Get your own Free Home PageGo down to your local bookstore and say hello to my favorite left-winger -- former Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower.
He has a new book in paperback titled There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. The publisher is HarperPerennial. It's surely worth a read.
Hightower and I are against the same thing -- this transglobal corporatization that is impoverishing and poisoning America economically, morally, culturally and environmentally. It's getting worse and worse every day.
If you pick up a newspaper or magazine or turn on your television set, with excrutiatingly rare exceptions, you will see whatever you see as filtered through the corporate looking glass and with the corporate slant. People who oppose the status quo, or ideas that challenge the status quo, will usually either be completely blacked out or presented occasionally as examples of bizarre extremism.
To avoid people being puzzled by my admiration for such men as Hightower and Oakland, Calif., Mayor Jerry Brown, let me state that there are two kinds of liberals. There are those who care about people, and there are those who care about ideology. I hate ideologues, whether their ideology is leftist or rightist. I hate them because they are committed to an abstract idea and are willing to sacrifice real people for their unreal idea.
Hightower and Brown are political men who care about people. Both men are worth a listen.
Hightower, for example, takes a well-aimed shot at government statistics. The most foolish statement you will ever hear is when somebody says, ``Let me see the numbers,'' meaning that if he sees numbers, he sees facts. Not so. Statistics are based on definitions and often don't reflect the truth at all.
Unemployment figures, for example, are based on a statistical sample of 12,000 households, Hightower points out. But a person who is so discouraged that he is no longer looking for a job is not counted as unemployed. He is defined as out of the labor pool. For a while the government did not even count as unemployed people who had been laid off. The government defined being laid off as ``suspended employment.''
And, of course, unemployment numbers say nothing about people working part-time, working for minimum wages in dead-end jobs, or highly trained, educated people working at jobs well below their qualifications.
Nor do they say anything about dangerous and unhealthy work conditions, sweatshops, child labor, environmental degradation, price-gouging, price-fixing, unsanitary conditions or bacteria-infected imported foods.
The reality of America and the America reflected by the news media are two different places. Sad to say, most of the news media today perform the services of lap dogs and parrots for government and corporations. You can find out more interesting stuff about America in British newspapers than you can on American television, where news shows have become a bad joke.
Hightower, who is funny as well as truthful and courageous, quotes a saying by a Texas gambler. ``If you sit down to gamble, look around, and, if you don't see any suckers, get up and leave because you're the sucker.''
A great many conservatives and liberals are suckers. The conservatives are suckers because they think that, if they bow to the Chamber of Commerce and Republican Party, they are supporting freedom when, in fact, they are supporting corporate privilege and exploitation. The liberals are suckers because they think that, if they vote for some guy who says he's a liberal and a Democrat, they are supporting liberal ideas when in fact they are getting the same corporate stooge with different rhetoric.
The best recommendation for seeing Saving Private Ryan came from a father who said his son lost interest in computer war games after seeing it. The second-best came from my daughter, who said, ``I'm sorry now I've never flown the flag on Memorial Day.''
Several combat veterans have said it is the most accurate depiction of war they've ever seen in a movie. Now why should people see an accurate depiction of war?
So they will know that it is so horrible that no one should ever put Americans into one except to defend the country against attack. So they will know what price men paid for our freedom and independence. So they will know that war is not a computer game or a silly Rambo comic-book adventure. So they will know what horrors bad politics and failed diplomacy produce.
I've observed that most creative people produce one masterpiece in which everything seems to come together exactly right. It's a form of magic. Most do it only once. I think that Saving Private Ryan is Steven Spielberg's masterpiece. And probably Tom Hanks' masterpiece, too. He is a rare actor who can write a novel with his face.
Not a film for small children, of course, but teenagers certainly ought to see it. After all, if the politicians and diplomats screw up, they will be the ones who have to fight the next war. And so far in this century there has always been a next war.
It may be that what we have been witnessing is not the dumbing down of America but the dumbing down of the human species. That's another disadvantage of war. It takes huge numbers of the best humans out of the gene pool by killing them.
I hope that all Americans will go see Saving Private Ryan and then ponder these points:
1. The current administration is practicing reckless and careless diplomacy. War is always a product of the failure of politicians and diplomats.
2. The current administration is weakening the military, cutting it too much, and depriving what's left of sufficient funds to keep fully equipped, manned and properly trained.
3. The current Congress, like past Congresses, is more interested in financing pork-barrel projects -- often expensive weapons systems the military doesn't want or need -- than in matching forces to missions based on professional advice.
4. The current administration, aided and abetted by Congress, is destroying military effectiveness by catering to feminists.
