In the Public Interest

It has been said that the young have few heroes today, but that may be so because many of the heroes there are in America remain unsung and unsuitable for the required antics that attract mass media attention. Two such stalwarts in the modern history of of motor vehicle safety were Dr. William Haddon, Jr.,…

It was a dramatic display of corporate power over political obeisance. The subject on the Phil Donahue Show recently was General Motor’s (GM) new Saturn plant, featuring GM Chairman, Roger Smith, and six Governors who have been furiously bidding to have the company locate the plant in their state. Roger Smith came on first with…

Every year around his birthday, business firms seem bent on giving George Washington more careers. In Boston recently our first President was seen on television repeatedly selling Datsuns. In New York City, he was pushing carpets. Around the nation’s capital, he was seen telling readers of the Washington Post that “Leasing is a revolutionary New…

General Motors, with the backing of “government off your backs” Ronald Reagan, is lobbying to enact mandatory seat belt use laws in dozens of states. Using his own agents and working through front groups, GM’s Chairman, Roger Smith, whose company once opposed mandatory three point seat belt installation in the late Sixties, privately boasts that…

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),…