Into Reaganland

...Black life has improved remarkably in this country...

...51 percent are against imposing strict handgun controls...

...He worries about the "buddy-buddy" attitude that got unions nowhere under Jimmy Carter and could be ruinous under Reagan...

...But protectionism is a palliative even less likely to shore up the American economy today than when Herbert Hoover embraced it...

...Housing must be improved, to let workers feel they are getting somewhere...

...And there are no Reuthers around with job-saving plans...

...Certainly many of its members are mortgage-poor, and harried by the high costs of making the city "liveable" through private transit, schools, and recreation...

...He concludes: "The employers' dream may be an American nightmare...

...Economic conservatives point to the renovation of some neighborhoods by market forces...

...They do provide some blue-collar jobs, but on the whole the skill barriers to entry are high...

...Or talk to him about the 1,500 consultants employed by more than a thousand firms that peddle unionbusting tips...

...According to a study conducted by Wharton Econometric Forecasting, real fixed investment averaged about 9 percent of GNP during the 1950s, the time of our fastest economic growth...

...The high cost of rebuilding will add to the debt structure of the U.S...

...If, by some miracle, no large exogenous event dominates economic policy in the next year or two, the Administration will have a chance to try out its cures for inflation, slow growth, declining productivity, and high unemployment...

...require that benefits be paid back to local government if a company leaves an enterprise zone...

...And yes, Sol Chaikin, head of the ILGWU, is impressed with the "cooperation" he has found among a host of bosses in the apparel industry, which like the auto industry is threatened by a flood of "cheap" imports...

...Gershman...

...With Soviet military occupation continuing in Afghanistan, with Soviet troops massed on Polish borders, and with President Reagan hurling verbal anathemas against the Soviets, the Administration was considering lifting the partial grain embargo imposed by Carter...

...However, the Treasury is headed by Donald Regan who in his previous career at Merrill Lynch enunciated no audible economic ideology and even contributed, much to the distress of Republican hard-liners, to the campaigns of liberal Democrats...

...Privately, there is widespread acknowledgment that pressing forward with prayer, antibusing, and antiabortion constitutional amendments is a politically dangerous process for the Republicans...

...Unionize...

...Probably, the Administration will propose deeper cuts than it expects to make, so it can convince its right-wing supporters that it stands by its `principles" and decent Americans that it is not all that inhumane...

...Lamentably missing is sensible incomes policy, starting with the six-month freeze on prices and incomes advocated by commentators as diverse as Felix Rohatyn and Gar Alperovitz and followed by tax innovations that reward good conduct by corporate price-setters and union negotiators with tax benefits and punish misbehavior with tax penalties...

...an unusual gathering of European socialist immigrants...

...as of this writing, Democratic leaders are not even able to agree on the formation of a Democratic Coordinating Council to set general national goals...

...Even if one were resigned to the mayor's upward recycling of the commonweal to the new class, one would expect him to support the growing network of community organizations that carry forward much of the vitality of the old progressive culture on far fewer dollars than the municipal bureaucracy required...

...Also directly related to OPEC's transformation of the global pecking order is the recycling problem—the flow of funds from OPEC surpluses in European and American banks that lend them to shaky, unpleasant regimes in Zaire, South Korea, Brazil, Bolivia, and Turkey, which send them back to OPEC...

...Throughout 1980, industrial capacity has moved along a recession level, from 70 percent to 78 percent, well below the 90 percent level that is considered full capacity...

...Kemp joined David Stockman, then a House colleague and now director of the Office of Management and Budget, in the formulation of the much-leaked "Avoiding a GOP Economic Dunkirk," a "private" memorandum to Ronald Reagan...

...the city's link to Washington through FDR and the New Deal...

...The Congress was dominated by a coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans...

...As the inflation rate approached 18 percent and the Carter administration failed to develop a coherent foreign policy, Democrats ended up haphazardly adopting positions already staked out by the Republicans...

...Helms has made it clear that he intends to force the party to keep its commitments on highly divisive legislation —abortion, prayer, and busing—along with an intensive growth of the military...

...As of this writing, though some of those killings have clearly been 148 attributed to whites, it is far from clear that all of them were committed by white hands...

...Transportation is an important part of the infrastructure, including mass transportation for workers and rail and water transportation for raw materials and finished goods...

...141 All this is not to deny that some firms are suffering from insufficient investment funds...

...But the postwar consolidation and the increasing mobility of large corporations, in a national economy whose share of the world's wealth is decreasing, has left little room for municipal public-sector development...

...Nevertheless, the deaths were enough to send shocks of alarm through black communities...

...The GOP House Committee raised just over $13 million, compared to $1.1 million contributed for Democratic House candidates...

...Though sophisticated blacks don't expect Strom Thurmond and Orrin Hatch's crudest political fantasies to come true, they do expect to have to spend a great deal of energy in the next few years keeping them in the realm of fantasy...

...Quite simply, 85 to 90 percent of the black workers, even though they had been most hurt by Jimmy Carter's austerity, voted for him because they could not swallow Reagan, while a significant majority of white workers, also disgusted with a Democratic president who did little for them, found it quite possible to support his Republican opponent...

...I think there's some evidence accumulating that their engines are not as durable, the whole power train is not as durable as ours...

...OBVIOUSLY, HEAVY INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION— meaning autos along with steel (soon to be plastics), rubber, glass, chrome and related commodities, accounting for every sixth or seventh job in the United States—will never recover its laborintensive character...

...industrial concentration amidst growing American economic power...

...In the House, Democrats hold a 243 to 192 margin, meaning that a gain of 26 seats is enough to give the GOP a majority...

...it's a tough world out there, and someday we'll thank him for disciplining us to cope with it...

...Nor is it clear that the boom "trickles down" to the older New York...

...The tragedy is that as the public sector has fallen behind in meeting basic needs, it has become as despised politically by hard-pressed taxpayers as it has been foreclosed economically by corporate decisions...

...Now this is not to suggest that there should be no debate about the means of achieving social justice...

...We witness the consolidation not only of investment decisions but also of a style lubricated by expense account and tax-break mechanisms that rob the public sector of vitality...

...market jumped by more than 25 percent, capturing the bulk of the market...

...Liberals and democratic socialists deem alienation and disenchantment bad in themselves...

...It is to say that in far too many instances blacks are being told that a strategy—busing or affirmative action, for example—is wrong, but are not offered alternative means of achieving desegrated education or racial justice in the workplace...

...An especially gaudy default would threaten the solvency of one or several Western banks and quite conceivably endanger other financial institutions...

...When we talked randomly with ambitious students from the South Bronx, they communicated a cautious feeling that the plan was worth trying...

...But other factors affect the will to invest and the choice of investment...

...Thus investors have preferred to put their money into such things as casinos in Atlantic City, tax-sheltered gambles on oil wells and real estate, and into such purely speculative channels as options, art auctions, gold...

...during the 1960s and early 1970s it rose to 10 percent, and to 10.5 percent in 1978...

...then the drawbridge to Reaganland would be up...

...MOSCOW, Dec...

...Even Hatch, an arch conservative who won his spurs by leading the successful filibuster against the Labor law Reform bill, now as chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee has been sending out mixed signals...

...But what seems urgently needed is that the union leadership, both at the top and medium levels, recognize that their post-FDR and postwar happy days are over...

...In an expanding industrial economy where barriers to entry were low, the old middle-class socialization of the outer borough neighborhoods held up to working people the prospect of a fuller social life...

...Nobody in the Reagan transition team has spoken out against them...

...But at least some of this also reflects the policies of the upper-tier unions...

...But JFK's investment tax credit was limited in scope and time, and pinpointed toward new equipment in order to encourage the updating of the industrial plant...

...Convergence over what...

...But with varying degrees of emphasis, supply siders also advocate substantial curtailment of social programs, relaxation of environmental and other regulation, and Friedmanite monetarism...

...It appeared in the mid-'70s that a fairly articulate and vociferous segment of the white population had decided that the civil rights war had been won and that continuing a commitment of public resources to alleviate civil rights problems was harmful to America...

...However, these theoretical advances are interpreted very narrowly and don't seem likely to generate urban reindustrialization...

...Social progress depends upon political mobilization...

...Nor has there been a shortage of available investment capital, either from retained earnings or from outside sources...

...Another test came when the reports about cuts in the Food Stamp program were balanced by the speedier lifting of oil-price controls...

...But on whose terms in the new political economy, and with what hope for the revitalization of the culture of progressive institutions...

...Even then, assuming we could afford the homemade product, it would increasingly be manufactured by computers and robots, with less and less human input...

...He could default on loans rather than cut services...

...Our Diplomatic Correspondent ment...

...All the same, they are vastly to be preferred to the adoption of the complete StockmanKemp prospectus for a meaner America, recalling Malthus's cheerful notation that "at nature's great table, there are no places set for some...

...But measured against the need for full employment to meet basic human wants, the new industries and their class are parasitical and nonproductive...

...Of just about as much good use as it was yesterday in Iran, where the vast quantities of equipment provided the Shah simply melted away...

...Others, for odd reasons, will simply rejoice...

...But what's actually in the cards...

...It is possible that the supply-side proposals and other tax measures may create temporarily, from one particular angle, the impression of a revived economy...

...In these ways, market forces are stacked against productive enterprises in decaying urban areas...

...Just the notion of Strom Thurmond serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was enough to frighten black people...

...This assurance is the core of the supply-side position...

...Under his nose, tenant management programs in buildings that were foreclosed by the city after owner abandonment are bringing over 30,000 apartments through rehabilitation toward the sale to nonprofit tenant cooperatives, returning them to the tax rolls...

...The recession thus promoted will be deep and protracted...

...It is safe to assume that Ronald Reagan is no less bored than other politicians by economics as a topic and economists as conversationalists...

...New human rights guidelines will have to be written for the MRAG countries...

...On precedent, events are far more likely to shape his administration's budgetary responses than the cogency of the intellectual arguments urged by any of the members of his official family...

...They could, if they weren't paying attention, lull themselves to sleep with the thought that the great mass of the American people were asleep, but when the crunch came, they would have generous instincts and that the momentum for decency was still alive in the land...

...Reagan's election and the composition of the new Senate suggest that this is not the case...

...She stumbles for a moment...

...Any local government that wants to obtain economic development will have to cope with similar problems...

...Department of the Treasury, 1981...

...The inability of the United States to define and control events was demonstrated in Vietnam, Angola, and Iran, and in the adoption of the OPEC countries' self-interested pricing and distribution policies...

...Well before the emergence of the postelection Republican dilemma—how to increase defense spending and balance the budget—Democrats had placed themselves in this squeeze, and the resolution was to cut benefits for food stamp recipients, to eliminate a section of the CETA jobs program, and to sharply reduce the low-income 144 energy assistance program...

...If urban enterprise zones are to stimulate small and medium-size businesses and revitalize communities, workers will have to obtain conditions that will let them develop a sense of dedication to the workplace and the neighborhood...

...Union busting, one growth industry that flourishes luxuriantly even in our depressed economy...

...People who can remember being called "boy" earlier in their professional careers and being mistaken for delivery people are now often called "sir" in places of public accommodation and are at ease attending meetings in the Cabinet Room of the White House or sitting in corporate boardrooms...

...BEFORE REAGAN'S ELECTION, blacks and their allies could console themselves with the thought that such true conservatives as Jesse Helms and the Commentary-style neoconservatives were an operative minority in American politics...

...Of the 25 largest gainers— where power will be increased through the addition of a district—now 15 are held by Republicans, and most of the 10 Democrats are conservatives representing districts that could easily shift to the GOP...

...The tone is harder and the rhetoric warmer...

...or commit those facilities to making [small cars] that we can't sell or, when we do sell them, we can't make any profit on...

...Once a majority, the Republicans have almost as much potential for internal conflict as the Democrats...

...The emergence of the Conservative Forum as a forceful group has damaged O'Neill's chance of retaining a semblance of control over substantive bills once they reach the floor...

...The philosophy of the new approach was expressed recently by Prof...

...Even the shade of the Anglican theologian William Ralph Inge, Dean of St...

...For it may be that Stockman-Kemp and their allies "peaked" too early (the danger Richard Nixon anxiously sought to avoid...

...If the United States wants to keep us as a friend, they're going to give us the tools to keep another regime from taking over...

...Koch's arrogance toward lesser elected officials is not without its good side...

...Hubert Humphrey was not a national figure early in that period and the voice most often heard in the Senate on black issues came out of the deformed and hating spirit of Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi...

...We need your reminder that "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges...

...We can no longer afford the wasteful diversion of funds into speculative ventures and the equally wasteful duplication of investment in many areas...

...Then it took really drastic action: Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin was barred from using the back door to the State Department...

...Microtechnology...

...Because the cultural experiences of their young years had so clearly defined America as a white country some of them were a little astonished to hear themselves say, "I am an American...

...Such control or guidance need not and ought not go beyond the 1,000 largest corporations...

...Jesse Helms wants to cut back the Food Stamp program and Orrin Hatch wants to cripple affirmative action and curtail activities of agencies that attempt to curb discrimination in the workplace...

...When demand is slow, production capacity underused, and profits are falling during recession, there is no incentive for adding to capacity, or to R & D. In reality, there is no stronger motivation for investment than moderate economic growth supported by a steady economic public policy, permitting long-range planning for business as well as for the worker/consumer...

...Ford's World Car is merely assembled in this country, all its major components are imported...

...A lot of blacks became psychically comfortable being Americans...

...These interests have coalesced in the conservative Christian evangelical movement under such leaders as Jerry Falwell and James Robison...

...The culture of progressive institutions has become a rout as people try to replace deteriorating parks, mass transit, and schools with private consumption of expensive alternatives...

...Shabecoff himself notes that conservatives view the recent election "as a mandate to press on with a long-deferred clipping of labor's wings...

...To draw once again on the sacred text of the Kemp-Stockman memorandum, the task of the Federal Reserve is to impose discipline upon money growth...

...President Carter's recent offer to rebuild Charlotte Street in the South Bronx failed because it did not include jobs...

...The past two decades have spawned a new breed of community activists who know how...

...Robots and computers...

...She called me all excited and said: 'I hope forthe day that you, too, can buy toilet paper this way...

...Can we continue summary executions without trials...

...Indeed so...

...But their highest art is to implement decertification and deauthorization...

...So says Sam Meyers, the leader of UAW local 259...

...Part of this shift will almost automatically occur through redistricting required before the 1982 election, entailing a shift of 17 House seats from Northeast and Midwest to South and West...

...With the proportion of organized workers down from a peak of 30 percent in 1955 to 20 percent at this moment and with the industrial workers down to 155 30 percent of those who are organized, concentrated corporate power has seldom been a more formidable antagonist...

...In some small measure, this decline may indeed have been caused by increased government regulations...

...They just followed former Senator George Aiken's formula for Vietnam: Declare victory and get out...

...One of the most prominent characteristics of racism is the mechanism of denial...

...In the ideal world of economics, change is small and disturbances by either nature or outrageous foreigners infrequent...

...In the wake of last year's election, Mr...

...Meanwhile, organized labor will have all it can do just to hold its own...

...If the Reagan program fails to produce prompt improvement in two major industries, auto and steel, the political repercussions are likely to be felt quickly by Republicans running for office in Northern, industrialized states...

...The most recent statistics, those for 1978, indicate that 56 percent of all white women and nearly 75 percent of all black and Hispanic women are in the workforce...

...He will serve as assistant to the new ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a lady already famous for her tolerance of "moderately repressive" right-wing authoritarian governments in Latin America...

...Soon it appeared, however, that some types of terrorism would still be in...

...Publicly owned or semipublic industrial parks are another proven option...

...She needs a dialectical point to justify support of the Argentine military, for in Argentina right-wing terrorism can't really be said to have killed people in more than the thousands...

...20, 1980...

...The latter's decline, insofar as it exists at all, is largely caused by idle capacity and the shift to low-productivity service industries...

...On the principle of collective bargaining itself—in greater jeopardy than at any time since 1935...

...It is rock 'em sock 'em jock talk devoid in large measure of subtlety or nuance...

...In less than a decade, Congress has not only abandoned the concept of using tax legislation for a modest redistribution of income from the rich to the poor...

...Unemployment, the welfare lock, and immigration law have plunged thousands of minority New Yorkers into a culture of silence and illegal activity, or into the defection from upward mobility observable in 160 such groups as the Black Muslims...

...Don't fill up the workforce with blacks...

...44 percent object to legal abortion...

...to eschew all consideration of extraneous economic variables like short-term interest rates, housing market conditions, business cycle fluctuations, etc., and to concentrate instead on one exclusive task: bringing the growth of the Federal Reserve credit and bank reserves to a prudent rate and stabilization of the international and domestic purchasing power of the Dollar...

...If the Helms wing becomes dominant, the remnants of the once powerful Eastern Establishment faction—Charles Mathias, Jr...

...Leadership, notably, in the UAW, that brought its white members around to more liberal candidates in an earlier election when they were infatuated with George Wallace, did far less well in its effort last year to scare them off Reagan...

...But my mother has enrolled for a subscription, and she thinks it's wonderful...

...Rightwing dictatorships, especially in Central and South America, were promised our support...

...Indeed, truly dramatic acceleration of inflation might soften the Administration's opposition to wage and price controls, much as in 1971 a far milder inflation impelled Nixon, equally vociferous in his condemnation of controls, to impose a 90-day price and wage freeze, followed by 13 months of comparatively efficacious limitations upon the upward movement of both wages and prices...

...Gershman to the rescue...

...We suggest that any company that moves out of an enterprise zone should have to repay its benefits into a revolving fund that could be used to provide new businesses to take its place in the area...

...A third OPEC price explosion will threaten so much acceleration of inflation that tax cutting will seem dangerously irresponsible...

...Co-Op City in the Bronx and Starrett City in Brooklyn had this negative effect upon housing in the Grand Concourse and in central Brooklyn...

...The consumers, for half a century easily led up the ladder of auto size and power (bigger is better) by industry marketing, now are calling the shots: "Should I buy Japanese or American...

...Or let's say the new Assistant Secretary of State for [that is, Against] Human Rights Ernest Lefever needs a quotation from Engels or Kautsky...

...Nobody in his or her right mind would argue with that...

...Unforeseen complications in acquiring the Penn Central's Harlem River yards, New York's deteriorating financial condition, problems in assembling land, lack of cooperation from the appropriate unions, and a myriad of bureaucratic permit problems convinced Zingone that his efforts would never bear fruit...

...If there is another large sphere in which such cozy arrangements appeal to labor leaders—with the shining exception of William Winpisinger of the Machinists—it can be found in arms production...

...Victories in the courts are cheap...

...But the industry ran out of time in 1979 when American consumers, stampeded by gasoline shortages, demanded smaller, fuelefficient cars...

...yet it has lost 70,000 municipal workers since 1975...

...In the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years, the black issue had receded from public consciousness...

...Which brings me to the Federal Reserve...

...Both its conservative economic policymakers and its breezy young fiscal activists of the 142 Kemp-Stockman stripe are ardent supply siders...

...In any case, the present position of leading Reagan policy-makers is opposed to accommodation...

...If events drift toward this anticlimax, the Reagan administration is likely eerily to resemble the Carter years, much as Carter policy became increasingly hard to differentiate from the Ford regime...

...The increased inequities will be felt most deeply by two groups, organized labor—and those dependent on food stamps and other transfer programs, the poorest people who are also the least likely to vote and consequently the least able to influence the elective process...

...Many manufacturing areas now need substantial investment to restore goods transport to the standards of 1955...

...TRUE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT WOULD require the active participation of local people in the planning of the enterprise zone...

...But we imagine that nigger jokes are sometimes told there, that disdain is expressed for the untidiness and squalor of inner-city life, and that there are even comments about big bucks freeloading on food stamps...

...But Ed Koch has let the stigma of his antipoverty busts linger over all neighborhood groups because, like the new class he represents, he consistently underestimates the abilities of people who don't share his experience...

...It is this influx from "above"—coupled, ironically, with official rejection of poor immigrants—that is giving us a new reputation as a "world city...

...For judicial activism on this scale stands at some remove from democratic politics, and whatever its immediate effects, it doesn't work over the long haul to strengthen democratic institutions...

...Japanese cars carry a $1,000-$1,500 lower sticker price because of lower labor costs (the Japanese auto worker earns two-thirds as much as his American counterpart) and better productivity owing to management and technological advances...

...It is a hedonistic style, corrosive of familial or neighborhood obligation...

...He has hired good administrators in areas where he is weakest—Human Resources Commissioner Stanley Brezenoff, for example, who is restoring the welfare caseload system although his boss rants about ineligibles...

...There is another reason for expecting only a modest response to the incentives offered by Kemp-Garcia: they will not match the concessions offered to entrepreneurs by small towns in the South and the West...

...They are also entrenched in the Treasury...

...Their constantly rising cost in the form of lessened capital productivity is becoming too heavy a burden...

...fl/ get a better j ob, but you'll never get a better mayor...

...Here he begins to work against the city's best interests...

...of intellectual development possible without huge resources simply to cross the threshold of higher education...

...If the economy significantly worsens, it is still unlikely that the Senate will return to the Democrats...

...It is a bitter end to the culture of progressive institutions...

...Philip Shabecoff of the New York Times seems to be such a person...

...The political-psychic effects of the oil embargo are incalculable, and the subsequent price hikes have created a sense of governmental powerlessness in coping with inflation...

...As we have seen, there is no real overall shortage of investment capital...

...This is a voice that comes from the country-club locker rooms across America...

...There sits the abandoned, rotting 5 million-square-foot eight-story hulk of the "Dodge Main" plant, built in 1910 and operated for about 50 years by Chrysler...

...The industry's chief money-making tool had been to persuade Americans to buy bigger, fancier cars that carried larger profit margins...

...One of the things that happened in 1980, and that was reflected in the election results, was a democratic mobilization on the issues...

...Or rather, particular 154 decisions will indeed be awful, but they may teach at the same time a useful lesson...

...Another year Our Fund Drive — A Big Success We're very happy to report that 400 of our friends contributed to our bi-annual fund drive, now completed, the sum of $41,500 in cash and pledges...

...In the Baker wing there is considerable reluctance to move forward on legislation that splits the electorate...

...This development of political strength coincided with the growth of single-interest groups, the most powerful among them concerned with "social issues": abortion, busing for integration, school prayer, and a subset of such other "family" questions as homosexuality, sex education, and pornography...

...Whereas we have won in court, again and again, and failed to build a movement, they have lost, again and again, and organized outside...

...very generous depreciation formulas...

...Former UN Ambassador Andrew J. Young was quoted as saying in rather lurid terms during the campaign that an America governed by Ronald Reagan would be profoundly inhospitable to blacks and their aspirations...

...Luxury conversions of lofts and tenements administer the coup de grace to blue-collar jobs and lower-income communities in Manhattan...

...The auto workforce, one of the most prosperous in the manufacturing sector and best protected against short-term economic downturns, will lose as many as 200,000 jobs to automation—to more robots, especially in new plants—and to productivity gains, according to Goldschmidt...

...Black people were not depicted in those portraits of America...

...That little group merged five years later with the American Federation of Labor at its first convention in Columbus, Ohio...

...that, too, is something struggling families can understand...

...All kinds of paper are in short supply in the Soviet capital and elsewhere throughout the country...

...This postcard will be mailed back to you whenever the store gets a fresh supply of toilet paper, and only those with postcards will be allowed to buy it...

...To prevent disenchantment, unions had best be consulted in advance about job titles, hiring conditions, and special rules dispensations...

...As for the monetarists, they dominate the Federal Reserve in the large person of Paul Volcker...

...A century ago Samuel Gompers, aged 31, helped to create the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions...

...By the time these jaundiced comments emerge in print, it may be clear what actual course the 138 Reagan administration chooses to pursue, to the extent that exogenous events allow any considerable latitude of discretion...

...First, since banks will give large depositors a couple of percentage points over the quoted rates for six-month certificates of deposit, a successful entrepreneur would have to earn more than a 15 percent return on capital...

...We want to thank all those who sent in contributions, large and small...

...More production, the argument runs, is the best cure for inflation...

...If the Kemp-Garcia bill is passed, the planners will have to work hard in neighborhood groups and local development agencies to get any results out of it...

...TRADITIONALLY, the public sector has employed people on the threshold of middle-class assimilation...

...An economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation speculates that the bill would benefit "basement businesses" such as laundries, garment shops, and bakeries...

...a new generation of middle-class New Yorkers is lost to the social bond of public schooling...

...Even if they were low in a deteriorated area, one would expect them to skyrocket once it is designated an enterprise zone, and property owners see a chance to cash in...

...First-tier union members receive a total compensation package—wages and benefits—of nearly $15 per hour...

...THE AUTO-MAKERS now are investing $70 billion in retooling and new factories to increase capacity and productivity...

...Father Knows Best...

...Fund-raising strategies became increasingly sophisticated, and the political action committee an integral part of over 1,000 corporate structures and of a nearly equal number of trade associations...

...Accommodation by the Fed risks intolerably high inflation...

...It's yet to be proven, in fact, there's some contrary evidence, that as a mechanical instrument theirs are any better...

...Renovating housing in or near urban enterprise zones requires funds that local governments do not have...

...Zingone's company had built European shopping centers and prefabricated factories...

...I believe that the U.S...

...By 1978, that had largely been eliminated...

...But there cannot be Socialism in One City...

...The business of putting Americans into smaller cars—"the transition"—has crippled the industry that directly and indirectly employs about 4 million workers across the country and consumes 21 percent of the nation's steel, 60 percent of synthetic rubber, 11 percent of aluminum, and 25 percent of glass...

...Like a father who tyrannizes his family but curries favor with anyone able to help his brood, the mayor leaves his community confrontations to call on the Republican platform committee...

...not in the fiction, not in the advertisements, not in the serious articles...

...Now Thurmond is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and contemplating significant modification or elimination of the 1964 Voting Rights Act...

...About it, an in-house statement reads: Seventy-two percent of our members are against cuts in defense, and 22 percent say they would vote against a candidate who disagreed with them on this question even if they agreed on everything else...

...Of course, the outcome of the election was shaped most importantly by the troubles of the economy...

...Even before November 4, black Americans were feeling less physically secure because of a series of sniper killings of black men across the Middle West, the murders of several black men in Buffalo, and the disappearance and death of a lot of black children in Atlanta...

...THE CASE OF THE RIGHT has been exactly the opposite...

...If business succeeds, the worker gains the appearance of accomplishment —but not the substance...

...People 147 who argue that the civil rights struggles whites and blacks pursued from the mid-'50s and through the early'70s accomplished nothing are fools...

...The appeal of Weidenbaum's approach to corporate types is obvious...

...The big question is, how far a moderately repressive autocratic government can go to keep the opposition down...

...Even if the highest hopes of the supply siders are in time fulfilled, the acceleration of growth and the improvement in productivity, which new incentives to effort and investment might conceivably facilitate, will at best be registered two, three, four or more years from the date President Reagan signs the Kemp-Roth tax bill...

...If, however, these amendments not only clear committee but appear likely to clear Congress, they run the risk of mobilizing women or revitalizing civil liberties groups and, on a larger scale, offending a broad, moderate segment of the electorate likely to be disturbed by extensive tinkering with the Constitution...

...Take the case of Zingone...

...And one thing is certain: there will be more working women with each passing day...

...Civil rights, school integration, school prayer, affirmative action, criminal law, capital punishment, prison reform, electoral reform, abortion, pornography: in all these areas, with only the partial exception of the first, victories have come not because of the political strength of the left but because of the persuasiveness of its lawyers...

...The courts have made us lazy...

...If you can keep them at a minimum, you are better off...

...our economic system is so riddled with tax exemptions and allowances that their package will make little difference...

...But that won't happen overnight, and it shouldn't have to happen on terms alien to working New Yorkers with new ideas of their own...

...Will President Reagan keep his promises...

...indeed, Brooklyn's Pratt Center for Community Development has assembled a top-level working group to explore how the Reagan administration's sympathy for self-help and local discretion in spending federal aid can benefit these efforts...

...The AFL-CIO organizing director Alan Kistler has testified before a House labor subcommittee about the not atypical advice of one business consultant addressing a seminar of executives at Wake Forest University: You have to follow the equal opportunity laws and have whatever percentage of blacks you are supposed to have...

...The supposed mainstay of the liberal Democratic tradition, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, Jr...

...his income tax relief was slanted toward the lower- and middleincome groups for maximum stimulation of demand...

...Local residents are hired for dead-end jobs that keep the "riff-raff" off the streets but do not lead to actual careers— while the managers stay outside the community...

...Or on the local officials who actually make the bad decisions...

...a 15 percent reduction in corporate tax...

...That is a question City Hall has answered by grasping at a dubious new development...

...The multiplying corporate takeovers and mergers rarely make economic sense, but they can increase financial and market power (and executive pay...

...People who were unprepared to declare victory were labeled old-fashioned sentimentalists, single-issue sloganeers, and preference seekers...

...Existing "sweat equity" programs can help workers find housing near their jobs...

...The handsomely rewarded experts are lawyers, industrial psychologists, and other white-collar bandits...

...In a democracy, there is no substitute for the people...

...The 1981 models are smaller and more fuel-efficient, and even luxury cars are being downsized—in time to meet the release of "pent-up" demand in the marketplace...

...But I surely question the second assumption...

...The hecklers are outflanked...

...The industry was sitting there and had to make a very simple decision: Commit the capacity of assembly plants to building cars on which we make $1,500 or $2,000 each—the large cars...

...The first foreign leader to receive a royal welcome by President Reagan was Chun Doo Hwan of South Korea...

...Let us accept the first assumption regarding the importance of steady economic growth, provided we learn to include qualitative growth (improvement of the environment, safety at work and in public places) in our overall concept of growth...

...For him, ideology supersedes party loyalty...

...In the absence of any larger social purpose, frank decadence is purveyed —a big business in New York whose next venture will probably be casino gambling...

...Part of the bad news is set forth by Warren Brown, a Washington Post staff writer who reminds us that black union members are concentrated in "so-called `second-tier' jobs in the service and garment industries and in nonprofessional positions in the public sector, where pay usually is lower than that received by union members in 'first tier' industrial and skilled trade jobs...

...Revitalization will alter the old manufacturing face of Detroit, where one of the biggest proposed projects would create 6,000 jobs...

...John Chafee (R.I...

...One hears no more talk within the labor movement of "dual unionism" as a peculiar sin either of the Black Caucus or of those women who have begun to clamor for a place in labor's decisionmaking process...

...Does that mean we can still throw writers, editors and students into prison without having our military aid cut off...

...A tall order...

...That change in attitude reflects changes in the real world...

...Between 1975 and 1980, the average American car lost 890 pounds (22 percent) and gained 6.5 miles per gallon (45 percent...

...And they are, heaven help us, sources of conflict...

...Managers view them as a greater menace than white men or women of any color chiefly because they are said to be more organizable...

...If persisted in, they will exacerbate current maladies and even evoke nostalgia for the golden years of the Carter presidency...

...Many large American cities now possess experienced development agencies and neighborhood groups...

...Prize Winner We are pleased to announce that the Eugene V. Debs Foundation has awarded its first annual Bryant Spann Memorial Prize to Marshall Berman, an editor of Dissent, for his article, "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air'—Marx, Modernism, and Modernization," which appeared in our Winter 1978 issue...

...Six years ago Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, actively considered abandonment of the Republican party and the formation of a new, conservative, third party...

...He is a charter member of the Committee on the Present Danger...

...After one reads the findings, it becomes hard to withhold all sympathy from a cautious union leader who says that a disheartening number of workers, especially white workers, in his local sympathize with the Moral Majority, that they supported Proposition 13 in California and would be ready to emulate it elsewhere...

...In this form, supply-side economics represents little more than yet another disguise, in pseudo-scientific language, for a straight tax gift Just ten years ago, Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, hired his first black congressional staff member...

...While we don't expect dramatic results from stimulating small businesses, the goal of increasing jobs for residents of deteriorating neighborhoods is too important, and the estimated cost ($1.5 billion) too small to justify unqualified opposition to the Kemp-Garcia bill...

...By itself, the bill is mostly wishful thinking...

...The same effective channeling of money has taken place for a host of conservative intellectual centers, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the Institute of Contemporary Studies...

...In the 1930s and '40s and in the South after that, whites thought it was perfectly acceptable to pick among black voices and to choose the most compatible as the true black spokesmen...

...A series of stabbings of blacks in New York City, Buffalo, and Rochester by assailants who were described as white did nothing to allay those concerns...

...Comprehensive planning is needed to control these market forces and provide other, useful supports for new businesses...

...Hovering in the background are the good, gray veterans of Republican administrations from the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford eras—Arthur F. Burns, George Schultz, Alan Greenspan, and Herbert Stein...

...yet the city also refuses to recoup the millions of dollars in tax abatement and exemptions it gives to accelerate the conversions, tax dollars that could help the homeless...

...THE MAYOR GREETS the new class in his jogging shoes, Fantasy Island's genial director...

...Some of their proposals have even been praised by the Heritage Foundation of Reagan think-tank fame...

...In two years, foreign auto manufacturers nearly doubled their share of the U.S...

...Other community housing organizations, like Los Sures in Williamsburg or the Manhattan Valley Development Corporation, Subscription, Anyone...

...Let's say Ms...

...152 But even if enterprise zones are implemented in the most comprehensive and sensitive manner, the difficulties are formidable...

...Kemp may or may not care, but he should if he wants his program to have any real consequence...

...the mayor leaves the room in a blaze of glory...

...And Reagan's amiability surely has limits...

...No wonder doubts are beginning to be voiced about the quality of our corporate leadership...

...Further unemployment...

...The federal government must not be allowed to shirk its share of the responsibility for comprehensive development...

...The alternatives are genuinely stark...

...The choice of shops or factories should be related to community needs and the labor pool, which is more skilled than most businessmen realize...

...Distrust of the military establishment, even a critical stance, gave way to uncritical acceptance of sharply increased defense spending...

...Zingonia, near Milan, is Europe's largest private new town...

...As for the press, increased specialization has resulted in a deterioration of the modest adversary tradition carried on by a minority of print journal146 ists...

...New York's older middle class, together with the unions, created a culture of progressive institutions —public, collective, and universal—which linked individual mobility with social purpose...

...Nor is there reassurance to be found in the state of the world food supplies...

...Once through Congress, the battle moves to the state legislatures where, with fights on the ERA and on state abortion laws, these groups on the right have demonstrated growing strength...

...The voices of conservatives, both black and white, could be ignored when the political issue was how much more of what we've already been doing can we get the government to do...

...Political leverage was to be gained by forming alliances with other corporations that shared an interest in a specific piece of legislation, thus submerging shortterm competitive drives in order to coordinate legislative cooperation...

...In the Senate, the conservative Democratic faction is less organized, but the ten active participants have declared their unwillingness to follow the Democratic leadership on...

...Ultimately that sort of life rests in a national commitment to a full-employment economy whose investments are directed to meeting basic human needs in health, education, housing, and transportation —something neither the classical free market nor the new corporate consolidation provides...

...And so, monetarist theory or no monetarist theory, he may avoid plunging a frail economy into a politically disastrous recession...

...In moderation...

...This shift, as the activist Ruth Jordan points out, was noticeable even in Meany's time...

...The official plans for the economy are internally inconsistent...

...Segregation, whether formal or informal, clearly shaped the black psychic relationship to this country...

...But what the hell, amity's a beautiful thing...

...Ed Koch is apt to conclude a boisterous community meeting with a warning...

...The blue-collar vote can be divided into tiers, and the tiers into races...

...No one pretends that well-being and strength can grow without major shifts of capital back this way...

...In his office, UAW President Douglas A. Fraser acknowledged that the critical issue for the industry, overshadowed for now by the recession's effect, is competition with the Japanese...

...It reminds older blacks of times and attitudes they had hoped had disappeared forever from American life and thought...

...Kirkpatrick is up there at the UN, anesthetizing the General Assembly with a recital from back issues of Commentary...

...New Majority Leader Howard H. Baker, Jr., Republican of Tennessee, foresees the possibility of at least ten years of GOP dominance of the Senate, a not impossible prospect...

...The network of public transit, parks, schools, libraries, museums, and hospitals (New York still has 30 percent of the nation's mass transit ridership, 60 percent of its municipal hospitals, the only city university system) meant much more to its beneficiaries than a leg up the ladder of personal advancement...

...Besides, no one seriously thinks of New York City as a family, particularly when its would-be patriarch is cultivating some New Yorkers at the expense of others and kicking errant rebels out the back door...

...Incidentally, with all the clamor for more investment in factories and machines, far too little attention is paid to investment in other forms of capital, notably the human one...

...Young says, "There is a growing respect among the blacks and whites for one another, a respect for workers as workers," But there must have been a wistful note in his voice when he added, "That's the way it ought to be...

...They will apply this income to yet more rehabilitation...

...and to do that, he needs to add a little social vision to his instinctive survivalism...

...Unless ideas are generated and debated, the next major transformation will probably do little more than change us at some gut level into ideological Luddites...

...means, "Educate the rank and file about trade unionism, its history, its opportunities, and its responsibilities...

...Despite the effort, it is uncertain whether the U.S...

...Just as, in recent years, Republican growth has coincided geographically with the economic growth areas, the party's fund-raising abilities have taken giant steps beyond those of the Democratic party...

...And there, I think, is a deeper cause for worry...

...The "shock" also disrupted a decadesold marketing strategy upon which the industry had built huge profits...

...it is simply not true...

...Murray Weidenbaum, the new Council of Economic Advisers' chairman, is a leader of the antiregulators, noted for his "demonstration" that the annual cost to American business of federal regulation is a tidy $100 billion...

...It may not be so awful, then, if judicial decisions start going the other way...

...For the first time in U.S...

...These shifts in a remarkably short period reflect 143 the fluid qualities in American politics and the difficulties in anticipating what will take place in the near future...

...2) that our economy is prevented from growing because of unfilled investment needs that are caused by insufficient capital formation...

...STILL, THERE IS MORE to be said about the ethos of the Reaganauts...

...Hatch, a politician who has let the fantasy of seeking the presidency enter his mind, recognized in the election-poll results that half the union vote went to the Republican candidate...

...Chaikin appears to be in touch with this reality when he warns that the income gap will not be closed if "current economic and political pressures convince the higher-paid unions that their interests are better served by looking after themselves...

...Second-tier members, like those in the garment industry, average 50 to 60 percent less...

...Strangely enough, the inflationary effect of such speculative diversion of investment funds—notably on the price of land, and hence on housing and agricultural costs— seems to have escaped the notice of our conservative inflation fighters...

...The corporate community—faced with the election of 74 new Democrats in 1974, deep public distrust of business activities in the wake of Watergate and related scandals, and the strong likelihood of the election of a Democratic president in 1976—initiated a massive mobilization...

...His first hearings were a relatively sympathetic inquiry into problems of women in the workplace, particularly their difficulties in obtaining equal pay for equal work...

...Lane Kirkland was as enthusiastic as George Meany about the Vietnam War...

...by highway and housing policies favoring suburbanization...

...We have won victories far beyond our political base—and this over a very wide range of issues...

...It is home for 78 auto and autorelated manufacturing plants employing 200,000 workers and for the corporate headquarters of the "Big Three" companies (Volkswagen of America is also here) and the United Auto Workers...

...More than a third of the black population still lives in poverty and more than 40 percent of all black children are coming out of the public school systems with reading and computing skills that are inadequate for anything but the most marginal participation in American economic life...

...And then, entrepreneurs must raise additional capital to supplement their initial capital—in the face of a 19.5 percent prime rate...

...The neoconservatives proved themselves masters of denial that racism existed and thus were the most elusive and sophisticated opponents of those who sought an enlarged American commitment to racial and economic justice...

...strengthened fair housing legislation and other liberal undertakings...

...Furthermore, blacks and `other minorities" constitute around 40 percent of the Laborers' union, 37 percent of the Service Employees' union, 30 percent of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and a similar percentage of the Food and Commercial Workers, even 18 percent of the UAW...

...Subminimum wages for the young...

...By themselves, the judges merely invite a populist reaction of the kind we have just seen...

...Paul's, must be rattling its bones because when Inge was among the living he had contempt for the idea of an afterlife for individual minds, though he 135 believed in eternal values...

...He includes in his round total the costs of compliance with the regulations of such old-line agencies as the Internal Revenue Service...

...protect existing federal grant programs for economic development...

...It takes time to construct new factories, fabricate and install new machines, and train managers and workers in their use...

...Indeed, Reagan's victory is as much a consequence of judicial activism as it is a threat to the existence of a "progressive" Supreme Court...

...He could denounce the Republican nonsolutions...

...While some black Americans had real qualms about Jesse Owens's unabashed expressions of patriotism after the 1936 Olympics, very few were concerned about similar sentiments from Sugar Ray Leonard after he won the gold medal in 1976...

...Their hit list encompasses many protections and entitlements dating from the New Deal, among them aid to the unemployed, farm credit, help for the disabled, mass 136 transit, food stamps, school lunches, CETA jobfunding, and so on...

...Neither the unions nor the labor intellectuals who cluster around them have given enough thought to such questions...

...GM has proposed clearing 465 acres here, including the plant, leveling 3,400 houses and 148 businesses and 16 churches...

...Kemp and Garcia are not really thinking in terms of the long-range health of deteriorating neighborhoods...

...SOME VETERAN OPPONENTS of Soviet totalitarianism have been given reason to wonder how the Reagan administration proposes to fight against the Communists...

...It's just that "he had unemployment going for him...

...Local governments can help entrepreneurs find suitable locations, often in buildings abandoned by landlords...

...As I see it, as long as we torture our opponents in moderation and repress our people for their own good, and only shoot the people who deserve it, we can have good relations with the United States again...

...Or will it, out of common decency, "cut a deal" such that workers who are still on the payroll get good benefits for their old age while the jobs they had disappear by attrition...

...Among many liberals and leftists, the deepest worry generated by Reagan's victory is the thought of the Supreme Court justices he is likely to appoint...

...A mayor more trusting of people's determination to save their own neighborhoods and less enamored of big developers might actually help these groups to survive the swing of Reagan's axe...

...Even if they have no good ideas, they have the power to make blacks rethink all the old programmatic ideas they have taken for granted over the last decade and a half...

...He goes along with the current excesses on defense policy, which assume that if you simply spend more and more billions of dollars on weapons often unusable in "confrontations" likely to occur during the next decade, you will really "do something" to stop Communism...

...Helms has also started his own independent political action committee—the Congressional Club—which is beginning to carry considerable influence in North Carolina and was instrumental in electing a political nonentity, John East, to that state's other seat...

...Sol Chaikin is so agitated by this gap, which is to him a generally unnoticed "agony within organized labor's own family," that he fears it could become "a class struggle within a class struggle...

...And their number is growing at a phenomenal rate...

...The new demand is "equal pay for comparable value," applied not only to women but to all workers...

...In two major ways Kemp-Garcia represents an advance in conservative thinking...

...they cannot build the infrastructure of belief, commitment, and organization on which democratic left politics ultimately depends...

...This will certainly result in political and administrative decisions that liberals will have to oppose...

...It would, at least, bring some order into the existing j umble of multitudinous federal, state, and local investment subsidies...

...the setting of priorities might suffice...

...What that social interaction provided—in the way a thousand scholarships to elite private schools could not—was an integration of proletarian strength with professional excellence and high cultural achievement...

...New Yorkers know their city is hostage to financial constraints, economic priorities, and political trends all beyond Ed Koch's control...

...Alienation and disenchantment can prevent those residents of deteriorating areas who want to get ahead from responding to Kemp-Garcia's initiatives...

...24,'81 (UPI)—Some Russians have found a perfect New Year's gift for a friend: a toilet paper subscription...

...Public services can play crucial roles in a genuine development...

...without it, new businesses cannot compete...

...Modernization often involves a substantial input of sophisticated machinery and outside construction contractors...

...His own transition from the old Jewish neighborhood of Crotona Park East in the Bronx to the flip, professional hedonism of liberal Greenwich Village politics is part of a larger class mutation whose survival in Reagan's America he is trying to negotiate...

...Does anyone know a more effective way to perform that operation than to foster a certain kind of "harmony...

...In addition, the SSE lobby is asking for further reductions in the corporate income tax and of the capital gains tax, and for a generous acceleration of depreciation for plant, equipment, and vehicles along the "10-5-3" formula strongly pushed by Big Business—and supported by a good many brainwashed liberals...

...Such an experiment is likely to be a misfortune for the supply siders and for the rest of us...

...Not so subtly, he disowns Elizabeth Holtzman, the errant daughter who offends outside authority...

...The Big Three, however, are at a severe disadvantage...

...electricity, and telephone services at reduced rates...

...There are potential side effects that could cancel any possible gains from enterprise zones...

...The local government would then promise to reduce real estate taxes by 5 percent for a four-year period...

...I haven't seen it in our store yet," a Muscovite said...

...He was impressed with the dock and rail facilities, the available labor pool, and the desire of New York politicians to improve a deteriorating area...

...Today Helms is not only chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee but also the Republican party's point man in the struggle to force party leaders to keep their promises to those who want to ban abortion and busing, permit voluntary school prayer, and place the United States on a footing where it is prepared to meet a challenge of war...

...Rather, the combination of high interest rates and inflation has encouraged misinvestment by deflecting funds away from productive projects (which cannot become profitable at over 20 percent interest) toward unproductive ventures promising quick profits...

...Why technological unemployment, a perennial problem, should be far more ominous in an era paradoxically called postindustrial demands close study and deep analysis...

...Joblessness here has soared to Depression levels...

...These are four of five "single issues" tested in the poll...

...The resulting "trickle-up" effect toward investment was faster and surer than the "trickledown" effect on demand expected from supplyside economics...

...Not even Douglas Fraser, the last of his wonderful generation, seems able to escape sufficiently from today's crisis in order to think about the problems piling up for tomorrow...

...In catering to it, the city sheds the proletarian imagery of production for the lithe imagery of consumption: the old docks and diners become playgrounds and cafes...

...insist that companies availing themselves of the legislation to hire and train local workers...

...But American politicians and their constituents are more impatient and less masochistic than their British cousins...

...This cruel hoax deserves a look...

...The issue will become increasingly salient at a time when radically different approaches to the economy, regulation, and budgetary expenditures are to be initiated by a party with deep roots in the business community...

...A mobilization of rightist, not leftist, forces—and a "moral" mobilization too, building on fear and prejudice as much as on economic interest...

...IN THIS GENERAL FRAMEWORK, it becomes less surprising that the voters elected not only Ronald Reagan but a Republican Senate...

...It is no wonder, then, that some of the blacks who lead this country now have, in times past, felt themselves to be tentative Americans...

...history blacks are more likely to be represented by unions than whites...

...This proved to be a wellspring of American vitality, and many New Yorkers still harbor personal associations with it...

...The Heritage Foundation has recommended elimination of the program providing legal services for the poor...

...It came when labor belatedly endorsed the ERA...

...Well, it's hard to know 156 how much difference this shift of language will make...

...One example of its flowering is the ILGWU housing in the West'20s—built by amassing real-estate capital on a nonspeculative basis for its members, who bring to their community rooms a felicity of social exchange and self-government learned in their early union days...

...Despite its disadvantaged position, the industry is displaying evidence that the seeds of change have been planted...

...But what can you expect from a magazine called Dissent...

...While labor spies and old-fashioned thugs are still around, the overwhelming tendency is indeed to move from "brass knuckles to briefcases...

...With less foreign competition in autos, steel, footwear and textiles, prices and profits will really soar...

...That, as much as anything, was a reminder to blacks with memories, of how things had been in the past...

...The Republicans in Congress are likely to run into trouble as they try to resolve a basic split within their party between what might be called the Baker wing and the Helms wing...

...Scuttling OSHA...

...Nor was it against the generally accepted codes of behavior for whites to be hostile and even rude to blacks, not just in the South, but all over the nation...

...A ferocious crunch on credit will ensue and interest rates will soar to figures that will make borrowers sigh for the good old days of a mere 20 percent prime...

...And a consortium of local banks could provide capital and credit at lower cost, thus overcoming one of the biggest obstacles to entrepreneurs, along with the other banking services that are often unavailable in run-down areas...

...Democrats initiated a program of governmental sacrifice, but the losers turned out to be perhaps the most loyal Democratic constituency —the economically weak...

...This was widely viewed as a recognition of the changing politics of the South, the accommodation of the segregationist, Dixiecrat Republican to the growing political muscle of blacks and other progressive forces...

...Americans will buy smaller cars as rising gasoline prices spur the search for fuel efficiency, and the shrinking size of the American family allows a redefinition—"downsizing"—of comfort...

...Then the time has come for some form of government control over investment, or at least investment guidance within a framework of long-term planning as suggested by the Leontief group, or along the French pattern...

...THERE HAVE ALSO BEEN some positive developments in Kirkland's administration...

...C. Davis Law Review, Summer 1980...

...This insures the survival of the magazine for the next year or two, and enables us to plan ahead...

...The site is nestled near the center of the city, mostly inside the boundary of the "island" city of Hamtramck...

...Companies claiming these concessions should agree to hire and train local residents...

...Even with Chrysler still afloat, 300,000 auto workers are jobless...

...WHAT CAN WE EXPECT from the Reagan administration...

...Saudi curtailment of its current pumping rate would by itself precipitate another oil crisis and plunge the Western world into serious recession...

...OTHER PROMISES being kept were to throw much more money at the armed forces...

...Medium-sized firms, however, might have a better chance of surviving and would also provide more career opportunities...

...During the next four years, perhaps the key element in the debate over the proposed revitalization of U.S...

...No one accuses $50,000-a-year professionals of accumulating wealth...

...Defense spending is the fifth and most "potent...

...Norman Ture, an ex-tax consultant, Beryl Sprinkle, a prominent bank economist, and Paul Craig Roberts, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, occupy important subcabinet posts and profess the true Friedman faith...

...and a greater possibility of being declared a Foreign Trade Zone...

...3) that this insufficiency could and should be remedied by tax cuts designed to stimulate saving over spending, complemented by both a speedup of depreciation and a slowdown of such social costs as environmental protection and safety regulations...

...But I think we better stay away from pulling out fingernails, at least at the beginning of the Reagan term...

...The quartet are Reagan loyalists but their policy preferences are in the direction of old-fashioned balanced budgets and their sympathy for supply-side analysis is controllable...

...If it avoids "adversary relations," can organized labor be expected to fight for jobs (different but real jobs) in heavy industry...

...So it may happen, after much huffing and puffing, that a president who dislikes commotion, prefers new horses to new thoughts, and hates to interrupt placid evenings and weekends will settle for the comparative moderation of the Ford stewardship—a touch of tax reduction, a nibble at social programs, less than fatal harassment of the regulators, and quiet encouragement of the Fed to behave prudently...

...After hearing them denounce affirmative action, support a subminimum wage, and attack the "dependency" fostered by welfare programs, he declared them the black voices of the future...

...Will the secret police be able to get the latest equipment to put down terrorism in our country...

...What Koch does represent, I think, are certain dominant middle-class currents that are reshaping the city...

...I suppose it is possible that a true believer in the unique virtue of tax reduction would simply counsel patience and fortitude, after the example of England's Margaret Thatcher...

...Another major explanation may be found in the passing of corporate leadership during the same 30-year period from experts in production and marketing to those in finance and accounting...

...The centennial celebration is underway, but more than one friend of labor will participate with a heavy heart...

...We put this section together before it was entirely clear which social programs the new Administration would cut, or the extent that it would cut them, or whether Congress would go along with the cuts...

...Winpisinger has argued courageously for the conversion of our essentially wartime economy to more useful purposes...

...Black servicemen who were expected to risk their lives for this country in World War II often found that they were treated worse in the South than German or Italian prisoners of war...

...Real estate costs are another deterrent...

...The more established service industries—advertising, finance, insurance, big real estate, dataprocessing —are doing fine...

...The West German government, for example, systematically subsidizes further education for employees who wish to upgrade their skills in various fields, both in the technical and organizational areas...

...Community planners who want to assist local development will have to — • try to amend the Kemp-Garcia bill to require local participation...

...As Jack Newfield put it, Ed Koch comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted...

...There is no question that Ronald Reagan and David Stockman are going to cut away at programs that make life more bearable for the poor in America...

...But, in the end, the advent of the Reagan administration may serve to spur a new period of creativity among blacks to fashion new attacks on the searing problems that still afflict large segments of the black population...

...New strategies can evolve and new balances struck between what America must do for its most vulnerable people and what black people can and should do for each other...

...Still, we don't want to deprive our readers of a positive note...

...That the currently fashionable "hard-lining" will either help us out of increasingly desperate economic straits or will (especially when linked with Reagan's fondness for right-wing despots) further an effective foreign policy—can one really believe this...

...This time tariff barriers can only save jobs that will in any case soon be liquidated by the hundred thousands...

...they are simply providing a new gimmick to increase some entrepreneurs' profits...

...60 percent are opposed to the Panama Canal Treaty...

...Astonishingly, Edwin Meese III found time to take nine hours during the period when he was running the government transition to listen to a conference of black conservatives...

...163...

...They involve the manipulation of words and symbols that go with the continuing consolidation of the nation's investment decisions by a few thousand big corporations...

...That 33 percent of all black wage and salary workers, including those on farms, are in unions, as recently reported by the Labor Department, is a truly impressive figure...

...They told us what American life was—what people were doing, what the latest fashions were, how fantasies were evolving, and who we were as a people...

...Nor is it enough to talk only of the money that was spent by these new right-wing groups...

...Since the construction of Lincoln Center began, for example, 20,000 people have been displaced from the West Side...

...Such subsidies may be unavoidable for political reasons...

...New York doesn't have to become the Paris Commune in order to be a seedbed of economic change...

...At the same time, however, the proposals, including both tax measures and budgetary cutbacks in transfer programs, are almost sure to increase inequities in both wealth and income...

...Obviously, a certain amount of torture has to be used but we can't overdo it...

...For a growing number of the best paid workers, without massive and systematic retraining, there can only be more unemployment...

...BUT EVEN IN THIS NEW ERA, which feels so chillingly old, there is some reason to have hope...

...It is of interest because it is the only conservative proposal even to notice the problems of urban America, and a variant of ideas more commonly associated with liberal interventionists and city planners...

...Young was attacked by the Republicans and repudiated by the Democrats...

...The Japanese grabbed their hold (now a onequarter market share) despite a downsizing program begun by American auto-makers in 1975...

...He is, after all, the candidate who in 1976 evoked the image of the "big buck" buying steaks with food stamps at the supermarket...

...Cooperative education programs, which already exist in many high schools and community colleges, can assist with the recruitment and training of workers...

...what a loss in man hours through preventable sickness, work accidents, labor strife, and low employee morale...

...These tactics helped only so long as the spate of Watergate and linked transgressions remained on the voters' minds...

...Pushed into a backseat by Japanese automakers, the Big Three's auto executives contemplate an estimated loss of over $4 billion in 1980, and plot their surival...

...By which he...

...How strange that this remarkable decline in the productivity of capital is conveniently overlooked by most establishment economists and the media, while much ado is made about a supposed decline in labor productivity...

...We have seen repeatedly what happens if development is not comprehensive...

...I think it's precisely because he places so little faith in this kind of work that he's defensive in his 162 relations with groups trying to capture local cash flows and outside subsidies for new forms of realestate management and collective enterprise...

...But to do that on behalf of the best efforts in the city, he first has to recognize the potential significance of those efforts...

...for the vast majority...

...He was made more comfortable by postponement of publication of the congressionally mandated report on worldwide human rights until he had departed these shores...

...That goes without saying...

...On this, Jules Bernstein, a labor lawyer, is the man who knows most...

...And the remedy proposed by business economists—ever faster acceleration of depreciation for plants and machinery—only invites yet more waste, and thus shifts the burden onto the rest of the taxpayers...

...Management teams usually set goals and working conditions...

...Another such "magic" formula has been successfully peddled by business economists and quickly picked up by the media: supply-side economics (SSE...

...Corruption, in fact, is always the problem of the party in power, and advocacy of reform is, as a political tactic, effective as a dominant issue only in the process of taking power away from the incumbents who have abused it...

...These factors are likely to offset the political consequences for the makeup of Congress in case there is no improvement in the economy under Reagan...

...Not only are there about 43 million women in the labor force, but more and more of them are working full time...

...Unless he appoints hacks, in the strongest sense of that word, Reagan is likely to find that judges, once appointed, are unresponsive to political signals from the White House...

...And where will she get this point...

...A woman, Joyce Miller of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, has been appointed to the AFL-CIO Executive Board...

...Membership in the UAW has dropped 20 percent, down to 1.2 million...

...Little creative and strategic thought had been devoted to the terrible issues and effects of the still-enormous black poverty or to the relative economic impotence of the entire black community in America...

...q Historically, this is a big year for the labor movement...

...The city oversees some of these programs, but they were invented by community people, now networked citywide through such groups as the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers, which publishes the invaluable bimonthly City Limits...

...the Business Roundtable emerged as a dynamic political force...

...One factor undoubtedly is the frequency and severity of recessions during the 1970s...

...If militants no longer cry "Equal pay for equal work," it is, in Ruth Jordan's opinion, because management' has manipulated that demand to produce less pay for both sexes...

...Or repeal of pre-New Deal legislation like the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 (and the "little" Davis-Bacon acts in several states), which set wage floors on governmentfinanced construction projects...

...In any case, we have been the beneficiaries of judicial activism...

...of brassy, better-educated workers...

...Furthermore, if the only beneficiaries are "Mom and Pop" stores, no secondary jobs will be created, and thus the project will not have much effect on the neighborhood...

...But, at this writing, Congress appears to be on the verge of moving in the opposite direction...

...The latter, insofar as they hope to stimulate the economy by their tax cut, seem to take a leaf out of Keynes...

...But one cannot envision laundries and bakeries springing up if their prospective market is the deteriorated area itself...

...As late as 1952, for example, smart campus shops in Ann Arbor, Michigan, would not permit black women to try on clothing as white women, of course, were accustomed to doing...

...Those who care about the most progressive force in this country—which, for all its flaws, the trade union movement still is—can only applaud a program that would translate into this formula: "Organize the unorganized, and reorganize the organized...

...This is a possibility already alarming to the hard right and, accordingly, a source of tremulous hope for those elsewhere located on the political Beset by inflation and rising taxes, people look for simplistic formulas—"Proposition 13," the Kemp-Roth 30-percent income-tax cut...

...The Democratic leaders failed also to retain the party's modest tradition of directing its concerns toward the distributional issues inherent in cutting up either an expanding or shrinking pie...

...Demolition began in December...

...At the same time the political wing of the corporate community recognized the lobbying potential of its multiple branch offices, factories, suppliers, and buyers, spread throughout the country...

...these costs are much higher in most old industrial cities than in the Sunbelt...

...These sources of interest are symbolized in the bill's co-sponsorship by Robert Garcia, a liberal Democrat from the South Bronx...

...Jack Kemp, now Number Three in the House of Representatives' Republican hierarchy, took a comparatively mild line on social spending in his 1979 manifesto An American Renaissance because he was convinced that the three-year schedule of tax reduction embodied in the Kemp-Roth bill would generate so much economic growth and so many new jobs that federal spending on food stamps, unemployment compensation, and welfare would shrink of its own accord...

...He would prefer to see most of the attack conducted by the Administration through regulation-writing, selection of personnel, and weakening of enforcement...

...Another measure at the other end is that as late as 1968 a team of doctors could find real hunger and malnutrition in America...

...In 1974, for example, leaders of the corporate lobbying community in Washington expected an onslaught of legislation backed by labor and environmental groups, fears that, emotionally, were similar to those now voiced by the left...

...Shabecoff did take me aback with a quotation from Glenn Watts, president of the Communications Workers of America...

...Now the conservatives cannot be ignored and they may just have a good idea or two...

...At a time when Democratic voting allegiances among traditional party voting groups had severely weakened (skilled labor, Catholics, Italians, and Irish, who had moved into the middle class), the party failed to recognize the importance of expanding its constituency, permitting defeat of such key legislation for this purpose as election-day registration and labor-law reform...

...Here in New York, the downward spiral of capital outflow, unemployment, shrinkage of the tax base, service curtailment, dependency on curtailed services, and deepening social pathology has by now itself become a disincentive to investment...

...Another Reagan enthusiast and potential official, Rita Hauser, appeared on public television (February 10) and added South Africa to Argentina as countries that have been offended by Carter's emphasis on human rights and would now head the list of American friendlies...

...Yes, the UAW has made common cause with the Chrysler Corporation to save a miserably managed company from the bankruptcy it deserves...

...The Helms argument goes as follows: (1) the 145 danger of mobilizing a stronger opposition is exaggerated, because most of it will consist of the remnants of the Democratic party's McGovern wing...

...In such groups as Greenpoint's People's Firehouse and Park Slope's Fifth Avenue Committee, these efforts are combined with sophisticated arson research and prevention, with community organizing and commercial revitalization, using federal and foundation assistance...

...Not only do we tolerate conditions that prevent a large number of black workers from applying their full skills...

...Evidence for this charge is provided by the Heritage Foundation economist who envisions that the more successful businesses will later move to more "desirable" areas...

...by skewed direct federal expenditures (military facilities, supplies purchases, and other dollar and employment outlays), which have the strongest multiplier effect in a local economy...

...Black men are not most men...

...2) the conservative single-interest groups provided the margin of victory in 1980, and a failure to honor the debt to them will result in their abandoning the GOP...

...In view of a still ample capital formation, even an actual allocation of funds may not be necessary...

...A capital market solely guided by the fastest and highest return, where speculative ventures compete on an equal footing with needed goods and services, no longer fulfills its function...

...The federal government, in turn, would confer several benefits on companies in these zones: a 50 percent reduction in Social Security taxes (on the worker's share as well as on the company's...

...His critics may rage against the thralldom in which he holds the little people he's supposed to serve...

...Ronald Reagan's victory has let black Americans know in a clear and visceral way what civil libertarians mean when they talk, in other contexts, about "a chilling effect...

...market, cutting into the volume that the Big Three need to survive...

...Given those changes in comprehensible lifetimes, it was not unreasonable for a significant part of a generation of blacks to expect in the early '70s that unevenly but steadily the nation would continue to attack our terrible racial inequities...

...Over the last several decades the liberalleft has become highly dependent on victories of this sort...

...In opposing the nomination of Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and delaying Senate consideration of Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, Helms has demonstrated a willingness to use his knowledge of arcane Senate rules to force the Republican leadership further to the right...

...The plan is intended to alleviate long lines by having shoppers buy something like "toilet paper futures...

...Jeane Kirkpatrick of Georgetown University, who is a very influential Reagan adviser...

...The morning after the Republican landslide, liberals panicky about the city's prospects discover that, no thanks to themselves, New York's drawbridge to Reaganland is down, the road to Washington still passable...

...But of what use will all the military junk that Reagan will order, and Kirkland support, be when it comes to a crisis tomorrow in Central America...

...Not only was the attempt doomed to failure, but the drive placed Democrats in the position of scurrying to achieve what had been a traditional Republican goal...

...Times change...

...Small businesses might move from old but functioning neighborhoods to nearby enterprise zones, for example, from Long Island City to the South Bronx...

...Although some Democrats are complaining about the inequities in the KempRoth tax cut, alterations of the bill are likely to be in the direction of further skewing in favor of the well-to-do with reductions in the inheritance tax and increased exemptions on earnings from savings and investments...

...In the meantime, there are over $12 billion in municipal pension funds, which could be invested in neighborhood and small business development (and fully guaranteed), if the mayor would only take the lead...

...It will be a time when the smartest blacks will adapt the opportunities that the conservatives make available much in the same way a great football offense adapts to whatever a good defense makes available...

...These two programs are prime targets in the Administration's drive to eliminate $41.4 billion from the 1982 budget...

...Public housing projects by themselves were an incomplete answer to the complex residential, employment, educational, and urban service needs of inner-city populations...

...but, as Lester Thurow and others point out, they tend to reward the inefficient instead of encouraging the efficient segment of our economy...

...For three decades now, the federal courts have been the dominant agency for social change in the United States, far outdistancing in both zeal and effectiveness the Congress, the parties, the unions, interest groups of all kinds...

...But the politics that crawled out from under the rocks in the wake of the election was even more appalling...

...The factors of significantly improved salaries and the dominance of news coverage by television —an inherently superficial medium inhibited by a need to please sponsors—have weakened a commitment to issues of justice and equity...

...Like Meese, a number of conservative commentators have been emboldened to instruct blacks who their real spokesmen are, where their real interests lie, and what issues it is appropriate for them to pursue...

...It recognizes the value of such a policy for the entire society...

...Will they now reduce their rage at the lumpenproletariat, which because "it was pampered at their expense" prompted so many of them to vote for Ronald Reagan...

...All signs point toward continuation of this trend...

...H. John Heinz, 3rd (Pa...

...But his arrogance extends toward the many effective community organizations that have arisen to fill the void left by the discredited clubhouse set...

...This includes not only constitutional amendments on abortion and prayer but also legislation to severely weaken the regulatory process, particularly the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the gutting of civil rights bills, particularly affirmative action, and assaults on environmental bills, including the clean air and clean water acts...

...President Carter and congressional Democrats attempted to become leaders of a party of "ethical" or "procedural" reform—concentrating on such areas as public disclosure, restrictions on unearned outside income for elected officials, the replacement of state party conventions with open primaries, and the weakening of the powers of committee chairmen...

...Whom will he turn to...

...This will be balanced by the proposals to eliminate various urban aid programs, which, in turn, will be balanced by continuing subsidies for Senator Helms's favorite agriculturalists, the tobacco Supply-side economics, the official Reagan alternative to the scorned Keynesian prescription, amounts to a gamble on the proposition that lower taxes will stimulate enough new investment and effort to flood supermarkets and showrooms with cheap merchandise of steadily improving quality...

...In such an atmosphere, it should go without saying, any fledgling investment boom will expire before it gets well under way...

...But don't be heroes about the goddamned thing...

...Yet they are much better off than most New Yorkers, and much of what they spend benefits others little and leaves even less generosity for building public institutions...

...They must feel that five or ten years down the road there will be rungs on a career ladder...

...The progressive culture hadn't exactly dissolved ethnic tensions, of course, but it could have evolved in that direction...

...But, of course, the neoconservatives never labeled themselves antiblack...

...Constant policy vacillations of a weak Administration, under the political pressures of powerful groups, or wild gyrations of interest rates have been disincentive to investment...

...create matching funds for local authorities' use for planning, police, education, infrastructure...

...But, in the long run, the number of jobs lost in the industrywide transition will be staggering...

...In all advanced, oil-importing nations, growth has slowed since OPEC's 1973 price coup...

...He said the black leaders with constituencies with whom President-elect Reagan had just met—unlike Vernon Jordan, Benjamin Hooks, et al., the conservatives have no known constituencies in black America—represented the ideas of the past...

...Among lower-income people who can't step up their private consumption, there follows a regression to ethnic enclaves that give dubious succor and balkanize the city into warring camps...

...The latter are more concerned with quick returns, tax strategies, and the exercise of financial power than with longterm innovation and efficient production...

...Shortly thereafter, the new secretary of state and then the president himself at his first press conference outlined the new priorities—human rights out, antiterrorism in...

...For the Republicans there are only two sources of criticism that have institutional permanence in Washington: the Democratic party and the press...

...The first reason why Reagan's appointments are unlikely to be disastrous is the sheer unpredictability of judicial decision-making...

...AS THE VOID LEFT by the public sector's decay has been filled by divisive and predatory activities, a very different sort of change is occuring in another tier of the city's economy...

...Buy American" is a slogan around which certain unions and their natural opponents have been able to coalesce...

...Unquestionably, many of them want to work, and just as surely many employers want them on board—as long as they are paid less than men for the equal work they do...

...Business is after "a unionfree environment...

...The probable results are disenchantment and alienation...

...Unlike the earlier middle class, which helped build the culture of progressive institutions, the new tier seems remarkably selfcontained...

...Equal pay" seems nice and simple, while "comparable value" sounds like something with which analytic philosophers can play...

...Demonstrating remarkable insouciance about the right-wing terrorists of El Salvador who tortured and murdered four American nuns and missionaries and two AFL-CIO supporters of land reform, the Reagan administration moved to substitute military measures for a political solution in that battered little country...

...There was a great deal of money spent (and it would be interesting to know in detail where it came from), but the right has always been wellfinanced...

...GIVEN THE DISARRAY of the Democrats, the only development assuring their party's resurgence would be a major failure of the Republicans, particularly in economics...

...He neglects to subtract from the costs of regulations any estimate of their benefits...

...They recognized its new shapes in the formulations of the neoconservatives and were appalled as those views began to seep into the body politic...

...The Kemp-Garcia Urban Jobs and Enterprise Zones bill is a legislative proposal bobbing in the wake of Kemp-Roth and the monetarist ideas that absorb the Reagan administration's attention...

...While the mayor's approach to municipal union needs, hospital reorganization, and tenant/realestate issues has been insensitive, his dismantling of the public arena has not been wholly irrational...

...This year, time and energy were spent as well, and in amounts that, years ago, only the left could command...

...It meant a different sort of social interaction than one found elsewhere: a city of walkers and subway newspaper and paperback readers instead of drivers...

...CLUW, which trains women to organize other women, is an exciting departure...

...Watts predicts that as this nation rebuilds its industrial base (any day now under one great Chief Executive or another), "the convergence of interests between labor and management will continue...

...On most "single issues" exploited by the Republicans last November, even the more conservative labor leaders appear to be ahead of their constituency...

...the choice is either to make a tough living in the second tier or to make nothing at all...

...Just remember," he chides disgruntled New Yorkers in that shrill, pedantic singsong of his, "if you don't like what I'm doing, you can vote me out...

...They will have to explain to union voters, many of whom voted for Reagan last November, why they remain out of work and are unable to receive either extended unemployment benefits or trade adjustment assistance...

...On the contrary, the growth rate of real GNP sank from 3.1 percent in the 1950s to 2.9 percent in the 1960s, and to 1.4 percent in the 1970's, with a negative growth rate at the end of the decade.* * These figures represent the drop in the productivity of capital, arrived at by eliminating the factor of labor input...

...Use of four-cylinder engines tripled, according to a report prepared by Secretary of Transportation Neil Goldschmidt in the Carter administration's final days...

...But then, one must consider the rate of failure among small businesses—and the fact that even Nixon's effort at `Black Capitalism" involved greater levels of financial support than Kemp-Garcia would offer...

...See, for instance, his exemplary article, "Union-Busting: From Benign Neglect to Malignant Growth" (U...

...The U.S...

...They are too busy blocking government expenditures to be able to put idle labor (and idle capital) to productive work...

...For this revolution, much credit must go to the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a 15-year-old organization, mostly funded by the AFL-CIO, which has devoted itself to the greater involvement of blacks in unions...

...It is easy to exaggerate the significance of the internal disputes among tax cutters, social program assassins, deregulators, and monetarists, because there is little reason to believe that singly or in combination their magic is powerful enough to cope with the enormous economic problems that are the heritage of the last decade...

...No one should clap with even one hand for continued alternation of recession and sluggish growth and for continuing inflation and high unemployment...

...How do all these assumptions stand up in reality...

...To begin with, there is at present an overall surplus and not a lack of production capacity...

...In a conservative polity such as the United States, it produces electoral consequences like those we now experience...

...then, like Cleveland's Kucinich, he'd probably be replaced from above...

...Against a picture of decay, the rise of this new middle class seems a godsend...

...Instead, the dream has become trapped in middle-class memory, where it dissipates in sentimental nostalgia inspiring no new constructive action...

...What good can accommodation do them...

...of Massachusetts, was so deeply rooted in the tradition of cutting up an ever-growing pie that he was unable to participate effectively in the budget-cutting debate...

...Kenneth Young, Kirkland's executive assistant, and a lot of other establishment people think Chaikin is an alarmist...

...The Republicans, with negligible community roots and strong 151 corporate ties, are to be watched, they feel, with even more suspicion than the familiar Democratic "poveriticians...

...To reiterate the point, this Administration, like its predecessors, will find itself coping as best it can with events beyond its control...

...The city refuses to use scarce housing subsidies to keep life-long residents in neighborhoods that the new upscale market can convert...

...Tax cuts, particularly in the company of larger defense appropriations, are in the short run unavoidably inflationary...

...In January, around the nation, 200,000 auto workers were out of work...

...Blacks had never for a moment entertained the idea that just because public discourse on race had become more civilized or places of public accommodation more accessible, racism was dead...

...The prime contradiction is between tax and monetary policy...

...It depends on which ones you have in mind...

...Without such policy the supply siders send conflicting messages, expansion from tax reduction and contraction from monetary restraint...

...An observer wandering through the crowd at the Distinguished Ladies' Reception felt as if he had stepped back into the elegance, arrogance, and whiteness that he remembered from the times when LIFE went to a fancy party...

...will no longer interfere in our justice system...

...Perhaps the most indicative statistic about black life-chances in America is that there are approximately three times as many blacks attending college now as there were in 1960...

...But maybe it's the place to begin as the AFL-CIO celebrates one hundred years of existence...

...His cheerful declarations that he wanted to enact a death penalty law, terminate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and strip the federal courts ofjurisdiction to deal with any matters affecting education was pure Bilbo talk without the vulgar words...

...But Mom and Pop stores offer few such opportunities...

...In his heart, Ronald Reagan may not really be a Reaganaut...

...In an article he wrote not long ago Chaikin cited a 1979 Labor Department study showing that women nationwide account for more than 80 percent and minorities for 50 percent of all persons holding "second-tier" positions in organized industries...

...they are not the work of a party or moveNot All the News Is so Bad .. . Lots of griping in this section on Reaganland, isn't there...

...As in the movies, Americans were white—except for a few buffoons or loyal servants...

...If the Fed follows these precepts, it will ignore the clamor of businessmen and developers for new credit at reasonable rates of interest to finance larger inventories and new projects...

...In almost all the areas I have listed, conservative activists have put together committees, alliances, even single-issue parties, at local as well as national levels: an extraordinary proliferation of groups, which participatory democrats might well envy...

...Kemp-Garcia's reliance on tax concessions will make our tax system even more unfair and irrational...

...While it is surely an overstatement to suggest, as Young did, that Reagan's election would be a signal that it is again "all right to kill niggers," blacks who remember the old days are already reminded of them now, just a few months after the election...

...EDS...

...No matter...

...Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, in a bid for leadership of the Democratic party, termed some of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's ablest assistants "extreme left-wingers," and a group of Democratic senators began meeting to nudge the party rightward, toward what they termed "the mainstream" of American politics...

...Some of our students who have worked in Model Cities construction projects report that these were plagued by pilferage...

...It admits (1) that markets must be manipulated to obtain socially desirable results...

...What has happened lately looks like a revolution...

...Tax cuts alone won't offset them...

...So begins an apartheid that presidential commissions have been warning about for a decade: enclaves of affluence amidst seas of despair, an isolation of classes completed by segregated transit (cabs, express buses) and schools, which permits upper-income people to ignore or even justify the suffering, the grinding down of those who seem, in their destitution, to be members of a different species...

...3) congressional passage of conservative constitutional amendments may help mobilize the left, but it will also give new impetus to the right...

...And the industry is 'displaying, finally, a recognition that problems do exist...

...The conservative Democrats, mostly from the South and Southwest, have already banded together to revive the conservative coalition...

...Still, given any imaginable Reagan appointments, we can anticipate a slow rightward drift—revealed most coherently in a growing willingness to accommodate rather than challenge state and local governments in such 153 areas as school integration, criminal procedure, pornography, and so on...

...a 50 percent reduction in capital gains tax (reducing the maximum tax to only 10 percent of the capital gain...

...The first test for equal sacrifices came at the inaugural ball where ladies in $10,000 dresses and gentlemen in $1,500 suits came out of $40,000 limousines and couldn't get into the ball because the sponsors had oversold admissions...

...In domestic affairs the Reagan administration emphasized "across-the-board" cuts and equality of sacrifice...

...The Democratic party is finding it difficult to raise money and revive its own intellectual resources...

...Then he shifts the blame for a possible reversal where about half of it belongs: "After all, a lot of what is happening with blacks in unions reflects the hiring 157 policies of management...

...A failure to take many of the conservative social and regulatory initiatives will alienate not only Helms but also freshman Republicans elected with strong support from the Moral Majority...

...You go to the store and fill out a form—a postcard, actually," one said...

...there 150 simply isn't the local purchasing power...

...and so on—will become increasingly vocal in their dissent...

...Throughout American history, blacks have proved amazingly adaptable to adverse circumstances...

...Stepped-up procurement of weapons systems was substituted for policy development...

...Koch is certainly astute enough to cast almost anything in terms Washington can understand...

...Thank God...

...These conditions include the construction of factories, cheap utilities, low rents, docile labor, and long-term reductions in real estate tax...

...And it is Chaikin's sense that while some minority union members "may be lucky enough to break through into the high-wage promised land of the first tier...

...Citywide, 6,000 people now live in the subways...

...You discover from this survey that 65 percent of union members favor a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget...

...As Edward Denison and Lester Thurow have convincingly demonstrated, lack of investment and a drop of work discipline play little or no role here...

...According to a report in the New York Times (September 3, 1980) entitled "American Industry Heads Toward Record Year for New Financing," a tremendous spurt in new investment has occurred in the capital markets...

...They're finally making some sense in Washington...

...Not that Gershman may be so familiar with the texts himself, but at least he'd know whom to phone...

...auto-makers, making them even less flexible in a future price war with the Japanese...

...They sustain a new middle class that can step up its private consumption, with some preferential tax help from all levels of government...

...So far, the Kemp people have been mum about how their initial 10 percent tax cut is to be distributed among various taxpayer groups...

...It is useful here to look back at how America felt in the late '30s and through the '40s—the period when the psyches of the people who now make up the leadership cadre among blacks were being formed...

...Even white commentators observed that during the inauguration the capital was awash with people who looked like the nation's monied countryclub set...

...The long-range figures are equally eloquent...

...People voted their interests or what they thought were their interests...

...Colonels, I don't know about the rest of you, but as head of the Moderate Repressive Junta recommend we give human rights a try...

...However, this increase of investment was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in productivity...

...Judges making decisions in loco populi cannot create a stable or a strong liberalism...

...As long as these amendments were bottled up in committee by a Democratic Congress, they were a goldmine for conservatives appealing to special interest groups for support and money...

...Colonels, I am happy to report that we can expect all the support we need from the United States to put down the political opposition, providing we can prove our repressive government is being threatened by Cuban intervention...

...It is time to think today in order to fight tomorrow...

...But it would be a mistake to overlook the extent to which Reagan was helped, and many senatorial contests decided, by groups of indignant citizens drawn together in response to Supreme Court decisions on such things as busing and school prayer...

...Consequently, he is having second thoughts on using his committee to eviscerate OSHA...

...Weidenbaum's statistics are shaky...

...THESE ARE BAD TIMES for those "labor aristocrats" who have enjoyed more affluence than any other segment of the working class...

...Gompers, elected president, was voted the princely sum of $1,000 a year plus traveling expenses...

...Not only is there a change in the political atmosphere that harks back to earlier and less hospitable times, there is also a change in the feel of the country...

...In contrast to Kennedy's targeted investment tax credit, these general business tax-relief measures would encourage waste and speculation, without necessarily stimulating new productive investment, in the face of a continued lag in demand...

...But in 1979, the low-profit small-car share of the Rather than bewailing a clearly nonexistent lack of investment capital, our corporate executives ought to look into the reasons for this decline in the efficiency of investment between 1950 and 1980...

...Finally, and perhaps most important, the Democratic Party showed an inability to contend with one of the most difficult decades in the nation's history...

...Back in 1975, Zingone, a major Italian developer, sought to build an industrial park in the South Bronx...

...Topping the cake's candied surface was a symbol of an executive and a worker locking arms in fraternal embrace...

...It wants to construct a 70-acre plant for assembling Cadillacs...

...and (2) that local governments must plan...

...Following Rockefeller's assurances to Argentina and the LatinAmerican dictators, and after Haig and Reagan proclaimed the new priorities, the United Nations' Commission on Human Rights reported (New York Times, February 5) "that Argentina alone accounted for more than half of the 11,000 to 13,000 people who have been reported missing and are assumed to be victims of political terrorism...

...Nonetheless, there are many serious criticisms to make: • Enterprise zones should provide a "trickledown" mechanism, but the benefits won't trickle down to the unemployed, the working poor, and the young...

...Since blacks know to a moral certainty that those goals are far from achieved, they have to conclude that those who would deny them the available roads toward those ends without suggesting alternate means have, at best, no real interest in black rights...

...Anatole France, where are you...

...The problem in all this is that the new middle 159 class Ed Koch represents—atomistic, nationally networked under the tutelage of large corporations and professional associations—seems to have detached itself almost completely from the poor and working masses in which the older middle class was firmly rooted...

...William E. Pollard, director of the AFL-CIO's civil rights department, sees more momentum for the positive trend "if racial discrimination continues to decline in the general workforce...

...The beating heart of the American auto industry is Detroit...

...Why he can be praised only privately by his more enlightened colleagues one learns from a national survey conducted by the AFL-CIO among its members last July...

...On the appointment of conservative judges who are unlikely to overrule local officials...

...This often is the consequence of disastrous management decisions (as in steel, auto, public utilities), of perennial market instability (as in the garment industry), and of more efficient foreign competition —or of a combination of these and other factors...

...In Britain, for example, several local authorities own public centers that house small workshops and the secretarial and accounting services they need...

...Women now constitute the largest new group of unorganized workers in America...

...Yet the whole project came unstuck before anything was ever built...

...Bids for desirable takeover objects often lead to uneconomic waste of capital, and conglomerate forays into unrelated industries to tremendous losses and destruction or deformation of entire industries (most sadly, book publishing...

...These measures are assumed to work as incentives to capital investment, new R & D (research and development), and general economic growth, with a direct stimulative effect on production, and a trickle-down effect on employment and demand...

...The Reagan economic program, much of which has been favorably received by Congress, involves the elimination of benefits targeted to the poor and unemployed—the only income group to be singled out to absorb a significant portion of the budget cuts—while at the same time the major beneficiaries of the tax reductions will be corporations and the rich...

...All this is vitality lost to the public culture of the city...

...These are some of the large, unpredictable events that economists term "exogenous" and profess themselves helpless to incorporate in the largest of econometric models...

...The city hired blacks and hispanics more quickly than, say, the construction industry...

...If it's done with compassion...

...That seems to me a misplaced worry, but it does reflect the enormous importance the Court has come to have in our political process and the generally progressive role it has played since the 1950s...

...In the last election, the Republican Senate Campaign Committee raised just under $20 million, compared to the $1.6 million raised by its Democratic counterpart...

...Seeking the most drastic condemnation of Communists that came to his mind, President Reagan decried their failure to accept belief in "the afterlife...

...In BedfordStuyvesant, neighborhood savings that would have left the community as profits to supermarket chains and savings banks are being captured by local credit unions and collective enterprises (homecare contracts, wholesale food co-ops), reinvested in creating more jobs and building a beautiful nursing home...

...Potentially, this means a whole new sector of housing free of the vagaries of rentcontrol battles, real-estate speculation, arson, and abandonment...

...The manufacturing strength of the United States now is overshadowed by that of Japan and other countries, both in the Far East and in Europe...

...Even if the American auto industry does recover, the process will take at least five years, according to Goldschmidt's Report to the President, The U.S...

...Local labor unions and development organizations must be involved at each stage...

...OPEC and the negative national balance of trade have brought huge foreign investment to New York and, with it, a boom in tourism and entertainment...

...And there will be more of the same...

...How many more will be union members is the big question...

...We expect a lot from Carl Gershman...

...Helms is a senator of importance, having become the de facto floor leader for almost all the conservative single-interest groups, while even such past stalwarts of the right as Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Paul Laxalt, Republican of Nevada, have started to moderate their views now they are in power...

...Koch should be proclaiming this truth and recruiting every possible source of capital and talent from around the country to help them...

...But it is hard to see how they, as devoted supply siders, could resist the almost certain pressures to direct the tax cut toward stimulating saving over spending, and thus slant it toward the higher inconke groups...

...A more serious objection to Kemp-Garcia is that urban enterprise zones could bring to depressed American cities the problems of modernization that one sees in Third World countries...

...This is called political strategy...

...Toward the end of his piece Shabecoff hurriedly refers to some of these matters...

...But not on "defense spending...

...Magazines—LIFE, LOOK, the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and the Ladies' Home Journal —were our television...

...Most of Shabecoffs article was written in the spirit of these embellishments...

...One might guard against this by making the benefits apply only to new companies or to the net expansion, and not to moving costs...

...We like even better a modification suggested by John Herling, the grand old socialist watchdog of the labor movement: "No, don't organize or reorganize...

...When Ed Koch begins to realize what people who are properly organized can accomplish, and when he takes up their cause, curbing gross inequities to give them all the help he can—he'll be doing a better job, and we'll have a better The Reagan administration has a new approach to human rights which, while it won't affect anyone in the U.S., may have some important ramifications for political prisoners around the world...

...Continued transformation of Youngstowns into ghost towns...

...Now editors and news directors around the country are beginning to realize that the Reagan administration's relationship to the black community is a big story that requires sustained attention...

...This conclusion—that comprehensive planning is necessary to make tax reductions useful—also follows from examining the Kemp-Garcia assumption that tax concessions, by themselves, would remove a major deterrent to entrepreneurs...

...Just as lower-income people are most vulnerable to even modest cuts, they're capable of being enormously cheered, mobilized, and trained with relatively modest outside aid, provided they're given the chance to deploy it wisely...

...And the outmigration of capital was abetted by federal welfare and Medicaid reimbursement formulas favoring other regions...

...Or, perhaps, we have been such successful litigants that we have hardly had to be activists...

...In retrospect it seems that New York's earlier middle class took advantage of a unique set of historical circumstances...

...auto-makers can drive the Japanese out of the marketplace without government restraints on imports...

...It has made some younger blacks suspect that the uproar about civil rights in the 1950s and '60s was overblown...

...It is perhaps a little surprising that Chaikin should preen himself on the nature of that cooperation: "Some of the most notorious antiunion manufacturers regularly go up to Capitol Hill with us" to plead his cause and theirs...

...But this assumption comes to seem implausible as soon as one realizes what one has to do to start a small business...

...Opposition no longer comes from within the ranks of the AFL-CIO to the interracial Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), which has sofarenrolled 8,000 members...

...From all I can gather, the U.S...

...The federal budget," aver the authors, "has now become an automatic coast-to-coast soup line" [their emphasis...

...The results are likely to be modest, mainly because of Kemp-Garcia's reliance on small business...

...If capitalists have to be bribed by tax and other government concessions to kindly invest in affordable housing rather than in gambling dens, and if they have to be guaranteed against the consequences of their misinvestments—then they have forfeited their usefulness...

...They are enough to refute his thesis...

...Most blacks don't know, of course, what white people say in the privacy of their country clubs...

...The new UAW officials will inherit a union that even now has fewer auto workers than non-auto workers, just as the steel union has fewer steel workers than non-steel workers...

...Though Reagan himself seems an amiable fellow, a lot of those who rode his coattails don't seem so amiable and neither do a number of people filtering into the Administration...

...Other regions of the country without our burdens or visions could make themselves more attractive...

