\
Page 4
Consumers Beware
Bureau of Consumer Protection offices through-
out the Commonwealth have been the pride of Gov.
Milton Shapp, and most of them have gone far
toward recognizing the needs of the consumer
during the Shapp Administration.
It is unfortunate, indeed, when one bad apple
upsets the consumer protection barrel. But that
seems to be the case since the Pennsylvania Justice
Department opened the second consumer
protection office in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Following the 1972 flood, Harrisburg was beset
with complaints from Wyoming Valley flood vic-
tims because of shoddy and incomplete work by
many building contractors, plumbers, electricians
and retail firms. But rather than draw from its
team of crack investigators and lawyers from other
offices, the bureau opened a Wilkes-Barre office
staffed mostly with Luzerne County political hacks.
The results obtained by the Wilkes-Barre office,
which hopefully will expire from lack of funds in
June, is partially documented in a page one story in
this issue. It leaves one to ask, would consumers
have been better served had there been no Con-
sumer Protection office at all?
Despite inadequate laws, huge multi-county
districts, and rules designed to keep consumers in
the dark rather than informed, other consumer
“protection offices have maintained a high standard
of results and consumer satisfaction. Court in-
junctions have become common place, and
fraudulent operators have often found themselves
A
In Wyoming Valley, however, where a vigorous
consumer protection office was needed, consumers
by the score have found little or no help.
Rules under which the bureau operates seem
inadequate, at best. Office personnel are not
permitted to inform a consumer, for example, of a
shoddy contractor, or business firm, even though
formal complaints are pending. Rather, the bureau
takes the position of saying nothing until legislation
becomes a matter of record.
It appears to us that the Wilkes-Barre Consumer
Protection Bureau has served out its ‘usefulness.
Gov. Shapp should insist that the bureau office is
staffed with competent, agressive full-time in-
vestigators and lawyers who will not only inform
consumers every time a complaint is filed, but who
will call a press conference to state publicly when a
business or individual is operating under
questionable practices. Anything less will continue
to be no more than a bad consumer joke.
World Hunger
A world food conference will get underway Nov. 5
in Rome, spearheaded by Gov. Milton Shapp and
Sen. Charles Percy, R-Ill. It will be attended by
officials from 130 nations, under auspices of the
United Nations.
Last December, a two-day food policy conference
in Hershey set the stage for six regional confer-
ences across the Commonwealth. From those the
governor and his delegation have been given a
storehouse of information regarding the role Penn-
sylvania might play toward feeding the world’s
hungry.
As state Agriculture Secretary Jim McHale told
conference delegates recently at Marywood
~ College, “When you're talking about food, you’re
talking about peace. There are 12 or 13 nations that
now have the bomb, and when starving nations are
going down, what the hell have they got to lose?”’
The Rome conference will center on the fact that
four to eight million people will starve to death this
year, with indications that number might double
during 1975.
That’s a sobering thought, indeed. But U.S. Agri-
culture Secretary Earl Butz has said that
Americans will not stand for eating one hanburger
less a week so that more food is available to star-
ving nations. And perhaps he’s right.
But the Shapp delegation to the conference isn’t
going to propose Americans do that, anyway.
Rather, they will ask for a sound national food
policy that will enable the hungry, both at home
and abroad, to eat meat from steers that are now
being slaughtered and buried to demonstrate the
inequity of current farm prices. They will ask for
wheat stockpiling that might make an occasional
difference between a nation surviving or falling,
rather than billion-dollar deals with the Russians
that mostly pad the pockets of a few rich Wall
Streeters.
We hope the governor’s world food conference
bears fruit.
