Tilting at Windmills
Tilting at Windmills Remember how angry you used to get when Dean Rusk would defend our actions in Vietnam by saying we had to “honor our commitments”? But now that we’re having so...
...They may give us joy, they may illumine the inner secrets of our hearts, but they don’t tell us how to make government serve the people...
...Kerr, a wealthy man,was corrupt not out of need but because, as Baker puts it, money was his god and he believed everything and everybody-including himself-should be for sale...
...The administration’s concern for human rights, even though uneven in its application, is a beacon to people who live under tyranny, and the effort to achieve peace in the Middle East even at the risk of losing the Jewish vote back home has to be applauded for its courage, even if the intransigence of the PLO may doom it to failure...
...But now that we’re having so much trouble getting the Israelis to be reasonable, one has to admit that Rusk wasn’t talking about nothing...
...On the domestic side, this administration appears more and more like Grover Cleveland’s, characterized by technical tinkering and modest reform, while the big problems underneath remain untouched...
...Once he found out what had happened, he didn’t feel he could admit the true dimensions of the error without seeming incompetent, so in the budget he raised the cost to only $8.8 billion, or less than a third to a half of what it will turn out to be...
...The problem today is that the kind of changes this produces are incremental ones, when what we need in areas like health and income maintenance and civil service is radical reform...
...The latest example is John Ryan, the executive who revealed that Southern Bell operated a political slush fund...
...Why, then, the original $2.8 billion figure...
...The height of this came when several members of the so-called ‘Right-to-Strike’ faction announced they planned to burn copies of the contract on the civic center steps...
...Now something similar is happening among wealthy women...
...Doesn’t it seem likely that, believing in national health insurance even more intensely than they do in welfare reform, they will again give Carter a figure that is false-and not just a little bit false-and that we will be on our way to national bankruptcy...
...On the other hand, the findings from at least this group of executives suggest that you would be wasting your time by devoting too much effort to increasing your company’s sales and profits...
...The other night an announcer on WTOP, a commercial radio station in Washington, instead of saying, “This program was sponsored by,” said “This program was funded in part by,” the way they do on public television- which reminds me to ask, just what is the difference between the two...
...The rich have conspired to syphon the brightest of the lower orders into the arts, where their work will entertain but not threaten their patrons...
...Some miners even began collaring reporters...
...By the time the program was put in the federal budget the figure was $8.8 billion...
...It is that if religion is the opiate of the masses, art is the opiate of the intellectuals...
...I asked for that much not because I really needed the money, but because I wanted the status that I thought a salary like that would confer on me...
...One reason they won’t is that money is a source of self-esteem...
...But the whitecollar unions have guaranteed high pay for jobs where high pay isn’t necessary...
...The person Carter chose to head them, Sam Brown, is a man of great charm and intelligence...
...For a 1 5-percent increase in sales volume, the associated pay raise is only four per cent...
...Why is this so important...
...The prevailing criteria seemed to call for outrageous comment, the more inflammatory the better...
...There would be no trouble at all if the Israelis were certain we would honor our commitment to defend them against agression...
...They offered me $40 and I grabbed it, because I wanted to work for the Peace Corps...
...As I turned to go inside, my son, with his helmet tucked under his arm and an expectant look on his face, said, “What about the post-game interview...
...Kraft from such torment in the future by letting him know that there are trains to New York, too...
...I believe strongly in unions, like the United Mine Workers and the United Auto Workers, that make us pay through the nose for the people who do our dirty work in the mines and on the assembly lines...
...The popularity of investigative journalism is producing a lot of onedimensional stories in which situations that have only the potential of evil are presented as certainly evil...
...Under the sneakingitthrough approach, nobody ever stands up to the special interests that have a stranglehold on a national problem-in this case the medical lobby...
...On the foreign affairs side, the record may be brighter...
...I wonder how Eugene McCarthy felt as he stood there at Hubert Humphrey’s funeral...
...And they did, but not before making certain that their act was being carefully recorded on tape and film...
...We went out to the back -yard and played for a while...
...So what did he do wrong...
...They came back with a program that was announced to the press as costing only $2.8 billion more...
...Anew magazine called Politicks was started last fall, Skeptic has just changed its name to Politics Today, The New Republic and The Nation have received infusions of new money, and state magazines of politics and government like The California Journal are springing up all over the place...
...Times Books, a subsidiary of The New York Times, advertises H. R. Haldeman’s The Ends of Power with a picture of Nixon and Haldeman and these words: “These two men knew everything...
...I had hoped, because of Carter’s religious background, that he would have tried to arouse the idealism of the nation...
...corporate bureaucracies aren’t so terribly different from their government counterparts, according to a recent study by Towers, Perrin, Forster & Crosby, a management consulting firm...
...Now the Times wouldn’t try to get away with a statement like that in its editorial columns...
...B o b b v Baker’s new book reveals that it was the late Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, not LBJ, who was the Senate’s leading crook in the fifties and early sixties...
...Ken Hechler of West Virginia is running for his old House seat using the slogan “Reelect Congressman, Ken Hechler...
...If you can move up from the fourth level subordinate to the chief executive officer to the third level, there will be another seven percent raise waiting for you...
...And my source in the Office of Management and Budget says it will finally be more like $28 billion...
...Many of these miners couldn’t resist the photographers and TV camera crews...
...And, of course, with that bigger organization you’re now managing, you’ll have to report higher up in the organization structure...
...Finally one tells the whole truth...
...Why should it be permissible in an ad...
...Similarly, with welfare reform and the whole problem of income maintenance for people who don’t have enough money to live on, there is not enough money to do the job if we continue all the existing programs...
