Jamie Court

Two years ago, as federal health reform lay on death's door, CEO Angela Braly, head of Blue Cross' parent company Wellpoint, spit on beleaguered patients. She sat through poignant Congressional testimony from...

Starting this week one million Californians will pay hundreds of millions of dollars more for their health insurance. It's a plot right out of Groundhog Day, only it happens every Spring, Winter, Summer and Fall.

Health insurance rates in California are like a runaway train and there's no police force...

Shouldn't the CEOs of health insurance companies like Blue Shield have to sign under penalty of perjury that their rate hikes are justified? If the first online signature gathering for a ballot petition is successful, Californians will vote on that proposition in November, and are almost sure to...

Last week an upset Honda Civic Hybrid owner won a $9,000 small claims victory against Honda for widely misrepresenting the miles per gallon on her Civic. Hyundai told my group Consumer Watchdog Thursday it would not advertise its 40 miles per gallon claim about the Elantra in its Super Bowl...

It's been a big day for those of us who have been making the case that Google steers users not to the most relevant products and services, but to its own services.  This morning in Brussels, Consumer Watchdog called upon European privacy officials to investigate such antitrust issues, including...

In a remarkable act of either stupidity or brinksmanship, the Obama Administration challenged the US Supreme Court to either keep the federal individual mandate to buy health insurance or throw out with it some of the most important consumer protections in the federal health care overhaul.

The Justice...

With a simple signature, California Governor Jerry Brown has struck a blow for populism in the ballot initiative process by signing a new law to clarify that all ballot initiatives be voted on in November, when twice the number of voters show up, rather than in primary elections.

This week...

The clock ticking down on the last night in the California statehouse is always a lot like waiting for last call at a rowdy bar around 2 AM -- you wonder how much damage will done before the last shot.

For years my colleagues and I have stood watch on...

If Facebook's new facial recognition software isn't scary enough, imagine Mark Zuckerberg's face replacing George Washington's on the dollar bill. Or rubbing out all the dead presidents on every bit of American currency.

July 4th may be Independence Day for America, but...

No CEO ever likes to testify before Congress, but Google's CEOs, past (Eric Schmidt) and present (founder Larry Page), are going so far out of their way to avoid testifying in Congress that they are begging for a subpoena.

Bloomberg is...

The quote of the month goes to Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, which is out with a poll that shows Arnold Schwarzenegger with a 75% disapproval rating among voters and with 90% of Los Angeles residents rejecting him.

DiCamillo told the San Francisco Chronicle: ...

Today California’s Democratic state lawmakers announced a budget plan to keep their paychecks coming that included one of the worst ideas Arnold Schwarzenegger had since impregnating his kids’ nanny.

If lawmakers don’t...

U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller did the American people a great favor today by introducing the Do-Not-Track-Online Act of 2011.

iPhone and Android users should not have to worry about being spied on by their smart phones. We should be able to say no to Google and...

The email warnings are flying in West Los Angeles about how the President's motorcade will once again gridlock afternoon rush hour. The cause: two mistimed, ill-placed Hollywood fundraisers on opposite sides of the traffic jam known as West LA.

There's probably no major city as pro-Obama as Los...

If you want to know why we're really paying over $4 per gallon for gasoline, and there appears to be no end in sight, the film Gas Hole lays it all out for anyone who wants to know the history of the pain at the pump.

The...

The strong buzz in Washington, DC is that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is President Obama's top choice for Commerce Secretary and an appointment is coming soon. The CEO who made billions collecting our personal information online and serving us up to advertisers, the guy who created online privacy...

While skirmishes in Libya and uncertainty in the Middle East are nice cover for outrageous gasoline prices, the fact is the same old suspects are making a killing from sky-high gas prices approaching $4 dollars per gallon in California: big oil companies and greedy speculators.

The speculative market may...

Should our right to privacy be sacrificed so Google can make billions of dollars off images of us and our things?

At the National Governors Association, President Obama just threw his weight behind a bipartisan effort in the U.S. Senate to allow states to innovate with health reform, including adopting a public insurance system or single payer health care system by 2013 instead of 2017.

The governors embraced the state...

The largely peaceful revolution in Cairo and Americans' celebration of it raises the question:

What would it take to mount a peaceful revolution in America against the Wall Street and corporate powerhouses that have turned the government against the best interests of our people?

In America, the corporation is...