The American Prospect articles from August 2002

The American Prospect archives from August 2002

All-capitalist class war. (Comment).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
August 12, 2002... WHERE IN THE ANNALS of class conflict do we put the current tiff between America's investors and its CEOs? Up until a few weeks ago, this would have been considered a question not worthy of an answer. Both groups bobbed on the same tide....

How Bushes get beaten. (Comment).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
August 12, 2002... ONLY A SHORT TIME AGO the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, whoever that might be, seemed to face two possibilities: losing to George W. Bush by a respectable margin or being wiped out in a colossal landslide. Such dismal prospects, if...

Correction.(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... THE USE OF THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK ILLUSTRATION ON THE cover of The American Prospect's July 1, 2002, issue was undertaken without the consent of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which owns the rights to the Doomsday Clock. The Bulletin of the...

This Is Your Party on Drugs. (Correspondence).(response to N. CONFESSORE in The American Prospect, July 15, 2002)(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... NICHOLAS CONFESSORE'S article citing prescription-drug costs as one of the Democrats' defining political issues is on target, but the author neglected an important piece of the puzzle ["This Is Your Party on Drugs," July 15]. Regardless of the...

Who Vouches for Vouchers? (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... MEGAN TWOHEY'S "WHO Vouches for Vouchers?" [July 1] suggests that the public shouldn't worry about school-voucher programs so long as they're not "universal." But even programs focused on certain cities or communities have a devastating impact...

Back to Brinksmanship. (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... IN "BACK TO BRINKSMANSHIP" [July 1], Sumit Ganguly presents an informative, succinct examination of the conflict over Kashmir and the resultant potential for a nuclear cataclysm. But he perpetuates a long-standing myth, popular with the...

Tax the Wealthy. (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... WILLIAM GATES AND CHUCK Collins make some good points in "Tax the Wealthy" [June 17] concerning revenue loss resulting from permanent repeal of the estate tax. But the authors imply that the best strategy is to fight for the status quo this...

Is the Third Way Finished? (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... IN YOUR JULY 1 ISSUE, JOHN Judis praised the third way as the salvation of the democratic left ["Is the Third Way Finished?"]. What Judis overlooks, however, is that the policy package espoused by third-way politicians in Europe--lower taxes,...

Greens to liberals: drop dead. (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... WE'VE SUBSCRIBED TO TAP for several years and will continue to. As Henry Wallace Democrats, however, we are displeased with your routine New Democrat positions. You attack Ralph Nader for costing Al Gore the presidential election, but the only...

Of the CEOs, by the CEOs, for the CEOs. (Devil In The Details).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... GIVE GEORGE W. CREDIT where credit is due: He promised us an administration with business principles, MBAs, wall-to-wall CEOs. And, to his woe (and ours), that's just what he's got. Looking left to right at the red-tinted figures in the...

Transparent hypocrisy. (Devil In The Details).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... REMEMBER "TRANSPARENCY?" Time was when this was the battle cry of American businesses, and their obliging government, as they ventured into the world. For more than a decade, U.S-based megacorporations have insisted on tighter accounting...

Roll over, Jefferson. (Devil In The Details).(Brief Article)(Editorial)
August 12, 2002... THE FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND is always a good time to consider the state of American democracy. So imagine our dismay when we opened our newspaper and came across an ad from the Ad Council that sets a new standard for political fatuousness. "Read...

No time for thinking. (Devil In The Details).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... "In the current climate and environment we're in, I don't see how you are going to get an enlightened debate on Social Security reform."--Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) Assume Hagel means what he says: that Social Security privatization can be...

Social Security scheming. (Networks).(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
August 12, 2002... IN THE LAST TWO YEARS THE Nasdaq has dropped more than 70 percent and the Standard & Poor's 500 more than 40 percent. The Dow is dipping below 9,000. Investor confidence is continually rattled by huge corporate scandals, and pension plans are...

Freedom farmers. (Networks).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... TWO HUNDRED MEMBERS AND SUPPORTERS of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association spent their July 4 sitting in at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's regional offices in western Tennessee. The group alleges that the federal government...

