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Friday, May 16, 2003
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I. Wallerstein, 113, "Empire and the Capitalists": "No doubt, George W. Bush thinks he is in the forefront of those sustaining the world capitalist system. No doubt, a large part of the world left thinks that too. But do the great capitalists think so? That is far less clear. A major warning signal has been launched by Morgan Stanley, one of the world's leading financial investor firms, in their Global Economic Forum. Stephen Roach writes there that a "US-centric world" is unsustainable for the world-economy and bad in particular for the United States."
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Monday, April 28, 2003
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Cutbacks Imperil Health Coverage for States' Poor: Millions of low-income Americans face the loss of health insurance or sharp cuts in benefits, like coverage for prescription drugs and dental care, under proposals now moving through state legislatures around the country. State officials and health policy experts say the cuts will increase the number of uninsured, threaten recent progress in covering children and impose severe strains on hospitals, doctors and nursing homes. But those officials, confronting a third straight year of fiscal crisis, say they have no choice but to rein in Medicaid, the fast-growing program that provides health insurance for 50 million people. Many state officials are pleading for federal help as they face an array of painful trade-offs, often pitting the needs of impoverished elderly people for prescription drugs and long-term care against those of low-income families seeking basic health coverage.
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Saturday, April 26, 2003
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The Headache of Black Gold Ownership: At the UN, the struggle promises to be merciless. Those principally affected, Russia, China, and France, permanent Security Council Members with veto rights, have no intention of clearing out for the Americans and the British. "Those are legally our reserves. If all else fails, we'll go to the Arbitrage Court in Geneva, which will lead to an immediate freeze on those reserves": as the premiere Russian oil producer, Lukoil, specified, Moscow is determined to fight to secure the contracts it signed with the former regime.
...the Republican Administration would like to hew a new legal framework. The acknowledged objective is to support American companies- the Mastodon ExxonMobil and the Texan and Californian "juniors"- who were shut out of the Iraqi oil sector before the war. The future oil authorities could offer some kind of legal immunity, protecting companies from lawsuits before the courts. New dispositions could, in addition, interdict the bribes that Russian and Chinese companies readily practice.
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Friday, April 25, 2003
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I.R.S. to Ask Working Poor for Proof on Tax Credits: Internal Revenue Service is planning to ask more than four million of the working poor who now claim a special tax credit to provide the most exhaustive proof of eligibility ever demanded of any class of taxpayers.
... But some tax experts criticize the higher burden of proof as unfair and a wasteful allocation of scarce I.R.S. enforcement dollars. They say that corporations, business owners, investors and partnerships deprive the government of many times what the working poor ever could — through both illegal means and legal shelters — yet these taxpayers face no demands to prove the validity of their claims in advance with certified records and sworn affidavits.
Others warn that the proposed I.R.S. rules will set a standard of proof so high that it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, for honest taxpayers to meet it. As a result, some people entitled to the tax credit will no longer receive it. And those who do manage to file successful claims will almost certainly have to pay commercial tax preparers more for helping them with the extra paperwork.
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Wednesday, April 23, 2003
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No war for whose oil?: By YAHYA SADOWSKI - The slogan 'No war for oil' rightly presumes that the Bush administration had plans for post-war profits from Iraq's substantial oil reserves. But those plans were based on the Bush cabal's relationships not with the major oil internationals, but with smaller independent firms. Everybody has now done the maths on Iraqi oil and found that their sums don't add up. [Very interesting and challenging analysis.]
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Sunday, April 20, 2003
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4/3/2003 -- Mugging the Needy - Bob Herbert: "The House plan offers the well-to-do $1.4 trillion in tax cuts, while demanding billions of dollars in cuts from programs that provide food stamps, school lunches, health care for the poor and the disabled, temporary assistance to needy families -- even veterans' benefits and student loans. An analysis of the House budget by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that its proposed cuts in child nutrition programs threaten to eliminate school lunches for 2.4 million low-income children. "
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Wednesday, April 16, 2003
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Carving Up The New Iraq: "In a special Sunday Herald investigation, we have charted the network of financial kickbacks, political pay-backs, cronyism, self-interest and ferocious ideology that underpins the entire reconstruction scheme. " - [long annotated catalog of interconnected persons and companies; not sure how well informed it is, though, since it lists (Pashtun) Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad under "The Arabs".]
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Tuesday, April 15, 2003
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News: "After days of arson and pillage, here's a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq's history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.
The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched -- and untouchable -- because tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of course -- with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq -- and the Ministry of Oil. "
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Bomb Before You Buy: Rather than rebuilding, the country is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neo-liberals can design their dream economy: fully privatised, foreign-owned and open for business.
...Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.
It's no surprise that so many multinationals are lunging for Iraq's untapped market. It's not just that the reconstruction will be worth as much as $100bn; it's also that "free trade" by less violent means hasn't been going that well lately. More and more developing countries are rejecting privatisation, while the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Bush's top trade priority, is wildly unpopular across Latin America.
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Friday, April 11, 2003
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Spoils of War: Bob Herbert - "The war against Iraq has become one of the clearest examples ever of the influence of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against so eloquently in his farewell address in 1961. This iron web of relationships among powerful individuals inside and outside the government operates with very little public scrutiny and is saturated with conflicts of interest."
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Thursday, April 10, 2003
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House Democrats Want Halliburton Probe: "Questioning whether Vice President Dick Cheney's former company has received favored treatment from the Pentagon, senior House Democrats asked Congress' investigative agency Tuesday to delve into contracts awarded Halliburton Co. over the past two years.
Halliburton's KBR subsidiary has a record of gouging the government in contracts awarded without competition, Reps. Henry Waxman of California and John Dingell of Michigan contended in a letter to the General Accounting Office.
Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the lawmakers have ignored the exemplary record of the Houston-based firm that employed Cheney as chief executive officer from 1995 to 2000 and still pays him deferred compensation for his services during that period.
.... -A GAO finding in 1997 that the company billed the Army for questionable expenses for work in the Balkans, including charges of $85.98 per sheet of plywood that cost $14.06.
-A year 2000 follow-up report on the Balkans work that found inflated costs, including charges for cleaning some offices up to four times a day.
