TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS If you've ever been an enlisted man in the armed forces, you won't be surprised to learn that the death count on the Iowa was one officer and 46 guys like you.... One of...
...The irony is that the Times did more Watergate reporting than any paper other than The Washington Post...
...According to one theory of the burglary—John Dean'sHigby's role was crucial...
...And more than 25 percent of the students who drop out are returning to their classes...
...Watt is, but he certainly has taken more than a crumb of subsidy...
...What kills me is that Exxon will get away with little or no real punishment...
...The any-knowledge-of-thefacts standard used to exclude jurors in the North case makes no sense at all...
...And it is worst of all from the military...
...Aficionados of Watergate trivia, this one is for you...
...There's a "Community Coordinator" and a "Community Organizer," an "Attendance Aide," "Attendance Officer," and an "Attendance Counselor," an "Assistant for Research and Assessment" and an "Assistant for Research and Planning," an "Employee Counseling Assistant," an "Employee Counseling Specialist," an "Employee Development Specialist," an "Employee Relations Assistant," and an "Employee Relations Specialist," not to mention an "Interagency Liaison" and the clearly overworked "Position Classification Specialist...
...This sentiment was confirmed by a Gallup poll showing that 64 percent favor higher taxes on those making more than $80,000 a year and a poll for Money magazine that showed 69 percent favored raising taxes on those making more than $100,000 a year...
...The reason is that these bases were planned for the Air Force of the 1950s, in which planes played a much larger role than they do in today's world of missiles...
...A solution to this problem that I have often recommended in these pages is to require all congressional testimony to be under oath...
...I recently flew to Dallas from Washington on American Airlines...
...Those under 18 years of age who drop out or have more than 15 days of unexcused absences can be denied a license to drive or have their license suspended...
...One aspect of the North case needs much more publicity because if widely known, it could have a revolutionary impact on the executive branch of the government, especially on the Pentagon...
...This meant that Magruder, who had been told to gather intelligence on the DNC and its chief, Larry O'Brien, was constantly being called by Higby and Gordon Strachan, who was Higby's Higby, and asked what he had found out...
...There is, for example, a congressional budget office that would be unnecessary if Congress could trust the OMB...
...So he, too, rose and proceeded to deliver a fiveminute oration praising the senior senator, the retirement home, and "the excellent breakfast that has been laid before us this morning...
...Dean believes Haldeman's "tickler" system, of which Higby was in charge, was what made Jeb Magruder authorize the breakin at the Democratic National Committee...
...Lily gilding, if not outright lying, is rampant in nonsworn testimony...
...In days gone by crooked doctors used to get kickbacks from the laboratories they selected to do their patients' work or from the other physicians to whom they referred the patient...
...I don't know how deep in that forest Mr...
...This is because the baby boomers have stopped spending every dollar they make on BMWs and trips to Paris and have instead been buying government securities directly for themselves or indirectly through other investments such as certificates of deposit, thus increasing the funds available to finance the deficit...
...There was one other person, an old lady, sitting at their table...
...By the way, the title of the person who responded to our request for job titles in the District public schools was Assistant to the Director, Classification and Wage Administration, Division of Human Resource Management, Office of Management Services, District of Columbia Public Schools...
...The result has been reduction of the dropout rate—by 50 percent in one county...
...That's how much, we are now learning from the HUD scandals, he received for lobbying for approval of a subsidized housing project...
...It, as almost everyone realizes, keeps interested, well-informed citizens off the jury...
...North was astonished—"I didn't know it was illegal," he said—because practically everyone in the executive branch assumes he is free to mislead Congress when he is not testifying under oath...
...Guess where Haldeman's Haldeman, Larry Higby, has ended up...
...Exxon made the top 10...
...West Virginia has found an effective way to discourage school dropouts...
...Then some clever fellow said, why don't we doctors get together and create our own labs and clinics...
...Guess who pays for these services...
...It is the fact that North was charged with lying to Congress even though he was not under oath when he lied...
...Because the report, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, was squelched by the Air Force...
...There still may be hope for the future of higher education in America...
...That power remains in the hands of notoriously spineless agencies like the FAA...
...He learned that an older former senator, a gentleman famed for his mastery of the courtly etiquette and the flowery idiom of the upper chamber, was living in a home for the elderly not far from where my friend resides...
...He's president of the Los Angeles Times...
...What does it say about the rest of corporate America if Exxon is one of the best...
...The only problem is that it has no power to require compliance with the safety recommendations it makes...
...One of the most unAmerican distinctions made by the American government is the one that gives Social Security to people regardless of how much unearned income (from stocks, bonds, and other investments) they may have but reduces it if they earned income by working...
...The savings rate is going up...
...Once a staff member was nailed with responsibility for the slightest project," Dean wrote in Blind Ambition, "the tickler would keep pestering until it was fed something...
...Pulling yourself up for such occasions over a lifetime of public service creates a sticking-to-the-drillthroughthick-and-thin mindset that is unshakable...
...This is far too little to let the rich get away with and the American people know it...
...Exxon itself could still peddle the gas, selling to other distributors, and come out fine...
...How does the profit the doctors receive from the lab or clinic differ morally from the kickback...
...The people who tell us not to worry about the deficit have at least one good argument...
...Three Airlines Say Profits Surged" read a headline a few weeks ago in The New York Times...
...Another government agency that deserves the kind of praise we give the Office of Technology Assessment in this issue (page 38) is the National Transportation Safety Board...
