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Suppose a friend owes you $20 and sends you a check for that amount in the mail. You take the check and deposit it in your bank and it bounces due to your friend’s innocent overdraft. Some banks will charge YOU as much as $20 for being the innocent victim. Regardless of whether the check…

Tobacco industry executives are reeling from a series of embarrassing appearances before Congress regarding the health effects of smoking and because of disclosures in the media about the nicotine content of cigarettes. Now comes the consumer and corporate accountability organization, INFACT, and its Tobacco Industry Campaign. One of INFACT’s main goals is to compel the…

New Yorkers have known for some time that they pay about the highest electricity prices in the country. Big Apple residents can now know one of the reasons why: Consolidated Edison (Con Ed), the monopoly electric company servicing the area, is the most profitable utility in the nation. This conclusion is based on a study…

As compared with portrayals of virtue, depictions of vice are more likely to stimulate attentiveness on the part of radio and television audiences. But Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh have taken this craven pit to new depths. Howard Stern, in case you’ve never heard him, is the multimillionaire radio “shock jock” with long flowing hair,…

What is happening to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia? Talk to him about his demands that wrongfully injured victims of medical malpractice and product defects be further restricted from having their full day in court and the normally shy, self-deprecating politician behaves like his great grandfather, the arrogant oil billionaire who crushed…

No one could pigeonhole the multiple careers of Betty Furness who lost a battle with cancer on April 2 in New York City at the age of 78. If the only true ageing is the erosion of one’s ideals, she never did age. Instead Betty Furness was the paragon of ageless living with the last…

The President has been playing and relaxing. Everyone needs a rest, even one whose ten day vacations cost the taxpayer one big bundle. But have you ever heard of a President who goes to three NCAA playoff basketball games and opening day of the baseball season in one week? Have you ever heard of a…

Ever wonder how vigorous markets in collectibles — stamps, coins, beer cans, match covers, baseball cards — got started? Numerous economists I’ve put this question to have no idea and cannot point to any research in this area. What we do know is that these collectible marketplaces usually do not start from one “producer” or…

At last count there were more insurance consumers by far in Connecticut than insurance companies and their executives, but you wouldn’t know it by examining the political behavior of the state’s two Democratic Senators Christopher Dodd and Joseph Lieberman and Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson. As legislative heel-clickers for the giant insurance lobby, many of which…

The nation’s most prosperous drug dealers — the tobacco companies — are on the defensive these days. After years of control over Congress and the White House, the once powerful tobacco lobby is under attack by forces determined in all kinds of ways to reduce the annual death toll of over 400,000 Americans from tobacco-related…