In the Public Interest

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…

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…