The Crucade Against Unchecked Industy Practices

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Recommended: Interest groups in politics

In 1968, the Center for Study of Responsive Law was founded by a Lebanese-American beginning a successful crusade against unchecked industry practices and bureaucratic government agencies focusing on a variety of environmental, consumer and worker health and safety issues. The creation of an organization to represent the people as a whole, or the public interest, was a bold, innovative development in American politics at the time. It began a much-needed qualitative reform of the Industrial Revolution characterized by the empowerment of the consumer through informative engagement holding business, government and other powerful institutions accountable to the American people. It has been almost 50 years since Nader’s example empowered citizens across the nation, to doubt, question, and fight for the public interest paving the way for thousands of groups to continue and expand that cause, and today, the public-interest group is one of the last functional elements of our political system able to affect policy and regulation with only the good of the general public in mind; what constitutes “good for the general public” remains subjective, but within that context certain public interest groups stand out with regard to their morality, effectiveness, and the broad nature of their issues as reflected by bi-partisanship and cooperation with other public interest groups.
 Citizens for Tax Justice’s role in tax reform began in 1984, when a Nader-trained lawyer, Robert McIntyre, found that 128 corporations had avoiding paying federal income taxes based on data extracted from their respective annual business reports. After the media grabbed on to a report issued by Citizens for Tax Justice called “The Top Ten Corporate Freeloaders”, for the f...

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...6 tax reform debate on the hill, the Senate Finance Committee, unknowingly, was ready to endorse a less liberal tax credit for the working poor than that favored by the House; the Center, in one day, produced a three-page memo proving the poor would be hurt and gave the senators a simple alternative to solve the problem, which ended up being utilized.(4) Today, the Center focuses on fiscal issues, low-income programs, taxes, outreach campaigns, social insurance programs, and reporting poverty and income trends in an effective, realistic manner. “In a political environment rife with ideological warfare and poisoned by partisanship, the Center’s knack for getting things done sets it apart from . . .well, from just about everybody else in Washington.”(5) Giving a voice to poverty is or should be in line with our economic, social, and moral values and responsibilities.

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