In the Public Interest

A smug, corporate-indentured Congress continues to misread the looming backlash by community groups and citizens against the gross indifference their legislators are displaying toward critical environmental health risks. In the past month, for example, Senators have refused to end a filibuster against a vote on a simple bill to establish a medical warning notification by…

Inside the offices of the Heritage Foundation–the non­profit policy advocate for the Reagan Administration, a handful of zealots are in constant touch with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Their mission: privatize a large array of governmental services and assets. The Heritage list was reflected in the recent report of the President’s Commission on…

Goodbye Firestone. The Japanese tire giant, Bridgestone, has offered to buy the venerable U.S. company for $88 a share. This is considered a hefty price by John Nevin, Firestone Chairman, who supports the sale of his company and who, along with other large shareholders, will become much richer as a result. But will America become…

Day after day in a federal courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, the ghastly story of the tobacco industry and lung cancer is being told. The case involves Rose D. Cipollone who died in 19E4 at age 59 from smoking cigarettes since she was 16. Her husband is suing, on her behalf, Philip Morris, P. Lorillard…

Many years ago I wondered why nobody developed a publication which just printed letters that citizens write to their members of Congress, their newspapers and other outlets. The vast majority of these epistles never reach beyond their immediate recipient — a pity as this sample of mail we have received on a recent day: —…

Former Speaker Tip O’Neill said of Reagan: “he knows less than any president I’ve ever known.” A hundred and seventy page book by Mark Green and Gail MacColl fills page after page with Mr. Reagan’s verbal errors, falsifications and wild political exaggerations. Among the items in “Reagan’s Reign of Error” are assertions that ‘once launched,…

“In the final analysis, the issue in this campaign is leadership”, says Bob Dole over and over again, adding that “I voted in Congress fifteen or twenty thousand times in twenty-seven years. My record is there. You can study it.” Let’s “study” some contrasts. Repeatedly, Dole says that the deficit is the biggest domestic issue.…

One of the results of eight years of Reaganism in Washington was the near eclipse of the government’s solar energy research and promotion program. The Californian came to town in 1981 touting atomic power and he poured money into subsidizing and advancing that failed and risky technology while starving the Energy Department’s solar and conservation…

Over 2000 Britons, most of them middle-aged or elderly, trusted the Eli Lilly drug company in Indianapolis and survived to regret it. Starting around eight years ago, they took a drug called Opren (named. Oraflex in the U.S.) to allegedly combat pain and inflammation from their arthritis. The agony for many of them ranged from…

Lee Iacocca had this to say about air bags in his 1984 bestselling autobiography: “There are those who believe that air bags are the answer. I disagree. I’ve been speaking out against them since they were first developed almost twenty years ago.” Now look at this report from the February 10th Wall Street Journal: “Chrysler…