News Release Archive - 2000

STEVEN HILL
Co-author of “Reflecting All of Us” and Western regional director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, Hill said today: “This may be the push we need to get rid of the Electoral College — which was actually designed to limit the popular will. But if we have a direct popular vote, we certainly don’t want a president winning with a 35 percent threshold. It should be a majority threshold. There are two ways to make that happen. A two-round runoff, like they do in many Southern states, is a solution, but it would cost more to hold two elections. The best way may be instant runoff voting which simulates a runoff by allowing voters to rank their first choice as well as their runoff choice on the same ballot. Instant runoff voting would also deal with the ‘spoiler’ dilemma which many people grapple with.”
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WILSON RILES
Director for the Pacific Mountain Region of the American Friends Service Committee, Riles said: “The Electoral College was established as a means to get around the democratic process, as a way to have the white male property class make the decision as to who should be president. We could replace it with an election based on the plurality of votes, or a system that allows for a winnowing away of those who get fewer votes until you get the one who has the most support. Such a system would allow more diverse voices — not just political, but ethnic voices — to be heard.”

ROBERT NAIMAN
Senior analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Naiman said today: “Under the Electoral College, voters in small states have more say than people in big states. In Wyoming one vote in the Electoral College corresponds to 69,000 voters; in California, one electoral vote corresponds to 180,000 voters. If each state had only as many electors as it had members in the House of Representatives and Bush won Oregon and Florida, Bush would have 216 and Gore would have 220 electoral votes.”
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JIM DeFEDE
A political columnist for the Miami New Times, DeFede said today: “There has been a propensity toward electoral shenanigans in southern Florida. In 1998, there was voter fraud in Miami that led to a mayoral race being overturned by a judge. There were numerous fraudulent absentee ballots…”

GREG ADAMS
Professor at the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Adams said today: “Many voters in Palm Beach, Florida, have claimed that they were confused by the ballot structure and may have inadvertently voted for Buchanan when in fact they intended to vote for Gore. Some colleagues and I have analyzed the county-by-county returns in Florida and found that there is a systematic relationship between the number of votes for Bush and for Buchanan — but that Palm Beach County was so atypical as to literally be off the charts.” [See web page for visual display of data.]

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

GWENDOLYN MINK
Professor of politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Mink said today: “What’s wrong with the two-party system is not that there are only two parties. What’s wrong is that ours is a middle-class party system that leaves out a host of programmatic alternatives and choices, and correspondingly demobilizes millions of citizens. Electoral laws protect the two parties, but that’s not the only reason electoral competition is generally so limited and limiting. Part of the reason is that the politics of solidarity in society is not as strong as it could be. Another part of the reason is that we wait for presidential years to notice and resist the two-party oligarchy. Invigorating democracy will take daily work, either to build alternative electoral institutions or to force democratization of one of the two parties.”
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BARBARA EHRENREICH
Author of numerous books including the forthcoming Nickel and Dimed,Ehrenreich said: “Support for Nader is only one small sign of a much larger growing alienation from the electoral process and the two parties that benefit from it. Much of the electorate seems unable, even after three debates, to detect any gripping differences between the major candidates. An even starker sign of alienation is that a majority of eligible voters are unlikely to vote. The working poor, who supposedly have the most at stake in this or any election, are especially well-represented among those who now abstain from voting.”
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JOHN C. BERG
Author of The State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, Berg is director of graduate studies in the Department of Government at Suffolk University. He said today: “In the years before the Civil War, antislavery voters were told they had to vote for the lesser evil — slave-owning Whigs like Henry Clay. They refused, in small but growing numbers. The Whigs collapsed, the Republican Party was born, Lincoln became president, and the slaves were freed. Today, anti-corporate voters are being handed the same lesser-evil logic. But the sweeping political changes we need will only come when voters refuse this logic and thereby force the collapse of the two-party monopoly.”
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JOHN BONIFAZ
Founder of the National Voting Rights Institute, Bonifaz said: “Over time, the nation has seen the elimination of numerous barriers to voting rights — from property, race, gender, and age qualifications to exclusionary white primaries, poll taxes, high candidate filing fees and vote dilution schemes. Today, we must face up to the newest voting-rights barrier: the ‘wealth primary.'”
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TED GLICK
National coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network and author of Future Hope: A Winning Strategy for a Just Society, Glick said: “The winner-take-all nature of the electoral system erects numerous hurdles for third parties. Instant runoff voting and proportional representation are needed reforms.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MARC MAUER
Co-author of the report “Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States,” Mauer is assistant director of The Sentencing Project. He said today: “America has just replaced Russia as the world leader in its rate of incarceration and incarcerates far more prisoners than any other nation — nearly 2 million. In next week’s election, 4 million Americans will be locked out of the voting booth as a result of laws that disenfranchise persons convicted of a felony. In swing states such as Florida, where more than 600,000 persons are disenfranchised, these laws could directly affect the state’s electoral outcome. The racial disparities of the criminal justice system have led to 13 percent of African-American males being excluded from the electoral process. Ironically, 50 years after the beginnings of the civil rights movement, an increasing number of African Americans are excluded from the political process each year. We no longer have laws that require literacy tests or poll taxes, but the racially disproportionate results today resemble those of a hundred years ago.” Mauer is the author of Race to Incarcerate.
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ROSE BRAZ
Program director for Critical Resistance and a criminal defense attorney, Braz said today: “One out of every 35 African Americans is behind bars. One in three African-American youth is under some kind of criminal supervision, whether that be jail, probation or parole. If you’re disenfranchising people based on criminal convictions, it’s going to disproportionately impact the power of people of color to vote in our society since the criminal justice system is racist. African Americans constitute 14 percent of drug users nationally, but represent 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 75 percent of prison admissions.”
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JASON ZIEDENBERG
Senior policy analyst from the Justice Policy Institute, Ziedenberg said today: “The policies that have disenfranchised such a large segment of the African-American community have had their greatest impact in the state of Texas, which this August surpassed California as having the largest prison population in the country (161,000). Under the watch of Gov. George W. Bush and former Democratic Gov. Ann Richards — whom Bush once attacked for being ‘soft on crime’ — the average annual growth of the Texas prison population during the 1990s was almost twice the average annual growth in the other states…. The incarceration rate for blacks in Texas is 63 percent higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks. Texas became number one in prisons under George W. Bush’s watch, and under the Clinton-Gore administration the federal prison system doubled in size. On Nov. 7, both major party candidates bear responsibility for the fact that huge numbers of the African-American population cannot vote…”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

