Comment
COMMENT Of the Marhet Prominent among the quaint myths that make up the Reagan Adminstration's cosmology is the notion that an unfettered market economy is history's great engine of economic...
...The Medvedevs pull no punches when assessing superpower blame for the incredibly perilous buildup in strategic arms...
...Such efforts are sure to be accompanied by attempts to discipline workers and eliminate other impediments to profitability, such as environmental controls...
...The package makes Sherrill, late of the University of Pittsburgh football "program," the best-paid university employe anywhere...
...Not that it's easy reading, or easy to take...
...Mfationof Private Bergeron Engineers, teachers, business people, and professionals are speaking out in growing numbers against the arms race...
...The Justice had trouble focusing his attention and completing sentences...
...The origins of the Cold War are, as they admit, complex...
...In Sweden, where a vast welfare state apparatus has pushed government spending to almost half of the GNP, workers have achieved impressive wage gains but next to no say in the allocation of capital—and the distribution of wealth in Sweden shows even greater disparities than in the United States...
...At the 250,000-strong demonstration in Bonn, Bergeron saw German soldiers in uniform and wrote, "I too longed to demonstrate in uniform . . . but who knows what the next demonstration will find me wearing...
...Bergeron is awaiting court-martial for wearing his uniform to a political gathering, an act forbidden by Army regulations...
...Anti-draft organizations suspect the number of no-shows is closer to one million...
...Once Bergeron was forced to confront his own contribution to militarism, he found he could not turn away from what he saw...
...The missile plunged at least fourteen feet toward the sub...
...In one test, weights were dropped on the stuff from different heights to see what would make it go off...
...But there is no way of knowing for sure...
...A 1973 report from the Lawrence Livermore laboratory noted that "LX09 displays some very undesirable properties...
...Curiosity: II Controlled Substance The publication of The Brethren two years ago was supposed to spur a new vigilance on the part of the Supreme Court press corps...
...Such demands, combined with a labor role in determing pension fund investments, would give the entire society a much more important part in deciding how the magic marketplace will function...
...We sit on the fifty-yard line at the American fatuity festival...
...therefore, is to wring from industry the broadest possible concessions in return for governmental assistance...
...It's a long and tightly reasoned piece...
...Communities should insist on protection of the environment—and of the jobs that industry can now eliminate at will...
...We do not wish to make sport of the suffering of a fellow human, even William Rehnquist...
...Officials say that to characterize the accident's severity would be to break U.S...
...we commend it to you, and we commend our good friends at The Nation for their enterprise in arranging its publication...
...Professors of literature and other panty-waists on campuses everywhere—even at A&M—were appalled by the terms of the Sherrill contract...
...But the burden of their message is that the responsibility for the current crisis cannot be equally divided between the United States and the Soviet Union, as E.P...
...We're tired of being against everything, so up with indignation-saving...
...Rather than viewing the negotiation process as one of preventing the development of further systems of annihilation, the United States has traditionally seen new strategic weapons as bargaining counters to force the Soviet Union to ratify the permanence of the postwar imbalance of military and political power...
...the crane braked just as it was about to hit...
...The secrecy that should have ended with the Pantex deaths continues...
...In March 1977, a worker at the Pantex weapons factory in Amarillo, Texas, tapped a sample casting of LX09 with a rubber mallet—the usual way of fitting castings onto lathes...
...All this Reagan firmly asserted in his State of the Union address, but an even more lyrical affirmation of his economic faith was delivered late last fall to the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...
...As we say, the Russian leadership gets some bad marks in nuclear deportment, but in the Medvedevs' view postwar America has even more to answer for when it comes to the current insane predicament...
...Even to talk about such economic changes may seem irrelevant at a time when the prevailing wisdom does not extend much beyond vacuous Reagonomics...
...The task confronting organized labor and the Left...
...If the Left does not begin to advance detailed proposals for worker ownership and control and for a humane economy that serves human needs rather than the mindless pursuit of profit, it will ensure its irrelevance to the next stage of our economic development...
...Now that President Reagan has affirmed Carter's registration order (violating one of his own 1980 campaign promises), the Selective Service System is making an all-out push to persuade the holdouts to sign up...
...Throughout the Court's fall term, reporters and other Marble Palace regulars noticed that Rehnquist slurred his speech during oral arguments...
...The Navy will not answer that one, either...
...Still broader forms of intervention, such as schemes to rescue and restructure flagging U.S...
