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March Madness comes once a year. Media Madness is year-round. What the mass media choose to cover and feature try to turn the priorities of any sane society upside down. People of vice, war, money, spectator sports and business receive media attention – oftentimes ad nausem. People of virtue, peace, civics, health, labor and community…
The Republican Party has a sense of humor, however inadvertently. Its ardent advocates regularly accuse the Obama Administration of heavy-handed regulation of business. Tell that to the hundred federal poultry inspectors who just picketed outside of the Department of Agriculture in opposition to a proposal that would allow those crammed, bacterial poultry slaughterhouses to do…
President Obama, As you know, this country has recently faced one of the worst financial crises in our history. In the aftermath, millions were left unemployed, without a home, saddled with enormous college loans, and struggling to get by. The economy continues to lag to this day, and many millions of Americans remain out of…
Dear Mr. Trumka, You have come to your leadership position of our country’s labor federation of unions with 13 million members the hard way. Starting by working in the coal mines, then becoming a lawyer, heading the United Mine Workers, then becoming the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO before assuming your present position in 2009, who…
By Ralph Nader Stetson J. Bradford III met up with his fellow CEO F. Reginald Lawless for a brow-to-brow lunch at the Penthouse Reverie Room high above Wall and Broad Streets in New York. As charter members of the 40-year Corporate Supremes Club, they had serious business to discuss before Thanksgiving weekend in 2011. The…
For months now our stocks have gone up and down due to various concerns, but none more recurrent than concerns about the financial crisis in Greece. Morning after morning, New York City based casino capitalists trade with Greece and the latest rumors from Western Europe on their minds. What will affluent Germany do to bail…
Gasoline and heating oil prices are ratcheting up. In California, some motorists are paying over $5 per gallon. President Obama declared that “there is no quick fix” for this problem. Meanwhile, the hapless but howling Republicans are blaming him for the fuel surge as if he is a price control czar. Indeed, President Obama has…
By Ralph Nader How inert can the Democratic Party be? Do they really want to defeat the Congressional Republicans in the fall by doing the right thing? A winning issue is to raise the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 since 2007. If it was adjusted for inflation since 1968, not to mention other erosions…
By Ralph Nader Anthony Shadid, called the “most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation” by his then Washington Post colleague, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (author of the widely heralded book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”), didn’t really need a byline. For anyone who knew of his peerless, unique reports from the Middle East would read them…
Call it what you will, but staged, premeditated or planned fighting in the National Hockey League (NHL), where two big “enforcers” slug each other’s heads with their bare fists, has no place in the game of hockey. Such fighting is boxing and as such requires a boxing license under many state laws. The NHL does…