Reagan's 'day of reckoning'
COMMENT Reagan's 'day of reckoning1 One of the more pathetic political spectacles presented to the American people in recent years has been the wholly ineffectual response of Congressional...
...The Federal Government is just going about its nuclear business as usual...
...Budget Director David Stockman may be the prime example...
...Mayor Daniel Whitehurst later upheld his manager's pretzel logic and added a twist of his own: The phrase, "think before you register," he said, "encourages illegal activity...
...AU we are asking...
...But if the petition is to have any real meaning, it will need the signatures of millions of people around the world...
...Samuel H. Day Jr...
...Say 'thank you.' It means you understand the sacrifice a veteran made...
...With such an untroubled allegiance to corporate interests, Lefever will fit right into the Reagan State Department, which has already renewed trade and military ties with the repressive Chilean government so that—according to State's official explanation—American businesses can "compete more effectively" in Chile...
...The prospect is increasing disaffection in both camps...
...True believers versus corporate realists Clearly visible in President Reagan's economic program is the outline of an internal struggle that is bound to intensify in the months ahead...
...And only days before he was nominated as Assistant Secretary of State, Lefever was attacking international controls on multinational companies that sell infant formula to poor women who cannot afford to use it properly...
...Otherwise, why think before registering...
...Will he appease the corporate realists by scuttling the Kemp-Roth scheme to cut personal income taxes by 30 per cent in three years...
...The proposed increases in military spending, on the other hand, are likely to erase completely the impact of Reagan's counterinflationary efforts...
...The other is to demonstrate that the waste problem has been "solved"—a demonstration that would smooth the way for continued nuclear power production as well as for continued production of nuclear weapons...
...In fact, the widespread assertion that business suffers from a lack of investment capital is a fallacy...
...Even if supply-side tax cuts were, somehow, to result in more investment and more spending, the inescapable consequence would soon be a new surge of inflation...
...Why now...
...The Administration's proposed cuts in domestic entitlement programs, while falling with great severity on poor and working-class Americans, will make only a small dent in the Federal budget of almost $700 billion, and can be expected to reduce the inflation rate by less than 1 per cent a year...
...The paid ads, which have appeared in some half-dozen other cities, also carried a photograph of gun-toting soldiers and the question, "Why is this the only job our government has to offer 19-20 year olds...
...These are pretty well-adjusted kids...
...The Carter policy went out with Carter: The Department of Energy has announced it intends to go ahead with building the nation's first permanent nuclear waste disposal facility...
...Because the wastes will be military rather than commercial, the project will not require licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC...
...Thinking in Fresno If you're thinking of going to Fresno, California, you might want to think twice before you go—because after you get there, you might be in trouble for thinking at all...
...Much, much more is needed—schooling, outreach programs, and simple human support from fellow citizens...
...Christian and others suggested the fanfare over the hostage release had finally prompted the public to remember with guilt the Vietnam veterans, for whom there were no parades but only profound confusion and shame, and the malign neglect of the Government, Congress, and public which sent them to an ugly and terrifying war...
...The' placards violated the city's policy against controversial advertising on the buses, Newfarmer said— forgetting, perhaps, that the buses have routinely carried military recruiting ads...
...A startling new statistic: More Vietnam veterans had committed suicide than the number of soldiers who had died in the war...
...In its latest, larger-than-life incarnation, this familiar approach is ballyhooed as "supply-side" economics...
...If the Fresno WILPF wins its case (and the precedent for doing so is favorable), the signs may return to the buses, regardless of those who wish people would obey first and think later—or not think at all...
...Politically palatable or not, said Weinberger, the neutron bomb—or "enhanced radiation warhead"—is a fine anti-tank weapon that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) can ill afford to pass up...
...But as it becomes more and more difficult to subsidize domestic peace by means of foreign exploitation, the internal stresses become acute...
...Psychologist John Wilson predicts war-related adjustment problems "haven't even peaked yet...
...Rear-guard actions can be fought against it now, to stave off the collapse it is likely to precipitate...
...On company business It is obvious that Ernest Lefever, President Reagan's choice to handle human rights issues at the State Department, is not much in favor of human rights...
...After all, the Department of Energy, which designs and manufactures nuclear weapons, defused the 1978 controversy by finding a way to produce separate components that could readily be assembled and deployed on short notice...
...But what disturbed many Europeans even more was the weapon's apparent practicality for battlefield use against tanks...
...Both the Department and the armed services committees share a couple of goals...
...Two long-time peace activists, Stewart Meacham and The Progressive's contributing editor, Sidney Lens, are the initiators of a new International Peace Petition addressed to Presidents Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev...
...COMMENT Reagan's 'day of reckoning1 One of the more pathetic political spectacles presented to the American people in recent years has been the wholly ineffectual response of Congressional Democrats to the "new" economic program proclaimed by President Reagan in mid-February...
...For environmentalists, the episode has been a hard lesson in the frailty of the National Environmental Policy Act as a tool for shaping policy...
...Money spent in this fashion puts dollars into consumers' hands but does not produce useful goods—thereby sustaining a permanent inflationary bias in the economy...
...Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who had been NATO commander during the big neutron bomb flap of 1978, promptly reassured European capitals that there had been no change in U.S...
...As a first step, we ask you jointly to terminate immediately all research, development, testing, manufacture, and deployment of nuclear bombs and missiles...
...And yet the report circulated with remarkable alacrity, producing horrified reactions...
...If you take each word separately and look up the meaning, there is nothing which suggests an illegal act," the mayor said...
...Jeffrey Stein (Jeffrey Stein, The Progressive's contributing editor in Washington, is a Vietnam veteran...
...When threatened with workers' demands, taxes, or governmental regulation of such abuses as pollution, these conglomerates can threaten to pick up and move the jobs they control...
...No one gave a damn...
...But the Reagan proposals to cut synfuel subsidies by about $3 billion (a blow to several major oil companies) and to reduce the Export-Import Bank's authority by about a third (a blow to such major multinationals as Westinghouse) clearly were concessions to the true believers, and will be fiercely resisted by the corporate realists...
...In his economic address, President Reagan warned of a coming "day of reckoning...
...The project, in the underground salt beds near Carlsbad, New Mexico, will hold not only so-called low-level (but not low-hazard) wastes but also high-level wastes, deposited in a separate research area...
...The general horror at the suicide report was perhaps more surprising because, as concerned veterans' groups pointed out, the figure had been in print years before...
...And the fault will not be particularly his, any more than it was Jimmy Carter's or Gerald Ford's, except to the extent that Reagan, like the others, is unable and unwilling to confront the fact that our economic disarray is not a temporary aberration but a permanent affliction...
...One is to evade moves elsewhere in Congress to put military wastes under NRC jurisdiction...
...If, however, you consider common usage, the clear meaning is to urge young men to consider courses of action other than registering...
...West Germany's Helmut Schmidt and Britain's Margaret Thatcher bought the NATO package, but resistance has been strong in the smaller NATO countries...
...With workers demanding more goods and business buying more equipment, many of the largest firms would readily use their market power to boost prices...
...Other statistics: Of those combat vets who went to college, only 43 per cent completed one year, while 50 per cent of non-veterans graduate...
...Within days, the signs were gone, torn down and carted away in the trash under orders from City Manager Gerald Newfarmer...
...And he predicted that "a new and more realistic [U.S.] administration" would affirm "the right of the manufacturers to market their product...
...European Nuclear Disarmament, which grew out of the Pershing II/cruise missile debates, draws its strength from the growing realization that European survival depends more and more on the whims of foreign bureaucrats with access to the continent's deadly arsenal...
...Sandra Iyall of the Fresno WILPF chapter, which is now suing the city, can offer lots of reasons...
