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News Releases

  • Post-Election Decisions

    ERIC FONER Professor of history at Columbia University, current president of the American Historical Association and author of The Story of American Freedom and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, Foner said today: “In 1876, there was a dispute over the Hayes-Tilden presidential election returns from Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana. An electoral commission was formed (which was extra-constitutional), but behind the scenes, the party bosses came up with the ‘Bargain of 1877’ which effectively awarded the White House to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes but gave control of the South to the Democrats. At the time the Democratic Party was the…

  • The Election: Process and Results

    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…

  • Election Perspectives

    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…

  • Keeping Millions From Voting

    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…

  • A Missing Campaign Issue: Economic Apartheid

    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…

  • Military Spending and Policy

    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 Environment: Behind the Rhetoric

    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…” More Information 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…

  • Bush and Gore Agree Death Penalty Deters; But What Are the Facts?

    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…

  • Big Oil Gets Bigger: Chevron and Texaco

    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…

  • Perspectives on Mideast Crisis

    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…

  • FTAA: Crossroads at Miami Summit

    JOSEFINA HERNANDEZ PONCE and PEDRO EUSSE and SEVERINA RIVERA, Hernandez Ponce is a sewing machine operator and president of SITEMEX, the only union in the sweatshop garment industry in Mexico. The union was founded last year after two years of efforts which began when Hernandez Ponce and four other workers refused to eat the factory…

  • Behind the “Special Relationship”

    GREG PALAST Palast is author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His investigative reports appear on BBC Television and in the Guardian Newspapers of Britain. He said today: “Blair, like Margaret Thatcher before him, faces revolt within his own party. They believe he lied to get Britain into Bush’s…

  • Mr. Bush Goes to London

    MILAN RAI The British author of Regime Unchanged, a just-released book on the invasion of Iraq, Rai is in the U.S. until November 25. He said today: “President Bush recently said in an interview with the BBC of the war on Iraq: ‘War is my last choice, not my first choice.’ In March 2002, a…

  • * Iraq * Israel * WTO — Interviews Available

    MEDEA BENJAMIN Benjamin, the founding director of the international human rights group Global Exchange, is also co-founder of the Occupation Watch Center in Iraq. Paul Bremer, in Washington mid-week, repeatedly cited the Iraqi Governing Council in his remarks. Benjamin said today: “The Bush administration wants the Iraqi Governing Council to rubber-stamp policies coming from Washington…

  • * Medicare Profiteers * Jobs * Mutual Funds * HealthSouth

    ALAN SAGER DEBORAH SOCOLAR Sager and Socolar are co-directors of the Health Reform Program at Boston University’s School of Public Health. They have recently released a report entitled “New Medicare Rx Benefit Means Big Profits for Drug Makers.” The report finds that “an estimated 61.1 percent of the Medicare dollars that will be spent to…

  • Interviews Available: Families of Military and 9/11 Victims

    JARI SHEESE Sheese owns a small business in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her husband is stationed in Iraq. She said this afternoon: “He had just dropped me a line telling me that he’d be getting around by helicopter and that made me feel better — then a helicopter gets downed killing 16. We find some way to…

  • Interviews Available on Iraq: * Invasion Fatalities * Visitors in the U.S. * More Attacks? * Like Vietnam?

    CARL CONETTA Co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, Conetta wrote the just-released report “The Wages of War: Iraqi Combatant and Noncombatant Fatalities in the 2003 Conflict.” Conetta said today”Reviewing U.S. combat data, battlefield press reports, and Iraqi hospital surveys, we have found that approximately 13,000 Iraqis (plus or minus 16.5 percent or 2,150) were…

  • Interviews Available: Bush vs. Facts

    Analysts are available to scrutinize some of President Bush’s claims, including those from Tuesday’s news conference, focusing on Iraq and the recent attacks there: BUSH: “I would assume that they’re [the suicide bombers] either, or, and probably both Ba’athists and foreign terrorists.” FACT: “There are a growing number of interviews with Iraqi resistance fighters that…

  • Welfare Policy: Interviews Available

    With welfare legislation for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families reauthorization making its way through the House and Senate, interviews with the following are available: LIZ ACCLES Accles is with the Welfare Made a Difference National Campaign, which is organizing with a host of other groups the “Shirts Off Our Backs Day” in Washington, D.C. —…

  • Bush’s Asia Trip: Interviews Available

    MARGO OKAZAWA-REY Director of the Women’s Leadership Institute and a visiting professor at Mills College in California, Okazawa-Rey has authored a number of papers about U.S. bases in East Asia. She said today: “Many activists in South Korea, the Philippines and Okinawa/Japan are opposing their governments that support U.S. policies, largely due to political and…

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