—J.R. Freeman
Something will have to be done about Alan
Greenspan. If the President’s chief economic
House may have to provide a translator to
stand at his side. Sad to say, the gentleman
speaks no English, and most of the rest of us
speak no Greenspan. ;
These observations are prompted by a
transcript that came in the mail the other
day. This is a report of the proceedings of the
Financial Conference on Inflation, held here
Sept. 20. Mr. Greenspan made the opening
address. He remarked that our system cannot
indefinitely withstand the effects of double-
digit inflation. Then he said:
“If you extrapolate the strains that we now
already see as a consequence of what we have
for an extended period of time, the institu-
tions—economical, financial, structural-
begin to break down because they are es-
sentially constructed or have been developed
over the decades in the context of low, single-
digit inflation, and it’s by no means clear or
had not been clear, I should say, how signifi-
cant this element was until we actually have
tested it, and having tested it, we found that it
does not respond terribly well.
“Clearly, we see— I don’t have to go
through examples, I’m sure that all of you are
most familiar with all of the various problems
that each and every institution is having, but _
that clearly the savings and loans are under
extraordinary pressure; insurance com-
panies, banks, business—especially smaller
business—were having difficulty getting fin-
ancing.
“The system clearly does not work well
under these conditions.”
Some years ago, Rudolf Flesch propounded
a formula for determining ease in reading.
The formula provides a fog index: 85 is easy,
65 is standard, 40 is difficult, and 15 is im-
penetrable. To judge from this passage from
Greenspan, the gentleman scores 13.6. If you
don’t count that short third sentence, he
comes in at minus 8.4. Better he should speak
Swahili.
Glancing through the transcript, one
perceives that other economists also speak in
TRB
fromWashington
by Richard Strout
When the Watergate trial recommenced
last week I went back and looked up the 245-
page opening statement of John Dean which
he delivered with a choir-boy’s smile in a lev-
el voice in the glittering Senate marble Cau-
cus Room, June 25, 1973, while his second wife
with the honey-colored hair (the one with
whom he honeymooned of $4,850 “borrowed” .
from the Nixon re-election fund) sat behind
him. And I had long, long thoughts. And I
thought I heard somebody murmur Mene,
Mene, Tikal Upharsin. ;
The 1968 presidential election, you remem-
ber was very close. Hubert Humphrey got 42.7
percent of the popular vote and Richard Nix-
on got 43.4 percent, a majority of only 500,000
out of 73 million votes cast, and if California
had gone to Hubert (he lost it by 223,000) the
election would have gone to the House. And if
Hubert had won he would probably have been
re-elected in 1972 and would be finishing his
second term now and we wouldn’t have had
Watergate.
Yet a Watergate would have come, I think,
sooner or later. As Peter Kumpa points out
Watergate needs three things and they all
came together in 1972--the growing and ex-
cessive power of the executive (which hasn’t
been checked) ; a time of division and turbul-
ence like that which followed the poisonous
Vietnam war (which is still wreaking its ‘‘fut-
ure revenge’ on us by the worst inflation in
history); and an amoral president, a reclus-
ive, paranoid figure whom we had thoroughly
trained in the anything-goes school of Amer-
ican politics.
So lights blazed, TV cameras showed their
red ‘‘on’’ signal, the Ervin committee hitched
Capitol Notes
by William Ecenbarger
Philadelphia Inquirer
Pennsylvania Republicans have been
claiming for nearly two years that the state
Justice Department has become ‘‘politicized’’
under the Shapp Administration the same
way the U.S. Justice Department was ‘‘politi-
cized’’ under the Nixon Administration.
Considering the fact that the state Justice
Department is headed by Atty. Gen. Israel
Packel--a man with intimate political and
personal ties to Gov. Shapp and who was
appointed to the job by Gov. Shapp, the
department is no more political than you
might expect.
Which is to say that the department is very
political.
But certainly no more political than it was
under the two Republican governors who
Letters expressing readers’ views
are welcome, and will appear on the
opposite editorial page. They must bear
the signature and address of the writer,
be in good taste, and are subject to
condensation. Anonymous letters will
be discarded. All letters become the
property of the newspaper, and are not
subject to individual acknowledge- -
ment,
Greenspan, though not so fluently. The
chairman of the Council of Economic Ad-
visors is in a class by himself. This is what the
gentleman had to say about inventory
liquidation:
‘Because of the fact that a very large block
of the inventories in our system are supported
by the capital goods markets, the extent of
inventory retrenchment is likely to be held in
check, and as a consequence, the degree of
physical volume decline implied in the in-
ventory sector is not—at least as we can see it
at this stage—of exceptional concern.”
