Word: nadering
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...With the Nader report for the first time in a generation, the Commission's whole record in consumer protection is considered, and devasted. The present-day morass of unregulated business practices is a real consumer crisis, yet the Nader report shows that the Commission once created to "prevent unfair and deceptive practices" in business is instead inactive and lethargic...
...Nader Report suggests that greatest blame for the F.T.C.'s inactivity must lie with Chairman Dixon. According to their findings, authority in the Commission is extremely centralized: Dixon is responsible for most decisions on what complaints to consider, what enforcement tactics to use, what information to withhold from the public. Appointed in 1960 by Kennedy as a Southern political debt, Dixon has driven, says the report, most Republicans out of high-level positions, and has staffed the agency with cronies, political appointees, and Southerners who share little of the interest of some low-grade attorneys in vigorous industry regulation. Dixon...
...Goddard's excellent tenure in the Food and Drug Administration showed the difference in an agency's efficacy that a vigorous administrator can make. Widespread replacement of personnel by men with a more wary view of business practices would indeed change the whole character of the agency. But the Nader report also notes that the conclusions of the Hoover Commission in 1949 were much the same as the F.T.C. deficiencies of 1969. Though the immediate problem lies with Dixon and his appointees, such consistent faults suggest consistent causes...
...Commission's sympathy to business must be blamed on the "conditioning process" to which all regulatory agencies are open. Congressional and lobby friendships, the interchange of jobs between agency and the industry it is regulating, inundation by the industry viewpoint -- are pressures to which all agencies are subject. The Nader report offers some hope of escape. It notes that the F.T.C., in "regulating" all of business, has a non-specific "clientele" and so is less likely to have interlocking relationships with it. The chairman can widen his awareness of consumer problems--he need not address business groups uncountably more times...
...long-range political prospect for the recommendations of Nader's group is uncertain. Several Senators--Ribicoff, Magnuson, Nelson, Pastori, and Kennedy--can be expected to be sympathetic to an F.T.C. reform effort; the Kennedy staff has "requested" a copy of the Nader report and the January 25 copy of Business Week reports that three Congressional investigations into the F.T.C. are slated for the spring. More public sentiment for reform may be generated upon commercial publication of the Nader report--leading perhaps to preliminary injunctive power for the Commission if not a change in personnel...