The American Prospect articles from October 2002

The American Prospect archives from October 2002

Revolting elites. (Comment).(US foreign policy)
October 7, 2002... BY ALL ACCOUNTS, WE ARE entering a month of great national deliberation. In the main arena, the most serious foreign-policy debate since Vietnam is unfolding, with senior members of the president's own party among those articulating the most...

No choice but war? (Comment).(US-Iraq relations)(Editorial)
October 7, 2002... I SHOULD BE AMONG THE SUPPORTERS of an invasion of Iraq. A decade ago, after Iraq seized Kuwait, I agreed with the decision to go to war and wrote in The New Republic, at the start of the conflict, that allied forces should go all the way to...

Neo-cons vs. New York Times. (Correspondence).
October 7, 2002... JOHN B. JUDIS' "NEO-CONS vs. New York Times" [Sept. 23, 2002] has managed to turn Henry Kissinger's position on U.S. action in Iraq upside down. Judis says that the "Times' reporters were correct to include him among the administration's...

Closed society, open source. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
October 7, 2002... I ENJOYED "CLOSED SOCIETY, Open Source" [Sept. 9] on Linux's growing popularity in China. It's news that a radical free-information movement could make such strange bedfellows with the Far East's secretive society. But it did history a...

Park wars. (Correspondence).
October 7, 2002... THANK YOU FOR JON MARGOLIS' excellent "Park Wars" [Sept. 9]. It's too bad that the national media simply doesn't get the issue, or chooses to ignore its larger implications. I do, however, have two comments. Margolis should look closer at...

What do Afghan women want? (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
October 7, 2002... AS V-DAY'S SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE to the Muslim world, I write to respond to Noy Thrupkaew's "What Do Afghan Women Want?" [Aug. 26] and to make some clarifications. The Vagina Monologues has never been performed in Afghanistan or Pakistan,...

Rush to judgment. (Devil In The Details).(Congressional decision on war on Iraq and November elections)
October 7, 2002... THE CLOCK IS TICKING. Iraq is working on a nuclear weapon, or is trying to work on a nuclear weapon, or wants to work on a nuclear weapon. None of the president's men is arguing that Saddam Hussein's quest for nukes is anything new, of course....

Those Jaundiced Americans. (Devil In The Details).(American and European views on war with Iraq surprisingly similar)
October 7, 2002... IF THERE'S ONE ABIDING article of faith within the American punditocracy, it's that the Atlantic Ocean is growing steadily wider. In the face of Islamic terrorism and Iraqi threats, Europeans have opted for appeasement, in the best Neville...

Hot stock tip: big money in Armaments. (Devil In The Details).(defense industry stocks rise)
October 7, 2002... The big money's not in Washington: Until this year, every Wall Street wizard and garden-variety economics professor told investors to sink their money into deregulated tech stocks. The investments with boundless futures were in those sectors...

Bush's anti-regulation Czar. (Networks).(John Graham, head of Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs)
October 7, 2002... SO HERE'S ANOTHER BORING abbreviation that's important to remember: OIRA. It stands for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Why is it important? Unpack what Bruce Josten, executive vice president for government affairs at the U.S....

The bullies of Burma. (Networks).(Unocal's actions in Burma)(Brief Article)
October 7, 2002... CORPORATE SCANDAL. ENERGY COMPANY. Gas pipelines. Exploited workers. Thinking Enron? Think again. Way before Enron stumbled into the corporate hall of shame, an energy company called Unocal had already bedded down in it. For decades the...

The best medicine. (On The Contrary).(the need for humor about September 11, 2001)(Column)
October 7, 2002... "WHEN WILL IT BE OK TO LAUGH AGAIN?" So the press and maybe the public wondered after last September 11. The moratorium on laughter, unofficially declared by David Letterman, was intended to signal respect for the dead and for the people who...

War resisters: the numbers are in and the "nays" are growing. (Below The Beltway).
October 7, 2002... REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES are beating the war drums just as support for invading Iraq is dissipating. Whereas a Gallup Poll last November revealed 74 percent in favor of a ground invasion of Iraq and 20 percent opposed, this August the percentage...

