In the Public Interest

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…

As the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft winds down, the question is no longer whether Microsoft violated antitrust laws but rather what can be done to curb its most harmful monopolistic practices. The case being tried by the U.S. Department of Justice and 19 state attorneys general has been a textbook tutorial on how anticompetitive…

Suppose, for a moment, you are a small business. You employ six workers. You write a letter to your state’s economic development agency. You insist that that state refrain from taxing you andoffer you job training credits and an assortment of other bonuses. In return, you offer to hire two more people in addition to…

The insurance industry continues to live a charmed existence in state and federal legislative halls. Even banks — no slouches at using corporate money and muscle to gain legislative favor — appear incompetent when compared with large insurance companies that regularly escape regulations designed to protect the public. Adequate credit on reasonable terms is often…

 What do monopolistic practices and antitrust laws have to do with traffic congestion and commuter woes? More than you might imagine. In the late ’30s and ’40s, General Motors, with the help of a few oil and tire companies, purchased electrified mass transit systems in 28 cities. It soon disabled these systems and began to…

Arcata, California — a small town not far from the redwoods and wild rivers of northern California — made news in 1996 when an elected majority of its City Council were members of the Green Party. Three years later, the town is about to find itself in the news again. Arcata is pioneering Measure F (“the…

The Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio lost his struggle with cancer on March 8, 1999. The next day newspapers were full of memories by his friends and teammates. As a boyhood fan of DiMaggio back in the forties, I always looked forward to meeting him. That occurred in the Spring of 1990 and I promptly wrote…

Bob Woodward (of Watergate reportorial fame) once called Richard Cohen the Washington Post‘s best regular columnist. But on Jan. 31, Cohen wrote a regular column in the (Sunday) Post Magazine that is noteworthy for other reasons. Cohen fired himself from his Sunday column. Cohen’s explanation for abandoning his Sunday column (he still writes a column…