...The plea is simple and clear: "We, the undersigned, call upon the United States and the Soviet Union to end the arms race which threatens all with annihilation...
...Instead, the emphasis has been (and will continue to be) on mergers and acquisitions^—some $40 billion worth by U.S...
...The victory was short-lived...
...It didn't raise any hysteria then," Christian told me, "or even any eyebrows...
...The data were inconclusive, it turned out...
...We ask the two superpowers to withdraw all nuclear weapons from European territory...
...Large conglomerates, which wield predominant power in the marketplace, follow their natural bent to maximize profits by keeping prices high and wages low...
...Still, it is possible to sympathize with the Democrats' dilemma...
...But it isn't just the Russians who are reacting...
...For any who may.need a reminder, Caspar Weinberger will serve very nicely...
...Two members of Congress, Representatives Tom Daschle of South Dakota and David Bonior of Michigan, have been trying to fashion legislation to help with jobs...
...In the Department's environmental impact statement, required by that law, the "preferred alternative" to proceeding with the New Mexico project was to consider the site among other potential locations for licensed disposal of commercial as well as military waste...
...Despite all of Reagan's rhetoric about drastic departures from past policies and practices, most of his program represents a magnified, intensified, accelerated version, of what has been happening for some years in Democratic as well as Republican administrations—bigger tax breaks for the rich, reduced benefits for poor and working-class Americans, increased military spending...
...For New Mexicans, the episode has been a harsh reminder that states' rights, like reason, have no part in nuclear policy making...
...Doesn't the new Secretary understand, they are asking, that for practical purposes, the neutron bomb already is undergoing deployment...
...Coming home The news ricocheted around Washington and the country, among veterans' groups, Congressional committees, and the media...
...The Department probably has the further motive of currying favor with the armed services committees, which approve that substantial portion of the Energy budget that is devoted to nuclear weaponry...
...More than 53 per cent of Vietnam veterans did not return to any school (subsidies were woefully inadequate...
...Reductions in domestic welfare spending are, of course, embraced enthusiastically by both the true believers and the corporate realists...
...The end of the long gray line...
...The central assumption is that if business and the wealthy receive added incentives to invest and produce, productive capacity will grow, prices will stabilize, and more jobs will be created...
...Stone, Studs Terkel, Cora Weiss, and other leading peace activists...
...And I believe that's one of the reasons the Russians are reacting so strongly to this slight suggestion...
...The veteran, a former Carter Administration appointee named David Christian, based his allegation on the 1977 Congressional testimony of a clinical psychiatrist who had studied the veterans' postwar readjustment problems...
...While the Administration intensifies its deftly orchestrated campaign to sell Reaganomics to Congress, the media, and the public, the Democrats have been thrashing about, quibbling over a small point here or there while hastening to add that yes, of course, they want to cooperate to the fullest extent with the President and the primitives who advise him...
...Neutrons for NATO The peace movement may have found an unwitting ally in Caspar W. Weinberger, the new Secretary of Defense, who has embarked on a one-man crusade to bring back the neutron bomb...
...The true believers are convinced that capitalism freed from Government regulation and taxation can and will provide perpetual affluence for all...
...Opposing them are those who adhere to the more conventional corporate notion that the Government's proper role is not to keep hands off business but to enhance business profits...
...He was right about that—and his proposals have already brought it closer...
...In other respects as well, the Reagan program offers no real solution to the problem of inflation...
...People were aghast when they heard of it—except at the Veterans Administration...
...With some 7,000 U.S.-made nuclear warheads already deployed in Western Europe, and the Soviets intent on matching them nuke for nuke, here was a new weapon that looked like a prime candidate for igniting the whole murderous stockpile...
...Then the neutron bomb issue stirred public opinion...
...We don't want parades...
...Aside from its direct impact on the economy (and on the prospects of preserving peace) such an increase in military expenditures will mean the further massive diversion of research and development facilities, trained personnel, crucial raw materials, and other resources from the civilian to the military sector...
...Just open up your arms...
