Comment
COMMENT When Hawks Fall Out A devoted reader who frequently shares with us her strong convictions on various topics of national and international import wrote recently in uncharacteristic but...
...Equally puzzling was the simultaneous news that Rostow and Paul Nitze, the Reagan Administration's European arms negotiator, had been reprimanded by the White House for trying to strike some sort of unauthorized deal with their Soviet counterparts...
...The Cold War was launched three and a half decades ago with a deliberate effort to "scare the hell out of the American people" (as Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg urged President Truman...
...Such attempts to discredit environmental activists will probably fail—the smear campaign against the nuclear freeze movement has not, after all, thinned the ranks of that cause—but they do pose a fundamental challenge: Should the movement remain in the safe harbor of clean air, clean water, parks, and wildlife issues...
...thirty-four of the forty-eight candidates they supported won...
...Business Week found that the movement is better-organized, better-financed, and more effective on Capitol Hill than in the past...
...economy is paralyzed...
...Case in point: a submarine-launched nuclear missile can land on American soil—or even on the Pentagon—in less than five minutes...
...Unfortunately, their efforts to keep Chicago's schools segregated have now received a stamp of approval from a Federal court...
...We need a well-designed jobs program that gets at the basic problems of our economy...
...Many Americans—especially those standing in the unemployment lines—have no cash to spend...
...To the Malthusi-ans at AID, Third World population growth is a political and economic threat...
...Penalty Declined The gendarme and marketing agent for collegiate sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, says it has devised a game plan to sack embarrassing recruiting scandals...
...What happens to students once they're admitted is much more important than the quality of credentials they compile in high school...
...Business Week editorialists agreed, and warned that the movement is branching out into "unrelated areas of public policy...
...He calls it "Red-baiting, no...
...Instead, a massive peace movement is mounting effective actions to preventwar, and it is not allowing itself to be gulled by official rhetoric, whether from a socialist government in France or a conservative government in Britain or West Germany...
...The equipment in the 280 rest rooms flushes efficiently, the 4,200 clocks are precise, and the 87,000 telephones ring when their numbers are dialed...
...Early in this century, European socialists and trade unionists pledged that if war broke out they would end it by calling a general strike, but when war came nationalist fervor triumphed over class consciousness...
...Though the law prohibits the export of domestically banned drugs, the company has found a simple evasion: It manufactures the contraceptive abroad...
...Predictably, the Reagan Administration is trying to frighten Americans away from the movement...
...Critics insist, of course, that Government spending must be inflationary, and in the short term, they are right...
...churches a special opportunity—and obligation—to expose Montt as the murderer he is, and at the same time denounce the Administration for giving him weaponry...
...The NCAA's two-pronged attack is designed to limit the activities of "overzeal-ous" alumni and impose stiffer academic requirements on incoming first-year students...
...In West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl is standing firm at Reagan's side—but without his principal Christian Democratic associate, Franz-Josef Strauss, who calls the U.S...
...Today's economy revolves around such products and services as the automobile, oil, and private medicine— precisely those sectors that have generated the strongest inflationary pressures in the last decade...
...And once a recovery does begin, there is no guarantee that industry will invest scarce capital in areas of need rather than in real estate and mergers, speculative ventures that have fueled inflation in recent years...
...The distinction between Reagan-style Red-baiting (which Radosh says he deplores) and Radosh-style anticommunism eludes us...
...A big deficit, they say, will force the Government to borrow large sums in the private capital markets...
...He summed it up in the words "Heresy, yes...
...A strategy targeted on Watt or Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch is easier, of course...
...To peace activists, the Pentagon has been a symbol of a dangerous process and a suicidal mentality, as well as a site of moral witness and protest...
...The politicians are the winners, because they can claim they've achieved integration without busing...
...it must give consumers more money to spend c-n goods...
...From up here in the booth, though, the strategy looks more like an end run around the problem than a blitz...
...The late Kingfish of Louisiana probably would enjoy this corollary: If McCarthyism is revived in America, it will be by people who call themselves liberals...
...According to the pollster, this sentiment is broad-based and flies in the face of your claim to a popular mandate for reduced environmental standards...
...Staying the Racist Course Whenever sociologists decide to compile a list of the nation's most segregated cities, Chicago wins a spot near the top...
...Within the past two decades, the CIA attempted to assassinate the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and concocted at least eight plots to murder Cuba's Fidel Castro...
...When Government spending is cut, people lose jobs...
