NOTES IN THE NEWS
Notes in the News Lavelle Case Whitewash The Senate Armed Services Committee has wound up its investigation of the "unauthorized" air strikes conducted last fall and winter against North Vietnam...
...All this was unacceptable to the Nixon Administration and to the United States Chamber of Commerce and sundry other special interests that lobbied energetically against the legislation...
...Pension Reform Failure Among the measures that fell victim to the Senate's headlong rush toward adjournment last month was the Retirement Income Security for Employes Act, which would have provided a modicum of reform and regulation for the chaotic and abuse-riddled private pension systems on which many millions of Americans depend in their old age...
...Premier Davis said that "cities do not belong to the automobile" but to people...
...Although I do not remember any of the Secretary's comments verbatim," Lavelle told Stennis, "the essence as I understood them was: Don't come into Washington and ask for additional approvals or authorities, it was an inopportune time...
...Many thousands of poor and working-class families have been subjected to evictions and foreclosures in recent years, while banks, insurers, and real estate speculators have reaped huge profits...
...Sergeant Lonnie D. Franks, the Air Force intelligence specialist who blew the whistle on the raids by writing to Hughes, says at least 200 officers knew about the attacks...
...Their efforts were rewarded in the Finance Committee, which insisted on reviewing the legislation after it came out of Labor and Welfare, and which succeeded in stripping the bill of all its reform provisions...
...Let's remember who chose to perpetuate it...
...Two black native sons who did return home to help were recently sworn in as mayors of their respective cities...
...It can happen to generals, too...
...Prichard was lucky to get someone so qualified and with so many outside contacts...
...The measure that finally reached the Senate floor was a travesty, and it was mercifully killed in the adjournment scramble...
...Ford left the South in 1964 to work as a recruiter for the Boy Scouts in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and he joined Kennedy's staff in 1968...
...Inept and corrupt administration of government housing programs has produced scandals in a score of cities...
...We have it in our power to raise the standard of living and the realizable hopes of millions of our fellow citizens," the President said in 1969...
...The Act, drafted after three years of work by the Senate Labor and Welfare Committee, stopped far short of the sweeping reforms proposed by Nader, but it would have dealt with some of the more egregious problems he cited by giving employes an irrevocable right to their pensions after a minimum period of service...
...The Chiefs provided assurances that they "would not question our aiming points [targets] on protective reaction strikes," and that "in the event of adverse publicity we could expect full backing from the JCS...
...He pledged financial assistance for rapid transit services for Toronto...
...by requiring employers to set aside enough money to pay all benefits owed to workers...
...The nation's 112 million automotive vehicles produce choking smog and monumental traffic jams and an incredible weekly toll of dead and injured along the nation's highways...
...He recalled that he had discussed the first of the raids, in November, 1971, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer...
...As Ralph Nader pointed out in the October, 1971, issue of The Progressive, "Never in history has such a huge agglomeration of funds provided so little benefit and disappointed so many millions of Americans...
...Strangled in Concrete For decades the highway lobby and its component, the auto industry, have kept a cycle going that each year escalates higher and higher: the more cars and trucks sold, the more pressure to build highways...
...Citizens raised funds for legal fees to develop the case against the project...
...Both men are former aides of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy...
...Ford's task is much easier than Cooper's since Tuskegee is eighty per cent black, with blacks in virtual control of every political office in the area...
...There, buckling under the lash of the highway lobby—a powerful array of auto and tire manufacturers, oil refineries, truck operators, and related industries—the House killed the proposal without even debating it...
...For the sake of those who depend on the pension funds, and those who contribute to them but are likely to be robbed of the full benefits to which they are entitled, a new reform bill should be high on the agenda of the next Congress...
...Make maximum use of the authorities we had and he'd support us in Washington...
...air activity was supposed to be curtailed—or whether he was merely executing policy laid down by his military superiors, and perhaps by his civilian superiors as well...
...It was a 314-page legislative monstrosity, replete with regressive provisions, that would have produced much more mischief than benefit...
...It has never compromised its absolute pacifism...
...The net effect of these provisions would have been to reinforce the barriers that now keep low-income housing out of the suburbs and in the central cities...
...Notes in the News Lavelle Case Whitewash The Senate Armed Services Committee has wound up its investigation of the "unauthorized" air strikes conducted last fall and winter against North Vietnam by administering a slap on the wrist to retired Air Force General John D. Lavelle and confirming the appointment of his former commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, to the post of Army Chief of Staff...
...the more highways and expressways opened, the greater the encouragement for more cars and trucks, which in turn bring more highways, and so on and on...
...But many whites think Mayor Cooper can save the city...
...The highways eat up green spaces and billions of tax dollars while far more urgent needs for mass transit, education, health care, welfare, and environmental programs are neglected...
...In the area of consumer protection, real estate interests and title insurers attempted through the bill to undermine the feeble safeguards that now exist against exorbitant closing costs for home purchasers, and against the kickback and collusion schemes that are rife in the industry...
...Though the Committee conducted its inquiry behind closed doors, enough of the record has been made public to suggest that it has produced an unconscionable whitewash of a case carrying the most alarming implications...
...So the cities will continue to strangle in concrete and congestion and smog, and the expressways will ravage more and more of the countryside...
...I think we'll see some sound financial management for the first time in this city...
...The Senate voted to waste five years on "tests" that will certainly prove what we already know—that the welfare system is in desperate need of overhaul...
...Milton Mayer (Mr...
...Nixon leveled at the welfare system in 1969—that it has fostered the breakup of families, that it has provided inadequate benefits to the needy, that it has deepened dependency rather than relieving it—were (and are) accurate enough...
...Native Sons Return Each year many young Southern blacks with leadership potential leave Dixie for an education or other roads to opportunity up North...
...In 1962-63 the same consultant's opinion was ' that the project was feasible...
...House Banking and Currency Chairman Wright Patman, Texas Democrat, acknowledged that the bill produced by his Committee after two years of consideration failed "to reflect any meaningful effort to bring reform and new directions to Federal housing programs which have been all but crippled by abusive and fraudulent real estate and transaction practices...
...Come home, young black man and woman," Cooper said in an interview...
...He has betrayed his own promises, betrayed the fourteen million Americans who depend on inadequate welfare benefits and the many millions more who need, but cannot obtain, even minimal assistance, betrayed the nation's traditional commitment to social justice...
...There was a brief period of hope recently that the cycle could be slowed...
...The Senate, for the first time in the sixteen-year history of the Federal Highway Trust Fund, proposed to divert a part of that sacrosanct hoard...
...Instead of addressing itself to these problems, the omnibus housing bill would have added to them...
...The decision to halt the project, he said, was for the sake of "the vast numbers of those who will inherit the cities and the environment we are now creating...
...It has never compromised its commitment to carry the Cross that faithful and faithless alike are satisfied to adore or ignore...
...The close vote by which the Senate approved the $800 million transfer to rapid transit represented a dramatic breakthrough—until the amendment reached the House of Representatives...
...They have defied man's will—including the U.S...
...The charges Mr...
...When agreement had been reached, however, the President said "no," and reform was killed...
...Dorothy Day Dorothy Day is seventy-five years old November 8—which may some day be another Saint's Day in the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church...
...It was the first time in Canada's history that a provincial cabinet had overruled the decision of a major municipal body...
...Cooper and Ford later did political work for Mayor John Lindsay...
...Citizens, if they are determined enough, can build an effective anti-highway lobby, as the Toronto experience discussed on Page 8 demonstrates...
...In a 48 to 46 squeaker the Senate voted to give the states discretion to spend up to $800 million a year out of the $7.5 billion annual fund for the development of subway, rail transit systems, and bus lanes, and the purchase of buses in a determined effort to relieve highway congestion and air pollution...
...an amendment proposed by Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Republican Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, which Volpe opposed, to raise the total earmarked for mass transit to $2.4 billion was defeated 60 to 18...
...The program carried with it some requirements that critics properly viewed as demeaning and coercive...
...But there are strong indications that the Lavelle affair involves much more than the issues of civilian authority and military insubordination that have dominated comment in Congress and in the press...
...Even the $800 million represented a cautious compromise...
...Economic power means the whites will have to cooperate with us—there's no alternative left for them...
...and by creating voluntary arrangements for the transfer of certain pension benefits from job to job...
...Senator Harold E. Hughes, the Iowa Democrat who brought the Lavelle case to public notice after receiving information from an Air Force enlisted man, put the question this way: "Was the Lavelle incident just one factor in a whole string of factors, orchestrated out of the White House, to undercut the peace talks and thus allow more political elbow room for increasing the military pressure...
...She would say, "Men must eat...
...He has lectured widely in this country and abroad and is the author of several books, including "If Men Were Angels...
...The new Congress should look at the housing crisis problem by problem, and draft separate measures designed to eliminate abuses and provide housing opportunities...
...This proposal, sponsored by Senator Edmund Muskie, Maine Democrat, and Senator John Sherman Cooper, Kentucky Republican, was backed by Treasury Secretary John Volpe...
