AMEII"M C&RAF r n
Exxon: Raising the
level of struggle
f .r
lim ll 111111
Building for impeachment
HT E ANN ARBOR Committee to Im-
peach Nixon is embarking on a vig-
orous letter-writing and lobbying cam-
paign to dramatize the urgent need to
demand accountability from the Presi-
dent of the United States.
We cannot afford to stand idly by
while the President, operates a secret
police force that acts outside the re-
straints of the law. Nor can we allow
the President -to decide on his own to
wage war and falsify military documents
to keep us in the dark.
But these are only two example of
gross misconduct on the part of the
President and his administration. The
President's recent defense of what ap-
pears to be blatant influence-peddling to
ITT and the dairy industry was pathet-
ically inadequate. And the question of
the deliberately erased eighteen-minute
portion of a key Watergate tape still re-
mains a mystery.
ALL- MUST take a strong stand
against these flagrant violations of
the public trust. Unless we do, we will be
TODAY'S STAFF:
News: Cindy H i1, Jo Marcotty, Sara
Rimer, Judy Ruskin, Chip Sinclair,
Becky Warner
Editorial Page: Brian Colgan, C I a u d e
Fontheim, Marnie Heyn, Joan Weiss,
Sue Wilhelm
Arts Page: Ken Fink, Mara Shapiro
Photo Technician: David Margolick
Stuff Artist: Doug Zernow
accomplices to the crimes of this admin-
istration, and we will be letting future
presidents know that their misconduct
will be similarly tolerated.
Ultimately, the decision to impeach
President Nixon will be made by Con-
gress, so it is critical that we tell Con-
gress exactly where we stand. Every
postcard and letter will be seriously con-
sidered by Rep. Esch during this elec-
tion year. The House Judiciary Commit-
tee investigating impeachment must be
made aware that people are outraged
and are demanding action.
The Ann Arbor Committee to Impeach
Nixon is organizing and rallying support
for impeachment. We'll be sending post-
cards, honking for impeachment, march-
ing to Esch's office, distributing educa-
tional literature, and eventually march-
ing on Washington this spring when the
House of Representatives votes on the
question. If enough voices are raised,
Congress will have no choice other than
to support impeachment.
THE ANN ARBOR Committee to Im-
peach Nixon needs the help and
support of every individual who recog-
nizes that the president must account
for his dubious actions in a fair and
full hearing. We can be reached in our
office in Room 4114 of the Michigan
Union (phone: 665-6220 or 662-6671).
Also, we have weekly meetings at 1:00
pm on Sundays at East Quad in the
Greene Lounge. We need your ideas and
your enthusiasm.
-DAN RUBENS
Daily Guest Writer
By DAVID STOLL
GRINNING AND SHOUTING militant slo-
gans with more enthusiasm than anger.
Tuesday afternoon the crowd of seventy-five
high spirits filled the hall outside the inter-
viewing rooms in the West Engineering Build-
ing. Inside the cubicles, recruiters from the
Exxon Corporation continued to interview
engineering students for jobs with the se-
cond largest capital enterprise in the world.
And plain clothes Ann Arbor policemen stood
by with arms folded, scowling.
"You're perfectly welcome to protest,"
smiled the gray-haired gentleman, "but I do
have two responses." A scattering of boos
and catcalls from the rear were hushed.
with the standard imperative, "Let him
talk."
"First, I have to protect your rights as
protestors," continued the gentleman, still
smiling. "Second, I have to protect the
rights of the people who want to be inter-
viewed."
"But what about the right to protect the
people from exploitation?" cried the sharp,
rising female voice, followed immediately
by a rousing chorus of yeas and cheers.
"Profits up, temperature down, let's get
Exxon out of town," resumed the chant. Prof.
John Young, director of the Engineering
Placement Office, cast his eyes to the floor,
but stood his ground. He has received such
visitors before, and will undoubtedly receive
them again.
INSIDE ONE of the cubicles a good-natur-
ed organization man from Exxon (black
rim glasses, slight in stature, about thirty
years old) was waging a ragged argument
with several activists.
"But I work for the oil company and
I have to put up with the same stuff," he
pleaded, grin on his face and hand in the
air palm outward. Two photographers snap-
ped pictures; a reporter took notes. "Are
any of you engineering students?" he con-
tinued through a barrage of challenges.
"We don't need to be engineering stu-
dents to know this stuff," answered a pro-
testor with a lofty, nasal I'm-an-articulate-
young-man delivery. "We know that the
corporation you work for is ripping off the
people and plundering the earth."
"Sooner or laterithese places are ging
to have to be exploited."
"Exploited?" responded the three protest-
ors archly.
"Yes, exploited. It's oil, you know, and
it has to get used up sooner or later."
"EXXON OFF CAMPUS," shouted t h e
crowd out in the hall heavily.
"Price wars have all disappeared in the
last two years!" nagged another protestor.
"Well?" challenged the recruiter as he
flung himself backward in his chair. 'So
what are you saying?"
"What do you think happened i 1776? It
was a conspiracy between the East India
Tea Company and George VIII's prime min-
isters . .."
"Look," interrupted the recruiter. "We're
all frustrated by these things ..."
"But not your corporation president," shot
back his opponent.
"He's one of the most frustrated people I
know," said the recruiter with great sincer-
ity, bringing his hand down flat on the
table.
AFTER THE PROTESTORS had left a
handful of engineering students lingered on
in the hall.
"The poor bastards who're getting inter-
viewed are on edge anyway," complained
one.
"I don't want to come to any flash con-
clusions about this protest," cautioned an
engineer in a business suit waiting to be
interviewed. "But you need an expert to
solve these problems. They ought to get
some of these professors around here to
come up with some ideas for solving the
energy crisis."
"Exxon knows what it's doing," observed
another, "but I don't think these people do."
"How's that?" I asked.
"Just now I asked this fellow what good
the demonstration was doing and he couldn't
tell me. He went on and on about how
Exxon was cutting off oil supplies to inde-
pendents, raising prices and conspiring to
monopolize the industry, how it was ex-
ploiting people and ruining the environment,
but he never told me what good it was going
to do for him and a bunch of other people
to come over here and demonstrate. I'm an
engineer, so I think about how to get things
done. This didn't get anything done."
ROUNDING A CORNER as I was leav-
ing the building, I came upon an astonish-
ing sight. Here, just out of sight from where
the protestors had shouted slogans for half
an hour, was an appointment window and a
bulletin board with half a dozen interview
schedules, before which stood a dozen peo-
ple busily pegging their names to the inter-
view lists of organizations with such names.
as the General Electric Company, U.S. Gov't
Navy/Naval Weapons Laboratory and the
Chrysler Corporation.
"Here's where the interviewing schedules
for the week are put up," pointed an en-
gineer with pride, as he showed me around.
"Over there are today's interviews" - the
Boeing Company, Exxon Corporation, Ford
Motor Company, U.S. Steel and others -
"and here's where you can pick up the liter-
ature which the representatives from each
company bring with them."
Last year 268 companies, I learned, includ-
ing most of the multi-national giants which
top the Fortune 500, visited the Engineering
Placement Office looking for employees. Bet-
ter than 300 engineering graduates took jobs
with them.
Sometime this month recruiters from such
organizations as Ford, GM and Chrysler;
Boeing, Lockheed and LTV Aerospace Cor-
poration; Shell, Gulf, Atlantic Richfield, Ex-
xon and the Standard Oil Companies cf Cali-
fornia, Indiana, and Ohio; Xerox and IBM;
Energy Commission; the Army Materil Com-
mand, the Naval Weapons and the Naval
Ordnance laboratories will or already have
visited the engineering school in order to
recruit its graduates.
OCCUPYING THE placement office ever
in the West Engineering Building in order
to denounce the presence of running dogs of
U.S. imperialism used to be a mre popular
pasttime than it is now. Prof. Young, the
man who welcomed the Exxon protestors., re-
calls receiving such visits regularly. In fact,
he recalls the last one he received before
last week's particularly well. That was back
in 1970, when the activists not only trashed
some interviewing cubicles but also Prof.
Young himself, knocking him to the ground
and breaking his glasses. After Young suc-
cessfully prosecuted for assault and battery
the visits stopped for a few years, until last
week.
