No Confidence

...BAPTIST BACKLASH...

...A new charter evolved which dropped almost all of the innovative sections of the original Fraser-O'Hara version...

...Passage of all the Barkan proposals would have ripped the draft charter to shreds...

...If he thinks he might be under investigation for possible indictment, or might have committed a draft-related offense, but his name is not on the list, he is instructed to call the U.S...

...BUTTON UP...

...This retreat found little space in the press...

...The drafters of the charter favored a form of public financing for both Presidential and Congressional races that would funnel money through the party organization, and not through any independent operation like CREEP or Citizens for Humphrey...

...A good many citizens looked at the performance of the two parties and apparently decided there was nothing they cared to preserve...

...The inclusion in the new charter of those two provisions from the original version was enough to incense Strauss and COPE's Al Barkan...

...We have no doubt that there are, among the Democrats who were elected or re-elected last month, some who will strive to fulfill that hope...

...BARRY LYNN (Barry Lynn is coordinator of the "To Heal a Nation" Program of the United Church of Christ...

...The full Democratic Charter Commission met five times over a two-year period under the chairmanship of Terry Sanford, former governor of North Carolina...

...The coal miners could join them...

...The Labor Government now has an absolute majority in the House of Commons, which means that Prime Minister Harold Wilson has achieved his immediate aim of ending six months of minority government...

...SPIRIT OF '76...

...Jackson's performance might well serve as a distant early warning to voters to examine Jackson's campaign pronouncements with considerable care...

...No one is yet aware of the Board's procedural guidelines...

...Those who said they could not attend were asked to resign, then replaced by Strauss from a list prepared by Barkan...

...An unconvicted violator of Article 85 (AWOL), 86 (desertion), or 87 (missing movement) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) could return to the branch of the service he left...

...The Board's military review role is also strangely limited...

...NO GIFTS, PLEASE...

...By October 1, 525 men had been processed...

...A BETTER MOUSETRAP...

...would keep the power to tax...

...Persons who call the Army to find out if they are eligible for the program have been sent letters informing them that the call constituted a request to participate in the program...

...MARK PINSKY (Mark Pinsky, a free-lance writer based in Durham, North Carolina, has covered the Democratic Charter Commission since it was established...

...If the machinery exists, why not use it...

...The quality of services from mass transit to mail delivery is suffering...

...The Fraser-O'Hara charter was a blueprint for a grass roots, ideologically cohesive Democratic Party...

...It is something, but it is not enough...

...This may sound paradoxical for a system in which the only lawful parties are those emanating from Generalissimo Francisco Franco's government itself—the amorphous Movimiento—but it is a fact...

...The new Ford program does little to accept, and nothing to exonerate, their acts of conscience...

...Nevertheless, this may be predicated on up to two years of alternate service, a genuine case of double jeopardy...

...The manufacturers of Dannon yogurt were planning to call their latest flavor "Gerald," but something happened in August to make them change their mind...

...The Pennsylvania Bicentennial Commission is reconsidering its plan to invite citizens to rededicate themselves to American ideals by signing copies of the Declaration of Independence...

...Their votes signify a measure of hope that the Democrats can do better—better than the crimes of Watergate, better than miserable mismanagement of the economy, better than the slavish subservience of public policy to private interests...

...Morton emerged as chairman of the newly created Energy Resources Council...

...There may be a lot of people unwilling to sign it...

...Some enlightened employers are beginning to realize that a UD can come about simply because of strong personal or political disagreement between a man and his commanding officer...

...The Defense Department has also abused its information machinery...

...Still, there will be many new faces and voices in the Ninety-fourth Congress—perhaps enough to break the stranglehold of the "leadership" so long entrenched in control by the simple expedient of growing old on the job and thus acquiring the power that goes with seniority...

...But this is changing, partly because the committee membership is changing, partly because of Mills's absences and the fact that his stand-in, Representative Al Ullman of Oregon, does not have the chairman's clout and determination...

...The Soviet government, he proclaimed, had agreed to permit at least 60,000 of its people, mostly Jews, to leave Russia each year from now on...

...The Liberals did not make their hoped-for breakthrough of the two-party system, but they did hold most of their February gains, dropping one MP and one percentage point in the popular vote...

...To placate the unions, especially if he imposes wage controls, Wilson can be expected to accelerate Labor's bash-the-rich program of new wealth and luxury taxes...

...Some deserters turned themselves in before considering their options, out of fear that failure to do so would constitute a charge of "disobeying a direct order" which would be added to their record...

...Excuses include the fact that the list might not be complete and that it does, in fact, include some names of persons who have not been indicted but are merely under prosecutive investigation (which means that persons who call might be misled into assuming there is already an indictment when there may only be an investigation...

