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Clinton as a free-trader
The Democratic presidential candidate took a sure step by giving support to a North American common market
GOV. BILL CLINTON deserves credit for endorsing the North American Free Trade Agreement at the risk of offending major labor organizations whose backing he counts on in the presidential election.
In deference to these constituents, Clinton put some conditions on his promise to advance the accord if he is elected next month. But as president, he would have sufficient leeway to reach supplemental deals with Mexico and Canada on stronger protections for the environment and labor standards, and against unexpected surges in imports damaging U.S. industries.
The free trade pact, on which negotiation was completed in August, would knock down remaining barriers and join the three nations in the world's largest trading bloc - 360 million people with a combined annual output worth $6 trillion. It is an issue in the presidential campaign because President Bush has accused the Arkansan of waffling on the question.
While endorsing the pact, Clinton needled the administration by asserting that the text had "serious omissions," which he proposed correcting with additional accords before ratification.
Clinton suggests creating international commissions on environmental and labor standards. He would reserve the right to re-erect barriers against import surges. Bush's trade representative, Carla Hills, believes there are enough such protections already in the agreement.
Clinton's pro free trade announcement is welcome, and might steer the Democratic leadership away from protectionist demagoguery, such as that espoused by House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri, who seeks renegotiation of the pact.
Clinton sees far enough ahead to know that free trade is not a killer of jobs but a necessity for creating them through increased exports and greater international prosperity.
Democrats used to be champions of that truth, and should be again.
Shipping sushi to Osaka
IT MAY SOUND like the modern-day equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle, but shipping sushi to Osaka has much to recommend it.
It means jobs, as American workers fashion the sushi, which is then frozen and sent to Japan. It means lower prices for Japanese diners - American sushi costs about half as much as Japanese-made.
And finally, the westbound sushi trade means the United States has made a small rent in Japan's rice curtain, which unfairly shelters a $35 billion a year market from foreign competition.
So, it was good news the other day when Japan relented and let in a shipment of 950 frozen sushi samples from Escondido to the 44-restaurant, Osaka-based Sushi Boy chain. Japanese food inspectors had held the samples hostage for several days in an Osaka warehouse.
The sushi met the requirement that 20 percent of their weight be from ingredients other than rice. But inspectors worried: What if the fish and the rice separate? Well, they decided, sushi just isn't sushi without attachment of fish and the sticky vinegar-flavored rice.
Sushi Boy plans to start making sushi in its Escondido plant in November, shipping about 2 million pieces a year to Japan. In Sushi Boy restaurants (coming soon to the U.S.), a conveyor belt carries sushi in endless circles to diners, who help themselves.
We'll leave to Sushi Boy whether Japanese eaters will buy defrosted, prefab American sushi instead of its fresh domestic counterpart, even at half price.
But we do think an important principle comes out of this sushi skirmish: Governments shouldn't tell consumers what to eat or what not to eat. Protectionism limits choices and raises prices.
If Japan had a kernel of sense, it would open its rice markets to everyone. Protectionism only benefits Japanese rice farmers, co-operatives and a few government bureaucrats. A free market works in the interests of everyone else in the world.
Save the tiger
-Chicago Tribune
WITH SO much international concern about the dwindling number of great beasts such as elephants and rhinoceroses, little attention has been accorded the plight of the tiger.
Elephants are slaughtered for the ivory in their tusks, highly prized for ornamental carvings; rhinoceroses are killed for their fibrous horns, which are used as medicines, aphrodisiacs and for such ceremonial accouterments as dagger handles.
Now comes word from the World Conservation Union in Switzerland that there are perhaps only 7,000 tigers left in the wild, scattered in regions of Asia and Siberia, with most of them in India. Within 10 years, there may be none, except for those in zoos.
The tigers are being killed for their bones, which, crushed and powdered, are a prime ingredient in ancient folk medicines used in China and Chinese communities in variouspartparts of the world.
The Chinese believe that these medicines and 'tiger wine' made from the bones can enhance strength and cure a variety of ailments, among them rheumatism, ulcers, malaria, typhoid, burns, nightmares - even eruptions under the toenails.
The poaching is so severe that in one wild preserve in India, the tigers were reduced from 44 to 15 in two years. And the price for the bones is so rewarding - as much as $170 a pound and escalating - that poaching is expected to increase, leading to almost certain doom for the tigers.
In response, the Chinese have begun experimenting with breeding farms to produce enough 'industrial tigers' to satisfy the demand for bones.
Ours will be a richer world with tigers still in the wild; it would be richer still if such animals weren't diminished by ignoble or dubious human activity.
All shook up
Once somnolent, the campaign awakens suddenly with agreement of the Bush and Clinton camps to hold three debates
AFTER WEEKS of horsing around, the presidential candidates have agreed to debate. This is good. The American people will finally get to see how George Bush and Bill Clinton match up. That's the best way to make a choice: the old-fashioned way. No sound bites or slick ads, just a contest of mind vs. mind.
Coupled with Ross Perot's re-entry, the debates save the race from boring inevitability. Clinton's lead was growing steadily. Nothing Bush did worked. Not family values. Not going negative. Not the pork barrel. Not train trips through mid-America.
Say what you want about Perot (and we have), his sprite-like dashes on and off stage kept us from falling asleep. He's turned the campaign from something resembling, say, 'King Lear,' into something more like 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'
Was it coincidence that Clinton and Bush agreed on debate dates within hours of Perot's self-resuscitation? Perhaps.
More fun under the Big Top is suggested by Perot's inclusion in the debates.
His running mate, James 'Man of Steel' Stockdale, a graduate of a North Vietnamese prison camp, apparently will join Al Gore and Dan Quayle in a single vice-presidential debate. Public-school graduate Quayle says he's at an educational disadvantage against private-school grad Gore, who's also a Vietnam vet. We doubt Quayle will bring up the Indiana National Guard.
In the main events, Perot will undoubtedly force discussion of the budget deficit, not a favorite topic of the Big Two. Bush has piled more than $1.2 trillion onto the national debt, and critics think President Clinton would be an even bigger contributor.
For settling the debate, we commend both the Clinton and Bush camps. They did the right thing, and each side compromised to do so.
Three presidential debates ought to bring the candidates, and the issues, into focus. All that's required is for voters to tune in. Let the shows begin.
Enact workers comp reform now
GOV. WILSON'S new list of 'reforms' for the state's workers compensation system increases the mystery of why - politics aside - he vetoed all of the Legislature's plan to achieve $1.15 billion in savings. Several parts of the Republican governor's package match or closely resemble the Democrat-sponsored legislation he rejected.
He challenges the legislators to approve his new version without hearings and without much change at a special session starting Thursday.
Similarities between the vetoed bills and the governor's new plan include limits on numbers of medical evaluations of injured workers, higher standards of proof in claims of mental stress and use of managed care organizations to hold down costs of treating injuries. Wilson also renewed his backing for repeal of the minimum rate law assuring profits for workers' compensation insurance companies - they get 32.8 percent of the premium dollar for profit and expenses whatever their inefficiencies.
The overriding need in realizing savings is to control costs borne by employers for the $11 billion program covering workers' on-the-job injuries. Savings also would permit increases in the inadequate benefits that finally reach workers. The seemingly clear aim of public policy, unfortunately, is buried in partisan rhetoric, with Wilson vowing to seek the electoral defeat of legislators who oppose him on the question.
The two sides should call a truce in the political war and quickly enact the reforms - including sensible anti-fraud measures - on which they agree or almost agree.
Those savings can be realized now. Then the governor and Legislature should give longer consideration to proposals that call for deep thought - like changes in the law that would profoundly affect the rights of injured workers.
With the state's economic health and the welfare of millions of jobholders at stake, this is no matter for political game-playing.
The last lion
VINCENT HALLINAN died Friday at age 95. He lived just long enough to:
Scan the obituaries of J. Edgar Hoover and the rest of his devoted enemies: "They're all dead," he once said. "It's a great disappointment to me."
See most of what were once his ultra-radical notions, such as civil rights, become the law of the land: "How anybody could stay out of the civil rights disturbances and still hold up his head, I don't know."
Become a very wealthy man, doing well by doing good. As probably the best trial lawyer of his era, he pioneered in bucking the system with personal injury suits that required Big Business to pay damages to victims of corporate negligence: "The only reason for going to law is to get money, except in criminal cases."
Justify all those years of serious boxing. In his 90s, confronted by a mugger, he knocked the man flat. He didn't condemn such people. "I think that men have become more cynical and more desperate. I think we are in a period that is marking the collapse of an economic system."
Soften his views on religion. Once an altar boy, he was a Navy officer in World War I when he read the works of Thomas Paine and became an ardent atheist who sued the Catholic Church to prove the existence of God. Much later: "A lot of people need religion. The world is a rough, tough place."
See one of his sons, Terence, elected as a member of the Board of Supervisors in a city of refuge for Vincent Hallinan's father, an Irish fugitive from British law.
Note how editorialists of The Examiner regarded him in the early years with choleric contempt, then with furious respect, later with a certain esteem and, finally, with proud admiration.
We won't see his like again.
Hands off the library
The plan to cut the budget of San Francisco's libraries by 10 percent is insane; Jordan should reconsider
WE URGE Mayor Jordan to attend one of the upcoming meetings of community residents who are concerned about the effects his proposed budget cuts of $1.7 million would have on our city library system.
The mayor needs to see firsthand what the branch libraries are doing for our city.
Visit North Beach, for example, on Wednesday nights, when the branch is open, and ask the many elderly residents. You'll find how much they rely on it.
Or the Richmond branch, where many of our recent Russian immigrants are learning new career skills, and where every day a goggle of students go to do homework.
Or the Main Library across Civic Center Plaza from City Hall, where the chess program provides the only warm, safe neighborhood magnet for the 5,000 children of the Tenderloin.
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Powerless, but not hopeless
FPL STRUGGLES TO COPE
HURRICANE Andrew has darkened not only moods and spirits, but blacked out homes and businesses as well. That is causing all sorts of inconveniences, and in some cases endangering personal health and security. It's just one of the countless grim legacies that the killer storm left behind.
As of yesterday afternoon, more than 750,000 people in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties had no electricity, and Florida Power & Light was urging many of them to brace for a long wait. Bothersome as that situation is, it demands patience and a general understanding of what is prolonging the darkness.
FPL personnel are being flooded with complaint calls from people demanding immediate restoration of their electric power. Their frustration is of course understandable. But that frustration is being inflamed, irresponsibly, by some local radio hosts and a few hysterical listeners who are urging the public to call the company to protest. They are part of the problem, not the solution. The effect of their behavior is to make it harder for FPL to do an already overwhelming job.
South Floridians must understand that FPL is scrambling to restore power as soon as possible. Crews are working around the clock to achieve that goal, beginning with priority areas such as hospitals, shelters for Andrew's thousands of homeless victims, police, and fire stations. They labor under intense national scrutiny, which adds to the pressure.
Some power outages are actually a pre-cautionary measure, safeguarding people and property from potential harm. In most cases, though, power is out because FPL equipment in the three counties suffered severe damage that can't be repaired overnight. A case in point is FPL's Turkey Point nuclear plant, which was not producing any power because Andrew blew away virtually all of its transmission wires.
Admittedly, Turkey Point was supposed to have done better. Supposedly hurricane-proof power pylons there collapsed in the onslaught. No doubt FPL will soon learn of other storm plans that failed, and will have to recoup and explain.
But pledging an all-out restoration effort, the company says that it expects to restore electricity to all of Broward County by Thursday. In Dade, many residents north of Kendall will be without power for a week, and those south of Kendall can expect to spend three weeks or more in the dark. That is roughly consistent with the pace of power restoration in Charleston, S.C., in the wake of Hurricane Hugo - a less destructive storm.
Unfortunately, no amount of complaining will shorten those timetables. It may, in fact, slow recovery, destroy morale, and feed a darkness that is more than literal.
Dry well rings hollow
WATER PROMISES UNKEPT
WATER IS proving to be the most critical problem left behind by Andrew - not the anticipated flooding, which was not as bad as expected, but broken pipes and seepage elsewhere. The latter left much of the region's water-distribution system with zero pressure and residents without safe drinking water. For safety's sake, all of Dade County remains under a boil-water order, but given the total destruction in Florida City, Homestead, and Southwest Dade, and absent electricity, those were difficult demands with which to comply.
The inconvenience and annoyance of Monday and Tuesday could turn to something much worse later in the week. Especially if the damaged Black Point sewage treatment plant can't be brought back on line or bypassed. Functioning public water and sewer systems are society's first line of defense against epidemic illnesses such as cholera and typhoid. With health department officials predicting that it may be two weeks before the water system is fully operational, delivering water safe to drink, there is a sense of alarm assuaged only by the willingness of people to share. Indeed, bottlers who showed up to distribute free water were a Godsend for many of the hardest-pressed residents.
When the crisis passes, however, there must be some answers to the question: Why? Following Hurricane Hugo, water and sewer officials were assuring Dade residents that they, and their system, were prepared and would function even in a Category 4 storm. Emergency generators were in place at every pump station. The assurances ring all too hollow now, and a full investigation is warranted.
We shall overcome
THE REBUILDING BEGINS
THOUSANDS of South Floridians have the numb feeling of mourners, seeing little reminders of normal life that offer sharp contrast to the depth of despair.
Some of us have lost only the familiar comforts of the nice old oak, or electricity. Many others, though, have lost the houses that were home, that were built with hope, sweat, and large, scary mortgages. A few have lost loved ones, paying the storm's ultimate price.
Will South Florida, especially Cutler Ridge, Homestead, and Kendall, ever recover? In a way, no. Those of us who have taken great losses will bear scars in our souls. Some of us now have financial burdens from which we may not fully recover. Nearly all of us will carry the new and clear knowledge of our vulnerability. How so much can be lost in a few hours. Only fools can say today, it can't happen to me.
Some day, though, the rubble will be cleared. The canopy of green will spread anew. Institutions will be reborn and rebuild <&|>sic, and so will families. South Florida has proved - again and again - its resiliency through hurricanes, through financial collapses, and through sudden, large waves of penniless refugees.
Miami and all of South Florida have always emerged stronger and it <&|>sic will again. Pioneers and refugees alike have amply proved, we can and we do rebuild from little.
We have the most important resource - ourselves. We have neighbors who continue to report to duty at our police and fire departments, utility companies, hospitals, and other essential work places, despite their own worries at home. In fact, some are working even though they have no homes.
We also have neighbors who have performed those big and little acts of heroism and kindness: the rescue of trapped families, the sharing of fresh water, the two hours of time with a chain saw to clear a driveway.
We will need much more kindness and heroism, big and little, for months to come. We will need patience now to restore basic services, and in the long-term to restore the flow of commerce. We will need courage, too - and confidence drawn from the knowledge that we have coped. We can cope. And we will cope.
Bush: A fighting speech
LET THE DEBATE BE JOINED
AMERICANS have waited nearly four years to hear what George Bush gave them on Thursday night: an animated, tough, and forthright defense of his approach to American government. It was an impressive and remarkable moment. Impressive, because the president combined strong terms with passionate argument. Remarkable, because he has waited four years to do it.
His supporters would protest, as he himself did before a jubilant Republican convention, that he has been pressing the main elements of his program for his entire term. But his vigorous convention address effectively disproves that. The speech, and the far-flung program that it contained, had earnestness and urgency, if not always freshness. In the 48 months since the last Republican convention, the president has displayed such fervor only in foreign affairs.
George Bush can - and on Thursday did - argue forcefully for his brand of supply side economics: for spending freezes and income tax cuts, tort reform, unregulated enterprise, and his beloved tax cut on capital gains. He defended open trade. He rejected national programs for health care (and even, by implication, threatened to freeze or cut Medicare and Medicaid). Like these ideas or not, there was no mistaking his commitment to them.
But this ferocious advocacy is a skill that, however potent, he has hardly ever employed. Nearly all of the achievements in domestic affairs for which he took credit - the Clean Air Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and (incredibly) a Civil Rights Act that he had first vetoed - were conceived and promoted by others. His curious passivity has persisted even through 19 or more months of economic hardship.
So how to explain the sudden vigor of Thursday night? Insiders give incoming Chief of Staff James Baker much of the credit. Some of the speech's most forceful language was reportedly inserted in the final day or two. That would suggest Mr. Baker's belated influence.
Mr. Bush, on the other hand, insists that advocacy would be wasted on an intractable Congress. True enough, Congress has acquitted itself miserably. (The president expended nearly a third of his speech saying just how miserably.) Yes, Republicans hold little sway there. And no, presidents don't have much power to steer domestic policy on their own. But those are all the reasons why the fire of Thursday night should have been lit 20 months ago, when Mr. Bush's popularity was stratospheric. Instead, he squandered that opportunity and now must scurry to recoup.
One speech won't achieve that for him. Nor will several. Americans must come to believe, in the next 73 days, that the zeal of this convention won't promptly go back into mothballs if George Bush goes back to the White House. That won't be easy.
But on Thursday night, he proved that it is possible, and that he means to do it. If so, the historically important differences between Mr. Bush and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton should get a sprightly airing and hearty debate. The public deserves no less, and is hungry for more.
Still better in the Bahamas
AS THE PINDLING ERA ENDS
SOUTH Florida has intimate ties to the Bahamas. It's as if both places formed part of the same Caribbean country, a land of islands and seaside cities that transcends national borders, joined by history, geography, and the perpetual movement of peoples. Indeed, Miami is closer in spirit to the Bahamas than to much of Florida.
Hence, events on the islands have a special resonance in South Florida. They needn't even be Earth-shattering events. This week, for example, an era came quietly to an end in the Bahamas. It ended peacefully, as Great Britain's dominion of the islands ended in 1973. As peacefully as life in general passes in the Bahamas, islands of openness and relaxed tolerance.
Lynden Pindling, the founding father of Bahamian independence and the country's prime minister during the last 25 years, lost Wednesday's general elections to Hubert Ingraham. Mr. Pindling graciously conceded defeat. That is how he has mostly governed these lovely islands - with graciousness and steadiness. Even when his government was accused of being autocratic. Even when he was under international scrutiny, accused of corruption and of letting drug-traffickers ship their wares through the Bahamas. The allegations, though worrisome, were never proved.
The end of the Pindling era will leave most things as they are in the Bahamas. The new prime minister does not intend to alter an economic policy that relies on tourism and on conveying the Bahamas's tranquility and stability to the world. Who would be so foolish as to alter paradise?
Two cases, two concerns
CHILDREN IN THE MIDDLE
SHARON McCRACKEN, a 50-year-old lesbian from Fort Lauderdale, was convinced that she would be an excellent foster mother. So she worked doggedly through the system to convince officials too. Now she has done so.
Meantime, a longtime Dade County wrestling coach, a man revered by children and admired by adults, worked through a different system - the courts. Now he is suspected of using it to get young boys for his sexual pleasure.
Nothing binds these dissimilar cases except this: They both offer compelling reasons for the South Florida community to examine continuously what it means when it avers to do "what is best for the children." Both cases demand that people as individuals, not as part of arbitrary classifications, be judged fit - or not - to contribute to the welfare of children.
Dick Jordan stands accused of sexually molesting dozens of young athletes over a 14-year period. The torment, sadly, stills haunts many who trusted him.
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What voters should watch for - and ignore
The season of campaign sleaze is upon us, but there are ways for voters to filter it out.
So you think the presidential campaign has been nasty so far? You ain't seen nothing yet.
As Election Day grows nearer and the stakes get higher, this contest will head where all the others have - mudward.
Despite the candidates' high-minded pledges to steer clear of personal attacks, ample amounts of dirt have been hurled by both sides already.
Don't despair. Tune out the discouraging spectacle of infantile antics and tune in what's really important.
The three most important topics are: Deficit, deficit and deficit. How the next president plans to eliminate this $333.5 billion drag on the economy will dictate everything else the government can and cannot do. Listen for a credible commitment to deal with the deficit, get the economy growing and create jobs before launching programs.
Next: Everything else. How will the candidates resolve the nation's other pressing problems, and how will they pay to do it?
On their agenda should be coping with the health care crisis; repairing crumbling bridges, highways and water mains; reversing and preventing environmental damage; reviving educational achievement; reducing crime; and stemming a growing intolerance of racial and other differences.
No president can, or should be, solely responsible for curing these ills, but his leadership will be crucial. Acknowledging the limitations of the highest office and envisioning a role for individual and community efforts are also vital elements of being 'presidential.'
At last as many topics are safe to ignore: Murphy Brown's baby, Hillary Clinton's legal theories, Barbara Bush's motherly mien, anyone's cookie-baking proclivities, Dan Quayle's creative spelling and Bill Clinton's creative grammar.
By following these guidelines, you may discover precious nuggets of leadership gleaming amid the slime. With luck and effort, you'll be able to cast a vote in November without feeling dirty.
Help protect home buyers
Home buyers deserve the right to know what condition home they're buying - warts and all.
It's a maxim of home buying that during the first hard rain after you move in, the basement turns into a scale model of Okefenokee Swamp.
Or the wiring opts for early retirement. Or the furnace emits noises usually associated with processing raw scrap metal.
And, innocently or not, the sellers knew but didn't mention the flaw before pocketing your cash and leaving town.
Mandatory sell-disclosure laws promise to lower the frequency of such unpleasant, often litigious surprises - although they may never be eliminated, given the cantankerous potential of both houses and humans.
Five states have such statutes, ending at least some of the uncertainty inherent in buying a home - the costliest purchase most people ever make.
That's why everyone gains from the get-it-on-the-table openness that mandatory disclosure laws foster.
Buyers appear to file fewer complaints, say regulators in California, which has required disclosure the longest, since 1987. Most brokers and agents say such laws short-circuit debate about whether they told buyers of defects - the accusation behind two of three lawsuits now filed against them.
Even sellers gain. They needn't rip houses apart seeking flaws - just disclose known ones. That can nudge them to fix faults that could slow a sale - or leave them liable afterward.
Disclosure laws also wouldn't end buyers' need to get houses inspected, or absolve agents and brokers from their legal duty to disclose known defects.
But such laws would smooth home buying for all involved. More states should adopt them. Making the first mortgage payment should be the biggest jolt most home buyers have to face.
Andrew's lesson: Disaster planning pays dividends
Florida's smooth evacuation is a testimony to federal, state and local emergency planning.
When Hurricane Andrew struck, South Florida was ready.
That doesn't happen by accident.
A remarkably well-choreographed evacuation effort succeeded in convincing an estimated 700,000 people to move out of harm's way.
Such plans are a testimony to intense federal, state and local preparation.
The federal government chipped in with a remarkable piece of computer wizardry called 'SLOSH,' for "sea, lake and overland surges from hurricanes," that predicts which areas due to be hit by a hurricane will be flooded.
Another computer model predicts how long it will take to evacuate specific areas, so state offices of emergency preparedness know when to start issuing evacuation orders.
Then there are local efforts, like Miami Beach's mock disaster drills for the elderly over the past three weeks.
More grim news is probably on its way, as reports from hard-hit areas come in and the hurricane rages on. But the teams who prepared for this disaster, and those who heeded their warnings, deserve credit for keeping that bad news from being far worse.
Protect telephone privacy
Congress should ensure that federal snoops after our phone records get the busy signal more often.
As you read this, some FBI, IRS or other federal agent could be trolling through your phone records to learn who you called, when and for how long.
You don't have to be a criminal. Or even under suspicion. And you can't stop it: The Supreme Court has agreed your phone records belong to the phone company - which routinely provides tens of thousands of them to anyone with a federal subpoena.
But Congress, where legislation is now being studied, can do something: Tighten the standards government agents must meet to get local and toll-phone records. Those records can disclose as much as conversations and should get equal protection from casual government 'fishing expeditions.'
They don't now. Just ask the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Its phone records were among those the IRS subpoenaed when trying to learn who leaked an embarrassing story to reporter Gregory Millman - even though, at the time, Millman's only contact with the group had been to call for an application.
The foundation's phone network, Bell Atlantic, got 22,000 such federal orders in 1991. Pacific Bell already has received more than 12,000 this year.
Clearly, reviewing phone records has become routine. An agency need claim only that they're relevant to some investigation; neither judge nor grand jury reviews such claims. But to wiretap, an agency must affirm to a judge that the subject is under investigation. Then, it can record only those parts of conversations linked to the activity being probed.
Congress should make it just as tough to see and copy phone records.
Law officers should find this no more a burden than the workable laws that regulate wiretaps. In a democracy, the focus should be protecting the rights of the majority, not nabbing a few crooks.
Where the feds go fishing should be determined by more than just a hunch.
Don't reject private initiatives in education
Private corporations could help the USA's public schools make higher grades.
When school bells ring this fall, hundreds of businesses will show up in the nation's classrooms. Corporations provide mentors, scholarships and equipment, from notebooks to computers.
A 1991 study found 65% of grade-school students surveyed were enrolled in districts that received a total of nearly $1 billion in cash, materials or services from businesses.
Now a bigger experiment is in progress - contracting businesses to run public schools - and, despite misgivings, it's an experiment worth trying as long as public oversight is retained.
The private firms hire teachers, maintain school buildings and select subjects the students are taught.
Baltimore and Miami school officials have given Minnesota-based Educational Alternatives a contract to manage some schools. The company's new approach promises personally tailored study programs and smaller classes.
Entrepreneur Christopher Whittle's Edison Project plans 1,000 for-profit schools that he says could replace publicly run schools.
With test scores falling and dropout rates rising, such new approaches should be welcomed, albeit with caution.
For-profit public education raises a daunting question. How will these schools make money for themselves without cutting educational corners?
For-profit schools must not be allowed to skim off highly motivated and affluent students, a guaranteed cost cutter that would hurt those most in need.
They cannot be permitted to skimp on the product they produce - education - the way a fast-food chain can cut down the size of a hamburger. The goal is not to churn out products driven by profit margins, but well-rounded students who can succeed in college, in vocational school and in life.
And the schools must not become an excuse to shift accountability away from public officials, parents and taxpayers.
School officials must assure that for-profit schools avoid those pitfalls. But they can't afford to rule out new ideas thoughtlessly. For-profit schools deserve a chance to make their case.
Soaked by Andrew
On another subject, USA TODAY argues the storm shows federal flood insurance should be junked.
Taxpayers will be lucky if Hurricane Andrew lets them dodge another bailout - of the federal flood insurance fund.
Flood insurance - sure to be soaked in claims by Andrew - is supposed to be self-funded but has been only since 1987. The fund now has $359 million from premiums. But there is no certainty that will be enough.
If Hurricane Andrew does its worst, moving from the Gulf coast to flood inland areas, the fund will be hard pressed. And this is only the first hurricane of the season.
If the fund runs out of money, taxpayer loans will be the only alternative to default.
That's a needless risk. Congress and Bush should consign flood insurance to the same scrap heap reserved for other storm detritus. Those who use it can buy insurance from private companies.
The federal fund puts taxpayers at risk to provide insurance for those who can afford to buy costly coastal property - 82% of all policies - or those who build in flood plains. Such unsafe areas now have 40% more structures than before the insurance began.
Structures for which taxpayers could be left footing the bill after the next 'big one,' unless Congress acts now.
Federal jobs programs must be made to work
The federal government should play a vital role in providing job training for those hit by economic forces.
There's nothing like the fear of losing a job to change someone's tune on federally funded jobs programs.
President Bush joined the chorus this week with a belated but welcome call to increase federal spending for jobs programs he once sought to cut.
Bush's proposal: Raise job-training spending from $740 million to $2 billion over five years to train the unemployed, youth and displaced workers, including those threatened by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Bill Clinton has a similar job-training plan that has one great advantage over Bush's: He says how to pay for it.
Clinton calls for a 1.5% payroll tax on employers, but Bush won't say how he'll finance his proposal unless he wins re-election.
Apart from spending, both candidates have the right idea about a strong federal role in job training. When trade agreements, a prolonged recession, global competition and technological advances leave workers stranded, government has every reason to intervene - and a track record to prove that intervention helps.
The few studies there are of federal jobs programs show most have succeeded at improving the employability of those who go through them: They raise average wages of disadvantaged trainees between $400 and $800 a year, teach life skills and speed up re-employment.
Some changes that could improve that record:
Get a clear picture of private-sector job needs before funding new programs. Some programs persist in training people for the kinds of low-skill manufacturing jobs that are rapidly disappearing.
Make sure programs work by measuring the success of their graduates. That enhances the value of the training for those who complete it, as well as holding the programs accountable.
Streamline the administration of the 60 federal programs and 51 state programs to eliminate duplicate efforts.
Federal jobs programs may not work miracles, but they do work.
Unite the United Way
On another subject, USA TODAY outlines the challenges facing United Way's new head.
After a stormy year of financial mis-management and falling revenue, the United Way of America could use a bit of peace.
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Quit Feeding the Flab
Here's one of the iron invariables of U.S. politics: Someone will always come up with another reason to draw more money into Washington and parcel it back out to the governments back home. We of course have the limitless 'unmet needs' of which state and local officials readily make us aware, but now our Keynesian economists fear that forced public-sector thrift during the recession could spiral into something more depressing for the whole country.
Sounds like something the Democrats might propose. But leave aside the doubtful theory and take a hard look at the premise: Where are the jolting cuts at the state and local levels? The broad, outrageous truth is that while nearly every other corner of American life has had to economize lately - even the Postal Service is downsizing, for heaven's sake - the governments closest to home have just kept growing and growing and growing.
To be fair, much of it is to attend to mandates from the next level up. A lot, however, is just nest feathering or the building of empires. Nor is this the first thing cut, either; that honor usually belongs to library hours. But before revving up the fiscal engines, consider our favorite measurement arrow, the payroll.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that growth in state and local employment - mostly the latter - actually accelerated between July 1991 and last month. As the rest of the nation cinched its belt, 250,000 more names were added to the 15 million on these payrolls, which include school districts. Seasonally adjusted numbers show this increase continued as spring became summer, when the start of an 'austere' new fiscal year was finally supposed to cut into the ranks. And it's not all because of a youth-jobs program, either.
BLS has broken down the numbers by states, through June. In some instances, there's evidence of real tightening: in Massachusetts, New York and Illinois. Elsewhere, some progress on the state rolls has been undone at the various local levels, which are often adjuncts of state government; this mixed record is true in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, California and especially Florida. Finally, there are states growing fatter in both categories; Wisconsin, Arkansas, Washington, Hawaii and, most strikingly, Texas. While Ann Richards was wowing the press corps, the public payroll grew by more than 30,000, or nearly 3%, over the past year in her strapped state.
An organization of conservative elected representatives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, this month fleshed out the municipal side of the story. The nation's mayors are constantly caterwauling about federal cutbacks, but ALEC found that though Washington is sending the cities less to administer, overall federal aid to urban residents increased in the 1980s.
More important, the statehouses and the tax bases of the cities themselves more than made up the revenue difference - $3.57 for every federal dollar lost. New York City over this period gained $7 for every $1 it gave up.
Detroit and St. Louis lost ground in funding, but they also suffered huge depopulation during the 1980s. But some shrinking cities, Atlanta and Philadelphia in particular, made out like bandits, according to the ALEC study. And Washington, D.C., which lost a quarter of its population during the cunning Marion Barry years, not only collected considerably more locally, it increased its federal handle.
Denizens of the nation's capital know that the boodle didn't go toward improved public services. What was it spent on, in cities across the U.S.? ALEC found the biggest gainers, more than the woeful schools and hospitals, were the public-housing bureaucracies and mass transit. The culprit? Inefficiency. ALEC calculated that operating costs, adjusted for inflation and population changes, rose an average of 28% in the 1980s in 41 surveyed cities. The biggest leap was in the District of Columbia, but New York, San Jose and San Francisco were close behind.
The reason, according the ALEC, comes to down to having too many people on staff, and paying them too much relative to the private sector. Not only has this practice been unabated by the downturn, but specialists in public finance seem to think it will continue.
And why not? The Center for the Study of the States reports that state tax revenue was up 8.9% for the second quarter of 1992 over the same period a year ago. It attributes the bulge to the higher taxes enacted last year during the supposed fiscal crises. The payroll numbers nationwide confirm that this money is being extracted from gaunt taxpayers to perpetuate flabbiness in government. It lies with the voters to stop the bloat.
