Comment
COMMENT An Echo, Not a Choice Let's give credit where credit is due: When Ronald Reagan spelled out his Administration's Central America doctrine at the end of April before an extraordinary joint...
...In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a city commissioner has proposed that trash cans be sprayed with kerosene or insecticide to discourage scavengers...
...Rigdon is speaking out against the relocation of a nuclear weapons plant in his Mississippi River town of 30,000...
...Answer: Mandatory national service, a scheme that would compel young Americans to give the Government a year of their lives, either for military training or for toil in some other Federally sanctioned cause...
...Natural gas producers can look forward to several years of fat profits, though the experience of OPEC suggests that their day of reckoning will come if demand drops drastically...
...At the same time, Epton seemed to fall apart...
...On paper, the giants sold their cheap oil to fly-by-night operations, which reclassified the oil as expensive and then sold it back, again on paper...
...Somehow, we doubt it...
...Efforts to divert a substantial quantity of this surplus food to the hungry have been blocked in recent months by an Administration that has consistently refused to release more than a token amount...
...But Washington's own campaign organization wasn't helping matters much either...
...Since Reagan insists against all evidence that the murderous regime in San Salvador is "beginning to let democracy take root," the United States will extend all possible assistance in exterminating those of its subjects who remain unpersuaded...
...The implied message of his ubiquitous campaign slogan—Vote for Epton Before It's Too Late—was unmistakable...
...After that dismal performance, Reagan is recommending that the same Commission continue to guard against unfair price increases until 1986...
...And pipeline companies, locked into long-term contracts to purchase expensive gas, pass along the higher costs to utilities and ultimately to homeowners and renters...
...Chicago politics might now experience some changes long overdue...
...Mobil has every reason to celebrate the proposed settlement, especially after two other oil giants, Exxon and Texaco, were slapped with bills exceeding $1 billion for the same violation as Mobil...
...Those are some topics a real tribune of the people might take up if he wanted a showdown with the bankers...
...But the public rationale most likely to be advanced in today's economic climate is that compulsory service would reduce the catastrophic unemployment rate among young people—get the kids off the streets and into the barracks...
...At the very least, "Project Democracy" may offer some light diversion...
...Washington has vowed to clean up the police department, notorious for its brutality, racism, and propensity to nab the innocent and poor for no reason except to pad arrest records...
...Truman, Reagan recalled approvingly, came up with "bold solutions" to the problems of the postwar era...
...Nonetheless, the decision was made back in the late 1940s that the United States, in order to pursue its imperial objectives around the world, had to rearm rather than disarm...
...In Chicago, it's usually impossible for a Democratic candidate to lose, but Washington was headed in that direction ten days before the vote...
...His staff lacked cohesion and savvy...
...Not surprisingly, many Iowans are all for the move...
...Making a military draft more palatable is the first purpose of mandatory national service proposals...
...To draw attention to this shameful situation, the Community for Creative Nonviolence (CCNV) is organizing a tent city to be pitched on the Fourth of July in Kansas City, Missouri, where much of the surplus food is stored in mammoth limestone caves...
...We can't wait to read all about it in one of those cute self-congratulatory ads Mobil runs on op-ed pages and in Sunday supplements...
...The tricky transactions engaged in by Mobil and Exxon should provide some titil-lation for those who can't help wondering how a company can pull off a billion-dollar overcharge...
...Can it be that they are still serviceable, despite the wretched record compiled over the last three and a half decades...
...Reagan was not content, however, merely to replicate the seamy rationales of the Cold War...
...On one level this is a fight within American conservatism—between those who place paramount importance on reducing the budget deficit and those who are most concerned about the administrative burden corporations must bear...
...Its parentage was suitably bipartisan...
...If Congress approves the plan, the United States will officially and openly undertake such activities as publishing anti-communist tracts in foreign countries, manipulating the contents of their press, infiltrating their universities, and fostering a right-wing labor movement along the lines charted by the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development...