Opening the Internet. (Networks).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... AS CABLE COMPANIES INCREASINGLY monopolize the Web, two major new players--Amazon.com and the American Civil Liberties Union--have jumped into the fight for open access. Amazon.com recently filed comments with the Federal Communications...

Diversity perversity. (On The Contrary).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... NEARLY 25 YEARS AGO, IN REGENTS OF THE University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court held that educational institutions may consider the race of their applicants in making admissions decisions. But the Court didn't clarify the...

Two steps backward: unilateralism revisited. (Below The Beltway).
August 12, 2002... AMONG DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS and political consultants, the accepted wisdom is that George W. Bush has been successful in foreign policy but a flop in domestic policy. This assessment is based more on polling than personal conviction, although...

Falling dollar, rising debt: the market is crumbling, accounting's a mess--and we owe the rest of the world about a quarter of our GDP. (Gazette).
August 12, 2002... THE VALUE OF THE U.S. DOLLAR has dropped more than 15 percent against the euro since February. That may not sound like a big deal--a bit of bad news for American tourists this summer, a bit of good news for American manufacturers selling things...

The road to nowhere: thirty years of campaign-finance reform yield precious little. (Gazette).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... FOR THREE DECADES, CAMPAIGN-FINANCE reform has been high on the liberal agenda. Not only that, it seemed like a winning cause: It played well in the media, attracted vigorous activist support and even, it seems, made its mark on Congress when...

Judge on the stump: what can--and can't--state judicial candidates say? (Gazette).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... THE CONCLUSION OF THE Supreme Court's term usually brings a spate of opinions in the most contentious and closely divided cases of the year, and this year's session did not disappoint. On its final day, the Court issued four 5-to-4 rulings,...

Interring a dream: the quiet death of school integration. (Gazette).(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... THE U.S. SUPREME COURT'S April 15 decision in a school desegregation case called Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was just a single line long and entirely devoid of explanation. A federal trial judge had recently ended more than...

"I plead the Sixth": right to counsel? It's not a given for juvenile defendants. (Gazette).
August 12, 2002... THE WAITING ROOM OF THE New Orleans juvenile court is hot and crowded. Its garishly painted walls stare down on angry parents, manacled teenagers and the occasional lawyer. In a corner, Victor Papai, the head of indigent defense at the juvenile...

Sam's amazing $5,000 dream coat: and other lies told to the House Tax Shelter Committee. (The Taxonomist).
August 12, 2002... YOU CAN HARDLY PICK UP THE NEWSPAPER THESE DAYS without reading about some freshly discovered corporate tax shelter scam, whether it's an Enron-style tax-haven subsidiary or a Bermuda shell company. The Bush administration and House...

Can liberals save capitalism (again)? Seven decades after the Great Depression, Democrats have their work cut out for them.
August 12, 2002... IN A FEW SHORT WEEKS, AMERICA'S POLITICAL ECONOMY has been stunningly transformed. The Bush administration, the Republican Party and three decades of conservative ideology are facing a potential rout. Yesterday's conservative cliches are...

No war for oil! Is the United States really after Afghanistan's resources? Not a chance.
August 12, 2002... THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN IS A SHAM. THE BUSH administration had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks but took no action, using the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as an excuse to topple the Taliban regime and...

Future imperfect: Minority Report--the story and the film--misses the mark. (The Critics Film).
August 12, 2002... THE CLAIM PHILIP KINDRED Dick, California nutcase and sci-fi seer, holds on our imagination is a particular one. Dick's signature as a writer is a sort of pre-epileptic hum or aura, an intimation of fast-approaching crisis. Something...

White parents, black children.
August 12, 2002... Gift Children: A Story of Race, Family, and Adoption in a Divided America By J. Douglas Bates. Ticknor & Fields, 270 pages, $21.95 Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother By Jana Wolff. Andrews and McMeel Publishing, 148 pages, $12.95 ...