The Korea-China Calculus
It had to happen that South Korea and China would finally go public with their status as political bedfellows. The two announced in Beijing that they are normalizing diplomatic relations. Now is the time to start thinking about how to help Taiwan.
Ties between China and South Korea have been growing at North Korea's expense since the late 1980s. China's tyrants don't mind running their own communist state, but they expect better sense from their friends. And China's party leaders have apparently noticed that their old flame, gaunt communist North Korea doesn't stack up to the rich, democratic-capitalist South.
So far, so good. We can all celebrate this Beijing-Seoul embrace as one more way of isolating communist North Korea, and so bringing Asia one move closer to polishing off the regional end games of the Cold War.
The dark side of this otherwise pleasant development, however, is that Pyongyang is not the only place in Asia where a government is waking up lonelier today for Seoul's tryst with Beijing. The other odd man out is the democratizing Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan.
This is where the world's leading democracies would be wise to step in as a friend and escort, right away. It is not remotely in the interest of peace, stability or generally ending the Cold War in Asia to isolate Taiwan further. By virtue of its trade, investment and brilliantly successful economic example, Taiwan happens to be one of the most powerful forces engendering liberal change in mainland China.
Now, however, Taiwan stands alone as China's declared prey in the region, recognized by only 29 countries, while 197 others recognize the communist mainland regime. Notified last week, of Seoul's imminent diplomatic shift, Taipei pre-empted the break by announcing that it would freeze out South Korea - cutting diplomatic ties, suspending all air links as of September 15 and ending preferential trade treatment.
The actions of both Seoul and Taipei are understandable. South Korea in recognizing China is seeking foremost to eliminate the immediate local threat posed by North Korea. And Seoul, in ditching the democratizing capitalists of Taipei for the communists of Beijing, is following a precedent set in the 1970s by many free countries that have pandered to China with far less to gain. On Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui is under pressure to take some face-saving action against South Korea. Democratization on Taiwan has come far enough so that President Lee must answer to an electorate that is irate over this latest diplomatic defection. Taiwan's people have been throwing bricks at the South Korean Embassy in Taipei, and boycotting dealers of South Korea's Hyundai cars.
But the important fight here is not the current tiff between Taiwan and South Korea. What matters on a world scale is the basic fight to end the communism that continues to endanger the peace in East Asia. China is for South Korea a convenient bedfellow right now, but not a worthy one. The world's democracies could greatly lessen the blow to Taiwan by moving fast to show that they appreciate their natural friends.
America, instead of threatening to wall out China-made underwear in the name of supporting free trade and human rights, could more clearly and consistently penalize China's faults simply by showing support for Taiwan's virtues. The General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade could stop holding up Taipei's application pending Beijing's admission, and wave Taiwan through the gate first. The goal should be to insure that South Korea's gain is a loss of status not for Taiwan and Chinese liberalism, but for communism in Asia.
The Clintons and the Lawyers
President Bush claimed last week that Bill Clinton "is being backed by practically every trial lawyer who ever wore a tasseled loafer." But don't take his word for it. Listen to the trial lawyers who know Mr. Clinton best.
"I can never remember an occasion," writes David H. Williams, when Mr. Clinton "failed to do the right thing where we trial lawyers were concerned." Mr. Williams should know. As president of the Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association, he's been sending out fund-raising pleas for Governor Clinton to his fellow plaintiff's attorneys around the country.
"Can I recommend that your folks put their money behind Bill Clinton for president? Not just yes, but hell yes," Mr. Williams wrote on July 10 to the head of the Houston trial lawyers' group. "Dig down deep and give."
Some of our best friends are lawyers, but their solicitude as a class for Mr. Clinton deserves more exposure than it's so far received. The decline of the U.S. justice system is one of the major political issues of the 1990s. A nation that has 70% of the world's lawyers, and its most backlogged courts, is in danger of becoming less a nation of laws than a nation of lawyers and lawsuits.
Studies out of Brookings and elsewhere have estimated the burden of lawsuits on the economy from $120 billion to as much as $300 billion a year. But the social cost may be even higher. The threat of lawsuits has stopped the development of birth-control devices and made delivering babies a high-risk profession. A family is now suing in Maryland because of injuries its daughter sustained playing high school football. Her enterprising attorney claims the board of education failed to warn her of football's risks, a sport whose violence is on TV every autumn weekend. Had she been barred from playing, of course, the school could have been sued for Title IX sex discrimination. Now the costs of her playing will be borne by the school district's taxpayers - not to mention that some judge may well force them to drop football.
This social impact, by the way, is why Hillary Clinton's legal ideas are a legitimate issue, contrary to the view that every criticism of her intellect is somehow unfair. Pat Buchanan and other Republicans strain credibility when they say she equates 'marriage' with 'slavery'. It's her advocacy of "children's rights" that is fair game. Mrs. Clinton has said that children should be "competent persons" under the law with standing to sue.
The law already allows for this in cases of abuse, as it should, but Mrs. Clinton wants to go much further. "Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child's future should not be made unilaterally by parents," she wrote in 1979. This is the sort of litigation liberalism that uses 'rights' as a cudgel against the common sense decisions of communities. (In a letter nearby, the Children's Defense Fund denies that it's litigious.)
This world view is also why the plaintiff's bar so loves Clinton&Clinton. In Mr. Williams's fund-raising letter, he explains how legal reform was stopped dead in Arkansas in 1987. "We immediately got on the horn to the Governor about this and the tort reform part of the legislative package was pulled," Mr. Williams boasts. "It has never come back up."
He can barely contain himself. "During another session, I remember a bill that had whistled through the Arkansas House and Senate that would have given immunity from liability to 'good Samaritan' doctors who provided medical care to indigent patients," the trial lawyer writes. "Once again we got on the horn" to Governor Clinton, who vetoed the bill. This is the same candidate who claims to be outraged by the lack of health insurance for the poor.
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The Primary Results
Tuesday's primary election had more than its share of surprises and close races. The voter turnout in the Savannah area - somewhere around 50 percent - was encouraging as well.
The biggest shocker on the local scene was Joe Mahany's upset of incumbent Chatham County Commission Chairman Robert McCorkle in the Democratic primary. Mr. McCorkle, who has served on the commission for 22 years, was beaten by Mr. Mahany by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.
The chairman's defeat by members of his own party is a clear indication that voters want a change in leadership. The victor, Mr. Mahany, will face one of two Republicans, Commissioner Julie Smith or Ray Gaster, who were the top vote-getters in the Republican primary. No matter who wins in the November general election, Chatham Countians will begin 1993 with a new commission chairman on board.
In other contests, the crowded fields in the 1st District and 11th District congressional races virtually guaranteed runoff elections, which will be held Aug. 11. Barbara Christmas, a Democrat, ran a strong campaign in the 1st District and will face either Buddy DeLoach or Bryan Ginn in the runoff. That winner will run against State Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah, who easily won the Republican nomination.
In the newly-drawn 11th District, Cynthia McKinney and George DeLoach will vie for the Democratic nod, while Republicans Woodrow Lovett and Savannahian Michael Pratt will fight to carry their party's flag. All four have an unenviable task, since this crazily configured district stretches from Atlanta to Augusta to Savannah.
In various judgeship races, Charles Mikell handily won the election for Superior Court judge, proving that his experience on the State Court bench paid off. State Supreme Court Justice Leah Sears-Collins, a Savannah native, won her race to keep her seat, guaranteeing a measure of diversity on the high court.
One disappointment was the statewide race between Labor Commissioner Al Scott and challenger David Poythress for the Democratic nomination. Mr. Scott has been doing an admirable job as labor commissioner; Mr. Poythress has been manufacturing issues and tossing mud. Unfortunately, the below-the-belt tactics apparently had an impact in the three-person race (Savannahian Frances Bright Johnson did surprisingly well) and Mr. Scott and Mr. Poythress go into the runoff.
On a more upbeat note, local voters wisely chose to return Dorothy Pelote and Tom Bordeaux to the Georgia House. There, they will be rejoined by Diane Harvey Johnson, who had little trouble reclaiming her old House seat.
On the Chatham County Commission, Republican David Saussy turned back former chairman Bill Stephenson's bid to get back on the board in the 1st District. He goes on to face Democrat Marty Felser. Incumbent Deanie Frazier was the leading vote-getter in the 5th District, but Democratic challenger Clifton Jones Jr. forced her into a runoff. In the 7th District, Eddie DeLoach won his race and will follow in the footsteps of his father, outgoing Commissioner James DeLoach.
In school board races, congratulations are in order for incumbents Daniel Washington and Andy Way and former State Rep. DeWayne Hamilton. All three won their respective nominations, and Mr. Washington and Mr. Hamilton will join the board because they have no opposition in the fall. Mr. Way, a Republican, goes on to face Democrat K.B. Raut.
Credit is also due Tax Commissioner Barbara Kiley, who handily won the Democratic nomination. She meets Republican Bill Atkinson in November.
A final winner Tuesday was the voting public. Getting people to the polls for primaries isn't easy. Yet, half the voters in Chatham County did their duty.
That's a positive trend. It's also one that the public, and the politicians, should try to build on through November and beyond.
President Should Settle Up
Some local Democrats are getting some cheap laughs at the expense of President Bush, who still owes the city some $14,000 for a campaign visit here back in March.
Actually, that's not too surprising. Most politicians are notoriously slow in paying their debts. Sitting presidents are no exception.
Still, it would behoove the president if he settled up with City Hall sometime soon. While the delinquency isn't going to mean a thing to most voters, it has to be a little embarrassing to his supporters.
Besides, it's not as if he's strapped for cash. Published reports say that his campaign is sitting on a $7 million surplus from his primary campaign fund that he has to spend before the Republican convention, so as to qualify for federal campaign funds in the general election.
Coming across with $14,000 for the city of Savannah should be painless. And while that's not a lot of money to the city either, local taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bills for political rallies, no matter which party stages them.
Thousands of area residents jammed the riverfront to see and hear the president. He got its money's worth for the pre-Georgia primary pick-me-up. Now he should finish the job and pick up the tab.
An Unpleasant Surprise
A month ago, Savannah seemed on its way to getting a 5-percent cut in federal flood insurance premiums. That was welcome news for residents and business owners who could use the discount.
But lately, representatives for the Federal Emergency Management Agency changed their mind. The agency says it won't cut rates because of "serious deficiencies" in flood control here.
Why the sudden turnabout? And more importantly, how can it be resolved?
Taxpayers are spending millions of public dollars to improve drainage in the community. Not so long ago, FEMA was applauding Savannah for some of the measures it was taking to improve flood control and reduce the risk of flood damage. Happily, it looked as though the investment would soon be paying off through reduced insurance premiums.
Now it appears the anticipated rate cut may be headed down the drain.
The feds are faulting the city for allowing five buildings - four private homes, scattered from Coffee Bluff to west Savannah, and the Goodwill Industries building - to be built below the nationally designated flood plain without adequate protection.
They also contend that several structures were given certificates of occupancy before the elevation was formally established, as required by FEMA regulations.
City Manager Don Mendonsa says this is the first he has heard about any problems. He says all previous contacts with the agency had been positive.
But Glenn Woodard, who works for the state Department of Natural Resources and serves as FEMA's representative, tells a different story. He contends that trouble was spotted last November, and that state and federal officials have unsuccessfully prodded the city for months to make corrections.
It's clear that a breakdown occurred somewhere. But what's most important is to correct what's wrong so Savannahians can save a little money on their premiums.
Mr. Mendonsa says he will send a detailed explanation to FEMA about the buildings constructed below the flood plain. That's a start. Perhaps the agency can be persuaded to change its mind. After that, city and FEMA officials need to do a better job of comparing notes so that such unhappy surprises don't happen again.
Ugly Campaign Tactics
Responsible voters in Georgia have reason to be concerned about the tone and direction of the state labor commissioner's race.
Al Scott, the incumbent labor commissioner, is the target of a barrage of ugly charges from challenger David Poythress, who has wound up opposing the incumbent in a runoff set for August.
A Savannahian and a former state legislator, Mr. Scott has performed capably at the Department of Labor, but you wouldn't know that if you listen to his opponent.
It is fair for a candidate to question his opponent's qualifications and competence. But Mr. Poythress goes well beyond that. He exceeds the limits of fairness. He emphasizes at every opportunity the race of Mr. Scott. This is blatant. There's nothing subtle about it.
A black, Mr. Scott was appointed to his post by Gov. Zell Miller. He is the first person of his race to hold the statewide office.
In addition, Mr. Poythress claims Mr. Scott took a bribe. This is an unsubstantiated charge that is not borne out by the FBI tapes Mr. Poythress claims are supportive of his allegations.
The tapes were made by an undercover agent operating a 'sting' against another state legislator. The legislator, Rep. Frank Redding, has not been convicted. A mistrial was declared in his case. Al Scott was a government witness at the trial. He was not a co-defendant.
If the investigators had evidence that Mr. Scott took money for his vote, why wouldn't they have sought his indictment along with Rep. Redding?
If they had suspected Mr. Scott, wouldn't they have gone to him and tried to trap him the same way they set up a trap for Mr. Redding?
Mr. Poythress also complained to the State Ethics Commission about Mr. Scott, claiming the incumbent broke the rules on raising campaign money. The commission dismissed the complaint.
Ironically, Mr. Poythress is supported by the forces of former Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell, who was forced to resign his office under a cloud of scandal and wound up spending time in jail. Mr. Poythress obviously is not as sensitive about his support as he is about Mr. Scott's alleged conduct.
Political contests should be settled at the polls by citizens who are not confused or misled by unconfirmed rumors and charges. We deplore this type of political attack whenever and wherever it is made. We hate to see it happening in Georgia.
Jones Falls; Newt Hangs On
Among those who got jolted in the Georgia primary voting was Democratic Rep. Ben Jones, the former TV actor. Among those who got scared but escaped defeat was Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich.
Rep. Jones fared poorly in a Democratic race won by state legislator Don Johnson. Mr. Johnson, chairman of the state Senate Appropriations Committee, accused Rep. Jones of working for perks and privileges, voting against voluntary prayer in school, and being out of touch with voters in eastern Georgia's 10th District.
"The commercials and the rumors and things like that are as tough as we've ever faced," Mr. Jones complained. Yes, they were tough. But they summed up his House stint pretty well. He has been doggedly liberal.
Mr. Johnson, however, is not home free. He must still survive a fall contest.
Newt Gingrich, the House minority whip and Georgia's only Republican in Congress, edged Herman Clark, a former state legislator who ridiculed Mr. Gingrich for writing bad checks, voting himself a pay raise and using a limousine. In this case, the criticism was also fair because Rep. Gingrich did all those things. But he was not a major culprit in the House overdraft scandal, he apologized for having been involved, and he voted to publicize the names of all those who had written overdrafts. He redeemed himself somewhat by properly supporting openness and reform of the system that brought about the scandal. He also has given up his limousine.
One of Mr. Gingrich's prime virtues as a congressman is his ability to put burrs under the saddles of the Democratic House leadership. For that reason, Democrats will work hard to beat him in the fall. But the minority whip's abrasiveness doesn't void the fact that what he says often needs to be said. Washington wouldn't be quite the same without him.
Keeping Up With Crooks
The days of the police six-shooters became numbered when more criminals started packing semiautomatic pistols. The Chatham C ounty Police Department is the latest to modernize.
County police officers are being issued .45-caliber pistols, which hold 8-shot clips, to replace their 5- or 6-shot .38 revolvers.
It's good that officers will be less likely to be out-gunned. With more sophisticated hardware on the market, those who protect and serve shouldn't be put at a disadvantage.
Still Needed: Great Orators
Great oratory is still missing from the presidential election campaign.
Most of us who like it are still smarting from President Bush's lackluster State of the Union address in January.
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Bush gets back in the game
"Good judgment," George Bush said, launching into the hardest part of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, "comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."
He then went on to confess that "with my back against the wall," he made a "bad call" in 1990 on "the Democrats' tax increase." It was, he said, a "mistake" he would not repeat in a second term.
Not to raise taxes wasn't the only lesson he learned in his first term. He also learned not to make ironclad pledges like the one he had to explain away Thursday.
His acceptance speech contained nothing remotely similar to his 1988 vow of "no new taxes." Even his promise of possible across-the-board tax cuts was carefully hedged: He will "propose" such cuts, to be offset with "specific spending reductions that I consider appropriate, so that we do not increase the deficit."
Bush did not win the election with his speech. But he did get himself back in the game. He displayed spirit and determination, combined with an appearance of mastery and control that had seemed to elude him for many months.
For that matter, his running mate, Vice President Dan Quayle, also showed himself to better advantage than he customarily does. Quayle was no Pericles, but neither was he a laughingstock.
Bush left no doubt that he intends to try to repeat the 1948 strategy of Democrat Harry Truman: run hard against a do-nothing Congress dominated by the opposition. Given the bad odor that currently envelops Congress, it could be both a successful gambit and a justified one.
Bush's speech was filled with derisive references to the "gridlock Democrat Congress," and he persistently linked opponent Bill Clinton to Congress and its financially undisciplined ways.
But Bush led, appropriately, with his strength: foreign policy. He sketched the dramatic changes over the last four years in the geopolitical landscape and claimed a rightful share of the credit:
"I saw the chance to rid our children's dreams of the nuclear nightmare, and I did. Over the past four years, more people have breathed the fresh air of freedom than in all of human history. I saw a chance to help, and I did. These were the two defining opportunities - not of a year, not of a decade, but of an entire span of human history."
But celebrating his foreign policy triumphs was the easy part. Bush's real challenge was to persuade the American people that he has a domestic vision and a plausible program to get the economy moving again.
The vision was captured in a couple of sentences: "The defining challenge of the '90s is to win the economic competition - to win the peace. We must be a military superpower, an economic superpower and an export superpower."
The economic program was more problematic, largely because of the issue of taxes and the sense of betrayal that many people - especially conservatives of his own party - feel because of Bush's abandonment of his no-new-taxes pledge.
The president made the necessary apology. But, hewing to his overall theme, he laid the blame principally on the Democrats. "I underestimated Congress' addiction to taxes," he explained.
Except for the suggestion of tax reductions and a gimmicky plan to let taxpayers earmark 10 percent of their payments for debt reduction, Bush proposed nothing economically that he had not offered before. That's good, because anything he could have proposed probably would have been irresponsible.
What was different was the perspective in which he placed his proposals: as the sharp, "whom do you trust?" alternative to the alleged profligacy of Congress and a Democratic presidential nominee who already has spoken of new spending and a new tax increase.
Indeed, the question for voters in November is the one that Bush returned to again and again in his speech: Whom do you trust? Bush has made himself, once again, a plausible answer.
It's time for these to go
A political campaign is often filled with a language all its own. Fortunately, outsiders aren't usually subjected to it unless they wander into the wrong bar on election night.
Not this time. The 1992 presidential campaign is in serious danger of being captured by the clichd interests. A plea to the campaigns: Stop it.
For instance, there is the once-pithy five-word phrase that emanated from the anger over the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court: "They just don't get it."
For a brief time, "they just don't get it" meant something. It was directed by women toward men who thought that women got some hidden pleasure out of crude, graphic pickup lines or other forms of sexual harassment. It has been diluted into a clich line uttered by any politician or single-issue activist to describe the other side. Just the other night, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) searched for a way to describe how Democrats have responded to the fall of communism, and he settled on, "They just don't get it." Three times he said it. Enough.
Next up, the multiplying variations of Lloyd Bentsen's "I knew John Kennedy" quip. It was one of the most memorable lines of the 1988 campaign, used by the Democratic vice presidential nominee to put down his GOP counterpart, Dan Quayle. "I knew John Kennedy," Bentsen told Quayle, and ... everyone knows the rest. Now it is a standard campaign put-down.
Granted, it was used quite cleverly by Ronald Reagan ("I knew Thomas Jefferson"), who managed to be charmingly self-deprecating while he took a slap at Bill Clinton. But Quayle couldn't leave it alone. He had to trot out his own version in his acceptance speech Thursday night and, predictably, it fell flat.
Remember, Bentsen lost.
The leading candidate for future clich status has to be, "It's time for them to go." This is a surprise, because it was a clumsy, instantly forgettable conceit when Al Gore used it at the Democratic convention. But the Republicans revived it at their convention, and it was as clumsy and forgettable for them as it was for the Democrats. So, forget it.
Drop the political clichs. Before it's too late.
The taxman's knocking on the door
This is dodge-the-bullet week for Cook County property owners. In the next few days, a postcard will hit the mailbox with all the impact of a brick hurled through a window. It'll be the property tax bill - more specifically, and confusingly, the second installment of the 1991 tax bill, payable nine months into 1992.
Some homeowners will greet the bill with a sigh of relief. It will be high, a little higher than last year, but not too dramatic. These are the folks who didn't go through reassessment roulette in the past year. Chances are, though, they have a pretty good idea when the assessor next will darken their door.
Many homeowners in Chicago will be astonished when they see their bills. They were reassessed in the past year, and chances are their property assessments soared. Those who were savvy enough to calculate the reassessment's impact when that notice arrived will have some inkling of what to expect. But many people aren't that savvy, and the bill will come as a shock.
The reassessment notice's "fair market value" probably didn't reflect their property's true value. The tax due will have little to do with their ability to pay it.
And this passes for tax policy in Illinois.
The new tax rates issued last week are another reminder of how confusing, and often unfair, the property tax system has become. Anyone attempting to figure out one's own bill in advance has to run a daunting gantlet of figures: assessment, state equalizer, homeowner's exemption, new tax rate.
Property taxes can have a depressing effect on a community's ability to draw business and industry, and often the biggest burden falls on those towns that most desperately need more business and jobs.
The new tax rate in Dixmoor (14.639) is more than twice the rate in Lincolnwood (7.162), largely because property values in the southern suburb are much lower than those in the northern suburb. But kids in Dixmoor still have to go to school, fires have to be doused, police have to be on patrol. Without a strong property tax base, the burden on property owners has to be that much higher.
Property tax caps in the collar counties will help dampen the rise in bills, and a law that delays the use of new reassessments for one year in Cook County will cause some easing of the confusion and suburban 'sticker shock' next year.
But if property owners want relief from their tax bills, they will have to acknowledge that the burden must shift to some other tax. And they will have to encourage the Illinois legislature to accomplish this.
At this point, too many people in the legislature are too petrified of a tax-backlash to consider a shift that would lower property taxes and raise income taxes. They expect they would get the blame for the tax increase and no credit for a drop in property taxes.
Maybe they just need a little encouragement.
China and South Korea make up
In late August 1950, as events moved toward China's entry into the Korean War, the Chinese government declared: "North Korea's friends are our friends. North Korea's enemy is our enemy. North Korea's defense is our defense."
Forty-two years later, North Korea has almost no friends left and its economy is collapsing. Meanwhile, an infinitely more pragmatic China makes common cause with the North's enemy, capitalist South Korea, and worries along with the rest of the world about North Korea's nuclear intentions.
Dramatic evidence of how things have changed came Monday when South Korea and China, putting economic aspirations ahead of ideological differences, signed an agreement restoring diplomatic relations.
Clearly, both Seoul and Beijing recognized that formally ending decades of enmity could further the already robust trade and investment activity between them. And neither, understandably enough, was willing to be held back by outmoded policies.
"The normalization of ties between our two countries marks a significant turning point in world history in that it heralds the beginning of the end of the Cold War in East Asia," South Korean President Roh Taewoo told Koreans in a televised speech.
For his part, Chinese Premier Li Peng declared that the official rapprochement "has great significance for peace and development in Asia and the world."
The new relationship comes at the expense of a couple of old ones. In Seoul, Taiwan lost standing as South Korea accepted that the Beijing government is "the sole legal government of China." And North Korea, despite China's assertions that it remains a friend and ally, is now more isolated than ever.
How the totalitarian regime of President Kim Il-sung reacts to its worsening situation is a crucial question.
If there is any political wisdom at all in Pyongyang, North Korea will begin to moderate its austere, oppressive policies now that it can no longer expect any real support from China.
Beijing would like the North to get on with the process of reunification with South Korea. Movement in this direction has snagged on Pyongyang's failure to live up to an agreement calling for inspections of nuclear facilities in both North and South Korea.
Neither South Korea nor the West believes North Korea's contention that its Yongbyon nuclear complex is for peaceful purposes only. In fact, the fear is that the North is trying to build nuclear weapons. Hence the urgent need for rigorous inspections.
Until the world is satisfied that North Korea poses no danger of triggering a nuclear weapon, welcome news like the China-South Korea deal cannot be received with the wholehearted joy it deserves.
A military stance that's hard to defend
Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer served as an Army officer for 26 years. Along the way, she won a Bronze Star during the Tet offensive in Vietnam, earned a Ph.D. in nursing and rose to the position of chief nurse of the Washington State National Guard.
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The school board must move on reform
Those who put together the Chicago school reform law had a clear intent: to bust up the central bureaucracy under which education had so sadly deteriorated and to push decision-making and dollars down into local schools.
From long experience, though, legislators and reform advocates were wary about whether the bureaucracy would willingly redefine itself. So they built in an enforcement mechanism, adding educational and administrative reform to the oversight responsibilities of the School Finance Authority.
The reform architects' fear proved unfortunately justified. Despite the seating of a new school board, the hiring of a superintendent from outside the system and the explicit mandates in the 1988 law, the status-quo crowd at Pershing Road headquarters has generally prevailed, fighting true decentralization at every turn.
Now the finance authority, after four years of frustrating struggle on the issue, has finally said to the school board: enough. The authority is insisting that the board develop a realistic, meaningful reform plan.
The reform plan as outlined by the School Finance Authority is not flawless. Neither is the amended version the board is to vote on today. There are inherent risks in sweeping dispersal of decision-making, and the process cannot be expected to work perfectly.
But it's clear that what exists has not been effective. And it's clear the authority is only doing its duty -to the law and to the children of Chicago -after the board failed to do its own.
Some board members, administrators and their supporters have put up an ugly, vitriolic battle. But let's call this fight for what it is.
It isn't, as imputed by the likes of State Rep. Monique Davis -who just happens to be a $54,971 school board administrator -a power grab by white business interests or a fifth column for school vouchers. This is a fight by the school superintendent, his staff and his allies to hold onto power that, by law, they no longer possess. This is purely a matter of their own political and personal interests.
The finance authority itself happens to be three-fifths minority. It includes parents of Chicago public school students. But the real issue here is what's in the interests of more than 400,000 city children. Propping up a stubborn bureaucracy is not.
Meanwhile, the board has until Monday to get its budget genuinely into balance and meet a deadline for finance authority approval. The board's arbitrary action Tuesday to void labor contracts would not seem to make for a legally balanced budget. If the board fails to work out a realistic spending plan, state law would transfer even more control to the School Finance Authority. Despite this potent threat, the board is still playing games with bogus budgets and -incredibly -hasn't even met with teachers to discuss options.
The verdict's not in on whether sweeping decentralization will make the city's schools better or even worse overall. But no one will know until the board gives it an honest trial.
The ticklish politics of ethanol
More than the heat and humidity made Gov. Jim Edgar uncomfortable Sunday at the Illinois State Fair.
Preparing for President Bush's campaign stop, Edgar, an unabashed cheerleader for ethanol, wondered what Bush would tell farmers about the future for the corn-derived alternative fuel.
Would he side with corn growers and promote expanded markets for ethanol? Or would he accede to those concerned about air quality and uphold proposed restrictions on its use in some major cities?
Bush met privately with farm leaders, but he said nothing publicly about ethanol. His silence bespoke volumes about the delicate politics of clean air and special interests in this election year.
In Illinois, corn farmers sell about 17 percent of their crop at premium prices to ethanol producers such as Decatur-based Archer-Daniels-Midland. The producers, in turn, get a federal tax subsidy to make ethanol-blended fuels competitive at the pump.
But science has turned what would seem like an easy political home run into a potential foul ball. Burning ethanol-blended gasoline reduces emissions of carbon monoxide, but it also creates more harmful ozone and smog than pure gasoline, especially on warmer days.
That's why William Reilly, Environmental Protection Agency administrator, favors a proposed rule that would restrict the use of ethanol during the summer in nine major cities, including Chicago. The limitation would begin in 1995.
Although they took part in negotiations on the rule last year, the ethanol proponents say they misunderstood. Now facing slower growth in ethanol sales, they want the rule changed, contending new evidence will show ethanol-blended fuels can be used in the largest cities year-round without damaging air quality.
Corn growers have been promising such data for some time without delivering. In the meantime, the White House is said to be looking for a political compromise. One possibility might be to push an ethanol derivative that meets the clean air standards and likely can be processed in oil-company refineries.
Such a step would please farmers because it would boost ethanol use. Some oil companies would be happy to run the product through their refineries, although ethanol producers, undoubtedly, would object.
Lost in this high-wire balancing act, unfortunately, is good public policy. Everyone should be looking for the most efficient, least expensive way to reduce pollution.
Bush has reason to worry about political support from Illinois farmers. But in seeking a compromise that won't alienate too many voters, he shouldn't turn his back on good science and clean air in the cities. For now, unfortunately, that means restricting ethanol's use.
Is there life without political signs?
From the Department of Laws You're Not Likely To See Passed in Your Lifetime:
A Lake County Board member -Larry Leafblad of Grayslake -has this extraordinary idea that people wouldn't object if they were deprived of political signs, posters, stickers and handbills. He has proposed an ordinance to ban them from utility poles and road rights-of-way and has been trying to whip up support for the idea -a notion that is as popular with most politicians as northern spotted owls are with loggers.
You are familiar with this material. If you were not before the March primary, when there were more candidates than registered voters in Illinois, you probably were in some emirate where elections aren't necessary. It was a banner season for political paraphernalia, with scarcely a sign, sign post, tree, telephone pole or highway shoulder neglected in the metropolitan area.
It also brought the proliferation of a new concept: candidates vying to see how many political signs they could stake consecutively in the shortest distance along a roadway. This presumes, apparently, that the more people see a name, the more likely they are to remember it. But while this may enhance recognition, it is not as entertaining as those old Burma-Shave signs.
Therein lies the principal objection to this campaign strategy: It is annoying. There are some folks who plain don't like being bombarded with political messages wherever they travel and bristle at the unsightly nature of them, especially in the abundance they were this spring. It is more annoying when the signs, posters, stickers and handbills remain up long after an election. And sometimes -when they obscure important road signs -they can be hazardous.
Of course, if we start passing laws just because something is annoying, then we should pass laws just because some people are jerks, or too silly. Hmmm.
No one knows for sure if these messages do any good. No one knows if they do any bad. This probably is why they are so popular. And once the first signs appear, they breed faster than wire coat hangers.
Because Leafblad's proposition would have to be approved by colleagues up for re-election, he is swimming against a strong current. The most novel argument against his plan came from board member Robert Depke: Since we incumbents already are known to voters, it would be terribly unfair to our challengers to deny them this opportunity. Is it any wonder that this guy got to be board chairman?
A ruling on the law, not abortion
Circuit Judge Thomas O'Brien issued a legal ruling, not a political statement, when he refused to block the resumption of abortions at Cook County Hospital.
The judge's decision in the dispute between Cook County Board President Richard Phelan and a handful of county commissioners will be viewed as a victory for abortion rights and a defeat for opponents of abortion. That's not the case. The judge was asked to rule on the delineation of authority between Phelan and the board. That's all he did.
The commissioners argued that Phelan lacks the legal authority to restore abortions at County Hospital without the board's approval. But the court proceedings demonstrated that their argument didn't hold up.
No ordinance or policy rule clearly restricts the authority of the president or hospital administrators regarding health procedures. The obvious precedent for this case was former President George Dunne's unilateral decision to stop abortions at the hospital and Dunne's subsequent orders, on a case-by-case basis, to allow them in certain circumstances. The board has never set an explicit policy prohibiting abortion.
Board members argued that public funds cannot be spent without their approval, but there is no budget line item for abortion, just as the board does not direct precisely how much money will be spent on appendectomies, heart surgery or gunshot wounds.
It is possible O'Brien's ruling will be overturned on appeal. More likely, this dispute will drag on through other lawsuits once this one is resolved. Abortion opponents are waiting in the wings to file more litigation.
