Comment
Dietsch, The Editors and Ros Jensen, Jim Castelli, David Zielenziger, Erny Tannen, and Robert W.
COMMENT A Message to Washington Last month in these pages we ventured the judgment that Richard M. Nixon's last, desperate attempts to rally public support for his discredited Presidency...
...This approach, according to McHugh, would allow greater Catholic cooperation with other religious groups in speaking out on public issues...
...A study by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago found that eighty-eight per cent of the Catholics surveyed would allow abortion in cases involving danger to the health of the mother...
...Since by Defense Department estimate the defense industry uses only between eight and ten per cent of total industrial consumption, the Government had enough chrome to last our defense industry more than sixty years...
...The Harris Survey reports, for example, that the people's assessment of Congress (which is, after all, under Democratic control) is now sixty-nine per cent "negative," as against a negative rating of forty-five per cent a year ago...
...The seat, safely Republican for more than sixty years and held most recently by Vice President Gerald Ford, was won by a Democrat who made Nixon's tenure the dominant issue of his campaign...
...It is a sorry state of affairs, and a potentially dangerous one, but it is real...
...A member of the OPS advisory board wants to use Defense Department sampling techniques —just dig up pipe here and there and test it...
...The forfeited national production has cost all levels of government, Keyserling says, "enough tax revenues to have financed about $451 billion of additional public outlays for goods and services, in support of the sorely needed and dangerously neglected great priorities of our domestic public needs...
...In each instance, Republican politicians, no less than Democrats, acknowledged that the Watergate scandals and the resultant rejection of Nixon played a decisive role in determining the outcome...
...Among Americans of every class and region and political persuasion, the prospect of impeachment—which seemed remote, we must confess, when The Progressive began urging it last year—now is accepted as likely if not inevitable...
...The most visible church response to the Supreme Court decision has been support of the concept of a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion, but there is doubt about support for such an amendment even among the Catholic population which, according to recent polls, continues to accept at least the legality of abortion in certain circumstances...
...The price of the roller coaster rides has been staggering...
...The church claims a worldwide membership of two million, about 10,000 of them in the United States...
...Meanwhile, people are being blown up...
...These centers help women with problem pregnancies find counseling, medical care, legal aid, adoption, and other services which would allow them to avoid abortion...
...Industry maintained that with the Rhodesian supply cut off, chrome prices were rising sharply...
...Since 1970, when the Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) in the Department of Transportation began issuing accident reports, there have been 3,559 pipeline accidents, 148 deaths, 939 injuries, and more than $8.8 million in property damage...
...He was held for almost three months in the stockade at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then sentenced to a punitive discharge—but not to the prison term he might have received...
...Last summer he made a study of pipeline safety for "Congress Watch," a project of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen organization...
...Henry Wakeland calls them "non-regulating regulations" because they do not mandate basic safety procedures, or provide penalties for negligent utilities, or for excavators who damage pipelines...
...But the Catholic church, in the year that has passed since the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, has shown signs of earning back some of that credibility...
...A recent move by Senator J. Glenn Beall, Jr., Maryland Republican, to add an increase of $1 million to the pipeline safety appropriation was said by one of his staffers to be a knee-jerk response to a spectacular explosion in Bowie, Maryland, not the launching of renewed Congressional interest in pipeline safety...
...The contrast in viewpoints between these two Federal officials reflects the current state of non-enforcement or, perhaps, under-enforcement of the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act of 1968...
...The White House had expressed advance interest in The Penny Press's poll—"We'd like to know how it is played in Peoria," Presidential Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler wrote to the paper...
...representatives had fully supported...
...bishops' conference, said that the Supreme Court decision "made the church more keenly aware that it is our mission to speak for the forgotten, whether they are the unborn, the poor, the elderly, the retarded, or the people of the Third World...
...Therefore, the crisis for America is a crisis for God . . . America's well-being affects the plan of God...
...Senate, March 1, 1974 past two decades the average annual rate of real U. S. economic growth has been "much too low"—3.6 per cent—the Keyserling study points out...
...Fraser is chairman of the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, and Diggs is chairman of the African Affairs Subcommittee...
...With the Transportation Department fiddling while the pipelines blow up, the Office of Management and Budget is not doing much either...
...Church activity in the past year gives some substance to Rausch's comments...
...a growing educational effort which places opposition to abortion in a much broader "pro-life" perspective...
...We are all on trial...
...Caldwell says, bluntly, "We can't re-invent the wheel...
...Monsignor James T. McHugh, director of the Family Life Division of the U.S...
...John Hillebrands, who heads Alternatives to Abortion, a Toledo-based federation of alternative centers, reports that there are now 467 such centers in the United States, compared to eighty just two years ago...
...Eddie McNally's Story (Cont'd) Eddie McNally, the Vietnam war resister whose case was featured in a cover story on amnesty in the February issue of The Progressive, is now a free man— but one who bears the stigma of a bad conduct discharge...
...They are equally dismayed and disgusted by a Congress that has failed, over thiese many months, to come to grips with the constitutional crisis confronting the nation—and that has, at the same time, abdicated its domestic and foreign responsibilities to a discredited and paralyzed Executive Branch...
...A Washington group called Public Technology, Inc...
...cooks with gas...
...OPS director Joseph C. Caldwell says that his guiding philosophy is not to deal in worries...
...The board has not even met since June 1972...
...Given these facts and figures, it becomes clear that Byrd's real purpose was to use the chrome issue to weaken U.S...
...Another example is the dropping of requirements.that interstate gas transmission lines be "odorized" so that citizens can smell escaping gas...
...Air Force-ret...
...America must demonstrate unity in love and forgiveness...
...Moon attracted national attention in December with full-page advertisements placed in major newspapers throughout the country...
...In recent months some municipalities have enacted "backhoe laws" to ward off contractors' tools severing gas pipelines...
...True level unemployment includes not only officially reported full time unemployment but part time unemployment as well, and those jobless not officially counted as part of the labor force...
...Five years ago, safety advocates pressed Congress into making the Government responsible for setting minimum safety standards for the operation of 981,000 miles of gas pipelines...
...Feeble Gas Safety Regulation General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr...
...The office of the President of the United States is, therefore, sacred," which comes close to invoking the divine right of kings on behalf of American Presidents...
...When the church speaks, said Rausch, "It will speak more forcefully on all human rights issues...
...But this policy was violated in September 1971, when the Senate adopted a section of the Military Procurement legislation which required this country to import "strategic and critical materials from non-Communist countries .. . so long as these commodities are not embargoed from Communist countries...
...The National Transportation Safety Board reports on major pipeline accidents are nothing short of spectacular—in one Missouri explosion, the force reached 3.5 on the Richter scale, the measure of a moderate earthquake...
...Stand up for your convictions...
...COMMENT A Message to Washington Last month in these pages we ventured the judgment that Richard M. Nixon's last, desperate attempts to rally public support for his discredited Presidency would not "play in Peoria...
...Five years from now, they project spending only $4.8 million...
...We doubt that was what Hebert and the Pentagon had in mind, but whatever their purpose, their petty action has gained nothing for anyone...
...They showed up with their signboards a few nights earlier at a downtown hotel, intercepting partygoers headed for an "Inaugural Anniversary Impeachment Ball...
...but during the period of the U.S...
...ROBERT W. DIETSCH (Mr...
...GEORGE S. McGOVERN tn the U.S...
...The House fight to overthrow the Byrd Amendment is expected to be led by Democratic Representatives Donald Fraser of Minnesota and Charles Diggs of Michigan...
...The plague of Watergate has struck the heartland of America," said the Republican governor of Michigan, William Milliken, when he learned the results of the special House election in that state's fifth Congressional district...
...Two months before the Byrd Amendment was enacted, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs David Newsom told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "Our present evaluation is that the embargo has not created serious economic problems for the United States...
...Now the Senate, after a prolonged struggle, has voted to restore the chrome boycott...
...Part of the message is a throwback to the American ized version of Christian imperialism, which held sway among the mainline Protestant denominations in this country a century ago...
...They and their supporters are well aware that President Nixon last spring authorized the disposal sale of large amounts of the Government's chrome stockpile, an action which undercuts the argument that stockpiling chrome is needed for national security...
...There is no mistaking the nature of the message Americans are trying to send to their Government in Washington: They are dismayed and disgusted by their President and his Administration, by the incredible disclosures of deception, corruption, bribery, espionage, and theft...
...Zielenziger, a senior at Princeton University, is chairman of the Daily Princetonian...
...House action on ending support for Rhodesia will not be easy to accomplish but it is imperative to fulfill the moral obligation the United States assumed in its support of the original United Nations sanctions...
...Watergate's Elmer Gantry One of the most curious—and possibly the most lucrative—of the sideshows produced by the Watergate scandals is the religious-political crusade of Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon, founder of Unification Church International...
...DAVID ZIELENZIGER (Mr...
...Eighty-two per cent rate Congress poorly on "inspiring confidence in government...
...Now those standards seem ludicrous...
...Meanwhile, more and more citizens are learning first-hand of the dangers of natural gas leaks and explosions...
...His articles have appeared in The Nation, Commonweal, and Christian Century...
...Well known or not, the Moonies are harvesting cash contributions at the rate of $6 million a year, accord ing to information obtained by The Washington Post...
...But the boycott cannot end until the House does the same, and that vote will come in this session of Congress...
...There was little danger that the country would run out of chrome in a national emergency...
...Now, in a move prompted by the personal pique of Representative F. Edward Hebert, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, the Pentagon has ruled that military officers may no longer enroll in the Harvard Business School...
...Members of the movement are rigidly disciplined, imbued with fundamentalist religious teachings and anti-Communist political ideology...
...links to the United Nations...
...The "new" Catholic approach to public issues involves a more subtle effort...
...But, as it happens, the polls carry bad news for Democrats, too...
...the Government's chrome stockpile has totaled about five times overall national consumption...
...The ads announced a fortyday "National Prayer and Fast for the Watergate Crisis" and offered Moon's simple solution: "Forgive, Love, Unite...
...There has been a "roller-coaster prosperity" of "four successive and rather consistent cycles of inadequate upturn or boom, stagnation, and then recession...
...one of the reasons for so many accidents is that they generally don't know...
...They do not set up a standard of safety training for supervisory personnel, and are loaded with subjective words like "sufficient" and "safe manner...
...Davis and Caldwell insist that the regulations are not "vague and unenforceable...
...When it leaks into concrete foundations it can cause a tremendous explosion...
...The same message has been sent to Washington in recent weeks by voters in the twelfth Congressional district of Pennsylvania and in the first district of Ohio...
...The House went along with the Senate...
...The regulations are not worth much, either...
...has a downward-looking radar that enables utilities and contractors to find where the pipes actually are...
...There are plenty of feasible, sensible ideas that could make pipelines safe, but none of these solutions is likely to be used in the forseeable future...
...The Penny Press, a weekly newspaper in that quintessential heartland community, polled its readers on the President's popularity and found he didn't have much...
...A substantial seventy-two per cent are critical of the way Congress has handled the Watergate case...
...If the church's credibility is restored, it will come not from support of an amendment, which is merely a new version of the church's same old fight, but through action on three other fronts: continued emphasis on the use of church resources to provide alternatives for abortion to women with problem pregnancies...
...resolution came to be called the "Byrd Amendment," after Senator Harry Byrd, Jr., the conservative independent from Virginia...
...and a broader and stronger "human rights" approach to moral and ethical issues...
...American purchases of Rhodesian chrome symbolized both this country's support for the white minority rule in Rhodesia and its disdain for commitments made by the United Nations...
...and we are now in the second stage of a fifth such cycle...
...In the last year and a half, the church has bought two mansions—one priced at $850,000, the other at $625,000 —in Westchester County, New York, and a former Chris tian Brothers seminary at Barrytown, New York, for $1.5 million...
...The Catholic hierarchy has been the most visible supporter of the United Farm Workers Union and striking Farah clothing workers in the Southwest...
...And unless Congress can soon clear the skies of the clouds swirling around the White House, both the Presidency and the Congress will be lost in the gathering storm...
...They are, finally, becoming dismayed and disgusted with the entire political apparatus, which seems ever more remote from people's interests and concerns and ever more unwilling or unable to respond to their needs and wishes...
...It was the first time the United States had ever imposed sanctions against another nation in response to an international body...
...If the American Catholic church can follow through on these new directions, it may well regain some of its lost credibility on the abortion issue...
...Meanwhile, his office trudges along with a professional staff of seventeen, a budget of $875,000, a $1.16 million grants-in-aid grab bag which a former official says is merely a "bribe" to get the states to go along, and a "no panic" attitude in the OPS headquarters...
...Such presumptions were discarded long ago by the mainline churches...
...Only twenty-four per cent of Gallup's respondents now call themselves Republicans—the smallest percentage to do so since the question was first asked in 1940...
...The March issue of The Progressive was hardly off the press before confirmation arrived from—of all places—Peoria...
...Keyserling estimates that, expressed in 1970 dollars, "we have forfeited, during the period as a whole, almost $1.8 trillion of total national production, representing the difference between actual production and reasonably full or maximum production...
...And their safety personnel averages less than three man-years of experience per state...
...Fifteen regional Unification Centers have been set up throughout the country...
...The evangelist himself was given a private audience with the President on February 1. Moon reportedly prayed fervently in his native tongue before telling the President, "Don't knuckle under to pressure...
...If Mr...
...The "strategic and critical material" involved was chrome, a metal resource in relatively scarce supply in the United States and used in a variety of defense and industrial products...
...But because sterilization exists in a pluralistic society, we must deal with more widespread moral and ethical concerns—for example, opposition to forced sterilization of the retarded...
...Catholic Conference, has pointed out another difference in approach: "There is a Roman Catholic moral code which determines the lifestyle of Catholics, but in a pluralistic society, we must also be able to deal with what might be called 'back-up human rights' positions...
...We are sending a message to Washington tonight," the newly elected Representative, William Vander-Veen, said in his victory speech...
...The message to Washington is clear...
...Collectively, they are spending only $3.2 million...
...U.S...
...It is tempting for Democrats to conclude from all this that their party will have a lock on the electorate this year, in 1976, and perhaps for a number of elections to come...
...sanctions, the rate of increase actually lessened...
...Nor does he care...
...The people expect us, as their elected representatives, to assume whatever political pain and risk are involved in cleansing the body politic of its worsening afflictions...
...On the other hand, Henry Wakeland, director of the Bureau of Surface Transportation of the National Transportation Safety Board, is scared stiff of gas pipelines in his Virginia neighborhood...
...He cited the case of sterilization as an example: "On the first level, the Catholic church is opposed to sterilization as immoral...
...Within the past year, the Republican percentage has dropped by three points, but the defectors have not joined the Democratic ranks...
...adherence to a United Nations resolution imposing mandatory sanctions against importing any product from Prime Minister Ian Smith's racist Southern Rhodesia...
...I can't worry about things until they happen," he says...
...The role of economists is still essential, Keyserling maintains, but he faults the scarcity school for policies and programs "designed to increase the total level of potential demand when the economy is slack, and to do the reverse when the economy has been allegedly (erroneously) subjected to excessive pressures upon our productive resources...
...Congress has not held an oversight hearing on pipeline safety since 1971...
...Dietsch is a Washington correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance...
...From Scarcity to Abundance The country needs "a veritable revolution in economic thought and action," warns economist Leon Keyserling, to bring about a change from "scarcity economics to the economics of abundance...
...The latest Harris Poll available to us at this writing, conducted before the Watergate grand jury handed down its first indictments of the President's closest associates and delivered its sealed report to Federal District Judge John Sirica, shows Nixon's popularity at a near-bottom of nineteen per cent...
...resolution, which U.S...
