In the Public Interest

It is time for the American people to send a wake-up call to the domestic auto industry (General Motors, Ford Motor Company and DaimlerChrysler). Backlogged engineering advances well suited for commercial application and widespread diffusion are ready for use. Unfortunately, today, as was the case 40 years ago, auto company management stands in the way…

General Motors should be renamed General Wasteful Motors for its decades of destructive resistance to improved fuel efficiency for your motor vehicles. Never mind that you deserve, after all these years of industry stagnation (the last upgrade in fuel efficiency was 1985), more miles for your gasoline dollars. Never mind that our country is more…

One of the bedrock privileges of commercial corporations is that they create and command the very yardsticks by which their performance is generally evaluated. As economist Milton Friedman once said, the sole responsibility of a corporation is to make a profit for its shareholders. Other corporatists may find this a little too narrow a yardstick…

Federal Reserve Chairmen have long had a habit of dropping pithy little phrases into their speeches—most couched in hazy Fed speak and subject to a multitude of interpretations. But there are times when the money czars are actually delivering a message. In 1974, Fed Chairman Arthur Burns traveled to Hawaii to warn the American Bankers…

It was, to use Yogi Berra’s phrase—déjà vu all over again. George W. Bush’s energy program in his State of the Union speech echoed the many similar promises made by his presidential predecessors going back to Ronald Reagan. Promises that were either vague or if specific, distant from realization. What irony to pledge to become…

What will it take for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to be held responsible for a multitude of political crimes, recklessness, prevarications and just plain massive ongoing mismanagement of the taxpayers government? The first step is to aggregate these travesties so they add up to a more comprehensive judgment. Then, together they confront us…

The Abramoff scandal has spurred one of the episodic “reform” moments on Capitol Hill. Republicans and Democrats are competing to offer ethics reform packages that ignore entirely their past entanglement in the very activities they now seek to regulate or eliminate. Not all of these reforms are toothless, and if enacted and enforced, some may,…

The right wing columnist for the Wall St. Journal, Daniel Henninger, in a mocking column on the Democrats’ performance during the Samuel A. Alito Jr. nomination hearings called them “intellectually exhausted and politically befuddled.” Overall, with some exceptional moments, his description was not that far off the mark, though he also could have applied this…

A small conference was held on January 6th in Washington, DC about a big concern for tens of millions of American workers — the loss of free time due to the omnivorous demands of their workplace obligations. The gathering, which met to press for public policies which will give workers a better work/life balance, was…

Civilian control over the military is a long established democratic tradition in our country.  It was the military that was believed by our founding fathers to be susceptible to plunging our country into foreign adventure.  Presently, however, the boondoggles, crimes and recklessness of draft-dodging George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and former Air Force pilot, Donald…