ighr std gan Batl-g Eighty-Seven Years of Editorial Freedom 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109 iwamp gait by Jim tobin ..and they want to keep their jobs Thursday, March 24, 1977- News Phone: 764-0552 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan The lectoral College: A, real threat to majority rule IN 1824, Andrew Jackson won a plur- ality of the popular vote, but John Quincy Adams became President of the United States. In 1876, Samuel Tilden won a ma- jority of the popular vote, but Ruth- erford Hayes won the presidency. In 1888, Grover Cleveland sought a second term, and had apparently won when he garnered "a plurality of the popular vote, but Benjamin Har- rison was the eventual victor. The reason the wrong man won in each of those elections is anti- quated voting system known as the Electoral College. But if President Carter has his way, problems like these will trouble us no more. Tues- day, Carter asked Congress to abol- ish the Electoral College, and make provision for the President to be elec- ted by direct popular vote. The Daily emphatically endorses that proposal, and we further hope that Congress will act quickly to end the reign of the Electoral College. It has been 89 years since the Elec- toral College actually' changed the outcome of an election, and many legislators have been reluctant to change the system because "it nev- er makes a difference anymore any- way." But the, point is that it still could make a difference, and we should do something to avoid that possibility before it becomes a reali- ty. AT NEARLY happened in the 1976 election alone should be sufficient for congresspersons to rec- ognize the need for immediate ac- tion. If Gerald Ford had changed some 15,000 votes in" Ohio, Hawaii and Mississippi, he would be in the White House today, even though Car- ter would have won 51 per pent of the vote. Fifteen thousand votes may seem like a lot, but that sum is in- finitesimal when one considers the over 80 million ballots cast nation- wide in the election. The Electoral College also nearly tossed the 1968 election into utter chaos. If independ- ent candidate George Wallace had managed to control a few more states, neither major candidate would have had a majority of the electoral vote, and the election would have been thrown into the House of Representa- tive. Once there, almost anything could have happened with all the wheeling and dealing that would have gone on. But, these are not the only defici- encies of the Electoral College. There are several less obvious faults, includ- ing: *,THE FAITHLESS ELECTOR. There are still several states which don't legally bind electors to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their state. In 1972, for example, elector Roger McBride cast his vote for the Libertarian Party candidate, even though his state voted Republi- can. * UNIT RULE FOR STATES. Elec- toral votes are awarded in a block, with no regard for the margin of vic- tory. So, if a candidate were to win California by a single vote, he/she would receive all 45 of that state's electoral votes. * MINIMUM NUMBER OF ELEC- TORAL VOTES. The minimum num- ber of electoral votes assigned to a state are three - one for each ,sena- tor, and representative. This means that an extremely sparsely populated state might be over-represented in the Electoral College. Even if a state had only one inhabitant, he/she would have three electoral votes. The Electoral College has caused more than its share of problems in the past, and could wreak havoc on' future elections if it isn't abolished. It is an antiquated and inequitable system of choosing our most import- ant public official, and beyond that it is a direct threat to democratic rule. It has hampered us long enough, and Congress should back Carter in eliminating it as soon as possible. HERE WAS SOME action during the AFSCME strike that most of us missed. Too bad. While we were all sleeping in dirty dorms as our bodies tried to digest the rations of those emergency menus; somebody else was having a ball down at the University motor pool next to Crisler Arena. They were cutting up truck tires and bashing in windshields. And when the Ann Arbor police laid hands on some of these guys, it was a surprise to no one that they were bona fide members' of AFSCME Local 1583, doing their part for a just and speedy settlement of their contract dispute with the Uni- versity. Neither was it a surprise when administra- tors said they were going to fire about twenty strikers who got caught. Now the union is screaming, and that is the least surprising of all. FROM SEVERAL FACTIONS, including this newspaper, comes the cry, "Forgive and forget, you meanies! Let's put this awful mess behind us in the spirit of good will and cooperation! What are you trying to do? Disrupt the campus? Bust the union?" Let's turn those questions on the union for a second - by vandalism, AFSCME members did at least as much as University administrators to spurn good will, to disrupt the campus, and to make their own union look bad. This stuff happens a lot during strikes, but it only hurts the union's cause. And it's wrong. You can learn a lot about homo sapiens by paying attention to a strike and its immediate aftermath. Here's how the drama usually gets played out, and how it was played out here in the last several weeks: * Union goes out on strike, amid righteous de- clarations of struggles for justice. * University says strike by public employes is illegal (correctly), amid indignant proclamations of poverty. * Union, amid righteous declarations of strug- gles for justice: "Okay, it's illegal. So what? It's illegal for those University supervisors to drive our trucks without licenses." * University, amid humble proclamations of pov- erty: "Like hell it's illegal for them to drive trucks. In Michigan, management personnel can drive trucks as long as it's not in the pursuit of their liveli- hood." And they're