In the Public Interest

For nearly 9 million students, another college year begins. For many of these students, the year is a tedious trip down memorization lane leading toward a diploma and, they hope, a job. College administrators and teachers go through their practiced motions of processing their students with the maximum of routine instruction and the minimum of…

The Monsanto Corp. is spending $7 million in a public relations campaign to speak up about chemicals. But chemicals have been speaking up for themselves recently in ways that Monsanto would rather not have publicized. More than 80 of these chemicals, 22 of them cancer-causing, have been oozing through a residential area in Niagara Falls…

It was bound to happen. But it still happened all of a sudden, Three new legal newspapers have been launched, and one of their quests is to illuminate one of the most secretive areas of the economy–the large corporate law firms. These law factories have played a powerful role in shaping government to the desires…

Nearly four million motorists will buy pickup trucks, vans or other multi-purpose passenger vehicles during the next 12 months. However, very few know that these vehicles do not meet even the modest safety standards that the U.S. Department of Transportation has required of passenger cars since 1968. This difference means, for example, that a driver…

After indicating early last year that she was going to be more than an ordinary sales agent for the business world, Secretary of Commerce Juanita Kreps is running for corporate cover. In a major flip-flop, Secretary Kreps has retreated from a creative proposal to further corporate social responsibility and assumed the traditional indentured role of…

Civil service reform–getting a better performance from happier government employees–is the centerpiece of President Carter’s campaign pledge to improve the federal government. Yet he is having a difficult time communicating a sense of excitement about his proposals both on Capitol Hill and among the public. To be sure, the jargon of civil service reform is…

The national Chamber of Commerce feels no shame when it comes to damaging consumer rights and interests. Knowing that the public may view their anti-consumer extremism with increasing concern, the chamber has jumped on the bandwagon behind a modest congressional bill to help small claims courts. The heartless lobbyists at the chamber wanted to gain…

The same lobbyists who fought the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 are at it again. This time the objective is to delay or to defeat the proposed standards by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit modestly the amount of cancer-causing chemicals in municipal drinking water systems. Who are these opponents of safer drinking…

Something happened a few days ago in the U.S. Senate that was more than good for consumers. By a vote of 60 to 33, the Senate passed a bill to establish a National Consumer Cooperative Bank that would provide credit and technical assistance to a wide variety of consumer co-ops. In doing so, the Senate…

Top Firestone Company executives and their advisers are trying to decide how to handle the regulatory and market problems involving some 13 million “Firestone 500” steel belted radial tires now on the highway. These are the tires, as many motorists know, that stand accused as being a danger on the roads by the National Highway…