Comment
Comment A Brand New Ballgame When Bill Veeck, the baseball impresario, died early in January, obituary writers and sports columnists fondly recalled his great contribution to the national pastime:...
...Eddie N. Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political Studies, demonstrated that the results of two other recent polls of black opinion differ sharply from Lichter's...
...Another Reagan fairy-tale gone bad...
...Who Speaks for America...
...troops had toppled the leftist government...
...And, as with any business-cycle expansion, the debt has both fueled growth and sown the seeds of future contractions...
...Are these circumstances which progressives must observe in silent despair, or address with such meek palliatives as nuclear freezes or arms-control agreements...
...People began keeling over from the fumes and eventually seventy-six were injured, one fatally...
...The EPA hasn't offered overburdened localities any new money, power, or technology to combat corporate irresponsibility...
...But the hawkish spirit of AFL-CIO policy remains noxiously intact...
...A list of the countries reads like an atlas of the American empire, and some of the more reactionary regimes "assisted" include those ruling Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa, and the Philippines...
...we hang around, hoping that maybe we'll get lucky one of these days and wake up to find someone has changed it for us...
...The forces of reaction that have so thoroughly cowed us don't share our perception of our own power-lessness: In their book, the Left is still a force to be reckoned with...
...Because of the inexorable workings of the marketplace, farmers must lose their farms and growing numbers of us must sleep in the streets...
...A perennial unemployment rate of 7 per cent is no longer even the subject of debate...
...An amazing number of words has been written and spoken in recent weeks about a survey published by Public Opinion, the journal of the American Enterprise Institute, on the subject of "Who Speaks for Black America...
...Kirkland ordered a boycott of the tour, claiming that the unionists were fostering communist propaganda against the AFL-CIO's foreign programs...
...The survey purports to discover that the black public at large is far more conservative than its "leaders," and many columnists, commentators, and editorialists have taken it upon themselves to tell the leaders to get in line with their people...
...Since 1980, chemical accidents have averaged five a day in this country, according to a recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency...
...What is missing is any discussion of the racism inherent in the very concept of the questions Lich-ter seeks to answer...
...A black leader is presumed to speak for black Americans...
...We no longer strive to change the world...
...At the end of the convention, the delegates adopted a mealy-mouthed resolution gently rebuking the Administration...
...In response to its new study, the EPA is content to publicize a list of dangerous chemicals and hold a teleconference offering strategies to local officials...
...Over the past few years, however, opposition to the AFL-CIO's ignoble activities has taken hold within the ranks of labor itself...
...But we persevered, confident that to pierce the veil of nuclear secrecy is to move the world back at least a half-step from the nuclear precipice...
...But after feasting off apartheid for decades, they can read the handwriting on the wall...
...Another went, "Things may get better...
...Today, in South Africa, business executives are going public with criticism of apartheid, and their motives are no more benign than those of their forebears...
...According to a recent article in the Pittsburgh Press, the most closely guarded secret of the U.S...
...A white leader, on the other hand, speaks for Americans...
...indeed, the companies could design a package that would cover only those people who are healthiest and most likely to live the longest...
...The aged have enough burdens...
...As life expectancies increase, insurance executives look to the elderly as a ready market for a new product: long-term-care policies...
...Our problem is not that we lack a program but that we have lost our voice and our confidence in making ourselves heard...
...Concerned officials are instructed to ask company representatives such questions as, "If you have a leak, what do you do...
...Curiously, the malaise that paralyzes American progressives is largely of their own making...
...So old people are drawn into the private insurance market, where they become entangled in a medical and legal web...
...We can make it, as Bill Veeck might have said, a brand new ballgame...
...In this most affluent nation the world has ever known, the domestic dialogue is dominated these days by discussions of where and how to diminish the meager benefits provided to the poor, the sick, the elderly...
...In its relations with the rest of the world, our Government alternates between bullying and bribing those it perceives as its friends while menacing or murdering those it perceives as its enemies...
...From time to time, Veeck suggested, baseball might even be fun...
