In the Public Interest

My home state of Connecticut has been known as “The Constitution State.” This month, Republican Governor John Rowland and Democrats Kevin Sullivan, President of the State Senate, and Tom Ritter, the Speaker of the House, shattered that moniker by ramming through a special session of the legislator a massive taxpayer subsidy to lure the New…

It has been said that virtue is its own reward. Tell that to Mark Green whose record of public service and a clean, vigorous, primary campaign for the Democratic party’s Senatorial candidacy against Senator Al D’Amato earlier this year, resulted in his coming in third. Having worked with Mark Green for nearly thirty years —…

The many pillars of a working democracy, coming out of the civic culture, are rarely publicized these days. The people who constitute these pillars keep going, believing that there can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship. One would think that the rapid expansion of television and radio spaces would find room for these civic…

If Dan Rather referred to a woman appearing on his evening news show as “that girl,” there would be more than a few objections and not just from women’s rights organizations. I wonder how many objections went sent to the CBS network for a segment of Howard Stern’s televised show on Saturday night, November 14,…

Toledo, Ohio — Chrysler Corporation, having just merged with the German auto giant to become DaimlerChrysler, is teaching this city about some state of the art corporate socialism. Last year, Chrysler announced that it would expand the existing Jeep plant if the City government would subsidize this project with local tax dollars and a 100%…

The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors—Article II, Section 4 of the U. S. Constitution. Talk show hosts, a bevy of academics and politicians of every variety are bombarding the nation…

Between November 13 to 15, the U.S. Labor Party will have their convention in Pittsburgh to advance a program of action on Key Workers’ Issues. There will be 1,100 delegates, representing more than one million working people from international unions, union locals and community groups from most of the states in the Union. The Labor…

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.…