...Three years ago, President Nixon submitted to Congress a proposal for "total welfare reform" which he described, with characteristic modesty, as the most significant piece of social welfare legislation to come down the pike in more than three decades...
...In 1969, Toronto citizen groups began to campaign against the project, a depressed roadway that was planned to cut through three parks and wild ravines, the only open space that Toronto, a city of 2.2 millions, has left for recreational use in the downtown area...
...Government's—again and again and have tried to do God's...
...Since the Armed Services Committee has chosen to close its inquiry, we may never know the whole truth...
...After testifying on the last day of the Committee's hearings, Admiral Moorer told reporters: "I don't think it is proper to describe this as a violation of the civilian authority...
...Mayer is Roving Editor of The Progressive...
...The South is the new frontier for black accomplishment...
...It has been afraid to...
...Nixon's own Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...The practice of writing massive omnibus housing bills has long since outlived its usefulness...
...As mayor of Prichard, a city of 41,000 almost equally divided between blacks and blue collar whites, Cooper faces far more difficult problems...
...It is this fund that provides expressway planning and Federal aid to construction...
...Whose Welfare Mess...
...Dorothy and the Worker have gone on feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and begging an overcoat for the cold who come to the door...
...When caught, spies are disavowed by their masters...
...Citizen protest grew so powerful that Ontario's provincial cabinet, headed by Premier William Davis, ordered a halt to the project with $75 million already spent but only 2.5 miles of the 6.5 mile expressway in various stages of completion...
...It strains credulity to accept the assurances of Senator John Stennis, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, that General Lavelle simply "had not obeyed orders...
...John Ford, thirty, took office in Tuske-gee, Alabama, where he was born and raised...
...Were one of the men and women she harbors to commit a murder or burn down the Worker's loft building, we know what Dorothy Day would say...
...Too few of them return to provide the kind of leadership so desperately needed by blacks— and whites—in the South...
...such complex measures merely make it easier for lobbyists to slip self-serving language past indifferent or inattentive legislators...
...Construction began the next year, but by 1970 the projected cost, with various changes in plans, had climbed to $142 million, and by later projections to $237 million...
...It has been so afraid to that it has even (in its terror of its own doings and its own destiny) called them Communists...
...But most important, as experts on the problem have pointed out, to slow down the highway lobby decisively it has to be denied part of the Federal Highway Trust Fund...
...The city, seventh largest in the state, is bankrupt...
...From these and other contacts with his military and civilian superiors, Lavelle concluded that what was expected of him was "an extremely liberal [!] policy, well beyond the literal language of the rules of engagement," towards bombing North Vietnam...
...The process of central city decay has been accelerated rather than stemmed...
...Voters should tell their Congressmen and Senators that the public interest demands that Congress transfer a significant share of the highway trust fund to the development of mass transit and other urgent domestic needs...
...The Worker has never compromised...
...And no questions asked...
...At a subsequent Honolulu conference, Lavelle recalled, the Joint Chiefs decreed that field commanders in Indochina "should be more aggressive" and more "flexible" in interpreting the rules of engagement...
...Even more significant was the impression Lavelle said he received at a meeting in Saigon with Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird...
...The "unauthorized" raids extended over a four-month period, and required a substantial expenditure of ordnance...
...One of its provisions would have granted localities a veto power over the erection of subsidized housing—a step certain to result in further racial and economic isolation...
...Their success in winning election to the top office in their home cities is encouraging to all blacks seeking some control over their future in the South, and to enlightened whites in some areas of Dixie that have long stagnated under the dominance of white political forces bent on maintaining a sterile system of stagnation...
...by establishing a Federal system of pension plan insurance...
...As we get political power," said Ford, "we also get economic power...
...The basic question raised by the Lavelle affair, as we observed in these pages three months ago, is whether the general acted on his own in violating the rules of engagement and falsifying his reports to cover the violations— whether he was, in fact, waging a private war against Hanoi at a time when U.S...
...Investigation disclosed documents which the anti-road forces said had been withheld from the public, including the suppressed report of a consultant who in 1970 had reported to the city of Toronto that the Spadina Expressway had become unworkable and prohibitively expensive...
...Anti-Expressway Victory The Expressway Juggernaut generally rolls over its opposition, if any, but in Toronto at least it has been brought to a halt...
...A world possessed by the goods it produces—and the greater evils it produces^—has not paid much attention to Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker...
...The remedies he proposed, including a minimum guaranteed annual income of $2,400 for a family of four, were rather niggardly...
