In the Public Interest

Joseph Blumenthal, a semi-retired Miami insurance agent, wrote us in June 1975 with an idea. Why not, he asked, challenge as unconstitutional the anti-rebate laws which prevent insurance agents from giving part of their commission to their customers in order to get their business? Good question. So Public Citizen’s lawyers set out to answer it…

Dallas — Cruel politicians having a good time, behind the gloss of Ronald Reagan, was what this Republican National Convention was all about. Moderate Republicans who wanted some sensitivity shown to Americans who earn under $75,000 a year were shoved aside. Long time Republican women delegates were appalled, some vociferously, at the GOP Platform which…

The wild swings in the national Presidential preference polls suggest more than a sizable number of very undecided voters. These polls demonstrate what Ronald Reagan’s image handlers have known all along — that many people make up their minds based on the most general mental images of the two candidates. Mr. Reagan’s image makers have…

The biggest sense of relief that President Reagan probably felt after his latest news conference is that no reporter asked him about the government’s biggest business bailout ever for the sinking Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company. As the nation’s eighth largest bank, Continental Illinois presented Mr. Reagan with the challenge that it was…

The message from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory confirmed that the domestic auto industry, except for maverick Chrysler, was losing interest in making their vehicles guzzle less gasoline. “For the first time since 1974, the overall fuel economy of new cars purchased in the U.S. was lower in 1983 than in the previous year,” the…

In the week before the Democratic convention’s opening sessions, a group of children, age 8 to 13, came to San Francisco to hold platform hearings on neglect and abuse of children. These youngsters were prepared, serious and diligent. They questioned experts in the fields of hunger, child abuse, health, nuclear arms, education, juvenile justice, employment…

The press conference room at the Department of Transportation was jammed with reporters, some of whom had an accurate sense of deja vu. Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole was announcing the automatic crash protection standard — commonly mis-described as the air bag rule — fifteen years after the Department’s first such proposal in 1969. The…

Lee Davis is an insurance agent in Tampa, Florida who one day last April picked up a ringing cordless phone at the home of a friend. As he put the phone to his ear, he heard a very loud shrill piercing noise. His ear has never been the same since. He has serious hearing loss…

The words were not circumscribed enough to be associated with a corporate executive. But on May 21, 1984 in a letter to Donald D. Engen, the new head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the chief of Pan Am, C. Edward Acker was blunt: “The Air Traffic Control problem,” he declared, “has gone from bad-to-worse-to-horrible-to-intolerable.…

What has been considered politically impossible for nearly two decades occurred in just a few days at the New York state legislature. A mandatory seat belt use law was passed, effective December 1, 1984. The precipitating event was the failure of legislation in May to enact a minimum 21 year old drinking age. A vacuum…