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trust. As Jan Jarboe says in her excellent Texas Monthly profile of Williams: “This is a formula for scandal.” According to the president of the Texas Consumer Association, Annette LoVoi, Richards has promised to work to repeal the insurance industry’s exemption from pricefixing laws. The exemption of insurance companies from the antitrust laws, in conjunction with the consequences of their immunity from federal regulation, has set up the country and insurance policyholders for a collapse as momentous as the savings and loan scandal. The real question is: which will be next, banks or insurance. Jim Hightower, Richards proposes establishing a computerized data bank to match Texas manufacturers with suppliers and international buyers. She also wants to offer tax cuts to companies that provide day-care programs for their workers. WILLIAMS SAYS that he would have the state waive the cost of tuition and books for low-income students during their first two years of college, and he favors state financial aid to help parents keep children in drug-rehabilitation programs. For the compassionate Williams, that’s about it. He would eliminate the prevailing wage rate in state-funded construction, which means the workers bustin’ rocks on the highways would get paid substantially less. Williams also would change just how, he doesn’t say workers’ compensation laws to improve the state’s business climate, that is, to benefit business and hurt already-injured workers. Last year Williams was quoted as saying “he would not rule out the possibility of the necessity of a state income tax.” The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative James Hury, says we’ll need at least $3 billion more just to keep state services and programs at present levels in the next biennium. Now, with his apparently unqualified will to commit hypocritical demagoguery, Williams promises to “veto any further tax increases … I’ll veto any tax increases.” Any tax increases of any kind; he will also veto, he says any laws that force local taxing authorities to raise taxes. He proposed to cut state government operating funds 7 percent \(after eight out of the last 12 hiring freeze except for education, law enforcement, and health, to fund his drug and prison programs. Williams even says Clements should have vetoed the tax increase for education! Williams berates Richards for her 1986 statement that Texas would need an income tax in four to six years and for her more recent remark that, despite her nowstated opposition to a personal income tax, she would not second-guess the Legislature, implying she would not veto one. Slowly it is drawing on more and more citizens that the Reagan-era politicians’ read-my-lips, nonew-taxes hypocrisies are infinitely more pernicious in their effects in the lives of 8 SEPTEMBER 28, 1990 people and on the community as a whole, than some nitwit burning a flag. Williams says he enforces random drug testing of employees in his company and would consider randomly testing state employees for drugs. If teenagers do drugs, Williams says. “I’ll put them in a boot camp. Military discipline, drug counseling, and I’ll introduce them to the joys of busting rocks.” \(This, apparently, is his real education proto these boot camps in waves of 5,000. He will use the Texas National Guard to keep drugs out of the state. “Clayton Williams wants to double the prisons,” the candidate also says. He goes along with Richards on tougher laws against rape. Richards favors ending parole for people convicted and sentenced for aggravated rape, capital murder, aggravated robbery, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated drug offenses. Williams has leapt on the statement by one of Richards’ aides that she has moral problems with the death penalty. She has pledged to carry out the death penalty law on the books. Williams proposes to expand the death penalty to murderers of children; she says she will study the proposal when the Legislature meets next year. While upholding the right of hunters to own sporting rifles, Richards supports federal legislation to halt for three years “the sale of a few cop killing guns” and a brief waiting period before buying guns to allow authorities time to check criminal and mental-illness records. Williams opposes any waiting period for the purchase of either handguns or semiautomatic rifles. He opposes banning the sales of semiautomatic weapons. In Gilmer in July, Williams said: “We may have to march on the government one day if it doesn’t straighten out. We need to keep our guns … I’m against any further gun control … She wants a waiting period for assault rifles, and she wants to ban more assault rifles, and I favor no further control whatsoever.” WHO HAS STRUCK the most and the lowest low blows? Williams by far. There was the thoroughly dishonest 30second spot which falsely stated that Richards had lobbied the Legislature to let put state funds in savings and loans institutions, falsely stated that Richards had destroyed relevant records on state deposits she put into in S&Ls when in fact the State Library had destroyed them in routine accordance with state law, and drew, from these lies, implications that likewise could only be false. Williams spokesman Bill Kenyon went so far as to say that Richards had used a truck “to send our financial records out of state” \(a falsehood that this is hard to get, but Williams has. In a round of statewide radio commercials running mainly on country and western stations, the Texas Republican Party accused Richards of drawing support from the gay and lesbian caucus death-row inmates whose paper reportedly endorsed her, and actress Jane Fonda because of her association with a campaign contribution to Richards. At the state Republican.convention, delegates called Richards an “honorary lesbian.” As Carolyn Barta wrote in the Dallas Morning News: “Mr. Williams says he’s not encouraging it, but some Republicans have labeled his opponent an honorary lesbian. He hastens to add, however, that he is against ‘that lifestyle.”‘ Williams also says, in a press release: “Ann Richards looks like she’s running for mayor of San Francisco, not governor of Texas.” In an equally sly and low-minded appeal to yahoo prejudice, Williams has berated Richards for favoring the repeal of the state’s law against sodomy. “I’m against sodomy, and I want to keep that law on the books,” Williams said, “because it is a statement of the true values of the people of Texas.” On this “issue” such as it is, Richards has obviously taken the moral and logical position, based in respect for people’s personal autonomy and privacy; the response from Williams is demagoguery of the kind that makes citizens turn with nausea away from electoral politics. Williams has flag-baited Richards, too, and to lamentable effect. Fending him off, she endorsed a constitutional amendment to prohibit flag desecration; no doubt she had in her mind Bush’s successful strangling of Dukakis with the flag. Williams has continued flag-baiting her anyway. The one low blow struck so far by or for Richards came from the national Democratic chairman, Ron Brown, who, in a morally rotten fundraising letter, linked Williams with former neo-Nazi and Klan leader David Duke them together as “hate-filled candidates” and asking for money to defeat politicians such as them to prove that “racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism aren’t winning strategies.” This was a contemptible slur against Williams; he is probably a sexist but there is no evidence against him in the campaign concerning racism or anti-Semitism. Richards said she had not known about the letter in advance, and when asked if she believed Williams is a racist, said no; she should have rebuked Brown for sending the letter. On the other hand, state Democratic Party official Ed Martin was fully justified in accusing proWilliams Republicans of “hate campaigns, like gay-bashing.” IT IS CLEAR to me on this record that any reasonably well-informed moderate or lib eral Texan, whether a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent, cannot logically vote for Williams on the issues and should vote for Richards. Williams’s posturing as compassionate is belied by his alliances and his policies, especially his promise to veto any new taxes. Richards’s program leaves much to be desired by programmatic progressives, but nevertheless is recognizably progressive. She has positive and specific programs for the environment, the public schools, and ethical standards in the Legislature. Her