The Iconoclast received a press release from Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Susan Combs recently entitled “Running Government Like the Business It Is.” In the release, the Comptroller flatly stated: “As the state’s Comptroller responsible for Texas’ finances, acting as tax collector, chief accountant, revenue estimator and treasurer, I can assure you it IS a business. To run it even better as the business it is, we must tap the talents of men and women with business training, skills and perspectives.

Most people have never heard of it, but it became allowed when Congress’s telecommunications act of 1996 permitted third-party charges on local phone bills. The unauthorized implementation of these third-party charges is known as “cramming,” the billing of fake charges on your phone bill to benefit good-for-nothing corporations who are actually outright thieves. This practice is becoming a monster and most people don’t know  it, but they are paying for things every month that they did not order or even realize is on the bill, since the wordage often looks like it might be legitimate.

The United States has a problem. For one, it keeps electing people who got us into this mess. For two, the top two political parties are nothing but trash. You’d think that anyone worth his salt would not have to bow down to a party to get elected, to give up his soul. Instead we get saddled with wimps whose allegiance might be to the United States, somewhere way down the line — but his party always comes first, as does catering to the dictates of big corporations.

In 2004, The Lone Star Iconoclast published an editorial that literally rocked the world. It consisted of a presidential endorsement of John Kerry with a negative critique of the first George W. Bush administration. The newspaper was published in Crawford, Texas, home of then-President Bush. The result was — on one end — a massive boycott, threats, and attempts to uproot the publication. On the other end was praise and new subscribers who felt that the honesty portrayed in the editorial was genuine and needed.

Dennis Brutus is dead. But tenderness survives. The South African poet and former political prisoner passed away last Saturday at the age of 85 leaving behind an earthly climate still in disarray. Yet he left us his poetry and his example.