Any sane person who sees Saving Private Ryan will not want his sons, much less his daughters, to have to endure the horror of war. Nothing is more stupid than to view the military as just a civilian career opportunity in camouflage.
Some of the above points have been made by retired Col. David Hackworth, and I want to reinforce them. Every time we get disgusted with politics -- and I am -- we have to remember that if we don't put sensible men and women of integrity and intelligence into the House of Representatives and the Senate, the consequences can be terrible.
Wars don't just happen. Politicians make them happen. Then politicians sit back and take the glory; the arms industry reaps the profit; generations of taxpayers get stuck with the bill; and young men die.
Don't ever think that politics is not important. It is as important as life and death.
I know people who hate war but take a flippant, cynical attitude toward politics. That's a contradiction. Bad politics ultimately breeds war. And war, as this film shows, is noise, confusion, fear, fatigue, filth, pain, brutality, maiming and death. There's not a damned thing good about a war.
This is a message for the bomb-a-foreigner crowd. Those are the blockheads who think that patriotism consists of cheering on a corrupt government whenever it decides to kill innocent foreigners for a public-relations stunt.
A true patriot is a lover, not a hater and a killer. A true patriot loves his own land and his own people and respects patriots in other countries who feel the same way about their land and their people.
Because he loves his land and his people, the patriot does not want to go to war except when there is no choice. He does not wish to place his people into harm's way for some stupid and irresponsible reason, such as trying to distract their attention from an odious scandal.
American intelligence in the Middle East is a contradiction in terms. I could write a whole column about all the things American intelligence did not know about the Middle East. It did not know that Anwar Sadat was going to Jerusalem; it did not know that he was going to be assassinated; it did not know that our embassy in Beirut was going to be bombed; it did not know that our Marines were going to be attacked; it did not know that the Iranians would seize our embassy.
More recently, it certainly did not know where Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan. It did not know that the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum was, in fact, a pharmaceutical factory with no ties to either bin Laden or Iraq.
And, of course, it did not know that our embassies in Africa would be bombed, despite someone telling it that they would be. An Israeli newspaper has reported that, when Americans asked Israeli intelligence about the informant, the Israelis said they had not found him to be reliable. Hence, his warning was disregarded. Furthermore, a former police officer in Kenya told embassy security people he had observed a man with two bodyguards videotaping all four sides of the embassy. This information was dismissed, ``just a tourist,'' he was told. So much for alert American intelligence.
I suppose a lot of Americans believe the Central Intelligence Agency when it says, ``Oh, we have all kinds of successes, but we can't tell you about them.''
Osama bin Laden, according to people in the Middle East, was considered by the majority of Muslims as an extremist nut. Now, the Clinton administration has made him an international hero to hotheads thoughout the Middle East. Most people in the Middle East considered Saddam Hussein a thug, but now, by killing Iraqi women and children with cruel sanctions, the United States has created sympathy for Iraq.
Here's what upsets people in the Muslim world.
The United States props up and supports oppressive governments if the dictators act as step-and-fetch-its for the United States.
The United States supports Israel no matter how much it abuses Palestinians or how often it violates international law. When the Israelis killed 100 women and children who fled to a United Nations compound in South Lebanon, the United States could not bring itself to utter even a mild rebuke. Instead, it turned on U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, when he refused to suppress a U.N. report blaming the Israelis.
The United States slaughters Iraqis in the name of enforcing U.N. resolutions; it prevents the United Nations from taking any action against Israel.
I just hope that the armchair commandoes are as brave when Clinton's unjust, photo-op war comes home to American streets. I'm as ready as anybody to fight a just and necessary war, but I will not support foolish and unjust attacks ordered by a sicko draft-dodger.
Bobby Unser, three-time winner of the Indianapolis 500, went snowmobiling with a friend in New Mexico. They were caught in a blizzard that created a whiteout, were forced to spend the night in a snow cave and had to trek 18 miles the next morning to find help. Both were hospitalized.
Unser was charged by the U.S. Forest Service with illegally taking his snowmobile into a federally designated wilderness area. He faced a fine of $5,000 or six months in prison. Now Unser had not gone snowmobiling in the wilderness area. He had gone into a national park open to snowmobiles.
If he had gone into the wilderness area -- his snowmobile had not been found -- it was purely an accident while he was trying to save his life in the zero-visibility blizzard. Yet, the U.S. government has spent more than $600,000 trying to convict Unser.
That's why people don't trust their government any more. That's why Unser wrote the introduction to the ``National Directory of Environmental and Regulatory Victims,'' published by the National Center for Public Policy Research. It is a record of injustice and government insanity.
