In the Public Interest

Once again the latest election cycle sets an all time record for money spent on television and radio political advertisements by the candidates, the political committees and interested parties. These thirty second political pitches, with their imagery, emotion, background music and professional announcers, seem to enrage almost everybody, in calmer moments, but almost everybody in…

From venerable laws, long unused, comes a new campaign theme for Eliot Spitzer, Democratic candidate for Attorney General of New York — capital punishment for corporations convicted of serious crimes. Such a punishment would mean the corporation is dissolved and its assets sold, or its corporate charter to do business revoked by state governmental authority.…

Is there a larger hypocritical conceit than the concern for children’s well-being express by corporate and governmental power brokers compared to the neglect and harm inflicted on the little ones? Just for starters, Four Billion Dollars a day is spent in the world on armaments while about 40,000 children die each day from preventable causes.…

Washington, D.C. hosted a swarm of three thousand central bankers and finance ministers from around the world. The limousines were thick like locusts and the hotels glistened with gushing hospitality suites by banks and securities firms. But the topic was Gloom — the worsening crisis of runaway global capitalism. There were large rooms full of…

Deregulation of the nation’s financial system has been sailing through the Congress like an Alice in Wonderland fantasy in which banks, insurance companies and securities firms live happily ever after–and certainly never never fail. This sugar plum world of finance is beginning to unravel. Ironically, it is happening just as the Senate is trying to…

There are people — you’ve heard them — who say “what’s Clinton’s personal life got to do with his performance as President?” There are many answers to that rhetorical point but few as concrete as the White House’s weakness on current key Congressional legislation. In the last few months of a Congressional session, the extra…

With the mutually gracious home run hitting competition between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa still roaring on (at this writing, each has hit 63 big ones), companies are lining up to sign the two stars to various endorsement contracts. But several young fans, who caught McGwire’s home run balls, gave the public a rare display…

With the complete approval of President Clinton and Vice-President Gore, the head of the federal auto safety agency, Dr. Ricardo Martinez has turned a life-saving enforcement agency into a meek consulting firm to the auto industry. Instead of upgrading obsolete crash protection standards and forcing recalls of defective vehicles, Martinez speaks of partnerships, collaboration and…

It is time for some humility from the proponents of unregulated markets and intensified economic globalization. It is no longer even superficially plausible for their proponents to contend that the solutions to the problems caused by deregulation, marketization and globalization are more deregulation, marketization and globalization. Wall Street’s wild swings, the collapse of the Russian…

Tuberculosis, the ancient scourge of humans, still takes about three million lives a year throughout the world. And less is spent doing something about applying known inexpensive drug cures to the afflicted than Westerners spend on anti-balding nostrums. Now, however, a more resistant strain of TB is spreading in one country after another, principally in…