...Carl Gershman, leader of "Social Democrats USA," has gone to work for the Reagan administration...

...To a much larger extent than is generally realized, not only Lockheed and Chrysler but many other companies also have received a boost in capital through government subsidies, directly in the form of loan guarantees and tax concessions or indirectly through import restrictions...

...He has instituted a credible accounting system and new productivity measures to stretch rather than discontinue services...

...Judges were not made independent for nothing...

...And they know Koch doesn't only threaten and blame...

...Reprinted with the permission of the author, Los Angeles Times Syndicate.—Dec...

...In the meantime, well-trained American consumers will continue to spend 94 or 95 cents out of each additional dollar of take-home pay...

...Raise the import quota and "Buy American...

...The hill would empower local governments to designate deteriorated areas as "local enterprise zones...

...A. H. Raskin, the retired New York Times labor reporter, is troubled by all this...

...During the first seven months of 1980, these investments amounted to $15 billion...

...Moreover, the income gap between mainly white "first tier" unions (petroleum, steel, transportation equipment) and such heavily black or otherwise ethnic unions as the Laborers is increasing...

...Garment shops might be more promising, since their product could be "exported" to affluent America...

...Police protection is necessary to give small businesses a chance to function...

...Does that mean we can still resort to torture to exact the confessions...

...People argue that the American industry should have gone ahead—downsized—because after 1974 and '75 it became obvious where the industry was going," observed Fraser...

...But it is worth asking just how our opposition should be focused...

...Recession would also stiffen even conservative resistance to limitations upon unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other cushions against adversity...

...EDS...

...Making sure that service jobs go the way of factory jobs...

...is still well behind other Western countries in such fields as education in basic skills or preventive health care...

...In their austere pharmacopia, budget cuts must precede tax reduction—leafy vegetables before chocolate sundaes...

...If one compares this with normal returns on manufacturing capital of approximately 10 percent, one becomes skeptical about whether tax manipulations can really bring many jobs to depressed areas...

...Secretary of Defense Weinberger may be known as Cap the knife, but he was not about to cut the triple pensions that generals and admirals (retired) were collecting along with their socialized medical benefits...

...Slow growth exacerbates group tensions, embitters political debate, and threatens the interests of vulnerable groups and regions...

...They chip away, shrink and weaken a movement that, short of the organizational and political "creativity" Bernstein calls for, is in mortal danger...

...The new Health and Human Resources secretary was eliminating family-planning education, but the new first lady had her personal manicurist flown to Washington from California because her nails are brittle...

...The real problem is, 139 Where do these investments go...

...Their average annual earnings are well over a half-billion dollars...

...These disparities are likely to grow as Republicans appeal to a constituency far better equipped to produce monthly party payments, soon to be channeled through such credit cards as Mastercharge and VISA...

...THE EDITORS of poor harvests in the United States and the Soviet Union will send supermarket prices soaring...

...At present, he has no real strategy to deal with Republican control of the Senate and the presidency except accommodation...

...that the time when coasting was enough for scoring victories is gone...

...What will happen on the day after tomorrow when service occupations start to be automated, at least in part...

...What about dunking them in water until they almost drown...

...It wasn't obvious at all," he continued, "because in '76, '77, and '78, we were working at almost total capacity...

...These questions suggest a second, and more important point...

...Well, we want to stop Communism as much as the next fellow, maybe a little more...

...Naturally, the City's survival agenda includes trying to turn investment incentives and federal policies around...

...Wallace, the racist and self-styled populist, truly appealed to white auto and steel workers: "With unemployment he would have swept them all...

...Unable to build a movement, unable to win elections or to work our will through legislative coalitions, we have increasingly resigned ourselves to a passive role: not activists, but litigants...

...Right now the ambassadors of Moderately Repressive Autocratic Governments are being called home for Christmas to advise their juntas on what the new American government will expect of them in the human rights field...

...It might be supplemented by an updated version of FDR's Reconstruction Finance Corporation...

...Or so we were bound to conclude last January 11 upon spotting a Times headline, "Labor and Business Amity," accompanied by a visual in the form of a gaily lighted birthday cake...

...The tax measures, including both across-the-board cuts and the lowering of rates on capital gains and inheritance, will be of most benefit to those on the highest rungs of the economic ladder, particularly the tiny fraction of the population, 2.6 percent, that holds 75 percent of the nation's wealth...

...Using every trick in the bag, including the polygraph (with such "jobrelated" questions as the applicant's sex life), these people busy themselves keeping potentially 158 pro-union people out of work...

...The 25 congressional districts that have lost the most population are all held by urban Democrats, and 10 of them are black...

...Indeed, they like to compare their proposal to John F. Kennedy's successful investment tax credit in 1962, followed up by the income tax cut of 1963-64...

...Many in that generation have recounted the confusion and embarrassment they felt when, representing this country abroad, they were challenged by Africans about their loyalties and identities...

...After all, managers know as well as anyone that women's portion of the dollar for equal work has diminished since the feminist push began...

...THOUGHT, SAID SOMEONE, always lags behind reality, and the kinds of people who write for and read this magazine can't claim that they have readymade answers to all these new problems...

...However, they were jaded by the failure of so many earlier governmental and private plans...

...Monetary moralism will generate frightening contraction...

...The human cost of revitalization—relocation for thousands—would be offset by the benefit of jobs for thousands...

...We will return to this question shortly...

...Wittier and better educated than George Meany, Kirkland seems even more a "hard-liner...

...Won't other units in the AFL-CIO see this as a threat to their interests...

...Greater inflation...

...In the face of these difficulties, the Democratic party vacillated in a fashion guaranteed to insure defeat...

...They too, however, believed in enduring values such as human rights...

...Few seriously believe that its decline heralds equivalent private-sector opportunities...

...And most of those who led America's revolution, the Deists who wrote our Constitution without mention of a deity (and who never once conducted prayers when in the constitutional assembly), had little room in their philosophy for life after death...

...The Fed, sternly advises the memorandum, should be required...

...Otherwise, they might resist working conditions at a later stage of negotiations and, in turn, become scapegoats for failure...

...All that is necessary is a lawyer and an argument...

...Moreover, as we moved through the '70s it began to appear that a smaller and smaller proportion of the educated black population was actively involved with the plight of the poorest blacks...

...Contrary to management expectations, women should not be much more difficult to organize than most men—which is to say, no more than enormously difficult...

...A reorganized business world was unwilling or unable to pay the high taxes and wages our public vitality entails...

...The single-mindedness of Bayard Rustin and Norman Hill in their dedication to this goal has paid off...

...Most of the revenue that does find its way from it into public coffers goes right back into services and amenities for the new class, which requires protection and hothouse nurture because it's skittish and highly mobile...

...When Secretary Haig indicates that somehow a concern about terrorism requires a diminution of conern about human rights, when Korea's strong man is the second head of state to be welcomed to the new White House, and when there is a gushing of tough talk from Washington about the Soviet Union, the American voice is coming from certain clearly defined places...

...Finally, and most important, the new mean mood in the country may force a new dialogue to take place in black America...

...that not only are new and fearful problems besetting the labor movement, but that a powerful array of enemies is out to bust it open—and all that talk about "cooperation" and "amity" isn't going to help...

...Blacks allowed to speak on public issues were expected to please white listeners or risk being branded "uppity" and thus beyond the pale of civilized discourse...

...but the benefits often fail to reach the original inhabitants, who have been driven out in the course of development...

...I would argue that ours are better...

...But terminology, especially in job classification, does make a difference...

...Survivalism without vision becomes gnarled, stunting—itself something to be escaped, even at great risk...

...Now, please: don't start up with your oldfashioned socialist notions that it's bad for one of our boys—well, almost one—to take a job with a reactionary Administration...

...In the House, the 39-member Democratic Conservative Forum has already used its leverage—primarily the threat of voting with Republicans to oust Tip O'Neill as speaker—to gut O'Neill's authority...

...The Chamber of Commerce was revitalized...

...At any rate, this would be the only form of supply-side economics that could be considered desirable...

...But the main causes he elsewhere...

...What a waste, by contrast, in an educational system that keeps perhaps a fifth of our youth on the lowest levels of skills and expectations...

...And the proposed lowering of the minimum wage underscored how equal the sacrifices would be...

...A rapid slide into renewed recession, another genuine possibility, would make tax cuts palatable to unregenerate Keynesians as well as supply siders...

...And there are certain things we know how to do better—air-conditioning, automatic transmission—because we've done it longer and more often...

...That's the good news...

...Six days after the election an enthusiastic supporter of the victors, David Rockefeller, went to Argentina and exuberantly announced that at least one promise would be kept—talk and action on human rights would be toned down...

...industry will be the distribution of the burden to finance this process...

...D now stand to reap tax-shelter proceeds from their recycling of abandoned buildings for low- and moderate-income tenants...

...They'll take our word for it, if we can produce confessions from our political opponents...

...would encourage it as long as we can prove they are a threat to the regime...

...his media popularity has enabled him to transcend at least some of the old machine politics, though he's far from pure on 161 that score...

...If we are confronted with the choice between offering assistance to a moderately repressive autocratic government, which is also friendly to the United States, and permitting it to be overrun by a Cuban-trained, Cuban-armed, Cubansponsored insurgency, we would assist the moderate autocracy," Miss Kirkpatrick was quoted as saying...

...Moreover recent years have seen a steady increase in the influx of foreign capital, and a decrease in American investment abroad...

...We believe he will carry on fearlessly in the great tradition of Ramsey MacDonald...

...Severe economic deterioration would probably prove to be a boon to House Democrats, as long as they avoid responsibility for undermining key Administration policies...

...Walkers and subway newspaper readers become drivers...

...And one new idea is that Gershman can be useful...

...The little people, frightened by a general deterioration the mayor successfully blames on others, would rather keep him and take some of his guff, knowing most of it's reserved for those who want "something for nothing...

...Automobile Industry, 1980 (U.S...

...When blacks argue that even if supply-side economics lives up to Jack Kemp's most optimistic dreams, America's minority poor will still have to be protected from racism, a lack of skills and the ineffi149 ciencies of the economy, they will be told that they are slavishly devoted to old issues and old ideas...

...What is certain is that smaller cars will dominate and the industry must find a way to make a buck on them—by reasserting the "buy up" principle in the form of the "luxury" small car...

...Local utilities could do their share by providing gas...

...If its Board of Governors "accommodates" to increased spending by consumers and larger investment by corporations, it will enlarge the supply of money and credit and thus administer another unneeded shove to inflation...

...Sam Meyers would like a new Reuther Plan, this time geared to manufacturers, say, trains, instead of cars, Good idea—especially if those trains also will not be turned out by robots and computers...

...So we find ourselves wondering whether a "better" mayor with a different temperament and vision would only wind up dancing the same dance...

...In this he reflects the tragic mutation in middle-class aspirations that has led so many New Yorkers to reject their past, instead of understanding that their own interests and peace of mind are linked to the economic well-being and cultural strength of those farther down the social scale...

...I think you've got to say they [the Japanese] are doing a better job than we are in [car] finishes...

...Another woman now heads the education department...

...Things have changed since those days...

...But his savvy takes us only so far...

...They will go their own way, determined more by the (changing) character of the legal profession and the law schools, and by their bargaining with fellow justices, than by any simple right-wing ideology...

...Projected for the full year, this represents a fourfold increase over the $6 billion annual average of the preceding three years...

...Russians who tried to explain the new marketing concept to a Western friend said it worked something like a magazine subscription...

...instead he embraces the presiding supervisor of Hempstead, the closest thing we have to Orange County, Calif...

...The Southerners were openly hostile to black concerns and the Republicans were indifferent, at best...

...Not that they loved the grade-B actor so much...

...At the time, he had almost reached the conclusion that moderate, centrist forces—the "Gerald Ford wing"—were so entrenched in the GOP that conversion to an ideologically pure conservatism was impossible...

...Ed Koch is a survivalist, not a social visionary...

...Black activists and politicians, like other liberals, had grown lazy with the illusion that Roosevelt's political arithmetic was forever...

...Suppose we can't prove it...

...It starts with three assumptions: (1) that steady economic growth is essential to the smooth functioning of a democratic society...

...To deal with inflation, the Administration and many congressional Democrats decided that an immediate attempt to balance the budget was essential...

...They don't require the mobilization of political forces...

...It was very, very difficult for the American auto industry to admit someone was doing something better than it was," said Fraser...

...Once the symbol of concentrated power and wealth, Detroit now is on the ropes, bloodied by a revolution in consumer taste...

...Republicans now are engaged in a debate about legislative strategy...

...We need, says everyone, new ideas...

...Heating- and driving-fuel costs zoomed while oilcompany profits went skyward...