All right! Who’s been proofreading with the spell checker again? From a recent suburban press release: “Excellent Whether Makes for Outstanding year at Festival.”
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Things welfare “reformers” don’t want to know, from “Welfare Reform and Child Care” (July), Toni Henle and Eve Ali’s paper for the Illinois Job Gap Project: “Workers just entering the labor force, particularly those in service establishments such as hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and stores that are open 24 hours a day, may have to work the hours more senior employees do not want, late at night or on weekends. Having an entry-level job can also mean working part-time at minimum wage, with the employee’s work schedule varying from week to week. And these are the typical jobs open to welfare recipients or to those who have just left the welfare rolls….There are virtually no licensed [child-]care facilities for employees who work evenings, nights, and weekends. The 1991 analysis commissioned by Public Aid found that only 8 percent of all centers surveyed in Illinois were open after 6:00 p.m., and only 3 percent were open on weekends.”
Competition could lower electric rates in the midwest, writes Howard Learner of the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Green Line (Spring)–but only if utilities’ recent “surge to merge” is restrained, and only if all consumers get to choose their electricity suppliers. “Unfortunately, some utilities envision a marketplace where large industrial customers choose among suppliers, while everyone else gets stuck with the high-priced leftovers from monopoly utilities. This ‘lemon socialism’ leaves the public holding the financial bag for uneconomic nuclear plants and should be rejected. All customers should have equal access to shop for cleaner, less expensive power. That is central to jump-starting the market for wind power, solar power, biomass and energy efficiency resources which people say they want.”
