Features

When Big Tobacco agreed to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars in a settlement two years ago, it looked like the public interest finally had the upper hand. More than 99 percent of the $206 billion settlement went to 46 states to spend however they saw fit (some on antismoking efforts and much more […]

Is journalism the only industry whose quality is adversely affected by the capitalist drive to increase profit margins? You might think so, judging by the media response to the resignation of Jay T. Harris, publisher of the San Jose Mercury News. Harris abruptly quit his job as chief of the Knight Ridder–owned daily earlier this […]

I was changing planes at the new airport in Jakarta the other day, on the way to Stockholm from Vladivostok. Three young Bangladeshi boys sat in the passenger lounge, watching The Power Rangers on satellite TV. Their mother–garbed in the traditional sari–talked to her cousin, a migrant worker who sold German-designed Walkman knockoffs in Hong […]

Last September AT&T approached the financially struggling First Christian Church in Alexandria, Virginia, with this bargain: In return for letting the company erect a 130-foot-tall cross doubling as a cellular phone tower, the congregation would receive $18,000 annually. Residents were split: Was the money–in the words of the Reverend Tim Mabbott, who supported the idea–a […]

When The New York Times revealed in April that Microsoft had hired Ralph Reed, the onetime executive director of the Christian Coalition, to lobby George W. Bush on the company’s behalf, the story that generated all the attention was Reed’s obvious, if bizarre, conflict of interest–he was also a paid adviser to Bush’s presidential campaign. […]

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to clean out my study. I am something of a pack rat. I have research files on every book and major article I’ve written going back to the 1970s, mostly sorted by topic. Throwing away outdated material under such headings as “budget,” “unemployment,” “savings rate,” and “inflation,” I […]

Greenspan: The Man Behind Money, Justin Martin. Perseus Publishing, 284 pages, $28.00. Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom, Bob Woodward. Simon and Schuster, 270 pages, $25.00. For those seeking a personal portrait of America’s maximum economic-policy maker, Justin Martin’s biography of Alan Greenspan will serve nicely. Informed and sympathetic, Martin traces Greenspan’s personal and […]

This month, the economic boom enters its 107th month, making it the longest expansion in U.S. history. But there are now two small clouds on the economic horizon. With the economy having grown in the fourth quarter of 1999 not at the 3- or even 4-percent annual rate that most economists now consider sustainable, but […]

We’re not in a war economy yet. We’re in an economy that’s just plainsinking. What to do? Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has told Congress to”wait and see” what happens before enacting a stimulus package lest it createinflationary fantasies among traders of long-term bonds. In an extraordinary showof newly bipartisan gutlessness, our representatives in Washington […]

It is hard to believe that the Bush administration could be in so much trouble on so many fronts. Just in the past few weeks, Bush has found himself politically isolated on the issues of stem cell research, offshore oil drilling, prescription benefits under Medicare, patients’ rights, access to the United States for Mexican trucks, […]