Page 4-Friday, October 6, 1978-The Michigan daily c11ant19 Eighty-Nine Years of Editorial Freedom Vol. LIX, No. 26 News Phone: 764-0552 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan NA SAsearches for extra terrestrial dollars A slave is a slave is a slave i*s a slave 0 0 0 L AST MARCH the Regents decided to send letter to those corporations in their portfolio which have South African operations, The purpose of the correspondence was to ascertain each corporation's reason for being in South Africa and how they justify their contribution to the racist regime in power there. South Africa, of course, is one of the few countries, Rhodesia is another, where racism not only exists under white sheets or red-lining, but where it is institutionalized; a country where the legal, economic and social systems are based on segregation and discrimination. The responses from the 47 corporations in which the University has investments and which operate in South Africa, were not surprising. Corporations are not in the business of being moral: they are judged on their ability to produce profits. They told the Regents in glorified terms how much they were doing for blacks and non- whites in their South African factories or banks. The large majority of corporations strongly support the Sullivan principles. The six Sullivan principles, written by a General Motors Corp. board member of the same name who happens to be a man of the, cloth, support desegregating company facilities and giving equal pay for etual work. They are a smoke screen created to appease a stockholder's conscience. The American companies operating ii South Africa all said they were an effective tool of change in that country. With that they said they would not leave South Africa. It is fine that American corporations are being progressive in their own factories. It is fine that they have desegregated. eating and working areas. It is fine that blacks and whites make the same wage for the same work at American factories there. However rosy a picture they paint of their.operations in South Africa, the fact still remains - that black or non-white person is still a slave. Albeit well paid but a, slave nonetheless. We asked the Regents to sell all investments in corporations with South African operations. They didn't. Instead they adopted a plan to make sure these corporations were each doing their best to alleviate discrimination and segregation in their operations. At least they did something. But what no~W? Will the Regents rest on their laurels believing their duty is done? That indeed would be unfortunate. The Regent's method of dealing with apartheid in South Africa is sugar- coated racism. The continued presence of these corporations in South Africa. merely serves to prolong the existence of apartheid, regardless of how fairly they treat their black and non-white employees. The University must now join with other colleges and institutions to challenge institutionalized racism in South Africa. The Regents must all cut ties the Univesity has to the racist regime controlling South Africa. It is a simple choice. The majority of South Africans will determine their future. The Regents can decide whether to be a help or, a hindrance in that self- determination. By Art Levine Is somebody out there trying to tell us something? The National Aeronautics and Space Ad- ministration (NASA) thinks so. The agency wants American taxpayers to spend $14 million over the next seven year trying to pick up alien broadcast signals because they belive there's a. good chance intelligent life exists in outer space. But Congress doesn't agree, and NASA is facing the possibility that funds for the new program will be cut. ADVOCATES OF the Search for Ex- traterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program are undaunted. Last month they again made their case before a House Science subcommit- tee. NASA's budget request for $2 million to start the program was approved by Congress last year, but this year appropriations com- mitteesin both houses cut the funds. Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) even singled out the program for his "Golden Fleece Award." Now NASA officials are showing the kind of plucky determination that landed a man on the moon. They won't give up. They still have supporters in Congress and the scientific community, including celebrity astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan. Since the 1960's, Russian and American scientists have made several attempts to pick up signals from civilizations in outer space. But, alas, they haven't heard anything yet. Are those outer space beings merely shy, afraid to say "howdy" to the planet Earth? Probably not, says NASA. In one of its publications, the agency notes, "Other civilizations, too, could be searching for in- telligent companions." The scientists say previous listening attempts have failed because our radio telescopes were beamed on too narrow a spectrum of stars and frequen- cies. The SETI program would be an all-sky, all-signals search using existing and new technology. ALTHOUGH SUBCOMMITTEE members expressed preliminary support after the hearings, Sen. Proxmire isn't impressed. And, as chairman of the appropriations sub- committee that has jurisdiction over NASA funds, his views carry a good deal of weight. "There is no urgency to fund this effort in fiscal 1979 or fiscal 2079, for that matter," he, says. "It should be postponed until right after the federal budget is balanced and income and Social Security taxes are reduced to zero." There's no proof anyone's out there, he con- tends. Even if we do pick up a signal, he says, it could have been sent millions of years ago from a long-dead civilization. "What do we do if we get it," asks one Capitol Hill aide, "send a mailgram?" NASA PROPONENTS are tired of such wisecracks. They emphasized to the commit- tee that the project would lead to advances in radio astronomy. But they also say it needs to be launched now because growing interferen- ce form our own communictions systems will make sensitive detection of signals difficult in a few years. At the hearings, Dr. Noel Hinners, NASA's associte administrator for space science, conceded, "The chance of success is very f 4 ., -- : - ------ t. '. - , , : . . ,, , _ _ 4 _ , , !y ," :"a : ' U. v y - small, but the rewards of success would be very great." Even signals picked up from a dead civilization could be valuable, the program's advocates claim. They liken potential messages from outer space to the books of Greek civilization. "Does Sen. Proxmire suggest we throw out all books written by those who are now dead?" asks a NASA rejoinder issued earlier this year.. Among the more fascinating documents in the proponents' research arsenal is a Library of Congress study, "The Possibility of In- telligent Life Elsewhere in the Universe." The 1975 study, revised last year, includes results of scientific surveys, but also includes poetry, science fiction and fanciful drawings of outer-space creatures. THE STUDY EXTOLLS the potential benefits of celestial messages but warns: "We should necessarily have to be