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IIe Sidhgan Da'
Eighty-two years of editorial freedom
Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan
letter front the editor
Factions threaten HRP in 2nd
Ward
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich.
News Phone: 764-0552
Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers
or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1973
Support the lettuce boycott
By CHRISTOPHER PARKS
IN THE TEEMING dormitories and off-
campus student neighborhoods of the
Second Ward there is a battle going on
which may well change the face of city
politics.
The Second Ward has become, either by
design of chance, the final battleground in
a deadly serious war for control of the fled-
gling Human Rights Party. Whether HRP
will continue as a viable force in city poli-
tics or shrivel and pass from the scene
will depend largely on the ability of the
party's majority middle to win out over
factionalism.
The ideologues of HRP's self-styled Cho-
colate Almond caucus are running harder
in the Second Ward than in any race with
the possible exception of the mayoral. This
caucus, which represents a tiny majority
of the party membership, is dedicated t-)
maintaining a rigidly left ideology even at
the expense of kising away the party's
hard-won power and influence. Their can-
didate is Lisa North.
AN EVEN GREATER threat, however, is
posed by HRP's off-again-on-again partners,
the Rainbow People's Party.
All of the considerable resources of RPP's
many corporate arms are being employed
into an all-out effort to put their candi-
date - David Sinclair - on the ballot
for April.
The Sinclair campaign has corn bined eie-
ments of Tammany with Barnum and Bail-
ey, featuring elaborate Tribal Stomps with
prominent local bands and "ail the beer
you can drink" at various dorms around
campus.
Waging a desperate battle to hold down
the party's middle ground against b o t h'
factions is Frank Shoichet.
It's a lonely battle, for unlike the riinor-
ity Chocolate Almond and Rainbow factions
the party's majority middle is not organiz-
ed as a caucus.
The middle is, in fact, only the anmorphous
majority of those within the party who
cannot identify with either the Rainbow
People or the Chocolate Almonds. The
middle stands for maintaining the party as
a viable alternative force in city politics.
As one middle person put it, their only
ideology is the HRP platform.
SHOICHET'S CAMPAIGN depends on get-
ting out the message to the average IIRP
sympathizer that the fate of the party
depends on it not becoming identified as
the vehicle of either caucus' tunnel-vision
politics.
For HRP, as many party members frank-
ly admit, is a radical party with an es-
sentially liberal constituency.
To win in the April election HRP must
stay away from vague ideological .lights
which turn voters off and hit hard on issues
which can attract a broad following.
HRP's strongest selling point is that un-
like its competition, it is not fat and satis-
fied, and its members have not lost their
idealism. The party is still behiden to no
special interest, and therefore doesn't have
to fear taking on any issue.
If Shoichet can get his message across, if
he can successfully hold down the party's
middle, HRP will still be alive and viable
in city politics. If not, this April's election
may mark the beginning of the end of a
chapter of radical participation in city
politics which was tragically short.
Christopher Parks is co-editor of The
Daily.
-t
NOW THAT THE war seems to be over,
we should focus a great deal more
attention on one of the key political is-
sues of the day. It's sitting right there
in the salad bowl.
For Cesar Chavez and nearly three
million underfed, underclothed farm la-
borers, the most important political de-
cision you ve ever made is sitting right in
there with the tomatoes, cucumbers,
avocadoes, and radishes.
It's the lettuce.
The United Farm Workers (UFW/AFL-.
CIO), under the leadership of Cesar
Chavez, are leading a nationwide effort
against A&P and other major food chains
to force large produce firms in Califor-
nia and Arizona to sign UFW contracts.
PRESENTLY, the produce firms, who
sell to A&P and the other chain
stores, are contracted with Teamsters'
officials who claim to represent a major-
ity of farm laborers. But when the Team-
sters tried to stop the lettuce strike two
years ago, the California Supreme Court
ruled that they were acting "in collu-
sion" with lettuce firms to stop Chavez'
organizing efforts among the farmwork-
ers.
And the court said "a substantial num-
ber, if not a majority" of farmworkers
sought to be represented by the UFW.
N1X1, n S S11C
THE SIZE of the President's 'New
American Majority' appears to be
rapidly diminishing.
Phasing out of the farm subsidy, rural
electrification aid and other rural sup-
port programs - all Nixon proposals -
would seem to cut the farm block adrift.
Planned eliminations and cutbacks of
social services, ranging from the Office of
Economic Opportunity to Medicare to
urban renewal will not incite lower in-
come groups to flock to the support of the
President.
And with a speech of the Chairman of
the Council of Economic Advisors
Wednesday, it now appears that youth
as well will suffer during the second
term of the Nixon regime.
With unemployment of black teenagers
standing at 37 per cent at the end of the
year, Presidential advisor Herbert Stein
stated categorically that "unemployment
of young people" is "not particularly a
1973 problem."
ACCORDING TO Stein, the "misery
component for our overall unem-
ployment picture is less than it used to
be," mainly because so many of the un-
employed were now young persons rath-
er than adults.
Less than a year ago, an official Presi-
Tod0 's staff:
News: Gordon Atcheson, Dan Biddle, Jack
Krost, Cheryl Pilate, Rolfe Tessem.
