Looking to the Future

...2) a war on the war machine...

...And the Wall Street Journal, in its usual thorough way, is uncovering the mounting wrath of the "other" ethnics—white immigrant descendants...

...2. Military Expenditure...

...Birth control, at best, is a long-range solution, not likely to keep the population below 300 million by the end of the century...

...In the old cities, with their overcrowding and overheated politics, mayoral rivals indulge in empty promises about how they would, if given the power and the money, solve the crisis...

...The one question is: Shall this occur haphazardly, in response to profit-making, or rationally, in response to social need...

...Three campaigns were proposed: 1) a war on wealth...

...Newsday, a newspaper published in New York's Nassau County, devoted a whole Sunday section to the yeomanry of Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties...

...The tax revolt of Mr...

...Although the dialogue is now limited to the Cabinet Task Force on Oil Import Controls, it could serve as the basis for a Congressional study of monopolistic "price control...

...In addition to the one by the Committee on Urban Growth Policy, there is the earlier report of the Advisory Committee on Intergovernmental Relations...

...There are other forces at work...

...See "The Working Class Rediscovered," NL, July 21...

...I enclose...

...The law is a simple one: Arms money swells demand without adding to supply—ergo, inflation...

...resulting in a net loss of $1.24 a week—not counting local taxes...

...Granting deep Federal change, there remain other systems of "taxation" that would be untouched...

...duced a 30-year plan to create 110 new cities...

...For on that day two agencies of the Federal government came out with contrary recommendations on the 10-year-old system of oil import limits...

...Because the need for new population centers is so patent and pressing, private money will ultimately move in that direction...

...The danger is that just as it has taken too long to recognize the realities, too little will be done even if the general approach suggested in this series is followed...

...The largest builder accounts for only 4 per cent of annual dwelling unit production...

...Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties and several heavy hitters?Left and Right—on the Hill...

...This year The New Leader is again a highly valued and popular teaching aid in colleges and universities around the nation...

...He is simply complaining louder about his poor estate because the myth-makers and policy-movers assumed he was sufficiently well-off to be forgotten...

...This excessively neat reduction is, of course, a rhetorical overstatement...

...The studies are at hand...

...Rural America is not interested...

...By establishing monopolies producers or distributors tax the consumer, limiting supplies and fixing prices to maximize profit...

...The private builders, for whom such centers should be a profitable undertaking, are hopelessly fragmented, each parochially wrapped up in local construction...

...The New Leader College Department, 212 Fifth Ave., New York, N. Y. 10010 Please send me subscriptions to The New Leader for the Fall Term 1969 at $3.00 per term per subscription...

...If you are not already using The New Leader in the classroom, take advantage of this special offer now by returning the coupon below...

...Thus it is they who are discovering the plight of the worker...

...While at first this will appear to be good and will be widely welcomed, in the long run it will prove disastrous...

...The New York Times, meanwhile, has been trotting around the boroughs surrounding Manhattan to record the woes of urban villagers...

...The abm battle was only one phase of a clash between Congress and the Armed Forces ending in a tie score of 50-50 in the Senate, followed by passage of the audit amendment (47-46...

...The latest "discoverer" of the workers is Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York City...

...The three campaigns are really one war...

...These should now be turned into legislation, starting with the creation of a "mechanism" in the Executive branch "to serve as a focal point of policymaking on matters dealing with urban growth policy...

...Middle has forced Congress to look to the top for revenue...

...The Democratic party needs it, for—as Richard Goodwin suggests —at present it is "little more than an institutional mechanism through which individuals hope to acquire public office...

...The war on wealth is not intended to end wealth, but to ensure a more equitable distribution of income...

...TIE NEW LEADER Every semester scores of teachers and thousands of students use The New Leader as source material in Political Science, Government and History courses...

...Second, they are likely to seek tax incentives, once more diverting public money into private profit...

...The Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill has launched a major drive for tax reform...

...without the strength to play its world role, but to eliminate waste and cut back the arms race...

...Peter Schrag wrote a fierce piece entitled "The Forgotten American" ("You better pay attention to the son of a bitch before he burns the country down") for the August issue of Harper's...

...metropolitan problems seem remote, and in any case it wants to keep the urban hordes far away...

...Consider the major items: 1. Income Redistribution...

...Hence, the need for a policy of urban growth...

...Public investment has to make the first move if new cities are not to duplicate the crises of the old...

...The war on the cities is not a plan to destroy urban America, but to create new towns and cities to help relieve the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the metros...

...Here, then, is an agenda for several generations...

...This, according to columnists Frank Mankie-wicz and Tom Braden, may well be more important historically than the vote on Safeguard, since it opens Pentagon books to legislative review...

...But military expenditure is unique in one crucial sense: It does not create consumer goods to help balance the rising demand caused in large part by the manufacture of defense hardware...

...While these moves are all modest, they tentatively point in a new direction...

...Where shall we put these people...

...The war on the war machine is not designed to leave the U.S...

...The worker, to be sure, has always been aware of his nonafflu-ence, if only because his wife never stops nagging him about it...

...This is another factor contributing to inflation...

...The tax debate has been the first major confrontation between Republicans in the White House and Democrats on the Hill over the issue of income distribution...

...Our country needs it...

...Finally, the creation of a new and open America could provide the employment to pick up the slack when war production is cut back...

...As the Times subhead put it, he urged "Negro Compassion for Blue-Collar Whites" in a speech last month before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, and went on to observe: "Millions of working men and women, once thought of as part of an affluent society, are discovering something different...

...The entrepreneurs, lacking the guidance of an overall national plan, will merely add new confusions to old chaos...

...If liberal leadership fails to act, there will still be action—but the kind that is almost sure to become a problem itself...

...If the Democrats are to be the political force of the future, they must think—and act?in terms of the future...

...Each percentage point (up or down) will be won in hard battle, denounced as confiscatory by conservatives, and hailed as revolutionary by liberals—while actually altering little in dollars and cents...

...Third, they will expect an early return on their investment, thereby saddling infant communities with the burden of constant debt...

...The surplus could continue to dump itself into the suburbs, but that would just compound the difficulties of megalopolis...

...Ill Name of instructor Name of college or university Address...

...The average wage of a worker with a family of four rose by $14.74 between 1965-69...

...Hence, on those two fronts we find activists at hand...

...Our student rate represents a remarkable value ?$3.00 per term per student for a minimum order of five subscriptions sent to the instructor...

...Since August 14, 1969, Congress has had a rare opportunity to start moving on monopoly practices...

...Income redistribution could assuage black fury without arousing white fear...

...Symbols sans substance...

...Minimum order: 5 subscriptions...

...second, even a full measure would miss...

...after 1965, it began to climb, reaching an increase of more than 5 per cent in 1968...

...The division between poor and unpoor, between black and white, would be further intensified, with the poor and black remaining stuck in the core as the more mobile move into suburbs and exurbs...

...Nixon's message on overpopulation easily provides the rationale for a policy of urban expansion...

...And new cities could relieve the population pressures on old centers while creating more wholesome ecologies in both...

...However, this increase was cut down by Federal taxes ($4.80) and by inflation ($11.18...

...Tyler, Assistant President of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, is the author of many books, including the forthcoming The Great American Riots...

...The urban crisis—dramatized by such mayors as Minneapolis' Arthur Naftalin, New Haven's Richard Lee, Pittsburgh's Joseph Barr, Detroit's Jerome Cavanagh, Omaha's A. V. Sorenson, Denver's Thomas Currigan and other great and good men who have given up in despair—has prodded the best minds in the urban-affairs business to think anew...

...Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin each did a hard-fisted article for New York magazine on the fears and frustrations of the working man, who is depicted by the media as an affluent snob and treated by the politicians like a poor slob...

...The core cities can't take them, and those with some means don't want the core cities...

...The Federal government, which will have to take the initiative, is under such pressure from existing cities it cannot even begin to think about allocating billions for new urban centers...

...Tax reform toward this end is likely to be doubly inadequate...

...Earlier in the series, it will be recalled, we noted the growing awareness that the middle class is not affluent at all, that its desire to fight or flee is rising, and that the only sound strategy is to unite all laboring people (poor and near poor) across color lines...

...Precisely because there is no ready backing for new cities, liberals in Washington must take up the challenge...

...Congress has ended Pentagon privacy with a downright revolutionary amendment to the Administration's abm proposal providing for a quarterly audit of defense contracts by the General Accounting Office...

...Though the report on new cities is still only a proposal, it carries with it the prestige of organizations like the U.S...

...The defense budget increases buying power by providing jobs, in itself a desirable objective...

...Added funds for social purposes could provide the capital for new cities...

...Reforms in the next four years may cut the oil depletion allowance or increase inheritance taxes or set a minimal rate for millionaires, but are not likely to seriously challenge the entrenched privilege and wealth behind any of these...

...What candidate would dare run with the admission that the mess is unmanageable and that the only hope is a national plan to thin out megalopolis by reversing the population flow into new areas...

...Long overdue is a Congressional investigation of monopolies in the U.S.—not in the simple old terms of concentrated ownership, but of concentrated pricing...

...These monopolies rest on many pillars: exclusion of imports, patent control, licensing of utilities, prohibitive advertising costs, long-term massive investment, leasing of lands, awarding of contracts, and—above all—the supersophisticated skill of corporate lawyers who have virtually relegated antitrust laws to ancient history...

...But on the third front—new towns and cities —there is no natural army of sponsors...

...3. New Cities...

...By the year 2000, we will have added another 100 million to our population...

...Interestingly, during the last six months there has been visible action on all three fronts...

...Recent installments have analyzed the frustrations of the contemporary American middle class, previous efforts to reform the two-party system, the 1969 mayoral primary contests in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York, the relations between the poor and organized labor, and the nature of the liberal coalition and need for its revival...

...3) a war on the cities...

...The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department wants to end the system because it "imposes serious costs to the economy, higher prices to consumers," and is not needed for "national security...

...An Interior Department staff study claims the ending of quotas would imperil national security...

...and the National Committee on Urban Growth Policy has introIn this piece, the last of his series, Gus Tyler sums up the essence of his "Agenda for the Democrats": redistribution of wealth, reducing military spending, increased public planning for new urban areas...

...They are finding, just as the blacks said a decade ago and the college students five years ago, that the system is not working for them...

...First, the measures are apt to be too restricted...

...Desk copy free...

...Reluctantly, I disclaim sole credit for these promising seedlings...

...Supporting the war on wealth and the war on the war machine arc natural constituencies: taxpayers, consumers, wage earners...

...In the same six months, America has been rediscovering the working class—especially its much maligned white component...

...Together they may head off the mounting racial tensions that could explode urban America...

...Liberal Democrats have had fewer hang-ups about lashing out at Nixon than at Johnson, and some who are not so liberal have joined in for partisan reasons...

...Between 1960-64, the Consumer Price Index rose about 1 per cent each year...

...The high cost of military hardware, especially when the stuff turns out to be shoddy and overpriced, has made many wonder whether the taxpayer is not being skinned by old-fashioned wartime profiteers...