-$2 million in fines paid in February, 2002, to resolve fraud claims involving work at Fort Ord, Calif. The Defense Department inspector general and a federal grand jury had investigated allegations by a former employee that KBR defrauded the government of millions of dollars by inflating prices for repairs and maintenance.
The Securities and Exchange Commission already is investigating Halliburton's accounting practices, looking into an accounting change made in 1998, during Cheney's tenure as CEO
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Tuesday, April 08, 2003
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US Arms Group Heads for Lisbon: Top of the meeting's agenda is expected to be the company's involvement in the rebuilding of Baghdad's infrastructure after the cessation of current hostilities. Along with several other US companies, the Carlyle Group is expected to be awarded a billion dollar contract by the US Government to help in the redevelopment of airfields and urban areas destroyed by Coalition aerial bombardments. The Group is managed by a team of former US Government personnel including its president Frank Carlucci, former deputy director of the CIA before becoming Defence Secretary. His deputy is James Baker II, who was Secretary of State under George Bush senior. Several high profile former politicians are employed to represent the company overseas, among them John Major, former British Prime Minister, along with George Bush senior, one time CIA director before becoming US President.
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Thursday, March 27, 2003
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Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus On Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein: Key figures associated with the Bush Administration, in particular Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, pressed Saddam Hussein during the mid '80's to approve the Aqaba pipeline project from Iraq to Jordan.
...the break in US-Iraq relations occurred not after Iraq used chemical weapons on the Iranians, nor after Iraq gassed its own Kurdish people, nor even after Iraq invaded Kuwait, but rather, followed Saddam's rejection of the Aqaba pipeline deal.
"In their own words, we now see that for Administration officials, a dictator is a friend of the United States when he is willing to make an oily deal, and a mortal enemy when he is not" said Vallette
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Tuesday, March 18, 2003
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The New York Review of Books: Bush's Tax Plan--The Dangers: Joseph E.Stiglitz - "By now, it is well known how Bush's tax package favors the rich, but the degree to which it does so is not well appreciated. While 50 percent of all tax filers would receive $100 or less, and two thirds $500 or less, Bush himself, according to Bloomberg News, would have saved $44,500 on his 2001 tax returns, and Cheney $326,555. According to an estimate in the Financial Times, John Snow, Bush's secretary of the Treasury, would save some $600,000. The calculations of the Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center show that more than half of the benefits of exempting corporate dividends from the individual income tax would flow to the top 5 percent of the population. All the taxpayers in that group earn more than $140,000 and they have an average income of $350,000. The 226,000 richest tax filers, those with incomes over $1 million, will receive a benefit roughly equal in size to the 120 million tax filers with incomes below $100,000"
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Sunday, February 09, 2003
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Ralph Nader on Oil and the War Against Iraq: "The connections between the Bush administration and the oil industry are clear and pervasive. A remarkable 41 members of the administration have ties to the industry, and both the President and the Vice President are both former oil executives. National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice is a former director of Chevron. President Bush took more than $1.8 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industries in the 2000 election. The Bush people and the oil moguls do agree with one another in part because they are one another...
The American people have a right to know what is being discussed in these meetings about the oil industry's designs on this gigantic pool of petroleum and what, if any, assurances they are being given by what is supposed to be our government.
Clearly, there is a better means of achieving U.S. energy security. Instead of relying on costly military ventures in unstable countries to ensure a steady source of oil, we need a national energy security strategy that is expeditious, self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable. "
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Sunday, January 19, 2003
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Thursday, January 16, 2003
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The Rise of the Fortress Continent: Naomi Klein - "the growing number of free-market economists, politicians and military strategists pushing for the creation of "Fortress NAFTA," a continental security perimeter stretching from Mexico's southern border to Canada's northern one. A fortress continent is a bloc of nations that joins forces to extract favorable trade terms from other countries--while patrolling their shared external borders to keep people from those countries out. But if a continent is serious about being a fortress, it also has to invite one or two poor countries within its walls, because somebody has to do the dirty work and heavy lifting.
It's a model being pioneered in Europe, where the European Union is currently expanding to include ten poor Eastern bloc countries at the same time that it uses increasingly aggressive security methods to deny entry to immigrants from even poorer countries, like Iraq and Nigeria. "
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Tuesday, January 14, 2003
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Bush Tax Cuts: "Fleischer... pushed the tax cuts as a package that would provide 92 million taxpayers with an average tax cut of $1,083 in 2003. This is about as disingenuous as it gets. The CTJ numbers show that most of the bottom 80 percent ($77,000 and less) receive much less than one thousand bucks. The average gain for taxpayers in the $46,000-to-$77,000 slice (the second quintile) is $657. Obviously, the people below will get less. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, nearly 80 percent of income tax filers would receive a tax cut below $1083. Almost half of all tax filers would get a tax cut of less than $100"
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Saturday, December 28, 2002
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Ranchers Bristle as Gas Wells Loom on the Range: "no one questions the need for new sources of this clean-burning fossil fuel. What alarms ranchers, along with environmental groups, is the hugely disruptive process of getting gas out of all those wells. It is a 15-year-old drilling technique called coal-bed methane extraction, which can turn ranches and prairies into sprawling industrial zones, laced with wells, access roads, power lines, compressor stations and wastewater pits."
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Automakers Block Crash Data Recorders: "Highway safety could be vastly improved if black boxes that record information about car crashes were standardized, experts say, but they contend that vehement objections from the automobile industry are thwarting efforts to set a standard."
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States of Alarm: "President Bush will have a heck of a time getting the national economy back on track while states from coast to coast are trying to balance their budgets by raising taxes, cutting spending and laying off employees. The National Governors Association, in a report last month, said states are facing "the most dire fiscal situation since World War II." Nearly every state "is in fiscal crisis," the governors said."
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Saturday, December 21, 2002
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U.S. Jury Cites Unpaid Work at Wal-Mart: "federal jury in Portland, Ore., found Wal-Mart Stores, the world's largest retailer, guilty yesterday of forcing its employees to work unpaid overtime in the first of 40 such lawsuits to go to trial. In the four-week trial, dozens of Wal-Mart workers testified that under pressure from their managers they frequently clocked out after 40 hours and continued working."