...Government has long been interested in "population control," and its Agency for International Development provides half of the worldwide financing for research on birth control...
...Even if SAT scores accurately reflect students' aptitude—a dubious proposition, at best—college officials would be wise to admit all students willing to learn and then provide remedial instruction in the basic skills to those who need it...
...The State Department cites a "dramatic decline" in Guatemala's violence...
...missile deployment scheme "unattainable and absurd...
...There is no evidence of any kind," Martella has told the Italian government, "of an international plan in this matter...
...But environmentalists would be doing themselves and the country a disservice if they allowed a systemic problem to be reduced to personal terms...
...Today, there is no talk in Europe of what will happen after a war starts...
...Not only will public opinion stand in the way, but the environmental movement itself is stronger than ever...
...We can think of no quicker path to oblivion for the peace movement than the institution of its own system of political screening...
...Promoters of Depo-Provera, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation, cite its "efficiency" in controlling population growth in the Third World...
...our friend demanded...
...most Europeans understand that if a war comes, they will all be gone...
...Seventy-eight per cent of the respondents said there is no reason to grant businesses environmental exemptions—even if some jobs are jeopardized...
...Alumni would no longer be able to conduct their recruiting off-campus, and athletic eligibility would be denied to freshmen who received less than a 700 combined score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test...
...These Candles Blow Up The anniversary slipped by before we could send a card or bake a cake: In January, the Pentagon turned forty...
...That may explain why the Reagan Administration smiles on the Chicago plan...
...If college officials were truly committed to ending the exploitation of athletes, they would limit the practice time that coaches can demand of players, shorten sports seasons, and devote more resources to intramural sports in which many participate...
...anti-Communism, yes...
...It was inconceivable that any of them would actually refuse to allow American weapons to be placed on their soil...
...According to Amnesty International, his counterinsurgency campaign killed 2,600 Indians and peasants in a four-month period beginning late last March, surpassing the rate of government atrocities—a ghoulish index the rulers of Guatemala and El Salvador have brought into currency— committed by his predecessor, Lucas Garcia...
...Too many of us still permit ourselves to be frightened by vapid babble about a "window of vulnerability" and other fantasies...
...Comes now Ronald Radosh, coauthor of a book about the Rosenberg case to be published later this year, with a 1980s version...
...Back in the 1950s, Professor Sidney Hook came up with a seamy rationale that allowed liberal intellectuals to make their peace with the witchhunts...
...Unlike oil or nuclear power, it is not a capital-intensive industry facing ever-increasing machinery costs...
...To the media, the Pentagon has served as a handy all-purpose name for the nation's warmakers, an easy image to drop into a sentence or flash on the evening news...
...officials hardly possess a moral license to be outraged by such a possibility...
...It is precisely the wrong medicine...
...Since last October, the level of killing has indeed dropped off, but not because of any human rights commitment on the part of Rios Montt...
...In laboratory tests conducted by Upjohn itself in the early 1970s, Depo-Provera was shown to cause many serious health, problems...
...An officer availing himself of one of those 280 rest rooms could look forward to a court martial—or to vaporization...
...Environmentalists are in a strong position, then, to draw the connections among pollution, corporate priorities, and public policy...
...Harris reported that you, in fact, are the reason for a resurgence of interest in stronger clean air and clean water legislation...
...allies] that the absence of agreement is the fault of the Soviets and not of the United States, it will be impossible to achieve worthwhile agreements with the Soviets, and our alliance systems will be in grave peril...
...Yet if the War Room lights were to start flashing, a high-ranking officer could be as far as seven minutes' walking distance from a command post down the corridor...
...In monkeys, the contraceptive induced curvature of the spine, retardation of bone growth, decrease in organ weights, and a three-fold increase in mortality...
...Busing certainly is no panacea for our schools' segregation problems, but it's better than a "voluntary" program that is really an exercise in evasion...
...That the Soviet leadership is capable of brewing a Machiavellian scheme to have the Pope shot is not beyond imagination...
...The evidence in the Vatican mystery is far from concrete...
...In the past, the governments in the NATO alliance have always been brought into line, however reluctantly, with U.S...
...The poll shows that the Reagan Administration will have a tough time overhauling environmental protection laws in 1983, the year it targeted for such an effort...
...What in the world is going on...
...Chicago is willing to pay to maintain segregation: These forty-five schools will be allotted an additional $42,000 each to bolster staff and curriculum...
