KATE MARTIN or KEN GUDE
Director of the Center for National Security Studies, Martin said today: “We do not live in a country where the government can keep secret who it arrests, where detainees are being held, or the charges against them. The secret detention of more than 1,000 people over the past few weeks is frighteningly close to the practice of ‘disappearing’ people in Latin America.” Ken Gude is a policy analyst with the group, which is demanding information from the government on the detainees under the Freedom of Information Act.
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BETSY LEONDAR-WRIGHT or RICHARD PERL
Communications director for United for a Fair Economy, Leondar-Wright said today: “Under the House plan, 14 profitable corporations such as IBM and General Motors would get $6.3 billion in rebates of their Alternative Minimum Tax payments back to 1986. These companies had in 2000 a net worth of over $217 billion and $43 billion of cash in the bank. In contrast, the bottom 60 percent of Americans (making under $75,000) only get 7 percent of the benefits this year.” A New York member of Responsible Wealth, a project of United for a Fair Economy, Richard Perl, president of Pacific Partners International Investments said, “I’d be embarrassed to take a tax cut at a time like this…. It is not just ineffective; it’s unpatriotic.”
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DAVID SWANSON
Communications coordinator for ACORN, an organization advocating for low and middle income Americans, Swanson said today: “We’re headed in exactly the wrong direction with the Bush plan. What’s needed both to help the people who are suffering the most and to actually stimulate the economy is to get money into the hands of low income people who need it the most and who are more likely to immediately spend it in a variety of sectors of the economy.”
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JILL NELSON
Nelson is editor of the recently released book Police Brutality: An Anthology. She said: “We want to believe in the facade of national unity that has been hastily constructed in the wake of the terror attacks. We want to believe that as American citizens, we are all in this together, as equals…. It is tempting at this point to succumb to a defensive patriotism and the desire to believe government assurances that they know what they’re doing and will do the right thing. Sadly, the circumstances surrounding the deaths of [postal workers] Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen tell us otherwise.”
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VANESSA DIXON
A member of the Healthcare Now Coalition and union organizer for the Committee of Interns and Residents, Dixon presented the paper “Communities in the Wake of Public Hospital Closures” at the recent American Public Health Association conference. She said today: “In the aftermath of the anthrax outbreak, officials told postal workers to go to D.C. General Hospital to have tests. The problem is that D.C. General is no longer a hospital. It was privatized last year and is now a level two emergency unit. They actually covered up the ‘hospital’ sign at the entrance. It’s a shell of a public facility. While some are treated at top-notch facilities, the rest of us are left at the mercy of overcrowded private hospitals and disappearing public hospitals.”
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167