Dollars & Sense articles from March 2000

Dollars & Sense archives from March 2000

Letters.
March 1, 2000... GREAT PENSION ARTICLE James Ridgeway's article about Wall Street and the pension funds (September/October 1999) was straight to the point, and should serve as a warning to labor and management that pension funds are in fact at risk. With...

REMEMBERING HERBERT SCHILLER.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
March 1, 2000... Herbert Schiller, who passed away on January 29 at the age of 80, was possibly the most original and influential media analyst of the left in the past half century, and he will be sorely missed. He taught at the University of California at San...

It's a Secret Recipe!(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Here's a clever scheme we thought up to take oodles of money from unsuspecting consumers. We figured we'd get a lot of tap water, filter it, put it in plastic bottles, and then sell it in grocery stores as "purified water" -- after marking the...

Poultry Poop Tax Break.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... In what probably qualifies as a piece of [chickens.sup.**]t legislation in more ways than one, Congress last November voted to continue the life of a tax credit for renewable energy sources (like windmills) -- but not before extending it to...

Avondale Workers Win.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Normally, we at Dollars & Sense are not big fans of capital concentration. Once in a while, though, we see a corporate acquisition we like. Last September, when we reviewed some of the worst offenders against U.S. labor law, Avondale...

"Crueliani," Scourge of the Helpless.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Sparing no expense or effort to make the lives of New York's homeless even more difficult, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on January 19 staged a police roundup of homeless people in his city. The New York-based Community Food Resource Center...

Adopt That Machine.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Executives at Bank of America in San Francisco had their feelings badly wounded last December, when a California labor official shot down their attempt to give bank employees a swell holiday present -- the chance to work for nothing. ...

Tighter White Collar.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... Back when "white collar" was nearly synonymous with "middle class," some office workers in the United States accepted a tradeoff. In exchange for healthy salaries, they agreed to take management responsibility. This meant, among other things,...

Good help is so hard to find.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Having trouble busting a union? Call in the Immigration and Naturalization Service. That's what Holiday Inn Express in Minnesota did last year, after nine of its maids helped win representation for its workforce from Local 17 of the...

Going up? Watch an ad!(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Just when you thought corporate sales pitches couldn't possibly worm their way into one more second of your life, here comes -- elevator advertising! On December 12 the Wall Street Journal reported on plans by the Otis Elevator Co. to...

ACTIVE CULTURE.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... In 1912, the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, made labor history with the "Bread and Roses" strike. Immigrant workers of 18 nationalities, mostly women, joined together in a strike that shook the textile industry. Last October, Lawrence...

SMALL ONLINE INVESTORS ARE GAMBLING IN A RIGGED CASINO.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... The perception that small "mom 'n pop" investors are using their 401(k) money to drive up the stock market got a boost at the end of the millennium, as the Nasdaq flew past record levels. The surge past 4,000 capped a year that saw the Nasdaq...

MEXICAN STUDENTS WIN CONCESSIONS.
March 1, 2000... The October 14, 1999 rally of students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) began on a positive note, with more than 3,000 people pouring from buses in shouting, smiling, bouncing waves. Ranging in age from mid-teens to...

SAINT GREENSPAN?(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... So extravagantly has the media been lauding Alan Greenspan, one would almost think he had been nominated for sainthood rather than a fourth term as chair of the Federal Reserve. To hear the business press tell it, Saint Greenspan has...

FORGOTTEN GENERATION.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... IN CHINA'S RUSH TO A MARKET ECONOMY, MIDDLE-AGED WOMEN ARE LEFT BY THE WAYSIDE The tale of Mama Zhuang makes for an uplifting news story. One of hundreds of thousands of unemployed women in Shanghai, she organized a dozen women to wash...

THE NEW ECONOMY.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... A MILLENNIAL MYTH As the stock market soars to ever greater heights, the voices proclaiming a "New Economy" are becoming louder and more numerous. According to this chorus, computer technology and the Internet have created a qualitatively...

GLOBALIZATION: TWO FACES, BOTH UGLY.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... WORKERS IN RICH, POOR COUNTRIES FACE A COMMON ENEMY Over 160,000 people, mostly women, work in Malaysia's big electronics plants - a production workforce the size of Silicon Valley's. The bosses are all foreign high-tech giants. Chips and...

PUBLIC TEAMS, PRIVATE PROFITS.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... HOW PRO SPORTS OWNERS RUN UP THE SCORE ON FANS AND TAXPAYERS The game is set to begin, and the home team jogs onto the field. As the excited voice on the public address system hails the appearance of "your Denver Broncos," or your New York...

NO PLACE TO CALL HOME.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... AMERICA'S HOUSING CRISIS With all of the attention paid to the booming economy, the soaring stock market, and even the record-setting home ownership rate, the fact that America's housing crisis has continued -- worsened, even -- has gotten...

The ABCs of the Global Economy.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... THE DOLLARS AND SENSE COLLECTIVE In the 1960s, U.S. corporations changed the way they went after profits in the international economy. Instead of producing goods in the U.S. to export, they moved more and more toward producing goods...

A NEW LABOR MOVEMENT IN THE ACADEMY.
March 1, 2000... Sept. 23 1999, First Day of Classes at Northeastern University: At 11 a.m. on a warm day last fall, more than 30 people assembled on the Northeastern quadrangle in downtown Boston. The placards hanging from their necks said: Sweatshops in...

DECIDING WHO'S POOR.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... For decades, now, right-wing think tanks have urged a reform of the official method of defining poverty and counting the poor. They have quite rightly complained that, in deciding whether a family should be considered poor or not, the Census...

Anatomy of a Deception.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... SOCIAL SECURITY: THE PHONY CRISIS Dean Baker Mark Weisbrot (University of Chicago: 1999) The year is 2030. For 30 years, the U.S. economy has been growing very slowly--averaging only 1.7% per year, barely half the rate...

ASK DR. DOLLAR.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... Dear Dr. Dollar, Each year the U.S. has huge trade imbalances, especially with Asian countries. How can we keep having these trade deficits without any apparent ill effect on our economy? Will we eventually no longer be able to do this?...

TOXIC SITES GROW, MONEY FOR CLEAN-UP DROPS.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... In the 1980s, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered that it was not only snow storms that kept students of East Saint Louis High School home for the day. Located on an oozing swamp of toxic waste, the high school dismissed classes when...