Fw: One-Eyed Man

["Sue Hovey" <suehovey@moscow.com>]

For more on this read Arianna Huffington's column in today's Lewiston Trib.

Sue
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Frye" <billfrye1@prodigy.net>
To: "Sue Hovey" <suehovey@moscow.com>
Cc: "Arthur Armstrong" <aarmstro@slonet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 9:13 PM
Subject: Fw: One-Eyed Man


> Digest this....no surprises.
> Subject: One-Eyed Man
>
> October 31, 2001
>
> The One-Eyed Man
>
> By PAUL KRUGMAN
>
>  Somewhere I read that to really understand legislation you have to look
>
> for the clause giving special consideration to one-eyed bearded men with
>
> a limp — that is, you have to look for the provision that turns a bill
>
> ostensibly serving a public purpose into a giveaway for some special
>
> interest.
>
> Most of the commentary about the "stimulus" bill passed by the House last
>
> week focuses on the huge benefits it lavishes on giant corporations. But
>
> that doesn't tell us much about the specific interests being served.
>
> What's good for corporate America is good for General Motors; it would be
>
> hard to devise a bill that consists mainly of corporate giveaways without
>
> giving a lot of money to the biggest companies. To understand what the
>
> bill is really about, you have to look at the big payoffs to not-so-big
>
> companies.
>
> One piece of the bill is custom- designed to benefit a small group of
>
> multinational financial firms. Another is clearly there for the sake of
>
> certain health insurors. But the most remarkable thing is how much of the
>
> benefit from repeal of the alternative minimum tax — a measure that is
>
> also included in the Bush administration's supposed stimulus plan, and
>
> which seems to be one of the administration's key priorities — goes to
>
> companies that are not all that big.
>
> For example, it's not too surprising that calculations by Citizens for
>
> Tax Justice show General Motors, with its 380,000 workers, getting a
>
> check for $800 million. But it's quite amazing that TXU (formerly Dallas
>
> Power and Light), a company with only 16,000 employees, would get a check
>
> for $600 million. And there are a number of medium-sized companies that,
>
> like TXU, are in line for surprisingly big benefits. These companies
>
> include ChevronTexaco, Enron, Phillips Petroleum, IMC Global and CMS
>
> Energy. What do they have in common?
>
> Well, they tend to be in the energy or mining businesses; and they tend
>
> to be based in or near Texas. In other words, the one-eyed bearded man
>
> with a limp looks a lot like Dick Cheney.
>
> There is almost certainly a lot of overlap between the companies that
>
> would derive large benefits from alternative minimum tax repeal and those
>
> that would have received large subsidies under the energy plan devised by
>
> Mr. Cheney's task force. You may remember that the administration, in
>
> apparent defiance of the law, refused to make the records of that task
>
> force's meetings available to Congress; that's one of those issues that
>
> seems to have been dropped after Sept. 11.
>
> And I guess it's superfluous to point out that the big winners in all
>
> this seem to be companies that gave large, one-sided donations to the
>
> Republican Party in the last election. (This is not to suggest that
>
> Democrats are any less susceptible to the influence of money.)
>
> To me, the story of the Bush administration is starting to look like the
>
> plot of "Victor/Victoria." First we had a candidate who was supposed to
>
> be a moderate. Then we learned, or thought we learned, that this was a
>
> mask; he was really a hard-line conservative who pretended to be a
>
> moderate in order to gain office.
>
> But the latest economic proposals from the administration, like the
>
> Cheney energy plan, don't look as if they came from serious
>
> free-marketeers. They don't make sense in terms of either demand-side or
>
> supply-side economics, but they do give a lot of money to certain
>
> companies. So maybe ideology was just another mask for someone who was
>
> really the candidate of corporations — not corporations in general, but a
>
> small group of companies with a quite specific set of business interests
>
> — and who is only pretending to be a hard- line conservative who
>
> pretended to be a moderate in order to gain office.
>
> It's an interesting and all too plausible picture. But it's a picture
>
> that most people will never see on their TV, and that many people would
>
> refuse to accept no matter how strong the evidence. That, of course, is
>
> what makes the whole thing possible. In the land of the blind, the one-
>
> eyed bearded man with a limp is king.
>
>
>