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Texas looking up while nation gets thumbs down

AUSTIN, Texas -- Now that Texas and George W. Bush have parted company, things are looking up deep in the heart. In fact, a positively astonishing number of good bills actually have a chance of passing this session, and I think we owe it in part to having the Texas record examined so publicly during the campaign. Some of us seem to have been startled by what we learned.

First, the Lege may actually do something about the infamous grandfathered plants. You'll be pleased to learn the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission has issued a report on how much progress in cleaning up air pollution has been made under George W.'s famous "voluntary compliance" program. The total amount of reduced emissions from grandfathered plants attributable to the governor's program is zero.

All our major cities are in danger of losing billions in federal highway funds if we don't move on the air pollution crisis, so the time is nigh.

One market under God

AUSTIN, Texas -- Haven't had so much fun reading a book since I was 12 and found "The Three Musketeers."

Thomas Frank's One Market, Under God is a populist romp over the most delicious idiocies of the past decade. The obligatory subtitle is "Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy," which doesn't sound promising, but this is a ring-tailed tooter.

The book is a delicious chronicle of the hubris of capitalism in our time, and it contains some of the most savagely funny cultural criticism I have ever come across.

Of course, it's really not fair -- all Frank has to do is quote them: business as God, technology as divinity, the New Economy as the end of history. We live in a culture that produces books like "God Wants You to Be Rich" and "Jesus, CEO."

What's startling about this book is the extent to which we're so surrounded by this nincompoopery but don't even notice it. How many TV ads for stock brokerages do you suppose you've seen in the past 10 years? Anything about them strike you as funny?

Day five of the restoration

LUBBOCK, Texas -- I'm back where most of the world is sky, the people are wonderful, and the water tastes funny. We are on Day Five of the Restoration and, ooops, not looking good.

Of special concern out here is the confirmation of Ann Veneman as secretary of agriculture. Veneman worked for both Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder on farm issues; she was director of California's Food and Agriculture Department under Gov. Pete Wilson and was most recently an agribusiness lawyer.

According to John Nichols in The Nation, "Veneman has rarely missed an opportunity to advance the interests of food-production and processing conglomerates, to encourage policies that lead to the displacement of family farms by huge factory farms, to open public lands for mineral extraction and timbering, to support genetic modification of food and to defend biotech experimentation with agriculture."

Don't come back

Off he rushed to the airport and thence to Chappaqua, N.Y., but if ever there was a man who left a sour taste in the mouth by the manner of his parting, it was surely Bill Clinton. From time to time, against my better judgment, I've thought kindly of the man, and time after time he's brusquely brought me to earth with some bleak reminder of his rottenness.

Try Colombia. Less than 48 hours before Clinton quit the White House with a legal deal covering his own ass, his administration announced that it would employ a highly questionable legal interpretation of "Plan Colombia" -- the $1.3 billion in aid going mostly to the Colombian military. The interpretation allowed the administration to dodge entirely any certification or waiver of human rights conditions attached to the aid, thus circumventing the whole certification process in providing money to the Colombian government.

Freep Heroes - Winter 2001

FREEP HEROES

Demonstrators at the TABD in Cincinnati

In November, the heroic struggle against undemocratic corporate globalism continued in Cincinnati when people took to the streets to expose the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) as the CEO puppetmasters behind the World Trade Organization. The battle between the forces advocating economic control by a few corporate honchos and people demanding bottom-up democratic control really will decide the fate of the 6 billion people on this planet. Once again, the demonstrators realized that politeness and politics as usual will only play into corporate domination of the world.

Ralph Nader

The Nader campaign for president was the most successful for democratic left forces since Norman Thomas in 1932 and much more justified. Thomas ran against the liberal FDR; Nader gave us a clear alternative to the vacuous and sterile rhetoric of the damnable New Democrat Al Gore. Nader allowed us to vote our conscience, express our values and to open up green space in the closed U.S. political system.

THE FREE PRESS SALUTES

Jesse Jackson

crimson on snow

the hotchkiss cannon’s opened up . . . .

as those who ran, were chased down   like rabbits.

women with or without child, men and even children

   all unarmed.

deadly silence fell over the killing fields . . . .

as cardinal red blood lay in stark contrast

 to falling pure and driven snow.

all metaphors still stand . . . .

distinctly apart, only one of the earth

 all balance remains undone.

michael eckhardt
december 29, 2000

Watts your name?

Watts your name?

Oooh Oooh -

Is it Eugene or just Gene

Watts your name?

Oooh Oooh -

Why’s your legislation so obscene?

I have always been aghast

At legislators like you

Who wrap up in the flag

And bad-mouth the

public schools

Watts your name?

Was it at the capitol?

(Senate or house?)

Or was it at your home in Galloway?

Or was it on the day you were born

That your good sense was taken away ?

Oh - Oh

Watts your name?

Oooh Oooh -

Is it Eugene or just Gene

Watts your name?

Oooh Oooh -

You’re so smug and so serene,

But you’re the kind of guy we love to hate

Because you are so mean.

Watts your name?

Doetn doetn doetn doetn doe oh ohhhhhhhhh!!!

-- Ukulele Man, P. Thomas Harker

Ashcroft an extremist?

The liberal public interest outfits rushed to the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the theme that John Ashcroft, Bush's nominee to run the Justice Department, is athwart the national consensus, "too extreme" to be confirmed as U.S. attorney general, as Ralph Neas of People for The American Way put it.

This alleged athwartness is attributed to Ashcroft's Christian fundamentalism, support for the Second Amendment and imputed racism. Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority has taken the same tack: "Women's organizations are justifiably outraged over Bush's appointment of right wing, anti-women's rights extremists. Both Ashcroft and [Wisconsin governor Tommy] Thompson [Bush's nominee to run Health and Human Services (HHS)] want to criminalize abortion and make it a felony."

Among other malfeasances, Ashcroft is charged with the liberals as being the driving force behind "charitable choice," the contracting-out of federal functions to private religious organizations not covered under federal anti-discrimination law.

The narrow separation of press and state

It was a remarkable comment that passed without notice. After interviewing the new White House chief of staff, a network anchor bade him farewell. "All right, Andy Card," said CNN's Judy Woodruff, "we look forward to working with you, to covering your administration."

If major news outlets were committed to independent journalism, Woodruff's statement on national television Jan.19 would have caused quite a media stir -- as a sign of undue coziness with power brokers in Washington. But it was far from conspicuous.

Woodruff's remark was matter-of-fact. Warm collaboration is routine. Many reporters work closely with each new crew of top government officials.

Leading journalists and spinners in high places are accustomed to mutual reliance. That's good for professional advancement. But the public's right to know is another matter.

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