In the Public Interest

Geraldo Rivera was clearly embarrassed and he did not appear to be acting. His show was on “transvestites, cross-dressers and the people who love them.” Geraldo’s titles are literal and the panel of guests spoke so literally that “bleeps” were blocking many of their words. Although he asked his audience “am I blushing?”, mumbled to…

Back in the Flatbush Brooklyn Dodger era, diehard fans would react to a close defeat on the diamond by saying “We wuz robbed.” That sums up the semi-stunned and angry response of Republicans to Bill Clinton’s State of the Union message before the assembled Congress. Later, at a Washington, D.C., fatcat Republican fundraiser, featured speaker,…

Injuries abounded once again this year in the National Football League and one of the causes is the artificial turf that covers the stadium floors used by 15 out of 28 NFL teams. Yet the owners, who make megamillions and pay millions to their players, watch indifferently from their luxury boxes as one athlete after…

Talk radio is breaking out all over. Listeners feedback their views more on talk radio programs than they can on all the television stations and newspapers combined. However, there is a pronounced tilt toward right wing talk show hosts that is getting worse. Who is the counterpoint to Rush Limbaugh — the cowardly mouth of…

Ever get the impression that just about every problem in our country has been studied to exhaustion. If you do, why not ask about what problem is rarely, if ever, studied? Let’s select a problem that involves the spending of over $1100 per year per American adult. I’m referring to over $210 billion in taxpayer-funded…

“Welfare reform” is becoming the talk of Washington’s politicians from the White House to Congress. Clinton wants to end welfare “as we know it” by getting recipients jobs within a reasonable time. Some Republicans want to eliminate welfare, following some of their comfortable theorists, and let the misfortunate children and adults be taken care of…

To western corporations, GATT the revised global trade agreement heading for Congressional debate in mid-1994, means more protection of their “intellectual property rights” or inventions around the world. To millions of Indian farmers, GATT means intellectual piracy of their knowledge and agricultural knowhow by multinational corporations in the West. With virtually no reporting by the…

To many Americans “tuberculosis” sounds like a word out of the past. For our country, it was, but no longer is. Cases of TB have doubled in the U.S. to about 25,000 a year since 1985 and the dreaded drug-resistant strains of this disease are increasing also. To much of the rest of the world,…

What is going on at the U.S. Patent Office? We’d all better find out. Ever since the Patent Office first granted in 1988 a patent on a living animal — the transgenic mouse developed by a DuPont-funded genetic engineer — the place seems to be going haywire in what it is giving monopoly ownership power…

Benjamin J. Stein is a serious actor who has played in made­for-tv movies and other theatricals. He is also the leading writer and analyst of corporate financial crimes in the country. Wall Street doesn’t like him; he is too insistent that owners of pensions, shareholders and other small investors, such as holders of savings accounts,…