SP IIe bo rm nce oi ot / EDITORIAL Highway Pork The State Transportation Commission recently approved highway and mass transit projects for Philadelphia’s Eastwick area, the site of the 1976 Bicentennial Exposition. It was announced that the $101.5 million cost of these highway projects would be shared by the state and federal governments. Construction in- volves a new road, additional ramps and relocation | of one highway. The mass transit program provides for the purchase of 115 new Silverliners. These highway undertakings are to be finished in time for the celebration in 1976 so that the ex- pected 50 million people who visit the exposition site can get there without too much difficulty. : Why? Why do these costly projects have priority of money and time over several local high- way projects that have been in the plans for years? How long has this area waited for the realignment and improvement of Carverton Road? The North Cross Valley Expressway has been on nearer to beginning of construction at this time than it ever was. And certainly this winter has proved to most of us Back Mountain motorists that nothing per-, manent can be done (at least, the evidence in- dicates nothing permanent can be done) about certain highway areas where surface water flows across the pavement and freezes, causing large icy areas that have been the scenes of 1umerous ac- cidents. Can't these drainage problems be corrected with the expenditure of just a minor amount of money as compared to the $101.5 million that will be spent--so visitors can get to an ex- position site? We in this area keep hearing excuses, excuses about why our roads are as they are. And lack of money is one of the excuses. How can the state provide its share of that whopping big $101.5 million? Why can’t the state find money, in lesser amounts, for our roads? It seems to us a case, again, where the big cities get { L 5 So EER starve. The President’s Cost of Living Council and the Department of Labor Statistics have finally said what many consumer advocates in the region have been saying for months: It cost more to live in Northeastern Pennsylvania than in most other areas of the state or nation. ; Short of New York City, the Scranton region ex- perienced a greater increase in the cost of living, according to the price index, than any other city in the country during the last statistical period, or 23.6 percent more than it cost to live here in 1967. The figures showed that prices to consumers in Scranton went up more than in other cities in- cluding Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. ~ Accroding to the statistics, the major price increases were in the areas of meat, poultry and fish, health care, and housing, three of the most im- portant and vital areas that could be called necessities. Also listed with high points were rental housing, fruits and vegetables, general foods, men’s and boys’ apparel, cereals and bakery products, and reading and recreation. The region now has operable a consumer council affiliated with the Pennsylvania Depart- ment of Agriculture. It has an active consumer Department of Justice. In the near future, the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Board plans to establish a consumer representative in this region. The fact remains, however, that consumers here are being robbed by high prices for the things they buy, in an area where the per capita income is As yet no one locally has explored how the price policing agency under Phase II, the Internal Revenue Service, is operating in trying to hold down the inflationary high prices of commodities. ‘By this time, it would seem, the IRS, would have the U.S. Attorney’s office swamped with cases. Meanwhile, consumers should not only beware the high prices they are becoming accustomed to paying, they should revolt to the extent of making their voices heard over the rhetoric of political leaders. After all, its the squeaking wheel that gets the grease. Changes You know, Carl, last night, when I was reading about the primaries, it occured to me that this whole election business is nothing more than newspaper filler. On page one, in big black letters you see ‘MUSKIE FIRST IN WISCONSIN”’-or whatever might fit-and on page 26, wedged in between the obituaries and the hardware store ads, you see, in small letters‘ ‘Tibet First in Yak Butter’, and the only real difference is that the first article takes up more space. I mean, they could just as well make “YAK BUTTER’ the page one headline and stick, “Muskie” in as a filler. Why not, for all it matters. I doubt if anyone would notice. In fact, people might be concerned that the US is losing the yak butter race.” Carl sipped his coffee while Paul talked. It