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Show Fear Too Often a Handy Tool For Exploiting Uncertainty Former Illinois congressman John Anderson did not do very well, its fair to say, in his third party run for the presidency in 1980. But while campaigning, he said some mighty sensible things which deserved to be said as part of a presidential election. Hes still making those comments. Appearing recently at the University of Utah, in a Kingsbury Hall lecture, Mr. Anderson struck a theme about fear infecting this countrys g that justifies attention. A similar warning sounded loudly as a claxon when the late Franklin D. Roosevelt used it in his first inaugural address, March 4, 1933. policy-makin- With the nation in the awful grip of a the depression, newly-electe- d . . . the Roosevelt observed that to is fear fear we have only thing itself. Almost 50 years later, former Rep. Anderson draws a valid parallel. When economic uncertainty reigns, the resulting general unease can be exploited to advance concepts based mostly on fear. Thats happening. Mr. Andersons example is the fervid return to the nuclear arms race. Deploring a still ballooning national budget deficit, which President Ronald Reagan now accepts as a necessary evil, Mr. Anderson indicts reinvigorated spending for military purposes, excused by what he terms perverse logic. Part of that logic rests on the familiar claim that the countrys enemies will conquer it with superior weapons if the United States arsenal isnt kept in condition. But second to none fright merchants dont limit themselves to the arms debate. The legislative hopper in Washington, D.C., is loaded with measures trading on fear and suspicion. Proposals which would severely restrict the amount of information that federal bureaus must now share with the public on reasonable request are pending. The argument, so convenient to bureaucratic preference for secrecy, is that enemies of the national defense, foes of law enforcement, can now obtain sensitive data for the purpose of subverting efforts to protect the country against sinister forces, whether foreign or domestic. In fact, existing law already restricts federal release of truly compromising information. A people beset by economic difficulties becomes more susceptible to A noticeable rise in scapegoating. and racism bigotry, locally and the country, can be traced throughout to this impulse. As economic depressants such as unemployment, bankruptcies, higher living costs grow worse, the tendency by the unscrupulous to gain position by blaming conspiracies or those least able to fight back can loom ever larger. Mr. Andersons response is as good implied, which can preserve and revive a system founded on community effort. Rather, it is appealing to the better instincts, by demonstrating that the principles of justice, fairness, openness and understanding prevail and function. In Mr. Andersons words, it is people, not weapons, that, finally, defend a society. People, its worth repeating, stirred not by fright and despair, but by hope and Good (For Country) Contract The overwhelming acceptance of a at GM ceased on Jan. 28. Since then labor contract that contains neither the No.l car maker has announced pay increases nor other new benefits, plans to permanently close five parts by Ford Motor Co. blue collar work- plants and temporarily close two ers, is nothing short of historic. Some assembly plants. 73 percent of the Ford workers The talks at GM broke down when contract that workers refused to consider concesapproved a basically only guarantees them their sions similar to those their counterjobs, and not much more. parts at Ford agreed to. While the But in an industry that is one of financial conditions facing the two Americas hardest hit by unemploycompanies are dissimilar, Ford lost ment (Michigans alone tops the 15 nearly a billion dollars last year while percent mark) the contract is a stark GM posted a $309 million profit, the reminder of the outstanding value of overwhelming 73 percent worker that old bird in the hand; a thought acceptance of the wage freeze at doubtlessly foremost in the minds of Ford cant help but have some those 43,683 workers who voted to persuasive effect on GM workers. accept the contract. The austere contracts negotiated In return for foregoing wage by auto workers at Ford and boosts and cost of living increases the Chrysler, besides creating an auto workers received assurances that industry benchmark, should tend to Ford will not close any plants for two be a trend setter in other industries, years as a result of shifting some one that would in the long term be work to outside suppliers and will economically beneficial for the whole guarantee an income until retirement American economy. for workers with more than 15 years A voluntary wage freeze, wilseniority who might be laid off. lingly negotiated by labor unions, in Last fall, workers at Chrysler exchange for pledges of job security, accepted a similar contract, giving will only serve to reduce inflationary up their quarterly cost of living pressures, along with moderating all increase, along with regular wage the other economy threatening facincreases. tors inherent in it. The result will be a The two contracts, especially now stablizing of the American economy. that Ford workers have demonWhile the Ford workers were strated an almost eager willingness probably motivated largely by perto forego pay boosts in favor of job sonal they, nevertheless, security, place considerable pressure have taken a course of courageous on General Motors and the unions and unselfish sacrifice that has the representing its workers to get back potential of paying great dividends to the bargaining table. Negotiations for the whole country. th self-intere- st George Anne Geyer Terrorist Bombing Only Too Common Universal Press Syndicate Our Nicaraguan Nicaragua airlines Taca plane had just pulled in from Miami Saturday night. I was standing about fifth back in the immig-- ' ration line when the bomb rocked the San-- ; dino airport. I wasnt panicked and neither was anybody else. The . response was one more of our times, typical something like, What in Gods name are they doing now? No one ran and no one screamed. Instead, the