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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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
New Orleans Reading the long story in The New Yorker recently, it was clear that Thomas A. Drake was no dream employee at National Security Agency (NSA), but it was even more obvious that trying to convict him of the Espionage Act was ridiculous, so seeing him plead out on a misdemeanor deal is probably [...]
New Orleans Henry Butler, the well known New Orleans piano player, and his music were featured on the Treme episode in the regular HBO Sunday slot. Early in the show, he said it was “good to be home.” In the real world of post-Katrina, Butler had showed up with thousands of others on the porch [...]
New Orleans Contrary to popular opinion, it is actually a very, very rare event for a New Orleans city politician to go to jail for some kind of corruption, regardless of our reputation. The hometown paper, The Times Picayune, campaigned mercilessly for investigations and convictions of Mayor Marc Morial and his troops, largely to no [...]
NewOrleans Thanks to my new library card, I stumbled onto the library’s homepage last weekend to learn how to order books on-line, and what do you know there was an announcement of a event commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Rides of 1961 complete with a traveling exhibit and speakers, so I trundled [...]
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