Editorial Pape: Bill Hednan, Eric Schoch,
David Yalowitz.
Arts Page: Diane Levick, Sara Rimer.
Photo Technician: Thomas Gottlieb.
The UFW wants to force the major
lettuce growers to sign contracts guaran-
teeing decent wages, decent living con-
ditions, and protection from hard pesti-
cides, which cause the death by poison-
ing of nearly 1000 farmworkers every
year.
According to the Departments of La-
bor and Agriculture, the average farm-
worker earns only $1600 a year. And lives
in a two room shack with no plumbing
or electrical facilities.
And is contracted by the Teamsters,
who have no interest in improving con-
ditions.
DON'T LET ANYONE give you iceberg
lettuce unless they show you the
screaming eagle-UFW's emblem-on the
package first. That includes friends, par-
ents, supermarkets, and restaurants. If
anyone thinks you don't know what
you're talking about, explain it to them.
So the next time you're on that big
night out, think of the screaming eagle.
Order the steak; medium rare, please;
the baked potato, with sour cream, of
course; and French dressing on the-
Wait. In the name of decent wages,
decent living conditions, and in the
name of justice, have peas instead.
-DAN BIDDLE
-tit minority
dential report called high teenage unem-
ployment, particularly among black
youth, "one of the country's most critical
manpower problems."
Can we explain this divergence off
opinions of two official sources merely
by the passing of 10 months?
It is an inexplicable difference if we
rely for information on the index of
youth unemployment. While the jobless
rate has fallen somewhat on a nation-
wide basis, youth unemployment hovered
near 15 per cent nearly all last year.
Moreover, the 1972 Manpower Report
of the President said that "With rates
of unemployment as high as this, it must
be assumed that many other jobless
young people have given up the search
for work and so are not counted among
the unemployed."
We can attribute Stein's ebullience
about the "misery component" to only
one thing, it seems - the election vic-
tory of the man he advises.
RICHARD NIXON appears to interpret
his electoralmargin of victory as a
clear. mandate to ignore America's social
problems-as with his address on en-
vironment and natural resources, in
which he stated flatly that "America is
well on the way to winning the war
against environmental degradation."
Trumpeting about decreasing misery
quotients while the ax cuts deeper into
social service spending with each day
can only continue for just so long. Oth-
erwise, President Nixon may well find
himself backed by an old American mi-
nority-the well-off white male.
-ZACHARY SCHILLER
POWm's return:
Hiding behind happiness
&
By ROBERT BURAKOFF
WHEN PRESIDENT Nixon an-
nounced the impending peace
agreement last month, he said that
his efforts to secure "peace with
honor" were prompted largely by
one consideration - that American
soldiers should not have died in
vain.
At the time, it was not quite clear
to this writer what the President
meant. But from this quarter at
least, it appears that the only
advantage salvageablefrom our
disastrous involvement in Indo-
china would be a little knowledge
on the nature of that involvement
and how such a fiasco can be
avoided in the future.
The only conceivable consolation
for the sacrifice of 50,000 Ameri-
can lives would be the prospect
of quitting this war stripped of
some of the illusions with which
we entered it.
The latest episode in America's
struggle with its own illusions -
the return of the POWs - suggests
that indeed, such re-evaluation will
not be soon in coming.
The administration and the mili-
tary played the event up to the
hilt, and the media added its stamp
of approval by lavishing unprece-
dented amounts of newscast a n d
special air time on the POW's
return.
TUESDAY EVENING, for exam-
ple, the American Broadcasting
Company devoted 25 minutes of its
half-hour national news program to
the event. Not only were there
films of the arrival of the men
at Clark Air Force Base in the
Philippines, but also tasteless films
of POW families watching TV cov-
erage of the arrival. Another large
segment of the program was de-
voted to describing in minute de-
tail the facilities of the planes
which would take them to the U.S.
Later in the evening ABC ran a
special on the proceedings.
Wednesday night the same net-
work continued its blanket cover-
age by allocating another half of.
its evening news to the returning
prisoners. There was coverage of
phone calls from the-men to their
families and a sentimental story on
the experiences of a little boy who
had visited one of them in the 'nos-
pital at Clark to give him his POW
bracelet.
There was even a spot on how
President Nixon had ordered the
flags at Clark to fly full-mast (r*t
withstanding Lyndon Johnson's
death) because he and Mrs. John-
son had decided that the ex-prison-
ers should not be greeted with the
sight of lowered flags.
The underlying supposition of the
whole show was that one can still
get a patriotic high off of Amer-
ica if one chooses to ignore certain
messy facts.
UNFORTUNATELY, those messy
facts are what we as a country
must face up to now that our in-
volvement in Indochina is lessen-
ing.
Many of the men given heroes'
welcomes this week were shot
down over North Vietnam. These
men were instruments in the great-
est aerial bombing campaign in
mankind's history. How then do we
reconcile the good feeling we na-
turally get when we see the POWs
reunited with their families with
the horrible trail of destruction
traced by the American bombers
in North Vietnam?
