Page 4 EDITORIAL Take the Bus | County. fares in turn meant fewer passengers. Now, under the auspices of the Luzerne County Transportation Authority, bus service in the Back Mountain is better than it’s been in years. Buses run from the center of Dallas every half hour on the quarter hour, with return trips from Public Square scheduled on the hour and half hour. Wonder of wonders, there are even Sunday buses! The price is right, too: A trip to Wilkes-Barre can be had for $.15. ~ To persons who turn up their noses at public transportation, let us point out that traffic conges- tion is so heavy in and around Wyoming Valley that Changes > by Eric Mayer Talk about excitement...Secret Plan Nixon steps back into the pocket with a week left in the fourth quarter and heaves a long bomb toward the end zone. Touchdown! The war is over! Peace is at hand. How do we know? Henry tells us so. And Time magazine. statistics. Who cares about craters and cas- ualties except the bleeding hearts? It’s the score that counts and if you're not so certain about what the score is the administration will set you straight. We won!!! Let’s all get drunk and fly our flags and thank the Lord that one of the dictatorships in Vietnam has the Uncle Sam seal of approval. Hip hip hooray! Nixon’s a jolly good fellow, the electorate tells him so. Only I don’t understand? If we won, where are all the parades? Never mind. Nixon’s got his honor now. He’s scrawled his name on the lavatory wall of history, in innocent blood. Hear that faint, moaning noise? No you don’t! That's just the ghost of Nixon’s past, Nixon ’68, calling the new Nixon a traitor, accusing him of selling out to the com- mies...but you don’t hear it because the old Nixon never existed or else he’s dead as a snake’s discarded skin or all the colors that a chameleon sitting on a leaf isn’t, at the moment. Forget it. : It’s peace we should be talking about. And what do you think of it now, America? Now that a football fan gives it to you instead of a poet; now it’s called victory rather than de- feat: now that old men in suits and important offices are selling it instead of long haired kids. What do you think of it now? It’s the same, you know...only it costs more to have.it this way...20,000 American lives more, and Vietnamese lives too. Well, you only get what you pay for, right? So after four more years and all that blood, it must be better. But after all, it’s still the same thing, only with face boweled Vietnam with four years of bombs, a latter day Jack the Ripper inveighing against the immorality of prostitution. Jack was well intentioned also. Who isn’t? Funny thing though. What Nixon is learning now the kids have known all along. All those freaks, Yippies, hippies, pinko’s—remember them ?—who got their heads smashed in Chi- cago and their rights spit on in Washington and their blood spilled at Kent and Jackson States for wanting to end the killing, for real- izing that the US was in an immoral war that it couldn’t win; that infinitesmal ‘‘vocal minority,” the “rotten apples,” the “bums,” they were right all along. Johnson wouldn't listen. He thought he could blast his way to victory like John Wayne and Nixon wouldn’t listen either. He had to find out for himself. he had to destroy an entire country (and maybe two countries) before he learned that you can’t slaughter your way out of an im- moral war. : So finally he’s done what he had to do. He's let the communists into the South Viet- namese government (Providing of course that Thieu and the million man army we've given him agrees). Too bad he didn’t listen to the protestors. They knew all along. The peace belongs to them, the deaths belong to Nixon. And isn’t it ironic that Nixon is so ve- hement in consigning the draft evaders, who helped end the war and helped turn off (at least temporarily) the draft, to permanent exile. It’s not surprising. He realizes that they understood the US's true situation in Vietnam many years and deaths before he understood is No doubt we’ll soon be hearing about how Nixon’s peace is superior to the peace Mec- Carthy offered. That’s understandable. If I'd supported four years of slaughter only to find out I'd been wrong from the start, I'd be trying to squirm off the hook too. I'd want to be deluded. That’s the great thing about Nixon. He'll with reality. Ignorance of the issues is common sense. Bigotry is laudable if it’s pre- sented in terms of busing. There are no injus- tices in this country. We have won a great victory in Asia. 2 Well, this is a democracy and, legally speaking, black is white if the majority agrees. Legally speaking only. Nixon insists on ‘calling Thieu’s dictator- ship a democracy. Apparently Nixon thinks a suppressed, where martial law reigns, where opponents are thrown into jail, where ele- ctions are run solo by whomever manages to grab enough power to force his adversaries out of the race. Augurs well for the next four years of our own democracy, doesn’t it? What with the war over, there’s no telling what wonders Nixon might perform HEhigge at home. I can hardly wait. 4 But who am I to argue with Mr. Nixon’s overwhelming majority? Certainly all those millions of people can’t be wrong. The Amer- ican electorate is very shrewd. I think I'll start selling