THIS IS JIM HIGHTOWER SAYING. . . BUYING "GOOD GOVERNMENT"
Like a spaghetti western, this is another story about a fistfull of dollars. The setting is not some dried up frontier town, with dust swirling down the street, but the Halls of Congress, with lobbyists swirling down the corridors, packing campaign contributions. A common claim by these hired guns is that their PAC donations are not meant to buy legislative favors, but simply to show their support for "good government."
Like Clint Eastwood squinting at a gang of thieving scum, however, the Center for Responsive Politics took a look at where the PAC money of top donors went, by congressional committee. Check it out: the top donor to members of the Senate Agriculture Committee just happens to be agribusiness giant ConAgra Inc.; the big giver to the Senate armed services committee is the huge Pentagon contractor, Lockheed Martin; the leading PAC contributor to finance committee members is Citigroup, the global financial conglomerate. Sure, they all want "good government"--especially from lawmakers who can do big favors for them.
One fat favor that the powerhouses of finance have long wanted is to loosen the rules to allow cross-ownership between banks, stock brokerages, and insurance companies. Last year, these firms gave $15 million to members of the committees handling this legislation. The top recipient was Sen. Al D'Amato, chairman of the banking committee. He got $1.7 million from them . . . yet he lost his re-election bid to Democrat Charles Schumer. Don't feel bad for the financial firms, though--they also gave $1.4 million to Schumer. Guess which committee the new senator was assigned to? Bingo if you said Banking! In the corrupt system of money politics, the corporate lobbyists never lose.
To fight this system and to get corporate cash out of politics, call the Center for Responsive Politics, 202-857-0044.
SELLING OUTER SPACE
Time for another trip into the Far, Far, Far-Out Frontiers of Free Enterprise. Today, Spaceship Hightower takes you into a curious time warp where big government metamorphs into big business. Take a close look at the brand new, International Space Station, largely developed by NASA and funded by us good ol' American taxpayers to the tune of $40 billion.
But according to a report by Gannett News Service, now that our government has put this orbiting outpost into space, the metamorphosis is already underway to turnover a third of its capacity to private corporations. Indeed, a NASA study has quietly identified 13 categories of businesses that can make use of the space station, ranging from biotech firms to--brace yourself for this--advertising agencies.
Great. We spend 40 billion big ones and we get an orbiting billboard? We're bombarded with way too many ads as it is, not merely through the media, but everywhere we turn--city buses are now entirely wrapped in product promotions, apples come with little stickers promoting movies, the hallways of our public schools scream "Coca Cola" and "Nike" at our children, and even standing at a self-service gas pump means enduring electronic promos for assorted products. Having covered every space on earth, must corporations now be allowed to cover space itself?
Not to worry though: NASA officials say that "good taste" will be required for any outer-space ads. Sure.
But NASA won't really be the arbiter of how companies use the space station, since it's planning to remove itself from management of the commercial portion, turning this responsibility over to a sort of outer-space chamber of commerce controlled by the corporations themselves.
Our nation's space program ought to serve public need . . . not private greed.
CLINTON'S FOREIGN JOBS PROGRAM
The good news is that the United States at long last has a jobs program, creating good-paying jobs in manufacturing! The bad news is that the jobs are in Turkey, South Korea, Poland, and elsewhere--not in the U.S. of A. The worst news is that these jobs are in the arms industry, manufacturing weapons that ultimately could be used by dictators against their own people, their neighbors . . . or against us!
A story on the website of Mother Jones magazine notes that the same Bill Clinton who campaigned in 1992 on cutting the world trade in arms, has become the Music Man of international arms sales. He has required our embassies to shill for U.S. weapons makers, literally becoming sales agents for Lockheed and the rest. It worked. In his first year alone, U.S. arms sales doubled. Since he's been in office, the U.S. government has sold, arranged the sale, or given away some $200 billion in weapons to nearly every nation on earth.
Also since Clinton has been in office, the U.S. weapons makers have cut some 800,000 American jobs. Odd, huh? More sales, fewer jobs.
