The American Prospect articles from January 2004

The American Prospect archives from January 2004

The new politics of Medicare.(Prospects)
January 1, 2004... The passage of the Republican Medicare overhaul, with its new prescription-drug benefit provided wholly by private insurers, was a huge political victory for the president and an ideological triumph for conservatives. Unlike Bill Clinton 10...

A tradition tested.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... AS AN AMERICAN HISTOrian and an Episcopalian, I applaud the historical perspective offered by Sarah Wildman in "Gay Rites Movement" [December 2003]. She makes one point, however, with which I would strongly disagree: "It was the Episcopal...

Jobs, not GDP.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... ROBERT L. BOROSAGE IS exactly right in pointing out that the jobs issue is more important than the deficit issue at present ["The Wrong Target," December]. The matter can be put into a broader context that connects ordinary workers' standards...

At least they're reading us.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... IN THE RECENT DISPATCH by Drake Bennett on President Bush's plan to strengthen the Head Start program ["Head Cases," November], the writer states, "... the Bush administration's Head Start proposal threatens some of the core provisions of the...

One funny liberal.(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... FINALLY, I READ SOME thing really funny, at least to a southern white guy, in a left-of-center magazine. Charles P. Pierce's column skewering Rush Limbaugh and his phony moralistic pals ["A Fan Gloats," November] was great. Even my right-wing...

Spare the dime!(Devil in the Details)
January 1, 2004... NOT CONTENT TO SPEND every waking hour chipping away at the New Deal, congressional Republicans are now seeking to erase President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from the dime and replace him with Ronald Reagan. The Ronald Reagan Dime Act, voted for...

How a bill becomes a law (revised).(Devil in the Details)
January 1, 2004... FORGET WHAT YOU learned in Government 101 (or math class for that matter), because in Congress these days, a negative plus a negative equals a positive. And even though R's control everything, a House "yea" plus a Senate "yea" can still equal a...

Off the Wall Street Journal.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... The Journal's editor for Tuesday, Nov. 25, started out with a promising headline: "The GOP's Spending Spree." The editorialist lamented, "Elected in 1994 as the party of limited government, Republicans seem to have abandoned any effort to limit...

Brave new words.
January 1, 2004... HEALTHY FORESTS Forests with no trees, according to the Bush administration's plan to prevent trees from burning by cutting them down. THE BEST IN THE WORLD The president's description of America's health-care system, which manages to cost...

Friends of spam.
January 1, 2004... WITH THE DAWNING OF the new year, e-mail users will find their inboxes subject to the benevolent hegemony of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act. Rarely has there been such an appropriately...

Do good and dump W.
January 1, 2004... HOW'S THIS FOR A TWOFER? Raise the minimum wage for hundreds of thousands of Floridians and boost Democratic turnout in the Sunshine State's 2004 presidential election to boot. Presently plotting this prospect is the Association of...

Phoenix rising: tucked away in the recent Iraqi appropriation was $3 billion for a new paramilitary unit. Close students of Vietnam may see similarities.(Dispatches)
January 1, 2004... WITH THE 2004 ELECTORAL CLOCK ticking amid growing public concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration's hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA's Phoenix assassination program in...

The terror trap: hard-line campaigns against Islamic terrorism--here or in Israel--don't merely fail as strategy. They fulfill the terrorists' stated goals.(Dispatches)
January 1, 2004... THE FOUR MEN, VETERANS OF A GRIM business, had only grim words. Former heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service entrusted with righting terrorism, they gathered to tell Israel's largest newspaper that the Sharon government was...

Abort mission: Ronald Reagan's miniseries may have bombed, but his global gag rule, vastly expanded by the Bush administration, is still spreading misery.(Dispatches)
January 1, 2004... THE TELEVISION LEGACY OF THE REAGAN administration has finally aired, on Showtime rather than CBS, bringing its screechy tales of 1980s conservatism only to a small, paying audience of devotees to kitsch. The miniseries was blasted by...

