Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [108]
For more on the costs of the drug war, read The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, April 2000; Drug Policy Alliance, “‘Fuzzy Math’ in New ONDCP Report,” February 12, 2003. To get involved, contact the Prison Moratorium Project at www.nomoreprisons.org, a group working to stop prison expansion and put resources into communities most affected by criminal justice policies. Also look at New York Mothers of the Disappeared, an organization of family members fighting to put an end to the Rockefeller Drug Laws that target poor people and people of color (www.kunstler.org).
The statistic on money spent on illegal drugs each year is from “Prepared Remarks of Attorney General John Ashcroft, DEA/Drug Enforcement Rollout,” John Ashcroft, United States Department of Justice, March 19, 2002.
The information on illiteracy in prisons and of welfare recipients comes from the most up-to-date National Center for Education statistics as reported in The Center on Crime Communities and Culture (Open Society Institute), “Education as Crime Prevention,” September 1997; Verizon Reads Program at www.verizonreads.net; Lezlie McCoy, “Literacy in America,” The Philadelphia Tribune, December 3, 2002. To become involved in programs fighting illiteracy, go to Literacy Volunteers of America at www.literacyvolunteers.org and Women in Literacy at www.womeninliteracy.org.
Statistics about spending on education and prisons comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, National Association of State Budget Officers, U.S. Census Bureau as cited in Mother Jones’ special report “Debt to Society,” 2001.
For information on income disparity in the U.S., read the Census Bureau report, “A Brief Look at Postwar U.S. Income Inequality,” June 1996 (covering years 1947 to 1992) and “The Changing Shape of the Nation’s Income Distribution, 1947-1998,” June 2000. Also look at Paul Krugman’s New York Times article “For Richer,” October 20, 2002.
11. Bush Removal and Other Spring Cleaning Chores
In 2000, Gore received 48.38 percent of the vote and Ralph Nader got 2.74 percent, according to the official results from the Federal Election Commission (www.fec.gov). Combined, this is 51.12 percent.
As The New York Times reported (David Rosenbaum, “Defying Labels Left or Right, Dean’s ’04 Run Is Making Gains,” July 30, 2003), Dean “remains a fiscal conservative, he believes gun control should be left to the states and he favors the death penalty for some crimes.”
According to the United States Census Bureau’s February 2002 report “Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2000,” 42,359,000 white non-Hispanic men voted in the 2000 election. A total of 110,826,000 votes were cast, making white men 38.22 percent. Women of all races accounted for 59,284,000 votes, or 53.49 percent. Black men cast 5,327,000 votes in 2000, comprising 4.81 percent, while Hispanic men cast 2,671,000 votes, equal to 2.41 percent—combined this is 7.22 percent. Thus, black men, Hispanic men, and women totaled 60.71 percent of all voters.
The two women senators as of 1991 were Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kansas), who served from 1978 to 1997, and Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), who has served 1987 to present. The other current women senators are: Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska); Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas); Dianne Feinstein (D-California); Barbara Boxer (D-California); Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana); Olympia Snowe (R-Maine); Susan Collins (R-Maine); Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan); Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York); Elizabeth Dole (R-North Carolina); Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas); Patty Murray (D-Washington); and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington). The first woman elected to the United States Senate was Hattie Wyatt Caraway (D-Arkansas). She was not, however, the first woman to serve in the Senate—that distinction belongs to Rebecca Latimer