COMMENT
COMMENT The irrelevant SALT debate With the opening of Senate debate on ratification of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), signed a few weeks ago by the two nuclear...
...I'm not aware of any state that requires advance notification of nuclear shipments," Dale Smith, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman, told Peter Bernstein of the Newhouse National News Service...
...But the rate setters plainly need a stronger prod than that...
...Carter's plan would pay for catastrophic coverage with six billion dollars in employer-employe contributions...
...It would establish a nationwide network of community-based health centers controlled by health workers and consumers and financed by a progressive tax on personal and corporate income...
...Although most states already allow generic substitution, these laws vary in their provisions and effectiveness...
...It is coming into being in a period of tension and crisis: The Carter Administration and the nation itself can't seem to get a handle on energy, inflation, foreign policy, or much else...
...Responding to a wave of public concern, Berea was one of twenty-six cities in northeast Ohio which passed a model ordinance to require advance notice of such shipments...
...One reason they persist is that Federal funding of agencies like the FAA is inadequate...
...Business as usual As citizens of a security-conscious society, we have grown accustomed to being watched by electric eyes peering from our supermarket ceilings, to being fingerprinted at our bank counters, to being frisked in the corridors of our airports...
...Ignored by the drug company lobbyists is the fact that generic drugs are routinely used by almost all major hospitals and that most drugs dispensed to Medicaid and Medicare patients are low-cost generics...
...But VA Compensation Director J.C...
...The substantial role for insurance companies under the Kennedy proposal would further undermine the principle of universal health protection, since there would be different forms of coverage for different groups...
...Whatever the outcome of the present DC-10 investigation, we may expect the FAA to reassure the public as to the general safety of the airlines while continuing to make only the most minimal requirements of carriers and manufacturers...
...The alternative is nuclear disarmament...
...As an instrument for effectuating nuclear arms reductions, SALT is a fraud and a delusion...
...In addition, while nine states require a pharmacist to dispense a lower-cost generic drug (unless the physician specifies otherwise), the FTC's model act omits this necessary mandate...
...Its grant of white control over the civil service, the military, and the courts effectively subverts democracy...
...See "Nagasaki's Other Victims," by Norman Solomon, in the July issue of The Progressive...
...If SALT were no more than a symbol of America's firmly grounded intention to achieve nuclear arms reductions at some later and more propitious time, then the symbolic act would be worthy of support...
...When the anti-substitution laws were being debated in California a few years ago, eight drug manufacturers took out full-page newspaper ads asserting consumers would not benefit from substitution and urging them to express their "opposition" to their elected representatives by clipping and mailing the forms the manufacturers had thoughtfully included...
...Such spinoffs take us another step toward becoming a society in which everyone is watched...
...It has already delivered 277, but must deliver 400 to break even...
...strategic stockpile rose to 6,800 in 1972, when SALT I was signed...
...The veterans and their survivors had hoped the evidence would prod the VA into conducting an investigation of its own, checking the subsequent medical histories of all GIs who served at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and reviewing its policy of automatically denying claims for medical benefits on grounds there had been no radiation hazard...
...However, present anti-substitution laws effectively require pharmacists to maintain larger-than-necessary inventories of each brand-name product...
...Finally, competition will encourage pharmacists to provide the least expensive drug...
...The conflict of interest is obvious...
...It is being organized as the intellectual product of a small group rather than as the evolutionary product of a committed movement...
...The Department of Transportation is not oblivious to the local pressures...
...But it is not the kind of choice the proponents and opponents of SALT II would have us believe...
...We treat each case as a separate case," he says...
...Another and more fundamental concern is that the incipient Citizens Party has not, so far as we know, delineated the basic differences that will make it preferable to the two major parties...
...Thus, there is every indication that the routine denials — and the cover-up — will continue...
...The FTC has already caved in to industry pressure by allowing preprinted forms that remind the doctor to prohibit substitution...
...Thus far the Administration appears to be holding firm in its commitment to continued sanctions, and thus to a sound policy on southern Africa...
...Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Radiation, P.O...
...To head off this attempt to subvert the new law, the FTC must follow the lead of several states and require that any restrictions on substitution be in the physician's own handwriting...
...Commoner, it is true, is the leading theoretician of the anti-nuclear movement and a cherished friend of the antiwar movement, but he carries no mandate from either...
...Now that electrical costs are rising, utilities are understandably worried about the prospects of a return to industrial cogeneration...
...And, paradoxically, these policing devices themselves play a powerful role in sustaining that technology...
...It would be better to press for reforms in the distribution of power in the health industry...
...While many slates already had regulations, the city of Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb, passed the first of many ordinances in northeast Ohio requiring special permits...
...These shipments are increasing yearly, and spillages now occur on an average of once every ten days...
...It should vote overwhelmingly for ratification...
...In 1971, the drug industry spent only $629 million on all research and development, while paying billions of dollars for promotion...
...Such proposals as Carter's and Kennedy's may have the best chance of enactment by the current Congress, but both would mean continued escalation of health care costs with no improvement in the quality of care...
...Surely, if anything needs ironclad protection it is the H-bomb...
...The station questioned Deputy Director of Environmental Quality Joseph E. Obr, and learned hot only that the state had no rules, but that state officials were unaware of the shipments...
...Average savings ranged from 11.5 per cent in Arkansas to 31 per cent in Delaware...
...Peckarsky says the Government has no plans to look more closely at the cases...
...The answer, quite simply, is neither...
...The Administration proposes to phase in national health care over a period of years, limiting initial coverage to the aged, the pbor, and the victims of catastrophic medical expenses...
...The real beneficiary of these programs would be the private interests that govern American health care and already have their noses in the Federal trough...
...Thus, the Interstate Commerce Commission received its strongest early backing from the railroad industry, which hoped to prevent the kind of "cutthroat' ' competition that had reduced corporate profits in the late Nineteenth Century...
...Just a day before, Iowa PIRG and ACORN, two public interest groups, had been in Obr's office with a rulemaking petition to require advance notice and issuance of a permit for shipments of nuclear materials...
...Ohio Energy Director Robert S. Ryan adds, "This is in the area of the people's right to know...
...Department of Transportation...
...It is an electronic identity badge designed to screen, monitor, and control anyone entering or leaving what company officials call "critical areas...
...The experience in those states which now permit substitution dramatically demonstrates the savings...
...There are large and extremely integrated economic stakes in the regulation of the industry...
...The Soviet stockpile, though smaller, has climbed correspondingly...
...Cogeneration is not a novelty in the United States...
...That was the VA's response to fresh evidence of widespread radiation disease and death among GIs who took part in the cleanup — evidence painstakingly gathered by independent researchers and made public in June...
...We do our darnedest to make sure that the casks are so strong that no one has to worry about accidents on the highway...
...Even the Ohio Turnpike Patrol was not informed of the deadly cargo...
...After hearings on the issue, the Department of Transportation chose to uphold the New York law on the common-sense grounds that no preemption had taken place since no Federal regulations existed...
...Preoccupation with "practical" proposals, along with misleading metaphors about half-loaves of bread being better than none, may only contribute to the long-run deterioration of the nation's health care system...
...Tied into a computer system, the electronic badges hold out the promise of a surveillance system free of human error...
...He proposed a 10 per cent tax cut to industries investing in cogeneration, a method of capturing waste heat and using it to produce electricity consuming half the fuel required by central power stations...
...The drug industry also contends that substitution will not result in any consumer savings...
...The national left-of-center party we need is an entirely different sort of enterprise...
...But when the waste from Three Mile Island passed through Berea on the Ohio Turnpike on its way to Richland, Washington, early in May (South Carolina had already rejected it), city officials were among the last to know...
