In the Public Interest

SOLAR ENERGY advocate Dan Berman has sent me news of a development for electricity consumers in Davis that millions of households may find of interest during these times of energy deregulation. A group of citizens are moving toward a referendum in Davis to establish the town’s own municipal utility district. If the voters pass this…

The drumbeat to corporatize (a.k.a.: privatize) essential facilities continues to beat from the business-funded think tanks in Washington, D.C. Recently, the government’s uranium enrichment installations — which deal with national security matters — were corporatized, and are now run by a company listed on the stock exchange. Corporatization is supposed to be more efficient, more…

Remember when the “energy crisis” was the big political issue? Remember the long gas lines and the sudden surge in gasoline prices — once in the mid-’70s and once in the late ’70s? Remember the politicians demanding that our country strive for energy independence, so that we would no longer need to be reliant on…

“America’s big oil companies have been ripping off federal and state governments for decades by underpaying royalties for oil drilled on public lands. The Interior Department tried to stop the practice with new rules, but Congress has succeeded in blocking their implementation….” So wrote the Los Angeles Times in an editorial this summer. Indeed, this…

In 1980, the U.S. Congress passed a law to protect adults who prey on children. You read that correctly. Public Law 96-252 prohibits the Federal Trade Commission from enacting rules that would protect the nation’s children from commercial advertising that exploits their vulnerable and trusting natures. This law is corporate power incarnate. It should be…

The gigantic computer files on the personal lives of Americans — as buyers, patients, children, students, workers, citizens, and taxpayers — continue to grow. The right of privacy, which is constitutionally protected, receives much lip service but little organized defense. Yet survey after survey shows people are worried and upset over repeated disclosures of violations…

The brazen, bullying Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is at it again. Only this time he is trying to intimidate a group of big business executives who are urging Congress to enact one important campaign finance reform — banning the unlimited “soft money” contributions to political parties. In an ocean of election money corruption and deepening…

The ups and downs of consumer protection efforts during this century teach an important lesson. Reforms don’t last. They either get appealed, as have many states’ unfair interest-rate laws, or they go unenforced, as have many tenants’ rights laws, or they find their regulatory agencies tied up in the spider webs woven by corporate law…

Noting that “these days, the business of birth starts early with the cutting of the umbilical cord,” consumer advocate Ralph Nader has asked the American Hospital Association to urge member hospitals to keep commercialism out of the maternity wards. In a letter to AHA President Dick Davidson and Board Chair Fred Brown, Nader wrote that,…

There used to be a time when big corporations were worried about rebellious and anticorporate students on university and college campuses. Rallies, teach-ins, boycotts, and other forms of protest took on corporations for polluting, discriminating, exploiting consumers, backing military dictatorships, and other misbehaviors. In 1970, Earth Day events involving nearly 2,000 colleges shook and exposed…