed peer of the cognoscenti (probably a
political pundit or campaign consultant) who'll lean back in full
pontifical pose, suck on his teeth for a second, then nail the
discussion shut with something like: "You gotta remember, Sam, this is
a conservative country."  His normally talky colleagues--including the
house liberal--will then start to bob their heads up and down in silent
tribute to the suffocating power of such gaseous wisdom.

Conservative?  Americans?  As my of' daddy would say, that fits about
like socks on a rooster.

Take my daddy.  For years W. IF.

"High" Hightower was proprietor and chief BS coordinator of Main Street
News, smack-dab in downtown Denison, Texas.  He died not long ago, but
he was the political experts' quintessential "conservative"
demographic: white male, small businessman, solidly middle class.
Southern--and while not quite angry, fairly agitated, worried that his
America was headed straight to hell in a jet-powered handbasket.

Pollsters could have found "High" most any day with a gaggle of his
Main Street cronies telling stories, laughing, and solving the world's
problems as they took a break around the Dr.  Pepper cold drink box in
his store ("coldest sodas in the Greater Denison Metroplex," he
constantly boasted).

"Do you consider yourselves: DLiberal, or DConservative," the pollsters
would have asked these world problem solvers.  Sure enough, given the
choice, Daddy and each of the others would have responded, "Better mark
me down a conservative."

But if the pollsters were to stay awhile, pop a Dr.  Pepper, set aside
their computer printouts, and just get Daddy and group talking, they'd
hear about how out-of-state bank-holding giants are coldly squeezing
the life out of little guys like them and little towns like Denison;
about how both political parties have become whores to the Wall Street
crowd and don't really give a rat's ass about Main Street folks; about
how the tax laws are written by and for big corporations and the
privileged at the expense of the working man and woman; about how the
oil and chemical companies are run by a gang of greedy polluters who'd
just as soon piss in your Dr.  Pepper as say "hidy" to you; about
how... well, about how they just don't fit in those tight little
squares the system draws up for them, and how they yearn for a
political movement, candidate, party, something, anything that steps
outside the conventional wisdom and speaks to them, involves them.

No matter what the pollsters, pundits, and politicos say, Americans are
no more right-wing than they are left-wing.  As the dust bowl
troubadour and rabble rouser Woody Guthrie once said, "Left wing, right
wing, chicken wing, it's all the same to me," adding that "I've never
been a Communist but I have been in the red most of my life."  Most of
us are mavericks, political mutts--each one of us a heady and sometimes
hot mix of liberalisms, conservatisms and (watch out now!)
radicalisms.

Yes, radicalisms--at least as radical as the antiestablishmentarianism
that is central to the very creation of America; at least as radical,
too, as these core political values that most of us hold dear in our
hearts: economic fairness, social justice, equal opportunity for all.

You want radical?  Here's the radical reality that the powers-that be
don't want you thinking about: America's true political spectrum does
not run right-to-left, but top-to-bottom.  This is the reality the
workaday majority of Americans like my daddy actually live.
Rightto-left is theory; top-to-bottom is experience.  And most people
today know they're no longer even in shouting distance of the powers at
the top, whether those powers wear the mask of Republicans or
Democrats, conservatives or liberals.

One more Daddy story.

Every city and town has its own little power elite--the bankers, real
estate barons, old families with parks named after them, that ilk.

The "Downtown Crowd," Daddy and his buddies called them.  They run
things and have an annoying way of setting themselves above and apart
from the small merchants, de liverymen clerks, working stiffs, and the
like who came into Main Street News.

At the pinnacle of Denison's power pyramid were the Munsons--old money,
big houses, banks, Munson Park right in the center of town, kids sent
off to faraway prep schools--"special" people, and they considered
themselves as such.  As Daddy once said of the family's reigning
patriarch at the time, Ben Munson III (or "Ben Three Slashes," as the
Main Street News bunch referred to him): "He could strut sitting
down."

Well, in 1982, the Munsons tried to strut their stuff in a way that
really, really, really PO'd my old man.  I was running for statewide
office that year and my parents were handling the campaign on the home
front  I was a total political outsider, making a shoestring, uphill
race in the Democratic primary against the do-nothing goofball of an
incumbent then sitting in the office of Texas agriculture
commissioner.

Now, Do-Nothing Goofballism doesn't necessarily work against you in
Texas politics--to the contrary, many a Texas governor has risen to
power precisely because he fit so snugly in the DNG profile.

The big-money interests are particularly partial to public officials
who demonstrate an aptitude for creative do-nothingism, and true to
form, my opponent had the full embrace of the state's Old Guard,
including the Munsons.

They didn't just quietly support him, either.  They brought him into my
hometown, gave him money, held a Downtown Crowd reception for him,
paraded him about like a monkey on a leash, had their pictures made
with the grinning fool and--get this--placed that photo right in the
middle of the front page of the Denison Herald.

Oh the outrage!  The insult.  The hurt.  They might as well have poked
Daddy in the eye with a sharp stick.

But this time, there was balm in Gilead.  Lo and behold, Election Day
rolled around--and I won.  Toward midnight, with my statewide victory
confirmed, I called home from my Austin headquarters to let my folks
know, hoping I wouldn't wake them.  Wake them?  In the background as
Momma answered, I heard the biggest, noisiest party I'd ever known them
to have.  Not only had I carried Texas, I took 65 percent in Denison.

When Daddy got on the phone, he didn't say, "Way to go, boy," or
inquire at all about how I ran statewide.  He just kept exulting: "We
beat the Munsons, we beat the Munsons, we beat..."

That's what people want out of politics--to beat the "Munsons," to have
a political movement that gives them a way to go head-on at the
powerful, to take America back from the bankers and bosses, the big
shots and bastards who are running things and, in the process, running
roughshod over them, ruining their sense of what America is supposed to
be.

Where is that politics?

HATE LOSING WHEN WE WIN

In the middle of Florida, just west of Orlando, lies Lake Apopka.

Some years ago it suffered a devastating spill of a pesticide
containing the dreaded DDT--dreaded because, among other horrors, it
messes up our sex hormones something awful.  How awful?  Ask the
alligators in this lake of woes.  Male gators there now have
testosterone levels so low that many are sterile, and the few newborn
males in the lake have penises only a quarter the normal size.

So let's ask the obvious political question: Have national Democratic
Party leaders been drinking from Lake Apopka?

How else are we to explain the astonishing wussiness of political
leaders so unwilling to embrace their own party's ballsy principles and
earthy constituency?

Bill Clinton and his self-proclaimed "New Democrats" are an
embarrassment to the party of Jefferson and Jackson, Roosevelt and
Truman, JFK and LBJ.  Instead of standing proudly on the egalitarian
principles of the party and fighting passionately for America's
working-class majority, they cling to the moneyed elite and feebly
attempt to govern as a bunch of Casper Milquetoasts skittering toward
some mythical political "vital center" where they think they'll be
safe.  On all things they seek to portray themselves as moderates,
apparently believing that folks down at the Chat & Chew Cafe will see
this as some big political plus: "Hey Earline, I'm all pumped up about
the Democrats being so moderate toward the global scumbags and
scavengers who've hauling every last one of our good jobs off to the
Sultanate of Southeast Shish Kebob, aren't you?"

People want moderates about like a hungry family wants a lecture on
diet.

Take Texas, where I ran as a Democrat in seven primaries and general
elections during the eighties, winning five of those.  I campaigned in
every town that had a zip code, and I can tell you there is no place in
our state called Moderation.  We have New Deal, Progresso, Fair Play,
Roosevelt, Gun Barrel City, and Buck Naked ... but no Moderation. Hell,
Texans are a people who have concocted at least two dozen different
kinds of hot sauces just to put on breakfast eggs--call it what you
will, but this definitely is not a moderate culture.  We like our food,
our fun, our love affairs, and our politicos to be somewhere between
plenty-spicy and hotter-than-high-school love

My first grab for the gusto of Texas politics came in 1980, when I ran
for an oddity of an office called the Texas Railroad Commission.

Despite its quaint name, this three-member outfit has zilch to do with
railroads and much to do with regulating the powerful oil industry and
utilities.  I ran as a consumer advocate, making me about as welcome as
a tornado in a trailer park.

One day as I was campaigning in Tyler (supposedly a bastion of East
Texas business-minded conservatism), I was escorted by a local
supporter into the office of a county judge who was one of the area's
power brokers.

"Be careful here," my escort cautioned.

"This of' boy is terribly conservative, so don't dump your whole load
on him."

The judge waved me in, leaned way back in his big swivel chair, propped
his feet on the edge of his long desk, clasped his hands over his
chest, and almost seemed to drift off as I made my newly modulated
pitch on why Texas needed me on the Railroad Commission.

When I got to the punch line--usually a fulsome tirade about how the
incumbents are nothing but a pack of egg-sucking dogs running side by
side with the thieves they're supposed to be watching--I went all
mealy-mouthed and mumbled that maybe some of the commissioners were
acting kind of in a somewhat biased fashion against us consumers.

You would've thought I'd fired a pistol in the room, that's how fast
his feet dropped to the floor, his belly lurched forward over the desk,
and his eyes suddenly locked hard on mine.  I thought, Oh Jesus, I've
hit his trip wire; even mealy-mouth is too strong for this guy.  But
uh-uh.  He squinted his eyes at me and in a gravelly, tight jawed voice
he asked: "Hightower, in your private moments, wouldn't you say they're
fucking us?"

Well, yes, Judge, I would, and they are.

This political epiphany in Tyler, Texas, convinced me for good that
"Big-D" Democrats make a miserable mistake anytime they back off the
"little-d" democratic truth and underestimate the savvy and inherent
populism of people.  But then I'm not a "New Democrat."

Enter the crowning achievement of the Nouveau Demos: Bill

Clinton, the hail-and-well-met Oxford fellow who bared his inner core
to us when he explained he didn't inhale.

Guffaws all around for that.  Rush Limbaugh was sputtering and frothing
so much I thought for sure he finally was going to implode.

But was Bill's claim the obvious fib it appeared to be?  I think not. I
think this was Clinton in a moment of candor: He really hadn't inhaled!
Even as a student he wanted to have it both ways (the distinguishing
mark of "New Democrats"), seeming to have taken a toke but not really. 
Indeed, this incident was a harbinger of Clinton's presidency--we would
get whiffs of progressiveness, but we would never get high.

He first came into office by talking about "good jobs at good wages,"
noting correctly that America needs a serious jobs program, a major
raise in the minimum wage, an industrial policy, and labor law reform.
Instead he gave us the Earned Income Tax Credit to subsidize McDonald's
and other low-wage employers, and NAFTA to help Wall Street move more
of our good jobs to Mexico.  Likewise, his promise of "universal health
care for all" became a managed-care plan to fatten up Prudential and
the other insurance giants.  And now Clinton even justifies sticking a
knife in the back of middleclass Medicate families by claiming his stab
is not quite as deep as Newt's.  Same half-assed performance on the
environment, education, tax reform, poverty, and other gut-level issues
affecting ordinary folks--compromise, accommodate, capitulate, and back
up on the principles and people of his own party.

Reviewing all this, a friend of mine, a Nebraska farmer and "old"
Democrat, sighed, shook his head, and said: "I don't mind losing when
we lose, but I hate losing when we win."

Clinton and his loyalists scoff at my farmer friend, dismissively
declaring that he simply isn't being realistic.  It's a "new day," a
"global economy," and Democrats "have to march to a new beat." Besides,
they privately whine, it's hard going against the lobbyists, the
Republican reactionaries, and those Democratic Boll Weevils in
Congress--if we were to put forward a true Democratic agenda in
Washington, why... why... and their voices trail off in surrender.

Sheesh.  If the meek ever inherit the earth, the Clintonites are going
to be land barons.

Early in 1998, Clinton momentarily surprised me by declaring in

Rooseveltian terms that he intended to "achieve a landmark for our
generation: a social security system that is strong in the twenty-first
century."  At last, the battle for the middle class would be engaged! A
Democratic president was going to throw down the gauntlet to the
Republicans, who want to convert social security to a Wall Street
lottery based on privatizing and profiteering.  What was the
President's countervailing proposal?  Oh, well, gosh, you see, it's
just that, uh ... He didn't have one.  Clinton said that if he (the
most powerful officeholder in the world) proposed a specific plan, it
would be attacked by the congressional Republicans and others, and he
didn't want to get into something like that.  So how was he going to
achieve this landmark for our generation?

"By conducting nonpartisan forums in every region of the country."

Can you imagine Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman or Franklin Roosevelt
brewing such weak coffee?  They would pop Newt Gingrich right in the
snout, plant the Democratic flag on the highest hill they could find so
people could see it, and rally that Nebraska farmer and the rest of us
to battle.  But the only time Clinton has taken an uncompromising
damn-the-torpedoes stand and actually used all the knobs, levers, and
gizmos at a President's disposal was to win two items at the top of the
Republican agenda: NAFTA and GATT.  This produced warm applause from
the Gucci-and-Pucci crowd, but left the Kmart set real cold.

Sometimes you have to wonder if the chuckle heads running this "new"
party could count to twenty with their shoes off.  They run a
Republican Lite agenda, then wonder why Kmarters aren't voting or are
chasing after Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, or other weirdnesses.

They then hire a new set of even-more-Republican-like White House
assistants to give them advice on what they should do next, which is
always to move closer to the Republicans and to Wall Street.

The Democratic Party needs to move to the right like a tomcat needs to
buy a tuxedo.  They don't need to move to the "left" either.

What they desperately need to do is to move out to the Kmarts.  They
should take off their natty Brooks Brothers attire, put on those
rumpled democratic work clothes they once wore, and begin siding
unequivocally with America's working-class families.  In other words,
Be Democrats.

If they would, they would tap into the grassroots power of the workaday
majority and not only win, but be able to govern as Democrats.  There's
an army waiting, but these "New Democrats" won't move it.  They remind
me of a predicament faced by the last good Republican President America
had, Abraham Lincoln.

For a large part of the Civil War, Lincoln could not find a top
military commander capable of getting the job done.  In April 1862 the
President was perplexed to the point of total exasperation by the
bewildering reticence of General George McClellan.  At the time
McClellan's Army of the Potomac had the Confederate forces outnumbered,
outgunned, and outmaneuvered in Virginia, yet the general simply would
not move his troops against the vulnerable enemy.

It was a decisive victory waiting to happen, and Lincoln knew it, but
McClellan dawdled and diddled for days.  All the while Lincoln was
dispatching message after message asking, demanding, ordering,
beseeching his general to attack.  But nothing.  The head of the army
would not budge.  Finally, after the Confederacy had been allowed to
slip away, averting certain defeat, the President sent a final letter
dismissing McClellan from his command, saying: "If you don't want to
use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while."

If Democrats don't begin using their army--and soon--someone is going
to borrow it, and they're not likely to return it.

POLITICAL MATH

"Well, Hightower, if the people have such a hellacious progressive
streak running through them, why'd they vote for Newt Gingrich and his
gang of right-wing marauders in the 1994 congressional elections and
force Clinton to run on a Republican agenda in '96?"

Glad you asked.

They didn't.

Yes, our Loudspeaker of the House was lifted to the dais by voters who
gave 53 percent of the congressional seats to Republicans in the '94
elections, putting them in the majority for the first time in forty
years.  And yes, this electoral turnover led the ever-modest statesman
from Marietta, Georgia, to proclaim himself a visionary revolutionist
whose ascension to power amounted to nothing less than a Historic
Mandate from the People, empowering him to "renew American
civilization."

But for all of his huffing and puffing and claiming to be the "Peoples'
Choice," Newt is just another politician sipping his own bathwater and
declaring it champagne.

The media mostly swallowed it, too: "Public Swings Hard to the Right,"
blared headlines and newscasts.  Even the White House swallowed it,
with Clinton himself looking all hangdog after the election and
declaring somberly that he had gotten the message from the people and
would move to the right, more in step with the country's obvious
conservative bent.

Hold it right there!  The "people" hadn't voted for Newt, or for anyone
else.  Amazing Political Statistic Conveniently Ignored by the Media
and the Political Establishment: Six out often Americans eligible to
vote in the '94 congressional elections did not do so.  Six out of ten.
They looked at the choices and said, "Mmmmmm ... no thanks."

There's the real mandate--a 60 percent majority for "none of the
above."

Of the four out of ten people who did vote, two and a fraction marked
the Republican box.  But half of those told exit pollsters they were
not voting or the Republicans (much less for Newt's "Contract with
America"), they were voting against the Democrats.  So the

GOP's claim to the mantle of power came down to only one out of ten
eligible voters--the same 10 percent minority of true believers, party
activists, corporatists, and gee ks in golf pants (as Garrison Keillor
calls them) that always vote Republican.

The story (and lesson) of the '94 elections is not that the public
swung to the right, but that it took a walk.

Which brings us to the last presidential campaign, a total sleepwalk
for most voters.  By '96 Newt had become so unpopular with the public
that his own party put a sock in his mouth and locked him in the
basement until the election was over.  Newt had leaped to power before
people really knew anything about him, and when they finally did get a
good look at him in action in '95 ... well, as the saying goes, the
higher the monkey climbs, the more you see of its ugly side.

Meanwhile Clinton spent '95 and '96 bashing welfare mothers, hyping
foreign trade deals, demanding more death penalties, siding with
industry over the environment, going golfing with corporate lobbyists,
and generally positioning himself as a sort of Eisenhower Republican,
only not so leftish.  He even ensconced Dick Morris, a card-carrying
GOP operative (Republican senate leader Trent Lott having been one
prominent client of his), as designer and director of his presidential
reelection bid, though Morris had to leave at mid campaign after
getting caught sucking a prostitute's toes while she read advance
copies of speeches and memos he had written for Clinton.

The actual Republican nominee, "Beltway Bob" Dole, was more boring than
oatmeal on a stick.  This longtime Washington hack, whose political
idol was Richard Nixon, was so inept a presidential candidate that he
could not even come up with a campaign theme song.  First he tried
"Dole Man," done to the tune of the old Sam and Dave classic "Soul
Man," but he was threatened with a lawsuit, so he jumped to "Born in
the USA," by Bruce Springsteen.  The Boss, though, let the media know
that he was "not a supporter of the Republican ticket" and that The Bob
was using the song without permission.  Dole finally settled for
"American Boy" by Republican song man Eddie Rabbitt, best known for his
hit "I Love a Rainy Night."  At least this was better than the music
Dole heard as he took the stage at one late campaign appearance: the
theme song to "Mission Impossible."

Dole spent most of his hapless campaign complaining publicly that
Clinton was stealing the Republican agenda from him.  True, but it was
not exactly a burning, gut-level issue with potential voters, most of
whom were wondering why there wasn't a Democrat in the contest.  In a
last grasp toward the end of the race, the Republican nominee tried to
rouse public anger over corrupt campaign funds flowing into Clinton's
White House.  Good message, wrong messenger--Bob himself was a
notorious old Washington hustler whose various campaigns had collected
more special-interest cash and done more favors for contributors in his
thirty-five years in Washington than Bill could imagine.  There was a
surreal moment late in the campaign, like something out of a Fellini
film, when a bleary-eyed Dole was pounding the podium in exasperation
at a Dallas rally, demanding to know, "Where's the outrage?  Where's
the outrage?  Where's the outrage?"  His anti money pitch might have
gotten a better response had his audience not been a crowd of frat boys
and sorority girls at the exclusive Southern Methodist University--a
group whose well heeled daddies are among the bigger corrupters of
American politics.

During this pathetic excuse of a presidential campaign, I was on the
air daily with my call-in radio show, and I found that folks were not
merely turned off by candidates so blatantly mired in special interest
money and media posturing, but were fundamentally embarrassed that this
is what our politics has become.  With no effective opposition, Clinton
won, then he claimed the election as a mandate for bipartisan
cooperation on a minimalist agenda of Republicanism, and he promptly
signaled his willingness to compromise away what few Democratic
principles he had not already scuttled to get elected.

As in 1994, however, the only real mandate was for "a pox on both of
their houses."  In the race for the highest office in our land, when
deep economic and social divisions were rending our national unity, the
two major party offerings were so obviously inadequate that more than
half of the electorate--100 million Americans-stayed home rather than
sanctioning either of these bamboozlers with their ballots.  This was
the lowest turnout-percentage of voters since Calvin Coolidge and John
Davis excited the people so much back in 1924.  Clinton was so weak
that even against the comically incompetent Bob Dole he couldn't muster
a majority of the minority that did vote.  Clinton now avers that he is
the choice of the "vital center," a political artifice his spinmeisters
crafted to gloss over the ignominy of receiving only 49 percent of the
votes of the 49 percent of the people who voted.  In other words, not
quite 25 percent of the American electorate voted for Clinton, and at
least a third of them confided to exit pollsters that they were really
voting against Newtism.

The beat goes on.  Instead of reaching out to that deep, wide, and
expanding pool of disaffected voters who either are not voting or are
voting against one party or the other (or both), Clinton continues to
govern as a cross-dressing Republican and continues to put at the helm
of the Democratic Party people who prize big-money contributions over
grassroots party building.  In the spring of '98, national party
chairman Steven Grossman (a multimillionaire Massachusetts businessman
and party fund-raiser) trotted out to declare, "We're back.  We are
suited up, on the field, and ready for the 1998 battle ahead."  What
did he mean?  Had the Democrats recruited a fresh batch of
people-minded congressional candidates, built a solid
precinct-by-precinct organization, decided to push a pro-worker agenda
that would turn voter yawns into cheers?  Grossman didn't mention these
essential blocks of party building.

He was referring solely to the fact that Clinton, Gore, and the other
money grubbers of the party had raised $12 million in the first quarter
of the year.  In response, the Republican Party, fresh from having
killed campaign finance reform in the Congress, calmly announced that
it had raised $18 million in the first quarter.  The opening whistle
for the congressional elections had not yet blown, and already the
Democrats were 6 million points behind, because they are on the wrong
field playing the wrong game.

Grossman, Clinton, Gore, and the rest would do well to heed a story
that South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle tells on himself.  The Democratic
senator says that during a visit to a nursing home in his state, he
walked into the recreation room and found a group of very aged
gentlemen whiling away the time watching television.  He stepped over
to one of them, began shaking his hand, and asked, "Do you know who I
am?"  The old fellow said, "No, but if you go to the front desk,
they'll tell you."