...The report, originally filed by UPI out of Philadelphia and based on one veteran's remarks, turned out upon investigation to be unsubstantiated...
...For one thing, there is considerable puzzlement among those who for the last two years have been busily manufacturing the neutron warhead...
...One third of the Federal prison population is made up of vets...
...Divorced from the President's engaging and emotion-charged rhetoric, all of his programs point to persistent inflation—with no significant reduction (and perhaps an increase) in unemployment...
...Like his recent predecessors— each of whom entered office promising stable prices and more jobs—Reagan will leave office with his program in shambles and his promises betrayed...
...We must act together to free the entire territory of Europe, from Poland to Portugal, from nuclear weapons, air and submarine bases, and from all institutions engaged in research into or manufacture of nuclear weapons...
...In failing to adopt its own preferred alternative, the Department exposed the Achilles heel of the Environmental Policy Act: While the law requires that environmental impact statements be prepared, it does not require that they determine policy...
...Arrayed on one side are those Reagan advisers who are true believers in a mythic "free enterprise...
...Ironically but unsurprisingly, these were also the cuts that drew the most vigorous Democratic criticism...
...It has evoked fresh nightmares of nuclear Armageddon in Europe at a time of increasing sensitivity to the danger of the continent's growing atomic stockpile...
...Evidence of Europe's rediscovered concern about atomic annihilation is the recent formation of a broadly based organization called European Nuclear Disarmament (END), which is appealing to Europeans to shake off nuclear domination by the superpowers: "The remedy lies in our hands...
...In the British Isles and across the continent, the NATO decision rekindled a ban-the-bomb movement stronger than anything Europe has seen since the mid-1950s, when Bertrand Russell and his followers marched on Britain's nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermar-ston, and when intrepid protesters regularly clambered aboard the early Polaris submarines in Scotland's coastal waters...
...So long as a certain degree of exploitation can be directed outward—toward the Third World, for example—it may be possible to maintain enough "trickle-down" to preserve a modicum of domestic equilibrium...
...Why rock the boat now, the weapons people are asking, when the battle for the neutron bomb has been essentially won...
...Among the petition's sponsors are Daniel and Philip Ber-rigan, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, William Sloan Coffin, Representative John Conyers, Daniel Ellsberg, Dave McReynolds, Linus Pauling, I.F...
...and that you progressively, but quickly, destroy present stockpiles...
...Until three years ago, Europe had remained largely oblivious to NATO's plans to make the continent a radioactive wasteland if the Warsaw Pact powers should try to take over by military force...
...Threatening legal action to stop the project, the state Attorney General wrote to the Department of Energy that its "decision to begin construction of WIPP without first resolving the state's legitimate legal and public health and safety concerns is a flagrant abuse of Federal power and a breach of trust with the government and citizens of New Mexico...
...The new NATO weapons would be the Pershing II missile, capable of hitting Moscow in four minutes flat from its bases in West Germany, and the cruise missile, a delivery vehicle which can elude all known defenses...
...If such opposition could be roused in New Mexico, producer of half the nation's uranium, where could the nuclear industry—commercial and military—find refuge for its growing wastes...
...The new Pentagon chief surprised a lot of people when he announced that the United States would "very probably" want to deploy the weapon that caused such a stir in Europe three years ago...
...But most of these increased profits have not gone into new plants or equipment, and there is little likelihood they will do so in the future...
...Wasting New Mexico When the Carter Administration decided early last year to hold off on building a radioactive waste repository in New Mexico, anti-nuclear activists heaved a sigh of relief...
...Neither Lefever nor The Wall Street Journal bothered to tell those who read this analysis that the biggest corporate contributor to Lefever's Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington is Nestle, the world's biggest infant formula producer...
...Just a few years ago, Lefever was praising "the remarkable freedom of expression" enjoyed by Chilean critics of General Augusto Pinochet's murderous regime...