...Department of Energy is considering moving or expanding its atomic bomb factory in Amarillo, Texas, and Burlington is one of two potential sites for the operation...
...Now, memories of the U.S...
...But that's exactly what Jerry Rigdon is doing in Burlington, Iowa, and it's in the best interests of his constituents...
...All of a sudden, though, just four days before the election, the momentum shifted...
...The city could become less segregated, and most city workers will enjoy union recognition in the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees...
...Although it may be politically impossible these days to achieve more than temporary (and welcome) price controls, we must start to show that the industry—not the nature of controls—is the real source of the continuing natural gas crisis...
...Reagan has made no threat to restrict banking practices that have endangered the world financial system or to control the increasingly significant Eurocurrency markets...
...They will be allowed to retain withheld funds for thirty days—a plum that is sure to offset some of the administrative costs...
...nuclear weapons were made in Burlington for twenty-seven years, until 1975...
...All of these machinations and hypocrisies have been successfully peddled to Americans before...
...Whether the pretext is patriotism, "altruism," or an economic quick fix, involuntary servitude is an intolerable affront, as thousands of draft registration resisters have shown...
...The emptying of those caves—and removal of the shame—would be a wonderful birthday present for America...
...One can only hope he's right about that...
...Chile's Augusto Pinochet and El Salvador's Robert d'Aubuisson undoubtedly would attend...
...Since Washington has decided, for example, that the socialist Sandinistas cannot possibly manage their economy in Nicaragua, we will do all we can to disrupt that economy by imposing trade embargos, sabotaging supply lines, and inciting outright aggression...
...And since Washington wants the world to know that human rights are jeopardized by the Sandinistas, we will bankroll a civil war that will ultimately require the imposition of martial law...
...And who would be better qualified to lead the sessions than that paragon eager to return to public service, Al Haig...
...What's more, the Treasury is disturbed by growing tax noncompliance...
...Mobil, Texaco, and Exxon realized it would be risky just to lie about the kind of oil they had, so they set up smaller companies to do the dirty work for them...
...To lend historic legitimacy to his pitch (and, presumably, to elicit some support from pliable Democrats), he reached back to 1947 and a speech by Harry S. Truman that helped inaugurate the Cold War...
...No oil actually changed hands, but presto, cheap oil was transformed into expensive oil...
...Socioeconomic imbalance in his own city has never troubled the mayor, who has resisted all attempts at imposing affirmative action guidelines, but perhaps he believes minorities in the military can't be trusted with guns...
...radicals seek changes that liberals abhor...
...He can denounce the bankers as "a selfish special interest" and urge them to devote more attention to reducing high interest rates...
...last winter's jump in natural gas prices made a mockery of that pledge...
...COMMENT An Echo, Not a Choice Let's give credit where credit is due: When Ronald Reagan spelled out his Administration's Central America doctrine at the end of April before an extraordinary joint session of Congress, he chose to invoke the most appropriate precedent anyone could conceivably have suggested...
...It would require Mobil to pay only $27 million for gouging a suspected total of $920 million from consumers in the years from 1973 to 1981...
...The nearby Iowa Army Ammunition Plant still employs about 900 residents building conventional weapons...
...The turf for this noisy tug-of-war is, of course, the bankers' massive campaign to repeal the new 10 per cent withholding of taxes on interest and dividends...
...The idea has been around for a long time— "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country"— and it seems to have a perennial fascination for some liberals who believe we all ought to volunteer for something, whether we want to or not...
...Relocating the Texas factory would bring between 1,000 and 2,600 new jobs to Burlington, depending on whether the transfer is partial or complete...
...ITT's Harold Geneen and Citibank's Walter Wriston could jointly lead seminars on "The Free Market in Governments—When to Buy and When to Sell...
...Perhaps after they've snubbed the Energy Department, the citizens of Burlington will turn their sights toward converting the existing ordnance plant to a peaceful purpose—one that would provide another 1,000 to 2,600 jobs...