right. * Union, amid particularly fervent declarations of struggles for justice: "Okay, but you're screw- ing us over. We're on the. right side of all this and you're starving our kids." * University, whose humble proclamations of poverty have begun to fade somewhat at the bar- gaining table, says, "We're trying to run a Uni- versity and you're shutting the place down. Who's screwing who? We're trying to educate the kids of the people who are paying your salaries." And then the two bargaining teams sit down behind a closed door, as they did last Friday night at the Holiday Inn East, and hammer out a settle- ment. The talk of justice recedes, the poverty pleas turn into solid cents-per-hour,and the whole thing is over. THE POINT IS, a strike is a simple power struggle with both sides hammering at the oppo- nent with every tool they can grab. There is some justice on both sides, but there is skullduggery too, and one just has to choose which balance one likes best. But there are a few simple rules of the game, and they have to do with decency. Violence and vandalism only mess things up. Strikes, however burdensome, solve labor problems, but when strik- ers break windows or when cops bounce picketers around, there is benefit for absolutely no one. It quadruples the resentment on both sides. What happens the next time around, when the new contract comes up for renewal in two years? "We got away with it last time," say strikers. "Let's bust some windows this time." If over-eager Ann Arbor police officers were disciplined, (and they probably didn't get the severe reprimand they deserved), then these few strikers deserve at least the same for busting up property. A spirit of cooperation. That's absurd. Union members flaunt guidelines of cooperation during the strike and then call on the University to for- give. That's like stabbing a guy and then telling him not to scream so loud. Today's "swawqp gas" is the firstof Daily co-edi- tor-in-chief Jim Tobin's columnns. This opinion is a rebuttal to yesterday's piece on the firings in the wake of the AFSCME strike. Although yesterday's was the official stance of the paper, there was con- siderable dissent among staffmembers, and Jim is one of those who disagreed with the majority opinion. A6 JSC A TAX COTT "1 -f a pH V W!x t AREh FR ri ;.-:--r-> -. ;, c ,' ''' 1 WE AUP PO1CC cJ1A~jf AU / FtfP~cA aSlihFaT -I/ : / ~' ITS IJOtAS (F IM 0'LAurIiefl ISR survey: Just a small step in the right direction SURPRISE, ANN ARBOR - you've got a housing crisis. After spend- ing over a year and $39,000 in re- search money, the Mayor's Blue Rib- bon Commission on Fair Rental Prac- tices has produced a report confirm- ing what anyone who has ever look- ed for rental housing in this city already knows - housing is scarce, it's expensive, and much of it is in- ferior. The issue of whether the money should have been spent at all is moot. The city likes documentation, and probably would not have proceeded without it. Mayor Wheeler has con- sistently said he wants to wait until the facts are in. Well the facts are in, and the pica ture they paint is not attractive. The average rent per dwelling, according to the survey, is $193.33, and the aver- age rent per tenant is $157.35. If those figures sound a bit out of line, remember that the report covers the entire city, including some fairly expensive rental housing out- side the central city. But one must also keep in mind that central city apartments are older (i.e. cost more for utilities), more crowded, and often in poor repair. MAINTENANCE complaints among tenants demonstrated a prepon- derance of small problems, not all of which occur in any one apartment or house. But any individual house, the survey indicates, is likely to have at least one maintenance problem - thin walls and inconsistent heat lead the list. Even the committee admitted that the odds against the private rental market being able to right itself were 'overwhelming.' It is apparent that if the city's housing crisis is to be eased, the city must do it. But in a tight housing market such as Ann Arbor's, maintenance of cur- rent conditions is not enough. Steps must be taken to alleviate a shortage of housing so acute that only seven- tenths of one per cent of the city's rental housing is vacant at any giv- en time, and rental rates so high one-third of the average tenant's in- come goes to pay it. TWO OF THE committee's proposals are particularly important because they deal with the University, which has long shirked its responsibility to house its students economically. One was simply a resolution de- manding that the University accept that responsibility. The other pro- posed that both the University and the city insure mortgages on non- profit and limited income housing in the central city. The city should look some form of rent control, possibly patterned after the Tenants Union/Trony lease of two years ago. Rent increases in the Trony contract were tied to prov- able increases in expenses. Federal funding programs for pub- lic housing should be explored, and the University should expand its dor- mitory space and try to bring its rates back into line with other Uni- versities. In short, it is time to act on a crisis which has only now been docu- mented, but has plagued the city for many years. TODAY'S STAFF: News: Joan Chartier, Ron DeKett, Mark Eibert, Lani Jordan, Ann Marie Lipinski, Mike Norton, Mar- garet Yao Arts: Lois Josimovich Editorial: Ken Parsigian Sports: Cindy Gatzziolis, Mike Hal- pin, Rick Maddock, Errol Shifman Photo- John Knox ICA T TNT!.2 , -1 C6ERWAt\J The Pali By T.D. ALLMAN Third of Five, Parts NEARLY 30 YEARS HAVE PASSED since Israel's founders, to use the Biblical idiom, drove the Palestinians of Jaffa and Haifa and Galilee and the Negev out from their land. Yet even within the borders established then, which the Arab states are now prepared to accept, the problem of the two peoples has not gone away. In