...The Veterans Administration does not monitor suicide rates, but the Public Health Service Center found in 1975 that veterans had a suicide rate 23 per cent higher than non-veterans in the same age group...
...The corporate realists understand that business needs Government intervention in the form of subsidies and managed recessions to control inflation and keep labor in line...
...In making the decision to proceed with WIPP, the Department of Energy is falling into line with the Congressional armed services committees, which have already authorized millions of dollars for the project...
...It hurts...
...In that attack, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Lefever made clear just what he does favor: He railed against the "compassion-coated revolutionary rhetoric" of those backing a World Health Organization marketing code for infant formula...
...It raised an appalling specter: a pile of tangled lives, some 53,000, wasted in confusion, disillusionment, and despair...
...policy on deployment of the warhead...
...If a bit of tinkering and patchwork here and there could cure the ailments of our irrational economy, it would have been done long ago...
...Within the past four years, corporate profits after taxes increased by more than 13 per cent a year—well above the annual increase in the consumer price index...
...In January, the Fresno chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) placed forty-five placards on city buses asking men born in 1962 to "think before you register for the draft...
...Under the Administration's planned increase of $20 billion a year over the current bloated Pentagon budget, the military share of all Federal spending will rise from less than 25 per cent at present to almost 33 per cent...
...But Weinberger stuck to his guns, underscoring his determination to push for the neutron bomb: "When you look at the number of Russian tanks and the other items, the enhanced radiation warhead could do quite a lot to restore some kind of balance there," Weinberger told The Washington Post...
...In spite of New Mexicans' opposition to the project, the Federal bureaucracy apparently reached its final decision to proceed without consulting either New Mexico's governor or the state's Congressional delegation...
...But European fears returned at the end of 1979, when the United States pushed NATO to accept "modernization" of its nuclear weapons because the Soviet Union had been upgrading its own stockpile in response to earlier NATO buildups...
...It's pretty ridiculous on the face of it," an official scoffed...
...Such breach of trust should come as no surprise...
...Where it hurts the most is when you know you made a sacrifice, and nobody appreciates it...
...Samuel ?. Day Jr., a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a special representative of the Nuclear Weapons Facilities Project, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...How can they mount an all-out offensive against an economic approach that is essentially their own, only more so...
...Will Reagan appease the true believers by cutting off the Chrysler Corporation and other handout-seeking bastions of "free enterprise...
...The basic structure of our economy creates dilemmas for any policy maker...
...That's the veteran's most troubling problem...
...The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) had been the target of a vigorous grass-roots campaign, which became a symbol for all efforts to exert local control over Federal nuclear policy...
...He added grudgingly, "It suggests they're in need of psychological help...
...Copies may be obtained from: International Peace Petition, 1127 W. Division Street, Fifth floor, Chicago, Illinois 60625...
...corporations in 1979 alone...
...Thinking first, she says, might lead one to put a protest sticker on the registration form, to seek deferment counseling, or to register as a conscientious objector—all activities well within the law...
...To European Leftists, it was repellent enough that the neutron bomb, in true capitalist style, was designed to minimize property damage while killing a lot of people...
...But that collapse can ultimately be averted only by a radical restructuring of the economy—one that is based on community and worker control, on rational use of resources, on the provision of decent and humane services in health, housing, nutrition, education—regardless of whether or not they can be provided at a profit...
...Carter's sleight-of-hand on neutron bomb deployment allayed public anxiety for a while in Western Europe...
...There is nothing new about the assumption, and it has been amply tested: Investment tax credits and accelerated depreciation allowances long ago lowered the effective tax on corporations without producing any shift toward stable prices or full employment...
...Reagan's irrational program is the inevitable response to this irrational system...
...Among Europeans, many of whom are under the impression that they won the battle to ban the neutron bomb, Weinberger's crusade is a summons to the ramparts...
...We're the person who lives next door," says John Ter-zano of the Washington-based Viet Nam Veterans of America...
Vol. 45 • April 1981 • No. 4
