From Gray Panther to National Nanny: The Kidvid Crusade and the Eclipse of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 1977–1980
This article chronicles the FTC's proposal to significantly limit children's advertising in 1977, a controversial episode for advertisers and corporate America alike that has come to be known as the “kidvid crusade.” As a comprehensive political economic analysis, this article relies on dozens of trade press articles, archival sources, government documents, and oral histories. In 1978, the U.S. Congress launched a retaliatory attack on the FTC; failing to renew the FTC's funding, it shut down the agency for the first and only time in U.S. history. The kidvid crusade is a lens through which to understand the broader political and economic shift toward neoliberalism in the coming years and, indeed, portended the rise of deregulation and new forms of corporate public relations in the political sphere.
The FTC Improvement Act
There is little doubt that Sections 202, 205 and 206 of the FTC Improvement Act 1 provide the FTC with vast new powers.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory
Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.