What's at work here is that U.S. policy is to promote arm sales by giving what are called "offsets" to the purchasing country. The "offset" is an incentive in the form of agreeing that our corporations will make some or all of the weapons in their country, hiring their people to do the job. Lockheed Martin, for example, in a deal to sell F-16s to Poland, is offering to build an assembly plant there where they would make all future F-16s to be sold in all of central Europe. So, Lockheed shareholders make a bundle, but U.S. workers don't get a dime--indeed, they get the shaft. Of course, they can always join the air force and look forward to the next war when those foreign-made F-16s are shooting at them.
To get this full story, check <www.motherjones.com/arms.www.motherjones.com/arms>.
THE URGE TO MERGE
While Al Gore, George Bush, and most other presidential pretenders keep mouthing platitudes about "economic prosperity," a handful of voracious corporations are completely remaking the economic landscape for all of us . . . and it's not a pretty sight. I'm talking about the urge to merge--for one corporation to devour another. It gets little political or media attention, but in the 1990s, every year has set a new record for these takeovers. There was a trillion-and-a-half dollars worth of them last year, and '99 will be even bigger. The result is an incredible elimination of competition in industry after industry.
Look at oil. In the blink of an eye, Exxon took over Mobil, British Petroleum has grabbed Sohio, Amoco, and ARCO; and Royal Dutch Shell has absorbed Texaco and is now reaching for Chevron, which itself took over Gulf. That's 10 major oil companies that are suddenly only three. Thousands of jobs have been lost, independent gas stations have been squeezed out, and consumer choice eliminated.
Check health care. MetLife, Prudential, New York Life, Travelers, and John Hancock are among the HMO competitors that are gone, gulped down whole by the likes of Aetna, Cigna, and Unitedhealth Group, which are now the Big Three. Aetna, which is notorious for squeezing the care out of health care, rules in cities like New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Orlando.
Have you flown lately? There are essentially only six national airlines now, and moves are afoot to shrink them to three: American-US Air, Delta-United, and Northwest-Continental, giving this trio 98 percent of the take-offs and landing spots in all of America's busiest airports.
This awesome massing of power is by far the biggest and most threatening development to America's workers, consumers, farmers, and small business. Yet not a political peep from either party. And they wonder why people aren't voting.
ECHELON HAS YOUR NUMBER
Look! Up in the sky. It's a bird, it's a plane--it's Echelon! Echelon is not something many Americans have seen or heard about, but chances are it's heard about you. It's a top-secret satellite and computer system that "listens" to every phone call, e-mail, and fax that is sent by anyone in the world.
I realize this sounds like a fantastical James Bond movie script, but Echelon is real--and, yes, Big Brother really is watching you! Established during the Cold War to spy on the commies, it continues its worldwide surveillance and has even been expanded, despite the fact that the Cold War is long gone. Run by the secretive National Security Agency and based in Maryland, Echelon is a joint espionage escapade of the US, England, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Like a virtual vacuum cleaner in the sky, this system sucks up billions of fax, phone, and e-mail messages from around the globe and funnels them into NSA's supercomputers. These computers are programmed with "Echelon dictionaries" that tag key names, phrases, and words. When the computers "hear" these targeted terms, they pull the full phone, fax, or e-mail message for further analyzing . . . or tracking.
What names, phrases, and words are targeted? NSA isn't saying, though it would have us believe that only names like "Saddam Hussein" and phrases like "terrorist attack" are of interest. However, NSA was recently forced to admit that it has 1,056 pages of classified data on Princess Diana. Independent analysts say that Echelon also collects information on US politicians and organizations, and that it's even being used by US corporations to spy on their foreign competitors.
This is Jim Hightower saying . . . It's time to bring this super-secret, multip;billion-dollar Echelon spy system down to earth and find out what it's doing . . . and why.
Contact us directly at: hightower@essential.org --Copyright 1998, Hightower and Associates, Inc.