cautious in accepting any advice initially, but in the long run, the possibilities are titillating." It worries that the alien beings might try to fool us by "transmitting messages that ap- pear beneficient, while their intentions were malevolent." The report also outlines future directions inter-stellar communiction might take, as well as possible drawbacks. Mere radio commuiniction doesn't hold much promise, the study says. We'd have to wait at least 48,000 years for an answer from some distant star to a signal sent in 1974. "There may be no one left on Earth to receive their answer, and all would have been in vain." IDEALLY, THE BEST method to com municate would be to send astronauts in spacecraft, says the study. There's one hitch, though. The occupants might not survive-the journey, which could take thousands of years. One solution would be to develop a vehicle that travels up to the speed of light to slow down aging. Or hibernation or suspended animation could be used. All that's still far in the future, however. For now, NASA is asking funding for what it believes is a modest, sensible, low-cost program. But indications are that if somebody out there is trying to contact, Congress, most members aren't listening. " Art Levine is a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly magazine. He wrote this article for Pacific News Service. Let DC." ST PEOPLE would think that it's not fair that within the United* States there is an enclave of almost 700,000 people who have only a semblance of self-government, no representation at all in the U.S. Senate, and only a non-voting representative in the House. Yet this is the way residents of Washington D.C. have lived. Until ten years ago, the entire city was controlled by a Congress that the residents could not even vote for. And, after a struggle that lasted nearly a generation, Congress finally approved an amendment to give full voting representation, complete with two Senators, to District residents. On the surface, the amendment would seem a good bet to become part of the Constitution, even before the troubled Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would. After all, it seems to be. a clear cut issue of simple fairness to give the right of representation to a group with a larger population than anumber of states. Yet the amendment. is already running into problems. Opponents claim that it would be unconstitutional to give representation to an area which Lave a vote is not a state. Others have vowed not to consider anX more changes in the Constitution until ERA has been ratified. The underlying opposition, however, runs more along political lines than valid constitutional ones. The residents of the District are overwhelmingly black, and Democratic. Many southern conservatives and Republicans feel it would be foolish of them to vote to add to their political opposition. And legislatures in some rural states object to the fact that the District would be opposed to rural state's interests. So far, only one state, New Jersey, has ratified the amendment. Michigan, with) its bipartisan support for the amendment, is expected to be one of the next to approve the measure. Surveys have shown, though, that it is going to be a close fight for final ratification. , If this country is truly a democracy, then it is of grave importance that every citizen have voting representation in Congress. If indeed political interests keep almost 700,000 people from being fairly represented in Congress, then maybe it is time to take a whole new look at our system of government. E 7 T - -- - - - - - - I Letters to the Daily misplaced logic To the Daily: Your editorial, published September 23rd, claims that "in a nation where abortions are legal it seems neither fair nor logical not to make funds available to women who otherwise could not af- ford to pay for an abortion." The appeal to logic is wholly misplaced. Surely the Daily would not maintain that "in a nation where distribution of racial hate literature is legal, it seems neither fair nor logical not to make funds available to bigots who otherwise could not afford to publish and circulate their opinions." The suggestion that society is bound to sponsor that which it may not con- stitutionally forlbid is a sophomoric non sequitur unworthy of the editorial page of the student daily of a great univer- sity. Furthermore, your sense of "fair- ness" is curiously one-sided. I find abortion-and particulary "convenien- ce" abortions-morally abhorrent. You may not share my moral convictions. Many people for whom I have the greatest personal respect and ad- miration do not. But should you not, in supposed "review" of the Sunday jazz festival concert, specifically, the per- formance of Chico Freeman and Hubert Laws. Mr. Laws is considered by most people, including national jazz critics, and the jazz public, as our finest contemporary flute player. It seems like your critic, R.J. Smith, did not have thecommon courtesy of listening to his performance, after R.J. was just blown away by Chico and his colorful bunch of so-called musicians. Mr. Smith devoted a column and a half to Chico Freeman and a measly three paragraphs to Hubert Laws. It strikes me that all a performer has' to do to receive a favorable review from the Daily is to perform in the avant garde style of jazz. My opinion of Mr. Freeman's performance was that it was fair at the best. The first number was almost unlistenable while the other two numbers were progressively bet- ter. It seems that it doesn't matter how well you play your chosen instrument, but how fast which impresses some listeners. How can your critic even mention the flue gimmickery of Chico after hearing Hubert (which I assume he did) play such a difficult instrument to its fullest potential? Unless my hearing was damaged by ivo comment department The following was written by H. L. Mencken in 1928 in an essay about Henry Grady's New South. "On those dark moments when I fear that the Republic has trotted before those weary eyes every carnival act in its repertoire, I cheer myself with the thought that someday we will have a president from the deserts of the Deep South. . . The president's brother, a prime specimen of Boobus Collumnus Rubericus will . . . gather his loutish companions on the porch of the White House to swill beer from the bottle and snigger over whispered barnyard jokes about the darkies. The president's counsin, Laverne, will travel the haleluyah circuit as one of Mrs. MacPerson's soldiers in Christ, praying for the conversion of some northern sodom's most satanic pornographer as she waves his work-well thumbed-for all the yokels to gasp at . . . The president's daughter will record these events with her box camera ... The incumbent himself, cleansed of his bumpkin ways of some of Grady's New South hucksters, will hve a charm comparable to that of the leading undertaker of Dothan, Alabama. Iiie £ idn~i~an 1 i1Qi t EDITORIAL STAFF Editors-in-chief DAVID GOODMAN GREGG KRUPA Managing Editors EILEEN DALEY Arts Editors OWEN GLEIBERMAN MIKE TAYLOR NIGHTI DITORIlI' S: .ieffFranik, uGary Kicinski. Geoff ILarcomn. Warirein.