Where else would you get your leftist bearings every week?
Volume III, Number 113 January 2003
Amidst all of the hubbub in Washington in the last few weeks, about Iraq and North Korea and yet another huge tax cut, was a story that exemplified how the Bush administration feels about much of the world. In an interview with Newsweek, Andrew Natsios defended the size of the American foreign aid budget by claiming, essentially, that a larger amount would wreck the economies of the world's blighted nations.
Natsios runs the United States Agency for International Development. He is the same official who explained to Representative Norman Delahunt during a House committee meeting in June 2001 that spending money on antiviral therapy for African AIDS victims was foolhardy. He claimed that Africans "do not know what watches and clocks are. They do not use western means for telling time." Natsios, of course, was dead wrong then. And he has not lost his penchant for placing his foot in his mouth in the course of an off-hand remark.
[Click on the title to read the whole article.]
Paul Corrigan is not writing this week.
thinks about what the new year will bring with the Republicans in control of the federal government.
examines the mutant economics of missile defense.
wonders why Americans are so apt to believe the illusions that politicians conjure.
shows the real winners of a proposed cut in dividend taxes.
[Click on the titles to read the whole articles.]
Articles from previous weeks are in our archives. If you're not careful, you might learn something.
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From 2000 to 2001, the poverty rate in the United States (the percent of persons living in households below the poverty line) rose from 11.3% to 11.7%. This is the first year-to-year increase since the increase from 1991 to 1992. Perhaps conidentally, 1992 was the last full year of the term of the original President Bush.
Obviously, the solution is to spare rich Americans the burden of paying taxes on their stock dividends.
Source:
United States Bureau of the Census,
Poverty in the United
States: 2001.
Last Enron update: 18 December 2002.