...The experience of the citizen resistance to Toronto's Spadina Expressway is heartening for all those who do not agree with the highway lobby and its political allies that expressways are the noblest work of man...
...that he went beyond the rules...
...In a letter to Stennis on September 26, Lavelle himself insisted—as he had during his testimony before the Committee—that "higher authorities" had condoned and, indeed, encouraged his unprovoked attacks on North Vietnamese targets...
...A. J. Cooper, twenty-eight, educated at Notre Dame University and New York University Law School, became mayor of Prichard, Alabama, a blue collar suburb of Mobile and one of Governor George Wallace's bastions of support...
...My interpretation of our discussion was that he encouraged me to run a protective-reaction mission to attempt to get the MIG or MIGs on Quanglang," Lavelle wrote...
...As some of Mr...
...Last month, the President quietly connived with reactionary Senators of both parties to kill his own reform scheme and to defer all hope of enacting a new welfare program for at least five years...
...It has never compromised its religious faith...
...In doing so, it should bear in mind a commitment that Congress made in 1949—the commitment that every American is entitled to "a decent home and a suitable living environment...
...But the pension abuses remain, and they are growing as rapidly as the funds, which now amount to some $150 billion...
...It was a great victory for the concerned citizens of Toronto and a case history of what an aroused populace can achieve despite resistance from public officials and powerful lobbies...
...Another would have curtailed the power of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to use its popular grants for the construction of water and sewer facilities and housing for the elderly as inducements for the construction of housing for the poor...
...Forty-two years ago she and the late Peter Maurin established the Catholic Worker movement in the Bowery and its remarkable newspaper, The Catholic Worker (a penny a copy...
...But at least the President had the courage—in 1969—to propose new departures for a system that had not undergone basic revision since the New Deal years...
...They had to know it just from the expenditure of ordnance...
...After almost a quarter of a century, fulfillment of that promise remains scandalously remote...
...It has never compromised its "people's capitalism...
...He and Ford have allied themselves with five previously elected black mayors in Alabama to secure Federal funds and outside private resources for their cities...
...The result, as several members of the Banking and Currency Committee noted, would have been "continued victimization of many home buyers...
...Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Connecticut Democrat, who favored a slightly more generous version, labored heroically to come up with a compromise acceptable to the White House, and received the active cooperation of Mr...
...There was general agreement among proponents and opponents of the measure that he could have had a bill if he had wanted one...
...It has begged and begged, in God's name, and by beggary has survived to go on feeding the hungry and housing the homeless—and perhaps to save an occasional soul from the deadliest sin, the sin of despair...
...The dream of mass transit to take people to work more quickly and more cheaply and more safely than in cars remains as elusive as ever...
...Something good has happened in Prichard and Tuskegee, good for both races in Alabama, and an encouraging sign to those anywhere in the country who truly believe that equality of opportunity should apply in all walks of life, including politics and public service...
...People are forgetting about color here," said James D. Phillips, the white president of a local bank...
...When Dorothy Day is asked if she may be harboring murderers and addicts, she replies, "Men must eat...
...He warned of the "ultimate futility of giving priority to the passenger car as a means of transportation into and out of the cities...
...In Toronto plans were approved in 1961 for the Spadina Expressway which with a subway right-of-way was to cost $67.6 million...
...One of every four families is below the poverty level, and the population has dropped by 10,000 in the last decade...
...This year, he has preferred to denounce "welfare bums" and issue pious homilies on the "work ethic...
...One may grieve, however, over a Congress that can contemplate the continuing national housing crisis and do nothing whatever about it...
...Their House of Hospitality, and then their farms, and then their branch Houses across the country, have had no other purpose than to feed the hungry and house the homeless, in God's name...
...In its inexorable march toward social irresponsibility and political expediency, the Administration no longer sees a need for such new departures...
...We will surely be hearing about the welfare "mess" for a long time...
...It may be, of course, that General Lavelle's recollections and interpretations, which have been disputed by Laird and the Joint Chiefs, are simply self-serving...
...Still Ill-Housed There is no need to grieve for the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1972, the omnibus housing bill which the House Rules Committee killed a month ago...
...He is convinced that "General Lavelle's superiors knew what he was doing...
...Nixon's aides confided while the welfare reform bill was languishing in the Senate Finance Committee, the President preferred to have "an issue rather than a bill...
...The frightening thing is that he may be dead right, that Lavelle did what the civilian chain of command wanted him to do...
...The highway lobby is the dragon that guards it...
...Citizen groups, which have been fighting to check expressway projects in a number of areas across the country, may have some local success...
Vol. 36 • November 1972 • No. 11
