Proposition 13: Screwing the Poor

Rabasseire, Henri & Bromwich, David & Gottlieb, Sanford & Blue, Joan & Skull, Leon & Ronchey, Alberto & Meyerson, Harold

August 29 The main casualty of Proposition 13 within California. and perhaps without.is the dominant politics of the last 40 years. Welfare-state liberalism has almost vanished from the state's...

...The money being denied these groups was at the same time being parceled out, via Jarvis, to the federal government (which gains from the diminished property tax deductions that will be taken on income taxes...
...The tax-reform debacle in the House Ways and Means Committee represents a complete cave-in to special interests...
...A sixth, India, has set off a nuclear "device," thus proving that it has weapons capability...
...The parties to the agreement will exchange data on the restricted weapons and check compliance through their own spy satellites and other technology...
...movements that receive Soviet weapons are no longer taboo...
...President Nixon had the courage to go to Peking...
...The labor-law package consisted of a number of relatively modest improvements in the procedures governing union organizing...
...The advantages lie largely in the restraints placed on Soviet strategic programs and, to a lesser extent, on the U.S...
...Worst" is a big word, of course, like "forever" and "never," and there may be little profit, except for the historian, in the analysis of past Congresses to see if one might be found where the members did so little and where their principal.perhaps sole.concern was their own reelection...
...Fraser declared: 1 have concluded there is no point to continue sitting down at Labor-Management Group meetings and philosophizing about the future of the country and the world when we on the labor side have so little in common with those across the table...
...Moro is not the first victim, and he will not be the last...
...The Soviet diplomats like to trade items in the third category for items in the second...
...There are many claimants who can only gain from any redistribution of power, and they will consider every new agreement a jumping board for new demands rather than a once-for-all-time world order...
...foolishly.to its expansion...
...Indeed, the alternatives open to the labor movement appear to be a clear turn toward militancy and resistance to corporate power in the face of a substantial rightwing mobilization or a capitulation to a status quo in which labor's role and influence will be diminished substantially in the years to come...
...The question is not whether we ought to suspend SALT negotiations with a country that places dissenters in psychiatric wards and sends Cubans to Africa, but whether we can afford to have another nuclear arms race...
...The ratification of a SALT II treaty will depend largely on the tone of SovietAmerican relations at the time, the degree of disaffection with Jimmy Carter, and the provisions of the treaty.perhaps in that order...
...This mobility, which makes it attractive to those who worry about "Minuteman vulnerability," makes it a nightmare to arms controllers concerned with verifying treaties...
...More than a century ago de Tocqueville, who was gifted with great curiosity, wrote with comparable suspicion about public opinion in America but came to a different conclusion about the importance of our freedoms...
...As this agency might also be requested to exclude South Africa, it would be embarrassing for the Soviet government to appear in the same dock with a racist regime...
...All these factors, together with what can be fairly described as a lack of political leadership in the White House, the House, and particularly the Senate, make the prognosis for any kind of legislation more than normally uncertain...
...But historically, persons of principle have seldom accepted voter reprisal as an excuse for casting a bad vote...
...as I write, that Council and others around the state seem likely to mandate a rent rollback and freeze...
...The ideological terrorism of our time always includes, as a necessary element, a sacrificial trial and, if possible, a confession.from the solemn show trials of the Stalinist period to the occult rituals of the guerrilla bands...
...The U.S...
...Often even the most privileged middle-class persons have been anxious to appear so far to the left that the most harassed and exasperated assembly-line worker in the FiatMirafiori plant could not go more to the left than they did merely by means of words.that is, without a pistol...
...Wise policies of detente have made it possible to negotiate the settlement of important issues without any military confrontation...
...We should accommodate ourselves to shifts in the power balance that have taken place, but we need not yield to further pressures...
...If the superpowers fail much longer to deliver on their decade-old pledge, there is little reason to believe they will have any power to dissuade the have-nots from going it alone...
...Matters that enjoy high priority for the West but are of minor importance to the Soviet Union, such as emigration of Jews, consular agreements, control or freedom of media, fishing rights and trade, may also be negotiated for good-will and "atmosphere...
...wish to get the best balance in the SALT agreements...
...Roughly, the Soviet doctrine of diplomacy distinguishes three tiers of values: . Matters involving ideology or the sovereignty of the country are not tradable at all (contrary to his signature at Helsinki, Brezhnev also places the suppression of dissent in this category...
...We are finding ways of talking to SWAPO and the PLO...
...g., the support of Arab aggression in the third Sinai war.tend to have long-run consequences...
...Yet, in the absence of a negotiated alternative to the arms race, both governments are prepared to mortgage more of the future just to keep up with each other...
...Instead of freeing the conduct of foreign policy from the vicissitudes of demagoguery and ideology, as he should, the President is asking Congress to bind his hands...
...Since that evening, city and county governments have had no alternative to cutting their services...
...They deal with each situation on its merits...
...Carter finds himself pretty much in the same quandary that Truman did 30 years ago: on the one side, the patriots accused him of "losing" China...
...III THESE ARE GRIM FACTS, and we are in grave danger of heading for another confrontation...
...On May 24, prior to the final filibuster vote, labor's frustration with management's massive resistance to its moderate proposals was voiced by AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Lane Kirkland at a symposium on "Work in America" held at Arden House...
...The majority of the Demo-Christians have never known the violent and tragic aspects of political experience, such as other parties had suffered through decades of clandestine activity...
...We acknowledged our impotence by producing the twin ideologies of isolationism and cold war...
...The verb "to coexist" describes our relationship with people we dislike, not with those we like...
...But when he tells us that "through intense suffering [Russia] has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive...
...And they might as well go...
...He concedes that the Soviet effort is not blind and irrational but perfectly calculated...
...There is nothing like rebating $1.2 billion in tax revenues to landlords, and then having those landlords hike the rent anyway, to induce a crisis of faith in the equitability of the market economy...
...The Labor-Management Group was established by John Dunlop when he served as secretary of labor under Gerald Ford...
...In Italy, for a number of years now the terrorists have put on trial the people they capture and staged countertrials of those who judge their captured comrades...
...What reaction the rest of the labor movement will have to the Fraser resignation is also open...
...Between an attack on corporate power and an assault on the poor, there is less and less room to maneuver...
...In the jargon of the arms-control experts, missile accuracy is "destabilizing" because it generates fears of a first strike...
...The mood in the Senate is very anti-Soviet and moderately anti-Carter...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...One month before 13 passed, the Los Angeles City Council summarily rejected a proposal for rent control...
...And it fell to Moro to undergo precisely such a trial in that Gulag that the Red Brigades have set up in anticipation of their dreamed-of conquest of power...
...Until these factors materialize, the 67 votes for ratification are not in sight...
...The labor movement had engaged in an unprecedented campaign for the bill's passage, in which it had enlisted the broadest political coalition assembled in years for any piece of social legislation...
...They remind us of the unpleasant fact that, whether we are first or second in power, we have to coexist with the Soviet Union, just as Denmark, whether it is 30th or 31st, has to coexist with all the stronger powers...
...Because of disastrous mistakes accumulated over the years, the public power has not been able to carry out its proper tasks: above all, that of rescuing the hostage from the terrorist organization, which proclaims itself at war with a state in which there is no death penalty and sentences to death the people who serve that state...
...There is a superficial resemblance in the premises: a disappointed hope for a settlement on the one side, expansionism on the other...
...But who are these people...
...For the Soviet leadership, SALT II also offers the psychological satisfaction of equal strategic ceilings (parity) with the United States...
...For example: . The Holt amendment to the First Budget Resolution for FY79, which would have cut over $21 billion in budget authority and $13 billion in budget outlays, was defeated by only five votes, even though these cuts would have wrecked an entire system of social programs...
...According to the analysis of Karl Dietrich Bracher of the University of Bonn, these three industrial societies have certain traits in common: (1) each is a democracy that came into existence only after defeat in a war...
...Even Ted Kennedy, when last heard from, was shunning the liberal label...
...On the other hand, we tend to think of "linkage" as a good idea because we hope to use our economic power to extort political concessions from other countries.a procedure that must be handled with tact...