...Nothing less will suffice...
...Too many of us are still willing to accept on faith our Government's insistence that we must advance ever closer to the edge of the nuclear precipice...
...Government approves Depo-Provera for use here and abroad...
...This fear is, at best, premature...
...No Guns for Guatemala "We have no scorched earth policy...
...For the time being, however, we should be willing to trade some inflation for jobs and economic recovery...
...We have a policy of scorched communists...
...Papal Bull The calm and reasoned voice of Ilario Mar-tella, the Italian judge investigating the shooting of Pope John Paul II, tends to be drowned out by the current babble of conspiracy theorists...
...it seemed to be little more than one of those proverbial occasions when thieves (if you'll pardon the expression) fall out...
...in activist groups such as the Sierra Club, it has doubled...
...We are witnessing a development of historic importance...
...Upjohn, for its part, has profited handsomely from Depo-Provera...
...Judge Milton I. Shadur recently approved a plan city officials designed two years ago to head off a busing order...
...The aborted Rostow/Nitze compromise was something less than a great breakthrough for disarmament: It would have reduced to fifty the number of Soviet SS-20 missiles directed at Western Europe (with three warheads for each missile), and it would have limited the new U.S...
...According to Business Week, "Membership in virtually every environmental organization has grown since Reagan's election...
...The alumni regulations are incomplete, but the SAT requirement is a fumble...
...strategic doctrine...
...They can point, for example, to the relationships between auto company profits, carbon monoxide pollution, and the Government's failure to develop mass transit—and the resulting high unemployment rates among auto and steel workers...
...One shot lasts for three months and can be administered by any health-care worker without the costly supervision of a physician...
...Weren't Rostow and Nitze su-perhawks, pillars of the obnoxious Committee on the Present Danger, implacable critics of the SALT II arms control treaty...
...It seems to be a favorite among those who treat non-white and low-income patients, and the University of Minnesota Hospitals administer it to mentally handicapped women...
...In our economy, it is impossible to have growth without inflation...
...But wealthy alumni will continue to find sympathetic ears in college athletic departments, where free autos and favorable business deals still buy influence and tickets...
...Not the military-industrial complex, which has been around since the dawn of the Republic, but the actual hulking building on the Potomac...
...Unless the peace movement understands this," he asserts, "it will sink into oblivion...
...Workers who collect unemployment compensation don't pay taxes, and only noninflationary growth can begin to bridge the gap between Government expenses and revenues...
...Significant Government spending would create jobs and stimulate growth...
...And in an era of mega-destruction, the institution may no longer be able to fulfill its intended purpose...
...In Praise of Deficit Spending The U.S...
...deployment in Europe to 150 cruise missiles (and no Pershing lis...
...Watt and Gorsuch are likely to be out of office in two years, but the lumber companies they cater to, the chemical companies they court, the other corporate interests they serve, will still be poisoning our air and water...
...Benching the enterprising alumni may put an end to some of the more glaring abuses—the free vacations for prospects, the phony jobs, the bribes...
...Government spending should be allocated, therefore, not to piecemeal public works programs but to mass transit, alternative energy sources, and health care systems—all avenues in which we can achieve growth without inflation...
...Even at a time of severe economic distress, the most'outrageous increases in military spending occasion only the most muted protest...
...This gives U.S...
...As consumer demand declines, businesses lay off workers and defer spending on new plants or equipment...
...To get out of this economic bind, the Government must boost consumer demand...
...But no woman needs Depo-Provera, and no nation will benefit from its use...
...peace movement and must be expelled forthwith...
...Their tendency to spout outrageous statements makes them pushovers...
...The late Mayor Richard Daley left a racist legacy, and today's Chicago power brokers apparently have no serious plans to wipe it out...
...For now, one would do well to heed the advice of In These Times reporter Diana Johnstone and remember that "terrorism, assassination, spies, and plots are distractions from the serious questions of stopping the arms race, reorganizing world economic relations, and assuring human dignity...
...Critics of increasing Government spending raise another objection: the "crowding out" phenomenon, a favorite catchphrase among economists...
...It didn't make any sense to her...
...The economy is suffering from a shortage of consumer demand...
...How could this be...
...How had they been transformed into dovish opponents of the Administration's hardline stance...
...Given the current decline of consumer spending, it is the only way out...
...But until the judge does so, the rumor mills of the Italian press and the American crackpot community can only feed on speculation—and not even solid speculation, at that...
