In the Public Interest

Each day, say the grim statisticians, 40,000 little children die from poverty and disease in the world, while the nations’ spend $4 billion on military arms. Each day! Such comparisons were used by the famed builder-architect, Buckminster Fuller, to demonstrate that a fraction of the world’s military spending could abolish poverty and reduce disease. As…

Is there any end to the expanding credit card trap? Now the banks are issuing home equity bank cards. Users can go out for dinner literally on the house, says Neil Fogherty, president of Consumers League of New Jersey, adding that “unlike other types of credit card accounts, home equity accounts are usually much larger…

T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn are receiving news headlines for their so-called takeover attempts of large corporations: but very little attention is being paid to the severe reductions in shareholder rights arising out of corporate management’s defensive moves against these or other potential corporate raiders. Many articles and newscasts have reported the collapse of…

A year has passed since the disaster at the Soviet’s Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine. Outside the Soviet Union, governments have impounded and destroyed radioactive cheese and milk; they have conceded that silage and hay for farm animals are contaminated in Western Europe. Turkish tea and hazelnuts have been contaminated. For the same reason,…

H. Ross Perot is 56 years old and is worth over $2 billion. He started EDS, his data processing company in Texas, 25 years ago with $5000, sold it to General Motors in 1984 for $2.5 billion and continued to run EDS as a wholly owned subsidiary. Last December, after privately and publically criticizing the…

Before condemning to death and serious injury thousands of Americans each year, the proponents of revoking the federal limit of 55 mph on federal interstate highways displayed a model of doubletalk in the House of Representatives debate. The argumentative madness was exemplified by Cong. Barney Frank (D­MA) who said that since he violates this speed…

The auction at Christie’s in London the other day left the art crowd gasping. An anonymous buyer won the bidding for Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Sunflowers” (1888) for $39,921,750. The price was more than three times the previous record paid for any painting. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. He had hoped…

There is nothing bashful about Ms. P.J. Marchner and Mr. Wiley Buchanan. They are partners in a Washington, D.C. advertising firm called Required Reading. Why Required Reading? Well, because they’ve begun to sell advertisements to toilet stall doors and walls above urinals at restaurants. They’ve already signed up a popular eatery for yuppies, Joe and…

Annapolis, MD — The new Governor of Maryland, Democrat William Schaefer, has trouble saying No to corporations. This inebriation with “business climate politics” at the expense of peoples’ rights does not bother him in the least; the Governor is a man with a mission to project nationwide the perception that Maryland’s government is so pro-business…

This is a story about billing errors by Xerox Corporation during their servicing of our copying machine. It illustrates how alert and persistent buyers must be and, if they are not, they’ll pay more than they should and never know it. It started when one of our associates was reviewing the service bills over a…