The Hightower Lowdown

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Congress and China Trade

Like a bunch of rubes at the county carnival, our Washington officials keep getting suckered when they cut deals with the dictatorial rulers of China. The latest example came recently when Congress passed the infamous deal allowing all products made in China to have preferential access to our markets. That simply means more U.S. corporations will move more of America's investment dollars, technology, and jobs over there to exploit impoverished sweatshop labor, as multinational corporations will be allowed to ship their made-in-China products to our stores without facing any tariffs or quotas.

"Goll-ee," our wide-eyed, ruby-cheeked political leaders exclaimed, "all those Chinese are going to buy tons of widgets and wheat and stuff from us." Yet as soon as our rubes okayed the deal, the Chinese regime started breaking its promises of open markets. No mass shipments of our industrial and farm products will be moving to China any time soon, though the transfer of U.S. jobs and technology to China is already underway.

How embarrassing. Indeed, Bill Clinton could only whine that bad-ol' China "must live up to the agreements it has negotiated with us." But, of course, China doesn't have to -- and it won't.

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Rewarding Failure

Here's a novel idea: What if CEOs actually had to do a good job before getting a pay raise? That would spoil the fun of, for example, Ed Whitacre Jr. Ed's the big honcho at SBC Communications Inc., our country's largest "local" phone com-pany. In a surge of merger-mania, SBC has snapped up control of local phone service in 13 states and several foreign countries, now adver-tising that SBC is "your friendly neighborhood global communications company."

In the process of merger-mania, not only has SBC jacked up people's phone rates, it's also made a mess of phone service. Customers are waiting weeks to get new phones installed ... and forget about repairs. As a Michigan business customer who had his phone disconnected for three days told the Associated Press, calling for service was a joke: "You might as well give up your afternoon," he said. "It's impossible to get a live person, much less someone who cares."

SBC executives blame "a smaller, less experi-enced workforce." So, who fired over 5,000 experienced workers when SBC took over these local companies? Not surprisingly, with higher phone bills and less service, SBC's stock price has taken a 9% dive in the past year.

Did Ed Whitacre take a hit for all this man-agement mess? Not hardly. In addition to his salary, Ed got a $6 million dollar bonus, plus a stock payment of $6.5 million, and a $5.3 million "special bonus and retention award."

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Ready Money

Imagine the reaction if a multibillion-dollar federal poverty agency were wracked with waste and fraud, and though the need for such a massive poverty program no longer even existed, the heads of the agency overseeing the program came to Congress demanding a $50 billion in-crease in their annual budget. What an outcry there would be! Trent Lott would spontaneously combust in outrage, Rush Limbaugh would turn purple and implode, and The Wall Street Journal would organize a media lynch mob.

So where was the establishment's outrage when the joint chiefs of staff -- the five barons of the Pentagon's fiefdom -- came to Congress to demand that their $300-billion-plus annual funding be increased by $50 billion a year? Re-member the bipartisan shrieking not long ago about all the single moms on welfare? That en-tire program cost $50 billion a year. Yet here's a corporate welfare program more than six times bigger, a massive chunk of which goes to fat cat military contractors, and we're supposed to give them 50 billion more of our tax dollars each year?

The Pentagon brass claims we have a "readi-ness problem"; we're not able to respond to our enemies' threats. The military already gets more than half the money Congress appropriates each year, and the generals claim to have a readiness problem. The money we already throw at this most wasteful, fraudulent federal bureaucracy is 22 times more than the combined military spending of our supposed enemies. These same generals had no readiness problem earlier this year when they got Congress to appropriate $50 million to lease six Gulfstream V executive luxury jets to fly them around the country.