was too cold in the diner for March. The cold came in at the heels of the customers and crept under the formica tables, to lie ankle deep under a nicotine overcast. “Do you really think Chisolm or Me- Carthy or even McGovern has a chance,” Carl shook his head. “I don’t know, Paul. McGovern has a chance. He's trying to level with people about.” “But that’s just why he can’t win. Look- don’t laugh-I made up a story about it. Its a ridiculous thing but I want to tell it to you. “My story is laid in the kingdom of America curing the reign of King Richard the Tourist. It has been almost 200 years since the Declaration of Independence promised ‘liberty and justice for all’. The people still have faith in demoracy, are in the process of fighting a ‘bloody and senseless’ war over it, even though King Richard, like his predecessor, violates the Constitution every day. The king rules by ultimatum; he brings charges of heresy against his political enemies. “Into this‘blighted realm’ where every day the heretics fill the courtrooms, there comes a man who wishes to abolish the monarchy and restore democracy. If you want you can imagine him as having something in common with our Berrigans and Ellsbergs as well as with the doomed politicians I spoke of earlier. He intends to enforce the Bill of Rights, reduce the power of the corporate barons, and political intrigue, protect the people from involvement in im- moral wars and so forth.” “The people must support him then,” Carl broke in. Paul laughed. “But, as you'd see if you thought about it a minute, they don’t. And that’s the chief part of what I have to say. Now one day, while this man is speaking to TRB, ashington You can feel it in the air, “the disillusionment; the alienation, the cynicism. Things in government aren’t going right; worse, there’s a growing feeling that you can’t do anything about it. It’s like groping in the dark for a light switch that may not be there. For the first time the U.S. frustration begins to embrace the very system itself. Take Vietnam: the public wants out; we can’t get out. We want a fair shake on taxes; we know we aren’t getting it. We want better distribution of income; the gap isn’t closing. We want Congress to control corporate wealth; instead, the corporations pay the congressman’s campaign bills. Everywhere in the dark we stumble into things; the economy — inflation is bad enough, unem- ployment is bad enough, but to get them together! The taxi driver’s wife tells him she needs more money. Why? You should see the price of vegetables and ground beef. But what’s this? The headline says Agriculture Secretary Butz ‘hails higher meat prices.” He says ‘‘they provide the best way to insure a good supply of the better cuts of beef that I prefer.” The public looks at Washington in disbelief. The ITT thing, for God’s sake. The huge concern shreds the documents of its lobbyist and then looks as innocent as Little Eva ascending into heaven. Its president's salary is three times Mr. Nixon’s. It runs its own foreign policy with the aid of the CIA; it finances political conventions. So. what? It does no more than other multi-billion, multi- national, corporations. Nothing criminal, you understand; you can’t indict a smell. Professors have been telling us about ’ Footnotes by J.R. Freeman for the Wall Street Journal, has been wat- ching politics for a long time. The veteran newsman has tried with the best of them to outguess the voters. And his experience can give us all some insight into what to expect in this, another election year. Take 1948 for example, a year before many of today’s voters were even born. In March of that year Harry Truman was dropped from the running by most political experts. But in 1948 the Republicans were the ones to watch. Tom Dewey that year took a slim victory in the New Hampshire primary. Then in Wisconsin Harold Stassen took the lead out in front of Mr. Dewey, and even further ahead of Sen. Taft. By May it was all decided that Stassen was by far the favorite Republican. But in June, just a month later, Republicans nominated Mr. Dewey, and then in November the voters elected Mr. Truman. Four years later, in the winter of 1952, politics really got sticky. Everything pointed to Sen. Taft as the Republican nominee, and hardly anyone gave Adlai Stevenson a chance as the Democratic candidate. Estes Kefauver the people, archbishop Edgar passes by. He is a very old man, almost eighty, an orthodox lawg and-order man, head of King Richard’s national church. At a distance behind him come his tonsured assistants (no sideburns) and his police dogs. His face, weighted down in its wrinkles is held nearly immobile but his eyes are still quick and his ears are still keen. He