February 4, 2002 Issue

Feature

A New Current in Palestine

It’s too soon to call it a party, but there’s now a popular, independent group.
Edward W. Said
For Her Own Good

With the “family cap,” the state says to welfare moms: no more babies!
Karen Houppert
Crime in the Suites

There are more Enrons out there; the rot is systemic.
William Greider
Who’s Utopian Now?

Welfare reform has left America dangerously undefended against hard times.
Frances Fox Piven and Barbara Ehrenreich
Reforming Welfare–Take Two

As Congress revisits the welfare debate, it’s time to look at what the law has wrought.
Bound and Gagged

The first thing they do is cover your eyes. They make you strip to make sure you’re not carrying anything. They replace your clothes with uniforms that are not clothes at all.
Charles Glass
Enron on the Hill

For weeks, conservative commentators and Bush White House defenders have been huffing that the Enron matter is a corporate scandal, not a political controversy–that it is an affair of business sku
David Corn
Enron’s Washington

Matt Bivens

Column

The Sinking of the USS Enron–A Free-Market Metaphor

The pirate ship has sunk beneath the waves.
The swabs who haven’t gone to wat’ry graves
Row desperately, though all of them now know
Their water and their food are running low.
They row their wretched boats and curse their lot.
Receding in the distance is a yacht
That carries all their officers, who knew
The ship was doomed but didn’t tell the crew.
The officers stand tall. They saw their duty:
Desert the ship by night and take the booty.
Calvin Trillin
$hotgun Weddings

Katha Pollitt
Divide and Misrule

One of the old school of the British colonial service, a man with the irresistible name of Sir Penderel Moon, wrote a book about the end of empire and titled it Divide and Quit. At whose expense was this extremely dry joke? Look around the global scene today, and you will find the landscape pitted with the shards of that very policy.
Christopher Hitchens
Enron Got Its Money’s Worth

One of the major falsehoods being bandied about by apologists for the Bush Administration is that while Enron may have bankrolled much of the President’s political career it got nothing for those
Robert Scheer

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