EERE
EY
eS a
Page 4
EDITORIAL
Teachers Strike
One would naturally expect the Pennsylvania
School Boards Association to be opposed to teach-
ers strikes.
Teachers strikes, per se, are intolerable, repre-
senting an absence of communications between
groups that by now should have learned how to
achieve mutual understanding over the bargaining
table rather than an uneasy, forced accord emerg-
ing from the orderly violence of the picket line.
Equally intolerable and basically dishonest is the
current propaganda campaign being waged by the
PSBA through its director of research and person-
nel services Joseph V. Oravitz, who stated Sept. 12
that ‘‘school strikes are unnecessary and are doing
harm to students and teachers alike.”
In addition,”PSBA originated statements in the
press earlier this month attempted to link the 13
Sept. 13 with an implied conspiracy by National
Education Association to single out this state and
Michigan for concentrated strike action.
The mere suggestion of a ‘“‘conspiracy’’ of any
sort tends to evoke suspicion and fear, even when
such feelings are not supported by the facts.
By using fear tactics reminiscent of those em-
ployed by advocates of the international Commun-
ist conspiracy theory that paralyzed the sensibil-
ities of the Western World in the 1950’s and 1960’s,
the PSBA has resorted to a public relations stra-
tegy bordering on demagoguery.
Not surprisingly, Donald Carroll, state Commis-
sioner of Basic Education was not influenced by
these tactics when he told members of the Council
of Basic Education at a recent meeting: ...there
does not seem to be any evidence to substantiate
this claim’’ of the PSBA.
The key to the PSBA’s strategy to undermine the
spirit and letter of Act 195, the controversial public
employes negotiations law, centers on the unwill-
ingness of school boards throughout the Common-
wealth to negotiate non-salary related items in-
volving working conditions, such as. class size,
duties.
Mr. Oravitz stated Sept. 12 that “Teacher unions
attempting to force bargaining on such issues are
clearly in violation of the law and it’s about time
the general public knows about it.”
What the general public should know is that the
dignities and injustices heaped upon the teaching
profession dating back to the days when teachers
politicians or when their public behavior had to be
so inhumanly discreet as to inhibit them from
smoking, drinking, marrying, or even becoming
pregnant.
Arguments tending to support the right of teach-
ers to strike when all possible avenues of negotia-
tion have failed are much more persuasive than the
specious premises of the PSBA.
The most ludicrous of the PSBA’s contentions,
defying the realities of our nation’s long and bloody
history of labor-management relations, is embod-
ied in Mr. Oravitz’ statement that “the same re-
sults in terms of employe benefits could be achiev-
ed without the strikes that are presently underway.
Such strikes generally do net produce greater
benefits than would otherwise be obtained...”
Before the passage of Act 195 several years ago,
Pennsylvania ranked approximately 20th among
the major industrial states in average salaries for
teachers.
Since the passage of the collective bargaining
law, Pennsylvania moved from 18th to 12th.
The PSBA has adduced no evidence that teachers
strikes harm pupils. On the contrary, by fighting
for the right to influence the design of curricula and
the basic conditions under which they work, teach-
ers, in the long run, will benefit their students. In
all professions, it is the professionals, themselves,
who decide what is best for their clients.
In schools operated by enlightened boards and
administrators the best results have been achieved
when teachers are directly involved in the decision-
making process and are held responsible for the
fruits of their decisions.
Teacher strikes are a necessary evil that must be
endured until the very structure of the policy-mak-
ing aparatus ii public schools evolves from the tra-
ditional unilateral approach, to a system in which
successes and failures are shared by school boards,
administrators, teachers, and hopefully students
alike.
Capitol Notes
by William Ecenbarger
Gov. Milton J. Shapp will need a fast-talk-
ing sales pitch next year if he is to sell Penn-
sylvania voters the idea that his drive for con-
sumer reform in state government has been
successful.
Mr. Shapp’s promise of a consumer para-
dise in Pennsylvania remains out of reach—
but the governor has plenty of places he can,
quite legitimately, place the blame.
After nearly three years in office, Gov.
