In the Public Interest

Mountain View, California — An invitation to visit Google’s headquarters and meet some of the people who made this ten year old giant that is giving Microsoft the nervies has to start with wonder. The “campus” keeps spreading with the growth of Google into more and more fields, even though advertising revenue still comprises over…

Dear President Bush, You and your White House have been sitting on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) since your arrival in January 2001, thus assuring the giant auto companies that NHTSA-toothless under President Bill Clinton and previous administrations– continues morphing even further away from the technology-forcing, life- saving regulatory agency it is supposed…

This is the grim story of a cancer patient, Lisa Kelly, and the famous, well endowed, non-profit M.D. Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas. Barbara Martinez, a reporter for the Wall St. Journal, related the billing hurdles that Mrs. Kelly has been confronting since late 2006 in a shocking front-page story on April…

Where is Harry Chapin when you need him? The popular folk singer (Cat’s in the Cradle), who lost his life in an auto crash 27 years ago, was an indefatigable force of nature against hunger—in this country and around the world. To hear Harry speak out against the scourge of hunger in a world of…

Andy Stern, the president of the 1.9 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is embroiled in the politics of accepting sweetheart union contract deals and, ironically is being condemned by the Wall Street Journal. What gives here? It seems that Stern wants to put heat on the private equity funds that have bought hospitals,…

In this year’s presidential campaign, the major media want you to focus on the candidates’ gaffes, their tactics toward one another’s gaffes, the flows of political gossip and four second sound bytes. Over and over again this is the humdrum pattern. Is Obama an elitist because of what he said about small towns in Pennsylvania?…

Is there a larger, more exploited, defenseless group of undifferentiated Americans than the 133 million individual federal income taxpayers? Their dollars are used to subsidize organized corporate interests, giveaway taxpayer assets like minerals under the public lands, and bail out speculative, self-enriching corporations and their crooked bosses. As large corporations, and their trade associations, complete…

There used to be a time when baseball parks were built by private investors—usually a wealthy local family—and the stands were full of what used to be called the “masses.” There used to be a time when libraries were maintained and stocked as an integral part of the neighborhood and community. Not a single library…

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Bush’s illegal war of aggression in Iraq, the Fabricator-in-Chief made a speech at the Pentagon, whose muzzled army chiefs had opposed his costly, ruinous adventure from the start for strategic, tactical and logistical reasons. As benefits the dictatorial monarch of yesteryear, evicted by America’s first patriots, this…

The Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has resigned for being a longtime customer of a high-priced prostitution ring. The President of the United States, George W. Bush, remains, disgracing his office for longtime repeated violations of the Constitution, federal laws and international treaties to which the U.S. is a solemn signatory. In his forthright…