A perfectly glorious political year in Texas

AUSTIN, Texas -- You can already tell it's going to be a perfectly glorious political year in Texas. Four months out, and we've already got one gubernatorial candidate accusing the other of being a drug dealer, naturally causing the maligned party to in turn describe his opponent as a raving liar. This is going to be so much fun.

A grand old slugfest is developing in the race between Gov. Rick (Goodhair) Perry and his Democratic challenger, Tony Sanchez, and it shows all the signs of becoming a fall classic in Texas' toughest contact sport.

For starters, this is a backward, upside-down race. Normally we have Republican outsiders with no government experience running on their credentials as bidnessmen, a la in Bill Clements and George W. Bush, while claiming, "My opponent is nothing but a professional politician." This year we have a Republican incumbent we didn't vote for -- as Sanchez's ads keep reminding us -- who is a career politician being challenged by a Democratic businessman. But it could be a bad year to be a successful bidnessman, even in Texas.

War and Forgetfulness -- A Bloody Media Game

Three and a half years ago, some key information about U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq briefly surfaced on the front pages= of American newspapers -- and promptly vanished. Now, with= righteous war drums beating loudly in Washington, let's reach deep down= into the news media's Orwellian memory hole and retrieve the story.

"U.S. Spied on Iraq Under U.N. Cover, Officials Now Say," a front-page New York Times headline announced on Jan. 7, 1999.= The article was unequivocal: "United States officials said today= that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors ferreting out secret Iraqi weapons programs....= By being part of the team, the Americans gained a first-hand= knowledge of the investigation and a protected presence inside Baghdad."

A day later, a followup Times story pointed out: "Reports= that the United States used the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq as cover for spying on Saddam Hussein are dimming any= chances that the inspection system will survive."

With its credibility badly damaged by the spying, the U.N.

Will this be an 'Official Scandal' -- or Something Else?

With huge financial scandals causing turmoil in the United States, this year has seen some vigorous reporting about high-level misdeeds and corporate manipulation. But many news stories just take the lead from top officials. In the months ahead, we'll find out how deep American media outlets are willing to go.

Big scandals always generate plenty of headlines and lots of excitement. Important information can emerge. But frequently, key facts remain buried and crucial questions go unasked. If it's true that reporters produce a first draft of history, they often serve as conformist "jiffy historians" who do little more than recycle the day's conventional wisdom.

A dozen years ago, when journalist Martin A. Lee and I were writing a book about media bias ("Unreliable Sources"), we tried to assess what had gone wrong with news coverage of the Iran-contra scandal. Along the way -- under the heading of "Signs of an Official Scandal" -- we listed some general characteristics of coverage routinely providing much more heat than light.

Today, it may be useful to consider how some "signs of an official

Reforming Corporate America

AUSTIN, Texas -- Now some fools want to fire Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the only straight-shooter in the Cabinet. Tell you what I like about O'Neill: He's from Widget World. This Cabinet is wall-to-wall corporate America, but most of them -- including the president -- are from Enron Economics, whereas O'Neill was CEO of a business that makes something useful, to wit, aluminum.

As many economic poohbahs have been at pains to explain to us lately, out there in Widget World, where people produce actual goods and provide useful services, things are going along quite nicely.

It's the financial sector that's the disaster, the part where they play fancy games with other people's money for a living. That's Enron Economics, the land of stock options, commodities futures, derivatives, swaps, financializing markets and offshore partnerships.

Before we get back to our ongoing project of connecting the consarn, dag-rabbiting dots between corporate theft and government corruption, let's see if we can stop Congress from actually making things worse. Good project, eh?

WorldCom

AUSTIN, Texas -- OK, it's now hundreds of thousands of words past the WorldCom bankruptcy, with the media might of this great nation devoted to explaining it all to you, and there are still six words I cannot find anywhere -- the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1996. Don't you think that's carrying our famously ahistorical journalism a little too far?

