THE CUBAN EXODUS A TASTE OF FREEDOM
Brand, H. & Geltman, Emanuel & Denitch, Bogdan & Jordan, Ruth & Gotbaum, Victor & Kornblum, William
An exodus is not yet a revolution. In the case of Cuba, it comes as evidence of desperation and geographical convenience. Where the Hungarians and Czechs had to face Russian tanks, the...
...It is through the budget and lower taxes that "supply economics" seeks to reduce consumption and increase savings, thus redistributing resources to capital...
...How long this phase will last and where it will leave the welfare state is largely dependent upon the outcome of political struggles...
...The participants were philosophers and scientists by training and inclination—though, as always in Czechoslovakia, their current menial occupations give no clue to this...
...He commands total and rapt attention, to which abstraction and complexity is no barrier...
...Men approaching the retirement years, like Eli Strenich whose family has worked at Wisconsin Steel since their days of immigration, suddenly have to scrape up hundreds of dollars to pay for medical benefits...
...Matos is hardly the sort to make wild guesses about impending revolution...
...Or would they...
...Our host disappeared from time to time to stoke the boiler, as the discussion ranged over the linguistic parallels between Nazi and Soviet propaganda, which is his special topic of research...
...It has responded with help, as have some non-Cuban agencies...
...THE WORKERS' RESIGNATION and despair is more frightening than their anger at the small groups of left leafleteers or their hatred of the newspapers that dwell on the fact that theirs is an independent steel union, not a local of the United Steelworkers...
...However, these expenditures only partly represent public "infrastructure" outlays that are indispensable to the functioning of the economy...
...Not an easy problem to solve...
...The reason business might agree to wage-price controls would likely be the same as in 1971 to restrain wage claims...
...q We are seeing the wanton gutting of the nation's heavy industrial plant...
...Whatever one may think about the virtues of universal military training, the proposal to reintroduce draft registration has no military justification...
...Working journalists will attest that the other New York, the inside population, has become less interesting to their editors, less visible in the media...
...It is the incapacity of present U.S...
...The welfare state, once it has reached a certain scale, is inherently inflationary...
...It is a market where banks are as likely to decide where investments are made as product and marketing specialists...
...I saw the impact of plant closings first-hand — the loss of a worker's status and skills, as well as material security...
...Budget deficits generated by the shortfall of taxes during slumps, together with such income supports as unemployment compensation and social security, were the "automatic stabilizers" that would keep "politics" out of the management of the economy...
...New York City cannot go on like this...
...Furthermore, the Council of Economic Advisers forecast a sharp rise in unemployment for 1980 as a result of a recession "likely to be mild and brief...
...They also compensate for costs shifted by business to society at large...
...But the Committee left no doubt of its commitment to the goal of tax relief, once the budget would be in balance...
...Since then he has worked, among other things, as a turbine operator and as a nightwatchman at the Prague zoo...
...TOMIN IS A SPECIALIST in classical philosophy, with a doctorate from Charles University, Prague, who has been denied a university post since 1968...
...We all note New York's remarkable progress toward fiscal health...
...farm prices had to he exempted altogether...
...I guess we go backs to beans and rice now...
...Families that had lived from week to week on steelTill earnings now had to hurry for emergency help to family and friends...
...The mobility of capital, and the velocity with which it can be moved from one nation to another and 266 from one industry to another, has commanded the invention of complex technologies that sustain its movement...
...They cannot be prevented by conventional Keynesian prescriptions, because of the insensitivity of prices and wages to cyclical downturns and because most capital investment remains beyond the guidance of government...
...265 achieve the most efficient economic development, and that the "best" jobs are in the private sector, most are eager to satisfy the requirements of a "good business climate...
...Senate...
...Moreover, these so-called dissidents are in fact ordinary citizens, with widely varying views and preoccupations, some politically motivated, others not...
...The program was in fact begun at a time of slack, but gradually failed as a boom developed...
...The growing concentration of business, which has permitted it to assemble the wealth needed to develop this kind of technology, has also led to the destruction of regional and local differences in products and businesses...
...Support and guidance services that used to help the ambitious poor and the infirm poor have been eliminated, or are overrun by increased demand and decreased staff...
...In the end the authors urge American workers to remember that the ultimate power to successfully challenge the corporations will only come from "a new burst of agressive organizing...
...We are presented with lists of Soviet gains over the past few years, without the balancing list of losses...
...In all this, there is a stab of memory...
...Castro and his Russian masters had to be dismayed, and then tried to turn it to their advantage by overwhelming the United States with more refugees than it might be willing to , take in, maliciously pushing criminals, the mentally ill, and probably some spies into the often leaky boats...
...Will this be a better city to live in because we attack budget deficits by eliminating teachers, librarians, and caseworkers for abused and neglected children...
...BaSed on Table B 51, 1980 Economic Report, p. 262...
...You don't sit in municipal clinics if you can afford a private doctor...
...Oversight on Economic Stabilization, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Production and Stabilization of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Third, there has been a 270 revival of an absolutist Cold War rhetoric, focused on an analysis of Soviet motives, which all but precludes a discussion of what may be appropriate responses in a world that—if it is to continue—will continue with both superpowers maintaining their relative positions of strength...
...to move their investments without concern for social consequences or human costs...
...Carter's personality accents even more strongly this general feature...
...For the political business cycle has been a steady reality of the postwar American economy, mirroring the virtually unchanging social and economic forces that have shaped the welfare state...
...In view of the pattern of inflationary price increases—a pattern that can he shown to have antedated the energy crisis--Okun and others have insisted that "we have been experiencing primarily wage-price spiral inflation—not food, fuel or other special-factor inflation...
...with Soviet violations of the spirit of detente, whatever that means, without an examination of the U.S...
...This means that political decisions determine the extent to which the instruments of stabilization are applied at a given phase of the cycle...
...policy to relate to these liberation movements that is the problem, rather than Soviet expansion in that area...
...For maintenance of full employment could not be achieved merely through budgetary deficits—it would require both public investments and the subsidizing of mass consumption...
...Zimbabwe is an excellent example...
...Insiders see little concern and dwindling effort by outsiders to help improve their condition...
...This is a topic we cannot go into here...
...Like many thousands of people in Czechoslovakia who have been denied or dismissed for political reasons from the positions appropriate to their qualifications, Tomin's students do menial jobs, like cleaning floors, keeping parks, stoking boilers...
...After several hours he was bundled out and, because the police did not want a body lying outside their station (he still would not get up) left him some distance away on a pile of coal...
...Prices and wages have received subordinate attention...
...This concentration has increased two and one half times between 1947 and 1972, and so has eliminated the many local breweries, some of them more than 100 years old...
...Compensation per hour in the nonfarm business sector rose 38 percent between 1975 and 1979...
...It's not the same any more...
...What remains are Cubans who have lived under Castro's rule for a large part of their lives...
...production also shifted frequently to higher-margin goods...
...It is up to the working class and its organizations to show the way...
...Now the Progressive Alliance has published an account of the impact that the unrestricted mobility of private capital has had on communities, on the national economy, and on the world economy.* In Capital and Communities, Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison challenge capitalists' royal prerogative in the U.S...
...Their checks would be cashed by the supermarket tellers...
