Notes in the News
The Smell of Oil A new ingredient has been added to the stench of the Indochina War. It's beginning to smell a lot like oil. The first signs of what may soon be a fantastic offshore oil boom in...
...Chemical wastes and human sewage pouring from the continent's great rivers and from coastal cities are poisoning its waters...
...Somewhere in the continental plateau of South Vietnam, some of the richest reserves of oil in the world are hiding...
...His 1971 message made no reference to the subject...
...The World Wildlife Federation estimates twenty-five European mammals face imminent extinction...
...Knauer surely would be no less deserving of prosecution than Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who, it will be recalled, earlier described the President's State of the Union Message as nothing less than "the most important document since they wrote the Constitution...
...On the basis of all our data and our experience in the area, let me tell you some more positive statements we can make about him," Dr...
...The economic conversion plans for unemployed defense workers, as offered in the Coalition budget, would spend $1.9 billion in 1972 and 1973, mostly in wage subsidies and retraining benefits...
...Nonetheless, it deserves commendation for adopting the overwhelming majority of the reform proposals and demonstrating that the Party did learn something from the travail and tragedy of 1968...
...I have to assume," Dr...
...Redevelopment and technology are destroying familiar European city vistas...
...For all this, however, the Nixon Administration's grand design is short on money and longer on rhetoric than on fair play or common sense or adequate coverage...
...Furthermore, twenty-five per cent of the first $5,000 of the cost of an illness would come out of the pockets of the insured...
...Instead of forcing free military aid upon friendly countries, they would have to make the hard choice whether they wanted to buy the military equipment or not," Proxmire says...
...He is two months old in that picture and weighs two pounds less than when he was born...
...Wells around Milan must be drilled below 900 feet before they can tap water that won't come out of the faucet with a detergent head...
...We urge the Senator to pursue the matter with full vigor, and explore it in public hearings...
...Poor and developing countries have had free military supplies thrust upon them which they would never buy under the discipline of payment and budgetary controls...
...Jack Geiger of the Tufts-Delta Health Care Center at Mount Bayou, Mississippi, who showed the Committee a photograph of an emaciated infant under his Center's care—a child the physician described as "not atypical...
...If one subtracts these trust funds from the "human resources" segment of the Nixon budget, the defense outlays far exceed the money allotted for human resources...
...Conservation or Conversation...
...Several opportunities to influence the diplomats still remain...
...military outlays around the world...
...Nixon's heart still belongs with the Pentagon and not with the people, no matter what deceptive figures are offered by the White House to make the public think otherwise...
...It seeks an "income support" program that would give a penniless family of four $2,400 a year in 1972 compared to the proposed Nixon family allowance figure of $1,600...
...The U.N...
...It is a minimum program to meet a shocking need, and it deserves complete and immediate support...
...The Coalition asks for a $15.1 billion increase in 1972 for Social Security, employment and manpower training, and public welfare...
...These cuts could be made, the Coalition contends, and the country would still be adequately defended...
...Oil and chemical pollution killed 100,000 guillemots and razorbills in the Irish Sea during 1970 alone...
...One would strengthen the Federal Trade Commission's power to act against deceptive practices...
...But again he wants crucial authority vested in one of his own appointees—in this case, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare...
...Wild plant and animal species are disappearing from the European countryside...
...Even populous bird species are imperilled...
...In that environment, with the water supply, the probability is good that within the first week of his life he was ingesting some of his own excrement—or his brother's, or sister's, or his neighbor's, or an animal's...
...He is co-author with Jerry S. Cohen of the forthcoming book, America, Inc.: Who Owns and Operates the United States...
...It is heavily weighted on the side of butter, in sharp contrast to the $229.2 billion Nixon budget heavily stacked on the side of guns...
...Also in 1969, Mr...
...Nixon in his new message does not even use the phrase "class action...
...The counter-budget offers alternatives, program by program, to the budget presented by the President for fiscal 1972, which goes into effect July 1 of this year...
...Even in underpopulated Sweden, many of the country's 100,000 lakes have been so polluted by chemicals and sewage that the sale of fish caught in their waters is severely punished...
...He added: "You could practically run the State of Wisconsin on what the national Administration squanders on one weapons system overrun...
...Appropriate types of service might be to precede combat forces in mine-sweeping operations or to serve as paramedical aides in helicopter rescue operations...
...Joachim Joesten, a writer for the respected Swiss journal Die Welt-woche, reported last year on the "recent discoveries, purposely played down, of gigantic oil reserves" in Southeast Asian waters...
...They demanded—and the National Committee has agreed—that all enrolled Democrats must be afforded "meaningful and timely opportunities" to take part in the selection of delegates and alternates...
...By that time the program would cost $28 billion a year and wipe out poverty as officially defined...
...But two states—Arizona and Alaska— do not participate in Medicaid, and the rest vary widely in the services they will pay for...
...ECY's only visible international accomplishment was an innocuous declaration of good intentions by the Western European governments...
...Morton Mintz (Mr...
...In addition, some might consider the enactment of FHIP their cue to abandon the program...
...It is also highly objectionable on the grounds that it would perpetuate the double standard of medical purchasing power that already exists...
...he asked...
...At least seventy-five plant species have disappeared from Britain during the past 300 years...
...And those both for and against the Nixon program agree that serious illness drives far too many into bankruptcy...
...In that entire period, less than 1.5 million subsidized housing units have been built...
...As Senator Warren G. Magnuson, Washington Democrat, pointed out, Mr...
...Geiger's area, north Bolivar County, Mississippi, only three of every ten housing units have piped water...
...They had a word for it: hubris...
...It would be erroneous and unfair to suggest that there are no worthwhile proposals in the message...
...As Richard Pollak reported in "The Plunder of Alaska" in The Pro-gressive's March issue, scientists fear that the heat of the oil—at temperatures up to 170 degrees—coursing through lines buried in the frozen ground could thaw the subsoil into a quagmire, and upset Alaska's fragile ecosystem...
...Is the U.S...
...Two—No one can be sent into combat without a declaration of war by two-thirds vote of the Congress...
...It seems certain that the new rules will produce a convention at which non-whites, the poor, women, and young people will have a larger say in the Party's decisions, including the crucial decision of who will head the ticket in 1972...
...that ample provision will be made to challenge delegates who may have been chosen in violation of these strictures...
...3) no Congressional committee exercises effective oversight on military aid, nor does the Congress as a whole exercise any real control...
...Meanwhile, however, almost two dozen leading oil companies—most of them American—have been eagerly pursuing negotiations for oil rights with the Saigon regime...
...The proposed Family Health Insurance Plan (FHIP) for those with incomes under $5,000 has some of the same drawbacks...
...In its current budget, the Nixon Administration proposes to reduce rural housing funds by one third, and to cut more than half of the money authorized for rural water and sewer system grants...
...At that time—sixteen months more remote in time from the 1972 Presidential election—he rightly pointed out that existing Federal laws give private citizens no standing to bring suits as a class against those who defraud them in consumer transactions...
...This is not to say that Government action could stop the flow of migration from rural to urban areas...
...He proposed legislation to permit class-action suits, with the proviso that either the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission first had completed a prosecution...
...It is replete with references to runaway costs, maldistribution of facilities and personnel, the plight of the poor and the middle income group, outmoded state regulatory laws, and the many other defects in our medical system that have been exposed by a wide range of observers for a number of years...
...The creation of the urban crisis has simply led to the rural housing problem being even more neglected...
...He emphasized that the pipeline project, the development of oil shale reserves in Western states, and the possible use of geothermal steam from natural sources in the West "all point up the need for a national energy policy," and that any final decision on the Alaskan project should be viewed in the perspective of such a policy, which has yet to be developed...
...Nixon's own Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Elliot L. Richardson, has provided an apt and revealing description of what may be the Administration's secret view of the whole charade...
...Misleading the Consumer "This is by far the greatest, most important consumer message that any President has released," Virginia H. Knauer, Mr...
...Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature have attacked Lucey for speaking out against the Administration on the war and the enormous military budget, contending that these are national, not state, problems...
...And instead of the present sixty days of fully covered hospitalization—again after payment of an "entry fee"—they would be entitled to only twelve days before being billed a per diem of fifteen per cent...
...According to AFP's Moscow informants, "this discovery is what led the United States to slow down the progressive withdrawal of troops in Indochina...
...that all voters, "regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin," must be given a chance to take full part in Party affairs...
...Nixon permitted no questions at the Governors Conference—a procedure that Lucey told the press was "very slick...
...All three measures are the direct outgrowth of hearings conducted in January by Senator William Prox-mire's Joint Subcommittee on Economy in Government...
...Nonwhites, including blacks, Indians, and Mexican Americans, occupy a disproportionate share of the nation's bad housing," the Committee pointed out...
...This fiscal sleight-of-hand makes it clear that when it comes to budgeting, Mr...
...I should preface this by saying first of all that I am opposed to the draft and have voted against its extension the last two times it came up for renewal...
...The cost of maintaining weapons or training the forces to use them has drawn desperately needed funds from programs to feed, clothe, and house the poor...
...While this contradiction frustrated the conservation lobbies, it also increased their ranks and stiffened their resolve to press for immediate action...
...In the face of traditional Party inertia and widespread predictions that their work would come to naught, they pressed for reforms designed to take the process of delegate selection out of the smoke-filled rooms and musty clubhouses...
...Approved, too, is the proposal that technicians be trained to perform some of the simpler services now rendered by doctors...
...When Congress passed a somewhat similar bill last year, the President vetoed it...
...Surely most of the competitive efforts of the health insurance companies would be focused on selling profitable policies designed to close these gaps...
...The failure to meet the problem of rural poverty, of which housing is the most serious, has been a major factor in the migration of America's rural poor to the big cities," the Committee's report stated...
...UNESCO experts warn that Venice will sink under the Adriatic within seventy years—the hydrologic equilibrium supporting it has been upset by the diversion of rivers on the mainland...
...They do not have to imagine the consequences of arrogant exploitation of natural environments...
...Their information, largely gathered from foreign press dispatches, suggests an ominous new explanation for the Nixon Administration's apparent determination to continue and expand the war...
...Experts estimate that about two-thirds of America's inadequate housing is in rural areas, though these receive less than one fifth of the nation's public housing...
...Some of the President's recommendations met with warm approval by health care reformers...
...Rural Housing Famine The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, headed by Senator George McGovern, South Dakota Democrat, conducted a series of hearings late last year on housing, water, and sanitation needs in rural America...
...World Oil, a trade journal, has predicted that by 1975 Southeast Asia could bring in "a daily average crude production of 400 million barrels," making it by far the world's most lucrative oil region...
...When the budget battle is fought in the Congress in the months ahead, the National Urban Coalition's "counter-budget" for new priorities should furnish a good deal of helpful data and a number of inspiring alternatives to the Pentagon-oriented Nixon budget...
...Acid rainfalls, once rare phenomena, are now frequent throughout Northern Europe...
...Governor Lucey Speaks Out While most of the nation's governors remain silent on the destructive impact of President Nixon's Indochina policy and his defense budget on the national economy, Wisconsin's new governor, Patrick J. Lucey, has been hammering hard at the Administration's continuing distortion of priorities...
...Curbing Arms Aid Three eminently sensible legislative proposals have been advanced in the Senate in recent weeks in an attempt to restore a measure of Congressional control to this nation's massive and mischievous programs of military aid to foreign nations...
...By doing this we can serve our real national interests, save the taxpayers billions of dollars, and help bring peace to a very unpeaceful world...
...The Administration maintains that competition within the health insurance industry would curb such abuse and thus control costs...
...Proxmire's measure also contains a direct prohibition against classifying the names of the countries receiving military aid or the amounts of assistance provided to them each year...
...In Wisconsin, at least, he has been exposing the myth that the war and the Pentagon's huge expenditures are the concern of the national Government only, not the concern of state and local governments...
...At least in Mrs...
...When he approved the raid on Sontay, he failed to free any POWs—but prof-t itably identified himself with their ! cause...
...With one or two exceptions, each of these problems requires an international remedy...
...To his credit, or, possibly, because he bowed to political necessity, the President proposed legislation to fix minimum safety standards for consumer products used in and around households...
...In January, before Morton took office, the Interior Department recommended construction of the $1 billion pipeline despite its admission that the project would cause environmental damage...
...It is also said that Washington received definitive information about this subject before its actions in the Cambodian crisis last spring...
...A twenty-seven nation committee met in Geneva during February to plan the agenda...
...This welcome change is the result of heroic efforts by two Party reform commissions, one headed by Representative James G. O'Hara of Michigan and the other by Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and, more recently,by Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota...
...The result is bound to be beneficial, though whether it will be beneficial enough remains to be seen...
...The reforms do not represent the ultimate achievement in Party democracy...
...Further, only the Justice Department, which he controls through his closest adviser, John Mitchell, could "trigger" a class action suit by completing a prosecution...
...In significant respects the President retreated even from positions he had taken in his first consumer message in October, 1969...
...the FTC could not...