"A regular little fireball," Young recalls
of Diana Oughton, SDS leader, later Veather
person gone underground, who led the first
occupation of the hall outside his office. On
that occasion, he says, Oughton and com-
pany managed to bottle up a physicist from
the Naval Underwater Research Laboratories
inside an interviewing room. Young remem-
bers that he held out "quite courageously."
Oughton was killed in 1970 when the New
York townhouse in which she was living blew
up, reportedly from bombs being manufac-
tured in the basement.
"I'm sure some of these companies have
done evil things," said Young in his office
the day after the Exxon protest. "But we're
not in a position to judge. We can't arbitrar-
ily decide which companies to allow in and
which not. It's a matter of civil liberties."
TUESDAY NIGHT an Attica Brigade mem-
ber who had helped organize the day's ac-
tion was trying to explain to me over the
phone what good the protest had accomplish-
ed. It was hard to explain.
"It's very important to mobilize and re-
sist the oil companies," he told me, "but we
don't feel that just by disrupting Exxon re-
cruiters we're going to accomplish any-
thing."
I asked him what the action had accomp-
lished then.
"It was a symbolic step on the way to
building a mass movement of the people."
"What about the engineers who kept right
on with their interviews?" I asked.
"They need to have jobs, we weren't ask-
ing them to boycott."
"So the action was symbolic?"
"No, don't say symbolic, I didn't mean
that. The harder it is for the oil companies
to recruit the harder it will be for them
to operate."
"The action made it harder for them to
recruit?"
"It was another step. The people who were
in the demonstration felt good about it after-
ward, we made a presence and drew atten-
tion to the problem. But for real change
the oil companies are going to have to be
defeated."
° t
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I
y :I*r s
Consumers pimped, by
deceptive advertising,,
SHAKESPEARE ONCE said, "all the
world's a stage and the men and wo-
men are merely players." Well it might
have been better if he had said, "half the
world's a stage and some people are play-
ers."
The players. The broadcast industry, the
corporations, food industry, pharmaceutical
industry and many more. All the indus-
tries that con, pimp and hustle the FTC,
the FCC and last and most of all, the
consumers.
Who are the consumers? We are the con-
sumers. Every last one of us who go to
school, work or whatever. We're all being
pimped and hustled for all we have.
On January 23, 1974, this ad appeared in
a well known Detroit daily: "FORD MO-
TOR CO. has made more small cars than
VW, AMC, Toyota, . . . or anyone else in
the world." Strange, but it seems that just
yesterday I remember that commercial
for that big gas-drinking Lincoln-Mercury.
IT SEEMS THAT every time there is a
market for a new product we are flooded
with all sorts of claims from out of no-
where. Being flooded wouldn't be so bad
if flooded didn't really mean flooded.
For example, a while back ago there was
a - commercial for a product with a name
that brought to mind standing by the
ocean and having water spray in your
face. The name is irrelevant but-the point
is that for several months this particular
brand of drink made the claim, "More
food energy than orange juice." When
called upon to prove this, they could only
make the case that calories were food
energy. Think of all the suckers-uh, peo-
ple who bought it on the basis of that ad-
vertising, and of all the money that was
made by the company.
This next case is more recent. For all
of you intelligent (or unintelligent) people
who happened to be watching the news
that day a year ago, you can share it
with me.
THERE WAS AN aspirin commercial on
whose name sounds like a Buffer letting
someone in. Their claim was "No head-
ache seems small when it's yours. That's
why the difference between (blank) and
plain aspirin can be important to you."
Then they went on to say that their pain
reliever reaches headaches faster than
plain aspirin which they were subsequent-
ly unable to prove when called upon by
the FTC to do so.
I never really minded that one so much
because I always took the plainest aspirin
I could find whenever I got one of my in-
frequent headaches.
BUT IN SHORT, we unhappy consumers
can never really trust an advertisers claim
unless we ourselves happen to be that ad-
vertiser.
That point is very interesting. Imagine a
fnrmer from backwoods Louisiana adver-
tising his snecial brand of manure. Or a
doctor in Farmington, Maine telling us
about his quick way to get rid of frost-
bite. Maybe, but I doubt if the manure ad
would work. The market for bullshit is al-
ready overcrowded with newspaper and
T.V. ads.
