In the Public Interest

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) is a huge law composed of hundreds of pages of detailed legalese. Somehow, the Supreme Court ruled that ERISA blocked state laws that allow consumers to recover compensatory and punitive damages from insurance companies who act in bad faith and do not pay up. There is nothing in…

The lifesaving struggle against the tobacco industry and its for­merly iron grip over Congress is branching out in various fruitful directions. In 1964, the surgeon general launched the drive against tobac­co and cancer with a historic re­port connecting smoking with lung cancer. There followed several li­ability lawsuits which were not successful, but they produced more…

Another round of attention to renewable energy — direct solar, wind, Geothermal, hydroelectric, wood and other seems to be getting underway. As long as oil is flowing in a non-crisis atmosphere, Congress, the White House and the media forget the old adage that “a stitch in time saves nine.” How menu times consumer and renewable…

Forbes Magazine used to headline its self-promotional advertisements with the moniker “Capitalist Tool.” A satiric dig at the then postwar bi­polarized world where communists used the term as a pejorative accusa­tion against western countries and as a treasonous charge against their own native suspects. Chuckles aside, the Forbes selling machine has gone into high gear,…

Molybdenum is a valuable metal that is used in strengthening steel. Years ago, the giant AMAX corporation was prospecting on federally-owned land in Colorado and discovered a major molybdenum mine worth $7 billion. They then bought the land from our government for about $5 an acre. All profits from the mine go to AMAX; the…

Crisis in faraway oil country. Gasoline prices here zoom upward. The politicians and the motorists denounce the avaricious big oil companies. They demand investigations and rollbacks. Nothing happens. Deja vu! Sound familiar? Well, here goes Exxon and its oil brethren again! There is a three month supply of gasoline and an oil glut. Yet the…

As a high school and college student in the Fifties, I delighted in requesting materials from my government. What was not held secret was available and at no charge. I would write my Senators and Representative and receive posthaste copies of Congressional hearings and reports on all variety of subjects. From federal agencies — such…

After all the shocking headlines and upwardly revised estimates of what the Savings and Loan (S&L) scandal will cost taxpayers, you may think you are shockproof. Think again. Item: Former executives of failed savings and loans, that the U.S. government has taken over, are still drawing full salaries paid for by the taxpayers. Some of…

President George Bush may be on the verge of making the boomerang decision of his political career. Should he nominate a replacement for retiring Associate Supreme Court Justice, William J. Brennan, Jr. who is a right-wing ideologue or even a person similar in philosophy to Justices Kennedy and Scalia -­the two most recent nominations by…

A little over ten years ago traveled to Richland, Washington next to the 570 square mile Hanford Reservation — home of the federal nuclear weapons industry run by corporate contractors and also the home of several nuclear power plants. The occasion was a debate about the hazards of nuclear power with physicist Ralph Lapp before…