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Coming to Grips with Elite Public High Schools

The original campus of Benjamin Franklin High School on 719 South Carrollton Ave., from 1957 to 1990. It is now Audubon Charter Middle School.

New Orleans     Some of my class at Benjamin Franklin High School came together over the weekend in New Orleans to celebrate largely surviving over the many years since we graduated.   Our [...]

Pulling Shots in the Service Industry

2 Mardi Gras Costumers Get their Coffee at Fair Grinds Before Hitting the Streets

New Orleans   Getting up at 430 AM to go to work reminded me of the days worked in the oil fields and offshore after high school where the clock started at 6AM and I had to be in the field or on [...]

Celebrating Barbara Bowen

Barbara smiling in Melbourne next to the head of the Australian Labor Federation

New Orleans     There is no way that anything I can write would do complete justice to the life and work of Barbara Bowen, my friend and comrade for over 40 years, but luckily I don’t really need to because her life and [...]

Force-placed Insurance and Me

New Orleans  I find no joy in reading about forced-placed insurance, but I take great satisfaction in seeing the farce and fraud of such anti-consumer insurance coming to light.  Quoting Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of Financial Services from Gretchen Morgenson’s “Fair Game” column in the Times,

Force-placed insurance appears to be the dirty little secret of the mortgage [...]

Consumer Relief at Continental Airlines and Confusion at Amazon

New Orleans Ralph Nadar may not know anything about politics, but he still knows a thing or two about effective tactics for consumers, specifically threatening and moving to small claims court to resolve obstinate problems.

Recently I wrote desperately about problems Local 100 was having in getting a refund on a plane ticket for an [...]

A Rating System for Public Scandals?

New Orleans Reading this “opinion” piece in the Pilot, which must be a small but feisty newspaper in the descriptively named town of Southern Pines, population a shade over 10,000 folks in North Carolina pushing towards the South Carolina border, I couldn’t resist passing this pearl on.  I’ll be darned if I don’t really believe [...]