Author Archives: floegel

Helter Shelter

5/15/1997 – 3:50 pm

The more I read the newspapers, the more I keep coming back to the same question: If agricultural chemicals are so safe, why do members of anti-government militias keep using them to make bombs? If it’s not a report from the McVeigh trial, then it’s the Republic of Texas or another clutch of wackos here […]

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Costs of Free Trade

5/8/1997 – 3:49 pm

If you’re one of those people who follow Congress, you know our elected representatives will soon debate whether we should extend the current most-favored-nation trading status to the People’s Republic of China. Deng Xiaoping is dead but little has changed in China; anyone who has the courage to publicly disagree with the government is dragged […]

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Sticking With the Union

5/1/1997 – 3:47 pm

Three weeks ago, I did something I should have done a long time ago. I joined a union. You are now being addressed by a member of the National Writers Union, United Auto Workers, Local 1981, AFL-CIO. You may think that because I joined the union I have a grievance; perhaps I have a bone […]

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Serf City, Here We Come

4/27/1997 – 3:45 pm

There used to be a show on public television in which a guy would talk about the history of technology and the effect it had on political history. For example, the British defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt because they figured out a way to build a better bow and arrow. History moves […]

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The One That Got Away

4/17/1997 – 3:44 pm

How about some good news for once? You must grow tired from all the bad news I bring you. I do. Our good news comes from Chile, that slim country in the south. Until a recently a dictatorship, Chile is again trying on the fashions of democracy. No sooner had Augusto Pinochet begun to relax […]

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Not Another NAFTA

4/10/1997 – 3:42 pm

In 1992, we had a presidential election. In 1993, we had NAFTA. In 1996, we had another presidential election. What are we getting this year? More NAFTA. As surely as winter follows autumn, it looks like we are locked into a cycle of elections-then-free trade agreements. As much as politicians tell us we want free […]

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The Cold War Comes Home

4/3/1997 – 3:23 pm

I was reading reports of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit last week, thinking about how these two men were putting away the last vestiges of an old order. I used to live in Washington, DC; I was there when the Soviet Union went out of business, when the Warsaw Pact dissolved like a chalk drawing on a […]

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