hears everything this strange man is saying. Everything is true, but as I think I mentioned before-in this kingdom the truth is sometimes illegal. Edgar points a withered finger and bids his guards to take the man. So indoctrinated are the people that they make no protest. The man is led to a gloomy dungeon directly beneath the White Palace and day turns to night. “In the stygian darkness the cell door swings open and King Richard himself ap- pears. He is dressed for re-election in his gorgeous statesman’s robes. His hair, newly dyed, glistens in the wane light of his candle. He goes up slowly to the prisonner and speaks. ‘* ‘Why hast thou come to hinder us?’ but receiving no answer he merely laughs, lets his hand fall to the hilt of his great sword of power, Presidency. ‘Knowest thou that tomorrow I shall condemn thee and burn thee as the worst of heretics. And the people will applaud me, will call me a patriot and a true defender of democracy, and thou, for all thy talk of freedom, and truth will be branded a traitor and a villain. Thou hast never had the support of the people.’ “But does the prisonner remain silent?” asked Carl. “Why doesn’t he defend him- self?” “I don’t understand, » Carl broke in ‘again. “Is he jesting?” “Not at all. King Richard claims it as a merit for himself that freedom has been vanquished. ‘For now the people are happy. There is nothing man dreads more than freedom. Thou woudst say my subjects are enslaved but they are well fed and little worked. The heavy burden of choice has been lifted from their shoulders. * ‘Dost thou not know, Democracy is merely a name, a foundation for people to rest their consciences on, an imaginary concept they might live for and worship together with the happiness of sheep. Nothing is a greater cause of suffering than true freedom. What dost thou offer men? Nothing but confusion, unanswerable problems and abject misely, while we would set men’s consciences at rest. We would pardon every sin so long as it is committed in the name of demogracy. The people need not burden thenflelves with worry over the morality of wars. If there are massacres in Asia or at the universities, it isn’t their fault. % “ ‘Men prefer freedom from respon- sibility to freedom of choice. They will con- tinue to vote against democracy. And that is well for we shall look after those who sacrifice their power to us and they shall be contented. Tomorrow thou shalt be condemned as a heretic by those you thought to free.’ Saying this the king leaves and darkness once again closes over the prisonner.”’ When Paul had finished speaking Carl was silent for a moment then he said, “I don’t quite understand what your story means. You | can’t be serious..” “Of course not. Why its por I should never have brought it up’ % r— 4 V1 ABODE WAY AN N HEAR SHOW NG pe Cl ARN giant corporations for years, but until now few. have listened. In 1950 the 100 largest corporations controlled 38 percent of total industrial assets in America; by 1965 it was over 45 percent. Today? Who knows. Seven big companies got 17 percent of all corporate profits in 1956 — GM, FORD, AT&T, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco, Gulf Oil and IBM. Ten years later the same seven got a quarter of all profits. Three of the biggest concerns are oil companies. The oil industry has holes in the tax laws you can drive a tanker-truck through—depletion allowance, drilling allowance, the import quota (tariff) system. The normal big oil company pays a lower tax rate than a charwoman. People are getting fed up. That’s why they voted for George Wallace. Not because of his stand on busing alone (though most competent demagogues have a sideline of bigotry). But because Wallace is vocalizing a dozen festering grievances. Here’s an illustration: a $200,000-a-year family presently gets a subsidy of about $70 for every $100 of its mortgage payments; a $10,000-a-year family gets an average of $19. We run a kind of welfare system for the af- fluent. The Proxmire Joint Economic Com- mittee has just estimated that about $63 billion in Federal subsidies are paid every year. Some are good, some are bad. In general the payments tilt in favor of the af- fluent. Why doesn’t Congress equalize things?—not easy with Russell Long, senator for oil, or James Eastland, senator for farm subsidies, standing in the way. Congress is pock-marked with road blocks. We lack was the big Democratic winner, capturing the primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland. But then at convention time the Democrats nominated Stevenson and the Republicans nominated Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. And then, eight years later, came the 1960 episode, with Vice President Richard Nixon as the field favorite for Republicans and Hubert Humphrey the leading Democrat. Sen. John Kennedy, of course, came along and won everything, after Lyndon Johnson took care of Mr. Humphrey and Mr. Nixon later couldn’t even beat Pat Brown for governor of California. It was in that era that we all thought we had heard the last of Richard Nixon, and he even téld us so. Four years ago we had another turn for the unpredictable. Who would have thought the Democratic nominee would be anyone but Lyndon Johnson? The voters elected him over Barry Goldwater in 1964 in order to stop the war, and after four more years of steady escalation, he decided to quit. - Sen. Eugene McCarthy came along and disciplined political parties; in the Canadian or European sense. Every poll shows that the average man wants Vietnam stopped. But bombs keep falling. Can the individual do “anything? Apparently not. Leaders tell us not to worry, combat soldiers are coming back home. Isn’t that fine? The bombs have a nice technical name, ‘protective reaction’’; they are used only when the enemy has the arrogance to track our fliers over their territory. In Holy Week, if you take communion, don’t think about them; it’s not your responsibility. Anyway, those little brown peasants aren’t Christians; that dead baby in the ditch with slant eyes was probably never baptized. Take the wafer; it’s all right. Our government is busy with other im- portant matters. For example, it is ferreting out conspiracy and just at present has a couple of informers to illustrate how ef- ficiently it works. Robert Hardy says the FBI employed him not only as informer but as agent provocateur and encouraged him to perform a criminal act in helping to organize conspirators at Camden, N.J. to raid the draft board files. The FBI also has a paid stool pigeon in the Harrisburg case against Father Philip Berrigan and a couple of nuns, who were plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger. Don’t laugh! What with the ITT spectacle and the FBI the funny things are getting to be the most serious. There should be more of them, too, when J. Edgar Hoover gets his huge new home built on Pennsylvania Avenue right across from its parent, the Justice Depart- ment. The FBI building will be bigger than Justice. won 20 of 24 delegates in New Hampshire on a peace ticket, and went on to sweep the Wisconsin and Oregon primaries. His only competitor was Robert Kennedy, also a peace candidate, who, at the time of his assassina- tion, had just won the California primary. But the Democrats went on to nominate Mr. Humphrey, who had a hand in escalating the Editor emeritus: Mrs. T.M.B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin News editor: Shawn Murphy Advertising: Carolyn Gass Half a dozen books we have read: lately. take a rather grim view of all tigs: The Party’s Over by top notch politic% writer David Broder; A Populist Manifesto, a splendid summary by Newfield and Green- field; America, Inc., Mintz and Cohen: Un- common Sense, by historian J. M. Burns; Money in Politics, Herbert Alexander. They all discern the same disturbance and rising resentment. There is an undercurrent of fear: The public is angry, they say, and keeps asking questions. Why is infant mortality so outrageously high ‘in America when doctors have an average income of $40,500? Why does Mr. Nixon offer a $100 billion deficit in three years and not staunch the hemorrhage of lost tax revenues? (Mr. Nixon's happy solution is to reelect him so he can give us a national sales tax (VAT); it will have such majestic im- partiality that the millionaire and the washer woman will each pay the same six percent sales tax for a bowl of chili con carne.) Why is it that half the members. of Congress have interests in law firs S, banks and TV stations? Why doesn’t the Ysap bet- ween rich and poor get smaller?—actually the $10,600 gap between the average income of the top fifth of the public and the bottom fifth in 1949 increased to $19,000 in 1969. These writers express concern, I think, for the same reason. History tells us that if enough people get angry enough about enough grievances at the same time they vif begin striking out and breaking things and they are not very discriminating about what they break. A competent demagogue can lead them almost anywhere. war as President Johnson’s, Vice President and the voters chose Mr. Nixon, the man who said he would not ‘‘be here to kick around anymore.” Meanwhile, four years later, the war continues, and George Wallace, who has been in and out of the Democratic Party more times than we like to remember, just won the Florida primary by a landslide.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers