Comment

...The threat from the Right is real: Two groups to which the Greensboro defendants belong operate a paramilitary training camp in Johnson County, North Carolina...

...A Kemp-Roth-style tax cut combined with increased military spending—a revival, in short, of the military Keynesianism of the Kennedy Administration— simply will not work in 1981...

...The Executive Branch has also insisted that since there is not enough time to call Congress together in the thirty minutes it takes for a Soviet missile to reach the United States, the President alone has the exclusive right to make war...

...Kim Dae Jung is, in the words of Andrew Young, "South Korea's Martin Luther King"—an internationally respected advocate of human rights who has been leading a fragmented coalition of students, church leaders, journalists, and labor leaders in repeated attempts to open South Korea to the fresh winds of freedom...

...The fire next time There was a report, among all the others, that one of the players in the MGM Grand Hotel noticed smoke an hour before fire actually broke out...

...When and whether the stagnation of our domestic economy will move into full-blown crisis cannot be predicted, but it is safe to assume that none of the remedies being discussed by the Reagan team will adequately address the structural disarray...

...Rohatyn's call for a mechanism to create broad capitalist planning still represents only a minority view among business leaders...

...Anything less would be acquiescence in murder...

...Robert Cahoon, who led the court-appointed defense counsel, did not miss the jury's political hue...

...There is no assurance that worried consumers will spend the extra dollars provided by a tax cut—and if they do, increased consumer spending is sure to spur a new round of inflation as oligopolies raise prices and energy bottlenecks, whether real or manipulated, drive up prices and interest rates...

...Evidence presented by the state included considerable eyewitness testimony—most of it from such "neutral" observers as journalists and bystanders, and much of it uncontradicted, along with ballistics analysis by the FBI laboratory in Washington and video tape, film, and still photos of the shooting, taken from different angles...

...We should try not to...

...That danger is intensified by a recent campaign by militarists who want to place authority for pushing the button in the hands of generals rather than the President...

...The Government reports that the index of leading economic indicators has risen for three successive months, and many economists now believe we have moved out of the recession...

...After that, he was harassed and banned from electoral politics...

...The financial press has been focusing on the differences among Reagan's advisers—on the one hand, such right-wing "populists" as Representative Jack Kemp, who favor large individual tax cuts, and, on the other, such traditional conservatives as Alan Greenspan, who advocate smaller cuts directed toward corporations and investors...

...As Chairman Mao once wrote, a revolution is not a dinner party...

...Although four out of five of the victims were white, black outrage over the verdicts by the all-white jury radiated from Greensboro in angry concentric circles across North Carolina and the nation...

...The people of the Morningside Homes public housing project, on whose front lawns the killings took place, were neither consulted nor asked for permission by the CWP in advance of the November 3 rally, and the invasion of their community—at the invitation of the CWP—could easily have resulted in the deaths or injury of residents and bystanders...

...In this context, it becomes crucial for activists on the Left to begin a vigorous campaign for democratic forms of economic planning...

...technicians in various parts of the world...

...Will we always be so lucky...

...But armed confrontations like the one at the Morningside project, no less than verdicts like the one returned in Greensboro, do not help to stem the tide...

...The CWP, a Maoist organization active in union organizing, has black leaders who have lived in the Greensboro area for more than fifteen years: It was only natural for them to schedule their "Death to the Klan" rally in a black, working-class section of the city...

...That .would be a graceful farewell from a failed administration and an early opportunity for Ronald Reagan to back a professed concern for human rights with real action...

...This is the time, therefore, to join with unions and other community groups in a campaign for worker and community control of basic business decisions...

...The mayor did admit that "there's going to always be a black mark on Greensboro because of November 3, 1979," the day five members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) were slain...

...It will not suffice to attempt to revive the liberal programs of past decades: Tax reform and government jobs programs have merely encouraged multinational corporations to invest overseas...

...Well before the zealous Dawson drove 100 miles west to the Lincoln County fair to invite people to Greensboro to disrupt the communist rally, he had acted as a paid KKK informant for the FBI and served a prison sentence for shooting from a car into a rural black community...

...Later, in a masterpiece of understatement, Cahoon said that "the fact that the defendants are patriotic individuals and the victims subversive must have played an important role in some of the jurors' decisions...

...Through the night, as Mayor Jim Melvin and other law enforcement personnel kept watch over the tense city, the mayor took time out to repeat that theme in press conferences and interviews...

...They would not have to consult either the President or Congress...

...Though the gross national product may be turning upward, no one expects the rate of inflation to fall much below 10 per cent in 1981...

...There were no police to be seen anywhere...

...President Chun's hand-picked supreme court is expected to decide Kim's fate at any moment...

...State Department, always supportive of Seoul's military dictators, insists it is using "quiet persuasion" to dissuade the latest gang of thugs from murdering Kim...

...Reasonable as these fixes may seem, on some level we suspect they are part of the problem...

...When the caravan of Klansmen and Nazis drove into the milling crowd of leftist demonstrators on November 3, Edward Dawson was riding in the lead car...

...But like all systems that depend on impersonal machines, it commits errors...

...As communists (and union organizers), the victims of the November 3 shooting simply stepped beyond the pale of acceptable political behavior and thus outside the protection of the U.S...

...Several of these would have covered the finding that one or more of the accused were acting in self-defense but used more force than necessary, even "deadly force," to protect himself or others...

...Fate just dealt us this blow," he said...

...The situation is even worse in South Korea, where the latest in a series of U.S.-supported military dictators has replaced the nation's entire supreme court in advance of a ruling on the fate of Kim Dae Jung...

...In the last eighteen months there have been 151 nuclear alerts, each requiring a "missile display conference" by radio or telephone among U.S...

...In that process, death, like political power, sometimes flows from the barrel of a gun...

...No one was interested...

...The U.S...

...detection system is a highly sophisticated one...

...Without even trying to amend the Constitution, which places this prerogative in the hands of Congress alone, Presidents from Truman on have insisted that they have the right to make war on their own—without restraint by Congress or anyone else...

...But he maintained that "the black mark was put there because of no fault of the community itself...

...The most likely prospect is that the stagflation of recent years will continue in the Reagan Administration, producing spurts of inflation followed by higher levels of unemployment...

...on Monday, November 17,1980, Octavio Man-duley stood before television cameras on the third floor of the Guilford County courthouse in Greensboro, North Carolina, explaining to stunned reporters why he and the rest of the all-white jury had just acquitted six Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis on all charges of murder and rioting...

...In speech after speech, civil rights activists and ministers associated the Greensboro verdict with the rise of the KKK and the Nazis nationally, the murder of blacks in Buffalo and Atlanta, and fears over what the incoming Reagan Administration will do to social service and education programs...

...To Dawson's recruits, the threatening, rhetorical hyperbole of the CWP was real, and the use of guns as...

...Nonetheless, there appeared to be more than enough evidence to convict the defendants of something, if not of the five counts of first-degree murder or rioting with which each was charged...

...such actions only contribute to the false notion that public enterprise in any form must be inefficient...

...The structure is a house of cards that may collapse at any time, and that will certainly remain shaky until we find a fundamental solution to the energy crisis and to the economic instability of the developing nations...

...That, even if true, is not good enough...

...To be fair, the Communist Workers Party must also share a portion of the responsibility...

...Many business economists are complaining that the recession was too short and mild to break the back of inflation, and some suspect that renewed inflation and high interest rates will, in fact, give us a "second dip" of recession...

...Finally, he left the hotel and the sky fell...

...Felix Rohatyn, the leading investment banker who heads New York City's Municipal Assistance Corporation, has renewed his call for a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but now he is going beyond his earlier proposals to suggest the need for a "social contract" among business, the Federal Government, and labor...

...It seems most unlikely, therefore, that the Reagan Administration will be able to make significant progress toward its promised goal of a balanced budget...

...But the situation could easily lend itself to catastrophe...

...But it has no relation to our form of government or to social attitudes in Greensboro...

...In October 1979, to cite just one example, a radar station at Mount Hebo, Oregon, mistook a piece of space junk reentering the atmosphere for a submarine-launched Soviet missile...

...The international financial situation is the most precarious in half a century...

...As long as workers toiled for low wages in (until recently) segregated mills, died slow deaths from such occupational diseases as "brown lung," and were not permitted to organize into unions, there was likely to be strife in and around these plants...

...Verdict in Greensboro At 5:30 p.m...

...Extending our senses with artificial devices, we lose belief in what we see, hear, and smell for ourselves...

...Almost as an afterthought, he added, "We do regret that this unfortunate thing happened in our city...

...But these distinctions, too, are less significant than one might imagine: Both groups of Reagan advisers share the basic assumption that the right blend of fiscal and monetary fixes will set the U.S...

...Forces of reaction and right-wing extremism are on the rise nationally, but this period of KKK resurgence, with rallies and marches by dozens of demonstrators, in no way compares to the 1920s, when tens of thousands marched in hooded waves through the streets of cities and towns in the South and Midwest, and lynchings were frequent occurrences...

...Besides the risk of technical failure, there is always the possibility of human error at the evaluation levels, where technicians discuss what they have seen on their screens...

...economy runs up large debts by importing oil, but recoups most of the deficit through OPEC investments in American banks and securities...

...political props was an alien concept...

...The compact he envisions would entail Government-imposed austerity for all social classes as the price for pumping new investments into urban areas, "rebuilding" our conventional military forces, increasing the nuclear and coal-fired energy base, and boosting U.S...

...An elected, politically ambitious district attorney could not make up his mind whether he was prosecuting the Klansmen and Nazis or the Communist Workers Party survivors...

...jobs to low-wage havens...

...President" Chun Doo Hwan, who grabbed the South Korean military throne last summer following the assassination of Park Chung Hee, wants Kim Dae Jung executed for the crime of advocating democracy...

...Even the prosecution realized this error, but too late...

...The U.S...

...Like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Pentagon always insists there is nothing to worry about when a mistake or mishap occurs...

...At one point, Cahoon told the jury that if the accused "had taken a machine gun and mowed the crowd down, it would have been justified," since "the communists were attacking the very society that gives them the right to be out on the street...

...In the aftermath, blame was placed on missing sprinkler systems and smoke detectors, on faulty alarms— technological fixes for an environment inherently dangerous...

...In this respect, the verdict in Greensboro was as much an example of "American justice" as of "Southern justice...

...And since there are warnings once every four days or so, the generals would have ample opportunity to exercise their doomsday prerogative...

...In fact, our economy remains a crisis waiting to happen...

...Even a real effort to control all but military spending can only intensify the crisis, as the British government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has recently demonstrated...

...But eventually even major corporate interests are likely to advocate something more than ad hoc subsidies and stimuli...

...The incoming Congress will, in any event, refuse to enact even tepid liberal programs...

...It would be a mockery, of course, to limit such efforts to Federal bailouts or worker take-overs offailing industries...

...In an article last spring, Alan Greenspan characterized our probable economic outlook as one "racked with inflation, excessive unemployment, falling productivity, and little hope for a more benevolent future...

...productivity...

...Mark I. Pinsky (Mark Pinsky covered the shooting and trial in Greensboro for The New York Times and The Boston Globe...

...Petersburg of 1905, nor Weimar of 1923, nor even Managua of 1978...

...And beyond that is the danger that someone far down in the hierarchy will set off a nuclear war either wilfully or by mistake...

...For more than half a century, communists and radicals of various hues—home-grown as well as Northern imports—have come to Piedmont Carolina cities for the same reason: It is the heart of the textile industry...

...High levels of military spending will only exacerbate inflation and unemployment...

...A good deal of smoke is floating through a good many corridors— undetected by our official seers...

...No conceivable blend of individual tax relief and Government spending cuts is likely to restore an industry devastated by rising energy costs, an increasingly saturated domestic market, and competition from the low-wage areas of the globe...

...After riots broke out last summer in protest against another military takeover, Kim, already under house arrest, was sentenced to death...

...Sidney Lens (Sidney Lens is a contributing editor of The Progressive...

...On the other side, most of the defendants were recruited from the mountains and foothills of North Carolina by a Greensboro resident, Edward Dawson, then employed as an informer for the city police department...

...The prosecution team spent seven weeks going through a pool of 2,500 potential jurors, only to end up with a panel that included no Jews, no blacks, no union members...

...The "big three" auto companies are likely to lose a total of $4 billion to $5 billion this year, and the eventual collapse of Ford as well as Chrysler cannot be ruled out...

...We can also expect new demands for Federal bailouts of faltering industries...

...A Cuban exile with a long history of anti-communist activities, Mandu-ley, the panel foreman, maintained that the decision, reached after fourteen weeks of testimony and arguments and almost seven full days of deliberations, was based "on the evidence and the facts...

...In a 1971 election heavily rigged by the government, Kim . still managed to win 45 per cent of the vote against the feared President Park...

...Korean atrocity What if President Richard Nixon had been able to fire all nine justices of the Supreme Court when he got a whiff of their impending decision to force release of the White House tapes six years ago...

...But if the prosecutors sincerely believed that, as they have said since, the mass of evidence they presented would outweigh the prejudice of the jury, they were mistaken...

...a stagnating economy, Government revenues will inevitably lag behind Government obligations, and the President will be in no position to cut the budget enough to bring about a balance...

...But such indicators are less significant than ever before...

...Even under President Reagan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget will presumably be realistic enough to fight off calls within the Republican Party for a "balanced-budget amendment" to the Constitution—an amendment that could only result in economic chaos...

...The doomsday prerogative About once every four days, on the average, the Pentagon discovers that the United States is being attacked by Soviet missiles...

...During the Vietnam war, the Johnson Administration argued that the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which empowered Johnson to retaliate for two alleged North Vietnamese attacks on American ships, was "the equivalent" of a Congressional declaration of war...

...The world would have to remain in constant prayer that a general with his finger on the button wasn't drunk, hadn't had a domestic argument that morning, or wasn't suffering from momentary delusions of grandeur...

...For a while, like Chicken Little, he kept mentioning the smoke to people he thought might like to know: hotel employes, a policeman...

...The authority to declare war has already been taken from the public and Congress...

...But as our economic problems intensify, those business interests which have long opposed political involvement in "economic" decisions will probably begin to push a form of planning that will give neither labor nor the public any voice, or any share of the economic rewards...

...Execution would follow a negative ruling "in a matter of hours," according to David Thurber of the North American Coalition for Human Rights in Korea, a Washington church group...

...The White House must join human rights forces and governments the world over in issuing the most stinging protest, backed by credible threats of sanctions...

...Nor should the Left fall into the trap of encouraging or acquiescing in protectionism, which can only deepen the international economic crisis...

...Despite the CWP's apocalyptic rhetoric, Greensboro of 1979 was neither St...

...And if we have learned anything fromlecent events, it is the sheer unpredictability of our irrational economy...

...Targeted" tax cuts will neither ensure adequate levels of domestic investment in our sluggish economy nor stem the flow of U.S...

...Nine days after the acquittal, District Attorney Michael Schlosser announced that he was dropping the case against ten other Klansmen and Nazis involved in the fray, as well as six members and supporters of the CWP...

...President-elect Reagan clings to the conviction that tax cuts will end the current economic malaise and "put America back to work...

...American banks worry about Third World indebtedness, but they also fear that refusal to extend more loans will start a chain of defaults...

...Such speculation, too, is of little moment...

...Official ineptitude surfaced again when the case came to trial...

...Under the legal doctrine of "lesser included offenses," explained to the jury by Judge James M. Long, the panel could have returned with any combination of verdicts against the defendants, including second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, or simple misdemeanor rioting...

...economy straight...

...Early on, the CWP's courtroom observers noted the "political screening process" of jury selection, and, after the verdict, charged that "the verdict was sealed when the jury was picked...

...it is an act of violence by which one class seizes state power from another...

...If the "launch-on-warning" doctrine becomes official policy, the authority to make war will be removed one step further from the American people—from the President to anonymous generals...

...We need social control of such major profit centers as energy, high technology, and the military industries if we are to apply our economic resources to a rational reconstruction of society...

...Lying out there on the streets of Greensboro were not abstract ideological concepts, or errors, but people...

...Secretary of State Dean Acheson stafed that Congress could not legally have overruled Truman's decision to dispatch troops, even if it had wanted to...

...it carries less weight than the musings of Jimmy the Greek before each Sunday's NFL football game...

...These investments are "recycled" in the form of loans to Third World nations, so that these increasingly vulnerable states can buy more OPEC oil...

...Thus, Mayor Melvin and others in white Greensboro were particularly dismayed—the mayor vocally so—when, following the verdict, Greensboro's black community almost unanimously took the opposite position: that the city's racial and political atmosphere had everything to do with both the shooting and the verdict...

...To be sure, the U.S...

...Fortunately, all 151 alerts turned out to be equipment failures or false alarms that were identified in time— sometimes barely in time...

...Obviously, no such program will be put into effect this year or next—but failure to begin an active campaign now would deprive the Left of the one advantage presented by the Reagan Presidency—the impending bankruptcy of classical "free enterprise" and a political void in which new ideas should receive a more receptive response than at any time in our recent history...

...As the jury members retired to deliberate, an assistant district attorney admitted to a reporter, "I'm worried about their anti-communism...

...To lure these men—most of them poor, unemployed, and functionally illiterate—from their homes to Greensboro was to touch dynamite to a lighted torch...

...During the Korean war...

...Mayor Melvin's insistent denials notwithstanding, there were some reasons why the confrontation between the Communist Workers Party and the Klansmen and Nazis took place in Greensboro...

...The detection system went into high gear and even estimated just where the "missile" would strike in the United States...

...The Pentagon insists, of course, that there is nothing to worry about...

...Under the "launch-on-warning" procedure, generals surveying radar and computers could order the keys to be turned in the missile slots just as soon as they concluded, in their wisdom, that a Soviet attack was under way...

...Fortunately, the mistake was caught before anyone at the Strategic Air Command or at the White House started pushing buttons...

...Later he was kidnapped from a hotel room in Japan and brought back to South Korea by the regime's notorious secret police...

...Constitution...

...When the mood of the country is increasingly conservative, when times are hard economically, when the local social fabric begins to fray, Americans of all regions tend to choose order over law—if they are forced to take their pick...