...Despite the Federal Government's much advertised food giveaway programs, the stockpile is growing at the rate of three million pounds of butter, fifteen million pounds of cheese, and thirty millions pounds of milk every month...
...He vigorously campaigned in the white liberal lakefront wards and in the Hispanic community—both areas holding votes crucial for victory...
...More and more Americans are forced to forage for food wherever they can find it...
...With affecting nostalgia, Reagan called for a return to the "bipartisan approach" that successfully insulated U.S...
...He petulantly skipped one national television show, refused to participate in another—because he didn't like one of the panelists who happened to be black—and began railing against the press...
...If it worked then, why not now...
...the situation allowed it to engineer a pseudo-shortage in 1977 as a spur to deregulation...
...In April, the Senate voted to block withholding until 1987, when Congress will have the option of implementing it...
...While the food warehouses bulge, the nation's soup kitchens, food banks, and emergency food services are inundated by growing numbers of the hungry...
...The circumstances confronting the Reagan Administration today are, indeed, similar in several striking respects to those Truman faced in 1947...
...fiasco in Indochina are still fresh enough to discourage popular support for new military ventures, and growing public understanding of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war is forging a revitalized peace movement...
...They're rejecting a short-term reward for the sake of achieving long-term security...
...Washington caught a second wind, lashed out against the personal charges against him, and reasserted his commitment to reform...
...Reagan's speech was delivered with all the bogus earnestness and sincerity an old thespian can muster...
...To the bankers, the new withholding rule is little more than a nuisance...
...Question: What looks like a draft, smells like a draft, sounds like a draft, and is a draft for civilian as well as military service...
...But for all the difficulties down the line, Washington's blow against racism is one that we all can savor...
...Other costs can easily be passed along...
...So long as the U.S...
...In part, he was suffering at the hands of John Deardourff, the outside consultant who managed Epton's campaign and focused attention on Washington's past personal problems, such as his failure to file income tax returns...
...A Conflict of Interest It's hard to tell which side you're on when the contest is between Ronald Reagan and Robert Dole on one end and the American Bankers Association on the other...
...As Chicago's new mayor noted in his acceptance speech, it was a historic occasion...
...Shultz was lobbying for "Project Democracy," a proposed $85 million propaganda program that would do publicly what the CIA has been doing secretly for the past thirty years...
...To maintain their profit margins, natural gas producers have pursued a classic monopoly strategy: increasing prices even in a declining market...
...The Wind Shifts in Chicago Harold Washington won the Chicago mayoral election because the city's black community, harried and humiliated for decades, was resolutely determined to have its say at last, and because a small coterie of white radicals and liberals saw in Washington a candidate of unusually progressive leanings...
...A Fighting City Hall It's poor politics, as a rule, for the mayor of a town to lobby against local business development—particularly in a place where one in seven is unemployed...
...Within a year or so, splits within his electoral coalition may begin to appear...
...These teach-ins would be designed especially for military leaders who hold traditionally civilian posts...
...In a speech to the Boy Scouts of America, Koch proclaimed that mandatory national service—in a socialist nation he'd call it forced labor, or Gulag for short—would instill a "spirit of altruism" in the nation's youth and "strengthen the military by producing a more socioeconomically balanced force...
...Government is determined to engage in such machinations, perhaps it is preferable to have them out in the open for all to see...
...That would, indeed, be a stop-gap palliative, until the kids were sent back out to the streets after their year of indenture...
...Now Reagan is making good on his promise: He has asked Congress to accelerate decontrol so that all price regulation will be wiped off the books by 1986...
...And though most Epton supporters played their racism close to the chest, some distributed vile propaganda based on crude stereotypes, or disseminated Klan-type venom on hotlines, in leaflets, and by word of mouth...
...So far as we can tell, it didn't work—either in Congress or out in the country...
