In the Public Interest

Corporate cyborg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, must be thinking these days that it was not like this in his movies. On the screen, Arnold was the pursuer, the hunter, and the attacker. On the hustings now, it is the nurses, along with the teachers, and the firefighters, who are dogging him everywhere with their protests against his…

Having moved along the path of destroying the freedoms and rights hitherto accorded wrongfully injured or defrauded Americans to have their full day in court via state class actions, George W. Bush is now pushing the Congress to make it even more difficult to sue for injuries and fatalities coming from medical negligence or incompetence.…

George W. Bush often says that the safety of all Americans is his highest priority. He doesn’t mean advancing vigorously the implementation of laws he has sworn to enforce against occupational disease and trauma, traffic injuries, air pollution, medical malpractice and other unsafe conditions that are taking the lives of many tens of thousands of…

It is difficult even for news hounds to keep up with the repeated and new prevarications of President George W. Bush. When he told his council of advisors a while back that he did not have to explain because he was the President, El Jefe was not kidding. It is difficult even for news hounds…

The phrase “participant-observer” comes from social science literature to mean someone who writes about an event or process while having participated in it. I’m going to have to do a little of that to make the following remarks. Bob Herbert is one of my favorite columnists. Writing twice a week in the New York Times…

Our lawless President and his Congressional cohorts are pushing legislation that would significantly erode Americans’ last defense against corporate crimes and frauds; the civil justice system. With a bill scheduled to reach the Senate floor next week, our freedom to redress harms in courts of law is in danger. S. 5, a proxy for last…

Last year, the Super Bowl halftime “wardrobe malfunction” led to an intense level of public outrage. The performance of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake prompted over a half-million complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, leading to increased fines against indecent broadcasters. While the nationally televised flash of a woman’s breast was shocking, the potential for…

The controversy over going ahead with the nine Inaugural balls’ huge fireworks and party bashes, to which mostly the rich and powerful have been invited, has not been restricted to talk radio shows. Deep in the White House deliberations last year, some of the BBBs (the brainy big backers), who are selected to give policy…

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines a “bigot” as “One obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his own church, party, belief or opinion.” George W. Bush has not turned, overtly at least, his war on Iraq and America’s civil justice system into his religion. But he has folded his “party, belief and opinion” into a relentless pattern of…

He calls himself a “compassionate conservative”óthis commander in chief of the carnage fields in Iraq. But when one of the world’s greatest natural disastersóthe giant tsunami waves of destructionóstruck South Asia’s millions of human beings on Sunday morning, George W. Bush was AWOL for over three days. On vacation again, Bush had delegated the representation…