OPINION Page 4 Friday, March 6, 1981 The Michigan Daily e bt anichigant Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Reagan: Let them eat cake I%..i Vol. XCI, No. 125 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board Proposed cut of CEQ: Let nature enfor itself rTHE REAGAN Administration is federal agencies, to ensure the safety considering eliminating the Coun- of projects affecting the environment. cil on Environmental Quality - a cut The council also gathers information that would only serve to isolate the on the quality of the nation's environ- president from environmental con- ment and produces a report not cerns. duplicated by any government office. Since his election, several of The CEQ administers the National Reagan's actions have indicated this Environmental Policy Act, which blatant lack of concern for environ- established environmental protection mental issues. His appointment of as a national priority. The Reagan James Watt, a long-time enemy of administration has maintained that western conservation groups, as the CEQ's duties could be diffused into Secretary of the Interior was a prime the EPA and Interior Department, but example of his advocacy for develop- in the past neither department has ment over environmental protection. demonstrated competence in super- For years, as president of the Moun- vising the NEPA. tain States' Legal Foundation, Watt A further problem with this has been known for his opposition to arrangement is that the two bodies are conversationists' efforts. Sadly, in his regulated by the NEPA, which could short term with the Interior Depar- cause difficulty in administering it. tment, Watt has lived up to his former The most important duty of the CEQ, reputation. The new Secretary of the however, is advising the president. The Interior has tagged more than one CEQ develops and recommends million acres of sensitive California policies that will promote the im- coastal waters for an oil and gas ex- provement of the environment. It ser- ploration lease in May. ves as a watchdog for possible en- To further his imbalanced, anti-en- vironmental infringement. Thus far, vironmental interests, Reagan has ap- Reagan's appointees seem unin- pointed Ann Gorsuch as head of the terested in undertaking this important Environmental Protection Agency. In task. her home state of California, Gorsuch By cutting the council, Reagan will has a history as a fierce opponent of turn a deaf ear to the nation's en- anti-pollution legislation. vironmental concerns. In order to Cutting the CEQ would further stack maintain a balanced approach to the the deck in favor of anti-environmen- nation's environmental issues, the talist efforts. Since it was conceived in Reagan Administration must not put 1969, the council has worked within an end to the CEQ. Drink up, Gov. Carey Nearly 200 years ago, American patriot and constitutional framer John Jay declared, "The people who own the country ought to govern it." Two centruies removed, the Reagan Administration is rushing to clasp our forefather's adage with patrician zeal. The day of upper class liberation has finally arrived: Heretofore cast as the necessary evil which keeps the financial wheels of society turning, our super-rich suddenly find them- selves acclaimed as the nation's most selfless paragons of benevolence. Coming Apart By Christopher Potter courage paving theway for the rest of us to live better, happier lives. How about that? Big business's legacy of sweatshops, monopolies, price-fixing and union-busting was all conducted on behalf of the people. The bosses weren't doing it to us, they were doing it for us. How could we be so blind? Perhaps we forget one must be cruel to be kind. SMALL WONDER Reagan's economists have launched an unabashed "reverse-Rob- in Hood" game plan. After all, as one official recently put it, "America wouldn't be wealthy if it didn't have any wealthy people". So much the better if the proposed myriat of tax breaks, deregulations, and welfare cuts give to them that's got and takes from them that ain't. Such is the ethical foundation for a new American plutocracy, based on rapturous trust in the wisdom of the rich: Just turn those corporations loose, and we'll all get to Paradise sure as night follows day. Stockman & Co. cling to the Gilder dialectic as feverishly as the most devoted communist clings to Marx: Ye must have faith - Exxon will save you in the end. SUCH ATTITUDES are not original in American political history. What is original - In the past half-century at least - is the class- NO LONGER MUST they feel egalitarian guilt over the three Astin-Martins in the driveway, the Leer jet out at the airport, the winter bungalow in Pago-Pago. Economic omnipotence has becomfe its own virtue, its practitioners the last, unsordid hope of our nation. This rebellion of the rich has lately found its guiding intellectual conscience in a new book, Wealth and Poverty, penned by economist and self-styled social philosopher George Gilder. The work has been labeled "promethean" by Reagan Budget Director David Stockman, who suggests that Gilder's book will provide