Medicare or casinos?
Theodore Roszak, in a Hope magazine interview (Winter '01), disputes the notion that growing numbers of seniors will make Social Security unaffordable.

"Americans should realize that not only did we come to entitlements after every other industrial society in the world, but we still spend far less on entitlements -- meaning, in our case, Social Security and Medicare -- than other industrial societies, which are doing a very good job of competing with us in world markets. We are a rich society; we can afford vastly more than other countries when it comes to providing a dignified retirement for older citizens. ...

"A very telling set of facts is this: Medicare costs us 200 billion dollars a year. The people of the U.S. spend 630 billion dollars a year on gambling alone. Look beyond that at the way we spend money on professional athletics, entertainment, cosmetics, cigarettes, liquor. ...

"The idea that we cannot possibly afford an older society is not only economically untrue, but it's ethically absurd. It's as if we're saying that now that we have gained the gift of time, which is the grand product of two centuries of industrial development, we can't afford it. Longevity is not a cost; it's a benefit of solving other problems. Every time we find a way to improve nutrition, every time we find a way to bring babies into the world healthier, every time we stop teenagers from smoking, every time we provide more safety in the workplace or automobile, every time we conquer another disease, the result is longevity. It is a benefit we're willing to pay for, as you can see by the way we use our money on medical science, public health and research."

Exporting the U.S. prison model
Repressive prison trends that activists are confronting in the U.S. are spreading to other countries, Angela Davis says in an interview with The Progressive (Feb. '01).

"When I visited Australia a year and a half ago, I found that the largest women's prison there, which is outside of Melbourne, is owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, which is headquartered in Nashville, Tenn. It is not only the tendency to incarcerate ever greater numbers of people that one can see in European countries and Australia, but also the supermaximum prisons have been exported. There are supermaximum prisons in the Netherlands, South Africa, and even Sweden. The security housing unit, which is a particularly repressive formation originating in the U.S., has invaded their prisons as well."

Cuba, in contrast, offers a better model, Davis says.
"In Cuba, at least in the women's prisons I visited, the women -- unlike women in the U.S. or in other countries -- did not feel disconnected from the larger society. The effort to pay close attention to the U.N. standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners was very obvious. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the system itself was the fact that prisoners were allowed to continue to work in their fields if their offense was not related to their particular profession. I talked to a woman who was a veterinarian, for example, and she continued to be a veterinarian in the prison. I talked to a woman who was a doctor, and she continued to be a physician in the particular prison where she was incarcerated. That in itself was interesting because it inverts the hierarchies of prisoners and guards. As the doctor, she was in charge of civilian nurses, for example, and was treated not as a prisoner, not as an inferior person, but rather as a doctor.

"Furthermore, people who work, and virtually everyone works who is in prison, receive the same wages and salaries as they would receive if they were working in the same job on the outside. It was a striking difference with respect to the U.S., where prisoners can receive as little as 10 cents an hour."

Monitoring of multinationals
A coalition of environment, labor and human rights groups is calling for new legislation that would require U.S.-based corporations to disclose information about their operations in other countries, The Michigan Citizen reports (3/3/01).

"U.S. law requires companies to disclose some basic information about their domestic activities, including what kind of pollution they emit or how many employees have been injured on the job.

"The coalition is currently circulating a proposal that urges members of Congress to draft new legislation that would extend these existing requirements to companies' overseas operations.

"'Communities and workers throughout the world have the right to important information about corporate practices that will have significant impacts on their lives,' said a statement by the coalition of more than 150 organizations including Amnesty International, the AFL-CIO and Friends of the Earth."

According to this proposal, U.S. corporations would be required to "reveal the environmental impact of products and operation, reveal details of all security arrangements with government or private firms, indicate whether or not they had a human rights policy, indicate whether they faced any charges of human rights violations, reveal the numbers of workers hurt, killed or handling hazardous material at each plant, and reveal the location of all plants around the world."

First Muslim holiday stamp
The first U.S. postal stamp honoring Muslim holidays will be available in October, 2001, Church & State reports. The stamp commemorates Eid-al-Fitr, a Muslim feast that marks the end of fasting for the month of Ramadan, and Eid-al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice. The campaign for the stamps was led by the American Muslim Council, which arranged for 3,000 Muslim children to send letters to the postmaster. The stamp features the Arabic phrase "Eid mubarak," which means "blessed festival," in gold against a blue background.