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Despite the record economic expansion and near full employment, wages for the bottom fifth of the work force are still far below their 1979 levels. Well over one-fifth of the male work force earns poverty-level wages (22.5 percent in 1997), almost twice as high as in the early 1970s (12.8 percent in 1973). This wage […]

Last fall, Martha Jernegons got a raise. By the standards of the new dot-com economy, it wasn’t much–just $2.15 per hour. But for Jernegons, a 56-year-old home health care aide in Chicago, working for a private agency that is reimbursed by the city, it was a 40 percent increase, to $7.60 an hour. Though she […]

By the third week of July, at its so-called “midyear budget review,” the White House will unveil its new projected 10-year federal budget. Insiders tell me it’s likely to show a surplus that’s half a trillion dollars larger than the one now projected. Why? Because America’s wealthiest 5 percent are becoming far richer, far faster […]

Poking my head down, looking into the abyss of a four-story-tall, 20,000-liter fermenter, which was one of 10 there to produce anthrax for weapons, made me shudder. It made me wonder, what were they thinking? This was a big facility, [with] just an awesome capability to destroy life. In a mobilization period, it was going […]

ACROSS: 1 A + D(MON)ISH; 5 S + HOT; 9 SIMB + A (IBM’s anag.); 10 DIG + IT + AL(l); 11 IN(BOR)N (Rob rev.); 12 ORDER (hidden); 14 P + ROM + PT; 16 SECRET (anag.); 19 ANEAR (anag.); 21 P(ROOF)S; 24 SHUT + TLE (let anag.); 25 I + DAH + O (had […]

With clinical trials now underway, it is natural to expect that a safe and effective vaccine against HIV will soon spell the end of AIDS in this country. But consider a more likely scenario: Immediately after the Food and Drug Administration licenses the vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend the immunization […]

ACROSS: 1 BONN + IEST (site anag.); 5 S + CAN; 9 NI(NE)S; 10 A…T + TRACT; 11 TAHI(T)I (Haiti anag.); 12 PAT + I + O; 14 CATCHMENT AREA (anag.); 17 EARTH (h shifted in heart); 19 ERNES + T; 22 CHIC + A + GO; 23 (d)INNER; 24 YARD (2 defs.); 25 STAR […]

Will the Democratic Party’s divisions over the China/ WTO vote prove fatal? For the sputtering Gore campaign, the timing could hardly be worse. The scenario recalls the 1994 NAFTA split prefiguring the party’s defeat in the 1994 midterm elections. In both cases, President Clinton depended heavily on Republican allies to win an agenda shaped by […]

“I had begun to feel that we were part of some psychology experiment whose design was to see how quickly we could abandon our humanity.” –Dr. Linda Peeno, an ex-medical director and claims reviewer for HMOs, confessing why she quit, in U.S. News and World Report, March 9, 1998. Back in the twentieth century, the […]

ACROSS: 1 THOUSAND (anag.); 5 BRED (bread hom.); 9 CACHE (cash hom.); 10 TRA(NS)IT (NS = last pair of coiNS); 11 G + ROT + TO; 12 KO(A)LA; 14 R(OR)SCHACH TEST (stretch cash anag.); 17 CELLS (sells hom.); 19 G(R)ASPS; 22 ERITREA (hidden); 23 E(C)LAT (rev.); 24 SAKE (acronym); 25 OD + IOU + SLY […]