JOEL BLAU
Author of Illusions of Prosperity: America’s Working Families in an Age of Economic Insecurity, Blau said today: “The economic fissure in American society is the great unmentionable of this year’s presidential campaign. Between 1977 and 1999, the after-tax income of the top fifth increased 43 percent, while the after-tax income of the top 1 percent increased 115 percent. At the same time, the bottom two-thirds of all households lost ground or struggled to hold their own. Absent much discussion of this issue, the gap between the presumption of universal prosperity and voters’ own experience of their lives is a big reason why neither of the major presidential candidates has been able to develop a strong bond with the electorate or retain a lead in the polls.”

CHUCK COLLINS
FELICE YESKEL
Yeskel and Collins are co-directors of United for a Fair Economy and co-authors of the newly released book Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Inequality and Insecurity. Yeskel said today: “Thirty years after the Kerner Commission predicted ‘Two Americas, separate and unequal’ based on race, a huge gulf has opened up between wealthy and working Americans. We titled our book Economic Apartheid to spotlight…just how extreme this economic divide has become. Between 1983 and 1998, the wealth of the top 1 percent has grown 42 percent, while the bottom 40 percent has seen their net worth fall by 76 percent, based on Federal Reserve numbers.” Collins added: “Twenty years ago, the average CEO of a major U.S. corporation earned 42 times as much as the average employee; today that gap has widened to 475 times. If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay during the 1990s, it would now be $24.13 instead of $5.15.”
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JENNY LADD
Ladd, who inherited part of the Standard Oil fortune at age 21, is now a philanthropic advisor and donor organizer whose business is called Class Action. She is a member of Responsible Wealth, a national network of business leaders, investors, and affluent individuals who advocate for shared prosperity. She said today: “I want to live in a society where we can all walk the streets with less fear, rather than too many of us living behind bars, some in gated communities and some in prison. As a wealthy person, I may benefit financially from the current system, but the fraying of our social fabric resulting from too much inequality pains me…”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

