Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (1760)	4/19/2003 7:15:04 PM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

LOL----get a grip....most businesses IN Texas are tied to the oil and gas industry, goofy. The Democrats were the ones courting Enron, so they keep quiet about it.

To: American Spirit who wrote (1760)	4/29/2003 9:08:47 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

At Home, No Superpower _______________________________ by Ruth Rosen Published on Monday, April 28, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle TO MOST OF US, national security means protection from external enemies -- other countries or terrorists. But there is another kind of national security -- the well-being of a country's citizens. And how do we rank in terms of our domestic national security? Poorly. Consider American mothers and their children. Among other industrialized nations, we have the highest rates of maternal and child poverty. The mortality rate of our children under the age of 5 is shared by Croatia and Malaysia. We are 54th when it comes to access to health care for women and children. And only four other industrial countries fail to guarantee paid leave from work to new mothers. In other words, when it comes to mothers and children, we don't even rank among the top 10. Ann Crittendon, the author of "The Price of Motherhood," has looked at just one county in Iowa, smack in the middle of the American Heartland, where 18, 320 kids live in poverty, 5,500 eligible children have no health insurance and 680 children live in homeless shelters. Though no foreign enemy has attacked Iowa, this sure seems like a threat to our national security to me. The Bush administration's decision to beef up the military and enact tax cuts is shrinking our public institutions. Even during the Great Depression, libraries stayed open. Yet, today, librarians all over the country are protesting local budget cuts that are closing the doors to the growing number of people who seek access to books, newspapers, magazines, and most important, the Internet. Public education is suffering as well. President Bush, who promised to "leave no child behind," failed to include increased funding for school districts in his 2003 and 2004 budgets. As a result, the dream of returning California's schools to their former glory has all but vanished. We see the damage right here, in the Bay Area, where our public schools are teetering on the edge of financial insolvency, forced to cut courses, increase class size and lay off teachers. At the state level, where law requires that budgets be balanced, governors are laying off prosecutors, releasing inmates, reducing health care to the poor and eliminating shelters for the homeless. In California, officials in cities and counties are holding their breath as they await the grim truth about California's staggering budget deficit. Starving public programs and services, of course, has always been the goal of the Bush administration. Behind the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism is a methodical plan to unravel the New Deal, the social contract forged 70 years ago that placed a safety net under mothers with small children, the infirm, the ill, the elderly and the unemployed. Through a brilliant public relations campaign, this administration has managed to convince ordinary middle-class, working families that huge tax cuts (targeted to the wealthy), ending the estate tax and a gigantic federal deficit will improve their lives. But it won't. These same people need public schools for their children, health insurance for their families, home health care for elderly parents, state universities for their college-age kids and Social Security for their retirement. Gutting our public institutions and programs encourages a greedy individualism and erodes a sense of the common good -- the exact opposite of what our born-again president says he values. We need brave voices that will trumpet our need for a stronger domestic national security. Rep. Richard Gephardt's proposal to scrap the 2001 tax cut and use it to offer universal health care is an important start. But we need many more elected representatives to counter the Bush juggernaut, before the proverbial public well runs dry. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle commondreams.org

To: American Spirit who wrote (1760)	4/30/2003 5:45:46 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10965

Where Your Taxes Aren't Going -- Health And Education richardreeves.com BY RICHARD REEVES Columnist Universal Press Syndicate April 25, 2003 WASHINGTON -- The new Marcus Emergency Response Center of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta opened earlier this month, just in time to coordinate information on SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) cases in the United States. Your government in action. Well, not quite. The new operations center exists right now only because of the generosity of Bernard Marcus, the retired founder and chairman of Home Depot, Inc., which is headquartered in Atlanta. He put up the $4 million for the center because the government of the United States would not or could not. In fact, the Bush administration is in the process of cutting the budget of CDC units, including the Center for Infectious Diseases, which is facing a $12 million reduction from $343 million to $331 million in President Bush’s new budget proposals. In the words of Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, "The administration came in this year with a budget proposal that’s essentially an abandonment of the CDC." That’s where Bernard Marcus came in. He is, by the way, a Republican, too, one of the party’s largest individual contributors. He was serving on the board of the CDC Foundation on September 11, 2001, when he learned that CDC staffers who rushed to New York after the destruction of the World Trade Center to prepare for possible epidemics had no working emergency communication system. They had to use pay phones to talk to Atlanta. The same thing happened a month later when the agency tried to deal with anthrax outbreaks in Florida and Washington. That is one small battle in the war against government begun by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and continued with great fervor by President Bush and his team. Making war on other countries and cutting taxes inevitably means that there is less money available for public services at home -- even for public health, probably the most effective government program of the last hundred years. Clean water, better sanitation and vaccines against polio, influenza and other diseases were among the great achievements of public agencies, federal, state and local, in the 20th century. Now it seems it’s up to Bernie Marcus, who lost his job at the age of 49 and and started Home Depot with a friend named Arthur Blank. Marcus, who is also a significant contributor to Emory University and many Jewish causes, brought in other donors for CDC, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Both companies supplied equipment for the new state-of-the-art response center. Good people, but they are hardly a substitute for a superpower government. "We shouldn’t have to depend on handouts from the private sector to afford a modern facility for disease surveillance," said Barry Bloom, dean of the public health school of Harvard University, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. No, we shouldn’t, but that is the way things work when the government is run by people who are proudly anti-government -- men and women determined to reduce not only the size but the role of civilian government. Not that they care, but they are managing a trickle-down public service crisis that is hidden in the budget lines of states, municipalities and boards of education. Perhaps the most revealing example of where we are going these days is that more and more children (really their parents) are being forced to pay fares on school buses. Yeah, public education is still officially free, but parents are being forced to spend more and more for books and such and now to get on the yellow buses. More than one-third of school districts in Massachusetts are now paying about $200 per child per year beginning in the 7th grade to use school buses. Governor Mitt Romney, another Republican, hopes to move toward balancing his budget next year by eliminating all state subsides to local school services. More than 300 California districts are now charging for bus rides. Students are paying in New Jersey, Montana, Hawaii, Kansas, North Dakota and Utah, as well. That’s the way it is in the richest nation in the history of the world. The president says no child will be left behind. But a lot of them will have to walk every day to catch up. _________________________________________________________ RICHARD REEVES is the author of 12 books, including President Nixon: Alone in the White House. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire and dozens of other publications. E-mail him at rr@richardreeves.com.