In the Public Interest

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…

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…