Shapp hasn’t even dented the armor of the
Public Utility Commission, which is an im-
pregnable bastion firmly in the control of the
Republican Party.
The same can’t be said of two other vital
regulatory agencies—the Milk Marketing
Board and the Liquor Control Board, which
have been taken over by Shapp Democrats.
Yet Pennsylvanians continue to pay higher
prices for milk and whisky than most other
Americans.
The administration has been unsuccess-
ful in its legal efforts to knock down the so-
called “affirmation system,” a nationwide
web of state laws and regulations that effec-
tively entraps Pennsylvania into paying the
same wholesale liquor prices as everyone
else.
Under the Democratic liquor board, there
has been much pomp but little circumstance
in the direction of lowering state store prices.
The Democratic milk board has been sty-
mied by the 35-year-old State Milk Control
Law, which was written by milk dealers and
is assiduously protected by milk dealers in
the legislature. Until the law is changed, con-
sumers aren’t likely to find any bargains in
their milk boxes—and the Shapp Administra-
tion has been less than diligent in seeking
such a change. ;
Gov. Shapp’s dream of a toll-free Penn-
nightmarish reality of maintaining a heavily
travelled, aging highway without federal
assistance. The governor’s outstanding ac-
complishment for Turnpike travelers to date
has been to abolish pay toilets in service
plazas. y
One of the administration’s less conspi-
TRB
from Washington
Any reasonable person knows that the
world population increase can’t continue.
Seventy million more people each year. Why,
that’s the size of East and West Germany! We
shrug and say, ‘“They’ll starve in a few years -
glad I won’t be around.” But suppose you are
around. Suppose time has runout. Suppose we
are about to see the greatest calamity in the
history of mankind.
It probably depends on the weather. The
world’s food stock is so low, the margin is so
thin, that with bad weather 10 to 30 million
people may starve in 1974. It has already
started in Africa. There are food riots in
India. The UN Food and Agriculture
Organization called an emergency meeting
on grain in Rome last week. Robert Mec-
Namara, head of the World Bank, pleaded for
a moral response from the affluent nations at
the annual meeting of the bank at Nairobi,
Kenya, this week. You can see one effect at
the corner supermarket at home in the price
of foods. Prices will fall, in time, but they are
never coming back again to “normal.”
The grab for food in the world protein war
comes from two sources, the rise in affluence
of the ““have’’ nations, and the rise in popula-
tion of the ‘‘have not’ nations. Here’s how it
works. West Germany, of course, is a ‘‘have’”’
nation. Its population has stopped growing at
ZPG (Zero Population Growth). But its food
consumption is expanding because its af-
fluence permits it to buy more meat- and
meat requires more grain, and grain occupies
over 70 percent of the world’s crop area. The
same thing is true of Japan. Also of Russia: it
has land but not enough fresh water. That’s
why it quietly grabbed a quarter of our grain
cuous serious failings has been the 18 state li-
censing boards that are supposed to police
various professions and occupations such as
pharmacists, real estate salesmen, beauti-
cians, barbers and funeral directors.
These boards were set up to protect the
public, but they in fact do a better job of pro-
tecting the people they license by insulating
them from change and competition. There
has been much rhetoric about making the
boards more ‘‘consumer-oriented”’ but little
tangible progress in that direction.
The administration’s overseer of the
boards, Vincent J. Fumo, recently resigned
tically-oriented spying operations from his
state office. :
Soon after taking office, Mr. Shapp made
a big media splash with the plan to bring all
consumer affairs into a single state agency
under his jurisdiction. But legislation to ac-
complish this idea has never been introduced,
and the governor has never explained why it
hasn’t.
There are, to be sure, two genuine consu-
mer superstars on the Shapp team-Insurance
Commissioner Herbert S. Denenberg and Joel
Weisburg, director of the Consumer Protect-
ion Bureau. But they are exceptions.
