In the Public Interest

Most candidates run for the presidency, Governor Jerry Brown of California, however, is standing for President in 2016. Already having run unsuccessfully for President in three primaries – 1976 and 1980 when Jimmy Carter won and in 1992 when Bill Clinton won – the always interesting Brown has no intention of slogging it through the…

Large corporate capitalism is a breed apart from smaller scale capitalism. The former can often avoid marketplace verdicts through corporate welfare, strip owner-shareholders of power over the top company bosses and offload the cost of their pollution, tax escapes and other “externalities” onto the backs of innocent people. Always evolving to evade the theoretically touted…

With the Tea Partiers giving the establishment Republican incumbents much ferment in the primaries (or retirement, as in the case of David Brat defeating powerhouse Congressman Eric Cantor in Virginia), what are progressives doing to their corporate-indentured incumbent Democrats? Not much. There are few electoral challengers or pressures directly pushing progressive redirections for our declining…

He could have chosen an easier path in life. After all, Howard G. Buffett is the son of brainy investor, Warren Buffett. Instead, he chose to become a working farmer in Decatur, Illinois and launch a serious effort to fight world hunger in poor countries and in the United States (where 50 million humans are…

Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section featured a one page interview with Hillary Clinton, author of the just released Hard Choices which brought her a $14 million advance from Viacom’s Simon and Schuster. My first reaction was “Can anybody believe this?” I’m referring to the replies by Mrs. Clinton to questions about her…

Next time you hear federal officials say that there is no money to repair or build necessary public facilities in your community, ask them why there always seems to be money to greatly overpay for government projects that are routinely outsourced to corporate contractors. It is important to understand why incomplete projects such as the…

Memorial Day – the origins of which stem from Decoration Day in 1868 which recognized the Union soldiers who had perished – is a day of lost opportunities. No, I’m not referring to consumers missing out on store sales and the advertising hoopla by television marketeers who have ravaged that special day in their unseemly…

Attorney General Eric Holder’s sweetheart settlement with Switzerland’s second largest bank, corporate criminal Credit Suisse, sent the wrong message to other corporate barons. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) says it well: “Nor does the plea deal hold any officers, directors or key executives individually accountable for wrongdoing, raising the question of whether it will sufficiently deter…

The Republican Party establishment – read the corporatist U.S. Chamber of Commerce and their incumbent toadies controlling the Party in Congress – is in the process of vanquishing the Tea Party. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, predicted as much when he told the New York Times in March that his brand of corporate…