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While the effects of today's severely depressed economy are well known to those who have lost billions in the stock market, it has been absolutely painful for those who have lost their jobs or suffered major reductions in their health-care benefits, as well as for those who are now having to postpone retirement in order to make ends meet.
But we'd never know we are living in such troubling times, when we read about the large salary increases being doled out to our state university presidents.
The rapid salary escalation began last year after the Legislature, with Gov. Jeb Bush's approval, abolished the Board of Regents, which, along with its predecessor Board of Control, had governed the university system for almost 100 years. In place of the regents, the Legislature set up a new governance system, which gave individual universities their own board of trustees. The trustees, among other things, now set presidential compensation.
As long as the regents were around, they established presidential salaries for each university and made them competitive with comparable universities around the nation. Now, each university's board of trustees is apparently attempting to outdo the others in setting presidential salaries. They do this while the newly constituted Board of Education does nothing about it.
-- The trustees at Florida International University in Miami started things rolling last spring, when it approved a 41 percent pay raise for President Mitch Madique, increasing his salary by $83,000, from $202,000 annually to $285,000. That would make him the highest-paid president in the university system at the time although his salary was not effective until November 2002.
-- Not to be outdone, the University of Central Florida trustees some months later voted to increase President John Hitt's salary by $93,000, from $202,000 to $295,000 effective in January 2003, which at that time would make him the highest-paid president in the system.
-- When Fred Gainous was appointed president of Florida A&M University last summer, he was paid an annual salary of $284,000, giving him almost $100,000 more than his predecessor, Dr. Fred Humphries, making him the highest-paid president in the state system.
-- The trustees at Florida Atlantic University are currently engaged in a search to replace former President Anthony Cantonese. They have indicated their willingness to pay its next president as much as $500,000 in salary, perks, and bonuses, as well as a $100,000 as a "signing bonus." This pay package is reported to be about twice that of Cantonese when he left FAU earlier this year.
-- On Dec. 11, the University of Florida trustees approved an increase of $93,000 or 36 percent for President Chuck Young which now makes him the highest-paid president in the university system. In light of the way the other presidents had been treated, Young's raise was predictable and perhaps justified. The UF trustees also announced that when they hire their new president within the next year or so, it will be necessary to pay that person substantially more than Young will now receive -- a level of at least $400,000 or more.
-- Major salary increases have been approved or are under consideration at Florida Gulf Coast University, the University of South Florida and other state universities.
-- Finally, Florida State University trustees have yet to announce a salary for the new president they are about to name. One may expect that their president's salary package will exceed those already established for most of the other universities in the system.
Keep in mind that all of our presidents receive substantial perks in addition to the state salary, including a bonus from the university's foundation, an automobile, a university residence or housing allowance, generous expense allowances for entertainment and other purposes, as well as some travel expenses for the president's spouse at some institutions.
It is true that some private institutions and a few state universities pay their presidents more than Florida does. But none of these states come close to Florida's despicable level of support for higher education, where we rank in the bottom 10 percent of states in per-capita funding for higher education.
How can anyone justify increases of such magnitude for Florida university presidents when university faculty and staff members this year are being given an average salary increase of only 2.5 percent? This translates into an average increase for all faculty members at the University of Florida of approximately $1,500 per year.
And from where does the money come to pay the presidents their handsome salary increases? It is obviously taken off the top of overall university budgets since the Legislature has provided no additional money for presidential salaries other than the 2.5 percent. Of course this means that it would be possible to use at least part of the money committed to presidential salary increases to support the total research, teaching and service mission of a university or to provide badly needed faculty salary increases.
And how are such substantial increases for presidents justified when they were already employed at what must be competitive salaries or they would have already moved to "greener pastures?"
Such use of taxpayer's money would not have happened under the old Board of Regents. Of course the Board of Regents was abolished because it wouldn't approve the creation of expensive and unneeded new medical and law schools, which powerful leaders in the Legislature wanted.
Let me make my position on salaries abundantly clear. I fully support the idea of paying university personnel as much as it takes to employ and retain the very best personnel available -- within the limits, of course, imposed by available resources. But it must be recognized that if resources are limited (as they inevitably will be) a university cannot compensate an individual or one class of personnel without affecting what can be paid others. Therefore, a university must achieve a balance in resource use, no matter how desirable it would be to pay an individual or class of individuals more.
Finally, let me emphasize that Amendment 11, which was approved by a 60.5 percent margin on Nov. 5, provides the framework for an even better governance system than that of the Board of Regents because the new Board of Governors will be insulated from unjustified meddling by the Legislature. However, it will provide a better system only if the governor and Legislature properly implement it.
Perhaps decision makers in Tallahassee should be reminded that almost three million Floridians expressed their desire for a different kind of university governance system than the Bush administration has given us.
What more of a mandate for proper implementation is needed?
...from Daytona Beach NewsJournal COMMUNITY VOICES
By E.T. YORK. York is a retired chancellor of the State University System and former interim president of the University of
Florida; 12/17/02
News-Journal editorial
There are two ways to regard the sudden, sweeping exodus of veteran state employees.
The first -- and easiest -- is to shrug it off. Who's going to miss a pack of career bureaucrats?
But a more realistic assessment must be tinged with concern. Florida's government structure covers a dizzying array of missions -- protecting consumers, fighting pollution, imprisoning felons and educating children, and myriad others. Accomplishing these goals inside the limitations of state budget, accountability rules and public need is no job for amateurs. Yet in the past months, Florida state government has seen a brain drain of near-unprecedented proportions. And even as Gov. Jeb Bush scrambles to fill the holes, Floridians are getting the notion -- for the first time -- of the vast amount of power Florida has invested in the governor over the past four years.
The state was already set for major changes as Florida transitions from a Cabinet with three, not six, members. The Department of Education has already made the shift from an elected commissioner to appointed Secretary Jim Horne, who answers to a new Board of Education (also gubernatorial appointees.) But recent events make that change seem tame.