many ways the problem of Israel's Palestinian minority poses a far hreater threat to the cause of Zionism, and to its ideals, than it did in 1948. Indeed, the major threat to Zionist aspiration today is no longer external Arab hostility, but the very existence of a large, well-organized and un- assimilable non-Jewish population within Israel it- self. It affects everything from the attitudes of Is- raeli youth, who increasingly regard menial labor as "Arab" work, to Israel's domocratic stability. Within Israel's multi-party system, the danger al- ways exists of the Palestinian members of the Knesset gaining the balance of power. THE PROBLEM IS VISIBLE almost everywhere inside Israel, from the Palestinians sweeping the -streets of Haifa to the de facto segregation of the Jerusalem school system. But nowhere is the dis- crepancy'between military success and political fail- ure more conspicuous . and more ominous for hopes of a permanent peace settlement - than in north- ern Israel. There, the Golan Heights - taken from Syria dur- ing the 1967 Six-Day War - tower above Lake Tiberias and the farmlands of Galilee like some immense bar- ricade erected to hold back a flood. The Arab popu- lation has been expelled, the promontories covered with Israeli defenses, the empty Syrian villages re- populated with fortified Jewish settlements. Today in Galilee there is no external military threat at all. But behind the bristling Golan defenses - in Galilee and the Jezreel valley - Israel has suffered one of the most disturbing political defeats in its en- tire national history. And without so much as a single Arab shot being fired. r.V1fTDTTI .rTV r, T A lC .'T , AVQn f s.L.. ,.....2.-. IF Tk$( tWc(9c*.s AtA HE- 2 1 estinIanS der most of Israel's victories on the battlefield mean- ingless. While the Jewish population of Israel today is in- creasing at a rate of 1,5 per cent per year, the non- Jewish population is increasing at a rate of 5.9 per cent. Since 1948, the non-Jewish population has grown from 150,000 to nearly 450,000 in a nation of 3.5 mil- lion people. Despite the announced Israeli policy of converting Jerusalem into an overwhelmingly Jewish city, the Jewish proportion of Jerusalem's population declined last year. In 1974, the Jewish population of Western Galilee and the Jezreel valley increased by 759 per- sons, while the Palestinian population grew by 9,035. WINNING CONTROL, In an official report made public last September, Israel Koenig, governor of the northern region of Is- rael, warned that the Palestinians in that region were steadily gaining power "through methods that were followed by the Jewish settlers before the cre- ation of the state." Not only, he complained, were the Palestinians win- ning control of more and more municipal governments by peaceful, legal means, but "organized operations for the purchase by Arabs of real estate in the northern areas" were beginning to threaten Jewish predomin- ance there. Gov. Koenig also lamented the growing Palestinian proclivity for higher education. He found particularly ominous a Palestinian "hunger strike in front of the United Nations headquarters, as some people are do- ing with regard to the Jews in the U.S.S.R." Koenig's recommendations for dealing with non-Jew- ish Israeli citizens were similar to policies outlined by Israeli Gem David Maimon for policing the Pales- tinian refugees of the Gaza Strip. HIGHER EDUCATION for Palestinians, Koenig ar- gued, should be discouraged. Government agents should infiltrate legal political parties in which Palestinians were active. Palestinian leaders who threatened Jew- ish interests should be removed from public life and replaced by officials willing to serve Jewish interests. Taxes on non-Jewish Israelis should be increased I cn a.tr anrim- m f dc-vvnlninom e forrrea in Israe~l Ai ' a ' A considerable distance still separates the Gaza conditions of barbed-wire enclosures from the Koenig recommendations for Galilee. But as the Koenig re- port demonstrated, one of the chief effects of military rule over a subject people has been not to enhance Israeli-Palestinian understanding, but to predispose Israeli officials toward using discriminatory martial law tactics even against Israel's own non-Jewish citi- zens, A PROBLEM WITHIN In his report, Gov. Koenig complained about low tax receipts from Palestinians. But in those areas where Palestinians haye won control of their own municipal governments, the fiscal results are even more disconcerting to the Israelis. Tax revenues from Palestinians have soared, and Palestinian voters have, in some cases, tripled their own tax burden to pay off municipal debts and fi- rance new public works. For an Israel that no longer attracts major Jewish immigration, that faces continuing economic prob- lems, and whose government is shaken by charges of corruption, this growing problem of Palestinian power seems one that no borders, however defensi- ble, can solve. The Palestinians of Galilee have learned that eman- cipation, which never arrived in the form of Arab armies, is never going to arrive in the form of bomb- toting guerrillas either. Instead they have learned, as the Palestinian mayor of Nazareth, Tewfiq Zayyad, recently told a visitor, "We must organize ourselves and depend on ourselves, if we are to survive as a people." "WE WILL NEVER REPEAT the mistakes that pro- duced the historical catastrophe of 1948," a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem said recently. "We will never flee and leave them empty lands to claim as their own. Let them annex the city and fly the Israeli flag here forever. I will stay, my sons and grandsons will stay, whatever they do to us. And in Nazareth, Mayor Zayyad said in a recent interview that even if a Palestinian state were et- tablished on the West Band; the Palestinian minority in that part of Israel would remain where it was. "We naturally do not intend to leave our country." he said. I