...If ever there was a cause that affirmed the principle of strength in numbers, this is it...
...This is no time for reporters to get On The Team in Washington, no time at all for them to opt for good taste and resist the implacability of fact...
...We won't get into what Red Smith might or might not have said had he lived a week longer, just time enough to roll the Sherrill story through his reproachful typewriter...
...It may be that Rehnquist's intellectual faculties remained unimpaired throughout his treatment (some of his recent handiwork to the contrary notwithstanding...
...By all means, call the Soviets to task, but we cannot expect to be taken seriously by them—or their unruly men and women of conscience— until we get off our primitive good 'n' evil jagAggie Joke What is there to say about the $1.7 million deal Texas A&M University cut in January with its new football coach...
...Before long, antiwar posters decked his barracks room, and he was taking part in rallies...
...We do, in fact, wish him a full and speedy recovery...
...His reaction to the drug drove him into George Washington University Hospital two days after Christmas...
...Three workers died...
...Soon after, he knew...
...A "grace period" has been declared until Feb-' ruary 28, and Selective Service Director Thomas K. Turnage says he is "confident that the young men of registration age will comply with the law...
...See "Specializing in Waging Peace," by John Junker-man, on Page 18 of this issue...
...The Woodward and Armstrong book, whatever its defects as a tattler's tale, burned away much of the sacerdotal fog enveloping the world's most powerful court where, it turned out, there was as much logrolling and smallness of spirit as in any jerkwater town council...
...The Army is not likely to let him get away with his act of conscience...
...Off I went to man freedom's frontier and hold off the Warsaw Pact forces...
...In a speech riddled with the reckless disregard for facts that has come to characterize his economic pronouncements, Reagan declared, "The societies which have achieved the most spectacular, broad-based economic progress in the shortest period of time are not the most tightly controlled, nor necessarily the biggest in size, or the wealthiest in natural resources...
...This is a mere gloss of the Medvedev thesis...
...The Navy kept word of the danger close to its braided breast until the accident waiting to happen finally did...
...But nothing doing, if the non-attention paid to Justice William Rehnquist's recent medical problems is any guide...
...No, no...
...What was an American soldier doing at a protest against the U.S...
...Reagan, who once solemnly assured us that he saw no reason for peacetime registration, now solemnly assures us that he sees no reason for a peacetime draft...
...He sang songs and flashed the peace sign to roars of approval from the crowd—and to the chagrin of his employer...
...But now come the Brothers Medvedev to gum up the works for the demonologists who would have us believe the Russians are to blame for everything from the arms race to the ever-earlier onset of puberty in the American young...
...The pace was leisurely, though...
...It's the professional health of our colleagues on the Supreme Court beat that alarms us...
...Sherrill, the sports-minded will recall, signed on as athletic director and head of the football "program" at College Station for $287,000 a year for six years—that's $95,000 in base salary and the rest in fringes (cars, insurance policies, shower soap, cleats, guaranteed television income...
...Some of the strongest statements have come from the most unexpected sources...
...As his trial proceeds, we have yet another lesson in the ways of the military, which claims to protect freedom while denying it in its own ranks...
...He now lives and writes in London...
...He faces up to six months in the stockade and a possible bad-conduct discharge...
...All it took, in most cases, was a drop of about thirteen inches...
...The dangerous and irresponsible spread of the technology of nuclear war in the 'hot spots' of the world is...
...Bergeron began his hitch in a burst of patriotism, ignited by nightly televised images of chanting Iranians, by stories of Soviets stomping on freedom-fighters in Afghanistan, by the U.S...
...Yet the President remains ardently devoted to policies that are bound to create such deficits— simultaneously boosting military spending while cutting taxes for the rich...
...Thar She Blows Antinuclear forces in Europe have every reason to want to turn around the James Bergerons of this world...
...Navy officials deny that the replacements are necessary because LX09 is so unstable...
...He was also lured by promises of a Government-paid education...
...In the widows' compensation suits, much of what the Navy had known all along about LX09 came to light...
...Poseidon missiles can carry up to fourteen warheads, each one twice as powerful as the bomb that devastated Hiroshima...
...There's plenty of blame to spread around, and the writers are unsparing when it comes to their compatriots...
...Not for us the tired leftist flogging of big-bucks compensation...
...Zhores, a scientist, was hounded into exile by the KGB's psychiatric highway patrol...
...Don't Sign, M Serve About 6.6 million young men born between 1960 and 1964 have signed up for the draft since Jimmy Carter revived registration in the summer of 1980...