The good news is that some Democrats know who they are and are trying
to reestablish the party's identity as champion of the middle class,
not by running slick image ads on television, but simply by going out
to the people and visiting with them.  For example, throughout 1998,
Representative David Bonior, Marcy Kaptur, Bart Stupak, John Lewis,
Bill Delahunt, Karen Thurman, George Miller, Bob Filner, and a few
other insurgent Democrats still in possession of their democratic
ideals have been making a series of two- to three day bus trips to
places like Columbus, Georgia; south central Los Angeles; Gainesville,
Florida; suburban Atlanta; and Merced, California.  They are meeting
not with lobbyists, contributors, or organizational bigwigs, but with
folks, hearing the personal stories about how the American Dream itself
is being trampled by the Wall Street-Washington stampede to maximize
global greed.  As mentioned in the introduction to this volume, I was
aboard the bus for many of these trips and had the chance to have my
own sideline conversations with workers, farmers, and others we
encountered along the way.  At every stop, someone would finally get
around to asking-either in a whispered, quizzical tone or in a bold,
demanding manner--the question that bothers a lot of Americans: "Where
the hell has the Democratic Party been?"

Sadly, most of the party's leaders remain inside the Beltway, tethered
to their corporate funders, lip-synching "free-trade" platitudes with
Republican leaders.  Representative Cal Dooley, co-chair of the
Republicanesque "New Democrat Coalition" in Congress, even expressed
dismay that Bonior and his breakaway bunch of air-trade Democrats were
going out among the rabble to discuss this explosive issue: "We just
spent two days at Wintergreen la Virginia resort] talking about issues
that unify the party," he moaned.

"I find this entirely inconsistent with efforts to maintain Democratic
Party unity."

Excuse me Cal, I know that I'm not exactly bent over double with
intellect, but common sense tells me there is a brighter Democratic
future in appealing to the disaffected majority than in constantly
trying to out-Republican the Republicans to squeeze a victory out of
the voting minority.  Some say we need a third party.  I say we need a
second one.

ADVICE

After I first took office as Texas agriculture commissioner in
1983-having run a head butting bloodletting campaign against the
chemical companies, the right-wing Farm Bureau, and other forces of
ignorance and arrogance--these same forces sent their lobbyists around
to see me, offering big toothy smiles, cooing words of congratulations,
and proffering checks to help pay off my campaign debt.  It's a ritual
in Texas politics called "getting well."

The Farm Bureau lobbyist, a particularly smarmy character, took me by
the elbow, pulled me closer to him than I ever wanted to be, and with
his hot, Binaca-tinged lobbyist's breath whispered confidentially into
my ear: "Now that you're in, Hightower, we can start with a clean
slate.  You move over to the middle of the road and we'll get along
juuussst fine."

Later I was laughing about this with a farmer I knew from Deaf Smith
County.  This corn farmer looked me in the eye and gave me the truest
political advice I ever got: "The hell with the middle of the road," he
said, "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and
dead armadillos."

I wish we had more politicians willing to live by that creed, willing
to stand flat-footed for what and who they really believe in.

Instead we mostly get tap dancers: "I'm foursquare for the working
people, as you know ... but tap pity-tap pity tap-tap), let's not do
anything that might upset the bond market; I'm 100 percent pure green
for the environment... but tap pity-tap, tap pity tap-tap) we can't do
anything that might pinch the profits of the chemical boys, you
understand?"

Yeah, we understand you're not going to do diddly for working people
and the environment.

I learned early on that if you're going to do anything in office
besides hold it, first you have to make choices about who it is you
want to help, then (and most importantly) you need to have the cojones
to take on the powers that are running over those people.

Want to help organic farmers?  Better strap on your butt-kicking boots
and get ready for the onrush of the pesticide companies,

bankers, AM chemical pushers, and the rest of the ag establishment,
including their toadying politicians.

Now don't be clucking your tongue and lecturing on how politics is the
"art of compromise."  Sure it is--compromise is essential to democracy
and all that.  But one doesn't come out of the chute compromising;

ride that bucking, twisting bull for all you are worth first!

Reach your compromises honestly, after you've given it your best
shot.

Notice that Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and other far-right
protectors of the powerful have had little queasiness about pushing
their agenda: "We're for rich people, now get out of our way,
dammit."

But middle-of-the-road Democrats are always hemming and hawing from the
get-go: "Hey, about that universal-health-care-for-all thing, we were
just tossing it out for the hell of it, we know you can't sit still for
that, but, seriously, tell us, what do you think you could do, maybe a
little more money so a few uninsured children could get some coverage,
how about that, huh?"  In his 1997 State of the Union peroration, Bill
Clinton did a little tap dance on this very topic.  In one sentence he
expressed his heartfelt concern that "40 million Americans still lack
health insurance," then just two sentences later he revealed the depths
of his political courage by vowing that, by jiminy, his new budget
would propose coverage for "up to five million" of them.  It turns out
he didn't even deliver on this eighth of a loaf.  A year later, 41
million Americans lack health insurance.  And he wonders why even
Democratic historians already have written him off as a "low average"
President, right alongside such giants as Gerald Ford and George Bush,
and just above the "failed presidencies" of Herbert Hoover and Richard
Nixon.

In surveys of what people want in a politician, at the top of the list
is the guts to come right out and say what the hell they think.  As a
man from Iowa said in a recent survey: "I would like to see a candidate
that would just simply state, "I know everybody is not going to agree
with me.  If you don't agree with me, don't vote for me.  But if you
vote for me, I'm going to try to do exactly this."" Seems to me we
would have a stronger political system in our country, a much broader
and more honest debate about things people care about, and far more
participation in the process if more politicians did as this fellow
says: Choose a side and come out fighting.

The shame is not in losing, but in clinging to office, afraid to lose.
Politics isn't supposed to be a career anyway.

CAMPAIGNING

About the only actual joy I found in political campaigning is the one
thing the polling consultants, fund-raising consultants, media
consultants, issue consultants, advertising consultants, makeup
consultants, GOTV consultants, and all the other purveyors of political
"science" are doing their damnedest to eliminate: campaigning.  I don't
mean the glazed-eyed glad-handing and formal speechifying, but the
simple chance to be among the amazingly diverse people of a community
or state in a way few others experience--being invited inside their
meeting places, to sit around their kitchen tables, to drink in their
juke joints, even to join them in their churches, experiencing the
laughter, songs, food, accents, and the whole human richness that is
the glory of our country.

Consider food.  Any politician who complains about the rubber chicken
circuit is a politician spending way too much time at the hotel
banquets of organized interests.  Ordinary folks don't eat rubber
chicken.

My mouth still waters for the duck gumbo I was served when I stopped by
unannounced at the IBEW union hall in 1986 in Bridge City, right in the
heart of Texas Cajun country, with the duck so fresh there was buckshot
in the gumbo.  Then there was a South Texas pachanga held in my honor
about dusk one evening on a vacant lot next to a Texaco station; I
thought I had died and gone to heaven as I wolfed down not one, two, or
three, but four of whatever that succulent thing was absolutely oozing
juices and flavor from inside those plain flour tortillas, learning
only later from my grinning hosts that it was trip as or cow guts. Ever
had a "Pearl sandwich"?

I did on my way to a Czech-American gathering in East Bernard, Texas,
not far from Houston.  The "sandwich" is one Pearl beer between two
others.  You want chicken?  Try the ambrosial chicken and dumplings
with fresh collard greens and sweet potato pie dished out at the little
cafe at Pounds Field, the airport outside Tyler, Texas--surely one of
the few airport eateries in America with food that people want to eat.
They come from miles around to get a bite whether they have a plane to
meet or not.

Another virtue of grassroots campaigning is that the experience won't
let politicians get away with putting on airs and feeling self
important because, well, as the bumper sticker plainly states: "Shit
Happens."  Like the time I spoke to the Denison Lions Club.  This was a
major moment in my life because my Daddy had been a loyal member there
since before I was a Cub Scout.  He held every office from "tail
twister" to president, and in all those years I had never gotten so
much as a glimpse inside their meeting room in the funky Hotel
Denison.

So here I was, the commissioner of agriculture for the whole state of
Texas, forty-something years old, and invited at last into Daddy's
Lions' den.  I prepared a hell of a speech and was no more than a
fourth deep into its wise words and hilarious stories when, out of the
corner of my eye, I caught sight of Beuford Thomas, one of Denison's
proud police officers, sort of scuttling up to the head table sideways
like a sand crab.  He began whispering importantly to one of the
official Lions at the end of the table.  Try as I might to hold the
crowd with my spellbinding talk, Beuford's whispering grew louder and
more insistent until every Lion's eye was on the end of the table,
rather than on center stage, where my self-assurance had begun to wane,
despite the resplendent power tie I had selected particularly for this
occasion.  There was nothing to do but halt and give the floor over to
Beuford, who officiously announced that there was a car double-parked
out on Chestnut Street, and if said vehicle was licensed to any Lion in
attendance, said Lion should deal with it PDQ or suffer the full
consequences of the parking ordinances of the municipality of Denison,
Texas.

Having spake, he moved on, leaving me in the shambles of my speech.
Politics, at its best, is always slightly humiliating for the
politicians, which I think is a pretty healthy thing for a democracy.
If nothing else, it forces them to get a sense of humor, and Lord knows
we're frightfully short of that.

Humor is so rare in politics these days that I've actually been asked
by the New York Times where I come up with my stuff, like maybe I'd
been sipping some well water no one else in politics knew about.  No
magic to it--in addition to being born full of bull, having a daddy
named "High," and being a faithful reader of the comics and sports
pages, I'm on the road and on talk radio a lot, constantly rubbing up
against the funny bones of hoi polloi.  Like the elderly preacher--had
to be eighty--who shuffled up to me after a talk I had given, patted my
arm, and said in a confiding voice: "Some of these rich folks today
seem to think everything belongs to them and they'll even get to take
it with them when they die.  But you know what, Mr.  Hightower?  You
don't ever see a hearse pulling a U-Haul."

He smiled a big, gentle smile, like he knew he'd just put that line
someplace where it wouldn't die.  I've lost that preacher's name, but
I've sure spread his jewel of a line all across America.  Amen,
preacher, and thank you.

I especially enjoy the self-deprecating humor that abounds in my state.
Just one quick example: I was invited to a town meeting in Parma Maria,
a Polish-American settlement southeast of San Antonio.  To put an
Austin outsider at ease, the chairwoman started the meeting by telling
me not to worry about getting everyone's name straight, most of which
didn't include a single vowel.  She proceeded to tell a story of a
local fellow who had gone to San Antonio for an eye exam.  The doctor
flicked on the light for the eye chart and asked the guy if he could
read the bottom line.

"Read it?"  he exclaimed.

"Hell, I know him!"

There's the rub, I think, in today's politics: Politicians don't "know"
the people because they simply aren't much among them.

Oh, sure, members of Congress will stage their own town meetings every
now and then, carefully stacking the crowd with supporters quick to
pounce on any hapless dissenter who actually tries to quiz hizzoner; or
some computer-chip employees will be blitzed by a visiting
congresswoman, grinning, bubbling, and shaking hands for the benefit of
the TV cameras trailing behind her, getting it all on tape for a
twenty-second bit on the 6 o'clock news.  The "people" are little more
than fodder for photo ops, focus groups, speechwriters, and campaign
ads--not a body for politicians to mess with, and certainly not for
them to listen to.

At least the people in these photo ops actually exist.  In 1996 the
Clinton campaign ratcheted down the bar for cynical campaigning by
having the President feign concern for a person who was not there.
Radio host Harry Shearer tells of whiling away time in Chicago as he
awaited Clinton's arrival at the Democratic convention by watching
live, unedited satellite feed of the Democrat's train trek from
Washington to the Windy City (surely a case of coals to

Newcastle).  Of course, the whole whistle stop journey was a staged
event, with advance staffers assembling a mass of bodies at each stop
and prompting "spontaneous" crowd responses to the Big Man's arrival,
speech, and departure.

With every line and move choreographed, Shearer was surprised by an
impromptu move Clinton made at the first train side speech he saw on
the satellite monitor.  The President suddenly interrupted his remarks
to ask solicitously about the condition of someone in the audience who
apparently had been overcome with standing so long in the sun.

"You need a doctor?"  Clinton asked, full of human concern.

Then he says urgently, "We need a doctor over here.  We need a doctor,
and my medical team."

It was a nice, personal touch, and Shearer was impressed.  Until he
watched Clinton do the same thing at the next stop.  And the next.

During nearly every train side talk, all the way to Chicago, the
President of the United States pretended that someone in his audience
was sick and that he was the Good Samaritan, dispensing aid.

The cameras never turned away from Clinton, so viewers never knew that
the victim was not there.

Campaign consultants insist that politicians must spend their time with
"people who count"--major contributors, power brokers, key media
personalities, consultants (of course!), and ... well, you know, the
players.  Politicians no longer feel compelled to live in our
neighborhoods or send their kids to public schools.  They lunch at the
Casa de la Maison House (as Calvin Trillin calls such places), not at
the Chat & Chew, and they party and play with lobbyists and
contributors, not with any of us.

This is why members of Congress don't know the price of a loaf of
bread, much less know you.  It's also why the ineffable, and now
infamous, Representative Frederick Heineman of North Carolina (one of
Newt's red-hot Republican freshmen elected in 1994) could say with
pursed lips and a straight face that his congressional salary of
$133,600 a year plus $50,000 a year he gets in other income doesn't
make him rich.

"That does not make me middle class.  That makes me tower-middle class.
When I see someone who is making from $300,000 to $750,000 a year,
that's middle class.  When I see anyone above that, that's
upper-middle-class."

If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights on

Fred's head.  Eighty percent of us Americans--eight out often of us--
make less than $50,000.  Half of us make less than $30,000.  This is
where the middle class lives.  Come on down and visit sometime!

Fred's constituents paid him a visit in '96, not just knocking on his
door, but knocking him out of office.

Still, Fred's tethers to reality are not that much looser than those of
most high public officials, who continue to live somewhere way out in
the ozone, largely uninterested in the travails of ordinary voters,
much less the thoughts of disaffected nonvoters.  Money and media is
all that matters, and if you can't deliver either, you rank just above
a head of cabbage on their political-importance meter.  I saw this
cynical reality in action in the '88 presidential run, when Democratic
nominee Michael "The Massachusetts Miracle" Dukakis darted in and out
of Austin three or four times.  His crack team of self-absorbed
political operatives had his visits down to stopwatch precision:

4:00 PM Wheels down, Austin airport.

4:05 PM MD greets local state officials on tarmac.

4:08 PM POLICE ESCORT.  MD and entourage to state Capitol; traffic
blocked along route, FULL SPEED authorized.

4:13 PM Arrive at Capitol for photo-op and rally with state officials
and party loyalists.  Full media coverage.

4:20 PM MD speaks (15 minutes).

4:35 PM MD departs Capitol.

4:45 PM MD arrives at Headliner's Club for private greet and-go with
party contributors ($5,000 minimum soft-money pledge by invitees).

5:30 PM POLICE ESCORT.  MD and entourage to Austin airport;

traffic blocked, FULL SPEED authorized.

5:35 PM Arrive airport and load.

5:45 PM Wheels up.

Slam, barn, thank you ma'am, the "Duke" does Austin in under two
hours.

Witnessing this technically proficient, quickie campaigning on
Dukakis's first trip in late summer, and noting national media reports
that the guy was not exactly catching fire with minorities, working
stiffs, 'id others whose votes he would have to count on in November, I
dared to propose to the East Coast Einstein running his Texas campaign
that on his next trip to Austin, Dukakis extend his stay from an hour
and forty-five minutes to a full two hours.

It had occurred to me that while there was no possibility of getting
our media-and-money-centric presidential nominee actually to campaign
among regular people, it just might be possible to get him to wave to
some.  Call me a radical lunatic, but it seemed worth the effort, what
with the presidency and all at stake.

Here was the nub of my thinking: Dukakis's pell-mell rush from the
Austin airport to the capital (and back) takes him right down Martin
Luther King Boulevard and right through East Austin neighborhoods of
black, working-class families.  OK, the nominee is waaaay too busy to
stop for an East Austin rally or neighborhood walk-through, but how
about this?  Instead of his ripping through the neighborhoods, tucked
invisibly inside a dark limousine going sixty mph with sirens screaming
... slooowwww hiiimmmm dooowwwnnnn, maybe to ten mph, and put the
Dukester in a convertible so a goodly number of his own constituency
might get a glimpse of him caring enough at least to wave to them.

Well, Dukakis's handlers looked at me as though a cockroach had spoken
to them.

"No time for that stuff, Hightower.  We've got a Houston fund-raiser at
seven.  Gotta go.  We're counting on you state officials to get the
vote out here in Austin.  See you next trip" ... and "thillbbbbttttt,"
they were gone.

Unfortunately the Dukakis campaign was no aberration.

Incumbent senators from California, Florida, New York, Texas, or other
big states now typically allocate 80 percent of their available
politicking hours not for meeting voters or even giving speeches, but
for phoning and meeting privately with the lobbyists and other high
rollers who bankroll their reelection campaigns.  Their average haul is
some $10 million per run, nearly half of which they dump into the
production and airing of media spots, about 95 percent of which are
either howling attack ads against their opponents or pure puff pieces
to exaggerate whatever microscopic speck of virtue the beleaguered
media consultant can find buried deep inside the sob's sorry
character.

So more and more people, having been stiffed again and again by the
high-tech low-touch politics of both parties, are dropping out.  And
you know what?  The parties don't care!  Not even the Democrats!

You expect the GOP to yearn for the good old days when only white male
property owners could vote, but Democrats?  Nonvoters are
overwhelmingly good Democratic prospects--working stiffs.

But the once-proud "Party of the People" shows no interest whatsoever
in going after the people.

In my final political race, 1990, I teamed with Texas Land Commissioner
Garry Mauro to propose a little democratic idea to all the other
Democratic statewide candidates, from governor to state judges.  The
nub of it was that of the $25 million total all of us would spend in
the general election, we should allocate about $750,000 to identify,
target, and bring to the polls a big block of guaranteed Democratic
voters who otherwise would not show up.

These are people who consistently go to the polls for the general
election in presidential years and consistently vote for the Democrat,
but they don't show up for the general election in such non
presidential years as 1990--the very year that such scintillating and
altogether superb candidates as Mauro and me might need their votes.

They live in strongly Democratic counties where the "real election" in
off-years like 1990 is the spring Democratic primary, where such
locally important and often hotly contested offices as sheriff, county
commissioner, and state rep are up for grabs.  Whoever gets the
Democratic nomination is usually a slam-dunk to win the general
election, so large numbers of these voters don't bother to return to
the polls in November.

Stupidly, since we statewide Democratic candidates knew we would win
these counties in the fall, we had not been targeting these
presidential-year Democratic voters, ignoring the fact that we could be
getting a lot more votes there if we tried.

Mauro and I calculated that with even a modest effort to find and talk
with these folks in selected precincts, simply telling them that their
participation in the '90 fall election would matter very much to us
statewide Democrats, at least 300,000 of them would bother.  This would
have produced an extra turnout of better than 5 percent--more than
enough to provide the margin of victory in practically every race, just
for asking, just for telling people they really mattered.

But no go.

What?!  Why would our gubernatorial nominee Ann Richards and all the
other statewide Democratic candidates turn down a 5 percent windfall?
Because in big states like ours, where it's hard for any of us to
"feel" an election with any sense of security, it's easy to fall into
the smothering arms of Campaign Consultants.

And their campaign consultants were like Chechen separatists in their
histrionic determination to crush this simple flower of an idea.

"Spend $750,000 for 300,000 votes?"  they hissed into their candidates'
ears, "why, that's $2.50 a vote!  Think of all the TV ads that would
buy in Texarkana."  Knock, knock, we countered, we're talking about
300,000 guaranteed votes for you, a cushion of 5 percent plus.

Anyone home?

No one was, because our idea was untested, and anyway, everyone knows
TV ads win elections.  Don't they?  That's what the consultants tell
us.

But something more basic than spending strategy was at the root of the
vehemence against actually trying to enlist more voters in this
campaign.  In an unguarded moment one of the top consultants, a
twenty-year veteran in the system, snapped: "We already have enough
voters.  We don't need any more."

On one level he was saying to nonvoters: You don't matter.  But on a
more commercially crass level he was saying: Hey, I own the
computerized, annotated, and cross-indexed list of current November
voters, which I get to resell to you dimwitted candidates every four
years for about a quarter-million bucks a pop.  I do not, however, have
a list of these on-and-off voters, and Mauro and Hightower are
proposing not only to create it but.  Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph, simply
to give it to the state party for its use in perpetuity!

No way in hell am I going to sit still for this.

So the consultants, much more interested in their fees than in 300,000
additional voters, snuffed our proposal.

I lost my election that year by the narrow margin of only 40,000 votes.
Four years later, still with no outreach program to enlist those
300,000 or more presidential-year voters, Ann Richards lost her
reelection race for governor.

The consultants, including Mr.  We-Don't-Need-Any-More Voters are still
in business, still collecting their fees and dispensing their excellent
expertise to a new set of candidates, while voter turnout continues to
dwindle and more and more Republicans replace Democrats in state
office.

At the national level consultants are even more powerful, with the
media now evaluating candidates' chances not on their ideas or
grassroots appeal, but on which team of professionals they assemble and
the amount of money raised to pay them.  These hired guns are
contemptuous of issues and voters alike, seeing both merely as so many
inputs to be manipulated through a mechanical politics of fund-raising,
polling, focus groups, and advertising--all of which they happen to get
paid big bucks to do.  Instead of real-life, down to-earth, hands-on
politics, the system is giving us "virtual campaigns," making a mockery
of our democracy.

CHURCH

One of the strangest, most kamikaze political strategies yet devised is
the ongoing campaign by some liberals to get religion out of
politics.

Of course, what has the liberals all worked up is the political
skullduggery and general slickum of Reverend Pat Robertson's "Christian
Coalition," Reverend Jerry Falwell's "Liberty Alliance," and other
outcroppings of the "Christian Right."  But be careful where you step
on this path, liberal friends, because you might get stuck on your own
chewing gum.

Let's start with the fact that the church is on the regular itinerary
of any halfway progressive Democrat running for office practically
anywhere in America.  Not the particular shrines of Robertson and
Falwell, but such houses of worship as Sacred Heart Catholic Church on
the south side of Waco Texas.

Sacred Heart baptized me in the practice of pulpit politics one
searingly hot Sunday afternoon in August 1981.  While Waco is renowned
as the Buckle on the Bible Belt and home to Baylor University, it also
boasts a burgeoning Mexican-American population, and it was a parish of
these good people I was invited to address.  It was an outdoor
occasion, the annual celebration of Sacred Heart's founding, that gave
the priest the excuse he needed to introduce a favored politico to his
flock ... in a totally nonpartisan, nonpolitical way, don't you know! I
remember it fondly not only because it was my first church gig, but
especially because when I arrived on this dry, scorching day and was
escorted into the rectory, the first sound that greeted me as I opened
the door was the pulsating, high-pitched b-zzzzzzttt b-zzzzzzttt
b-zzzzzzttt of a well-used Waring blender, with my priest friend bent
over it industriously concocting frozen margaritas and gaily waving me
in with the priestly salutation: "Strawberry or watermelon?"  Church
politicking ain't gonna be half-bad, I decided right then and there.

Some of the richest, most joyous experiences I have had in politics
have been in church, including the hour I spent in Reverend Edwin
Davis's Galilee Baptist Church in the Acres Home section of Houston. It
was October 1986, and I was making a series of scheduled campaign stops
at African-American churches.  This was always festive and fun
campaigning for me.  I would be escorted by a respected church member
into one Sunday service after another, where I would be welcomed by the
minister and allowed to say a few words about the theological
imperative of the entire congregation turning out on Election Day to
vote for me and the whole Democratic ticket, all according to God's own
Cosmic Plan.  I would arrive, greet, soak up a bit of the jubilant
singing, speak my piece, jump in a car, and dash away to the next
church, visiting about four in a single morning.

In these churches, Sunday service runs 11 a.m. to at least 1 p.m., and
politicians are supposed to be out of the way by noon, which is when
the preacher gets down to the more profound business of saving souls.
On this particular Sunday, though, I arrived a bit past 12 at Reverend
Davis's church, and he was already wading rhetorically into the
cleansing waters of the River Jordan, just beginning to get into the
cadence of his sermon, Beulah Sheppard, the church member who escorted
me in, gestured for me to sit with her in a pew midway down the aisle
and whispered that the reverend would call on me after he was
through.

No one told me what a ride I was in for.  I thought I had been to
church before, but I soon learned that there is church, and then there
is church.

Pastor Davis is a "singing preacher," literally belting out his homily
in song, delivering it a cappella in a driving, bluesy, rich, rhythmic
baritone that both laughs and cries, is playful one minute and deeply
soulful the next, rises to a shout then plunges to a whisper, sweeping
you up in its hypnotic musicality, all the while delivering an
intoxicating mix of biblical admonitions, everyday anecdotes, twinkling
one-liners, personal tragedies, and pointed parables, exploring all
nine levels of hell before lifting everyone within sound of his voice
onto the true path of redemption and giving us all a teasing glimpse of
the glorious light of heaven.  He sings extemporaneously for a good
forty-five minutes, constantly interacting with the congregation,
moving from his pulpit to the pews and back again, never missing a
beat.  It was the most mesmerizing forty-five minutes I've ever spent
anywhere listening to anyone on any subject.

So powerful is this musical messenger, so emotional his delivery, that
the experience leaves you all wrung out, and many of the faithful in
attendance this Sunday soon were swooning.  This was expected, though,
and several of the sisters of Galilee Baptist had been positioned to
handle the situation.  Dressed in white uniforms, they stood watch at
the rear of the church, moving swiftly and silently to the sides of
those who began to show telltale signs of ecstasy, preventing harm by
catching them in mid-swoon, either placing them gently back in their
pews or literally carrying them out of the sanctuary into a back room
to recuperate.

As the preacher continued, first one, then three, then four, and soon
many more of the congregation were hauled out, including several
members of the choir.  It slowly dawned on me-the-politician that, wait
a minute, there are not going to be more than a dozen people left by
the time I get up to make my political pitch.  Then a truly horrific
thought came to me: I'm supposed to follow this preacher!  The only
white guy in the room is supposed to get up and talk to them about
voting for agriculture commissioner after they've just been shown the
depths of hell and delivered back to the euphoria of salvation?

But there I was.  The time came and the reverend did call me forward.

I faced the remaining churchgoers, who looked up at me through
blinking, emotionally exhausted eyes, as though I had just shaken them
awake from some dream.  I stood as close to Reverend Davis as possible
and said, in essence, "I'm with him."  Shortest speech I ever gave.

I know, I know--for every preacher, priest, or rabbi letting me in the
door, there's a Pat Robertson praising God for Jesse Helms, embracing
Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," and waging a terrible Holy War
against liberals, environmentalists, women, unions, Sesame Street, the
PTA, books, welfare recipients, Time magazine, UNICEF, Ted Kennedy,
Episcopalians, government, Hillary Clinton, Democrats, democrats, and
even The Lion King (they say that if you look very, very closely, there
is a moment in Disney's animated flick where a cloud of dust rises up
and seems to spell out S-E-X).

But the presence of a few seriously twisted Beelzebubs in the pulpits
of the "Christian Right" doesn't mean everyone in the far flung flock
of conservative Christianity is afflicted with a terminal case of
political right-wingitis.  After all, we're talking about some 51
million people.  Here's my contrarian's notion: Instead of progressives
expending energy trying to exorcise the Pat Robertsons from politics,
better we should put our energies into winning the political souls of
those church members the Robertsons claim to speak for.

Whoa, you say, we might as well try to herd cats as try winning over
those people!

But who are "those" people?

In large part they are working class and poor, often they are black and
Hispanic.  It is not politics that draws them to the churches of the
religious right, but the church itself--both the welcoming sociability
of the church family and the reassuring religious doctrine that God
takes an active role in their everyday lives.

Politically they are hybrids.  On such family and cultural issues as
abortion, prayer in schools, birth control, homosexuality, and
pornography--count them as staunchly conservative.  But on economic
issues--mark them down as William Jennings Bryan.

In an important, insightful, in-depth, and therefore widely ignored
analysis, two Indiana sociology professors reported that Robertson and
Falwell try to throw a wide loop with a mighty short rope when they
claim that conservative Christians bless the Republican right wing's
congressional assault on poor folks, working families, and that old
devil government.  Yes, Falwell, Robertson, and other political
televangelists shout, "Hallelujah" at every whacking of Medicaid and
cry, "Thank you Jesus!"  when the privileged are awarded a new tax
loophole--but if you listen, you won't hear any big chorus of "Amen"
being shouted back by the congregation, Remember, the congregations are
working-class families, middle income and less.  While they might not
love government, they know they don't want to be left to the tender
mercies of unbridled big business, which is the secular salvation
offered by the Right Reverend Gingrich.  Nancy Davis and Robert
Robinson, authors of the groundbreaking report, found that
rank-and-file religious conservatives "are actually more egalitarian
and more favorable toward government intervention to assist the poor
and reduce class inequality than are moral progressives."  Specifically
they found that these supposedly "conservative" churchgoers strongly
favor government efforts to reduce the income gap between rich and
poor, government providing a job for everyone who wants one,
government-paid health care for all, ample welfare spending, aggressive
labor unions, making corporations put more of their profits into better
wages and benefits for workers, and ... well, an agenda that is pretty
much the opposite of what Republican politicians are pushing and
Democratic politicians are meekly accepting these days.

In conclusion, wrote the analysts: "The term "Religious Right' implies
a broad-based conservatism that does not exist."

It does not exist in the Bible, either.  At Waples Methodist Church,
where I grew up steeped in the blood of the lamb, I recall many a
sermon that began with Jesus's words in Matthew 19:24: "It is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of God."  I recall that the greatest sin of them all,
"the root of all evil" according to Jesus, is "the love of money."  I
recall the vivid and passionate retelling, by Sunday School teachers as
well as preachers, of the time Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the
temple--threw them out for charging interest rates far less than the
usurious rates we are now charged on our Visas and Master Cards by the
way.  I recall Mary's song in Luke 1:52-53:

"He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low
degree; he hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he
hath sent empty away."  I recall that Jesus fed all the masses that day
on the mountainside at the Sea of Galilee, not just those few who could
afford the price of fishes and loaves.  I recall the hellacious fate of
Dives, the rich man who would not give even the crumbs from his table
to the beggar Lazarus.  And I recall that Jesus flatly said: "You
cannot serve both God and Mammon."

Such graphic condemnations of greed, such potent parables conveying
what God thinks of the powerful and the privileged, such godly alarm at
the disparities between the rich and the rest of us are central to the
teachings of the Bible.  In the good book, Jesus talks about economic
justice more than almost any other subject, and the apostles make clear
that the most important ethical religious test in the Judeo-Christian
experience is how we treat the least wealthy, the least important among
us.

Yet instead of gleefully grabbing this treasure trove of moral
progressivism and reaching out to the millions of our fellow citizens
who cradle these biblical lessons inside their hearts, there is an
unfortunate tendency among most liberal leaders to view the Bible and
its adherents cynically, and they rather prissily reject the emotional
power of religion to move people.  Instead of appealing to the
religious, liberals today are pursuing a self-defeating strategy of
trying to ignore or ostracize them.

OK, admittedly there is a chasm wider than Rush Limbaugh's mouth
separating liberals from these people on social issues.  I've had it
explained to me thusly: "Hey, Hightower, the Pope has his mind riveted
shut on the choice issue, he's a complete jerk-off on women in the
priesthood, he's from Never-Never Land on birth control, and he wears a
silly hat... so screw him."

But isn't this the same guy who speaks out against income disparities
in our country and around the world, who lambastes global corporations
for pillaging poor workers and ravaging the environment, and who has
even traveled to America to say to our faces that Gingrich's "Contract"
is a moral stinker?  Isn't there something here--something big--to
build on politically?

And even though Pat Robertson is given to such bull-goose crazy crap as
referring to non-Christians as termites, declaring that "the time has
come for a godly fumigation," ordinary, get-up-and-go-to church
conservative Christians don't agree with that any more than they agree
with those letters Robertson sent to members of Congress in 1995,
claiming that giving new tax loopholes to wealthy speculators was the
Christian thing to do.

When these religious folks sit down at their kitchen tables in the
morning for a quick bowl of cornflakes and a cup of coffee before
dashing off to their jobs, they're not talking about abortion and
prayer in the schools.  They're wondering how they can keep making ends
meet on the miserable paychecks they're getting, they're worried about
paying for Grandma's nursing home bills, they're concerned about
whether their daughter will get to go to college, they're discussing
the rumors that Dad's company is going to shut down and out source his
work to nickel-an-hour villagers in the Indian Punjab, they're
realizing they'll never get to retire, they're thinking ... progressive
thoughts, the kind of thoughts Jesus would bless and nurture if he were
sitting with them.  The fact that these families believe that Jesus is
sitting with them ought not deter progressive political organizers from
asking to pull up a chair, too.

It is only recently that progressives abandoned these kitchens, and we
are all the poorer for it.  From William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of
Gold" speech to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech,

 R

from Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker's crusade in the cities to Cesar
Chavez's United Farm Workers' fight in the fields, great progressive
movements in our nation have been unabashedly evangelical, often
connected directly to the churches and always rooted deeply in the
radical message and democratic values of Jesus.  Why give up such moral
power, especially at a time when economic fairness and social justice
are at the core of so many people's daily struggles?

