Molly Ivins March 16

AUSTIN, Texas — Attention, karma fans; oh, come all ye connoisseurs of what-goes-around-comes-around. Consider the plight of the poor oil- dependent school district. Yea, verily, 300 Texas school districts whose incomes are slumping along with the oil industry's are the object of solicitous concern in the Lege.

Our Boys, led by state Rep. Rob Junell of San Angelo (who just happens to be chairman of the Appropriations Committee), are considering using state funds to offset a projected $157 million loss in local revenue in the afflicted districts during the next two years.

"We're not going to let them take that kind of hit," Junell told The Dallas Morning News. "We're going to make sure that they're not going to have to let people go or raise taxes."

Raise taxes?! To pay for good schools?! Horrors to Betsy.

Gov. George W. Bush, in one of his famously definitive stands, said that helping oil-dependent districts "is something we ought to really seriously look at."

And so we should — there's no reason that children's education should suffer just because the oil industry is having a sinking spell when the rest of the economy is doing beautifully and the state can afford to make up the difference.

It's just that those who follow school-finance debates in our fair state may recall that these very districts (and their representatives) threw a wall-eyed fit a few years ago over the so-called Robin Hood plan, which actually suggested that extremely wealthy districts — like the ones sitting on a lot of oil — should maybe share a little of that wealth with poorer districts.

Holy cow, the stink they raised over that — you'd 've thought Karl Marx hisself had come back to lead a Red revolution. Welcome to the other side of the debate, oilers.

Now, as the state scrambles to the aid of the suffering oil industry, it might be useful to peruse the papers. For example, The New York Times reported a few days ago that a coalition of major oil producers announced an agreement to cut production by another 2 million barrels a day to keep crude prices heading upward. We have here such major players as Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, etc. — in other words, OPEC Plus.

"Based on the clout of the broad coalition of OPEC and non-OPEC producers, and on hopes that flagging demand in Asia may be reviving, many analysts saw yesterday's cutback plan as significant." The article went on to discuss how rising oil prices may or may not touch off an inflation wave by year's end.

There's no guarantee that this new effort at price fixing by what the aforementioned Marx called a cartel will work.

But as several analysts noted, the trend is already stable and upward for oil prices, and there are many indications that the industry will once again be fat and happy before you can say "intangible drilling costs and depreciation allowance." At which point, the industry will have even more tax breaks and special loopholes in place — isn't that special?

And one of them is, of course, the work of our very own Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison — or at least we assume she's the person who slipped a little rider onto an unrelated disaster relief bill, since she's the one who did the same thing last year.

This cute little number prevents the Interior Department from implementing a new policy that would require the oil industry to pay market rates for drilling on federal lands. We're talking around $66 million a year, which does mount up over time — just a little subsidy from all us taxpayers to Exxon and Shell and Texaco and BP and Amoco and Mobil and the gang.

"Taxpayers are once again about to get their pockets picked by the oil industry that doesn't want to pay a fair share for the oil and gas produced from public lands. And the price will be paid by the schoolchildren for whom these royalties are targeted," said U.S. Rep. George Miller of California. "We all know what's going on here: It's cheaper for Big Oil to pay the lobbyists and the lawyers than to pay their fair share of royalties."

The putative author of the rider, Hutchison (until very recently the No. 1 recipient of oil industry contributions in the U.S. Senate) attached her rider to the disaster aid bill for Central America.

Hey, the oil industry is a risky business. Even with all the latest technology, seismology and geological expertise, there is no guarantee that when you drill for oil, you'll find it. Whereas if you put money into Congress, friends, you hit pay dirt every time, as the oil industry has proved again and again over the years. Indeed, sometimes, you hit the mother lode.

Crow Eaten Here: In my March 2 column on the drug war, I mentioned a legal foundation involved in a case focusing on the Miranda rule; unfortunately, I got the name wrong. The actual organization was the Washington Legal Foundation. Mea culpa.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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