The fog index for that sentence is 12.04.
Now, granted, the subject does not lend
itself to baby talk: “I see inflation. Inflation
sees me.” Mr. Flesch’s famous fog index has
limited application. All the same, the people
have a right to expect some reasonable level
of clarity in public discussion of the fix we are
in.
Before long, we will be hearing proposals to
impose higher taxes on industries and in-
dividuals. Wisconsin’s Sen. William Proxmire
A Greenstreet News Co. Publication
[4
already is homifg in on steel. It would be
pleasant to hear such proposals defended in
language we can understand. Why is it
socially better, or economically better, for the
government to spend an additionald $5,000
taken from a wealthy taxpayer, than it is for
the taxpayer to spend the $5,000 himself? How
is the steel industry to build new plants if steel
companies are denied high profits? These
giddy notions ought to be discussed in
English. Heaven help this republic. if our
leaders explain them only in Greens
\
a
ee
Se DL &.
V
emer GE
- ;
Lo
A
i
Za
3
HEADED BY . . .’
NON
wn
7
7
.
geen
forward and John Dean, began in an easy nat-
ural monotone that he kept up for five days:
“To one who was in the White House and be-
came somewhat familiar with its inner work-
ings, the Watergate matter was an inevitable
outgrowth of a climate of excessive concern
over the political impact of the demonstrat-
ors, excessive concern over leaks. an insat-
iable appetite for political intelligence, all
coupled with a do-it-yourself White House
staff, regardless of the law.”
That’s how he began, and five members of
the do-it-yeurself crew, stony-faced John Mit-
chell, advertising man Bob Haldeman, jaw-
jutting John Ehrlichman and the lesser figur-
es, Mardian and Parkinson, sat in the court,
and 70-year old Judge Sirica, son of an imm-
igrant, looked over the heads of the men who
had once run a government and who had
thought so little of the Priest-President that in
their private talks they had had no hesitation
in interrupting him, contradicting him, and
plotting out with him their “scenarios’’ to gull
the public whom he regarded, after all, only
as children. Looking down behind Judge
Sirica were the statues of Moses, Justinian,
Hammurabi and Solon.
It was agile John Dean, that flexible young
man so eager to please, with an inner tough-
ness none of his superiors suspected, who de-
cided that perjury is dangerous if you get
caught at it and who concluded that the best
way to avoid being made the scapegoat is to
get to the prosecutor first. Senators couldn’t
believe what he said and every time they ask-
ed questions he came through with some fur-
ther damning detail. There was more there
than he knew himself. “Keep a good list of the
press people giving us trouble,” the president
told him, ‘‘we will make life difficult for them
after the election. But what was this about
tapes? He said that befor. he decided to turn
state’s evidence he had learned that the Pres-
ident had informed the government ‘‘that he
had taped a conversation with me.” What
conversation--what tape? About his alleged
conversation in the Oval office? “I do not in
fact know if such a tape exists but if it does
and has not been tampered with and is a com-
plete transcript, I think that this committee
should have that tape, because I believe that
it would cooroborate many of the things that
this committee has asked me to testify
about.”
Weeks later Alexander Butterfield unex-
pectedly revealed that everything said in the
President’s private office was secretly re-
corded; a year later the Supreme Court, 8-0,
required the President to reveal 64 disputed
tapes, and 17 days after that the President
was out. He had lied to everybody.
But now comes a part of the drama really
stranger inits way than what has gone before.
While Judge Sirica tries to impanel a jury,
with Hammurabi watching over his shoulder,
Gerald Ford, the first President since Wash-
ington, hand-picked for the job—a nice man,
an open man, an honorable man—is voluntar-
ily going before the House Judiciary sub-
committee to tell why he pardoned Richard
Nixon, without seeming to understand at all
why it caused such stunning consternation.