...If inflation reflects a struggle over the distribution of resources, not only between workers and employers, but also between the poorer and more affluent strata of society, as well as between the state (seeking to compel business to internalize costs) and business, seeking to shift costs to the public (i.e., to externalize them)—then the truth of the implication in such statements as the Business Week editorial must be conceded...
...and its NATO allies, together, not only spend more than the Soviet Union and its weak and unreliable allies, but the West's military establishment is technologically superior to that of the Soviet Union...
...For example, goods and materials were in short supply because costs could not be passed on, often compelling the use of more ample, higher priced supplies, or encouraging exports...
...The conglomerates "milk" these cows until they run dry and then they shut them down or sell them to an unlikely successor...
...The Cuban-American community has behaved admirably...
...These pressures, exerted also by the White House in combination with newly found allies among the heads of corporations (see Business Week, May 19, 1980) and key congressional committees, may indeed turn out to be more effective than ever before...
...More important than the Budget's details is the political intent...
...The argument that inflation would be mild or absent now but for the steep increases in food and fuel prices over the past few years does not wash, as the figures in the following table show...
...They did it all in the name of economic development, convinced by the business community that the cutting of Workmen's Comp was needed to produce that elusive "right business climate...
...THE LEFT SHOULD NOT MINIMIZE the significance of federal deficits...
...But he may now find the joke turned sour...
...role...
...It's inside and outside...
...This has been true throughout the past 40 years, i.e., since a budgetary deficit was first deliberately fostered in 1938 to prevent a recession from deepening...
...One aim of balancing the budget is tax relief...
...I took pictures of the four-lane highways that led to empty factory buildings— buildings and highways often built by community bond issues for companies that demanded this sacrifice for locating there and providing jobs...
...In 1979 the number of work stoppages was at a 12year low...
...in 1969-71 it ran at postwar highs...
...But Bluestone and Harrison point out that the concerted opposition of the corporate community is as likely to defeat such legislation as it did laborlaw reform...
...Both kinds of tax relief, however, would further weaken a fiscal system that has been chronically in deficit in "good" years as well as bad...
...Humble origins were a badge of honor in this town...
...The contract gains, which had built the well-being of the community, were now blamed by the corporation, and believed by the citizens, to be the cause of the shutdown...
...Questions are insistent and probing, and the answers to them matter...
...defeats" are not the defeats of the American people or its legitimate interests, but are the defeats of a policy that is politically and morally wrong and does not serve the legitimate interests of the West...
...The discussion was alive and exciting, but the topic was a real disaster—the problem of course being Marxism, not morality...
...Even short of such changes, business would insist on "sound finance...
...The Editors With the following comment we continue the informal discussion among Dissent editors regarding the changed international situation after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...General revenue sharing for states and cities should he eliminated...
...Their inflationary impact is slight, however, compared to private debt...
...Government Printing Office—hereafter G.P.0.-1980...
...This might not be inflationary in times of slack, except that it sustains the administered pricing system of corporate business...
...Some have a heightened degree of courage, some just cannot live otherwise than they do...
...Pollution abatement costs, for example--defined as the difference between what business would have laid out on its own and what it had to lay out to conform with federal law—have been estimated at $9.5 billion in 1975, roughly one percent of the GNP at the time...
...For this city to stay healthy, this other New York has to be brought into the mainstream—the middleclass mainstream of status and possessions and hope...
...q Reference Notes Michal Kalecki, The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972...
...1 and 6, 1974 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1974...
...The pattern has been growing for years...
...was to Britain and France when they invaded Suez in 1956...
...The visiting lecturer, whoever he may be, is treated with respect but not deference...
...I would maintain, on the contrary, that its policy, although inconsistent, has been characterized by bellicosity and increasing reliance on military spending and the development of weapons systems that can only result in a new cycle of the arms race...
...foreign policy must either be naive about Soviet power and the nature of that totalitarian society, or are victims of a process of "self-Finlandization...
...Informing the public has become less important than building a going, doing, spending, buying audience to sell their advertisers...
...Pressure to balance the budget manifests a "fundamental realignment," a "major political shift," the liberals having "become a very small minority" in the House of Representatives (New York Times, March 25, 1980...
...You may or may not believe that the intention here is not to malign the Mayor...
...It is a signal in the same sense that stationing missiles of a medium range in Europe was a signal...
...This incoherence is exacerbated by the peculiarly American, sanctimonious tone of this Administration, which is often shared by its critics...
...Well, you know we were always poor when I was a kid," Ed Hernandez sighs through tight lips...
...THE CENTERPIECE of the critiques of the Carter administration is its supposedly inadequate defense policy...
...Solar?' and Ms...
...The welfare state as we have come to know it is entering upon a phase of contraction...
...Bluestone and Harrison ask the American public to add up the devastation that bust towns have suffered and match it against the temporary and insecure glow of boom towns...
...The federal government's purchases of goods and services has actually declined, from 11 and 10 percent of the GNP in 1959-61 and 1969-71 to an estimated 7 percent in 1979-81...
...What about Korea, West Berlin, Vietnam...
...pursue a self-destructive strategy that weakens the West as a whole...
...This is implicit, first, in the "strategy of restraint" that in 1981 continues from earlier Carter budgets...
...The worst...
...The demise of the imperial presidency has resulted in a situation where the executive does not, and apparently cannot, offer a coherent policy while the competing interest groups in the Senate, the Congress, the military and foreign-policy lobbies all but cancel each other out...
...The "National Accord" signed last September between the Carter administration and the AFL-CIO leadership gives promise of continued "moderation" of wage claims, if not abdication of militancy in pressing them...
...Some are from Oxford, some from elsewhere, but they are always known in Prague as "the Oxford visitors...
...Ultimately, the authors teach, but they do not tell us how...
...liberal establishment merely as a decline of U.S...
...Therefore, they represent in effect an assault on the adequate funding of human services and income supports...
...Times are more complex...
...We should point out that, so long as the United States continues to back tyrannical, despotic minority regimes in the Third World, it will be faced with defeats and, I might add, should be faced with defeats...
...First Concurrent Resolution on the Budget — Fiscal Year 1981, Report of the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, March 26, 1980 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1980...
...It gets harder and harder for the inside population to move out of their poverty and they know it...
...Yet, there are limits to compensating for this loss by raising prices or relocating in countries more tolerant of externalities (including substandard working conditions...
...Witness its opposition to all but the final and watered-down versions of the Employment Act of 1946 and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978...
...They should be good allies to the United States in the way the U.S...
...These guys with the leaflets are only trying to 264 trade on our misery," an old friend from the mill tells me...
...income and retail sales...
...Hence, the pressure to "balance" the budget while also cutting it, so as to afford tax reductions and "incentives to invest...
...The political business cycle results from the use—or deliberate nonuse—of stabilization policy in moderating fluctuations in production, income, employment, and investment...
...But surely, the presence of criminals among the refugees is no excuse to refuse entry to the hordes desperate to risk the journey...
...On one recent occasion, Dr...
...When they arrive, the visitors are treated at the seminars as colleagues...
...Tens of thousands willing to take any chance, including drowning (and some have)—that doesn't speak very well for the blessings of "Cuban socialism...
...What kind of city will this inexperienced, undereducated generation make in the next 20 or 30 years...
...But that is a political and not a military problem...
...True, recessions have not been merely the result of deliberate policy...
...The standard of living for 800,000 people on welfare goes down monthly as prices outdistance their checks...
...There is, to begin with, a state of general malaise that is centering on the issue of the governability of this society...
