In the Public Interest

We are constantly being told that the information age is engulfing the world, but much of it seems to be bypassing the banking industry. Many of the inner workings of the industry are revealed only when the taxpayers are called on for billions of dollars to bail out failed institutions. Certainly that was true when…

Nothing is tougher for politicians and editorial writers than admitting a mistake. Two years ago, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was ratified by the Congress amidst a tidal wave of propaganda and promises from corporate America and the Clinton Administration and echoed on the editorial pages of many of the nation’s most powerful…

Steve Forbes and his fortune are running for Presi­dent. The media dutifully report the swelling polit­ical advertising budget that has raised him in the polls ahead of other Republican primary candidates, and surveys show him second to Dole in some early primary states. But because Forbes has no voting record and has held no public…

The Big Lie and the Big Dollar are at work again in California. Both have greased two referendums onto the March ballot that would further the ongoing corporate drive to destroy those laws of America that protect your safety and your savings. One referendum is designed to severely limit the rights of shareholder-owners to sue…

The most useful thinking about the media starts with not thinking like the media. This is not easy to do, because corporate-controlled communications systems tend to lead their audience and, for the most part, their critics into accepting assumptions that confine their reactions within a conceptual cocoon. Consider television. Try asking your friends, for ex­ample,…

The Oklahoma humorist-sage, Will Rogers, called Congress the best money can buy about 60 years ago. The “buy” is much, much better today for corporate welfare. In this season of gift exchanges, here is a specific, very limited list of what some corporations got for their money; compliments of your taxpayer dollars: 1. $110 million…

Next year, the nation’s commercial banks will cease to pay premiums for deposit insurance — a gift of at least $5.5 billion to the industry courtesy of some monumentally bad decision making at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Free insurance for multi-billion dollar banks may be the ultimate in corporate welfare. And under FDIC’s decision,…

We all have our complaints about the media, so let me share some of mine with apologies to Andy Rooney. Have you ever wondered about the absence from the national evening news of interviews with wise older people with a life-time of experience like George Kennan or ex-Senator Mike Mansfield or John Kenneth Gailbraith? In…

On November 28, 1995, spurning the veto requests of safety, insurance medical emergency and trauma prevention groups, President Clinton signed into law a highway bill that, by his own Department of Transportation’s statements, will kill and injure tens of thousands of Americans every year. The bill abolishes the national maximum speed limit of 55 mph,…

On November 24, The New York Times published a page-one story by Tamar Lewin that explored why “an odd hush has fallen over Washington: the sound of advocacy groups that have been unable to create much of a clamor against the most drastic cuts in decades.” Ms. Lewin, in all modesty, left out a significant…