...As the facts are now known, however, only about seventy of those men had actually turned themselves in...

...Even New York state chairman Joe Crangle pronounced himself "scandalized...

...But that is about the only issue the October elections resolved...

...Considering the changes in official pronouncements, the charge of entrapment on the part of the Defense Department looms large indeed...

...The Department has not had a particularly successful conviction rate for draft law violators over the past decade...

...Even before the wounds from a traditionally brutal series of Democratic primaries this summer and fall began to heal, Democratic factions were plotting strategy and raising war chests for the first national midterm policy conference in the party's century-and-a-half history, scheduled to begin December 6 in Kansas City...

...It may, in fact, be more damaging by its mere label...

...The struggle for control of Ways and Means is worth a lot of blood, sweat, and tears...

...First, according to a non-public memo, the UD which would be given would have in the "Remarks" column of the discharge form (DD214) a comment that this discharge was issued under the Presidential proclamation of September 16 with a given number of months of alternate service required...

...The commission reversed its vote on a mandated midterm policy conference by a vote of 89 to 39...

...Attorney will desist from beginning an investigation of a person who calls if he has not already started one...

...Morton proceeded to demand that Congress grant him the power to open up virtually all Federal lands to oil drilling by private corporations, including national wildlife refuges, the National Wilderness Preservation System, land adjacent to the nation's scenic rivers, naval petroleum reserve land, and naval oil reserves—all in all what the St Louis Post-Dispatch correctly characterized as a request "for such extravagant authority as to raise the fear of a monstrous giveaway...

...There was not the voluntary ground-swell of acceptance which Defense and, tacitly, the media had first implied...

...SYRUP ON THE SIDE...

...The future more than the present is their worry...

...A group fighting a desperate rearguard action is more likely to react with sudden and reckless violence than an entrenched organization that is more sure of its ability to deal with challengers...

...What the voters were saying, Speaker Albert suggested quite plausibly, was that they were overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the program—or the lack of program—advanced by the Ford Administration to cope with the nation's critical economic distress...

...Yet, if one published an antiwar newspaper, participated out of uniform in antiwar rallies, or distributed leaflets against the bombings, and received a bad discharge, he has no redress under this Board...

...The Boiling proposals would not leave Ways and Means any less conservative or any more inclined to delve into oversight hearings on a long list of issues and laws...

...Faced with this double repudiation, Jackson lamely conceded he had used the "more than 60,000" figure as a "benchmark...

...Its ranks are filled with university students and sons of the middle class, who probably could not be persuaded to train their guns on the people...

...A mandate, according to our dictionary, is " a n authoritative command...

...Perhaps it is too much to hope that Congress, so profligate with its powers these many years, will reject the Morton program...

...Indeed, as far as we know, he has not criticized the current policy that permits petroleum profits to soar out of sight...

...That position was endorsed by a majority of Democratic House members...

...Retiring Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan comments that "the vultures already are circling trying to pick up the pieces...

...The extreme right-wing faction is led by a fanatical lawyer, Bias Pinar, who recently proclaimed, in a manifesto addressed to President Arias Navarro: "Senor Presidente, we wish neither to follow nor to obey you...

...Ways and Means also has a hand in deciding House committee assignments...

...However, other antiwar acts which led to a bad discharge are not handled by this system...

...Franco's disappearance, instead of giving the green light for prudent, longawaited democratic action, may unleash a pack of power-starved fanatics...

...Ways and Means would retain its vital tax authority, and some astute observers have said that while the Boiling proposals would have struck at Mills's ego, the resulting changes would have been more shadow than substance...

...This is t he legacy of Franco's rule and the dilemma facing Spain's hopeful reformers...

...Next came the rumors and final official pronouncement that persons who took "advant a g e " of the "loophole" could be prosecuted under Article 83 of the UCMJ which prohibits giving false information in order to obtain a discharge...

...On the other end of the Falangist spectrum lie the Jose Antonio Circles, founded to foster the principles of the party's idealistic leader, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was executed by the Republic in 1936...

...The largest and most conservative bloc on the Charter Commission, as shaped by Strauss, represented the AFL-CIO unions of COPE, although a few more liberal trade unionists, affiliated with the UAW, the Communications Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employes, were also appointed...

...The election results only confirmed Northern Ireland's dismal slide to anarchy and away from any political solution to its historic and religious divisions The Protestant ultras, with Enoch Powell newly elected to their ranks, confirmed their hold on eleven of Ulster's twelve seats in Westminster...

...The charter that Strauss and Barkan were so anxious to obliterate is known as the Fras?r-O'Hara charter, a joint product of Minnesota Representative Don Fraser's Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure and Michigan Representative James O'Hara's Committee on Rules...

...Strauss had commission members polled on whether they would be able to attend the Charter Commission's final meetings, August 16-19, in Kansas City...

...This year the electric power workers are threatening to test Wilson's midwinter mettle with big wage demands...

...The election returns confirm what we have all observed in our daily lives: There is widespread lack of confidence in our politics, our economics, the public arrangements that govern our private existence...

...To suggest, as Speaker Albert and other Democratic cheerleaders are suggesting, that the voters made a positive rather than a purely negative choice this year is to imply that the Democratic Party—or any important segment of it—offered them a positive rather than a purely negative program...

...Throughout our involvement in Indochina the men who refused to fight or to give in to the system have been harassed and penalized...

...This group contains a band of well-to-do activists known as the Guerrillas of Christ the King, who devote most of their energy to burning bookshops and threatening outspoken liberals...

...Duane Shank, associate director of the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, believes that such language "paves the way for a return to work camps along the lines of the California Ecology Corps...

...Consequently, the "clemency discharge" seems to offer no advantage for a person over having the UD...

...Much in the program was deliberately vague, designed to be fleshed out by the agencies involved...

...but nonetheless reform of the House remains in the air and the Ninety-fourth Congress is expected to tackle the issue again with new vigor...

...What the voters were also saying, he continued quite implausibly, was that they were overwhelmingly impressed with the economic program of the Democratic Party...

...Sawhill, it was charged, was not "a team player"—which, translated, meant that he had been driven out of office because he had dared say in public that the oil cartel had become a rather decisive force in the nation's economy...

...It does not take a conspiratorial mind-set to locate them...

...Secretary of Commerce Frederick B. Dent scoffs at suggestions that the economy is experiencing a recession...

...Allied with the COPE people were such conservative southerners as South Carolina chairman Don Fowler and such machine regulars as Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago...

...A communique issued by this organization in September called for the legalizing of workers' strikes, the suppression of large capitalist interests and monopolies, and the authorization of political associations...

...Last winter, it was the coal miners who went on strike and helped bring down Heath's government...

...More than 130 members had registered for the session, fully fifty more than had been in Washington in March, and the reformers estimated that Strauss's fourteen "new members," coupled with Barkan's personal whip-cracking, raised the conservative majority's edge to about two to one...

...Within a short time the "loophole" started to thread over...

...At their official clemency telephone number are a few secretaries shifted there from other bureaucratic positions...

...The private interest lobbyists who track every Ways and Means move are fully aware of the upheavals rippling through the committee...

...conservatives and regulars will have a slightly larger percentage...

...Britain's inflation rate could hit 20 per cent by the end of the year...

...To suggest that this program ends the work for amnesty is a fiction...

...Recently, Jackson dropped in at the White House to announce what he modestly characterized as a "historic agreement" for which he gracefully accepted the credit...

...This appeared to be a viable option for a while, considering the rather bizarre conditions attached to the "clemency discharge" itself...

...The official, yet unsubstantiated, reason for most dismissals is that the person involved agreed to face induction...

...In the confusion that followed, chairman Terry Sanford was able to end the meeting because of lack of a quorum...

...The elections further ingrained the politics of fragmentation into the British system...

...The Left, accustomed to confronting a united oligarchy, recognizes the dangers posed by the new multitude of personally-led factions on the Right...

...Wilbur Mills has long prided himself on his ability to sense impending change...

...Because of his deep familiarity with tax law and his preparation for expert witnesses, most other members have been ready to bow to his superior knowledge and his wishes...

...The gap between promise and performance is increasingly evident to a growing number of our people...

...For several tense hours it appeared that a rightist coup was in t he making...

...Section 1660.6(a)(2) of the new guidelines for Selective Service announces that the Director can establish "special programs" which will open "alternative service" jobs which do not interfere with the competitive labor market...

...From the outset of his tenure-, Strauss had three aims for the three commissions...

...In a rapid-fire reshuffle—the fifth in little more than one year—Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B...

...In past years, Mills has been the hardest working member of the committee...

...It costs $3,500, not including mice...

...When Robert Strauss took over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1973, succeeding Jean Westwood, he hoped to rescue his party from debt and defeat and lead it to solvency and success within four years...

...Words and charges so familiar to Democrats throughout their raucous history—*'takeover,'' ''boycott,'' 4' p u r g e , ' ' ''walkout"— filled the air like falling leaves...

...In theory, Juan Carlos de Bourbon, thirty-six-year-old grandson of Alfonso XIII, is Franco's choice as legal successor to the throne...

...The American reality does not match the promises of freedom, opportunity, security, and peace that constitute the American dream...

...in fact, it is up for grabs, and if liberals in the new Congress act with unity, strength, and intelligence they might gain control and ease the way for enactment of forward-looking tax and social legislation not possible under the Mills of yesteryear...

...More to the point is the fact that Mills's power has clearly been eroded...

...However, it has become dangerous even to phone to get a report of your standing...

...The great strength that the Democrats brought to the 1974 campaign was that they did not produce Richard M. Nixon, that they were not responsible for the Watergate atrocities, that they have not occupied the White House in a time of rampant inflation, rising unemployment, bothersome shortages, and general malaise...

...Even without controls, the unions are sure to test the so-called social compact, a voluntary agreement between the Labor Government and some unions to hold wage increases in the 10 to 15 per cent range...

...The A.G...

...the other hundreds were persons who had been jailed in military prisons before the Ford plan was even announced...

...Don Juan, his liberal-minded father in exile in Portugal, has never relinquished his right to the throne, and J u a n Carlos's cousin, Alfonso de Bourbon, seems to be leading the Franco family's bid for a royal affiliation through his recent marriage to t he Generalissimo's granddaughter...

...To a large degree the power to tax is the power to govern, and Mills & Co...

...If you sit down and read it , " says George Ebner, the Commission's executive director, "you'll find it's a pretty revolutionary document...

...In his frantic and futile effort to rally Republican votes, President Ford rushed around the country in the final weeks of the campaign imploring the electorate to preserve the two-party system...

...For more than three decades the Falange has more or less quietly licked the wounds inflicted by Franco, who shrewdly used this array of fascist hoodlums for his own purposes and then discreetly swept them under the rug when his power was consolidated...

...Strauss believed that the Democratic reform commissions, mandated by the 1972 national convention and national committee, were impediments to that goal...

...However, John Schulz of the Selective Service Law Reporter notes that the dismissal rate for fiscal 1973 was just as high even though persons did not any longer have the option of joining the armed forces to avoid prosecution...

...What authoritative command did the American people issue on election day...

...The Pentagon denies it was trying to frighten persons into surrendering...

...Every economic and political problem facing the nation before the elections is still there and so defiant of solution that within six months the election winners will probably envy the losers...

...Distant Early Warning If the opening salvos in Senator Henry Jackson's quest for the Presidency are any sample of his campaign strategy, the electorate faces a couple of dreary years of sensational claims and muted denials from the same man...

...COMMENT No Confidence In a television interview on election night the durable Speaker of the House of Representatives, Carl Albert of Oklahoma, displayed understandable enthusiasm for the notable victories that Democratic candidates recorded in all sections of the country...

...The mood of the reformers was one of resignation...

...Hence a convicted Quaker pacifist objector could present himself to the Board to be granted "clemency" by the President if the Board so recommended...

...Beyond all these considerations, the Justice Department has virtually admitted that much of the "clemency" proposal is, legally, of questionable constitutionality...

...The Democrats' subsequent inability to fulfill that potential now seems, in retrospect, to be a missed opportunity of major proportions, and the opportunity is not likely to arise soon again...

...On Page 24 of this issue, Stephen Nordlinger chronicles the petroleum industry's drive to plunder the Atlantic for oil...

...Spain's conscript Army has not seen action for more than thirty years...

...There was a moment in 1972 when the party of Jefferson had a chance—if it adopted the Fraser- O'Hara charter—to transform itself and, indirectly, the two-party system of American politics, into instruments of democracy...

...Defense personnel also appeared to enjoy their use of the "numbers game" in dealing with the media...

...Whatever "clemency" means here is unclear, and there is no guarantee that it extends to expungement of the felony record...

...ROBERT W.DIETSCH (Robert W. Dietsch is a Washington correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance...

...he switched positions on Medicare and revenue sharing and steered those measures through the House...

...As inevitably happens whenever one party or the other attains more than 51 per cent of the vote, there is much loose talk about an electoral "mandate...

...Willie Brown took the floor to denounce it as the "last nail in the coffin...

...After all, the whole clemency program is a direct descendant of the Vietnam war...

...We waited in vain for some enterprising network journalist to ask, "What program...

...On January 1,1959, Nelson Rockefeller issued his first executive order as governor of New York...

...JULES STEWART (Jules Stewart is a correspondent based in Madrid...

...Backed by the same coalition that killed the Fraser-O'Hara charter in 1972, Strauss and Barkan began turning the screws...

...Five years of inflation and erratic government have worn at the edges of British society...

...Under Mills, oversight review has been minimal, mainly because of the chairman's lack of interest and the absence of staff and subcommittees...

...of Pittsburgh says it must charge $1 apiece for the two-and-a-half-inch WIN buttons it is manufacturing for President Ford's antiinflation campaign...

...The Gathering Storm in Spain Madrid After thirty-seven years of virtually unchallenged dictatorship, the regime of Spain's ailing, eighty-one-yearold Caudillo finds itself at odds with every political group in the country...

...Legally, then, a master list compiled by the Government should be similarly available...

...A party— whether one of the existing parties or an entirely new one—that could command their allegiance and marshal their strength would be in a position to transform the nation...

...and that this is true of the Democratic Party no less than of the Republican Party...

...Widespread publicity has been given to telephone numbers resisters can call to get information on the program and the status of their case...

...that it serves the concerns and interests of corporate concentrations and ruling elites...

...The Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog features a twelve-foot-square plastic mouse ranch, complete with corrals and fences, as a gift for anyone "who has ever dreamed of being a cattle baron...

...Any examination of the " m a n d a t e " must begin, we would suggest, with the great majority who did not take the time and trouble to go to the polls...

...The final participant in this whole scheme is the Selective Service System...

...Sawhill, mind you, is no radical in general and no zealot in the field of conservation...

...The Left—Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, intellectuals, students, and regional nationalists—is naturally opposed to Franco's wearisome dictatorship, but so is the Right, whose principal components—the Falange, the Army, and the monarchists—each have their own propaganda organs and backing from diverse financial sectors...

...Any major votes will be decided by a swing middle group of about 10 per cent...

...The list ought to be of public record under the Freedom of Information Act since all unsealed indictments for a district are of record in the Federal District courthouse...

...Thus, more assertive Democrats are now often unwilling to defer to Mills's wishes...

...House rules have ended Mills's use of the closed rule, which previously barred any floor amendment to a committee bill...

...But Barkan was still not satisfied...

...Now, major changes in committee legislation can be pushed through on the floor by insurgents challenging Mills's consensus...

...Yet the Army's feelings are unknown, although it is generally accepted that in a moment of extreme gravity the generals would soon be out on t h e streets with their tanks...

...The result seems to foreshadow the doom of any chance for Britain to work out power-sharing arrangements on a local level...

...Southern Baptist pastors in Texas are complaining about an anti-pornography manual recently mailed to them by the Baptist General Convention's Christian Life Commission...

...They tend to shrink measurably in the face of facts...

...Chairman Mills's Fiefdom Wilbur D. Mills, sixty-five years old and only slightly the worse for wear after his celebrated evening on the town, will be back in Congress next year, having persuaded his Arkansas constituents that the country needs him for at least another two years...

...It is the future that Harold Wilson and his Labor Government have in their hands, for an uncertain moment, to make or to break...

...He would then be processed out with an undesirable discharge (UD) after pledging to perform a term of alternative service...

...They are given about ten days to report to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana for processing...

...That leaves Wilson the alternative of imposing mandatory wage and price controls, exactly what he promised his union backers he would not do...

...Today, the younger generation of Falangists is seeking revenge...

...Two weeks before the 1972 Miami convention, the document was condemned by a majority of Democratic governors and members of Congress...

...Such an implication has no basis in reality...

...They do nothing but tell the caller whether his name is on an "indictment list...

...Traps in the 'Clemency' Plan When President Ford's so-called clemency plan for Vietnam war resisters and deserters was announced in September, it was presented in the complex format of two executive orders: a proclamation and a "fact s h e e t " giving practical details of the plan to some extent...

...It is conceivably safer, then, not to call...

...Bruce Fein of the Justice Department reports that he "cannot absolutely guarantee" that a U.S...

...The admission lies in the statement all "clemency" applicants must sign which waives their constitutional protection against double jeopardy, and protections of due process, a speedy trial, and consideration of the statute of limitations for the alleged offense...

...They also proclaim themselves ready to take action on a larger scale should the need arise...

...Republicans on the committee have also become less cohesive and less predictable, although they are still highly conservative...

...The Great Western Sugar Corp., the nation's largest processor of beet sugar, reports that profits increased by 1,200 per cent in three months...

...Implicit in the Fraser-O'Hara charter were basic changes in the relationship of the Presidency to the party and the electorate...

...If Mills perceives a strong sentiment for a more liberal committee, he might acquiesce...

...Morton's proposal constitutes an even more egregious program to despoil our thinning national heritage in the name of "energy conservation...

...Britain's Worrisome Future Britain has made its choice, if only barely...

...Normalcy Marches On If there were any lingering doubts that the Ford Administration, like its predecessor, views with kindly tolerance the rapacious demands of the petroleum industry, they were dispelled when President Ford fired John C. Sawhill as head of the Federal Energy Administration...

...Perhaps as a depression looms, the jump fromthe"clemency" program to a plan of universal service for the young is not at all fanciful...

...But he did try to exert moderate pressure for a policy of energy conservation, and that was enough to alarm the petroleum cartel and its supporters in the White House...

...Throughout the autumn, liberals met, conservatives met, blacks met, labor leaders met, state Democratic chairmen met, the national committee met, and the Democratic governors met...

...The national chairperson, for example, would be expected to serve out the full four-year term, not serving at the pleasure of a particular President or Presidential candidate...

...The Fraser-O'Hara charter, once read by elected Democrats, never had a chance...

...order...

...The fact that the House declined to endorse the Boiling ideas was considered a victory for Mills...

...But the party's past performance, its sorry leadership, and its smug, self-congratulatory postelectoral mood, offer little basis for optimism...

...The electoral drop-outs, whose numbers have been rising steadily for decades, constitute an enormous potential force in America, for good or evil...

...A civilized and pleasant way of life is still possible, although at a dearer price...

...But in fact, there are still serious threats to his royal career...

...That afternoon,however, the more moderate head of the Army General Staff, Lieutenant General Diez-Alegria, forced Iniesta to rescind his volatile order...

...In June, the Democratic governors voted unanimously to oppose a mandated midterm policy conference and the judicial council...

...The agreement, he said, represented the Soviet Union's submission to his demand for a liberalized emigration policy in exchange for better trade relations with the United States...

...For the Delegate Selection Commission: make sure there is never another convention like Miami...

...Compared to their share of delegate votes in Miami in 1972, blacks at Kansas City will be down from 15 per cent to between 6 and 11 per cent, women down from 39 per cent to 33 per cent, and delegates under thirty years old will be down from 20 per cent to 2 per cent...

...Although the aspirations and possibilities of upward mobility are not nearly as strong in Britain as they are in the United States, these high-tax programs increasingly risk alienation of the middle class and intensification of class warfare...

...The country may be tired of elections after two within one year, but even the most determined effort by all the parties to avoid another one soon could be overtaken by events...

...He appointed sixty-two new members to the Charter Commission from a list of " r e g u l a r s " prepared by Alexander Barkan, director of the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education (COPE), and he forced the ouster of two McGovern holdovers from the commission staff...

...Mills has run the committee like a fiefdom...

...The President's election-eve appeal to "cast your vote of confidence in the United States of America" seemed almost calculated to dissuade those potential voters whose confidence has been destroyed...

...As for those who remain within the system, at least to the extent of exercising the franchise, their'rejection of President Ford and his party denotes, we believe, an authoritative command to steer the nation away from the calamitous course of the present and the recent past...

...Their earnings and level of affluence have gone up...

...At this point, Strauss had everything that he, the Democratic governors, and members of Congress wanted cut out of the draft charter...

...The poor and pensioners are the first and most obvious victims...

...This followed a historic meeting in Kansas City in mid- August, scheduled for the purpose of ratifying a party constitution, which was suddenly transformed into a battle for the soul and future of the Democratic Party...

...That project essentially trapped men inside barbed wire enclosed grounds to do their alternative service...

...Feminist Martha McKay, a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, characterized the proceedings as the "Sunday afternoon massacre" as she and other women joined the black walkout...

...the chairman has called the shots, arranged for consensus, kept the committee on a generally conservative bent...

...The day Premier Carrero Blanco was assassinated last December, Lieutenant General Iniesta Cano, commander of the powerful paramilitary Guardia Civil, ordered his forces to assume control of all urban centers and not to hesitate in using their weapons against suspected left-wing activists...

...But if he chose not to be awarded the special Ford-created "clemency discharge" by fulfilling his pledge, he could merely not do the alternative service and go home...

...Mills has been described repeatedly and, for the most part, accurately as the most powerful man in the House, a description directly linked to his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee...

...Since then, both generals have been replaced by shadowy figures whose actions in an eventual crisis can not be predicted...

...Attorney closest to where he may have committed the "offense...

...The people sense, and increasingly articulate, that the existing system does not work for them...

...Strauss insisted on another meeting to reconsider the charter document and began mobilizing the opposition...

...Therefore, an employer who took the time to get the DD 214 would know that the man was not only a deserter, but an "unrepentant" one...

...What Wilson is confronted with, then, is a potential nightmare that with time and a bit of luck could become his party's greatest opportunity...

...It can review only bad discharges (dishonorable, bad conduct, and undesirable) which resulted from desertion and similar acts, the most serious " c r i m e s " the military knows...

...But the odds against Wilson are overwhelming...

...A classical economic treatment of inflation would only exacerbate unemployment...

...The opportunity exists to direct change in ways which can help bring about true tax reform and funding of social programs...

...It grants no Veterans Administration benefits (while the UD grants some on a discretionary basis), and it clearly labels the recipient as a " deserter " (read "traitor," albeit a repentant one, as viewed by the average employer...

...Edward Heath's Tories emerged divided, in search of a new leader who does not symbolize stiff-necked confrontation, but without a clear successor in sight...

...WHAT'S IN A NAME...

...Despite the new bout of adversity, many Britons are staying even or slightly ahead...

...Nevertheless, through all this, the original, allegedly deliberate "loophole" got much more publicity than the realities that have kept it from becoming a wide hole...

...At the midterm policy conference, delegates would elect a national chairperson to a fouryear term and agree to platform issues on which all Democratic Congressional candidates would campaign in the midterm elections the following November...

...Four committee members are leaving this term, and backstage dickering has begun on replacements...

...And the observations of our daily lives also confirm that there is ample reason for this lack of confidence...

...Amnesty groups that now have all the guidelines (except for the yet undetermined Clemency Board procedures) can say with assurance that serious " t r a p s " exist in the Ford program...

...It appeared that men were literally climbing out of the woodwork to turn themselves in...

...He has been absent for long periods because of an ailing back, and those absences have made some Ways and Means members bolder...

...It was an indication that at least one faction of the Army is determined not to let Spain be steered off its gradual course toward democratic reform...

...They told us so—by voting or not voting—on election day...

...Ways and Means handles tax matters and other legislation important to all Americans—health insurance, Social Security, welfare, unemployment compensation, transportation trust funds...

...A cash squeeze has created a bankruptcy fever in British industry and threatens a big jump in unemployment...

...The new Congress will be confronted with a host of unsolved problems, but few more important in the long haul of history than the Morton giveaway scheme...

...It was roughly as comprehensible as the first draft of a high-school debate case...

...It declared: "It will be a firm policy of the governor and his administration not to accept gifts of a personal nature...

...The walkout finally came not over "affirmative action," which was fudged at the last minute into a multiple-choice section, but on reintroduction of the unit rule...

...We're talking about sideways waffling," he says...

...NO COMMENT WILLIAM L. CALLEY, SUPERSTAR...

...Their authoritative command, not just to the politicians but to all of us, is to create a political system that will engage their attention and commitment because it genuinely addresses their concerns and interests...

...Two vestiges of that document, a mandated midterm policy conference, and a party judicial council to rule on matters of party dispute between conventions, were narrowly included in the Charter Commission's fourth meeting in Washington in March...

...At the outset of the mid-August meeting it was clear that the famous long knives of the Democratic Party, reserved for use in internecine warfare, had been drawn...

...Labor has a majority of three votes, and on most divisions can count on another twenty to thirty votes from the smaller parties...

...By a voice vote the judicial council was made optional, at the discretion of the national committee...

...For several days Defense admitted to a "loophole" (which they insisted was supposed to be in the program all along) for deserters...

...Ways and Means is structured for one-man rule: small staff, no subcommittees despite the fact that the committee's legislation is some of the most complex on Capitol Hill...

...The committee long has included a few liberals urging tax reform, but they have never managed to put together a political coalition and, in characteristic liberal fashion, they have tended to rely more on blarney and rhetoric than on homework and the nitty gritty details needed to cope with complicated legislation...

...With any pressure from the House leadership (if such pressure is possible under Speaker Carl Albert) and organization by liberals, Ways and Means could become somewhat less conservative...

...Two principal conclusions can be drawn from the results of the off-year election on November 5: First, that a substantial majority of Americans—more than 60 per cent—is so angry, so alienated, or so apathetic that it chose not to exercise its franchise at all, and second, that among those who did vote, a substantial majority chose not to elect Republican candidates...

...Critic Howard Thompson called it " a fine fiercely stimulating musical evenmg...

...Under this charter, there would be a national convention every two years, with a rtiidterm policy conference alternating with the Presidential nominating convention...

...In Parliament, Wilson has limited room for maneuver...

...One member concedes, "In some respects we all were Wilbur's children...

...One morning's news brought words and pictures of a planeload of one hundred men arriving for "clemency...

...Members of the black caucus announced that if the Barkan forces succeeded in a further weakening of the "affirmative action" section designed to involve minorities, women, and youth in party affairs, the blacks would walk out of the commission meeting the next day...

...Even so, every death or serious illness of a member of Parliament threatens a by-election and a new challenge to Labor's majority...

...The Lieutenant, a rock musical based on the My Lai massacre, opened at the Queens Playhouse in New York and received a rave review in The New York Times...

