In the Public Interest

Most readers of The Washington Post probably missed it. But probably not Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Fifty-six of his law school classmates (Harvard Law School, class of 1982) bought space for an open letter in mid-May that excoriated his “cavalier handling of our freedoms time and again.” It read like an indictment, to wit: “Witness…

Here they go again. After thirty years without a firm order, the atomic power companies are pushing their radioactive, costly technology for a comeback on the backs of you the taxpayers. The old argument in the Seventies was that nuclear powered electricity would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. With only three percent of our…

Thursday, July 12, 2007’s Washington Post was another day of well-supported headlines chronicling the lawless, incompetent, wasteful, negligent, bumbling and multiple perils to our nation’s security and safety caused by the Bush-Cheney regime. One headline reads: “U.S. Warns of Stronger Al-Qaeda.” The report by the Bush Administration’s National Counterterrorism Center was titled “Al-Qaida Better Positioned…

It has been a long time coming, but now the mass media and even the “look-the-other-way” Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are focusing on a stream of Chinese imports that are contaminated or defective. After years of warnings about farm-raised seafood imports from the Chinese mainland, the FDA’s Dr. David Acheson, in charge of food…

Recommended Readings for Summer of 2007 By Ralph Nader 1. A Handful of Straw Blowing in the Wind by Thelma Doak (About Times Publishing, 2007). She reached her 104th birthday, remembering her life in the dust bowls of the nineteen thirties, of seeing the Wright brothers and their flying machine at the Oklahoma State Fair…

He sat there dejected and indignant—twenty years ago—in our office. His position as editor of the monthly muckraking magazine, Mother Jones, had broken up. He was looking for a job that would allow him to bring his conscience to work. We gave him a place and support to start Moore’s Weekly—a media critique. Michael Moore…

Is Hillary Clinton a political weather vane or a political compass? Consider her latest detour from the NAFTA and WTO policies of her husband. Last week she announced her opposition to the proposed trade agreement between the U.S. and South Korea. The place for her remarks was a town hall meeting in Michigan organized by…

Lucy Komisar of the Tax Justice Network—USA (taxjustice-usa.org) spoke at the Conference on Taming the Giant Corporation last week about “Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket.” Her words were so compelling that the rest of this column is devoted to excerpts from her presentation: “The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world.…

Anybody who played schoolboy sandlot baseball in Winsted, Connecticut with David Halberstam back in the nineteen forties would not have been very surprised to observe his spectacular journalistic career that took him to the civil rights struggles in the South, the war torn African and Asian continents, and the writing of some 20 books which…

This column heralds a pioneering conference next month in Washington, D.C. But first a little background. Back in the nineteen thirties, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went on the national radio and declared what the basic necessities were for the American people — a wage that can support a family, decent housing, the right to health…