...Fiscal Year 1981 Budget Revisions, March 1980 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1980...
...You come here because you wish to discuss philosophy with us...
...The unease of the European social democrats with this policy should have been a warning note, but these signals were a part of an incoherent set of responses that, taken together, are truly frightening...
...Holtzman...
...Had the seminars been permitted to continue by the police who roughly invaded the apartment where they take place, they would have treated the subjects of rationality in science and of Aristotle's Ethics, respectively...
...To respond in this way is not to foster illusions about the Soviet Union...
...Such language is significant, not merely because of its echoes of 268 the 1950s and its bureaucratic ruthlessness...
...In New York City, the present grant for a family of four was set in 1974 on the basis of 1972 prices and amounts to $374 a month, compared with the actual cost of $586 for items that the grant is supposed to pay...
...Very few liberal-minded persons have taken exception to the Committee's stand or the Carter administration's economic policies...
...Half this city can't support the other half forever...
...This doesn't mean that the vessel that is left is an unworkable enterprise...
...The Chase Manhattan Bank holds the notes and has frozen the assets...
...The decline in influence by the two superpowers and the increasing difficulty they have in managing their respective alliances is seen by much of the U.S...
...The union was always on the defensive...
...and its allies have considerable military capacity immediately adjacent to Soviet territory, with no equivalence on the other side, unless one considers Cuba a military threat to the United States...
...Instead, business and its academic spokespeople have marshaled forces to pare consumption outlays funneled through the Federal 275 Budget, and to design tax cuts favorable to capital investment, spelling a redistribution of resources from the public to the private sector—all billed as increasing "supply," and thereby curbing inflation...
...Now 35 percent of black youth are unemployed...
...President Carter welcomes the newcomers with "open arms" while immigration officials threaten boat owners with massive fines...
...It is indeed from these institutions that major new cost pressures arose during the '70s...
...Here intellectual work and intense conversations take place...
...to project its power globally, whereas any moves on the part of the Soviet Union in that direction violate the rules of the game...
...q 278...
...This program (I shall say more about it further on) is bound greatly to aggravate another problem, barely alluded to by the President—unemployment...
...On the contrary, the most useful policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union is one calculated to isolate it within the Third World and to make the West the legitimate focus of the hopes and aspirations of oppressed people everywhere...
...But it is unlikely that allocative planning would be accepted by American business, except in wartime...
...The Carter administration, the Joint Economic Committee, and the House Budget Committee all have echoed these demands...
...The unemployment rate for black adult workers, now more than 8 percent for men and 10 for women, while also smaller than the levels of the mid-70s, continued to run twice as high as for white adult workers in 1979...
...As it was, they could only leave their philosophical thoughts with the Prague police who, given the amount of energy they devote to interrogating and confiscating papers from intellectuals, must be the best educated cops in the world...
...The weaknesses in the U.S...
...He is fiercely instransigent, fiery, prickly, and brave, and intensely jealous of his right to study and teach philosophy...
...What began as a small surge to get out has swelled to an immense, almost frantic, mass movement...
...Praise where praise is earned...
...The President, unlike some of the liberals who support the draft, seems to recognize this and argues for the draft primarily as a "signal" we want to send to the other side...
...Thus, business is not strongly motivated to accept controls—aside from its usual reluctance to contemplate incomes policy in general...
...You don't put your kid on a waiting list for a preschool program in the park if you can enroll the child in a nursery immediately...
...He is presently studying Aristotle's commentary on Aristotle...
...Yet, although committed to combatting inflation, the Nixon administration, with its reelection in 1972 at stake, also desired low unemployment...
...This spells a new development in the political business cycle...
...The production and economic planning achievements of the war years, which followed upon the trauma of the depression years, rekindled the self-confidence of business leaders...
...The 25-cent increase in the minimum wage should be eliminated...
...The boat went on to Cuba (ironic, isn't it...
...The Joint Economic Committee of Congress, with its perennial Democratic majority, has so decisively moved toward supporting the interest of capital—disguised as "supply economics"—that its Republican minority found it unnecessary, for the first time in some 20 years, to file a minority report in 1979 and 1980...
...Moreover, the figures mentioned can mislead one into believing that they reflect resources absorbed by the federal government...
...The discussions continued long into the night over drinks bought with beer money from paychecks cashed by tavern owners like Rose Alivojovic, or Tina Guel who owns the Juan and Tina Tavern...
...Any anti-inflationary proposal that relies solely on balancing the budget and tightening money is, in reality, a proposal for an encore of that experience that is, 90 percent production losses, and only about 10 percent inflation saving...
...20036...
...Yet, he spoke of hundreds of thousands who were fed up with political repression, economic chaos...
...1980 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...His interpretations are fresh and deep, and his way of teaching is intense and alive...
...Government intervention in the U.S., if frequently bureaucratic, also is the result of popular pressures...
...Costa Rica did at least offer to take all the Cuban refugees who could be flown there, if only as a staging area...
...We have more nuclear weapons, more systems for delivering those nuclear weapons, a greater investment in a bluewater Navy, and far more bases than our Soviet rival has...
...The attack on the welfare state is undoubtedly gathering force...
...And here, as elsewhere, American policy is a shambles, conflicted, this day humane, another day insensitive...
...They wait longer to see doctors, to fill prescriptions...
...For whatever historical reasons, the U.S...
...But there is no historical evidence supporting such claims whatever...
...As to grants-in-aid to the states and localities, nearly three quarters of them consist of investment-type outlays—that is, education and training, health, natural resource development, and community and regional development...
...Controls were advocated by Arthur Burns, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as well as by the Business Council, a group of top executives of large corporations...
...Similar measures to protect home markets would surely he extracted as a condition for effective wage-price controls now...
...One lecture on Kant, dealing with the most difficult and intricate points, lasted for some five hours, and the audience never faltered...
...The Oxford dons were the latest in a stream of academic visitors Tomin had received...
...The conglomerates have moved into every area of production and since their objective is only money, oil companies buy department stores, banks buy manufacturing enterprises, food processers buy textile firms, insurance companies buy food producers...
...The real separation in the city is personal...
...The U.S...
...But inflation does not resolve underlying conflicts...
...q To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...And what has the International Union done to keep mills open in Youngstown, or in any of the other towns...
...Capital and Communities devotes more than half of its pages to proving the consequences of economic disinvestment, and it should be credited for its insistence on a humanistic standard in judging economic activity...
...Social security payments which after the cost-ofliving adjustment due this July will average $6,756 annually for an elderly couple, and $8,736 for a disabled worker with wife and children (modest sums indeed)—is almost entirely financed from taxes on consumption, and cannot be regarded as inflationary...
...There is no prospect of national planning being accepted here in the foreseeable future...
...Kalecki, however, viewed the dilemma of stabilization policy more narrowly...
...Other workers sped home to break the bad news to their families and to prepare for the customary shopping expeditions that night or the next morning...
...Parallel to this goes the assumption that it is proper and necessary for the U.S...
...That is, it signaled an end of detente and an increasingly military response to the foreign-policy challenges that concern primarily the Third World...
...There are a number of other reasons that might be adduced why deficits are inflationary, particularly at a time when private debt also is rising rapidly...
...But the inside population has paid the heaviest price for this progress...
...Can they ever come to understand that without democracy, all talk of socialism is mere ugly travesty...