...Mills has lost much,of his ability to persuade his twenty-four colleagues to accept compromises, the hallmark of Mills's chairmanship...

...A further problem arises in regard to the indictment list itself...

...Inflation, a Trimble executive explains, "has sent the price of thin sheet metal for buttons out of this world...

...The effect was to kill all remaining items on the Barkan list, including unit rule, until the Kansas City miniconvention meets December 6. By late fall, the division of strength among party leaders and the 1,700 elected delegates to the miniconvention indicated that liberals and reformers will control 35 per cent to 45 per cent of the delegates...

...The platform adopted at the nominating convention was to be considered binding on the Presidential candidate, in the campaign and in office, as on all other elected officials...

...Clearly the regime is unable to comply with the demands of either of these Falangist groups, and that seems to b e precisely why they were formulated...

...But today Ways and Means is changing...

...MICHAEL D. MOSETTIG {Michael D. Mosettig is an NBC News editor and former UPI correspondent in Europe who recently returned from a trip to London...

...The McGovern people reasoned that with the Presidential election coming up, it would be pointless to offend the party's elected officials...

...HOW SWEET IT IS...

...California Assemblyman Willie Brown told the liberals, "If they [the conservatives] were smart, they'd let us win on this o n e . " Said Wallis Albertson of California, "This charter isn't worth a goddamn thing anyway...

...It appears that the Justice operation as a whole is a good way to short-circuit the whole judicial system...

...The pastors say the 190-page book, entitled Pornography: The Sexual Mirage, is, well, pornographic...

...The Boiling reform commission, whose work was unfortunately pigeonholed, proposed to strip Ways and Means of the nontax aspects of health and unemployment compensation and of general revenue sharing...

...injunction...

...And a demagogue who could exploit their alienation and rage would be in a position to establish a totalitarian regime...

...Jackson's announcement made a front-page splash across the country and around the world—until Moscow denounced it as false and President Ford, who had allowed Jackson to use the White House to make his announcement, rushed into print to assert that the Jackson statement was "widely misunderstood," that the tentative agreement contained no numbers—neither 60,000 nor 60, but rather used the same generalities so often advanced in the past...

...Trimble Co...

...The Justice Department's tactics are equally suspect...

...Under relatively new House procedures, Ways and Means legislative markup sessions are open to the public, and in those public sessions a growing number of committee members are prone to speak their minds even when they are at odds with the chairman...

...Strauss moved swiftly to ensure the success of the last and most significant of these goals...

...How far the Army's broadbased loyalty to Franco stretches is another question, since it has never been put to the test...

...The middle class feels threatened by the unions and new taxes...

...Considering the abuse to which the people have been subjected in recent years by their politicians and their Government, there is nothing that should surprise in either of these conclusions...

...And, for the Democratic Charter Commission: make sure there is never another charter like the one almost passed in Miami by the convention that nominated George McGovern...

...However, repeated attempts by counseling groups to obtain the list have met with failure...

...On the floor of the convention, McGovern strategists, in another of their celebrated "strategic maneuvers/' postponed consideration of the charter until 1974, so that yet another study commission could " r e f i n e " it...

...Defense Secretary James Schlesinger has already admitted that information (such as address and telephone number) given to the operators by "deserte r s " will be turned over to the FBI to use in their investigations if the caller does not turn himself in by the termination date of the Ford program, January 31, 1975...

...More than 60 per cent of all draft evasion cases in that period were dismissed before trial...

...And there are often-expressed fears about the durability of democratic institutions if inflation persists beyond the 20 per cent barrier...

...For the Vice Presidential Selection Commission: make sure there is never another Eagleton affair...

...For if he handles Britain's immense problems with any degree of skill, he could transform the Labor Party into a governing rather than an opposition party...

...The new yogurt flavor will be called "Mortimer...

...Crime and hooliganism are on the increase, although still far from making London a dangerous city...

...His aides had come to Kansas City with a laundry list of additional proposed changes that sought to reverse every meaningful section of the charter, from abandonment of proportional representation in selecting convention delegates to reintroduction of the unit rule by which a party caucus majority casts all the votes of the caucus as a bloc, and winner-take-all Presidential primaries...

...Spain has nominally been a monarchy since 1947...

...In light of the significant Democratic gains in last month's election, Mills faces demands to expand the committee from twenty-five members to thirty or thirty-five...

...Voting with such traditional midwestern reformers as Don Fraser, also chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, and Jean Westwood were fourteen of the sixteen black commission members and feminists...

...The Democrats' Reform Failure One political aphorism of ancient vintage—that Democrats fight before election day, Republicans after— remains only partially true in 1974...