In the Public Interest

The question confronting the Occupy Wall Street encampments and their offshoots in scores of cities and towns around the country is quo vadis? Where is it going? This decentralized, leaderless civic initiative has attracted the persistent attention of the mass media in the past five weeks. Television cameras from all over the world are parked…

Congressman Ron Paul introduced H.R. 1831, the “Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011” on May 11th of this year. It is a simple bill at just two pages in length, and it would legalize the growing of industrial hemp in the United States. Currently farmers can grow industrial hemp only if they have received a…

Inside the barricading bubbles surrounding the Wall Street plutocrats and the Washington oligarchs who service them, there must be worry. After three years of disclosed “lying, cheating and stealing” as one prosecutor put it, with nary a visible stir from the masses, suddenly the barricades are beginning to quiver. Could this “Occupy Wall Street” challenge…

Masters of the repeated lying sound byte, the craven Congressional Republicans are feasting on the health and safety of the American people with gleeful greed while making the corporate and trade association media swoon. “Job-killing regulations,” exudes daily from the mouths of Speak John Boehner, his Wall Street-licking side-kick Eric Cantor and Senate minority leader,…

The fast developing predator drone technology, officially called unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, is becoming so dominant and so beyond any restraining framework of law or ethics, that its use by the U.S. government around the world may invite a horrific blowback. First some background. The Pentagon has about 7,000 aerial drones. Ten years ago…

Imagine a private meeting between President Barack Obama and 25 mega barons of U.S. business at the White House Indian Treaty Room. President Obama: “Gentlemen and Lady, I’ve invited you here today to give you a preview of an address I will deliver in a month before the national convention of the National Association for…

How easy it is to miscommunicate. I did not ask to speak at the rally opposing the Keystone XL devastator. On Friday, I went to the area in front of the White House to express my support for this extraordinary demonstration. Assistants to Bill McKibben asked me to return on Saturday and address the rally.…

Dear President Obama: Happy Labor Day! This is your third opportunity as President to go beyond your past tepid Labor Day proclamations. You could convey to 150 million workers that you You can add that a $9.50 minimum is still less than what workers made under the minimum wage in 1968, adjusted for inflation, when…

This is the second week of protests, led by Bill McKibben, in front of the White House demanding that President Barack Obama reject a proposed 1700 mile pipeline transporting the dirtiest oil from Alberta, Canada through fragile ecologies down to the Gulf Coast refineries. One thousand people will be arrested there from all fifty states…

It was only a matter of time before the “pull down” NAFTA and WTO trade agreements on U.S. wages and jobs would be followed by “pull down” contract demands by U.S. corporations on their unionized workers toward levels of non-unionized laborers. The most recent illustration of this three-decade reversal of nearly a century of American…