Dollars & Sense articles from May 1999

Dollars & Sense archives from May 1999

Active culture.(United Methodist Women)
May 1, 1999... Profile: The Methodist Women's Active Faith Anyone watching the United Methodist Women (UMW) over the past 20 years must wonder why more of the left doesn't embrace organizing on the basis of faith. UMW was the first women's...

Waiting for the millenium.
May 1, 1999... Waiting for the millennium is getting more difficult. It's getting harder to deny the anxiety and excitement building with each tick of the clock. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, reported to the Senate Banking Committee that...

Radio for people, not profit.(pirate radio)
May 1, 1999... Gainesville, Florida is the kind of Southern college town where Spanish moss drips from the dogwoods and fraternity brothers binge-drink on Friday nights. But Gainesville also nurtures a vibrant counterculture that has spawned numerous campus...

Ring out the debt, ring in prosperity?(Third World countries)
May 1, 1999... Have five years of grassroots campaigning finally placed the onerous debt of Third World nations on the radar screen of the "G-8"? It seems so, looking at the agenda for the annual meeting of the world's eight economic powerhouses, to be held...

Corporation crackdowns: business backs brutality.(includes related article on Nigeria)(Cover Story)
May 1, 1999... In the sleepy fishing village of Veldur in India, Sadhana Bhalekar, a young woman in her mid-twenties, was taking a bath on the morning of June 3, 1997 when police broke down her door, beat her retarded nephew, and mercilessly dragged her naked...

Freedom to farm - and starve - in Kenya.(includes related article on human rights violations in Kenya and on Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson's African policies)
May 1, 1999... It's a long bus ride from Kenya's capital of Nairobi to the main port, Mombasa. The distance is only 300 miles or so, but it takes eight hours or more because the highway is in such awful condition. It's a narrow two lanes, filled with large...

The myth of the Social Security Trust Fund.(includes related article on Clinton's Social Security plan)
May 1, 1999... Since the 1980s, American workers have been paying more into the Social Security system than retirees are taking out. These excess payroll taxes, now running at about $100 billion per year, go to the Social Security Trust Fund, "saved" for the...

Myths and facts about privatizing Social Security.
May 1, 1999... The right wing has promoted a variety of falsehoods to convince the American public that Social Security is in grave danger and must be privatized if our retirements are to be secure. Below, Richard Du Boff and John Miller take apart three of...

How to rebuild Nicaragua.
May 1, 1999... Anastasia Garcia watched in horror as the sides of her house dissolved into mud. "The rain came during the night," she recalls. "We were looking for high ground." The 24 members of the Garcia family joined the immediate community; together they...

Low-income groups try out community money systems.
May 1, 1999... During the Great Depression of the 1930s, hundreds of communities in the United States issued their own money. They did so because banks around the United States had closed, and the deposits they held disappeared. But farmers in these...

Going Local! Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age.(Review)
May 1, 1999... by Michael Shuman (The New Press, 1998) Thad Williamson Is it time for the left to embrace the profit motive? And if so, how? Michael Shuman's book Going Local! aims to articulate a progressive vision of traditional American...

From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future.(Review)
May 1, 1999... By Stanley Aronowitz (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) Stanley Aronowitz used to be one of organized labor's most scathing critics. In books written in the 1970s and '80s like "False Promises" and "Working Class Hero," the former organizer turned...

For sale: weapons or pollution control?
May 1, 1999... Suppose you are the federal government and need to decide which export sector of the American economy most merits the support of public agencies, and that you have $7.7 billion to spend. One industry is in worldwide decline and, incidentally,...