In the Public Interest

Once again, General Motors shows how it can go backwards into the future. Its average new motor vehicle fuel inefficiency has been getting worse in recent years. Now it wants to unbundle many of its vehicles by dropping standard equipment side air bags and anti-lock braking systems (ABS) and charging its customers more for these…

One of the hardest decisions for citizen reform groups to make when supporting legislation that is pending for years is how much weakening they will tolerate before they break away in opposition. Campaign finance reform in Congress, after years of struggle by coalition groups such as Common Cause and Public Citizen, passed and was unenthusiastically…

After years of indifference to reports of corporate crime and abuse in the mainstream media, a significant shift toward alarm, indignation and revulsion is occurring in Congress by some senior members of both Parties. This does not mean that strong legislation and strong law enforcement are inevitably on the way; the Bushites in the Executive…

In its celebrated cover story eighteen months ago, Business Week magazine asked “Too much corporate power?” and answered yes in several detailed pages. it then delivered an editorial which urged that corporations “get out of politics.” Last month, the giant British Petroleum Company (BP), having acquired the American oil companies, Amoco and Atlantic Richfield, announced…

Television advertisements during the recent Olympics were high-priced, but one by McDonald’s reached a new low. It pictured a baby next to a parent with the message “There will be a first step, a first word and, of course, a first french fry.” The lethal impact – start clogging the tiny arteries at the earliest…

Thanks to one of the biggest corporate giveaways during the Clinton Administration, most of the nation’s commercial banks have been enjoying the benefits of free federal deposit insurance since 1995. Now the decision to let banks drop premium payments when the bank insurance fund’s reserves reached the statutory minimum of 1.25 percent of insured deposits…

Enron, Enron, Enron — front page and center, top of the network television news and the biggest criminally-derived bankruptcy in U.S. history. A “gargantuan pyramid scheme,” says Republican Senator Peter G. Fitzgerald. Proposals for reform are gushing forth from Congressional minds of varying sincerities. Tougher regulations to protect investors, pensionholders from crooked self-dealing corporate executives…

For years I have wondered why religious sermons in places of worship focus so exclusively on excoriating individual sin while avoiding corporate sin in the business world. Well, those days of avoidance are being replaced with increasing attention to the gigantic, multi-directional Enron crimes and abuses against so many innocent people. “The behavior of Enron…

The integrity of institutions of higher education has long been under assault by the growing collaboration between corporations and academia, particularly in the areas of scientific and technological research. More than two decades ago, David F. Noble, a historian who now teaches at York University in Toronto,warned in an article in the Nation that corporations,…

Two leaders – one the Secretary of Defense and the other the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – need to put their fortitude behind their recent acknowledgments of major problems in their domains. Donald Rumsfeld, who was a class ahead of me at Princeton and vibrating with energy even then, has been reported…