In the Public Interest

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…

Here is what we have learned about the tobacco industry in recent months, thanks to document disclosures resulting from litigation: — The RJR papers stemming from a California lawsuit conclusively demonstrated that R.J. Reynolds marketed cigarettes to children; — Documents from Minnesota’s suit against Big Tobacco showed the industry doing market research on children as…

After nine year with the large consulting firm McKinsey & Co., and several years with the Environmental Protection Agency, Bill Drayton decided in 1980 to have a go at starting a global search and support institution for social entrepreneurs. Thus was born the organization known as Ashoka. What is a social entrepreneur, you may ask?…

Ever try building democracy in the good ole USA? It’s not for the fainthearted, as our history points out over the past two centuries. Try asking Theresa Amato, who, for four years as director of the Citizen Advocacy Center in Elmhurst, Illinois. nestled in the Chicago suburbs, has been grappling with local tyrannies and autocracies…