Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [33]
THIRTEEN MONTHS AFTER Secretary Chao wrote senators promising she would “improve” ergonomics regs, the Bush administration announced its grand new plan for worker protection. To wit, OSHA announced that in six months it would publish a set of voluntary guidelines companies might choose to use to protect workers.
In one of those little protocol tiffs that absorb so much energy in Washington, the White House even stiffed Democratic senators with the release of the plan on the voluntary workplace guidelines. “They came over and briefed the Republican senators,” a Senate committee staff member said. “Then they made the Democrats go over to the Labor Department for their briefing. And they didn’t even have enough information packets for the Democrats who showed up.” Readers of Washington tea leaves noted the new “voluntary rules” were announced on a Thursday—bad news is always released at the end of the weekly news cycle.
A month later Secretary Chao assured angry members of the Senate Labor Committee that solicitor Scalia would aggressively enforce the voluntary guidelines—as soon as they were written. Chao said she was aware of Scalia’s anti-ergonomics work in the past, but that was when he was a lobbyist working for business interests. At the DOL, she promised, Gene Scalia would be different: “He has a new client.”*
The news that there would be no workplace protections and that Eugene Scalia would be their advocate didn’t surprise a small group of catfish workers sitting in the living room of a housing project on a Sunday afternoon in Tchula, Mississippi. In this part of the Delta, most news related to work—whether cotton farms, catfish factories, or chicken-processing plants—is bad. “The unions, they might help you a little,” said a former “Chili stripper” (Chili’s restaurant chain buys tons of catfish every year, cut into small “Chili strips”), “but these companies don’t much listen to no union. These companies wear you out, and when you can’t work no more, they tell you good-bye.”
She is in her mid-thirties; she doesn’t look a day over fifty-five.
5.
Leave No Child Behind
You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, TENNESSEE, FEBRUARY 21, 2001
Where did this idea come from—that everybody deserves free education? . . . It’s like free groceries. It comes from Moscow. From Russia. Straight out of the pit of hell.
—REPRESENTATIVE DEBBIE RIDDLE, AUSTIN, MARCH 5, 2003
OK, so we’re not real partial to public education in Texas.
And we got fooled. Maybe more than twice.
So did you.
Here’s how it happened.
Between GeeDubya Bush’s second legislative session in 1997 and the official beginning of his run for the presidency in 1999, the state of Texas pissed away much of a $6 billion surplus. A surplus in Austin is like the hundred-year flood in Amarillo: it comes about every eight hundred years. You want to make full use of everything you can get out of it.
Governor Bush made good use of the surplus, at least for his own political purposes. In a state known for low taxes and no income tax, he gave a big chunk of the surplus back to taxpayers. Then he ran for president saying, “I passed the largest tax break in the history of the state of Texas.” And why not? The economy was booming. Enron stock was going to hit $100 and split. Streets were filled with trucks laying fiber-optic cable. If you could get a table near the lean and hungry venture capitalists at the Mezzaluna restaurant in downtown Austin, you might hear one of them mention “the next killer ap.” Then you could call your broker, sell Agillion, and buy Tivoli. The boom was like Robert Earl Keen’s song “The Road Goes on Forever and the Party