Rotten to the Core

Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel are University of Chicago law professors who believe that, when it comes to making profits, nothing -- not even the law -- should stand in the way. (For almost two decades, Easterbrook has also been a federal appeals court judge.)

Twenty years ago, writing about antitrust crimes in the Michigan Law Review, Easterbrook and Fischel, then both professors at the University of Chicago, wrote that managers not only may, but should, violate the rules when it is profitable to do so. And it is clear that they believed that this rule should apply beyond just antitrust.

In a nutshell, this is the Chicago School view of corporate law that has taken hold over the past 20 years.
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Bush Proposing to Shift Burden of Toxic Cleanups to Taxpayers

Faced with dwindling reserves in the huge account that gave the Superfund waste cleanup program its name, the Bush administration has decided to designate fewer sites for restoration and to shift the bulk of the costs from industry to taxpayers.
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Shop till you ... stop!

"The economic function of mass media is driven by advertising," he says. "It's to make sure products are sold and consumed. What happens when you stop looking at mass media as vehicles for the dissemination of ideas, and start looking at them as vehicles for capturing audience attention for advertisers?

"We are still blind to what mass media is really about. Media companies stay in business because they get their money from advertisers and they provide advertisers [with] audience attention."
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