...When they seek to redeem their costly coverage, they may have to hire lawyers to sort through ill-defined policies and put the heat on recalcitrant insurance companies, thus adding another layer of "professional" intervention to their lives...
...Rare, intractable, and costly diseases may also fall outside the area of coverage...
...Nothing less than the blueprint for destroying the Earth is being kept under wraps...
...And I don't like talking a lot on them...
...More wisdom from William F. Buckley Jr., feted cloyingly by the media of late: 'This is the moment for skillful diplomacy...
...Credit policy isn't the sole cause of our economic woes, to be sure, but unless we develop and impose stronger mechanisms for public allocation of credit, loan after loan will be piled on to risky and unnecessary ventures...
...Our game isn't just boring...
...war of attrition against Nicaragua...
...large aquariums are in...
...For too many companies, there is no profit in safety," says Richard H. Mays, head of enforcement for the EPA...
...Two years ago, heads of twenty-two of the AFL-CIO's ninety-six member unions formed the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador...
...Yet we live in a sick society that cries out for radical remedies...
...That is why, for the better part of a year, U.S...
...Building them is the latest fad among civic boosters...
...It was a subversive idea and the industry's solemn moguls drove Veeck out for promoting it, but his efforts changed the game for the better...
...Must we refrain from speaking frankly about the need to renounce violence and the urgency of disarmament...
...Down the road, someone will have to pay the piper...
...If they knew, we bet they wouldn't stand for it...
...But a deeper and more intriguing one is a fresh optimism....' —The Economist, December 21, 1985 Elsewhere in this issue, Stanley Aronowitz deals with one of the principal factors in the Left's disarray—a chronic and pathological dependence on the Democratic Party, despite repeated demonstrations that the Party is neither willing nor able to embrace a progressive program...
...Progressives cling to the Democrats because they are afraid to talk candidly to the American people about the need for radical change...
...Their intervention played no small part in the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and the United States...
...Many banks are also overexposed to corporate clients, who are taking out billions of dollars for highly leveraged mergers and buyouts—the latest rage in Wall Street...
...If this spectacle of sanctimony weren't so repellent it might be amusing, for their tardy protestations are not likely to shield them from the day of reckoning...
...Toxic Touchdown Three years ago, at a DuPont chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, an operator's mistake sent a cloud of chlorine into the sky...
...One urban-affairs consultant who pushes them on cities currently lacking a place for citizens to be splashed by hoop-jumping dolphins and serenaded by horn-tooting penguins explains that an aquarium gives a city "something more colorful to put on the cover of a phone book than a new waste-treatment facility...
...multinationals and South African businesses have been pressing Pretoria and denouncing apartheid...
...Spectacle of Sanctimony By the Nineteenth Century, slavery had become a nuisance to industrialists, who needed a ready supply of cheap, mobile labor to work their factories...
...And one correspondent wrote, "Here's hoping we can hang on until Reagan's gone...
...Banks and financial institutions, eager to cover losses in energy, steel, and shipping loans, have been pushing money on unsuspecting customers, promoting mortgages, consumer loans, and credit cards...
...Brown urged the Reagan Administration to continue aiding the contras so as to prevent "a second Cuba...
...We need to go a step further than to leave our bases in the Philippines at the mercy of democratic whimsy.' In other words, the critics have attacked the poll Comment by asking whether it is accurate, and they have found it seriously wanting...
...And among the more sophisticated conservatives, a deep worry surfaces: It's Ronald Reagan's charm, not his ideology, that has impressed the American people, and when he's no longer here to peddle the line, the Right will be back at Square One—making its unappealing pitch to an unresponsive public...
...That's solidarity for you...
...The New Republic found the poll, by Linda S. Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, to be "shoddy, disingenuous, and slightly ugly...
...And who cares, after all, about unfriendly casualties...
...The questions she asks overwhelmingly concern race relations, seemingly the only subject on which black people are allowed to have opinions that the rest of America wants to hear...
...But who will offer an alternative...
...But the forlorn hope that the Democrats will somehow be pursuaded to address real problems with real solutions is, itself, a symptom rather than a cause of our weakness...
