The Hightower Report

Horse and Sparrow Economics

Time for another Gooberhead Award – presented periodically to those in the news who started their mouths running 100 miles per hour ... but forgot to put their brains in gear.

Today's Goober is a repeat winner – Rudy Giuliani. The former New York City mayor has long been a stalwart defender of the Wall Street crowd that has lavished campaign money on him over the years. So – even though workaday Americans are absolutely outraged and exasperated by the extravagant bonuses that failed Wall Street bankers are paying to themselves, using our bailout money for their self-enrichment – Rudy has stood tall for banker excess. "If somehow you take that bonus out of the economy, it really will create unemployment," he cried.

For the bankers? No, for the little people, says Giuliani. He almost teared up as he explained that the multimillion dollar payouts to high-flying Wall Streeters trickle down to waiters in swank New York restaurants, to clerks at Tiffany & Co. and Gucci, to sales staff at Lamborghini dealers, and to real estate agents selling mansions in the Hamptons. Even gardeners and garbage collectors get their cut, Hizzoner claimed.

He is spouting the age-old theory of "horse and sparrow" economics. This approach says that if you let horses gorge on oats, some of that grain will pass through their systems and be deposited on the ground for the sparrows to enjoy.

Not everyone shares our Gooberhead's enthusiasm for the horse and sparrow theory. Republican Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, for example, is calling for a strict limit on the pay of bank executives who are getting our bailout money. "The way they have spent it," he said, "is getting close to being criminal." And Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, is even more blunt about the rank greed of top bankers. Demanding that no bailout banker should be paid more than the president of the United States, she added: "These people are idiots."

Freedom to Protest

The American establishment loves protesters. Foreign protesters, that is – those causing trouble for regimes that our officials don't like.

Here at home, however, the establishment is much less fond of protesters. Curiously, a nation born of democratic rebellion systematically resorts to knee-jerk police repression to crush legitimate public dissent. Not only does this make a mockery of our nation's founding principles, but it usually ends up being quite costly for taxpayers, who later must foot the legal bill for police excesses against our laws and people.

The most recent example stems from a 2002 protest in Washington, D.C., against the corporate autocracy of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Hundreds of peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders were attacked by police forces, roughed up, cuffed, and taken away for hours of interrogation about their political and even religious beliefs.

Consequently, lawsuits happened. The city has already paid more than a million dollars in fees and settlements for the police repression. As usual, authorities tried to cover up their actions with lies and more suppression – including mysterious gaps in official audiotapes and the disappearance, destruction, and doctoring of police records.

Last November, the city paid another big settlement to eight protesters who had been illegally detained and grilled by the FBI in a parking garage. For years the FBI and city police flatly denied that this interrogation ever happened. But – oops – as the case was headed to trial, lawyers for the protesters dug out police logs documenting the role of a secret FBI unit in this assault on American liberties.

The price of liberty is, indeed, eternal vigilance, for the Powers That Be are eternally striving to shut down our freedoms. To keep up and act up, visit the American Civil Liberties Union website at www.aclu.org.