In the Public Interest

In the Great Hall of the New York City Chamber of Commerce there occurred recently a most ironic legislative hearing on a bill to establish a state-owned bank Sponsored by the New York Assembly Committee on Banks, the two-day ses­sion in the portrait-ringed hall heard witnesses for and against the proposal to put the state…

At age 19, weighing 110 lbs, Franklin L. Gage is a leading candidate for the title: “America’s toughest kid.” Working out of a small, drafty bedroom-office in a rowhouse three blocks from Congress, Gage is organizing a national petition drive against nuclear power and for solar energy. As coordinator for the Task Force Against Nuclear…

In a discussion of energy issues with consumer representatives at the White House last month, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller could not resist one prideful remark. Speaking of himself in the third person, he said, “If the vice-president’s brother hadn’t made a deal with Libya to leak oil during last winter’s embargo, we wouldn’t have been as…

In a discussion of energy issues with consumer representatives at the White House last month, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller could not resist one prideful remark. Speaking of himself in the third person, he said, “If the vice-president’s brother hadn’t made a deal with Libya to leak oil during last winter’s embargo, we wouldn’t have been as…

Plutonium, that horrendously potent cancer-caus­ing substance, is viewed more benignly in some gov­ernmental and industrial circles. The Nuclear Regu­latory Commission is proposing to license wide-scale use of plutonium-powered heart pacemakers. There are more than 100,000 conventional or non-nu­clear pacemakers implant­ed in Americans, and the market is growing rapidly. Companies wanting to manufacture the plutonium pacemaker…

Outside the door of a Sen­ate meeting room recently, Sen. James B. Alien (D-Ala.) was huddling with Al Bourland, a notorious anti-consumer GM lobbyist. The filibuster-prone senator was exchanging strategies and information about the Con­sumer Protection Bill (S.200) which he has op­posed for five years. Allen then joined the other senators on the com­mittee to…

Back in the late ’60s when students were demonstrat­ing or sitting-in on many a college campus, embattled school administrators would urge students to work for needed changes in soci­ety through conventional political and legal channels. Why be so disruptive, they would plead, when stu­dents could use their demo­cratic rights as citizens through traditional branches of…

President Ford, who be­lieves consumer energy prices are not high enough, is pushing Congress to deregulate the price of inter­state natural gas. Although this move, backed by the giant oil companies, would cost consumers about $10 billion a year (a $64 annual increase in the average residential user’s gas bill), Ford thinks it would encourage…

The FBI is bracing itself for an expected surge of requests by citizens for copies of their FBI files. Under new amendments to the Freedom of Information Act passed last fall and effective this month, it will be easier, though not easy, for people to start prying loose some of the personal files kept on…

A coal miner’s hazard is emerging as a significant and commercially feasible source of clean energy. It is the methane gas in under­ground coalbeds which is historically associated with coal-mining explosions Virtually equivalent to natural gas, methane can be used, like natural gas, for home heating and fuel­ing gas appliances. UNTIL RECENTLY, the methane in…