For example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration ordered state road workers to wear long pants in the middle of a heat wave because they were dealing with hot tar, as if experienced road builders didn't know that. After several collapsed with heat exhaustion in the long pants, a congressman finally intervened.
But the stories of people deprived of their life savings by federal bureaucrats abusing the Endangered Species Act are tragic, not amusing. What these bureaucrats, egged on by environmental extremists, do is designate private property as the habitat of some bug or bird or animal, thus depriving the owner of any use of his property without compensation. Thousands of people lost their jobs over the spotted owl.
Another trick federal bureaucrats use is wetlands. Let some bureaucrat declare your property a wetland, and you are effectively robbed of your property -- without compensation. This is unjust. This is tyranny. Since when does property, often owned for decades, suddenly become U.S. property if some bureaucrat says the water doesn't drain off of it fast enough?
The political problem is this: There are more renters and folks living in urban areas where they generally don't run into this kind of nonsense than there are property owners who get victimized. So, as people do when it isn't their ox being gored, they don't support the property owners who are isolated and then picked off by the bureaucrats.
That's a dangerous indifference. The principle of the right to own and use property is the foundation of all other human rights. The principle of destroying private property rights so that all live at the mercy of the government is the foundation of all tyrannies.
It is only by acquiring and using private property that a human being can become economically independent -- and, thus, politically independent. Slaves and serfs, dependent on the landowners for subsistence, cannot afford to complain or to assert their rights. That's why the basic plank of communism is to eliminate private property. Because the state controls all property, everyone in a communist country lives by permission of the state.
That's why people in the streets and in the 'burbs ought to be protective of property rights. Property rights are the foundation of human rights and political freedoms. It seems to me it's just kindergarten-level political philosophy not to tolerate the government confiscating private property without compensation.
Bad government, when neglected, just gets worse, never better.
Ken Starr is the good guy. Bill Clinton is the bad guy. Yet, for most of this year, the public supported Clinton and booed Starr. That's the power of propaganda combined with ignorance.
Clinton, with the help of his pack of news-media lapdogs, spread several obvious lies about Starr. Let's look at them one by one.
Lie No. 1: Ken Starr has spent four years investigating the president and has nothing to show for it. Fact: Starr has been the second most productive special prosecutor since the law was written. Before the Monica Lewinsky scandal came along, Starr had already gotten guilty pleas and convictions of 12 people -- including the governor of Arkansas and the former deputy attorney general.
Lie No. 2: Whitewater was just a land deal that went bad. Fact: American taxpayers were defrauded out of several hundred thousand dollars.
Lie No. 3: Starr is a partisan Republican who is pursuing Clinton for partisan purposes. Fact: Starr, whose ambition is to be a Supreme Court justice, killed his chances for appointment when he was George Bush's solicitor general. Bush wanted Starr to intervene on behalf of the defense contractors in a case involving whistle-blowers. Starr, after looking at the facts, sided with the whistle-blowers, knowing that it would ruin his shot at the Supreme Court. Sure enough, Bush soon thereafter appointed David Souter to the vacancy. Sacrificing one's dream for the sake of the truth is hardly the action of a partisan hack.
Lie No. 4: Starr deliberately dragged out the investigations. Fact: The investigations took so long because the Clinton Gang stonewalled and contested every motion and request and persistently ``lost'' records.
Starr is a man of genuine religious conviction, a faithful husband and a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and fairness. Clinton is a sociopath and sleazebag.
A nation is in trouble when people can no longer tell the difference between good and bad. That says they have no standards. A nation is in trouble when the people are so ignorant they are easily duped by propagandists. That says they have no real education and no ability to think critically.
Such people will never remain free, as Thomas Jefferson noted long ago. It is impossible to function as an effective citizen without knowledge and the ability to think and without a moral standard by which to judge men and events.
``For men are so simple and yield so much to immediate necessity, that the deceiver never lacks dupes.'' So said the great Italian realist Niccolo Machiavelli.
Perhaps Americans have lost the capacity and fitness for self-government. Perhaps they've grown too lazy and too selfish. If so, then rest assured some Caesar or Napoleon will come along to govern them, though he will probably wear a suit rather than a uniform. There are no vacuums in nature or in politics. But men in suits can be as ruthless and cruel as men in uniform.
Jefferson, George Washington and Patrick Henry would be sickened and appalled to see what a mess we've made of the constitutional republic they gave us. We turned our back on the republic and installed a European-style, centralized government that definitely leans toward socialism. It may turn out that their faith in the ability of ordinary people to govern themselves was misplaced.
I hope not. If what could be learned from the Clinton mess is that we should be more skeptical of charming people who tell us they will fix all our problems, that would be cause for optimism.
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