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Show a lini ll ILk.-- akc Sribtuir gait Firsl, the eommendably fast f f ! ' ac- tion by Salt Lake County Sheriff's officers, the Sandy Police Department. Salt Lake County Fire Department and Jordan School District officials kept a potentially horrible situation from becoming a disaster. These agencies, under the direction of Salt Lake County emergency services director A1 Briton, Friday swiftly put together the massive evacuation of a school, a mobile home a park and a number of homes when Crest-wood chlorine gas cannister at the Pool Swimming began spewing lethal fumes over the area. The pressurized gas was released when a workman mistakenly made the wrong connection of a valve while he was changing chlorine bottles at the county-ru- n swimming pool. Prompt and decisive action by deputies. police officer, fire fighters and others limited injuries to six people, five of whom were quickly released by hospital attendants. The sixth was held overnight for observation. The whole incident could have been much worse. There were those 700 youngsters at Oakdale School, those 30 pupils of a along with the residents of the mobile home park and the occupants of homes in the area. Many of them could have been injured or killed by the gas. Secondly, the accidental release of deadly chlorine gas at the swimming pool prompts this obvious question: Are the people handling those cannisters properly trained, and are they thoroughly aware that chlorine gas is a deadly substance? pre-scho- ol, $3. Our close friends observation, tinged with more than just a little resentment, is probably typical of people across the country. The cost of fuel oil, the primary home heating fuel in much of the eastern United States, has climbed some 60 percent to an average of 80 cents a gallon. Five years ago, the price averaged 35 cents a gallon. However, on the basis of a long walk around the neighborhood, there seems to be a lot of Utahns who aren't sitting still just complaining about the increase in their gas bil) They have taker, a significant step backwards in an effort to or so it would seem offset the increased cost of keeping the house warm this winter. These are the people who have take-hom- 1 a busy man. There was an older reporter working for my paper at that time who had served with the Marines in China after World War II. He used to tell of people packing suitcases w ith Chinese currency before going to a restaurant to buy dinner. I believed very little of this then Never Carry- Cash Now, however, I never carry cash when headed for a restaurant. The necessary bulk inside my suit would make me appear to be supply of underwear. wearing a three-mont- h I a slim credit card, the sight Instead. carry of which reduces the most arrogant headwaiter to a cringing toady. With this powerful plastic I been a rash of accidents involving chlorine gas at swimming to have pools. Fortunately, none have resulted in deaths, although a number of people have required medical treatment. Nobody won. The government failed to protect what it says are fundamental secrets about the construction of the hydrogen bomb. The Progressive, and the press as a whole, failed to establish either that prior restraints on publication are unconstitutional or that the government has misused its secrecy stamp. All that has been established is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep information secret once it is out of the government's control. This results came about because the Madison Press Connection published a letter containing the information that the Progressive had been barred by a federal judge from publishing for more than six months. Once that information was in tlie hands of the general public, as it obviously, was after the Press Connection-printe- d 8.000 copies, further efforts by the government to stop others from printing it were senseless. That's why the government asked that the order against the Progressive, and a similar order against a California paper, which also had the letter, be dissolved. There is no way to judge now what damage life-lon- j i j j j j j i (Copyright! Hobart Rowm returned to the woodpile. Nationally, since 1973 when the U.S. Forest Service opened the national forests to the public for free firewood, the volume of fallen timber removed has climbed from tons a year. 1.1 million to 7.3 million why what was a rarity has now become This explains contemporary the increasingly common place in stacked orderly family woodpile fashion in carport or alongside garage wall. It also explains why the incessant buzz of chainsaws are now frequently part of the background noise on a weekend visit to some of Utahs national forests. It also is the answer why some people smile smugly w hen people like our very close friend complain about their rising natural gas bills. They have found they dont have to choose between staying warm or going they have a liungty this winter wood burning stove or radiating fireplace and a couple of cords of wood, split and stacked in the carport. has been done to national security b.v the publication of this information. The governments contention all along has been that it might be used to shorten the time in which nations that do not now have hydrogen weapons can produce them. Because much information a is put such weapons is, or has been, available if you knew where from other public sources to look for it tracing the impact of these disclosures on nuclear proliferation will be difficult. The primary lesson to be learned from this aflair is the flimsiness of prior restraint as a way to prevent the disclosure of secret information. A judge cannot bar the publication of something unless the government knows in advance it is going to be published, and in this case the Department of Justice did not know the Press Connection had the letter. Any person intent upon publishing a secret, or communicating it to someone else, can similarly avoid a prior restraint (and the summary punishment for violating it simply by keeping secret the fact he has it. Tlie oi.ly truly effective w ay the government can keep secrets is to keep them Once they get out. they tend to lie spicail qukkl.v just us this one was. The (inly real protections then available