...The American Left could use a Bill Veeck right now to snap it out of its almost stuporous despondency...
...More than the Federal deficit, this private debt jeopardizes the economy...
...Comment A Brand New Ballgame When Bill Veeck, the baseball impresario, died early in January, obituary writers and sports columnists fondly recalled his great contribution to the national pastime: He introduced (or revived) the quaint notion that baseball might be something more than a business—and a boring business at that...
...This time, the victims are the elderly...
...The unholy alliance continues today, with the AFL-CIO spending $43 million a year in some eighty-three countries to help crush radical unionism...
...they don't need to shoulder another...
...Time was when the Government talked of handling the costs of insurance for the elderly, but Medicare simply doesn't meet their health needs...
...Exposing that secret, publishing SIOP, would show how the deaths of many millions of people are being calculated, coldly and bloodlessly, within the five walls of the Pentagon...
...For many of us, wallowing in self-pity is about the only political exercise we get...
...Scamming the Aged The insurance industry, never known for its altruism, has come up with another device to line its pockets at the expense of the people it ostensibly serves...
...Among those who were not asked are the chief executives of the Urban League (John Jacob) and the NAACP (Benjamin Hooks), the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (Mickey Leland), the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Joseph Lowery), as well as Jesse Jackson, Cor-etta Scott King, Vernon Jordan, and New Orleans Mayor Ernest Morial...
...The extent to which progressives have succumbed to abject pessimism was painfully evident in the holiday greetings we received from friends, including many readers of this magazine...
...foreign policy establishment, publicly lending support to the most mephitic adventures and surreptitiously aiding anticommunist forces around the world...
...Patrick Buchanan, then just another right-wing hack, called us traitors and equated us with the Rosenbergs, and the Government took us to court...
...About thirty American cities are planning or constructing them, and it would have taken only twenty to double the number of fishy tourist attractions the country already had...
...Cuomo: Nicaragua, I'm not too good...
...No one ever asks, "Who speaks for white America...
...Burdened by heavy debt, these new corporate entities are less stable and efficient than their predecessors...
...The agency itself, however, is partly to blame...
...It expects private citizens and local officials, on their own, to investigate and police companies suspected of handling toxics improperly...
...A Brooklyn policeman was arrested recently and charged with 'brutal and vicious' sexual attacks on eight prostitutes, including one woman he allegedly raped at gunpoint in his patrol car while he was on duty...
...But if we can rediscover that faith and build on it, we can do work that is not only necessary but joyful and ultimately successful...
...He was backed in this effort by international affairs director Irving Brown, long accused of being linked to the CIA...
...Politicians, however, are in no mood to redress the problem...
...It would show which cities and countries would go first, which populations have their death warrant signed and are just awaiting execution...
...In a quixotic effort to arrange and perpetuate a world order that suits America's needs but no one else's, we squander our wealth on weaponry, engage in bloody military adventures, and subject all of humanity to the risk of nuclear annihilation...
...Federation president Lane Kirkland tried to repel the upstarts...
...Consider turning the question around...
...They, too, depend on cheap black labor— that's why they set up shop in South Africa in the first place...
...to them, the elderly are just another drain on the national treasury...
...There has also, of course, been criticism...
...Sink or Swim Convention centers are out...
...Thus disguised, its destructiveness remains potent...
...Those accidents killed more than 135 persons and injured about 1,500...
...A steady decay of the public infrastructure, particularly in the large cities, is deemed inevitable...
...We have abandoned our faith in the willingness of our fellow citizens to recognize and cope with the crises that confront them...
...Private debt—which includes corporate bonds, home mortgages, and consumer installment loans—has increased dramatically during the Reagan "recovery...
...Predatory insurance policies further isolate the elderly from friends and family and unnecessarily raise the cost of "health care...
...And must we fear talking openly to the millions of victims claimed by the irrational system under which we live...
...After traveling about a mile, the cloud descended onto a high school stadium crowded with football fans...
...Certainly not today's demoralized Left...
...What is your question about Nicaragua...
...they can't get much worse...