...propaganda would, one way or another, become reality...
...The oil firms hire top talent to devise such schemes, and the fast-shuffle experts did their jobs quite well in the 1970s...
...his issues team did not adequately represent women and community groups, diluting his image as a reformer...
...Full Bins, Empty Stomachs The U.S...
...Federal judges recently ruled that Exxon and Texaco both were guilty of overcharging consumers in the 1970s and ordered the companies to pay full reimbursement, plus interest...
...Then, Americans who had endured a long and costly war yearned for peace and international cooperation...
...Or perhaps the scam will be dramatized one night on "Masterpiece Theater," brought to you by a grant from Mobil Oil...
...But Reagan is not the only villain here...
...In Phoenix, Arizona, garbage has been declared city property, making food foragers liable to a charge of theft...
...They have been able to do so by marketing only those categories of gas that command the highest prices under NGPA...
...Today, the President added, "the political and strategic stakes are the same" in Central America as they were then in Europe...
...A senior Republican in the U.S...
...The stockpile includes 769 million pounds of cheese, 388 million pounds of butter, 33 million pounds of honey, 1.74 billion pounds of rice, and 1.26 billion pounds of dried milk...
...That's a full three-year supply of milk for everyone in this country...
...Stepping on the Gas Ronald Reagan's virtue is his vice: He goes all out for his friends...
...The latest enthusiasts for mandatory national service are President Franklin Thomas of the Ford Foundation and Mayor Edward Koch of New York City...
...the program he proposed was designed, as in the past, to make sure that official U.S...
...Bernard Epton, Washington's Republican opponent, insisted that race was not an issue, but he made it his only issue...
...I love peace," the mayor says...
...In the meantime, consumers will continue to be bilked, the U.S...
...The discriminatory patronage system may finally be abolished, and the City Council may become a deliberative body, rather than a mere rubber stamp...
...In fact, his plan scarcely deviates from the 1978 Natural Gas Policy Act, legislation blessed by President Carter...
...If Central America were to fall," he asked, "what would the consequences be for our position in Asia and Europe...
...His campaign slowed to a snail's pace.' When the votes were tabulated, Washington won with about 98 per cent of the black vote, 18 per cent of the white vote (drawing 6 or 8 per cent in wards where he was expected to get next to nothing), and 75 per cent of the Hispanic vote...
...Ronald Reagan gets a great opportunity to pass himself off as the William Jennings Bryan (or at least the Wright Patmart) of the 1980s...
...Up to now, the industry itself has been the principal source of data on natural gas reserves...
...CLEC favors "recontrols" on prices and legislation governing contracts between producers and pipeline companies...
...No one can fault Ronald Reagan for lack of effort...
...The resistance to new imperial adventures is growing, even among those who supported the follies of the past...
...Storage costs alone amount to $600,000 a week...
...This was the way we were threatened with the "fall" of Europe, the "loss" of China, the collapse of the dominoes stretching from Indochina all the way to Waikiki...
...Appearances are what this struggle is really all about...
...if you're an ordinary citizen, stand back and admire the sheer gall of your duly elected Government...
...That's a penalty of less than three cents for every dollar filched—and the Department plans to suspend all civil actions against the company for the overcharges...
...Rigdon concedes that the jobs would be a "tremendous boon" to Burlington, but contends the issue must be seen in the context of national and world affairs...
...Both have floated trial balloons that may catch the eye of Federal policymakers...
...The lessons of this slippery tale are simple: If you are a huge corporation, by all means settle with the Government out of court while the settling is good...
...Thomas said a national service program could have "historic importance to America's youth and to America's future...
...Reagan's proposal has drawn the fire of the Citizens Labor Energy Coalition and other consumer organizations that are trying to hold the line against this move to send gas prices—and industry profits—soaring...
...Without the restoration of such consensus, he said, it will be impossible to meet "America's global responsibilities...
...Washington could also face some problems at home...