Bad news: what the right doesn't understand about Howell Raines. (Gazette).(chief editor of New York Times)
October 7, 2002... IN GEORGE ORWELL'S NOVEL 1984, the authorities trace every act of sabotage, every heresy, every defeat, to a fellow named Emmanuel Goldstein. Little is known about the man except his face, his past and his alleged crimes, but his existence is...

A cautious opposition: will Democrats block the road or pave the way to Baghdad? (Gazette).
October 7, 2002... WILL GEORGE W. BUSH'S decision to seek congressional approval for invading Iraq slow down the war juggernaut? Up to now, Democrats have only been willing to declare, as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) observed after President Bush's Sept. 4 address...

Mute witnesses: a dispatch from Johannesburg. (Gazette).(World Summit on Sustainable Development)
October 7, 2002... THE MORNING SUN GLINTS against corrugated iron roofs scattered with car engines, beer crates and wire shopping carts. We are in Alexandra, one of the oldest shantytowns in Johannesburg, South Africa. Nelson Mandela rented a one-room shack here...

Bite the ballot: progressives are developing a new taste for initiatives. (Gazette).
October 7, 2002... FOR YEARS CONSERVATIVES had a corner on ballot initiatives. Think of California's infamous Proposition 13, and the anti-tax blitzkrieg that swept after it through 43 states. Think of the anti-choice, anti-gay and anti-environment ballot...

My tax paradise: how I (almost) felt the tropical breeze of an offshore haven. (Gazette).
October 7, 2002... I COUNTED ON A $200 TAX REFUND this year. But the Internal Revenue Service, perhaps sensing that I had vast hidden assets, adjusted my return, and I only got 129 bucks. As a magazine intern and a college student, I make a little less than the...

Corruption revisited and (maybe) reversed: now's the time to get rid of accounting firm giveaways. (The Taxonomist).
October 7, 2002... MARK WEINBERGER DIDN'T SERVE LONG AS GEORGE W. Bush's assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, but until he retired last April, he was a man with a mission. Before and since--and apparently during--his brief stint at the U.S. Department of...

Northern light: navigating the Maine Senate race with Chellie Pingree.
October 7, 2002... "WE'RE SLIGHTLY OFF COURSE. BUT WE WANTED to let the trainee run the boat," jokes Chellie Pingree over the din of an outboard motor. It's a chilly, starlit September night off the coast of Rockland, Maine, and Pingree--a onetime farmer,...

Where's the movement? corporate reformers need to target the radically possible. (ComonWealth).
October 7, 2002... IN EARLY JUNE, THE CONSERVATIVE WASHINGTON POST columnist Sebastian Mallaby wrote: "Enron has created a natural moment for a smart assault on capitalist excess. The wonder is that political leaders and social activists alike do not seem to have...

Our tropical terrorist tourist trap: as Fidel and his critics creak toward irrelevance, the push for normalized U.S.--Cuban relations grows stronger.
October 7, 2002... THESE DAYS, IT CAN BE HARD TO TELL THAT THE United States still maintains its 40-year trade and travel embargo on Cuba. Jimmy Carter and Ralph Nader recently touched down on Fidel Castro's communist island in the Caribbean, just 90 miles from...

This little student went to market: when colleges sell themselves to applicants--and vice versa--fairness falls by the wayside.
October 7, 2002... "NO MATTER WHAT IT IS CALLED, WHO DOES IT or where in the institution it is being done, universities are engaging in marketing activity." That message shocked academics when a marketing professor named Richard Krachenberg first delivered it in...

A not-so-novel approach: Possession's two-for-one love story is for another crowd. (The Critics Film).
October 7, 2002... WHEN A WELL-MADE film whistles past me without, touching, when I've sat down and presented the astonished bull's-eye of my brain to the filmmaker only to hear the arrow go harmlessly by my left ear, I have to assume that it was aimed...

The populist fantasy: wrong history, wrong politics. (Populism A Dialogue).
October 7, 2002... LOOKING FORWARD TO 2004, liberals and progressives have become embroiled in an argument over whether Democrats ought to embrace or reject populism. Pro-business moderates--or, more precisely, anti-anti-business moderates-have lambasted Al...