...But these activities are themselves risky: Almost $48 billion in consumer and mortgage debt is already past due...
...Nothing like playing hardball...
...So sensitive is SIOP that the Pentagon refused to let Congress see several pages of a report by Congress's own Office of Technology Assessment on the Pentagon's command and contrpl of nuclear forces...
...Overseas Private Investment Corporation to obtain $350,000 for his Grenadan venture...
...I hope we get through the next year," was one of the cheerier communications...
...But the factory shut down after four months and William Ingle, the owner, has since pleaded guilty to giving a false statement to the U.S...
...An irrational drive to consume ever greater quantities of useless or downright destructive merchandise is accepted as the price of "prosperity...
...Reagan did not create the contras, the oppression by the Sandinistas created the contras" Brown told The Washington Post...
...Newfield: Whether you favor, either through the CIA or any other agency, financial subsidies to the counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua...
...Why are aquatic palaces a growth industry...
...And so the captains of industry added their voice to the movement to outlaw slavery...
...Labor of Hate Throughout the postwar period, Big Labor has walked hand-in-hand with the U.S...
...Comes now a greater secret, which we would be obliged and proud to publish if we were able to get hold of it...
...Government is the Pentagon's playbook for waging nuclear war, antiseptically called the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP...
...it is weighed down with inertia engendered by terminal despair...
...Banks have spread their capital too thin, and if one major bank goes under, it could topple the financial house of cards...
...After ten years in eclipse, hopes are brightening for democratic socialists in Western Europe...
...One commercial venture Reagan singled out for praise was Ingle's Handcrafted Wooden Toys, the first American business to open in Grenada once U.S...
...Business Week says the policies may be worded in a way that would exclude coverage for psychiatric care...
...Carefully written, such policies can reap large profits for the industry...
...Credit is Due As the Federal debt climbs to a dizzy $2 trillion, no one seems to be paying much attention to the even more staggering private-sector debt, which now stands at about $5 trillion...
...The American people don't know the details of the mass destruction being planned in their name...
...The glimmer of better election chances as conservatives tire is an obvious reason...
...Here, under questioning from The Voice's Jack Newfield, is Cuomo at his supine best: Newfield: What about aid to Contras...
...Anger has given way to resignation...
...Free Market at Work After the bracing invasion of Grenada, Ronald Reagan boasted that the United States would bring the magic of the marketplace to the ill-starred Caribbean island...
...Unless the South African regime swiftly undertakes significant reforms—and it may well be too late already—the revolution will come, the whole system of cheap black labor will collapse, profits will plummet, and businesses may even be nationalized...
...Is there no work for the Left to do in a society beset by such monstrous inequities...
...Have we no program to address that state of affairs...
...Don't Ask Me Mario Cuomo, the last gasping hope of liberals, reveals his stalwart credentials for the 1988 Democratic Presidential nomination in a December interview with The Village Voice...
...In November, six Central American labor leaders launched a tour of the United States to draw attention to the plight of workers in that region...
...Secret Sharer When The Progressive published Howard Mor-land's "The H-Bomb Secret" in 1979, this magazine was attacked for breaching national security...
...Williams also did some calling around to see which "black leaders" had been interviewed...
...Without such faith, the Left and its program are doomed...
...Cuomo: I'm going to pass on that...
...Use of atomic weapons should result in a considerable reduction in friendly casualties and in more rapid cessation of hostilities/ the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in a September 1955 study on how to stop an anticipated communist invasion of South Vietnam, according to recently released documents...
...I'm no expert on foreign-policy issues...
...Barry Sussman, director of polling for The Washington Post, demolished, in detail, Lichter's methods and the formulation of her questions...
...A grand jury issued a twenty-eight-count indictment against the officer, who surrendered to authorities and was released on his own recognizance...
...And at the Federation's thirtieth anniversary convention in October, this group formally challenged the AFL-CIO to oppose the U.S...
...What is most distressing about these dismal sentiments is the mood of hopeless helplessness that suffuses them...
Vol. 50 • February 1986 • No. 2