...One major distortion that we hope liberals in and out of Congress will challenge is the Nixon Administration's claim that it is shifting priorities away from emphasis on the military because defense spending in 1972 will be only thirty-four per cent of the budget while human resources spending will account for forty-two per cent...
...In plain English, this means that as the cost of living rose, so, too, would the portion of physician charges which the aged themselves would have to pay should they become ill...
...Senator McGovern, whose Committee has made a notable contribution in calling attention to the persistent scandal of hunger and malnutrition in affluent America, points out that the housing problem is inextricably linked to hunger, disease, and other plagues of deprivation...
...oil industry spokesmen shrug off these reports as "speculative...
...it was the cornucopia of the ancient world...
...Patchwork Health Program On February 18, nineteen months to the day after he had warned of a "massive crisis in health care," the President finally sent Congress a package of suggested remedies...
...And when in his consumer mes-^ sage he continued to resist creation of an independent consumer protection , agency, he presumably knew he would 1 lose, because on Capitol Hill there is massive bipartisan support for such an agency—but presumably he also knew that grateful businessmen would express their appreciation in the form of campaign contributions...
...engagement in Southeast Asia strictly ideological...
...He proposes a "Consumer Fraud Prevention Act" which, however, would permit such litigation "where appropriate"—an obviously rubbery qualifier...
...This approach was not the one urged by the National Commission on Product Safety before it went out of business last summer...
...In theory, those who exhausted their benefits could then turn to Medicaid, the existing health care assistance scheme operated by the states with matching money from Washington...
...Swedish experts contend the Baltic, smaller and with an equally narrow ocean outlet, also will soon become a biological desert...
...He has proposed creation of an Emergency Rural Home Development Administration—an agency that would be authorized to provide housing, sanitation, water, and such community facilities as day-care centers in any town of 25,000 population or less within the next five years to meet the needs of all families and How to Amend the Draft I have been working on a series of amendments to the draft that I am thinking about suggesting, partly with tongue in cheek, partly in bitter irony...
...The Urban Coalition's "counter-budget" took $100,000 and a year to prepare...
...The prepaid group practices many of them have long advocated have been rechristened by the Administration as "Health Maintenance Organizations...
...Edward W. Knappman (Mr...
...It is too complicated to remember, and by no means every provision that demands critical examination is dealt with in this editorial comment...
...The Committee itself, with its archaic composition of two members— one man, one woman—from each state, remains sorely in need of structural reform...
...The big oil companies—confident they would receive early Administration approval of the proposed Alaska pipeline and prepared to start construction this year—were jolted when Secretary Morton told the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee that he was "a long way" from deciding whether or not the 800-mile pipeline was the best way to tap Alaska's oil reserves or even that development of this oil supply was critical to the national interest...
...A cradle-to-grave national health program, financed by payroll taxes and an income tax surcharge, was proposed by the Urban Coalition to begin in 1973 at a cost of $3.3 billion, rising to $64 billion in 1976...
...The nation's health care system is indeed sick, but a mere recital of its many ailments hardly supports the White House claim that it is prescribing definitive treatment...
...I find it ironic," he pointed out to a Wisconsin gathering recently, "that as your governor I have had to spend almost three months reviewing every dollar of agency requests in order to achieve an executive budget of under $2 billion for the biennium, while Wisconsin citizens will be taxed $3 billion in the same period just to support the Pentagon...
...When the President made a bitter-end fight to put G. Harrold Carswell on the Supreme Court, he lost—but \ won support from white Southerners...
...It all smacks of the paranoid fear of "welfare cheating" and is disjointed and confusing besides...
...He added, "I'm not under those pressures...
...4) details of the program are withheld from the public—and from Congress—in the interests of "national security," though it is clear that the real purpose of the secrecy is to spare the Government of the United States and its clients the embarrassment that would come with disclosure...
...Lucey's response has been to insist that the states are intimately and vitally involved...
...When the President recently briefed the National Governors Conference at Washington for thirty minutes, Lucey wanted to raise questions about Laos and the Vietnam war—questions he had addressed to the President in an earlier telegram that went unanswered...
...In fact, past policies—farm, housing, and welfare—have exacerbated the problem by practically forcing millions to leave rural areas for the cities...
...In London, Paris, Florence, Vienna, and other cities the stone facings of ancient buildings are pock-marked from corrosive automobile fumes...
...Conferences were two-for-a-penny, but few rivers were flushed clean, little derelict land was reclaimed, no anti-pollution treaties were initialled...