In the past week, four department heads announced their resignations: Michael Moore (Corrections); Kim Binkley-Seyer (Business and Professional Regulation); David Griffin (Florida Lottery) and Cynthia Henderson (Management Services.) Others who have recently said good-bye include Steve Siebert (Community Affairs) and Tom Barry (Transportation). Earlier this year, Kathleen Kearney, secretary of the Department of Children and Families, quit following a scandal over children missing from state foster care.
Turnover this drastic is common when a new governor takes office -- but Bush was just re-elected to a second term and the departed officials were all selected by him (except Barry, originally appointed by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles.) One of the advantages voters presumably perceived in Bush's candidacy was a chance to retain some stability in challenging times. Unfortunately, more upheaval appears likely.
In Children and Families -- arguably the most troubled department in the state -- Kearney's replacement, Oklahoman Jerry Regier, has brought a tidal wave of change. Following a wave of resignations, Regier pink-slipped a cadre of top-level district and state officials in the single largest one-day purge in the department's history. Will his choices to replace them help bring the state out of the crisis of trust it faces? Advocates are frightened that the budget crunch -- combined with the fact that many areas (including this one) are currently being headed by interim administrators -- will make it even harder to keep children out of danger.
Other departments -- including corrections, still reeling from budget cuts and scandal, and management services, charged with overseeing massive privatization efforts -- aren't grabbing as many headlines as the DCF troubles. But they are also potential trouble spots that bear close watching.
There's also the potential that the purges could reach down into the nuts-and-bolts of state government. Of particular concern is the graceless way 65 Department of Education employees were booted Wednesday with no notice. The firings swept out veteran personnel as well as support staff.
But a greater concern is whether the state has lost so much of its institutional knowledge that it hurts the ability of state government to act with responsibility and accountability, and puts an enormous burden on Bush to find leaders capable of hitting the ground running.
... http://www.n-jcenter.com/2002/Dec/13/OPN1.htm
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Daniel Patrick Welch
Take a deep breath-or better yet, a stiff drink. Don't watch any news if it makes you too sick, and try to get plenty of fluids (hopefully of the aforementioned variety). But before succumbing to the war fever that is supposedly gripping the nation, take time to think a bit. I just read a piece on vote suppression by Joe Conason, and even though I feel sick I must admit it struck a chord. I've been mulling over some thoughts about this particular election, its ancestors and its progeny, and the GOP's penchant for vote suppression is as good a place to start as any.
'Challenging voters' under the guise of 'preventing fraud' is an old White Supremacy trick--and until Florida 2000, it was widely acknowledged as such. What the Democrats' cynical reaction to 2000 did was far worse than their short-term mindset could have imagined. It allowed the right wing to dress up this old racist scam just like David Duke tried to do with the Klan in Louisiana. The measured, lawyerly response allowed the slick, 'modern' argument about accuracy to become the new republican mantra--which hampers progressive efforts for years to come. What we rightly tried to do--and were discouraged from--is to make Jim Baker look like Bull Connor. God knows he fit the bill enough, with his puffy red face screaming into the cameras. Without exaggeration, he was basically 'Keepin the niggers down,' as Randy Newman might say.
The poster boy and the poster moment for reactionary resistance to voter reform was always Strom Thurmond's historic filibuster against the Voting Rights Act. Instead, it has been allowed to transform itself into a sort of Klansmanship Without Robes. Imagine John Ashcroft, basically a klansman himself, sending out monitors to 'make sure that every vote counts!' It is Bizarro World stuff, the The Big Lie run amok.
No, I'm not ranting here. I'm convinced this really is the crux of the matter. Those of us on the left all believe, more or less and to varying degrees, in some version of what we might call the SPM: Suppressed Progressive Majority. It's not a pipe dream or wishful thinking--common sense also dictates that the people shouldn't collectively vote consistently against their own interest. And yet elections yield far worse calamities than our failure to see this majority emerge in the U.S. Across Latin America, people have voted for their own killers time after time, in the grip of fear, bribery and the Big Lie. One of many nagging problems is that broader participation is anathema to incumbency on both the right and left. New voters, more work, uncertainty, and more money. Basically, it's just a big pain in the ass.
This is why no mainstream political force has pursued it aggressively with the exception of the Democrats in the Civil Rights era. White politicians, for the most part, were dragged to it kicking and screaming, but it was one of the party's finest hours. And the modern Knights of Reaction believe fervently that vote suppression is cheaper and more effective than expansion (as Joe Conason's insights show). Basically, reactionary forces have put up barriers to voting as quickly as others fall, from the Black Codes to Klan intimidation to Jim Crow to poll taxes to reading tests to loyalty oaths and Byzantine registration processes.
There is an unbroken historical link from slavery to the scrubbing of voter rolls in the name of accuracy and fraud prevention. Across the country, but most pervasively in the old Jim Crow South, restrictions on felons voting have continued this trend, with the more insidious form being a permanent loss of suffrage, even after convicts have served their time. A demographic footnote? Hardly. What this means is that, notably in something like nine states of the old Confederacy, upwards of 20% of black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised. Now, we may be accused of arrogance simply to assume that these potential souls 'belong' to the left or progressive majority. But the consistent targeting of this and other constituencies by the right certainly implies that they think so (such as those targeted by Bill Rehnquist in the nefarious Operation Eagle Eye in Arizona in the early 60's-and no, it didn't hurt his appointment as Chief Justice).
Playing off the poor white against black has of course also been an insidious historical trick, and another of slavery's distorting legacies. It is undoubtedly one of the reasons why the U.S. is the only major industrial democracy without a worker's party (why the hell not??) or serious popular front coalition, where racism hampered efforts time and again. But my point here is about structural barriers, and how the well funded right wing electoral project is able to magnify its perceived majority. Taking Tuesday's vote, for example, it would be unwise not to concede a victory for reaction. But perspective is always an important antidote to despair. The electorate, and more importantly a slim majority of that subelectorate that could be coaxed to vote, was scared to death, pure and simple.
Bucking demographic, historic and economic trends, this election result is an anomaly, an obvious, logical reaction to the fear instilled by the events of last September. It needn't have been so, and quite arguably wouldn't be without the fomenting of Bush and his henchmen storming the country shouting 'boo' at every turn, flat out lying about Iraq and al-Qaeda and bashing the U.N. It has been Halloween all year for this cabal, and it's only getting scarier. Before moving to Canada, consider that more sophisticated polling reveals that-surprise!--when people know the truth they are less stupid (not such an obvious fact for many of us on Wednesday morning). But a poll on Iraq which correlated people's awareness that there is no reliable evidence of a connection with al-Qaeda revealed that those who caught the lie oppose the war by a massive margin.
Feel just a little bit better? I thought you might. For a sweetener, add in the fact that Missouri was decided by 22,500 votes in a special election that wasn't even supposed to take place but for a plane crash that killed Jean Carnahan's husband two years ago. Speculating yet again, though the 2000 voting trends seem to give us ample room for it, Mel today would be serving out the last four years in a seat he wrested from John Ashcroft, not fighting for his political life in the wake of September 11 war fever.
Likewise, another plane crash might have altered the course of history, with the 55,000-vote margin that sank Mondale's seat in Minnesota (it's around 40,000 if you count the absentee votes for Wellstone. They were thrown out because no one can really be sure if those who bothered to vote early for Paul Wellstone wouldn't really have supported the republicans and their right wing agenda). Speculating yet again-isn't this fun?-we saw Wellstone pulling ahead before his untimely death. The obscenity of republicans in Minnesota spitting on his grave (repulsive, but effective) with their mock 'outrage' over his memorial service (which they charged was repulsive, but secretly envied as effective) was just the chest beating they needed to reenergize their base in the final days. [For the record, I told a Catholic priest to go to hell when he tried to tell me what I could say at my father's funeral, but maybe that's just me.] So what? No one can predict the weather, right? Well, okay, but I'm just saying….
Besides, I'm talking about structure, not climate. This isn't sour grapes, and I'm not just venting either. My point isn't that WE WUZ ROBBED. We IZ robbed, but in a much greater way than some touch screen fiasco in Florida. By the way, isn't anyone alarmed at the abolition of the paper ballot? My head almost exploded when I heard about this. But back to our friend, the Senate. The point is not just about vote counting, but the magnification of the result through the structural prism of our electoral system. All told, the republicans garnered about 1.6 million more votes for Senate candidates than Democrats. A three or four percent split. Hardly a whisper, I know-hey, I already admitted it was a reactionary night. But with those votes they scooped up 23 Senate seats to the Democrats' 10 (and I'm cutting Landrieu and Johnson some serious slack here).
And, since it's structural, this phenomenon is not unique to this election. The Senate, itself a throwback to the belief that a barrier to direct democracy was necessary to calm the rabble-a sort of modified House-of-Lords type bulwark-is endemically prone to this thwarting of popular will. The very institution was conceived, in part, as a hedge by the slaveholding Southern states of the new republic against being overrun by the more populous north. This form of super-representation spread like a virus as new states entered the Union, compounded by the win/win compromise that allowed slavery's proponents to pimp off their chattel for representation without giving them the franchise.
And so it goes: everyone gets their two cents-or in this case, two Senators, from Wyoming to California. Except, of course, for the good people of DC, who perversely don't merit representation in this ponzi scheme because they allegedly have 50 Senators-and right in their own backyard, too! Ironically, in their attempt to fend off the potential bogeyman of Tyranny of the Majority, the (Slaveholding) Founding Fathers virtually ensured that this tyranny would be magnified beyond recognition, and that minority voices would never be heard.
The winner take all arrangement when the Senate moved to direct election, as well as the Electoral College, gives these overrepresented constituencies a Supervote that has ballooned with the growth of the republic. Again, who am I to deny this stacked deck advantage to the oppressed poor progressives of Montana and Wyoming? And how dare I automatically assume that our beloved SPM is concentrated in the underrepresented constituencies? Sue me-or consult the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Your choice. But whatever you do, don't grant true voting rights for DC. That would apparently just compound the problem (not to mention give the left two progressive black Senators).
What bears repeating is that Eleanor Holmes Norton garnered 113,000 votes, more than most of her (voting) House counterparts. Pundits who decry low black turnout have it backwards: the real story is why they bother to vote at all. The late Stephen Jay Gould, eminent natural historian, crusader against creationism, and spellbinding lecturer and writer, fascinated me with his penchant for explaining just about any phenomenon with a baseball analogy. Though an avid Red Sox fan as a kid, I have never taken sports that seriously as an adult. It's just a sport-you know? That's why it always surprises me that, in one realm, people would instinctively laugh you out of the room at the suggestion that Sox fans would pay just as close attention if their team isn't playing. Or root for the Yankees to win the World Series (hey, it's still OUR league, isn't it?) And yet black voters are supposed to be imbued with a sort of superhuman altruism in the voting game.
The amazing thing is that they still answer the call. In this game, without proportional representation (or in DC's case without any at all) it is completely impossible for minorities to get their cut without piggybacking off a majority winner. Not in a negotiated coalition for a share of control, of course, but only for the table scraps-which are getting less appetizing under the tyranny of the DLC. Maybe this explains why black voters are less prone to being picked off by third party candidacies than their liberal white counterparts. Being junior partners in a coalition is all they can ever squeeze out of this system. It's the same for other constituencies on the left, of course, but most don't quite realize how the winner-take-all scheme nullifies their vote.
And it is only by the bizarre gerrymandering of districts than any semblance of representation is maintained in the House-but of course this is neatly countered by the Supervotes already discussed. It seems like we've been here before, but the whole nut seems to come back to the fact that the Civil War is still unfinished business. Hey-don't blame me-I'm just a spectator. The undocumented aliens I descend from weren't in the country yet-and we weren't even considered white back then.
Yes, I've hear the reverent arguments about the wisdom of Tom Jefferson and his friends (though Sally Hemming might disagree, in hindsight). In a federated republic, the supermajority prevents fragmentation by giving a mandate to the True Majority. The one small problem is that True Majority only equals the true majority in times of enormous crisis, like the 1930's. And possibly the Great Opportunity of 1964 (later squandered on Johnson's War). At least those are the only times our SPM is able to punch through the Class Ceiling of American politics. The sad fact is that without structural change, the victories we long for will elude us.
