Comment

...Count on your fingers the television pieces you've seen in the last year that followed any of these stories to the leeshore of truth and common sense...

...Instead, by the time voters said "enough" to the Washington Public Power Supply System (long ago dubbed WHOOPS) on November 3, the project had become one of the nation's most spectacular nuclear washouts...

...A question that needs to be asked is why so much importance should be assigned to the trustworthiness (if that's the word) of one Reagan Administration advocate...

...After they filled out the requisite forms, one of them received a congratulatory handshake...

...Regulations meant to preserve the environment or protect the health and safety of workers lead to the loss of jobs...

...Or to a sixty-seven-year-old woman in Oregon who is inventing a self-cleaning house, complete with dishwasher cupboards and washing-machine closets...

...You can probably open a beer with one of your hands while counting...

...Twice as many reminders of the corruptibility of human flesh, for one thing: twice as many spots for headache tablets, hemorrhoidal balms, antacids, mouthwashes, and denture glue...

...The result: "We are going to see more and more voter involvement in the commitments municipalities are making in utilities," predicts Eileen Titmuss, a bond analyst for Drexel Burnham Lambert...

...The editors of The Atlantic Monthly, which published the article by William Greider in which the Budget Director bared the state of his mind, were understandably astonished at the uproar...

...It may be peevish, then, to withhold our applause at the announcement that CBS plans to lengthen its nightly newscast to at least forty-five minutes, and probably an hour, by the spring of 1983...

...Twice as many trenchcoated Examining Angels bombinat-ing away on the White House lawn about this and that, but rarely about anything tricky or ambiguous or elemental...

...A Win Against WHOOPS It was to have been one of the most ambitious nuclear power projects ever: five reactors generating cheap energy for Washington state, projected when work began in 1973 to cost $4.1 billion...

...Many insisted it was only a matter of time before the President would be compelled to find himself a new Budget Director...

...They are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck, to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty, or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices...

...She broke off her wedding plans on the spot, vowing not to marry until the Equal Rights Amendment had been passed...

...If future bond sales were rejected for a project of this size, it would be a watershed for the troubled nuclear industry...

...Construction was six years behind schedule, costs had soared to $24 billion, and some utility customers were staring at the possibility of 1,000 per cent rate increases...

...To be sure, we could savor Stockman's remarks about those $10 billion to $30 billion squandered annually by the Pentagon—but neither the Budget Director nor his Atlantic Monthly interviewer nor any of the columnists, commentators, and editorialists sent into a dither by Stockman's ruminations went beyond Pentagon "inefficiency and waste" to ask what all the weapons were for in the first place...

...When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important...

...Such contradictions can be resolved only by a kind of basic, structural change that neither business nor government leaders have the courage or imagination to propose or endorse...

...But the average taxpayer is seeing how much it costs and is concerned about [paying] added dollars...

...To put the sharpest point on it, two times zero is still zero...

...It can be argued that retroactive insurance provides protection for us all against the social costs of new technology...

...That our economy is foundering on some basic contradictions is becoming evident to a growing number of Americans...

...These are political questions first, functions of the utilitarian calculus of the market second...

...What are all of us out there in television land in for...

...More than one hundred years have gone by since Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that "this whole question of women's rights" boils down to the division of labor within the home...

...Yet even when victims can be fairly represented in litigation against powerful corporate interests, the process effectively depoliticizes all...

...Americans, too, show a growing awareness that something must be done to halt an arms race that threatens peace, to say nothing of life itself...

...Efforts to insulate communities from cyclical upheavals and the whims of industry provoke corporate resistance and a fall-off in business investment...

...Time to Sign Early in 1981, when The Progressive's senior editor, Sidney Lens, and another veteran peace activist, Stewart Meacham, began circulating an International Peace Petition addressed to Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev, it was possible to dismiss the effort as well-intentioned, certainly, but peripheral...

