In the Public Interest

On March 26th, the voters of California defeated three proposals on the ballot that would have destroyed or restricted the legal protections of injured motorists and other people swindled of their savings or harmed by defective products. About fifteen million dollars of computer, insurance and financial industry monies bankrolled these “democracy destroyers” behind a barrage…

Republicans in Congress are in a struggle with President Clinton over H.R. 956, a bill to federalize and restrict the state-based legal rights accorded injured persons who take the perpetrators of their harm to court. This legislation is by no means the full package that its business backers, including the insurance and tobacco industries, have…

Without exception the most authentic breath of fresh air running for the U.S. Senate on a major party ticket is Pat Quinn. He is battling to defeat Cong. Richard Durbin, a true corporate Democrat, in the Illinois Senatorial primary this month. Quinn is a remarkable man. As a citizen activist, he sparked a referendum in…

The waves of commercialism sweeping over the nation’s institutions of higher learning are becoming larger and more frequent. Many years ago, Universities and colleges were wary of business turning their institutions into partners, joint ventures and other deals. Now, more and more of these academies are actively bidding for business partnerships and encouraging their professors…

Suddenly basic economic and trade issues are front and center in national politics. Discussions of job security, stagnant wages, corporate ethics and flights of factories to Mexico are pushing out the endless renditions of balanced budgets, deficits and arcane tax proposals as the hot button issues. Belatedly, politicians and pundits are discovering that jobs and…

At the Cedar Lane Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland on the morning of February 19, 1996, there was a memorial service to celebrate the life of an extra ordinary musician, Randy Hostetler, age 32. In a short hour, his friends, younger brother, Eric, and his parents, Jim and Zona, through their pastor, conveyed the iconoclastic…

Its Presidential Primary Time and never before have so many state primaries been stacked together so closely on the calendar. The politicians hone their 5 minute speeches about “getting this country moving again,” tailor their sound bites to 5, 10 and 20 seconds with suitable slogans and flood the television with their vapid self-advertisements. What…

Will the new labor leadership at the AFL-CIO of John Sweeney and Richard Trumka shake up this giant passive organization of trade unions into a new dynamic? They certainly talk that way in the few weeks since they moved into the AFL headquarters near The White House in Washington, D.C. There is no way to…

First, some short items. Jodie Allen, the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday “Outlook” section, is not like The Wall Street Journal’s editors. But on the subject of the law of torts for wrongfully injured persons, she shares the same ideology, which is to mind the tort deformers’ diatribes, and who cares about the facts?…

The repeated characterization of Senator Bob Dole as “too old”, “a grumpy old man,” and other appellations by the media, not to mention his Republican opponents for the Presidential nomination, is pure ageism discrimination. Dole will be 73 years old on July 22, 1996. He carries a daily Senatorial load and a travel schedule for…