If you think county government is clean, you haven’t done any scrubbing lately. County Clerk David Orr: “Cook County government spent about $1.84 billion in 1992, but lobbyists claimed they spent only $118,263 to influence decisions. Seventy-seven percent (77%) of this total was reported by Common Cause and Chicago Metro Ethics Coalition, two reform groups who listed their entire organization’s budgets.”
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“Clinton Administration betrayals are not our biggest worry–we expected those,” writes Chicago Coalition for New Priorities director Elissa Bassler in the New Priorities Voice (Winter). What is? “The potential split in our ranks….The bright side of the Reagan/Bush administrations was the powerful combining of interests in coalition by labor, low-income advocates, peace and justice groups, environmental groups, economic development advocates and many others. If the work for new priorities over the past several years has taught us anything, it’s that all of our agendas are inter-connected. To abandon that knowledge now for tiny crumbs from the Clinton pie will not serve our constituents’ long-term interests.”
Slow to get the message. “How could a communal and potentially beneficient ideology like Marxism so cruelly turn on its people?” asks Michael McCally, reviewing Ecocide in the USSR. “Perhaps Soviet environmental neglect is the result of thousands of seemingly discrete administrative decisions that, taken together, produced awful results.” Or just maybe Soviet environmental catastrophe is proof that communism was a totalitarian and destructive ideology to begin with (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January-February).