...What television reports is what television sees: the mere dross of topicality...

...There are a number of us who were against nuclear power initially because of the dangers we saw," says Susan Thurson, an organizer with the Clamshell Alliance...

...But the company's answer to the problem is depressingly consistent with the status quo...

...A clear signal from an aroused public determined to call a halt to the mad momentum of the arms race could provide that kind of motivation even for Ronald Reagan...

...At worst, we are offered new ways to intensify the contradictions and inequities in our economy...

...The Salt Lake County episode serves as a particularly irksome reminder—as if our memories needed prodding—that housework is still primarily a woman's responsibility after all these years, and that it is still written off as trivial and valueless precisely because women do it...

...But the vote is more than a loud peal of the nuclear industry's death knell...

...Lord have mercy, Richard Nixon said it best: Television news is to journalism as bumper stickers are to philosophy...

...Men: Old Piece of the Crock Some months ago, a man and a woman applied for a marriage license in Salt Lake County, Utah...

...New product line development should involve many more than those with narrow economic interests...

...The other was handed a plastic bag full of free dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent, tampons, a copy of TV Guide, and a five-dollar gift certificate toward a household checking account...

...people who do this usually call themselves Democrats...

...We learned nothing new about the substance of Ronald Reagan's economic program from the Stockman incident...

...As it turned out, the petition campaign could not have been better timed...

...There is every sign that such protests will continue and grow, and that they will put ever more pressure on the NATO governments to resist the emplacement of the new U.S...

...Women are already under pressure from infant formula makers to bottle-feed their babies (see "Here's Looking at You, Kid," by Mary Ellen Schoonmaker, in the December issue of The Progressive...

...People are asked to have faith: If we really do have problems, well, they are best left to the dedicated attention of sincere and intelligent officials who will, of course, act only in our best interests...

...Apparently not, for only a few days after Reagan's much heralded speech, more than 350,000 peace marchers—the largest number yek—demonstrated in the streets of Amsterdam...

...At first hearing, then, it sounded like good news when a London insurance firm added up what it would cost a man to hire a waitress, dishwasher, driver, cleaner, laundry worker, baby-sitter, gardener, tailor, cook, accountant, and nurse...

...A month after the fire, MGM, facing many millions of dollars in potential liability claims, began buying insurance to cover such claims retroactively...

...The time to sign is now, and the place to obtain petitions is: International Peace Petition, 1127 W. Division Street, Fifth Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60625...

...people who do this usually call themselves Republicans...

...For men, ingenious "free enterprise" has devised yet another way to defray the costs...

...Today, Washington seems to understand that its NATO allies are confronted with an antiwar movement of massive dimensions...

...The petition is beautiful in its simplicity: "We, the undersigned, call upon the United States and the Soviet Union to end the arms race which threatens all with annihilation...

...It is not surprising that many such firms are now rushing to climb on the retroactive insurance bandwagon— including asbestos and drug manufacturers with large product liability suits pending against them...

...And where nuclear power is concerned, environmentalists and economists alike seem to think we will see more of this heartening public mulishness...

...the rotten hand dealt to many of us by accidents of race and gender...

...It is not hard to guess who got what...

...That realization was enough, apparently, to wring a gimmick-riddled speech out of the President, but it was not enough to bring forth a substantive proposal that might actually constitute a first step toward nuclear disarmament...

...Retroactive insurance is not available to home- or car-owners, and if it were the premiums would be prohibitively expensive...

...Only a few months ago, such Cold War stalwarts as Defense Secretary Weinberger shrugged off hundreds of thousands of peace demonstrators in the capitals of Europe as kooks and Communist dupes...

...and the corporate takeover of our lives, liberties, and institutions...

...Consequently, the WHOOPS initiative has set everyone with a stake in the five plants on edge...

...And now this: If good literature is, in the end, devoted to just two or three universal themes—the family, the search for God, art, love—we might dare the same pithiness when it comes to the American drama...

