In the Public Interest

Nearly forty years ago, a young high school motorcycle rider in Rockford, Illinois went over a grate, flipped over into the air and landed with a broken body. He became paraplegic. Because of the remarkable way Ralf Hotchkiss responded to his disability, thousands of people with disabilities here and in developing countries are now riding…

In the rarified world of economics and industrial engineering, there was never anyone like Columbia University professor Seymour Melman. I grew up reading and listening to the prophetic, factual and hard-nosed arguments he made for his anti-war and worldwide disarmament causes in the specialized and, occasionally, the major media as well. There were Seymour Melman’s…

Colman McCarthy believes in “strength through peace.” So much so that he left his job as a columnist for the Washington Post to expand his Center for Teaching Peace to spread the wisdom of adopting peace studies at high schools and colleges around the country. There are now 300 peace programs in place, offering majors,…

Michael Sommer, a technology consultant, found out the hard way about one-way fine print contracts as he checked in recently for a flight to Buenos Aires. A United Arlines supervisor at the gate handed him a letter that decreed the confiscation of his 2 million frequent flier miles, dozens of flight coupons and his elite…

Law-breaker, union-buster, tax-escapee and shifter of costs to others, the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, announced last week that it would respect the wishes of its Chinese workers to form a union. As is usual with Wal-Mart announcements, a substantial overstatement is working here. In China, unions are not independent; they are government-controlled with the Chinese…

In response to corporate crime waves, the government usually passes a series of meek reforms (like the Sarbanes Oxley law of 2002). Over the years, our citizen groups have introduced numerous proposals to crack down on corporate crime, including: the FBI creation of an annual Corporate Crime in the United States report; tripling the budgets…

The massive corporate wave of crime, fraud and abuse rolls on, is undeterred by regular exposes in the business media itself. My favorite corporate crime journal (aka the Wall Street Journal) is a daily newspaper that never runs out of material. Daily Journal headlines recently alerted readers to: (1) “Lucent Faces Bribery Allegations,” (2) “Companies…

Whenever I hear sports fans on talk radio or personally chat with people about sports both Spectator and participatory games — the depth and breadth of the conversations are not surprising. As a teenager fan, I knew the batting averages of half the players in the American League. It is the American way. This mental…

Let’s face it. Most politicians use the mass media to obfuscate. Voters who don’t do their homework, who don’t study records of the politicians, and who can’t separate the words from the deeds will easily fall into traps laid by wily politicians. In 2002, Connecticut Governor John Rowland was running for re-election against his Democratic…

The callous politics of profit over people are in play every fourth November, but on November 2nd 2004, voters in four states — Florida, Oregon, Nevada and Wyoming — will be voting on various measures of tort reform that would essentially limit the rights of those grossly injured by medical malpractice errors in those states.…