In The News

The Shrimp Wars

Christina Hoag April 19, 2004
When American wild pink shrimp caught in the ocean are sold for $18.99 a pound while farmed shrimp from Thailand are only sold at $7.99, the market is going to tilt. In recent years, American shrimpers have found it increasingly difficult to maintain their business – ten years ago there were 5,000 shrimp trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico, but today only about 1,900 are left. The Southern Shrimp...

US Attempt at Domination Hobbled by Contradiction

Michael Kraig April 19, 2004
Critics point to the war in Iraq and President Bush's subsequent denial of reconstruction contracts to dissenting nations as proof of Washington's hegemonic tendencies. However, argues security expert Michael Kraig, the Iraq War is just the latest manifestation of a US foreign policy that has been deeply contradictory since the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the Cold War, a...

Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Media: Anatomy of a Failure

Susan Moeller April 14, 2004
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made the decision to present terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and Iraq as a linked triple threat. Susan Moeller, professor of media and international affairs at the University of Maryland, argues that in the “stultifying patriotic climate” that followed the attacks, most mainstream...

Outsourcing, Turned Inside Out

Ken Belson April 11, 2004
While most Americans today have heard about and many already been alarmed by the outsourcing of jobs overseas, some others might not be as worried; those include the employees of South Korean semiconductor company Samsung in Austin, Texas. The company just announced that it would pump another $500 into its Texas plant, adding an additional 300 jobs to its 700-people workforce. Samsung is not...

Globalization Alone Isn't Enough

Stephen Haber April 11, 2004
At a recent Summit of the Americas meeting in Mexico, US President George W. Bush urged Latin American countries to adopt a Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement so that the region could become even more integrated into the global economy. Latin American leaders, however, are cautious. In the 80s and 90s, most Latin American countries opened their economies to foreign trade and investment...

A Shortage of Seasonal Workers Is Feared

Eduardo Porter April 10, 2004
As the summer approaches, many American companies have started their seasonal worker recruitment process, but when employers went to the US Departments of Labor and Homeland Security to submit their visa applications for their foreign employees, they found out that this year's 66,000 limit for the H-2B visa, a visa for temporary foreign workers, was already reached, putting many of the...

Pentagon Seeks to Use Foreign Airlines

Micheline Maynard April 10, 2004
When the war in Iraq broke out and American troops and equipment were being transported half way across the world to the Middle East, people realized that not all the carriers involved in the transportation were in the US Air Force fleet. Instead, American owned commercial airlines did a large part of the job. Recently, however, the Pentagon announced that it wanted to include foreign airlines...