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Show Consumers and business at fault for injustices urging, an auto safety bill was passed. This represented a change in the public consciousness with regard to manufacturing," he said. Moss attributed the change in consciousness to what he called "cantankerous individualism," combined with a loss of faith in industry. The change in attitudes, he said, were obvious: "The automobile, a symbol of American progress and engineering genius, became an objectionable, subject-to-recall polluter of the environment. "The cigarette, formerly a basic American staple, now stands condemned by doctors as a cause of cancer. "The television, with the advent of color broadcasting, has become a dangerous source of radiation. Near the close of his speech, Senator Moss drew a burst of applause from the audience by stating, "The Nixon administration has had a disastrous record in protecting the consumer. I hope someday Nader will do a report on the internal workings of that administration." f - i .. .,f. V- .'. .:!'' A .. - J' r" -is "It's true that manufacturing industries have perpetrated their share of consumer injustices. However, we, the consumers, don't realize that we should be shouldering an equal amount of the blame," said Utah's Senator Frank E. Moss at the weekly Contemporary Con-temporary Issues program last Thursday in the Art and Arch-itechture Arch-itechture Auditorium. "Big business has often overstepped over-stepped the line in consumer affairs, af-fairs, and the conssmers deserve equal rights. But as we clamor for those rights, we must ask ourselves: our-selves: while business has been making vast technological implementations im-plementations in the years since World War II, where has the consumer been? In every case, no one has made an attempt to curtail a bad practice until it had already gotten out of hand." Senator Moss serves as chairman chair-man of the Subcommittee of Consumers of the Senate Commerce Com-merce Committee, in addition to being chairman of the Subcommittees Sub-committees on Housing for the Elderly and on Long-term Care; both in the Special Senate Committee for the Aging. The Subcommittee on Consumers has overseen the passage of such legislation as the ban on broadcast cigarette advertising, the prevention preven-tion of the sale of flammable fabrics, a toy safety law, and many others. "Increasingly, big business has Senator Frank E. Moss, (D-Utah) spoke at Contemporary Issues on consumer problems. While big business has its share of faults, the consumer is also responsible for some of theproblems. Moss believes. been cast as the villain in this drama. Is this unfair? I think it is. For decades, business has done just what we've told them to: it has explotied mercilessly our natural resources, for example. Now the people seem hell-bent on blaming business for everything," Senator Moss said. However, the senator asserted, if the consumers are to be blamed for not being alert to bad practices, then industry has not assumed a totally angelic role, either. "They (the industries) complain that corporate freedom is being circumscribed cir-cumscribed by government controls in the interests of the environment. But if they had concerned themselves more with self-regulation than with trying to see how much they could get away with, those 'punitive' pieces of legislation wouldn't be on the books." As proof of the consumer's initial unwillingness to tackle the task of self-protection, Senator Moss cited the lag between President Kennedy's Ken-nedy's consumer message in 1962, which was the first major call to consumer awareness, and the first piece of protective legislation, which was passed in 1966. "Kennedy's message called for four consumer rights: to have safety in products, to be informed, to be able to choose, and to be heard. It should have incited people to do something, but it wasn't until four years later that, with Ralph Nader's |
