Washington: The Winter of Our Discontent

...And nowhere is this more evident than in a sector of economic activity that lacks equity, flexible pricing and political control--energy, or oil, if you will...

...An Englishman, Kenneth Clark, in fite course of h!s lectures, "Civilization...

...They can't afford the gasoline...

...Our leaders will be perhaps described by future historians as watching football games on television, a mind-numbing process, while it's third and long, long yardage for the country...

...But the new factors suggest there may be a political and personal price of an unpalatable nature...

...If it were a football game, President Ford and the sports-minded members of Congress would nod their heads approvingly at any coach who chalked on the locker room board something along the lines of "when the going gets tough, the tough get going" or some such Frank Merriwell-ism...

...delegate to the UN, is not being merely rhetorical when he warns that "self-centered actions" by the UN's new majority will not only erode support for the organization but also devastate its authority...

...Previous meetings have been more of a "supermarket" of action strategies, offering workshops on ad hoe plans and projects...

...Such a provision has been successfully resisted for many years...

...WASHINGTON REPORT i THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT Winter has come to this Baghdad on the Potomac and with it the chilling spirit of drift and disorder, even decay, is more enveloping than ever...

...Now in bad times, trouble is ahead...

...The grandiloquent phrases of the satraps, political as well as governmental, multiply as ever...

...So too, the annual assembly of the Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry (CCUM)-though nowhere as large a meeting as that of the charismatics-has been growing each year...

...The big question is whether PLO objectives are to be gained at the sacrifice of the national identity of Israel--and whether they are to be pursued in the UN by tactics that could cause the world body to self-destruct on the timebombs of passion and partisanship...

...The annual gathering of the charismatic movement has grown in size and enthusiasm each year, and now fills up the Irish football stadium...

...sequences could make them more analogous than most of us might wish to contemplate...

...It's not bombing...

...Making the federal government's task more difficult, even if determined, courageous leaders were at its helm, is the technique of "administered prices," whose operation has been described by the economist Gardiner Means...

...The PLO, for its part, must cease its terrorism and repudiate its stated goal to destroy Israel as a state...

...the manager is all...

...One that is only faintly beginning to be understood is the rise of the multinational corporation, or international corporations, such as IBM, that has been the subject of a study by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, chairman of a Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee...

...Both seem to prosper on ,the campus of the University of Notre Dame...

...It is an option of historians to levy shaping phrases about the rise-and-fail of this or that civilization...

...But worked out they must be on terms that protect Israel's future as a nation, else Arab-Israeli war number five is only a matter of time...

...The composition of the UN, and the Third World allegiances therein, guarantee the Arabs and the PLO the outcome of almost any vote relating to Israel that they might care to press...

...Many professional blacks who face loss of their jobs are in social-science research organizations and other places Commonweal: 253 of employment that have been largely federally funded...

...A Personal View" said: "If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings...

...And the collectivist corporation, in its' international aspect, is more powerful than most nationstates...

...As long ago as the 1950s, Means described to Congress that in industrial sectors, such as steel, the usual play of supply-and-demand are not determinants of price...

...2. t h e federal budgetmakers' axe is falling first on social-sector programs, rather than on the military...

...School busing is another indicator...

...These funds are not flowing as abundantly as they once were for two reasons: 1. the Congress has correctly decided that much social science "research" is hokum and if hokum is to be financed let it be by others such as the Rockefeller Foundation...

...than the exception to UN procedure, historians of tomorrow may well look back on the events of these recent weeks and see them as the critical downward turning point in the life of the world body, much as the spuming of Halle Selassie at Geneva in 1935 was the fatal turn in the life of the League of Nations...

...It's air support...

...No state is under obligation to negotiate with people from whose hands their own blood runs...

...Americans should paste this observation above their TV screens as they settle-in each evening for a recitation that purports to be the day's "news" by Cronkite, Chancellor & Smith, Ltd.--news that is derived in large measure from written governmental and elected political pamphleteers...

...What do meetings of Catholic charismatics and Catholic social activists have in common...

...Particularly, since busing has become a divisive issue in Northern cities-Boston, Detroit, Denver, Wilmington, etc...

...Outside, Dick Gregory and two members of the House of Representatives were walking up-and-down in a brisk wind in front of the Executive Mansion in protest against the Ford Administration's proposals to reduce expenditures for food and medical support of the needy...

