Molly Ivins September 28AUSTIN, Texas — Update from the cosmetic counter: I went to get some skin cream the other day, and the saleslady solemnly informed me that the cream I had selected contained "a mnemonic component" that would cause my skin cells to remember how they used to function. I was amazed. But will it work on the brain? The current issue of Vanity Fair, not a magazine I normally favor (Bud Trillin once described it as the purview of "glitzhounds, Eurotrash and dress designers from New Jersey") contains a priceless interview with Fran Leibowitz, one of our clearest thinkers, not to mention funnier citizens. For some reason, she was being interviewed about race in America; asked if education was not the real solution to the problems of black children, she replied: "Absolutely — look how well it's working for white children. I think it is generally agreed that the great scandal in this country is the state of public education. But far worse is the currently fashionable, but in no way stylish, Republican proposal that it be solved by the use of school vouchers — a genuinely diabolical plan and one that, if instituted, would surely result in the end of any sort of democratic society. Recently, a business magazine devoted an issue to this subject and used black parents who wanted school vouchers to argue their case for them. It's so profoundly deceitful for rich people to ask 'Why should rich people be the only ones to send their children to private school?' when the answer is so plainly that they have the money. So serviceable, in fact, is this answer that for the edification of these bewilderingly bewildered millionaires, I offer it also as the clear explanation to the centuries-old riddle of why only rich people own Sargent portraits, vintage Daimlers and beachfront property. "These black parents are decoys, to distract your attention from what the Voucherites are doing — which is lowering taxes. School vouchers are advantageous because they would result, ultimately, in no public school system at all — there's no free lunch in the totally free market. School vouchers are, for the readers of such a magazine, about lowering taxes. Life, for these readers, is about lowering taxes. They look constantly for the cause of taxes the way oncologists look for the cause of cancer and, like surgeons, cut them out wherever possible, even at the expense of what you might previously have thought of as a vital organ.
"Not to mention that even among the not-so-rich white people there is a sizable constituency for the notion that the public schools attended by poor blacks are useful only as a source of professional basketball players — so, conceivably, one such school would really be sufficient. Perhaps I am judging them too harshly and what they are really doing is at long last making good on a very old promise: 40 Lakers and a school." Leibowitz is equally mordant on affirmative action ("One Clarence Thomas is not enough") and related topics. I was touched, really I was, by the concern demonstrated by financial commentators for the fate of those who will lose their jobs in the recent round of mergers and consolidations on Wall Street itself. Wall Street has been arranging corporate mergers for years now, but in the latest round, capped by the Travelers Group's $9 billion bid for Salomon Bros., Wall Street is eating its own. Mergers and acquisitions hit an all-time high last year, a record $651 billion worth and in the first six months of this year topped that pace. As Gary Silverman wrote in Newsday: "The reason is fairly straightforward. With share prices at record heights, companies can pretty much print the most powerful currency around — their own stock. And they are using this high-octane currency to help fuel the biggest takeover binge on record, increasingly paying top dollar to clinch deals. ... Thanks to Wall Street, the percentage of America's takeover bill being financed by shares is also growing. For the first time in more than a decade, more than half of the takeover deals last year were financed with stock, according to Securities Data figures." As Jamie Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin points out, this expansion is built on a mountain of debt and speculation, and not on the solid foundation of growing wages and incomes. If you'd like to cheer yourself up some more, contemplate the villain being named in the congressional hearings on what's wrong with the Internal Revenue Service: the "culture" of the organization. Surely those reliable folks at The Wall Street Journal's editorial page will regard this as piffle — yet another attempt to evade responsibility for individual misdeeds. But I do think organizations can develop "cultures" that tolerate, if not encourage, misdeeds. Take Drexel, Burnham for example — or, for that matter, the giant bond-rigging scandal at Salomon Bros. itself. Now imagine a financial institution bigger than anything we've ever seen or imagined before, with a "greed is good" corporate culture. We live in interesting times. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1997 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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