real estate on the moon. (15 acres near Copernicus, dirt cheap but going up in price. A peaceful location. No dogs, no hip- pies, no grass, no noise, no air.) Why not? Nixon can apparently convince people: that the sun rises in the west. More than anything, this election has de- monstrated how quickly a nation’s ideals can go to seed, how quickly prosperity can leech a people of morality. Grandsons of immigrants who fled famine and injustice voted for Nixon, a man who persecutes minorities and vetoes bills that would feed the starving. At any rate, Nixon has won. The American people are buying transitory illusions with the future of their children. The American spirit is dead and the maggots are feasting on the corpse. Already Spiro Agnew is being touted for ’76. If he wins the presidency next elec- tion, and gains a second term as most pre- sidents do, his term will end in 1984. Fitting. (Note: As I write this the US continues to haggle with dictator Thieu over the peace “settlement.” Why? If the US and North Viet- nam have agreed on a settlement after all these years of war, shouldn’t Thieu be given an ultimatum amounting to, “take it {# leave it, we've done our part, we've arranged a peace and we're leaving.” If Thieu wants to carry on with the war, let him carry on, without US aid. Is Thieu, after all, com- mander-in-chief of the US military? At this saving accessories; with ‘‘honor.” In other : : i i the 40-minute bus trip from Dallas to center city words defeat with delusions. — point I begin to suspect that Nixon knew his Of course Nixon takes credit, strutting 3 J mmol) deal with Hanoi would be rejected all along Wilkes-Barre is frequently no longer than it is by car. And the joy of having 40 uninterrupted minutes in which toread, or to chat with a fellow passenger, or to be alone with one’s thoughts, appeals to an in- creasing number of persons as an unparalleled lux- ury. Take the bus—and leave the driving to them. Reform “Few but the rich are assured access to. elected officials.” “Campaign costs make politics a rich man’s game.” men who ever sat in the White House. If Mr. Administration favors for corporate favors in = have to be that there are always about twice Some economists think that fairer distri- J ‘Lobbyists operate unobserved and Nixon had been captain of the Titanic he some high powered off-stage string pulling. as many unemployed blacks as whites, and bution of income is just what the American oy ” would have told the passengers not to worry, This is a subject in which it is wise to pick an that blacks earn about half as much as economy must have; yes it would send that 4 unregulated. he was just stopping to take on ice. But the de- ~~ impeccable authority. Ours is former Attor- whites, or so Father Hesburgh says? Do taxes GNP zooming. “Such a redistribution is ) Ay ‘Legislators pass laws from which their friends ‘derive personal financial gain; and all this goes on beneath a shroud of secrecy. So reads the introductory paragraphs of a new Common Cause book, Money and Secrecy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reforming State and Federal Practices, by Lawrence Gilson, State Issues "Coordinator of the 200,000 member citizen’s lobby. The message of Mr. Gilson’s study, which will be the backbone of a Common Cause congressional reform project in 1973 entitled Open Up the System, is a simple one: federal and state laws governing structural problems in the areas of open meetings, lobbying disclosure, conflict of interest, and campaign finance are notoriously lax. major The study reveals that open meeting laws are so weak, congressional committees may close all around the media crowing, like a rooster taking credit for the sunrise; talking morality this and honor that after having disem- TRB from Washington —— America’s unsolved social problems stand there like milk bottles on the steps of the White House, waiting for the President to take them in. Only it’s not milk in them. From inside each one comes a baleful ticking. Let’s look at some of them. Right off, America faces fiscal crisis. There have been three enormous deficits under Mr. Nixon and this year will bring a fourth; perhaps all told $100 billion in red ink. It is amazing how modest and reassuring the President has been about this. Indeed, when it suits him, he is one of the most reassuring ficit icebergs are here now. What lifeboats do we use—taxes, retrenchment, inflation? Somebody must decide quick. ° —There’s the disparity of income in the United States, apparently getting worse. For the first time in history the deprived people seem to be aware of it. Too much looking at sleek TV commercials, maybe. A fourth of Americans either live below the official poverty line ($80 a week for a family of four) or slightly above it. Yes, one-in-four. It is hard to think of a greater element of social insta- bility. —Then there’s race. Mr. Nixon has seemed willing to exacerbate this by exploit- ing the busing issue. Maybe we're wrong. Anyway, there’s no question of the problem. Father Hesburgh is a responsible witness; he’s president of Notre Dame and head of the US Commission on Civil Rights. In America’s Ares Ar and only made it for its publicity value. If an agreement is not reached by election day we