The Hightower Report

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NEIL BUSH MILKS COWS

George W.'s No Child Left Behind program is being perverted into No Bush Left Behind.

You might recall brother Neil Bush from his "Hi Yo Silverado" days, when he headed a Colorado S&L that went broke, costing us taxpayers a billion bucks to bail it out. Now Neil is in the education game.

As honcho of an outfit called Ignite! Learning, he goes around to school districts hustling a computerized learning center dubbed COW, for Curriculum on Wheels. Made up to look like a purple cow, it's wheeled into classrooms where it uses jingles and cartoon videos to "teach" students. Each COW costs $3,800, and at least 13 school districts have used No Child Left Behind money to purchase them. That money is primarily intended to help disadvantaged kids learn reading and math – yet, Neil's COWs don't teach either of these subjects. Curious.

Additional money to place COWs in various schools has come from such Republican stalwarts as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and such longtime Bush benefactors as the Saudi Arabian oil company. Also, Neil's investors come from afar – including millionaire businessmen from Kuwait, China, and Russia. Odd.

Both Daddy and Momma Bush are investors as well. Barbara is so committed to the enterprise that when she made a donation to help Hurricane Katrina evacuees who had moved to Houston, she required that all of the money be spent buying Neil's COWs. How charitable.

Ignite!'s ethics are also on display in a com-pany video on its Web site. A Texas teacher named Lori gives a glowing testimonial about how COW did wonders for a young student named India. Only, Lori is really not India's teacher. She's Ignite!'s marketing director. Ignite! says Lori was not lying … just role playing.

So is Neil. He's pretending that Ignite! would be getting these federal dollars, investors, donations, and sales even if his name was, say, Neil Jones.

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RESPONDING TO LABOR

At last, the national government is responding to the widening income gap and the severe economic side effects of greed-fueled globalization by extending real power to labor unions and cracking down on sweatshop goods.

Unfortunately … this national government is not our own. It's China's. Yes, the Chinese rulers, who have a brutal record of repressing labor, have suddenly embraced a new doctrine of protecting worker rights. This is not altruism at work but self-preservation – the ruling elites are in a sweat over massive social unrest there. So, they've proposed a new law to empower formerly toothless labor unions to negotiate on wages, safety protections, and workplace rules.

Now guess who is howling in protest? Dell, Ford, GE, Microsoft, Nike, and other brand-name corporate giants that have been abandoning U.S. workers and communities for Chinese sweatshops. They have profited for years on the backs of China's impoverished workers, hiding behind the doctrinaire hokum that globalized sweatshops will somehow, sometime raise the living standards of those workers. As the surge of Chinese social unrest indicates, however, workers are no longer swallowing the hokum, and the time for push-back is now.

Expatriate U.S. corporations are lobbying ferociously to get China's government to drop its labor reforms, wailing that the new law amounts to socialism. Socialism in a communist country? Imagine! Well, say the Dells and Nikes, these rules would make it more difficult for them to fire workers. Well, duh … yes! The corporations might ask their former American workers if that seems unfair.

What must the Chinese people think? Just as they might get a small break, here comes the U.S. of A. – represented by these greed-headed corporations – stomping on their dreams. Who elected Dell, Nike, and the rest to do this in our name?