There is a Christian Progressivism awaiting, not just among a religious
intelligentsia or a clique of card-carrying liberal Christians, but
among the millions of Pentecostals, Catholics, holiness churches, and
other evangelicals wrongly presumed to be the property of the
"Christian Right."  Despite the self-serving claims of Robertson and
other para-political, false-profits of the right wing, most of their
own flock cannot find a home in the racist, anti worker laissez-faire,
caveat emptor, never-give-a-sucker-an-even-break, big-business,
Republican Party of Newt Gingrich, Phil Gramm, and those other hounds
from hell.  (While Republicans keep insisting that God is on their
side, I cite biblical evidence that Jesus actually is a Democrat-check
Matthew 21:1 and you'll find that he didn't ride triumphantly into
Jerusalem that first Palm Sunday on any elephant, but on the sturdy
back of a donkey.  I rest my case.) Sadly, though, the only Democratic
alternative Christian believers see today is the strategically
challenged leadership of Bill Clinton and his clueless band of "New
Democrats," who are marching off into the distance under the twin
banners of "social liberalism" and "economic conservatism"--the exact
opposite of what makes this massive constituency tick.  These New
Democrats are like the guy in a joke I was told recently by my dentist.
Seems a guy went to his doctor, complaining of sexual inadequacy.

"Nothing wrong with you that a little light exercise won't cure," the
doctor assured him.

"Tell you what, I want you to begin taking walks.  Just walk about five
miles a day for the next ten days or so, then call me back and let's
see how you're doing."

Ten days later the fellow calls in and says, "Boy, Doc, you were right
about this exercise business, I feel great, strong as a bull!"

"So," the doctor asks, "how's your sex life?"

"Sex life?"  the guy asks incredulously, "Doc, I'm fifty miles from
home."

THE DAY JIM BOB DISCOVERED DEMOCRACY

Senator Mitch McConnell is fast becoming a favorite of mine.  At least
as smart as Clan Quayle, this Kentucky Republican can always be counted
on for a boffo performance whenever the Senate considers any sort of
political reform.  He's against it, you see, whatever it is.

Like some amiable twit from one of P. G. Wodehouse's send-ups of the
British upper crust, my man McConnell simply cannot fathom why there is
a need to change anything.  For him the system is doing smashingly
well, thank you, just dandy.  Stop lobbyists from giving
all-expenses-paid junkets to senators?  Outlaw the soft money loophole
that lets a corporation grease the wheels of government by injecting
half-a-million dollars (or howsoever much it takes) into a political
campaign?  Mitch doesn't see the point.

Especially mirthful, was McConnell's contribution to a heady debate the
Senate fell into one day concerning you voters, or more specifically,
the majority of you who are choosing not to vote.

"Why?"  was the question perplexing our learned Solons.  Rising to the
occasion, Mitch opined that he saw nothing at all to worry about: "Low
voter turnout shows that people are happy with the job we're doing in
Washington."

Happy?  Mitch, if you get one digit dumber, we're going to have to
start watering you twice a week.

People are not "happy," nor are they "lazy,"

"stupid," or "apathetic," three pejoratives often hurled at the
nonvoting public.  What they are is mightily PO'd, as can be confirmed
by anyone who has put his or her finger on the throbbing pulse of the
body politic.  The Harwood Group has done exactly this regularly and
extremely well during the past few years.  They're a nonpartisan,
independent outfit that has been conducting a series of in-depth and
very telling conversations with plain citizens about their attitudes
toward our national political system.

Number one finding is that it is no longer "our" system.  You don't
have to be in Who's Who to know what's what, and people do know that
there has been a "hostile takeover" of America's electoral and
governmental processes by a political class of professional
politicians, big-money contributors, lobbyists, and the media.  In his
latest round of discussions in various towns and cities, Harwood finds
that people are not just angry, but "exasperated" by the politicians
who, as a Jacksonville man put it, "don't have a clue as to what we're
up against as working people."

People feel locked out by a system in which politicians and officials
listen to moneyed interests and not the common interest--the same
moneyed interests running roughshod over them in the workplace.

"The individual is no longer represented," said a man from Laconia,
"it's whoever has got the most money."

"In order to run for office, you have to be in a certain tax bracket,"
a Tampa woman complained, adding, "you've got to be dealing with
corporate America."

"Screw those $500-a-plate dinners," exploded a man from Orlando.

"Every one of those candidates should be out at Fleet People's Park or
Lake Keola so we can go down there and tell them what we think for
free."

At the root of the public's negative feeling is something entirely
positive: Americans want to be involved in the politics and governing
of their country.  Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which says the
majority is too self-absorbed with their own lives to care about public
life, they have a deep longing to participate.

"It's not that people no longer have a sense of civic duty," said a
Seattle man who was part of Harwood's conversations, "but it's that
they don't have a sense of power."

But give us even a tiny opening, a sense that our voices will be heard,
a sense that change is possible if we take some action, and ... well,
stand back.  Although you do not see it covered on the network news,
and while doofuses like Mitch McConnell know less about it than a hog
knows about Christmas, America's grassroots are alive with progressive
agitation and political participation.  Many of the same citizens who
have written off national and congressional politics as a "public
relations charade" are devoting time and energy to causes and campaigns
at the local level where, as one devotee puts it, "politics still has
hair on it."

Anyone who thinks people just don't give a damn and won't get involved
ought to ask Jim Bob Moffett about that.  On the long night of June 7,
1990, democracy rose up in all its chaotic glory inside the city
council chambers of Austin, Texas ... and bit Jim Bob square on the
butt.

He's still chapped about it.

Jim Bob Moffett is an actual person.  You could look him up in Business
Week magazine, which listed him in 1997 as America's tenth highest-paid
corporate heavy, hauling home $33,732,000 (or $16,800 an hour) for
sitting in the big chair of the global conglomerate Freeport McMoRan
(Corporate Motto: "If brute force isn't working, you're probably not
using enough of it").  A worldwide mining petrochemical-development
octopus that grosses in excess of a billion-and-a-half bucks a year,
the conglomerate is involved in digging, spewing, bulldozing, and other
activities hither, thither, and yon that have made more than
money--they've made some serious environmental messes, ranking Freeport
McMoRan more than once as America's number one water polluter.  Aw
hell, is Jim Bob's attitude, to make lard you've gotta boil a hog--it's
a messy process.

Moffett, who is the "Mo" in McMoRan, is a pompadoured rooster of a guy,
pretty well satisfied that it's his cock-a-doodle-doo that brings the
sun up every morning.  So when this native Texan and former University
of Texas football letterman strode to the podium in Austin's city
council that Thursday in June, every bit as big as his
six-feet-four-inches, he fully expected to get what he wanted.  After
all, did he not enter the chamber with a covey of lobbyists who had
been purring sweet nothings into the ears of the council members for
weeks?  He did.  Was it not true that he had put the president of the
University of Texas on Freeport's well-paid board of directors?  It
was.  Had he not already donated $2 million to UT's College of Natural
Sciences, another two-and-a-half-million to boost the salaries of UT's
athletic coaches, and an extra $200,000 to build the Mr.  and Mrs.
James Robert Moffett Room of the ex-student association's building?  He
had.  Was this deal not wired?  It was."

Except for one loose wire he had never contemplated: the people of
Austin.

What Jim Bob wanted from the local government was just a few "little
of' technical approvals" to let him build some homes and stuff on the
hills that frame Austin's west side.

"Some homes"?  More than 2,500 of those high-end designer houses and
1,900 upscale apartments.

"And stuff"?  More than 3 million square feet of office and shopping
space, and not one, two, or three, but four eighteen-hole golf courses.
Plus thoroughfares, roads, and streets.  All on 4,000 acres.

But it wasn't the scale of the development that caught Austin's
attention, it was--as real estate agents say--"location."  Jim Bob
wanted to build his playpen right up against Barton Creek, one of the
five creeks that merge just past his proposed Jimbobville and then
disappear underground through limestone fissures and openings in the
creek beds.  Seven miles further down, inside the city of Austin, these
cold, crystalline waters reemerge as Barton Springs, burbling out into
as sweet a swimming hole as the gods could imagine.

The springs are not merely in the center of Austin, they literally are
the spiritual heart of Austin.

Here, then, is where J. B. Moffett proposed to take a corporate crap.
All the contaminants from his garish development--the spilled gasoline
and motor oils, the fertilizers and pesticides running off the lawns
and golf courses, the construction solvents, the household and
commercial bug sprays, the sewer leaks, the inevitable detritus of such
a human and commercial mass--were headed for the creek, the springs,
and the heart of Austin.

Until the "Barton Creek Rebellion."

Two weeks before the June 7 vote, word began spreading rapidly through
town about this Moffett gentleman and his designs on the springs.  His
lobbyists reportedly had lined up four sure votes on the seven-member
council, including that of the mayor.  It did not look good, but a
couple of talk-radio hosts and the Austin public radio station began to
pound their electronic pulpits and fulminate against the cabal between
Jim Bob and the council.  The Austin Chronicle, a weekly alternative
paper, jumped in with journalism at its gritty best, grinding out
column inch after column inch loaded with details about this slea2y
deal--details that the local establishment paper (whose publisher
actually doubled as the president of the chamber of commerce) either
didn't bother to dig out, ignored, or intentionally buried.

Then the people took over.  Neighborhood and environmental groups began
to walk and talk, but the most encouraging sign was that non activists
were suddenly, spontaneously on the phones, absolutely aghast that the
nation's number one water polluter was going to be allowed anywhere
near hallowed water.  One of them, third-generation Austinite Cathy
Lee, told a Texas Monthly writer:

"I'm not in those environmental organizations, and I didn't want to be
aligned with them.  We just spread the news by word of mouth.

People asked, "Who are you with?"  and I said, "Myself and Barton
Springs."" Comes 4 p.m."  June 7. The mayor nervously gavels the
hearing to order--nervously because every seat in the chamber has been
filled for hours, and the suits are badly outnumbered by the T-shirts.
The rowdy crowd flows out into the hall, into the street, and on down
the block to Liberty Lunch, a classic Austin music venue and bar that
has thrown open its doors as a makeshift headquarters for those who
have come to fight Jimbobocracy.

Still, Moffett feels good.  His team of lawyers, lobbyists, and
engineers is headquartered in a Bravo RV parked in the lot right behind
the council chamber, a lot usually reserved for council members only.
He has hired eight "sitters" to take front-row seats early in the day
and hold them till he is ready to make his entrance, which he does just
as the mayor's gavel comes down.  Then Jim Bob steps up to bat.

His role is to establish his legitimacy in the community and to assure
everyone of the environmental sensitivity he and his company will bring
to the task at hand.  With his first swing, he goes for the fences,
trying to wrap himself in the orange and white colors of UT.

With heartfelt pride and a booming voice he declares: "I graduated with
the highest grades of any football player at the University of Texas."
Now this assertion might have won him warm applause at a Rotary Club
luncheon, but it was met with hoots and waves of derisive laughter in
this chamber.  Strike one.

His next swing is a professional stroke, telling the locals that he and
his engineers are the finest in the land and know precisely what they
are doing: "As a geologist, I assure you I know more about Barton Creek
than anybody in this room."  Foul ball; more hoots and louder derisive
laughter.  Strike two.

His final cut is to attest to the integrity of his company and the
character of those who run it, adding that none of his esteemed board
members, "including Henry Kissinger," would have any part of harming
anyone's environmental quality.  Great gales of howling derisive
laughter for this whiff, especially from those who recall that Dr.
Kissinger secretly bombed Cambodia's environment clear to hell.

Strike three, and the Mighty Jim Bob has struck out.

