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It is remarkable how someone like Gray Davis can be elected Governor of California without knowing the basic elements of Civics 101.Yes, Governor, our state and federal governments are divided into three branches — the legislative, executive and judicial branches. They were designed both to balance one another’s excesses and to perform functions unique to…

“Granny D You Speak For Me” That the streets of Washington, D.C., as they followed 90-year-old Doris Haddock on the last leg of her cross-country march to rally support for meaningful campaign finance reform. Granny D began her cross-country trek at the Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena, California on January 1, 1999. She steadily made…

Some thirty years ago David Caplovitz wrote about a situation that the poor have known for years. He called his book THE POOR PAY MORE. At the time, his documented evidence created quite a stir and many articles were written in the press about these intensive consumer abuses against people least able to endure them…

The Federal Reserve has always acted as a separate government. Normal checks and balances that apply to other federal agencies are simply ignored by the Federal Reserve Board. The Board sets its own budget and operates off the billions of dollars collected in buying and selling government securities as part of its control of the…

Alert for the millions of airline passenger knees — American Airlines will give them three to five extra inches of space in about a year. Hooray for small favors. One would think that buying an airline ticket for a seat on the plane would include knees along with toes and torsos. But since airline deregulation…

When twenty years ago Senator William Proxmire (D—WI) was championing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) that prohibited U.S. companies from bribing their way to sales in foreign countries, many large U.S. corporations were outraged and opposed. Unfair, they cried; other western countries allow foreign bribes (in fact, such bribes were deductible in some countries)…

There are two questions that have not been asked about the post election Clinton Administration and the Bush nomination of John Ashcroft as Attorney General. First, why does Ashcroft want the job? In over 20 years, as Missouri State Attorney General, Missouri Governor and U.S. Senator, he has fought against numerous laws that, as U.S.…

The major Presidential candidates are grinding through the various TV and radio press interviews and the town meetings with their three minute daily, redundant speeches and highly predictable replies to mostly predictable questions. That is what their advance people are supposed to accomplish. But what is remarkable is that both the national and the local…

Nothing is more scarce than thorough, tough or objective analysis of today’s corporations. What little there is comes mostly from academics, consumer and other public interest groups. The majority of the mainstream media skims the surface and usually serves as little more than a cheerleader for the corporations. Rarely does anyone from inside the corporate…

On January 6, 2000, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced that there would be three Presidential debates and one Vice Presidential debate in October 2000 at different locations around the country. The Commission has an official sounding name, but it is, in fact, a private organization run by the Republican and Democratic Parties, led…