...Unfortunately, it also hampers the private deals that the West Germans have been able to make with their Eastern neighbor and the Soviet Union to obtain relief for individuals...
...q With the 54-day stand-off that stretched from the kidnapping to the murder of Aldo Moro, the strategists of the terrorist warfare, which for years has been bloodying Italy, set themselves a double objective...
...Neither Brown nor Reagan is much inclined to specifics...
...The United States has 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads on its submarines...
...But however much we may want to correct that behavior, SALT is not a good-conduct medal to be pinned on the Russians as a reward...
...Trading in this area is strictly tit-for-tat...
...As for the mobile ICBM, it would be moved around in its various proposed modes of transport, either above or below ground...
...but the Italian nation has not gone through anything like a religious war or a great civil war...
...Families receiving Aid to Dependent Children received no increase at all...
...Nuclear war scenarios tend to push aside the common-sense judgments that are so necessary if public opinion is to provide a corrective to miscalculation in high places...
...Such a listing of the price for peace is apt to arouse the patriotic anger of some and the expert censure of others...
...In the strategic nuclear area, the American giant leads in the number of warheads, which determines how many targets can be hit, as well as in heavy bombers and in missiles that carry multiple warheads...
...Each candidate, incumbent or not, establishes a personal campaign committee...
...Defense Secretary Harold Brown has described both the superpowers as giants, with roughly 375 comparable military power...
...The stories of Begin and Sadat carry the plain lesson that it need not be so...
...X" article of 1948: Stalin, the villain of that generation, has been dead for many years...
...This is far from the reality of world politics...
...On the one hand, Soviet leaders have done little to reassure the West in recent years...
...Let not our moralism now stand in the way of negotiations that are vital for the survival of mankind...
...In 1977, Soviet-American collaboration helped persuade South Africa not to conduct its first nuclear test...
...In plain English, it makes the leaders at the other end nervous about a nuclear Pearl Harbor...
...On the other side, an alliance was forged between the old and the new right, supported by the most powerful corporate interests in America...
...If such resoluteness may discourage the terrorists from attempting further kidnappings, the Demo-Christian leaders will nevertheless still be exposed to reprisals...
...Minuteman missiles in their silos...
...Kennan seems to imply...
...The Defense Secretary complained in June about "simplistic comparisons" ignoring "that a quarter of the Soviet non-nuclear capability is on the Chinese frontier...
...SO THE TERRORIST CHALLENGE did not achieve its aims...
...The Senate Budget Committee 376 estimates that, without SALT, the United States will spend about $100 billion more for strategic weapons over the next decade and a half...
...We in the UAW intend to reforge the links with those who believe in struggle: the kind of people who sat-down in the factories in the 1930's and who marched in Selma in the 1960's...
...Political leaders," as Ugo La Malfa, leader of Italy's Republican party, has summed it up, "have the duty to care not for their own lives but rather for the lives of the citizenry...
...While the rise in prices was fueled by rampant speculation, its basic cause was a housing shortage that has seen the apartment vacancy rate fall to 2 percent...
...When Dunlop resigned in protest over Ford's veto of the Situs Picketing Bill, he reestablished the Group outside of government as a high-level forum for seeking cooperative approaches to national economic problems...
...The Russian leaders might be disposed to let more people emigrate.provided we don't dare them to do so...
...Seven Miller amendments to appropriations bills have cut 2 percent from the FY79 appropriations bills for social services...
...The public believes that, "in a nuclear era, confrontations between the two leading nations in the world must be avoided," according to pollster Louis Harris...
...Moro has been the Italian guerrilla terrorists' chosen major "scapegoat...
...But I am concerned with attitudes rather than with concrete measures...
...And the candidate is therefore not much concerned with the platform of the party to which he or she professes allegiance...
...The anti-SALT II treaty leaders of today are the ones who opposed negotiations in 1970 on the very technology, separately aimed multiple warheads carried by a single missile, that might permit the Soviets to threaten American ICBMs...
...In addition, the Senate has heard contradictory signals from the President, who in the early spring followed the urgings of his political advisers to talk "tough" to the Russians and thus restore his flagging popularity in the polls...
...The hungry blacks in South Africa whom some senators would like to punish for their jailers' beating of prisoners...
...The Walker amendment, which would prohibit the use of Labor/HEW funds to implement goals or other numerical requirements relating to race, creed, or sex in higher-education hiring, promotion, or admissions policies, was adopted 232-177, and must be seen as a major blow to civil rights...
...We have reached a watershed: a generation of Democratic refusal to challenge corporate priorities has made it almost impossible for the Democrats to continue to adhere to the welfare-state liberalism of the past four decades...
...Even last spring, when the Jarvis threat had to be taken seriously, the Legislature's tepid alternative to Jarvis was weakened still further when its provisions for a real estate speculation tax were excised in deference to the realtors' lobby...
...It might be said that the guerrilla warfare that exists in Italy is not sufficient without the civil war that may well take place, hurling Italy into the worst conditions of our time...
...Still less should contacts of greater importance be at the mercy of unrelated issues...
...All he could tell them was the grimy details of that cellar or subgovernment, with which everyone in Italy is familiar who reads the newspapers...
...right to interfere with the relationship between the Soviet government and its subjects...
...To insist publicly that the Soviet government keep its part of the bargain...
...According to the fears articulated by such spokesmen as Paul Nitze, in the 1980s the Soviet Union will have enough nuclear warheads carried by accurate missiles to be able to destroy the U.S...
...Besides the tyrannical or colonial regimes that are usually accompanied by terrorism, or the countries suffering from ethnic and religious conflicts in which terrorism is rampant, among modern industrial societies terrorist guerrilla warfare can be found only in Italy, West Germany, 384 and Japan, and with varying intensity according to their economic and political conditions...
...They create obligations to stick with a new ally, and they entail shifts in the power balance that in turn have further consequences...
...They are primarily concerned with the issues that they perceive to be critical to their reelection...
...more than the Soviets possess in their entire arsenal...
...In the ever-increasing number of daily attacks, terrorism now strikes whomever it wishes, as it wishes, where and when it wishes...
...Much as a mere freeze in the arms race might be worth having, let us not forget that the state in which it will leave the balance of power is highly 382 undesirable...
...In 1976, the property tax accounted for $7.3 billion in revenue to the state of California and its municipalities...
...Or with the several thousand bombs carried by the 350 fully operational B-52 bombers...
...The party has had to undergo a storm of letters from the secret Gulag dugout beneath the lawful state...
...And, even assuming a wildly improbable refusal of the United States to retaliate, how would Mr...
...Of course it will favor detente in the West, and perhaps even a freeze on nuclear arms, when the sheer weight of its conventional military and political power is likely to earn it friends in other areas...
...This is not to say that California harbors a significant movement to enforce public priorities upon corporations...
...The victim of an exciting word.revolution.which has become equivocal and today is putrified, one of those words that Carlo Emilio Gadda, the wisest Italian writer of our time, regarded as the cause of excessive and senseless acts: "Sometimes they direct the fate of their children toward the darkness...
...The Soviet empire, far from liberalizing its system, shocks the world once again with show trials, and moreover there are signs of 378 ideological tightening in both the Soviet Union and the satellite countries...
...We must have the courage to stand by allies and to defend interests that are vital to the West as a whole...
...The cruise missile, a tiny pilotless drone that carries a nuclear bomb with great accuracy to a target up to 2,000 miles away, can be launched from bombers, ships, and flat-bed trucks...
...But, one must add, the state was only able to defend a legal principle, while enduring the burdens of impotence, inefficiency, shortsighted383 ness, and the reductive interpretations that for some time have been reserved for the guerrilla phenomenon...
...Now, after so many years and so many erudite and nimble public advisers, who do not stop quoting from the manuals of South American guerrilla warfare, it is not surprising that some people have taken all these words seriously and finally want somehow to try to make this blessed revolution...
...and that we have stronger, more reliable allies than the Soviets...
...Kennan claims that the world-political theater is significantly different today from the one he analyzed in his famous "Mr...
...If one wishes to punish the Soviets for the Shcharansky outrage, one should consider acts that more realistically promise to achieve something...
...The city of Burbank, for instance, closed its branch libraries and cut its library budget by 45 percent...
