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Question: Who is a leading candidate for the title of “The Best Friend of the U.S. Shareholder”?Answer: Stanley Sporkin. chief of the Enforcement Division of the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is Uncle Sam’s watchdog against corporate financial manipulations. SPORKIN? Who ever heard of Sporkin? Ask a growing number of big businessmen and their assorted…
Attention William Simon, William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, American Enter- prise Institute and other economic conservatives! Why are you so calm before the gathering storm of atomic socialism? WHERE IS your ideological fervor for free-market enterprise when giant mismanaged corporations are pushing Uncle Sam (alias the small taxpayer) to bail them out by socializing their…
On the morning of Nov. 6, prior to final House of Representatives debate on the Consumer Protection Bill (H.R. 7575), two White House agents sat in the office of Congressman Pete McCloskey, R-Calif. THEY WERE trying to persuade McCloskey to drop his amendment to the bill that would have consolidated consumer advocacy efforts in the…
For over 100 years the slogan, “the bigger, the better” has guided the business community. Even today, few executives would question the validity of such a slogan. Banks with assets exceeding $30 billion, oil companies with sales over $30 billion annually and insurance companies with millions of policyholders are believed to be big because they…
How do large American and European food and drug corporations affect consumers abroad, say, in South America? Robert Ledogar, a soft-spoken former Roman Catholic priest with a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set out two years ago to find out. BACKED by a grant from Consumers Union, Ledogar journeyed, observed and researched…
There is nothing that upsets corporate and governmental bureaucrats more than an effective proposal on behalf of consumers. So, expectedly, Gerald Ford, his golfing partners from the auto, steel and oil industries and dozens of trade associations in Washington are straining to stop the establishment of a tiny consumer protection agency to fight consumer abuses…
One of the surest ways to lose your job in the federal government is to do your job, even if it makes waves. Ask David Shaw, a 38-year-old statistician for the Bureau of the Census. A few years ago he became interested in how the Census Bureau could collect more information for local neighborhood and…
Maria Sanchez and her neighbors in adjoining apartments were concerned about an abandoned building next door at 2639 W. Haddon Ave., in Chicago. It was strewn with broken glass, foundations were badly cracked, floors buckled, exterior doors missing and rats everywhere. THE OWNER of this sagging structure was the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban…
Ever since the introduction of the farm tractor in the 1920’s, farmers have suffered the economic abuse of the giant oil companies. But, unlike their urban consumer counterparts, they fought back by forming farmer-owned oil cooperatives. Starting with cooperatively owned filling stations and bulk storage plants, they gradually introduced the cooperative idea into oil-product distribution,…
Ever since the introduction of the farm tractor in the 1920’s, farmers have suffered the economic abuse of the giant oil companies. But, unlike their urban consumer counterparts, they fought back by forming farmer-owned oil cooperatives. Starting with cooperatively owned filling stations and bulk storage plants, they gradually introduced the cooperative idea into oil-product distribution,…