This March, primary voters in Youngstown, Ohio, have the opportunity to weed out the worst haircut in Congress. Said haircut belongs to Representative James A. Traficant, Jr., a Democrat who faces his first stiff re-election challenge in a 16-year congressional career. Traficant has won a fair amount of national media attention–and has become a favorite […]
Laura Maggi
Laura Maggi is a reporter in the Capital bureau of The Times-Picayune. She is a former writing fellow for The American Prospect.
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The Greening of Giuliani
This June found New York City’s crusading public advocate Mark Green courting financial support at a fundraising “comedy gala” in honor of his 55th birthday. To raise around $1 million for his 2001 mayoral bid, Green culled a selection of celebrities finely tuned to appeal to the sensibilities of the left-leaning (yet moneyed) baby boomer. […]
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Pork, Sweet, and Sour
Word was out in May that the Clinton administration was offering enticements to undecided congressional Democrats in order to win enough votes to permanently normalize trade with China–which the White House had singled out as key to the Clinton foreign policy legacy. After all, during the North American Free Trade Agreement vote in 1993, the […]
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The Squeeze
I n most city neighborhoods, the flight to the suburbs continues–with families leaving the city the moment they acquire the means. However, in a handful of trendy cities, there’s been a movement in the opposite direction. This may be just what the cities thought they wanted, but it often leaves the poor with nowhere to […]
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Death, Taxes, and Fees:
Every year around this time millions of the working poor send their tax forms to the Internal Revenue Service, applying for an end-of-the-year bonus known as the earned income tax credit (EITC). For people struggling to support their families on salaries that typically hover around the poverty line, the couple thousand dollars they might receive […]
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A Conversation with Suzanne Gordon
Suzanne Gordon [“Nurse, Interrupted,” TAP Vol. 11 Issue 7] is a journalist who has been writing about nursing issues since 1986. In “Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines,” Gordon details the three years she spent reporting on three different nurses. Laura Maggi is a Writing Fellow at the American Prospect. Q: In your […]
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The Poor Count
Determining precisely who are the poorest Americans would seem to be a simple enough things to do. But like many bureaucratic tasks, counting up the official poor is fraught with political complications. Last October the issue became front-page news when The New York Times suggested that the Census Bureau might raise the poverty level, boosting […]
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Making White Elephants Fly
In the summer of 1998, after about a year of peddling its Oyster Creek nuclear plant and finding no takers, GPU Inc. appeared resigned to shutting the unit down. Aging, inefficient, and economically uncompetitive, Oyster Creek was a prime example of how nuclear power–the ultimate energy boondoggle–wouldn’t survive in the new world of deregulated energy […]
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Bearing Witness for Tobacco
In 1994, before book after book documented how the tobacco industry had successfully manipulated the public’s perceptions about smoking, the eminent historian and author Stephen E. Ambrose took the stand in a Louisiana case brought by Gere Covert, a Baton Rouge attorney who decided to sue after the death of his wife, a longtime smoker, […]