group of passengers backed up toward the walls in a kind of collective shock and fell to the floor. The bomb had been a stunner. My ears rang, numb from shock. But it was my white summer suit, more appropriate for a Caribbean that no longer exists, that took the hardest beating from the dusty floor. From my spot along the wall, I could see through the archways by the passport-checker- s the luggage room where it had happened. But only clouds of dust from the explosion that had brought down part of the roof in a terrible crash of glass and plaster were visible. Then the Sandinistas, in military uniforms and with pistols on their hips, began running between us. Calmate, calmate, (Be calm) they kept telling the 50 or 60 of us strangers sharing that dirty floor together. But in truth, we were the calm ones. We hear and read endlessly about terrorism and bomb blasts and kidnappings today. But it is odd what happens when it is you who are in the eye of terrorisms senseless fury. I felt oddly deceived. I would have expected this to happen in neighboring El Salvador, deep in .a civil war. But I did not expect it in MANAGUA, , '"& Nicaragua, whose revolution ended two years ago. My second thought unworthy, I admit it was, Dammit, Ive been on flights since early this morning and Im tired. But it was my third thought that was strongest. Even as the Sandinistas quite properly interrogated each of us privately (where had we come from? Had we see anything strange or unusual?), I was growing more and more angry. I was angry at the murderous thugs who now seem to inhabit every comer of the earth. I was angry that so much of the world is disintegrating before our eyes and that events such as these, aimed at the destabilization of regimes, have now indeed become the new warfare. As we sat quietly and patiently in the waiting rooms, I discovered that there were a number of American journalists on the plane because Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo was arriving in Managua Sunday for a special visit. One courageous TV network correspondent reminisced sadly about his friends, journalists who had been killed in neighboring El Salvador, where this sort of thing happens regularly. well-travele- d, It isnt so much that they died, as strange as that may seem, he was saying slowly. They expected that. Its just that youre gone then and did you get the murder on film? I sympathized deeply with what he said. Its not that one wants to be martyred, God forbid. But whether you are a diplomat, a journalist, a missionary or a businessman, you accept the danger if there is a unified nation in back of you that will at least mark your sacrifice for it. That there was not is the special torment that our Vietnam veterans suffered. Meanwhile, I was selfishly thinking: To die in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War was to have your name come down through the ages. To die in the Managua, Nicaragua, airport, your beautiful white suit covered with grime, square-shouldere- . He was bom a century too late for that, but he did all right as a lawman in the modern urban jungle. To paraphrase Jack Valentis immortal remark, I always slept better knowing that Pitehess was in the saddle commanding the largest sheriff's department in the nation. Pitehess, a throwback to the era when men and large boys demanded only that the government stay off their backs, t is a rugged individualist I remember him well at the 1964 Republican convention, which was jammed with roaring dele gates who booed the radical Nelson Roekeleller and nominated Barry Goldwater, a product of of old Arizona. the frontier When Pitehess departed the sheriff's office, he carried, tucked away in his saddlebags, a disability pension that equaled his full salary of $62,962. I was somewhat perplexed. After all these years, had he become a beneficiary of the welfare state? It was a disturbing question, but I refused to associate myself with the crabby views on the pension that instantly appeared in the press. One letter read, The reason the cities, counties, states and federal government are in such financial trouble is the high (public) salaries, pensions, disability payments, double dippers and the like. An outfit called Taxpayers Watchdog Inc. wrote a nosy complaint to County Supervisor Deane Dana, inquiring about the disability benefits, which the county Retirement Board bad approved in a flash Dana passed the note Tomas Shortly afterward, Nicaraguas tough minister Borge, of the interior, arrived at the airport in a shriek of sirens and twirling lights and announced that it was an imperialist plot. It could have been. One of the Cuban or groups in Miami or Nicaraguan in Honduras might have been trying generally to terrorize, or specifically to disrupt the Lopez Portillo visit. It could have been them; it could have been anyone. Perhaps the worst thing was that despite our discomfort and our rage, despite the sad deaths of the three humildes, the bombing was not really very special or even unusual. Things like this have become a tiresome fact of life these days. Copyright) t Old Premises of U.S. Foreign Policy Must Yield, Accommodate Change New York Times Service The premises of U.S. foreign NEW YORK policy have not changed since the late 1940s. They insist the United States has global interests that require the defense and cooperation of Western Europe, and that its major rival is the Soviet Union. The 1945 Yalta agreement provided for free elections in Poland, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, and withdrawal of the Red army from Czechoslovakia. But it did accept Moscows right to insist that these countries on Soviet western borders should not have hostile governments. In fact, Stalin methodically violated the pact and Yalta came to symbolize the partition of line dividing GerEurope on the east-wemany. That was essentially accepted by the West, despite a lot of mutual recrimination. While there have been wars on other continents and sometimes bloody upheavals in Eastern Europe, the arrangement kept the peace in Europe and underlay America's policy of containment, the resolve to tell the Soviets: so far, but no further. The Marshall Plan, NATO and other alliances stemmed from this analysis