Word: payes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...phone call last December from consumer advocate Ralph Nader spurred Jerry Williams of Boston to help organize a citizens' revolt against the proposed 51% congressional pay raise. Among the tactics: deluging members of Congress with tea bags as a reminder of the Boston Tea Party...
...defining event for these radio activists was the battle early this year over the proposed congressional pay raise. Inspired by outraged callers, a number of talk hosts initiated letter-writing and phone-in campaigns, and kept in touch with each other to exchange information and plot tactics. The radio campaign was widely credited with helping scuttle the pay increase. Now several of these hosts are leading the protests against Exxon's slow cleanup of the Alaska oil spill, collecting cut-up Exxon credit cards and advocating a company boycott. More such crusades may be in the offing. Williams, of Boston...
This new strain of talk radio, Nader maintains approvingly, "is the working people's medium. There's no ticket of admission. You only have to dial." Congressman Chester Atkins, a Massachusetts Democrat who was a chief target of pay-raise opponents, gamely praises the format as well. "Talk radio is in touch with the anger and hostility and frustrations that people feel with respect to government in their daily lives," he says...
...talk shows and a fixture at WRKO in Boston since 1981. A onetime liberal who now calls himself a populist, Williams often had Malcolm X as a guest during the '60s; today he spends much of his time inveighing against Governor Michael Dukakis. Before his role in the pay-raise controversy, Williams' most notable on-air campaign was against Massachusetts' mandatory seat-belt law: he helped gather 40,000 signatures on a petition calling for a referendum, which led to the law's repeal...
Like Siegel, Williams downplays the power that radio talk hosts wield. "All we did," he says of the anti-pay raise jihad, "was direct passions and emotions to the right place." Not everyone regards him so benignly. Columnist Tom Moroney of the suburban Middlesex News has charged that Williams "does a disservice to the political process" and claims that he isn't legally registered to vote in Massachusetts. (Williams denies the charge; Moroney, he counters, is "evil incarnate...