In the Public Interest

During a stretch of years in the late 1960s and 1970s, the young environmental movement, rippling with exuberant grassroots power and loaded with powerful arguments, pushed through a series of bedrock federal laws: the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air and Clean Water Act amendments, the Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe…

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…

For years, many school administrators, hard pressed to find extra funds to finance student activities and supplement needed classroom supplies, have allowed the installation of vending machines which dispense soft drinks, candy and a variety of junk foods. The machines may well be significant money makers, but it is a sad and ill thought out…

Banks and their regulators have always enjoyed a cozy relationship. Regulators are notorious for going slow in clamping down hard on practices that might be unsafe and unsound. Cease and desist orders, a weapon available to all the regulators, are used sparingly and usually only in the most egregious cases. The hundreds of billions of…

Labor Day comes and goes — but Congress does little to improve the plight of workers in our country. In the last three decades our elected officials have too often chosen to side with big corporations rather than the working people in the United States. In the face of aggressive employer demands for concessions, the…

The war in Iraq is doing more than wasting human lives and vast sums of money and goodwill for the United States around the world. As the quagmire of Iraq deepens, other issues affecting the vital health and economic well-being of our citizens are being ignored by the Bush Administration. The costs of this neglect…

You won’t find the Judges’ Journal on any newstands, but the Summer 2004 issue headlined “Justice in Jeopardy: The State Court Funding Crisis” will affect you more than most of the magazines that are so posted. State court budgets all over the country are being cut, which means reduced services and longer delays for trials…

Anchorage, Alaska— His eyes were darting and his voice was urgent with a compelling message. Peter Gruenstein, an Alaskan trial attorney and co-author of a book on Alaska, was speaking against the greatest blow to our political democracy since big money started buying the two major parties. He calls gerrymandering—often known as redistricting— “the civil…

Better later than never. More than two decades after Michigan’s Supreme Court upheld an egregious abuse of government’s power of eminent domain, that same court acknowledged the error of its ways. The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution permits government to seize private property for a “public use,” such as a highway, railroad, or…

The Democratic Party-Party Convention is over and its singular memory will be its predictable banality and the commercialism that mostly financed it. Historically, conventions were newsworthy because there was a struggle over who would receive the nomination and what the Parties would stand for in their platforms. Today there is a coronation for the nominee…