...First: to put the hostage on trial, both as a person and symbol of an "objective enemy," since they consider themselves agents authorized by history with the right of life and death over everyone...
...but when we do negotiate we should strive for tangible, enforcible concessions rather than for concessions that look good on paper...
...we reply that his work more than 377 anything else has convinced us that this is not so, that in Russia the spirit itself is laid waste, for all but a few lucky survivors...
...It is understandable, therefore, that the Soviet diplomats, from their point of view, have a preference for piecemeal settlements, and that we tend to regard as a Soviet victory any occasion where we have to conclude piecemeal agreements...
...Both sides will produce new weapons systems, generate new fears of surprise attack, indirectly encourage an expansion of the Nuclear Club, and expend much more money, sweat, steel, and oil...
...It is not simply the huge numbers of weapons of mass annihilation that cause the dangers of the nuclear era...
...They are different because . . They come with more political experience in their home states than has been customary in the past, which means that they are accustomed to making political (vested-interest) decisions...
...Yet, two precious years were lost, and Western diplomats were unable to exploit the Russians' moral weakness to obtain then a favorable arms agreement...
...National security adviser Brzezinski counseled the same approach for reasons of international politics...
...Jarvis himself confesses great disappointment in the small number of apartment-house owners who have passed on their refunds to renters and at the much larger number who have impolitically raised their rents...
...And party organizations have correspondingly declined in their ability to influence events...
...There is no open violence such as in the East...
...Underlying their arguments is a world view that sees Soviet power as the overriding threat to U.S...
...The well-financed, long-organized opposition to the agreement has not limited its attacks to the provisions of the treaty, most of which were classified secret until earlier this year...
...No welfare state, be it ever so begrudging, can long survive this kind of diminishing support...
...In the East the press is censored but at any rate knows its place...
...But our view is distorted by our craving for "system...
...Before Kirkland could make good his threat, Doug Fraser resigned from the Labor Management Group...
...And the special aspect of the case is that he was murdered after 54 days of waiting: it was "murder in slow motion...
...But this did not happen...
...This is a pretty sophisticated understanding of international priorities and of the limits of power...
...In fact, the number of registered voters in the state peaked in 1972, when it stood at 101/2 million...
...Add to these items the impending sell-out to the oil interests in the natural gas deregulation bill, which by 1985 will result in a $250-billion windfall profit to the oil interests...
...Another 20 to 25 countries have the technical competence to manufacture their own nuclear weapons before the end of this century...
...We should not refuse to negotiate where negotiating promises better results than sulking...
...At the end of such an essay, readers may expect some specific recommendations of policy...
...This historic inexperience seems to exert the irresistible attraction of the abyss, where crime and political hatred are superimposed on the many factors that combine to disintegrate the social fabric, conspiring to cause the common ruin of the classes and groups now struggling against each other...
...IT WILL NOT BE the demonstrations and strikes of protest against terrorism, so much like those mass ceremonies in India that are called "invocations for rain," which will lead to control over the areas of recruitment for armed extremism...
...and to landlords and businesses (who received a windfall totaling $4.3 billion...
...IT IS PRECISELY the business of business, and the state's obeisance to it, that led to the Jarvis crunch in the first place...
...As such, it is built on areas of common interest: avoiding nuclear war, stemming the spread of nuclear weapons, someday reducing the terrible economic burdens of the arms race...
...The welfare state itself still limps along, more feebly than before, but without benefit of audible defense...
...An analysis of congressional votes, especially in the House, shows that both the first- and second-term members of the 95th Congress are different...
...In the verbal inflation of the last decade, almost any nonsensicality could get a hearing provided it seemed to conform to the "spirit of the age...
...the Democrats screw their own...
...may have used economic tools to achieve political ends but has never hesitated to accept economic hardship rather than lose a point of prestige or abandon a position of political or strategic importance...
...It is believed here [Budapest] that if the Soviet Union were to feel its security in any way challenged, it would immediately seek to reimpose a monolithic orthodoxy on Eastern Europe...
...in the West it is responsible to no one, and has become an ungovernable power...
...Both superpowers share a heavy burden of responsibility in such a situation...
...There is another common trait: all three are nations on the frontiers between the great international blocs...
...And why do its detractors oppose it so vigorously...
...In sum, the arms race would be much more dangerous without a SALT II treaty, and no official on either side knows how to reach negotiations for further reductions without first going through the door marked SALT II...
...Every attempt at a bloodless solution was limited by the inviolability of the legal system, without which even bloodier consequences would follow at some later date...
...And if the Democratic response to Jarvis has consisted preponderantly of an assault upon the powerless, it has also included an incipient campaign to politicize previously sacrosanct areas of the market...
...Political crisis areas, arms races and the like are recognized as interconnected...
...Even as their current policies converge, however, the parties still maintain their distinct constituencies, and therein lies one source of their abiding difference in the age of lowered expectations: the Republicans screw the Democratic poor...
...For instance, the Olympic games in 1980 are of great interest to the Soviet government as a token of prestige, as an opportunity for propaganda, and also as a source of income...
...The third section of SALT II will be a Joint Statement of Principles and Guidelines for SALT III...
...For instance, one must acknowledge the example set by the majority party, the Demo-Christians [the Christian Democratic party] "under fire...
...The American economic base is twice as large as that of the Soviets, and U.S...
...They believe that voters are obsessed by fear of "big government" and by their own inflation-related economic problems...
...Among its stockpile of 25,000 nuclear weapons of all sizes, the United States deploys 9,000 strategic warheads that can reach the Soviet Union on long-range missiles and bombers and submarine-launched missiles, within half an hour...
...Because of their small size, sea-launched and ground-launched cruise missiles would be easy to hide and thus could foil any verification scheme that tried to locate and count them...
...And the proposal to hold the budget to 20 percent of the GNP would sound the death knell for all new federal programs, including, of course, national health insurance...
...We should not childishly display our impotence by venting our anger at substitute targets...
...For a word that is marvelous to say, marvelous to be heard...
...government to "fight Communism," the Gulf Oil Corporation has accommodated itself to the Net?‹ Regime in Angola and, as Ambassador Young blurted out, considers even the Cuban presence there "a stabilizing factor" (translated: without the Cubans, the Company's installations could not be run and the Company's shareholders would earn no dividends...
...3) each has experienced the improvisation of an ideology of material prosperity under the impetus of the three economic "miracles" that were then interrupted by the oil crisis of 1973-74...
...Kennan, of course, would be the last to use such blunt words), and we refuse to admit that the dominoes we set up deliberately are beginning to fall...
...A series of abortion votes effectively deny abortion funds to the poor, while for the affluent, under the Supreme Court ruling, abortions remain available...
...Consider as a case in point the Democratic turnabout on the state spending limitation...
...we are recognizing the strength of the guerrilla movement in Rhodesia...
...Kennan seems to say, in his all-toopolite way, is that the United States and the West as a whole must become resigned to the balance of power that has developed in the world during the last decade...
...Now many of these nonsensicalities, though much simplified, can be found in the proclamations of the terrorists...
...Legally," Solzhenitsyn adds, "your researches are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day...
...Unfortunately, the U.S...
...He dismisses Kennan's premises but 379 recognizes his purpose and substitutes for Kennan's resignation an activist philosophy of dealing with power...
...Arrangements for cultural exchanges should be left to S. Hurok or his heirs and should not be used to express the pleasure or displeasure of the State Department...
...Considering the scope of the problem, SALT II represents a very modest step...
...The smallest of these strategic warheads is three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb...
...That, however, does not make it any less serious, and precisely because it is rational it must and can be countered by rational moves on our side...
...Six months ago no one would have believed that the Steiger amendment, which the President characterized as a give-away to the rich, had any chance of passage...
...withdrawal from East Asia, the Helsinki and Berlin accords (recognizing Stalin's conquests of World War II, but setting a limit to further Soviet encroachments on Western Europe), the test stop and the nonproliferation agreement, the understanding on temporary limitations of strategic weapons, and the ongoing talks on more definite restraints...
...the amendment cannot be enforced...
...He believes that great souls are formed by the contest of courage with intense suffering...
...Has it not fostered sedition and war in countries near and far...
...It may go against our grain, but we must know that Carter's campaign on behalf of dissenters in the Soviet Union was considered there a provocation...
