Corporatizing Our Public Parks
Every state has its official song, official state bird, and maybe even its official state insect — but, now, Texas has something more: an official SUV!
Yes, the Chevrolet Suburban has bought its way into officialdom, becoming “the official vehicle of Texas State Parks.” Apparently, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is oblivious to the irony of a massive, polluting SUV being the mascot of our state’s natural wonders — but there it is. This is a part of the overall corporatizing of public parks, not only in Texas but all across the country, as park officials seek to jack up their revenues by commercializing the public domain.
Well, surely Texas got its money’s worth — several millions of dollars, or at least a fleet of Chevys for this vast state’s park system? Hardly. According to the Austin American-Statesman, all we got were two Suburbans, $230,000 for a couple of park projects, and some Chevy ads in the park agency’s magazine. In return, General Motors gets to promote its Suburban as the vehicle of choice of our parks, use the agency’s official logo in its ads, and display its big honking SUV at various park events.
Among other corporatizers of the Parks and Wildlife Department are Budweiser, Dow Chemical, and Copenhagen snuff. But the department’s chief has rushed to say that he’s drawn the line at any inappropriate or tasteless connection between parks and products: “We’ve said that we would not have the Budweiser Big Bend State Park,” he assures us. Now that’s a mighty loose loop around tasteless.
Common Sense on Drug Policy
Just as volcanic eruptions are earth-shattering, every now and then we get an eruption of common sense from high government officials. It’s so surprising that when it occurs we should take notice and cheer.
So here’s a “hip-hip hooray!” for Chief Judge Judith Kaye of New York. The judge recently ruled that state courts there will become the first in the nation to provide medical treatment rather than jail time to nonviolent criminals who are drug addicts. This ruling blows apart the rock-bound, draconian drug policies imposed by a generation of opportunistic politicians trying to look “tough” by throwing ill people into prisons.
Judge Kaye’s breakthrough order is based on pilot programs in New York and elsewhere that have proven addiction treatment to be remarkably successful at reducing the number of people who commit crimes like prostitution to support their drug addictions. The New York Times reports that court-required treatment is a success in 70% of cases. Indeed, in New York City’s treatment program, 88% of offenders who participated were not arrested again.
Not only is this of obvious benefit to the participants, but it’s also a break for us taxpayers. In New York, for example, the state spends $29,000 a year to keep each and every one of these addicts in a prison cell. It costs about $650 million a year in New York to imprison these people, while treatment costs only about $100 million. Even much of that amount gets paid back, however, since these addicts are no longer on the streets costing us in police actions — instead they are in jobs and paying taxes.
Carnivore Wants Your E-mail
J. Edgar Hoover would’ve given his pink tutu for such a sneaky surveillance toy as the FBI now has.
Never before have the Feds been able to scoop up so much information from so many Americans so quickly and so surreptitiously. Most Americans, however, won’t be so thrilled about this development, for the FBI’s new electronic vacuum cleaner not only sucks up information — it also sucks up our constitutional right to privacy. This thing is as dangerous as its name implies: “carnivore.”
Agents say that the name carnivore was chosen because this black box of computer software literally gulps down e-mail messages, going to the “meat” of what you and I might be saying in our electronic messages. With the carnivore system, the FBI can plug into an Internet service provider, channeling every e-mail from every customer using that provider into the FBI’s surveillance system. It gives the Feds the ability to monitor who is sending e-mail to whom, and to read the content of any or all of the e-mails.
Tut-tut, says the agency, we’re only after terrorists and other bad people, plus we have to get a court order to use carnivore, so it’s no different than a phone tap. Well tut-tut right back at them. First, this is not a tap on a single phone line, but on entire e-mail networks — more like getting a tap on, say, Bell Atlantic, grabbing millions of lines at once. Second, once it plugs into a network, carnivore can take any information it wants — not just the e-mails of the bad guys. And, by the way, who gets to define “bad guys”? The FBI itself, of course — not an agency with a reassuring record of self-restraint.
Not to worry, though — the agency is already responding to public outrage: It plans to change the name of carnivore to something less menacing.
This article appears in December 1 • 2000.