Editorials
COMMONWEAL A shadow government From the start, there have been two ways of looking at the Iranconrrospiracy. One way focuses on the Iran end of the operation. It sees an American executive...
...78 percent attended once last month...
...Frankly, we think this is too good to be true...
...The problem lingers...
...it is one of constitutionality and democracy...
...The crisis is more than one of policy...
...The Endowment's president claims he knew nothing about the covert side, although even the Endowment itself was involved in some curious monkeyshines, like funding a farright youth group in France, all of which smacked more of anti-Communist networking than pro-democratic assistance...
...not domed states...
...The common suggestion that limited roles for women have led younger women to drop out of parish life simply cannot be either supported or negated...
...Catholic women are in a state of revolt...
...Finally, while some of the interpretation and explanation given may be good guesswork, or even accurate judgment, at times it isn't supported by the data — at least not the data mentioned in the text...
...According to Dr...
...It is particularly ironic therefore that the shadow government apparently had its roots in a Reagan initiative called Project Democracy...
...Individual states in the U.S...
...Not so...
...Project Democracy reflected a Reagan administration desire to articulate a positive ideological basis for its anti-Soviet foreign policy...
...the difference is a matter of emphasis...
...Education appears to be a plus...
...What the Iran-^on/raspiracy investigations are uncovering is a species of shadow government...
...This may not be "confusion" — just a dramatically changing reality...
...Just as the Reagan administration had endorsed the idea of subcontracting government tasks of all sorts out to private contractors, now it had supposedly carried the principle right into the field of foreign policy...
...Catholics have grown more conservative with affluence and are not interested in justice and peace issues...
...Set this actual practice alongside just one of the "tolerant" attitudes of Catholics toward others — 81 percent of Catholics believe one can be a good Christian without attending church at all — and the figures seem more remarkable...
...83 percent feel "close to God," but only 46 percent think that deepening their relationship to God is "very important...
...This is patently false...
...While admitting a dramatic swing in political party affiliation toward the Republican party, the study documents Catholic liberal tendencies: support for the nuclear freeze, for increased social spending and decreased military spending by government, and for the ERA...
...The Gallup-Castelli survey, a compilation of information both significant and insignificant from over a dozen studies conducted since 1978, is basically optimistic in its claims to refute Five common stereotypes about Catholics today: # Religious activity is declining dramatically among Catholics...
...The more that is learned about this network, the more ominous it has appeared...
...The National Foundation for Democracy turned out to be only the visible tip of the Project Democracy iceberg...
...Increasingly it appears that the Iran deal was one assignment among many given to an established network of public officials and private contractors operating out of the National Security Council...
...hasn't altered its attitude of "Eat my dust...
...It sees an American executive branch contradicting its own loudly proclaimed policy toward terrorism...
...The Iran«w«raspiracy was the work of private contractors receiving funds from private individuals and other governments...
...While the technology for making a start at reducing some of this pollution is available, what is lacking so far is the political will to control and coordinate the effort...
...Now that Congress has attempted to do something about clean water, overriding the president's veto, it is only logical that it next look up to the sky...
...Both agreed to a five-year, $5 billion program by governments and industries to take the acid out of the rain...
...lakes being acidified, but that a spreading blight of dying forests in the U.S...
...For a while this was referred to as "privatization...
...The dust comes home...
...What's the difference—and how do we know...
...But "privatization" is not the word for what has been going on...
...it has roots in covert operations of many years ago...
...While the study confirms what has long been known — that Catholics no longer listen to church teaching on sexuality and divorce and that singles and minority members want more pastoring and programs — it includes several pleasant surprises: high satisfaction with clergy performance, with the reforms of Vatican II, and with an increasing role for the laity...
...The existence of an unaccountable shadow branch of government strikes at the heart of democracy...
...Because only 66 percent described the ideal lifestyle as married with children, and because there was an increase among those who saw childlessness as the ideal (6 percent in three years...
...Young Catholics are leaving the church...
...But exaggeration aside, the uneasiness is justified...
...The "privatization" of foreign policy, by contrast, was meant precisely to baffle such a choice...
...and those who were undecided (9 percent in three years...
...For example, Catholic women are said to be "confused" about the role families should play in their 27 February 1987: 101 lives...
...It sees an administration appeasing terrorists and fanatics, its thinking processes clouded by illusion and gummed by sentimentality...