Next up were the people.  Nine hundred signed in to speak their
three-minute pieces.  They spoke all night--some heard the hearing
being broadcast on radio after work and decided they should speak out,
too, so they drove back downtown to the meeting; after the live music
bars closed about 2 a.m. the musicians showed up to speak for the
springs; others arrived as late as 5 a.m."  saying they were on their
way to work, but wanted to stop first and support the cause.  As the
Chronicle reported: "One by one, using logic, research, emotion, humor
and ridicule, the people of Austin tore the Barton Creek development
apart.  Poems were composed for the occasion.  Videos were shown. Songs
were written and sung.  People spoke of childhood memories, sacred
places, departed loved ones.  Eloquence was on parade."

Democracy, too.  The last speaker finished around 5:30 a.m."  thirteen
hours after the hearing began.  Still the people stayed, eyes riveted
on the council members who were whispering and gesticulating,
frantically trying to devise some last-minute compromise language that
would give Jim Bob what he wanted but not cause a public hanging of
council members right on the spot.  A weasel motion was offered, but a
council opponent of the deal shredded it for the sellout it was.  Then
George Humphrey, a council member who had been counted as one of Jim
Bob's four votes, spoke: "We've all got to look into our hearts right
now.  I baptized my baby in Barton Springs about ten months ago, and I
want to make sure he can baptize his baby in Barton Springs.  I'm
asking you to rethink what you're doing because it's wrong, wrong,
wrong."

There was a bit more wrangling on the dais but finally, about 6 a.m."
the vote was called.  Seven to zero for Barton Springs.

This victory is still a long way from assured.  His ego stung, Moffett
continues wailing and flailing to this day.  He threatened the council
and the people of Austin, filed lawsuits right and left, forced a
second vote at the city council (he lost) and a special election (he
lost again), then ran to the state legislature with even more lobbyists
in tow, stuffing money into legislators' campaigns and produced a "Bail
Out Jim Bob" bill, which Governor Ann Richards vetoed.  Eight years
later his assault on Austin continues full-tilt, with him trying to
defeat all pro-environment council members, hiring still more lobbyists
and lawyers, sending threatening letters to journalists and even some
professors who oppose his corporate buccaneering--and I have no doubt
he is bargaining with the devil himself, trying to undo what democracy
wrought back in June 1990.

But the people felt their own power that night, and they have stayed
vigilant since.  The Jim Bobs will no longer just roll over them.

LOOK UP

I confess to envying the powerful in our society.  Not for their
exalted status, but for the relative ease they have in making whatever
political play strikes their fancy.  It is an ease stemming naturally
from the twin facts that (1) they are powerful, and (2) they are few:
Make a dozen calls to the boys (and they are nearly all boys), touch a
few bases, maybe take a meeting or two at the club, and suddenly it's
snap, crackle, and pop--money begins to move, PR firms jerk into gear,
bills are introduced in city council or Congress, editorials are
written, ducks get in a row, skids are greased, and the next thing you
know there are odd breakfast conversations all over America:

"Hon, what's GATT?"

"What's a gnat?"

"No, GATT, G-A-T-T."

"I don't know, what is it?"

"Well, I don't know, either, but it says in this little item that
Congress just passed it."

On the other hand, on the progressive side of politics, where our
forces are short of button-pushing power and long on numbers and
diversity, getting everybody organized is about like trying to load
frogs in a wheelbarrow.

This democratic handicap is cheerfully exploited by the powers that-be,
which are always Johnny-on-the-spot to spread lies, money, gossip, and
whatever it takes to divide us.  They say to farmers, "Your problem is
with those labor unions"; they say to unions, "The environmentalists
are out to get you"; they say to environmentalists, "The minorities are
against your plans"; they say to minorities, "It's those gays you need
to look out for."

But hold it.  It's not gays who are knocking down wages, looting
pensions, canceling health plans, and stealing our middle-class
aspirations from us.  It's not minorities who are using GATT and NAFTA
to haul our good jobs out of the country and undermine our
environmental and worker-protection standards.  It's not
environmentalists who are jacking up our interest rates, cutting back
on banking services, and taking away all local control over our own
money.  It's not union members who are depressing agricultural prices,
bankrupting good farm families, and closing off the opportunity to
farm.

None of us are enemies.  We are natural allies--as Jesse Jackson puts
it, "We might not have come over in the same boat, but we're in the
same boat now."  Whenever people realize this they are empowered, for
it gives them the political clarity needed to rise above the distrusts
and divisions used constantly to separate one group from another,
allowing people instead to focus jointly on real enemies.  In Oklahoma
City in November 1997,1 saw this "same boat now" phenomenon at work
during an all-too-rare meeting between two groups often pitted against
each other: environmentalists and farmers.

What brought them together was--excuse my French--hog shit

As discussed in an earlier chapter, a tidal wave of hog excrement is
being loosed on rural America as corporations like Seaboard Inc., Land
0' Lakes, Nippon, and (I love this name) Pig Improvement Company roam
the countryside plopping down dozens of massive and massively polluting
hog factories.  The weekend-long Oklahoma City meeting brought some 200
citizen activists together from several states to strategize and
organize against these swine combines, with roughly half of the
attendees in boots, the other half in Birkenstocks.  At the Saturday
luncheon, where I was to speak, a Western Oklahoma farm activist,
Suzette Hatfield, received an award from the Sierra Club for her
grassroots leadership on this issue.  In her short thank-you to the
crowd, she noted that just a year earlier she had been shopping with
her daughter in a mall.  The girl had come up to her clutching a
picture calendar, asking her mother to buy it for her.  No way, Suzette
told her daughter then--"Not a dime of my money is going to that bunch
of environmental radicals."  It was a Sierra Club calendar she was
saying no to, yet here she was less than a year later accepting an
award from those very radicals, saying how proud she was to be teamed
up with them in the Oklahoma hog wars.

Pogo, Walt Kelly's cartoon character, is famous for saying "We have met
the enemy and he is us."  But with due respect to my favorite possum,
the enemy is not us people generally, but specifically those in the top
suites who lord it over us, our environment, and common sense.  That is
why we need more of the radicalism of ordinary citizens like Suzette
Hatfield who refuse to be lorded over.  The central issue that unites
us today is this: Too few people control too much of the money and
power in our society, and they are using that control to take more for
themselves at our expense.

It is no longer enough for us to be passively progressive--we must
become aggressive again, because the powers-that-be have become rabidly
regressive, reaching for it all, no matter what it costs the majority
or what it does to our country.

We should not be glancing side to side at one another, squabbling over
this one being gay or that one being in a union, and we damn sure
should not be looking down at those below us on the economic ladder,
fussing over which one of us got on the ladder first.

Rather, we should all look up, keeping our eyes focused on those at the
very top who are trying to cut the ladder off for all of us.

DADDY'S PHILOSOPHY

My daddy is buried in the rolling Texas prairie at Denison, with a
modest marble headstone to mark his grave.  But there is another
monument in town with his name on it, too, a couple of miles from the
cemetery, where West Woodard Street dead-ends at Maurice.

Right there is a Little League baseball field, the first that Denison
had, and at the edge of the field is a small sandstone monument with a
brass plaque acknowledging the half-dozen men who started Little League
ball in our town, including W. IF.

"High" Hightower.

The marble stone marks his grave, but this stone marks the way he lived
and what he valued.  Daddy and his Lions Club buddies got the city to
donate the vacant lots that now form the ball field they organized the
teams and came up with a few dollars to buy equipment, uniforms, and
such; then they "volunteered" us boys to clear the lots of rocks
(approximately 117 billion of them, as I recall) and to do the
shoveling, hauling, leveling, planting, and other chores necessary to
turn this raw space into a ballpark.  Once we made a place to play,
Daddy and other folks in town coached the teams, did the official
scoring, ran the snow cone stand, and announced the games on the
squawking PA.  system.

I played five summers on that field--once batting .517 (a far better
year than I have averaged since; little did I know I had peaked at age
twelve).  Even after I moved on, though, Daddy stayed involved in the
Little League program, because it was what the community needed.  He
was not doing it only for his boys, but for the community.

He believed in that concept.  He believed that everyone should pool
efforts when the common good calls for it, whether pitching in locally
to start a Little League or being taxed nationally to assure everyone's
social security.

"You're no better than anyone else," he would tell me as a maturing
boy, "and they're no better than you.

We're all just people and we need each other."  Not that he was any
kind of philosopher, for God's sake, or any do-gooder, either--just an
ordinary American of common sense and goodwill who grew up on a hard
scrabble, Depression-era tenant farm and had learned from life that
everyone does better when everyone does better.  That is what passes
for political philosophy in Denison, and it remains the best I have
found in all my years wandering and studying.

Also I found that his outlook is shared by a majority of folks
everywhere, today just as surely as it was in Daddy's time.  Yet it is
this very concept of the common good that the powerful in our society
are rending as fast as their fat little hands can rip.

In the class war of the past couple decades, the corporate and investor
elites have made out like bandits by shortchanging the middle class on
economic gains that the whole society has produced.

They have forcibly held down wages (interestingly, "wages" is a term
derived from the same Latin root as the term for "waging war"), just as
they have depressed the paychecks of nearly every salaried employee not
working on the top floor.  The result is that the prosperity generated
by the many has been stolen by the few, especially by the million or so
richest Americans, and there is a widening chasm between the wealth of
these elites and the well-being of the great majority.  Writing about
the last time such a separation was made in our country, in the 1920s
and 1930s, Woody Guthrie penned these lyrics: "As through this world
I've traveled/I've seen lots of funny men Some rob you with a six gun
Some with a fountain pen."

Today's fountain-pen bandits do their finagling in the name of "global
competitiveness," but they are merely feeding us globaloney when they
say that.  These privileged and powerful ones have severed themselves
from the common good (1) because they can, and (2) because there is a
"screw you" imperative built into the corporate system that commands
top managers to produce as much money as possible for the big
shareholders (including the top managers) as quickly as possible, no
matter who or what has to be run over.

While the bandits are loose in the private sector, plundering the
middle class by day and stealing back at night to their gated-and
guarded compounds of wealth, those running our public sector have
adopted the same pernicious philosophy of "I got mine, you get yours." 
Health care for all?  Hey, Newt and his gang of money corrupted
cutthroats shout, buy yourself a medical savings account.

Universal education, the notion that our communities and our nation
will be enriched if we are smart enough to provide a system of quality
public schools for all?  Hey, the ideologues of separation shout, we
want to take our tax dollars out of the common pool and fund exclusive
academies for our kids, the hell with your ragamuffins.

Old-age protection through a shared retirement fund?  Hey, shout Wall
Street's minions in Congress and the White House, sever the bonds of
common responsibility and let everyone bet the farm by putting their
social security money in a dazzling array of Wall Street schemes and
scams.

The disuniting of our society is the result of a historic failure of
our political system.  The workaday majority, the folks who believe in
America's concept of the common good, have no home in the two major
parties, both of which have been molded into branches of one Corporate
Party that is pushing hard for disunification.  There is no political
redress in Washington (or in state capitals) for working people, inner
city and rural residents, old folks and children, small farmers, the
poor (working and otherwise)--no redress for the middle class and less
fortunate.

Bill Clinton himself is a quisling in the class war.  Ironically,
Clinton's second inauguration was held on the national holiday
established to honor Martin Luther King Jr."  and of course Clinton
invoked the King name to demonstrate his concern for racial
tolerance.