The populist imperative. (Populism A Response).(response to Sean Wilentz denunciation of populism and Wilentz's response)
October 7, 2002... SEAN WILENTZ CHALLENGES THE contention that Democrats need to become more populist. He does so by reminding us of the uglier side of 19th-century Populism--that's Populism with a capital "P." But no modern Democrats are proposing the racism or...

Persons unknown.('All Over But the Shoutin',' 'Ava's Man' and 'An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood')
October 7, 2002... All Over but the Shoutin' By Rick Bragg. Vintage Books, 329 pages, $14.00 Ava's Man By Rick Bragg. Random House, 272 pages, $13.00 An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood By Jimmy Carter. Touchstone Books, 288 pages,...

A reckless rush to war. (Comment).(George W. Bush's plans for Iraq)
October 21, 2002... THE SUSPICION WILL NOT DIE that the Bush administration turned to Iraq for relief from a sharp decline in its domestic political prospects. The news had been dominated for months by corporate scandals and the fall of the stock market, and the...

Pictorial.
October 21, 2002... AND THIS MEDAL IS FROM THE PRESIDENT FOR VOTING FOR THE WAR JUST TO GET RE-ELECTED EVEN THOUGH I THINK THE WAR IS A WASTE AND WILL GET FOR NOTHING... EXTRAORDINARY BRAVERY!

The Origin of Specious. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
October 21, 2002... I WAS TOUCHINGLY AMUSED by the title of the article "The Origin of Specious" [Sept. 23, 2002] because it brought back bittersweet memories of a minor editorial skirmish with Stephen Jay Gould. As his editor when Gould was an occasional...

The Scandal Beyond Enron. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
October 21, 2002... REGARDING CHRISTIAN E. Weller and Laura Singleton's "The Scandal Beyond Enron" [Sept. 23], I was dismayed to find that the article made no mention of the consequences for pensioners once a company goes bankrupt. While there is a government...

Perils of Preemptive War. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
October 21, 2002... WILLIAM GALSTON'S "PERILS of Preemptive War" [Sept. 23] makes several good points, one of which I would like to elaborate on. Galston writes that a U.S. war against Iraq would probably widen the gap between European and American worldviews....

Stray Crats. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
October 21, 2002... IN "STRAY CRATS" [SEPT. 23], Sasha Polakow-Suransky states that Susan Davis (D-Calif.) "represents a lopsidedly Democratic district." To the contrary: The 49th District includes La Jolla, one of the country's wealthiest communities, as well as...

Follow the Bouncing Congress. (Correspondence).(Letter to the Editor)
October 21, 2002... IN "FOLLOW THE BOUNCING Congress" [Aug. 26], Nick Penniman makes much of the new personal bankruptcy legislation. What gets lost in the discussion, however, is the corresponding lack of controls over corporate bankruptcy. Corporations with...

Politics profanes a noble war. (Devil In The Details).(American right wing and Gerhard Schroder)
October 21, 2002... THERE'S A NEW ADDITION to the American right's Gallery of Deeply Evil (and Really Annoying) People. Alongside Tom Daschle, John Sweeney, Bill Lerach, Howell Raines, Gloria Steinem, Martin Sheen, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Janet Reno (she couldn't...

Whereas the moon is green cheese. (Devil In The Details).(US plans to attack Iraq)(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... Take yourself back in the recesses of time to a simpler, more logical era in human history, to a period unimaginably distant--say, three, maybe four, weeks ago. And remember, if you can, the calls for the Bush administration to make a case for...

PAC attack. (Networks).(political action committees)(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... PROGRESSIVE PACS. THEY'RE not the latest North Face gear but an increasingly effective way for liberal activists to play hardball in national elections. Political action committees (PACs) emerged as a major pipeline for political money in the...

401(k)ave-in. (Networks).(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... REMEMBER ALL THOSE HEARTFELT POST-Enron, post-WorldCom promises congressional leaders made to strengthen the nation's shaky pension system? Well, talk has never been cheaper in Washington. Not only did the House approve a bill that would...

Dystopia revisited. (On The Contrary).(American civil liberties under Geroge W. Bush's administration)(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... IT'S TOO BAD THAT THE WORD "ORWELLIAN" IS LOSING its power from overuse, because sometimes no other word will do. Sad to say, it's often used appropriately. There's no better word to describe U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's depiction of...

In Israel's interest? Not necessarily. (Beyond The Beltway).
October 21, 2002... MORE THAN 15,000 Israelis lined up on a single day to get new government-issue gas masks, the daily newspaper Ha'aretz reported Sept. 18. On the same page: Israel's Defense Ministry was seeking an advance on next year's budget to speed gas-mask...

Drug money: how PhRMA's front groups buy elections. (Gazette).(Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America)
October 21, 2002... WHO ARE THOSE GUYS? Connecticut voters can be forgiven for asking themselves that question after being inundated with radio and television spots sponsored by two senior-citizen groups that few had heard of before. The ads tout the...

The winner-steal-all society: and the persistence of the CEO-market myth. (Gazette).
October 21, 2002... HOW MUCH IS A CEO WORTH? These days the munificent compensation packages lavished on America's chief executives have about as many defenders as Slobodan Milosevic. The statistics are simply too obscene: In 1999, the average chief executive...

In the name of national security: Bush declares war on unions. (Gazette).(George W. Bush)
October 21, 2002... ERLINDA VALENCIA CAME FROM the Philippines almost two decades ago. Like many Filipinos living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she found a minimum-wage job at the airport, screening passengers' carry-on bags. Two years ago, organizers from...

Oregon gets taken: property-rights radicals versus our most livable state. (Gazette).
October 21, 2002... FRANK HARDIN MAY FINALLY get his chance to dig up the 18 million tons of gravel beneath his land in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. For nearly a decade, Oregon's Jackson County has denied him mining permits in order to keep scores of...

Dubyanomics: Bush's budget policies make Reaganomics look honest. (The Taxonomist).(George W. Bush)
October 21, 2002... ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY, NEWSPAPERS BIG AND SMALL have reported the shocking news that the $5.6 trillion in 10-year budget surpluses projected in early 2001 has almost disappeared. Instead, as an Associated Press story typically put it, "Last...

Under the plume: September 11 produced a new kind of pollution, and no one knows what to do about it. (Cover Story).
October 21, 2002... FROM HIS HEALTHY HEAD OF HAIR TO HIS RUNNING shoes, Andy Reeve, a young computer programmer, was covered in white soot and ash. He had just arrived for work across the street from World Trade Center that horrible September morning, when a...

Union seeks Republicans; forget the Teamsters. It's those new-age organizing unions that are going post-partisan.
October 21, 2002... I. LABOR DAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE If you closed your eyes at this year's New York City Labor Day rally, you might have thought you'd been transported to some Hibernian rite at the turn of the last century, back when organized labor...

Canada's romance with market medicine: for-profit health care has failed in the U.S. So now its sponsors hope to export it north.
October 21, 2002... CANADA, OF ALL PLACES, IS HAVING A HIGHLY charged national debate about whether to adopt the U.S. model of commercialized health care as part of its national health-insurance system. Health policy makers in Canada, particularly at the...

Animation sensation: why Japan's magical Spirited Away plays well anywhere. (The Critics Film).
October 21, 2002... TERRIFIED BY THE TOXIC PERKINESS of Pokemon and Sailor Moon, or by the splattery violence of other Japanese cartoons, mainstream America has largely shunned as childish or eccentric what Japanese audiences see as a sophisticated, adult art...

How the culture war was won: lesbians and gay men defeated the right in the 1990s, but tougher battles lie ahead. (State Of The Debate).
October 21, 2002... IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT THAT WE live in an alternate universe where the United States is openly hostile to lesbians and gay men. How hostile? Well, in this world, the liberal state of Massachusetts bans lesbians and gay men from being foster...

Too hot to handle.(Book Review)
October 21, 2002... Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago By Eric Klinenberg. The University of Chicago Press, 305 pages, $27.50 Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago By David Naguib Pellow. The MIT Press, 234 pages,...