...Similar reactions are pervasive in Western Europe, and the momentum of opposition is still building...
...Despite the restriction on its use as a contraceptive, Depo-Provera continues to be injected into the arms of American women, since applying the drug is left to the discretion of individual physicians...
...Take solar energy, for instance...
...But it is the students, as usual, who have lost...
...pledge to refrain from installing 464 new cruise missiles and 108 Pershing lis in Western Europe...
...For the first time, Europeans are compelling their governments to abandon policies that have been justified in terms of "national security" and that could lead to catastrophic conflict...
...Rios Montt cloaks himself in fundamentalist religious garb...
...In the long term, noninflationary growth is possible—if the structure of the economy is transformed...
...A Depo-Provera user in Ghana, for instance, would probably die before suffering the long-term effects of the contraceptive—or so the argument goes...
...The Reagan Administration responded in January by lifting a five-year embargo on U.S...
...Now, after pressure from Upjohn, the FDA has held public hearings that may lead to a new ruling...
...conspiracy, no...
...Businesses will hardly search for new capital when their plants are currently operating at less than 70 per cent capacity...
...COMMENT When Hawks Fall Out A devoted reader who frequently shares with us her strong convictions on various topics of national and international import wrote recently in uncharacteristic but self-confessed confusion...
...About ten million Third World women have received injections...
...Depo-Provera, manufactured by the Upjohn Company, was banned for contraceptive use in 1978 because the Food and Drug Administration found it to be dangerous...
...arms sales to Guatemala, claiming that Rios Montt had taken "significant steps" to improve the human rights situation there...
...The call for a reduced or balanced Federal budget is not only counterproductive but dangerous...
...Educational enrichment is important, of course, but it does not bring whites and minorities together in the classroom...
...But raising taxes and reducing Government spending will deprive consumers of the money they need to help bring us out of this near-depression...
...Now, however, Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds is boasting that the plan achieves desegregation "through education, not transportation...
...Early in the study, Upjohn suppressed some of the findings which pointed to carcinomas in the dogs' uterine linings...
...Athletics is clearly a legitimate part of education, but neither the physical nor mental fitness of students will benefit from the high-stakes, big-money environment nourished by the NCAA...
...Radosh's thesis, set forth in the January 31 issue of The New Republic, is that communists and "a new breed of fellow travelers" have infiltrated the U.S...
...Indeed, a Chicago school board official acknowledged that under the program, forty-five of the city's schools will remain all black...
...Late last year, it turned out, Nitze— acting with Rostow's approval—had discussed with Soviet negotiators a possible modification of President Reagan's "zero option" proposal, under which the Russians would have been required to scrap several hundred missiles that are already deployed in exchange for a U.S...
...But U.S...
...Watt's Wrong James Watt, take note: A public opinion survey recently conducted by Louis Harris for Business Week indicates that Americans still want tough environmental laws, even in 1983, more than a decade after the original Earth Day...
...For example, none of the mystery buffs rushing to lay the incident at the feet of Yuri Andropov can explain why an assassin for the KGB would write the Pope vowing to "exterminate" him, as Agca did in 1979...
...Let Sleeping Dogmas Lie It was Huey Long's sage observation that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would be called 100 per cent Americanism...
...Beagles injected with Depo-Provera suffered malignant breast and endometrium tumors, death from diabetes, atrophied adrenal glands, and organ destruction...
...its Justice Department is content to let Chicago's predominantly white government stay the segregated course...
...Watt has said of environmentalists, "Their real thrust is not clean air, or clean water, or parks, or wildlife, but the form of government under which America will live...
...Collegiate sports is in a crisis not because students who shouldn't are joining teams but because students who do are routinely neglected in the classroom...
...But as the details began to come into focus, the episode assumed considerably more significance...
...One Shot Too Many Women may once again fall victim to a harmful contraceptive if the U.S...
...The bottom line, of course, is that the Pentagon remains a giant office building—the world's largest, in fact—where some 23,000 individuals are at work planning for war...
...And it didn't make any sense to us, at first...
...In fact, Rios Montt ushered in the worst period of violence in Guatemala's history...
...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...
...Depo-Provera is, from their point of view, a "wonder" contraceptive...
...But just as the West Europeans have begun to take control of their governments' policies, we can begin to take control of ours...
...Although it seems unlikely, Martella may eventually link the Soviet Union—or at least its Bulgarian satellite—with Mehe-met Ali Agca, the right-wing Turk who tried to kill the Pope in 1981...
