The Hightower Lowdown

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The Army's Chemical Waste Plan

There's a new $1 billion factory going online next April in Anniston, Ala., but not even the local chamber of commerce is celebrating.

The factory is at the Anniston Army Depot, and its job is to incinerate some 660,000 lethal chemical weapons. The New York Times reports that, for decades, the military brass has assured the locals that underground storage of these weapons was perfectly safe. But the Army recently changed its tune, conceding that the underground bunkers have leaked deadly nerve gas and asserting that the only recourse is to burn the chemicals. Trust us, the Army is again telling the people of Anniston, incineration is perfectly safe ... and this time we really mean it.

But what if there's a mess-up, asked the skeptical locals? Ha-ha, laughs the Army, we're prepared for that! A very loud siren will give a shrill whoop-whoop if a deadly plume of gas gets loose, and we're issuing special protective equipment for each home, business, and school.

Guess what the protective equipment is? Sheets of plastic and a big ol' roll of duct tape. That's it! When citizens hear that shrill whoop-whoop, they're supposed to leap up, grab the duct tape and plastic, and seal off their windows and doors. They'd better be quick about it, because a gas plume would cover the area within eight minutes.

I think the fairest way to dispose of these horrendous weapons of destruction would be to have a mobile incinerator burn a couple of hundred pounds of the chemicals in the back yards of each of the Congress critters, generals, and corporate executives who created them in the first place.

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Under the Eagle's Eye

The U.S. Postal Service's official logo proudly features a sharp-eyed American eagle. Most Americans would be shocked and amazed, however, to learn that we are the ones getting the eagle-eye from the post office.

This is another sorry case of police power running amok, now intruding so deeply into our personal liberties and privacy that federal authorities are compelling even well-meaning postal clerks to be surveillance snitches on their own customers.

These authorities say they want to combat money laundering. Fine. Not so fine, however, is that they are targeting innocent citizens who buy money orders or make other money transactions at our post offices.

Through a special surveillance program called "Under the Eagle's Eye," clerks are being trained to watch for "suspicious activity" and to file a report on such customers. What qualifies as "suspicious?" Insight magazine obtained Postal Service training materials that instruct clerks thusly: "The rule of thumb is if it seems suspicious to you, then it is suspicious." Did someone buy $2,500 worth of money orders three days in a row? Suspicious. Did someone buy $25,000 worth of credit for their office postage meter? Suspicious.

These are most likely to be perfectly legitimate transactions, but clerks are told they must assume criminality, fill out a suspicious activity form, and report the customer. Forget "innocent until proven guilty" -- a postal clerk's report on you can be zipped to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and be distributed to police agencies worldwide without you even being informed.

"Under the Eagle's Eye" is an all-out assault on our privacy. As an American Civil Liberties Union spokesman put it: "This training will result in the reporting to the government of tens of thousands of innocent transactions that are none of the government's business."

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It's Off to Work We Go

What is it with us Americans and our servile attitude toward work?

We typically spend more than half of our waking hours either at work or getting to and from work. We compliantly give 50 out of 52 weeks of each year to our employers, reserving only two weeks a year to ourselves for vacation. This means that if you start work at age 18 and retire at 65, only 94 weeks out of those 47 years belong to you. Millions of Americans don't even get two weeks' vacation; meanwhile, millions more who do take their jobs with them, thanks to laptops, e-mail, faxes, and cell phones.

America has gone from "work ethic" to "work excess." The average work year for a middle-income family is now six weeks longer than it was just a decade ago.

None of this is ultimately good for the corporations, much less workers or our society. A recent corporate survey found that American workers are stressed to the breaking point, with a third of them feeling not merely overworked, but overwhelmed. The survey reports that this results in on-the-job mistakes, resentment, more injuries, absenteeism, more health-care claims, and turnovers.

Reducing the workload is a huge issue with American families. Americans need a real vacation (like the one to two months provided by our European competitors), and they want and deserve a 35-hour work week. Yet both major parties are in the pockets of their corporate funders, so neither has had the cojones to challenge the corporate orthodoxy and stand with the people. No wonder working folks don't vote.

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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.