...He spoke quietly and gravely about widespread disaffection in Cuba...
...True, their mill had been sold by the International Harvester Company to an undercapitalized affiliated concern, Envirodyne, Inc., some months earlier...
...But "believing is seeing," and in the last few weeks we have been seeing it for real, beyond anything he said...
...In time, the program fell apart, compelling Arthur Burns to retreat from his earlier position, and again urging "the sound management of aggregate demand...
...If the aim of cutting the budget is to curb inflation, the official reports offer no relevant rationale...
...Sadly, that hysteria is not limited to the hawks but extends to liberal and labor-oriented intellectuals...
...Finally, we should revive an old and honorable socialist theme, that is, that these U.S...
...But the "realignment" or "shift" is not as fundamental as it seems...
...271 THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION'S PROPOSALS about how to deal with what I consider a contrived defense problem are quite simply not supportable and essentially demagogic in nature where they are not dangerous...
...Partly because of these pressures, but also because it has a stake in preventing extreme economic instability, business has supported relatively mild stabilization measures...
...What they have in common is that they have been labeled as subversive by the authorities and so are marginalized, for trying to do what should be normal and natural in any social order that values freedom of thought and the maintenance of cultural traditions...
...We have already indicated the modesty of scheduled social security payments...
...I emphasize the word experienced, since the unemployment problem has usually been belittled by being defined chiefly in terms of youths and women newly entering the labor force...
...But tax relief is among the worst enemies of adequately funded human services...
...Perhaps so...
...It is noteworthy that rising wages are generally no longer mentioned as prime sources of inflation...
...It explains why the "social wage"—those benefits built into the community structure by years of slow gains—is being eroded by pressure from the business community...
...These statements do not reflect ant' shift in the Carter administration's basic policy...
...But it has always rejected the larger role for government that, along with Kalecki, such prominent economists as Alvin Hansen envisioned...
...As for the United Nations, the less said the better...
...The refusal to adjust for inflation—let alone for changing standards of need—has pushed families dependent upon public welfare more deeply into poverty...
...Thinking about all this, we can't help wondering whether those American "leftists" still infatuated with totalitarian dictatorship—if only with the "different" or "better" one in Cuba—will now have some second thoughts...
...The quality of New York's population in the next decades is a legacy being shaped by decisions we are making today...
...Thereby the pattern of "political business cycles," previously associated with Republican administrations, continues...
...This pressure is not only exerted by conservative forces, it also arises from a provision in the HumphreyHawkins Act, cited by the Joint Economic Committee in its 1980 Report, stating that "the President's Economic Report includes interim numerical goals for reducing the share of the Nation's GNP accounted for by federal outlays to 21 percent or less by 1981, and to 20 percent or less by 1983...
...Although the Committee's economic assumptions for this year and next are similar to the Carter administration's, it has proposed drastically to reduce the budget submitted last January...
...The Budget of the United States Government: Fiscal Year 1981 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1980...
...There is here an underlying assumption that critics of the present U.S...
...Cuts totaling $16.5 billion would center on health, employment, income security, and 276 environmental protection programs...
...But the geography, kinship, the glimmer of opportunity really is directed toward one country: ours...
...But the most interesting contribution, and one that socialists will find particularly provocative, is its exposure of the extent to which American capital has disengaged itself from the nation/state and has charted new courses of enterprise, by defining a world market far beyond any previously achieved...
...The states have become less able to maintain decent welfare standards because their tax systems have been increasingly linked to sources fluctuating with the economy (that is...
...Louis set sail from Europe to cross the ocean with a boatload of Jews fleeing Nazi terror...
...Since significant numbers of Americans, both middle-class and workers, believe that unrestricted capital mobility and free management decisions * Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Capital and Communities: The Causes and Consequences of Private Disinvestment (Washington, D.C.: Progressive Alliance, 1980), 333 pp., $20.00...
...Some indeed are criminals...
...It is that aspect of the report that will be most useful in public debate...
...Permitting the initial phases of recession to run their course so as to curb inflation is a bankrupt policy...
...A have or a have-not...
...Business would fear the intrusion of public investment into hitherto private sectors, the reduced incentives to work from subsidized mass consumption, and, more generally, the slackened work discipline full employment might spell...
...The mutually reinforcing anti-inflationary thrust of budgetary and monetary policies is openly recognized in the official texts...
...they are latent in the structure of American capitalism...
...The corporation almost always escaped the community's wrath...
...But it does bespeak contagion and, unlike soldiers, the infection cannot simply be shipped off to Angola...
...on the January 1980 Economic Report of the President, Feb...
...military establishment are in shortages of skilled, senior, noncommissioned officers, pilots, and army doctors...
...Not all the refugees have families here...
...IT IS commom for the media to call such people "dissidents," but the label is seriously misleading...
...must have an overall military and political superiority over the Soviets...
...foreign policy...
...Surely, we as socialists do not and cannot support that Western interest...
...This tragic waste of bluecollar jobs and working-class lives will not cease as long as we allow government to abet the sacrifice of production facilities to the momentary needs of private cash flow...
...in foreign-policy matters...
...The apparently self-regulating character of the "automatic stabilizers" has always appealed to business, since it would constrain direct government intervention...
...Tomin translating, at times explosively interjecting his own comments, but in general carefully and patiently pursuing the logic of the argument wherever it leads...
...Some have just selected the wrong parents...
...My own view is that a number of the critics have really never been willing to accept a rough equivalence or balance between the two superpowers and are implicitly or explicitly committed to the notion that the U.S...
...Rent supplements are extra, but inadequate for at least one third of recipients (New York Times, March 23, 1980...
...They must therefore rely more and more on the federal government, whose grant-in-aid policies, however, are coming under 277 pressure from business and other affluent taxpayer groups...
...They were workers at the Wisconsin Steel Works, one of America's oldest and most successful specialty steel-rolling mills...
...It may be useful to remember that the United States has 14 carriers at its disposal versus 2 small Soviet carriers, a Marine Corps of over 120,000 men and women versus the Soviet Union's naval infantry of 12,000 men, and a greatly superior military technology in antitank weaponry and in aircraft...
...The authorities of what he calls "The Security State" have frequently interrogated him, denied his elder son an academic education, beaten up his wife (a remarkably sensitive and intelligent person and a leading spokeswoman for Charter 77), threatened him with a psychiatric diagnosis (which, to their great credit, the Czech psychiatrists refused to perform), set policemen to chase him across fields and woods, positioned two of them outside the door of his apartment for five months, and repeatedly tried to get him to leave the country...
...It would also offset the payrolltax increase scheduled for next January, presumably by income-tax cuts...
...There would be no supplemental unemployment benefits, an immediate cessation of all health insurance, and, of course, no vacation checks for those waiting for hard-earned vacation dollars...
...The outside population lives in or commutes to the city, earns its income here, enjoys the cultural and other advantages, but can afford to take care of itself...
...They should say clearly that—because they value the Western alliance and because the United States, for good or ill, is a pivotal part of that alliance—it is the act of a loyal friend to say no when we in the U.S...
...There is, to begin with, the growing pressure to halt and reverse the supposedly rising share of federal expenditures in the national income...
...Younger men who finally have managed to purchase a house and are struggling to meet mortgage payments now face the loss of all their gains...
...It is a world in which the product is incidental to the industrial process...
...But wage claims have been fairly moderate in recent years...