...Consumer groups have proposed several methods to keep the lid on fuel prices...
...But a Republican governor sits in Springfield and Ronald Reagan occupies the White House, so his prospects in this area are dim...
...Washington's election, even by the slim margin of 51 to 48 per cent, dealt a severe blow to racism—after the Second City seemed to wallow in a swamp of unreconstructed bigotry during the campaign...
...Take the Department of Energy (please...
...I do not support the manufacture of nuclear arms anyplace, especially in my backyard," he recently told the Chicago Sun-Times...
...foreign policy for several decades from any significant public—or even Congressional—discussion and debate...
...Senate, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, told the Democratic President how to go about the business of remobilizing a people who yearned for peace—"Scare the hell out of them"—and the Cold War was born...
...Poor blacks have needs different from those of wealthier blacks...
...This built in an incentive for cheating: If a company owning cheap oil could disguise it as expensive oil, it would receive money from the pool instead of having to pay money in...
...Similar self-fulfilling prophecies are to be the order of the day in El Salvador...
...balance of payments will suffer as oil purchases rise, and, as utilities convert from gas to cheaper coal, the environment will be needlessly damaged...
...Project Hypocrisy "Don't be nervous about democracy, about holding that torch up there," said Secretary of State George Shultz, late of the Bechtel Corporation, in moving testimony before Congress...
...The U.S...
...People like Rigdon—and his supporters in Burlington Citizens for Peace—give cause for optimism...
...But such a game plan ignores the prigins of the problem...
...The demonstrators plan to fast until the food is released...
...Another activify contemplated for "Project Democracy" is a series of "symposia on the nature of democratic societies...
...It was the era of oil price controls, and companies with access to cheap domestic oil were supposed to contribute into a pool for compensating the unlucky firms that had to pay higher prices for expensive domestic or foreign oil...
...Washington's success in this regard will depend on his ability to squeeze money out of the state and Federal Government...
...Improving the economic health of the city, however, will be no easy task...
...If it was possible—in fact, easy—to scare the hell out of the American people in 1947, why not in 1983...
...In the context of a $200 billion deficit, the fiscal stakes in the withholding struggle don't loom large, but even the $2 billion to $3 billion the Treasury hopes to net is worth recovering...
...In the last week," says one of Washington's aides, "my heart was in my mouth...
...If you'd like to help make it happen you can get more details from the CCNV at 1345 Euclid Street NW, Washington, DC 20009...
...The DOE, as Washingtonians call it, is cutting a deal—such a deal—with Mobil Oil, your friendly neighborhood energy conglomerate...
...That's what his buddies in the oil industry wanted, since they dominate natural gas production...
...The Administration's plans call for a "Center for Free Enterprise" that will expound "the role of business in democratic societies...
...He never really answered the question, nor did he explain how Central America would actually "fall" or from what, but the old, vague scare rhetoric was all too familiar...
...Department of Agriculture has enough surplus food in storage to supply nine bushels of grain and ninety-five pounds of other edibles to every hungry man, woman, and child in America...
...At the time, we were told that the Federal Energy Pricing Commission would protect consumers against burdensome increases...
...Stronger controls are needed not only on prices but on producers...
...Do You Feel a Draft...
...Though we "will not protect the Nicaraguan government from the anger of its own people," we will cheerfully render that service to the government of El Salvador...
...When he was running for President, he vowed to eliminate price controls on natural gas...
...But we might consider an exception to permit the forced induction of some big-city mayors and foundation presidents...
...The new withholding provisions get at unreported non-wage income, and are intended to make the system seem more fair to the millions of working-class Americans who face mandatory withholding of taxes on their wages...
...Oil Slick The fading scandal over the Environmental Protection Agency had at least one salutary aspect from the Reagan Administration's perspective: It provided good cover for other Federal agencies that continue to lavish favors upon industry...
...Congress and consumers need to have reliable information on actual gas reserves if such manipulation is to be prevented...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 6