Abortion doesn't belong in the courts; it belongs in the legislatures. In this case, the judiciary has been asked to rule only on government procedure and not on the appropriateness of abortion. But it shouldn't have gone to court at all.
O'Brien rightly called this case "a perfect example of legislative timidity" by lawmakers who wanted the court to be a "surrogate decision-maker." Commissioners might yet seek a board vote on the issue, but they probably won't, and the abortion foes don't have the votes to override a Phelan veto, anyway.
Abortion is a legal medical procedure, one that can be performed at a reasonable financial cost. As long as it is legal and not prohibitively expensive, County Hospital should provide it for the largely indigent clientele it serves.
One aspect of all this that has not drawn much attention is that Phelan's plan includes several reasonable restrictions, guidelines that probably come close to reflecting much of the public's sentiment about the availability of abortion.
A woman would be allowed only one abortion at the hospital in a year's time. Abortion would be performed only in the first trimester of pregnancy, except in cases of fetal anomalies, rape or incest, or when the health or life of the woman is endangered. Patients would receive counseling, including discussion of alternatives to abortion. In effect, this would create a waiting period. If the guidelines were followed, abortion at County Hospital would not become a mere substitute for birth control, as some have feared.
This matter belongs in the County Board, not in court. If the board doesn't have the temerity to challenge Phelan on its own turf, it ought to leave the matter alone.
Bush's necessary risk in Iraq
When a president who trails badly in a political campaign takes military action, his motives inevitably become the object of scrutiny. George Bush's latest move against Saddam Hussein -sending planes to enforce a ban on Iraqi military flights in southern Iraq, site of a rebellion by Shiite Muslims -is bound to create suspicion that he might be exploiting an international crisis for his own ends.
But the president's action in this case ought to be judged on the merits of the policy, and Bush has done what needed doing: He has confronted the Iraqi dictator in a way that punishes him for defying the peace terms imposed last year, while making it a bit harder for Saddam to keep his grip on power.
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FROM THE PUBLISHER
Smoking out the true nature of an American presidential contender is never easy, but with not-yet-declared candidate Ross Perot, the journalistic challenge has been especially tough. The billionaire businessman comes with neither a political track record nor detailed position papers, and two weeks ago, he announced he was cutting back on press appearances. Sensitive to criticism when it hits home, Perot made no secret of the fact that he was unhappy with his coverage in TIME - especially a story in the April 6 issue that said he had displayed a "thirst for publicity."
So when Houston bureau chief Richard Woodbury approached Perot to arrange the in-depth interview that appears in this issue, the first thing Woodbury got was an earful. "Perot is a quirky, prickly guy," says Woodbury. "We defended our reporting, but he wouldn't stop complaining. He really held our hands to the fire." It took a series of extended phone calls, a formal letter and a long phone conversation with managing editor Henry Muller before TIME finally got its foot in the door.
It was worth the effort. The session, conducted in Perot's Dallas offices by Muller, Woodbury and senior writer Walter Shapiro, ended up running for three hours. Shapiro, who has covered every presidential campaign since 1980, describes it as one of the most extraordinary experiences of his career. "For once we had the luxury of waiting out the sound bites, asking the follow-up questions and then getting on to totally fresh stuff. It's a wonderful moment when you realize you've been able to sort out those things he really knows, those things that are smart but that he has not been able to explain well, and those things that still do not make much sense. You can't do that on TV. You can't do it in a one-hop fuselage interview with Bill Clinton. And you certainly can't do it with George Bush."
That kind of access may grow scarce as the campaign warms up. Woodbury, who has covered Perot since 1986, notes that the take-charge Texan still works without handlers, travels without aides and returns his own phone calls. But with his funds unlimited and his polls still zooming, Perot can afford to be eccentric. "As the pressures grow, it will be interesting to see how long the homespun style can endure," says Woodbury. "I'll know it's a new ball game if a media adviser starts returning my calls instead of the man himself."
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Three weeks ago, our art department cover coordinator, Linda Freeman, received a phone call from Maurice Skinazi, an international businessman and art collector. Mr. Skinazi suggested that if by any chance TIME was going to do a story on the Rio summit, we should consider using something painted by his friend, Brazilian painter Lia Mittarakis.
Mr. Skinazi, who might consider a second career as an editor, had guessed our plans exactly right. Yes indeed, we were readying a special report on the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, and yes, we were in need of a cover illustration. Freeman asked Skinazi to send a transparency of the painting. Even though TIME rarely uses unsolicited artwork for the cover, the simple beauty of this painting delighted everyone, and art director Rudolph Hoglund decided to use it. "Before I told Lia about the situation, I asked her to name the most famous magazine in the world, and of course she said TIME," recalls Skinazi. "She was simply elated that you would consider her painting for the cover."
Mittarakis' style is commonly known as 'naive art,' a term that describes contemporary works that are painted in a folk manner. Mittarakis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, lost both her parents by the time she was 10 years old. She took up painting during her teenage years while living in an orphanage. For years the artist supported herself and two daughters by selling tropical scenes at Rio street fairs. Her vibrant works - which have been called 'painted poetry' - eventually attracted the attention of European critics.
Although a detached retina has robbed Mittarakis of sight in her right eye and she has lost 60% of the vision in her left eye, she continues to produce canvases at home on Paquet<*_>a-acute<*/> Island off the coast of Rio. The work reproduced on this week's cover is an acrylic portrayal of the Tijuca forest overlooking Rio.
Our special report on the summit is part of TIME's commitment to cover environmental issues, which began when we named Endangered Earth as the Planet of the Year for 1988. Says senior editor Charles Alexander, who edited the stories: "The summit itself can't save the earth, but it can put the nations of the world on the right path." Mittarakis shares that optimism and hopes that "by portraying the beauties of nature, we can remind the world about what is at stake." That is exactly our intent.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Every journalist dreams of working on the big story. Here at TIME that means reporting or writing a cover story. By that measure, veteran writers George Church and Ed Magnuson have had enough dreams realized to last a lifetime - even if they live to 100. For Church and Magnuson are the only men in the magazine's history to have written more than 100 cover stories each.
From the agony of the Vietnam War to the exhilarating fall of the Berlin Wall, a scrapbook of their work could serve as a comprehensive index to the most momentous events of the past quarter-century. Says editor-in-chief Jason McManus: "Church and Magnuson excel at the most demanding newsmagazine art: writing fast news covers. Masses of information must be quickly absorbed, mentally structured, and the relevant facts, anecdotes and quotes smoothly mortised into place while writing on the run."
Church, 60, joined TIME in 1969 after spending 14 years at the Wall Street Journal. He wrote his first cover, on the inefficiency of American business, just one year later. Since then, George has efficiently produced 104 more covers, hitting the 100 mark last summer with an elegant analysis of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But his own favorite is the 1986 cover on the secret sale of arms to Iran. "That's the one in which I was really challenged," says George. "I was writing while the files were coming in and then rewriting to incorporate the new things the correspondents had found out. I like that kind of pressure. It's kind of suicidal. But I love it."
No one understands that better than Magnuson, whose first cover was a crash effort on nuclear testing that ran in 1962. He has specialized in late-breaking stories ever since. "There is a real pleasure in putting them together under pressure," he says, "where you just stay up all night and get the job done." Ed has got 118 of them done, including 21 covers on Watergate, four of them written in consecutive weeks in May 1973 for the U.S. edition of TIME. This year Magnuson, 66, will retire after 32 years at the magazine. Looking back over his distinguished career here, Ed recalls handling our coverage of the My Lai massacre in 1968; the publication of the Pentagon papers - the secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam - in 1971; the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979; and "a lot of plane crashes. I guess you could say I was a bad-news guy." For us and our readers, though, it has always been good news when he and Church handled the bad news.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Great ideas are often generated in the most unlikely places, or so claims photographer P.F. Bentley, whose latest brainstorm occurred while he was having dinner at a sushi bar in Nashua, New Hampshire. Bentley was part of the press corps covering the state's first-in-the-nation primary, and he was trying to devise a more personal approach to the U.S. presidential campaign. Then it hit him: Why not portray a run for the presidency from the inside looking out? A few days later, P.F. told associate picture editor Rick Boeth that he'd like to hook up with the Clinton campaign, a risky choice because the Arkansas Governor's candidacy was in trouble at the time and his aides were suspicious of becoming involved with the press. "P.F. used all his diplomatic skills to convince everyone in the campaign that he could be a part of their lives," recalls Boeth.
That hunch led to the special series of photos that appear in this week's issue. Initially, Bentley and Clinton agreed to a one-month trial run, but the candidate felt sufficiently comfortable with the arrangement to continue it indefinitely. "We both understood that he would have to instantly trust me," says Bentley. Campaign advisers were told to get used to the photographer's presence in meetings, and Hillary Clinton welcomed him to the family home in Little Rock. The first photos, published in late March, ended with a Clinton win in Illinois. Since then, Bentley has been privy to the Clinton campaign's controversies, days of triumph and stolen moments of calm. His photos capture the gritty reality of rumpled hotel rooms, late-night strategy sessions and dinners of cold pizza, all shot in black and white to emphasize the documentary nature of the project.
P.F., 39, lives in Stinson Beach, California, grew up in Honolulu and has been a TIME photographer for 13 years. His TIME presidential-campaign coverage won first place in the Pictures of the Year Competition in both 1984 and 1988. In addition to his U.S. political coverage, Bentley has shot assignments in Panama, El Salvador and Haiti.
"Clinton often acts as if I am not in the room at all, and we can go a couple of days without speaking to each other," observes Bentley. "I've found him to be the most casual politician I have ever worked with." So casual, in fact, that P.F. actually followed Clinton into the steam room of his New York City hotel last week. The intrepid photographer could take only two exposures at a time before the cameras fogged up and had to be cleaned - but eventually got the shot he wanted.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Olympic athletes know that extensive preparation contributes to a great performance, and that's a lesson our photo department has taken to heart. Operations manager Kevin McVea spent more than a year mapping out TIME's technical requirements for the Barcelona Summer Games. Readers will begin to see the results this week in our coverage of the opening ceremonies. Thanks to new equipment in place at our press center, we will be able to bring high-resolution images to our readers in special sections on the Olympics so long as there's a medal yet to be won.
In Barcelona, the daily work of seven photographers will be reviewed by associate picture editor MaryAnne Golon, Paris-based picture editor Barbara Nagelsmith and picture researcher Mary Worrel Bousquette. Imaging specialist Kin Wah Lam will transmit the edited selections to picture editor Michele Stephenson and assistant picture editors Karen Zakrison and Eleanor Taylor. A new Eastman Kodak 2035 scanner will be used to send pictures to us here at headquarters in a mere 45 seconds. The editors will sift through these low-resolution 'first drafts' and pick the photos to be sent via satellite to them in publishable form.
Using scanning and transmission workstations developed by Israel's Scitex Corp., Kevin and his crew will be able to produce the final, high-quality photographs on site. The images will have the same sharp quality as those scanned on our premises and will be ready for use in the magazine. Notes McVea: "These innovations actually extend our deadlines. Four years ago, it took up to five hours to process and send a single image from the Seoul Olympics. With this technology, all that work takes just 35 minutes."
McVea, 30, makes it his business to keep track of cutting-edge technical developments. He worked at Newsweek as head of picture operations before joining TIME in 1988.
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S. African Realism
POLITICAL realism may be getting the upper hand in South Africa. The decision of the African National Congress to adopt a more moderate policy toward negotiating with the administration of President Frederik de Klerk could open the door to more rapid progress toward a multiracial transitional government and democratic elections.
The ANC's move comes after intense internal discussion. Nelson Mandela has represented the middle ground of negotiation and compromise in these discussions, with ANC militants pushing for heightened mass action.
The latter tactic has failed in its immediate goal of toppling leaders in the so-called black homelands.
Mr. Mandela recognizes, realistically, that his organization's best opportunity to secure a grasp on power is through continued bargaining with the white National Party regime inn Pretoria. And he rightly concludes that Mr. De Klerk - for all the ups and downs in their relationship since the ANC leader left prison almost three years ago - remains the white leader most likely to cut a reasonable, politically valid deal.
De Klerk, too, is constrained by realism to move toward productive talks. Revelations concerning efforts by the South African military to subvert the ANC have left the president little room to maneuver. Judge Richard Goldstone, who heads the government commission looking into allegations against the security forces, doubtless has more revelations to come - even if De Klerk continues to refuse his request for wider investigative authority.
De Klerk needs political damage control. His best recourse is expedited negotiations with the ANC. He, like the ANC, may have to settle for a short-term resolution that doesn't give him everything he wants in terms of long-term goals - for example, a guarantee of substantial white representation in any future government. Not only political stability in the country, but economic recovery, hinges on progress in negotiations.
ANC and government representatives have secluded themselves for intensive talks in the days ahead. South Africa, meanwhile, will shift into its summer vacation season, when little governmental business is conducted. By early 1993 the negotiators should have a plan for power-sharing.
That plan will be born of political necessity, and it will be criticized from many angles. But the process of negotiations should also bring greater good will - an honest desire to move beyond confrontation.
That, along with realism and pragmatism, will be needed to implement any plan.
Talks Worth Continuing
THE latest phase of the three-strand talks about the future of Northern Ireland either "has collapsed" or "has been concluded," depending on where one takes one's reading of events, from the headlines or from diplomatic sources.
No, the talks did not reach a comprehensive settlement of the question of governing the six counties of the North. But for the first time since the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, unionist leaders sat down with ministers from the Dublin government. This historic fact should not be minimized.
That said, however, we must also note that once the whole talks process moved from the procedural to the substantive, and the various parties set forth their positions, the width of the divide between them only became more apparent. The discovery of unexpected areas of common ground that one might have wished, if not hoped for, did not occur.
Still, scoping out the breadth of a disagreement, finding out which positions a party really holds to and which may be negotiable, can be valuable.
A next phase of talks is to be held in the new year, after a new Irish government has been established (Nov. 25 is election day) and has met with its British counterpart some time after mid-December.
The same 'strands' approach will be taken as has been the case so far; that is, talks are to occur among constitutional parties in Northern Ireland (those seeking unification with the south, and those seeking to retain the link to Britain), between the north and south within Ireland, and between Dublin and London. And as is always the case in these situations, the informal contacts - quick conferences in the corridors - are at least as important as the formal ones.
Meanwhile, it is clearer than ever that a unilateral British military pullout from Northern Ireland would precipitate a civil war, and the Dublin government has every bit as much interest as London - indeed, more so - in preventing that.
Skeptics may well be right that the current negotiations have only a small chance of reaching a genuine political settlement to the Northern Ireland issue. But realists would have to counter that there is no chance of a settlement without such talks.
Tolerating Atrocity
SERBIA'S brutal "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia has been going on since May. The barbarity of the crimes has been known in every world capital since June. But only recently has the heinous nature of the acts been fully understood.
Journalists in Bosnia have persistently found savagery beyond the telling. They have shown that early ethnic cleansing was a form of "elitocide" - killing off the educated, thoughtful Muslims who could have led a resistance. Former US Secretary of State George Shultz was filled with "a sense of fury" when reading of systematic internment and rapes of girls and women in Bosnia.
Decent people find it hard to live with such atrocity. As Mr. Shultz put it, "When forces of intolerance go wild, you get a result that is intolerable."
Yet so far the West has tolerated the wildness. Intervention was ruled out in favor of the joint United Nations-European Community talks in Geneva. But Western leaders have lost faith in them. Last week, US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger indicated this by naming war criminals from the former Yugoslavia, including Serb President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadizc.
Mr. Eagleburger seeks enforcement of the "no fly" zone over Bosnia. This made for tough talk and high drama - especially after UN mediator Cyrus Vance disagreed with the no-fly zone enforcement. But step away from the headlines, and what has actually happened? The answer: Little. All the essential problems in Bosnia remain. Indeed, they are worse. Facts on the ground have changed since the summer. Serbs are no longer trying to take 70 percent of Bosnia: They now have it. Mr. Milosevic also now knows the West won't act.
The enormity of "ethnic cleansing" has sunk in, but doing something about it has now become more complicated. Delay has cost. Reiterating the decree of a no-fly zone and shooting down a few planes will do little. Even lifting the arms embargo to let Muslims defend themselves is late. Nor can the West afford to act just to seem engaged, since even a minor scrape could give either side a pretext for starting something bigger.
Western action now will require a more serious effort. Doing nothing out of concern that the cost might be great has ensured that the cost will be great. Unchecked, ethnic cleansing is a mentality of systematic hatred more dangerous by far than found among, say, Somalia's war lords. It is a dynamic that could spread east, beyond Yugoslavia; it already has adherents in Russia.
The question isn't, What is the cost? The question is, Can the West deal with aggressive evil?
IBM in Perspective
IBM may be down, but it's not out. The computermaker still produces and sells more than all other US high-tech firms put together. Some of its products are doing well, its staff still includes many brilliant engineers, and its financial resources are considerable. But, like other giants of American industry, IBM may have lost its ability to dominate a whole field of enterprise.
Critics point out that the company once prided itself on holding a top position in all facets of the computer market. Its chief competitors were thought to be overseas, especially in Japan. But, in the end, it was smaller companies in the United States - like Intel, Sun Systems, and Microsoft - that carved out profitable niches and nudged "Big Blue" to the periphery.
In the personal computer realm, particularly, IBM lagged. The company's biggest profits had always been in large, mainframe machines, and it continued to push those products even as the market shifted toward desktop units that were both more agile than and as powerful as the larger computers. IBM is hustling to catch up now, and its PC line includes some popular items. The road ahead, however, will be difficult.
The degree of difficulty was shown by IBM's announcements last week - possibly its first-ever forced layoffs, a $1 billion reduction in research, a 1992 profit picture that shocked investors.
IBM executives talk of a devolution of power within the corporation, with pieces of the business, like the PC branch, gaining independence. But the greatest need may be an honest assessment of the firm's greatest strengths and a determination to build on those, letting other product lines fall away.
When companies like IBM - or General Motors, or Sears - are shaken, the whole country feels a jolt. Concerns about industrial decline are rekindled. It's worth remembering that it has happened before, when the railroads, of Big Steel, collapsed.
Lots of people who thought their working lives were secure are put out of work. A still-vigorous and competitive US high-tech sector will absorb some of them, but there's no doubt IBM's dark news gives Bill Clinton's promise to "grow the economy" even more urgency.
No Time For Hate Conspiracies
CONCERN about US racism is renewed by the political campaign of David Duke and the nod it gives to white racial anger.
But what about new forms of black racism?
Black anger is understandable. But racism, and the discontent it spawns, is wrong in every form.
That's why New York City College President Bernard Harleston is right to remove Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr. as head of the African-American Studies Department. Dr. Jeffries would still teach.
A conspiracy theorist, Jeffries plays something of the intellectual harlequin to his classes (blacks only, please) and the public. His ideas, which as department head he sanctions as 'academic freedom,' run from kooky to dangerous: As "sun people" blacks are superior to "ice people" (guess who) because of a chemical in the skin named melanin missing in whites. Or, that AIDS was put in Africa by whites in the World Health Organization to attempt genocide. And this is the tame stuff.
While it's true, as the white male Shakespeare said, that "there are more things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - a factual basis for Jeffries's ideas is probably not among them. Yet sadly many blacks - 40 percent in a Harlem poll - believe this conspiracy theory.
Jeffries, like grandstander Al Sharpton, has a following. But most New Yorkers are uncomfortable with Jeffries's message. Last summer he went too far. In an anti-Semitic public speech he conjured up a movie industry conspiracy against blacks planned "by people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani" that Gov. Mario Cuomo denounced.
No faculty would allow David Duke to teach the thinking that made him a Grand Wizard; CCNY must discipline Jeffries. By demoting him, Dr. Harleston (himself black) can send a needed message that there are moral and academic standards.
Now is a time for blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, and others to respect diversity. No nation has ever done so. It can only work by seeing that all folks under the sun are brothers and sisters.
Gerrymander Wars
A HANDFUL of people seated before computer screens are changing the face of American politics.
They are engaged in outlining new congressional districts in 43 states to reflect population shifts recorded by the 1990 census. Most of these states require new district lines because they gained or lost seats in the House of Representatives.
Sophisticated computer programs facilitate drawing with precision district borders that satisfy the Supreme Court's 'one man, one vote' standard and also the mandate under the Voting Rights Act to create black- or Hispanic-majority districts. Within these parameters, however, the line drawers have a lot of leeway. Thus, in many states political battles are being waged over which party controls the computers.
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GATT: WHO SAYS BUSH IS A LAME DUCK?
The transition from George Bush to Bill Clinton has temporarily given the U.S. powerful leverage to move the long-stalled Uruguay Round of trade talks ahead. Now relatively free from domestic lobbying pressures, President Bush has turned his lame-duck status to advantage by breaking the deadlock with the European Community over farm subsidies. That clears the way to resume serious bargaining at Geneva under the 108-nation General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade on the full range of global trade issues, from textile quotas to protecting patents.
Until Jan. 20, President Bush has more political leeway to make tough trade-offs among the demands of competing U.S. economic sectors than incoming President Clinton is likely to have. But Bush certainly will insist that key trading partners dismantle long-standing trade barriers. Tokyo, for one, can't be allowed to block rice imports while it benefits from open global markets for its huge exports of cars and electronic goods. And India and Brazil can't rip off U.S. pharmaceutical patents on the pretense that economic under-development gives them the right to do so.
The GATT negotiations can lift the global economy out of the doldrums by unleashing a vast surge of new trade. More than that, the bargaining is a chance for each country to unshackle its productive powers by getting rid of protections and subsidies that hobble domestic producers. President Bush, in what could be one of his greatest achievements, has led the way.
HOW TO SPREAD THE GOSPEL OF QUALITY
Big U.S. corporations on the front lines of the global economy have taken to heart the principle that success begins with high quality, to the advantage of consumers and workers alike. Defect rates on U.S.-built cars are barely distinguishable from those of their Japanese counterparts, and such companies as Xerox and Motorola have become case studies in how quality drives corporate performance.
But there still are plenty of medium - to smaller-size U.S. companies to enlist in the effort. And because quality practices know no borders, the lessons these companies learn can be applied around the world<O_>(page-64)<O/>.
A lot is at stake. Most new jobs in the U.S., Asia, and Europe are created by smaller companies. In America, they account for one-half of exports. And big manufacturers often rely on smaller suppliers for more than half the value of finished products.
Recognizing this, bigger companies, most notably in autos and electronics, have set stringent quality standards for suppliers. More important, Detroit's carmakers and other companies are working with suppliers to demonstrate how to achieve higher quality. That still leaves many smaller companies without guidance, particularly if they can't afford consultants' fees.
Here, then, is an area where government and nonprofit institutions can play a key role. In the U.S., 16 states have initiated their own versions of the Commerce Dept.'s prestigious Baldrige award to provide guideposts to upgrading quality. The Minnesota Council for Quality also provides grants to local chambers of commerce for education. The non-profit American Productivity & Quality Center disseminates information that lets companies compare their procedures with the best in various fields through benchmarking.
These programs deserve support. Another initiative long advocated by BUSINESS WEEK, a nationwide network of technology-extension services offered through federal research laboratories or community colleges, would also help. The skills and the information to significantly enhance the international competitiveness of medium and smaller companies already exist. A small investment in spreading knowledge would pay big dividends.
WESTINGHOUSE'S DO-LITTLE BOARD
Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s board of directors provides yet another example of failed corporate governance. Even though the company was teetering on the brink of financial disaster, it was investor pressure - not the board - that moved CEO Paul E. Lego to act <O_>(page-26)<O/>. The activist institutional investors that began agitating this summer can take heart that Lego finally moved. Getting action at other recent activist targets, such as GM and Sears Roebuck, took years.
Interestingly, Westinghouse's diversified nature made it more vulnerable to activist shareholders because its disparate businesses lend themselves to a fire sale. The activists demanded an easy remedy, and the market applauded, pushing up the company's stock by 24% on the day of the restructuring announcement - despite a dividend cut.
But a more important point is involved. Westinghouse shows just how dysfunctional corporate boards can be - particularly at diversified companies. No one believes, anymore, that a professional manager can manage any kind of business. If making a conglomerate work takes exceptional management, it takes exceptional directors, too. Yet despite the need for greater vigilance caused by problems in many of Westinghouse's diverse businesses, the company's board did little. The company's finances deteriorated, its market performance declined, and its investors grew angry, but its directors didn't rise to the challenge. What made Westinghouse directors think they could be effective monitors of management at a troubled, diversified company without an extra effort? Notes Stanford law professor Joseph A. Grundfest: "Where you find conglomerates, you often find a dysfunctional governance process."
If the board wants to burnish its tarnished reputation, it should enact many of the reforms activists seek, notably creation of a nomination panel to replace departed directors.
CHANNELING BIG STORES' AWESOME CLOUT
With enormous marketplace power, a small circle of merchants is determining more and more how consumer products are made and sold in the U.S. They're telling even the mightiest of manufacturers what goods to make, in what colors and sizes, how much to ship, and when. They are forcing suppliers to rethink whom they sell to, how they price and promote products, and how they structure their own organizations<O_>(page-40)<O/>.
A vast consolidation in U.S. retailing has produced giant 'power retailers' that use sophisticated inventory management, finely tuned selections, and, above all, competitive pricing to crowd out weaker players and attract more of the shopper's dollar. The top tier of superpowers includes Kmart, Target, Toys 'R' Us, Home Depot, Circuit City, Dillard, and a few others. Leading the pack, of course, is Wal-Mart Stores. The nation's No.1 retailer is expected to grow 25% this year, to some $55 billion in sales, at a time when retailers as a whole will be lucky to grow 4%.
The increasing influence of these retailers has obvious benefits for consumers. For starters, the stores are continually wringing excess costs out of the U.S. distribution system while squeezing price concessions out of suppliers. Many shun the constant promotions, coupons, and 'sales' that introduce big inefficiencies. Much of the savings gets passed along to consumers in the form of lower prices. And because these retailers use sophisticated information technology to keep close tabs on what's selling and what's not, consumers are likelier to find what they want in the stores.
The risk is that small manufacturers, who lack the resources or savvy to cope with the inherent bias toward large manufacturers, won't be able to compete. Innovation and risk-taking could also be diminished. Those dangers must be monitored vigilantly by federal and state antitrust authorities. But pressure from the power retailers also benefits manufacturers by forcing them to become leaner and more nimble themselves. They're becoming more competitive with each other - and with overseas rivals. Some have wrested U.S. markets away from foreign manufacturers by cutting costs or reducing cycle time, and some have even been able to penetrate overseas markets, thanks to their new efficiency.
SEASONED ADVISERS CAN TAKE CLINTON ONLY SO FAR
In selecting leaders of his economic team, President-elect Bill Clinton seems to be off to a good start at filling the most important jobs in his Administration. His early choices, short on fresh faces and long on Capitol Hill experience, are safe, intended to convey a commitment to competence and moderation rather than innovation<O_>(page-24)<O/>.
Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.) built a solid reputation as a student of the economic impact of government policy during his six years as Senate Finance Committee chairman and his earlier tenure as Joint Economic Committee chair-man. His passion is tilting the tax code to promote savings and investment, which should sit well with the Clintonites.
Representative Leon E. Panetta (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, would run the Office of Management & Budget with a fervor for cutting the deficit. The plan to nominate him is a welcome signal that Clinton is serious about cutting the deficit in half during his first term.
Others who seem headed for senior jobs - investment bankers Robert E. Rubin and Roger C. Altman, and former Congressional Budget Office Director Alice M. Rivlin - are also familiar with the levers of power in the capital.
In his desire to staff up with folks who know how to get things done in Washington, however, Clinton could overload his Administration with the sort of insiders who have given Washington a bad name. Experience is a virtue - but only to a point. We also hope to see some of those bright faces from state governments, business, and the universities that Clinton told us he was going to bring to the capital.
HONG KONG NEEDS A QUICK, QUIET SETTLEMENT
To an outsider, the dispute between Hong Kong and China seems like a tempest in a teapot. After all, the argument is about increasing the number of directly elected seats on the Crown Colony's legislative council - from 20 to perhaps 40 out of 60. By no means does this amount to representative government, as the Chinese fear. Yet Beijing's stern warnings to desist from the plan have upset the Hong Kong business community, triggering gyrations in the stock market <O_>(page-16)<O/>.
The dispute has been inflamed by two issues: Governor Chris Patten went public with the plan apparently without much consultation with the Chinese. This mortified Beijing, which felt it had lost face. Second, the Politburo is afraid that any change could quickly spread to South China, whose booming economy is directly linked to Hong Kong's.
It's easy to be cynical about the British timing. After all, they have been ruling Hong Kong for 150 years, so why the sudden interest in democracy? But it is because of the British that Hong Kong enjoys fundamental rights that don't exist in China, such as the rule of law and civil liberties. Preservation of these rights, they say, is the motive for making changes before the 1995 elections - the last Hong Kong will hold before China takes over in 1997.
There is plenty of common ground for resolving the dispute quietly, without China losing face. Any backsliding by Beijing could deter the foreign investment so crucial to the Chinese boom. For Washington, the proper response is to support bilateral talks on electoral reform. But the U.S. should also make it clear that China must move toward democracy and human-rights guarantees in both Hong Kong and China. If Beijing is unwilling to accept reform, pressure is likely to build in Congress to deny it most-favored-nation status. That would hurt both China and Hong Kong. The two sides should work things out - pronto.
THE MARKETS ARE APPLAUDING - SO FAR
Presidential elections take place every four years, but the financial markets vote every day. And because participants vote with their money, their message is always worth pondering. As BUSINESS WEEK's editors and writers detail in the 1993 Investment Outlook, investors like what they're hearing from Bill Clinton<O_>(page-40)<O/>.
They like the focus on economic growth and his attentiveness to the role that private investment plays in financing that growth. They like the emphasis on getting a long-term plan to reduce the budget deficit. And they like the investor-friendly leadership of his economic team.
Keeping the confidence of the markets is critical. If the bond market senses that Clinton is backpedaling on deficit reduction, investors will bolt - and interest rates will jump. That would raise the cost of capital and choke off the economic growth this country so desperately needs.
There are other areas where the market may turn on Clinton. The President-elect is already committed to boosting taxes on very high-income individuals. That is palatable to the markets as a method of deficit reduction but will be repudiated if it becomes the first step in a Democratic plan for a major redistribution of income.
<#FROWN:B11\>
STEPHANIE SALTER
Ted Kennedy: Product of the '70s
THE LAST thing I want is for anybody to feel sorry for Teddy Kennedy. So that is not what this is about. As far as I'm concerned all of those Kennedy boys - dead or alive - have wreaked more personal havoc than they'll ever pay for.
But this ratty new book, 'The Senator: My Ten Years With Ted Kennedy,' is lower than low. Written by a former aide to the senator from Massachusetts, one Richard E. Burke, the book rankles me not because of the dirt it dishes on Edward M. - allegations of cocaine, hot tubs, bimbos - but because of the period of time it covers: 1971-1981.
Come on, Burke, play fair.
That was The Seventies, thus far the nadir in post-war U.S. history. You could have followed millions of adult Americans around during that same period and come up with a slimy, embarrassing book about each of them.
For many, the '70s was the decade of "Whatever turns you on." Situation ethics of the personal persuasion reigned supreme. The unofficial national credo was, "If it feels good - do it," and the anthem should have been, "Call Me Irresponsible."
The '70s was before Mothers Against Drunk Driving slapped a whole nation in the face and told it to grow up about its drinking. Herpes was something only medical students heard about, and AIDS was unknown and unimagined.
THERE WAS a recession for part of the '70s, but it did not carry with it legions of homeless and unemployed as we have now. Consequently, whatever money you had was for spending. And we Baby Boomers - deep into our I'm-gonna-live-forever 20s - spent it.
In the '70s that I remember, a lot of adult Americans behaved pretty badly. Oh, not all of them, I know (I heard Marilyn Quayle's speech at the Republican Convention, too), but more than ever before.
Granted, I spent the first half of the '70s in the fast-lane in New York, New York, living on the lower West Side, allegedly working in Midtown and drinking Scotch all over. But I kept in touch with high school and college friends from the Midwest; they were not at Marilyn Quayle's house swilling RC Cola and discussing creationism.
