Want to live in the country? Pay for it. In a new report on “scatter development” near three Chicago suburbs, A. Ann Sorensen and J. Dixon Esseks find that “the annual per home costs of busing, street maintenance and new infrastructure facilities not financed by existing taxes are relatively modest. These deficits could be covered by increases in tax rates or in special development impact fees that would not drive out the middle-to-upscale families locating in the sites we studied.”
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History just isn’t what it used to be. According to Carmen Pate, the new president of Concerned Women for America, “The public education system that was established by our founding fathers as a means for teaching every child the word of God became a vehicle for the federal government to turn our children from God and from his law” (“Right Wing Watch Online,” March 11). Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest would be interested to learn this, since the federal government has never established any public schools, and the states didn’t start establishing them until well into the 19th century, after the founders were all dead. Perhaps Pate has us mixed up with Iran.
Organic oppressors? “Anti-union feeling is deeply ingrained at Whole Foods,” reports Jim Motavalli in In These Times (April 5). “CEO [John] Mackey is the author of an anti-labor pamphlet called Beyond Unions, which exalts the company’s team-centered management (along the lines of Japanese auto factories) as a superior form of worker organization. Most recently, Whole Foods has refused to sign a non-binding United Farm Workers petition in support of California’s low-paid strawberry pickers, who work under a toxic cloud of pesticides, including the acute toxin methyl bromide.”
Is the son mightier than the father? In Illinois Issues (March), James Merriner Jr. compares the Daley mayors: “Richard M. Daley certainly surpasses his father in running the city’s schools and probably in controlling the City Council, the County Board and the state’s attorney’s office. The senior Daley had more power in patronage, the Democratic organization and state government. The junior Daley at least approaches his father’s influence in the White House.”