Hard luck and welfare.
August 12, 2002... Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock By LynNell Hancock. William Morrow, 320 pages, $25.95 AFTER FLEEING ABUSE AT home, Brenda Fields and her children, Ty, 3, and Loreal, 17, found themselves on the doorstep...

Assignment: Vietnam.(Review)(Brief Article)
August 12, 2002... Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War From the Other Side Edited by Doug Niven. National Geographic Society, 240 pages, $50.00 DURING THE VIETNAM WAR, dozens of photographers working for the North Vietnamese Communist Party fanned out across...

Wanted: brave Democrats. (Comments).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... VERMONT GOV. HOWARD Dean, recently profiled in these pages, committed a brave political act the other day. He called for repeal of George W. Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut. What makes the act so brave is not that repealing the tax cut is an...

Shifting to offense. (Comment).(liberal efforts for economic reform)(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... EPOCHS DO NOT CHANGE ON a dime. Yes, the era of market extremism is waning, Republicans' ratings are plummeting, and, the polls agree, more of us believe that Elvis is hiding in the hills with the Shining Path than still have faith in American...

What does Minnesota know? (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... DAVE HAGE WRITES THAT Oregon "earns high marks in national evaluations for promoting work and reducing poverty" ["What Does Minnesota Know?" TAP, Summer 2002]. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, Oregon has never been lauded...

Creating a lie. (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... I APPRECIATED "CREATING A Lie" [July 1] on Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Creating a Life; it articulated another side of the debate. Hewlett, for example, assumes that one can just go out and find a suitable partner with whom to parent in the same way...

The road to nowhere. (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... IN "THE ROAD TO NOWHERE" [August 12], Ellen S. Miller and Nick Penniman raise important questions about the campaign-finance-reform movement. While we agree that the ultimate goal is full public financing of elections, the authors...

Greens to liberals: drop dead! (Correspondence).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... HAROLD MEYERSON QUITE rightly points out some of the alarming ramifications of third-party spoiling and of the Green Party's decision to run a candidate against Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone ["Greens to Liberals: Drop Dead!" July 1]. On both...

The nothing exchange. (Devil In The Details).(telecommunications market)(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... YOU CAN ALWAYS READ America's history by the maps of its roads, rails and networks. In the early years of the 19th century, you could chart the country's growth with a map of its canals. Fifty years later, a railroad map would be your best...

How history is cyclical. (Devil In The Details).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... WHAT WITH THE ENACTment of the Sarbanes bill and all the talk of further corporate reforms, we've been turning to accounts of the New Deal years to see how Franklin Roosevelt and his merry band were able to bust up the Enrons of their day, put...

The anti-pop.(Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign)(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... When Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the doyen of New Democrats, met with reporters at the Democratic Leadership Council's convention in New York during the last week of July, he brought his very own autopsy of the late, not widely lamented...

TIPS of the iceberg. (Networks).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... IT'S BEEN PRETTY HARD TO miss the clamor over Operation TIPS, the Justice Department's plan to create a network of civilians who are in a "unique position" to watch for and report "suspicious activity." Who might those civilians be? Mail...

Help wanted. (Networks).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... LAST YEAR THERE WERE ABOUT AS MANY visits to national parks as there are people in America: nearly 280 million, according to the National Park Service. But along with the mountains, forests, monuments and exhibits, visitors could be seeing a...

No picnic. (Networks).(recall of contaminated beef)(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... WITH CONAGRA BEEF CO. having voluntarily recalled 19 million pounds of ground beef since June 30, an old idea is getting a new boost: Why not allow government to require the recall of contaminated beef? Legislation to give the government that...

Faith healing. (On The Contrary).(federal aid to religious schools)(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... CONSIDERING THE GENEROUS TAX EXEMPTIONS long enjoyed by religious institutions, the routine invocation of God at official events or even the persistence of blue laws prohibiting the sale of liquor on Sundays, it's clear that the "wall" between...