Take your pick from a laundry list of options: statehood for DC, proportional voting, apportionment of seats, instant runoff voting, abolition of the electoral college, replacement of the Senate (sorry, Ted, sorry Strom)-not to mention sincere, rigorous enforcement and expansion of the Voting Rights Act. I'm not stupid or pie-eyed enough to suggest that this guarantees victory. But you just can't win without unrigging the game. These structural changes should be the among the top priorities of every progressive campaign from now until victory, first, because it's right (whew-glad we got that out of the way-and secondly, because it's a winning electoral strategy for the long term).
This is not the place to brag-well hey, screw it, why not brag? I'm proud of (most of) the political work I've done: from organizing, demonstrating, work in progressive campaigns, in Nicaragua, support for left causes, strikes, and so on.... But of all of it, I think one of my most radical accomplishments was a tiny little campaign a roommate and I ran on a dorm council in college. The council, whose meetings we almost never attended, was a direct democracy. There was no representation, and yet over the years the clique of members (whom we nastily and somewhat unfairly dubbed the Politburo) had instituted bylaws tying voting rights to various attendance requirements. 'What if the jocks brought a bunch of friends and raided the till by voting all the money for a party in their suite?' was a standard argument. Tough shit-bring your own clique-was our retort. Hey-it's either a direct democracy or a representative one. It can't be both a council and a club.
I know, it might be a silly anecdote. Voting is supposed to be serious business (like baseball). But the practice of democracy is simply not something people are exposed to-despite our lofty rhetoric-in their workplaces, homes, schools and institutions. People can call me a cockeyed optimist or romantic fool (for believing the SPM exists at all) or an insufferable downer (for believing that it will never emerge without structural change). But I still have a populist streak in me, and I do believe in the SPM. And I do believe that it will never emerge without structural change. Please-call me a cockeyed optimist.
© 2002 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted.
Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School.
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Chief Justice’s daughter purges Health and Human Services office
By Peter Daniels
30 November 2002
A series of complaints about the conduct of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general has shed some additional light on the workings of the Bush Administration.
Janet Rehnquist, who previously held the relatively low-level post of an assistant US attorney in Virginia, was appointed in August 2001 to the inspector general’s job at HHS, where she is responsible for oversight on the spending of more than $450 billion annually for such programs as Medicare and Medicaid. She also happens to be the daughter of the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, William Rehnquist.
In the 15 months since she took office, Ms. Rehnquist has carried out a wholesale purge of her department, the largest of the 57 inspector general offices within the federal government. Nineteen career officials, including five of the six deputies in the department, have been removed through retirement, forced resignation or transfer.
Some of those who have been removed by Rehnquist have apparently taken their complaints to Congress and other government agencies. The dispute has reached into the Republican Party, with Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, calling for a review of Rehnquist’s actions. Grassley said the loss of the 19 officials could “hinder the performance of an office that has a stellar reputation for fighting fraud, waste and abuse in federal health care programs.”
In a bizarre but significant sidelight to the Rehnquist dispute, officials are also looking into whether she illegally kept a gun in her office at HHS. Marcia J. Van Note, a former executive assistant to the inspector general, told investigators that her boss kept a pistol in a file cabinet, and that she had a poster of a life-size human target posted on her office wall. She told co-workers that she used the target to practice her aim, according to a November 11 report in the Wall Street Journal, prompting the office’s employees to fear for their safety.
Whether Rehnquist’s illegal brandishing of a firearm at her workplace was a calculated attempt to intimidate her subordinates, evidence of mental imbalance or a combination of both is unclear. What has become increasingly evident, however, is that a management style that approaches a reign of terror is directed at rolling back longstanding procedures within the inspector general’s office.
Every federal department and major agency has an inspector general. The HHS office is the biggest, with 1,600 employees. It was created in 1976, and was followed by the establishment of 57 similar offices throughout the federal government. In fiscal year 2000, the combined budgets of these 57 inspectors general was $1.3 billion, and they recovered $5.5 billion in waste and fraud, while recommending another $15.6 billion be put to better use.
Incoming inspectors general often make some changes, but the wholesale turnover under Rehnquist is without precedent. According to the Wall Street Journal, Rehnquist “quickly put her stamp on the office, easing antifraud measures and instead emphasizing voluntary compliance. She scaled back the use of ‘corporate integrity agreements’, in which health-care companies found to have defrauded the government acquiesce to strict reporting conditions, saying she was ‘concerned about [their] financial impact’ on providers.” Rehnquist’s predecessor at HHS, June Gibbs Brown, said these changes had “weakened the system...It’s really giving in to industry.”
Among those who left soon after Rehnquist’s arrival were Deputy Inspector General Tom Roslewicz, who retired a year early after Rehnquist attempted to force him to sign a loyalty pledge and denied him a customary bonus. Another deputy, D. McCarty Thornton, left under pressure. Both of these officials had won Meritorious Executive Presidential Rank Awards.
Two other deputies—Michael Mangano and George Grob—were told to leave, and were made no-show employees in the meantime. These two had won the most prestigious Distinguished Executive Presidential Rank Award for “a relentless long-term commitment to excellence in public service.”
Rehnquist is the only political appointee in her office, and she clearly felt that the veteran civil service employees on the staff were too conscientious in their hunt for fraud and waste among the big private providers of medical care. The ultra-right campaign against bureaucratic waste in government abruptly stops when it comes to big business illegally profiting off of government spending.
The Rehnquist dispute also lifts the veil on a practice of the Bush Administration that has received scant coverage in the media— rampant and unprecedented nepotism. She is only one of the many children of powerful government officials identified with the Republican right who have been catapulted into top jobs.
Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the vice president, occupies a State Department position created especially for her, and her husband is chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. The top lawyer at the Labor Department is Eugene Scalia, the son of another right-wing Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s son, Michael Powell, is chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
The cases of Scalia and Rehnquist are particularly revealing. Children of the leaders of the Supreme Court majority that installed Bush in the White House two years ago have been given powerful executive branch jobs. Eugene Scalia acted as one of the Bush campaign’s attorneys in the successful effort to have his father and the other four right-wing Republican justices in the Supreme Court majority block a Florida vote recount, elevating Bush to the presidency despite the fact that his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, had won the popular vote and, in all likelihood, had outpolled Bush in Florida.
