In the Public Interest

It’s a confrontation between a labor union and the Reagan government, but this time the issue is not wages; it is asbestos danger in 30,000 American school a. The Service Employees International Union is suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ask the federal court to require the agency to establish standards for the performance…

The newspapers of late have been full of the Democratic Party’s woeful introspections. Congressional Democrats traveled recently to a hotel retreat in Virginia to find their compass. Who are we? where do we go? what do we do?, they asked one another. At one retreat Lee Iacocca was invited, presumably to counsel the defeated ones…

At first I thought that House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill (D-Mass.) had unfurled the white flag of surrender at his post-inaugural meeting with President Ronald Reagan. O’Neill told the president that “in my 50 years of public life I’ve never seen a man more popular than you are with the American people.” This is…

Nearly five years after its scientific review panel said they were ineffective, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now proposed to ban the sales of all non-prescription drug products that claim to prevent or reduce baldness. Following the usual FDA practice of leisure, the proposed ban, now open to public comment by any interested…

General Motors made the press last week by announcing a new subsidiary to build its small Saturn automobile beginning sometime in 1988 or 1989. The media resonated with the pulsating prospect of the Big Company finding cheaper ways to build small cars and stave off the Japanese imports. Governors, Mayors and local development officials all…

With the advent of the New Year, it s appropriate to give a “hat’s off’ to three citizen activists who represent what civic activity is doing to make this a better country. J. Robert Hunter, a casualty actuary by profession, a former Federal Insurance Administrator and now head of the National Insurance Consumer Organization (NICO),…

  This is the story of a public servant — Michael Pertschuk -‑ whose valiant work for over twenty years in the Senate and the FederalTrade Commission have helped millions of Americans. He started as a young lawyer out of Yale on the staff of Senator Maurine Neuberger (D-OR). She had replaced her husband–a cigarette…

Waiting a month after the November elections, New York State legislators sneakily moved to raise their own salaries by 30%, to a level of $43,000 a year — the highest salary for state law makers outside of Alaska and the highest in all 50 states if their $75 per diem is included. The pay package…

Madison, Wisconsin — This week, Wisconsin’s pioneering Citizens’ Utility Board (CUB) celebrated its fifth birthday with a victory over Wisconsin Bell and activity for’ consumers on a wide variety of utility fronts. This unique residential rate-payer-supported group obtained the agreement of the Public Utility Commission to refund about $24 million dollars in overcharges from the…

Sean Marsee was a track star at Talihina High School in Talihina, Oklahoma and had intended to join the Army on July 14, 1983. But in May 1983 his doctor found a malignancy on the youth’s tongue which led to surgery. The cancer continued to spread to his neck and two additional operations removed a…