Molly Ivins February 22SAN FRANCISCO — Say now, here's a bad idea: President Clinton has proposed that we increase our spending on cleaning up the nation's water by $568 million, a chunk of which he plans to pay farmers for not letting their pesticide-laden runoff go into the public waterways. Let me run that by you again. We are going to pay farmers, who are using tons of pesticides per acre — not good for insects and other living creatures — if they stop letting their poison wash into the rivers. In other words, we will pay them if they try not to pollute. How's about making them pay us if they do pollute? How's about making them stop using pesticides in the first place, thus solving the entire problem? How's about using that money to teach them to farm without pesticides and to support them if there is any monetary loss during the switch-over? Attention, Republicans: This could well be the start of a new entitlement program, with farmers everywhere considering themselves entitled to government payments for not poisoning the rest of us. Get right on that. It is not always true, particularly in politics, that the good is the enemy of the better. As Earl Long once observed concerning ethics, in politics, you got to use whatever you can get your hands on. And Clinton clearly thinks that all he can get his hands on for clean water is another $568 million. The reason he doesn't want to do anything alarming, like spend real money or put some new laws in place, is because he can't get the Republicans to so much as re-authorize the Clean Water Act of 1972. As you know, this has been one of the great environmental success stories; this law had doubled the number of waterways safe for swimming and fishing and reduced industrial discharges by billions of pounds a year. Nevertheless, 40 percent of the country's rivers, streams and lakes are still too polluted for swimming and fishing. Beaches were closed more than 2,500 times in 1996 because of pollution. What we're trying to deal with now is not the big industrial polluters, which used to dump stuff by the ton, but the more generalized problem of runoff full of pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorus. It seems to me that this is an easy one for Clinton. Why not call the Republicans' bluff? He's got all the cards.
And another bad idea, this time from the Christian nut-right: Followers of Randall Terry, former head of Operation Rescue, are on a jihad about what they call child pornography, which according to them means any picture of a naked child, including your mom's shot of you on a bearskin rug. They've been going into bookstores and destroying art books with pictures of naked children; apparently, the cherubim from Renaissance paintings qualify. Their latest move was to insist that some dim district attorneys in Franklin, Tenn., and Montgomery, Ala., indict the Barnes & Noble book chain on charges of child porn and selling obscene materials. That's because Barnes & Noble carries a book of photographs by Jock Sturges called "Radiant Identities." True, Sturges, a long-established art photographer, takes pictures of nekkid people; but they tend to be standing calmly on beaches, doing nothing, so it's kind of hard to see where the porno part comes in. Sturges told the San Francisco Chronicle, "Calling my work child pornography is so far from the truth as to be beneath notice. To buy this indictment, you'll have to find that Homo sapiens between the ages of 6 months and 18 years are inherently obscene if naked. That's something I reject out of hand. That, in and of itself, is an obscene suggestion." Speaking of obscenity, Common Cause, trying to rally support for campaign finance reform, reminds us of the effects of soft money on politics — specifically, on how much it costs you. For example, in the last tax and budget package, the alternative minimum tax on corporations was eased considerably. The AMT was enacted in 1986 so profitable corporations could no longer avoid paying taxes by using tax shelters and loopholes. Naturally, the corporations hated it. Oil companies and automobile, steel and chemical manufacturers lobbied hard to loosen the law — and they got it. According to Common Cause, since 1991, they have contributed $22,193,908. The cost to you of their new loopholes: $18.3 billion over 10 years. As I have been pointing out for some time, the financial return on investing big money in our political system is ever so much higher than investing in the stock market. On the other hand, if we all invested in the system by way of public campaign financing, we could save ourselves literally hundreds of billions of dollars. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1998 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