50,000 American men died in
Vietnam. They were brought home
in body bags, not crisp new uni-
forms.tHow do we reconcile the
pleasant rush of sentimental and
patriotic feeling marketed by the
networks with the brute fact of
50,000 young American bodies ;n
cemeteries across the country?
During the course of the war the
question arose if American militat y
behavior in North Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia might in fact be in
violation of international law. Spe-
ifically the articles on proportion-
ality of human suffering to stra-
tegic gain seem to many to have
been violated. How then do wa re-
concile this fact with the proud,
unquestioning "God bless Amer-
ica" delivered by one POLY to a
cheering crowd at Clark Air Force
Base?
IN SHORT, the administration
and the military, with the networks
in their train, chose to make the
return of the POWs a reaffirmation
of the illusory American self-iden-
tity.
The image that was pandered
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THE MILVA KEE JOURNAL {i hers-fal Syndicate,1973
cOn the other hand some things have not changed...
handguns flooding the country, rising interest rates,
cities decaying ...
to the public was one of the mis- questioning it and eventually rc- equally despicable .
understood and perse .ed Amer- jecting it. as a convenient targ
ican boy home at last, main'ain .ig dissatisfaction.
his righteousness, innocence, a i d ALL THIS IS not to suggest that
courage through rough times c f in the returning POWs should not be What our nation
credible hardship. The f-eling was ignored or treated with contempt, point is not a good
"Gee, it's all over now, and when
you look back on it with men like They suffered much and certainly but some answers to
those, it couldn't have been such do not deserve to be isJed as scape. important questions.
a bad war after all." goats.
is using them
et for national
needs at this
warm feeling,
some prery
l
This unreal self-image is being
sold and resold at precisely t h e
time when we should be seriously
Yet capitalizing on their retfin,
using them as a convenient pan-
acea for national doubt, seems as
Robert Burakoff is a staff writer
for The Daily.
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Outlining a struggle
for human rights
By PENNY BLANK
THE NATIONAL Women's Political Cau-
cus held its first convention this last
weekend in Houston to decide what direc-
tion the 18-month-old organization should
take in striving for women's rights, and,
moreover, human rights.
Many people may not consider important
or earthshattering what went on among
the 1,200 women delegates gathered there
from 48 states in the first such political
event for nearly 101 years. Others may
brush it off as insignificant to the future of
American politics.
"After all," they may say, "it didn't
get any big media coverage did it? How
important could it have been?"
Does media coverage of women's con-
cerns have to be limited to bra burning,
or marches on Wall Street,tor confined to
the fashion and homemakers section of a
daily newspaper?
SINCE ITS founding in July, 1971 the
Women's Caucus' 30,000 members have in-
creasingly seen their role in politics as not
ators of their sex but also as champions of
broader social issues.
At the convention Rep. Bella Abzug (D-
NY) criticized the caucus for concentrating
their efforts on "narrow" feminist issues
in the past.
"We have- not done enough to speak out
and fight for the programs that mean the
difference between a society permanently
wedded to militarism and a society with
humanist values," she said.
The original aims of the caucus were to
get more women active in government, both
in elective and appointive jobs, to seek
adoption of legislation and other policies
that concerned its members. This past
weekend they stressed their dedication to
more "humanist" concerns such as improv-
ed day-care, welfare reform, adoption of
a national health program, and expansion
of the minimum wage.
Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) echoed
this new evolution in policy in chiding fem-
inists who had "downgraded the traditional
role of women" and said it was "not
the role of the National Women's Caucus
to be the cutting edge of the women's lib-
en in that race, and was nominated for
vice president at the Democratic National
Convention in August. It is tempting to
think how George McGovern might have
faired if had chosen Farenthold instead of
Thomas Eagleton as a running mate.
The caucus expressed hope of the pas-
sage of the proposed Equal Rights Amend-
ment to the Constitution. The amendment
states: "Equality of rights under the law
shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any state on account
of sex."
Supporters argue that the amendment
would simply recognize women as people.
Having respect for yourself as a human
being not just as a member of a minority
or social class or a particular sex is es-
sential for everyone.
THIS ARGUMENT of need for recogni-
tion as people by women may seem petty
or ridiculous to some but those who have
experienced the everyday petty discrim-
inations by society don't see it that way.
As D. H. Lawrence wrote: "Man is will-
ing to accept woman as an equal, as a
man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-
face, a machine, an instrument. a bosorn,
categories of housewife and mother.
THE WOMEN'S Caucus is still serving a
special purpose for the role of women in
politics but is aware that this service must
and can be expanded for the good of all
people, not just women. There is much
schism in politics, but the Women's Cau-
cus membership is of all parties and en-
courages all races, creeds, colors, econom-
ic groups, ages, and national origins to join
them - and yes, even men. After all, men
are people too.
Penny Blank is a staff writer for The
Daily.
Campaign
state ment
Editor's note: The following is a cam-
paign statement submitted by Lewis Ernst,
Republican primary candidate for Mayor.
Lewis Ernst
I WANT TO reduce taxes, crimes and all
that sort of thine to the areatest ex-
k*'~Y~KON-