The fact that Mr. Shapp has . reached
most of his consumer goals is nwt all-con-
demning. They were tough goals to begin
with. But he set them, and he must live with
them. Pennsylvania voters can get a refund in
November, 1974, if they're not pleased with
‘what they bought four years before.
gL
NN 7
ANS
17 7
of
Je
THEE, a
Y
7
crop this year.
For the ‘have not” countries the choice is
to get more food or starve. Their population
doubles every 25 years. There are 3.5 billion
people on earth, 2 billion in the ‘‘undevelop-
ed” (have-not) countries.
Robert McNamara, lean, quick, intense -
glasses thicker, hair thinner than when he ran
Ford Motor'Company or worked for LBJ, put
the thing on moral grounds. Here’s what
“absolute poverty’ means, he said: one-third
to one-half of the 2 billion people in have not
countries’ suffer from hunger or malnutri-
tion’’; a quarter of their children die before
five; life expectancy is 20 years less than in
the affluent world; ‘‘they are condemned at
birth to an early death,” often to ‘‘utter
degradation.”
That isn’t all: the gap in income within the
have-not lands itself is a lot worse than in the
affluent countries, more extreme for example
than in the United States. Landlords gener-
ally own 50 to 60 percent of the cropland; in
Venezuela, 82 percent. ‘‘In many countries,”
Mr. McNamara says, ‘‘tenants have to hand
over to landlords 50 to 60 percent of their crop
as rent, and yet in spite of this are faced with
the constant threat of eviction.”
Mr. McNamara, who obviously is making
‘what he regards as the supreme contribution
of his life, wants the well-to-do nations to
double their aid to the poor countries. If we
raise their living standards, he argues, we
will automatically bring down their high
birthrate. Experience proves that one follows
the other. He wants the affluent counties to
contribute 0.7 percent of the GNP. For the US
that would be about $8 billion a year. The
moral justification: ‘All the great religions
teach the value of each human life.”
There is probably no country less prepared
for what is happening than the United States.
The calamity is in two parts: the immediate
likely famine in the next 12 months, and the
long-range problem of giving moral leader-
ship and dollars to the undeveloped nations to
put them on their feet over the long run!
Why should the US help? For the famine, if
it develops, it’s easy: Even though food is
scarce we can spare some to send abroad.
But Fred Bergsten, once at the White House
and now at Brookings, gives a grimmer an-
swer in a study, ‘The Threat from the Third
World.” It boils down to this: smallpox below
decks may spread to the first-class, and there
always is a chance of mutiny.
Europe and Japan, Bergstern says, have
long realized this fact of international life.
Not the US. He says, “The US is the least
responsive to Third World needs of any in-
dustrialized country at this time. US help is
small in quantity, and getting smaller. Its
quality is declining. It often runs directly
counter to the central objectives of the LDC’s
(Less Developed - Countries). It lags far
behind the policies of Europe and Japan. The
Administration and Congress must share in
the indictment.”
Take these facts: Among 16 nations giving
development assistance the US is 15th,
measured as a percentage of gross national
product. While Europe and Japan have been
lowering trade barriers to the poor countries
the US has been raising them. The US made a
commitment to extend trade preferences but
hasn’t yet made good. The US hasn’t contri-
buted anything to the ‘‘soft-loan window”
(low interestrates) of the Asian Development
Bank. When the UN Council invoked sanc-
tions against the racist Rhodesian regime to
cut off imports of chrome, the US alone
breached it.
"The less-developed countries an an’t’ fools.
They can be proud and passionaf# Some of
them have hunger but they also have goods
the US needs. The US has six percent of the
world’s population but uses a tly of its
energy. Where's it to come from We know
about this winter’s possible oil shortage.
Then there’s copper: four countries control
80 percent of it. The US needs it. Two coun-
tries control 70 percent of world tin exports;
four control 50 percent of natural rubber.
Ditto bauxite, coffee, timber. The Third
World has a lot of leverage.
Then again, the US has $23 billion directly
invested in the Third World, and another $25
billion loaned. Repudiation or confiscation
would be disagreeable. Any number of LDC’s
can produce -enough opium to supply the
entire US addict population. These weak
countries can also play on the economic
disputes between the big nations.