...Thompson argued in his "Letter to America" in The Nation, January 24, 1981...
...High on the agenda are government efforts to increase the supply of investment capital and impose direct controls on its allocations...
...Jackie Sherrill...
...Nor will they say whether the missile that took a spill at Holy Loch was even armed with the plastic...
...Missile Epistle The American Right has taken to its smothering bosom every Soviet dissident who has caught the fancy of the Western press...
...In Japan, for example, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry works with banks and leading corporations to allocate credit in ways that will help the industries that display the greatest growth potential...
...the solution to the arms race is elusive, and the responsibility of all countries...
...Even that might have been enough to hurl plutonium to Glasgow and beyond...
...If this third branch of government were to continue to conduct its affairs in total secrecy, the public's well-paid sentinels could at least be counted on to complain loudly...
...There is no more reason to believe him now than there was before...
...At the national level, we need the kind of economic planning that will provide the public goods and services—like mass transit and health care—which are indispensable if life is to be livable in an era of declining economic growth...
...They come to notice now by way of their "Letter to the West: A Nuclear Samizdat on America's Arms Race," which appears in the January 16 issue of The Nation...
...No, what unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace...
...Too often, Washington newsgathering is an exercise in prurience...
...There a Poseidon missile was being moved by crane between a submarine tender and a sub when the winch holding it up suddenly failed...
...It is better, by this logic, if the people who have to live near places like Holy Loch do not know how scared they should be...
...The threat at Holy Loch was not a nuclear explosion, though, but a conventional blast...
...As this issue of The Progressive goes to press...
...We all thought we'd be blown away," said one eyewitness...
...COMMENT Of the Marhet Prominent among the quaint myths that make up the Reagan Adminstration's cosmology is the notion that an unfettered market economy is history's great engine of economic growth...
...We will forebear: Not for us the sissified dismay over the "perversion of values" some have seen in the A&M-Sherrill compact...
...But The Progressive will hold its fire...
...policy of never confirming or denying the location of nuclear weapons...
...Don't get yourself in a lather over unimportant things, counsels Dugger...
...The Soviet Union, in stark contrast, has always refused to share its nuclear secrets even with its closest allies...
...Even a casual examination of those capitalist economies that are growing most rapidly shows that they emphatically reject Reagan's simplistic conservative nostrums...
...Perhaps Rehnquist's pharmaceutical misadventure is of no great moment, but the drugged performance of those who sat on their curiosities certainly is...
...industries, are already being promoted by such influential voices as Business Week and financier Felix Rohatyn...
...The incentives of the market place, combined with inherited technological superiorities, give the free world one important, if dubious, advantage over the Soviet bloc [in weaponry]: a permanent lead in the design and output of new kinds of nuclear weapons and armaments systems...
...This has happened entirely because of the availability of Western nuclear technology and raw materials...
...As the crisis of stagflation continues to grip this country and the rest of the capitalist world, Reagan's prized "magic of the marketplace" is likely to yield to ever more imaginative forms of government intervention...
...By official admission, some 800,000 have not registered...
...Everyone froze...
...Within Reagan's inner circle, there is growing hostility toward the less bullish conservatives in Congress and the Federal Reserve who are troubled by the prospect of record Federal deficits, and who therefore want to apply the brakes to the money supply...
...But the education he got was not the kind he expected, and his patriotism took a nonviolent turn...
...Reportorial doggedness must sometimes give way to a common respect for the privacy of high officials...
...In Germany and France, which have outperformed the United States in both productivity and national income over the last two decades, government spending has exceeded 30 per cent of gross national product since the mid-1950s, though conservatives like to insist that economic growth is severely impeded once government intervention exceeds 20 per cent of GNP...
...Sherrill, Aggie administrators were quick to point out, will draw his pay from a boosters' club fund set up by men who apparently think the playing fields of Eton ain't a patch—as in lettuce patch—on the oil fields of Texas...
...The Brethren, it was thought, would embolden the reporters covering the Court...
...As if the bristling atomic arsenals in their midst were not bad enough, evidence now indicates that a conventional explosive that triggers some of the bombs may be ready to go off at the drop of a hammer...
...Any accidental mechanical ignition has a large probability of building to a violent deflagration or detonation...
...But we Americans would do well to look first at our own record as a people of peace since 1945...
...Maybe the athletic director at the University of Maryland, one Dick Dull, had it right when, defending the Sherrill hiring, he observed that "a winning football program gives institutions exposure on radio, television, and print that they can't afford to buy...