...The workers and their families were to discover that their checks were uncashable...
...His attitude is that his course is public and open, and that in defending his way of life there must be no compromise with "The Security State," whose authorities know from very long experience that he will resist—by hunger strike, nonviolence and demonstrative letter-writing—all attempts to silence him or negotiate with him...
...More than 40 percent of our people are poor and/or minority group members...
...I went to Paducah, Kentucky, to Sandusky, Ohio, to Selma, Alabama—I knew that even though the first of these runaways went from North to South, it could just as well be from Upper South to Deep South, or maybe out of the country altogether...
...Measures to relieve it will be sparse, lending greater potency to the threat of job loss...
...Economic Report of The President, transmitted to the Congress, Jan...
...He dusted himself off, walked home, and then discussed Aristotle with his waiting students for four hours...
...In Washington, D.C., workers got a good demonstration of the principle when Marion Barry, black mayor from a radical civil-rights background, led the fight to gut the workmen's compensation benefits workers had won over the years...
...When will they get their first jobs...
...The leading actors who formulate economic policy—the secretary of the Treasury, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the head of the Office of Management and Budget— have in all Democratic administrations since 1960 been of the same stamp as their Republican confreres...
...What is the meaning of the "political business cycle...
...Unemployment will once again become the price of efficiency and higher productivity...
...Tomin's students are the children of well-known signatories of Charter 77...
...The expected greater "supply" of productive capital would restrain prices and wages...
...Progressive Alliance, 1625 L Street, N.W., Washington, D.C...
...There are, however, many other such groups—in Prague, Brno, and elsewhere—though they meet in a more clandestine manner...
...What the Soviets do have is a larger land army, much of which is tied up on the Chinese frontier, in border guard duty, and in maintaining internal stability within the bloc...
...Julius Tomin...
...So tolerance for high unemployment will rise by more than just another notch...
...On the contrary, we should argue, that while it is both illegal and immoral to take hostages, there is nothing wrong with asking the United States—yes, even good Christian Jimmy Carter—to apologize for a decade-long policy of supporting a bloody, tyrannical regime in Iran...
...These were the anxious questions shouted over and over again at stormy meetings in the weeks following the closure...
...q In the 1960s, when I was a writer and organizer for the International Union of Electrical Workers, one of my jobs was to travel to communities where plants were closing (sometimes in the aftermath of a strike or other militant union action) and to explain to the community leaders that the union was not to blame for the loss of jobs...
...Why had the workers received no communication whatsoever that the plant might close "indefinitely" and that Envirodyne was filing for bankruptcy...
...They bespeak a lack of social solidarity, an unwillingness adequately to fund public needs, an undue preoccupation with private consumption...
...IT MIGHT BE ARGUED that the current deepening recession is an auspicious time for a more successful version of the administered wage-price control program...
...What they lack is their rightful share of the attention, resources, and opportunity this city always offered its poor...
...The political business cycle will therefore recur...
...One thing we do know: thirteen-year-old gunmen are made, not born...
...or the deductibility of mortgage interest on owneroccupied housing, valued at $10.2 billion...
...reviews, decorating ideas, leisure and luxury displace hard news...
...Since the demise of the wage-price controls initiated by President Nixon in 1971, both the Ford and the Carter administrations focused on the Federal Budget and manipulation of interest rates as the arena of anti-inflationary policy...
...But the core idea of the welfare state is full employment, spelling a frictional unemployment rate of perhaps 3 percent in this country...
...It would do this in ways that would leave the existing pattern of taxation undisturbed, except to accelerate depreciation writeoffs so as to create "incentives" for more capital investment...
...Stagflation, Hearings before the Special Study on Economic Change of the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the U.S...
...Restaurant District Council 37, A.F.S.C.M.E., AFL-CIO...
...However, once financial flows between public and private sectors are used in attempts to control cyclical fluctuations, the business cycle is of necessity politicized...
...We are not," he told me forcefully, "grateful to you for coming...
...The failure of the program was rooted more deeply in administrative laxness...
...It is a technology that robs workers of their unique skills and the means of using these skills to slow down the industrial process and ameliorate its impact...
...The list of visitors include names of international eminence...
...Restraint" means that while military expenditures rise sharply, in both current and constant dollars, nondefense purchases of goods and services and grants in aid to the states and localities decline...
...Second, it is implicit in the restrictive monetary policy of the Federal Reserve...
...The most complete assembly is left to a plant in Saarlouis, Germany, where immigrant workers, dependent on Ford for permission to stay in Germany, are thought to be most docile and least likely to cause trouble...
...In terms of disposable troops, NATO, including the United States, comes close to matching the Soviets in land forces, and greatly overmatches the Soviets in nuclear weaponry and technology...
...Edward F. Denison, Accounting for Slower Economic Growth: The United States in the 1970s (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979...
...At least that much should also be expected from American liberals...
...We're headed for trouble, sooner or later...
...A likely result of these policies, also openly recognized, is an expected unemployment rate of 7 percent of the labor force this year, and 7.4 percent in the next...
...Yet they come...
...to the extent that this is true, they do not differ in character from other compensatory outlays, such as antirecession aid to the states, or occupational health and safety measures...
...267 Another entrepreneur, a cooperative, or a community-owned operation might run it as a profitable firm or at least one that provides jobs and stability...
...No less important than the Carter administration's effort to reverse welfare-state gains has been that of the House Committee on the Budget...
...An alternative to the Budget Committee's proposed cutbacks would have been to eliminate such tax privileges as the investment tax credit, which in 1979 cost the Treasury $13.9 billion...
...But the real problems are yet to be met...
...q In the spring of 1980, the Senior Tutor and the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, both philosophers, and an English schoolboy were expelled from Czechoslovakia, after interrogation, for attending the unofficial philosophy courses of Dr...
...Second, there is the sense that the U.S...
...This may he inflationary, but of course the Federal Reserve has the option of neutralizing this effect of federal deficits...
...It is transfer payments—mostly social security—and grants-in-aid to state and local governments that have expanded relative to GNP—to an estimated 12.5 percent in 1979-81...
...They are more likely to depend on what the business community has defined as a "good business climate...
...Special Analyses, Budget of the United States Government: Fiscal Year 1981 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1980...
...The philosophical visitors agree in finding him a stimulating and impressive philosopher...
...Many are young, educated in Castro's schools...
...Let us briefly review the reasons for which wage-price controls were instituted, then abandoned by the Nixon administration, for they represented an important attempt to deal with inflation without inducing recession...
...The treatment these Oxford visitors received is mild when compared with that regularly meted out to Dr...
...It may be that deficits are inflationary, inasmuch as they are largely financed by banks that purchase Treasury obligations...
...The businessmen of the media read and reflect the same environment...
...a 7- or 8-percent rate will become the "normal" rate, a 12-percent rate at the nadir of recessions will not he unusual...
...Had the United States been as relatively generous then as it is now, how many 263 thousands would have been spared the agony of extermination...
...These obligations can easily be resold to raise funds for loans...
...I believe that this feeling—for that is the only way I can describe it—is manufactured, wrong, and based on untenable premises for what can be a proper defense for the West...
...It is bluntly summarized in the following passage from an editorial in the March 3, 1980 issue of Business Week, demanding that This year's scheduled 13 percent increase in social security . . . be scrapped and the system's linkage to inflation [be] severed entirely...
...This was only the beginning of the disaster...
