In the Public Interest

New Orleans, the largest city devastated by two Hurricanes, lies in ruins.  The reconstruction plans are forming and the usual commercial interests are in the forefront to receive large subsidies, federal overpayments and special immunities from having to meet labor, environmental and other normal legal safeguards for the people.   The corporate looting of New…

Amidst the wailing and grieving by those many victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita comes the growls of greed from those corporations getting huge contracts from the US government to supply emergency relief, reconstruction services and materials. From everywhere — the press, citizen groups, lawmakers, federal inspectors general — come the howls and charges of…

You would think that with all the troubles surrounding George W. Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress — from the life-costing bungling of Hurricane responses to the deepening quagmire in Iraq to the front page stories of corruption, self-dealing and national security leaks — you would think the Democrats would be in the ascendancy.…

Historians like to speak of special times when leaders “seized the moment” to enact or implement their priorities. Giant hurricanes make these “special times,” and no one is moving faster to exploit them than the corporate powers. Urged on by the Wall Street Journal’s editorials, corporate lobbyists are demanding of the federal and state governments…

If only corporations could laugh—if only corporations could laugh during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge John Roberts’ nomination for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, they would head for the nearest champagne closet in their executive suites. What a triumph for the most dominant powers in and around our nation. Judge Roberts got…

With the proper media focus on the horrors of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent preventable destruction by flooding of lives, hopes and jobs, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week on the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States will be fighting for…

For over two years I have been saying that the Mayor of Baghdad, George W. Bush, should be paying attention to America, including its massively unmet public works needs. But the President, who scheduled five weeks in Crawford, Texas, to assure “a balanced life,” is now finding his political status unbalanced and hanging by fewer…

Soon millions of parents will be writing tuition checks for their children at public universities, believing that they are paying much less than the actual cost of an undergraduate education. Tuition at these public institutions has been going up quickly in the past decade, reversing the long-held public policy that tax monies should pay for…

While George W. Bush keeps saying that the United States is at war, for most of the United States, apart from the soldiers and military families, the people seem detached from the daily devastation in Iraq. Reporters and anti-war activists have made this observation repeatedly over the past months. To be sure, the polls are…

Babies are dying of starvation in Niger—a large country in dry Africa with 12 million people. Their emaciated mothers and fathers are eating rats except lately the rats themselves are starving. A massive attack of locusts in the midst of a prolonged drought led to a harvest failure and the spreading fatal famine. The government,…