In the Public Interest

The Congress and most of Washington’s corps of lobbyists have been occupied in recent months with legislation that would fashion a new system to serve affluent customers interested in playing in the stock market and dabbling in esoteric financial products. In this rarified air of high finance, little thought or time is being devoted to…

Carol Hawes of Tacoma, Washington started collecting the letters she received from credit card companies and banks. She read them and then sent them to us with the following comments: “I think it is about time the consumer got some protection from some of the things these companies are doing. A few years ago, it…

HR 10–the so-called financial modernization legislation which passed the House of Representatives by a single vote on May 13–won’t win any legislative beauty contests, but it may set new records for industry arrogance and Congressional cowardice. No where is this more true than in the kid-glove treatment of big insurance companies. Whatever the insurance companies…

To see arrogance in a New York Times reporter is to see the state of the art of that trait. Fortunately such swell-heads are a minority of the many good, curious and open-minded reporters who call everyday from the nation’s most influential newspaper. Nonetheless, the arrogant ones do enough damage to warrant some observations from…

A beacon of serious corporate light on industrial environmentalism shines forth from the darkness of one massive corporate lobby network after another against public efforts to do something about air pollution, global warming, ozone depletion and other corporate damage to the ecological commonwealth. The light (and action) hails from the Interface Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia…

The next time you are sitting bumper to bumper in rush-hour traffic, or pass by a blighted inner city neighborhood, or see a new housing development replacing what was just recently farmland remember this word: SPRAWL. These phenomenon are simply different facets of sprawl, the low-density, unplanned patterns of development that have largely defined American…

This week a broad cross-section of civic leaders joined together to announce the creation of the “Foodspeak Coalition” and to launch a national campaign to repeal existing “veggie libel” laws and to block any new food disparagement laws from being enacted at the state or federal level. For over 200 hundred years, our country’s legal…

The Washington press corps — increasingly obsessed with National Enquirer-type rumors, hearsay and celebrititis — showed this past week what this trivialized redundancy costs the American people in important information denied. A Sunday TV opinion show — Late Edition — replaced a program on the giant bank mergers, recently announced, with Paula Jones’ lawyer. Apparently…

Edmonton, Alberta — At a recent conference opposed to the undermining of the Province’s universal health care by a combination of companies and politicians, the stage was cleared for an astounding instrument of social protect — The Edmonton Raging Grannies. Out came seven “Grannies” who sing serious, sharply satiric songs, to known tunes, relating to…

The big players in the financial industry and their allies in the Congress have been trying to downplay the impact of pending deregulation legislation on the nation’s economy. Just an effort, they said, to change a few “depression era” laws to “modernize” the financial system so consumers could have something described as “one-stop” shopping centers…