ustxtxb_obs_1977_11_04_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

L_ _J L _J uii co co V c “The Shortage Creators” Rep r in t cour tesy Consumer loss New Braunfels congressman and U.S. Senate hopeful Bob Krueger shot down Section 7 of Rep. Bob Eckhardt’s Federal Trade Commission Amendments Act of 1977, thus killing the provision that would have given defrauded consumers a limited right to bring class action suits against violators of FTC regulations \(Obs., Sears Roebuck, Penney’s, Dow Chemical and other giant firms stood behind Krueger, who won his fight when his amendment to kill Section 7 passed the House 281-125, despite Eckhardt’s best effort. Reps. Barbara Jordan, Jack Brooks and Henry Gonzalez were the only Texans to support Eckhardt against the business interests. Amendment 6 The state’s big bankers are making a major publicity push to shove home their favorite bit of constitutional patchwork this year \(Obs., Amendment 6 on the Nov. 8 ballot proposes that electronic funds transfer systems be legalized, and Texas’ major banks and bankholding companies have been whooping it up for passage. The top officers of the Texas Bankers Association have stumped the state all fall on behalf of the EFTS amendment, setting up political action committees in the large cities and urging member banks to make the case for EFTS with ads in their local newspapers and visits to publishers and editors. Leaving as little as possible to chance, the TBA has, in search of endorsements for the EFTS proposition, dispatched its people to each of the major dailies in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. At least one of the visits is known to have paid offThe Austin American-Statesman agreed to go along with its personal banker on Amendment 6. Moral decay Hoo-boy! Everybody who de plores the end of the barefootedand-pregnant era of women’s history need look no farther than Amarillo to find their champion. Wesley S. Izzard, editor of the Amarillo Daily News, has taken up the fight against feminism and the “wholesale destruction of the family and moral values traditionally held by most Americans.” Izzard took his stand Sept. 27 in “Libbers use tax dollars to promote moral decay,” a diatribe against the International Women’s Year conference to be held Nov. 18-21 in Houston. The phrase-coining editor called the conference a “federally financed funny-female festival.” \(Such peculiar people as Lt. Gov. Mary Ann Krupsak of New York, journalist Liz Carpenter of Austin, Betty Ford, actress Jean Stapleton, and representatives from the Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, and the Junior League “the majority of women all over America would hang their heads at the shame brought upon their sex” by the IWY meeting. Adair honored Christia V. Adair, Harris County civil rights worker for over 50 years, was honored Oct. 22 when a 43acre county park was named after her and dedicated to the citizens of Harris County. Adair, 84, worked with the Houston NAACP from the mid-’20s to 1959, serving as the organization’s first recording secretary and later as executive secretary. In 1966, she was one of the first black Texans ever elected a state Democratic committeewoman. Later, she was a co-founder of Harris County Democrats. Still active in. politics, Adair admonished friends at the ceremony, “Don’t put a man in office and surround him with rattlesnakes and think he can do a job. I’m not asking you to do anything I wouldn’t do or haven’t done. Don’t call me and say, what are we going to do. Do it!” For some months now, Dallas’ Dresser Industries has been waging its own political offensive against Congress generally, Democrats specifically, “dogooders” especially, and any others who don’t share the corporation’s world view. Last April, Dresser lashed out at Congress for poking its nose into the Israeli boycott agreements that U.S. companies have struck with Arab customers \(yes, management mailed a special letter to stockholders urging them to vote for Gerald Ford rather than Jimmy Carter on the basis that the incumbent “would act in the best interest of your company.” Now the combative conglomerate is back in the fray, having taken out a $20,000 two-page spread in The Washington Post to lambast “The Shortage Creators” environmentalists, Congress, the news media, and regulatory agencies, all depicted in Dresser’s ad as beavers busily damming up the country’s energy supply. The whole thing is a pitch for nuclear power, and the banner headline to the Post ad warned that “opponents of nuclear power may be dangerous to your health.” Dresser, a manufacturer of energy production equipment that grossed $2.2 billion last year, has the nuclear industry as a major customer. 12 NOVEMBER 4, 1977