Dollars & Sense articles from March 2004

Dollars & Sense archives from March 2004

Ominous budget proposal.(From the Editors)
March 1, 2004... It's not hyperbole to say we stand at a historic juncture. Lost in the clamor the day after the Super Bowl, the Bush administration's fiscal 2005 budget was released with little fanfare. It's the most dangerous budget proposal in recent memory....

Obey your television.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... You may already suspect that the television possesses near-supernatural powers of control--now there's proof. New Batman toys developed by Mattel will move, light up, and make noises at key moments in the Batman cartoon show slated to air this...

Brand name baby.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... Apparently, thousands of U.S. parents are willing to turn their children into walking advertisements. In 2000, 353 U.S. families chose to name their daughters Lexus, a.k.a. a Japanese luxury automobile. And 298 girls and 273 boys were named...

School of marketing.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... A is for apple. B is for boy. C is for commercialism. That's the lesson many cash-strapped public schools are teaching their students. One school district in Texas is getting paid millions of dollars to display a Dr. Pepper billboard on a...

Charity for Adam Smith?(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... The British Department for International Development gave the UK-based Adam Smith Institute [pounds sterling]7.7 million (about $12.7 million) in grants last year, more than it gave to many African countries, including Liberia and Somalia. In...

In chains.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... Female chain gangs have been introduced in Maricopa County, Arizona. According to Reuters, 15 women were chained together at 6 a.m. one day last fall and taken to a local cemetery to bury the bodies of nameless Native Americans who had died...

Playing to win.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... Do you dream of escaping your cubicle, making some smart investments, and becoming a millionaire? Then Cashflow, a new board game in which players pursue imaginary investments, may be for you. Players navigate rat (!) figurines around the...

Wedded bliss?(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... George W. Bush wants to spend about $1.5 billion dollars to help poor families uphold "the sanctity of marriage." The money will fund, among other things, advertisements supporting marriage and the promotion of public couples as role models....

Oops, forgot to test the drugs.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... The Bush administration wants to stop local governments from importing lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada. U.S. officials have raised questions about the safety of the Canadian imports. But though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)...

A lasting legacy.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... By 2050, over one million plant and animal species will have become extinct due to global warming, concludes a new study conducted by leading biologists on four continents, published in Nature. That figure represents a quarter of all plant and...

Banking on death.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... Texas is considering a macabre plan, floated by former U.S. Senator (now UBS Investment Bank executive) Phil Gramm, to fund its teacher retirement system by taking out life insurance policies on retired teachers and other school employees. The...

Trying (again) to hold Exxon accountable.(The Short Run)
March 1, 2004... In late January, a federal judge in Anchorage imposed a $4.5 billion judgment for punitive damages on the ExxonMobil corporation for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. This was Judge H. Russel Holland's third attempt to impose punitive damages on...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... To the Editor: In "Clouds on the Recovery Horizon" (January/February 2004), Jared Bernstein describes some positive economic numbers. Let's pause a moment before celebrating them to recall that the "prosperity" the government's economic...

Defenders of the coastal commons: a network of Filipino fishing cooperatives resists the privatization of their bay.(Active Culture)
March 1, 2004... At first the tale of Balayan Bay in the Philippines sounds familiar: big business encroaches on natural resources long used by the poor, privatizing them and exploiting them for profit. Too often, this sort of tale ends with rural communities...

Philadelphia janitors take over their union.(Active Culture)
March 1, 2004... Philadelphia building service workers made history this winter when they elected a rank-and-file slate to lead their union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 36. The election came at the conclusion of an 18-month trusteeship....

Rainforest Action Network wins concessions from Citigroup.(Active Culture)
March 1, 2004... This January, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) declared victory in its campaign to reshape the environmental practices of the world's largest financial corporation, Citigroup. For years, the megabank was the number-one funder of the oil...

Supremes limit punitive damages: in a little noticed ruling, the Supreme Court curbed juries' ability to punish corporate misdeeds.(Making Sense)
March 1, 2004... Punitive damages are designed to punish wrongdoers for intentional malicious conduct. Awarded over and above compensatory damages, they're meant to teach a defendant a lesson and deter others from similar behavior. Traditionally, punitive...

Guest worker schemes and broken dreams: what's wrong with the bush immigration plan.(Comment)
March 1, 2004... The details of President Bush's proposed guest worker program remain vague, but this much is clear: it's essentially a system of indentured servitude. The plan would enable undocumented workers and people living abroad to obtain temporary...

Greenspan's red scare: did the Fed chair's fear of public ownership lead him to back Bush's disastrous tax plan?
March 1, 2004... Did America in the year 2000 stand on the brink of a historic transition to a socialist economy? Unlikely as that scenario may seem, it was very much on the mind of Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, according to Ron Suskind's...

Just in time? Emerging alliances between unions and day laborers.
March 1, 2004... The unionized hotel and restaurant workers on strike at Chicago's Congress Hotel are facing an increasingly common threat: temporary or day laborers hired as replacement workers to bust the union. Exploding numbers of vulnerable workers, often...

Space wars: interview with Bruce Gagnon; the administration's proposal for human space exploration is designed to project U.S. military power into the skies.
March 1, 2004... "Mankind is drawn to the heavens for the same reason we were once drawn into unknown lands and across the open sea. We choose to explore space because doing so improves our lives, and lifts our national spirit. So let us continue the journey."...

High and dry: the economic recovery fails to deliver.
March 1, 2004... This economy is pumped. Boosted by economic stimulants--military spending, tax rebates, interest rate cuts, and a spate of mortgage refinancing--the U.S. economy expanded at an 8.2% annual rate in the third quarter of 2003, its fastest pace in...

Toward a global energy transition: what would it take to reverse climate change?
March 1, 2004... In 1998, Hurricane Mitch killed 10,000 people in Central America. Last May, the worst flooding in memory in Sri Lanka killed about 300 people, left another 500 missing, and left 350,000 homeless. The president of Tuvalu, an island nation in the...

"Occupying, resisting, producing": argentine workers take over abandoned factories.
March 1, 2004... It started timidly at first, in the mid-1990s, with workers occupying factories abandoned by their owners and getting them up and running again. But the phenomenon took off in December 2001, when the Argentinean economic crisis hit and massive...

Dear Dr. Dollar.(Ask Dr. Dollar)
March 1, 2004... Can you explain what trade deficits are? Who owes what to whom or is it just an accounting device? --Jack Miller, Indianapolis, Ind. I see that the United States has had a negative international trade balance for years. What happens...

Tax cut time bomb.(Economy In Numbers)
March 1, 2004... President George W. Bush and Congress planted a time bomb in the federal budget, and they're about to light the fuse. The largest parts of the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 didn't activate immediately, but were designed to kick in later this...