...The concept of private property, the Physiocrats advanced as just such an independent base...

...The Congress and some state legislators passed equal-employment opportunities and fair-employment practices statutes and other measures designed to help unassimilated minorities obtain steady employment with avenues to promotion...

...Close to 600 persons attended the 1974 CCUM meeting, Nov..10 to 14, 100 more than last year's gathering and up markedly since the 35 attendees of the first meeting in 1970...

...20 December 1974:252 Beyond the problem of communications, however, is that of the day's desperate events...

...soc!ety...

...But the prospects for a stiff spine among these same men in the face of depression-generated social troubles are not encouraging...

...This is what becomes of the economic toe-hold that blacks have achieved in recent years...

...Whites, whether on the assembly line or on the academic line, now feel economically threatened...

...What brought the social activists to Notre Dame was a challenge to take a hard look at the U.S...

...There must be a more mature and sober debate of issues--and at the same time continued stepby-step negotiations between the Arabs and the Israelis, with doors not irrevocably closed to direct negotiations one day between the Israelis and the PLO...

...Today private property, corrupted by the rise of the collectivist corporation, no longer exists as such a shelter...

...Not even Israel challenges the latter point, as Yosef Tekoah, the chief Israeli delegate to the UN, made clear in affirming "Israel's readiness and desire to reach a peaceful settlement with the Palestinian Arab state of Jordan in which Palestinian national identity would find full expression...

...The British somehow seem less taken with the high sounding phrasings of their governors less inclined to "pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird...

...economic system and to ask: is the system reformable...

...Nevertheless, one, holding a lesser writ, may remark that if Nero fiddled while Rome burned, he, at least, was "doing something...

...John A. Scali, chief U.S...

...The economic structure differs in scope and kind from that confronting Franklin Roosevelt when he set out administratively to pull the nation out of a depression...

...Incidentally, this year's annual awards of the Committee on Public Doublespeak included one to the last White House Press Secretary (one such award should be automatically reserved each year to whoever occupies this position) and to an Air Force Colonel who complained to reporters about their stories on bombing raids in Southeast Asia: "You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing...

...There 'are numerous problems in the way of peaceful and satisfactory settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab question--and some essential preconditions...

...An MIT economist describes a multi-national corporation as one that has "no country to which it owes more loyalty than any other, nor any country where it feels completely at home...

...CCUM, headquartered at Notre Dame since Egan moved there in 1970 from Chicago, is not so much an "organization" as a "connection" - - a means of linking numerous Catholic personnel, priests, religious, and lay, who are involved in a variety of practical social action...

...But in the past year the leaders of CCUM felt a need for a more substantive look at the total U.S...

...Forecasts are risky, but Northern liberals in Congress are losing their stomach for another sustained defense of busing as a part of public-school integration efforts...

...But the hard step proved to be applying Sunday-sermon sentiments to the other six days of the week...

...But their respective con...

...How to get a handle on those right questions was the primary purpose of the four-day meeting...

...no state, as the Washington Post has editorialized, is bound to cooperate in its own undoing...

...Whether this existence be within the boundaries Israel had before the 1967 war (as Britain, France and Italy have asked) or within frontiers that provide a more genuine security (as the Israelis appear to hold) is for negotiators to work out...

...What are the connections between this fact and the social disorder and human suffering which community organizers, social workers, inner city pastoral 20 December 1974:254...

...What's ahead for the poor among minorities...

...The President seems "over his head," to use a shirtsleeves English language expression...

...Of course, the political bazaars are doing their customarily brisk auction business, despite a general eeoomie decline among the population at-large...

...White students, faced with a shrinking of middle-class jobs, are taking manual jobs available in recent years to minorities...

...Like the domestic corporation, it is an automatic, self-perpetuating oligarchy...

...The economy worsens...

...In which case, Lord help us all...

...SISYPHUS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 URBAN MINISTERS .IS THE Su REFOBIvIABLE...

...Our constitutional system of checks-and-balances is being nullified...

...The few producer corporations that exist in the steel-making industry are able to set prices for their products that will assure them of a specific rate of return, regardless of demand during any one period, exempted as they are from a fear of competition-it being far more prohibitively expensive to establish oneself in the steel-making business than to set up oneself as a blacksmith...

