The Kill-Floor Rebellion
St. Agnes church and its sister parish, our Lady of Guadalupe, are the heart of south Omaha, Nebraska. Every Sunday, hundreds of packinghouse workers — Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans — dress up in their best clothes and stream through St. Agnes’ doors for Spanish-language mass. The men take off their wide-brimmed sombreros as mothers call out…
Hire the Clueless
Some say John Peter Suarez is a well-regarded career public servant, a “fair and balanced prosecutor” who has gained a reputation as a “very thorough” attorney while assembling the résumé of a government lawyer on the rise. He therefore may seem an unsurprising choice for a position in the federal regulatory apparatus — but he…
Who Vouches for Vouchers?
If you happened upon the newspaper, radio, and television ads last year, you might have assumed they were the work of a conservative organization. After all, they spotlighted black students and their parents touting an idea close to the hearts of many Republicans: government-funded vouchers for tuition at private and parochial schools. The tagline for…
Creating a Lie
To judge by the public reception of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s much-hyped Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, you might think it was the first time American women had been admonished not to pursue high-powered careers when they could be having babies. Hewlett argues that the more women achieve in the workplace,…
Easy on the Adrenals
I could have walked out of Enigma. Not in anger — not in that state of congested indignation that sometimes forces cinemagoers to their feet, huffing and puffing and clawing for their coats in the darkness — but through simple lack of concern. Which surprised me, because almost any film set in England in 1943…
Performance Art: The Gods of Shopping
It is no secret that shopping and religion are close relatives in America — money is God, God is heavily marketed, and then there’s “Christian rock” — but it sure does help to be reminded sometimes. Not surprisingly, neither advertiser-driven media nor religious leaders like to make the connection. But every once in a while,…
Despots R Us
In 1934 the German Dye Trust retained public-relations pioneer Ivy Lee for $25,000 a year, ostensibly to promote the company’s image in the United States. Lee’s true client, though, was Adolf Hitler’s regime, and his aim was to favorably influence American public opinion of the Third Reich. As part of his work, Lee produced a…
Seeking a Higher Intelligence
When news broke about the infamous FBI “Phoenix” memo, which warned headquarters of possible terrorist activity in U.S. aviation schools last July, members of Congress could be heard fulminating across the land. “How in the world could somebody have read this document and not had lights, firecrackers, rockets go off in their head that this…
Porn Again
Free-speech advocates who cheered the recent Supreme Court decision striking down portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) should not have been surprised when Attorney General John Ashcroft and members of Congress quickly announced their intention to enact another, similar child-porn law for the courts to consider. Congress and the White House (under both…
Plan to Lose Money
The Great 401(k) Hoax: Why Your Family’s Financial SecurityIs at Risk, and What You Can Do About It By William Wolman and Anne Colamosca. Perseus Publishing, 246 pages, $26.00 Since the Enron corporation imploded, Americans havegotten quite an education in the corporate chicanery, accounting gimmickry, WallStreet scams, and feckless regulation that helped sustain the roaring…
The American Way of Death
The Death Penalty: An American History By Stuart Banner. Harvard University Press, 385 pages, $29.95 Warning: This book is not for the squeamish. With graphicaccounts of snapped necks and roasted flesh and rabidlike reactions to lethalinjections, Stuart Banner spares no detail in describing American methods ofexecution. Yet Banner’s timely book on the history of capital…
Democracy-Proof
How Democratic Is the American Constitution? By Robert Dahl. Yale University Press, 198 pages, $19.95 In the Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy(1996), Daniel Lazare points out that the U.S. Constitution was adopted unconstitutionally. The Articles of Confederation, our first governing compact, contained a provision that any amendment would require the consent of…
Bush’s Most-Favored Taxpayers
As federal budget deficits head back into the stratosphere, most congressional Democrats remain petrified about frontally attacking the Bush tax cuts that are the central cause of the problem. Perhaps if they understood that most of us already face a tax cut freeze they’d be more willing to fight to extend such a freeze to…
Is the Third Way Finished?
In the last two years of his administration, Bill Clinton hosted three conferences on the “Third Way” that included British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Three years later, only Blair and Schröder are still in office,…
Back to Brinksmanship
India and Pakistan stand once again on the brink of war.The moment is a precarious one and the stakes are high, not just for the regionbut potentially for the world. The United States has burgeoning interests in thesubcontinent since the war in Afghanistan, and renewed Indo-Pakistani conflictcould divert needed resources from the effort to stamp…
Outing Alec:
Earth Day, conservatives have been known to complain,always brings out the weirdos. This year’s celebration was no exception. “Absentfrom the debate [on global warming] is the discussion of human ingenuity and ourability to adapt to our environment; when the temperature increases, we turn onthe air conditioner,” ran one line of thinking that went out over…
Comment: Republicans’ Favorite Democrats
The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was organized by southern governors, business Democrats, defense hawks, and social conservatives to push the party to the center. The theory was that this repositioning would win presidential elections (and also raise a ton of corporate money). Bill Clinton was taken as the DLC’s vindication. But how is the DLC…
Greens to Liberals: Drop Dead!
Ask any liberal to identify the force in American politics most intent on destroying progressive prospects and causes and you’re sure to hear that it’s the Bush administration or the Republican right or some such reactionary power. Let me gently suggest, however, that a very different force has wormed its way onto this list, and…