When the cause of a disaster is a mere six years back in time, surely even American journalists can dredge up a twinge or two of memory. For those of you not afflicted by Alzheimer's in recent years, Bob McChesney, the media critic and professor at Southern Illinois, sums it up nicely: "The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was one of the most important of the last 50 years. It was also the most corrupt and undemocratic bill of the time: It was of, by and for special interests. Most of the congresspeople who voted for it didn't even know what they were voting on."

He understates. The bill was actually written by industry lobbyists, each of the several components of telecom snarling at one another

The Hog Wallow

When did the great executive stock option hog wallow really start? You can go back to the deregulatory push under Carter in the late Seventies, then move into the Reagan Eighties, when corporate purchases of shares really took off. But the true binge got going between 1994 and 1998, when non-financial companies sank themselves in debt by either repurchasing their own shares or acquiring shares as a result of mergers. The annual value of the repurchases quadrupled, testimony to the most hectic sustained orgy of self-aggrandizement by an executive class in the history of capitalism.

Why did these chief executive officers, chief financial officers and boards of directors choose to burden their companies with debt? Since stock prices were going up, companies needing money could have raised funds by issuing shares, rather than borrowing money to buy shares back.

Top corporate officers stood to make vast killings on their options, and by the unstinting efforts of legislators such as Senator Joe Lieberman, they were spared the inconvenience of having to report to

So what's a conscientious citizen to do?

First it was all about drugs - or so we were told. Sen. Mike DeWine helped craft Plan Colombia for the Clinton Administration, and $1.3 billion flowed to Colombia's declared drug war. Two years later President Bush demands more dollars and weapons - having broadened US objectives to fighting terror and insurgency - and DeWine cheers him on.

The U.S. insists its intervention in Colombia is protecting democracy and the rule of law. But our policy there violates both of those principles, as well as the human rights which depend upon them. And the violation - of rights and logic - is extreme.

For starters, many drug policy and human rights organizations refute the Drug War rationale for supporting the Colombian military. Even the relatively conservative Rand Corporation has concluded that drug treatment for U.S. cocaine users is 10 times more cost-effective than drug interdiction, and 23 times more cost-effective than coca eradication!

DeWine's Plan Colombia kills democracy in Ohio

U.S. tax dollars kill in Colombia but Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio doesn't care. His Columbus staff delivered this message on April 30 when they ordered myself and 9 other concerned constituents arrested for requesting a face-to-face meeting with the Senator.

For years students, teachers, faith-based activists, and workers of all sorts have met with DeWine's staff in their Washington and Ohio offices to call for a more humane policy toward Latin America. As U.S. involvement and the death toll in Colombia have escalated in recent years, concerned taxpayers from throughout the state have called, written and visited DeWine's staff, pleading with them to persuade the Senator to rethink his approach to America's drug problem. Despite our persistent efforts, the Senator has remained seemingly oblivious to our concerns, leading us to conclude that meeting with him in person is the only solution.

Venezuelan coup: Made in the U.S.A.

In contemplating the failed coup of April 11-14 in Venezuela, only one fact

I am Jewish

I am Jewish because all of my fathers and mothers before me were Jewish.

I am Jewish because I grew up on the south side of Chicago where even my public school was Jewish.

I am Jewish because my grandfather was oh so Jewish and I felt it then and feel it now.

I am Jewish because of the angry Irish boys who could feel my Jewish nose at the end of their Catholic fist.

I am Jewish because we are commanded to remember when we were slaves in the land of Egypt and I do.

I am Jewish because we are commanded to seek justice and because I believed my teachers who said we must do so.

I am Jewish because I have never felt any other way.

I am Jewish because dissent is my faith.

I am Jewish because I learned Hebrew and then forgot nearly every word of it.

I am Jewish because in my grandmother's kitchen nothing would rise, but of everything there was plenty.

I am Jewish because the South Shore Country Club was founded by people who wouldn't let us in.

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