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Local, state and federal governments, faced with complex problems in the delivery of services, increasingly are falling for schemes to let private corporations take over public duties. Behind the privatization of government functions is an ongoing propaganda campaign centered around the theme that corporations can manage and deliver services more efficiently at less cost than…
One of the Clinton Administration’s more outlandish giveaways to corporate interests was its decision six years ago to provide free deposit insurance to about 92 percent of the nation’s commercial banks. The move represented a five billion dollar annual bonanza to the banking industry and billions of dollars of new risk for taxpayers. Before she…
This year marks the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, one of the great blows to American democracy. The Act, which was drafted by employers, fundamentally infringed on workers’ human rights. Legally, it impeded employees’ right to join together in labor unions, it undermined the power of unions to represent workers’ interests…
Decades of consumer advocacy have built an impressive, if still inadequate, array of consumer guarantees in the common law, statutory allocations of rights to consumers — governmental and non-governmental — for consumer interests. It is unclear however, if the integrity and effectiveness of these norms and structures of consumer protection will continue in the digital…
Once more a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has raised big questions about how much of the federal government’s generous subsidy to the housing finance giants?Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–finds its way into housing, particularly affordable housing for low and moderate income families. In 1996, CBO estimated that Fannie and Freddie received $6.5…
At a time of rising customer complaints, sagging airline profits and cutbacks by major carriers, Southwest Airlines stands above the pack as brash and adventuresome as it was 30 years ago when Rollin King and Herb Kelleher launched the company as a three-airplane enterprise carrying passengers between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. From that modest…
Walter D. Miller, 70, was pumping gas into his vehicle on July 17th,when he collapsed and never revived. His hometown, Winsted, Connecticut, lost more than the owner of the 40-year-old Miller Air Conditioning and Heating business. The community lost a many-splendored public citizen — a pillar of local democracy and service. There were times when…
Most corporations measure their worth by their bottom line—profits. For some companies, like Working Assets Long Distance and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, profits, however, don’t begin to measure their valueto the public and communities. Working Assets, for example, donates one percent of its long-distance phone revenue to progressive non-profit organizations working for peace, human…
Senior citizens long have been targets of cruel scams perpetrated by credit merchants, fast-talking telemarketers, fraudulent charities and other sleazy operators who scheme to separate retirees from their meager pensions and savings. But these devious “backdoor” merchants may not be the seniors worst nightmare. That title might be better attached to the “respectable” white collar…
In our nation there is an accelerating obsession with public opinion polls, standardized tests, employee evaluation systems and a multitude of numerical measurements of every aspect of human existence. Television and newspaper coverage of national elections has become little more than a blizzard of polling data. Education policy is influenced heavily by tests which purport…