As much as I hate it that Ronald Reagan ever got his hands on the presidency of the United States, I'm not surprised. The '70s were at once wild but depressing - not of a Weimar Republic caliber, but wild and depressing nonetheless. They were fertile ground for the emergence of a 'leader' who talked a great game of old-fashioned American values - no matter how lame his actual follow-through.
IN MANY WAYS, that wild-but-depressing character is best symbolized for me by the grotesque fashions of the '70s, especially men's fashions:
Helmets of hair with mutton-chops or skinny, earlobe-length sideburns; bib-like wide ties with polyester suits the color of ice cream; white shoes and matching belts; platform shoes (yes, for men); florid polyester Nik-Nik shirts; hip-hugging, bell-bottom trousers; shag haircuts.
Even sex, of which there was no shortage during the '70s, was sort of wild but depressing. When Jimmy Carter confessed to Playboy that he felt bad because he had lust in his heart for women other than Rosalynn, a lot of people thought he was a schmoe.
Big deal, they said; he looks and dreams. Why not do?
I remember, in particular, a personable woman, about my age, with whom I worked in New York. Before she was 25 she was semi-responsible for the break-up of two marriages and very nearly a third.
"I think marriage sucks," she said one night, after the requisite six Dewars and waters. "Why should I respect a man's marriage vows when he doesn't?"
"Why indeed?" I probably said. My own observations had led me to a similar cynicism, and I had not yet grasped the feminist truth that, whatever you do to one of your sisters, you do to yourself.
No, the '70s was not America at its best. (Not that this decade is much better.)
And when I think about it, the words from a song in a minor Broadway musical, 'Salvation,' come to mind. Written in late 1969 by Peter Link and C.C. Courtney, it's called, 'Let's Get Lost in Now.'
WITH ITS WILD-but-depressing refrain - "So let's make love and maybe tomorrow, if we still feel the same, we can do it again" - it foreshadowed a mentality that I believe drove the '70s. Here's the best/worst part:
Time is a butcher, killing everything in sight.
He ain't lookin' at you, but in a minute he might.
So, come on, pretty baby, drive tomorrow from your head;
'cause in the long run, you know, we're all dead.
All I'm saying is, from 1971 to 1981, Teddy did not act alone.
IAN SHOALES
The song of Muzak
AN OAKLAND rapper named Tupac Shakur was recently attacked by Dan Quayle, who believed that the killer of a Texas policeman had been listening to Mr. Shakur's '2Pacalypse Now,' before he pulled the trigger. Mr. Quayle, apparently, was mistaken.
The killer, in fact, had been listening to a rapper named Gangster Nip. Despite having been listened to by a murderer, Mr. Nip remains at large.
No wonder the country's going to hell in a handcart.
Inspired by Dan Quayle and by Bill Clinton's attack on Sister Souljah, I've been thinking of making a citizen's arrest of Debby Boone for the traffic accident she caused 12 years ago.
I was driving along, minding my own business, when 'You Light Up My Life' came on the radio. I couldn't help myself. Something snapped. I began punching the dashboard with my fist, causing me to veer into a parked car.
Who's to blame if not Debby Boone? Is there a statute of limitations on a provocation like that?
We used to believe that the person who did the crime was also guilty of it, but the times they are a'changing.
IT'S JUST LIKE when Dylan went electric. Sure, it was upsetting to the folk purists among us, but it was a shot in the arm to the electric guitar industry. That meant jobs, folks, American jobs.
And if the Republicans and Democrats are so concerned about musical morality and job creation, why did the Democrats choose for their theme a song by Fleetwood Mac, an English band?
Why did the GOP choose for their theme a song from a musical based on 'La Cage aux Folles,' a French movie about a gay couple? Is there a bipartisan conspiracy going on to undermine America's precious musical heritage?
It's a complicated issue. Music itself is problematic. On the one hand, we believe that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. Muzak in the mall puts us in the mood to shop. KOIT in the workspace makes us more productive.
ON THE OTHER hand, music awakens savage impulses. Didn't the waltz scandalize Europe? Didn't rock 'n' roll lead to juvenile delinquency and bad Elvis movies?
And if response to music is a learned behavior, how are musical prototypes created?
Theme music for westerns, for example, always seem to employ a full orchestra, heavy on the French horns. What do French horns have to do with cowboys? Try tootling a French horn next time you lasso a dogie.
Western fans may also have noticed that cowboys around camp-fires play the exact same harmonica songs as movie convicts on death row. What would Dan Quayle make of that?
Movie music is frequently used as a kind of shorthand. Whenever we hear those 'wokka wokka' guitars, we know that Shaft is in town. If we hear a 'rinky-tinky-tin-tin' figure, we can be certain we're close to Chinatown. Of course this is racist. We never hear Debby Boone when we have establishing shots of white suburbia, now do we?
The process is mysterious.
WHY IS IT when we hear two notes on a cello we know immediately there's a shark in the water?
Why do shrieking violins make us want to get out of the shower?
"Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum" means it's time to circle the wagons. A wailing saxophone means it's time for a beer. And the theme from Perry Mason always means it's time for Perry Mason.
Should we be reassured or frightened by this? Or both? If it takes me back, for example, to hear Fever Tree do 'San Francisco Girls,' the nostalgia is offset by the terrifying fact that I had once liked this song in the first place.
In this political year, here are some other musical questions to ponder:
Who do we hold responsible for the lambada?
Why wasn't 'Cop Rock' a TV hit?
Why is a tango sexy and a polka square?
Why do armies always march?
Why don't they waltz to war?
WHEN A PRIMITIVE ancestor first banged on a hollow log with a mastodon femur, did it shock a Cro-Magnon traditionalist who felt that femurs should only be banged on rocks?
Finally, if somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly, why the hell can't I? Personally, I still blame Debby Boone.
KAREN O'LEARY
Perot's quiet running mate
JAMES STOCKDALE, chosen by H. Ross Perot as his candidate for the vice presidency, has lived since 1981 the quiet life of a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Hardly a conventional politician, he grants few interviews. His articles and speeches address public virtue, personal heroism and moral leadership, as well as stoic philosophy and endurance in the face of adversity.
These are subjects he came to know only too well when, as a Navy fighter pilot, he spent 7 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. If he had yielded to torture, he might have seriously damaged U.S. credibility.
Stockdale had information that could have undermined America's justification for escalating the Vietnam conflict.
As it was, his courage, personal philosophy, and physical stamina empowered him to stand up to torture and to lead his fellow POW's to do the same.
And if Stockdale's wife, Sybil Bailey Stockdale, had not recognized a covert message in one of his letters, torture of POW's might have remained undetected by the U.S. government or the American people.
Galvanized by the knowledge of her husband's suffering, she launched a major effort to bring a halt to the abuse of all POWs.
A YEAR BEFORE Stockdale was captured, he had been commander of the air squadron that was covering the Maddox, an American destroyer, on the night it was supposedly attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The alleged attack on the Maddox by Vietnamese PT boats was used to justify U.S. retaliation and became the pretext for escalating the war dramatically.
However, Stockdale knew that there had been no PT boats close enough to attack.
Rather, he says the incident was due to confusion caused by stormy weather, an inexperienced Maddox crew and misinterpretation of an intercepted Vietcong radio message.
He informed Washington, but the United States went to war anyway and continued to maintain that the Maddox had been attacked.
Stockdale was caught in the middle: He knew the truth, but did not want to give the North Vietnamese a valuable propaganda card to play.
When he refused to divulge information to his captors, he was put in hand and leg irons for periods of torture that lasted up to three days.
For eight agonizing months, Sybil Stockdale didn't know if her husband was dead or alive. His first letter brought both relief and anguish, as she picked up a covert reference to torture: "One thinks of Vietnam as a tropical country ... but there's cold and darkness, even at noon."
She recognized the reference to Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon,' a book that chronicled Soviet abuse of prisoners. She concluded that her husband and fellow POWs were being tortured.
She then developed an elaborate code for communicating with Stockdale in the prison camp. In one encoded letter, he sent disheartening information that his wife translated as: "Experts in torture.
<#FROWN:B13\>
Political conventions are devoid of, disconnected from, reality
Charley Reese
OF THE SENTINEL STAFF
One word describes the Democrat and Republican national conventions: disconnected.
Both conventions were so surrealist, so disconnected from the reality of American life, that the Comedy Channel convention coverage seemed normal. After all, what were 15,000 journalists doing at non-news events - two pre-planned, pre-programmed charades designed for television in which every event and every word spoken was pre-planned, pre-written, pre-edited and predictable?
The anchors, commentators and Rolodex experts were all reduced to banal chitchat - pretty expensive chitchat. As an aside, the spectacle of a horde of journalists on expense accounts staring at a Disney-like animation show reminds one that perhaps the nation's news executives have a lot in common with General Motors executives.
Now I know what it was like to wake up and brush your teeth in Hiroshima in the summer of 1945. I know what it was like to be playing bridge on the Titanic, to be sleeping off a hangover at Pearl Harbor in 1941. To hear the political rhetoric, one would think America was in great shape - some minor problems with recalcitrant Democrats or some minor problems resulting from uncaring Republicans, but nothing really to worry about.
One of two things is occurring, and neither is reassuring. Either the major candidates are unaware of the economic peril this nation is facing or they are deliberately misleading the American people until one of them is elected.
I despise the greedy Wall Street types who amassed so many millions of dollars engineering job-destroying mergers and acquisitions. At the same time, however, I recognize that these parasites are smart when it comes to finances and money. I'm beginning to think the explanation for the orgy of greed in the late 1980s was that these rats knew the nation's economic ship was going to founder and decided to grab some provisions for their personal life-boats while there was still time.
The present situation - an accumulated $4 trillion debt, an annual interest cost of $200 billion or so, an annual deficit pushing $400 billion, a continuing loss of jobs, and not a hint of any political courage or economic understanding in either party portends a dark future. We are on the eve of what Arnold Toynbee called "a time of troubles."
But just as the politicians are avoiding the problem, so also are they avoiding the solution, part of which is a government that works. Neither the legislative nor the executive branch of the federal government works. They are inefficient on a mind-boggling scale and seem to lack the will to correct even the most obvious defects in the process.
It's hard for me to believe that we as a nation have somehow become genetically incompetent to govern ourselves. After all, the same people who do not seem able to make government work in a competent manner nevertheless show a great deal of ability in terms of improving their own personal financial status.
The American people, as a whole, have been sold down the river. They have become largely a propertyless proletariat, dependent on paychecks for survival, but paid in a currency others are free to inflate. That means the wage-earner can work to the point of exhaustion and never get ahead. The average American has been rendered economically impotent. He has no control over the businesses he works for and he has no control over the value of the money in which he is paid for his labor.
Thus the average American today is worse off, really, than a slave. At least in the slave's case, the owner had a selfish interest in keeping the slave healthy enough to work.
Today, however, the wage-earner is as expendable to the capitalist as any other piece of equipment.
Unless Americans relearn the art of thinking, they don't have much of a future.
It's not OK to do whatever you want
Cal Thomas
LOS ANGELES TIMES SYNDICATE
Mary Fisher, the woman with AIDS whose eloquent, compassionate and compelling address to the Republican National Convention silenced the delegates even more completely than the invocations and benedictions, left something out of her speech.
She forgot to mention the role her ex-husband played in her infection. She failed to use her moment in the sun to address men who use intravenous drugs and risk acquiring infectious diseases they then pass on to their wives.
Fisher sought to identify with all persons who have AIDS, as if the circumstances which led to her infection were common. She may be the medical equivalent of everyone with AIDS, but the source of her infection was different from most. She contracted it from her husband who used intravenous drugs.
Fisher is part of a tiny minority - women infected by their husbands during marital intercourse. But her ex-husband is part of a large majority, those who acquired the disease because of personal behavior that could have been avoided.
In her speech to the Houston Republicans, Fisher should have addressed men who use drugs or those who commit adultery, and who get AIDS and other venereal diseases that they pass along to their unsuspecting wives. Married women have a fundamental right to avoid being put at risk of disease and death by their mates.
If a married man is going to cheat on his wife or abuse drugs, the very least he should do is tell her so she can protect herself. Why aren't women and editorial writers speaking out on this?
The attempt by Mary Fisher to link her AIDS to all other AIDS carriers is disingenuous and part of the politicization of a disease that is handled differently from all others. It is also part of an advocacy program led by the gay rights lobby and their fellow travelers in the press whose condemnation is reserved only for those who oppose their attempts to impose immorality on a reluctant country.
Appearing on CNN's Sonya Live program the day after her speech, Mary Fisher said that "people should be able to do whatever they want." Sonya Friedman should have noted that it is precisely because Fisher's ex-husband did what he wanted - abused drugs - that Fisher now has AIDS. Why do some say it is hateful to state this fact?
When a nation fails to set boundaries for acceptable behavior, people believe there are none and do whatever they want. Why shouldn't Woody Allen be surprised at the nearly universal condemnation he has received for his acknowledged affair with the adopted daughter of his lover, Mia Farrow? Time magazine quoted Allen as saying he didn't feel it was a moral dilemma to have an affair with Farrow's child. If he thinks having sex with Farrow is OK, who's to say it is out of bounds to have sex with her daughter? Only those who wish to impose their morality on him, right?
If there are no rules for such things, no objective standard to which people can appeal for right and honorable and decent behavior, then Allen can say he was just doing what he wanted.
It is the same with the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson. The London tabloids published pictures of a topless Ferguson cavorting with a man not her husband while her children watched. Hey, why not? They were just doing what they wanted, and to say that there is anything wrong with this is to summon people to hate and fear.
Give the adulterers and incest practitioners time to get organized. As soon as they become big enough or loud enough, we can expect to hear appeals from them for 'tolerance' and condemnation of those who say that what they are doing is wrong.
"Woe to those who call evil good, and good, evil," says America's most banned and least consulted book. There are growing numbers who are saying and doing precisely that, and the woe they, and we, are feeling is the price we pay.
Your candidates won't fight for your economic independence
Charley Reese
OF THE SENTINEL STAFF
I was sitting in a mall recently, waiting for a relative to finish shopping, and out of 200 to 300 faces, I saw only one - that of a young person - that reflected any happiness or joy. The others were glum, worried or simmering with hostility.
Why is this? I invite you to conduct your own survey. Observe a crowd and note how many happy faces you see. If indeed we are the best country on Earth, the freest and most prosperous, there ought to be a lot of happy and content faces in every crowd. Why aren't there?
Obviously, regardless of what the politicians and the institutional poohbahs say, Americans as a whole are worried of dissatisfied or both.
Neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush is going to discuss the really important matters because they are both establishment candidates. But here is the nut of the problem.
Our goal as a nation should be, to the greatest and widest extent possible, to be a nation of people who are economically independent, which is to say owners of property - homes, farms and businesses.
Mortgage holders are not owners of property. What they own is a debt. Usually these days, if it's a home mortgage, that debt is three times larger than the just value of the property.
To build a nation of economically independent property owners should be our goal for the following reasons: (1) political rights are meaningless to the economically dependent; (2) property owners have a vested interest in stability, which means good government; and (3) economically independent property owners can afford to act on principles, whereas the desperate must always put survival first.
It's clear from the writings of early Americans that it was their intention that America would in fact be a nation of economically independent property owners.
People, however, who lust for power over their fellow men also recognize that the greatest barrier to their seizure of power is a population of economically independent citizens. Thus, those people do everything they can to prevent Americans from becoming economically independent and to bankrupt those who are.
It follows then, if we had honest political leaders, they would be discussing this basic issue: What helps Americans become economically independent and what forces them into economic dependency?
Instead they argue generalities - family values, liberal vs. conservative, education, abortion, TV characters and other trivia - anything in order to avoid addressing the main issues.
The main methods of depriving people of their property or preventing them from acquiring any are: taxes, usury, inflated currency and establishment of monopolies.
Do you hear any of the candidates discussing these subjects? They only mention taxes, and that only in the sense of demagoguing some minor cosmetic change. They won't open their mouths on the subject of usurious interest rates, the corrupt monetary system or the ever-growing concentration of business and industry into fewer and fewer hands.
This is the reason why in the past it never made any real difference whether the man in the White House was a Democrat or a Republican, a so-called liberal or a so-called conservative. It is the reason why it won't make any difference whether you elect Bill Clinton or George Bush. Neither one of them will stop the monopolization and internationalization of business and industry. Neither one will even talk about usury and bringing it under control. Neither one will even mention the monetary system, which robs both the active and retired worker through inflation. Neither one will seriously consider lifting the tax burden and the regulatory burden, which crush people's attempts to build successful businesses.
Watch and see for yourself.
Not all wives like their mates the way Barbara likes George
Mike Royko
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
After listening to Barbara Bush talk about her husband, I asked the blonde: "What would you say about me?"
"What do you mean?" she said.
"Well, Barbara Bush just publicly stated that her husband is, and I quote: 'The strongest, the most decent, the most caring, the wisest and, yes, the healthiest man I know.'"
<#FROWN:B14\>
Bush's Regulations: The Unkindest Cut
James J. Kilpatrick
Washington
These are hard times for George Bush. Everybody is picking on our kindly Caesar, and the most unkindest cuts of all are coming from such a right-wing Brutus as the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
The conservative think tank has hung around his neck the scornful label of "the regulation president."
This is a bum rap but an understandable one. The immemorial political custom is that a sitting president gets thorns when things go bad and bouquets when things go well, and generally he deserves neither one.
Herbert Hoover will be forever remembered for the Hoover Depression, but the poor fellow was as blameless as Little Orphan Annie.
In the same fashion, Bush bears some of the responsibility -but only some of it -for the increase in regulatory activity on his watch. On the surface, the figures are sobering.
The Federal Register, which records all federal proposals for regulatory measures, ran to 53,376 pages in Reagan's last year in the White House. In 1991, under Bush, the Register carried 67,716 pages.
Under Reagan, the government hired 104,360 persons in 53 regulatory agencies. Under Bush the figure has grown to 124,994.
In 1988, spending on regulatory programs amounted to $9.5 billion. Last year the same agencies spent $11.2 billion, and the data are reckoned in constant dollars that give account to inflation.
These figures from the Heritage Foundation are substantially confirmed in analyses from the Center for the Study of American Business in St. Louis.
In May the center predicted that regulatory spending will reach $14 billion in 1993, with 126,000 workers engaged in administering rules and regulations.
A slowdown, says Heritage, "is desperately needed."
Not many persons, and certainly not many persons in the business community, would disagree with that assertion. Bush imposed a moratorium last January on new regulations, and it looks as if the regulatory budget for 1993 will show a tiny decline.
Meanwhile, Vice President Dan Quayle is leading the administration's charge against regulations that damage the competitive position of American industry. This helps.
To what extent is Bush personally to blame for the burgeoning budget? The Heritage critics single out two laws for particular attack -the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Clean Air Act. Bush signed the former in July, 1990, and the latter the following November.
This is what gets overlooked. The disabilities bill soared through the Senate in September, 1989, on a vote of 76-8. Eight months later it passed in the House 403-20.
The conference report cleared the Senate 91-6, the House 377-26. Is Bush alone to bear the blame for what this law will cost?
Consider the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. The bill cleared the Senate in April 89-11. It passed the House in May 401-21. In October the conference report won approval 401-25 in the House, 89-10 in the Senate.
What the record does not show is that Bush worked doggedly for three months before the first Senate vote to pull some of the sharpest teeth out of the bill. Minority leader Bob Dole threatened a filibuster. Bush threatened a veto.
In its final form the bill imposed heavy new burdens, but it could have been much worse.
The Heritage critics acknowledge that "the precise cost of regulation is extremely difficult to determine." Having said that, they proceed to give us some figures anyhow.
Different scholars place the direct costs of regulation on the economy between $636 and $857 billion a year. After subtracting benefits, the net cost supposedly comes to $364 to $538 billion.
Such figures are mostly moon-beam conjectures. Given a sharp pencil and a large tablet, even a sophomore economist could draw up a plausible tally.
Some expenses under the disabilities act will be clearly identifiable: It costs money to build a ramp for wheelchairs. To meet clean air standards, expensive equipment will be required.
Benefits are not so easily quantified, but they should not be minimized. Fair treatment of 43 million disabled Americans is a desirable goal to go for.
My own feeling is that marginal improvements under the Clean Air Act probably will cost more than they're worth, but it's a close call.
Anyhow, my point is that George Bush didn't add to the regulatory burden all by himself. Congress voted overwhelmingly for these programs. It's the guy in the kitchen who takes the heat.
Why the GOP is Ignoring 'Desert Storm'
Art Buchwald
Washington
Last year the wise people in Washington predicted that Desert Storm would be the centerpiece of the Bush political campaign. The president could not miss with all the film of our boys striking a blow for freedom.
You can read George Bush's lips from here to California, and not one word has been uttered about the war.
"Why," some may ask, "has Desert Storm become a bigger secret in Washington than Deep Throat?" The answer is that while it was the greatest show we've had on television in ages, there was more to the Gulf War than met the eye.
Capablanca was assigned eight months ago to put together an entire "Desert Storm Bush" campaign. He was told to spend all the money he wanted as long as he showed yellow ribbons hanging on old oak trees.
But although he is ready, he just can't get the 'go' sign from the White House and is starting to suspect that he never will. He told me:
"The hitch is that since no one bothered to knock off Saddam Hussein, he's telling everyone that we gave him agricultural grants that he managed to turn into weapons to invade Kuwait. This makes George Bush look bad."
"I should think so. Didn't the president know that Saddam Hussein would attack Kuwait?"
"No, Mr. Bush thought that Iran was going to attack Kuwait."
"Why did he think that?"
"Because the White House always gets Iran and Iraq mixed up. They both start with an 'I.'"
"Even if Saddam got the weapons from us to fight, he didn't do very well in the field," I said.
"No, but he is still getting away with murder by building atomic weapons and germ warfare projectiles. If we bring up Desert Storm, some wise guy Democrat is going to ask where the supplies came from for Saddam to try to go for the big one."
"From the United States," I volunteered.
"Yeah, but just because we gave forbidden material to him doesn't mean we considered him a friend. In any case, the Republican big shots think that if we mention Desert Storm, somebody is going to say, 'Has Kuwait changed from the way it was before we helped them?'"
"It's ruled by a royal family. How can it change?" I asked.
"The president promised the American people that our boys were over there to fight for freedom and to liberate the Kuwaiti people from the yoke of totalitarianism."
"I don't believe that," I said.
"We have it on tape, but we're not going to put it in a TV spot because there are independents who will say 'What the heck is he talking about?'"
"Why don't we ask for a filmed statement from Saddam denying that American money was used to equip his army?"
"He won't do it. He says that he never interferes in the internal affairs of another country. The truth is that Desert Storm is a dead issue politically, and the whole exercise is one that we can't cash in on, particularly if Congress appoints a special prosecutor before the election."
"It's a pity," I said, "since it was Bush's finest hour."
"You better believe it. If you had had your pick of Iran or Iraq, you would have done the same thing."
As Customary, Reflections on Tuesday's Elections
Tom Coffey
Please permit, as has been your tolerant custom, some reflections on the recent primary elections:
First it was John Rousakis, and now Bob McCorkle, the latter experiencing on Tuesday what the former did last November when the voters ended his 21-year reign as mayor. A lesson perhaps to local politicians: two decades is sufficient.
Or, as many a mother has admonished a teen leaving the house all dolled up on Friday night: "Don't stay too long at the party, Son."
Still, Joe Mahany's upset of McCorkle in the race for the county commission chairmanship came as a surprise to Yours Truly. Didn't have nerve enough to predict in print, but I told anyone who asked me, one-on-one, for a prediction that I thought Ol' Bob the populist would win, especially considering the difference between him and the challenger in name recognition.
But Bob's 22 years in public office, Joe's low-key but steady and make-sense campaigning, and the anti-incumbency wave -too much.
No surprise in the Republican runoff in the chairman's contest. Two excellent campaigners in Julie Smith and Ray Gaster, and with aired differences while stumping they have helped to demonstrate that the GOP has come of age as a political entity in our neck of the woods. Used to be that offices went uncontested in Republican primaries.
And Mahany will have a formidable foe in whoever wins the runoff.
Good Loser of the Night Award is shared by McCorkle and Tom Taggart, who lost to Charlie Mikell in the race for Superior Court judge. Both were gracious in defeat.
Happily, there's no Poor Loser award. The others (at least those who appeared on television) took defeat admirably.
Barbara Kiley, who won her first-round race for tax commissioner and faces opposition in November, may be the rare exception among longtime incumbents. The lady has demonstrated how to win ever since she and John Rousakis co-honchoed the late Carl Griffin's first race for sheriff. Her second-round test against Republican W.D. Atkinson will be the biggie.
State Rep. Dorothy Pelote -now there's a political lady who always has known how to win, even before she ventured out to seek public office, first as a county commissioner and of late as a legislator.
Years ago, she was her neighborhood's spokesperson and unofficial ombudswoman in seeking such improvements as play-grounds, drainage, better streets, lighting, etc. And whatever Miss Dorothy wanted, she usually got. Her political success is due to years of built-up respect from dedication to constituents.
David Saussy's first-round triumph in his race for a district County Commission seat was nip-and-tuck against Bill Stephenson, whose one-on-one method won him the county chairmanship 12 years ago in an up-hill battle against the so-called Establishment.
Saussy used pretty much the same technique, but obviously with slightly more persuasion. His race against Democrat Marty Felser in November will be among the more interesting ones.
Consider such factors as the accent on women candidates at the recent Democratic National Convention... a woman in the Savannah mayor's chair, women on Tuesday's ballot for statewide, congressional, countywide and district offices, and the Constitution which has, since 1920, accorded women the right to vote.
Now, imagine a lady's surprise the other day when, campaigning by phone for a candidate, she was told by the lade on the other end of the line: "Call back and talk to my husband. He does the voting in this family."
As usual, there was confusion at some polling places, and the tallying into the night was slow. It's obvious we need a faster method of tallying, and when the money is available the county should consider converting everything to computer.
Still, it wasn't all bad, at least not in my polling place. I stood in line behind friend Willie Remley, who had six ahead of him. When his turn came, he allowed that he had waited only about 10 minutes. Willie took just about a minute. I took less than that because I voted GOP and had fewer offices to confront.
The Dedication Award goes to those supporters of various candidates who stood on street corners to wave placards and give motorists the old high-sign. In mid-July heat, that's dedication.
And who got rich off the primaries?
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Abortion debate is becoming moot
Marilyn Geewax
Few issues in U.S. history have stirred as much vehement disagreement as abortion. In modern times, only conflicts over race and Vietnam could match the nastiness that now characterizes abortion debates.
In many countries, ending a pregnancy is a quiet matter involving a woman and her doctor.
In the United States, abortion has been turned into a political screen on which partisans project their fears. Each views the picture clearly and can't understand why others don't see it.
'Pro-lifers' look at the screen and perceive a nation in moral decline. They see people having sex without concern for commitment, marriage or the children they might conceive.
When 'pro-choicers' view abortion, they see government officials taking away a woman's right to self-determination. Recognizing that all forms of birth control can fail, they believe that forcing an unwilling person, perhaps even a young girl, to give birth is simply barbaric.
With the two sides engaged in this furious debate, few seem to realize the outcome already has been determined. Abortion opponents are losing - not to liberals, but to new drugs and technology.
Anti-abortion firebrands can block clinics and push states to regulate the procedure. For now, they are having some success. But power to control the issue inexorably is slipping from their hands.
In coming years, women who wish to end pregnancies will be able to take medication, such as RU-486, a pill now widely used in France and England. The drug, which is banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is bound to make its way into this country, legally or illegally.
Recently, the Supreme Court stopped a California woman from bringing her dose of RU-486 into this country. That ruling was intended to settle the issue - but it won't.
Sooner or later, RU-486 will become available to U.S. women. Doubt it? Just look at cocaine.
Cocaine is a drug that many Americans want. They can buy it in any city, even though government has spent billions to keep it from entering the country.
If enough Americans want a drug, they will find a way to get it. Prohibition lasted just 13 years because so many citizens chose to ignore the alcohol ban.
Even if the U.S. government somehow can stop RU-486 from being distributed widely here, no one will be able to stop the proliferation of home-abortion kits. Women are using legal equipment - glass jars, syringes and coils of aquarium tubing - to end pregnancies in private.
According to the Federation of Women's Health Centers, roughly 2,000 U.S. women are volunteering now to help pregnant women perform home abortions. More women are learning to do the procedure every day.
Whether anti-abortion arguments make moral sense is an issue for each person to decide. But right or wrong, abortions won't go away. More types of abortion pills will be developed soon and more laywomen will learn to how tolearn how to end pregnancies without doctors present.
Trying to turn back the clock to a time when women didn't have access to reproductive information or birth-control technology is futile.
The ability to end a pregnancy is just a fact of modern life. Blocking clinics and passing laws may be emotionally satisfying to some, but such actions won't stop most women from choosing whether to give birth.
Political pro strings along press corps
By Leonard Larsen
Secretary of State James A. Baker III's descent from the heavens to take over another George Bush presidential campaign has moved backward from "sure thing" to "maybe" and that just goes to show how smart the man is.
There'll be more drama in it now: Will the brilliant star risk his reputation and pedigree on a mission impossible to rescue his Texas sidekick, a president who's lower than a snake's belly in the polls and sitting unhappily as first in a collection of dunces?
It can't be done. So, of course, Mr. Baker will do it. And the Washington-headquartered herd journalists who have built the Baker reputation might soon be reporting a rejuvenated Bush campaign, a new verve and savviness in an effort that was about to be given up for dead.
It was Mr. Baker himself, in the midst of another trot around the globe, who deliberately dampened talk of the "done deal," orchestrating staff leaks at his pique with underlings in the White House who were already talking about Mr. Baker's return to Mr. Bush's side.
As his staff leaked it and the trailing herd journalists reported it, Mr. Baker - at the edge of a break-through to peace in the Middle East - feared his work in foreign affairs might lie unfinished without him.
But there was the tug of loyalty back to his floundering friend, it was also said, and there was the prospect that all would be lost - Mr. Baker's monumental good works as well as Mr. Bush's sorry presidency - if Mr. Baker didn't go back and save Mr. Bush from what looks like approaching disaster.
Mr. Baker stage-managed the sure thing prospect of his role in the presidential campaign back to "maybe" with polished expertise, even acting aggravated during a joint news conference in Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek.
To a reporter inquiring about Mr. Baker's intent to leave the peace process to go back to political campaigning, he suggested the poor fool "ought not to believe everything you read in the papers .... There has been no decision made."
So now it won't look so much like Mr. Bush and his friend have been planning it for the past several weeks when Mr. Baker - probably after helping cut the deal for $10 billion in guaranteed loans for Israel - will move to salvage the pitiful Bush campaign.
If - probably when - the reassignment puts Mr. Baker back in presidential politics, Washington herd journalism will dwell for a while on his sacrifice and selflessness but will quickly turn to marvel at his miracles.
There'll probably be leaked stories of the new mood at the White House as Mr. Baker dispels gloom, stories of the new clarity of purpose in the Bush campaign, the sharpening of its message, the spring in the president's step and the lift in his spirits.
There'll be herd journalism's analysis by leak, revelations of Bush and Baker man-to-man talks, palsy stuff but important in stiffening the Bush backbone.
And pretty soon, with the brilliant Baker back at the controls, the media herd will report on the rehabilitation of the Bush campaign and the Bush presidency: lean and mean, ready at last to make a fight of it.
All that, of course, will be pretty much Mr. Baker's view of it and pretty much the way his Washington career has been reported by a Baker-friendly media. If President Reagan was Teflon on which nothing would stick, Mr. Baker is rubber, bouncing always away from harm.
It's seldom recalled by the herd that Mr. Baker was secretary of the Treasury when the economic slide into debt and recession was quickening and the savings and loan scandal was coming to an untended boil.
He left Treasury to head the 1988 Bush presidential campaign but herd journalism never attached the dirty business done there to Mr. Baker.
And while State Department small fry and the president himself have been pilloried for ignoring Saddam Hussein's belligerency and for actually strengthening the Iraqi dictator, it all happened while Mr. Baker was directing American foreign policy.
