In the Public Interest

Sniff, sniff, sniff is big business It goes far beyond selling perfumes and deodorants that people buy to use on themselves. The business of odoriferous alteration or manipulation of products and environments that interact with people is spreading fast. I noticed just how pervasive this diffusion of smells has become when a cab driver told…

Ronald Reagan is not known to practice leadership by example. Recently, for instance, he sent Congress a proposal to cut the pay of federal workers by 5 percent. but he did riot apply that same level of sacrifice to his $200,000 a year Presidential salary. Now, however, he has an opportunity to support legislation, sponsored…

College graduations are in full swing these days and almost as predictable are the announcements of annual tuition increases that precede these joyous occasions by a few weeks but, hark, from southern Kansas comes a discordant note: Southwestern College (Winfield, Kansas) declares that it “will reduce tuition by $800 for the 1985-86 school year.” College…

Ma Bell and the now independent, local Bell companies owe you $182 million from certain overcharges exacted in the year 1978. “What’s taking so long, you say? Well, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did not order a refund to long distance telephone consumers until November 22, 1904 and then only after a consumer group, the…

Genesee Township assessor Steve Nagy said: “Roger Smith just wants to stomp Us [into] the ground. Gil is shifting the burden from large industrial taxpayers to local people, individuals, who are already up to their necks in taxes.” To achieve this objective, GM has hired a large Detroit law firm with incentive payments in proportion…

Before and after the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was established with Congressional funding in the late Sixties, right wing ideologues were on the attack. PBS was, in their view, a radical, leftist television network. Reaction: PBS took on a weekly discussion show hosted by William F. Buckley which continues to this day. There is still…

Back in 1890 a Republican Congress passed the first federal anti-monopoly law and called it the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Today the Republicans in the White House and the Congress seemed to have forgotten that this law and the Clayton Anti-trust act of 1914 are the principal defenders of competition in interstate commerce. The tidal wave…

To most people the town of Gabrovo, Bulgaria does not exactly induce intimations of hilarity. But the jovial Gabrovians would say that’s because you have not been there. Gabrovo? Bulgaria? When? From May 18 to May 25, 1965 opens the Third International Festival of Comedy and Satirical Films during the Seventh International Biennial of Humor…

Judging by the growing convergence of influential conservative and liberal forces, the bottom has about fallen out of the corporate tax loophole industry. From the Treasury Department to Cong. Jack Kemp (R-NY) to right wing columnist James J. Kilpatrick, the calls are mounting for making corporations pay their fair share of taxes. There is more…

A few days ago I called up a journalist in Vermont who has interviewed William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt, Lenin and Mussolini, among others. George Seldes, age 94, is working on his umpteenth book to be called “Adventures with People: The Noted, the Notorious and the three S.O.B’s.” Next month his magnum opus, “The Great…