...As Daniel Boorstin has observed, “We can no longer say that Life imitates Art, for now Life imitates Television...
...S i n c e this is the era of the conspiracy theory, I feel it is time for me to float my favorite...
...Another is the ardent and successful efforts of the various professional associations and white-collar unions...
...If you have one level now and can do a bit of empire-building, that second level will get you 12 per cent more salary...
...At The Washington Monthly I’ve been paid the same salary for the last nine years, meaning that with inflation I’ve had a cut in real earnings each year...
...When my son was five years old, he got a football uniform for Christmas...
...The coal strike is a recent example...
...Carter’s subordinates in the Domestic Council and HEW wanted welfare reform...
...There may be a message here...
...But as one read the story, it became clear that Bell had fully disclosed his interest in the legislation and abstained from voting on the bills...
...Occasionally a Goya or a Beethoven or a Dickens will attempt a political statement, but by and large artists leave politics alone...
...Graef s. Crystal, the firm’s vice president, writes this advice, based on the study, for corporate executives who want to get a raise: “First, try convincing your boss to create another management level beneath you...
...So they lied to Carter to get the program past him originally...
...As we all know by now, the whistle-blower always loses...
...At least then he will have a chance of creating a constituency to support the right choice...
...There is a long and honorable tradition among the “good guys” in government of trying to get away with slipping something good into government policy, changing the language of a bill or of a presidential decree in such a way that no one notices until it’s too late for the good deed to be undone...
...Before women’s lib, their volunteer work made it possible for many poor but useful organizations to survive...
...This has never really been a sacrifice for me, because, again I have a job I like...
...Now the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost $17.4 billion...
...Charles Peters...
...But now proving feminine worth means getting paid as much as men...
...And for a 15-percent increase in profits-the most difficult achievement of all-your efforts, and results, will be thoughtfully rewarded by a one-percent decrease in base pay...
...Early last year Jimmy Carter told his subordinates that he wanted welfare reform, but that he didn’t want it to cost much more than welfare costs now...
...If, however, trends in magazine publication have any relation to trends among intellectuals, my conspiracy theory may be all wet...
...If we fought for eleven years for a bad cornmitment, what might we do for a good one...
...I suggest, however, that Israel should take heart from our experience in Vietnam...
...How many new jobs could we create if the people who have the interesting jobs would accept less money...
...A t t e n d closely, for what follbws is a story that explains a lot...
...He says he gave up and canceled his plans around 1 p.m...
...In particular, terms like “conflict-of-interest” and “apparent abuse’’ should never be used without a full explanation of just how the public interest is being harmed...
...We must have a president who will educate people to these facts, to the hard choices that must be made...
...In a democratic society that kind of reform can come only from a people who have been informed and inspired by their president...
...Well, these same people-in the Domestic Council and at HEW-are responsible for coming up with a national health insurance program that they can sell to Carter, who, you will remember, wants to balance the budget some 6 day...
...Remember how rich youngsters would go after scholarships just to prove they could get them...
...But his speeches have made Sominex unnecessary for millions, and the existing programs that could tap latent idealism, like the Peace Corps and VISTA, are instead permitted to languish...
...Strat Douthat of A?’ reports from Madison, West Virginia: “Along with its many other effects, the 86-day coal strike has brought out the desire in dozens of miners to be media stars...
...When I was hired to work for the Peace Corps in 1961, I asked for a salary of $75 a day, which was a high government salary in those days...
...But he has displayed no sign of the driving determination that would be needed to rescue these programs from the sad state they were left in by the Republicans...
...We can take care of people below the poverty line, but we cannot afford to continue to pay social security, veterans, pensions, and unemployment compensation to people who don’t need the money...
...So once more we have women adopting masculine values instead of changing them...
...The way to stand up to an interest group that strong is to arouse public support, and that requires seeking reform openly, not covertly...
...By lolling on the French Riviera with his financial backer, Howard Stein, while his admirers sat on their hands until it was too late in the 1968 campaign, McCarthy contributed more than any other Democrat to Humphrey’s defeat and to the disastrous six years that f 011 owed . Joseph Kraft recently devoted an entire column to berating Eastern Air Lines for giving him unreliable information about its flights on February 23 from Washington to New York and causing him to miss a ballet performance in New York that evening...
...Recently there was, an article in The Washington Star that reported with seething indignation that Delegate Earl E. Bell of the Virginia General Assembly had introduced a number of bills benefiting auto dealers, even though he is an auto dealer himself...
...As a cure to this idiocy, we urge all editors to require their investigative reporters to explain in plain English, no later than the third paragraph of their stones, just what’s bad about the situation they are exposing...
...Bernard Shaw is the exception that reminds us how lively political discourse could be if artists were not seduced from its practice, and of how badly we need relief from the stupefying dullness of most of the literature of political science...
...Carter said he wouldn’t go for it unless the cost was held down...
...A problem like health care is so big that sneaking through a few extra billions on the national budget isn’t the way to face it-we really need to stop letting the providers of medical services set their own fees, and that means we need a president who will make this clear...
...Not only did Ryan lose his $64,000-a-year job with the phone company, but out of 16 executives originally indicted, he is the only one who will have to stand trial...
...We’d like to save Mr...
...Incumbency is viewed by politicians as such an aid to victory at the polls that former Rep...
...As a result, an unacknowledged competition developed to see who could get into the papers and on the six o’clock news...
...With the TV producers running around, grabbing outspoken miners and the print media reporters doing the same, the competition became fierce...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
