It’s hard for small businesses to get a leg up in this sluggish economy.
Merrill Goozner
Merrill Goozner is the senior correspondent for The Fiscal Times and a Prospect contributing editor. His blog can be found at http://www.gooznews.com/
Posted inSpecial Report
Can Government Go Green?
If the “mission accomplished” photo-op was the defining moment of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, the president’s recent visit to the National Renewal Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, defined its energy policy. One week after he embraced alternative energy in his State of the Union address, Bush’s budget axed 32 employees at the nation’s premier […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Can We Housebreak Capitalism?
This year marks the centennial of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and it’s sobering to imagine how that exposé of working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants might fare before the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the contemporary gatekeeper for proposed regulations. The lightly fictionalized novel’s most grisly passage showed workers slipping, falling, and […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Throwing Away the Rules
Corporate America’s ideological assault on government regulation has undermined middle America’s understanding of why these rules exist in the first place. It is true that some regulations have lived past their prime, protecting monopolies and stifling innovation. But the free-market ideologues of our era were not content to adjust those regulations to accommodate new economic […]
Posted inSpecial Report
Higher Skills, Fewer Jobs
In the past three years, U.S manufacturers have suffered their most dramatic job losses since the Great Depression. Even with the turnaround in job creation reported this fall, manufacturing lost another 19,000 jobs in November. The sector’s low-skilled and lowest-paid workers have been especially hard hit because they engaged in repetitive work at outmoded plants. […]
Posted inArticle
Reconstructive Surgery
The initial reports from the recent Iraq donor conference in Madrid, Spain, provide plenty of new ammunition for members of Congress who oppose President Bush’s request for an immediate $20 billion in new aid. Simply put, Iraq can’t absorb that much aid in the coming year. Giving proconsul Paul Bremer a blank check would only […]
Posted inArticle
Natural Disaster
The energy bill moving inexorably through Congress is like a massive oil spill heading for a pristine coastline — there’s not much one can do except contemplate the eventual cleanup costs. If September 11 changed everything in politics, you’d be hard pressed to tell from this special-interest giveaway. Two years after the attacks, the Republicans […]
Posted inFeatures
Bioterror Brain Drain
Dr. Marcus Horwitz, professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted most of his career to finding a vaccine for tuberculosis. Though the age-old killer is well controlled in the industrialized world, TB kills more than 2 million people each year among the global poor. It’s not a sexy field: Compared […]
Posted inArticle
Nuclear Blackmail
About a year ago, the Bush administration began laying the groundwork for war in Iraq with a propaganda offensive based on what now appears to have been a deliberate manipulation of faulty intelligence reports. In recent weeks, there have been a slew of news reports based on leaked intelligence suggesting that North Korea — another […]
Posted inFeatures
Medicine as a Luxury
It’s generally recognized that people have the right to eat. When famine breaks out, relief agencies rush food to the hungry. Politics and war may get in the way (indeed, they are often the causes of the famine). Sometimes relief efforts are too small or come too late. But the advanced industrial world usually acts […]