But Dr.  King was not only a martyr for minorities and the racial
cause--his agenda was one of economic power for the working class.  He
was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone in 1968 not to register
African-Americans to vote, but to support striking garbage workers and
to organize white and black folks alike to join him in the massive
"Poor People's March" he had scheduled for Washington--a trip he never
got to take.  In the eyes of the country's power brokers, King had
moved from being an acceptable missionary of civil rights to being an
unacceptable meddler in economic rights.  Clinton did not mention this
richly heroic side of Dr.  King, much less invoke any of the great
crusader's populist message.  No surprise, given Clinton's essential
Republicanism.  Indeed, had King been alive on January 20, 1997, he
most certainly would have shunned the inauguration of this
pusillanimous President, probably instead organizing a march of the
"Other Americans" for a show of strength against a "Democratic"
administration that is owned and managed by the comfortable and the
corporate.

Clinton-the-Democrat campaigned in '92 as the candidate of economic
justice, but he has governed as the President of economic privilege.
Again in the '96 campaign he sounded populist themes, jumping the
Republicans for their assault on Medicate, but now he has met in back
rooms with the GOP to plot a bipartisan raid not only on Medicate, but
also on Medicaid and social security.

Ironically, he agreed to this Republican assault on the elderly and the
poor the same week he participated in the dedication of the Franklin
and Eleanor Roosevelt memorial in Washington, thus setting a new
Olympic record in political hypocrisy.

Having Clinton as a Democratic President is like getting bitten by your
pet dog--the bite will heal, but you never feel the same about that dog
again.

Have heart, though, for a change is coming.  It's coming because it
must, just as it has had to come periodically in our history when
economic elites have set themselves too far above the rest of us.

"The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up
colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind,"
proclaimed the preamble to the 1892 platform of the People's Party,
rallying the Populist movement to a historic reshaping of America's
political landscape.

"We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles
of the two great political parties for power and plunder," the platform
raged, "while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering
people.  We charge that the controlling influences dominating both
these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to
develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them.  Neither do
they now promise us any substantial reform.... They propose to
sacrifice our homes, lives and children on the altar of mammon; to
destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the
millionaires."

No need to appoint a drafting committee to put forward the particulars
of today's populist manifesto--just fax this one across the country.

A change is coming because there is no party representing the worker
majority of our country, creating a political vacuum that a civil
society cannot survive.  The vacuum exists because today's national
Democratic Party is immobilized by its corporate sponsors and its
craven leadership, no longer having either the inclination or the
political freedom to nod to that majority, much less represent it.

The good news is that a change is coming because it is coming, already
organizing and gaining strength at the country's grassroots.

One vital development is that organized labor has shaken itself awake
and is on the move again, with savvy and aggressive new leadership at
all levels, adding energy, focus, and resources to the long-term
process of building a new political path.  There are groups like ACORN,
Citizen Action, the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups), and Clean
Water Action working door-to-door in thousands of neighborhoods all
across the country, organizing and training "just folks" to fight back.
There are now serious-minded third parties that are beginning to crack
the lock that the Democrat and Republican parties have had on the
system--a smart and well organized group called the New Party, for
example, already has more dues-paying members than the national
Democratic Party; it is running candidates for school boards, city
councils, state legislatures, and other local offices in dozens of
cities and towns (of 185 campaigns it has run so far, it has won 126);
it has teamed with ACORN and others to win "living-wage" campaigns in
cities across the country, effectively raising the local minimum wage
to as high as $7.50 an hour; and it has had the brains and chutzpah to
challenge the election laws that presently rig the political system for
the perpetuation of the two major parties.  In addition there are
groups like the Labor Party and the Alliance for Democracy that are not
yet running candidates, but are working throughout the country to
inform, educate, and activate citizens to take charge.  Also, an
essential network of communications already is in place for this
burgeoning progressive political movement, including magazines and
papers, hundreds of important Internet sites, radio talk shows,
newsletters, cable television broadcasts, videos, cartoonists, and
musicians.

Most significantly, though, people themselves are ready to fight back
and are actively in search of a new politics that enlists them, that
stands unequivocally for working families against the bandits, that
rejects trickle-down policies in favor of percolate-up economics, and
that is centered on that philosophical notion I first learned from my
of' daddy, which bears repeating here; Everyone does better when
everyone does better.

Daddy also would have agreed with the thought of "fellow philosopher"
Lao-tzu, the sixth-century Chinese founder of Taoism, who observed: "To
lead the people, walk behind them."  You have to walk pretty briskly,
though, for people today are moving way out front of their so-called
leadership.  Three examples:

1. In the fall of '97, the full line-up of establishmentarians was
rolled out to make sure that one of the power tools of corporate
globalization was put in the hands of Bill Clinton.

Called "Fast Track," this legislation would give the President (acting
on behalf of the corporations) the antidemocratic authority to
negotiate more NAFTA-like trade deals around the world, then ram them
through Congress with no real debate and no chance to amend them.
Corporate chieftains, the national media, every Republican
congressional leader, all living ex-presidents, the memory of all dead
presidents, Henry Kissinger, the entire army of K Street lobbyists. Old
Glory, the Pentagon, and six of the Seven Dwarfs were marshaled to say
to Congress that "Fast Track" must, absolutely must, absolutely must
with mustard on it be approved.  But it wasn't.  To the shock and
amazement of the Beltway Crowd, the people rebelled.  Oh, them.  Just
average Americans, who were assumed to be disinterested or dumb about
trade matters, had already swallowed more globaloney than they could
stand, so they raised a righteous ruckus against "Fast Track" that even
brain-dead members of Congress could not ignore.  I know the depth of
feeling that people have about globalization, because for two months
leading up to this vote in Washington I talked with them about it every
day on my call-in radio program.  Working with Citizens Trade Campaign,
we targeted two to four undecided lawmakers each broadcast day, gave
out the names of the staffers handling the "Fast Track" issue in those
offices, offered an 800 number for the Capitol switchboard, and
unleashed the people on their Congress-critters.  Not for nothing are
our listeners known as "Radio-Active"--they melted the phone lines to
the offices we targeted.  One of our Georgia listeners reported the day
before the scheduled vote that he had called "all 535 members of the
House and

Senate, plus Al Gore."  He added, "Thank God for 800 numbers."

The public outcry was so great that Clinton and Gingrich kept delaying
the vote for several days while they browbeat, begged, and all but
bribed members to support their dog of a bill.  But finally they had to
surrender, pulling "Fast Track" from the floor to avoid the humiliation
of having such a bold NO slapped across the establishment's face.

From that day on, the balance of power on globalization issues switched
from the elites to the people, and no longer will Congress just
rubber-stamp any trade scam industry wants.

2. The absolute corruption of our political system by corporate money
is a non issue according to Washington insiders, because people don't
care, and besides, money is a free speech issue.  Free speech?  Holy
1776!  I don't recall the Federalist Papers explaining that the First
Amendment's reference to "speech" means that the voice of Amway
Corporation, amplified by a cool $ 1 million contribution to the
Republican Party by Amway's president in April 1997, should be so loud
that a few months later the Republican Congress would slyly slip
Provision C, Section XI into the 1997 Budget Act, producing a $280
million tax windfall requested by Amway lobbyists.  That is not free
speech, it's bought-and-paid-for speech.  Caution, startling numbers
ahead: Barely 10 million of us 260 million Americans give any money to
any congressional candidate, presidential campaign, or national party
in an election year; only one fourth of 1 percent of us give as much as
$200 in an election year; this leaves a teensy-tinsy one tenth of 1
percent of us (235,000 people) who are the $l,000-and-up political
donors; since it takes at least $1,000 to get noticed as a political
contributor in Washington, this money system of allocating "speech"
leaves 99.9 percent of us voiceless.  Yet the media pundits and the
political operatives think we don't care?  They should go to Arizona,
Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Vermont,
Wisconsin, or any of two dozen other states where citizens care so much
they have either passed or are presently pushing major campaign finance
reforms that remove private money from the public business of
elections.  People know that Washington won't lift this load, so they
have to do it for themselves at the state and local levels.  In
practically every place that has had a vote on reform, folks have not
merely cared, they have rallied, organized, and won.  In my town of
Austin, for example, a reform initiative was put on the ballot through
the tenacious grassroots efforts of a coalition with the best political
moniker I ever came across: "Austinites for a Little Less Corruption."
The entire power structure, from city officials to the media, came down
hard on this proposal, trying to submarine it, ridiculing it, lying
about it, and generally foaming at the mouth about it for weeks.  But
on Election Day 1997, a resounding 73 percent of Austinites said Yes!
to it.

3. While Washington turns a blind eye to sweatshop products pouring
into our country bearing brand-name labels, people like Ed Boyle and
Tico Almeida are doing something to stop it.  Tico, a student at Duke
University, noticed that his school was selling everything from
basketball jerseys to electronic games with the Duke "Blue Devils" logo
emblazoned on them--$20 million worth of goods a year, produced under
contracts the school has with Nike, Russell Athletic wear, and hundreds
of other manufacturers.  But wait, thought Tico, Nike is a notorious
exploiter of teenage Asian girls, effectively holding them as
indentured workers in sweatshops.  Forming a campus group called
Students Against Sweatshops, he began in September 1997 to poke, prod,
organize, and protest.  Within six months, administration officials had
to concede that Duke's credibility as an institution that promotes high
moral standards for youth was being tarnished by the pell-mell pursuit
of these product sales.

"We cannot tolerate having the sweat and tears of abused and exploited
workers mixed with the fabric of the products which bear our marks,"
said the utterly chagrined director of trademark licensing for the
school.  But Students Against Sweatshops wanted more than a baring of
the anguished academic soul, they wanted results.  Like a num her of
corporations (including even Nike), Duke put forth a "code of conduct,"
nobly declaring that licensees must refrain from using child labor,
must maintain safe work places must pay at least the minimum wage of
the countries where they operate, and so forth and so on.  But, as
workers worldwide know, these codes are worthless if not enforced, and
this is where the students achieved a major breakthrough.  Duke will
now require that its licensees provide the precise location of all
factories making products for the university, and that they allow
independent monitors (paid for by Duke) to inspect these plants at any
time, including unrestricted access to the workers and to human rights
groups that are familiar with conditions in the plants.  No inspection,
no license.  Duke is a private institution, but even our public
institutions--from state prison systems to the local library--use our
tax dollars to buy many goods made by sweatshop labor.  If Ed Boyle has
his way, this will stop.  As mayor of North Olmsted, Ohio, a
blue-collar suburb of Cleveland, he came up with a way to ban city
purchases of sweatshop products--a 1997 North Olmsted ordinance
requires vendors to sign a legal document swearing that each and every
product sold to the city is free of child or forced labor, is produced
by employees who are free to form unions of their choice, is made in a
safe and healthy workplace, and so on.  If a vendor won't comply, or
lies--no sale.

"I had my worries at first," the mayor told writer John Nichols.

"We're a small city and I didn't know if we were the ones to take the
lead on this.  But it's worked.  We're reaching Americans who think
like I do--that this country is supposed to be against exploitation.

If there's one thing that the government of this country, from
Washington right down to North Olmsted, ought to be against, it's
sweatshops."

There is no need to "create" a progressive movement, because it already
exists in the hearts and minds of America's ordinary folks.

Instead the chore of progressive strategists and organizers is to
connect these folks nationally and help them build an independent
political mechanism that frees them from reliance on either branch of
today's corporate, one-party structure.

There was a moving company here in Austin that had an advertising
slogan I liked: "If we can get it loose, we can move it."  That's the
spirit!  If we give people a means to get loose from the old politics,
they'll get moving--and they'll take America back.