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US blocks cheap drugs agreement: "The deal was agreed by 143 countries. The United States has blocked an international agreement to allow poor countries to buy cheap drugs. This means millions of poor people will still not have access to medicines for diseases such as HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis. US negotiators say the deal would allow too many drugs patents to be ignored. "
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The Politics of Selling Tax Breaks for the Wealthiest: "Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research institute, found that the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers -- those with annual incomes over $356,000 -- would receive about half the revenue the government would lose next year if dividends went untaxed and 45 percent of all the money from accelerating the rate cuts. The 80 percent of households with incomes below $73,000 a year would get less than 10 percent of the new tax breaks. These findings are not surprising. After all, the richest 1 percent has 18 percent of all the pretax income and pays 36 percent of all personal income taxes. But studies like this reinforce the public perception that the Bush administration favors the rich."
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Thursday, December 19, 2002
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Untypically, a Rockefeller Tells the Story of His Life: "David Rockefelle, at age 87, has become the first in three generations of Rockefellers to publish an autobiography, breaking a century-long habit of fierce privacy instilled in his clan by his grandfather. "Memoirs," a candid account of Mr. Rockefeller's life at the busy intersection of global banking, family business and unofficial diplomacy, made its debut from Random House yesterday."
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New Tax Plan May Bring Shift In Burden: "As the Bush administration draws up plans to simplify the tax system, it is also refining arguments for why it may be necessary to shift more of the tax load onto lower-income workers. Economists at the Treasury Department are drafting new ways to calculate the distribution of tax burdens among different income classes, which are expected to highlight what administration officials see as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor."
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Lawsuit Says Del Monte Sale Was Rigged: "A lawsuit filed in a Miami court yesterday by seven private and corporate minority investors includes allegations that may shed light on why Del Monte was sold for so much less than it seemed to be worth. The suit accuses Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh and his company, the IAT Group, of bribing Eduardo R. Bours, a powerful Mexican politician who was chairman of the investment group and an important member of the country's ruling party, to rig the sale in their favor."
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Nestle claims £3.7m from famine-hit Ethiopia "The multinational coffee corporation, Nestle, is demanding a $6m (£3.7m) payment from the government of the world's poorest state, Ethiopia, as the country struggles to combat its worst famine for nearly 20 years. The money is compensation for an Ethiopian business which the previous military government nationalised in 1975. It could feed a million people for a month, according to Oxfam."
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Democracy Now!: "Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Honeywell and other major U.S. corporations, as well as governmental agencies including the Department of Defense and the nation's nuclear labs, all illegally helped Iraq to build its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs."
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
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NAFTA to Open Foodgates, Engulfing Rural Mexico: "on Jan. 1 tariffs on almost all agricultural imports from the United States will end. The looming deadline has consumed the attention of a nation where a quarter of the population lives in rural areas, and produced warnings about the possibility of unrest and increased migration across the Mexican countryside and into the United States, as millions of peasants are forced to abandon their tiny fields. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers and their supporters have blocked highways and border crossings. They have temporarily shut down gas and electricity installations, and even burst into Congress on horseback."
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The Evil of Access: Mark Green - "with President Bush loudly beating his war drums, who heard any discussion about the escalating cost of campaigns? Spending in the New York and Pennsylvania gubernatorial elections, for example, tripled within one election cycle. The evidence that money shouts is mountainous: Ninety-four percent of the time, the bigger-spending Congressional candidate wins--and 98 percent of House incumbents win. The average price of a House seat rose from $87,000 in 1976 to $840,000 in 2000. It cost Ken Livingstone 80 cents a vote to win the London mayoralty last year, compared with Michael Bloomberg's $100 a vote in New York City. As money metastasizes throughout our political process, the erosion of our democracy should be evident to left and right alike: "
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Monday, December 16, 2002
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Hydrogen: Empowering the People: JEREMY RIFKIN "While the fossil-fuel era enters its sunset years, a new energy regime is being born that has the potential to remake civilization along radically new lines--hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most basic and ubiquitous element in the universe. It never runs out and produces no harmful CO2 emissions when burned; the only byproducts are heat and pure water. That is why it's been called "the forever fuel." Hydrogen has the potential to end the world's reliance on oil."
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Thursday, December 12, 2002
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William Rivers Pitt | The Pure Essence of Stupid: "George W. Bush has tapped John J. Snow to replace blabbermouth former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. Snow rises to his post from a corporate executive background, having served as the CEO of railroad giant CSX... Mr. Snow ran a company whose 2001 annual report claimed this as its company motto: "CSX will pursue all available opportunities to pay the lowest federal, state and foreign taxes." They succeeded admirably in this. CSX has not paid taxes in three of the last four years. In fact, CSX supplemented its $934 million in pretax U.S. profits over those four years with a total of $164 million in tax rebates from the federal government. "
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002
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Administration Proposes Rules That Can Alter Pension Plans: " Bush administration has proposed sweeping new pension rules that will encourage companies to adopt a type of retirement plan that has been under attack for three years for what critics call a tendency to strip benefits from older employees. The proposed rules, which are to be released by the Treasury Department on Tuesday, describe the steps for companies to avoid age-discrimination challenges when they convert their traditional pension plans into what are called cash-balance pension plans. Cash-balance plans tend to benefit younger workers, often at the expense of older workers, and are less costly for companies."
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Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US | csmonitor.com: "Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person. This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades, his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the Israel lobby."
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Monday, December 09, 2002
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Pastoral Poverty: The Seeds of Decline: "Around the country, rural ghettos are unravelling in the same way that inner cities did in the 1960's and 70's, according to the officials and experts who have tried to make sense of a generations-old downward spiral in the countryside. In this view, decades of economic decline have produced a culture of dependency, with empty counties hooked on farm subsidies just as welfare mothers were said to be tied to their monthly checks. And just as in the cities, the hollowed-out economy has led to a frightening rise in crime and drug abuse...
Supporters of subsidies say they keep entire counties from going under and ensure a cheap and abundant food supply.
But opponents say that the biggest checks go to large corporate farms and do little to stem rural decline. The farm bill signed in May by President Bush — and backed by both parties — will, over the next 10 years, distribute two-thirds of $125 billion in payments to the top 10 percent of farms, according to an analysis done by the Environmental Working Group, a conservation group."
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Thursday, December 05, 2002
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Wednesday, December 04, 2002
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Bush to End Rule Allowing Jobless Money for New Parents: "Bush administration will repeal a Clinton-era rule that allows states to use unemployment insurance money to help people who take a leave from work to have babies or adopt children, officials said today. The executive action will effectively shut down legislative efforts in as many as 16 states to make unemployment compensation money available to working parents who have taken time off to care for a newborn or adopted child."
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Tuesday, December 03, 2002
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Union Head Cites Secret Report in Quitting Insurer: "A.F.L.-C.I.O. president John J. Sweeney resigned yesterday from the board of Ullico, an embattled union-owned insurer, because of concerns that an outside counsel's report into accusations of insider trading at the insurer might never be made public. Mr. Sweeney resigned on the day that Ullico's board met in Washington to consider an investigative report.. into highly profitable stock trades by members of Ullico's board, which is made up primarily of former and current union presidents... with Mr. Sweeney demanding that the Thompson report be made public and Mr. Georgine seeking to limit its disclosure. Mr. Sweeney, who did not participate in the stock trades, has criticized them and was one of the first to urge that an outside counsel be named. "
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Health Food Company Buys Rival: "For the last decade, a significant part of Hain's strategy has been to grow by acquisition. In 2001, Hain Celestial acquired Yves Veggie Cuisine Inc., a Canadian manufacturer of soy-based burgers and cheese substitutes. In the same year, the company also picked up Lima N.V., a Belgian company that makes natural and organic foods. Hain purchased Celestial Seasonings, the tea company, for about $390 million in 2000, and in 1999, it bought the Earth's Best brand of organic baby food from the H. J. Heinz Company. In exchange, Heinz took on a 19.5 percent ownership stake in Hain Celestial"
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Saturday, November 30, 2002
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Union Chief to Return $200,000 From Stock Deal Under Inquiry: (11/1/02) "The president of the carpenters' union, Douglas J. McCarron, President Bush's closest friend in organized labor, has agreed to return more than $200,000 in profits he made in a stock deal that is under federal investigation. On Tuesday, Mr. McCarron informed the Union Labor Life Insurance Company, a labor-owned carrier known as Ullico, that he would pay back the money, which he earned when he sold Ullico shares in what is being investigated for the possibility of insider trading."
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S.E.C. Facing Deeper Trouble: "Bowsher said there were ominous parallels to the problems facing the commission and the difficulties that confronted regulators during the onset of the savings and loan collapses of more than a decade ago, when he led the General Accounting Office. As was the case then, he said, the regulators are sharply underfinanced, face ferocious corporate lobbying interests with friends in Congress who want to weaken the rules, and are often unable to anticipate or prevent major infractions that can wind up costing investors huge sums of money."
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Monday, November 25, 2002
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Whose Hands Are Dirty?: Bob Herbert "Last week the Senate approved legislation to establish a Department of Homeland Security and it will soon be signed into law by the president. Buried in this massive bill, snuck into it in the dark of night by persons unknown (actually, it's fair to say by Republican persons unknown), was a provision that -- incredibly -- will protect Eli Lilly and a few other big pharmaceutical outfits from lawsuits by parents who believe their children were harmed by thimerosal. Now this has nothing to do with homeland security. Nothing. This is not a provision that will in any way protect us from the ferocious evil of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. So why is it there? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the major drug companies have become a gigantic collective cash machine for politicians, and that the vast majority of that cash goes to Republicans. Or maybe it's related to the fact that Mitch Daniels, the White House budget director, is a former Eli Lilly big shot. Or the very convenient fact that just last June President Bush appointed Eli Lilly's chairman, president and C.E.O., Sidney Taurel, to a coveted seat on the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council."
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Sunday, November 24, 2002
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Nurses' Association Says in Study that Big Hospital Chain Overcharges Patients for Drugs: "Tenet Healthcare, already under scrutiny for receiving unusually high Medicare payments in recent years, apparently charged patients high prices for drugs as well, according to a new analysis by the California Nurses Association to be released tomorrow. In recent years, Tenet-owned hospitals have raised their drug prices to roughly eight times actual costs, the association said. Tenet, one of the nation's largest commercial hospital chains, has come under intense scrutiny for the unusual amount of special Medicare payments it has received in recent years. By raising prices sharply at some of its hospitals, particularly in California, Tenet received hundreds of millions of dollars in special payments. "
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Saturday, November 23, 2002
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Madison Ave. Plays Growing Role in Drug Research: "The three largest advertising companies -- Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP -- have spent tens of millions of dollars to buy or invest in companies like Scirex that perform clinical trials of experimental drugs. One advertising executive calls it "getting closer to the test tube." Ad agency executives say they do nothing to distort the research process. But critics worry that science is being sacrificed for the sake of promotion.... Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer of the University of California at San Francisco has been critical of drug company involvement in clinical trials."
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Should churches convert drivers of SUVs? | csmonitor.com: "Economist Michelle White of University of California at San Diego calculated the effect of SUVs and light trucks on traffic safety. Many people purchase SUVs to make their families safer, but the cost is extremely high, Dr. White said in an interview. "My calculations suggested that for every accident involving a fatality that you avoided by buying a bigger vehicle, you cause 2 1/2 accidents involving fatalities for vehicles that you hit."
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The Sons Also Rise: Krugman - "Last week my Princeton colleague Alan Krueger wrote a column for The Times surveying statistical studies that debunk the mythology of American social mobility. "If the United States stands out in comparison with other countries," he wrote, "it is in having a more static distribution of income across generations with fewer opportunities for advancement." And Kevin Phillips, in his book "Wealth and Democracy," shows that robber-baron fortunes have been far more persistent than legend would have it. But the past is only prologue. According to one study cited by Mr. Krueger, the heritability of status has been increasing in recent decades. And that's just the beginning. Underlying economic, social and political trends will give the children of today's wealthy a huge advantage over those who chose the wrong parents."
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Changing of Republican Budget Guard Could Create Waves: "The question being asked throughout the Capitol and in the institutes that track budget and tax matters is whether the officials who replace Ms. Paull, Mr. Crippen and Mr. Hoagland -- none have been named yet -- will mainly be honest evaluators of tax and budget policy or primarily facilitators of the Republican political agenda. The three who are leaving were squarely in the camp of honest brokers. Year after year, they spoke their minds and resisted all efforts to alter their designs to fit the latest Republican fashions. For example, Republican leaders were furious this year when Mr. Crippen said publicly that the federal budget would still show a surplus if not for the president's $1.35 trillion tax cut."
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Why U.S. Oil Companies and Russian Resources Don't Mix: " Bush administration is pushing American oil companies to invest in Russia, and President Vladimir V. Putin has thrown his weight behind tax and regulatory changes to draw foreign investment. The only problem is that American oil companies are not buying. After years of grappling with stubborn bureaucracies and hostile local oil companies, Western executives doubt that even Mr. Putin can make investing in Russia much easier. The Russian industry, led by companies like Yukos and Sibneft, has turned itself around and is now battling to keep foreigners off its turf. The two sides are mired in a standoff that most executives and analysts say will drag on for years. "
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Thursday, November 21, 2002
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States of Pain: "Watching the fiscal crises gripping cities and states across the U.S. is like watching a chain-reaction auto wreck in slow motion. I don't think the general public has a good sense yet of the pain that will result from the carnage. California residents learned last week that their state, already laboring under a huge budget gap in the current fiscal year, will face a potentially catastrophic shortfall next year -- $21 billion, which is far higher than almost anyone expected. In New York, state officials will have to close an estimated $10 billion gap next year."
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Wednesday, November 20, 2002
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Nuns Bring Hope to Mississippi Delta Towns: "In the 1980's, a half dozen orders of Catholic nuns looked around the country to see where they could be most helpful, and they began sending members into the Delta, with the support of the Diocese of Jackson, Miss. Since then, several hundred nuns have settled in communities like Tutwiler, Tunica, Marks, Rosedale and Jonestown -- places that whites had deserted with the desegregation of schools. With little fanfare and no government help to speak of, these sisters help reinforce the town's crowded and underfinanced public schools. They are also nurses, doctors, counselors and community organizers. They build medical clinics, nonsectarian preschools for the youngest children and houses with Habitat for Humanity volunteers. They provide the towns' only refuges for many children to do homework or make decorations for Halloween. They organize programs for teenage girls as alternatives to becoming pregnant. "
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Tuesday, November 12, 2002
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G.O.P. Victory Sets Stage for Pro-Business Agenda: "Waking to a new power configuration in Washington yesterday, business leaders began to revise their wish lists for action on contentious issues like taxes, health care costs, personal-injury lawsuits and the ability of government employees to strike"
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Friday, November 08, 2002
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Labor Opens a Drive to Organize Wal-Mart: "labor is escalating its efforts, and in an all-out assault on the discount retailer that has grown to nearly 100 stores in 20 states, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has hired disaffected managers as organizers and created a radio show and Web site that lambaste Wal-Mart's working conditions."
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Tuesday, October 29, 2002
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For the People: Krugman - "Paul Wellstone took risks. He was, everyone acknowledges, a politician who truly voted his convictions, who supported what he thought was right, not what he thought would help him get re-elected. He took risky stands on many issues: agree or disagree, you have to admit that his vote against authorization for an Iraq war was a singularly brave act. Yet the most consistent theme in his record was economic -- his courageous support for the interests of ordinary Americans against the growing power of our emerging plutocracy. In our money-dominated politics, that's a dangerous position to take."
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Friday, October 11, 2002
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The high-tech angle on an old-fashioned dock strike: "THE CURRENT DISPUTE between dockworkers and port owners is a repetition of the age-old union struggle, but with a technological twist: One of the primary stumbling blocks is over the possible adoption of new technology that could eliminate up to 800 union jobs. But what most media reports have failed to mention thus far is that the technology at the center of that dispute was invented by a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). He is, in fact, among those in danger of losing his job if the technology is adopted. Bob Carson, the "chief visionary officer" of three-year-old tech start-up ContainerTrac, is also the chief clerk for Pier 80 in San Francisco. Adding to the irony, ContainerTrac chief operating officer Red Smith says the Berkeley, Calif., company's technology is actually endorsed by the union. "
[This is a great story. It's not coincidental that this ingenious use of life-saving, cost-saving technology comes from a leading member of a strong, independent labor union, giving the lie to the classic canard that unions hold back progress. What democratic unions fight is not technology, but the use of technology to deprive workers of a fair return on labor, and of what little control they still have over labor conditions. What possible reason could the shipping industry have for insisting that the new jobs be non-union, other than as part of a long-term strategy to push labor costs toward third world levels, as industry after industry has done so successfully? This is the same morality that produced bloated paychecks for CEOs and collapsed pension funds for everyone else.]
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Wednesday, October 09, 2002
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Molly Ivins - Death of Corporate Reform: "We just lost the whole ballgame on corporate reform -- without the news even making it to the front page. The sick, sad tidings were tucked away discreetly on the business pages: "SEC Chief Hedges on Accounting Regulator." Now there's a sexy headline. All of you who were shafted by Enron, shucked by Worldcom, jived by Global Crossing, everyone whose 401(k) is now a 201(k) (I think that's Paul Begala's line), you just got screwed again. They're not going to fix it. They've already called off the reform effort; it's over. Corporate muscle showed up and shut it down. "
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Friday, September 06, 2002
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Wednesday, August 28, 2002
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Cheney Stumps for War, Ignores His Own Ties to Hussein: "According to the Financial Times of London, between September 1998 and [early 2000], Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, oversaw $23.8 million of business contracts for the sale of oil-industry equipment and services to Iraq through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump, which helped rebuild Iraq's war-damaged petroleum-production infrastructure. The combined value of these contracts exceeded those of any other U.S. company doing business with Baghdad. "
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Wednesday, August 14, 2002
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Give Greenspan's Fed Its Share of the Blame: William Greider oped - "Federal Reserve policy has been a contributing force in producing deep imbalances in the American economy -- the growing inequalities of incomes and wealth and other disorders, such as the burgeoning debts of families and business. The Fed helped induce these injurious shifts by essentially favoring the financial system over the real economy of production."
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Friday, July 26, 2002
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Living With Bears: Krugman - "with the recovery still wobbly, this is no time for fiscal austerity -- if anything, right now the federal government ought to be pumping more money into the economy than it is. The obvious answer to this seeming dilemma is to loosen the reins now, but prepare to tighten them once the economy has fully recovered. For example, the Bush administration could move quickly to aid distressed state governments, avoiding harsh (and contractionary) cuts in essential programs. Meanwhile, to assuage worries about the long-run fiscal position, it could put on hold future tax cuts that were written into law back when visions of surplus sugarplums were still dancing in our heads. And after the administration takes these responsible steps, thousands of pigs will fill the skies over Washington."
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Thursday, July 11, 2002
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Suffer the Children: "while the wealthiest Americans "have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts -- averaging just under $12,000 each this year -- 80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won't take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005." For the vast majority of Americans, three-quarters of the Bush tax cuts -- averaging about $350 this year -- are already in place, the study said. From 2001 through 2010, "the richest Americans -- the best-off 1 percent -- are slated to receive tax cuts totaling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade." The clincher: "By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent, whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million.""
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Wednesday, July 10, 2002
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Slouching Toward Populism: "How can Mr. Bush crack the whip on Big Business when he's a wholly owned subsidiary of it? His dynastic ties to business gave him his career in oil and baseball, provided the record-breaking $100 million that made him president, and spawned his C.E.O. administration. "
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Monday, July 08, 2002
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Succeeding in Business: Krugman: Bush financial history: "A group of insiders, using money borrowed from Harken itself, paid an exorbitant price for a Harken subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum. That created a $10 million phantom profit, which hid three-quarters of the company's losses in 1989. White House aides have played down the significance of this maneuver, saying $10 million isn't much, compared with recent scandals. Indeed, it's a small fraction of the apparent profits Halliburton created through a sudden change in accounting procedures during Dick Cheney's tenure as chief executive. But for Harken's stock price -- and hence for Mr. Bush's personal wealth -- this accounting trickery made all the difference.... Mr. Bush portrays himself as a regular guy, someone ordinary Americans can identify with. But his personal fortune was built on privilege and insider dealings — and after his Harken sale, on large-scale corporate welfare."
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Friday, July 05, 2002
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CPI Inflation Calculator: "This is an inflation calculator for adjusting costs from one year to another using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation index.... This inflation calculator will compute inflation rates between 1913 and 1999"
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Friday, June 28, 2002
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SatireWire | REMAINING U.S. CEOs MAKE A BREAK FOR IT "Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense."
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Friday, June 14, 2002
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The Rove Doctrine: "As analysts at the Cato Institute point out, the Bush-Cheney energy plan may have been conservative in the sense that it was anti-environmentalist, but otherwise it was stuffed full of things free-marketeers are supposed to abhor: expanded government power to seize private land (for transmission lines), large tax incentives for energy sources that don't pay their way at market prices (nuclear power in particular). The energy plan wasn't about principles; it was about payback."
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Plutocracy and Politics. - Paul Krugman - The Gilded Age looked positively egalitarian compared with the concentration of wealth now emerging in America. Pretty soon denial will no longer be possible.... In 1981 those captains of industry were paid an average of $3.5 million, which seemed like a lot at the time. By 1988 the average had soared to $19.3 million, which seemed outrageous. But by 2000 the average annual pay of the top 10 was $154 million.
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Thursday, June 06, 2002
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Our Fruit, Their Labor and Global Reality: Dana Frank - "the big banana producers have been transferring production to Ecuador, which has been almost completely nonunion since the banana labor movement was largely crushed there in the 1970s. Dole now gets 31 percent of its bananas from Ecuador, Del Monte 13 percent, and Chiquita 7 percent, according to industry figures. Bob Kistinger, president of Chiquita's international division, complained in August 2000 that Ecuador's rock-bottom wages were making it difficult for his company to compete elsewhere. Explaining the layoff of 650 workers in Honduras, Kistinger said in the Financial Times of London: "The costs in Ecuador are so much lower. There are no unions, no labour standards and pay is as low as two dollars a day." According to a 2000 study by US/LEAP, a banana worker's average monthly wage was $500 in Panama, $200 to $300 in Colombia, $150 to $200 in Honduras -- and $56 in Ecuador. "
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Friday, May 31, 2002
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Heart of Cheapness: Krugman oped - "So here are our priorities. Faced with a proposal that would save the lives of eight million people every year, many of them children, we balk at the cost. But when asked to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million, we don't hesitate."
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Saturday, May 25, 2002
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Pilfering from Publishers: Have You Hugged an Indie Press Today?: "Borders Group Inc., the country's second-largest book retailer, has told book publishers that they have to attend expensive "marketing seminars" if they want to see themselves on store shelves. Moreover, they're putting the foxes of the publishing world in charge of the book store farm. According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Borders' new plan is modelled on one that's used by grocers. The chain will choose publishers to co-manage each of 250 categories in their stores. These "captains" will be involved in determining which titles will be carried, displayed, and marketed, says Borders. Random House, for example, has been made "captain" of books for younger readers. " - sounds like it's time for a boycott of Borders.
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Monday, May 20, 2002
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Enemies of Reform: " Honesty in corporate accounting isn't a left-right issue; it's about protecting all investors from exploitation by insiders. By blocking reform of a broken system, the Bush administration is favoring the interests of a tiny corporate oligarchy over those of everyone else."
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An Anti-American Boycott Is Growing in the Arab World: "American support for Israel, especially during its recent military offensive in the occupied territories, is driving a grass-roots effort to boycott American products throughout the Arab world. With word spread via the Internet, mosque sermons, fliers and even mobile phone messages, the boycott seems to be slowly gathering force, especially against consumer products."
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Officers May Gain More Than Investor in Move to Bermuda: "parade of companies that in recent months have proposed incorporating in Bermuda to reduce their American taxes usually provide the same rationale. They are doing it, they say, to increase their profits and, in turn, to benefit their shareholders. But left unsaid is another fact: the biggest beneficiaries could actually be the chief executives of these companies. "
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Saturday, May 11, 2002
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M&M/Mars is currently asking consumers to vote for a new color for its M&M™s. Global Exchange is encouraging chocolate eaters to swing the votes in support of Fair Trade Certified chocolate between now and May 31.
Fair Trade M&M's Ballot Box......
* Vote Online for Fair Trade Certified M&M's at the M&M's web site: http://www.mms.com/us/ Choose "Write in Your Own Color" type "Fair Trade Certified!" in the box, and click to submit your vote.
* Cast & Collect Fair Trade Ballots. From now until May 31, Fair Trade supporters across the world will urge their community members to fill out specially designed Fair Trade M&M's Ballots. Call or e-mail the HRAS for a stack of write-in ballots or download the ballots at http://www.humanrightsaction.net/downloads/guides/marsballot.pdf/
* Fax A Prepared Letter Free to M&M/Mars from the Global Exchange web site:
http://www.globalexchange.org/cocoafaxMMMars031402.html
* WRITE a letter to M&M/MARS to register your vote.: Paul Michaels, President, M&M/Mars Inc., 6885 Elm St., McLean, VA 22101
*CALL M&M/MARS at 1-800-627-7852.
*E-MAIL M&M/MARS consumer.affairs@mmmars.com and askmms@mmmars.com.
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Thursday, May 09, 2002
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Vote on Offshore Tax Plan Is Testing Company's Values: "if its shareholders approve a proposal in a vote on Thursday, Stanley will become a Bermuda company in address only, with its legal residence in Barbados. The company says its plan will slash its income tax bills by at least 28 percent -- $30 million a year -- and predicts that the resulting higher cash flow could by itself raise its stock price by 11.5 percent. Tax experts say the saving could be much higher."
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Wednesday, May 08, 2002
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Big Tobacco, smuggling: "Twenty-five percent of exported cigarettes, according to the World Health Organization, are smuggled. Smuggling has enabled multinational tobacco companies to increase sales volume dramatically by evading local tariffs and competing head to head with domestic producers, thereby helping to establish internationally recognizable brands....
From 1984 to 1993.. the number of cigarettes illegally imported into [Colombia] quadrupled. Meanwhile, domestic cigarette producers' share of total cigarette sales dropped.... Colombia used to have a thriving domestic tobacco industry, but since 1984 the amount of hectares devoted to tobacco crops has plummeted. As the domestic cigarette industry imploded, many tobacco farmers made the shift to Colombia's far more famous addictive crop, coca.
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Monday, May 06, 2002
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True Blue Americans: " what's really outrageous is the claim that the heartland is self-reliant. That grotesque farm bill, by itself, should put an end to all such assertions; but it only adds to the immense subsidies the heartland already receives from the rest of the country. As a group, red [Bush-vote] states pay considerably less in taxes than the federal government spends within their borders; blue [Gore-vote] states pay considerably more. Over all, blue America subsidizes red America to the tune of $90 billion or so each year.... There's no mystery about why the heartland gets such special treatment: it's a result of our electoral system, which gives states with small populations — mainly, though not entirely, red states — disproportionate representation in the Senate, and to a lesser extent in the Electoral College. In fact, half the Senate is elected by just 16 percent of the population."
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Sunday, May 05, 2002
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The World We're In - Will Hutton: "Those Americans who do not get to college are pushed into the labour market with a poverty of skills, educational and vocational training. Those who do get to college are overwhelmingly students from the higher socio-economic backgrounds, just as they always have been; a study in 1965 found that two-thirds of the explanation for educational achievement was accounted for by family income; a study 30 years later found exactly the same figure. As inequality grows, the grip of the wealthy on educational advantage becomes ever more eviden"
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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
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Shredding of Smoking Data Is Ruled Deliberate: "After years of unproven allegations that tobacco companies had shredded internal files that documented the health risks of smoking, a judge here [Australia] has ruled that British American Tobacco had in fact carried out a systematic worldwide program for that purpose."
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Thursday, April 25, 2002
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'The Myth of Ownership': Challenging the Rhetoric of Tax Cutting: "They assert that a naive philosophy of ''everyday libertarianism'' infects American politics with a ''robust and compelling fantasy that we earn our income and the government takes some of it away from us.'' This popular myth ''results in widespread hostility to taxes, and a political advantage to those who campaign against them and attack the I.R.S.'' This fantasy grows from the acceptance by all sides in the tax debate that gross, or pretax, incomes are presumptively just and therefore the proper moral base line to begin debate. "
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Wednesday, April 24, 2002
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Thursday, April 11, 2002
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AFL-CIO: Executive PayWatch: "Two big trends distinguished CEO pay in 2001: first, a dangerous and ongoing disconnect between performance and pay, and second, stark double standards on retirement security and job security for CEOs compared with workers. "
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Monday, April 08, 2002
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Bush Seeks Voluntary Steps by Industry to Reduce Work Injuries: "Democratic lawmakers and union leaders were quick to attack the new policy, calling it toothless and far weaker than the Clinton administration regulations that a Republican-dominated Congress repealed 13 months ago, with President Bush's encouragement. Business groups, on the other hand, were mostly pleased. "
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Thursday, April 04, 2002
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Connect the Dots: Krugman - "The ideological powers behind the current administration want to do away with Social Security -- not to offer retirees a better deal, but because they are opposed to the program in principle. Unfortunately, that's an argument that won't work in the political arena; Social Security is very popular. So the strategy they have adopted is to declare that the program is already dead, or nearly so. If the facts say, on the contrary, that Social Security is very much alive, the administration doesn't want to hear about it. And it doesn't want you to hear about it, either. "
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Saturday, March 30, 2002
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Burgers in Chile: Hold the Criticism. McDonald's has filed a $1.25 million lawsuit against a woman in Chile who complained that her son came down with food poisoning after eating one if its hamburgers.
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Oil Company Proves Bush Wrong On Climate Change: "BP chief executive John Browne announced that his company had met its self-imposed target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions -- nearly eight years ahead of schedule, and at no net cost to the company. It was Browne who, five years earlier at Stanford, had sent shock waves through the energy industry by announcing that his company had decided that the risks of climate change justified precautionary action. "
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Wednesday, March 27, 2002
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Army Secretary Defends Timing of His Sale of Enron Stock: "Thomas E. White, a former Enron executive who is now Army secretary, today defended the timing of his sales of millions of dollars in Enron stock late last year, saying that dozens of conversations he had with Enron executives at that time did not guide his decisions"
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Tuesday, March 26, 2002
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Europe Versus United States in Steel War: "In 1980, Europe's five largest steel companies accounted for 30 percent of steel production in the European Union. Today, the top five account for more than 60 percent. By contrast, the top five American companies account for about a third of the American market, and they are all much smaller than their biggest rivals in either Europe or Asia. Europe's steel employment, meanwhile, has shrunk radically, from nearly 800,000 workers in 1980 to fewer than 280,000 today."
