Hightower Lowdown

THE WAILING IN OUR COUNTRY ABOUT the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages...Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the U.S. itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness--around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery, and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate. [ read more ]

THE SPRAWLING $43 BILLION HOMELAND SECURITY DEPARTMENT (HSD) is known chiefly for being the agency in charge of America's color-coded terrorist-threat alarm system ("Good morning, Americans. Today is Yellow. Be vigilant. Report all suspicious people.") It's boogeyman nonsense, of course, doing absolutely nothing to make our country safe. But such falderal helps those in charge obscure HSD's real mission: to serve as a giant federal cookie jar for corporate America. T Go to HSD's website, and you'll find a prominent section called "Open For Business." There, on any given day, corporate shoppers can scroll through the hundreds of contracts and grants available to them. Just dip in and grab some cookies, each one worth from $50,000 to more than $80 million. Like the department's color codes, the vast majority of these projects do nothing to make our country safe. Instead, they are make-work studies, silly technologies, and useless systems that essentially serve as mediums for transferring billions of our tax dollars to a few corporate big shots. Ever helpful to its clients, HSD also maintains a private-sector office, headed by an assistant secretary who is not a security expert but a former banker from JP Morgan Chase. This office provides concierge service for cookie grabbers. For example, it recently held a corporate seminar, entitled "The Business of Homeland Security," offering "tips, hints, and directions" on how to grab the latest contracts and grants. Lest you think that patriotism or even national security might be the motivating force behind these government-industry confabs, a Sikorksy Helicopters executive who attended the session bluntly explained why he was there: "To us contractors, money is always a good thing."

Government by corporation

A monumental shift has quietly and quickly been taking place in the way the public's business is done--and We the People have not even been informed about it, much less been asked to discuss and okay it. Corporations are taking over our government. No longer is it just a matter of big business's lobbyists and campaign donations perverting public policy. Now, politically connected corporations are also seizing day-to-day governmental operations for their own profit.

Since the Carter years, Washington has drifted toward more and more outsourcing of public functions to private contractors, but Bush Incorporated has turned that gradual increase into a fullblown, jet-powered rush to privatization. The shadowy and highly lucrative world of government contracting has boomed under George W, rising 86% since he's been in office and now totaling nearly $400 billion a year. Get this: There are now more people doing federal jobs under corporate contracts than there are people employed directly by the government. In other words, in today's government, corporate servants outnumber civil servants.

Bush likes to claim that he has cut the federal bureaucracy. In fact, he's increased it, but most of the people working in his government wear corporate logos. The New York Times recently reported that contract employees are in practically every agency, not merely doing perfunctory chores, but sitting in on policy sessions and drawing up agency budgets. "Even government's online database for tracking contracts, the Federal Procurement Data System, has been outsourced," says the Times. [ read more ]

George W keeps buzzing around like a maniacal mosquito on a hot summer night, pestering us with speeches and photo ops to tell us, in so many words, that he's doing "a heck of a job." Let me ask you: If he were, wouldn't we know it? Yet in the wonderland where George seems to dwell, prosperity abounds for every American; Iran and Afghanistan are budding flowers of democracy; our environmental skies are perfectly clear; all of our children "is" learning; and the government is in good, capable hands. I don't know where Bush's beautiful world is, but I want to go there! Meanwhile, back on earth, reality is a lot less rosy. In this special fold-out issue and in next month's, we'll put some hard numbers to that reality, offering you Lowdowners a series of scorecards on various areas of importance to We the People. By seeing where we really stand, we can see what needs to be done if our country is to realize its phenomenal potential. We are putting these facts forth as ammunition for agitation to turn the negative numbers positive by organizing and mobilizing folks at the grassroots level -- not merely to take our country back... but to move it forward by teaming up to confront the Powers That Be and press for progressive change. We hope you'll use this ammunition in letters to the editor, family discussions, comments to Congress critters, public forums, and other outlets, rallying your coworkers, friends, and others to action. Also, please pass the ammunition on -- share these issues with the regulars at the café or cantina, copy some of them to post on bulletin boards at your favorite coffee shops or bookstores, leave copies in the break room at work or in your church fellowship hall, send them out to your holiday list or put the scorecards in your blogs, etc. As Thomas Jefferson said, "Educate and inform the whole mass of people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." Check out our special-edition scorecard poster: "Are you better off yet?" [ read more ]