...Kennan's fault, and when John Foster Dulles interpreted it to mean "roll-back," Kennan replaced the containment doctrine with the doctrine of "disengagement" though he remained critical of detente (which is not a policy but a stratagem, a tactic...
...national security and perceives American power as waning and Soviet power as waxing...
...The 369 distinctive feature of the emerging era of limits is that public servants and the disadvantaged are the only ones limited...
...Through the 1974, 1976, and 1978 elections, it hovered just below the 10 million mark despite an increase of 2 million persons in California's votingage population during this time...
...Kennan could have saved himself the trouble of painting the Russians white...
...Life in Italy can also be reduced to the conditions of Buenos Aires during the last years or, worse, to those of Beirut or Addis Ababa during recent months...
...President Johnson abruptly broke off the first SALT negotiations when Brezhnev sent his troops to quash Dubdek's "communism with a human face...
...The Republican State Senator who had revived the idea the week before Brown's speech responded by announcing he was "willing to welcome Governor Brown into the ranks of the Republican party...
...He leaves his listeners uncertain whether he has really thought about, or understood, the interdependence of liberties and liberty as such...
...And they see personal service to their constituents as more important than the consideration of legislation...
...they received no increase at all...
...the heavy missiles represent an effort to catch up with the earlier U.S...
...This means finding areas of agreement which might then ease tensions...
...According to Brown, the American giant is somewhat more agile...
...It is not detente but raison d' etat that dictates its efforts at appeasement in the West...
...Some timid steps in that direction have been made in recent months...
...Then, with the kidnapping of Moro, the party has had to confront the problem of whether or not to deal with the terrorists...
...This rightward drift can be broken, and the crisis of welfare-state liberalism humanely resolved, only by campaigns that counterpose democratic solutions to the failure of corporations to supply jobs or landlords to offer reasonable rents...
...Obviously, neither we nor they will trade the constitution and internal makeup of the country for some temporary advantage...
...What matters is that we learn to deal with Communist powers in the same way as with others...
...Carter has since moved away from a cold-war stance, but the improvisations have not helped generate confidence in his handling of the Soviet Union...
...While the Administration is trying to normalize relations with China or to find ways of accommodation with the future rulers of Africa, it hears charges from all sides: that it is selling Taiwan down the river, abandoning our allies in Africa, "playing the China card," which may provoke the Russians, and that its dilly-dallying between moderates and guerrillas in Africa may yet lose us the last chance to catch up with history on that continent...
...H's iconoclasm, however, is less original than he supposes: a decade ago we heard exactly the same criticism of America from Herbert Marcuse.who even gave a name, Repressive Tolerance, to the manipulation of public opinion that Solzhenitsyn now loudly and audibly laments...
...Nor does experience confirm the popular view that the more dictatorial and brutal a government is at home, the more aggressive it will be abroad...
...The voting booth is increasingly a place for the middle-aged and older, the middle class and richer...
...The question is not whether the SOviet regime is distasteful to us but whether we can "coexist" with it (in the above sense) without having treaty relationships...
...Therefore, even the appearance of an attempt to influence their minorities policies, or to use a Soviet minority for our purposes, will prompt them to retaliate...
...The unresponsiveness of the market has led to an unprecedented campaign to subject it to public control...
...Kissinger to be of immediate practical value.is in Soviet eyes a renewal of ideological warfare...
...THE ATTEMPT TO LINK a SALT treaty with Soviet adventurism in Africa or Soviet repression at home speaks to the anxieties of many Americans about the behavior of the other superpower...
...Even outside the political society, among the important figures of the "civil society" there is no longer any space for "playing with the fire of words...
...There is simply no realistic case to be made for U.S...
...What Mr...
...The cuts worked out by the Governor and the heavily Democratic Legislature have been aimed more directly at the disadvantaged...
...If we cannot go from there to disarmament, or if it should be a bad agreement...
...Accuracy is a requirement of nuclear warmaking...
...Moreover, if a new generation of civilian nuclear reactors known as fast breeders comes into widespread use and produces large quantities of plutonium, terrorist groups as well as governments are likely to get their hands on nuclear weapons in coming years...
...11 OUR FRIEND RICHARD LOWENTHAL has also replied to Mr...
...Candidates now run for office as independents...
...Over half the respondents did not believe we could influence Soviet treatment of their citizens...
...If, however, Soviet leaders are irrational about their own survival, then there's no point in devising enormously costly and sophisticated deterrence systems...
...on the other, Henry Wallace charged that he was missing the peace bus to Moscow...
...Then we had neither the means nor the will to change the results of World War II...
...neither side would take a less advantageous deal in return for a loan or for the release of Jews...
...Any specific policy may have different meanings in different contexts...
...To make a case for U.S...
...4) all three governments have been accused of being lackeys to some foreign supergovernment...
...precisely for that reason the Soviet leadership is constantly tempted to create trouble spots and nuisance areas that can then be traded for essential targets...
...Walter Lippmann, who had coined the term "cold war," gave Truman his candid advice to name Thomas Dewey secretary of state and then to resign so that a hopelessly compromised regime could be replaced speedily by the inevitable winner of the coming election...
...If they did that, they would have to expect the U.S...
...In recent years, the Legislature has had before it a number of proposed tax reforms that could have obviated the need for Jarvis and kept the welfare state intact.could even have expanded it.but these were invariably derailed in deference to the corporate rich...
...However, to charge that the SALT II treaty is somehow responsible for this theoretical danger is to engage in psychological jiu-jitsu...
...That may be true of American diplomacy...
...The numbers of land-based missiles reflect the Russians' historic land-oriented military outlook...
...among their prime targets thus far have been libraries and schools...
...IF WE HAD TO SAY why Solzhenitsyn finds himself among the critics of freedom of the press, we might point to a single intellectual limitation that runs through his life: he seems incapable of distinguishing strength of character from the strength of a principle...
...Despite the phenomenal interest Jarvis provoked, only a little over 40 percent of voting-age Californians went to the polls on election day...
...market (provided, however, they don't have to sign anything implying a U.S...
...There are five avowed nuclear-weapon states: the United States, the U.S.S.R., Great Britain, France, and China...
...He clearly regards himself as such a soul, and he is...
...Each superpower could inflict over 100 million deaths on the other in the first day of nuclear war, through the heat, blast, and immediate radiation from these weapons...
...This was part of the bargain with the non-nuclear weapons states...
...But the persons murdered already number 80, ever since there appeared on the scene the dark shadow of a group that grants itself the ideological right of life or death over anyone whomsoever...
...Finally, Mr...
...Solzhenitsyn also shares Marcuse's unqualified revulsion from "publicity," "TV stupor," and "intolerable music": an "invasion" whose effects both men are led to exaggerate by their exceedingly abstract knowledge of the invader...
...build-up...
...We must overcome the Vietnam complex, the assumption that either we or they are "right," the urge to force whoever associates with "them" to become their avowed and permanent follower...
...inferiority, now or in the future...
...Now it is the liberals who are saying, for different reasons, that Congress ought to go home and the sooner the better...
...the new Soviet leaders have allowed the dictatorship to soften and are concerned with the consolidation of their power sphere rather than its further expansion...
...On a fair number of important economic votes during 1978, O'Neill has been able to win only after some of the fanciest arm-twisting on record...
...But if we wish to stop the atrocities on the other side of the Iron Curtain, we should not pay ransom for their victims...
...Like the late John Foster Dulles, he makes cold-war noises with a toothless mouth...
...The question is not whether we approve of the Soviet support for military coups in Africa and Asia but whether we can either stop them or live with them...
...For obvious reasons, we cannot use our potentially most powerful threat.a refusal to export grain...
...moreover, the superpowers are no longer the only players on the nuclear scene...
...Kirkland observed that the filibuster had been "organized, promoted and sustained, not by some primitive sections of industry, but by all of corporate America . . . and by the most privileged and powerful in the society...
...cooperation or contest.he thus opposes a judicious mix of incentives and threats, "linking" concessions in one field to counterconcession in another...
...The progressive taxes.bank, corporation, personal income, inheritance.accounted for a total of $4.6 billion, one-third the amount brought in by the regressive taxes...
...the widening gap between the available economic resources and the people's growing expectations, and the opportunism of political power...
...Kennan in a superbly lucid essay in Encounter...
...Not that bank and corporation taxes have since been raised...
...The danger is that Western publics might react to the situation of 1978 with a repetition of the cold war reflexes that were understandable in 1948...
...IV I DON'T THINK that the United States is as impotent as Mr...
...And on the other, there are the so-called autonomous collectives, devoted to the systematic propagation of intimidatory violence, which like "colonies of moles" enlarge their areas of subterranean control...
...Many of the nations standing just outside the Nuclear Club are involved in rivalries with neighbors...
...The Legislature may follow suit...
...The bill was sent back to the Senate Human Resources Committee for watering-down and subsequent Senate reconsideration...
...The West German government is paying millions every year to obtain the release of hostages taken arbitrarily by the criminal government of East Germany.a humanitarianism that only helps to perpetuate the inhumane practice...
...The second major danger of the current nuclear era is the spread of nuclear weapons to additional countries...
...Kennan's views have at least the merit of stark realism...
...Call this neoisolationism, appeasement, or illusionism, Mr...
...It was sheer luck that the ensuing arms race did not degenerate into hot war, and the cold war developed a tendency to be frozen, at least in Europe...
...The conservatives.the Phil Cranes, the McDonalds, the Hatches, and Smiths.get a lot of publicity but are no more effective in holding their following than are the liberals...
...We have a moral obligation to our stockholders...
...This was because the conservatives do not much believe in government...
...that we don't relate every shift of alliances in Africa to an all-embracing EastWest conflict but, again, deal with local issues as local issues, defusing rather than emphasizing their cold-war aspects (whose existence need not be denied...
...Immediately after Jarvis-Gann passed, when it seemed that layoffs would total in the hundreds of thousands (they still may: if the courts invalidate the Legislature's abrogation of public-employee union contracts, then cost-of-living raises will be reinstated and the layoffs begun in earnest), Brown, Reagan, and Jarvis all alerted business to its "moral obligation" to create jobs...
...I am especially surprised to read that Lowenthal, in agreement with some of the Western press, believes that economic incentives can be offered to obtain major political concessions...
...The treaty, to last until 1985, will provide for equal ceilings on the numbers of strategic missiles and bombers, although not on the numbers of warheads they carry...
...First and foremost, Proposition 13 is a substantial upward redistribution of wealth...
...The sad conclusion is that the area of "linkage" is much smaller than it might have appeared at first sight...
...Lowenthal agrees with other experts in the field that it is not now the Soviet leaders' intention to attack the West...
...provided we extend to them a few more billion dollars' credit, refrain from insisting on fulfillment of the Helsinki undertakings to the letter, and don't get overly alarmed by their activities in the Third World...
...Soviet rocketry is boosting the defense budget to the point where even its admitted total absorbs one-third of the gross national product...
...The Russian physicists whom we would punish for their government's treatment of dissidents...
...Both superpowers are preparing to deliver these weapons more accurately...
...In California, as a result of Jarvis, there is specifically $7 billion less with which to favor the powerful and pacify the poor...
...If the Administration hints that show trials in Moscow will create a climate that might be unfavorable to the ratification of a possible SALT agreement, it is handing Congress a dangerous weapon...
...What appears to have accounted for Fraser's disengagement from the "Group" is the massive effort by management to block, through a Senate filibuster, labor's proposals for reforming the labor laws enacted by Congress...
...Among them are Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan...
...Instead of seeking a wider margin of maneuver for political initiatives, he uses his impotence vis-a-vis Congress as an alibi for his impotence vis-a-vis the increase of Soviet power and its drive into a power vacuum...
...In this state of sects and movements, it doesn't even rate a cult...
...The difference between total repression and voluntary adherence to fashion is a difference in kind...
...Like rent freezes, corporate hiring was headline news, even though the hiring had nothing to do with property tax savings...
...Approximately half of the Warsaw Pact troops are Poles, Czechs, and East Germans...
...One might think that faced with these harsh trials they would have left to others, above all to the Communists, the task of representing the sense of the state...
...What then are the advantages of SALT II...
...This may occasionally be tough on our sense of decency...
...This fear has caused Washington's anti-arms control forces to fasten on "Minuteman vulnerability" as a major reason for opposing the SALT II treaty that is still under negotiation...
...At the Belgrade Conference humanitarians and civil-rights advocates were often annoyed by the U.S...
...The postwar growth of state and local government services, of the defense economy and of Social Security spending, has not come at the expense of the corporate sector...
...The Brezhnev in whose political survival we now place our hope of an arms freeze is still the same who gave the fatal signal to invade Czechoslovakia ten years ago...
...With a smaller arsenal, the Soviet Union has 4,500 strategic nuclear warheads mounted on its own triad of delivery vehicles...
...Instead, both sides continued the arms race and pushed it to a point where a new balance seems all but impossible to achieve...
...While the 1985 ceiling would oblige the Soviets to dismantle 250 to 300 missiles and bombers, the United States could actually build up to that level...
...It is not only in Washington and Moscow, Dallas and Kiev that observers will be watching the progress of SALT II...
...In the doctrine of containment, 30 years ago, Kennan told us practically the same thing: we must recognize the status quo that has been created through Hitler's wars...
...The Kemp amendment to Humphrey-Hawkins, which would have mandated a permanent tax cut.at a cost of $500 billion.by 1983, was defeated 216-194, a margin of only 22 votes...
...It betrays, of course, an absence of political courage...
...Ceilings will also be placed on the total number of missiles and bombers that can carry multiple warheads and cruise missiles, with subceilings for the number of land-based missiles that can deliver multiple bombs...
...President Truman had the courage to support Tito, a Communist...
...This little-noticed element could become very important, for SALT III will be the first opportunity to negotiate significant reductions in the Soviet and U.S...
...It is almost enough to make one nostalgic for 1973...
...AGAINST THIS BACKDROP of proliferating A- and Hbombs and improvements in the missiles that carry them, what is contained in the SALT II treaty that will come before the U.S...
...The ghost of Alfred Marshall must be mightily displeased...
...With the comment, "I don't see any point in gratuitously taking revenue from any particular class when there's no need for it," Jerry Brown opposed a 1977 tax reform bill that would have rebated property 370 taxes and rents in accordance with income, and made up the difference with higher taxes on banks, corporations, and capital gains...
...I do not ask my grocer whether he beats his wife or practices bestiality...
...Other nations, the major nations, have learned from cruel historic experience the absolute necessity of establishing and maturing a rigorous "sense of the state...
...Could Soviet leaders assume the American president would fail to retaliate with these weapons...
...for the Soviet Union distrusts its Eastern neighbor, while at the same time trying to expand its influence in the Third World...
...This is not, alas, a case of California exceptionalism...
...He interprets the recent buildup of Soviet armed might as having two purposes: to discredit the American assertion of a nuclear umbrella for our friends, and to bring the pressure of conventional arms superiority to bear on the targets of Soviet penetration...
...The social bases of the two complementary strategies can be found in all the disintegrating factors thrown up in Italy by the crisis of the last decade: the siege of the uprooted and marginal masses in the cities...
...What do Messrs...
...The second stage of the terrorists' timetable.the exchange of prisoners and virtual recognition of the "armed party".was rejected by all of Italy's constitutional forces, for it would have caused the collapse of the state apparatus and perhaps the "Lebanonization" of an already disrupted society...
...the stalemate among the major political parties and thus a government that has gone unchanged for 30 years...
...he 381 still preaches coexistence and detente, which are really but the reverse side of the cold war...
...A protocol that will probably last through 1980 will place temporary limits on several major weapons systems that are still under development: cruise missiles and mobile ICBMs...
...The Senate managed to pass the Panama Canal Treaty, and then could not muster 60 votes to end cloture for modest labor-law reform legislation...
...Humphrey-Hawkins was amended by the Senate Banking Committee to add as a target a zero inflation rate by 1983, and a commitment to spend through the federal budget no more than 20 percent of the GNP by 1983...
...More important, Lowenthal's reliance on "linkage" has one decisive flaw: like every other government but in important respects more so, the Soviet leaders do not consider all matters of contention equally capable of being traded...
