Stories by Russell Mokhiber

Conference Board, the New York-based business-backed research enterprise best known for its monthly Leading Economic Indicators and Consumer Confidence Index, recently released a report detailing the widening of the wealth gap. What's more surprising is the list of Fortune 500s who underwrote it.

The U.S. has pledged a billion dollars per year in loans to debt-saddled African nations that cannot afford high-priced HIV-treatment. Even though drug makers will sell the drugs at discounted prices, are the loans mere ploys to slow the development of less costly generic HIV-drugs?

The legitimacy of a report warning that the UN Global Warming Treaty will push Blacks and Hispanics into poverty has been undermined by its questionable financing. Backed by a coal industry front group, the report was released by six Black and Hispanic labor, civil rights, and business organizations.

Two Congressmen have offered sweeping proposals to regulate multinational corporations and to reorient the global economy towards sustainable development, not corporate greed.

Last Wednesday, we walked down to the MCI Center to catch the "National Tribute to President Clinton." The event reeked of corporate corruption.

The endless amount of soft money cash flowing from corporate coffers into federal campaigns and national political parties have created a veritable tsunami of corruption that is crashing over the countryside. According to Charles Korb, president of the Committee for Economic Development, Washington's culture of corruption has given the green light to the rest of the country. "Go for it!" is the message being sent out from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- and the country is responding.

The Time Warner-Disney conflict symbolizes how media concentration will hurt consumers and democratic processes.

Channel One Network is the company that loans televisions to public schools, in exchange for access to schoolchildren for 12 minutes every day. The marketers use this opportunity to pump the children with commercials pushing such nutritious staples as Pepsi, Snickers, M&M's and Fruit Loops. When one Alabama citizen started a crusade against this commercialism in schools, it turned into a tortuous conflict between corporate interests and grassroots politics.

It was a bleak week for communications democracy in the United States. When MCI and Sprint announced their poten- tial merger, stock prices went up, and the investment banks that brokered the deals will surely collect inflated fees. But citizens are not likely to make out as well.

"Think Big Tobacco has been whupped? Think again. Philip Morris and company aren't throwing in the towel. With a series of image-enhancing ad campaigns that cast them as 'caring, responsible members of the community' Big Tobacco hopes to reform itself in the eyes of Americans."

"Fearful of a public backlash that might drive the biotech industry into oblivion, Monsanto is reaching out to its critics."

"Few top government officials have managed to emerge as unscathed from a half dozen years in the Washington, D.C. spotlight as former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. And Rubin did better than escape without scratches -- he ended his term of office with his image enhanced."

"Marriott hotels recently exacted an enormous tax and road improvement subsidy from taxpayers in exchange for a promise ... to do nothing."

"A new report issued by the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions details with piercing clarity how the thousands of American employers violate their workers rights by squashing unions, intimidating organizers and illegally firing pro-union workers."

"A little bit of democratic empowerment can be a dangerous thing. If the broad coalition that came together in Seattle can stay together -- a big "if" -- it may eventually be able to force new rules for the global economy, so that trade is finally subordinated to the humane values of health, safety, ecological sustainability and respect for human rights, rather than the reverse."

A trademark dispute erupts between the makers of the Clark Bar and a small North Dakota firm selling a Lewis and Clark candy bar to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

"Watch out, because the newly minted millionaires of Silicon Valley are on track to become major political players. They have graduated from the adolescent view that they could ignore government to the more "mature" position that money and economic power translates easily into political power and influence on Capitol Hill."

Public health scientist Dr. George Carlo has found that the risk of acoustic neuroma, a benign brain tumor, was 50 percent higher in people who reported using cell phones for six years or more. Unfortunately, his findings may go unheeded -- because the cell phone industry has bought off the FDA.

"A few years ago, even a few weeks ago, we might have opposed the AOL-Time Warner merger. In buying Time Warner, AOL suddenly acquires one of the largest cable systems in the country, and gains a material interest in opposing open access. But that's OK. We're satisfied by AOL's verbal commitment that it will voluntarily permit open access in the cable systems it will control...."