ustxtxb_obs_1993_06_04_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

Page 22

by

PEOPLE Make a world of difference ! We’re proud of our employees and their contributions to your success and ours. Call us for quality printing, binding, mailing and data processing services. Get to know the people at Futura. FUTUM COMMUNICATIONS, INC P.O. Box 17427 Austin, TX 78760-7427 389-1500 Continued from page 8 in the past two years, and whose Dallas office was run by Daniel Cook III, one of her key political supporters, the Dallas Morning News reported February 27. Goldman Sachs reportedly was paid $113,000 for its service. The Houston Chronicle on February 28 reported that a New York firm that lost a 1991 Treasury contract to market revenue-anticipation notes when it was low bidder won a similar contract in 1992 after entering into a joint venture with a Dallas firm headed by a Hutchison friend, a former member of her husband’s law firm. On the allegations that a state Treasury employee was expected to do personal errands for Hutchison on state time, Hutchison claimed that the aide, Sharon Ammann, the daughter of former Governor John Connally, compensated the state for any personal errands she did, but the News on May 24 reported that state payroll records do not show any such compensation and Ammann told the News she was never asked to make up the time she spent doing chores for Hutchison. In its defense, the Hutchison campaign raised questions about Krueger’s calls on a state telephone to his business in New Braunfels and to a Washington lobbyist and Krueger fundraiser. Continued from page 6 polio, mumps, hepatitis B and the two types of measles. The law sets a sliding fee scale, based on the family’s ability to pay. The estimated cost to the state is $56 million over the next two years. Currently, only 30 percent of Texas 2-year-olds are fully immunized, compared with 60 percent nationally. Current law requires that children entering schools be vaccinated against childhood diseases. JOBS FOR WEST TEXAS. The House approved Senate Bill 1206 by Bill Sims that enacts a compact with Maine and Vermont to store their low-level nuclear waste in a dump in Hudspeth County, in West Texas, for $25 million. While some objected to Texas agreeing to accept any other state’s waste, Sims said the compact was needed under federal law to prevent other, larger states in the future from forcing Texas to accept their waste. Texas refused an offer of $50 million from Connecticut officials seeking to buy into the compact. Some residents welcome the $2.5 million in local inducements Hudspeth County will get, in addition to jobs at the site, but environmentalists are suspicious that, once the first nuclear dump is established in Texas, the feds could change the law and invite other states to use it. FOOD FIGHT FIZZLES. The bill to allow food producers to sue and recover damages for disparaging remarks about their products died in the Senate on May 20’when Sen. Bill Sims, the sponsor, was able to get only 15 votes in favor, six short of the number needed to bring up the bill. Continued from page 7 upon the ability to pay. “Senior citizen lobbies went berserk because they would have had to pay part of the costs,” a Texas Congressional staffer remembered. Elderly advocates virtually occupied Congressional offices until the program was repealed. The state’s 30 House members also received $923,863 in contributions from health and insurance industry political action committees in 1991-92, according to figures compiled by Citizen Action. In addition, they collected $277,884 from individual donors with health or insurance industry ties. Only six Texas Congressmen Bill Archer, Kika de la Garza, Craig Washington, Henry Gonzalez, Henry Bonilla and Solomon Ortiz received less than $10,000 from health and insurance PACs in the past two years. If there is little financial incentive for members of Congress to cut insurance companies out of health care, there has to be political pres Continued from page 17 ception that . the press had to be dealt with and not just by sending death threats. The editor responds. with talk of la apertura the latest democratic opening that his country is experiencing. The opening is a widely discussed but completely unofficial occurrence. To the outsider events in Guatemala may seem like relentless mayhem but those who follow politics closely can detect minute changes, moments when there is a bit more space in which to work, or, in the case of journalists, to write more freely. During the last opening, in 1988, Byron Barrera’s La Epoca was born. A leftish, muckraking weekly on the order of the Nation, it took on the government, the military and the secret police. It lasted four months before it was blasted out of circulation. To many, the death of La Epoca represented the closing of that apertura. This time around, Siglo XXI, a more centrist paper with liberal and conservative columnists, is testing the climate. Under dif sure to accomplish progressive reforms. Lisa McGiffert, of the Consumers Union office in Austin and a coordinator of the single-payer movement in Texas, said Clinton’s task force at least appears to be adopting some of its features, such as universal coverage and the choice of health-care providers. But the success of health-care reform depends on more grassroots activity. “The people don’t want HMOs and managed competition,” she said. “They’re not excited about it and [Clinton] is going to have to depend on the people to get things moving.” McGiffert acknowledged that the selling job needs to be done so people will accept the higher taxes to pay for universal coverage, either through income tax, payroll tax, value-added or sales tax or flat premiums charged to everybody. But she added, “We have to start recognizing that we’re already paying for it now and we’re paying a whole lot of money and not getting the coverage we should be getting.” ferent circumstances, its reporting would seem the workaday stuff of normal journalism. The infiltration into the post office by military intelligence, for example, was exposed by a member of the postal workers’ union, not a journalist. The reporter merely covered the union’s press conference, got a quote from the Defense Minister for objectivity’s sake, and wrote the story. Nothing remarkable. But in Guatemala, that it is enough to earn death threats. The Siglo XXI editor tells me he has no plans “to seek new horizons.” “We feel that the press has to play a role in strengthening democracy,” he says. But aren’t the forces fighting to expand la apertura and those who want to close it heading towards a collision?.”We can’t speculate about the future. We simply have to create the conditions that will allow us to do our work. And our work is to tell the truth.” Editor’s Note: President Serrano suspended the Guatemalan constitution as this article went to press. THE TEXAS OBSERVER 21