The Hightower Lowdown

---

Clinton's Legacy

During his eight-year presidential tenure, Bill Clinton often wondered aloud what his "legacy" would be. NAFTA? The Wall Street Boom? King of soft-money fundraising?

If he really wants to know, he could ask Debbie Delrio of Austin. A mother of two young boys, one 6 and the other a year old, she's a former welfare mom now being expelled from assistance, thanks to Clinton's highly ballyhooed Welfare Reform Act, which he boasted would "move America from welfare to work." It was a grand political scheme, grounded in classic Republican ideology, but while Clinton and the congress crowed about getting millions of Americans off the welfare rolls, they never wanted to talk about the "work" part of the equation ... and it's the Debbie Delrios who now are struggling to pay for the politicians' schemes.

Various studies show that while about 2/3 of the welfare moms technically got "jobs," few of the jobs paid enough to make ends meet. Plus, the jobs provided no child care, no health care, or transportation to get to and from their jobs. The one mitigating provision in Clinton's welfare scheme was that it gave a temporary exemption to the disabled, the ill, and parents with young children. But now that exemption is expiring, and Debbie Delrio is one of millions of Clinton's legacies scrambling to survive.

She got a job as a clerk in a boutique, but her gross pay is only $18,000 a year -- leaving her and her children one paycheck from poverty in high-cost Austin. Now, her child care costs are rising, which is a budget-breaker for her -- plus, the mall where she works is closing, so she might soon be on the street, trying to get another low-wage job at a time when the economy is tanking.

Clinton needn't worry about his legacy -- he could travel to every city and town in the country and see it in the anxiety-ridden faces of Americans like Debbie Delrio.

---

Dousing Columbia

Here's a proven formula for human disaster: Take one part avarice from Monsanto corporation, add one part arrogance from federal officials, mix, spray on a small foreign country, then cover up the mess with official secrecy.

This is the formula used in Vietnam, where Pentagon officials liberally doused the countryside (and people) with a monsoon of Monsanto's toxic defoliant, Agent Orange. At the time, corporate and government officials both claimed that while this stuff would strip a jungle's foliage bare, it posed no health threat to humans. They lied -- as we learned after 50,000 birth defects, hundreds of thousands of cancers, and untold numbers of deaths from Agent Orange exposure.

Now, Monsanto and our government are applying their disastrous formula to Colombia, where hundreds of thousands of gallons of Monsanto's toxic herbicide, Roundup, are being sprayed on the jungles and the people. Once again, our government claims that while this stuff will decimate a field of coca (from which cocaine is made), it poses no risk to humans. And, once again, they're lying.

Indeed, Monsanto's own label warns that Roundup is a deadly threat to plants, pets, people, and all other living things. Plus, the Roundup being sprayed in Colombia is supercharged, creating toxic exposure 100 times higher than allowed in the U.S. Not to worry, say the officials, for our satellite-directed planes are so precise that only the coca is getting sprayed. Yet the people who live there testify that their villages, water supplies, vegetable crops, and even school yards are routinely drenched, causing widespread sickness.

The official Monsanto-government lie was embarrassingly exposed last December when Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., went to Colombia to witness the pinpoint accuracy of our spraying. Standing well away from the coca field, the senator was drenched in Roundup on the very first flyover. Oops.

---

Stadium Envy

Tom Benson, multimillionaire owner of the New Orleans Saints pro football team, is lusting for a new sports palace, and he's been in a furious funk because the state government was balking at having the taxpayers pay for one. Ol' Tom kept pointing to other NFL owners who had mugged their local taxpayers to get commercial Taj Mahals built for them. Now, Tom wanted his.

But Benson's Saints already play in a dandy taxpayer-financed stadium, the Louisiana Superdome, that's loaded with luxury accommodations and routinely draws avid fans who put millions in Tom's pockets, despite him producing mediocre teams. Benson is the business "genius" who wasted millions by signing his team's losing coach Mike Ditka to a long-term contract extension just months before firing him. The former coach receives a check for $104,000 every two weeks until 2003. Thanks for nothing, Tom.

Still, this staunch free-enterpriser stomped his feet and demanded a big wad of corporate welfare from the state ... or else. Or else, he said, he'd haul his team to Mississippi, where gambling houses promised to help him get public subsidies and fill his stadium skyboxes with real high rollers. Sure enough, Lousiana's Republican governor caved in, promising to give $12.5 million in operating cash and other "inducements" to assure that the team stays in New Orleans, and promising either to build a new stadium or totally renovate the Superdome.

Maybe they'll rename the team the Welfare Devils.

---

Jim Hightower's latest book, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates, is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition.