Dollars & Sense articles from July 2000

Dollars & Sense archives from July 2000

Letters.
July 1, 2000... LABOR PIONEER Several months ago, there appeared an article in Dollars & Sense about the number of states that have laws permitting agricultural workers to form unions ("Cali-Ho!" Melissa Hostetler, Sept./ Oct. 1999). Hawaii was not...

Would You Like Fries with That?(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... It was a triumph of better living through chemistry. Monsanto's genetically modified "NewLeaf" potato secretes a toxin that repels the Colorado Potato Beetle, reducing the need for expensive pesticides. Many potato farmers embraced the NewLeaf...

Minor (League) Victories.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Sports fans and community activists have seen it all when it comes to big-league ripoffs: exploding ticket prices, team moves, and publicly financed stadium scams. Some of the same problems have now come to minor-league baseball. New...

Paging Upton Sinclair.(meat industry)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... In 1906, novelist Upton Sinclair's The Jungle blew the lid off exploitative, dangerous, and unsanitary conditions in Chicago slaughterhouses. Though Sinclair later lamented that the public had missed his worker-rights message -- "I aimed at the...

"Friendly Fire" of the Electronic Variety.(PowerPoint slide shows popular with U.S. military)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Apparently, the "Love Bug" virus isn't the only thing tying the Defense Departments computers in knots. Officers, long accustomed to sending briefings by email, have been emailing more and more elaborate PowerPoint slide presentations -- those...

Internet on the Halfshell.(Arthur Treacher's, Inc., )(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Arthur Treacher's, Inc., a franchiser of fast-food fish and chips restaurants, has changed its name. The company's new identity is... Digital Creative Development Corporation. Huh? According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is keeping...

Workers Ignored.(general strikes lack of media coverage)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... You would think that a strike by millions of workers protesting neoliberal economic policies would merit some news coverage. Apparently, however, the mainstream U.S. media doesn't agree. The web site LabourStart [less...

The Art and Science of Tax Evasion.(corporate clients and tax shelters)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Over the last several years, corporate profits have gone up, up, up. Over the same time period, however, the percentage of their income that corporations pay in taxes has gone down, down, down. Between 1996 and the current fiscal year, total...

From the Horse's Mouth.(Joseph Stiglitz)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Third World critics have long criticized the International Monetary Fund for its destructive "structural adjustment programs." For the last few years, they have had an unlikely ally in Joseph Stiglitz, chief economist at the World Bank from...

ACTIVE CULTURE.(protests against free trade)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Despite police crackdowns, the protests against corporate globalization in Seattle last December and in Washington, D.C., in April felt like a big, subversive party. Police rounded up 600 protestors at preliminary demonstrations against the IMF...

SHOW ME THE MONEY.(political fundraising)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... A CALL FOR FULL DISCLOSURE Repetition is a basic principle of human learning, as any language teacher or basketball coach knows well. What people really want to convey they repeat often; and this helps explain the curiously sterile quality...

PUTTING THE DEMOS BACK IN DEMOCRACY PROGRESSIVES IN ELECTION 2000.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Are you suffering from Goredom? Wondering who will provide the compassion in George Dubya's "compassionate conservatism"? You're not alone. When a recent phone survey asked 1,000 people how they would vote if a third-party candidate had a...

PARAMILITARIES, DRUG TRAFFICKING, AND U.S. POLICY IN COLOMBIA.
July 1, 2000... At 32 years old, Carlos Casta[tiled{n}]o leads Colombia's largest paramilitary force, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), or United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. The AUG has earned the nickname "The Head Cutters" because its victims...

KEYNES RECONSIDERED.
July 1, 2000... Current conventional wisdom has it that business cycles are obsolete; promarket policies have swept recessions into history's proverbial dustbin. The generation of policymakers nurtured on notions of government economic management after World...

FOOD OR DEBT.
July 1, 2000... THE JUBILEE 2000 MOVEMENT The Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, prescribed that every 50 years all debts should be canceled, land returned to the dispossessed, and slaves set free. Biblical writers knew that a combination of unjust...

HOW MONEY IN POLITICS HURTS YOU.
July 1, 2000... Big money is smothering Washington, breaking all the records for past elections. And Congress has shown no signs of doing anything about what, in essence, is a crisis of democracy. What was once exceptional is now routine: the selling of a...

THE CLEAN-ELECTIONS MOVEMENT.(Interview)
July 1, 2000... In the fragmented world of political reform, the clean-elections movement makes a convincing argument for its primacy in democratic reform efforts. It says apostasy is not a precondition for radical democratic reform in the United States. Cast...

CLEANING UP POLITICS, CLEARING OUT BIG MONEY.
July 1, 2000... CITIZEN GROUPS WIN STATE REFORMS It is hard to predict when a real person will penetrate big media and actually find her issues covered, but Granny D managed it. She is the 90-year-old retired secretary from New Hampshire who walked and...

LAWS FOR SALE.
July 1, 2000... Say you're a corporate entity and you want new legislation that will boost your profits -- a tax cut, the repeal of "burdensome" regulation, or labor law "reform," The old-fashioned way is to buy access by making campaign contributions to...

'CAPITAL' HILL.
July 1, 2000... FIGHTING BIG MONEY IN GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY Nearly 160 years ago a young German journalist wrote, "Politics is in principle superior to the power of money, but in practice it has become its slave." Millions of Americans today would agree...

UNITED McNATIONS?(UNESCO)(Walt Disney Co.)(McDonald's Corp.)
July 1, 2000... THE UN'S GROWING ALLIANCE WITH MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS Some strange bedfellows met up last May at Florida's Walt Disney World Resort. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) teamed up with Disney...

ASK DR. DOLLAR.(World bank and IMF ethical issues)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... Dear Dr. Dollar, Defenders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, including U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, claim that during the past two decades there have been dramatic improvements in lowering...

DOLLARS & SENSE SUMMER READING LIST.(Review)
July 1, 2000... Is summertime your time to catch up with the reading you didn't get to during the rest of the year? Members of the Dollars & Sense collective recommend the following outstanding books from the last few years for inclusion in your beach bag....

economy in numbers.(look at where election campaign funds come from)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2000... The Buying of the President 2000, by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity, takes a detailed look at where the money's coming from, who it's going to, and what it's buying. Dollars & Sense has excerpted some of the best parts (in...