Dollars & Sense articles from November 2003

Dollars & Sense archives from November 2003

Another globalism is possible.(from the editors)(Editorial)
November 1, 2003... The recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico--where a bloc of 22 poor countries challenged the United States' pro-deregulation agenda--is the latest reminder that the march toward corporate globalization is not...

GOP's offshore fundraising.(the short run ... Republicans contract out)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... The Republican Party has taken up a hot corporate trend: outsourcing white-collar jobs to Third World countries. Fundraising for the GOP and George W. Bush's re-election campaign will be conducted in part by 75 call-center workers in the Indian...

Top ten reasons to oppose universal, government--paid health care!(the short run)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... 10 FACE IT. LONGER LIFE EXPECTANCIES WOULD JUST BE WASTED ON OLD PEOPLE. 9 THE EMERGENCY ROOM IS THE BEST PLACE TO GET BASIC MEDICAL CARE! 8 I THINK THE WAY AMERICANS PAY MORE AND GET LESS FOR HEALTH CARE IS COOOOOL! 7 SOCIETIES...

Al-Qaeda mouthpiece?(the short run)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... CNN's senior war correspondent Christiane Amanpour admitted categorically in an interview on CNBC that the television media was "muzzled" in its coverage of the U.S. war against Iraq and the subsequent occupation. Amanpour said, "I think the...

Woodwards and Bernsteins, stay out!(the short run)(print media excluded by John Ashcroft)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... Attorney General John Ashcroft excluded an important sector of the media from a Philadelpha press conference in which he defended the Patriot Act: any and all print journalists. Howard Altman, editor of the Philadelphia City Paper, was just one...

Workers practice labor law in China.(the short run)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... Globalization has brought longer hours and poorer working conditions to Chinese laborers, and they have not acquiesced quietly. In response to worker protests, the Chinese government opened the labor code to public scrutiny for the first time...

Iraq for sale.(the short run)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... The sweeping economic and financial "reforms" recently announced by the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council read like they were lifted directly from a "Washington Consensus" manifesto. Foreign investors will be allowed 100% direct ownership...

Solution found to U.S. health care woes.(the short run)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... The United States wastes more money on its health care bureaucracy than it would cost to insure everyone who currently lacks coverage, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study that compared the health systems of the United States...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... To the Editor: Rodney Ward writes ("in Harm's Way," May/June 2003), "Treasury Department worker Renee Toback reports that her department was told their budget would be "taxed' to pay for the war in Iraq." I find it difficult to believe...

Income gap widens.(the short run)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... The income gap between the rich and poor in the United States is the widest it has been in 20 years, according to Robert Greenstein and Isaac Shapiro of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Their 2003 study, which analyzed...

Gardencrest tenants get organized: tenant organizing and direct action force concessions from apartment management giant.(active culture)
November 1, 2003... Anita DiFelice has lived at Gardencrest Apartments in Waltham, Massachusetts, for nearly 40 years. Now in her 70s, she would like to retire. But when the family owners of Gardencrest sold the complex to Home Properties of New York, Inc., over a...

Resource markets or resource rights?(comment)
November 1, 2003... When it comes to vital resources like water and land, free market is the dominant mantra of the world's financial elite. Markets improve efficiency for everyone's benefit, we are told. A closely linked mantra is market democracy: if the people...

What spending boom?(Up Against The Wall Street Journal)
November 1, 2003... Next year's federal deficit will reach $480 billion, the federal government will not balance its budget again before fiscal year 2013, and the deficit could get yet worse in the decade ahead. Those are the projections the Congressional Budget...

Stop killer coke! Death squads have assassinated eight trade union leaders in Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia. The Stop Killer Coke campaign holds the beverage giant responsible.
November 1, 2003... On the morning of December 5, 1996, two members of a paramilitary gang drove a motorcycle to the Carepa Coca-Cola bottling plant in northern Colombia. They fired 10 shots at worker and union activist Isidro Segundo Gil, killing him. Luis Adolso...

Fields of free trade: Mexico's small farmers in a global economy.
November 1, 2003... In Cancun, Mexico, on the stifling afternoon of September 10, Korean farm leader Lee Kyung Hae scaled the police barricades, which were keeping 10,000 protesting farmers from storming the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks, and thrust a knife...

Fair trade and farm subsidies: how big a deal? Two views.
November 1, 2003... In September, the global free-trade express was derailed--at least temporarily--when the World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico, collapsed. At the time, the inconsistency of the United States and other rich countries--pressing poor...

Whose right to water? Corporate water giants seek to privatize this most basic of all natural resources. Consumers and communities are fighting back.
November 1, 2003... "[Water is] one of the world's great business opportunities. It promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th. " Fortune, May 2000 Arriving in Haiti by air provides a dramatic visual introduction to a country facing a...

Backs to the wall: Israel's stranglehold on the Palestinian economy is consolidated by a massive wall.
November 1, 2003... Uncertainty about the future intensified for Mufida Ahmad's family this year when a mammoth wall ripped through their land in the West Bank village of Jayyus. Ahmad and her husband had bought the quarter acre for $1,400--a hefty but hopeful...

Fiscal lockdown Part II: will state budget cuts weaken the prison-industrial complex--or strengthen it?
November 1, 2003... Ed. Note: In Part I of this article, which appeared in our July/August issue, Julie Falk outlined how states in severe fiscal crisis--that is, most of them--are handling their corrections systems. As the number of prisoners has reached historic...

Ask Dr. Dollar.
November 1, 2003... Dear Dr. Dollar: A Republican friend tells me that the huge new tax cuts will actually produce more revenue than the government would have collected before the cut, because once rich beneficiaries invest the money, they will pay taxes on...

Our fair share? Has the United States pledged its fair share to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria?(Balance Sheet)
November 1, 2003... The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is the world's war chest in the battle against the trio of deadly infectious diseases that most afflict the poor. But in October, a cash shortfall forced fund trustees to borrow $101...