may have four more years of war.) population he counts 22 million blacks, 12 million browns, a million yellows, and another million reds, plus variants—a total of 36 million, he says, or about one-in-six. The black slums are ringed by a white noose of suburbs. There’s trouble ahead. We are at a “historic crossroads,” he thinks. Which way are we going to go? —And sooner or later we must come to terms with corporate concentration in America, a subject-that has surfaced briefly but frequently in this election. We are dimly aware in the ITT case, and in the exchange of ney General John Mitchell (spouse’s name, Martha) who noted anxiously in a speech, June 6, 1969, that whereas the nation’s 200 lar- only 48 percent of the country’s manufact- uring assets, they now control 58 percent, and the consolidation is growing all the time: “The danger that this super-concentration We could go on naming other domestic unfair just as we're all sighing that, thank Heaven, the election is over, and that it looks up to the reality of all our domestic agonies. “Gross National Product” and it’s enormous, Thissa 'n Thatta and it keeps getting bigger and it’s beyond the dreams of Ninevah and Tyre, and we are told to be proud of it. In this materialistic civiliza- tion we worship God, and God’s initials are GNP. But it doesn’t seem to solve our pro- blems of race, poverty and corporate mono- poly. : Just a minor equalization of distribution of wealth and income in the United States would do a lot of good. Is it really necessary that the top 5 percent of the families get 20 percent of the income and the bottom 20 per- cent of the families get only 5 percent? Does it have to be written so that the poor pay rela- tively more than the affluent, and that loop- holes are so wide that a gentleman farmer can get rich out of his tax ‘losses,’ and that Senator Eastland can thrive by not growing cotton? It’s not just the poor, it’s the middle class that’s affected though they often spend so much time worrying about welfare chiselers, and the impudence of the lower classes that they aren’t aware of it. We get a lot of our in- side dope from The Wall Street Journal. Here, for example, their report on a research study by Goldman Sachs, the securities house. The big Nixon deficits make a tax increase likely, says Goldman Sachs, and it sees a ‘great risk’’ that the burden will fall heavily on cor- porations. Why on corporations, you ask? Be- cause, warns GS, recent federal tax cuts have helped corporations a lot more than indivi- duals—the effective rate on. corporate profits has fallen ‘significantly,’ and the relief to in- dividuals ‘‘hasn’t been nearly as sharp.” Here's another item from the Journal: US businessmen are shunning jobs in Canada. Why? Because Canada, it seems hase differ- ent tax system. ‘Property taxes afd mort- gage interest aren’t deductible as they are in the US; executives earning $25,000 to $50,000 a year pay 10 percent to 15 percent more of their gross income for taxes, a Toronto con- sultant figures.” he needed if the US is to achieve full employment and a maximum use of our productive capacity,” writes Maxwell Stewart, consul- tant of the middle-road Public Affairs Com- mittee. Putting buying power into low income families is just like shoveling coal into a steam engine: ‘The most basic social challenge is that of increasing the buying power of the 20 to 25 million Americans who lack the money for decent housing or enough nutritious food.” That was the conclusion, too, by the way, of the classic four-volume study by the Brookings Institution of the depression in the 1930’s. Note: Final quip heard at the National Press Club on 1972 election: If John Connally had been at the Alamo he probably would have organized a “Texans for Santa na”’ Club. u' Es committee sessions to the public. by H. H. Null, IIT Mr. Gilson’s assessment of Pennsylvania laws in four government reform fields reveals that, similar to the situation on the Federal level, state laws in the fields of open meetings, lobbying disclosure, conflict of interest, and campaign finance laws were all rated as “ineffective.” To remedy this serious breakdown of the democratic process, concerned citizens must push / for comprehensive news laws governing open meetings and conflicts of interest. Lobbyists and their employers should be required by law to register and file statements listing incomes and expenditures related to lob- bying periodically throughout the legislative session. Candidates and committees should file statements of contributions and expenditures before and after all elections. Limits should be set for individual contributions and campaign expenditures. We endorse the efforts of Common Cause and concur with the citizens lobby’s founder John W. Gardner that “To place increased power or money ‘in the hands of the state or federal government without at the same time taking steps to make them more responsive, more accountable, and more accessible to the citizen would be the worst kind of folly.” Although I don’t feel strongly enough about it to leave my comfortable seat by the fire and raise the red flag of rebellion, my heart is with the citizens of Michigan who once voted down daylight saving time and in a coming election are forced to defend