Comment
The Day Before The Reagan Administration was, according to Time magazine, "fearful of the political fallout" from the ABC television movie The Day After, and therefore "launched a counteroffensive"...
...Big Buck for the Bang The storm over the Euromissiles has temporarily swept a related tempest out to sea: the controversy surrounding the MX missile program...
...Payne is a senior associate on the Institute's ICBM project, which will be completed by April 28,1984...
...they account for 10.5 per cent today...
...The only mildly surprising aspect of the Greyhound strike was how easy it was for Greyhound to hire scabs...
...it is no longer confined to such notorious anti-union outfits as Coors and Litton...
...It is, today, the reason why the Reagan Administration refuses to forswear the first use of nuclear arms...
...As consumers, they have been angered by the high price of goods in the marketplace, which they attribute at least in part to the unions...
...and the likely Soviet responses to the Peacekeeper/Midgetman tandem and how this could change the requirements of U.S...
...But the Reagan Administration is taking no chances...
...To be sure, the film was anticlimactic and naive...
...As 1983 drew to a close, U.S...
...The first premise was that to protect vital U.S...
...The Murderers Among Us If it should transpire, despite the best efforts of political leaders around the world, that sentient beings survive on this planet into the third millennium A.D., then the day will surely come when historians and anthropologists probing the savage practices of uncouth antiquity will regard us with the kind of contempt we reserve for the barbarous torturers of the Dark Ages...
...industry...
...His sermon should haunt the conscience of those scientists who have led us down our mis-siled path, and perhaps it will persuade some significant number of them to slam the door on General Dynamics, United Technologies, and the Pentagon...
...At the same time, the Sandinistas are wisely trying to shore up their international image and remove any pretext for U.S...
...that would be a formula for the unilateral abandonment of the competition...
...It was Richard Nixon's proposed "madman" solution to the Vietnam war...
...He wrote those words with co-author Keith B. Payne in Foreign Policy magazine...
...After the Grenada invasion, the Sandinistas assumed they were next on the President's hit list...
...A more progressive tax structure could generate the necessary funds without impoverishing anyone...
...Or it can arouse fierce determination to reassert control over our own lives and over the future of human life on this planet...
...For more than three decades, American foreign and military policy has been based on two inherently contradictory premises...
...John Paul II strongly suggested that scientists should abandon all military-related work so that "discoveries of science are not placed at the service of war, tyranny, and terror...
...Reluctant Reprieve After two years of waging an undisguised secret war against the Nicaraguan government, the Central Intelligence Agency has apparently concluded that it's not going to achieve a military victory over the Sandinistas...
...More than 57,000 applicants lined up for jobs as drivers, mechanics, dispatchers, and baggage handlers...
...The responsibility for ensuring the benign use of science rests with the scientists themselves, he argued: "By refusing certain fields of research, inevitably destined in the concrete historical circumstances for deadly purposes, the scientists of the whole world ought to be united in a common readiness to disarm science and to form a providential force for peace...
...That sense of helplessness can elicit two possible responses: It can persuade us that we have no choice but to resign ourselves to the inevitable...
...Congress has approved funding and the Air Force has conducted required environmental impact hearings near the placement sites—existing missile silos in Nebraska and Wyoming...
...But after hearing the case for three weeks, a jury took only four and a half hours to quash that effort...
...The same righteous officials who worry about blind trusts would serve us all better if they reexamined their blind faith in the CIA...
...And the nuclear war itself, depicted on the television screen with the best special effects money could buy, was— as ABC itself admitted—not nearly as devastating as we should expect the real thing to be...
...Now, the CIA's message seems at least temporarily to have taken the wind out of Reagan's interventionist sails, and the Administration has slightly moderated its bellicose talk...
...But this affair serves mostly as distraction, for being involved in a possible conflict of interest is surely the least of Casey's sins...
...AMC management financed the action against the union activists to muzzle Fighting Times...
...military pilots and U.S...
...According to a Washington Post story recently filed by Patrick Tyler, the CIA believes the 10,000 to 15,000 counterrevolutionaries it has financed and trained cannot win because they have failed to develop sufficient support among the Nicaraguan people and because the Sandinistas are too strong and too committed to defending the revolution...
...interests around the world, Washington had to be able to persuade all adversaries, real or imagined, that the United States would not shrink from using nuclear weapons to achieve its ends...
...At 10:16 a.m...
...It hardly ranks with being involved in the affairs of countless Third World nations...
...Some weeks ago, Parade, the mass-circulation Sunday newspaper supplement, devoted its cover and several inside pages to an article by astronomer Carl Sagan about a new scientific study that shows how even a limited nuclear war would have catastrophic consequences...
...For a quarter of a million dollars, the Government would have done better to buy a screwdriver...
...military "advisers" were trying to repress revolution in Central America...
...Greyhound's antilabor stance is hardly unusual at this high noon of Ronald Reagan's rule...
...Our Government is counting on our willingness to be victims, if need be...
...At the same time, a new and determined peace movement came into being in Europe, providing energy and inspiration to American antiwar activists...
...In 1980, Gray argued that the United States "should plan to defeat the Soviet Union and to do so at a cost that would not prohibit U.S...
...Just as we find it difficult to comprehend how human beings could be put to the rack, burned alive, drawn and quartered, and subjected to other unspeakable horrors by members of their own species, so those savants of the future will puzzle over our grisly rites of execution by hanging, electrocution, suffocation, firing squad, and poisoning...
...The Pope's message came at a critical juncture, when the latest scientifically developed weapons of mass destruction are being readied in Western Europe...
...Before reaching a tentative settlement early in December, some 12,700 Greyhound employees overwhelmingly rejected the company's ultimatum that they take a 7.8 per cent cut in wages and additional reductions in benefits or lose their jobs...
...Cost is a problem, obviously an acute problem, especially as it injures poor and middle-class patients...
...What troubled them was that on a single Sunday evening late in November 1983, some 100 million Americans, many of whom had never before given serious thought to the prospect of nuclear catastrophe, were suddenly brought face to face with that prospect in terms they could find "realistic" and, therefore, frightening...
...Among the questions to be studied: "How a phased approach to Peacekeeper deployment and Midgetman development can serve U.S...
...But by stressing costs over quality, price tags over performance, we only prolong the unhealthy state of our medical system...
...Our Government was determined to keep us swaddled in assurances of nuclear safety...
...It seems that last summer's snow job by the Scowcroft Commission, the "blue-ribbon" panel which sold Congress on the MX, will shepherd the weapon system through any winter of discontent...
...Phelps Dodge hired scabs to break a strike at its Arizona copper mines...
...Are we supposed to make policy by scaring ourselves to death...
...On the Bus, Off the Bus When Greyhound urged its customers last fall to "leave the driving to us," it was really telling them to leave the driving to scabs...
...Sullivan insisted to the end that he was innocent of the crime for which he was to die...
...The first signs of widespread concern appeared not long after Ronald Reagan entered the White House...
...Hospitals will have an incentive, therefore, to push a patient into the most lucrative diagnostic category available...
...Health-care costs are skyrocketing, and the remedies proposed by the Federal Government and many private insurers may end up hurting the patient more...
...The second premise, without which the first could not be sustained, was that Americans would remain blithely unaware of the danger of nuclear havoc, and would cheerfully continue putting up the mind-boggling sums required to fuel each successive escalatory spiral of the arms race...
...they loosened restrictions on the opposition daily, La Prensa, and even offered to subsidize it, and they took steps to ease the tension between the government and the Catholic Church...
...The more complicated the condition of the patient, the more money the hospital will receive from Medicare...
...The availability of willing scabs is not unusual, however, in an economy beset by what has become chronic high unemployment...
...Unions have emphasized short-term bread-and-butter concerns at the expense of such far-sighted social programs as full employment and income security...
...But the recent events provide the first glimmer of hope in quite some time that the Sandinista revolution just might persevere...
...None of these shortcomings, however, occasioned the Reagan Administration's apprehensions, or Time's, or those of the various right-wing oracles and media pundits who felt obliged to warn us against drawing any serious conclusions from The Day After...
...Love's Labors Cost Victories for the labor movement and for the First Amendment are few and far between, so when a resounding triumph for both arrives all rolled up in one tidy package, it's cause for celebration...
...The champagne bottles were recently popped when three employees of the American Motors Corporation (AMC) in Kenosha, Wisconsin, beat back a $4.2 million libel suit brought against them by four AMC foremen...
...And once the procedures are performed, hospitals will have an incentive to discharge patients before they are fully recovered, since payment now depends on diagnosis, not length of stay...
...He had spent an unconscionable ten years on death row and world notables, including Pope John Paul II, had attempted to intercede in his behalf, but the Governor of Florida and the Supreme Court of the United States were unmoved...
...If it is not yet the day after, it is very late on the day before...
...But even these proposals are no substitute for the overriding imperative confronting the labor movement: Organize...
