In the Public Interest

I read the other day where an advertising agency was negotiating with some municipality for access to parking meters. That’s right -­advertisements on top of parking meters. Are there any boundaries beyond which the advertisers will not cross? A few years ago, they almost convinced the Postal Service to rent space on postage stamps for…

September 1986 marked the 20th anniversary of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) but you would scarcely know it by watching the Reaganites virtually ignore its celebration. They did have their reasons, however. First, they did not want to admit the very substantial life-saving and injury preventing successes of this federal regulatory program over…

A new little booklet, titled “Quotations from President Ron,” published by prize-winning Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz, is the most recent reminder of the astonishing free ride that Mr. Reagan has received from the media both before and after he became President. Lou Cannon, a biographer of the President and regular White House reporter, wrote…

Brace yourself, if you are an air traveler, for higher airline fares next year. Why? Because price competition between airlines in many cities and also at several hub airports will become a memory as the Reagan-approved airline mergers move the airline industry into the hands of a few giant companies. Even Alfred Kahn, a former…

For ten years Mark Green was a writer and consumer advocate with our citizen groups in Washington. Now, he just won a stunning upset against multimillionaire John Dyson for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate from New York state. Outspent ten to one ($6 million to $600,000), Green’s victory (by a margin of 53…

Matters of taste, more than most things in life, appear to be matters of personal choice. Even in dictatorships, people choose the color of their socks or shirts or scarves or the taste of their food and drink within the limits of their poverty. Yet, increasingly in mass media consumer economies, matters of taste become…

Back in the Sixties I was traveling thru an Asian country and was astonished to observe even middle class families regularly buying imported ice cream, imported crackers & imported water from Europe. Today, the modest to quite affluent classes in the United States are buying imported Swedish ice cream, French Perrier, British crackers and Swiss…

Every so often when I read complaint letters by consumers complaining of mistreatment by sellers, I think of Davis, California -­that gradually remarkable city of 37,000 people located in a farming region near Sacramento. Davis received some national publicity in the late Seventies because of major successes in energy conservation, including a high percentage of…

News about motorists being saved in highway collisions by airbags is increasing in frequency these days. Sometime later this year, there will be in the United States 100,000 cars equipped with airbags — mostly driver-side only, and mostly recent Mercedes models. The rest include twelve-year-old GM cars — with full front seat airbags — a…

SAN DIEGO — In this perennially growing part of the country, the average price for a detached single family used home reached $144,800 last month. This item in the local newspaper reminded me how little change is under way in our country for more efficient housing construction before the next Japanese import invasion of manufactured…