In the Public Interest

The District of Columbia should be declared a “state of emergency” so that federal disaster relief can commence, urged dozens of local citizen groups who call themselves the Fair Budget Coalition. No floods, hurricanes or pestilence are involved; just a disaster of abdication by the business rulers and political governors of the nation’s capital. Let’s…

For the past two years, big companies have been going after the few pockets of resistance remaining inside the big electronic media with frivolous law suits demanding billions of dollars for spurious damages. It started with General Motors bringing NBC to its knees through that television network’s parent company — General Electric. GM and GE…

If, at the last minute, the Congress does not stop the abolition of the national maximum speed limit on highways that is in a highway construction bill, President Clinton will be faced with two choices: Sign the bill and reject his own Department of Transportation’s warnings that it will condemn about 7,000 American children, women…

Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is under assault by the powerful broadcasting industry and their indentured allies, Cong. Jack Fields and FCC Commissioner, James Quello — a Nixon appointee. His sin: he wants to enforce the law — specifically the 1934 Communications Act which contains the imperative that broadcasters meet…

The surge of corporate power over our political economy that started in Richard Nixon’s second term has met few roadblocks. From the swarm of business-funded campaign contributions to the concentration of a corporatist mass media to the smashing of both worker efforts to unionize and wronged consumers’ access to the courts, Big Business has become…

HERE is a game that congressional leaders play to de­’ feat popular measures like – cleaning up Congress. It is called the delay game. Congressional leaders love to bury bills this way because there are no fingerprints. Behold, like magic, the bills are stranded at the end of the congressional session. Here’s how the lip-…

For years I have been urging insurance agents to more vigorously represent their consumers rights and needs rather than place their insurance company principals, whose insurance they sell, first. Well, two former associates, Mitch Rofsky and Jason Adkins, have decided to start an insurance agency that does just that -­putting consumers or policyholders first. Before…

A new kind of polling and a broader way of describing intelligence than the IQ test offer promise for a higher quality of public discussion and respect for intangible talents. The polling registers the relationship between what people know and their attitudes. For example, a recent national poll showed that most people think that foreign…

Remember that brief dustup during the 1992 Presidential campaign about how little in federal taxes that foreign companies pay because of all the ways they can maneuver their books and engage in pricing transfers to artificially increase their costs in the U.S. The estimates of taxes they should have paid ranged from $3 billion a…

Adbusters is a satiric, irreverent, profound, almost indescribable magazine out of Vancouver, Canada whose mission is to chew up the crass materialism and commercialism that is devouring conscience, soul and economic sustainability on Earth. If that is a mouthful of praise, this colorful, quarterly journal deserves it. If you are experiencing unease at the flood…