...In Great Britain—where antiwar women have created a crisis of conscience by sitting in at Greenham Commons, designated as a future cruise missile site—Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has made it known that she does not feel bound to go all the way with Reagan's plans...
...In last year's elections, for example, environmental organizations spent $1.5 million...
...Obviously, there are urgent lessons in all this for the people of the United States...
...she asked...
...Because of demonstrations in Brussels and Bonn and London and Paris, Eugene Rostow and Paul Nitze are compelled to dissent from their own President's unyielding stance...
...As the Reagan Administration and business leaders flounder around for a way out of this mess, their natural inclination is to follow the path marked by Martin Feld-stein, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Peterson, Richard Nixon's former Secretary of Commerce: substantial budget cuts and tax increases...
...Nor is it vulnerable to manipulation by multinational giants or an OPEC-style cartel, one of the main inflationary engines of the 1970s...
...it is merely a proposal to improve the quality of education in black, white, and Hispanic schools...
...War is even bigger than the Pentagon...
...When taxes go up, consumers have less disposable income...
...The current budget deficit is more a symptom than a cause of economic paralysis...
...Since the amount of lendable money is limited, such public borrowing will deprive industry of loans for the improvement of plants and machinery, and will raise interest rates across the board...
...But Rostow and Nitze recognized that there has been a change—not in the governments but in the public pressures to which they must respond...
...Martella never changed his stance," Christopher Winner recently wrote in the National Catholic Reporter...
...Others are reluctant to spend because they fear they may soon lose their jobs...
...Government, in its quest for dominance, would benefit from lifting the ban on the drug...
...But though the Pentagon has not changed, the nature of its trade certainly has...
...Just when the mindless anticommunism that helped engender the arms race is finally losing its grip on most Americans, it would be ruinous to revive it among those who are struggling for sanity and peace...
...The evidence of those machinations was "concrete," according to a 1975 report of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee...
...She was perplexed, it quickly transpired, by the sudden and involuntary departure of Eugene V. Rostow as chief of the U.S...
...many more would be exposed to the drug once the FDA gave its blessings...
...It is not a prescription for lifting us out of the current recession but for sending us headlong into a depression...
...Standing to suffer are millions of women, here and abroad...
...The building is still in good shape, even if the economy it bleeds is not...
...Rather, Guatemala now enjoys the "Pol Pot Cambodian tranquility of a massacred population," says Lawrence Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Latin American human rights organization in Washington, D.C...
...No one wants to say it aloud these days, but what is needed is a large deficit in the Federal budget...
...Late last year, General Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemala's born-again strongman, heralded the Christmas season with that fetching turn of phrase...
...The risks are diminished in developing countries, say the drug's advocates, beCOMMENT cause Third World people have a shorter life expectancy...
...Thus, Ronald Reagan's chief Sovietologist, Richard Pipes, says, "It could not have occurred without his [Andropov's] authorization," while Henry Kissinger says Agca could not have succeeded "without the Bulgarian secret police...
...Two years ago, the Justice Department threatened to sue the city because of its failure to take substantive steps to end pupil assignment by race...
...The scheme Shadur approved as constitutional contains no specific guidelines for desegregating schools...
...Rostow gently made this point in departure remarks to the staff of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: "If it is not obvious to [U.S...
...The rationale behind the plan—the one Judge Shadur swallowed—is remarkably similar to the discredited "separate but equal" doctrine rejected by the Supreme Court in 1954...
...Imagine what we'll be able to accomplish when the protests are mobilized here at home...
...An answer can be found in the recent Harris poll, which indicated that Americans do not buy the "jobs versus environment" proposition espoused by industrialists and their supporters in the White House...
...Only Upjohn, in its thirst for profits, and the U.S...
...For those who make a career of conjuring up Soviet conspiracies—for consumption by the MacNeil-Lehrer Report or the President—the most popular way to link Agca with Andropov has been to phrase the proposition in the negative...
...Our real gross national product fell last year by 1.8 per cent, and unemployment stands at 10.8 per cent—postwar records for both of these gloomy indicators...
...The U.S...
...What made the overture important was its motivation: Rostow and Nitze have come to understand the reality which apparently still eludes the President and his White House staff—that Washington can no longer impose an unyielding policy of endless arms escalation on its European allies...
Vol. 47 • March 1983 • No. 3