...Insurance companies can charge high premiums and collect income on their investments as post-loss litigation drags on—an arrangement insurance firms have greeted with undisguised cheer—and the current Internal Revenue Code allows insurance purchasers an immediate income tax deduction on the premiums...

...The bankruptcy of economic policy is becoming clear even to journalists—but the response of the mainstream media is to obscure reality by focusing public attention on the politics of personality...

...Back to you, Dan...

...Unnamed White House officials let it slip that in their view Stockman could no longer engage in effective negotiations in behalf of Reagan's program on Capitol Hill...

...You certainly won't have to take off your shoes for more digits...

...As a first step, we ask you jointly to terminate immediately all research, development, testing, manufacture, and deployment of all nuclear bombs and missiles...

...Once again the Administration demonstrated that its real strength—its sole strength—lies in public relations: It took much ingenuity, not to mention sheer chutzpah, to advertise as a "zero option" a plan that calls for the removal of Soviet weapons already in place in exchange for a pledge not to deploy U.S...

...But we can't assume that the West Europeans will do our job for us— or that the Reagan Administration will respond to them as it would to hundreds of thousands marching here at home...

...Louis County Counselor Thomas W. Wehrle...

...and that you progressively, but quickly, destroy present stockpiles...

...Nor was it a laughing matter to a harried mother in the Middle West who held a one-woman sit-down strike on her own front lawn last summer...

...Programs devised to stimulate growth and increase employment tend to produce intolerable levels of inflation...

...Legal opinions that uphold the obscenity of the functional breast will make free choice even more elusive...

...At best, we are offered Band-Aid remedies and new combinations of old policies that failed long ago...

...It began offering to insure husbands against the loss of their wives' free services...

...Who would pay attention to a petition drive...

...Who would care...

...We will welcome it: That is the way the system should operate, but until now it rarely has...

...Stockman's admission that President Reagan's across-the-board tax cut was a ruse cooked up to pass along benefits to the rich was hardly stop-the-presses stuff: American capitalism has always made sure that the rich got theirs and more, and it would stop investing in the economy if any tax program ever posed a serious threat to wealth and privilege...

...Even U.S...

...Why, then, put it forward...

...We hear such stories from time to time, and they invariably bring to mind Germaine Greer's tert-year-old observation in The Female Eunuch: A woman's "breasts are only to be admired for as long as they show no sign of their function: Once darkened, stretched, or withered they are objects of revulsion...

...missiles in Western Europe...

...It is just another way our economy takes important decisions on what goods will be produced—and how they will be made—out of the hands of the public, leaving them instead to non-accountable marketing managers...

...If the President's economic prescription is sound, does it really matter whether or not one or another of his pitchmen believes in it deep down inside...

...Insurance companies, once the adversaries of their policy holders, also have little incentive to investigate the insurability of new corporate practices...

...Others speculated that the program's credibility, such as it was, had been dealt a body blow...

...Evidently, the Administration felt compelled to make at least a token gesture in recognition of the growing worldwide outcry against the lunacy of the arms race...

...Opponents spent more than $1.2 million trying to defeat the ballot measure (compared to $300,000 by the other side) and now say they will test its constitutionality in court...

...missiles that have not even been built yet...

...About a quarter of a million signatures have been collected so far, and the sponsors have extended the petition deadline until April 15...

...Still, Stockman's unguarded but unremarkable criticisms of Reaganomics created a major media flap...

...At that point, it will be groping for rationalizations and excuses for cutting back...

...Generic Reaganomics David Stockman's revelation that he had harbored secret doubts about Reaganomics even while hawking the President's program to the press and Congress was moderately interesting to those who follow the psychopathology of the Reagan White House, but it was hardly the sensational disclosure depicted in the mass media...

...Affected groups have a right to decide how much risk they are willing to take, how they wish to live and work...

...The firm concluded that it would cost a widower $360.00 per week to replace his wife...