What's to remember about Mr. Baker - whether White House aide, Cabinet secretary, political pro or presidential pal - is that he's not only smart; he's always his own best press agent.
2 is enough? For families, that's the subtle message
By Ana Veciana Suarez
In the beginning, there were two of us.
At restaurants we were seated immediately. We drove compacts, small cars we could slide into tight parking spaces. Our grocery bill was insignificant, our electric bill a source of admiration. We even had trouble filling a large top-loader with our weekly laundry.
Now with four children, I look back at those days and wonder if they ever truly existed.
Our lifestyle was transformed subtly with the first child, but it changed exponentially with each child thereafter, as much our doing as the doing of the shrinking-family society that surrounds me.
America, I have concluded, has become the home of the two-child family. An extra kid or two throws off the delicate balance of the economy. Why, even most board games - a popular (and inexpensive) pastime for our family - allow only four players. Someone is invariably left out.
For most people, four children constitutes a large family. We discovered that when I was pregnant with our youngest more than two years ago. The announcement was met with a modicum of apprehension by friends.
My husband's side of the family, most of whom have only one child, accepted the news with raised eyebrows.
"How will you ever keep track of all of them?" asked his cousin, a mother of one.
Admittedly, such reaction has taken me by surprise. I'm one of five children, and that, among my extended clan, was considered a small troop. Family get-togethers were a blast, and you never needed classmates for birthday parties.
Nowadays, more than two children invites unwelcomed speculation. Everybody hints at what you do on cold evenings.
There is a pernicious belief, too, that those of us who have more children are single-handedly destroying the environment, perhaps even enlarging the hole in the ozone.
Society plots, in small but cutting ways, against families with more than two children.
Contests invariably award prizes for a family of four, which means you can leave part of the gang behind or pay for them to come along. The latter choice tends to offset any contest gain, though.
I am no longer fooled by the kids eat-fly-stay free advertisements, either. They mean one paying adult per free child. It's as if the remaining children in the family did not exist in the minds of Madison Avenue.
I've always been comfortable with whatever number of children I've had, though each took some adjusting and expanding, particularly in the furniture department. When there were two, I thought of this as a nice even number, yet three turned out to be more fun. And four made it possible for each child to have an ally - an important strategic move in sibling wars.
I became accustomed to eating at a large dinner table as soon as we outgrew dinettes, and I've long stopped buying single servings or anything smaller than family size.
But one thing still gets me: How come all the close parking spaces are for compacts only?
Balanced budget a bitter bill
Strapped states, cities would have to face consequences
By David Rapp
GOVERNING MAGAZINE
Washington - The balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution flamed out in Congress this summer. But it will almost surely be back.
Anti-deficit sentiment is too strong across the country for the amendment's sponsors not to try again sooner or later.
In the end, it may still be up to the states - with their power to ratify constitutional amendments - to decide whether a balanced federal budget is necessary or even desirable.
Just about everyone in Washington believes that a balanced-budget amendment would sail through the 38 states needed to ratify it. After all, the states balance their own budgets; all except Vermont are required to do so. Wouldn't they want Washington to play by the same rules?
Not necessarily. The whole balanced-budget issue presents states with some puzzles they probably want to think through before the amendment ends up in the legislatures' lap.
In most states, a balanced budget is more fiction than reality. Some regularly borrow from pools of money outside the 'general fund,' such as capital budgets or pension funds. Others count revenue that won't really arrive until the next fiscal year. Many more simply delay making obligated payments - to suppliers, to salaried employees or to local governments.
But there is a more important reason why states should think twice about ratifying a balanced-budget amendment.
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Poor, Misunderstood Garbage
By William Rathje and Cullen Murphy
BOSTON
In the spring of 1987, all eyes were on Mobro 4000, the infamous garbage barge that sailed from Long Island in March and spent 55 days plying the seas in search of a place to deposit 3,000 tons of municipal solid waste. Five years later comes the summer of the trash trains, two of which, laden with tons of New York City's garbage, wandered the Midwest in search of landfills before heading home and dumping their loads where most city garbage goes in the first place: the Fresh Kills Landfill, on Staten Island.
One could not drive through the Midwest this summer and escape the radio reporters tracking the trains. Nor could one escape the barrage of commentary, some directed generically at New York, most of it focused on the garbage 'crisis'. The message was that Americans are generating far more trash per capita than they can ever hope to deal with and that we're desperately short of solutions.
That is an unfortunate message, because it happens not to be true. The trash trains and garbage barge are imperfect examples of what they are supposed to symbolize. The barge's voyage was the result of an economic gamble by an entrepreneur that went awry. It was not the result of a lack of ways to dispose of Long Island's garbage. The farce of the trains involved labor and permit disputes, equipment failures, bad weather and court orders that combined to disrupt what is otherwise the vast daily shipment of garbage from the country's most congested areas to less congested ones with landfills.
The U.S. does have serious garbage problems. We produce more municipal solid waste per capita than many other industrialized countries, and we dispose of it less efficiently. But it is also true that we sometimes exaggerate our problems and emphasize the wrong ones. In fact, there seem to be few subjects of public significance on which opinion is so consistently misinformed. And misinformation can lead to alarm, despair and bad decisions.
The misperceptions involve matters as diverse as per capita garbage volume (we're not producing more by leaps and bounds) and biodegradation (not much of which happens in landfills). One especially significant misperception concerns landfills. The landfill problem we face is usually described like this: 50 percent of existing landfills will close within five years. But all landfills are not equal: Many of those being closed are small and environmentally dubious, whereas newer ones are much larger and much safer. And it has long been the case that 50 percent of all landfills will close in five years. The waste-management industry has never seen the need to maintain limitless capacity. The difference today is that new capacity is getting harder to find.
Why ? The reasons often have nothing to do with the claim that we're running out of room for safe landfills. Yes, in some parts of the country we have run out of room. But few nations are as endowed with open territory as the U.S., and suitable land is available even in relatively populous areas. A survey of eastern New York state in the late 1980's for possible landfill sites pinpointed locations that together made up only 1 percent of the land under study but added up to about 200 square miles. The obstacles to new sanitary landfills are less territorial than psychological and political.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. The garbage crisis is not a crisis caused by growing amounts of garbage. It is caused by an evaporation of political will.
Sensible ways of dealing with disposal exist. Sanitary landfills can safely handle garbage in many places around the U.S., perhaps even most. Recycling is no panacea, but it is essential everywhere. Consumers can help by buying products that are recyclable or that have a high post-consumer recycled content.
Incinerators are necessary in some places, and her and there may even have to shoulder most of the burden. Incinerators are not the smoke-belching monsters of yore and can operate within stringent environmental guidelines. And they can be made safer if some items, like batteries and some plastics, are disposed of separately. Incinerators do require, however, that workers be trained to think of pollution control as more important than energy production.
Beyond these means of disposal, market forces, in the form of graduated fees linked to the volume of garbage that households and businesses throw away, can be harnessed to give consumers - and, through them, manufacturers - an incentive to reduce the volume of discards.
Clearly, we have ways to dispose of our garbage. What seems no longer to exist is the capacity to make important decisions about fundamental policies - a problem that afflicts us in many arenas.
New York City's leaders recently arrived at a tentative compromise on a long-term plan for the disposal of city garbage, one that relies heavily on recycling and incineration. Whether that plan would work is probably less open to doubt than whether the city has the will to adopt any plan at all. When it comes to political gridlock on this issue, New York remains a world-class city.
Recycling, Minus the Myths
By John Schall
NEW HAVEN
Recycling is a noble idea, its critics concede, but they say it won't work and costs too much. Many supporters say recycling and composting can take care of the entire solid waste problem. Both sides perpetuate misconceptions that New York City's proposed solid waste management plan should help dispel. As the City Council prepares to vote next week on this plan, it should not be dissuaded by any of the following myths.
Recycling is costly and an environmental extravagance. The city's proposed recycling program may be costly but it is also cost-effective. Managing solid waste is expensive, regardless of the method used. The city's plan shows that half of the waste could be captured in well-planned recycling and composting programs, at a lower cost than it would take to bury or burn it.
Recycling is too difficult and people don't participate. True, not all New Yorkers will sort their trash, but the success of the proposed plan does not depend on 100 percent participation. By making the program simple and consistent, 65 percent to 80 percent of New Yorkers could reasonably be expected to participate, based on experience in New York City and elsewhere.
Currently, the city's patchwork recycling programs differ from neighborhood to neighborhood. Under the new plan, recycling would be uniform throughout every borough. People would be required to sort recyclables into only two containers - one for paper and textiles, the other for glass, metal and plastic. It would be complemented by a public education campaign, and perhaps every block would have a volunteer recycling coordinator. More products would be recycled, including textiles, junk mail and plastic bags. More recycling facilities would be built, and the current collection method, in which two trucks stop at every building, would be streamlined to require only one truck.
A lack of markets for recycled materials will make recycling meaningless and uneconomical. Dozens of states have passed laws in the last two years that require makers of packaging and many consumer goods to reuse up to 50 percent of all the materials they produce. Many other states including New York are considering such mandates, and Congress may pass similar Federal laws. These laws create markets, and the trend will only continue as landfills nationwide fill up and pressure from environmentalists increases.
Recycling makes economic and environmental sense. A study released in June by the Tellus Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Boston, reports that most industries have found using recycled materials technologically feasible, and that this has reduced toxic pollutants, greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting emissions. According to the American Paper Institute, paper mills using recycled materials were five times more profitable last year than those using virgin fiber.
The issue is recycling versus incineration. Under the proposed plan, from 50 percent to 65 percent of the 28,000 tons of waste the city produces each day would be prevented, recycled or composted. The remainder cannot be sent indefinitely to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Unless new ways of handling the waste are developed, including more energy producing incineration, New York will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year exporting garbage. The city's proposed plan isn't a recycling vs. incineration plan: it maximizes recycling and composting and buries or burns only the remainder. Recycling works. By approving the plan, the City Council can take a giant step toward an environmentally and economically rational approach for handling waste.
The World Needs An Army on Call
By David Boren
WASHINGTON
Americans are not enthusiastic about having the United States stand alone as the policeman of the world. There is a feeling that we simply no longer have the resources, given the pressing need to rebuild our strength at home, to play that role any longer.
This does not mean, however, that Americans have been lulled by the dangerous siren song of the new isolationists. We understand more clearly than ever that our economic well-being and national security depend on developments and relationships outside our borders.
No American, for example, wants to allow Saddam Hussein to thwart United Nations weapons inspections and rebuild his military capability. No American can remain indifferent to the images of starvation and brutality in detention centers in Bosnia and Herzegovina; the hideous policy of "ethnic cleansing" is something many of us never expected would occur again in our lifetimes. It has filled our people with a sense of moral urgency and an overwhelming feeling that we must do something to stop it.
But while Americans want something done, they do not want to do it alone. For the United Sates to act, the burden must be shared. It is time to create a genuine multilateral mechanism that can deal not only with these crises but also those that inevitably lie ahead.
Instead of shrinking from the task, we should welcome the fact that we are the first generation, perhaps in centuries, to have the opportunity to act boldly in the absence of confrontation between great powers.
The opportunity for the United Nations is clear. In the aftermath of World War II, President Truman wanted to empower the new United Nations to create a new world order. Addressing the General Assembly at its opening session in October 1946, he said, "We shall press for the preparation of agreements in order that the Security Council may have at its disposal peace forces adequate to prevent acts of aggression."
That promise was never realized because of the cold war and the Soviet Union's use of its veto power on the Security council.
But under Article 43 of the United Nations charter, the Secretary General still has the authority to ask member nations to designate military units that can be deployed in the event of a crisis "to maintain international peace and security." In June, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asked member countries to make that authority a reality.
Richard Gardner, a professor of international law at Columbia University, proposes that 40 to 50 member nations contribute to a rapid-deployment force of 100,000 volunteers that could train under common leadership and with standardized equipment. Intelligence could also be shared to allow the United Nations to anticipate problems and take pre-emptive action.
It is time for us to create such a force, and the United States should take the lead in proposing it.
Of course, details would have to be worked out. The War Powers Act would have to be amended to insure that the United States does not surrender its right to final approval of committing American troops to life-threatening situations. Members of the United Nations that lack veto power in the Security Council could condition their commitment to a rapid-deployment force on the right to withdraw units for their own urgent national security interests.
Still, the existence of such a force, uniformly trained and ready to act, would go a long way toward making the 'new world order' more than just a slogan.
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Prejudice and 'problem people'
Clarence Page
There is an old story about a cat who jumped onto a hot stove once and found the experience to be so profoundly unpleasant that he never jumped on a hot stove again. Of course, he never jumped on a cold stove, either. Ruth Jandrucko of Miami, who was mugged in a parking lot in 1986, can identify with that cat. Ever since she was mugged, the 65-year-old woman says she panics at the sight of black men.
She's not alone. As a black man who has had the experience of being passed over by taxis, seeing women wait for the next elevator rather than get on alone with me or seeing people suddenly lock their car doors at a red light when they see me standing on the nearby corner, I know she's not alone. Shelby Steele, the black, middle-class conservative writer, calls these "little slights" that I should best ignore while keeping my eyes on life's larger prizes.
I try. Still, it's tiring. And enraging.
Anyway, what separates Mrs. Jandrucko's story from countless other cases of individuals coping privately with the aftermath of a violent crime, according to USA Today, is this: She has persuaded Florida authorities to sympathize with her enough to award her full disability and $50,000 in workers' compensation, since she says she can no longer work at the racially integrated company where she was employed before the accident.
Maybe Dan Quayle is right. Maybe we do have too many lawyers. The news sparked inspiration of a financial kind in the imagination of the friend who called to tell me about it. "I've got a business proposition for you, Clarence," she said. "We can consult people on things to be afraid of so they can collect workmen's compensation."
Prejudice for profit? Now, there's a twist on Reagan-era enterprise. Ah, yes, I can see it now:
Can't work in high-rises because you fell off a ladder, and now you panic at the sight of anything taller than a chair? Sue. Can't get to work because a fast-closing door caught you in the rear, and now you panic at the sight of doorknobs? Sue. Spurned by a baseball player, and now you panic at the sight of sports fans? Sue.
Maybe my friend, who happens to be white, and I are being too heartless. Or maybe we're just being too jealous.
After all, I might like some compensation for the two unpleasant occasions in my southern Ohio youth when I was assaulted by roving bands of young white males who happened to have rural Southern accents. They weren't after my money. They just wanted to beat me up. They didn't like black people. Who knows? Maybe each one of them was mugged by a black man, too. I didn't stop to ask.
I escaped serious injury, but I confess that the experience causes me to flinch even today when I am approached by a pickup truck that has a gun rack in the rear, a Confederate flag on the bumper and a hound dog riding shotgun. I know better than to expect all good ol' boys to be racial bigots, but prejudices are not rational.
Yet, if my unpleasant personal experiences had left me with a phobia so fierce that I panicked at the sight of white people, I would have a tough time not only finding work but also living in this country, my home, which I love in spite of its flaws and occasional foolishness.
Unfortunately, America is infested with a national fear of young black males that exceeds rational basis. Since urban blacks commit more crime proportionately (although not numerically) than whites, many people reason that it's better to be safe than sorry and dodge all young black males.
Of course, most victims of black criminals also are black, although that brings little comfort to whites caught in the spillover. I received a memorably poignant letter from an aging white Chicago woman whose family I know. She was mugged with extraordinary brutality by several young males who happened to be black. She wanted me to know that her resulting wariness of all young black males on the street was based on something more than irrational prejudices.
She was writing in response to an essay I had written about how sad I felt that, when my cute little 3-year-old son grows up in 10 years to become a teen-ager, chances are good that he will suddenly be perceived as someone you should cross the street to avoid.
If we haven't taken steps to heal this problem by then, don't tell me how proud you are of America's racial progress.
A national phobia has grown up around a distorted picture of poverty and its bitter fruits, like crime, and the news story about Mrs. Jandrucko's personal phobia symbolizes it. Since the '60s, when poverty, high crime and broken families usually were reported as a problem that touched all races, it has been transformed through the distortions of media and political processes into something else: a black problem.
By every index, poverty, high crime and broken families continue to plague white communities, too, but, by transforming all of these problems into black 'pathologies', it is easier for Americans to think of blacks as a 'problem people,' in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow Americans with problems.
Mrs. Jandrucko's case symbolizes a country that avoids engaging its national racial hang-ups directly in a way that can lead to long-term healing. Instead, we make short-term pay-outs while our irrational fears fester.If Mrs. Jandrucko has a severe psychological problem with black folks that resulted from one bad experience, maybe we'd all be better off if she received psychological help instead of help in avoiding black folks. Maybe that's another good argument for national health insurance. We need to plug the gaps in physical and psychological care we have in this country. We need to bridge some social gaps, too.
Gore's book is good case against him
George Will
Someone retrieved Rudyard Kipling's poem Recessional (the one about "dominion over palm and pine" and "lesser breeds without the Law") from the wastebasket where Kipling had tossed it. Whether that someone did literature a favor is debatable. Clearly Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance is wastebasket-worthy.
The senator says our civilization is a "dysfunctional family." He favors "wrenching transformation of society," altering "the very foundation of our civilization." Some leaders have effected such changes. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. But the U.S. government?
His environmentalism is a caricature of contemporary liberalism, a compound of unfocused compassion (for the whole planet) and green guilt about "consumptionism" (a sin that Somalia and many other places would like to be more guilty of). His call to "make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization" is embarrassing. Who wants politicians who are unaware of the comical figure they cut when announcing new "central organizing principles" for civilization?
When Mr. Gore asserts, as he did yet again on television last Sunday, that "the world scientific community" is in "consensus" about global warming, he is being as cavalier about the truth as the Bush campaign has been about Mr. Clinton's tax increases. Mr. Gore knows that his former mentor at Harvard, Roger Revelle, who died last year, concluded: "The scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time. There is little risk in delaying policy responses." Mr. Gore knows, or should know before pontificating, that a recent Gallup Poll of scientists concerned with global climate research shows that 53 percent do not believe warming has occurred, and another 30 percent are uncertain.
Mr. Gore is marching with many people who not long ago were marching in the opposite direction. New York magazine's Christopher Byron notes that Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, is an "environmentalist for all temperatures." Today Mr. Schneider is hot about global warming; 16 years ago he was exercised about global cooling. There are a lot like him among today's panic-mongers.
Mr. Gore complains that the media, by focusing on controversy, threatens the planet by creating skepticism about the agenda for which he insists there is scientific consensus. Actually, too often skepticism (about Love Canal, acid rain, the - it turns out - non-existent Northern Hemisphere hole in the ozone layer) is vindicated long after being portrayed in the media as a moral failing, rather than an intellectually debatable position.
Mr. Gore, who has spent most of his life in Washington's governing circle, overflows with the certitude characteristic of that circle. He knows the future and knows exactly what it requires, which turns out to be an unprecedented expansion of government - spending, regulating, evaluating technologies, and transferring wealth abroad.
He has mastered the Washington art of arguing that his agenda won't really cost anything. You know: This or that program or regulation will make us healthier or smarter or better behaved, and therefore will make us more productive, so economic growth will increase and so will revenues, and thus everything will "pay for itself." Mr. Gore's new wrinkle on this is environmentalism-as-business-opportunity. We shall prosper by making environmentally "necessary" products. Perhaps.
But we know who certainly will prosper. Ronald Bailey in National Review reports a Rand study that shows that 80 percent of the money spent by an environmental program Mr. Gore sponsored - the Superfund, for cleaning up contaminated sites - has gone in fees to one of the Democratic Party's most powerful, and financially grateful, constituencies: lawyers.
The hoariest cliche in modern American politics is "Marshall Plan" for this or that (nowadays usually "the cities"). It is being given another trot around the track by Mr. Gore's call for a "Global Marshall Plan." He is vociferous against the "hubris" of our technological civilization but he partakes of the hubris of the government class which, having failed at its banal but useful business down the street (schools, bridges, medical care), has an itch to go global.
Mr. Gore's particular ideas (lots of new taxes, treating the automobile as a "mortal threat" to civilization, and much more) have no constituency. But what is dismaying is the way he trades in ideas, uncritically embracing extremisms that seem to justify vast expansions of his righteousness and of the power of the government he seeks to lead.
His unsmiling sense of lonely evangelism in a sinning world lacks the sense of proportion that is produced by a sense of history - and of humor. The planet is more resilient, the evidence about its stresses more mixed and the facts of environmental progress more heartening than he admits. His book, a jumble of dubious 1990s science and worse 1960s philosophy ("alienation" and all that) is a powerful reason not to elect its author to high office in the executive branch, where impressionable people will be bombarded by bad ideas in search of big budgets.
Congress avoids fiscal restraints for its staff
Stephen Moore
It is often said that Washington, D.C., is a city where people come to do good and end up doing well. Nowhere is that more evident than on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress and their growing legions of staffers are doing well indeed.
This past January, as the U.S. economy continued to sputter, unemployment continued to escalate and congressional approval ratings sank to a near all-time low, Congress rewarded itself with a $4,400 pay raise. Members now 'earn' $129,500 a year - a larger income than that of 96 percent of all Americans and four times more than the median wage earner makes.
Speaker of the House Tom Foley, D-Wash., and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, even do better. Mr. Foley makes $166,200, and Mr. Mitchell makes $143,800. Remember that the next time Mr. Foley and Mr. Mitchell start one of their demagogic rich-bashing escapades. They are the rich.
A case might be made that the 535 elected members of Congress deserve to be handsomely paid.
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Nukes for Sale
KARL GROSSMAN AND JUDITH LONG
"The time has come to consider creating a global system for protection of the world community," Boris Yeltsin said on January 31, addressing President Bush and the United Nations Security Council. "It could be based on a reorientation of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative to make use of high technologies developed in Russia's defense complex." Yeltsin's proposal is a hot deal for the former enemies: Russia gets cash, the United States, nuclear technology - and power through the militarization of space. The losers are the planet and its peoples.
A deal to buy Russia's Topaz 2 space reactor was struck more than a year ago and announced in January 1991 at the eighth annual Symposium on Space Nuclear Power Systems in New Mexico. Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoi, first deputy of the Kurtchatovis Institute of Atomic Power in Moscow, explained at the time, "Our institution got its budget cut 50 percent and ... we need to look for finances from different sources." As for the cost to the United States, Richard Verga, director of key technologies for the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, said that Topaz 2 would be used in a program with an overall cost of $100 million. The Topaz, a reactor that produces energy through nuclear fission as it orbits the Earth, uses a "thermionic" design - technology in which Russia outstrips the United States. It could be mass-produced here to provide power to weaponry on Star Wars battle platforms.
The Topaz 2 deal poses stiff competition to General Electric, which is developing a Star Wars nuclear reactor of its own, the SP-100, and is causing a split among U.S. policy-makers. In a January 6 memo the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered the Energy Department and NASA to give preference to the Topaz 2 because "the potential availability of the Topaz 2 ... offers new possibilities," and it cut D.O.E.'s SP-100 budget for 1993 from $40 million to $30 million. The Pentagon also favors the Topaz, claiming it can be deployed in three years at a tenth the cost of the SP-100, which has a price tag of $1.6 billion and can't be tested until 2004. But D.O.E., longtime friend to G.E., insists SP-100's liquid metal heat system is "ahead of thermionics."
This past January the Russians were back with more deals - and some veiled threats of selling to Libya - at the ninth annual Symposium on Space Nuclear Power Systems. This time they were peddling their nuclear-powered rockets. Coincidentally, the Pentagon had just disclosed some of its own plans for nuclear-powered rockets. Scrubbed in 1972 after seventeen years of development as too dangerous and too costly (at $1.5 billion already spent - $6.5 billion in today's dollars), the project was covertly reopened for Star Wars in 1987, code-named Timberwind and kept in deep secrecy. Nuclear-powered rockets, with a stronger blast force than conventional ones, would theoretically be able to loft the massive lasers, particle-beam devices and other heavy Star Wars weaponry into orbit. Air Force spokesmen admitted to a cost of $800 million for the project. The designer and manufacturer of the U.S. nuclear-powered rocket engine is Babcock and Wilcox, of Three Mile Island fame.
Lost in the scramble for dollars and technology is careful consideration of what the nuclearization of space can cost the planet - in dollars and in lives. In dollars: The Star Wars budget jumped from $2.9 billion in 1991 to $4.1 billion this year. The White House in calling for a record 1993 Star Wars budget of $5.4 billion.
In danger: There has been a 15 percent failure rate in both U.S. and Soviet nuclear space hardware. The most serious U.S. accident occurred in 1964, when a plutonium-powered satellite fell toward Earth, breaking up i the atmosphere and showering plutonium over vast areas of the planet. Russian nuclear-powered satellites have also fallen to Earth. The 1978 crash of Cosmos 954 covered a broad swath of Canada with radioactive debris. Topaz or SP-100, Timberwind or Russian rocketry, they're Chernobyls in the sky.
Government documents on Timberwind told of a prototype of the nuclear rocket failing on the ground. Still, the Pentagon planned a test flight, which for "safety" reasons would take place mostly over water around Antarctica, though New Zealand is on its path. A government analysis put the chances of the nuclear rocket crashing into New Zealand at 1 in 2,325. (For some perspective on these odds, recall that the chances of a Challenger-type disaster were estimated at 1 in 100,000.) The Topaz 2 has been used in only two missions, in 1987. Both ended because of a malfunction in the reactor.
This past July, insuring against accidents with U.S. nuclear space machinery, NASA and D.O.E. signed a Space Nuclear Power Agreement limiting U.S. liability in the event of a nuclear accident in space to $7.3 billion to Americans for property damage or death from radioactive contamination and $100 million, total, for citizens of all other nations. Five months earlier, the United States withdrew support for U.N. draft guidelines on the use of nuclear space devices because the Defense Department and NASA feared that Star Wars might be hindered by such a treaty. It's the nuke world order.
Toxic Banking
DOUG HENWOOD
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." The publication of these words, from a leaked internal memo, caused a rush of bad publicity for their author, World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers, who now claims he was being ironic and provocative. There were calls for his resignation. But Summers was expressing honestly the logic of his discipline and his employer.
Summers - whose salary is 225 times the per-person income of the bank's Third World clientele - is a whiz-bang Harvard econocrat, a class that believes religiously that money is the final measure of value. Happiness is a growing G.D.P. Legal issues can be resolved as competing economic claims, and ethical decisions can be translated into dollar terms, with the cheaper alternative always preferable.
In his memo, which criticized a draft of the bank's World Development Report, Summers was applying cost-benefit analysis, which measures the value of a human life by the stream of wages remaining to it. Say it will cost Global Megatoxics $1 million to install a state-of-the-art scrubber in its chimney. If Global determines that not spending this sum will shorten the lives of five people by ten years apiece, all that would be lost would be the present value of these fifty years of wages. At a wage of $1,000 a year, the cost of the five lives can be figured at $41,000, thanks to the magic of compound interest; at $30,000 a year, they're worth $1.2 million. As Summers said in his memo, "health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages."
Since the costs of pollution - always priced in dollars or their equivalent - rise with development, Summers argued, it makes sense costwise to dump in Africa. If a pollutant is going to cause "prostrate" [sic] cancer, a disease of old age, why not locate it in countries where people aren't likely to live long enough to get it? He concluded this section by saying that disagreement with this logic suggests the belief that things like "intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc. could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization." Exactly; as they should be.
It makes no sense for Summers to resign; he expressed the bank's logic perfectly. It's a bank, and acts like one. It may preside over a steady erosion of Third World incomes relative to First World ones, but it makes big money. Last year, after paying $7 billion in interest and fees to its investors and bankers, it had a $1.2 billion surplus and a rate of return that commercial banks would envy.
What's a public institution to do with that kind of surplus? The bank's executive board spends a lot of time working that question over. In 1991 it decided to contribute $267 million to its soft-loan affiliate, which lends to very poor countries at concessional rates, $29 million to the Global Environment Trust Fund and stuff the remaining $904 million into its hoard of 'retained earnings,' which now stands at $11.9 billion. According to Unicef, preventing vitamin-A-deficiency blindness would cost $6 million. Preventing "the great majority" of childhood malnutrition deaths would cost $2.5 billion. But adding to the World Bank's surplus is a higher priority.
In recent years, the bank has moved away from project-oriented lending - power plants and dams - and toward structural adjustment lending, in which credit is conditional on adoption of a standard austerity/deregulation package. Not surprisingly, these schemes have savage effects, to which the bank has a ready answer - more loans. The bank is lending its clients more money to treat the poverty, social dislocation and environmental damage that earlier loans helped create. The bank funds greenhouse-gas reduction schemes in countries where the greenhouse-gas producers were initially financed by the World Bank.
Bank publicity makes much of a new environmental consciousness, but actions tell a different story. The bank exempted structural adjustment programs from environmental review even though their point is to work human and physical resources harder which can't be friendly to people or their environment. It has redlined its environment department, leaving it little power. World Bank claims to a larger role in global environmental politics - to be pressed, for example, at this spring's United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development - should be beaten back with heavy sticks.
Whether or not Summers returns to Harvard, waste export will be a growth industry for these sluggish times. The practice of shifting dirty industries to poor countries is well established. Greenpeace follows the routine stuff all over the world - German (per capita income: $20,440) plastic to Argentina ($2,160), U.S. ($20,910) mercury to South Africa ($2,470), car batteries from everywhere to Brazil ($2,540). Plastic dropped into recycling bins is likely to be shipped to Malaysia ($2,160). The logic is impeccable.
IMPLANTS: TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
KATHA POLLIT
The F.D.A. hearings into the safety of silicone gel breast implants have ended with a split recommendation by the advisory panel: Rejecting an out-right ban on the devices, it urges that implantees be registered in clinical trials, to which only women who needed the surgery for reconstructive, not cosmetic, purposes would be guaranteed admittance. Which is it - "Panel Backs Marketing of Implants" (The Washington Post) or "Experts Suggest U.S. Sharply Limit Breast Implants" (The New York Times)? You be the judge.
Whatever else they were, the hearings were great theater. There was the perfidy of Dow (Napalm? Agent Orange? What's that?) Corning, the largest manufacturer of the implants, which was revealed to have lied and stonewalled for almost thirty years. There was the pious greed of plastic surgeons, who aggressively marketed the devices as a "cure" for "micromastia" (small breasts, to you) and now warn of an epidemic of "hysteria" in breast-enlarged women newly enlightened about the risks of autoimmune disorders, painful scarring, obscured mammograms. There was a hero, too, if a few decades late - David Kessler, the F.D.A.'s energetic new head. But most of all there were breasts - sex, beauty, fashion, women, women's bodies. Does anyone think the implant story would have been plastered all over the news media if it was about orthopedic shoes?
The real breast-implant story, though, isn't about women's bodies; it's about their minds. In the postfeminist wonderland in which we are constantly being told we live, women's lives are portrayed as one big smorgasbord of "choices" and "options", all value free and freely made, and which therefore cannot be challenged or even discussed, lest one sound patronizing or moralistic. Thus, women "choose" to have implants, we are told, to please men - no, wait, to boost their self-esteem - and who are you to criticize their judgment?
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Task Proves Too Great for Bush
George F. Will
HOUSTON - The Republican convention succeeded in the sense that the party clearly spoke its mind. It was, perhaps, a costly success, because it proved that there can indeed be indecent exposure of the mind as well as the body. Let us begin with the president's speech, which had the merit of being merely inadequate rather than, as many others were, strange.
His speech was not up to the demands that his political condition placed upon it. Judged, as the speech must be, against the background of behavior that his condition has caused, his speech was (in T.S. Eliot's phrase) "dry sterile thunder without rain."
It is not news that when Nature was dishing up rhetorical gifts, Bush did not hold out his plate. But by the verve of his delivery here he proved, again, that practice makes adequate. Unfortunately, this adequacy was a reminder that his problem has not been his lack of style but rather his abundance of insincerity.
The speech would have been far better for a candidate for a first term. As the umpteenth reiteration of mostly familiar items, from tax cuts to school choice to term limits, for which he has been only intermittently and impotently ardent, it repeatedly raised a ruinous question. For example, when the man under whom domestic spending and regulations have exploded says, "government is too big and costs too much," people wonder why years five through eight will be better than years one through four have been.
