The Corporate McCain

Who is John McCain? His spin-meisters paint a picture of him as a straight-talker, Washington outsider, maverick reformer, determined foe of the special interests, champion of the average Joe.

Gosh, what a guy! Only, that guy is not the real John McCain. The real one is the corporate suit who has been a faithful servant to the corporate interests in his many years as head of the Senate Commerce Committee. To see the real John McCain behind his carefully crafted reformer image, take a peek at the crew running his presidential campaign. They comprise a Who's Who of the K Street lobbying crowd that he supposedly is going to reform.

Leading this pack is Charlie Black, known as "The Republican Party's quintessential company man." He has used his GOP connections to become one of Washington's most aggressive and successful lobbyists, representing the likes of tobacco corporations, Blackwater, Lockheed-Martin, the brutal dictator Jonas Savimbi of Angola, Iraqi flim-flammer Ahmed Chalabi and the government of Saudi Arabia. A multimillionaire influence peddler, Black is the anti-reformer — indeed, he's the embodiment of what's wrong with Washington.

With these corporate cronies raising campaign funds for him, it's not surprising that McCain's policy proposals would bring cheer to CEOs, not to Average Joes. His economic plan, for example, is centered on more Busheconomics, cutting corporate taxes and extending Bush's tax giveaways to the rich. How to pay for these withdrawals from our public treasury? By cutting national programs that help regular folks.

Far from being the outsider who'll change Washington's special-interest rule, McCain's entire campaign is being paid for and run by the same corporate insiders who brought us eight years of Bush-Cheney.

THE OLYMPICS: LET THE SPYING BEGIN

It's another Olympic year — that quadrennial spectacular of athletic prowess, international goodwill ...

and government spying on all who attend.

The government, this time around, is the authoritarian regime of China. As in all host countries, the Chinese leaders are eager to put their best foot forward by building world-class sports facilities, removing poor people and beggars from sight, and generally putting polish on everything.

But — pssssst — look around. Isn't that a surveillance camera up there, over there and back behind you, too? Indeed, the host city, Beijing, will have almost as many cameras as visitors — and there has been a gold rush of U.S. corporations vying to get the multimillion-dollar contracts to set up the high-tech surveillance state before the summer games.

Honeywell is working with state police to install elaborate computer monitoring systems to analyze feeds from cameras throughout one of the main Olympic areas. GE has sold its powerful VisioWave system that allows authorities to control thousands of video cameras simultaneously, automatically alerting them to "suspicious" behavior. IBM has provided a computer system to analyze and catalogue people's movements.

Officials claim that this surge in techno-spying is necessary to protect visitors from terrorists. But the system's targets seem more designed to protect the regime from democracy activists and dissidents — cameras are to be installed, for example, in Internet cafes, places of religious worship and even in the Olympics media center. And when the games and visitors leave, the see-all spying apparatus will remain in place.

In the interest of quick profits, Honeywell, IBM, GE and the rest are putting an American imprimatur on Chinese authoritarianism, providing the regime with the most advanced tools of repression. Not exactly the Olympic spirit, is it?

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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