the dominant philosophical underpinnings for the Administration's economic grand design. Clearly, the Gospel has been found and Gilder is its prophet. Predictably, the author argues for a com- merce untramelled by government inter- ference. But his thesis turns novel when he challenges a key ingredient in the classic assumption - generally held by conser- vatives as well as liberals - that capitalism, though inherently selfish, still channels its wares to the general .populace more efficien- tly than does any other economic system. UNFAIR, SAYS GILDER. Far from skulking in selfishness, capitalism is actually the quintessence of altruism: The American entrepeneur sets sail into murky, ambigious waters, bravely casting forth his money and resources without the slightest guarantee of return of reward. He is a "giver" in the most self-sacrificing sense, his creativity and consciousness belicosity the current ad- ministration drapes around its policies of dismantlement and privilege. Its pronoun- cements barely even attempt to disguise the haughty, let-them-eat-cake disdain which cuts through the surface sactimony likea gentleman's rapier. Are we thus doomed to an immediate future of government-by-aristocracy? We remainin theory a nation of the people - yet the people have habitually exercised an inordinate tolerance for the machinations of the rich. Wherever and whenever organized labor bas asserted itself, the bulk of public opinion has always come down on the side of the bosses, the cops, and the goon squads. Some strange inversion of perspective has ceaselessly tainted the unionist and reformer as perverse, sinister, somehow anti- American - while the company moguls would emerge legitimate as apple pie. They might be imperious wheeler-dealers, but at least they were our wheeler-dealer's, swinging the economic clout to make America feared and envied the world over. AMERICANS HAVE always been mesmerized by the concept of power, seduced by the assumption that bigness means good- ness, that might makes right. "Our country,@ right or wrong" usually extends to our cor- porations as well, who all too often become surrogate stand-ins for the nation itself; to in- veigh against their multifold excesses ultimately seems shameful, almost un- patriotic. Big remains big, regardless of political per- spective. However free-flung its aspirations, Gilder's philosophy is every bit as pater- nalistic as the big-government menace Reagan so piously denounces. UNRESTRICTED CAPITALISM would likely prove as oppressive as the most en- tangled Soviet state bureaucracy; nothing in our economic history indicates laissez-faire would flow with the divine, utopian inevitability Gilder and his disciples preach. As with most things, logic lies ,in moderation - in this case, the interlocking system of government-commerce checks and balances that has served us remarkably well to this point in time. But if the Reagan clan truly wishes to transmute our direction from rationality to ideology, then America's future is anybody's guess. Gas up the Astin-Martin? Hell, pass the firewood. Christopher Potter is a Daily staff mem- ber. His column appears every Friday. PRESIDENT REAGAN reviews notes on board Air Force One. Chilean resisters continue struggle against repression .0 N EW YORK Gov. Hugh Carey seems to be a little confused. When workers complained that toxic chemicals, including PCB's, per- meating their state office building might pose a threat to their health, Gov. Carey scoffed, "I offer here and now to wvalk into Binghampton (where the building is located) or-any part of that building and swallow an entire glass of PCB's ... You've got to take PCB's in quantities, deadly, over a long period of time and probably be pregnant-which I don't intend to become-and then you get PCB con- tamination. "If I had a couple of willing hands and a few vacuum cleaners, I'd clean that building myself," he continued. Gov. Carey apparently does not view the soot laced with PCB's and other highly toxic chemicals that spread throughout the building after a fire last month as a threat. Maybe that's because he works in a different building a long way away. Maybe it's because he finds the workers' con- cerns and complaints bothersome. If that's the case, let's take Gov. Carey up on his offer. Drink up. I, I. J I-1 SANTIAGO, CHILE - From a distance the 140-year-old San- tiago Penitentiary has the rustic charm of an old Spanish mission. The white adobe-like structure gleams in the sun while palm trees sway on either side of the wide entrance. Up close, however, in the cold glare of reality reflected from the heavy iron bars and menacing machine guns, the illusion begins to fade. From the inside, where the fetid air smelling of human waste hangs in the cold, dark cells, the penitentiary has all the charm of a tomb, which it is: a tomb for the living. THANKS TO THE efforts of in- ternational organizations such as Amnesty International and the Red Cross, as well as the political prisoners' own militant actions, it's now possible for friends and relatives to visit here, although it is illegal for journalists