...In his 1982 address to Parliament, President Reagan called for a worldwide effort to build up an "infrastructure of democracy" against the restraints of authoritarianism...
...Woven throughout Colonel North's various enterprises are the personal ties he formed in Southeast Asian covert activities during the Vietnam war...
...it even escapes (conveniently, it seems) close executive supervision...
...PAINTING BY NUMBER The data on American Catholics have been rushing in with frequent reports from the National Opinion Research Center, the Notre Dame Study on Parish Life, and now a book by George Gallup, Jr., and Jim Castelli, The American Catholic People: Their Beliefs, Practices, and Values (Doubleday...
...And are the middlemen in these covert enterprises genuinely private...
...The report fails to show the most substantial Catholic beliefs, what lies at the heart of the Mass...
...The names that keep coming up on the books of dummy corporations include people who left government service under clouds, and some with disturbingly close links to Edwin Wilson, the rogue ex-CIA agent apprehended and convicted of supplying Colonel Qaddafi with arms, explosives, and training...
...Fifty-three percent of Catholics sampled said they attended Mass in the last seven days...
...The facts, furthermore, seem to be confirming that emphasis...
...Still more ominous than some of the unsavory individuals involved in these activities is their conveniently non-governmental structure...
...Particularly when the "private'' individual or company is lavished with non-secret government contracts, perhaps for the services specified or perhaps for others unspecified...
...THE ACID TEST It is nearly a year since President Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney cut through the smog and reached an agreement over the cross-boundry problem of acid rain...
...This need not be so...
...Bible reading has particularly climbed...
...It was an assignment his administration was evidently not capable of carrying out...
...102: Commonweal...
...Still, the problem remains "holistic" in scope...
...Religious activities outside of Mass attendance — confession, Bible reading, social functions, prayer and meditation, outreach programs, etc...
...are also up compared with statistics collected a decade ago...
...Just what does this mean...
...For the moment, however, the principle of supporting democracy overseas has been swallowed up by the practice...
...it evades legal control...
...100: Commonweal Canada has committed itself to reducing its acidity-causing emissions by 50 percent over the next decade...
...To us, who favor the second view, the emphasis is important...
...The result has been just the opposite: to build up an infrastructure of authoritarianism against the restraints of democracy...
...At first, it appeared as though the contra funding had been an extra twist, a side bet, to the Iran deal...
...Another government employee or military officer first retires, then does exactly the same thing...
...Nor were enterprises like the supplying of arms to the contras ever genuinely private, even when they were successfully secret...
...Among Catholics under thirty, 37 percent attend weekly Mass and two out of three participate in some other religious activity...
...The comparison made between these enterprises and the private aid raised for programs sympathetic to the Sandinista revolution is completely specious...
...The hearings presented the first strong evidence that acid rain poses a serious health problem to the nation, and that to delay action would be fool-hardy...
...At full production, it will emit 500,000 tons of suffers pollution, and will increase acid rain in the Rocky Mountain region by 50 percent...
...And since women comprise a higher percentage of the elderly, and the elderly themselves have unusually high Mass attendance and satisfaction levels, the age factor may skew findings for younger women and women as a whole...
...Yet 42 percent of teenagers say religion is less important to them than it is to their parents, and there is a high level of superstition among teens as well, a preoccupation with ghosts, Bigfoot, the occult...
...If so, the bishops should anticipate no real opposition by the rank and file to their pastoral letter on the economy...
...The two views are not mutually exclusive...
...Within weeks, we now learn, the administration had decided to transform the program into a vehicle for covert operations...
...In the case of the $30 million from the Saudis, the payoff derived from a secret condition attached to the sale of American weapons, a condition unknown to Congress when it approved that sale...
...One government agent sets up a company to provide "cover" or to support some covert project...
...Announced in the president's 1982 speech to Britain's Parliament, Project Democracy was to be a straightforward public-private effort at supporting fledgling democratic forces struggling to gain a foothold in authoritarian lands...
...It sees an executive branch secretly circumventing the law that Congress passed restricting aid to the contras...
...Curiously, teens expressed a desire for increasing acceptance of sexual freedom, alcohol, and marijuana use-on the one hand (69 percent), and a desire for closer family ties (86 percent) on the other...
...Vice President Bush flew there in January to smooth feathers...
...A second view focuses on the contra end of the operation...
...It was a vision related to the Reagan Doctrine, committing the U.S...