...We, after all, are the murderers among us...
...In the past three decades, many unions have failed to organize actively, preferring to secure wage and benefit gains for existing members rather than win over unorganized sectors of the work force...
...Gray was the author of the recently published American Military Space Policy, in which he contended, "The United States should not, of course, decline to deploy weapons solely because the Soviet Union would have a strong incentive to offset them...
...Part of the problem is rooted in a fundamental weakness of the National Labor Relations Act, which fails to prohibit the use of strikebreakers...
...recovery...
...For each patient, hospitals will be paid a predetermined rate depending on that patient's diagnosis...
...At a cost of $243,673, it has contracted for still more studies designed to demonstrate the vital need for the MX...
...For such disillusioned and frustrated workers, talk of labor solidarity is a joke and the label of "scab" carries little sting...
...Under new Medicare rules, the Government will reimburse hospitals under a system of so-called Diagnosis Related Groups...
...When we contemplate the punishment that was meted out to him, the question of Sullivan's guilt or innocence—and the guilt or innocence of any of the hundreds of men and women still awaiting their fate on death row—is wholly irrelevant...
...Initially, such a health-care system may entail large capital expenditures to introduce new diagnostic techniques and emphasize preventive care...
...But maintenance of health is one of society's prime obligations, and a way must be found to provide full, competent care for all...
...Time must have been fearful, too, for it launched a counteroffensive of its own, devoting several pages to a rather heavy-handed attempt at dismissing The Day After as "anticlimactic, even naive...
...But an unhealthy portion of the blame must be placed at the unions' own doorstep...
...This will further bifurcate the two-tier health-care system in which wealthy private patients receive attention from the most skilled and highly paid doctors, while poor and middle-class patients are hustled through the Medicare mills...
...The beneficiary of this particular windfall is the National Institute for Publie Policy in Fairfax, Virginia, one of the many think tanks Government officials use to put lofty imprimaturs on irrational decisions...
...Unlike Diagnostic Related Groups, HMOs have an incentive to provide less, not more, health care: the consumer has already paid for the health plan, so HMOs don't make an additional profit when the consumer needs special or expensive care...
...The Sandinistas are by no means out of the woods yet, since Reagan could, on the slightest imperial impulse, give the nod to an invasion...
...To every worker, a picket sign and a pen...
...Continental Airlines had no trouble replacing its striking pilots last fall...
...Sooner or later, Americans were bound to pick up on the conflict between the bland assurances issued at home and the dire threats dispatched abroad...
...Congress is also considering freezing the fees Medicare pays to physicians...
...Recent proposals by the International Association of Machinists and the United Auto Workers for a national industrial policy—designed to promote full employment and predicated on full labor participation—represent a commendable beginning...
...forces working behind hastily erected barricades and fences were installing the new U.S missiles in Western Europe...
...Intrepid CIA Director William Casey has announced, somewhat belatedly, that he is putting his bloated stock portfolio in a blind trust...
...Since the air traffic controllers were sent packing in 1981, strikebreaking has become the procedure of choice for U.S...
...Blind Faith Investors, at least in this country, can finally relax...
...It was also mawkishly melodramatic, as is the custom when television presents a drama intended to address an issue of urgent public concern...
...Whether Ronald Reagan will heed the cautions of the usually reckless Agency remains to be seen...
...If worse came to worst, we could dig a hole in the backyard, or provision an emergency shelter in the basement, or seek refuge in a public building of some sort, and we'd ride out the firestorm...
...The Administration's ill-considered determination to proceed with the emplacement of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe severely exacerbated U.S.-So-viet tensions, disrupting even the feeble arms control discussions that had long been under way...
...on Wednesday, November 30, 1983, Robert Sullivan, a convicted killer, was executed in Florida's electric chair...
...Many private employers and insurance companies are adopting these prepaid plans, which pose a different sort of problem for the consumer...
...So long as we made certain that the United States retained the lead in the arms race, we would have nothing to fear from enemy bombs and missiles...
...Wear It in Good Health It doesn't pay to get sick...
...Just as we marvel at the sort of superstition that would attempt to ascertain truth by putting people to the stake, so they will wonder at the logic of teaching men and women not to commit murder by murdering them...
...That was the message the Kennedy Administration sent to Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis...
...Such dangerous reasoning will be nothing new for Colin S. Gray, project director for the ICBM study and president of the Institute...
...Only a broader political and economic agenda can save organized labor from further onslaughts...