to enter the prison without written authorization from the ministry of justice. That, I was told, was all but impossible to obtain. So I approached one of the people waiting in line to give in- formation to the guard outside, maintained a conversation, and stayed at the person's side as we went through the prison gates. Since it's common for one family member to sign in the entire family, the guards never challenged me. I visited the penitentiary 10 times and this method has always worked. One of the people I met inside was Eugenio Bisama Castillo, who has been entombed here sin- ce he was 19. He's now 23. He shares an eight-by-six-foot, unheated cell with two other men. Eugenio, a highly intelligent, gentle-mannered man, is a mem- herof th in n aP cicta wires were attached to his genitals and to his tongue; and finally he was placed on an elec- trically-wired metal cot, with his hands and feet tied to the metal and wet cloths to increase the shock. He said he has no hatred for his torturers or for others who sup- port the dictatorship because, "Our enemy is the system, not individual people." As for that system, it remains today nearly as repressive as it was in the dark months following the assassination of Salvador Allende in 1973, despite widespreadibelief elsewhere that things have changed. SEVEN YEARS have passed since the bloody U.S.-sponsored and Chilean military right-wing coup that ended the democratically-elected socialist government, killed hundreds of thousands of Chilenos; sent into exile 1,000,000 more and systematically sought out, tor- tured, or imprisoned thousands more Chilenos who were believed to be "enemies of the state." But perhaps you've heard all this before. And perhaps you've read the articles like this recent and typical one printed in American newspapers late in 1980: "In seven years, Chile has moved from being a bankrupt, chaotic basketcase to being one of the most robust and vibrant systems in the world. A true suc- cess story." But according to a Human Rights Commission report to the United Nations this year, there were more than 1,200 violations of human rights in Chile during the first half of 1980. By Lawrence Johnson as a result of the controversy surrounding the Chilean secret police involvement in the bom- bing assassinations of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C. in 1976, private banks and corporations have proven more than willing to fill the gap. Their key interest is still cop- per. The U.S. companies- that were nationalized under Allende have begun to move back in - not to take over the same mines - but to explpoit vast new copper deposits. Billion dollar invest- ments have come from Anaconda and Exxon in the last two years. By the end of the 1980s, foreign investment, mainly from the United States, is expected to ex- ceed $5-billion. A NEW LABOR code has been implemented, designed essen- tially to institutionalize low wages and very weak unions. No third parties can be involved in a strike, which eliminates secon- dary boycotts or solidarity strikes by other unions. There are no industry-wide unions allowed. Lockouts, on the other hand, are legal. Yet, despite the dictatorship's massive economic and military repression, the Chilean people have managed to build a popular and multi-faceted legal, semi- legal, and clandestine resistance movement, involving most unions, church and social clubs, even sports organizations. Also active in the resistance are groups of unemployed workers, family members of political prisoners, and those killed or exiled. These groups usually operate on a local or neighborhood level although many, like the family groups, have national networks as well. Their members come from all levels of society ald from all types of employmentbut there is strong unity on the need to overthrow the dictatorship. How to achieve its overthrow and the type of government to replace it are currently subjects of hot debate. The Communists and Socialists agree with-the Movement for a Revolutionary Left (MIR) that armed struggle is the most effective method. Unlike the others, the MIR sees the time for this struggle as now. This year the MIR has stepped up its overt actions against, the dictatorship. There have been numerous battles with security forces, bombings and corporate offices, and hundreds of "ex- propriations" from banks. Food delivery trucks have been seized and their contents distributed among the poor, and in July th4 director of the military school of intelligence was assassinated. Members operate primarily as urban guerrillas although they claimi strength in the countryside as well. Unless weapons are needed for a specific action, they travel unarmed, and like most people from other sectors of the resistance, they spend their lives looking over their shoulders. For all government opponents it is a difficult, dangerous life. But it is becoming increasingly clear that even for those outside the political process, life in Chile today is difficult and dangerous. Lawrence Johnson, who wrote this article for the Pacific News Service, has just returned from a year in Chile. am r.