The American Prospect articles from September 2001

The American Prospect archives from September 2001

The Great Obfuscator.(Pres. Bush on stem cell research)
September 10, 2001... PRESIDENT BUSH'S HEAVILY choreographed decision to support "limited" stem cell research generated the desired headlines and TV commentary. He had anguished over the decision, we were told, and navigated a prudent course between zealous...

CORRESPONDENCE.
September 10, 2001... The Taxonomist ROBERT S. MCINTYRE asserts in his May 21, 2001, "Taxonomist" column that I suggested in off-camera banter that I believed that the conservative positions on Social Security reform, tax reduction, and choice in Medicare are...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
September 10, 2001... OWING TO AN EDITORIAL error in our August 13 issue, the fertility rates of women in Cameroon (5.3) and Mexico (2.8) were incorrectly quoted as percentages in the letter from C.W. Helstrom. They are pure numbers and represent the average number...

Ergonomic Enemy.(appointment of solicitor of the Labor Department, Eugene Scalia)
September 10, 2001... After a career of bashing workers' rights, Eugene Scalia may soon control them. DEMOCRATS STILL REELing from the Bush v. Gore decision in December must have cringed when President Bush announced his choice for solicitor of the Labor...

Whose Benefit?(price regulation of prescription drugs)(Brief Article)
September 10, 2001... PRESCRIPTION-DRUG costs are rising at an unsustainable rate--19 percent per year--and will soon surpass payments to doctors as the largest item on the health bill after hospitalizations. Medicare does not cover outpatient drug costs, and many...

A Reform That Lobbyists Could Love.(Brief Article)
September 10, 2001... WHEN THE HOUSE RETURNS after Labor Day, expect the final push to pass the Shays-Meehan campaign finance "reform" bill. Caveat emptor. If a bill comes out of this Congress, it will be nothing more than a symbolic victory, at best. According...

Unspinning the Energy Bill.(Brief Article)
September 10, 2001... EARLIER THIS YEAR, SOARING GASOLINE AND ELECTRICITY prices had much of the public outraged at villainous energy profiteers. So, after careful study, the Johnny-one-notes in Washington, D.C., who run the Republican Party concluded that there are...

Bill of Wrongs.(patients' bill of rights)
September 10, 2001... The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawsuits. A PAIR OF CLASS-ACTION lawsuits filed on behalf of patients and doctors wronged by health maintenance organizations spearheaded by the lawyers who beat the tobacco industry and...

Insufficient Credits.(tax breaks and health insurance)
September 10, 2001... Why Tax Breaks Won't Help the Uninsured AS AIR LEAKS OUT OF THE economic balloon, the number of Americans without health insurance will rise. For two decades, the number--now more than 45 million--has been steadily growing, as it has during...

Learning to Count.(election standards)
September 10, 2001... Why We Need Federal Election Standards THE ELECTORAL CIRCUS IN Florida shined a klieg light on the need to overhaul our elections across the nation. The debacle yielded a chorus of reform pledges from politicians. As if to prove they meant...

Bush's House of Cards.(George W. Bush and social security)
September 10, 2001... The privatization scheme is wobbling: Mainly, it has energized Democrats, labor, and the elderly to resist handing Social Security to Wall Street. ON A SWELTERING MORNING IN LATE JULY, 300 demonstrators, rallying to defend Social Security...

Investor Beware.(social security privatization)
September 10, 2001... Can small investors survive Social Security privatization? IT HAS BECOME NEARLY AXIOMATIC IN THIS COUNTRY TO argue that everything would be better if it were run like a business. In response, government has shifted its mission: If it used...

Money and Moral Hazard.(Brief Article)
September 10, 2001... THOSE WHO FAVOR AN END TO Social Security as we know it might want to take another look at the repeal of the estate tax. The two policy initiatives are linked by their conservative supporters as well as by timing: The President's Commission to...

Bailing Out Private Jails.
September 10, 2001... The abuse-ridden for-profit prison industry is on the verge of bankruptcy. But the feds are jumping to the rescue by providing even more business. THE PRIVATE-PRISON INDUSTRY IS IN TROUBLE. For close to a decade, its business boomed and...

Mississippi Churning.(public funding to state prisons)(Brief Article)
September 10, 2001... AT THE END OF MARCH, DESPITE the fact that more than 2,600 beds stood empty in Mississippi's state prisons, the Mississippi legislature committed $6 million in scarce public funds to increasing the number of state prisoners sent to private...

