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News :: Miscellaneous |
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HOW DARE THEY? |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sharon Basco
(No verified email address) |
16 Nov 2001
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Sharon Basco interviewed Micah Sifry for TomPaine.com.
Let Rep. Tim Johnson know that you know he is letting his constituents down. See:
http://urbana.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2988
http://urbana.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2952
http://urbana.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2941 |
TomPaine.com: Micah Sifry, what are the origins of your project, this Web site called HowDareThey.org, and what are its goals, its mandate.
Micah Sifry: Well, the organization I work for, Public Campaign, which works for comprehensive campaign finance reform, decided to launch a new Web site, called HowDareThey.org, and the goal of this Web site is very simple. The only way to stop what's going on in Congress now, to kind of shake them and make them realize that they have to change the way they're behaving, that these are different times, is we need a sustained public outcry.
So three very simple things happen when you go to HowDareThey.org. Number one, we've pulled together the most recent, up-to-date analysis and news on these various aspects of the shameful things that they're doing, ranging from airline bailout, airline security weaknesses to the high cost of pharmaceutical drugs like Cipro, all the way to this sham economic stimulus package that's already passed the House of Representatives. So number one is: find out more, educate yourself.
Number two, if you agree that this is an outrage, very simple place on the site, click here and it will prompt you to put in your zip code, and you can send an e-mail directly to your representatives in Congress as well as to the president.
And the third thing, and this is really the most important: send the message, forward it to as many of your friends and family. Congress does listen when the public sits up and takes notice. A lot of what's happening now I think is happening because the normal wheels of money-greased business in Washington are functioning as they do, and the rest of us are terrified by anthrax, understandably, or a new attack. And we are, I think, fearful in many aspects just of our personal lives. But we have to, at the same time, put some of that new patriotic energy that people are feeling into sending a clear message to Congress and to the President that says "No! How dare you? This will not stand. This is not the kind of America we're going to be. We cannot be the way we were before."
I think the important thing here is -- and a lot of us get the gist of it, you know -- we're standing here. We have our hands on our hearts, saluting the flag, mourning the people who are dead, and at the same time these special interests are trying to pick our pockets. And we can't let that happen.
TP.c: The fact that you're calling this "How Dare They?" sounds as if this came from your own reaction to some sort of news that you heard. Is that true, or where did it come from?
MS: This started about five days after the World Trade Center was bombed and the Pentagon was attacked, when I read a story in The New York Times on airport security and how the workers in charge of screening bags knew for a long time that the kind of work that they were performing was under par. People were quoted as saying, "I don't make enough money to risk my life."
And the article pointed out that most of these people were minimum wage workers, and there was high turnover, and that all of this flowed from years of airline industry efforts to keep the job of airport security in the hands of private companies, and where they went out and bid for the lowest price on the service. And the result was lousy security.
And it struck me that "You know, there is a connection here to something that we've been talking about for a long time, which is that good public policy that protects our safety, protects our air, our water, and so on, is often corrupted by the role of large, wealthy, well-heeled lobbyists and industries that work the system through campaign contributions and other means to weaken or water down or basically block vital public interests. And I started keeping a file of these kinds of things. Not just airline security. And as time went on and I saw what else started to come out of Congress, it really just struck me that they were back to business as usual. They couldn't help themselves. Thus, the only thing a citizen could say was "How dare they?"
TP.c: Well, you must have had another 'How dare they?" when the airlines got a $15 billion bailout with no strings attached.
MS: Oh, no question. Again, the impulse to help the airlines I think everybody in the country understands. It's a vital industry, it is one of the underpinnings of the rest of the economy. But this bailout was greased by a bi-partisan array of lobbyists, starting with the wife of Senate Majority Leader Daschle, and including former Senators, former FAA directors, and the fact that there were no strings attached, you know, really was bothersome when you compare it to, say, the bailout of Chrysler, also a very important part of the economy, the auto industry. But when Chrysler was bailed out, number one, there wasn't this incredible rush. Number two, Lee Iacocca agreed to take a $1 a year salary. The UAW got a seat on the board of Chrysler, and the public was guaranteed a share of the benefits once the company was turned around.
We've seen nothing like that with the airlines. And what really put me over the top was watching the Republicans -- at least some of them in the House -- attempt more recently, even to eliminate a provision that had been in the airline bailout bill that put a freeze on executive compensation. And they wanted to eliminate that; they think that an airline CEO who makes $2 or $4 or $10 million a year, and that's what their current salaries are with stock options, that that wasn't enough.
TP.c: And yet we've heard legislators tell us that it's un-American to make any special provisions for all those laid-off airline workers.
MS: The thing that is so hard to swallow is when you compare this to every other major national crisis -- the World Wars, the Civil War, even the War of Independence -- I mean we've always had, historically, there have always been private businesses that have tried to get profits out of wartime. To pad their contracts, and raise their prices, and no one has ever thought of that as a patriotic thing.
You know, presidents have always gone after war profiteering. Harry Truman made his reputation in the Senate during World War II over that. The country this time, I think, again is ready for shared sacrifice. And instead we're getting the same skewed kind of policies that we had before -- skewed by wealthy special interests -- but on top of that, I don't think we've ever had a moment where the country goes to war, and instead of raising taxes to help pay for the war, which is what we've always done, and to pay for other ways to strengthen national security, they say we have to have a tax cut on the rich, and we have to give some of the biggest Fortune 500 corporations a rebate on taxes they've paid going back to 1986.
TP.c: How dare they?
MS: Absolutely.
Originally published at: http://www.tompaine.com/features/2001/11/13/1.html
© 1999-2001 The Florence Fund
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See also:
http://www.howdarethey.org/
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