...To put it another way: if access to decent health care is to become an American birthright, there is a good deal less in these proposals than is claimed for them...
...Leaving aside the fight made against the proviso by Representative Bob Eckhardt, Texas Democrat, and others on the ground that it would impede citizen suits, Mr...
...If [Defense Secretary] Mel-vin Laird and the Pentagon generals had to sell their budget to the people of Wisconsin as I have to sell mine, the war in Indochina would stop in a week...
...Geiger is indeed not atypical—is, in fact, all too typical of the abominable conditions that prevail in many of the nation's rural communities...
...During the last twenty years half of Dublin's Georgian buildings have been torn down...
...We think it is vital," the two Senators explain, "that there be compiled in one place, for all to see, a list of what military aid the United States is giving away, lending, selling, leasing, or otherwise providing foreign countries...
...If there were hundreds of other state and municipal officeholders across the land speaking out boldly, as Governor Lucey is doing, the Nixon Administration might yet be forced to bow to public pressure by withdrawing all U.S...
...And it may be that no one told her that the consumer message made good sense only if seen as a Presidential instrument to maintain the flow of campaign contributions from the business world by using the rhetoric of consumer reforms to abort those reforms...
...Four—No private corporation should be permitted to make a profit on the production of armaments and other military items...
...At this writing, his inquiries have elicited no response...
...Nixon's consumer affairs adviser, told a news conference...
...London European Conservation Year (ECY) was intended by its sponsor, the Council of Europe, to be a turning point...
...From 1960 to 1968, the percentage of nonwhites occupying substandard housing actually increased from twenty-two to thirty-three per cent...
...Looking back over 1970, one frustrated activist quipped that a more fitting title would have been European Conversation Year...
...The conference circuit is buzzing already with a proposal to designate 1975 World Conservation Year...
...This is hardly an attractive prospect for those living on fixed retirement incomes in an inflationary time...
...The insurance industry's performance has varied from mediocre to dreadful and, while no one would blame it for all the ills that ail the system, the industry's willingness to pay doctors and hospitals their asking prices with little or no question has both sent health costs soaring beyond the reach of most Americans and threatened the quality of medical care...
...pollution doesn't...
...Conference on the Human Environment is scheduled for Stockholm in June, 1972...
...Nixon would deny the agency power to impose criminal penalties for willful fraud and to require compensation of defrauded consumers...
...Permanent shrouds of smog drape Europe's industrial valleys and its most beautiful cities...
...Even here, however, Mr...
...According to the Athens chamber of commerce, the Acropolis suffered more damage from smog and jet vibrations over the past twenty-five years than from other causes over the previous twenty-five centuries...
...Since 1933, Congress and a succession of Presidents have repeatedly pledged themselves to the goal of providing every American with a decent home...
...Europeans have reason to be eager for deeds: • A scientific symposium was told recently that "a great ecological change" might transform the nearly-landlocked Mediterranean into a dead sea within the next two years...
...Mintz is a staff writer for The Washington Post who specializes in consumer affairs...
...The message demonstrates, she continued, the President's "commitment to a better world, a world where quality, justice, compassion, and understanding are key elements in the marketplace...
...Senator George McGovern individuals who are not being assisted under present housing efforts...
...Hickel had been under "tremendous pressures" to get the pipeline started, Morton told the committee...
...But Mr...
...The Coalition family income support figure would rise to $4,708 by 1976...
...This spring and summer cars from every European nation will speed down the Autostrada del Sole toward the Greek ruins along the shores of Sicily and Southern Italy...
...This shameful state of affairs is evidence of decades of official indifference and neglect...
...Genoa's sewage washes ashore at Nice...
...Morton's predecessor as Secretary, Walter J. Hickel, a former Governor of Alaska, was dismissed from his Cabinet post last November by President Nixon...
...He had infectious diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition, and anemia...
...She is, after all, a woman who once accounted for her first twenty months of Federal service with such weights and measures as the number of consumer bills pending in Congress, her 154,980 miles of travel ("I think we can round that out to 155,000"), and her five scrap-books of clippings ("which are five inches high...
...The decision of Secretary Morton and the Administration to ponder the Alaska pipe line project long and carefully is an encouraging development and a reflection of the political clout which the environmentalists have begun to demonstrate...
...Taken together, Proxmire says, the three reform bills "should bring our chaotic military aid program under control...
...under this arrangement actual and potential campaign contributors would not find it difficult to apply heat to HEW through the White House...
...Coalition chairman Sol Lin-owitz describes its basic purpose as "the reordering of national priorities" to remove "the inequities which caused men to riot and burn and kill...
...The forward steps in the message, as Representative Benjamin S. Rosenthal, New York Democrat, justly said, "are outweighed by half-steps, side-steps, and back-steps to confuse and mislead the consumer...
...I am against involuntary servitude, and I intend to again vote against the extension of the draft this year...
...Europeans have every incentive to demand that these opportunities should not be wasted...
...Despite the Federal Government's massive efforts at compiling myriads of statistics, no reliable index exists of the nation's housing need—a statistical gap that is itself, as the Committee noted, an indication of offical neglect...
...Nixon spoke of the need for legislation to assure the efficacy, reliability, and safety of some 5,000 types of medical devices—everything from emergency respirators to bone pins, heart pacemakers, and intrauterine devices for birth control...
...Too many political leaders, as Senator J. W. Fulbright recently pointed out, lag far behind public opinion on the war...
...This would insure that no man is denied the opportunity of a few youthful years before his life is placed in danger by forced military service...
...Proxmire discovered that some $700 million in "Food for Peace" money had been diverted to arms purchases in the last six years...
...seven out of ten have outhouses, and only half have heat for the entire house...
...The two commissions, whose work has recently been ratified and adopted as official Party policy by the Democratic National Committee, labored for two years to remedy some of the more glaring defects made manifest at the disastrous 1968 convention in Chicago...
...U.S...
...They didn't...
...The soil and forests seemed inexhaustible...
...That step would be to put an end to military aid, entirely and at once...
...It proposes $60.2 billion for defense in 1972 compared to President Nixon's $76 billion, and asks that defense outlays be scaled down to $50 billion by 1975...
...The Administration proposes to pick up the $5.30 a month they now pay to help them meet doctors' bills ($5.60 after July 1), but would exact in return what a triumph of Nixon phrase-mongering calls the "dynamic deductible...
...Our environment is such that many of his brothers and sisters literally die before they are born...
...an equal number may vanish before the end of the century...
...Europe, perhaps mankind, has inherited that mixture of insolence and arrogance also...
...In non-metropolitan areas, some 34,000 communities lack modern water facilities, and 44,000 lack modern sanitation facilities...
...forces from Indochina by Christmas...
...The decision, he indicated, might be postponed until next year...
...The Democrats Reform When the Democratic Party convenes next year, at a time and place still to be determined, to nominate a Presidential candidate, the choice will be made by delegates more truly representative than ever before of the Party's national constituency...
...Senator Clifford P. Case, New Jersey Republican, and Proxmire are co-sponsors of a bill that would require the President to submit an annual report to Congress on all aspects of American foreign military and economic assistance programs...
...Judith Randal (Judith Randal, medical editor of The Washington Star, won the Lasker Award for distinguished writing in the field of medicine several years ago...
...The message is remarkable for its frank recognition of the shortcomings of American medicine—many of its provisions could have been written by the most outspoken progressive...
...The purpose would be to demonstrate the full confidence of Government decision-makers in the nation's commitment...
...European Conservation Year underscored the urgent need for international action but failed to undertake it...
...Any decision we make is not going to be made on the economic-profit-and-loss basis of the industry involved," he said, but will be based on "national need...
...If the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act applied to political bombast, Mrs...
...It is to say that Government policies could make the migration less severe...
...Geiger said, "that he is not premature and he is not dead...
...Finally, Proxmire has introduced a comprehensive Foreign Military Assistance Reform Act, which would establish (or re-establish) the clear jurisdiction of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee over military aid authorizations and transfer the administration of the program from the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of State...
...Knauer's case one must suspect that the purity of her adulation of the President is not unalloyed by self-delusion...
...The Coalition called for scrapping of the SST, and a halt to ABM development and the equipping of intercontinental nuclear missiles with multiple warheads—weapons systems whose costs are projected to reach astronomical heights...
...Presenting the White House proposals to a Labor and Public Welfare subcommittee headed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose alternative health security bill is more rational, more comprehensive, and—if the dollars to be spent by the private and public sectors are considered as a unit— possibly cheaper, Richardson said: "I am firmly convinced, to recall a phrase used by Jefferson, that we have found the right-sized patch—neither too large nor too small—to cover the hole...
...it asked for an independent commission to set and enforce product-safety standards...