WILLIAM HARTUNG
President’s fellow at the World Policy Institute, Hartung said today: “When Gore and Bush have addressed the Pentagon budget, they have talked about how much to increase it, not whether to do so. That is remarkable if you consider that at $311 billion per year, the United States is already spending more on its armed forces than the next seven largest military powers combined. After dropping under the Bush administration and the beginning of the Clinton administration, the Pentagon budget has increased for the last several years. We are currently spending 22 times the combined military budgets of the so-called rogue states: Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Libya and Cuba. Our military budget is almost ten times that of China. Gore and Lieberman have underscored that they plan to increase the military budget by $10 billion per year, while Bush-Cheney plans ‘only’ a $4.5 billion per year boost for the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the two major parties have raked in millions from military contractors. January 2001 is the 40th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in which he warned of the ‘undue influence’ wielded by the ‘military industrial complex.’ His warning is even more apt today.”
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CECILIA ZARATE-LAUN
Co-founder and program director of the Colombia Support Network, Zarate-Laun said today: “Both Bush and Gore agree on spending $1.3 billion, mainly for military hardware, for the Colombian military. Ostensibly, this is to fight against drug trafficking, but if you look closely, they are ignoring the northern part of Colombia where the headquarters of the paramilitaries — which are heavily involved in drug trafficking themselves — are located. Instead, the U.S.-backed military effort is focusing on the south of the country, where leftist guerrillas — who only indirectly profit from drug production — control the territory. The U.S. is in fact backing a counterinsurgency war.”

SAM DAY
Former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Day said: “Bush and Gore are for more military spending, only Nader is for decreasing the military budget. Similarly, both Bush and Gore favor the continued bombing of Iraq and the sanctions which are killing thousands of innocent Iraqis. Bush wants a more vigorous missile defense program than Gore, while Nader is against it altogether. Both Gore and Bush have been unflinching in their backing of Israel… Gore is in favor of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty; Bush is against, but has not talked about it much since foreign policy has been marginal in the campaign.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

PATTI GOLDMAN
A managing attorney with Earthjustice Defense Fund, Goldman said today: “Differences between Bush and Gore include the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, which came up in the debates. There are also differences in the priority and strategies for recovering Pacific salmon…. Gore favors having labor and environmental protection in trade agreements while Bush has not come out for those, but Gore’s position will not solve some of the fundamental problems…”
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TIM HERMACH
Founder of the Native Forest Council, Hermach said today: “Gore is getting the endorsement of some national environmental groups only because they are so afraid of George W. Bush, and so intimidated by the Gore campaign’s where-else-can-you-go attitude.”
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NIAZ DORRY
Greenpeace campaigner Dorry used to live in East Liverpool, Ohio, where Waste Technologies continues to operate an incinerator. She said: “During the 1992 election Al Gore promised to close down the incinerator, which is just 400 yards from an elementary school. But it has been nothing but delays and broken promises.” Today activists held a protest at the EPA in D.C. with a school bus impaled by a mock incinerator smokestack.
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JOE BROWDER
A longtime Everglades activist in Florida, Browder said: “Vice President Gore, while talking anti-sprawl, has been doing his best to move jobs and industrial activity away from Miami to farm land between two national parks to benefit a group of real estate speculators that he is politically close to.”
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HARVEY WASSERMAN
Author of The Last Energy War: The Battle Over Utility Deregulation and senior advisor to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Wasserman said today: “Bush is right when he says that Clinton-Gore have failed to have an energy policy. Unfortunately, Bush’s own energy policy is oil, oil, oil. Gore bragged that he would put his environmental record against Ralph Nader’s. Gore may be better than Bush, but neither are on the same planet as Nader, whose credentials define the term ‘green.’ Clinton-Gore is now demanding that the Kyoto accords include emission credits for nuclear power, which would in effect subsidize nuclear power as a ‘cure’ for global warming. They’re flirting with more Chernobyls here.”
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JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Co-author of Al Gore: A User’s Manual and a specialist in the environment, St. Clair said today: “Bush’s environmental record is anemic, but most of the problems which he has exacerbated in Texas have at their core laxities of the Clinton-Gore EPA. Clinton and Gore have done more harm to the environment than Presidents Bush and Reagan did. This isn’t because they are to the right of the Republicans, but because public interest groups fought Reagan and Bush and abetted Clinton and Gore in their sellouts to chemical companies, timber giants, real estate developers and the energy conglomerates. It was Clinton-Gore that was able to enact NAFTA and GATT; it’s questionable whether a Republican president could have done that for big business.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Last night, presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore agreed that the death penalty is an effective deterrent. “I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people’s lives,” Bush said during the debate. Gore agreed, saying: “I support the death penalty…. I think it is a deterrence. I know that’s a controversial view, but I do believe it’s a deterrence.”

But what are the facts about data on the death penalty and deterrence? The following policy analysts are available for interviews:

RICHARD DIETER
Executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, Dieter said today: “The issue of deterrence has been studied for decades, and the overwhelming conclusion is that the death penalty has failed to be a deterrent and certainly is no more of a deterrent than life without parole. The average of murder rates per 100,000 population in 1998 among death penalty states was 6.2, the average of murder rates among non-death penalty states was only 3.2. A look at neighboring death penalty and non-death penalty states shows similar trends.”
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TANYA McCLARY
Program director with the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, McClary said today: “Several studies have shown that the death penalty is not a deterrent. For example, a recent survey by The New York Times found that 10 of the 12 states without the death penalty have homicide rates below the national average. Life without parole would deter people just as well as the death penalty.”
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MICHAEL RADELET
Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Florida, Radelet has done research on the death penalty for 20 years, writing six books on the subject. He said today: “The argument that the death penalty is a more effective deterrent to criminal violence is an argument that has been supported by virtually no credible research over the past 75 years. A 1996 survey of 70 of America’s top criminologists, ‘Deterrence and the Death Penalty: The Views of the Experts’ in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, found that over 80 percent agreed that the death penalty has not and cannot lower homicide rates.”

ROB WARDEN
Warden is director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which has helped show that nine prisoners on death row were innocent. This was in large part responsible for the death penalty moratorium put into place by Republican Gov. George Ryan in Illinois. Warden said today: “Until 1808 they had the death penalty for pickpockets in England and it didn’t deter that. The claims of these presidential candidates call into question their fundamental judgment. Every single study indicates that the death penalty provides no deterrent effect whatsoever.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Chevron has just agreed to acquire Texaco for $36 billion. This follows the BP-Amoco and Exxon-Mobil mergers. The following analysts are available for comments:

WENONAH HAUTER
Director of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy Project, Hauter said today: “This trend towards more consolidation in the oil industry is bad for consumers in the long run and has the added impact of increasing the political power of these larger companies to influence energy policy. So rather than transitioning away from the use of oil, these larger, more politically powerful companies can influence public policy and this results in more subsidies, more tax breaks for the oil industry and increased pressure to drill in environmentally sensitive areas. It also influences foreign policy as the U.S. taxpayer funds military operations to advance these companies’ interests around the globe.”
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JAMES LOVE
Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, Love said today: “Why would we want another giant merger in the oil industry? The last wave of mergers was followed by rising prices. This type of merger makes it easier for the private sector to make the cartel work. There is already too much collusion in the oil industry, and too many competition-reducing joint ventures.”
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DANNY KENNEDY
Director of Project Underground, Kennedy said today: “Chevron-Texaco clearly puts more power in the hands of still fewer oil men. We need to bust this and the other Big Oil trusts in order to protect consumers from getting ripped off at the gas pump. But today’s merger bespeaks an even darker consummation in the Niger Delta, where Chevron and Texaco have both produced oil for years at the expense of people there. These facts are rarely considered by the regulators when looking at mergers and acquisitions, but they should be. From Burma to Ecuador, Nigeria to Papua New Guinea, communities resisting exploitation by these two need more accountability of the companies, not less.”
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RICHARD GROSSMAN
Co-director of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, Grossman said today: “The law gives corporations the authority to make our country’s and communities’ decisions about our energy policy — and about so many other vital matters. Yet aren’t we supposed to be self-governing people? Aren’t ‘we the people’ supposed to be the ultimate source of all legal authority? Well, despite all the regulatory and antitrust laws on the books, giant corporations do the real governing in the USA. So rather than trying to ‘fix’ one giant merger after another…the American people need to go beyond anti-trust and regulatory laws — and beyond promises of corporate social responsibility and voluntary codes of conduct — to contest giant corporations’ generations-old seizure of governing power.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MARC ELLIS
Director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University in Texas and author of Oh Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant, Ellis said today: “The escalation of the Israeli helicopter gunships firing into civilian areas is just appalling…. Justice would mean a shared real sovereignty of all of Jerusalem: political, economic, spiritual…. The Israelis are still occupying the Palestinians; the Oslo ‘peace process’ is not one of justice and reconciliation — it is a solidification of a victory by Israel over the Palestinians. Israel has taken just about all of Palestine. Those of the Abrahamic faiths who claim religious tradition should be aware of…the Jubilee tradition [which] calls for a periodic redistribution and return of land and wealth — today, for Jews, this means a decision to share the land…”
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RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW
Director of the Shalom Center and author of Godwrestling — Round 2, Waskow said today: “The violence has to stop, whether it’s a lynch mob or a bombing. It is inconceivable to me that the two peoples aren’t going to be living like conjoined twins for the rest of history, and if conjoined twins are not insane, they know that the health of the other one is crucial to the health of each one. Two conjoined twins who share a single, vital organ have to nurture each other and protect each other, and these two peoples share a single vital organ: the land.”
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ELIZABETH BARLOW
Coordinator of Friends of Sabeel-North America, which supports an ecumenical center for liberation theology in Jerusalem, Barlow said: “One must express regret for all loss of life including the many Palestinians and the two Israeli soldiers who were killed yesterday. One also needs to ask what the soldiers were doing there.”
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YVONNE HADDAD
Professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, Haddad said today: “Much of this was set in motion with Clinton’s criticism of Arafat for not signing the Camp David agreement. We should be sending food and medicine to the Palestinians — not arming Israel. Israeli violence seems to be considered justifiable while Palestinian despair is being condemned. Palestinians are being told that they have to accept their situation, sign on the dotted line and be quiet. Israel seems to be expecting Arafat to kill his own people for them. Many in the U.S. think the Palestinians are attacking Israel, but the Palestinians are seeking liberation from a repressive occupation — Israel has yet to fulfill withdrawals it has agreed to.”
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TERRORISM:

BEAU GROSSCUP
Professor of international relations at California State University and author of The Newest Explosions of Terrorism, Grosscup said today: “The essential definition of ‘terrorism’ is that it is against innocents — but the U.S. Navy patrolling the Mideast and enforcing the strangulating economic sanctions against Iraq doesn’t really qualify it as ‘innocent.’ When a force has a global presence, people tend to resist its plans for domination, even if they have to kill themselves to strike just a minor blow. In skewed language, many refer to violent acts against Western military power as ‘terrorism’ while violent acts by Western powers are deemed humanitarian heroism.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

ALLEGRA PACHECO
An Israeli Jewish human rights lawyer who represents Palestinians in the West Bank, Pacheco is now a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. She wrote in The New York Times last week: “Since 1994, Palestinians have seen the influx of 50,000 new Jewish settlers into the West Bank and Gaza, the paving of more than 400 kilometers of roads on confiscated land, demolition of more than 800 Palestinian homes, a threefold increase in unemployment …the arrest of 13,000 Palestinians, and complete curtailment of freedom of movement.” Today she said: “In almost every city and town in Israel, large Jewish mobs, chanting ‘death to the Arabs,’ have attacked Palestinian citizens. The Israeli government has yet to crack down — effectively giving a green light. The international community should send protection for them — they are no less deserving than the Albanians in Kosovo.”
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SIMONA SHARONI
Executive director of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development, Sharoni has written extensively about Middle East politics and conflict resolution. An Israeli Jew living in the U.S., Sharoni said today: “During the intifadah, it took Jews awhile to be horrified as to what was happening in their name. How can Barak set ultimatums to the Palestinians to stop the violence when his military is carrying out most of it? The Oslo process was unjust and problematic to begin with — the situation calls for a totally different framework designed to address the core issues of the conflict: refugees, Jerusalem, borders and settlements.”
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PHYLLIS BENNIS
Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN, Bennis said today: “The UN is the right venue for resolving the Mideast crisis — it always has been. It is an international crisis that must be resolved by international law and the international community. The U.S. should step back and let the UN do its job…. The U.S. decision to abstain from a consensus of the rest of the world sharply demonstrates the isolation of U.S. policy in the Mideast.”

BARBARA LUBIN
Director of the Middle East Children’s Alliance, Lubin, who will be going to Israel and Palestine on Friday with money for medicine for Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem, said today: “Until there is a just resolution for both peoples, there will be bloodshed, so for us this is expected. Palestinians should have their own state, no more of these bantustans with zone ‘A,’ zone ‘B,’ zone ‘C.’ Sharon’s visit to the mosque was a political move, part of his battle with Netanyahu and the latest chapter in his bloody record.”
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ALI ABUNIMAH
Vice president of the Arab-American Action Network, Abunimah said today: “For the first time in decades Palestinians in the occupied territories, Palestinians in Israel and Palestinian refugees (especially in Lebanon) are all protesting simultaneously. This shows that this is about basic injustice, not about Yasir Arafat giving an order.”
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FRANCIS BOYLE
Boyle is professor of law at the University of Illinois and former legal advisor to the Palestinian delegation from 1991 to 1993.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020 or (202) 332-5055; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167