...This pattern will remain unchanged as long as basic decisions about employment and production in the industry — as well as the rest of the economy — remain in the hands of a few regulators dominated by the industry itself...
...If the NRC was unaware of any state requirements, it had obviously done little checking to find out...
...Both proposals also provide a major role for private insurance companies and Blue Cross-Blue Shield, closely interlocked with the hospitals, where the primary commitment is to medical technologies that maximize hospital revenue...
...In doing so we can best support and influence the revolutionary forces that play an ever more important role in southern Africa...
...These costs are, of course, passed on to consumers...
...The issue the Senate should be considering is not by what means and to what ends and under what terms strategic arms will be controlled, as the SALT debate would have it...
...Ineffective and costly intervention of this sort also has the unfortunate consequence of convincing many that all forms of political intervention in the health care sector will not work...
...Such formulas are regressive, since major corporate employers are able to pass on the added labor costs through higher prices to the consumer...
...The promise of security with electronic gewgaws is a dangerous sham, one that neatly enables Sandia to continue its own grim business as usual...
...The model act would enable pharmacists to dispense a lower-cost but therapeutically equivalent "generic" drug for the more expensive brand name indicated on the prescription...
...Before the ill-fated American Airlines Flight 191 went down, McDonnell Douglas expected to be marketing forty DC-lOs a year by 1981...
...The "internal settlement" which brought Bishop Abel Muzorewa to the prime-ministership of Zimbabwe Rhodesia is little more than a facade for the maintenance of white political power...
...There may have been a rationale for central power station monopolies earlier in the century, when fuel was plentiful and inexpensive...
...By last summer, local governments began to understand that they had clear authority to act on their own in dealing with movements of radioactive materials...
...Skin-deep health care President Carter's unveiling of a national health insurance proposal has generated a predictable debate over which plan Congress ought to approve: his own or that of Senator Edward M. Kennedy...
...The national Republican Party, after all, developed out of a half dozen statewide Republican parties, and had a number of years to develop a program...
...Federal regulation, while responding in some fashion to the most obvious abuses, has always assured stable profits for the regulated industries...
...While three trucks rolled west along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to 1-80, notice should have been served on several Ohio cities and the state of Indiana, which requires a permit for such shipments on the Indiana Turnpike...
...An FAA policy which grounds a plane like the DC-10 for any substantial period of time will affect the jobs of hundreds of thousands of workers and the economic stability of entire communities...
...The Department of Energy or any affected rate payer could request a commission to consider such standards...
...air carriers, United Airlines has 21 per cent of its fleet in DC-10s and American has 23 per cent...
...Consumers should beware of scare tactics...
...Box 42384, Portland, Oregon 97242...
...In the guise of safeguarding nuclear weapons systems, they lull us to the dangers that those weapons systems ultimately pose...
...The People's Party, born on July 4, 1892, at a convention attended by 15,000 enthusiastic supporters, was the end result of a quarter of a century of farm protests, labor organizing, and other active movements — the Grange, the Alliances, the Wheels, the Knights of Labor, the suffragettes, the single-taxers...
...It should be clear that one prescription for relieving the pain of high-priced medicine is to permit pharmacists to make generic substitutions...
...The committee voted nominally to require the President to lift sanctions but allowed him the option of preserving them if he certifies this to be in the national interest...
...A proposal sponsored by Representative Ronald Dellums of California comes closest to that goal...
...But SALT's most enduring and deadliest contribution has been its impact on the opposition to the arms race...
...The Shaker Heights ordinance has become model legislation for cities throughout the country...
...Congress has taken a small step in that direction by passing legislation requiring state utility commissions to consider prohibition of reduced industrial bloc rates...
...The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty focused attention and concern on the growing stockpiles of the nuclear weapons states, to which the superpowers responded with the concept of "strategic arms limitation," once again lulling the world community into inaction...
...Two Olympic sprinters with badges attached to their uniforms could run through a portal just an arm's length apart and still be detected by the system," says Sandia...
...But funding of research in an industry that enjoys a return on sales more than double the average of all industries is merely a matter of priorities...
...In that sense, the time is propitious for organizing a new party that addresses people's fundamental concerns...
...Jim Schwab (Jim Schwab is coordinator of the Iowa Public Interest Research Group...
...Don Rose has had great success in the mayoral campaigns of Richard Hatcher and Jane Byrne — traditional campaigns of handshaking, thirty-second television spots, and media events...
...If it were simply a question of whether the United States should step up or cut back the nuclear arms race — the issue pictured by both sides — there could be no doubt what the Senate should do...
...There is a widespread feeling that the problems are not being solved — and that they can't be...
...If the Citizens Party wants to be more than a closet operation, it will have to seek a much broader base...
...The inconvenience and invasion of our privacy seem a small price to pay for the security such devices appear to provide...
...With cogeneration equipment, industries could satisfy their own power needs and sell excess electricity to power companies...
...Staying firm on the question of sanctions is the most effective way of exerting that leverage...
...The Citizens Party does not have the luxury of time, but that is all the more reason for it to seek as much guidance as possible from the grass roots...
...It's business as usual at the U.S...
...The SALT process has also permitted the nuclear establishments to introduce, bargain for, win, and then develop whole new weapons systems — the multiple warhead missile, the cruise missile, and now the mobile missile, a thirty-billion-dollar boondoggle extracted by the Pentagon as its price for accession to SALT II...
...Mayor Jack Kafer of Berea, Ohio, also part of the Cleveland metropolitan area, does not feel the cities are abusing their authority...
...It now stands at 9,500 with the signing of SALT II, which permits it to rise to 14,000 by 1983...
...Medicare, which guarantees a substantial role for Blue Cross, has reinforced hospital expansion by allowing hospitals to pass along some of their costs to the Federal Government, contributing to a doubling in the rate of health care inflation since 1967, the first year of the program...
...But the FTC's concern for consumers is being resisted by an intensive campaign mounted by the drug industry to block the proposal...
...The present anti-war, anti-nuclear, feminist, and black movements have not yet coalesced, nor have they attracted any significant labor commitment to a new party...
...Industry found it profitable to buy power instead of generating it...
...With that thought in mind, many might be inclined to welcome a new security product now being developed by Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico...
...Meanwhile, New London, Connecticut, along Brookhaven's only other route, passed its own restrictions...
...Efforts already are under way to gather more information and evidence to put pressure on the VA, on Congress, and on the President himself...
...Jimmy Carter's good idea deserves more than just lip service...
...Elections under such a regime cannot justify removal of the sanctions...
...If, as Alan Wolfe suggests in a recent issue of The Nation, SALT II is "the attempt of two declining superpowers to maintain their hold on a world that is slipping out of their control," then let the world thwart that effort while there is still time...
...But the treaty is none of those things...
...The utilities threw other roadblocks in the way of cogeneration by refusing to buy industrially cogenerated electricity at fair prices and charging high fees for replacement power when industrial cogenerators had to be shut down for maintenance or repair...
...This proposal may not be passable now, but focus on these issues offers the most certain route toward fundamental improvements in the quality and availability of health care...
...Environmentalist Barry Commoner has a point, therefore, when he compares the present period to the 1840s and 1850s and proclaims that "what this country needs today is an analog of the Republican Party of that time" — the only successful third party in American history...
...Of the six major domestic U.S...
...Having claimed and won acceptance as the central framework for nuclear weapons policy debate, it has come close to destroying the only solid base from which a real alternative to nuclear war can be created...
...Let them suffer If you or a loved one served your country in 1945 in the cleanup of atomic-bomb-ravaged Hiroshima or Nagasaki and are wondering now about the aftereffects of radiation, don't look to the Government for help...
...And if it does intend to "live" between elections, what will its focus be, and what kind of organizational structures will it develop at the grass roots...
...Citizens Party The proposed Citizens Party is still little more than a gleam in the eyes of a few people, but it has a great deal going for it...
...The Kennedy proposal at least has the advantage of including all citizens in its coverage...
...An additional emotional appeal by the drug industry will be that diminishing the profits obtained primarily from the sale of brand-name products will impair research and development...
...It deserves to be rejected — not because there is any merit in the claim of those who profess to see in it a threat to "national defense" but because that claim is irrelevant to the real issue that demands attention...
...Of these, 118 resulted in spillages...
...But will the Citizens Party personnel be accountable to its constituency...
...Such laws also rule out the economies that could result from purchasing greater quantities of fewer brands...
...Last November, it initiated a Federal rulemaking proceeding which will begin this summer...
...We hope it will be treated that way...
...If SALT II, even with all the loopholes the negotiators found it necessary to leave for the nuclear weapons makers, were the only feasible alternative to unrestrained competition, a plausible case could still be made for ratification...
...But both proposals are fundamentally flawed...
...Before drafting begins, therefore, a systematic effort should be made to seek out the opinion of those who are likely to be the Citizens Party's recruits...
...SALT has been equally successful in drawing attention away from nuclear weapons research and development (the mainspring of the arms race) and from burgeoning systems of tactical nuclear warfare — both conveniently excluded from the arms limitation agenda...
...For Americans, let the demand for an accounting begin now, before the Senate is done debating irrelevancies...
...Resistance has taken the form of "letters to the editor" from officials of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, and we can expect to see "public service ads" pointing out supposed dangers of substitution...
...Many drug companies have gone so far as to supply doctors with preprinted forms that would prohibit a pharmacist from dispensing a generic equivalent...
...But now the ratio has declined to 5 per cent because of decades of low fuel costs and rigged rate structures that allowed utilities to set low prices for bulk power...
...This Orwellian specter will persist as long as the military technology that spawns automatic policing devices prospers...
...The bulk of the Kennedy program is financed in the same way...
...There is no reason why the platform of the new party should be drawn up in advance, with a predetermined emphasis on economic issues and only token attention for the anti-war issue...
...He should fight for it — and so should we all...
...Ray Bonner (Attorney Ray Bonner is director of the California Citizen's Action Group, based in San Francisco...
...Decentralized cogeneration can become a reality again only by confronting and dealing with rate structures that perpetuate utility monopolies...
...Holding firm in Africa Recent action by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Zimbabwe Rhodesian trade embargo represents at least a partial victory for forces supporting democracy in that nation...
...Neither proposal provides any significant incentive for preventive health care, and both would force the costs of needless medical expansion to be borne by working-class Americans...
...Since public policy does not protect workers against layoffs and communities against major economic dislocation, effective regulatory policies will always be met by stiff calls for more "realistic" — that is, softer — regulation...
...Already, the new security system has been installed and tested at a Government nuclear facility for the purpose of efficiently and automatically securing "critical areas...
...But it cannot be explained simply by citing venality in particular agency administrators...
...Unfortunately, the evidence does not suggest that the FTC, already under fire from other industries it seeks to regulate in the consumer interest, will offer much resistance to the drug industry...
...After all, they enable us to continue doing business as usual...
...The Twentieth Century seems to have betrayed America...
...If Federal legislation were enacted forcing utilities to sell industrial and residential power at the same rate, industry would have a powerful incentive to exploit the efficiencies of cogeneration...
...Its cause would be better served by defeat rather than victory for a policy which offers only the semblance of arms limitation...
...The system has generated high profits for hospital suppliers, drug companies, physicians, and hospitals — with the costs being passed on to consumers...
...Under the model act, the laws would be standardized...
...Will it function between elections, or will it — like the present major parties — lapse into suspended animation...
...Will candidates of the Citizens Party "vote their conscience" or will they be bound to defend, support, and carry out the promises of the party platform...
...The case of the DC-10 illustrates the point...
...Will it initiate them, participate in them, avoid them...
...And what better source for this relief than Sandia, the laboratory that has had years of experience developing the very products it now is taking such elaborate pains to protect...
...But it must be remembered that the nuclear weapons makers and their lobbyists are not the only threat to peace...
...Further west, WOI-TV, of Ames, Iowa, learned of three truckloads from Three Mile Island coming through the state on 1-80...
...While the NRC currently regulates the packaging of radioactive materials for shipment, there are no rules at the Federal level on routing, advance notice for state or local officials, or even any coordinated preparation for response to accidents or spillages...
...Two decades ago, outraged public opinion forced the superpowers to suspend nuclear weapons tests which were polluting the atmosphere with radioactive fallout...
...The issue is whether such weapons serve the national interest...
...Equally dangerous is the notion that the threat can be averted through a process of accommodation...
...The full realization that the arms race is out of control may be what the public needs to spur it to action...
...The United States has the economic leverage to induce reforms which will alleviate the extreme economic inequalities in Zimbabwe Rhodesia...
...If the United States and the Soviet Union are to continue their deadly game of "nuclear chicken," let them do so openly without the flim-flam of strategic arms limitation talks...
...Neither the President's nor the Senator's plan comes to grips with the basic economic and political problems of the health industry...
...But rather than a comprehensive test ban that would have curtailed weapons development as well, the world settled for a treaty that permitted the testing to continue underground — and development has been escalating ever since...
...Veterans Administration...
...Rather than admitting it may have been wrong about radiation hazards following the 1945 bombings, thereby risking further public doubts about nuclear policies to which it seems unalterably wedded, the Government appears willing to let the Hiroshima-Nagasaki veterans and their survivors bear their pain and anxieties alone...
...The alternative to the nuclear arms race is not SALT or other forms of "arms control" which serve only to legitimize the steady buildup toward nuclear disaster...
...To side with those who excoriate SALT for opposite reasons may seem unthinkable to some...
...Still, the applications of this system do not stop with the nuclear industry...
...Deadly cargo From 1974 through 1978, according to Federal records, 328 accidents occurred on American highways involving shipments of radioactive substances...
...The utilities should no longer be permitted to squander fuel resources when a better alternative exists...
...But those days are gone...
...COMMENT The irrelevant SALT debate With the opening of Senate debate on ratification of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), signed a few weeks ago by the two nuclear superpowers, Americans face a momentous choice affecting the peace and security of the world...
...Such practices are not unique to the regulation of this industry...
...The accounting will matter little in years to come, when, from the rubble of the next world war, the accusing finger points not just to those who engineered the nuclear arms race but to those who always meant to stop it...
...Certainly today's challenges — and the failure of the established parties to cope with them — are even more acute than the circumstances that created the Nineteenth Century Republican Party...
...But the trouble is that Jimmy Carter isn't pushing it...
...It will have its own program and personnel, to be sure, and both will be immeasurably better than the program and personnel of the major parties...
...The allowance of such comfortable numerical ceilings — as high as either side could wish — is only one of SALT's many accomplishments...
...More socialism for the rich is not the way to solve this problem...
...Sidney Lens (Sidney Lens is a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...The drug industry will use the term "generic" disparagingly, implying inferior quality...
...In the face of industry pressure, the FTC is not expected to advance the strongest consumer interest...
...The source of this confusion is the U.S...
...We need to know what is going on and I'm not happy to have to find out from the news media...
...Our major concern is that we be at least aware and on the alert," he insists...
...Consumers themselves must vigilantly guard against the drug industry's desperate efforts to prevent widespread use of generic drugs...
...The historic underfunding of regulatory agencies reflects the enormous economic and political power enjoyed by the "regulated" industries...
...Concerned about the limited spent fuel storage capacity at their reactors on Long Island, Brookhaven Laboratories promptly sued to invalidate the rules on grounds of Federal preemption...
...A few years later, mounting concern about the worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons was effectively dissipated by the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which since 1970 has been scattering nuclear power technology and nuclear weapons know-how to the four corners of the earth...
...Such stonewalling is all the more reprehensible in light of a new VA regulation, issued late in June in response to Congressional pressure, requiring more liberal review of claims submitted by soldiers exposed to radiation by nuclear weapons exercises in Nevada in the 1950s and 1960s...
...From a total of three or four thousand warheads when the SALT negotiations began in 1969, the U.S...
...That issue can best be raised — perhaps it can only be raised — through rejection of a premise which, by accepting and regulating nuclear weapons, serves only to institutionalize them...
...The real aviation flaws Since the nation's worst air disaster near Chicago in May there has been much speculation about possible design flaws in the DC-10...
...Sandia, which does the engineering work for this country's nuclear weapons program, has come up with a one-ounce security device that fits in the palm of your hand...
...If you want to help, write the newly formed Committee to Support U.S...
...DOT is likely to hear from many localities, organizations, and individuals before the debate is over...
...If a fingerprint worn on the lapel can help protect a weapons plant, it might also be useful in a prison, a bank, or any other "critical area...
...The FAA has a long-standing practice of allowing strategically placed employes of airplane manufacturers to wear two hats — an industry and a government hat...
...New York City moved into the regulatory vacuum in 1976 with its own restrictions, which virtually banned any nuclear fuel cycle shipments there...
...What better way to relieve anxieties about protection of nuclear weapons facilities...
...The verdict is still out on the DC-10, but what is known for a certainty is that procedures employed by the FA A to monitor the industry make it all too easy for manufacturers to design and construct airplanes with major faults...
...This was the case long before the present era of tight budgets and skepticism about the benefits of regulatory processes in general...
...It is neither a cutback nor a freeze nor even the faint promise of a slowdown of the deadly enterprise to which this nation and its rival seem unalterably committed...
...Though employed by a private corporation, their job is to ensure that airline design and production specifications conform to government regulations...
...The ultimate constituency of a new party may well have an entirely different idea of priorities...
...The growing role of Blue Cross and the private insurance industry has led to a rapid expansion of hospital facilities regardless of social need...
...That doesn't mean, though, that these victims need suffer in silence...
...Other founders of the Citizens Party, including Don Rose, who helped steer Jane Byrne to victory as mayor of Chicago, have smaller constituencies or none...
...Whether the Citizens Party is that party, however, remains to be seen...
...Their profits depend on a centralized power production monopoly in which rates are based on what the traffic will bear...
...Some studies have shown that — if vigorously pushed — cogeneration could supply 40 per cent of the nation's electrical need by 1985, enough to end dependence on nuclear power...
...Toward energy efficiency Jimmy Carter had a good idea in 1977...
...Drug scare tactics The mode...
...act proposed by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to ensure all consumers the benefits of lower-cost prescription drugs may never be implemented if the drug industry has its way...
...In fact, according to the FTC study, the average saving has exceeded 20 per cent...
...Because of lack of personnel, funding, and expertise, the agency appoints "designated engineering representatives" at every plant...
...Ultimately a just and effective social order in Zimbabwe Rhodesia will have to include substantial elements of the Patriotic Front, which is carrying on the struggle for true majority rule in that country...
...As the quickening tempo of the nuclear arms race has made increasingly clear, SALT is the culmination of an accommodation process that goes back many years...
...It is, in fact, a further cementing of that commitment...
...Unfortunately, far less attention has been devoted to design flaws in the Federal Aviation Administration...
...But actual promulgation of rules could take up to five years, and not all local governments along the nation's nuclear thoroughfares will wait patiently...
...What will be the Citizens Party's relationship to such extraparliamentary actions as anti-nuclear or anti-war demonstrations...
...Fifty years ago it provided 30 per cent of all the country's electrical power...
Vol. 43 • August 1979 • No. 8