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Tuesday, March 19, 2002
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Bad Medicine: Krugman oped " Medicare payments have already been squeezed beyond their limits, to the point where recipients can't find doctors willing to take them. Something will have to give, and soon. "
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Thursday, March 14, 2002
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Crony Capitalism Goes Global: "By hiring enough former officials to fill a permanent shadow cabinet, Carlyle has brought political influence to a new level and created a twenty-first-century version of capitalism that blurs any line between politics and business. In a sense, Carlyle may be the ultimate in privatization: the use of a private company to nurture public policy--and then reap its benefits in the form of profit."
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Going Down the Road: "New Orlean Campaign for a Living Wage's volunteers had made thousands of calls and gone door to door in a spirited shoe-leather campaign, ... winning by a sweeping 63-37 margin. The next day the corporate lawyers went running back to the courts, and a decision is due in the next few weeks on whether a trumped-up state law can overturn the voters' voice. "
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Press Release: "A pathbreaking national study finds that although living wage laws reduce employment, they also decrease poverty among urban families. A report released today by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) shows that the substantial pay increases generated by such laws can outweigh job losses among low-income workers - and the net effect is a modest decrease in family poverty."
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Tuesday, March 12, 2002
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Missing James Tobin: Krugman - "Yale professor, Nobel laureate and adviser to John F. Kennedy â014 died yesterday. He was a great economist and a remarkably good man; his passing seems to me to symbolize the passing of an era, one in which economic debate was both nicer and a lot more honest than it is today."
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Thursday, March 07, 2002
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The Urge to Converge: Safire oped "Today's any-merger-goes regulators permit cross-ownership of content and distribution while encouraging corporate titans with swollen egos to gobble up competitors or suppliers. Where does this power grab leave the innovative entrepreneur, the small business, the individual talent and the consumer?"
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Wednesday, March 06, 2002
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Breaking the Contract: Krugman oped - "baby boomers have spent their working years paying quite high payroll taxes, which were used mainly to support their elders, and only secondarily to help Social Security build up a financial reserve. And they expect to be supported in their turn. Mr. Bush proposes to allow younger workers to place their payroll taxes in private accounts -- in effect, to break this ongoing contract. But then what happens to older workers, who have already paid their dues? "
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Wednesday, February 27, 2002
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Bush's Plan on Welfare Law Increases Work Requirement: "At least 50 percent of a state's welfare families must now participate in work and other activities aimed at self-sufficiency; Mr. Bush proposes to raise that requirement so that 70 percent must be working by 2007. ... The administration plans to require welfare recipients to work 40 hours a week "at a job or in programs designed to help them achieve independence." Adults are now generally required to work 30 hours a week, of which no more 10 could be in job training or education programs."
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In Corn's Cradle, U.S. Imports Bury Family Farms: ""Corn growing has basically collapsed in Mexico," Carlos Heredia Zubieta, an economist and a member of Mexico's Congress, said in a recent speech to an American audience. "The flood of imports of basic grains has ravaged the countryside, so the corn growers are here instead of working in the fields." The facts are stark. Since Nafta took effect eight years ago, imports of corn to Mexico from the United States have increased nearly eighteenfold, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. The imports will probably keep growing for the next six years as the final phases of Nafta take effect. In the United States, corn growers receive billions of dollars a year in subsidies from Congress, much of it going to huge agribusiness operations. That policy fuels huge surpluses and pushes corn prices down.....One unforeseen result of the collapse of corn farming, Mr. Nadal warns, will be the loss of genetically unique kinds of corn. As imports grow and farmers give up their fields, he said, ancient varieties like the succulent blue corn used for tortillas may be endangered. Some may already be lost, he said. "
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Monday, February 25, 2002
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Web Site Helped Change Farm Policy: "www.ewg.org, operated by the Environmental Working Group, a small nonprofit organization with the simple idea that the taxpayers who underwrite $20 billion a year in farm subsidies have the right to know who gets the money."
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Bush Proposing to Shift Burden of Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers: "Under pressure from the chemical and oil industries, Congress let the corporate taxes expire in 1995. Without them, the trust fund dwindled, from a high of $3.8 billion in 1996 to a projected $28 million next year. President Bush did not reauthorize the taxes last year in his first budget, and his proposed budget for 2003 explicitly states that he will not do so."
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Sunday, February 24, 2002
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The W Scenario: Krugman on $300 tax "rebates" - "The Bush administration didn't want to give those famous $300 rebate checks; its original plan would have pumped hardly any money into the economy last year. Under prodding from Democrats the plan was changed to incorporate immediate cash outlays. But those outlays were included only grudgingly, and with a catch: they really weren't rebates. Instead, they were merely advances on future tax cuts. What that means is that most taxpayers, when they reach line 47 of their 1040's, will discover that they owe $300 more in taxes than they expected. In other words, the one piece of the Bush tax cut that probably did help the economy last year is about to be snatched away. "
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Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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Congress to Investigate Wall St.'s Ties With Enron: "Even as Enron was collapsing, analysts were pushing a strong buy. Did investment banks have an interest in trying to keep the stock from falling too far and was there an attempt to deceive investors?"
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Tuesday, February 19, 2002
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Changes in World Economy on Raw Materials May Doom Many Towns: "Since the last recession, in the early 1990's, China, Russia and the former Soviet republics have charged into the world's commodity markets. At the same time, new trade agreements have erased quotas and tariffs that long insulated United States industries from foreign competition. While freer trade benefits American consumers and industries that can now buy cheaper imported commodities, it has been rough on the places whose livelihoods depend on raw goods. For these already-struggling communities, the first post- globalization recession may break the old sequence of boom-bust-boom, and erase any hopes of long-term survival."
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Saturday, February 16, 2002
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The New York Review of Books: The Betrayal of Capitalism: Felix Rohatyn on Enron "Unless we take the regulatory and legislative steps required to prevent a recurrence of these events, American market capitalism will run increasing risks and be seen as defective here and abroad. " (shudder!)
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