For a smarter public, Deliberation Day.(Comment)
January 1, 2004... It is easy to wring one's hands, especially with a presidential campaign approaching, over the scandalous state of the public's knowledge about politics. But is there anything practical to be done? There is, and the answer can be found in a new...

No common sense in the Commonwealth.(The Taxonomist)
January 1, 2004... In November, with much fanfare, Gov. Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced his "comprehensive tax reform plan." He bragged that it will bring "tax fairness for working families" and "put Virginia back on the path to fiscal integrity." Warner's....

Is it time to believe? Bill Clinton rebuilt the Democratic Party in crucial ways. But Howard Dean is rebuilding it in a way Clinton missed. Party insiders would do well to make their peace with it.(Primary Kickoff)
January 1, 2004... AS DEMOCRATS IN IOWA AND BEYOND PREPARE TO START voting, we can look back and identify four distinct phases of this nascent presidential campaign: the early, we-get to know-them phase; the preliminary nuts and bolts phase, concerned with which...

And they're off! Dean may be on a roll, but he's still 2,159 delegates away from being the nominee. Here, our comprehensive, all-knowing, semi-speculative skinny on who's strong where.(Primary Kickoff)
January 1, 2004... ELECTIONS ARE INVARIABLY MORE MESSY, MORE CONTINGENT, THAN THEY MAY seem in advance, and the coming year's Democratic presidential primaries are unlikely to prove an exception. Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), who has fervor, volunteers and...

Super hype: not all delegates are created equal, but party insiders can't block Dean. Unless ...(Primary Kickoff)
January 1, 2004... IT'S NO SECRET THAT MUCH OF THE DEMOCRATIC ESTABlishment fears Howard Dean. For months, rumors have abounded that party insiders will mount some kind of last-ditch effort to deny him the nomination he seems ever closer to securing. One natural...

A bad senior moment: the GOP won this Medicare fight. Now, Dems must keep seniors (and themselves) united.
January 1, 2004... IN A MIDDLE-OF-THE NIGHT VOTE HELD OPEN FOR AN UNprecedented three hours on Nov. 21-22, Republican leaders finally corralled enough conservatives to ram through the House of Representatives a bill restructuring Medicare and authorizing a...

The O'Connor project: can we end racial discrimination without affirmative action? Here's what it will take.(Setting Agendas)
January 1, 2004... JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, SPEAKING FOR A MAJORITY of the U.S. Supreme Court in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case, declared, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary... ."...

The low-wage puzzle: why is America generating so many bad jobs--and how can we create more good jobs?(In Low-Wage America)
January 1, 2004... When America's most recent economic boom ended in 200l, the economy was turning out $7 trillion worth of consumer goods and services a year--enough to provide every man, woman and child with almost $25,000 worth of food, housing,...

Las Vegas as a workers' paradise: the hotel workers' union boosted wages and transformed dead-end jobs into middle-class careers in the very belly of the casino economy. Here's how it happened.(In Low-Wage America)
January 1, 2004... I. WHAT'S RIGHT WITH THIS PICTURE? LAS VEGAS--In the middle of his life, Sylvester Garcia decided he'd had enough of the cold and the heat. He'd been a welder in the copper-mining towns of New Mexico for a most a quarter of a century, but,...

Higher skills, fewer jobs: with advanced technology and skilled workers, America can keep a strong manufacturing sector, but rising productivity equals a smarter--and smaller--work force.(In Low-Wage America)
January 1, 2004... IN THE PAST THREE YEARS, U.S MANUFACTURERS HAVE suffered their most dramatic job losses since the Great Depression. Even with the turnaround in job creation reported this fall, manufacturing lost another 19,000 jobs in November. The...

Wal-Mart nation.
January 1, 2004... "WE ARE THE VANGUARD IN AMERICA," UNITED AUTO Workers President Walter Reuther told the delegates assembled for the UAW's 1947 convention. "We are the architects of the future." And for the quarter-century, they were. In mid-century...

Press one for better service: squeezed by corporate managers, call centers have been exasperating consumers and workers alike. New research shows that better jobs produce happier customers.
January 1, 2004... Something was wrong on my credit-card bill, so I placed a call to the issuing bank's customer-service line. The computerized voice told me to press "1" for customer-service inquiries on existing accounts, then to press "3" for credit cards....

