WASHINGTON REPORT: Underground Movement

...The cost to citizens was simply unacceptable in terms of the proclaimed but unperceived "emergency" or "threat...

...This is not exactly like King Canute commanding the tide to stop where it was, but it does resemble a proposal heard on the Hill as the House was decorating Humphrey-Hawkins that an amendment be added decreeing a mild winter next year...

...Applied to the UMW, Balkanization might mean the return of effective, responsive unionism after the murderous corruption that characterized the UMW so recently, the uncertain timidity that succeeded...

...Most .Americans do accept the right of the state to require their labors, indeed their lives, in an authentic national emergency...

...The word and its use here are both interesting...

...That's insupportable...

...It's the 19th century come again, with troops at the ready to compel the undeserving poor to serve the 31 March 1978:200 pleasure and profit of the deserving rich...

...The government is not saying, The emergency is on, you'll have .to work for the government...

...The united Balkans the metaphor evokes were united most recently under three despotisms, the AustroHungarian, the Czarist Russian and the imperialist Turkish...

...has been the attitude...

...Those of us similarly occupied and ruled by giant corporations need any countervailing forces we can find and big unions have been one...

...Balkanization means the splitting up of a former unity into separate parts...

...Certainly a case can be made for a regional emergency, at least a state emergency or two and a good handful of municipal emergencies beginning or on the way...

...Much o{ the area has been fitfully united for the last 30 years under the Soviet despotism, but the drive for national independence has been unstoppable and once again the Balkans are effectively Balkanized and getting more so...

...What do these people 'want...

...In the middle of all the Rosencrantz and GuUdenstem activity going on at the White House, Justice and around the table itself, a possibly significant development went little noticed...

...If that gesture is repeated, if those two groups get together, the next decade could see an economic-political development in this country that would change the values and positions of all the pieces on the board and more than make up for the weakening of today's big unionsl FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 2,01...

...Apparently...

...Taft-Hartley, like the premature dismantlement of price-controls and the subsequent unleashing of the postwar inflation, was the product of the last Republican Congress and may well be one strong reason why the people in their wisdom have never elected another one and perhaps why, in electing Republican Presidents, they have chosen outsiders like Eisenhower and Nixon, never party establishmentarians .like Goldwater or Tom Dewey...

...In a couple of places, the striking farmers brought food to the striking miners...

...It's involuntary servitude...

...People who ostentatiously did without lettuce and grapes for years never missed an issue of the Post...

...The shrinking coal supply probably does constitute a more genuine national emergency than the loss of Vietnam to the Vietnamese ever did, but Ta[t-Hartley is a very different thing from conscription into the armed forces...

...What's bad about it, of course, is the potential loss of "big" labor as a force for all of us against really big corporate power and moderately big government...

...The invocation of TaftHartley by a Democratic'administration fits in with the general split that may be observed betmeen the liberal and the labor groups of a formerly united Democratic party...

...That Tito, the leading Balkanizer in the Balkans, should never have insisted on and created a Yugoslavia independent of the Soviet Union...

...For its part, the Post has been notably anti-union on its editorial pages throughout the miners' strike...

...WASHINGTON REPORT UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT The White House may have changed its mind by the time you read this, but as I write it, the administration is handling the miners' strike by invoking Ta.ftHartley and issuing statements that the miners are expected to obey the law and return to work in time to save several Midwest and Border states from brownouts, .blackouts and alternating hours for alternating current...

...Politically, all this probably means that the Carter administration is in the process of losing its labor support, as it is the support of blacks, Jews and the Democratic Congress, among other sectors of the Democratic party...

...In Washington, that split has been most evident not in the union-~busting, strike-breaking activities of the Washington Post, which have been those of any corporation aiming exclusively at increased profits, but rather in the reaction to those activities on the part of the liberal community, which has been a single momentary sigh followed by uninterrupted reading of the paper...

...Does the metaphor mean the person using it really believes that Roumania, for example, is better off ,being occupied by Russian troops, that Hungarians are not fit to manage their own affairs, Bulgarians similarly incompetent...

...As negotiations resumed while the Justice Departmere was learning that you have to have summonses to enforce any law, even Tafft-Hartley, talk here rose a~m the dread threat of "Balkanization" of the UMW should the national union fail once more to come up with a contract its members witl accept...

...The justification for Ta~t-Hartley is, as ever, the existence of a national emergency...

...The next elections are not going to be '68 all over again, there being nothing Carter can do remotely comparable to Vietnam, but there are already points of resemblance...

...It is interesting that the second fierce front in journalistic union-busting right now is taking place in the Capitol-Times papers of Madison, Wis., like the Post long regarded by friends and foes alike as dedicated to liberalism, indeed, over the years, rather to the left of the Post, a position by no means as hard to find as old Nixonians imagine...

...These things feed on themselves...

...If Taft-H, arttey means anythingwand if it does this time, that'll ,be the first--it means that the government is saying, You get right back in that hole in the ground and start digging, you rascal, or we'll put you in jail...

...The good thing about Balkanization is the same thing that's good about having real countries in the Balkans instead of somebody else's provinces: home rule, unavoidable oloseness between the governing and the governed...

...The Post, profoundly antiunion at the corporate level, has now become antiunion at the editorial level through routine seepage, one supposes, and the seep continues into the readership...

...It is saying instead, The emergency is on, you'll have to work for that corporation over there and strictly on the corporation's terms...

...Taft-Hartley is really a kind of self-indulgence on the part of the anti-union element in our society, the people who are now laboring stalwartly for the misnamed "fight-to-work" laws...

...It's feudalism, with the state enforcing one man's "right" .to another man's work...

...The Balkans got their independence in the first place through war among the occupying empires and the consequent destruction of those empires...

...Only people like General Westanoreland thought the Viet Cong would land in Malibu once they got a ,boat...

...And, on the face of it, Ta~t-Hartley has to be either meaningless, as it has been so far, or unconstitutional, which it has not been declared because it has always .been rendered moot by events before the question could be brought in the lowest courts, let alone the highest...

...This probably means a) that any number of people are going to see the Democratic primary of 1980 as by no means the pro-forma shoo-in primaries have traditionally been regarded as when an incumbent President wants renomination, and b) the Republicans have what will apparently become an increasingly fair chance at the big one in '80 if only they can restrain their natural instinct to nominate the last of the Hapsburgs...

...That's what wartime conscription is all ,about and why it ultimately failed in Vietnam...