...system within which these strategies, plans and projects operate...

...The Congress needs dissenters who appeal to the intelligence of a future day...

...Even in boom times, this was like shoving sand against the tide, although in some fields progress was made...

...Nothing of the foregoing is meant to imply that the Palestine Liberation Organization should be shut out of the UN and its deliberations...

...One avoids generalizations that come easily to mind at times like these...

...Senator Brooke, a conferee, did refuse to agree to the matter...

...There are, consequently, fewer voices among the politicians, in-and-out of Congress, being raised on behalf of retaining, much less advancing, the economic improvements of blacks and other minorities...

...Making price even more difficult to lower are other built-in costs found in an industrialized state--pension systems and labor union contracts among these...

...But a vote won is not necessarily a gain made--either for them or the UN...

...Such an analytical approach was a notable shift from CCUM's previous meetings...

...The President's voting record as a House member is a poor one in ameliorating the condition of the dispossessed...

...Certainly the Arab nations must assume a more responsible diplomacy, including within the UN...

...Finally, and most especially, there must be an acceptance on the part of all nations and groups involved that Israel has a right to continue to exist as a sovereign and independent state within secure and recognized boundaries...

...The PLO, on the surface of things, has many legitimate aspirations, up to and including national identity...

...The Selassie and the PLO-Arafat cases are disparate in all their details-indeed, in their very nature...

...They may become more powerful than the nation-state, traditional largest political unit of the last few centuries...

...In outlining the process for this meeting, David O'Brien, an historian at Holy Cross and CCUM .board member, suggested that some probing examination of the alternatives of our political economy was called for today...

...Monsignor Jack Egan, a long-time leader in social ministry and founder and chairperson of CCUM, said that he was "sick and tired of simplistic answers to changing large institutions--we need to be sure that we are asking the right questions...

...It'll help them translate double-speak...

...The philosophical underpinnings of the defense of segregation have been pulled away by a combination of court decisions and direct actions during the 1940s, '50s and '60s...

...Contrary to Will Rogers' remark in the 1930s that Americans were the only nation to go to the poor house in an automobile, they can't this time...

...The Physiocrats argued in the Eighteenth Century that in order to be free-- to speak, to write, to act in a public or private capacity--man would have to be provided w~.~, or provide for himself, a base other than one ecclesiastically and/or politically controlled...

...In addition, the Congressional climate shows signs of changing--for the worse...

...That'U be a bitter one, if unemployment continues to rise...

...A "compromise" reminiscent of the infamous Compromise of 1877 that marked an end to Reconstruction...

...On Thanksgiving Day instructively, although inadvertently, Gerald Ford, the grand vizier, was feasting inside the White House at a reunion with his teammates on their 1930 championship high-school football team...

...These are the "noble lies" as they are called in the diaries of the late British Labor party leader, Richard Crossman---diaries the incumbent Labor party government seeks to suppress...

...Still another indicator of weakened Congressional resolve occurred in late November...

...the latitude for governmental action seems to have narrowed in view of the greater power of large economic aggregations in those troubled areas that should have a more disinterested administration...

...And Senator Alien of Alabama, a prime exponent of old Southern ways, stands a pretty good chance of winning a seat on the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over civil rights and related legislation...

...The stockholder is nothing...

...But a more pragmatic and immediate social problem confronts us in view of the advancing economic depression...

...dissenters, who will remind us of posterity's inevitable judgment...

...Of course, the problem is not that a deep economic recession--even a depression---cannot be reversed in the 1970s...

...The Church study pointed out that the total sales of these corporations are greater than the GNP of the USSR and this country...

...A ferocious struggle may occur next year in the Congress when legislation is introduced to make it clear that collective bargaining contractual provisions, relating to lay-offs ("last hired, first fired"), take precedence over any equal-employment or fair-employment statute...

...there is no government energy policy, although the oil companies have imposed theirs upon the nation...

...Members of a Senate and House conference, compromising differences over a major deficiency-appropriation bill, agreed on language that, for the first time by statute, would prohibit federal funds from being cut off to school districts practicing racial discrimination...

...Social activists struggling for justice in this country repeatedly find themselves up against the massive fact of the maldistribution of income, wealth and power in U.S...