of the world the United States faced. Meanwhile the United States supported and was sometimes actively involved in the liquidation of Europes colonial empires, in part to express traditional American regard for independence and of peoples, in part to resist communist preemption of the liberation cause. Now, nearly 40 years later, decisions made after the war remain the fundamental guidelines of American policy. But the world has changed drastically. The Soviet Union has become a nuclear superpower with global reach. Western Europe has fully recovered, though it is still too divided to act as a coherent power. Chinas alliance with Moscow has turned to hostility. Decolonization is completed, and the world is burgeoning with poor countries that have found that independence is not enough and that in some U.S. Is Wealthy Enough to Give Officials Financial Safety Net Los Angeles Times have always thought of the recently retired sheriff of Los Angeles County as i ieal-lif- e John Wayne. Peter Pitehess, a square-jawed- , square shooter, would have cut an ideal figure in the Old West, taming the frontier, protecting the helpless, shixiting the bad guys between the eyes. Square between the eyes. did not somehow awaken any romantic sense in me. But it was not until we were let go several hours later that I was, for the first time, filled not with terror but with horror. It had been no small bomb. It had apparently been hidden in one of the suitcases arriving on the Honduran airlines (Sasha) plane. It had arrived from New Orleans and Tegucigalpa at almost the same time as ours. Seeing now the insides of the room that we had been a bare 50 feet from, I was smitten silent. As three innocent humildes simple working men unloading the bags had carried in the luggage, the bomb had gone off. The glass walls were shattered, and giant pieces were strewn everywhere. Most of the roof had fallen in. The three humildes had been mercilessly killed by a distant and cold killer. In a terrible monument, their blood stained the wall in the form of a giant crucifixion whre their hodies had been flung and flung apart. I was still not afraid, but seeing that room I was sick at heart. We could all figure out the odds. We could all have been inside the luggage room and most likely killed. Flora Lewis Phil Kerliv I i along to H. B. Alvord, county treasurer and tax collector and a retirement board member. Alvord had the answer. He wrote back to Watchdog's Jane Nerpel that the claim qualified under Section 31720 of the California Government Code. Pitehess had undergone heart surgery in ran for two years later and again in 1978. He went back on the job after another operation in 1980, but the county retirement experts found, just a few months short of the end of his last hitch, that he was disabled from performing his duties. The law presumes that any heart ailment suffered by a public safety official is 1972, but job-relate- That cleared up the entire situation to my satisfaction. In filing for disability benefits, Pitehess was only following the law, and If he became a client of the welfare state, the law was at fault. He also got an extra $20,000 in going-awat y, but that gif is a mystery only y to those who don't grasp the infinite complications of government. The theory is that since county department chiefs receive no formal vacation time, they are entitled to a bonus w hen they quit or retire. The goodby present rests on die fascinating assumption that these officials never take a vacation. The county pension apparatus seems quite logical and fair to me, and yet I worry a bit about the danger that it may cause some public confusion and misunderstanding. That undesirable result can be avoided if we put the matter into perspective. We supply school kids with free lunches, help mothers with dependent children and give food stamps to a lot of old people splurging around in the supermarkets. A country that is wealthy enough to do all this can afford to put a safety net under public officials. , , 'Copyright i 99-ce- cases are growing frustrated to the point of explosion. With ups and downs, the postwar policy worked, but it is running out now. In Europe, people no longer accept the a partition as inevitable and permanent. While Moscow fiercely denounces any challenge to the results of World War II, its euphemism for its European empire, there has been a striking advance toward German-Sovireconcilation. This showed when Leonid Brezhnev in Bonn last November paid tribute to our two peoples will for peace because our two peoples suffered most in World War II, omitting familiar diatribes about Nazis, aggression, revanchism. Poland has been the latest and one of the most spectacular demonstrations that the Yalta symbol has frayed. The military regime may suppress active opposition for a time, but it can't ease any of Polands economic and social problems, and resistance, perhaps more violent, will surely emerge again. As one Polish official who long served the Both Moscow and regime said recently, Washington must come to see that the division of Europe won't work any more and its no longer in their interest to impose it. So it is time for a sweeping new look at the premises of American foreign policy. Can we find a safer way to cohabit the earth with the Soviets? Can we support the European urge to relax the continental and German division? Can we insulate unavoidable conflicts in the ' Tliird World, which has its owti intense demands, from the dangerous East-Westruggle? Can we accommodate change, not,, always to our liking but often beyond ouj, ability to prevent? These questions address an immense tangle of risks and opportunities. They raise fears that easier East-Werelations in Europe would increase Moscows influence on Germany and break up the alliance, without reducing Soviet dominion of the East. The Soviets, internally weak, are seen as irresistible except by force. But underlying questions havent really been examined for a long time, and the old answers arent necessarily so anymore. There is a profound lack of confidence In the West's own strength and stamina which seems to block a new analysis. It must be made if we are not to stumble into disaster unaware. post-Yalt- et st Copyight) . |