Libertarian Rhapsody.
September 10, 2001... Columnist John Tierney is not just the resident contrarian at The New York Times. He's also part of its growing neocon chorus. "IT'S SO HARD TO TEACH NEW YORKERS," SAYS COLUMnist John Tierney of The New York Times, lowering his binoculars...

Garbage In, Garbage Out.(John Tierney's article "Recycling is garbage")(Brief Article)
September 10, 2001... JOHN TIERNEY'S BEST-KNOWN PIECE, "Recycling Is Garbage," was somewhat recycled itself. The piece drew heavily on the work of a number of anti-recycling think tanks, among them the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Reason...

Equal Rights Postponement.(Equal Rights Amendment)
September 10, 2001... ASK STATE AND FEDERAL LEGIslators if they believe that legal rights should be extended or withheld on the basis of sex. Most would probably say no, and many of them would be lying. Adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution...

Beyond the Multiplex.(motion pictures)
September 10, 2001... IN "THE MOVIEGOERS," A BLEAK New Yorker article from a few years back, the film critic David Denby bemoaned both the current state of movie culture and the marginal role of serious criticism in shaping popular taste. According to Denby, the...

Smells Like School Spirit.(PBS documentary 'School: The Story of American Public Education')(Review)
September 10, 2001... "NO OTHER PEOPLE," wrote Henry Steele Commager, the most widely read American historian of the generation following World War II, "ever demanded so much of schools and of education as have the American. None other was ever so well served by its...

Monkey Doo.(Planet of the Apes)(Review)
September 10, 2001... HOW DARE DIRECTOR TIM Burton "reimagine" (he avoids the word "remake") the classic 1968 film Planet of the Apes? It's a milestone in sci-fi history, a brilliant, many-layered social commentary, many Apes buffs would argue, and its timing and...

Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black.(Review)
September 10, 2001... Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black By Gregory Howard Williams. Plume (1996), 285 pages, $13.95 paperback WHEN I WAS 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father's brother had married a black...

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.(Review)
September 10, 2001... The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother By James McBride. Riverhead Books (1996), 297 pages, $12.95 paperback WHEN I WAS 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father's brother had married a black woman. The wedding...

Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self.(Review)
September 10, 2001... Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self By Rebecca Walker. Riverhead Books (2001), 323 pages, $23.95 hardcover WHEN I WAS 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father's brother had married a black woman. The wedding...

Divided to the Vein: A Journey into Race and Family.(Review)
September 10, 2001... Divided to the Vein: A Journey into Race and Family By Scott Minerbrook. Harcourt Brace and Company (1996), 261 pages, $24.00 hardcover WHEN I WAS 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father's brother had married a black woman. The...

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.(Review)
September 10, 2001... Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance By Barack Obama. Kodansha Globe (1995), 403 pages, $15.00 hardcover WHEN I WAS 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father's brother had married a black woman. The wedding took place...

Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural.(Review)
September 10, 2001... Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural Edited by Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn. Pantheon (1998), 273 pages, $13.00 paperback WHEN I WAS 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father's brother had married a black woman....

Beyond the Bottom Line: The Search for Dignity at Work.(Review)
September 10, 2001... Beyond the Bottom Line: The Search for Dignity at Work By Paula Rayman. St. Martin's Press, 288 pages, $26.95 NORSK HYDRO IS THE world's largest salmon-farming company as well as the second-largest producer of oil from the Norwegian North...

What Killed the Boom?(telecom industry)(Brief Article)
September 10, 2001... THE WORRY IS OBVIOUS: JUST as an expanding high-tech sector contributed to strong growth in the 1990s, so might a deepening slump in technology drag down the entire economy. High among the sources of concern is the recent meltdown in the...

Building Blocks.(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... It's September and the return of yellow school buses and back-to-school sales reminds us that a record 53 million kids are heading back to the classroom. Of those children, nearly four million will be starting kindergarten this year. The good...

Tax and Spend.(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... PRESIDENT BUSH INSISTED that we could afford both a tax cut and the shoring up of Social Security. He was dead wrong. So the Democrats could hardly pick a better set of galvanizing issues. But as Robert Borosage points out in "The Austerity...

DRAWING BOARD TOM TOMORROW.(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES SINCERELY BELIEVED THAT AN INVISIBLE, OMNISCIENT BEING LIVED UP IN THE SKY SOMEWHERE, WATCHING OVER US ALL? WE THANK THE ALL-KNOWING SUPREME SAUCERIAN FOR THE BLESSINGS HE BESTOWS, AND PRAY THAT...

CORRESPONDENCE.
September 24, 2001... Parental Discretion Advised LEAH PLATT'S REVIEW OF my book Not in Front of the Children contains numerous misstatements ["Parental Discretion Advised," TAP, August 27, 2001]. Platt says that I "sidestep the debate over media violence...

Correction.(Brief Article)(Correction Notice)
September 24, 2001... OWING TO AN EDITORIAL error in our August 27 issue, two of the political figures cited in John E. Ullmann's letter were misidentified: "General Albin Wheeler" should have been "Earl Wheeler" and "Colin Powell" should have been "Thomas S....

Solidarity Sometimes.(elections and labor unions)
September 24, 2001... NOTHING DIVIDES THE labor movement like a good city election. To watch the calculus of narrow self-interest play out in the scrambled union endorsements of candidates in this month's New York mayoral primary is to be grateful that all politics...

Auto Erratic.(automobiles and the environment)(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... TWO OR THREE TIMES A day, perfect strangers come up to me in the parking lot at the grocery store or the bank and ask about my hybrid car, a Toyota Prius. STRANGER: How do you like your car? ME: I love it--it's great. STRANGER:...

Let the Games Begin!(evaluation of George W. Bush's tax cuts)(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... SOONER THAN ANYONE IMAGINED ONLY A FEW MONTHS ago, the inevitable conflict between the Bush tax cuts and public programs has come to a head. In January the Congressional Budget Office told us to expect hundreds of billions of dollars in...

Without DeLay.(House Republican whip Tom DeLay, human cloning banned)(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... THE RECENT HOUSE VOTE to ban human cloning saw members on the opposite ends of the political spectrum joining in the majority. Whatever else divided them on stem cell research, they agreed that cloning of entire human beings would be...

Irrationalist in Chief.(head of the Council on Bioethics Leon R. Kass)
September 24, 2001... The Real Problem with Leon Kass We, on the other hand, with our dissection of cadavers, organ transplantation, cosmetic surgery, body shops, laboratory fertilization, surrogate wombs, gender-change surgery, "wanted" children, "rights over...

The Austerity Trap.(evaluating the Democrats' stance on economic policies)
September 24, 2001... Bush is vulnerable on spending priorities and the tax cut, but Dems are promoting the economics of Coolidge. THIS IS JUNIOR'S `READ MY lips,'" gloats former Clinton campaign adviser Paul Begala. Bush has broken his pledge not to dip into...

Pharma Buys a Conscience.
September 24, 2001... Bioethicists increasingly find their work underwritten by pharmaceutical companies. Who passes on the ethics of ethicists? I WAS RAISED IN A HOUSE FILLED WITH DRUG-INDUSTRY trinkets. My father has been a family doctor for more than 40...

Selling Private Ryan.(social aspects of the portrayal of World War II)
September 24, 2001... Stephen Ambrose, Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, and the Abuse of Nostalgia THIS JUNE, FOR THE SECOND TIME IN THEIR LIVES, the men of Easy Company invaded Normandy. It was considerably easier than the first time. From New York City, the...

Borderline Sanity.(immigration policy and the United State's relations with Mexico)
September 24, 2001... U.S.Mexican-immigration policy is utter folly. But the Bush administration, partly for cynical reasons, is opening an opportunity to reform it. UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD MEXICAN IMMIGRATION is suddenly on the table again. The Bush...

Politics of Identity.(George W. Bush's policy on cultural diversity)
September 24, 2001... GEORGE W. BUSH OPPOSES affirmative action, at least in theory; in practice he has an affirmative-action record that might have made Bill Clinton proud. According to Time magazine, Bush "has appointed more women to positions of power and...

Comic-Book Realism.(review of the films "Ghost World" and "Original Sin")
September 24, 2001... I REALLY WANTED TO READ DANIEL Clowes's Ghost World before Terry Zwigoff's film version appeared, but I was having a hard time getting hold of it. Amazon.com had it backordered; my local Borders didn't carry it; and frankly, I didn't think to...

Class Trip.(review of the documentary "People Like Us: Social Class in America")
September 24, 2001... WHAT AMERICANS NOWADAYS fear most is not death, suggests satirist Joe Queenan, one of several commentators in the PBS documentary People Like Us: Social Class in America (first airing September 23). It's that others won't think they're cool....

Stealing Tocqueville?(translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America")
September 24, 2001... FOR YEARS HARPER AND ROW featured a blurb on the front cover of George Lawrence's 1966 translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America: "Tocqueville, whose brilliance has always been granted by academics, is now accessible...

Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform.(Review)
September 24, 2001... Unfree Speeeh: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform By Bradley A. Smith. Princeton University Press, 286 pages, $26.95 IT'S A SHAME THAT THE DEBATE over campaign finance reform as played out in the mainstream media is so shallow and so...

Money Talks: Speech, Economic Power, and the Values of Democracy.(Review)
September 24, 2001... Money Talks: Speech, Economic Power, and the Values of Democracy By Martin H. Redish. New York University Press, 319 pages, $35.00 IT'S A SHAME THAT THE DEBATE over campaign finance reform as played out in the mainstream media is so...

Fugitive Days: A Memoir.(Review)
September 24, 2001... Fugitive Days: A Memoir By Bill Ayers. Beacon Press, 295 pages, $24.00 THIS IS BOTH AN ADMIRABLE book and a ludicrous one. Bill Ayers was one of those 1960s radicals who, for better or worse, defined the term. Son of a utility-company...

The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone.(Review)
September 24, 2001... The Connection Gap-Why Americans Feel So Alone By Laura Pappano. Rutgers University Press, 224 pages, $26.00 MORE THAN 100 YEARS ago, Friedrich Nietzsche observed the gradual turning inward of the German population, away from an open...

Better Together: Report of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America.(Review)
September 24, 2001... Better Together: Report of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 108 pages MORE THAN 100 YEARS ago, Friedrich Nietzsche observed the gradual turning inward of the...

A Proper Global Agenda.(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... THESE DAYS, ANY OFFICIAL organization with the word "International," "World," or "Global" in its title has to worry about where it meets, check in with the riot police, and pray for rain. Washington is already girding itself for the...

Body Politics.(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT--AND PROGRESSIVE politics--faces a pivotal moment. On the one hand, the fundamentalist right has a powerful ally in the White House, and insidious incursions are already restricting reproductive choice. We could be one or...

THE PARTIAL-BIRTH FRAUD.
September 24, 2001... How the Anti-Abortion Movement Turned a Contrived Procedure into a Political Battle Flag and Snookered Congress and the Press THE ARTICLE WAS BURIED FAR DOWN IN SECTION A of The New York Times on Wednesday, February 26, 1997. But it hit...

Hard Cell.
September 24, 2001... The Ethics and Politics of Stem Cell Research PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH'S AUGUST 9, 2001, address to the nation on embryonic stem cells was an exercise in politico-moral bumper bowling. He acknowledged the hopes of desperate patients and...

New Options, New Politics.
September 24, 2001... How the Morning-After Pill and RU-486 Increase Women's Choices and Illustrate the Extremism of the "Right to Life" Camp IN RECENT YEARS, MEDICAL SCIENCE HAS DEVISED NEW options for very early termination of unwanted pregnancy, measures that...

The Sex-Ed Divide.
September 24, 2001... An abstinence curriculum roils Osseo, Minnesota. IF MAPLE GROVE SENIOR HIGH CHOSE A PROM QUEEN, Ashley Gort would have had a good shot at the crown. Ashley, a petite and popular junior with delicate features, wore deep-sea blue to the...

Reproductive Roulette.
September 24, 2001... There's no evidence that chastity education works. IN 1996 THE NEWLY REPUBLICAN Congress approved nearly $440 million in public funds over five years to teach celibacy. The law comes up for renewal next year. The local programs supported...

The Sound of Silence.
September 24, 2001... Bush's gag rule denies family-planning funds to clinics in the third world if they even mention abortion. It is undermining a lot more than abortion rights. I AM HERE TODAY IN THE UNITED STATES TO TESTIFY about the impact of the global gag...

How Pro-Lifers Promote Death.(Brief Article)
September 24, 2001... WHEN HER HUSBAND RAN OFF with another woman, Goma Bogati was left destitute with three young children. Speaking to an interviewer from her prison cell in September 1997, the 34-year-old Nepali described the events leading to her arrest: After a...

Will Choice be Aborted?
September 24, 2001... The New Battle for Public Opinion AMERICANS ARE PROFOUNDLY AMBIVALENT ABOUT abortion. A majority of voters accept the formulation of the pro-choice movement that abortion should be legal, safe, and rare. Yet most Americans consider the...

Making choice Real.
September 24, 2001... Intimidation and state restrictions have narrowed access to abortion. One hopeful harbinger: Medical students are organizing to expand options. THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF ROE V. WADE IN JANUARY of 1998 was a bittersweet celebration. While...