The popularity of no other new president has
fallen so precipitously (and perhaps tempor-
arily): 20 points on the Gallup poll. We needed
ing sacrifices of the anti-inflation fight. The
popularity of the President, the lift he gave us
after the sick-bed of Watergate, were national
assets, A lot of thaf has gone.
Mr. Ford has been here, there, and every-
where. He was at the vast hotel ballropm of
the Ecomonic Summit where Sen. Ci###ston
delivered a memorable quip: Recession isn’t
completely bad: it has allowed every Americ-
an to live in a more expensive neighborhood,
without moving. He has been at his wife’s
bedside; he has met with leaders of fo#)other
big oil importing powers (inconclusively) ; he
opened the World Bank session. The Adminis-
tration’s anti-inflation program and energy
conservation program will come at once. But
1 can only report that the atmosphere of this
city is disturbed and finicky; the bounce has
gone out. Why?
Mr. Ford looked at Mr. Nixon’s CIA-inter-
vention in Chile and thought it was all right.
Undermining foreign governments is legiti-
mate. The Russians do it. On the economic
front the feeling grows that the Administra-
tion hasn’t really got control: it used up a
month in summits and the recession still
deepens; the stock market casts a gloomy
verdict. Then there is the pardon. Even Mr.
Nixon never used executive privilege to cut
prematurely across the legal process -- not
only for crimes known but for any ‘he may.
have committed.” Every day of the Sirica
proceeding recalls that the chief unindicted
co-conspirator goes free. Then there is the
give-away of the Nixon tapes, which Congress
is trying to redress. And the ps
uncertain signals to the Arab oil coun®es. .
.Let’s hope it pulls itself together soon. We
need to get some bounce back.
preceded the present Democratic chief
executive.
Although Mr. Packel and Mr. Shapp will
deny it, there just is no way under the current
system that Pennsylvanians are going to get a
legal opinion from the Justice Department
that is not heavily weighted by the thinking
and politics of the governor. The manifesta-
tions are numerous.
Alleged investigations by Justice into
misdeeds among bureaucrats that are poten-
tially damaging to the Shapp Administration
have faded quietly into the sunset without
public denouement.
In this respect, it’s interesting to hear the
Governor’s Office proclaim (quite correctly)
that the current legislative investigation of
venality in state government is politically
motivated. The other half of that equation is
that the committee is probing matters that
have been glossed over by the Justice Depart-
ment for political reasons.
On all controversial bills that have cleared
the Legislature--abortion, pornography
capital punishment, state income tax, and
others--the attorney general’s official opinion
has neatly dovetailed with the personal and
political opinions of the governor.
In the early days of the Shapp Administra-
tion, the Justice Department’s man assigned
to the state Liquor Control Board was
Alexander Jaffurs, who tried to call them as
he saw them without political considerations.
For his efforts, Mr. Jaffurs was sacked
ignominiously by Mr. Packel and labeled an
incompetent by Gov. Shapp.
None of this is new to the Capitol. The state
Justice Department has always been the
hamdmaiden of the governor, and it will
continue to be so as long as the governor
A proposed constitutional amendment has
been before the legislature that would change
the system by having the attorney general
elected directly by the people--as is done in 43
other states.
do anything about the proposal this year, but
it doubtless will be back next year.
The state attorney general is no ordinary
-.
Telephone 675-5211 or 825-6868.
dx ot sy
cabinet officer carrying out the governor’s
policies. He can give an opinion on the con-
stitutionality of a new law or policy that has
the weight of law unless countrmiggy by
another law or court decision. He #Iso is
responsible for investigating wrongdoing in
the administration.
The chief argument against an elected
attorney general is that it would make the
governor’s job more difficult, which it surely
would. It would be more convenient for the
governor if the attorney general did not have
to run for election--indeed, it would be more
convenient for the governor if he didn’t have
to run for election.
Convenience to rulers isn’t one of demo-
cracy’s virtues.
an
al