WILLIAM HARTUNG
Senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute and author of the recent report “Lockheed Martin and the GOP: Profiteering and Pork Barrel Politics with a Purpose,” Hartung said today: “Bush-Cheney is the arms industry’s dream team. Bush tried to give Lockheed Martin a contract to run the Texas welfare system. Lockheed Martin VP Bruce Jackson, a finance chair of the Bush for President campaign, was heard to brag at a conference last year that he would be in a position to ‘write the Republican platform’ on defense. Under Cheney, Halliburton went from 42nd to 18th on the Pentagon’s top contractors list. Cheney’s wife, Lynne, serves on Lockheed Martin’s board, a service for which she receives $120,000 in compensation.”
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DIANA ZUCKERMAN
President of the National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families, Zuckerman said today: “Texas has one of the nation’s worst records of health care for children, and yet Gov. Bush did not support a federal program (CHIP) that provides health insurance for children who don’t have it. Assaults in Texas schools have increased, and yet Gov. Bush has opposed efforts to limit access to lethal weapons. Bush’s proposed tax cuts will mean less money for federal programs — and the GOP has a habit of cutting health and education programs, not defense… [Dick Cheney has] opposed some of the most essential programs for children, including school lunch programs, Head Start, and legislation aimed at preventing family violence.”
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JULIE DAVIDS
“Bush has been silent on AIDS as governor and candidate,” said Davids, a member of ACT UP Philadelphia, which is widely credited with forcing the Clinton administration to begin to back down from its threats to impose sanctions on African countries that produce legal generic versions of expensive AIDS drugs. “Bush’s extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry virtually assure that he will reverse that policy. With millions of African lives at stake, AIDS drugs for Africa must become a campaign issue for Bush as well as Gore.”
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DEBORAH TOLER
Policy analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, Toler said today: “The Republicans are making it a point to feature attractive African Americans like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, but George W. Bush’s official positions on racism, the criminal justice system, welfare ‘reform,’ affirmative action and so on are totally contrary to the interests of African Americans.”
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MARK CRISPIN MILLER
Professor of media studies at New York University and author of the forthcoming Operation Desert Storm and the Triumph of Illusion, Miller said today: “With its cinematic tribute to Operation Desert Storm, the Bush-Cheney ticket demonstrated the same dangerous knack for fantasy that made that war seem — on American TV — like one long happy dream. This film was a tissue of seductive lies. It erased the U.S. complicity in Saddam Hussein’s military buildup and invasion of Kuwait, the weeks and weeks of unprecedented bombing from the air, the actual failure of our very costly high-tech weaponry, and the dreadful sufferings of the Iraqi people — sufferings caused directly by President Bush’s war and by U.S. sanctions that continue to this day.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020