... from the World Socialist
Website
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/nov2002/rehn-n30_prn.shtml
....posted by AO, 12/01/02
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TALLAHASSEE -- John Leo, the U.S. News & World Report columnist, poked fun recently at the American penchant for such euphemisms and "upscale name changes" as the current campaign to recast the Florida Panhandle as "Florida's Great Northwest." The reason, he wrote, is that "some residents think their area's name leaves the impression that panhandling is the major local activity."
Leo had that example only half right. It's not the local residents who want an etymological facelift. It's the work of the giant St. Joe Co., an absentee land owner and developer headquartered at Jacksonville. Though St. Joe owns more of the Panhandle than any entity other than the U.S. government, the venerable place name is as conspicuously absent from the company's literature as the word "gambling" in a casino promo. (More on that later.)
As it happens, panhandling in the begging sense is exactly what St. Joe is up to at the moment. As this newspaper and other media have reported, the St. Joe Co. is the major force behind a proposed new airport, which would be twice as large as Tampa's, to be built on its land near Panama City, and to move inland a four-mile section of U.S. Highway 98 in Franklin County, so that St. Joe can replace it with a "natural beachfront trail system" to attract upscale home buyers.
You, the taxpayer, will be paying for most of this. St. Joe is well fixed with both the Washington and Tallahassee branches of the Bush dynasty.
The Panhandle needs a new airport about as much as the Sahara needs snowplows. Panama City already has a sorely underused airport, with a new terminal built just seven years ago. The case for the road is no better.
That's total gall panhandling. No wonder the company is sensitive to the word.
* * *
Speaking of euphemisms, Floridians are in for a daily dose of "video lottery," which is the gambling racket's term of art for electronic slot machine. These are being peddled in the interest of "gaming," not "gambling."
That's like calling a cesspool a parfumerie and pretending that it improves the smell.
The "video lottery" euphemism first appears in the Nexis database in connection with the New York state lottery's 1981 attempt to set up 300 card-playing video game machines. The lottery division canceled the project after then-Attorney General Robert Abrams ruled that the machines "are in reality slot machines and thus are barred by the state Constitution."
But you'll hear only "video lottery" from the lips of the legislators and lobbyists who want to legalize these devices in Florida and give the race tracks a monopoly on them.
Now as always, slot machines are a sucker's bet. But you can bet safely on this: Any politician who calls them a "video lottery" knows better. He also thinks you don't.
Speaking of politicians, Johnnie Byrd, the new speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, raised lots of eyebrows by saying the Legislature would probably have to consider the slots as a palliative for the state's budget crisis. That didn't square with his reputation as a social conservative. A couple of days later, Byrd issued a statement to set the record straight.
"I do not support the expansion of gambling in Florida," he said. "I believe that we should build a better Florida based on the strengths of people and not their weaknesses. There are significant social costs to the expansion of gambling and any expansion of gambling should not be mistaken as a quick fix for any budgetary problems."
But by then the House had already approved new rules that, among other things, establish a subcommittee on "gaming and parimutuels." Gaming? Score one for the gamblers.
William Safire looked into that bit of wordplay in his "On Language" column in the March 14, 1999, New York Times Magazine. Gaming vs. gambling had become a litmus test with the conservative Committee to Restore American Values, an ad hoc group that was vetting Republican candidates for president: One of its questions: "Do you normally call games of chance gambling or gaming?"
Safire's etymological research showed that gaming is actually the older word; gambling came into English usage two centuries later. But in modern times, he wrote, the differences have become clear. "Both sides agree: gambling has a negative connotation, gaming, a positive one."
Gaming might reasonably describe card games like poker or blackjack, where mathematical skill can make a difference (at least until the casino kicks the card counter out.) But of course there is no skill in playing the slots, which is where most of the gambling money goes those days.
Do you hear people talk about gaming on the stock market or gaming in real estate? No.
Here's another sure bet. The politicians who call it gaming favor gambling. Those who call it gambling oppose it no matter what it's called.
By MARTIN DYCKMAN, Times Associate Editor;
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/12/01/Columns/Let_the_euphemisms_go.shtml
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 1, 2002
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If there is any doubt at all that the terrorists have won - that they have managed with a single day's freakish hits to revamp the most open society on earth into an emerging police state where suspicion and secrecy are the twin watch-towers of government and cowering and conforming the prevailing instincts of an allegedly free press or an even more alleged political opposition - then last week's creation of the Department of Homeland Security should put all such doubts to rest.
The New Deal was a "reorganization" or an "expansion" of government. The creation of the Homeland Security Department is a coup within the government. What Ollie North once did illegally in a White House basement - free-lancing policy with public money and accountability to no one - a $37 billion department with 170,000 employees will now do legally in what is sure to be a high-rise of basements and metaphorical windows on Washington's Bureaucracy Row. Like a Wall Street firm beholden only to its board room, the second-largest government department is now a proprietary arm of the presidency. It operates beyond congressional scrutiny and public accountability, and guarantees secrecy to its own machinations or to those of any private business with which it deals.
Let's say Kafka Inc. were a company that made surveillance cameras the government was installing at a few thousand intersections. Kafka's products happen to be pathetically faulty, as such devices commonly are. The public would be outraged if it knew. But all Kafka would have to do to keep its products' evaluations from becoming public is submit them to the Department of Homeland Security, where everything is to be kept secret by law. What Kafka does, every other company or hospital or airline or even local sheriff's department can do with any proposal, any budget item, any safety plan made part of the homeland security racket. The department, in other words, is a black hole to the Freedom of Information Act - everything goes in, nothing gets out.
Secrecy is national security's favored fraud. With rare exceptions, it harms the public interest more than it protects it. Keeping America's atom bomb secret may have been a good idea, but even that failed. Keeping the Pentagon Papers secret, the government's own most damning evidence that the Vietnam War was a known failure even in the early 1960s, needlessly prolonged a needless war at the cost of thousands of American lives (and perhaps a million Vietnamese). Designed around the same principle of prescribing what Americans should and should not know, the new department will incubate just such secrets, covering up what should be known at the risk of prolonging what shouldn't be happening. Substitute Main Street for rice paddies and what's ahead is less reassuring because of the department's existence.
