In the Public Interest

If you buy fresh apples, apple juice, apple sauce or other apple products rid apples, this campaign is for you. With relatively slight effort, you can help rid apples of a cosmetic applied to this fruit that has been shown to cause cancer in animals and therefore most probably in humans as well. The fall…

Here is a story of two Senators and a President at work. Multimillionaires Ronald Reagan and Senator John Danforth (R-MO) are upset at the verdicts and settlements which a few adults and children, badly injured by defective products and toxic chemicals, have been winning in lawsuits against corporations. Joining them in this worry is Senator…

An excess of concentration by the mercantile mind can lead to displays of genuine commercial derangement. Consider two recent episodes. The first is a report that talking and scented supermarket shelves may be tried on consumers in selected markets. The sponsors of this new marketing technique would place devices that trigger a taped selling message…

When the news broke last month that the Senate Finance Committee had agreed, by a vote of twenty to nothing, on a tax reform bill with a maximum personal income tax bracket of 27%, among other dramatic changes, editorialists erupted with awe and praise. The media relied for almost three weeks on a 30-page summary…

It took a high school student asking President Reagan a question about hunger in America at a White House meeting to put the subject on page one. Mr. Reagan replied: “I don’t believe that there is anyone going hungry in America simply by reason of denial or lack of ability to feed them; it is…

There is an interesting ideology maturing in Reagan’s Washington these days. It is best called “corporatism.” Here is an example. For years Ronald Reagan would speak against mandatory seat belt use laws and mandatory motorcycle helmet use laws. Long before he was president he would give these proposals as prime examples of a meddling Big…

Is this country serious about preventing cancer? Americans who stop smoking are serious. So are mothers and fathers pushing for school containment of asbestos that is exposing their children to risks of cancer later in life. So too are community groups fighting toxic dumps and emissions. But what about our national government and its helmsman,…

Now that David Stockman, Reagan’s former duplicitous budget director, is cashing his $2 1/2 million in royalties for his book: The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed, his critics are having a field day deploring his disloyalty to Reagan. Why, they demand, did Stockman wait until he left office and sign a book…

The response to the Soviet atomic power plant accident by U.S. government and nuclear industry officials has been curiously self-righteous. We are told that Soviet safeguards for nuclear plants are weaker than those applying to the 100 licensed nuclear plants in the U.S. Then we learn that five plants used for producing weapons grade material…

About ten years ego physicist Alvin Weinberg, former director of the Oakridge National Laboratory told me that no one will really know how dangerous a nuclear power plant could be until a meltdown occurs. The disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, at this writing, may come closer to giving Dr. Weinberg…