Clifford Brown is a staff writer for The
Daily,
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Eiglay-three years of editorial freedom
Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan
,'.,f
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mi. 48104
News Phone: 764-0552
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1974
1
Letters:
Teaching fellows seek support in tuition
battle
To The Daily:
ONE POINT of clarification con-
cerning your article "T.F. organi-
zation approves. package". When
we say it is not our responsibility
at this time to figure out where
the U can get funds from, it is
most emphatically with the excep-
tion of increased tuition.
There is nothing we would like
better than joint GEO and under-
graduate action which would force
the University to both concede a
GEO contract, and also avert the
increase in tuition which was
threatened by Vice-President Smith
even before the recent strike talk.
We have been hesitant, however,
to make promises about taking re-
sponsibility on our own for prevent-
ing a tuition hike. For this is an
issue which would be difficult to
win on our own. We need militant
support from undergraduates to
succeed in preventing all tuition
(probably Thursday-Daily ads and
leaflets will appear soon giving
exact details). The purpose of this
meeting will be ft w o f olI d. We
ask undergraduates to support GEO
in the event of a strike. But, more
importantly, we hope that out off
this meeting might grow a new
organization of undergraduates to
demand their right to low tuition.
Ideally, we would join with such
an organization and together take
whatever action necessary to win
the ful range of our rig'ats.
It is important that each of us
support all demands and actions
taken by either GEO or under-
grads because we are the people
of and whom Universities a r e
made. One of the most exciting as-
pects of a union of teaching fel-
lows and other graduate academic
employees is it's implication for
improving the quality of uner-
rr -nla --n A1^n r n l .nn r t -nc
dergrad education than any other
group.
THIS IS reflected in several
items in our contract package.
One is the demand for an average
maximum class size of sixteen.
Another is that tf's retain or lose
their teaching positions on the
basis of evaluations by undergrad-
uates, administered and interpret-
ed by a committee composed of
1/3 tf's, 1/3 undergrads and 1/3
faculty.
Only through united acion can
we compel the U todface it's re-
sponsibility to provide low-cost
quality education as well as decent
renumeration and conditions for it's
workers.
-The Executive Comm. of
GEO-OTF
January 11
Letters to The Daily should
is ...m.ala .o .k. -VAitriw ni .
oppression
.=
Ty '
N
t f
4too
To The Daily:
AS CHAIRPERSON of the Stu-
dent Committee on Oppressed .Jew-
ry, I have spent a fair amount of
time this year protesting various
forms of oppression. I wish now
to protest another instancw of o)-
pression, although in this case, un-
fortunately, it was perpetrated by
a fellow Jew.
Let no one think that wearing a
skullcap and a Jewish medallion
makes one either particularly pious
or well qualified to speak on behalf
of Jews. The lettuce eating o' Hoff-
man was one of the moat disgust-
ing incidents I have seed in some
time, and was counter to every-
thing Judaism stands for.
There are certain Jewist laws
relating to charity. The highest
pose it, but he spit in the face of
those making the request.
THERE ARE VERY extensive
dietary laws concerning what a Jew
may or may not eat. Expressly for-
bidden, along with other things.
is any food which is the pro-luct of
oppressed labor. Rabbinical courts
in both Boston and New Yerk have
ruled that non-United Farr Work-
er lettuce and grapes fall under
this category, and therefor6 any
Jew who is serious about the laws
of kashruth must refrain fToni eat-
ing them.
Finally, in a more pragmatic
vein, Hoffman bills hims if as a
shrewd defender of Jewish inter-
ests. Last fall, during the Mileast
War, Cesar Chavez made a stata-
ment strongly supporting 'srael an..
is right to exist. In spite of thA,
not even common deceicy was
shown to those representing Cha-
_, _ ._ ftn
with the repeated attempts cf a
racist and reactionary to cloak his
"ideals" in an ethical system
whichsI know to stand for exactly
the opposite.
-Barry Bennett '76
Feb. 11, 1974
illegal
To The Daily:
THE HUMAN Rights Party, in
registering voters outside the Uni-
versity Cellar during book rush,
consistently gave each registee a
sort of indoctrination speech, which
advised the potential voter just
how much (?) HRP has done for
Ann Arbor, and why it might be a
"good idea" to keep a few mern-
bers of the party on City Council
to look out for "student interests."
Such procedures are clearly il-
YAI'