Once upon a time political parties talked about things that were clearly public matters, things like land for homesteaders, anti-trust policies, rural electrification, Social Security, medical care, defense and so on. Not so Wednesday night.
Then Republicans made "family values" their focus. In the process they showed that their view of government is out of focus, and they pounded the phrase "family values" into shapeless mush with a bad odor.
Marilyn Quayle's speech was evidence for those who say women should be kept out of combat not because they are too physically frail or morally fine but because they are too fierce to respect the rules of war. In a speech that launched an evening of sustained innuendo, she said - well, tip-toed to the edge of saying - that Bill Clinton "took drugs" and "joined in the sexual revolution" and "dodged the draft" ("ran from his responsibilities" was Lynn Martin's version an hour later.) And he probably believes "that commitment, marriage and fidelity" are "just arbitrary arrangements."
As for Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Quayle implied that Mrs. Clinton is one of those women who "wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women" and who in the 1960s believed - may still; can't be sure - that "the family was so oppressive that women could only thrive apart from it."
Next, Barbara Bush said: "However you define family, that's what we mean by family values." Fogginess is, apparently, a Bush family value. Her contribution to the evening's thoughts about government was that families are good. But coming hard on the heels of Mrs. Quayle's philippic, and later spiced with Pat Robertson's revelation that the Clintons are hatching "a radical plan to destroy the traditional family," Mrs. Bush was just a kinder, gentler coda to one long innuendo: Democrats may hug their children, but probably don't really mean it.
The Republicans' graceless rhetoric here compelled two conclusions.
For all their talk about America's "strength" and "greatness," their tone is of frightened timidity. These are "America the Endangered Species" Republicans, terrified that neither "family values" nor the nation can survive Mrs. Clinton.
And Republicans have caught a particularly virulent version of the Democrats' quite-virulent-enough tendency (remember the Bork confirmation fight) to turn political disagreement into moral assault.
Times Change and So Does Writer's Task
Carole Ashkinaze
The ghosts of "Bugs" Moran and Dion O'Banion don't lurk here any more. Having an alderman in the family doesn't mean you have a job. It's easier to find a cappuccino on Clark Street than a chili dog. Chicago has changed and is changing in some disorienting ways.
That much has been obvious since the Sun-Times gave its blessings three years ago to an Op Ed column with a liberal, feminist slant - a radical departure for what a colleague described (I think unfairly) at the time as a "working man's newspaper" in a "'dems' and 'dose' kind of town."
Lacking the perspective of a native Chicagoan, I couldn't accept either characterization. The Chicago I knew prided itself on the excellence of its universities and libraries. The Sun-Times was chock full of women's bylines. The "dems" and "dose" I heard tended to be the affectations of college-educated Bears fans from Beverly; they might swill "brewskis" and festoon the Picasso at Daley Center Plaza with a Cubs cap - but they stood in line for hours outside the Art Institute when a Monet exhibit came to town.
The women I met - from Operation PUSH's Willie Barrow, philanthropist Marge Benton and Personal PAC's Marcena Love to politician Miriam Santos, the ACLU's Colleen Connell and educator Paula Wolff - were formidable.
There had to be others.
We didn't have a happy hodgepodge of cultures, either, despite the hype. Our town's racial and ethnic boundaries were straining at the seams. Its schools were on the brink of disaster. Its infant mortality rates rivaled those of Third World nations. It seemed full of invisible people.
Chicago was their town, too, but it was just beginning to feel their behind-the-scenes machinations, gentle persuasions and rage. Though renowned for the fearlessness of its journalism, it had more than its share of columnists who wanted to slow the rate of change, so far as women and families were concerned. I had a chance to write a different kind of column, and I jumped at it.
Is this beginning to sound like the reminiscence of somebody who isn't going to be writing in this space any more? Right you are. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Wanting to make the most of my allotted space on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, I decided that nobody would ever have to wonder where I stood on the 'gag' rule, abortions at Cook County Hospital or the exploitation of ancient Indian burial grounds. There would be no cavalier dismissal of sexual harassment or women candidates here; no turning away if rabid anti-Semites questioned the rights of Jews to participate in elections.
And the result has been gratifying. If Carol Moseley Braun's campaign hasn't proved that change is stirring, nothing does. Remember the smiles that women who didn't even know each other exchanged on elevators the morning after her primary victory? Everybody's writing and talking about women now.
My columns have made some people, especially abortion foes, angry. But I've heard from single mothers, rape victims, priests and people with disabilities, too. They've taught me about their struggles and thanked me for making them visible. Sometimes, they moved me to tears.
They also got me thinking about missed opportunities and roads not taken, things I addressed in a social policy context (with co-author Gary Orfield) in a 1991 book, The Closing Door, about the persistence of poverty in Atlanta, my hometown. Then I heard that Jimmy Carter, the ex-president, had declared war on poverty in Atlanta. And that there was a task for me, if I was interested.
Imagine that. So without further ado, and with the hope that women will continue to be visible in these pages, I return this space to the editors.
I'll miss you, Chicago, but I'm off to Atlanta for a while. Bye, y'all.
Bush Plays the Shell Game With Proposal for Tax Cut
Carl T. Rowan
WASHINGTON - Give a clever, cynical politician an audience of his blindly faithful and together they can make snake oil seem like the elixir of life.
George Bush and the power-protecting conservative delegates proved that anew Thursday night in the closing hours of the Republican convention in Houston.
Consider the issue of taxes on which Bush flamfloozled voters in 1988 with his "read my lips" deception. This time the media and key delegates were propagandized for a week with leaks that President Bush would make a "stunning" promise of an across-the-board tax cut.
"What a great political coup this will be, because everybody loves a tax cut," some pundits said. Well, let's look at what Bush actually promised:
"I will propose to further reduce taxes across the board - provided we pay for these cuts with specific spending reductions that I consider appropriate."
The party faithful could shout and cheer, but the average American, in debt, jobless, laid off, worried about keeping kids in college, fearing the loss of a long-cherished home, had better be smart enough to ask: "What the hell did Bush mean?" Would his "across the board" tax cut mean that his friends making a million bucks a year would get a $100,000 windfall while the family struggling along on $20,000 would get a $2,000 saving? That would fit Bush's demonstrated mentality.
The president gave a clue that his obsession is still to get tax laws that reward his rich friends when he demanded for the umpteenth time a reduction in capital gains taxes on the money those friends make from selling stocks, bonds, real estate and other investments. The tax cuts Bush 'promises,' but did not spell out, will not bring relief to one percent of the Americans who now suffer.
But listen again to the words Bush used to explain how he would ensure that the tax cut did not add to budget deficits that have crippled America throughout his and Ronald Reagan's administrations: " ...we pay for these cuts with specific spending reductions that I [I meaning Bush] consider appropriate."
We'll have probably 150 new faces in the Congress after the November elections, but we sure won't get a majority of lawmakers who would cut spending in areas that Bush regards as "appropriate." Bush would cut spending on Medicare and Medicaid, even as he rails against any reasonable national health insurance plan. This president would cut the food stamp program, which has provided life-sustaining food for 27 million Americans during a recession that he said didn't exist. The WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program that provides vital nutrition to poor pregnant women and their babies would get zapped by Bush.
Mr. Bush's lollipop promise of a tax cut is more cruel and diabolical than was his "no new taxes" lie of 1988.
Even snakes wouldn't slither through the oily proposal that each taxpayer be able to check a box on his or her return saying "reserve 10 percent to reduce the national debt." Suppose Congress ever were stupid enough to enact this gimmick and taxpayers checked off $100 billion. That would reduce the $4 trillion national debt by $100 billion while increasing the current budget deficit by the same amount - unless Mr. Bush found a way to cut spending by another $100 billion. Note that in four years he hasn't cut a nickel out of White House spending, either for staff and its uses of airplanes and limousines, or for his patently political trips at taxpayers' expense.
Mr. Bush's "tax cut" proposal and his "checkoff box" to reduce the national debt are part of a shell game that surely has won the admiration of every swamplands real estate con man in Houston and 3,000 miles beyond, in every direction.
President Bush seemed to exult in his jibe at Bill Clinton's so-called "Elvis economics." He said that under Clinton, "America will be checking into the 'Heartbreak Hotel.'" It was as though Bush was unaware that millions of Americans have checked out of their homes and bankrupt businesses, including the Houston hotel where he claims to have his official residence. But the faithful were in no mood Thursday night to ask George Bush how much he knows about "heartbreak."
Mr. Bush may get a big upward 'bounce' in the polls just because people who see his party faithful cheering think momentarily that they must open their gullets to join the clamor.
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Here Come the Eager Beavers
Liberals, thinking government is a scalpel, are hot to operate on the body politic
George F. Will
James Carville, Bill Clinton's Clausewitz, talks like an Uzi, in bursts. He should do the president-elect a final favor by firing off for him the story of the traffic lights on Florida Street in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
A decade ago, Carville helped elect as mayor of that city a man who promised to synchronize the traffic lights on the main drag, Florida Street. By God, said the candidate, using a rhetorical trope then fashionable, if we can put a man on the moon, we can smooth out the herky-jerky stop-and-start nonflow of traffic. So the new mayor straightaway turned to Carville and said: Get it done. Carville called the city's traffic engineer and said: Make it happen. The engineer said: OK. But it will cost bushels of money. The computers will have to be jiggered. And there will be these problems with left-turn lanes. And, besides ...
The traffic on Florida Street still does not flow.
But even if Carville tells this cautionary tale to Clinton and to the swarms of eager beavers now bearing down on Washington it probably will not do a lick of good. Washington had better brace itself for the arrival of a lot of liberals who really believe that government is a sharp scalpel, and who can hardly wait to operate on the body politic. Or, to change the metaphor, they are eager to go marching as to war.
The Cold War is over, but the governmental hubris that the war engendered lingers on. Liberals, who often have faulted U.S. foreign policy for its alleged bellicosity, are enamored of 'wars' on the home front. Burton Yale Pines, a leading conservative, believes the Cold War gave rise to a misplaced confidence in Washington's capacity to do things not related to the Cold War, but which were called 'wars' anyway. The powers Washington acquired to run containment of Communism seemed to give Washington legitimacy as architect of ambitious domestic undertakings. Washington declared 'wars' on poverty, crime, drugs and AIDS, spoke of a "Marshall Plan" for the cities and a "Manhattan Project" for education. The language of war lent spurious plausibility to the idea that the government's skills in foreign policy could be as successfully applied to solving the social problems of an individualistic, pluralistic society.
Actually, the importation of martial language into domestic governance began before the Cold War. Franklin Roosevelt, in his first Inaugural Address, said he might ask Congress for "broad executive power to wage war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." Eight months before that, FDR had told the Democratic convention that the nation should resume the "interrupted march along the path of real progress." The 12-year interruption had been the interval of Republican rule between Woodrow Wilson - a war leader - and FDR, domestic 'commander in chief' treating a domestic difficulty as the moral equivalent of war. Wilson, who disliked the Founding Fathers' purposes in designing the separation of powers, was impatient with institutional inhibitions on government's freedom to alter the balance between "the power of the government and the privileges of the individual."
Before Clinton surrenders to the siren call of the Wilsonian presidency, read Terry Eastland's 'Energy in the Executive: The Case for a Strong Presidency.' Eastland traces some problems of the modern presidency to Wilsonian grandiosity in the conception of the president's duties. Wilson, writes Eastland, was the first holder of the office to believe "that Presidents are to lead the people ever onwards and upwards - to an unknown destination only history can reveal, but which, as the decades have passed, inevitably seems to have required larger and more costly government whose reach extends more deeply into the states and the private sector." Wilson declared that "the size of modern democracy necessitates the exercise of persuasive power by dominant minds in the shaping of popular judgments." Thus began the inflation of the presidential function: The president as the public's tutor, moral auditor and cheerleader.
"Salvation by society": Clinton, who will be the sixth Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, leads a party still awash with Wilsonian liberalism's desire to conscript the individual into collective undertakings. Wilson presided over the 'war socialism' of modern mobilization. Walter Lippmann and other 'progressives' thought war could be a healthy antidote to America's excessive 'individualism' and "the evils of localism." The public, properly led by a "dominant mind" at the pinnacle of the executive branch of the central government, could be nationalized and homogenized and made into good raw material for great undertakings. The greatest of these was to be what Peter Drucker calls "salvation by society" - society, controlled by government, would perfect individuals. Hence, Lyndon Johnson. One of his aides, Harry McPherson, described how LBJ envisioned the nation as a patient whose pathologies were to receive presidential ministrations:
"People were [seen to be] suffering from a sense of alienation from one another, of anomie, of powerlessness. This affected the well-to-do as much as it did the poor. Middle-class women, bored and friendless in the suburban afternoons; fathers, working at 'meaningless' jobs, or slumped before the television set; sons and daughters desperate for 'relevance' - all were in need of community, beauty, and purpose, all were guilty because so many others were deprived while they, rich beyond their ancestors' dreams, were depressed. What would change all this was a creative public effort ..."
It is a wonder we did not wind up with a Department of Meaningful Labor and an Agency for Friendly Suburban Afternoons. LBJ promised a Great Society "where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." Today Americans would settle for cities where the basic needs of the body (such as protection from bullets) and the rudimentary requirements of commerce (order; adequate education and transportation) are provided.
Clinton's eager beavers should ponder that, perhaps during a herky-jerky drive down Florida Street.
Europe, Our Former Ally
The bitter trade dispute reveals isolationism is growing on both sides of the Atlantic
Robert J. Samuelson
We call the Europeans our 'allies'. This reference is an increasingly outdated relic of the cold war. The bitter trade dispute now raging between America and Europe merely captures a larger reality: Western Europe is so self-absorbed that it's aggravating the conflicts of the post-cold-war world. An alliance presumes common goals. In practice, Europe gives only lip service to the common goals we supposedly share.
Ever since World War II, Americans have correctly favored greater European unity. The Common Market spurred economic recovery and helped subdue the hatreds of two world wars. But the latest exercise in unity - embodied in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty - no longer deserves our admiration or support. It aims to create a single European currency by 1999 and to remake the European Community (EC) into something of a superstate. These foolish ambitions are bad for Europe, bad for the United States and bad for the world. They inhibit Europe from playing a constructive role in international affairs.
Everyone knows the basic problems of the post-cold-war era. The first is to help Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union establish prosperous and democratic societies. The second is to nurture cooperative mechanisms that enable countries to maintain peace, healthy world trade and a cleaner environment. And the third is to foster strong global economic growth. On every count, Europe has been unhelpful.
It has been unimaginative and stingy in dealing with the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It has been totally ineffectual in Yugoslavia. Its heavy farm subsidies threaten the global trading order: precisely the type of cooperative framework that's now needed. As for the economy, Europe's slump is self-inflicted and is hurting the rest of the world. The slowdown resulted from poor economic policies - rigid European exchange rates and high interest rates - adopted to cope with German reunification.
Europe aspires to join the United States as a superpower. The trouble is, Europe provides no practical or moral leadership. Building a more grandiose Europe serves as an all-purpose excuse to shirk global responsibilities. Europe's message to everyone else is: be selfish like us.
Consider the current trade dispute. In 1962 the EC eliminated its tariff on soybeans. As soybean imports rose, the EC sought to stem the tide by massively subsidizing its own farmers to grow competing oilseeds: sunflower seeds and rapeseed. Europe's oilseed production jumped from 1.5 million metric tons in 1976 to 11.7 million in 1991. Meanwhile, its imports of oilseeds (mainly from the United States) dropped from 7.6 million tons to 6.3 million tons over the same period. In effect, the EC's subsidies revoked the 1962 tariff concession. That violates the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
In 1989 Washington complained to GATT. The GATT twice ruled in our favor. The Europeans refused to remedy their violation. Only after long negotiations did we retaliate: 200 percent tariffs to be imposed on $300 million worth of European food imports (mainly wine) in December.
Global leadership requires the capacity to identify larger international interests - consistent, to be sure, with a nation's own interests - and pursue them, even at some immediate domestic political cost. This has been the hallmark of postwar U.S. leadership. We helped Europe and Japan rebuild after World War II, kept a strong military and maintained relatively open trade policies. It is precisely this capacity that Europe lacks.
Irrelevant goals: On trade, perhaps the worst calamity - a breakdown of GATT - will be avoided. By threatening Europe with real penalties, the tough U.S. retaliation may prompt a settlement of the soybean dispute and the broader GATT talks. Even if this occurs, though, Europe seems fated to remain self-absorbed by the impractical and irrelevant goals of the Maastricht Treaty.
Take a common European currency, which would replace national ones, like the French franc. In the United States, a single currency works because, among other reasons, people migrate from a region of economic weakness to one of strength. Europe, divided by language and culture, lacks our flexibility. It's hard to create an economic policy that suits all countries. The bad experience after German reunification confirms that.
Even if a common currency could work, it is irrelevant to Europe's immediate needs. If Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union slide into chaos, it won't matter whether or not Western Europe has a common currency. The economic and social effects of this anarchy - unwanted immigration, perhaps more strife as in Yugoslavia - will be overwhelming. But Western Europe focuses on Maastricht instead of the more critical problems in the East.
Europe cannot be made into a nation: it is a permanent cluster of nationalities. The unrealistic effort to do so is increasingly unpopular. The Danes rejected Maastricht, the French approved it by 2 percentage points. People fear being submerged by a faceless EC bureaucracy. To overcome hostility, Europe's leaders pander to local interests. They are insensitive to outsiders, including us. Farm policy is one area where we've suffered; Airbus - Europe's subsidized commercial jet maker - is another.
What Europe should do, as columnist William Pfaff writes in the International Herald Tribune, is follow its "past model of progress through pragmatic economic integration." Specifically, it should bring Eastern countries into its market as quickly as possible.
The Persian Gulf crisis showed that Europe needs us. But we also need Europe as a superpower. All nations are looking inward, perhaps (as after World War I) dangerously so. Americans won't make the sacrifices for global leadership unless other rich nations do likewise. Unfortunately, the Europeans won't play. They merely want to advance their own agenda. Their isolationism feeds ours. Down that path lies a world without superpowers.
This Economy Won't Walk
Yup. But it may not be quite as crippled as you've been led to believe.
<#FROWN:B21\>
Judge Bea's case
This is to correct inaccuracies and to supply facts neglected by your writer in his article about me ("Judge profits from poverty program," Sept. 27). Far from abusing the U.S. Department of Transportation Minority-Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program as charged by your article, our family business (Ampac) met the letter and the spirit of the legislation.
The program is not a 'poverty program.' It was never designed to provide benefits to the needy. It is an 'affirmative action' program that provides an opportunity for minority enterprises to participate at all levels of government contracting, not just in the low-scale janitorial and house repair sectors. The hope is that minority entrepreneurs will hire and promote minority persons. Ampac did just this. We had 80 percent minority employees, placed at all levels of the company.
Manufacturing reinforced concrete pipe is not a backyard industry. It requires a factory, land, capital and people. Ampac's competitors in the Southern California market were all companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, either directly or through their parent companies.
One of our competitors, Hydro (a subsidiary of Consolidated Gold Fields, which received over 45 percent of its income from South African gold diggings and is largely owned by De-Beers, the South African diamond cartel) challenged Ampac's disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) certification before Caltrans. We demanded a hearing at which evidence was challenged and presented. We won. Hydro appealed to Washington. We won again.
We didn't win based on any 'legal argument.' We won, fair and square, on the substance and merits.
Your article also charged that I misused office stationery by seeking "to advance the private interests of others" in responding to Caltrans inquiries and implied I refused to supply the information requested. Nothing could be further from the truth.
My letter of April 20, 1990, to Caltrans was not a response on behalf of Ampac or Radco. It was a response to Caltrans demands for information regarding my relationships with Ampac and Radco. Your writer again "neglected" to print that after questioning the legality of the department's request. I nonetheless answered the specific requests of the Caltrans letter writer.
I continue to consider the matters submitted to the U.S. Senate to be inappropriate for comment at this time, due to the pending nomination [for a federal judgeship]. That includes financial matters.
CARLOS BEA
San Francisco
It amazes me that a well-intentioned program that provides minority businesses with government contract opportunities can be so easily manipulated. I am equally amazed and angered that a person like Superior Court Judge Carlos Bea, who is not Latino, African American, Native American or Asian American, can legally be considered a disadvantaged minority. After all, he is a white European (he was born in Spain).
Many of us in the Latino community have lamented over this predicament that people like Bea, who have a Spanish surname, are the first to say they are Latino (they hail from Latin America) and have faced historical discrimination in this country, when they in fact fail on both accounts.
FILIMINO REYES
Menlo Park
Bush can't manage
I was very disappointed in the column by William Randolph Hearst Jr. ("Why Bush may win," Op-Ed, Sept. 27). Hearst definitely seems out of touch with the impact of the current economy, deficit, AIDS and other significant problems, and the lack of action by the Bush administration.
Bush simply lacks management skills, and is unwilling to recognize problems and unable to develop actions to resolve them. The more I read, the more I am convinced that Bill Clinton and Al Gore have the energy, intelligence, vision and management skills to tackle our significant problems.
If the U.S. were run as a business, Bush and Dan Quayle would be fired for poor management, incompetence and complacency.
GEORGE M. HUNT
San Francisco
State plans for extra income don't endanger parks
For the record, no one in the state parks systems has 'embraced' such ludicrous notions as a Disney-run railroad at Mount Tamalpais State Park, as implied in your editorial, "Turning parks into profits: the Ansel Adams Marriott" (Sept. 27).
Although the editorial notes that I as state parks director asked for a study of whether additional concessions can be granted without "violating our resources," it seems to suggest that this department has a cavalier attitude toward parks resources.
At one point in this year's state budget process, the Department of Parks and Recreation came within just a few votes of having to close 100 of the 270 state parks. Your suggestion that parks be closed rather than that serious studies of alternative funding be conducted simply won't work without serious adverse impacts on the parks.
State parks are not enclosed by barbed-wire fences that allow them to be protected when money is not available to staff and maintain them. A closed state park unit is not immune to trespassers and vandals.
A continuing decline in general fund support for state parks has already resulted in a stiff increase in visitor fees. I am most troubled by your suggestion that state parks have a historic mandate to enact fees that "exclude all but the affluent." We are exploring ways to reduce fees to make parks more accessible to people of all income levels.
This year the department has begun a restructuring that will save over $10 million annually by eliminating supervisory and headquarters positions. We will also shift personnel to field positions so that we end up with more people working at the parks themselves. The California state parks system has fewer staff positions than it did in 1986.
With a mandate to protect and preserve California's natural, historic and cultural resources and to provide for public enjoyment of those resources, this department would be remiss if it did not study every possibility for reversing the decline in financial resources.
One such possibility is an expansion of privately operated concessions that provide legitimate visitor services in a manner that won't harm precious resources. No development, no matter how financially lucrative, will be undertaken in the state parks if it degrades natural and cultural resources.
DONALD W. MURPHY
Director
Department of Parks and Recreation
Sacramento
City Hall salaries and automobile perks
The Insiders' salary story ("Jordan's pay tops all U.S. mayors," Sept. 28) combined with their car story ("City Hall brass rides high while pinching pennies," Sept. 24) only reinforces the cynicism the average person feels toward government.
These salaries have no relation to any kind of reality concerning productivity or efficiency. The way these salaries are set is nuttiness run rampant. No wonder most people think of themselves as caught in the pincers of greedy "public servants" and greedy "public service consumers."
RICHARD N. PREVOST
San Francisco
I got very angry when I read The Insiders column Sept. 24 (on city automobiles). I feel that the leading problem in the San Francisco city government is fiscal irresponsibility.
On one hand we are promised our second increase of Muni fares within a six-month period. On the other hand, Muni head Johnny Stein gets a 1992 Ford for his use. He is not alone. Other city officials are abusing their privileges. These vehicles are being used outside of The City, during off hours, without any city markings.
Meanwhile, Mayor Jordan requests budget cuts and the Finance Committee debates them. I hope the committee decides to cut the personal transportation perks of city employees. I call for the Board of Supervisors and the mayor to conduct an investigation into abuse of the privileges of these people. Find a way to put the city seal on these vehicles in a way it can't be removed. These are not times for fiscal irresponsibility.
MARTIN P. VOJEWODA
San Francisco
In regard to the recent "scandal" about the use of city cars by top S.F. executives, it would seem to me that the general manager of a "company" with more than 3,000 employees, such as Johnny Stein of Muni, might just be entitled to a "luxury" ($14,000 is luxury?) Ford Crown Victoria. I'm sure he has occasion to transport officials from transit agencies around the world as he shows off Muni's facilities. I imagine transporting three or four people in an economy car (sub-compact) can't be impressive or comfortable. The same probably holds true for other city department heads to one degree or another, but let us be reasonable.
Rather than a "meat ax" approach, taking these vehicles back and assessing city officials what I think would be exorbitant fines (three times the normal mileage rate for past use, in one proposal) for what has obviously been a practice (right or wrong) for many years, let's take a reasonable look at the use of city vehicles. A reasonable solution will benefit the needs of department managers and their subordinate managers, their ability to respond to emergencies and their general overall service to The City as a whole.
MARK DONOVAN
San Francisco
Marines vs. AIDS ad
I grew up in a U.S. Marine Corps family. My father was in the corps for 38 years and I am a proud son. The Marines have always been my idea of the highest and finest branch of service. But today I feel differently.
These men who valiantly raised the flag at Iwo Jima have taken on a new foe: A grass-roots organization dedicated to saving lives from the devastation of AIDS. Marine Corps lawyers have taken on the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, a non-profit education organization. Why? A model in an anti-AIDS ad wears a tattoo of the Marine Corps emblem.
Even if this were proved a "trade-mark violation," what American would give consent to this mean-spirited lawsuit? And if the Marines win this suit, what would they gain?
The Marine Corps will pay any price and pursue any action to distance themselves from the stigma of homosexuality. What they don't realize is that AIDS is everyone's problem - gay and straight - and that education is one of the few ways of preventing it.
The AIDS Foundation has a slim budget and could quickly spend all its money on this case. The Marines obviously have no budget problem. We, the taxpayers, are picking up the bill. How sad that the Marines are spending tax money to pursue legal actions against an organization that is working to put an end to AIDS.
As a proud member of a longtime Marine Corps family, I feel betrayed.
JOHN HOFFMAN
San Francisco
Electoral win-lose folly
The presidential race has become a heated and fierce footrace to the White House. As mere spectators we find ourselves almost breathless, tense with anticipation to see who will win.
The most disturbing part of this win-lose format is that it polarizes the candidates. Each tries to represent the winner, the good, while making his opponent out to be the loser, the evil.
This notion of a winner and loser in a presidential race is absurd because the only losers are voters.
ALEX COSTA-STEVENS
San Francisco
500 years from now?
This being the 500th anniversary of the beginning of colonization of this land by the European nations from over the horizon, it might be interesting to try an exercise.
From today's perspective, let us imagine what the world 500 years from now would look like? I would wager that a significant number of people have difficulty perceiving what human life will look like-- provided we make it that long.
If more corporate high guys and their political friends would think ahead several generations, we might see a different set of decisions being made in behalf of the Earth and those of us who inhabit it.
Of course, we may choose to picture the Earth in 500 years with no human life on it. The choice is ours.
DON L. EICHELBERGER
San Francisco
Bush's bid for 'trust'
So we're supposed to trust George Bush. Bush said he knew nothing about illegal arms sales to Iran. He brushed aside evidence showing his complicity in illegal acts, saying it was an underling's "error of judgment" and wouldn't happen again.
<#FROWN:B23\>
Help Aristide return to power in Haiti
To The Editor:
Over the past 10 months, The Herald has attempted to cover the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti.
Does the Bush administration want President Aristide to return to power? If yes, what is President Bush doing to secure President Aristide's return? If no, then President Bush owes an explanation to Haitian Americans, Haitian nationals, and the American people.
Why must this matter take so long to resolve? How is it that the leader of the world is unable to assist the Organization of American States in bringing about an end to this untenable situation in Haiti? Why did State Department officials meet with army-backed Marc L. Bazin's minister of foreign affairs recently? Does that imply a tacit recognition of the Bazin regime?
The United States traditionally has portrayed itself as the bastion of democracy. Would it not then be correct to reinstate President Aristide to power immediately? Has President Bush forgotten that he pressured the OAS and the United Nations to facilitate elections in Haiti in December 1990? These were recognized as the first truly democratic elections held in Haiti's history, and Father Aristide emerged as a winner with over 67 percent of the electorate.
What is the World Bank's explanation for inviting to its annual meeting an unconstitutional, de facto regime headed by the former finance minister of dictator Jean Claude Duvalier? Is the World Bank considering lending money to the Bazin regime? Even if the Haitian Chamber of Deputies votes on such a loan, only President Aristide's signature can validate that action.
We are definitely at an impasse. The Haitian problem needs to be resolved soon. We the Haitian people want our president back.
PAUL SYLVESTRE
North Miami
On unincorporated Dade residents' needs
To The Editor:
I am a member of the Dade County Citizens' Advisory Committee on Incorporation. I wonder whether the legal reasoning upon which U.S. District Judge Donald Graham based his judgment (declaring the present countywide system of electing county commissioners to be in violation of the Federal Voting Rights Act) considered the dilution or debasement of all of the nearly 2 million unincorporated Dade residents' votes. The current system allows the residents of Dade's 27 municipalities to vote on what in fact is the municipal government of the unincorporated area of Dade County, to wit: the Metro Commission.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unknowingly, Judge Graham's judgment has failed to mention the express finding of the advisory committee's February report that the votes of all of Dade County's unincorporated-area residents in any election for county commissioners are diluted or debased by as much as 46 percent. That is because residents of the county's 27 municipalities participate in this particular election.
Furthermore, the dilution or debasement of the unincorporated-area residents' vote will continue if the 27 municipalities' residents continue to vote for county commissioners, no matter whether there are countywide or single-member election districts. That is particularly true if each unincorporated-area resident will now be limited to voting for only one commissioner.
I respectfully suggest that Judge Graham review the Citizens' Advisory Committee's report. He should include in any redistricting plan the committee's recommendation to divide the unincorporated area into municipal-service areas based upon communities of common interest and geography, so that unincorporated area residents can elect their own true municipal officers.
BRIAN. W. PARISER
Coral Gables
Address the issues
To The Editor:
Did the president condone Deputy Campaign Director Mary Matalin's reference to "bimbo eruptions" in the Clinton campaign? If he did, then I'm really disappointed.
Once again the Republicans will lose my vote. Whatever happened to addressing the issues, keeping one's integrity, and promoting constructive political discourse? Mary Matalin should join the 7.7 percent of Americans without a job.
JIMMY BLACK
Miami
Avi<*_>n-tilde<*/>o's reality check
To The Editor:
I am disgusted at County Manager Joaquin Avi<*_>n-tilde<*/>o's $30,000 salary increase (to $157,000 from $127,000)!
We are in the midst of recession, and as both local and state taxes increase, government services seem to get worse.
Mr. Avi<*_>n-tilde<*/>o should give himself a reality check. Many people have lost their jobs and no longer can make their mortgage payments. As a public official who earned over $10,000 a month, he was well compensated.
CARLOS E. RUIZ
Miami
Free trade mugs the U.S.
To The Editor:
A new, great menace to our struggling economy and dwindling jobs is in the making. This one is a creation of President Bush, under the misleading name of "North American Free Trade Agreement." A more descriptive title would be, 'The Upcoming Economic Mugging of the United States and Canada by Mexico.'
The present negotiations covering this trade agreement will produce devastating results for the average American still lucky to have a job today. Not just companies, but whole industries will begin moving south of the border to the land of low-cost labor and high profits.
Proponents in the United States maintain that Mexico, through this newly found prosperity, will be in a position to become our best customer. But for 50 years, Japan has refused to buy U.S. output of 95 percent of our products. Mexicans will do the same, because in a short time they will be in a competitive position to make more cheaply for themselves the very products that we want them to buy from us. As with Japan and Germany, Mexico will end up being our Frankenstein monster, and competitively devour us.
BOB RIJOCK
North Bay Village
Eastern Europe tragedy merits front-page play
To the Editor:
On Aug. 5, an article describing the bombing of Serbia during the funeral of two children appeared on page 14A of The Miami Herald. This same story appeared on the network news on Aug. 6 as a headline story. More progressive reporting of events in the former Yugoslavia appeared in Anthony Lewis's excellent column (Aug. 5, View-points, 17A) provided by The New York Times News Service.
There are relevant international issues being addressed through the reporting of European events, the importance of which The Miami Herald seems to miss.
There is an international situation going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even though much of the American public does not understand the political subtleties of such an issue, they at least will be interested enough to turn to pages 14A and 17A in order to read more about it, having been informed of some of the atrocities believed to be going on in that corner of Europe.
Even though the article on page 14 was simply factual reporting of an incident, it should not only be encouraged, but should be given front- or second-page attention.
I hope that the editor will give these European concerns better exposure in the future, and contribute to American humanity's general awareness of worldwide events in doing so.
JILL GILBERT
Pembroke Pines
Hispanic isn't a race
To the Editor:
Gary Illas's July 25 Readers' Forum letter neatly summarizes the confusion we all experience in distinguishing between race and ethnic background.
A classic example was on your front page: Peru's President Alberto Fujimori obviously is Hispanic and at the same time is of Asian extraction. Hispanic is an ethnic background, not a race.
The difficult question arises: If Pik Botha immigrated to the United States and was naturalized, would he check the 'African-American' block on his census form?
ROB CARDWELL,
West Palm Beach
Simpson isn't the only popular Homer
To the Editor:
On July 28, Herald writer Tracie Cone wrote about Howard Robinson's ad asking people to call him if they'd be interested in reading and discussing Homer's Iliad.
Surprise, surprise! Some 30 to 40 souls met at the bandstand in Hollywood Beach. For over two hours we read and discussed. One woman was an expert in Greek history, and Robinson himself provided background material and information.
What thrills me is to find that a literary oasis exists and can thrive in the midst of sleaze a la Channel 7 and its ilk of grocery-line checkout 'journalism.'
Some of the people who attended already belong to Great Books clubs (one from the North Miami Public Library) but are ready for more, more!
Several young people joined the group, so fuddy-duddy - Not.
Thank you for having the wit to pick up on a unique story, and for publishing it.
MARION L. HALLAM
North Miami
Welcome garbage police!
To The Editor:
Herald staff writer Charles Strouse's attitude toward enforcement of the ordinance against illegal dumping of trash in stations designed for residential use is one of ridicule (Garbage police on patrol, July 30). Yet if more county enforcement officers did their jobs, we would have fewer zoning violations, building code violations, and yes, illegal dumping.
Unfortunately, some people just won't get with the program unless there is a penalty - and even then, some won't comply.
For example, since July 1, businesses and multifamily units were supposed to have recycling programs for employees and residents to participate in. The management of my office building (in Coral Gables) tells me that it's the waste-hauler's responsibility to set up the program; the waste-hauler tells me that the owner has to sign a recycling contract so it can put out a bin ($26 per month); and the Coral Gables Public Works Department tells me that it isn't enforcing its own ordinance.
When I confronted the owner about the law, he basically said: "Oh, that won't go into effect for another year." So what's the point in having an ordinance if it's not enforceable? How many businesses and condos don't care about saving resources or about the solid waste problem? Plenty. To them, recycling is just another bureaucratic scheme to plague private enterprise.
When we have to permit yet another landfill or, God forbid, shell out millions for a polluting garbage incinerator, those who now smirk at the thought of a "garbage police" ought to remember how silly they thought mandatory recycling was.
KAREN YOUNG
Coral Gables
Overrun by aliens
To The Editor
I disagree with Herald Editor Jim Hampton's Aug. 2 column, Toss a legal lifeline to Haitians. I and a lot of other men didn't risk our necks defending this country from our many enemies all through the past 200 years just to see the place overrun by a bunch of humanity from Third World countries.
When a place gets overrun like this, it has a depressing effect on wages for everybody. No one gets ahead. I have lived in this town almost all of my 40 years, and it is apparent just by looking around Miami that when a load of poor people washes ashore, the place gets poorer. A few fast buck operators might make a killing in the short term, but the rest stay broke.
In a way, I take it personally about Mr. Hampton and his Editorial Board colleagues wanting to be nice guys. I think that their hearts are in the right place, but their brains ain't.
As far as worrying about any other Third World country going down the tube, that is too bad. Some places on this Earth are blessed, and some are not. We are, and others are not. Life is essentially cruel, and I for one have enough problems without worrying about getting overrun again. If you want them here that bad, give them your job. I need mine.
BRIAN SHARP
Miami
On the bosom beat
To The Editor:
Those who have written concerning crime downtown and in support of Rafael Kapustin's Aug. 6 Viewpoints Page article, Downtown Miami: 'Mayday!': should be aware that all is not lost. The police are focusing on more- important offenses.
Just visit Rickenbacker Causeway or Virginia Key Beach and watch what happens when a tourist from Europe or Brazil drops their bathing suit top.
You will witness the finest display of police tactical response and command and control performed with immediate precision. Yes sir-ree!
As citizens and taxpayers, you should be proud. The next time you or your co-workers are victims of crime, take comfort in knowing there are no bare bosoms on Miami's beaches.
<#FROWN:B24\>
How Taxpayers Might Stop Deficit Spending
Editor:
It seems to me the foremost problem to be addressed by candidates in the coming presidential election should be the federal deficit.
Amazingly, the general public hasn't protested with the ferocity a problem of this magnitude demands. I feel this is due in part to the fact that the dollar amounts involved are so large the common taxpayer can't relate to them easily.
Time magazine of June 22 took projections of government spending and revenues for 1992 and scaled them down, based on household incomes from $20,000 to $100,000.
Example: Annual income, $40,000; total existing debt, $144,981; annual interest on debt at 5.1 percent, $7,398; other spending, $47,472; total annual spending, $54,870; additional debt acquired, $14,870.
If you had $144,981 left to pay on your mortgage and were earning $40,000 a year, would you borrow an additional $14,870 in 1992?
I feel the recently exposed congressional check-writing scandal inspired such public outrage because it somehow proved to some people what they've always suspected. It's not that our elected officials can't balance the budget (or their own checking accounts). It's that they choose not to.
Perhaps we should be made to write two checks to IRS at tax time - one for our normal tax and one for our share of what the government spent beyond its means in the previous year.
First, it would be fair in that people who actually benefited from services provided by deficit spending in the previous year would have to pay for them rather than passing the bill on to future generations.
Second, the general public would be outraged to the point of demanding a truly balanced budget.
ROB MAHARREY
Court's Beachfront Decision Reinforces Property Rights
Editor:
The Sierra Club to the contrary notwithstanding, the Supreme Court's June 29 decision in Lucas vs. S.C. Coastal Council does not "gut environmental law."
It merely returns a small measure of protection to the rights of property owners that the founders of this country created when they added the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution.
The property rights and takings clauses are models of clarity and brevity: "No person shall be deprived of property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."
Mr. Lucas was clearly the victim of an unconstitutional taking (the Coastal Council forbid him to build on his beachfront lots because of erosion), but cases such as this involving total loss of value due to an act of a governmental entity are, and will continue to be, relatively rare.
Mr. Lucas bought the property (near Charleston) in reliance on the land-use regulations then in force, but the S.C. Coastal Council changed the rules retroactively and he was forced to seek relief through the judicial system.
Mr. Lucas's perseverance may encourage others to sue when their property rights are taken from them by administrative procedures.
It's very disturbing that the reaction of the Sierra Club to the Lucas case is to equate property rights to greed. Carried to its logical conclusion, the Sierra Club seems to be saying that all undeveloped property should be taken by the government, without compensation, in the name of public welfare.
It's becoming increasing<&_>sic<&/> apparent that "the Green tree has Red roots."
JOHN C. SNEDEKER
Our Judicial System: A Retort
Editor:
I hope attorney Kevin Street (Letter, Sunday, July 12, 'Is Our Judicial System Sick? No, It's the Best in the World') wrote a letter to Terry Santiago expressing his sympathy over her husband's June 6 death as I'm sure he has written to the Saltysiaks, MacPhails, Kellys, Valerie Armstrong's mother and others, assuring them the judicial system will do everything in its power to protect the rights of individuals who perpetrated the ultimate crime against their loved ones.
I'm sure they'd like a lesson in how the criminal is treated versus how criminals treat their victims. Apparently the fact the chief witness for the prosecution in a murder case is dead means little to Mr. Street.
He feels the rights of the defendant must be protected and is glad courageous lawyers and judges have improved our society. I only wish he would direct me to this improved society he and his peers have created.
Perhaps this society is the one described by Cade in Shakespeare's 'Henry VI,' where everyone "agrees like brothers." The only problem is, Dick wants to "kill all the lawyers."
I made no threat of violence in my tirade, as Mr. Street labels it. I only pointed out the direction the country is going. And I suggest Mr. Street spend some time in court, as even I know the jury doesn't plead a case.
RICHARD F. TUYLS
A Humanist Speaks Out
Editor:
Priscilla Carlton explained in her Sunday, June 14, letter ('Atheism and Humanism: Dispelling the Ignorance'), in a clear and powerful style, the definitions and differences of the terms 'atheism' and 'humanism.'
Nancy Buttimer's June 28 letter ('Religion, Character, Decency') is a beautiful example of tolerance with believers and non-believers.
Then came Luther Nichols's July 5 letter ('Some Thoughts on Humanism') with his anxiety concerning humanism. What kind of laws would we have, he asks, if atheists (and humanists) were in control? Perhaps he should re-read the Carlton and Buttimer letters.
As a member of the American Humanist Association, I can say we presently number less than 20,000 in the United States. We are made up of various levels of believers, agnostics and atheists.
If we were in control (which we don't want to be), there would be much less federal and state law concerning control of individual behavior of the victimless type.
The current domestic war on drugs would be throttled back and turned over to health agencies rather than police. There would be considerable<&_>sic<&/> more research and education on the effects of harmful individual behaviors.
Crimes against individuals and property would be managed much more rapidly. There would be no difference between the sexes in the eyes of our law.
Our goal would be a lot less government and much more freedom.
We would hope all individual behavior would be based upon rational choices, tolerance, and the courage to accept choice consequences rather than the fear and punishment model presented in Mr. Nichols's letter.
Most of all, we would encourage all people to take control of and become responsible for their lives.
If you wish to know more about humanism, go to your local public library and read some issues of the Humanist magazine.
Also, check out and read Corliss Lamont's book, 'The Philosophy of Humanism.'
HORACE W. SHEWMAKER
Cobbtown
Get Rid of the Rebel Image
Editor:
I like to add some input on the flag issue. The great state of Georgia has come a long way since the days of old and if we're to keep moving ahead, we must forget the past.
It's hard to forget when the flag reminds us of the way it used to be in Georgia.
I think changing the flag would change the way other states look at Georgia. In ridding ourselves of the rebel image, we can only advance further.
Thank God for Gov. Zell Miller and others who favor the change and the new image for this great state of ours.
God bless Georgia.
GENE MINOR
A Perot Backer's Plea: Come Join Us
Editor:
Ross Perot has a debt on his shoulders that makes the national debt seem comparatively trivial. He owes his supporters and all those who favor the concept of an independent political party one thing, a presidential candidate.
Personally, I'm glad Mr. Perot is gone now rather than after he took office, if he had no stomach for it. But he should at least name an heir to his place in his movement. The 20,000,000-plus volunteers and uncounted millions of voters who were willing to hand him their voting blocks on a silver platter know the two-party system in America is dead.
The 'Perot Party' wasn't really about Ross Perot anyway, it was about freedom of choice and recognition of the failure of both the Democratic and Republican parties to run this government by and for us. That hasn't changed, even if Mr. Perot's resolve has.
Those of us who dreamed the dream can't go back to the two-party system, regardless of how warmly and hungrily Bill Clinton or George Bush want us. We'll likely write in ourselves first. But what we really should do is stay united and bring in a new independent party, candidate and platform to a yearning America.
The 'Perot Party' (new nomenclature needed) would carry on the ideals we believed in and fought for in the first place, and win - forcing an entirely new form of democracy in this country for generations to come. Imagine the possibilities.
I'd also say to supporters of Bush and Clinton that, rather than us join them, they could now vote with a clear conscience and be part of the future by joining us, that powerful new grass-roots independent party with all the momentum instead.
Applications and resumes for prospective officeholders are now being accepted.
JIM ESHLEMAN II
Statesboro: Grow Up
Editor:
In a recent article in the Savannah Morning News, staff writer Laura Milner quoted Statesboro City Councilman John Newton as stating the city of Statesboro helps "maintain the integrity of what a single-family residential area should be" by limiting the number of unrelated roommates living together and the number of vehicles parked on private property in certain neighborhoods. These limits are set by city ordinance.
Councilman Newton goes on to say, "A family unit has people working in the daytime and coming home and wanting a little peace and quiet." He further states he thinks all Georgia Southern University freshman students should live on campus and implies they need to "learn responsibility toward the public and the folks around them."
If these attitudes are shared by the majority of the city fathers and the 'movers and shakers' of the city of Statesboro, then as a city, Statesboro is undeserving of a university the magnitude and caliber of GSU. It's precisely these close-minded and socially-retarded attitudes that cause many of the growing pains communities in our country experience as they undergo the transition from big towns to small cities.
If Statesboro wants the prestige and social and economic benefits of being host to such a fine, sophisticated institution as GSU, then as a city it needs to learn to accept some of its own inevitable 'urbanity' and 'grow up' in mind, as well as in size.
JACK FLETCHER
Pembroke
Change in DUI Law Was Unfair
Editor:
Maybe someone can give me some advice. I'm running out of options for a solution.
I recently called the State Department of Public Safety in Atlanta in hopes of obtaining my temporary driving permit. The date I was to get it was April 27,1992.
It was then that I found out about a new law.
The clerk informed me it would cost $690, plus completion of DUI school at a cost of $155, and also SR22 insurance, which is very expensive. The clerk said the $690 was because of a new law passed April 1, 1992.
Let me explain my feelings on this. First, I don't condone drinking and driving. It's a very serious offense. It's very dangerous and does cost many lives everyday.
But like any crime, there's a price to pay. I honestly believe I've paid mine. I spent 5 1/2 months at Hardwick (GWCI) and six months on intense probation, meaning curfew, alcohol tests nightly, and considerable restrictions on freedom.
During that time I did some serious soul-searching, and began to turn my life around. I started taking medicine, and getting treatment. I am a recovering alcoholic. This was not something anyone made me do. I did it on my own, and by the grace of God, I'm finally, after all this time, somebody.
I guess the thought that most goes through my mind is, if a person commits armed robbery, or even manslaughter, they're allowed to go free, after being deemed 'fit for society,' and are allowed every privilege and freedom provided by law after time served.
<#FROWN:B25\>
Who's Behind Hysteria in the Main Woods?
To the Editor:
Your Aug. 2 news article on Mainers who are worried the Federal Government will take their land for a wildlife refuge implies that there is a genuine threat this might happen. There isn't.
You report that last year the Government bought 318,000 acres to add to national parks, forests and other public land units. Three of the four agencies that purchased these areas did not use condemnation at all. The fourth, the National Park Service, did use its condemnation powers in some cases, almost exclusively to purchase tracts in Florida's Everglades eco-system, which the owners had bought sight unseen and do not live on.
The Mainers are suspicious of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the adjacent Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. Last year, not one of the 235,727 acres aquired by the agency around the country was obtained through condemnation. The landowners near Moosehorn should believe the refuge manager's assurances that they can either keep their land or sell it.
This is one more example of nationwide efforts, financed mostly by the extractive industries and their allies, to whip up hysteria among citizens by convincing them that steps to protect our environment will hurt them.
GEORGE T. FRAMPTON JR.
President, Wilderness Society
Washington, Aug. 12, 1992
Monterey Safeguarded
To the Editor:
An ad from members of the environmental community criticizing the recently announced designation of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary makes accusations that do not reflect the hard-fought safeguards for this treasured portion of California's coast (Op-Ed page, July 22). To counter a few of the more obvious misrepresentations:
No offshore oil drilling will be allowed in the area.
No contaminated dredged materials can be dumped in or adjacent to the sanctuary. Through a unique, co-operative planning effort joining the Corps of Engineers, state and other Federal agencies, ports, fishermen and environmentalists, a permanent ocean dump site is being studied to the west of the sanctuary. But the eventual plan is required by law to prevent damage to the sanctuary; and sediments disposed at the site must be sands and muds that are as clean as or cleaner than current conditions found in this pristine area.
All pesticide runoff and sewage disposal into the sanctuary must meet the strict state and Federal requirements. Further, all discharges must be upgraded to secondary treatment, and the state has committed itself to revise its coastal water-quality plan in keeping with the purposes of the sanctuary.
Finally, the state has entered into a joint agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to insure meaningful regulation of water quality in the sanctuary. To complement the agency's proposed sanctuary staff of five, who will implement all regulations, this agreement brings to bear hundreds of the state's water-quality experts.
The remaining claims in the ad similarly distort the purposes and achievements of this largest marine sanctuary in the country. Fulfilment of the sanctuary purposes will be difficult, given its size and that this is also the first marine sanctuary adjacent to major population and agricultural centers. Under Gov. Pete Wilson, California has committed its resources to working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in bringing this dream to reality.
KEN WISEMAN
Undersecretary for Environmental Protection, California E.P.A.
Sacramento, Calif., Aug. 3, 1992
Alaska's Park Pennies
To the Editor:
'City Dwellers Want U.S. Park Funds to Go East' (front page, July 27) makes a good point: that the public really does need more accessible open spaces.
But national park lands in Alaska do not, as you state, use a large percentage of the National Park Service's budget.
The Alaska region receives only 3.4 percent of the Park Service's $1.3 billion budget, though 70 percent of national park lands for the entire United States are situated there. Now 3.4 percent is not a big slice of the pie, when national park lands in Alaska exceed 54 million acres and some Alaskan national parks are the size of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont combined.
In 1980 you supported increasing National Park lands in Alaska from close to 8 million acres to more than 54 million acres. We warned at the time that management of new Alaska National Park lands would affect the budgets for recreation lands in the southern 48. No visitor access by road is possible to at least 10 of the 15 national parks in Alaska, and demand for that access in Alaska's national parks is up too.
TED STEVENS
U.S. Senator from Alaska
Washington, Aug. 2, 1992
In Algeria, Not French, But Arabs Suffered
To the Editor:
Re 'Still Aching for Algeria, 30 Years After the Rage' (Toulon Journal, July 20):
In describing what is generally identified as one of the most brutal colonizations suffered by Africa, the Fench historian M. Bandicourt relates how French troops occupying Algeria in 1830 would sever the limbs of Arab women to retrieve the silver leg and arm rings they wore.
Such violence continued more than a century, as the colonial authorities ruthlessly subdued the Arab population and confiscated and settled tribal land with French 'colons', also known as 'pieds noirs'.
There is not a word of this in your article. Instead, you tell us only that the pieds noirs enjoyed a 132-year "presence" in a country they considered their home, but were forced to leave en masse because of an Arab "blood bath", your epithet for Algeria's revolutionary struggle. Now, their former residences and neighborhoods in that country are "run-down" or "in ruins". You would have us believe that a great injustice was done to the French by the Algerians.
In detailing the experiences of the pieds noirs during the revolutionary war, you speak only of Arab "atrocities". But it was the French who showed a penchant for gross brutality: they killed a million Algerians in the eight-year war against the nationalists, and uprooted large sections of the rural population by a relentless bombing campaign.
The use of torture by the French military was widespread. Why is this aspect of the war denied? Among the ideological precepts of the 'new world order' is one that describes the third world as brutish and backward, and justifies continuing domination by the advanced Western countries in economic, political and military terms. This outlook can be seen in your article.
One would expect you to maintain a certain objectivity about such crucial issues.
MUHAMMAD SAAHIR LONE
Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., Aug. 3, 1992
Must Doctors Always Do Something?
To the Editor:
After reading your news article on the risks associated with the drug ritrodrineritodrine, used to prevent premature births (front page, July 30), I was left with a flood of emotions.
I am among the lucky. My only cross to bear for having been born to a mother who took the drug DES in the 1950's to prevent miscarriage was to remain on strict bed rest for the last six months of my two pregnancies, to have two sutures surgically placed around my cervix and to take ritodrine. At the end, with much praying, I had two glorious children.
The scars of others run deeper: malformed reproductive organs, multiple miscarriages, premature births, vaginal cancers and the curse of sterility. And yet, lucky or unlucky, the feelings of having been indelibly damaged by a drug whose effectiveness was ultimately found to be nil persist in all of us who were exposed.
Given my history and knowing I took ritodrine while pregnant, imagine my terror as I read your report. The word ritodrine popped out, my pulse began to race, and I began to shake, not knowing what fate awaited me. Was it to happen to me again - a "double dose," as my physician husband called it? What would it be this time - my health, my children's, some other hidden time bomb?
Fortunately, the newest information on ritodrine does not seem to hold out the same horrors as DES. Yet the experience is the same: an ineffective drug exposing pregnant women to needless risk and sometimes even death. How is it that such a thing should happen again?
Most disturbing of all was the statement of a prominent obstetrician that although he thought the new data on ritodrine should "sway doctors to use no drugs in most cases," he himself was not sure he or others would follow that course: "most doctors would rather give some treatment than do nothing." Who is being treated, the physician or the patient?
Isn't it possible that if physicians were more highly developed and educated in doctor-patient relations - that is, in empathy, understanding and communication - it would offset their driving need always to do something?
JANET RIVKIN ZUCKERMAN
Mamaroneck, N.Y., Aug. 1, 1992
Treat Hypertension With Right Mix of Drugs
To the Editor:
'Treating Hypertension Without Giving Up Sex' (letter, Aug. 1), by Dr. Elliot Wineburg leaves the impression that all medications used in high blood pressure management cause impotence, and that nondrug measures are usually effective.
A new generation of drugs lowers elevated blood pressure: ACE inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, alpha-adrenergic blockers, centrally acting agents, beta blockers and diuretics. In skilled professional hands and with some patience, the right combination of drugs can almost always be found - without intolerable side effects, and that includes impairment of sexual function.
Most doctors agree that hypertensive patients of whatever race should first be treated with a low-salt diet and a weight-reduction program. However, such measures alone suffice in only a minority of cases: when the blood pressure level is only mildly or moderately elevated; when the disorder is salt-dependent (less than 50 percent are), and when the subject is significantly obese.
Severe hypertension, however, with its risk of serious vascular complications, requires normalization more qickly than diet and weight loss can possibly effect. In such cases, medication is necessary early on.
Biofeedback and psychotherapy may play a supportive role in some anxious individuals, but they cannot be considered mainstays of treatment.
ISADORE ROSENFELD, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Medicine
N.Y. Hospital-Cornell Medical Center
New York, Aug. 1, 1992
Let's Reject Concept of Dogs as Designer Jeans or Sports Cars
To the Editor:
Larry Shook in 'Bad Dogs' (Op-Ed, Aug. 8) raises the important issue of the increasing frequency of genetic diseases in pure-bred dogs. However, he misses the point when he suggests that this should be dealt with by having the American Kennel Club refuse to register such animals or by forcing the pet store to cover the owner's associated medical expenses.
First, Mr. Shook ignores that there are individuals knowingly responsible for the suffering of sick dogs. For every dog suffering from a genetic disease that survives to adolescence or adulthood, there are many more that die as puppies or shortly thereafter. Second, and most important, the vast majority of people do not show dogs and therefore do not need pure-breds.
There are millions of adorable, loving, healthy mixed-breed dogs waiting for homes in shelters across the country. The majority will be destroyed. Puppy mills and irresponsible show breeders will churn out defective dogs as long as there is a market for them, even as shelters are forced to destroy dogs that can provide love and companionship. The problem can only worsen as the frequency of deleterious genes increases in the pool.
People should ask themselves whether what they want from a pet can be fulfilled only by a pure-bred and whether they must accept that, for this, the mixed-breed dog they reject must die. Few people who want pure-bred dogs are themselves pure-bred! Are dogs now to be considered on the same level as designer jeans and sports cars?
KAREN S. ZIER
New York, Aug. 9, 1992
Relief on Auto Alarms
To the Editor:
'Wailing about Wails' (Topics item, Aug. 12) echoes the feelings of New Yorkers on the usefulness and nuisance of car alarms. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo has signed a bill I sponsored that outlaws the sale of new car alarms that sound for more than three minutes or that can be set off by other than direct physical contact.
<#FROWN:B26\>
NAFTA Seen as Resulting in Devastation for Mexico's Corn Growers
Regarding Part 3 of the series 'Farming a Shrinking Planet,' the article 'Trade Deal With the United States Puts Many Mexican Farmers at Risk,' Nov. 4: If the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is passed, I am concerned about the possible effects it could have on the 2.7 million corn producers in Mexico.
Any benefits NAFTA might bring to Mexico would be outweighed by the problems brought on by the displacement of millions of farmers and their families due to a drastic reduction in the production of the nation's largest agricultural product - corn. Under NAFTA, Mexican farmers could not hope to compete with US farmers, due to climate conditions and geographical disadvantages.
I fail to see how an agreement such as NAFTA, which is intended to benefit all participating countries, can justify the risk of possible economic disaster for a nation by reducing or eliminating the production of its main food staple. A nation cannot eliminate the livelihood of millions of its people without causing an economic domino effect. One problem leads to another. If NAFTA is passed it will not be as profitable or beneficial to the overall economy of Mexico as expressed by the proponents of the agreement.
Alisha Whitaker
Burnsville, Miss.
Empathy for French farmers
Regarding the editorials 'Against the Grain,' Oct. 28, and 'Back From the Trade-War Brink,' Nov. 12: About one-third of the farmers in Nebraska have been forced from the land by rising costs and falling farm prices during the last 10 years. Similar statistics apply to other agricultural states. This is 'progress' under the so-called free-market system? During this time agricultural-business giants such as Con-Agra of Omaha, Neb., and Cargill of Minneapolis have become bigger and richer.
I sympathize with the French farmers because, under the international free-market system of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, they will also see their numbers greatly reduced by rising costs and falling farm prices.
Hank F. Bohling
Auburn, Neb.
A mandate for the UN
Given the emerging regional trends in the direction of peace, it is time that the United Nations General Assembly changes both the tone and the content of its resolutions regarding Israel. With the sole exception of the United States, UN member nations continue to pass resolutions which repeatedly have the effect of hindering - not helping - the peace process.
One important case in point is the UN's refusal to allow Israel, like other countries, to hold key positions such as a nonpermanent membership on the Security Council, the presidency of the General Assembly, and chairmanships of various committees. Without this, Israel uniquely continues to be denied full participation in the work of the UN, and an opportunity is being missed to grant Israel the international acceptance it needs as it considers the risks it must take in the peace process.
The current (47th) session of the General Assembly provides the chance to reverse the UN's defamation of Israel. It is crucial that all Americans seeking constructive change in the fragile Middle East encourage our government leaders to work with foreign representatives to end this trend of 'Israel-bashing.'
Mark J. Levinson
Boston
President, American Jewish Committee
Greater Boston Chapter
A Two-Sided Coin: Feeding the Hungry and Preserving the Land
While I applaud the four-part series 'Farming a Shrinking Planet,' there are serious oversights in the perspective from which the articles were reported. In Part 1, 'Can the Earth Feed Everyone?,' Oct. 21, the question presumes that our current norms of eating must be maintained. Nutritional research and environmental awareness have lent great weight to the argument that we must change our food consumption patterns dramatically.
Regarding Part 2, 'How Far Can Technology Boost Output?,' Oct. 28: The emphasis is on new genetics and new varieties. Why not emphasize the value of intensive gardening and the role of policy in encouraging subsistence and sustaining farming rather than export production?
Regarding Part 3, 'Will Trade Barriers Fall,' Nov. 4: In looking at the global arena, examples are given of the counter-productive nature of agricultural subsidies. The underlying assumption is that the global marketplace is the best way to provide the world's food. The tragedy is that the cost of such production is hardly borne by consumers in the short term.
Regarding Part 4 How Is Change Affecting Farmers?,' Nov. 12: Where is the discussion about programs to link consumers directly with producers? Where is the discussion about the awareness among farmers that the land cannot continue to produce with agribusiness practices? The global economy will work only when farmers, the land, and consumers enter into a mutually enhancing relationship.
Marilyn Welker
Columbus, Ohio
The immigration issue
The article 'Immigration Issues Land in Clinton's Lap,' Nov. 18, points out our continuing problem of hordes of people from already-crowded countries trying to enter the United States regardless of quotas. In addition to seeking answers to our present dilemma, we should take a long-range view and give more help to fast-growing countries in their efforts to spread family planning.
The US devotes less than 3 percent of its total foreign aid appropriation to bringing down the birthrates of less-developed countries. In contrast, billions go to military aid and to developmental and infrastructural projects that will soon be overwhelmed with too many people. Let us hope that the new administration will resume our contributions to the United Nations Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. No additional money is needed; just modified priorities.
Keith C. Barrons
Bradenton, Fla.
The Opinion page article 'US Refugee Policy Faulted,' Nov. 12, is an excellent review of the issue. The author notes that our refugee policy has outlived its historical mission. The same could be said for our entire immigration policy.
The United States currently allows entrance of more immigrants each year than the rest of the world's nations combined allow into their countries. And this quota does not take into account refugees and family members of immigrants who enter the US each year.
Do the immigration-policy makers truly understand the long-term implications? Through natural increase and legal and illegal immigration, America is adding at least 3 million people to its population each year. Conservatively, in 50 years, there will be at least 400 million Americans.
If the US limited its total number of immigrants to the total number of people leaving the US each year, which is approximately 200,000 people, would not that be a wise policy in the long run? Responsible policymaking must be based on long-term not short-term benefits.
G.B. Lloyd
Southwest Harbor, Maine
The US Government's 'Tough Love' Approach to Somalia
The good news is that Washington has decided to apply 'tough love' principles in Somalia, where disorder is so severe that less than half the donated food and medicine gets past warlords and looters to reach the multitude of innocent victims. The bad news is that our troops risk undertaking a dangerous mission without a clear objective. An open-ended notion of why they are there could lead them into the very quagmire everyone wants to avoid. We need to be explicit with ourselves, our allies, and Somalia that our sole objective is to safeguard the humanitarian relief operation - not to take charge of the country politically. Drawing the distinction is vitally important:
Troops should be used to take control of ports, airfields, and storage facilities used for relief purposes; to escort food convoys and personnel; to protect distribution sites; to provide a communications network and air-mobile rescue capability; and to organize and train local civilian guard forces. And they should do so in the face of opposition from warlords, using whatever force is necessary.
American troops should not be used to settle clan feuds, chase down warlords, or police political truces or cease-fires. The time may come when outside forces are needed for these purposes, but that is another mission, involving a different set of policy judgments.
Inevitably, the presence of an imposing modern military force will lend political stability to the situation. But for now, let's focus squarely on saving innocent lives from needless starvation.
T. Frank Crigler
Arlington, Va.
US Ambassador to Somalia, 1987-90
A serious peace proposal
The Opinion page article 'Peace Process Hang-Up,' Nov. 25, implies that Israel has made significant confidence-building moves which are not reciprocated by the Arab participants to the Middle East peace process. The steps described are largely cosmetic and aimed at the United States, not Palestinians or other Arabs.
Considering the scale on which Palestinians have been stripped of their property and human dignity during 25 years of Israeli occupation, Israel has a long way to go to convince anyone that it is serious about peace. Real confidence-building steps include: an end to torturing prisoners, collective punishments, and land confiscations; permission for diaspora Palestinians to return as permanent residents to their former homes in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem; and an end to the taxation system. These are reasonable expectations of a country that describes itself as a Western-style democracy.
Lee Elizabeth Britton
Petoskey, Mich.
The author of the Opinion page article 'In Occupied Lebanon,' Nov. 25, distorts Israeli and Hizbullah policy in Lebanon.
Israel's policy is clear: It has no territorial claims against Lebanon, and its sole concern is the safety of its northern population, which continues to experience cross-border infiltration attempts from Lebanese territory. With proper guarantees and a peace treaty, Israel is prepared to withdraw from the security zone.