...Too much time spent before the lighted box persuades us that it would be silly to expect anything but more of the same from CBS or the other networks (which will certainly follow the lead of Uncle's employer and extend their thirty-minute formats), even if they were to turn their reports into 'round-the-clock telethons, great orgies of televised information...

...There are only a few stories: militarism and the threat of nuclear annihilation...

...There is a possibility that even this war-minded Administration will have to come to terms sooner or later with the reality that the economy can not bear an endless escalation of military spending...

...The tax deductibility feature of retroactive insurance is but one more form of "socialism for the rich"—and it has especially pernicious applications for the makers of dangerous products, who can simply write off a portion of their losses at the expense of the taxpayer...

...In Good Hands The catastrophic fire that devastated the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas a little more than a year ago turns out to have inspired some innovative, if dubious, financial and insurance schemes...

...Retroactive insurance is an out-and-out corporate subsidy, one for which taxpayers did not vote...

...Retroactive insurance is one more unfortunate way that political questions about our futures have been further removed from our hands...

...For many women, the price of marriage and motherhood is still too high...

...But at the multi-million-dollar corporate level, it turns out, retroactive insurance offers benefits to both the insurer and the insured...

...The massive disarmament demonstrations in Europe, the first stirrings of a reborn peace movement here in the United States, the jockeying among the superpowers for a propaganda advantage in pledging to control armaments—all these have lent new urgency to the International Peace Petition...

...Did it work...

...Double Vision Walter Cronkite knew what he was talking about a few years ago when he said a thirty-minute evening news show could be little more than a national "headline service...

...Firms have neither need nor incentive to consult with affected communities or workers when new products or technologies are developed...

...officials conceded before Reagan had even delivered his speech that there was no way the Soviets would buy his plan...

...Over and over, we hear the folks in government saying they wish women would go back home, put on their aprons, and act like women again...

...Leonid Brezhnev wasn't born yesterday...

...Film at eleven...

...Jlwnieless Motherhood And while we are discussing women's domestic roles— Last September, a young mother was nursing her baby in a department store parking lot in De Soto, Missouri, when a police officer happened by and warned her that she could be cited for indecent exposure if she continued...

...After all, Stockman's acknowledgment that supply-side theory is merely an arbitrary and untested attempt to reconcile the incompatible goals of tax cuts, military spending increases, and a balanced budget was no big news: Even mainstream economists had made the same point long ago, and so, for that matter, had Vice President Bush when he tagged supply-side theory as "voodoo economics...

...Wehrle agreed with the officer that if "the manner in which the nursing is accomplished exceeds the bounds of decorum as determined by local standards of decency," then a nursing mother could be arrested...

...You heard it here first...

...Reagan's zero option would do nothing at all about some 7,000 tactical warheads already on the ground in Western Europe, or about 5,000 warheads poised against the Soviet Union aboard forty-one American nuclear submarines...

...But just go ahead and try it...

...Still, it stripped Reaganomics of its only impressive element—its packaging...

...Small wonder voters nixed further bond sales to finance this and other large Washington power plants, absent specific public approval at the polls...

...That's how we wind up being subjected to mindless obsession with the personalities of David Stockman and others dubbed "policy-makers," their petty conflicts, and their private (or public) shadow dramas...

...What the networks have in mind, we fear, is just a bigger bumper sticker...

...When health is affected or lives are lost, victims— workers or consumers—will be compensated...

...The woman, outraged, demanded an apology and, getting none, took the matter as far as St...

...For the propaganda advantage, of course...

...And more than thirty years have passed since Margaret Mead observed that "men may cook, or weave, or dress dolls, or hunt hummingbirds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, votes them as important...

...They had not expected to make such a splash...

...It is also a refreshing sign of public unwillingness to cede authority to those who stand to gain by making decisions while bearing none of the costs...

...But housework was not a trivial issue to the Utah bride-to-be...