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May 3, 2000

Bill Maxwell
Insurance bias has more sinister side
For as long as I can remember, black people have tried to tell insurance watchdogs that some companies were charging white customers one rate for burial insurance and black customers another.

Editorials
Unsafe skies, a year later
Legislators never heard a word -- not in public, anyway -- to explain why this was necessary or why the lives of Floridians should be worth less than the lives of other people when multiple jurisdictions are involved. It was wrong to put that in the law and unconscionable to leave it in.

Scaring them away
It's little wonder that all of the candidates for the University of Florida presidency have withdrawn. Who would want to come into a system that may soon lose its Board of Regents and become a political quagmire?

An advocate who set an example
In the incestuous world of big-money politics, it's not always easy to tell when politicians, government workers and lobbyists are acting in the public's interest -- or merely in their own.

Letters
Pollution is reason to reject power plants
Re: Open state's electric avenue, editorial, April 28.  

Perspective
Taking jobs, alienating customers
For weeks Americans have been told that the outsourcing of high-tech jobs is good for our economy. So said Greg Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a recent report signed by President Bush. So, too, writes Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in articles praising the rise of call centers in India used for everything from making airline reservations and reading medical X-ray films to providing tech support for American computer firms.

Philip Gailey: Democrats fall off campaign finance reform wagon
Well, what do you know. Soft money is back, and it's making hypocrites of all those Democrats who fervently championed the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, not to mention those Republicans who objected to the law's restrictions on issue advocacy.

Bill Maxwell: Who is for the farm worker?
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is touting legislation to improve the lives of Florida's 300,000-plus farm workers, who endure institutional and systemic injustices each day in our fields and groves and their personal lives.

Robyn E. Blumner: For some defendants, an American gulag
In Bernard Malamud's masterpiece The Fixer, inmate Yakov Bok was subjected to psychological torture in a Soviet gulag through the humiliations of constant shackling and repeated strip searches.