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In the past few weeks, the Winsted (Conn.) Evening Citizen has run three full page notices inviting the people of this small town (pop. 10,000) to come forward “with some ideas that will help Winsted.” The Citizen’s publisher, Joe Bradley, wants “to get the people of this area thinking positively again.” He was referring to…

These are the days of maximum hypocrisy in the Congress as the session nears its closing time. These are the times when politicians bifurcate their tongues and throw themselves into the laps of the business lobbyists eager to trade campaign contributions for corporate subsidy legislation. So get ready, airline passengers; that same combination is about…

For nearly 9 million students, another college year begins. For many of these students, the year is a tedious trip down memorization lane leading toward a diploma and, they hope, a job. College administrators and teachers go through their practiced motions of processing their students with the maximum of routine instruction and the minimum of…

The Monsanto Corp. is spending $7 million in a public relations campaign to speak up about chemicals. But chemicals have been speaking up for themselves recently in ways that Monsanto would rather not have publicized. More than 80 of these chemicals, 22 of them cancer-causing, have been oozing through a residential area in Niagara Falls…

It was bound to happen. But it still happened all of a sudden, Three new legal newspapers have been launched, and one of their quests is to illuminate one of the most secretive areas of the economy–the large corporate law firms. These law factories have played a powerful role in shaping government to the desires…

Nearly four million motorists will buy pickup trucks, vans or other multi-purpose passenger vehicles during the next 12 months. However, very few know that these vehicles do not meet even the modest safety standards that the U.S. Department of Transportation has required of passenger cars since 1968. This difference means, for example, that a driver…

After indicating early last year that she was going to be more than an ordinary sales agent for the business world, Secretary of Commerce Juanita Kreps is running for corporate cover. In a major flip-flop, Secretary Kreps has retreated from a creative proposal to further corporate social responsibility and assumed the traditional indentured role of…

Civil service reform–getting a better performance from happier government employees–is the centerpiece of President Carter’s campaign pledge to improve the federal government. Yet he is having a difficult time communicating a sense of excitement about his proposals both on Capitol Hill and among the public. To be sure, the jargon of civil service reform is…

The national Chamber of Commerce feels no shame when it comes to damaging consumer rights and interests. Knowing that the public may view their anti-consumer extremism with increasing concern, the chamber has jumped on the bandwagon behind a modest congressional bill to help small claims courts. The heartless lobbyists at the chamber wanted to gain…

The same lobbyists who fought the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 are at it again. This time the objective is to delay or to defeat the proposed standards by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit modestly the amount of cancer-causing chemicals in municipal drinking water systems. Who are these opponents of safer drinking…