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Reading a recent issue of Public Citizen’s excellent Health Letter titled “Know When Antibiotics Work,” I recalled the recent tragic loss of a healthy history professor who was rushed to a fine urban hospital, with a leading infectious disease specialist by his side. No antibiotics could treat his mysterious “superbug.” He died in 36 hours.…
Bob King, the new president of the United Auto Workers, whose membership is down under 400,000 from a peak of 1.5 million in 1979 is rolling out an initiative to organize foreign auto plants in the U.S., expand the union’s reach overseas and forge alliances with social justice organizations. Ordinarily, the response to these ambitions…
Dear President Obama: The sentiments expressed in this letter may have more meaning more for you now that the results of the mid-term elections are clear. You have seen what can happen when a number of your supporters lose their enthusiasm and stay home or do not actively participate as volunteers. In your first two…
The start of the New Year is a good time to talk about Time. About this, we can all agree—there are only twenty four hours in a day. Zillions of companies and persons want a piece of that time from us in order to make money. But that supply of Time is not expandable. Unlike…
December 30, 2010 Dear Governor-Elect Cuomo: The conditions where many regular New Yorkers live are grim. Poverty, unemployment, home foreclosures, and small business bankruptcies keep growing. On the other side of the tracks, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers recorded an average of $1 billion each, or over $80 million each a month in 2009.…
Pharmaceutical Industry Fraud By Ralph Nader The corporate defrauding of taxpayers (eg. Medicaid and Medicare) and prescription drugs with skyrocketing prices was the subject of a report by Public Citizen’s Dr. Sidney Wolfe and his associates (see Citizen.Org). Dr. Wolfe’s team compiled a total of 165 federal and state settlements since 1991 totaling $19.8 billion…
Thomas Blanton, the esteemed director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University described Washington’s hyper-reaction to Wikileaks’ transmission of information to some major media in various countries as “Wikimania.” In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday, Blanton urged the Justice Department to cool it. Wikileaks and newspapers like The New York…
On Friday, December 10, 2010, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent Socialist, of Vermont, came of age. At last. With just about the best progressive voting record, Senator Sanders has nonetheless been an underachiever in the minds of those Americans who marveled at his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vt. before he became a Congressman and now…
Dear President Obama: Increasingly credible press reports say that you are going to join with the Republican minority in the Congress and support the two year extension of the Bush tax cut for the Rich, along with the cuts for the $200,000 (individual) and $250,000 (couples) that the Democrats were favoring. It has become a…
If there was a mental health hospital for institutions the Republican Party and its top leaders would be admissible as clinically insane. Their bizarre wackopedia seems to contain no discernible boundaries. Repeatedly, these corporate supplicants oppose any measure, any regulation, any legislation that will directly help workers, consumers, the environment, small taxpayers and even investor-shareholders.…