...And those who do not will meet the hostility of Americans who feel threatened by a tightened economy...
...The boat sailed back to Florida, where it lay off the coast while taking on supplies, and then returned to Europe...
...The intent is to halt and reverse the reach of the welfare state and its human services...
...In no agency of this city can one point to improvements generated by this administration...
...The conglomerate mode of enfolding this variety of production units within the parent corporation frequently has the effect of making a profitable or stable plant or store seem unprofitable...
...They are not the only ones, but they have been particularly articulate...
...By contrast, these two variables rose 30 and 21 percent in the four years ending in 1971...
...At any rate, it is not political morality that moved the House Committee to urge a balanced budget, but the fact that as of last March 30 state legislatures had passed resolutions in support of a constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget...
...Julius Tomin's group is by now well-known outside Czechoslovakia, mainly because of the Czech authorities' ham-fisted treatment of recent visitors...
...He is also a fine philosopher who spends some ten hours a day studying original texts (modern secondary works are of little interest to him...
...Decisions to relocate plants, contend the authors, are not related to such traditional economic issues as transportation costs, proximity to markets, or even the real differences that might exist between energy costs and unit labor costs...
...All are constantly exposed to harassment and the danger of prosecution and imprisonment...
...Representing 115,000 New Yorkers...
...The term was first used by Michal Kalecki in the early 1940s...
...In South Chicago some 3,500 steelworkers who know that their mill could be managed to thrive again now are waiting for the final word on the fate of their jobs, while in Washington an Administration they feel they have elected fumbles on, saving capital and destroying communities...
...A cutback in government spending would produce substantial budgetary savings that would free labor and capital for growth and productivity improvement...
...It shops anywhere for options...
...and more concerned with putting their own houses in order...
...So they see the most popular Mayor we've had in years direct his attention successfully to the outside population...
...Any retreat from the argument into "professional" academic expertise is noticed and deplored...
...The theory, developed by the business-oriented Committee for Economic Development, of balancing 273 the Federal Budget over the span of the business cycle rather than annually—together with the enormous expansion of income taxation, and the fiscal-policy leverage afforded by withholding taxes—all suggested possibilities of managing the economy according to Keynesian principles while not directly interfering with investment or labor markets...
...They are passionately interested in philosophy and intensely grateful to Dr...
...274 Percent changes in the Consumer Price Index and Components, 1974-79 Total 47% All items less food and energy 46% All items less energy 45% All items less food 48% Household fuels* 78% Food and beverages 63% *Includes gas and electric utilities...
...Marxism is intellectually dead in present-day Czechoslovakia...
...I addressed one such discussion group on the subject of Marxism and Morality in a beautiful apartment in Prague...
...To be effective, the program could operate only under one of two conditions: either under full employment, in which case direct allocation of material resources, as during World War II, would have been required, or else under conditions of economic slack...
...WELL, IT'S BACK TO CUBA, more than 20 years after the revolution...
...Apart from objecting to a fraudulently inspired, renewed mobilization for a second Cold War, we should also ask the question—a critical question— about the impact of such policies on Soviet authoritarianism domestically and on the relationship of the Soviet Union to the East European dependencies...
...Suffice it to say that in seeking to accommodate pressures to reduce the share of the federal budget in the GNP, and in its futile effort to balance the budget as an earnest of its antiinflationary convictions, the Carter administration has severely cut not only strictly human-service funds but also civil investment-type outlays...
...Not all agree with Dr...
...Of course, they are right...
...The humanist Marxism of the 1960s is long and irretrievably gone...
...They also imply the willingness of a Democratic administration to permit a recession to occur—if not to foster one—so as to restrain inflation...
...It is implicit in the Business Week editorial and similar statements that the welfare state lies at the root of inflation...
...I cite these facts not to argue that the Soviet totalitarian bureaucracy has suddenly become benevolent or peace-loving, or even that the Soviets are not capable of intervening militarily in an immediately adjacent Afghanistan, but to make the simple point that whatever else the Soviet Union is, it is not now, or in the conceivable immediate future, a military threat to either the United States or its NATO allies...
...The cleavage is growing deeper...
...and, even if it should come to pass that it will be in balance, it will become progressively less able to fund humanservice needs and civil investments...
...Can we really intern people who have not, not yet anyway, committed a crime here...
...Yes, the long strike at Harvester had cut deeply into orders for bar stock, spring steel, and plowshares, but now the strike was settled...
...The desire and potential of the poor are no less today then they ever were...
...It had been instrumental in emasculating the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation in 1978, by introducing clauses stressing anti-inflationary provisions and virtually nullifying employmentcreating features...
...But in the meantime, as the thousands flee from Cuba, we say to them: welcome, friends...
...How many generations have to grow up in the rubble and garbage of burned-out Big Apple slums...
...It is fueled by the circulating typescripts of the samizdat "Padlock Press" and takes the form of courses, discussion groups, and private scholarship, but also of theater groups, poetry readings, and rock music, whose significance is hard to overestimate...
...You're one or the other...
...The failure can be traced entirely to the absence of allocative planning (which was precluded by political considerations...
...Will New York be better because we excused hundreds of millions in taxes due from real estate and hotel developers...
...Would the mill reopen...
...Where the Hungarians and Czechs had to face Russian tanks, the Cuban escapees face Castro's wrath, hazardous waters in less-than-reliable craft, gougers, and a government welcome to these shores that blows hot and cold...
...After years of bloody civil war, the black-majority regime, led by Mugabe, makes it very clear that even though it got its arms from the Soviets, it wishes the closest possible economic relations with and aid from the West...
...In fact, civil investment-type programs undertaken or funded by the federal government accounted for nearly three fifths of the sum of nondefense expenditures for goods and services and grants-in-aid in 1979...
...Except to skirt their neighborhoods...
...For the best analysis cannot be translated into action by a labor movement divided in principle and determination, apolitical in nature, unorganized and defensive, crippled by the insecurity of unemployment, and embarrassed by the erosion of its past victories...
...The 1970 recession had generated high unemployment without moderating collective bargaining settlements—proof that worker militancy is not in any mechanical sense deterred by unemployment...
...The distinction is economic...
...The book comes at a time when trade unionists are reeling from losses, not only at the bargaining table but in the halls of government as well...
...The Soviets will roll back the tentative steps toward greater autonomy within Eastern Europe and create an atmosphere of increasingly harsh repression...
...is not militarily weaker than the Soviet Union...
...These were only a few of the questions that stunned workers asked themselves as they filed home to nearby mill neighborhoods that day...
...The production of Ford's Fiesta model is divided between three different countries in Europe in order to meet the potential impact of a strike in any country...
...A whole basket of issues is involved here, and it is difficult to begin to untangle them because they are so interwoven...
...The police, however, had made clear their intention to disrupt future meetings of his course, and they have been carrying it out...
...That, at least, is a consistent view...
...Our host, a gentle ex-professor who has been repeatedly arrested (most recently while he was addressing Tomin's group, speaking on the phenomenology of meaning), is employed as the stoker of the boiler in his own apartment block...
...Policies that generate the unemployment rates postulated in the budget erode the gains of, if they do not contribute to dismantling, the welfare state...
...Were the pensions safe...
...In fact, neither is now the case, or will likely be in the years ahead...
...How are we to respond to the idea that the miserable colonial adventure of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan is the "worst" threat to world peace since World War II...
...Those who are baffled by what seems to be a sudden shift in American politics from a liberal to a right-wing ideology can find at least part of the answer in Capital and Communities...
...STILL, THE LONG-RANGE RESULT of the erratic and dangerous policies the U.S...
...Recall, however, that the 1971 wage-price freeze was accompanied by a stiff import surcharge that helped protect the markets of domestic manufacturers...
...The private sector becomes more dependent upon "public policy"—while public policy is held hostage to the forces that underlie the business cycle...
...The true impact of the proposed reductions is understated because of the magnitude of the inflation rate...
...interference...
...Its technology empowers the managers to control the industrial process far from the site of production...
...That night word spread throughout South Chicago: "Wisconsin Steel is closed, the checks won't be honored at the banks...
...It is sometimes misleadingly called an "underground university" or the "Patotka University" (after Jan Pataka, the great Czech philosopher, who helped inspire the Charter and whose spirit is widely in evidence among Czech intellectuals, especially philosophers...
...The administration of the control program has at times been faulted-- yet it did succeed in curbing wage rate increases...
...The documents of expulsion that these students received accuse them of being members of "an organized group that incited university students in an antisocialist direction" and of engaging in conduct "incompatible with the standards required of students at socialist universities...
...Tax relief, especially the kind that is presently being mulled, is likely to be regressive and of benefit mainly to capital and rentier elements (e.g., increased exclusion of dividend income from the income-tax base...
...Barry and his predominantly minority and liberal City Council used openly repressive tactics to limit the effectiveness of union opposition, even locking workers out of the Council chambers during debate on the bill...
...The Battistaists, the rich, have long ago fled or been eliminated...
...He lavishes that teaching on a group of 30 or so young people who have been excluded from official higher education, in the case of three of them as a result of attending his course...
...An intense intellectual life—small talk simply does not exist in such circles—is pursued singly and in small groups by the stokers, nightwatchmen, streetcar-drivers, and stockroom-keepers of Prague and other Czech cities...
...Further, it is very dubious whether the many African liberation movements that have accepted Soviet arms have by this fact become Soviet satellites...
...The share of nondefense purchases has risen slightly from around 2 percent in the two earlier periods to just below 3 percent in the later period...
...The other participants in the seminars while we were there included a philosopher, on the point of expulsion from his post and from the Party for associating with Chartists (described in his document of expulsion as "incompetent persons...
...April 30, and May 7 and 9, 1979 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1979...
...With good homes, furnishings, summer camps, ready health care, schools with promise, jobs that are not demeaning and deadening, reasons to believe they can do better soon...
...Surely, the younger of the refugees can have little recollection of pre-Castro life...
...consumer prices rose 35 percent...
...Yet, theirs seem voices in the wilderness...
...The pricing power of business would thus scarcely be compromised...
...Some thinkers on the left believe that national planning will in time supersede the cycle, hut national planning in a basically democratic society could make matters worse for business than the welfare state, whose reach in fact it would likely enlarge...
...THE AUTHORS endorse plant-closing legislation that would ameliorate the impact of business shutdowns by requiring advance warning, governmentsponsored training and transfer policies in order to protect workers' assets and skills as well as to provide disincentives for disinvestment...
...Despite this forecast—probably wrong as to depth and duration of recession—the Council opposed any easing of fiscal or monetary policy since such moves would "heighten expectations of inflation and reduce our prospects of making progress toward price stability...
...They target their product to the suburbs and the comfortable of the city...
...This is a market where cash flow and the maximization of profit rule...
...The next issue will carry further comment by other editors.—Ens...
...q The Other New York • Comments by Victor Gotbaum, Executive Director, The old theme notwithstanding, it's not East sideWest side that separates New Yorkers...
...To most Europeans who share democratic and socialist values, the U.S...
...There is indeed a wide-ranging underground intellectual and cultural life in Czechoslovakia that was stifled but not extinguished by the "normalization" following 1968...
...Hadn't the federal government guaranteed the operation of Envirodyne's managers with a $90 million loan, much of it still unspent...
...These limits would not pose much of a threat to human-service funding if the GNP continued to rise in real terms or if the share of defense expenditures in the budget were contracting...
...Budget cuts have been slicing directly into the quality of their lives for the past five years...
...He is now unemployed...
...The Angolan regime, likewise, has been recognized by all NATO powers except the United States, and is doing its damnedest to reduce its links to the Eastern European and Soviet bloc...
...But to pursue such a policy, we must get rid of some ideological baggage...
...INFLATION . . . remains the Nation's number one problem," stated the President in his Economic Report of January 1980, outlining a program designed to combat it...
...None of this suggests that his regime is in imminent danger of collapse...
...safety and health costs at $4.1 billion...
...American business has been profoundly averse to large-scale government intervention in labor markets...
...Would money be available from the company credit union...
...Tomin himself and to the participants in his seminars...
...It suggests that they form a distinct group, a selfdefined and politically motivated opposition...
...Let us probe the question a little...
...The sweat of your brow is no guarantee any more...
...The few of us who were at the small gathering that was addressed by Huber Matos, reported briefly in the last Dissent, were deeply impressed...
...He is the city's appropriate symbol and symptom of this time...
...Although in need of some modernization, the mill was sound...
...Alternatively, federal deficits free funds that would otherwise be absorbed as taxes, and they thus add to purchasing power...
...Finally, there is an increasing irritability in the tone of the public discourse about the "failure" of U.S...
...The relatively small current-dollar cutbacks in the 1981 Budget, which often still leave increases over 1979 and 1980 levels, mask substantial reductions once the administration's own assumption of a 9-percent rise in price levels is taken into account...
...Since 1954 or 1958, inflation has been intertwined with recession, although rates of inflation were then lower than they are now...
...but it is hardly appropriate for socialists and democrats, especially if one considers the nature of U.S...
...Hence, Kalecki wrote, "The assumption that a government will maintain full employment in a capitalist economy if it only knows how to do it is fallacious...
...Roosevelt—the great FDR—wouldn't let them land...
...But the Mayor does better and better in the polls as the middle class hears the language it wants to hear from its Mayor...
...I do wish to mention two representatives, both from New York City, who have strongly dissented—Mr...
...The authors point out, for example, that one reason for your getting only nationally advertised beer in most cities of the U.S...
...Their vote is not considered significant...
...That "climate" is one that keeps taxation and regulation of business to an absolute minimum and is enhanced by the presence of a hungry, docile and unorganized, or poorly organized labor force...
...It would be easy to argue from historical precedent that these movements seek nothing so much as national independence and ultimately find themselves hostile to both superpowers...
...We visited one young scholar who decided early not to pursue an academic career after 1968...
...has followed may in fact be positive...
...There is a constant sense of drama...
...The legacy of a city is more than landmarks, and ambiance...
...It shows clearly how academic authorities in Czechoslovakia look upon the intellectual life...
...The growing inability of business to externalize costs forecloses important sources of capital gain...
...There is nothing paranoid in the otherwise paranoid politics of Iran when they ask for guarantees against U.S...
...allies to provide proper support for the increasingly erratic responses of the U.S...
...Tomin is not only a superb and exciting teacher...
...The seminars take place in a crowded apartment, with Dr...
...Kissinger, quite properly, identified it as the fact that in the Third World the United States is a stand-pat power, generally opposed to change...
...Actually, the entire Czech population is "dissident," expressing its alienation in thousands of indirect ways, in sullen rejection of a society saturated with corruption and bureaucratic mismanagement...
...What are we to make of the disgraceful episode about the Cuban brigade...
...Neighborhood tavern owners were left with checks in the thousands of dollars— of worthless paper...
...What will they become when they're forty...
...A university system that educated waves of immigrants' children free now charges for tuition...
...The moral obtuseness of this equals only the lack of economic logic...
...The democratic countries of the world have not been overly generous in welcoming refugees...
...In 1979, the unemployment for experienced wage and salary workers was, to be sure, lower than during the recession and recovery years of the mid-'70s—but also higher than in 1973 or 1974, years cyclically comparable with 1979, and much higher than in 1964-70...
...Yet, seen in perspective, the outstanding federal debt is not overwhelmingly large I9 percent of total outstanding debt, with nonfinancial business accounting for 32 percent, and households for 41 percent...
...When will they learn how to work and get promoted...
...power and consequently an increase in the power of the other partner in this "competitive relationship"—the Soviet Union...
...The cycle itself could not be eliminated by those instruments, since business would oppose the degree of expansion of government intervention necessary for it...
...q 272 The Carter administration, with the support of key congressional committees, has deliberately fostered recession and unemployment, and has steadily curtailed expenditures for human services...
...is the growing concentration in the malt-brewing industry...
...The authors, both economists, have analyzed virtually all the significant studies in the field, along with data used by the business community, to build a carefully documented case that leads to their ultimate recommendations for reform and action...
...only capital is the real product...
...30 and 31, and Feb...
...The business may be productive as an independent operation or a small chain, but once required to meet the profitability standards of the conglomerate, it fails...
...There are no signs of change, no plans for improvement, no indication that the establishment takes notice of the disestablished...
...Tomin was dragged by police down three flights of stairs from his apartment at the time his Wednesday seminar was due to begin, then was forced into a car and taken to the police station—where he refused to answer all questions and even to stand up...
...The historical separation between the two sectors lessens...
...Some 3,500 steelworkers in South Chicago (Chicago's far South Side) were notified, as they collected their weekly paychecks last March 28, that their mill would close indefinitely that day...
...producing a near-stalemate in policy-making...
...where it could not unload its human cargo either...
...He has converted the room adjacent to his boiler into his own underground study-cumseminar room, containing typewriter, books, and papers, and a remarkable collection of bric-a-brac and kitsch, including a picture portraying the apotheoisis of Stalin...
...This is not a time for a foreignpolicy consensus and for a rallying around an Administration that in addition to all its other errors seems doomed to subordinating foreignpolicy considerations to the narrow need to reelect Jimmy Carter to the White House...
...Can the United States have any coherence whatsoever in foreign policy...
...More such visits are planned from various countries, including the United States, though after the recent expulsions there are real fears that they will be systematically disrupted...
...Therefore, a democratic foreign policy is not only in the immediate interests of those forces within the West with which we identify but is also the most effective counterpolicy to the expansion of influence of Soviet authoritarianism...
...power in the Third World and the regimes with which this country seems inevitably drawn into alliances...
...military power has somehow declined and that the balance has shifted perilously in favor of the Soviet Union...
...Inside meaning those residents who depend on the city to provide their basic services: health, education, housing, child-care, income, recreation and other special services...
...The annual economic documents issued since then simply confirm that high employment has ceased to be a priority of economic policy...
...None of these problems would be solved by the draft...
...The lesson to our European friends is that they should be less dependent on the U.S...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Back in 1940, the S. S. St...
...Much of the underground intellectual life is to be found literally underground, in the boiler rooms of 269 Prague, where intellectuals commonly stoke the boilers of hospitals, apartment blocks, and factories...
...Some of Dr...
...all opposition has been focusing on the human-service and civil-investment institutions of the welfare state...
...foreign-policy responses, in the past year especially, appear to be nothing short of hysterical...
...Tomin's public, demonstratively combative stance, and not everyone finds him easy to work with...
...Decisions to cut or raise taxes or public expenditures are political by definition...
...Their figures show that while New England has suffered the greatest economic losses owing to unrestrained capital movement, the South is as likely to suffer losses as any other section of the country—for with increasing mobility, capital can move out of the country as easily as out of a state...
...It used to be that the poorest, most recently arrived New Yorkers could realistically hope that they or their children would move up...
...Tomin for the lifeline he gives them to intellectual adventure and cultural tradition...
...Although full employment might be transiently attained due to boom or war, business would not tolerate its being maintained by government...
...Some won't make it because Castro won't let them out, and they will suffer severe penalties for their disaffection, especially those who had until now behaved as "loyalists...
...Many of the steelworkers from Wisconsin Steel stopped in one or another of the popular taverns that line Torrence Avenue facing the length of the plant...
...The parochialism of American liberal intellectuals is nowhere more evident than in the increasingly acrimonious discussions about U.S...
...Arnold R. Weber, In Pursuit of Price Stability: The Wage-Price Freeze of 1971 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973...
...The renewed tensions between the superpowers have had, and will continue to have, a catastrophic impact on the dissidents within the Soviet bloc...
...Without greater social control of capital, horror stories like this one from South Chicago will become ever more commonplace...
...On the contrary, the U.S...
...FOR OVER A YEAR now his course has been regularly visited by a stream of philosophers, following an open letter from him to four universities in the West (Heidelberg, West Berlin, Harvard, and Oxford), to which Oxford philosophers responded...
...I don't want to send that signal, nor do I think that socialists and liberals should want to...
...Incentives should be created for business to step up new capital investment...
...The three-month wage-price freeze mandated in August 1971 and the control apparatus put in place following the freeze were mainly designed to restrain wage boosts...
...28, 1980 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1980...
...The small gestures to take 50 here, 300 there hardly add up to much...
...While the circumstances of the present cycle differ, in some respects radically, from earlier ones, what is new about the economic policy is mainly a difference in political coloration...
...He saw it in terms of the resistance put up by business to full employment...
...Half this city can't be left out forever...
...Arthur Okun, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, commenting upon the 1974-75 slump, showed that when the government pushed the economy into deep recession and prolonged slack, each dollar trimmed from GNP meant a loss of roughly 90 cents of output, and a saving of about 10 cents on the price level...
...The contrary is true, in fact, as efficiency and quality of service continue to decline...
...Where the Soviets are capable of "threatening" the West is in their ability to find national liberation movements in need of arms and military support...
...The import surcharge was also used as a bargaining lever to compel foreign acceptance of dollar devaluation - again favorable to domestic firms...
...The 1980 Joint Economic Report, Report of the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the U.S...
...If almost half our students don't finish high school, who's going to supply the workforce for the financial, cultural, and service industries that are supposed to bulwark New York's growth in the next decades...
...Elizabeth Holtzman, one of the brightest people in Congress, argues that we must do something to weed them out—negotiate with Castro, keep them interned...
...Bluestone and Harrison describe the "hoops" through which local management must jump once the newly acquired firm becomes part of the "group...
...Their children's class sizes are larger...
...In the light of history, it would be rash to assume that American labor and other affected groups will permanently acquiesce in cutbacks of hard-won gains...
...The current recession will compel more persons and families to go on welfare...
...They have therefore proposed administered price-wage controls...
...Self-help has its virtues, but it is no substitute for a massive federal effort...
Vol. 27 • July 1980 • No. 3