Banking on decent jobs: bankers have choices in how they use new technology to transform work. So far, ordinary workers are both winners and losers. Why not more winners?
January 1, 2004... NEW TECHNOLOGIES CAME SLOWLY TO THE BANKING industry, but change is now coming faster and faster. The question is, who will benefit? Consider the check, a banking mainstay introduced shortly after the Civil War. For more than a century,...

When the high road isn't enough: North Carolina's hosiery industry has it all: technology, training and employer-worker partnerships. But because of lax--and often unenforced--trade laws, it still may lose out to cheap foreign labor.
January 1, 2004... DAN ST. LOUIS MAY NEVER GRACE THE COVER OF Business Week magazine or dash off to board meetings in a Gulfstream jet. He works in a cramped, windowless office in a former Nickel's department store that is now home to a branch of Catawba Valley...

Pathways to good jobs: can career ladders solve the low-wage problem?
January 1, 2004... LOW-WAGE JOBS CAUSE STAGNANT LIVING STANDARDS only when they are dead-end jobs. Deliberately designed occupational pathways can enable people to move up as they acquire more skills: Entry-level wages may be low, but people advance beyond them....

High-wage America: how we can reclaim a middle-class society.(Editorial)
January 1, 2004... THIS PROSPECT SPECIAL REPORT HAS DEMONSTRATED that America is needlessly generating a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs, and that other paths are possible. Low-wage America is a nation of hard-working people struggling to make ends...

Revolution now (and then)! The Battle of Algiers defined a political moment when it was released in 1965. Now it's back, and, if anything, it's even more relevant today.(Currents)
January 1, 2004... THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS IS BACK--along with the Battle of Algiers scenario. At a time when Gillo Pontecorvo's documentary-style account of a bloody, anti-colonialist urban uprising has been used by commentators from Tariq All to Zbigniew...

Culture war, round 3077: this latest battle has it all: a federal international-studies bill and two sides--government and academe--worlds apart in their interpretation.(The Academy)
January 1, 2004... AMERICANS, THANKFULLY, ARE NOT being gunned down in disputes over political correctness. But disputes over who should decide which ideas should circulate where are very much in play. In fact, a new front has opened. On Oct. 21, the House...

A pretty business.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE: HOW THE RISE OF AESTHETIC VALUE IS REMAKING COMMERCE, CULTURE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS BY VIRGINIA POSTREL * HARPERCOLLINS * 237 PAGES * $24.95 VIRGINIA POSTREL'S THE SUBSTANCE of Style joins David Brooks' Bobos in...

Bookshelf: the World of Tomorrow.(Book Review)(Brief Review)
January 1, 2004... THE GREAT BIG BOOK OF TOMORROW: A TREASURY OF CARTOONS BY TOM TOMORROW BY TOM TOMORROW * ST MARTINS PRESS * 236 PAGES * $17.95 Tom Tomorrow, who appears in these pages every month (see p. 9), has published a collection of cartoons...

Works on progress.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... DOWNSIZING IN AMERICA: REALITY, CAUSES, AND CONSEQUENCES BY WILLIAM J. BAUMOL, ALAN S. BLINDER AND EDWARD N. WOLFF * RUSSEL SAGE FOUNDATION * 321 PAGES * $29.95 THE BETRAYAL OF WORK: HOW LOW-WAGE JOBS FAIL 30 MILLION AMERICANS AND THEIR...

The Catholic paradox.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... A PEOPLE ADRIFT: THE CRISIS OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA BY PETER STEINFELS * SIMON & SCHUSTER * 416 PAGES * $26.00 CAN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AS WE know it survive in America? This is the question raised by Peter Steinfels'...

The Democrats' micro economics.(The Last Word)
January 1, 2004... To hear Democratic contenders in this final stretch before the primaries, you'd think the biggest economic question facing America is whether to repeal all or part of George W. Bush's tax cuts. How utterly pathetic. This lets Bush frame the...