...Below the surface, the administration soon had in place what the New York Times has described as "a parallel foreign policy apparatus—complete with its own communications systems, secret envoys, leased ships and airplanes, offshore bank accounts, and corporations," all operating "outside the established government decision-making process and beyond the purview of Congress...
...To begin with, 27 February 1987: 99 privatization is a perfectly legitimate, although controversial, concept when applied, as it has been in recent years, to the delivery of government services by commercial subcontractors...
...It is neither private nor public...
...The Toronto Globe and Mail editorialized recently, "Clearly, there will be no real progress on acid rain until Mr...
...Last year Mexico opened a huge copper smelter not far from the Arizona border...
...The problem must be dealt with on an international scale...
...All of which may only remind us that covert operations are not apt to be carried out by just anybody, and that once you launch these kinds of activities they are not easily unlaunched...
...Whether or not it actually increased efficiency, whether or not it had dubious side effects like dodging union pay scales, it was nonetheless a choice that governments could make and carry out in the open...
...His visit only reinforced Canadian perceptions that the U.S...
...At the time, Canadian critics said Mr...
...In Ottawa, there is acid indigestion again...
...Whether such a commitment can be a sound element in plotting foreign policy, or whether it is doomed to lead into ideological fantasies and military quagmires, remains an important topic of debate...
...The president's 1987-88 budget appropriates a paltry $287 million for the acid rain problem...
...It sees an administration hospitable to the idea that fighting Communism is a higher responsibility than accountability to the law and the lawmakers...
...They seem to be right...
...have begun their own efforts...
...It includes assorted arms merchants, gun runners, possibly drug traffickers...
...The more education Catholics get the more likely they are to leave the church...
...The "private" contra funding was obtained in large measure by U.S...
...found that eighty large chemical companies were releasing highly hazardous materials from hundreds of factories in the U.S., and that no uniform emission standards apply to most of the materials...
...Through chemical reactions, nitric or sulfuric acid is formed...
...Philip Landrigan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, "acid rain is probably third after active smoking and passive smoking as a cause of lung disease...
...These percentages mark the highest attendance at Mass in a decade...
...Sixty-one percent of college graduates and 55 percent of Catholics with some college attend Mass weekly, and 60 percent of these give the church an "excellent" or "good" rating in meeting their needs...
...Reagan is put out to pasture...
...It falls to earth in rain, sleet, snow, mist, or even in dry form...
...Acid rain occurs when oxides of sulphur or nitrogen from the burning of fossile fuels combine with moisture in the atmosphere...
...government solicitation...
...The figures show that after twenty years of decline in Mass attendance, stability has been achieved since 1978...
...71 percent attended twice in the last month...
...It is not subject to congressional scrutiny...
...We can build domed stadiums...
...It would be a shame if there were no pasture to go to...
...These are fertile fields for paranoia: as one conspiracy buff put it, "All we need now is the Trilateral Commission and a link to the Kennedy assassination...
...It concluded that not only were U.S...
...The crisis is one of sound policy...
...could be attributed in part to acid rain...
...The Iran fiasco was stepchild to the contra funding, not vice versa...
...Whether this stability and growth will continue remains to be seen...
...Last year, Rep...
...Anti-Castro Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs have been working with the contras—possibly sabotaging the independent antiSandinista effort led by Eden Pastora, whom they considered a Fidelista...
...Last March the National Academy of Sciences issued a comprehensive report on acid rain...
...to back insurgents against Communist regimes whenever possible, indeed against dictatorships in general...
...Reagan had given little more than a nebulous commitment to the cleanup...
...The longer it does, the worse it gets...
...New York, for example, has set a goal of reducing sulfur dioxide emissions from 857,000 tons in 1986 to 524,000 tons by 1991...
...The report shows 61 percent weekly Mass attendance, and a high level of satisfaction in meeting personal needs of women, but what is lacking is a gender-age breakdown...
...Henry Waxman (D-Calif...
...How these apparent contradictions will be worked out in relation to the church cannot be predicted, but from the data given, we find no reason for particular optimism here...
...Earlier this month, medical doctors testified before the Senate Environmental Pollution Subcommittee that acid rain and the pollutants that cause it are a threat to human health...
...It tries the patience with such ridiculous measurements as: 90 percent believe God loves them, but 65 percent: believe God loves them "a great deal...
Vol. 114 • February 1987 • No. 4