Behind the poverty and hunger of the un-
developed countries lies the unsigstainable
birthrate. The UN holds a world ‘$opulation
conference in 1974. The US is approaching
ZPG itself and would be vastly strengthened
in its leadership if there were an official
statement of American policy like that of the
US Commission on Population Growth under
John D. Rockefeller III, which Mr. Nixon
named and ignores. It recommends control.
By all the old rules of political analysis,
the Republican Party should be staggering
toward catastrophe. Under the usual prac-
tices of public accounting, only one verdict
could be rendered on the party’s appalling
excess of current liabilities over current
assets: bankruptcy. There is, in my own view,
a considerably brighter prospect.
The Republican Party, as a party, plainly
has its problems, but the Democratic Party,
as a party, has its problems too; and there is
-this aspect of American politics to consider:
Political parties, as such, tend to have less
meaning all the time. The old rules of analysis
no longer apply.
The most recent Gallup poll found that
only 24 percent of the country’s eligible voters
regard themselves as Republicans. This is a
decline of four points since the 1972 election.
The figure marks the lowest level plumbed by
the GOP since 1940. Yet the Democrats, with
a 43 percent identification factor, are not
gaining. They are barely holding their own.
The great increase is among those who consi-
der themselves independents.
These independents, making up 33 per-
cent of the electorate, clearly care little for
party labels. They vote on issues, and they
vote on candidates. Whatever the failings of
Richard Nixon may be, the onus is not neces-
sarily transferable. The independents will go
their own way.
The catalogue of liabilities, at first
Persistent unemployment. Continuing ten-
sions abroad. Small prograss in human bet-
terment at home.
On closer examination the liabilities may
not seem so overwhelming.
Unless I am wholly mistaken, the Water-
gate investigation is beginning to have a
backlash effect. The President increasingly is
seen as the victim of a concerted effort by
liberal newsmen and by Democratic politi-
cians who have ganged up to get him. After so
long a time, even scandal ceases to titillate.
Watergate in many households is becoming a
velations, the scandal has done all the
damage it is going to do.
Inflation, especially in terms of food pri-
ces, is a far greater concern. The Nixon Ad-
ministration has made a botch of economic
policy. Its record, as of this autumn, is a re-
cord of blunder followed by fiasco. Yet even in
this area of political disaster, one finds offset-
ting considerations. From the Republicans’
point of view, the blunders—if they had to
come—could not have come at a better time.
We are still 13 months from the 1974 congres-
sional elections, and three full years removed
from the next presidential campaign.
Contrary to popular impression, the
voters donot have the memories of elephants.
On most issues, they have the memories of
barnyard geese, who, I am told, suppose the
~
world has been created fresh every day. In
November of next year, the voters will be vot-
ing on the economic situation as it is then. The
shock of 1973's inflation will have been
largely absorbed. If personal incomes contin-
ue to rise, if unemployment continues to de-
cline, individual Republican candidates are
not likely to suffer unduly.
Indeed, an arguable case can be made
that even now, while the shock is still upon us,
Republicans are not faring badly at the polls.
In state legislative contests and in mayoralty
elections from Mississippi to California, one
looks in vain for evidence that Republicans,
as such, are in any particular trouble.
Finally, because the White House re-
mains the grand prize, it may be observed
that the presidential race is still wide open.
The Democrats have Edward Kennedy; they
also have a resurgent George Wallace, and do
not be deceived: Never the twain shall meet.
Otherwise, the stable houses mostly has-
beens and never-weres. The Republicans,
meanwhile, have some attractive prospects
growing in such senators as Baker, Brock,
Buckley, Percy and Griffin, and, in such
governors as Bond of Missouri.
None of these cheery speculations will
matter if coming months produce a new com-
bination of recession and inflation. In such an
event, all the Republican calamities will
gather intq one massive thundercloud that
will rain all over the GOP. My own guess is
that the Republican Party, while it is far re-
moved from political sunshine, is not at all
likely to drown.
scripiion, $6. per year. Call 675-5211 for subscriptions.
Sylvia Cutler, Advertising Sales