Wendell H. Ford Quotes
If you had wanted to alienate every prominent citizen in every major town, you couldn't have done a better job—insurance salesmen, funeral directors, doctors, dentists, used car dealers— if the [Federal Trade] commission had chosen to get everybody up in arms, it did exactly the right thing.
Wendell H. Ford, U. S. Senator (Democrat, KY), Remark to FTC Commissioner Michael Pertschuk
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Commission is not a law enforcement agency in the sense that it can initiate or prosecute a civil or criminal lawsuit against a party that is breaking the law. The Commission however, can refer cases to the Justice Department and turn over their findings with a recommendation to prosecute. However, under George W. Bush, the policy was not to even do that. Chairman Majoras actually persuaded the Bush Justice Department to terminate efforts to prosecute Intel and other companies that previous Commissions had recommended prosecuting.
As an economist, Janeway coined the term to represent the potential “lashing back” by white workers against blacks if there was a severe recession and whites became unemployed in large numbers.
At the time of this interview there had been a decade of business fraud at many different levels. The regulatory agencies supposedly responsible for the regulation had neither the staff or the political will to even enforce the laws and regulations then in existence and there were many loopholes in those. Many business interests opposed all regulation and strict enforcement as a diminution of the health of the economy. Others, like Greenspan, saw fraud as corrupting the markets themselves and therefore the usual capitalistic economic competitive forces that would control business do not operate with extensive fraud.
A justification of some mergers that would lessen competition was that the consumer would not be harmed as the merger will produce cost savings that could be passed on to the consumers. However, others argued that if the competition were reduced there would be no pressure on the merged companies to pass any savings along to the consumer. However, in this opinion, Justice Douglas set forth a basic principle of regulatory law: Even though the merger might have some consumer benefits, that is still no justification for doing.
This is an interesting quotation because it shows that utilities and monopolies using their power and money to avoid effective pro consumer regulation is nothing new and was ongoing as soon as there were government granted monopolies that were supposed to be regulated.
Wendell Hampton Ford was an American politician from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He served for twenty-four years in the U.S. Senate and was the 53rd Governor of Kentucky. He was the first person to be successively elected lieutenant governor, governor and United States senator in Kentucky history. The Senate Democratic whip from 1991 to 1999, he was considered the leader of the state's Democratic Party from his election to governor in 1971 until he retired from the Senate in 1999. At the time of his retirement, he was the longest-serving senator in Kentucky's history, a mark which was then surpassed by Mitch McConnell in 2009. He is the most recent Democrat to have served as a Senator from the state of Kentucky.
