In the Public Interest

General Motors is having serious quality control problems with its cars. The giant auto manufacturer’s recent lemon crop is so unsettling that the company’s chief executives have admitted their worries publicly. According to the Wall Street Journal, GM president James McDonald conceded that the X cars are plagued “with uneven doors, shabby paint jobs and…

Casualty insurance companies are usually a pretty bland bunch. But a few have stood out in the past decade. Allstate has crusaded for installation of automatic crash protection (such as air bags) in automobiles, much to the ire of General Motors. State Farm has battled for more competition in spare parts replacement costs. And Aetna…

Two Stanford University scientists have just authored a stunningly graphic book that Interior Secretary James Watt prob­ably will never read. It is too factual, too enlightening and too disturbing for his extremist brand of environmental pillage. Called Extinction, the Causes and Con­sequences of the Disappearance of Species (Random House, New York), the 290-page volume takes…

The Democrats in Washington—beset by indecision, incohesiveness and incredible amounts of corporate campaign finance slush funds arrayed against them—have a more immediate problem. It is Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, the portly speaker of the House. “Tip” can be as amiable as Ronald Reagan. The difference between the two politicians starts there. While Reagan specializes in…

You and all other Americans own that great national resource known as federal lands. Through the foresight of our country’s forefathers, these lands, mostly in the West and equal in size to about 150 Connecticuts, are held in trust for present and future generations to preserve and enjoy. A group of land grabbers, led by…

Father Joseph Karasiewicz, pastor of the beautiful Immaculate Conception Church in eastern Detroit, is wondering how this could happen in America. An entire neighborhood of 3,500 people—houses, small businesses, schools, a hospital and 16 churches—is under siege. General Motors is demanding that the city of Detroit buy the 365-acre area (with federal funds, of course),…

Well, motorists, get ready for higher auto insurance rates, higher casualty rates on the highway and more pollution, especially from trucks and diesel engines–all compliments of the Reagan administration. Notwithstanding the technical ease with which the auto company engineers could have produced cleaner, more life-saving and less damage-prone cars, the Reaganites have moved to dismantle…

Sen. Jake Garn, the new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, recently confronted the siren call of political hypocrisy on a piece of legislation. He succumbed to the temptation. Throughout his six years in the Senate, the Utah Republican has always railed against regulation of business. But when a federal law prohibiting retail merchants from…

Mrs. Essie Briggs of Columbia, S.C., is not likely to be pleased with what Ronald Reagan is doing to textile workers. She put in 53 years at a cotton mill where she breathed the dense cotton dust that gave her the lung disease called byssinosis. By the mid-’60s, she recalls, “I’d go in there and…

Most consumers believe that the large ‘economy-size” package in the supermarket gives them a lower price per unit than the smaller size of the same brand. A new study in Rhode Island shows that too often the reality is just the reverse. In short, there is a widespread prevalence of a “quantity surcharge.” Students and…