...At any given moment, everyone will be less secure...
...Urgent above all is the necessity for a truce with the "Peronistic" trade unionism, a stop to corporative and municipal quarrelsomeness, and to those generous indulgences on the basis of some abstract theory that cause the paralysis of essential services, since the most propitious terrain for terrorist guerrilla warfare is a disorganized society...
...The immediate pressure for Jarvis was generated by a tremendous rise in housing prices in Los Angeles County, and a concomitant rise in property taxes out of all proportion to personal income: tax increases of more than 100 percent in a three-year period were commonplace in all but declining neighborhoods...
...that we consider every issue on its own merits...
...And in contrasting Soviet repression with American freedom, he exhibits what must strike his listeners as a weird nostalgia for one element in the Soviet system: By what law has [the American press] been elected and to whom is it responsible...
...The aged, blind, and disabled were granted a 3.7 percent annual cost-ofliving increase, which is well under half of the annual inflation rate...
...q This past July Douglas Fraser, president of the United Automobile Workers Union, announced that he was pulling out of the high-level LaborManagement Group of union and business leaders presided over by former Secretary of Labor John Dunlop, because in Fraser's view American capitalism had declared open war on the trade unions...
...Besides, such short-term decisionse...
...Kennan states that the Soviet leaders have no desire to make war on the West or use force in expanding their sphere of domination elsewhere...
...Or, as was the case with Eugene Rostow at a State Department-sponsored conference in Hartford in July, they are obliged to invent "facts...
...We certainly would be better off now had we not allowed our moral indignation to override our judgment of the realities of power...
...Moreover, it should be pointed out that almost any Demo-Christian leader might find himself in Moro's situation at any moment, knowing quite well by now that the reply of the public power to a terrorist blackmail attempt will in no case be different...
...If SALT II is defeated, the arms race will be run without restraints...
...that current Soviet operating doctrines require larger forces than we would use for the same purposes...
...This idea was first introduced in 1973, when then-Governor Reagan proposed that state expenditures be held to a fixed percentage of citizens' personal income...
...we confirm their conquests, indeed, but in return we should get guarantees that are not purely verbal...
...For instance, both the U.S...
...The agreement has three parts...
...When cruise missiles are mounted on specific kinds of bombers, the bombers are easily photographed by the other side's spy satellites...
...In 1970, only the United States possessed this technology...
...military "inferiority," the opponents of SALT, who tend to be opponents of any arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union, are obliged to stress only one end of a broad and complex spectrum of military strength while ignoring the rest...
...Half a year before Brown was offered his Republican papers, Jimmy Carter's State of the Union address so loudly trumpeted the limits of government's capacities that Barry Goldwater was moved to claim spiritual authorship...
...374 In Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that was negotiated in 1968 and went into effect in 1970, the superpowers pledged themselves to make progress toward nuclear disarmament...
...it is a legitimate (concern...
...Conservative opponents of governmental intervention in the rent market can only offer themselves as a substitute state: Jarvis and the various apartment owners' associations are imploring landlords to forestall these controls by adhering to their program, which is identical to the ones the city councils are considering...
...The meat-axe Michel amendment, aiming at "fraud, waste and abuse," reduces the FY79 Labor/ HEW appropriations by $1 billion, and passed by a 290-87 vote...
...We cannot be so sure that the present war of position in the Middle East and in Africa will remain "cold...
...The Vanik amendment on elementary- and secondary-school tuition tax credits gives far more money to upper-middle-class and affluent families 372 for school-tuition payments than is now spent, through elementary- and secondary-school appropriations, on the underprivileged...
...however,".in short, the violence we do to freedom is better concealed but equally pervasive, and Solzhenitsyn has come to tear away the veil...
...should hint at difficulties in obtaining ratification of a SALT agreement unless the Russians softened their stand on Africa, on dissenters, etc...
...Epithets like "cold war," "isolationism," and "appeasement" are heard again...
...And second: to use the threat of the death sentence to force an exchange of prisoners and virtual recognition as an "armed party," in outright defiance of the law and articles 18 and 49 of the Italian Constitution, with the aim of bringing about the disintegration of the legal system...
...In most respects, of course, Solzhenitsyn and Marcuse could hardly be more different from each other, yet they have in common a fairly obvious personal trait.a commanding need for isolation...
...As with rents, so too with employment...
...X indeed had hoped it would), and the rivalry between the superpowers has led to a new balance in whose preservation they have a common interest...
...Translated from the Italian by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL q 385...
...THERE IS ONE additional factor that should be adduced in this autopsy, though it is as much an effect as a cause, and that is the declining size of the electorate...
...the violent conflicts in the factories...
...technological lead by building nuclear blunderbusses...
...We should encourage neutralism among nations tilting toward the Soviet Union and Eurocommunism among groups opposed to our own system...
...It is hard to exaggerate the watershed quality of this modest treaty, for those who yearn for liberalization in Moscow's sphere of influence as well as those who just want to enjoy the basic human right of survival...
...Among the periodic waves of terrorism described by historians, the phenomenon has never before reached so vast a scale in a liberal democracy...
...Let us not forget that Khrushchev made two explicit reservations when he offered "coexistence" to the West: ideological warfare can never be muted, he stated at the 20th Party Congress, and the Soviet Union will continue to support anticolonial wars of liberation (or what it decides to call that...
...They shake us out of the delusions of "the American Century".although, being a ghost of the '50s, he may not have noticed that hardly any of us have lately used the phrase...
...I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold...
...What he now proposes sounds like a doctrine of confinement: we have neither the means nor the nerve to fight the expansion of Soviet influence in Africa and Asia, so let's accept it gracefully and try to hold the Soviet government to the conditions of coexistence in those areas where it has willingly accepted coexistence with us...
...Moreover, both sides could increase the number of multiple warheads placed on the 2,250 "delivery vehicles," as these death-carrying instruments are so blandly called...
...the Soviet navy is nursing its Avis complex...
...As the electorate shrinks and becomes more conservative, Democratic party politicians respond by adopting more conservative policies...
...q Ghosts of the past haunt the political scene...
...has no means, except prayer, to undo the Helsinki Agreement, in which it recognized the partition of Germany...
...Therefore, it is utterly naive to propose that the U.S...
...SALT II will permit only bomber-launched cruise missiles at longer ranges...
...Neither of them has seen much of America and both are astonishingly without curiosity about it...
...Both amounted to immobilism, hardening of the frontier, inability to break out of the framework of the status quo...
...The survivors would no doubt envy the dead...
...Disneyland's President Donn B. Tatum explained why rides weren't going to get any cheaper, despite Disneyland's $1-to-2-million annual tax savings, with the useful admonition, "A million dollars doesn't buy you much these days...
...It must be said, too, that this "worst Congress" is in part the product of the steady trend that has produced today's weakened Democratic and Republican parties...
...This has been the repeated dynamic of the arms race, with the United States thrusting into a lead that the Soviet Union vigorously strives to overcome...
...to yield some point in SALT that it cannot safely abandon...
...That a big power sit still while great opportunities for expanding its influence are opening in the Third World...
...It is widely held on the Hill that the CETA reauthorization action in both House and Senate will have to include a sub-minimum wage for youth and a Walker-type anti-affirmative-action amendment...
...But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives...
...He still views the global scene from the vantage point of the 1950s...
...In a Gallup Poll conducted during the emotion of the Shcharansky trial, 64 percent said that SALT negotiations were too important to be broken off...
...The Democratic leadership in the Legislature, far from resisting Brown, is busily adding the specifics to his suggestion...
...but the entire history of Soviet diplomacy shows that the U.S.S.R...
...This is not to say, of course, that we must always take the Europeans' word for gospel...
...It has had to reckon with that psychological change, frequent among kidnapping victims and particularly acute in the case of Moro, which experts call "the Stockholm syndrome" (identification with the kidnappers, hostility toward the outside world...
...Those who believe that the worst has already taken place and that by now nothing is left to be lost have little imagination or information...
...But if they thought that Aldo Moro could reveal startling state secrets they were misled by their own ideology, according to which a secret conspiracy is always afoot, Moro could not reveal "the conspiratorial plans of the supergovernment" that the extremists imagined...