their position. In my well-considered opinion, actually saving any daylight is impossible and any efforts to do so are attempted with the sole purpose of getting the world to schedule things in favor of those who object to getting up early in the morning, but can kid themselves into thinking that they are not doing so, so long as they have a few more summer hours of daylight before they go to bed. After spending 16 or 17 years of my life in a stable world where eight a.m. meant eight a.m. with Eastern Standard Time an un- necessary addendum, this daylight saving madness began (I believe in Europe) as a means of saving electricity during World War One. As most of the factories were working three shifts at the time, it didn’t really save very much, but it seemed the patriotic thing to do, so a lot of towns and cities went along with it. But some didn’t and if you got in some traveling, you never knew what time it was in a given place. For some years after World War One, Daylight Savings came and went generally sponsored by local Chambers of Commerce at the behest of its well-to-do mem- bers, who liked to get in an extra hour of golf and didn’t really have to get up an hour earlier, leaving to their employes, the burden of pulling out of bed into the grey dawn and getting the store or business under way. A few years ago, there was a fairly suc- cessful drive to make Daylight Saving a state- wide proposition and most of us have ac- cepted the imposition with patience, figuring that eventually the world will come to its senses or that the Grim Reaper will deliver us from consideration of such earthly follies. But not in Michigan. Michigan put a referendum on the ballot in 1968 and Daylight Saving lost. This year, its proponents are successful at having it again come up on election day and the results are not being predicted by any poll because it is known that it will be a close thing. Farmers, mothers, theater owners, or- thodox rabbis, astronomers and bowling alley proprietors are against it, while, for reasons I gave above, and others, the state Chamber of Commerce wants it. Michigan is a little special as it is at the end of the Eastern Time Zone, so with D.S., the sun won’t come up until 8:30 and go down at 10:30 in summer. The only other states that have rejected Daylight Saving are Arizona, Hawaii and part of Indiana. Maybe these little sparks of in- telligence in the U.S. of A. will kindle some sense for the rest of the states, but, on the other hand, they may be snuffed out. I have given a lot of deep, concentrated lucubration to studying why the human race, after centuries spent in learning to measure time and establishing it throughout the globe, suddenly decided that it was better to tear up the whole thing and establish confusion. The only answer that I can come up with is the known fact that people get bored with anything and want to change it, even when they suspect that it is going to worsen things. The most obvious example of this is costume. Starting out without any, our an- cestors through the ages have tried about everything thinkable in the way of clothing, including such monstrosities as hoop skirts, huge, hot, heavy wigs, bustles, wooden ear plugs and god knows what else. I would point out a number of present day dress features that are uncomfortable, expensive and hideous, but I refrain from doing so because some of my best friends affect them and I don’t want to lose them over such a slight matter. Good friends are a comfort and much can be forgiven them. Just during my own lifetime I have seen a complete about face on many things. For example: morals, education, patriotism, charity, hair styles, government, money transportation, health, ecology, laws and other headings innumerable and the inescapable conclusion is that people just can’t help getting bored with things, whereupon they demand a change. This accounts in part for strikes and wars as well as costume. It also accounts for suicides and the deterring effects of a jail sentence. But it isn’t really necessary to be hgzed, nor to change things just for the sake of Poco A change that is generally agreed to and that is of demonstrable benefit is okay, but if something is working all right and has done so for centuries, it should be left alone. Cards and other sedentary games, if you aren’t the athletic type. Golf, skiing, tennis and such if you are. Television. Movies. Bird- watching. Girl-watching. The state lotteries. There are many more. But it isn’t necessary to be sucked in by the changes in style of everything that is known as planned ob- solescence, which is the way in which hucksters take advantage of human boredom. And how about reading? One need not be a sheep to blindly follow wily shepherds who lead us back and forth between wide and narrow neckties. Forget it ‘and wear none at all if you see fit. Dare to be conservative. scription, $6. per year. Call 675-5211 for subscriptions. bresident, news; William W. Davis, vice president and general manager ; Doris Mallin Editor emeritus: Mrs. T.M.B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin News editor: Shawn Murphy § a i id El mit id ira i tanta ye fmt ite hn etre mim ,secretary-freasurer. mm Rm
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers