In the Public Interest

The last hours of a state legislative session is a paradise for avaricious corporate interest groups. This is the time when they can sneak through, without public debate or even public notice, some of the most craven laws against consumer or small-taxpayer interests ever enacted. Among the lobbies that ply this just-before-midnight stealth strategy is…

On June 9, Connecticut became another state in a long list of victims of the real estate industry. On this last day of the session, in the last hours, the Senate passed House Bill 6981 by suspending its normal rules and tacking this anti-consumer legislation on to another bill as an amendment. The bill’s sneaky…

The Senate Commerce Committee recently held a hearing to consider a new bill that is designed to replace state auto insurance laws with a no-fault system backed by a coalition of insurance companies led by State Farm. The bill, S.B. 837, can be simply explained this way: Consumers would give up their right to compensation…

Back in 1969, the Nixon administration settled a civil antitrust suit against the Big Three automakers that charged them with conspiring since 1953 to “eliminate all competition among themselves in the research, development, manufacture, and installation of motor vehicle air pollution control equipment.” (The Johnson administration originally brought the civil suit in 1968, after having…

Albert A. Foer is scratching his head these days. As president of the American Antitrust Institute, he is puzzled why Congress keeps the budgets so low for the federal cops on the anti-monopolistic, price-fixing, corporate beat. Not only do the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have the duty to stop and…

Twenty years ago, consumer advocate J. Robert Hunter studied insurance rate filings in the District of Columbia and found that, other things being equal, the same consumer could pay as little as $350 or as much as $900 a year for the same coverage from different companies. Comparative shopping for auto insurance is a good…

Although New York City owns some 10,000 empty lots throughout the city, in a triumph of impulse over judgment, Mayor Rudy Giuliani has announced the pending sale to commercial developers of 12 lots that support community gardens. Apparently the mayor wants to add to the city’s coffers by placing these small oases of productive greenery…

Would you want your children to see propaganda that glorifies reckless driving or that reinforces the poor body image of teenage girls? That’s exactly the kind of thing schoolkids are watching on Channel One, a so-called educational broadcast piped into classrooms across the country. Whether your main concern is quality of education, the role of…

Following last week’s tragic homicides at Columbine High School and the mourning over the loss of life there, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate majority leader Trent Lott announced they would convene a national conference on youth and culture. That’s good. Such a conference is sorely needed.   But it must not be an empty…

South Africa and the rest of Africa is experiencing an HIV/AIDS catastrophe, which the U.S. Surgeon General has likened to the plague which decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. South Africa reasonably wants to take steps to lower the extraordinary prices of essential medicines to treat HIV/AIDS and other diseases. (“Drug cocktails” to treat HIV/AIDS…