In the Public Interest

How does “Bill Moyers for President” sound to you? The long time Democrat and special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson would surely widen the political debate inside the Democratic Party and its primaries in 2008. For over a year, since leaving Public Television and his luminous Friday night program NOW, Moyers has been completing…

On October 17th, George W. Bush, signed into law a bill he bulldozed through Congress that, in Senator Patrick Leahy’s prophetic words, would suspend “the writ of habeas corpus, a core value in American law, in order to avoid judicial review that prevents government abuse.” This law, whose constitutionality is in doubt and will be…

The wilting, nay the collapse of the once mighty New York Yankees for the sixth straight year in the baseball playoffs has moved them into the failure fields so long inhabited by the Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox (except for the dazzling comeback of 2004). Since 2002, the pattern has been almost uncanny.…

Imagine the U.S. military — from the soldiers on the ground to the generals — saying publicly what they are thinking and saying privately about their two draft-dodging but bellicose rulers in the White House. Sometimes, reporters have gathered a few excoriating statements from the frustrated, beleaguered, often body armor-less GIs. One even demanded Bush’s…

William C. Taylor was a rosy-cheeked Princeton intern when he began his rise to fame and fortune, working with the Multinational Monitor magazine. As a freshly minted Princeton graduate, he worked on the book The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business as a co-author with me. After that it was the Sloan School…

Forty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a ceremony at the White House, which included me, signed into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966. Thus, for the first time, the giant auto industry was no longer exclusively able to decide the margins of casualties in crashes. It…

It is fortunate for Wall Street’s institutionalized criminals and looters of investor assets that Ben Stein likes acting. Because that leaves this skilled x-rayer of corporate fraud and greed with less time to produce more of his incisive articles in major media outlets like the New York Times or Barron’s. And even less time to…

The chronically no-fault White House and its no-fault President were on their no-fault roll again around the country. George W. Bush, the Commander-in-Chief of the politics of non-faultism—went on another redundant symbolic trip to Katrina land. There, near the wreckage that even now is much of New Orleans, he announced: “I take full responsibility for…

George W. Bush—the master of fabricated distractions—as with the false pretense invasion of Iraq—has turned the national television news media away from the United States. So it was a sobering reversal of direction to watch ABC’s August 24th Primetime Special Edition “Out of Control: AIDS in Black America.” It marked the 25th anniversary of the…

I first came across the name of John Kenneth Galbraith during my student years at Princeton where I picked up his book American Capitalism. Wondering why it was not on any reading list for my economics course, I put the question to the professor. He replied: “It’s really not about economics. It’s about political economy.”…