...In East Germany, military instruction has just been decreed for school children...
...In a like fashion, the corporations' moral obligation to hire was placed in perspective by Harold E. Berg, president of Getty Oil and a frightening amalgam of Calvin Coolidge and Gertrude Stein: "Offhand, the business of business is business...
...We do need a SALT treaty despite Soviet brutishness, and even the experts don't know how American actions can make the Soviet leaders less rigid and more cooperative across the board...
...the collective alienation that suddenly came into existence with the collapse of the public educational system...
...The shortage, in turn, resulted from two business-oriented political decisions.that of the federal banking agencies to tighten the money supply, and that of state and local governments to build no public housing.and from a series of decisions by voters and their representatives to limit growth...
...This attractive program may be a good guide, as Lowenthal says, "in the long run".but certainly not in the melee of short-term decisions, and especially not when Soviet leaders are hard pressed to assert their effectiveness and, moreover, don't see at the moment any need to spare American sensibilities...
...Let the American government take a leaf from the book of the big corporations...
...The danger is that we reduce the complexities of a global diplomacy, once again, to the simplicity of a bi-polar contest...
...George Kennan, who had originally formulated the policy of "containment," now opposed the military implementation of that policy (NATO and German rearmament...
...And then they pile one stupidity on top of another...
...It fell to him a year ago to warn his fellow Demo-Christians that it would not be easy for anyone, in such circumstances, to face up to the scandals of their party (Lockheed, etc...
...The latter agreed not to acquire these weapons...
...In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official...
...Of this the Soviet leaders are painfully aware...
...In Italy the guerrilla warfare of global ideological confrontation advances on two fronts...
...The Soviet army, too, not content with numerical and qualitative superiority, is rapidly expanding its conventional equipment...
...in fact, the outrage was so enormous that neither the American people nor our European allies would have understood a more Machiavellian attitude...
...it rather has the makings of a hot war...
...The establishment of policy and raising of funds by the candidate, the development of campaign and political strategy for the candidate, all take place outside the political party...
...Aldo Moro was the victim of the degradation wrought by a revolutionary myth that does not subsist in any of the modern advanced societies, but makes its explosive appearance among the vandalistic utopias and destructive social peculiarities that are both the causes and consequences of Italian disorder...
...By deciding as they did in the Moro case, Demo-Christians have also decided their own possible fate...
...So is California business...
...To President Carter's false alternative...
...added to the sales and gas taxes, these levies brought in over $131/2 billion...
...While less accurate missiles may be militarily useful as a deterrent, more accurate missiles are primarily useful to attack other missiles in their silos...
...In the last year they have been subjected to 28 attempts with firearms aimed at their leaders and 146 attacks on their various headquarters, 45 of which have been destroyed...
...Indeed, how explain the radioactive fallout carried to the Soviet heartland...
...But Proposition 13 has had a side effect not counted upon by its initiators and apologists: it has put the trickle-down process (or, more accurately, its bottlenecks) under unprecedented public scrutiny...
...He was rescued by a principle, the principle of freedom of speech...
...This creates a vicious cycle...
...but he succeeded in luring his opponents onto a terrain of total irrelevance...
...The assumptions on which Kennan's analysis is based are plainly false, Richard Pipes and Leo Labedz, two specialists in Soviet studies, have replied, likewise in Encounter...
...As a general practice, however, we should allow contacts between people to proceed without political guidance...
...This split vision happens to reflect a healthy dose of reality...
...It is in the nature of the nuclear balance to require an agreement without reference to any other matters...
...Does the Soviet Union not owe us some $50 billion that we already have contributed...
...It is in a similar stituation that one of the thinkers of that generation now offers his reflections on world politics, a summary of his life's experience...
...Brezhnev needs an arms agreement less today and is less capable of imposing one on his generals...
...Nonetheless, one result of 13 is that what capital does with its money is suddenly everybody's business...
...To regain hold of the rudder, President Carter engaged in a cold-war maneuver of ideological warfare.the campaign for civil rights abroad, which may be popular with our liberal press but violates the rules of sound diplomatic practice and diverts our attention from the real issue, which is the preservation of the power balance...
...Soviet adventurism in Africa, military buildups, and the repression of dissidents at home have combined with three decades of cold-war competition and conditioning to make us highly suspicious of their motives...
...the so-called Third Basket, which had been included at the time to assuage Western consciences but was hardly thought by Mr...
...The opponents claim that the United States is militarily inferior, that SALT freezes this "inferiority," and that the Soviet Union should be made to pay a price in some other field (Africa or treatment of dissidents) for the right to conclude an arms-control treaty...
...We have not recognized yet that we did not win the cold war and that we lost the Vietnam war (though Mr...
...The U.S.S.R...
...Moreover, on certain objects neither side can make a concession in order to obtain a counterconcession in some other field...
...Obviously, we should not refrain from using the power resources we have, nor from exploiting differences within the Communist orbit...
...This is not a case of California exceptionalism either...
...Americans, by contrast, have tried to move economic aid, such as the export of technology or the most-favorednation status, from the third into the second category...
...Specifically, the more fingers of hostile neighbors on the nuclear button, the greater the chance that nuclear war will begin in the Third World.perhaps between countries that have different big-power allies...
...Let us affirm.with all deference to the moral, religious, and political cant that fills our lives.that this sliding analogy between the "open violence" of totalitarianism and the "however-violence" of republican democracy is the worst cant we know...
...Shortly before Carter's Annapolis speech, Hungarian politicians were reported by Washington Post correspondent Michael Dobbs to be "particularly uneasy about the uncertainty over SALT...
...Among these are the U.S...
...q A curious feature of Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Speech at Harvard (National Review, July 7, 1978) is its attack on freedom of the press...
...On the other hand, most Americans know that 373 nuclear war isn't good for humans and other living things...
...For instance, far from instigating the U.S...
...Solzhenitsyn has lived to tell the tale...
...the fragmentation of the Leninist ideology that is a result of the Italian Communist party's quiet shift in policy...
...In Europe, on the other hand, we are using our military presence to obtain agreement on economic measures that we favor...
...On the contrary, although the corporate sector grew from accounting for 54.9 percent of the GNP in 1948 to 60.7 percent in 1974, the percentage of federal, state, and local taxes it paid shrank from 31 percent in 1952 to 14 percent in 1975...
...Senate, which must ratify treaties by a two-thirds vote, is not hearing from the public at large...
...Millions more would die from the longer-term effects of radiation, lack of sanitary and health services, and a phenomenon first reported by the National Academy of Sciences in 1975: depletion of the ozone layer that shields us from the sun's radiation...
...Precisely here, it seems to me, the anti-Soviet argument turns against itself...
...President Carter's remark in Frankfurt that he would pray for German reunification is the kind of irresponsible talk that encourages German revanchism and needlessly irritates the Russians...
...Nor do I say that "linkage" and the yearning for a once-for-all-time settlement are bad in themselves...
...In the real world, what possible gains would induce hard-headed Soviet leaders to attack our ICBMs and risk national suicide...
...But why was the reliance on the property tax so great...
...If to some people that doctrine then sounded aggressive, it was not Mr...
...It is a series of treaties negotiated to enhance our security, Soviet security, and world security...
...This picture could be modified by an effective Administration campaign for the treaty and by the mobilization of a vocal arms-reduction constituency...
...And as policy differences between Democrat and Republican wane, as the Democrats offer less and less that will make a positive difference in the lives of the poor and the young, these groups stay away from the polls, and the cycle begins anew...
...Public employees had their contracts nullified...
...As for the Senate, its only achievement after seven months is the Panama Canal Treaty...
...technological prowess is superior...
...His attack on another highly visible beneficiary of that principle should be most disturbing to those who have been the greatest admirers of his courage...
...On one side, there are the compact clandestine "columns" of the Red Brigade, which carry out striking terrorist exploits on a military footing...
...Kirkland then threw down the threat of a labor withdrawal from existing national cooperative 371 labor-management efforts and committees in the event labor-law reform failed...
...But if "linkage," which seems to have become the Administration's favored diplomatic tool, is to succeed, we must also coordinate our policies in Europe with those in other areas...
...What is frightening the members is clear enough...