...Agence France Presse, the French news service, quoting unnamed "sources" in Moscow, reported early in February that "oil fields comparable at first estimation to those of the Near East have been discovered under the alluvial plain of Lower Menam, in the middle of which is Bangkok, as well as in the Mekong Delta and along the shores...
...There is no certainty, they insist, that oil in marketable quantities will actually be found off Vietnam—and if it is, production is several years off...
...The first signs of what may soon be a fantastic offshore oil boom in South Vietnamese waters have received scant attention in most of the American news media, though several peace organizations—and especially the California-based Another Mother for Peace—have been trying for months to call attention to this most significant development...
...Even the existing housing programs, inadequate as they are, are not being funded to the level authorized by Congress...
...Britain's smog returns to earth as Norway's acid rainfalls...
...Too many governors, Congressmen, and Senators are guilty of the crime of silence that permits the war to go on...
...If the Alaskan North Slope oil reserves are needed, Secretary Morton advised the Senators, "this means transportation should be developed compatible to the environment...
...reform...
...European government experts will "exchange views" in Prague this April under the auspices of the Economic Commission for Europe...
...Three—In all American combat operations each member of Congress and each member of the President's National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall devote a period of time to front-line combat duty...
...This strikes us as rather naive...
...A more even housing policy could lead to an easing of both the rural and urban crisis...
...How right he is, is proven daily by the desperate financial plight of state, county, and local governments across the country as they find themselves unable to meet urgent public needs because billions of dollars in tax resources are siphoned off to pay for the war in Indochina and huge U.S...
...Supplies of potable fresh water are dwindling in many areas...
...Even in that state he is a lucky survivor...
...A Creative Budget In a valiant attempt to stimulate public and Congressional debate over the Government's neglect of the nation's basic needs, the National, Urban Coalition has proposed a "new priorities" budget of $230.8 billion for fiscal 1972...
...The real need," Senator McGovern observed, "requires that level of output each year, not each third of a century...
...In the course of those hearings, the Wisconsin Democrat discovered that (1) no one seems to know precisely how much is being spent on military aid (estimates ranged from $4.8 billion to $7 billion a year) ; (2) jurisdiction over the program has gradually slipped from the Department of State to the Pentagon...
...For the employed with annual incomes of $5,000 or more there would be deductibles and charges each time a patient went to the hospital...
...if the Nixon Administration has done any serious thinking about conversion from a war to a peace economy, it has kept it a secret...
...Brilliantly engineered, the superhighway spans mile-wide but waterless river valleys and winds across gaunt and soil-less mountain ranges...
...Government writs stop at frontiers...
...Unfortunately, reports have indicated great effort is going into bowdlerizing a "direction-setting and inspirational" declaration, the object being to make it too vague to vex any member state...
...The Proxmire bill would phase out the present $2.5 billion military aid grant programs run by the armed services, and convert all other grant programs to a sales or credit-sales basis...
...But while most employed Americans and each of their dependents would be entitled by law to as much as $50,000 worth of coverage in the event of a catastrophic illness, those low-income families enrolled in FHIP—whose premiums would be paid either wholly or in part by Federal subsidies, according to their assets—would get far less protection...
...they have only to open their eyes to the dramatic evidence found on their own continent...
...The Greeks were unconcerned that the earth had stored almost all its fertility within six inches of its surface...
...Geiger continued...
...Air pollution is costing the British economy $1 billion each year, according to a recent report...
...The National Committee, still under the disproportionate influence of the smaller states, rejected the fair and equitable formula for state-by-state delegate allocation proposed by the O'Hara commission in favor of a formula based in part on the distorted apportionment of the Electoral College...
...One is tempted to believe so in view of all this eagerness: Oil companies had begun investing at the same time that President Nixon was promoting 'Vietnamization.' " In a more recent dispatch, Decornoy quoted a publication of the South Vietnamese Council on Foreign Relations to this effect: "The face of Southeast Asia might become unrecognizable in the next ten years, and the Vietnam war might undergo a significant transformation if South Vietnam's hopes in oil become a reality...
...Among the witnesses who testified was Dr...
...Prompted by a letter-writing campaign mounted by the peace groups, Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been seeking more information about the oil situation from the State Department...
...the attraction of urban living is historic and will continue...
...However, aides have said a bill would be forthcoming...
...there are...
...But the concept is identical...
...In addition, the Coalition charts new priorities for a five-year period...
...Perhaps the crowning insult to equity, however, has been reserved for the twenty-one million elderly who depend on Medicare as their hedge against the frailties of old age...