Warranted neither by necessity nor security, the department is a business venture without risk, a portal to corporate subsidies that has poured $30 billion in tax dollars into the security-industrial complex already, and is projected to pump upwards of $100 billion a year in public and private money from here out. Most of it is money spent on the kind of specious technologies that had fattened up the stock market of the late 1990s before the market bubble finally burst. That artificial bubble is being replaced with another, this time at taxpayers' expense. As always, war pays dividends to its lucky shareholders.
Those dividends will rise in direct proportion to the loss of openness and civil liberties. We've been there before, most recently and most dramatically during the 1940s' and 50s' raving campaign on communism. The USA Patriot Act's contempt for liberties had its equivalent in the Internal Security Act of 1950. The Pentagon's office for "Total Information Awareness," the ultimate electronic snoop on every American's activities, had its genesis in the House Committee on Un-American Activities' endless and endlessly fabricated dossiers on Americans. The Homeland Security Department's cult of secrecy had its miniature version in the Atomic Energy Commission, which exerted similar authority on industry and the dissemination of information. The overreaction to communism then was as delirious as the overreaction to terrorism today. By the time Joseph McCarthy made a fool of himself at his Red Menace hearings the country had been under anti- communism's debilitating spell for almost a decade. McCarthy was only the summation of a parody of liberty, a belated wake-up call to a nation that had been had by its own government's fictions.
Osama bin Laden isn't any more of a fiction than Stalin was. But the threat Stalin posed to the United States was as fictive then as the threat Osama bin Laden poses today. Freak attacks don't make a war, and they certainly don't mark a victory. The victory has been handed to bin Laden subsequently, in spades, because the nation has let itself be had again. It took 10 years for anti-communism to be shown to be "itself a heresy against the basic principles of American life," as the late Walter Millis, a long-time editorial writer for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote in 1968. If America's richly redeeming history is any guide, it will similarly be a matter of time for anti-terrorism to be proven an equally lethal heresy and for the Homeland Security Department to be the ugliest parody of a lawless and imperious age.
Daytona Beach NewsJournal, EDITORIAL VOICES, By PIERRE TRISTAM, 11/26/02
http://www.n-jcenter.com/2002/Nov/26/OPN2.htm
Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. He can be reached at ptristam@att.net
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"Man is conceived in sin and born into corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something." -- From Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men
As homeland security heats up and federal officials consider extending the government's plans to -- oh, let's just go ahead and say it -- spy on Americans, patriotic citizens who value civil liberties might want to start practicing a few words that could prove useful in the coming weeks and months: "Not no, but hell no."
They should start saying it soon and loudly in the direction of Washington, D.C., as a new domestic- surveillance plan takes shape at the Pentagon. Officials there are in the process of researching a program, titled "Total Information Awareness," that should send chills down Americans' spines.
If implemented, TIA would permit the federal government to gather and collate all sorts of personal data in the name of national security. Big Brother, no longer a fictional character in a scary futuristic sci-fi novel, would know where you go, with whom you chat and e-mail, what Web sites you visit, where you travel, eat and sleep. And did I mention "with whom"?
Not that you or I have anything to hide.
Unfortunately, Americans correctly fearful of terrorist attacks (they're coming any day now, we're constantly told), are complacently willing to surrender all manner of personal freedoms in order to be safe. Law- abiding citizens, after all, have nothing to fear. The government is after the bad guys and we have to give up a little personal freedom in the process of being safe, right?
All together now: Not no but . . .!
Unfortunately, that's not what Americans are saying. For the most part Americans are nice, cooperative people who don't want to cause trouble. They want to get along and be helpful. So we trip all over ourselves to avoid saying the obvious -- that we're being spied on, Stalinized and slowly robbed of everything that's worth defending -- and trust that America will be more or less the same when we wake up tomorrow.
But tomorrow is yesterday and already America is not the same. Incrementally, we've grown accustomed to invasions of privacy that we wouldn't have tolerated before Sept. 11, 2001. Until then, we knew what the limits of government should be. We knew, for example, that when security inspectors at the New Orleans airport started running their hands over blond women's breasts to make sure their bra underwires weren't really explosive devices that someone was stepping over the line.
Note to flat-chested (I mean, mammary-minimalist) brunettes: Your day has arrived.
Two women with whom I recently had dinner, both well-endowed blondes, recounted being pulled aside at the airport and manually inspected, literally hands-on. More disturbing to me than the free grope was the women's benign acceptance of life's little inconveniences.
"They were nice about it," said one. Oh, well, OK then.
"They're just doing their job," said another. Silly me.
And this from one of the un-mauled -- "I say if the boobs bleep, wand 'em."
Now I get it. If they don't feel us up, the terrorists win.
In other words, post- 9-11, we know nothing. It's as though the terrorist attacks erased the "Civil Liberties" file from our national memory banks. When federal security agents physically harass people who are clearly not terrorists in furtherance of the random-search hoax, we blithely submit because, well, that's the way it is. We have no choice.
Precisely. They have guns and our nail clippers. We have blondes with underwires. They have the force of the federal government; we have too few cowboys, if you ask me. Anyone displaying a "hell no" attitude, once an admired American trait, is suspect.
Not to be paranoid, but how much longer before such words are deemed suspect, too? Ah, but that could never happen in the United States because we have the First Amendment. True, but we also have the Fourth: "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
I guess it all depends on what your definition of "reasonable" is. Stay tuned.
The slow but steady progression from national security to TIA has been insidiously sinister if not necessarily intentional. I don't believe, in fact, that George W. Bush and John Poindexter, the TIA's Dr. Frankenstein, sat down and mapped out a strategy for stripping Americans of their privacy and personal freedoms.
Yet experience tells us that freedoms once lost are difficult to regain and that government policies once in place take on lives of their own. If ever there were a time for a pre-emptive strike, this is it. Best to say "Hell no" before it's no longer permissible to protest.
....This editorial appeared in the Orlando
Sentinel 11/20/02
Kathleen Parker can be reached at kparker@orlandosentinel.com
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The Fight Against Totalitarianism
"...If I wrote at the time (1931) that fascism and bolshevism were not solutions, just easy ways to escape from the problems of freedom into simple obedience, I was still convinced that National Socialism would never triumph in Germany. Today I do not believe that any nation is proof against giving birth to the same evil, even though in other ways and in a different spirit.
All over the world I dread the self-deception which we have experienced - that this could not happen here. It can happen anywhere. It is improbable only where the broad masses of the population are aware of the possible menace and thus will not be lulled into security; where they know the type of totalitarianism and will recognize it in its rudimentary stages and in each of its manifestations - this Proteus who keeps appearing in ever new masks, who slips eel-like out of our grasp, who does the opposite of what he says, who distorts the meaning of words, who speaks not in order to communicate or tell the truth, but in order to numb, to distract, to hypnotize, to intimidate, to dupe - who will exploit and evoke every fear, and will promise security and utterly wreck it at the same time.
Totalitarianism is neither Communism nor fascism nor National Socialism, but it has appeared in all of these forms. It is the universal, terrible threat of the future of mankind in a mass order. It is a phenomenon of our age, detached from all the politics governed by principles of a historic national existence of constitutional legality. Wherever it comes to power, domestic politics gives way to intrigues and acts of force, and foreign policy, the conduct of relations with other states, is shrouded in a semblance of talk and negotiation, but without being tied to any rules of the game, to any community of human interests.
It is not easy to see through totalitarianism. It is like a machinery that starts itself while its very operators often fail to grasp what they are already putting into effect. It seems like an independent being. To speak in mythical terms, it seems like a soulless, daemonic something which seizes everybody - those who drift into it blindly as well as those who half-knowingly bring it about. Totalitarianism is like a specter which drinks the blood of the living and so achieves reality, while the victims go on existing as a mass of living corpses. ..."
... from kristine 1/15/02 (click for entire essay)
Excerpted from the "Fight Against Totalitarianism", Philosophy and the World, Selected Essays, Gateway Editions, Regnery, 1963 (no longer in print, but used copies can be found from time to time)
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Commentary - Bill Moyers
Way back in the 1950's when I first tasted politics and journalism, Republicans briefly controlled the White House and Congress. With the exception of Joseph McCarthy and his vicious ilk, they were a reasonable lot, presided over by that giant war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, who was conservative by temperament and moderate in the use of power.
That brand of Republican is gone. And for the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal government the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate.
That mandate includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives.
It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich.
It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable.
And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what's coming.
And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don't even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote 'a Biblical worldview' in American politics?
So it is a heady time in Washington a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.
Don't forget the money. It came pouring into this election, to both parties, from corporate America and others who expect the payback. Republicans outraised Democrats by $184 million dollars. And came up with the big prize monopoly control of the American government, and the power of the state to turn their ideology into the law of the land. Quite a bargain at any price.
http://www.pbs.org/now/commentary/moyers15.html
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By PAUL KRUGMAN
Rule No. 1: Always have a cover story. The ostensible purpose of the
Bush administration's plan to open up 850,000 federal jobs to private
competition is to promote efficiency. Competitive vigor, we're told,
will end bureaucratic sloth; costs will go down, and everyone except for
a handful of overpaid union members will be better off.
And who knows? Here and there the reform may actually
save a few dollars. But I doubt that there's a single politician or
journalist in Washington who believes that privatizing much of the
federal government a step that the administration says it can take
without any new legislation is really motivated by a desire to
reduce costs.
After all, there's a lot of experience with privatization
by governments at all levels state, federal, and local; that
record doesn't support extravagant claims about improved efficiency.
Sometimes there are significant cost reductions, but all too often the
promised savings turn out to be a mirage. In particular, it's common for
private contractors to bid low to get the business, then push their
prices up once the government work force has been disbanded. Projections
of a 20 or 30 percent cost saving across the board are silly and
one suspects that the officials making those projections know that.
So what's this about?
First, it's about providing political cover. In the face
of budget deficits as far as the eye can see, the administration
determined to expand, not reconsider the program of tax cuts it
initially justified with projections of huge surpluses must make a
show of cutting spending. Yet what can it cut? The great bulk of public
spending is either for essential services like defense and the justice
system, or for middle-class entitlements like Social Security and
Medicare that the administration doesn't dare attack openly.
Privatizing federal jobs is a perfect answer to this
dilemma. It's not a real answer the pay of those threatened
employees is only about 2 percent of the federal budget, so efficiency
gains from privatization, even if they happen, will make almost no dent
in overall spending. For a few years, however, talk of privatization
will give the impression that the administration is doing something
about the deficit.
But distracting the public from the reality of deficits
is, we can be sure, just an incidental payoff. So, too, is the fact that
privatization is a way to break one of the last remaining strongholds of
union power. Karl Rove is after much bigger game.
A few months ago Mr. Rove compared his boss to Andrew
Jackson. As some of us noted at the time, one of Jackson's key legacies
was the "spoils system," under which federal jobs were
reserved for political supporters. The federal civil service, with its
careful protection of workers from political pressure, was created
specifically to bring the spoils system to an end; but now the
administration has found a way around those constraints.
We don't have to speculate about what will follow,
because Jeb Bush has already blazed the trail. Florida's governor has
been an aggressive privatizer, and as The Miami Herald put it after a
careful study of state records, "his bold experiment has been a
success at least for him and the Republican Party, records show.
The policy has spawned a network of contractors who have given him,
other Republican politicians and the Florida G.O.P. millions of dollars
in campaign donations."
What's interesting about this network of contractors
isn't just the way that big contributions are linked to big contracts;
it's the end of the traditional practice in which businesses hedge their
bets by giving to both parties. The big winners in Mr. Bush's Florida
are companies that give little or nothing to Democrats. Strange, isn't
it? It's as if firms seeking business with the state of Florida are
subject to a loyalty test.
So am I saying that we are going back to the days of Boss
Tweed and Mark Hanna? Gosh, no those guys were pikers. One-party
control of today's government offers opportunities to reward friends and
punish enemies that the old machine politicians never dreamed of.
 Whispers of vote
fraud tremble on the wires - companies like Diebold, who make the new
voting machines, whose officers are to a man Republican donors and
activists, come under suspicion in the aftermath of such a wrenching
reversal. How difficult is it to reprogram a machine which leaves no paper
trail to say that 2 + 2 = 5? Is it about as difficult as sabotaging the
workings of a small corporate jet, perhaps?
Perhaps. Senator
Mel Carnahan died in a small plane crash two weeks before the conclusion
of his vital race in 2000 against John Ashcroft, who went on to become
Attorney General. Paul Wellstone died in a small plane crash two weeks
before his all-important election contest for the Senate seat of
Minnesota, throwing that race into chaos and ultimately handing the seat
to Bush-picked conservative Norm Coleman. No satisfactory explanation has
been forthcoming to explain these disasters, and on the latter matter of
Wellstone, there has been virtual silence from the media and the NTSB
investigators. Meanwhile, there have still been so arrests in the anthrax
assassination attempts on Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. On this
matter, again, the media is silent.
Carnahan-Wellstone-Daschle-Leahy.
These should have been the four leading voices against the ideological and
political desires of the Bush administration. Two are now dead, and two
seem to have been cowed into an acquiescing silence. As a prince of
Denmark was once heard to remark, something is out of joint. Questions on
these issues, and on the voting irregularities and conflicts of interest
surrounding the November 5th elections, must not fall silent. Indeed, they
must be bellowed from rooftop and radio.
Simultaneously,
though, we must also look to the legislative aftermath of all this. One
way or another, we must deal with the conservative freight train of
legislation that is ramrodding towards us. A brief look at who will be
taking control of the congressional agenda in January proves to be
revealing.
Senator Orrin
Hatch of Utah is set to take over the chairmanship of the Judiciary
Committee. From this seat, Hatch will be instrumental in setting the
agenda for judicial nominations. Hatch is not in favor of legalized
abortion, but has stated many times that no judge should be appointed or
refused a seat on the bench based on one "litmus test" issue.
Hatch believes homosexuality is contrary to Biblical teachings, voted
against same-sex marriage, and desires a constitutional amendment
prohibiting flag-burning. In 2001 he voted for the loosening of
restrictions on the wiretapping of cell phones. He believes the McCain-Feingold
bill is unconstitutional. He voted against mandating background checks at
gun shows, and against mandating the sale of all guns with trigger locks.
Despite his
claim that no litmus test should determine the fate of a judicial nominee,
Hatch has made it clear where his desires lay. Indeed, he ran for
President in 2000 to take advantage of such an opportunity. A Boston Globe
article from June of 1999 entitled, 'Hatch Sees Opportunity,' defines
these desires clearly: "One of Hatch's prime reasons for running is
that the next president could nominate three Supreme Court justices and a
large number of federal judges. While Hatch said he does not believe in
litmus tests for judges on issues such as abortion, he has made it clear
he prefers conservatives for the bench."
Senator James
Inhofe of Oklahoma will take the chairmanship of the Environment and
Public Works Committee. Inhofe is in favor of drilling for oil in the
Alaskan National Wildlife Reservation, and voted in favor of preserving a
$1.2 billion budget for that purpose. He voted in favor of Gale Norton
when she was nominated for Secretary of the Interior. He voted against
keeping CAFÉ standards for automobile emissions, and voted in favor of
funding to build more roads through forests and fishing habitats. In 1999
he voted in favor of defunding projects to develop renewable and solar
energy. In 1997 he voted against the banning of chemical weapons.
Senator Don
Nickles of Oklahoma will take the chairmanship of the Budget Committee.
Nickles in 2001 voted in favor of restricting the rules regarding personal
bankruptcy. He voted against funding to aid minority- and women-owned
businesses. He voted in favor of limiting punitive damages awards in
product liability cases. He is in favor of the immediate deployment of a
national missile defense system, and like Inhofe voted against the banning
of chemical weapons. In 1996 he voted in favor of spending international
development funds on the War on Drugs. He is in favor of oil drilling in
the Alaskan National Wildlife Preserve, voted against maintaining CAFÉ
standards for automobile emissions, and voted to defund projects to
develop renewable and solar energy.
Senator Judd
Gregg of New Hampshire will assume the chairmanship of the Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Gregg voted against spending $448
billion of Bush's massive tax cut on education and debt reduction, but
voted in favor of spending $75 million on in-school abstinence programs.
He is in favor of allowing prayer in public schools, but against the
creation of national education standards. He voted against mandatory
background checks at gun shows. He voted against allowing patients to sue
their HMOs, and voted against including prescription drugs under Medicare.
He voted to repeal Clinton-era rules that safeguard against
repetitive-stress injury, and voted in favor of killing an increase in the
minimum wage. Gregg is in favor of allowing Social Security funds to be
gambled in the stock market.
And there you
have it. The legislative future of the next Congress appears quite clear.
The despoiling of the Alaskan wildlife preserve and many other precious
environmental treasures, the further dumbing-down of national education
standards, the degrading of a separation between church and state, the
rubber-stamping of any and all war proposals by the Bush administration,
and the creation of an activist conservative judiciary are all but
guaranteed.
Rather than
wallow in despair, those citizens who would see this program blocked and
thwarted must take decisive action. The people must knock their knuckles
bloody on the doors of those Republican Senators who do not blindly follow
the edicts of the Bush administration. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island must
be cultivated, as must Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
Senator Jeffords of Vermont, who was counting on a Democratic victory to
spare him the vengeance of his former GOP comrades, must be protected. If
these people can be counseled to vote as Democrats on important
environmental, judicial and military issues, the gains made by the GOP on
November 5th will be blunted.
As for the rest
of it, there is only the watchful eye and the questioning mind. The shades
of Carnahan and Wellstone do not rest easily. Serious questions about the
manner in which votes were tallied last Tuesday are in the offing. We have
much to do, and little light to work with. Like Run-DMC used to say, it's
like that, and that's the way it is.
...William
Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. He is the author of two
books - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter) available now from
Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," available
in April 2003 from Pluto Press.; 11/18/02
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