...If you've traveled lately, you know why...
...At the conclusion, the old lady clapped politely, and my friend felt there was nothing for him to do but respond in kind...
...Another would be to post a copy of the statute-18 USC 1001—on the office wall of every executive branch employee...
...The old lady had begun to look like she would prefer to be somewhere else, but still she summoned up the courtesy to applaud once again as my friend concluded his remarks...
...To give you an idea of how the District of Columbia spends its public school budget, here are some titles of its employees...
...It was prepared by one of the Pentagon's most respected analysts, Franklin C. Spinney...
...Finally, in desperation, he ordered the break-in...
...But we also know that unions are sometimes necessary to protect workers from the greed of the bosses...
...A Louis Harris poll shows that 62 percent favor raising the tax rate for the wealthy from 28 to 38 percent...
...But I am told the only losers would be the station owners...
...But if there is a work test, which I don't think there should be, it should favor those who work, not those who don't...
...It has consistently done a good job of tracking down the causes of these accidents...
...This revelation was contained in a report prepared by the office of the assistant secretary of defense for program analysis and evaluation...
...A significant factor in that growth has been the congressional distrust of information provided it by the executive branch, a distrust that took hold in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam...
...Now consider this: One month later the Teamsters executive board appointed a new member, George Vitale, who has two convictions on his record, one of them for the embezzlement of union funds...
...I had thought a boycott of its gasoline stations would do the trick...
...The standard should be: Is there the slightest suggestion that the juror's knowledge of the facts would cause him to be prejudiced for or against the defendant...
...I'm sure The Washington Monthly seems anti-union when we attack union corruption, wage increases without productivity increases, and the protection of incompetent workers from dismissal...
...My friend decided to go see his former colleague, and they arranged to meet for breakfast at the retirement home...
...The great mistake of tax reform was slashing the top rate to 28 percent...
...The response was a handwritten memo from General Larry D. Welch, the Air Force chief of staff, that said, "Chief wants to meet with person who wrote this study and his boss:' It's a safe bet that the meeting did not involve the presentation of any medals...
...A recent example comes from the Emhart Corporation of Farmington, Connecticut, which, finding itself the object of an unfriendly takeover, offered its workers as little as three months' wages as severance pay, while paying executives three years' salaries...
...It investigates transportation mishaps such as the oil spill in Alaska and the fuselage that ripped off United Flight 811 from Honolulu...
...One was "community and environmental responsibility...
...They are, in other words, penalized for working and rewarded for not working...
...This did not deter the senior senator from rising to introduce "my distinguished colleague from the great state of , a tireless champion of the working man, an indomitable foe of oppression, a steadfast friend of Israel" and so on...
...Charles Peters...
...Thirty-six of 64 major Air Force bases operate at less than 50 percent of their capacity...
...The catch for the rest of us is that patients of these physicians get an average of 45 percent more services than other Medicare patients...
...For its January 30 story on America's Most Admired Corporations, Fortune magazine asked about 8,000 senior executives, outside directors, and financial analysts to rate companies they knew about on eight attributes of reputation...
...It's the larceny that monopoly power is enabling the airlines to get away with in setting their fares...
...Here's how it reads: "Whoever, in any manner within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States, knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals or covers up by any trick, scheme or device a material fact or makes any false, fictitious or fraudulent statements or representations...shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both" If the bureaucrats were made to realize that they might be put in the pokey if they fail to adhere to the truth even when not under oath, Congress not only would be much better informed, it also could reduce its staff, which has grown enormously in the past 20 years...
...The problem was that all this was illegal and might get the doctor in trouble...
...I don't think any of us should receive Social Security when we don't need it, so I approve of a means test...
...You read all those stories about how the teamsters were going to reform as a result of the March settlement of the government's racketeering suit against the union...
...The last time it fell that low was in the 1920s, when Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were the Reagan and Bush of their era...
...Why haven't you heard about it...
...An illustration is provided by a story told me by a friend who recently retired from the Senate...
...As they walked to the door, the senior senator thanked my friend for coming and said, "Next time, give me a little more notice and I'll try to arrange a better turnout...
...Since American dominates the route, it could charge more than $800 for a tourist-class roundtrip ticket on a journey that just a few years ago cost half that...
...James Watt used to warn us of the danger of being "lured by the crumbs of subsidies, entitlements, and giveaways— lured deep into the forest of government controls and regulation...
...This, as the columnist Kevin Phillips recently suggested, shows that the Democrats do not have to imitate the Republicans on tax policy, as many seem to think...
...Students are rebelling against the high costs and the low quality of a system that features lightweight courses and underworked professors and that rewards even shoddy research more than it does good teaching...
...If you have ever been a politician, as I once was, you surely have known the daunting experience of arriving at a scheduled speaking engagement and finding only a handful of people assembled to hear your message instead of the large and enthusiastic crowd you had expected...
...The rebels have formed a group called the National Organization of Undergraduates for Better Education and plan to hold a national confernce at Syracuse University in October...
...And so it has come to pass that 12 percent of the doctors who treat Medicare patients refer them to laboratories and clinics in which the doctors have financial interests...
...The HUD scandal not only unmasks Watt's hypocrisy but provides another piece of evidence of the corruption that pervaded the Reagan administration...
...Three hundred thousand dollars, to be exact...
...Then we will have no problem with the law, but the profits from the referrals will still come to us...
Vol. 21 • June 1989 • No. 5