...Nobody with any sense," one Italian scientist commented, "would eat shellfish in Italy...
...Another danger is that breaks in the line would release huge pools of oil that would ruin vast areas for any recreational or productive use...
...Each fall millions of migrating songbirds are slaughtered by Italians who have an acquired taste for larks and thrushes...
...But to make some points that need to be made, here are the amendments I intend to offer if the draft is extended: One—No one under thirty can be drafted...
...Scattering the lizards which infest dead cities of fallen pillars and entablatures, a few tourists may look up and wonder why the Greeks, from whom Europeans have inherited their concepts of beauty and their brilliance at engineering, would choose such a bleak, inhospitable landscape for their cities and temples...
...The Coalition also proposes a public service employment plan providing 250,000 jobs in fiscal 1972 at a cost of $1 billion and rising to $4.5 billion and one million jobs by 1975...
...In Dr...
...The results of the McGovern Committee's investigation have now been summed up in a report—Promises to Keep: Housing Need and Federal Failure in Rural America—which makes it clear that the sorry case history cited by Dr...
...The happiest outcome would be eventual rejection of the pipeline by the Government in favor of preserving much of Alaska from the ecologically destructive greed that has ravaged so many other states...
...Paradoxically, the nation's urban crisis, which has drawn attention away from the needs of rural America, has been aggravated by the unchecked spread of rural blight...
...The Colosseum has withstood the natural elements for 1,700 years but the rumble of Roman traffic threatens to shake it down...
...The sleazy history of oil and politics is replete with instances where the public interest—and human lives —were wantonly sacrificed for the sake of profits...
...Hot Oil Cooled Off What the oil industry wants, the oil industry usually gets, but it recently suffered a surprising rebuff at the hands of Rogers G. B. Morton, the new Secretary of Interior...
...The first of the pending bills, sponsored by Proxmire and three other Democratic Senators—Mike Mansfield of Montana, George McGovern of South Dakota, and Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota—would simply eliminate the most obnoxious abuse uncovered by the Proxmire hearings: the use of "Food for Peace" funds for military purposes...
...In the case of any item of information to be included in the report that the President, on an extraordinary basis, determines is clearly detrimental to the security of the United States, the Case-Proxmire bill provides that he shall explain in a supplemental report to the Congress why publication of each specific item would be clearly detrimental to the security of the United States...
...We agree, but we would modestly suggest one further step that would, in our judgment, serve the national interests still better, save even more billions of dollars, and bring us closer yet to peace...
...The pay-off could be fantastic...
...Nixon somehow managed to ignore "the one area of perhaps the greatest consumer frustration and inequity: auto insurance abuses...
...withdrawal from Indochina by December 31 this year, but the chances of adoption of the McGovern-Hatfield proposal to accomplish that purpose are considered poor indeed...
...And the National Committee members, in a petty display of self-interest, assured themselves of places at the Convention despite recommendations that all delegates should be chosen by enrolled Democrats next year...
...We got rid of the tired old men in Washington all right, but not the tired old ideas" In numerous other ways this "greatest, most important consumer message" resembled a modern breakfast cereal —over-advertised, sugar-coated, and low in nutrition...
...Knappman is an American writ-er and editor now living in England and traveling on the continent...
...The probability is good . . . that he was taken home to a deteriorating shack with a contaminated water supply, a sunshine privy, a crumbling ceiling, open windows, holes in the walls patched with newspaper, inadequate heat, to share an environment with three or four other people per room and countless flies, mosquitos, roaches, and an occasional rat...
...For example, as the Gallup Poll discloses, seventy-three out of 100 Americans now want U.S...
...In the event, it seemed only a good talking point...
...only one in four has a bathtub or shower...
...Thucydides wrote that Magna Grecia was a lush garden...
...Jacques Decornoy, Southeast Asia editor for the distinguished French daily, Le Monde, reported in January that American oil companies are investing heavily in Indochina explorations, and wondered: "Did oil groups receive some sort of firm assurance from Washington about the determination of the United States to 'hold' Indochina, and in particular South Vietnam...
...Granted, some of its tenets are laudable: the provisions for preventive care for the well child and free immunizations, for instance...
...The ratio between the two has been distorted, beginning with the Johnson Administration, by incorporating in the budget billions of dollars of Social Security and highway trust funds—a huge total that had not been part of the budgets submitted by previous Presidents to the Congress...
Vol. 35 • April 1971 • No. 4
