Molly Ivins December 10AUSTIN — The Texas Legislature, God forbid, will be with us again in just a few weeks, thus depriving many a village of its idiot. Due to some of the more unfortunate tenets of the Republican faith, the Lege will have considerably more power and responsibility than heretofore have been thrust upon it. And you know what our team is like with power and responsibility: The last, best hope of members of the Lege is always that some federal court will relieve them of whatever burden they have been struggling with, so they can go back to staving off homosexual marriage and gritching about the federal courts. The thought of welfare deform in the hands of our Lege is enough to make any decent citizen chill with horror. Since we're already at rock bottom, they'll have to get out the power drills and start digging. How much damage can they do to a system that now "encourages dependency" by providing a maximum of $188 a month worth of riotous living for a family of three (one adult, two children) on Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)? There are no able-bodied adults without children on AFDC in Texas. Under the Republican creed, we can strengthen the children's little characters and encourage their entrepreneurial instincts by cutting them back to $150 a month. By God, that'll make the stock market soar, just you watch. According to the president of the United States, who made the most ludicrous speech in recent history last Saturday, welfare deform will open "a new era of freedom and independence" for the poor children of Texas. We're all so happy for them. My problem is that I am old enough to have vivid recollections of the days when our poor children enjoyed just such freedom and independence, except in those days we called it low-grade malnutrition. Of course, as we all know in this era of spin, everything depends on what you call something — cutting Medicare vs. slowing the rate of growth in spending, ketchup or a vegetable, it all depends. So let me be precise about the definition here. I'm not talking about kwashiorkor, the severe malnutrition we sometimes see in Africa where the little kids' bellies swell up and their hair turns red. Nor am I talking about hungry children — it's so overly dramatic and passe and liberal to talk about hungry children, don't you think? If you give a kid of lot of grits and Jell-O, followed by Jell-O and grits, he won't be hungry at all.
The result used to be a sight common in schoolrooms in East and South Texas: kids sitting in class with a blank look in their eyes and a tendency to go to sleep. Once you've seen that blank look — it's like a mild, confused worry with no focus — you'll remember it. Low-grade malnutrition. It is said to be a painless condition. Of course, the Lege is not going to worry about low-grade malnutrition because in Texas the welfare system will be privatized. Those bidding for the contract are Lockheed-Martin, EDS and Andersen Consulting. Gov. Shrub Bush is pushing the idea, and the Department of Human Services is writing the contracts. The winning company will write the eligibility requirements for those applying for health care, food stamps, disability support and AFDC. All these programs currently cost the state about $560 million a year, according to The Independent. The winning bidder will strive to reduce costs below $560 million and will then be permitted to pocket the difference. Human Services says it does not expect that margin to be above 10 percent, but a Lockheed spokesman said the company thinks the savings may be as high as 40 percent. Lockheed is my personal favorite in this bidding war because it has so much experience with welfare. In addition to the famous Lockheed bailout of the 1970s, when we taxpayers were called upon for a dollop of corporate welfare in the face of Lockheed's bankruptcy, the company has more recently gotten into the public trough by merging with Martin-Marietta, costing the taxpayers $1.6 billion in government subsidies and costing the economy 30,000 jobs. According to The New York Times, the subsidies included $92 million in executive bonuses, with an $8.2 million bonus for Lockheed's CEO Norman Augustine. Wow, now that's a company that knows how to gouge the government for welfare! From the public's point of view, there's just this one little problem with this nifty arrangement: It shuts them out; they are no longer entitled to information about how the welfare deform is working. You see, freedom of information laws do not apply to corporations, and corporations have even been held to have a right to privacy. The gradual increase in the legal protection from restraints on reporting government activities over the past century does not count with corporations, even corporations carrying out government functions. In Newton County, the new private managers of the county jails have instituted a new policy of "no media contact with our prisoners," so reporters no longer have access to find out what's going on. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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