...Because such policies have been pursued over the THE GRISIS AND THE REMEDY The hour is growing late for the Congress and the American people to confront and resolve the issue of Presidential leadership...
...Only when he came upon a toppled marker recently did he discover a twenty-four-inch pipeline eight feet from his front door...
...JIM CASTELLI (Jim Castelli is an associate editor of National Catholic Reporter...
...Only forty-two per cent call themselves Democrats, also the lowest proportion in thirty-four years...
...The Byrd Amendment put this country in clear violation of the U.N...
...Still more significant is a Gallup Poll showing a pre cipitate decline in voter identification with either major political party...
...seventy-seven per cent in cases involving probability of a defective child, and seventy-five per cent in cases involving rape...
...Some attempts at upgrading Catholic policy positions stem, no doubt, from pur...
...Nixon's soiled Administration is now the chief threat to the Presidency...
...Nixon has told us that beyond partisan considerations, he wants "the Presidency to survive...
...Mr...
...He has no idea where the gas pipeline is in his neighborhood in Rosslyn, Virginia...
...The growth of abortion alternatives centers in the past few years has been phenomenal...
...Like all other commodities, chrome is now in great worldwide demand and prices have risen...
...Criticism of Nixon, presumably, falls under the category of blasphemy...
...That was when the United States was the "new Israel," the "darling of Providence," the "chosen people of God" carrying out the divine mission on the American frontier and beyond...
...With help from the National Park Service, the Moonies practically packed the stands and waved "GOD LOVES NIXON" signs at the lighting of the national Christmas tree...
...Chrome and Conscience Seven years ago, President Johnson issued an executive order calling for U.S...
...ROS JENSEN (Ros Jensen is an editorial writer for the Des Moines Register and Tribune...
...Though the overwhelming majority of the 1,500 readers who responded to the paper's survey called themselves Republicans or independents—only twelve per cent were Democrats—fifty-one per cent offered the opinion that the President should be impeached...
...The states are miserly, too, when it comes to unsafe pipelines...
...Judith Miller, The Progressive's Washington correspondent who told his story, reports that Eddie "is looking for a job, intends to go back to school, and is working with Safe Return, the amnesty group under whose auspices he surrendered to the military, to help others like himself gain the right to return to their country and live above ground without penalty...
...But some of Caldwell's new standards have actually reduced the safety of gas pipelines...
...What remains to be seen is whether anyone is listening and will respond...
...Even religious flim-flam is enlisted for the Presidential defense...
...And we have suffered more than forty-eight million man-years of true level unemployment, in excess of the level consistent with reasonably full or maximum employment...
...but a rather sizable list of other countries—including South Africa, Turkey, Pakistan, Brazil, Greenland, India, and Iran—supposedly would be glad to fill any gap if the Soviet Union were to cut off sales to the United States...
...For example, the new rules of inducing electric current in gas pipelines, to prolong their life, may actually have disastrous effects on buried telephone wires, electric cables, and water mains...
...Leaking gas can cause asphyxiation, and over a long period dehydrates soil and kills plant life...
...No ROTC, no graduate students...
...Keyserling, who headed President Truman's Council of Economic Advisers, pro poses a National Purposes Act of 1974 to foster policies designed—among other things—to abolish poverty, cor rect the maldistribution of wealth, and keep the na tion's labor force and other productive resources fully employed...
...The President's rating on that point is seventy-eight per cent negative...
...From the military viewpoint, it would seem shortsighted to deprive its officers of the high quality of training Harvard offers...
...Pentagon Pettiness Now that American manpower has been withdrawn from Vietnam and the draft is in limbo, the military Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program is making a comeback on college campuses, from many of which it was driven at the height of the student antiwar protests...
...Unless our policy makers decide on drastic changes —and Keyserling does not see these changes in The Catholic Church and Abortion It is no secret that the credibility of the Catholic church leadership's opposition to abortion on a "right-to-life" basis has been undercut by an apparent lack of equal concern about other life issues, including war and poverty...
...It also reveals the tremendous power of a single member of Congress to force an action which had been specifically rejected by Congress as a whole...
...the American bishops issued an excellent pastoral letter on prison reform, and Rausch warned energy czar William Simon that the poor should not be made the chief victims of the energy crisis...
...That Nixon would openly accept such support, and thereby lend credence to Moon's counterfeit Christianity, is another example of the moral bankruptcy characteristic of this Administration...
...But what he chooses to ignore and what many of us have not yet been willing to assert is that Mr...
...Eighty per cent or more believe Congress has failed to cope satisfactorily with inflation, the economy, and the energy shortage...
...The conduct of a single temporary occupant of the White House cannot destroy that great office unless we permit his wrongful conduct to go untried...
...This nation is God's nation," Moon declares...
...politics, but there is also no doubt that the Supreme Court decision had a definite shock effect on many Catholic leaders: Persuaded that they could no longer rely on the law to enforce morality, they saw the need to make that morality believable in itself...
...Bishop James S. Rausch, general secretary of the U.S...
...Well, now they know...
...Moon's message is a blend of old-time patriotism and piety: "God is depending on America today...
...Wakeland is scared stiff, not just of what he did not know, but of the dangers facing millions of American families who use natural gas in their homes without realizing how "explosive" it can be...
...No one can disagree with that expression...
...Basically, Byrd and his followers contended that without Rhodesian chrome, the United States was becoming too dependent upon Soviet chrome...
...After Moon visited Nixon in February, the White House issued a brief announcement saying "the President wanted to take the opportunity to personally thank the Reverend Moon for his support...
...The Soviet Union's shipments of chrome to this country actually rose after the Byrd Amendment was enacted and Rhodesian chrome began arriving here...
...Drafted by industry lobbies, the regulations are put into effect after consideration by an "advisory board" dominated by representatives of gas companies and public utilities...
...Considering that General Davis is Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Safety and Consumer Affairs, he ought to...
...He admitted that when an OPS official talks to him about pipelines and chemicals, he is likely to confuse "someone like me whose background is in public administration...
...The Pentagon's move probably ensures that Harvard will not restore ROTC in the immediate future...
...When Congress reconvened in January, about 1,000 of Moon's disciples (sometimes called Moonies) marched on Capitol Hill with placards pleading for the beleaguered President: "PRAY FOR NIXON" and "FORGIVE...
...The arguments for the Byrd Amendment were nonsense from the start...
...One of their cosponsors on the Foreign Affairs Committee is Representative William Mailliard of California, ranking Republican on the Committee...
...Two weeks later, Moon began a thirty-two-city tour to evoke sympathy for Nixon...
...But ROTC has not been reactivated at all these colleges, and Harvard is one...
...The order to violate the U.N...
...One OMB official said recently that the lack of a solid safety plan from DO T had precluded any serious look at how the Pipeline Safety Act was working...
...For whatever it says about the Pentagon or the nation's schools, the affair reminds us of Henry David Thoreau's observation, "It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter...
...God chose this na tion as His champion in His modern day dispensation . . . God is testing America through the Watergate problem...
...There are some easy ways to make pipelines safe...
...Nixon and his subordinates are not now called to account for what we have already been told about this Administration, there can be no confidence either in the Presidency or the Congress...
...After living underground for four years as a deserter, McNally turned himself in to the military last December to help dramatize the amnesty cause...
...rather they are among the growing number who identify themselves as political independents...
...The Unification Church is pretty much of an unknown quantity to American religious leaders, although Moon already has impressed some churchmen as a Korean-style Elmer Gantry...
...As The Washington Post put it, "Byrd's brief for Rhodesian chrome is pure mischief...
...The Soviet Union, after Rhodesia, is the world's largest supplier of chrome...
...American economists "have been far more responsible" for this "than any other single group .. . for their influence upon national economic policies has increased year by year since the enactment of the Employment Act of 1946...
...In his recently published study, The Scarcity School of Economics and the Shortages It Has Wrought, Key serling says that the energy crisis, which he considers "real and serious," should not divert attention from the fact that "our economy and our people have suffered immensely during the past two decades or longer from a wide variety of scarcities and shortages...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