...Because of drastic editing, the story line was at times spastic and muddled...
...Those scholars of an age still to come will recoil when they contemplate our cruel contempt for human life, and so should we...
...intervention...
...Friends and enemies alike had long warned Casey that his holdings made him susceptible to a conflict of interest if the Company awarded contracts to Casey's companies...
...Though these new employees were, in some instances, less than fully qualified to handle intercity transportation, the company's ability to function with replacements severely undermined the union's leverage...
...The laboratories and factories of death" must give way "to laboratories of life," the Pope declared...
...In other words, the Institute will report that more is less, at least in the logic of the arms race, and that the Soviets will probably call our bet—compelling the United States, in turn, to deploy yet another weapon system...
...This style of leadership has made many nonunionized workers envious of the high wages earned by their unionized counterparts...
...What rendered the ABC film effective, in our judgment—and what made it so menacing to the interests of the Reagan Administration and other missile-rattlers—was the sense it conveyed of people's utter helplessness...
...Last November, they told 1,000 Cuban military advisers to leave the country...
...Though the deployment of its medium-range cousins has bounced the MX off the front pages, the intercontinental missile dubbed "Peacekeeper" by Ronald Reagan has not vanished...
...Epitomizing the view of America's policymaking Establishment, the ineffable Henry Kissinger sniffed, "The film presents a very simple-minded notion of the nuclear problem...
...Though Casey's trustees may be able to avoid investing in firms holding CIA contracts, they will inevitably sink some of the Director's wealth into multinational corporations that benefit from the CIA's global atrocities...
...Health-care costs claimed 6.5 per cent of our gross national product in 1960...
...Casey, worth $10 million, comes out a winner whether he or his cronies control his investments...
...Nat Hentoff examined the case in "Libel and Labor," November 1983 issue...
...Each of these points of conflict is a potential point of conflagration, and each could provide the spark that sends those irreversible missiles on their way...
...it beats bombing ourselves (and everyone else) to death...
...Another cost-containment strategy that may boomerang for the patient is the development of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs...
...arms control and deployment strategies...
...The defendants had been accused of publishing defamatory material about the foremen in Fighting Times, a feisty little paper supported by contributions from plant workers...
...Disarming Science Scientists, the pontiffs of the secular world, recently took a drubbing from Pope John Paul II for participating in the nuclear arms race...
...People who desperately need work will even cross a picket line to get it...
...If we have other plans, now is the time to make them known in terms that cannot be mistaken for assent...
...What matters is that the Governor of Florida, the executioner who pulled the switch in the state prison at Starke, the Supreme Court of the United States all spoke and acted in our name—and we allowed and even encouraged them to do so...
...Far more dramatic than the portrayals of nuclear rubble or the agony of radiation sickness were the scenes of passive spectators watching missiles— our missiles—being launched into the beautiful blue Kansas sky...
...The simple-minded notion that might, indeed, be gaining currency among Americans is that no conceivable policy objective justifies the initiation of nuclear war...
...But still the question of control over health care goes unanswered—and often unasked...
...The deliberate effort to keep the movie "apolitical" left viewers perplexed about the causes of the nuclear holocaust that seemed to burgeon swiftly and inexorably from an East-West confrontation described in only the most fragmentary terms...
...Those who understood what was happening knew that the war had begun, and that there was nothing at all they could do about it...
...The medical profession continues to neglect occupational medicine and preventive health care, though improvements in these areas hold out the promise of long-term health benefits...
...Such fancy footwork will skew patient care toward needless and even dangerous procedures, with likely increases in x-ray testing and possibly even in surgery...
...There were other signs of mounting public concern about the nuclear threat...
...the President's own reckless rhetoric and that of some of his close aides seemed to suggest that the Administration regarded the prospect of nuclear war with equanimity if not outright enthusiasm...
...If that realization is advanced by scaring ourselves to death, so be it...
...The Institute will examine "ICBM Policy Issues," providing "deeper assessment and elaboration" of the Scowcroft Commission's findings...
...Cost containment is this year's rage in the health industry, but it can be more accurately described as health containment...
...The Day Before The Reagan Administration was, according to Time magazine, "fearful of the political fallout" from the ABC television movie The Day After, and therefore "launched a counteroffensive" against the film...
...The jury refused to award damages to the foremen, reaffirming the workers' right—and our own—to agitate under the First Amendment...
...The emphasis on cost containment obscures these broader issues...
...arms control goals...
...Marines were killing and dying in the Middle East...
Vol. 48 • January 1984 • No. 1
