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A group of spirited employees at the American Safety Razor Company (ASR) plant in Staunton, Va., are honing a political action strategy against the Federal Trade Commission. At issue are hundreds of jobs and the kind of antitrust dilemma that most government lawyers would rather not have to resolve. Here are the facts at their…
Four young reporters from the Children’s Express recently interviewed me. They ranged in age from 10 to 13 years and asked very though-provoking questions on consumer and environmental subjects. Children’s Express is a new monthly magazine written by children. Americans first heard of this delightful idea at the Democratic National Convention last July. The children…
Few situations are more pleasant to follow than a determined businessman on a public interest crusade. One such advocate is William N. Plymat, a co-founder and just retired Chairman of the Board of the Preferred Risk Mutual Insurance Company. From his offices in Des Moines, Iowa, Plymat is accelerating his long fight against alcoholism by…
An American Bar Association Committee has completed a report for the Justice Department on economic or business crimes that is sure to focus more top-level attention on tax enforcement efforts regarding these offenses. Already, signals from the Carter White House and from Attorney General Griffin Bell foreshadow a move to expand the federal government’s resources…
How many times have you heard it said that this nation has no comprehensive energy policy? Probably almost as often as you have heard Jimmy Carter and other political figures promise to give you one. Well, it is important in this harsh winter of the energy industry’s content to summarize what has been learned, if…
About 12 years ago a 9-year-old girl was riding her bicycle near her suburban home outside of Washington when she struck the rear bumper of a parked automobile. The collision hurled her flush into the sharp, protruding tail-fin on the car. She was fatally impaled. Such tragedies are not freak accidents. Hundreds of thousands of…
A few months before the Congressional elections of 1816, the members of Congress voted themselves a pay increase. The public outrage was jolting. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “There has never been an instance before of so unanimous an opinion of the people.” Even though the Congress quickly repealed the compensation law before election day, almost two-thirds…
If the lessons of recent Washington history are to be heeded, Jimmy Carter should be launching a “two track presidency” to fulfill his campaign declarations. The first track is the familiar one. It involves treating the problems of inflation, unemployment, disease, poverty and crime on the domestic scene and the urgency of the arms race,…
Utilities, polluters, other corporate defrauders and wayward government agencies may not be pleased, but here is a bit of good news on the horizon for the people. The fraternity of lawyers known as the “organized bar” is finally beginning to consider seriously its obligations to support what has come to be known as public interest…
The other day I came across a unique report from U.S. District Judge Charles B. Renfrew in San Francisco. It examines the sentences he imposed on several corporate executives in a criminal antitrust case. Judges rarely follow up their sentencing decisions and even more rarely write an evaluation of them after they are carried out.…