Hizbullah's policy is also clear: It is an anti-Western, anti-Israel terrorist organization bent on taking American and Israeli lives. Hizbullah does not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East and has launched terrorist attacks against Israel's northern population.
The complexities of the Middle East must not blind observers to stark realities. The Lebanese practitioners of violence and their Syrian and Iranian patrons are responsible for delaying progress on the Israeli-Lebanese front.
Bluma Zuckerbrot
New York
Anti-Defamation League
Clinton's Middle East Policy
Regarding the article 'Mideast Talks Hinge on Clinton,' Nov. 10: I find it distressing that "Clinton's own definition of Palestinian self-determination" does not entail Palestinian statehood. What then does it entail? What does President-elect Clinton think is the appropriate resolution for the question of Palestine? It is unwise for Mr. Clinton to make statements concerning such a delicate and complex matter without being informed of the facts and realities of the situation.
His understanding of the situation does not take into account prevalent, accepted positions and decisions of the international community or statutes of international law. This includes his position on Israeli settlements in the occupied territory, on Arab East Jerusalem, and on the right of Palestinians to self-determination.
The settlements are illegal, according to international law and are major obstacles to peace. The overwhelming majority of the nations of the world, including the nation Clinton will lead, does not recognize Israel's annexation of Arab East Jerusalem, and the right to self-determination is an inalienable right to all human beings.
In this regard, it is imperative that Clinton appoint specialists who understand the history, politics, and culture of the region and its people to advise Clinton and enable him and his administration to deal with the issue in a responsible manner.
F. Abdelhadly
Cliffside Pk., N.J.
Winter in Bosnia
The continued fratricidal fighting in the former Yugoslavia, the revelations about the death camps, and the coming of winter underscore the need for effective and immediate humanitarian action to relieve the suffering in Bosnia and the region. Because of the sophistication of Serbian forces, military intervention is not easily attainable but should not be ruled out.
In the absence of immediate military intervention, the following interim should be undertaken: Resettlement must be provided for far greater numbers of concentration camp survivors; aid to United Nation's agencies must be increased and speeded; protected shelters must be available for those who will be forced to leave their homes owing to freezing temperatures and conflict; Croatia must be induced to accept additional refugees on a temporary basis.
<#FROWN: B27\>
'BESSIE' & ANITA HILL
New York City
I agree with Nell Irvin Painter's conclusion that the black woman's role in history, past and present, is largely ignored or demeaned ['Who Was Lynched?' Nov. 11]. However, she incorrectly cites Bessie, in Richard Wright's Native Son, as the first murder victim of Bigger Thomas. Bessie was the second murder victim. In contrast to the essentially accidental killing of the white woman, Mary Dalton, Bessie's murder is depicted as premeditated and particularly brutal, making Bessie's death far more horrifying. Thomas rapes Bessie, smashes her head with a brick and finally tosses her down an airshaft, where she freezes to death.
As Trudier Harris points out in her essay "Native Sons and Foreign Daughters" (New Essays on 'Native Son', Cambridge University Press), "Wright does not respect his own creation [Bessie] .... Bigger and the whites for whom she works use Bessie to their own physical and emotional ends." Painter is on the mark when she states that black women are treated as two-dimensional both in Wright's novel and in real life - as all could see in the treatment of Anita Hill.
Elise Fischer
GIRLS & BOYS IN THE BAN
New York City
In his recent editorial, 'Ecce Cuomo' [Dec. 2], Tom Gogola refers to two cases of antigay bias in the U.S. Armed Forces. Would that the odious discriminarory policy of the Pentagon were limited to those two instances. Unfortunately, gay service personnel like Joe Steffan and the lesbian reservist Gogola mentioned are released from the military at an astonishing rate. Since 1982, more than 10,000 men and women have been discharged from military duty on the basis of perceived or admitted homosexuality. That translates roughly into 1,110 individuals per year, or just over three persons per day.
My colleague Barbara Boxer and I have recently introduced a resolution in the House to instruct President Bush to rescind the ban on lesbians and gay men in the military. Our resolution has forty-seven sponsors. The resolution is straightforward, acknowledging what at least three studies by the Pentagon itself have already concluded: that gay men and lesbians have served our nation, at peace and at war, with the same dedication and professionalism as heterosexual service personnel.
Ted Weiss
Member of Congress
N.E.C.L.C. & C.O.s
New York City
Bruce Shapiro, in his article on Gulf War conscientious objectors, 'The High Price of Conscience' [Jan. 20], asks, "Where are all the civil libertarians?" I can speak only on behalf of myself and the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (N.E.C.L.C.); we are, and have been, on the front lines representing, pro bono, hundreds of soldiers seeking advice and serving as counsel for many of the resisters named in the article.
As one of only three attorneys representing approximately twenty resisters held at Camp Lejeune, both in the hearings on their C.O. applications and in their criminal trials, I spent eight months working solely on their behalf; my time was donated by the N.E.C.L.C. Other attorneys, also acting for the N.E.C.L.C., fielded hundreds of telephone calls from soldiers seeking legal advice relating to their military status.
Indeed, those of us who spent most of our time on the front lines at Camp Lejeune often wondered where the press was. For example, Enrique Gonzalez, a first-year law student, activated with only two weeks left on his contract, found medically unfit for duty and recommended for discharge as a C.O. by the Marine Corps, was found guilty of desertion and missing troop movements after a mere thirty minutes of deliberation by a Marine Corps colonel. He was then sentenced to thirty months' imprisonment and given a dishonorable discharge. This outrageous conviction received virtually no press coverage. As Shapiro mentions, Amnesty International adopted Gonzalez as a prisoner of conscience and named him a worldwide prisoner of the month. However, this resulted not from some spontaneous action by the European peace movement but from a tremendous effort by the War Resisters League and Hands Off! Moreover, the clemency granted Gonzalez was the consequence of months of hard work by myself and others and not merely by virtue of Amnesty's campaign, as Shapiro intimates.
N.E.C.L.C.'s contribution to the anti-Gulf War effort was a natural consequence of its commitment to civil liberties. We were active during the Vietnam War, representing draft resisters and challenging the legality of the war. While I agree in large part with Shapiro's critique of the American left's inaction, I believe credit should be given where credit is due. Not all civil libertarians sat on the sidelines; some of us actually engaged in hand-to-hand political combat.
Hillary Richard
GRANDMAS
Sacramento, Calif.
Do add to your "handful of groups" that have kept the C.O.s "at the center of their attention" an organization of which I am a member, Grandmothers for Peace. A number of us worked on behalf of California's Erik Larsen and many others. I think the war frenzy and all the tragic so-called 'patriotism' that fevered the nation helped keep publicity about the peace movement's support for military resisters to a minimum. I wrote to my Congress members and others to ask their help for the C.O.s. I had no reply from any of the men to whom I wrote.
Margaret M. Waybur
GREENS
Keene, N.H.
The Monadnock Greens of Keene, New Hampshire, would like to inform Nation readers that in December we adopted conscientious objector Paul Cook through the organization Hands Off! During the horror of the Gulf War, the courage of the conscientious objectors was a source of strength for many of us facing the blinding rhetoric of flag-waving enthusiasts. The Monadnock Greens hope to support Paul during his imprisonment at Camp Lejeune and also to educate the public on the unfair treatment of conscientious objectors.
Darcie Boyer
SHAPIRO REPLIES
New Haven, Conn.
Not just credit but honor is due the handful of attorneys, including Hillary Richard, who defended Gulf War resisters in the military. My comments were directed not at them or at the tireless, always admirable N.E.C.L.C. but at the many prominent civil liberties advocates who remained silent and at large, well-funded organizations like the A.C.L.U., which failed to lend its legal resources and publicity apparatus to what was after all a free-speech fight.
Several community-based peace organizations like the Grandmothers for Peace and the Monadnock Greens have contacted me about their efforts on behalf of C.O.s. The passion these scattered groups brought to adopting imprisoned military resisters proves an important point: Support for C.O.s should be central to the peace movement's efforts. Support for C.O.s is not only just but gives citizen-activists concrete tasks and attainable victories - so essential to the morale of any movement, and so often elusive during the Gulf War.
Readers may be interested in developments since my article went to press. In late December, Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn's sentence was reduced on military appeal to fifteen months. She is imprisoned under medium security at Leavenworth, even though by the Army's own standards she merits less restrictive confinement. In January the Marine C.O.s released last fall from Camp Lejeune filed a lawsuit (with help from the N.E.C.L.C.) challenging their commanders' right to prohibit them from speaking publicly. The court-martial of Tahan Jones has been set for late February at Camp Lejeune.
Bruce Shapiro
'ABOUT THAT AD ... '
Portland, Ore.
You are right: The ad for Positive Realism's program to "straighten out" gays and lesbians is thoroughly offensive to queer readers and flies in the face of everything The Nation stands for, with the possible exception of free speech. The ad strikes me, a proud gay man, as equivalent in its obscenity to an ad for child pornography or a recruitment ad for the K.K.K. In your 'apology' for running the ad ['About That Ad,' Feb. 10] you make the common progressive mistake of treating gay issues as merely political. It is more than a political issue; the ad insults the integrity and dignity of gays and lesbians.
An ad like this is dangerous. Someone struggling with his or her sexuality might attempt this program. It would inevitably fail and reinforce the belief that being gay or lesbian is a disorder and that the person must truly be diseased because he or she failed to become straight.
Here is a good idea for all the lesbians and gays who came away from that ad with that familiar dull sense of rage. Call that silly outfit and tell them exactly how happy we are being what we are, and that even if we could change, we would never want to.
Bill Wilkerson
ABOUT THAT DISCLAIMER ...
Studio City, Calif.
Please stop confusing censorship with editorial policy. You don't run right-wing editorials. Is that censorship? Surely you reject unsolicited manuscripts that are well written but politically incorrect. Is that censorship? Well, guess what? You don't have to run a politically, humanly incorrect ad just because it "does not seem fraudulent." It's a free country! You have the right to reject ads! In fact, your other disclaimer, the one on the Classified page, begins with your "right to ... reject ... any advertisement." So if you didn't reject this ad what do you reject? Disclaimer or no, your acceptance of that ad endorses it. I considered canceling my subscription, but I'll wait for your Institute for Historical Review double truck.
Sharon Bell
FROM THE ADVERTISER
Culver City, Calif.
I appreciate The Nation's spirit of open discussion. I don't view homosexuality as evil or a disease. I consider it an unhealthy choice - nothing more or less. There are many people with homosexual feelings who are unhappy about it. I help them change. I am against eliminating a homosexual from any job he is qualified for. I also think homosexuals should be allowed to marry, even though I don't recommend it. My gripe is not with homosexuals. I have no licenses or degrees. For the last seven years I have been helping people make the change from gay to straight. My gripe is with the 'experts' who claim it can't be done.
Joe Zychik, director
Positive Realism
'TWOFOLD OVERSIGHT'
Paris
Why was Gilberto Perez - whose name is unfamiliar to me but whom I take to be an informed film scholar - so unkind, indeed so unscrupulous, as to fault at some length (for "modernism" and "proletarian sentimentalism," which is fair enough) an article of mine on W.S. Porter published some fifteen years ago, at the very outset of my work on the period, while studiously ignoring my book Life to Those Shadows, which appeared early this year and which, being entirely devoted to the early cinema, would have fit nicely, it seems, into a review dealing with recent publications on the subject ['In the Beginning,' Nov. 4]. The book devotes exactly 100 pages to the question of the social composition of early film audiences in Britain, France and the United States and shows that I believe that blanket answers, encompassing different social formations, are wholly inadequate.
As for the "modernism" of the early cinema, I have shown the fallacy of this projective reading (including my own early tendency to sacrifice to it) in an article published eight years ago and collected in another book that also appeared at the beginning of this year, In and Out of Synch. A twofold oversight seems unlikely. My impression is that any scruples were simply overridden by the desire to produce a 'neat' article.
No<*_>e-umlaut<*/>l Burch
PEREZ REPLIES
New York City
The three books I chose to review (among several others I could have reviewed, including Burch's) were a sampling that enabled me to consider certain important issues pertaining to early cinema and to film history and theory more widely. Because Burch made a significant contribution to the rethinking of early cinema that has taken place in recent years, I mentioned him in my article even though I wasn't reviewing his book. I thought I was recognizing him rather than attacking him (for me "modernism" is not a term of attack, and "proletarian sentimentalism" - his term, not mine - is nothing to be ashamed of), and it didn't occur to me that he would take offense.
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Has Bush Really Flipped on Abortion?
DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
FINDING GEORGE BUSH'S definitive position on abortion before Bush became Ronald Reagan's running mate is no easy feat.
Groups such as the National Abortion Rights Action League insist that Bush has flip-flopped from an earlier pro-choice position. Yet Bush's pre-running mate public statements on abortion are such a mish-mash, it's hard to pinpoint just where he stood. And the search to pin down Early Bush is made harder by the fact that most databases start with stories printed in 1985.
Supporting those who argue that Bush was pro-choice are the president's one-time affiliation with Planned Parenthood, his erstwhile championing of family planning and his tendency to eschew social conservatism in pre-Reagan days.
The most damning bit of evidence is an interview in the March 1980 Rolling Stone in which Bush said, Ronald Reagan "opposes me for not wanting to amend the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I happen to think it was right."
The Stealth Position
A 1980 position paper, supplied by the Republican Mainstream Committee, from the Bush Iowa campaign belies a pro-choice stand. The paper stated that Bush is "personally opposed to abortion" - which in those days often was code for personal opposition but support for choice. But it also said that Bush supported states' rights on abortion and opposed federal funding except in cases of rape, incest or to save the mother's life.
The paper said Bush was opposed to a constitutional amendment banning abortion because he "believes there is a need to recognize and provide for exceptional cases - rape, incest or to save the life of the mother."
At no point did the paper assert that Bush was pro-choice or pro-life. The curious voter reading this paper could assume basic agreement with Bush, whatever the reader's abortion persuasion. In 1980 pols got away with such fudging.
Bush has flip-flopped on rape and incest; he has vetoed measures to fund such abortions.
But was he pro-choice? By NARAL's current standards, no. What's more, you have to figure that if Bush publicly supported Roe vs. Wade, there would be much more than the Rolling Stone article to show for it. (NARAL also produces an NBC transcript in which early 1980 Bush said, "I do not want to change the Constitution. There is some freedom of choice that exists under the law today, and I would support the law." But that's it for contemporary evidence.)
And the thing with Bush and the elliptical way he talks, well, it makes you wonder whether he was being goofy and left out words that would have changed the meaning. More likely, Bush was talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Before becoming Reagan's running mate, Bush didn't seem particularly concerned about abortion; if he were, he would have talked about the issue more frequently and with specificity. Now Bush evokes the subject at every chance.
Evolution, the Wrong Way
The president has admitted to a change in his position; he calls it an "evolution."
Vice President Dan Quayle's position seems to be evolving too. He has supported outlawing abortion. Then Tuesday Quayle said, "What I am trying to do and what the president's trying to do is to get more reflection on the issue of abortion before the decision is made."
That's a move to mushy ground, and a natural one. Many who have called themselves pro-life blink when they realize their agenda could bring a return to the days of coat-hangers. They are appalled by abortion, but as the prospect of victory approaches, they hesitate for good reason. Whether Quayle sustains this worthy doubt remains to be seen.
What Bush calls evolution, I call decline. After years of throwing sops at the far right, his presidency brought an end to the days when the GOP gave the religious right mere lip service.
Technically, Bush's abortion position may not be a flip-flop. It's worse, because Bush went from being wishy-washy to solidly on the wrong side. It's perverse: He flips on hard promises, then stands tough on the one issue where few want or expected him to. Figure that, having betrayed fiscal conservatism, Bush felt he had to embrace social conservatism or he wouldn't be able to portray himself as a conservative at all.
Burma's Quiet Prisoner Maintains Her 'Presence'
KAREN SWENSON
DAW AUNG San Suu Kyi's goal is a democratic government where all regions and ethnic groups are represented, said the Nobel Prize committee in awarding the 1991 Peace Prize to this woman under house arrest in Rangoon, Burma.
While the award honored Suu Kyi, it was a threat to the government which under Ne Win has steadfastly fought against his country's ethnic groups. In fact, the government cites its struggle with the ethnic population as the reason for spending over half of its budget on defense.
Meanwhile, it meets this expenditure by selling gems and logging franchises to the Thais, who help out with money and arms. The Chinese in 1990 also supplied $1.2 billion in arms. Japan cut back on its aid to Burma in 1991, but it remains the only major nation outside China, to keep up high-level contacts with Burma.
Burma's human rights record is one of the worst in the world, as cited by both Amnesty International and Asia Watch. The Nations Commission on Human Rights has sent officials to Burma.
The U.S. Senate last year passed a resolution congratulating Suu Kyi and condemning the Burmese government for repression and human rights violations, yet a number of U.S. businesses continue to conduct business there.
Pressure from the outside world, however, has had some effect. The Burmese regime recently released a few political prisoners and allowed Suu Kyi's husband, Michael Aris, to visit his wife for the first time since December 1988.
Guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, Suu Kyi has as visitors only a young girl who looks after her, and an intelligence officer. Still Rangoon is filled with rumors about her: that she converts her guards so that they must be changed frequently; that she heard about winning the Nobel prize on her shortwave radio; that she gave up playing the piano because her strings broke.
Her absence is a presence in the minds of her countrymen and women, just as her silence has spoken to the world.
Benicia Home
THE WHITE HOUSE has bestowed a singular honor on a Benicia recovery home for men with alcohol problems, citing the Adobe center's participants for developing good character and values while devoting themselves to serving their community.
The Adobe home, which helps the residents build self-esteem through activities such as repairing houses and cars for the elderly, received the Daily Point of Light from the Bush administration.
The award is designed to recognize those who successfully address the country's most pressing social problems through acts of voluntary commitment to the community. The Daily Point of Light program is a welcome promotion of volunteer service.
Poignant Pleas
WHEN ALL THE HOOPLA and campaign rhetoric of the Democratic National Convention are long since forgotten - probably a few weeks from now - Elizabeth Glaser's heart-felt plea on behalf of present and future AIDS sufferers should remain burnished in the nation's memory: "America, wake up. We are all in a struggle between life and death."
Glaser, who contracted the HIV virus in a blood transfusion and unwittingly passed it on to her two children, joined fellow AIDS sufferer Bob Hattoy Tuesday night in wrenching open the closet that has kept AIDS mostly isolated from the political agenda. In separate, prime-time speeches, they displayed to the Democratic delegates and the TV audience a quality of compassion, anger, frustration, fear and love that transcended politics and spoke directly to the moral core of America. As Representative Pat Schroeder of Colorado exclaimed afterwards, "If that didn't touch your heart, you don't have one."
PART OF what was said was partisan - dealing with an alleged Bush administration failure to respond adequately to the AIDS epidemic. But the broader message that came across was a plea to respond to AIDS not as a political or moral problem, but as a public health catastrophe that affects the entire spectrum of the human family.
As Hattoy, the Clinton campaign's environmental adviser who discovered a month ago that he has AIDS, put it so eloquently: "We are your sons and daughters. Fathers and mothers. We are doctors and lawyers. Folks in the military. Ministers and rabbis and priests. We are Democrats. And yes, Mr. President, Republicans. We're part of the American family."
U.S.-Mexico Nearing Deal
AS DEMOCRATS basked in the warmth both of New York's humidity and the uncharacteristically smooth functioning of their nominating process, President Bush was demonstrating practical, effective leadership out here in California.
At a San Diego meeting with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Bush told reporters that the North American free-trade talks were in the "top of the ninth inning" and that domestic politics will not prevent speedy conclusion of a treaty.
That's good news. Divisive voices have been raised about this U.S.-Canada-Mexico pact: The usual retrograde protectionist ones; the cry by labor that jobs will be lost and wages affected; the sounds of environmentalists who fear Mexico will become a low-cost refuge for polluting U.S. companies. But many of these problems have been addressed, and there is no doubting the ultimate benefit to all parties involved of a free trade zone extending from the Yukon to the Yucatan.
A MAJOR HURDLE was surmounted recently when Mexico agreed to open its financial services industry - long shielded from competition - to the U.S. and Canada.
The parties will be meeting for final negotiations on July 25. And while the U.S. Supreme Court's decision giving tacit approval to the kidnaping of a Mexican charged with complicity in a drug case may have cast a shadow over U.S.-Mexico relations, there are indications the process will stay on the rails.
President Bush is quite properly pressing ahead, and will not allow the election to deflect this important effort. That's leadership.
Greatest Female Sex Symbol of All Time?
CONTI
(Asked at various locations)
Edward Myotte, 38, not working, Vallejo:
Marilyn Monroe. What a body. She was so soft looking. She must have had some good cosmetology work. Being on drugs, she couldn't have kept up that way without it.
Paul Uliana, 50, electrician, San Bruno:
Brigitte Bardot. She was totally animalistic and it was the way she pouted. She gave the appearance of being self-assured, and anyone who has respect for themselves is sexy.
Eric Thorsen, 29, electrician, the Sunset:
Kelly Bundy from 'Married With Children.' She's naive and makes herself available to the opposite sex, which is appealing. She's very easy. She's a possibility.
Jim Simms, 31, electrical maintenance man, Fremont:
Cindy Crawford. She's sleek looking. It could be her hair. The different ways she fixes her hair. It's always wild looking. It doesn't look all perfectly in place.
Seth Kilbourn, 27, public policy major, Berkeley:
Madonna. She exudes a real sensuality and sexuality that's refreshing. It's honest and it challenges the status quo. It challenges conventional notions of female sexuality.
David Jay, 33, claims examiner, the Richmond:
Grace Kelly exuded class and sensuality. She had an air of sophistication and seemed to be someone that would be out of reach. Someone you would put on a pedestal.
Camille Paglia - born to be mild. Not.
IF YOU have any sense, I kept telling myself, you will stay out of the Camille Paglia House of Horrors. No feminist writer gets near Camille Paglia without losing a pint of blood and at least one eye.
Paglia was born ticked off because she's a girl and not a boy. She fights like a man - viciously and to conquer - which excites the hell out of a lot of people but has nothing to do with the advancement of feminist dialogue.
Camille Paglia calls Susan Sontag a "bitch." She calls 'Backlash' author Susan Faludi "stupid and naive," 'The Beauty Myth' author Naomi Wolf "profoundly hypocritical" and "bourgeois," and Gloria Steinem "an outmoded tyrant."
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Chilling Specter
Editor - Ross Perot claims his mission is to serve the American people, to do whatever it is we want him to do. The tragic consequence of his billion-dollar fantasy, fed by a host of well-paid sycophants, is that he fails to understand we Americans do not speak with one voice. We are, in fact, a nation with many voices crying out on behalf of countless interests. Even given the clear choice between a candidate supporting a more prominent role for government and a candidate advocating a laissez faire approach, we were not a decisive bloc.
From which quarter would Ross Perot get his mandate? From an 800 line set up to count only the yea votes? How would he hear from the rest of us? We are not like the 'shareholders' in a business. Investors have a single-minded goal: bottom-line profit. Sell more widgets for the best price while incurring the least cost. But we in this nation do not sell widgets, and the definition of profit is different for each of us.
Ross Perot opted out of the chance to plead his case, to answer the voices of defiance that had only begun to be heard when he quit the race in July. The specter of Ross Perot on the political landscape, with his bag full of money to buy out the fair process of debate, sends a chill up my spine.
BETH CONNOR
Los Altos
Ross for Boss
Editor - Naturally we are hesitant with Mr. Ross Perot, but why must we continue to be this way when we finally have someone who doesn't care to race because of name calling or because of candidates who are playing up to the media?
We finally have a candidate who is running because of the issues that are affecting the United States as a whole, as a democracy. Why must we burden ourselves by turning the candidacy into a soap opera?
Right now we need a president who is a businessman, who can project where we are 50 years from now. We do not need someone whose own state is bankrupt and someone who is walking around with no concept of the people. We need someone to help us, the American people, not to define who we are or our beliefs, but to aid in the economy and give us the chances we need again to fulfill the American Dream ... of freedom.
F.P. DERWILLERBY
Oakland
Titillating
Editor - Golly gee-whiz gang, seems I had to check my 'family values' at the door when I opened Wednesday's Chronicle. Those titillating photos of Madonna's mounds and Crawford's cleave ... butts in Berkeley ... it was all too much for me! I snapped. I'm now casting my vote for Joe Bob Briggs for prez.
STEVE SALAZAR
Santa Rosa
'Sore Sport'
Editor - Ross Perot; the Will Rogers wanna-be, the candidate was-a-be, the contender never-be. We've got him back: the buffoonish, bumpkin billionaire who claims to be different, a change and an outsider. Outside and different from what? Here's a guy who made a bulk of his money from dealings with General Motors and the Pentagon. How much more inside can you get? How many billionaires do you know who are not "ego-driven, power-hungry people"?
Anagrammatically speaking, Ross Perot = Poser Sort and Sore Sport.
BRIAN LEHMAN
San Rafael
Women for Clinton
Editor - Bush and Clinton are running neck and neck among men, but Clinton far out polls his rival among women. A quick comparison of their records reveals that there are very good reasons for women's preference for Clinton. Bush vetoed the following provisions in legislation passed by Congress, all of which Clinton supports: establishment of an Office of Research on Women's Health; a requirement for inclusion of women in clinical trials in medical research; increased funding for research on breast and ovarian cancer, osteoporosis and contraception; the Family and Medical Leave Act; over-turn of the 'gag rule' that forbids health-care providers that receive federal funds from giving low-income women information about abortion.
In addition, Bush opposes and has threatened to veto the following other provisions, supported by Clinton: the Freedom of Choice Act, which would protect women's legal right to choose abortion even if Roe vs. Wade is reversed; full funding of Head Start, WIC and childhood immunization by 1996; and restoration of the U.S.'s contributions to the United Nations Population Fund.
This adds up to a remarkable record of indifference by Bush to women's health, to their reproductive freedom and to the health and well-being of infants and young children. Women support Clinton because we know that he supports us.
EMILY STOPER
Oakland
Diversity at Boalt
Editor - Boalt Hall's changes in its admissions policy are wise and welcome. Contrary to what critics say, the new policy poses no threat to diversity. The new admissions rules will promote real diversity - diversity of life experience, culture, political belief and outlook - and replace the old diversity which was based on immutable characteristics, such as race, which aren't directly related to how an applicant has spent his or her days on Earth.
CLINT N. SMITH, student
Boalt Hall Law School
Oakland
Why Bush
Editor - Enough! We have been blitzed by constant media propaganda consisting of subtle, too extremely obvious, anti-Bush messages! One cannot read a newspaper or watch TV without being subjected to biased political statements.
On the other hand, Clinton has been allowed to smooth talk his way across the country, telling every special-interest group exactly what they want to hear, and leaving many of the negative campaign tactics to a very willing, primarily Democratic media, eagerly scrambling to help him in his attempt to win the White House.
Think America! And put the blame where it belongs: a Democratic Congress, a changing world economy and worldwide recession, an open door policy and a negative media.
There has never been a more crucial time for experienced leadership, if the U.S. is to remain a superpower. It is vital that we continue with a president who has the respect and admiration of world powers and the strength of character to do what is in the best interest of the American people rather than what is politically expedient and 'attractive.' And that man is President Bush!
KRIS GUILIANI
San Francisco
Sex, Abortion And the GOP
Editor - I am dumbfounded by the conservative Republicans who prefer a Democratic victory in California to a platform compromise on their definition of family values ('Bickering Hurts State's GOP Candidates,' Chronicle, September 22).
The right claims the moral high ground and implores its disciples to stand firm and seek the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. The position is so extreme, lacking in thought and common sense, that there is no longer room for Republicans like myself. Why is a party that professes the virtues of parental responsibility asking the government to outlaw something it is incapable of enforcing? Parental responsibility means explaining sex and birth control to adolescents when the hormones start ragging. I grew up in the ivory tower of the upper middle class and have found to my amazement that more than half of my friends never had a discussion about sex with their parents. Outlawing abortion ignores the all important parental role in preventing pregnancy in the first place.
When conservative Republicans stop seeking a simplistic and unworkable solution to a complex moral dilemma, maybe the party can get on with the business of winning an election.
STEVE FILLIPOW
Alameda
Oust Congress
Editor - Congress has deliberately attempted to sabotage the Bush administration at the expense of the country. They should be ousted not Bush.
Voting for Clinton is a vote for socialism and a sucker's bet.
With inflation low, interest rates low and no outside threat, the reason for the recession is clear - over-regulation.
KENNETH DEKKER
Lafayette
No Contest
Editor - The radical right-wing of the Republican Party has been promoting an anti-environmental theme throughout the 1992 election campaign. No candidate is more pronounced in this view than Bruce Herschensohn. Mr. Herschensohn believes that environmentalists are socialists, that the Environmental Protection Agency and Endangered Species Act should be abolished, that offshore oil drilling should take place up and down the California coast and that both the Clean Air and Clean Water acts are "con jobs ... unworthy of a free society." Not only are these positions absurd, they expose Mr. Herschensohn as being unworthy of high public office.
The Senate needs leaders who understand the reality of the environmental threat and are willing to advocate solutions. Candidate Herschensohn who would repeal both the Clean Air and Clean Water acts is not such a person.
Barbara Boxer, however, is such a leader. She has consistently been one of the strongest environmental advocates in the Congress. She understands that if our grandchildren are to inherit a clean, liveable environment, public policy favoring the environment will have to be established now. Clearly, if one cares about the environment and the health of the planet there is no contest between the candidates. 'Senator' Herschensohn would allow further degradation of the environment. 'Senator' Boxer would lead the fight to preserve and restore it.
ROBERT H. SULNICK
American Oceans Campaign
Topanga (Los Angeles County)
Man of Change
Editor - As California headed into a recession, the Congress voted itself a 40 percent pay raise. Among those voting for the raise was the self-proclaimed candidate of 'change,' Barbara Boxer.
Boxer made her name in Congress by attacking the Pentagon for spending $7,500 on coffee pots - then she turned around and voted against firing the House elevator operators.
Her definition of government waste is simple: if it's spent on her and her pals in the Congress, it's a bargain - no matter what the cost.
Bruce Herschensohn delivered more than a dozen television and radio commentaries against the 1989 congressional pay raise. I trust him to bring change to the Congress.
GERRY SNYDER
Danville
No Gimme's
Editor - Re: Sharon Johnson's letter, 'Unshackle Women' (Chronicle, September 29). I read and hear many opinions akin to those expressed by Ms. Johnson. She states that "women will flourish in any position if they are given a level playing field in the workplace." Who wouldn't?
I realize it is not in vogue, but nevertheless I offer Ms. Johnson and anyone who thinks like her to reconsider. In real life no one is given anything. Respect, position, renumeration, success and anything else worthwhile, are earned by hard work, dedication, perseverance and personal responsibility. Not by gimme!
ART WALLSTEAD
Merced
7th on Sale: a Zoo
Editor - "7th on Sale" I hope was a huge success in spite of itself. Friday night I'm told was wonderful, but for the rest of us peons, Saturday and Sunday was a zoo!
Too crowded, slow moving, long lines, sessions starting way too late, and worst of all old, old merchandise - more like a high-class rummage with a tax write-off for the designers.
I'm not the only one who said "never again."
NINA STONE
San Francisco
WAVES Reunion
Editor - I am trying to locate WAVES that we served with during the Korean War to have a 40th reunion. I am looking for all WAVES stationed at El Toro Marine Base in Santa Ana, Calif., working in Navy supply of the infirmary during 1953-1956. Please contact Mona (Foster) Benson, 16713 E. Queenside Dr., Covina, Calif., 91722, regarding a 40th reunion in the spring.
MONA BENSON
Covina (Los Angeles County)
'FAMILY VALUES'
Editor - It's laughable to see a scoffer like Quayle acting as a press agent for family values.
The very system that bestowed him with privileged status - the modern industrial system - has from the very beginning declared war on the family by dragging fathers and mothers out of the home to go to work for someone else, by turning people and nature into objects to exploit and transform into money and by forcing everyone to work harder and longer for less pay. Our system idolizes money and judges everyone in terms of it. Thus, family values are constantly under fire from the very processes of the 'free' market and everyday life.