In the Public Interest

Never underestimate the flexibility of corporate executives who run the nation’s major air carriers. Last week, they slammed file cabinet drawers shut on their favorite speeches about the glories of free markets and the horrors of government intervention, and marched to Capitol Hill, hats in hand to ask the Congress for multi-billion dollar handouts of…

Nobody sweats the details like GM customers. That’s the complaint that comes to us day after day by Americans hailing from all backgrounds and trades. A short while ago we printed a sample of over 100 of these letters in a collection entitled “The General Motors Lemon Grove.” Read together, once can see they comprise…

States rights used to be the rallying cry for corporations, segregationists, and an assortment of special interests determined to blunt federal initiatives, particularly in the arena of regulation. Many state legislatures were underfunded, poorly staffed and were in session only for a few weeks or months, some meeting only biennially. As a result, corporate lobbyists…

Local, state and federal governments, faced with complex problems in the delivery of services, increasingly are falling for schemes to let private corporations take over public duties. Behind the privatization of government functions is an ongoing propaganda campaign centered around the theme that corporations can manage and deliver services more efficiently at less cost than…

One of the Clinton Administration’s more outlandish giveaways to corporate interests was its decision six years ago to provide free deposit insurance to about 92 percent of the nation’s commercial banks. The move represented a five billion dollar annual bonanza to the banking industry and billions of dollars of new risk for taxpayers. Before she…

Decades of consumer advocacy have built an impressive, if still inadequate, array of consumer guarantees in the common law, statutory allocations of rights to consumers — governmental and non-governmental — for consumer interests. It is unclear however, if the integrity and effectiveness of these norms and structures of consumer protection will continue in the digital…

Once more a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has raised big questions about how much of the federal government’s generous subsidy to the housing finance giants?Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–finds its way into housing, particularly affordable housing for low and moderate income families. In 1996, CBO estimated that Fannie and Freddie received $6.5…

At a time of rising customer complaints, sagging airline profits and cutbacks by major carriers, Southwest Airlines stands above the pack as brash and adventuresome as it was 30 years ago when Rollin King and Herb Kelleher launched the company as a three-airplane enterprise carrying passengers between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. From that modest…

Walter D. Miller, 70, was pumping gas into his vehicle on July 17th,when he collapsed and never revived. His hometown, Winsted, Connecticut, lost more than the owner of the 40-year-old Miller Air Conditioning and Heating business. The community lost a many-splendored public citizen — a pillar of local democracy and service. There were times when…

Most corporations measure their worth by their bottom line—profits. For some companies, like Working Assets Long Distance and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, profits, however, don’t begin to measure their valueto the public and communities. Working Assets, for example, donates one percent of its long-distance phone revenue to progressive non-profit organizations working for peace, human…