“When someone is having a heart attack, he doesn’t want to shop around,” Dr. Quentin Young of Chicago’s Health and Medicine Policy Research Group tells Chicago Enterprise (October 1990). And that’s why the government’s attempt to control health-care costs through the marketplace hasn’t worked out so well. The heart-attack victim, Young notes, “wants to be treated and cured now and he doesn’t care what it costs.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“For the past year or so, Bush and the right-wing establishment have been looking for a way to get rid of the ‘peace dividend’ other than implementing the social programs the American public has been asking for,” writes Chicago attorney Marian Henriquez Neudel in the New Patriot (November-December 1990). “So first they tried the ‘war on drugs.’ It seemed to meet all the requirements. Like the Cold War, it could absorb endless amounts of money without producing any measurable results. By the same token if it got to be too much of a drag, we could always declare a victory and pull out, and nobody would be able to tell the difference. But too many of the top brass in the war on drugs were actually starting to either point the finger at the behavior of respectable middle- and upper-class Americans, or even advocate a negotiated pullout by way of legalization. So our next step was Panama. [But] Panama was just plain too small to be taken seriously….This time, Bush actually seems to have hit pay dirt…. Given that the Middle East has been the scene of several different wars at any given moment for the past 3000 years, there is no danger that peace could break out and spoil everything. The original Crusades, after all, lasted four hundred years, on and off. For those purposes, the Middle East is even better than a land war in Asia.”
Just what you suspected all along. From the General Accounting Office’s September 1990 report on recruitment, retention, and inadequate pay in federal jobs: “The Chicago IRS reported in a 1987 clerical special rate request that, because of the lack of qualified candidates, it had often hired ‘any warm body’ just to get some work done.”
“The best single source of information on American executions is the extensive archive in Headland, Alabama, developed and maintained by Watt Espy,” writes Michael Radelet in the Southern Coalition Report on Jails & Prison (Summer 1990). According to this archive, various American jurisdictions have executed 15,978 people since 1608–and just 30 of them were white people executed for crimes against blacks. “In other words, there has been 1 execution of a white for a crime against a black for every 533 recorded executions in American history.”
