Word: ftc
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Such congressional action reflects the public's new antiregulatory sentiment. The FTC has come to epitomize all the problems of Government regulation run amuck. This new notoriety represents a strange metamorphosis for a body that in 1969 an American Bar Association commission condemned for inactivity and Ralph Nader's Raiders ridiculed as "the little old lady on Pennsylvania Avenue." Established in 1914, the FTC for most of its history was a largely ineffective agency that rarely used its powers to curb deceptive advertising and to press antitrust cases. In 1975, however, Congress broadened the commission's mandate...
Using its new muscle, the agency became the nation's nanny. An FTC administrative judge challenged Pitching Star Vida Blue's pitches for drinking milk because blacks often have trouble digesting milk. The commission proposed a truth-in-menu rule that might mean, for example, that no restaurant could offer as Maryland crab any crustacean that had crawled into Delaware. The agency intensified a holy war against breakfast cereal companies; it has proposed breaking them up and banning ads for presweetened cereals from Saturday morning's TV cartoon shows. An FTC-proposed rule warned that such...
...company accused the commission of exhibiting "absence of fundamental fairness." Kentucky Senator Wendell Ford said that the agency had offended every businessman in his state. He noted that Louisville's Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., in answer to a subpoena, spent three years and $800,000 to ship the FTC 14,000 pounds of documents. Chicago-area Businessman Joseph Sugarman, the owner of a mail-order firm selling home computers and burglar alarms, took out half-page ads this month in papers around the country to cry: "The FTC is harassing small businesses, but I'm not going...
Commission Chairman Michael Pertschuk, who was appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1977, has become the lightning rod of criticism against the FTC. An ebullient, Yale-trained lawyer with a crusader's rapid-fire zeal, Pertschuk has further raised the ire of both congressional leaders and business. Senator Ford accuses him of turning the agency from law enforcement to social planning. Last year a federal judge banned Pertschuk from all involvement in the children's television case, concluding that he had become too biased against the cereal companies. Other critics charged that Pertschuk was an intemperate, excessive regulator...
Congress, though, is determined to yank some of the FTC's teeth. The House Commerce Committee voted to give Congress a veto power over all commission regulations. This would be the first time that any federal regulator had been so controlled. By a lopsided 223 to 147 vote, the House two weeks ago recommended canceling commission plans to force undertakers to disclose their prices fully and in advance. Representative Bill Frenzel of Minnesota suggested that every FTC staff member and all five commissioners "should spend 20 years at hard labor filling in their own asinine forms." The Senate Commerce...