against publication of such secrets arc the A a during dinner. - Chlorine is somewhat analogous to fire. It can. under control, be a very useful substance, like its use in small amounts as a disinfectant of water in swimming pools and culinary water supplies. Out of control, it is a deadly poison. For that matter it was the first chemical warfare agent used during World War I and accounted for g thousands of deaths and of additional incapacitation thousands of soldiers. The gas, after severe exposure, causes suffocation, constriction of the chest, tightness in the throat and edema of the lungs. Rather small amounts can cause death: approximately 0.085 percent by volume in the atmosphere causes death in a few minutes. Quick action Friday prevented disaster. Perhaps had there been a process whereby all handlers cannisters were exactingly trained there would have been no need to evacuate those school kids, along with the others forced from their homes. No one died Friday and only a relative handful were even slightly hurt. But they were lucky. They, or others like them, might not be so lucky next time, unless steps are taken to reduce to an absolute minimum the chance of a repeated incident. Italy Underground Economy Booms ROME The Washington Post Call it the underground economy leconomie sommersa) or "black labor or by any other name, the extraordinary and growing level of undercover business activity that escapes the and the tax collector is official statistics the most striking phenomenon in Italy today. Not only does everyone know about the underground economy and talk about it freely while the government looks the other way but Italians basically are proud of it. "In reality. whispers a high government official, it's the last element oLflexibility in the Italian economic system. Fiat president Giovanni Agnelli estimated in an interview that if the output of the underground economy were counted, it would add 25 percent, or more than $50 billion, to Italys gross national product. The government itself, in revising statistics recently, boosted GNP Uii'.a b 10 pel cent, lnost of which a.i openly attributed to the underground economy. Estimates of the extent of this subterranean activity supplied by private and official sources put the total anywhere between 10 to 30 percent, with perhaps as many as 7 million Progressive Case Exposed Prior Restraint The case of the I'nited States v. the Progressive magazine came to a dismal end. ' Iw47-stvl- e, $5,000-a-yea- d of the labor workers, or more than force, involved. With little doubt, it's the biggest such submerged economy relative to GNP in Europe. Basically, the underground economy is viewed as the natural response to the high cost of labor, and labor union inflexibility. It's a window you can open. says Alessandro Alessandrini. managing director of the powerful Banco Di Roma. Alessandrini says that employers in the regular economy must pay such a huge social security tax for each "registered employee that they have been forced to turn to undercover operations. one-thir- In the prosperous industrial north, an extraordinary development new to Italy is the importation of about 500.000 Tunisians, Egyptians, and other North Africans for menial labor. Such jobs, scoffed at by Italians, also ev ade the tax and welfare benefit system. A final element in the "economic sommersa is moonlighting on an unprecedented scale by a bloated civil service in Rome. The unchallenged estimate is that 75 percent of civil with the servants here have a second job income unreported to the tax collector. J iii Civil St rv ant Except for the top brass in government, the typical civil servant does not return to work after the 1 .30 p.m. lunch hour ("if he reports in at all, adds a cynic) and then goes to his other job. The result has been the creation of a vast number of small and medium enterprises, where the boss (and owner) avoids not only l security levies, but the normal tax burden. Many of these smaller companies have concentrated on the export market, and their lower cost has given them a huge advantage. Italian exports last year txximed by 11 percent and the twice the growth of world trade underground market probably helped swell the total. There are other elements in the "eeonomie sommersa. As in other countries, there are the professionals who exact payment in cash and do not report income. That gx-- oil here in T Mx-ia- The Washington Post dine on spaghetti and veal wahHi down with Sicilian wine, feed a guest similarly and stride out aware that I have jud spent almost three to pleasure the weeks salary. innards So long as you keep the lt47 base pay in nund. inflation is a delight. Three weeks' salary on dinner for two! Diamond Jim Brady never feasted more w ant only. My sense of money derives partly from the even more ancient era of the Great Depression, w hen I had an uncle w ho made $5. (Ml a year. He was regarded in the family as a rich man. He wore a suit and necktie to work, had his own desk in a bank, commanded a secretary, owned a summer house and a boat, rented a floor in a tow n house, drove a Buick with a rumble seat and ate in restaurants that had potted palms and musicians in tuxedos who played waltzes Beyond Fantasv Five thousand dollars a year. The sunt was beyond fantasy. Even today that uncle could pay my electricity bill and have I3.S04 6 left over. That would he enough to buy half of a very small Buick. without a rumble seat. r mentality Growing up with a has its advantages in an age of galloping prices. That uncle, whom I still think of as a Mellon, a Rockefeller, a Gulbenkian, would collapse in awe of my annual grocery- bill today. "Think you're rich, uncle? Hah! Look at me here in the checkout line paying $5 for a half pound of steak and a half pound of steak fat My purpose here is not to strike the pose, but to encourage the young. If inflation is eternal, as all the evidence wages and prices will indicates, present-da- y seem. 32 years hence, the bench mark of a sound currency, as my uncle's $5,000 salary and my own $1,279.20 now seem to me. Assume, for example, that the cost of electricity over the next 32 years rises as it has over the past 32 years, so that a person who started in the late 1940s now pays a bill almost exactly equivalent