The tax plans that the Democrats and Republicans have offered do differ, but only by degrees, as an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy makes clear: 

Who benefits?  The percentage of proposed tax cuts going to each income level 

Clinton Administration on NAFTA's effects: Shhhh! 

As expected, the Clinton administration has suppressed a report on the real effects of NAFTA by Cornell researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner (Labor Party Press, July 1997). 

On June 1, 1997, the NAFTA Secretariat, an entity created under the NAFTA agreement, released a 110-page document entitled "Plant Closings and Labor Rights." The doc  ument was supposed to address concerns that emerged from the first labor rights complaint filed under NAFTA. (The complaint was lodged by a Mexican union on behalf of U.S. Sprint workers, members of the Communications Workers of America, whose jobs were moved to Mexico.)  
  Photo: ©Paul Felon 
 
Labor Party members joined the June 21 march in support of Detroit newspaper workers. Just before and after the march, workers got good news from the NLRB: After two years on strike, they may finally get their jobs back.  

One of the reports that the NAFTA Secretariat had commissioned was by Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at Cornell.  

But Bronfenbrenner's conclusions weren't what the Clinton administration wanted to hear: Her survey of union organizing campaigns found that a majority of employers are using plant closing threats to intimidate workers from joining the union, and that some 15 percent follow up on that threat by actually closing the plant down. Bronfenbrenner also found that, since passage of NAFTA at least, many companies explicitly say that they plan to move to Mexico. 

Bronfenbrenner suspected her findings would never see the light of day -- at least as part of the NAFTA Secretariat's report, which was subject to approval by the Clinton administration.

SHE WAS RIGHT:  

The final report cut the summary of Bronfenbrenner's findings from 10 pages and 21 charts down to less than two pages. And a good portion of those two pages is spent questioning the validity of Bronfenbrenner's findings. Worst of all, the overall conclusion of the NAFTA Secretariat's report is that labor law is basically working to protect people from the ravages of NAFTA. 

"The report failed to address even the most basic issues regarding plant closings and workers rights," commented the Communications Workers of America. "The superficiality of the report is surprising." 

More help for those who don't need it 

"You can't say because a company is big it shouldn't get assistance," said Clinton's Commerce Secretary William M. Daley in an interview reported by Los Angeles Times columnist Robert A. Rosenblatt. 

Rosenblatt goes on to note some of the happy beneficiaries of this outlook: 

* Ralston Purina gets federal dollars to defray the cost of advertising cereals overseas 

* GE gets research grants to develop new high-technology products 

* Archer-Daniels-Midland gets tax subsidies for ethanol 

* Pillsbury, Tyson Foods, Dole, Campbell Soup, and Ernest & Julio Gallo get money from the U.S. Agriculture Department to help with their foreign advertising budgets 

* Through a federal agency called the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, companies like Motorola, ITT, Anheuser-Busch, McDonald's and Coca-Cola get loans and loan guarantees to help them invest in developing countries. 

The conservative thinktank known as the Cato Institute estimates that the federal government spends more than $65 billion a year on over 100 programs to aid business. The Institute reports that 13 big corporations that gave generously to both Democrats and Republicans hauled home a total of $250 million through one government aid program alone. Not a bad investment on the $6 million they collectively gave to the two parties. 

Who's the public in public TV? 

Regular watchers of "public television" can't help but notice that corporate sponsors are steadily creeping onto the screen in what was originally supposed to be a non-commercial medium. But while the Public Broadcasting Service seems to have no problem accepting support from the likes of Archer-Daniels-Midland, Prudential Securities, and Travelers, the network apparently views union money as tainted. 

PBS has blocked the broadcast of an independently produced doc  umentary called "Out at Work." The documentary, which profiles three working-class gays and lesbians who face on-the-job discrimination, was funded in part by AFSCME, UNITE, CWA, the UAW, and several other unions. The piece was selected as a finalist for the PBS series Point of View (P.O.V.), but was cut from the list because of what PBS termed "problematic funders."  
    Photo: ©Bob McKeown courtesy Andersongold Films You won't see it on PBS: UAW activist Ron Wood protests anti-gay and anti-labor policies at Cracker Barrel, from "Out at Work."  "On its merits alone, we found 'Out at Work' to be compelling television responsibly done on a significant issue of our times," a PBS programming director told P.O.V. in a letter. But, she added "PBS's guidelines prohibit funding that might lead to the assumption that individual underwriters might have exercised editorial control over program content -- even if, as is clear in this case, those underwriters did not." 

Jim Ledbetter, a columnist for New York City's Village Voice who is now writing a book on PBS, had this to say: "The idea that corporations can fund programs and unions cannot is frightening and so contrary to the historical underpinnings of public television that they should be ashamed." He adds that labor unions helped provide some of the seed money that got PBS going in 1967. The AFL-CIO itself contributed $25,000. 

The Center for Defense Information calculates that if you converted the U.S.'s annual military budget into silver dollars and stacked them up, it would make a stack 460,000 miles high -- enough to go around the world 18.5 times -- or go to the moon and back.