...We hope the young men of registration age will prove that their business is with life, not death, by continuing to spurn the registration process...
...But Reagan's free market myths represent the last gasps of an economic system that will soon be drastically transformed one way or another...
...The Medvedevs' letter is a response to Thompson...
...After all, that's part of the dissident's job description—poking the Kremlin in the eye...
...After basic, I was given a reporting date of July 10," he says...
...As the public would eventually learn, the Court's youngest male member was whacked out on Placidyl, a powerful hypnotic and painkiller prescribed by a physician treating Rehnquist for a chronic back problem...
...I. . . became aware of the European peace movement almost immediately through the media...
...Army...
...In this matter we do well to observe the Principle of the Conservation of Indignation, the work of Ronnie Dugger, editor and publisher of The Texas Observer and long a friend of this magazine...
...The plastic detonated, setting off another explosion nearby...
...How close a call was it...
...Though the President is increasingly beset by critics within his own party as well as in the Democratic "opposition" who fear that his supply-side program can't possibly spark the promised economic revival, Reagan clings to the faith that all will be well if only we do away with most taxes and most Government spending that isn't lavished on the military...
...hundreds of Poseidon warheads still contain LX09...
...But if we want to head off the revival of conscription, there is no better way to do it than by forcing the Government to cope with massive numbers of non-registrants...
...It then swung wildly, smacking the side of the submarine...
...It's all grand...
...In spite of all this, weapons-makers went on using LX09...
...About a year after the accident, it began "retrofitting" Poseidon warheads with a better explosive...
...hockey team's upset over Russia at the Lake Placid Olympics...
...Workers should insist on equity and a voice in management—including a say in how and when automation is introduced or plants closed...
...Which economies could the President possibly have had in mind...
...Despite the fulminations of conservatives (or, for that matter, the best intentions of liberals), government intervention isn't an unmixed blessing: It can be used to undermine the power of labor and to shore up the prerogatives of management, as well as to subsidize private profits...
...arms buildup in Europe...
...In this case, it took months before the asking was done...
...That's the kind of tough, off-tackle thinking we too often decry here...
...That's mostly all right with us—there's no mistaking the moral resonance of the Sakharovs, the Solzhenitsyns, and the Ginzburgs of this world...
...His twin, Roy, hangs on in Moscow, a prolific historian of Russian Marxism run amok...
...The alarming possibility came to light after an accident last November at the NATO nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, on Scotland's west coast...
...Ours is, of course, hardly an unfettered economy, and even Ronald Reagan's most strenuous exertions aren't likely to turn it into one...
...To wit: "Military-industrial complexes exist in all modern industrial societies, but they are under much less responsible control in the ' United States than in the U.S.S.R...
...In an era of monopoly pricing, large Government deficits may not be the sole or even the most fundamental cause of inflation, but they certainly contribute to unacceptable price increases...
...The reason: Poseidon warheads were originally built with triggers made of plastic explosive LX09, even though the compound was regarded as "drastically unstable" by one of its developers...
...It is not just Jesse Helms, Arnaud de Borchgrave, and other professional patriots who stand to be inconvenienced by the Medvedevs' intellectual honesty: Anyone who thinks that truth-telling is an exclusively Western practice, that Soviet dissidents, once they've made a stand at home, roll over dead and play a moral zero-sum game (Moscow bad, Washington good) is also in for a poke in the eye...
...the most frightening development of the last decade...
...Even in those rapidly growing economies that come closest to meeting the conservative litmus test, other forms of government intervention are widely practiced...
...Every significant new technology of nuclear warfare—nuclear-missile submarines, multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), cruise missiles, the neutron bomb and so on—has been introduced into the arms race by the United States...
...see "Bombs, Bunkers, and Blind Justice" in the February issue), but reporters ought to have given the public, and not a discommoded Supreme Court Justice, the benefit of the doubts that must have risen...
...And we've got season tickets...
...We're above the fray...
...But when a Supreme Court Justice bobs and weaves from the bench, it is time the dictates of good taste were violated and some unpleasant questions asked...
...Last December, he showed up at a peace rally in Heilbronn, West Germany, wearing his work clothes: the uniform of the U.S...
...Take James Bergeron...
...The Medvedevs have paid their dues, the grim sort exacted by the Soviet thought police...
...There, Rehnquist experienced severe withdrawal symptoms...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
