In the Public Interest

Alert for the millions of airline passenger knees — American Airlines will give them three to five extra inches of space in about a year. Hooray for small favors. One would think that buying an airline ticket for a seat on the plane would include knees along with toes and torsos. But since airline deregulation…

When twenty years ago Senator William Proxmire (D—WI) was championing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) that prohibited U.S. companies from bribing their way to sales in foreign countries, many large U.S. corporations were outraged and opposed. Unfair, they cried; other western countries allow foreign bribes (in fact, such bribes were deductible in some countries)…

There are two questions that have not been asked about the post election Clinton Administration and the Bush nomination of John Ashcroft as Attorney General. First, why does Ashcroft want the job? In over 20 years, as Missouri State Attorney General, Missouri Governor and U.S. Senator, he has fought against numerous laws that, as U.S.…

The major Presidential candidates are grinding through the various TV and radio press interviews and the town meetings with their three minute daily, redundant speeches and highly predictable replies to mostly predictable questions. That is what their advance people are supposed to accomplish. But what is remarkable is that both the national and the local…

Nothing is more scarce than thorough, tough or objective analysis of today’s corporations. What little there is comes mostly from academics, consumer and other public interest groups. The majority of the mainstream media skims the surface and usually serves as little more than a cheerleader for the corporations. Rarely does anyone from inside the corporate…

On January 6, 2000, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced that there would be three Presidential debates and one Vice Presidential debate in October 2000 at different locations around the country. The Commission has an official sounding name, but it is, in fact, a private organization run by the Republican and Democratic Parties, led…

Unlike the sleazy headlines in some tabloid newspapers, the Detroit News often has sensational headlines on page one that reflect important, substantive stories. This certainly was the case on January 4, 2000 with the lead story blazing the headline “Report: Edison overbills $248M.” The “Report” refers to a study done by Moody’s Investors Service for…

The Y2K computer problem, in an increasingly computer- reliant world, will begin to reveal its dimensions, small or large, on January 1, 2000. While the various predictions have ranged all over the proverbial lot, from catastrophes to glitches here and there, the cost of fixing an entirely preventable situation in the United States alone will…

The information age, we have been told repeatedly, is the signal characteristic of the modern political economy. Technology will liberate and advance the voices and impact of all people as it decentralizes power, say numerous books and essays. Well, let’s examine those articles of faith in two areas — that of congressional information and federal…

Increasingly, the citizens of Toledo, Ohio, are making connections between their daily lives and corporate welfare payouts, thanks to the recent provocations of DaimlerChrysler, which is sitting on $20 billion in cash, and its buddy Toledo Mayor, Carty Finkbeiner, who is sitting on a financially crumbling city government. The residents are seeing the emergence of…