Author Archives: floegel

The Future of NAFTA

12/16/2004 – 12:48 pm

I’m just back from Mexico. Not the Mexico of gleaming beaches and gringo-oriented resorts, but poor Mexico, where a decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement has taken a terrible toll. I visited Mexico City, the largest city in the world, with 25 million inhabitants. Mexico, the country, has 100 million inhabitants, so one […]

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Shell Game

12/9/2004 – 5:29 pm

The theme of the December 6 issue of Newsweek magazine is “Health for Life” and the cover lists several articles about health, but who cares? The real action is in the ads. The “book,” as they say in the business, is 98 pages long and contains 15 full-page ads for pharmaceutical drugs. Promotions include treatments […]

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Eleven Months Later

12/2/2004 – 12:56 pm

On January 1, I wrote in this space that 2004 would be the year that determines whether democracy survives in the U.S. With less than a month to go, three stories from the front section of today’s Washington Post give us an idea of where we stand. On the front page is a story about […]

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Decoding the Turkey

11/25/2004 – 8:09 am

Sharing a meal is the oldest of rituals; the first hominids to share food with those beyond their family group took the first – and probably largest – step on the path toward civilization. What a transcendent act it must have been, 20,000 years ago, to give away food. It’s not surprising that eating or […]

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Welcome to the Monkey House

11/18/2004 – 2:32 pm

After a week of intense fighting, often at close quarters, it now seems the remaining insurgents are being driven from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? It’s astounding, that even at this late date, one can read “thought” pieces in the mainstream media urging George […]

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Practice What You Preach

11/11/2004 – 11:52 am

Today is the 11th of November; when I was a child, people still called this “Armistice Day,” in commemoration of the cease-fire that ended the First World War. Maybe it’s a good day to call an armistice in America’s red-vs.-blue civil war. Maybe not. Presidential advisor Karl Rove was quoted in Wednesday’s New York Times […]

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The Government We Deserve

11/4/2004 – 9:33 am

It was dusk on Election Day and I was reaching a state of exhilaration. Exhausted, dehydrated, I had been running on adrenaline for the past 36 hours and now I was literally running through a low-income housing project in Ocala, Florida. We’d been through there a few days before, knocking on doors, urging citizens to […]

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