to his starting wage. Dinner for $600 This means a person starting now at $300 a week with a gross pay of $15,600 per year will by the year 2011 be paying about $15,000 a year for electricity. The residue of $600 will then purchase a modest restaurant dinner for two. perhaps. After eating it. the diner of tlie year 201 1 A.D. will feel like a Croesus by reflecting that if anybody had told him back in 1979 that he would someday be paying $600 for dinner, he would have said. "Quit spoofing me. I'm a busy man. By that time, of course, this diner will have a child, whose college tuition is $150,000 a year and who is insistent about receiving a $110,000 gift to make a down payment on a new car. This child can be made to pay in boredom as he is forced to listen to tales of the good old days when electricity was only $99.61 a month, when you could buy a half pound of beef fat for only $2.50. Yes, inflation may seem to cast a dark cloud over the future, but every cloud has a plastic lining. I wonder if the electric people will cut off the juice if they don't get the $99.61 this month. The gas people are starting to get suspiciously testy. Oh, they wouldn't. Its only money. haven't been keeping count, but during this past year there seems Another View (mint From year s alur less $vt hh. for eiectn-itvwould have said. "Quit spoofing me. 1 111 We Smugly Warm A very close friend of ours remarked the other day, If you dont think the gas bill has gone up, take a look at this, and shoved the current Mountain Fuel Supply Co. bill under our nose. It was the August bill for $7. Not too many years ago, that bill (the minimum) would have only been vV 1 uould probahlv siend the $S5 SS before the year ended, a week at a time. This way I would hae $1 61 a week for food and rent Even with that kind of money, it would he frivolous to splurge on clothing Well the year 1 took home $1 ,274 20 was 1947. and money w as different then. If somebody had told me I would someday lie paying that whole Cloud of Escaping Chlorine Stresses How Deadly Gas Is I Time Service UEK Kelt If lie iiiuiitlily lull. It is for $44 til. Should 1 feel amused or At this rate, electricity for the antiquatedcoming year will cost me $1. ins 32 The e pay for a full ear from my first job came to $1,279 20 Today this would be enough to pay mv electricity hill ill full and leave me $s3 H at the end of the vear. Nfc Page 10 Seri ion A Its 2011, and $600 for Dinner New York Monday Morning. October I, 1978 r (Wilt moral constraints felt by those into whose hands they have fallen or the deterring effect of the criminal provisions of the Atomic Energy Act and other laws. In this case, neither was sufficient to prevent publication the former loo many people thought the government was carry ing secrecy too far and the latter because some people, apparently including the editors of the Press Connection, believe the government la ks either the will or the ability to prosecute. The risk those editors are taking is great prison terms of up to 20 years if their judgment of the letter's content is wrong arid he government's right. But if the letter does contain the highly sensitive material the government says it docs, it should not have been published. While a prosecution of those editors could jeopardize the current classification system and. perhaps, portions of the Atomic Energy Act itself, a decision by the Department of Justice not to prosecute could well turn that act's deterring provisions into a sham. In that event, the government would lx1 tempted to ignore what it should have learned from this affair alxxif protecting its secrets and to rely even more on a dangerous system of ineffective which it should in fact prior restraint abandon security burden, normally paid by business, in the public-secto- r budget. But in terms of trying to squeeze the underground economy out of existence forget it. "There are only a handful of inspectors. says a key source, and 95 percent of them are corrupt. Corruption is a way of life in Italy. In Italy, you can get anything you want, so long as you pay for it Satisfies Independence Beyond that, the underground economy appears to satisfy the Italian capacity for independence and small entrepreneurship. It produces what the Italians call "the little bosses," who are not only happy at what they do. but very good at it. Thus, the town of Plato, near Florence, is known as the "rag capital of the world. There, both regular and "black labor companies reprocess rags into cloth, heavily in demand by some of the best tailors in Europe. The Paris boutiques are loaded with ties and silk scarves produced in Como. Shcxs and handbags are produced in small manufacturing clusters all over Italy. Clearly, the black economy is not legal. But it has an acceptance here as a necessary evil, and one that has helped move the overall Italian economy forward. Copyright i Orbiting Paragraph?! The spoils of war include thing it touches. just about every- Time waits for no man and even less for a woman. Too much of a balanced diet creates a lot of healthy fat. A bargain is something which allows you to spend the $10 you cant afford instead of the $12 you can't afford. s a big way. txi. It is debilitating in more wavs than one. ' ll vou have a wilt- - and a girl friend." says an what do you think Roman. about The girl, of course. And if you area civil servant with two jobs, what's on vour mindThe other Job. ol course." Most of us die just one da) hurt of beginning our most ambitious projects. cxx-ncncc- - May Hamper Labor Those like Alessandrini and Agnelli who see the underground economy essentially as a response to the inflexibility of the labor unions think that the growth of the undercover system may eventually throw some fear into labor leaders. free-mark- Govci nineid official acknowledge that the combined tax and sixial security bite on legitimate business forces the payment of a full dollar to the tax collector for ev erj dollar paid to a wotker. The officials try. but not very successfully, to woik some water out ol Busy stem. t The that the government has (men able to do is to assume a port'on of th- - si , lx-s- i I The world Isn't ready for a car that gets miles per gallon . . . It's Impossible to go 1500 miles between restooms! 100 j |