Follow the bouncing Congress: it's corporate reform Thursday, corporate cave-in Friday. (Below The Beltway).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... THE FIRST 24 HOURS AFTER Congress passed the Sarbanes financial-reform bill must have been excruciating for many of our nation's leading legislators. In a stunning burst of boldness--or panic, what with the market's collapsing--they had enacted...

Is the big-business era over? The public sure thinks it should be. (Gazette).
August 26, 2002... IT MAY BE TRUE THAT THE ERA OF big government being over is over, as conservative Christopher Caldwell has argued, done in by President Bush's reluctance to challenge popular spending programs. But it may also be true that the era of big...

One-day wonder: the dangerous absurdity of the Bush-Putin arms treaty. (Gazette).
August 26, 2002... THIS SEPTEMBER, WHEN THE Senate returns from its summer recess, the Foreign Relations Committee plans to vote on the Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions, which Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin signed at the Moscow Summit...

The Andersen tape: on which Dick Cheney vouches for our favorite accountants. (Gazette).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... ARE THE CORPORATE SCANdals the work of a few bad apples" in an otherwise healthy business world, as President Bush asserts? Or do they spring from a "bad seed" that's sprouting corrupt practices all over the corporate landscape? A...

It's clear skies for dirty air: W.'s emissions-swapping plan may be dangerous if you breathe. (Gazette).
August 26, 2002... WHEN THE ENVIRONmental Protection Agency launched its highly publicized Acid Rain Program in the early 1990s to cut sulfur-dioxide emissions, environmentalists were skeptical. The Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 introduced a nationwide...

Help from the Hill: military insiders want some to derail Bush's plans for Iraq. (Gazette).
August 26, 2002... AS A RULE, BOTH THE JOINT Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency's leadership prefer that Congress stay out of their affairs. Indeed, an ideal Congress for many denizens of this realm would be one that simply holds open the cash...

Multinational tax deform: the problem's not just the corporations--it's the Republicans who actively support them. (The Taxonomist).(Brief Article)
August 26, 2002... IN RESPONSE TO PUBLIC OUTRAGE, CONGRESSIONAL Democrats are clamoring for a crackdown on offshore tax dodges. They've focused particularly on the notorious Bermuda loophole, whereby unpatriotic companies such as Tyco, Stanley Works, Accenture...

Dems' fightin' words: Democrats debate policy quite nicely. But until they embrace politics, become proud partisans and figure out who they are, they will be continually clobbered.
August 26, 2002... THERE IT WAS, THE FIRST FOURTH OF JULY AFTER September 11: The majestic swell of a patriotism associated more with the era of the Andrews Sisters than the age of Destiny's Child. The ritual exultations of American values. The worry, yes, that...

What do Afghan women want? A dramatic and militant Afghan feminist group has captured the West's imagination. But does it offer what the women of a shattered society need most?
August 26, 2002... THE UNVEILING TOOK PLACE AMID THE GIDDY whirl of a $1,000 ticket, all-star production of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues on Feb. 10, 2001. Raucous merriment had come and gone: Ensler conducted a chorus of ecstatically groaning celebrities,...

Plumbing the depths: K-19: the Widowmaker offers a grim but seaworthy tale. (The Critics Film).
August 26, 2002... THERE ARE MANY REASONS TO applaud K-19: The Widowmaker, not the least of which is that it is such a hellish bummer. Here's the scenario (and it's based on a true story): In 1961, with the Cold War glacially raging, the Soviet nuclear submarine...

Europe's new crusade: will the tolerant society survive the battle over Islam? (Culture Wars).
August 26, 2002... THE NETHERLANDS, VISITORS have long observed, seems the very embodiment of tolerance. To stroll along Amsterdam s central canals is to see cops bicycling through a haze of marijuana smoke while heroin addicts, drunk British tourists, pimps and...

Shock without therapy.(books on contemporary Russia)
August 26, 2002... The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy By Strobe Talbott. Random House, 457 pages, $29.95 The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia By David E. Hoffman. Public Affairs, 567 pages, $21.00 Russia's Post-Communist...