In the Public Interest

The mid-term elections are over. After spending hundreds of millions of business dollars, the Republicans now control the Senate and hold on to the House of Representatives. It is amazing that the Democrats did not do worse. They had decided months ago on a strange strategy — that they were going to defeat the Republicans…

The Democrats should have an easy time winning control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in next week’s election. Recession is deepening, unemployment is rising, and corporate corruption headlines are proliferating. Health care costs, drug prices and the number of Americans without health care coverage are all increasing. Median household incomes are falling.…

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of one of the nation’s fastest growing unions — the 45,000-member California Nurses Association — called him “the greatest labor leader I have ever known.” She was referring to Anthony Mazzocchi, a mentor and strategist to thousands of labor activists over the past 50 years. He lost his struggle with…

About 80,000 Americans die every year (and many more are harmed) in hospitals from medical incompetence, neglect or worse, according to the Harvard School of Public Health report. The make matters worse, the Republicans in the Congress are pushing to pass legislation to drastically restrict the compensation for pain and suffering that state and federal…

When the revelations of crime and deception poured out of the executive suites of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and other corporations earlier this year, politicians-particularly sitting members of the Senate and the House of Representatives-unleashed a blizzard of news releases to denounce corporate crime. Never mind that many of these same politicians long had been neck-deep…

Blind adherence to ideology can get you in some sticky places. That’s where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — the Washington, D.C.-based agency which makes loans to developing countries facing balance-of-payment and fiscal difficulties — now finds itself. The IMF believes in unregulated markets, and pushes for policies of deregulation, privatization and marketization without regard…

The ultimate downfall of the corporate globalizers may be that they know no limits. Not satisfied with imposing pull-down agreements on the trade in goods, Big Business is looking to do the same thing for services through the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Services includes such economic sectors as finance (banking, insurance, pensions),…

Can the Congressional Democrats draw a bright line between themselves and the Republicans over what needs to be done about corporate crime in the eight weeks before the November elections? At first thought, the answer should be easy. The Republicans and their “whatever corporations want” subservient stance during the Nineties reached levels somewhere between unconditional…

Workers and consumers these days could echo Rodney Dangerfield’s line about not getting any respect. Labor Day has come and gone with very little mention of its significance by the major newspapers or the television networks. It is not for lack of news. Non-union labor has been slipping behind in their inflation adjusted wages since…

Ever since the first public transit — a ferryboat near Boston in 1630 — got underway, a Broad variety of carriers have emerged — buses, trolleybuses, vanpools, jitneys, heavy and light rail, cable cars, monorails, tramways and automated guideway transit. Rarely did these transports ever attract private investment — that was reserved for The Car…