...To contend that the Italian situation is similar to many others is a pitiful consolation, which does not try to assess the real scope and nature of the phenomenon...
...but of the reason for his survival he appears to have a very imperfect understanding...
...to homeowners (who received slightly over $1 billion in indisputably necessary relief...
...With some effort, one can remember how mainstream Democrats opposed the limitation, how they viewed with alarm its potential effect on government services, and how it met resounding defeat at the polls...
...I am pained to admit that we have even less hope for changing the Soviet system now then 30 years ago...
...It is remarkable that, despite the KGB tactics so visibly in use in the Soviet Union, the American public appears to understand the complexity of living on the same planet as the Soviets...
...The Democratic drive against the welfare state was formally inaugurated on the night of 13's passage with Jerry Brown's announcement that he would support no new taxes...
...It is hearing from the new right, which manages to produce mail on subjects as varied as Paul Warnke's nomination, Panama, ERA, abortion, and the Russians...
...Tip O'Neill has been more effective than Bob Byrd, but this is faint praise...
...Although in general I think it is bad policy to politicize sports events, in this case the threat of a boycott might move the Soviet government to abstain from further show trials...
...The United States also has a technological lead in cruise missiles, warhead accuracy and guidance, computers, submarine detection, and survivability of missiles...
...Of course, one would like to have as few dealings as .possible with people who keep "their" Negroes segregated or who detain "their" Jews from emigrating...
...The Russians might be happy to let a few thousand Jews emigrate if in exchange they could gain access to the U.S...
...IT SHOULD BE CLEAR that this turning away from liberal proposals reflects a conscious and calculated decision about how to get reelected, not a real change in the ideology of the members...
...They believe they "owe nothing to anybody," meaning that they owe nothing to the President...
...Cuban dancers should perform at the Met, and American physicists should visit Peking without feeling that someone is "playing the China card...
...The first of these amendments, the inflation amendment, is a prime example of irresponsibility...
...Lowenthal believes "that an inherent linkage exists, at least in the long run, between certain forms of economic East-West cooperation and Soviet willingness to exercise restraint in the arms race and in [the use of] violent action in crisis areas...
...As the "haves" we display a natural predilection for settling all questions at once with the main assailant, and we would like to have him then guarantee, once and for all, the new status quo...
...Members of Congress are concerned about possible loss of votes at home...
...and the whole question of the government in a summary public trial...
...A seventh, Israel, is believed by the CIA to have an untested stockpile of atomic bombs...
...Brezhnev or his successor explain the irradiation of the Kansas wheat fields that have helped feed the Soviet people...
...This is elementary.a freshman lesson.along with other elementary rules, for instance that moralizing and indignation are poor counsel in international affairs, and that our views of another government's domestic system must not obstruct our search for mutual interests...
...The Senate filibuster commenced on May 16 and concluded on June 20, when the 60 senatorial votes required for cloture were not achieved on a sixth attempt...
...They are concerned about losing face...
...followed our lead, and now both nations are more insecure...
...Attempts to interest the corporations in lowering prices or creating jobs with some of the $2.9 billion they are receiving in rebates have met with considerable resistance...
...The recent coups in Afghanistan, Mauretania, Ethiopia, and South Yemen, the guerrilla wars in Africa must all be traced to Soviet arms deliveries, and 30,000 Cubans would not be in Africa without Russian support...
...Since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear era, the Soviet-American arms race has produced two arsenals of mass destruction so awesome as to defy human imagination...
...The treaty would also reduce the uncertainties each side would feel about the nature of the other's strategic forces during the 1980s...
...Precisely because in California, as in other states, the tax structure was designed to favor corporations...
...380 Given these limitations, which are augmented by the present weakness of the American government and the lack of consensus among the Western allies, the danger arises that the American public might react to its frustration with ideologies similar to those that 30 years ago were the product of a similar quandary...
...Nor does the immediacy of the danger offer those long stretches of time that would be necessary to overcome the chief social contradictions...
...Every afternoon, the Los Angeles Hearst newspaper runs on its front page a "Roll of Honor" of landlords who have elected not to raise the rent: apparently, any account of trickle-down's actually working constitutes genuine, man-bitesdog news...
...one that gives neither of the powers incentives to go on negotiating for further measures of arms control, defusing issues of contention and of detente.the benefit will be almost nil, except that one might be thankful for any symbol of political, as opposed to emotional and ideological, attitudes in dealing with the Soviet power...
...The Soviet giant leads in the number of land-based and heavy missiles...
...As Kennan of all people should know, Russian diplomacy has at all times tried to compartmentalize its dealings with the outside world...
...The untoward liberties that American journalists are known to take have been shocking to Solzhenitsyn, and he responds with something between petulance and indignation...
...In other days it was always the conservatives who wanted Congress to go home as soon as possible and to do as little as possible...
...What's more, Moro has been the victim of the virulent political iconoclasm that arose in Italy in opposition to all those images personifying power after 30 years of government without a change, due to the lack of a realistic and acceptable alternative to the majority party...
...And it has had to bear the accusation of trying through the ritual sacrifice of one of its members to attain a kind of collective absolution for the kind of government it has administered over the last 30 years...
...a feeling of powerlessness in the face of moral and political outrages...
...2) each suffered the rapid replacement of an accepted system of values...
...But the boycott proposal would have to come from private persons, and it would have to be submitted to the Olympics committee, a private organization...
...The American President has temporarily lost control of policy-making in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate...
...The political system has been subjected to exceptional stress, yet it seems to have mobilized certain reserves of energy...
...Weak countries resent and denounce it as imperialist, under the label of "strings attached...
...delegates' intransigence in politicizing these issues, taking them out of the humanitarian and placing them in a political, coldwar context...
...So, Carter talked tough, the Russians didn't melt, and his slide in the polls continued...
...Indeed, until 1976, it took a twothirds vote of the Legislature to raise bank and corporation taxes, where a simple majority sufficed for all others...
...But that the first-round defeat on labor-law reform has had an eye-opening impact upon the labor movement cannot be doubted...
...In an essay published earlier this year in Encounter, and also in a book entitled, The Cloud of Danger (New York: Little Brown, 1978), Mr...
...On June 23rd of this year, two weeks after the passage of Jarvis-Gann, Jerry Brown took to the airwaves to offer a spending limitation that was in essence identical to the Reagan panacea...
...They are in dire need, however, of Western know-how and technology, and therefore should be amenable to an era of good feeling...
...These consist of the traditional tools of diplomacy: deterrence by measures that would make further expansion too costly for the Soviet Union, and rewards that would make cooperation with the West attractive to its leaders...
...He was not given asylum in recognition of his great soul, or his art, or the strength of character that helped him to live and write...
...Pipes and Labedz expect...
...There's little reason to believe that this Congress can do anything except damage...
...So direct a threat should impose a suspension of party maneuverings among the constitutional forces...
...If none of these things are done, we will soon see not only Red Brigades but also Yellow or White ones...
...These areas of common interest are so overarching that other important interests on which survival does not depend must be dealt with separately...
...What is needed is a radical change in the common way of thinking and in the prevailing rules of conduct.a change that would affect both the egocentric fatalism of the rulers and the contradictory demands (due to pietism or simply contentiousness) of the ruled...
...Often the opposite is true: democratic countries can be aggressive and imperialistic...
...Welfare-state liberalism has almost vanished from the state's political spectrum...
...Tests are necessary to prove whether these weapons will work...
...for a word...
...the ideologized prison revolts...
...But it seems to me that the Soviet leaders today are much more prepared to go to the brink than Stalin, who.contrary to his reputation.was a coward and took no risk unless he was sure of success...
...Senate in 1979...
...q Public-opinion polls indicate that Americans overwhelmingly distrust the Soviet Union.and favor nuclear-arms agreements with the U.S.S.R...
...The more fingers on the nuclear button, the greater the chance of war...
...Europe has recovered (as Mr...
...q There, are people in Washington who say that the present Congress is the worst in memory...
...The SALT II ceilings-2,250 missiles and bombers on each side by 1985.would provide the superpowers with no less destructive power than they deploy today...
...Both sides of the aisle display this lack of leadership...
...arsenals...

Vol. 25 • September 1978 • No. 4


 
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