4 OPINION Pcge 4 Saturday, February 5, 1983 The Michigan Daily Gie am itu ga aiLyi Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Vol. XCIII, No. 104 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board Toxic delay from the EPA N THE BATTLE over Anne Gorsuch, the U.S. House won a big victory Wednesday that may eventually provide relief for thousands whose health is threatened by toxic waste dumps. A federal court judge dismissed a suit filed by the Reagan adminisration on behalf of the embattled Environ- mental Protection Agency head. The suit had challenged a contempt of ,Congress citation levied on Gorsuch because she had withheld information from Congress. The House had subpoened thousands of documents detailing how Gorsuch is spending a multi-billion dollar super- fund earmarked for toxic waste cleanup. After conferring with President Reagan, she decided to withhold several documents essential to the investigation. The affair, especially Gorsuch's delaying tactics, raises some interesting questions about what is and isn't being done to clean up the thousands of toxic waste sites - many of them in Michigan - that threaten the health and safety of hundreds of thousands of people. Is the following through on orders to these sites up? Is Anne Gorsuch her job? EPA clean doing Wasserman GO-WOGS! 0H56 - 000 L!IISNS 00 T0 *0 GO'-IDSI 00000000000000 0000000o G o \ HI \ _ _ ~~~~~ -- - ~ ~ - $ 4 -GO0HOGS! 4 The only way Congress can answer these questions is by looking at the documents Gorsuch is withholding. Her reasons for not complying with the House request are flimsy at best. Tur- ning over these documents will hardly hinder the EPA's efforts to hasten the clean up operations, unless, of course, Gorsuch is hindering the process her- self. The Reagan administration has been less than friendly towards just about every sort of environmental concern. The administration has already cut funds used to investigate the effects of acid rain (so as to cripple that project), and unleased James Watt on the nation's offshore and wilderness areas. Could it be the administration is now guilty of complacency in cleaning up deadly toxic waste sites? Perhaps the documents Gorsuch is hiding provide some concrete proof of this complacency. In any case, the people deserve to know where their money is being spent. --~ C - ~-~ ~ ~- - - 4 f Who needs OPEC?' Maybe everyone does 4 Guns for T STARTED off as a protest against a federal hike in fuel and road use taxes, but since then the independent truckers' strike has degenerated into a deplorable level of violence. More than 500 trucks have been at- tacked by gun- and club-toting truckers trying to coerce their less militant counterparts to join them. Already, one person has been :uthlessly killed. And yesterday marked the first strike-related arrest in Michigan of a man who allegedly slot at a truck and car in Detroit. What the truckers want is for Congress to scrap or at least reduce the measures they claim will hike their federal taxes more than 300 percent. The government has put the figure closer to just double what truckers pay now, but the independents insist the in- dustry will be devastated when the taxes take effect April 1. dthe road Beyond all the bickering about the relative effects the taxes will have, few are questioning the truckers' right to strike or lobby Congress. But by calling a strike now, nearly two mon- ths before the law takes effect, and en- forcing it with guns, they have aban- doned the very process that was meant to serve them. The battle that was originally begun and fought out in Congress back in December, belongs in the political arena, not on the roads. Guns should not be used to force the trucking in- dustry off the road, nor do they have any place in influencing congressional decisions. But instead of relying on political processes, simple-minded zealots have brought them out and used them in- discriminately against innocent people where the only real influence they can have is to terrorize and outrage. By Franz Schurmann There is no major international organization, not even the Kremlin Politburo, which is so loathed by the U.S. public as OPEC. Thus, when the Geneva OPEC meeting to set world oil output and prices fell apart into bitter wrangling in late January, much of the American reaction was gleeful: Let the band of thieves cut each others' throats-and lift millstones off the necks of depressed consumers allover the world. So much the better if the finely attired co- conspirators of this oil Mafia, the big-oil executives, saw their stock and profits take a nosedive. And if the monopoly power of OPEC and the oil corporations were broken, the big banks might finally get out of the in- ternational financial game and resume exten- ding investment credit to small businesses and ordinary citizens. LOATHING OF foreign capital, big cor- porations, and mighty banks is a good old American tradition. Around the beginning of this century, rising populist sentiment broke much of the monopolies' power through anti- trust legislation. There is no denying that it worked then: The United States rapidly ex- perienced a mighty upsurge of production and consumption, reflected in the evolution of the automobile from an expensive toy for the rich to a daily necessity for most people. But there are good grounds for concluding that it is not going to happen again this time in the same way. A look at the experts' reaction to the Geneva fiasco finds some analysts arguing that the expected price drop will be good for the economy, others that it will be bad. Common to just about all the comments, however, is that any precipitate drop in prices now would be just as catastrophic as the 400 percent price hike in late 1973 was for the world's non- Communist economies. BUT ISN'T competition always the name of the game in capitalist economies? Absolutely not. As Thornton Bancroft, former president of Atlantic Richfield Company, observed many years ago, there has never been a free market in oil. For years the state and treasury depar- tments have refused to launch antitrust ac- tions against the big oil companies. Never- theless, all the evidence indicates that these companies formed an international oil cartel very similar to OPEC. Traditionally, evidence of monopoly is a price rigidity which would be impossible un- der normal competitive conditions. But as figures released in the early '70s by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed, world oil prices from 1950 to 1970, aside from,.one tiny blip, formed a near ruler-perfect line. The slight instability blip occurred at the time of the 1958 crisis that resulted in U.S. Marines being dispatched to Lebanon. IN A SENSE, what some refer to as oil's "historic price stability" is a politer way of saying "monopoly pricing." Yet before suc- cumbing to American-as-apple-pie populism, -TA~,'E AK._ I .Y !% ' i i s4, . t L-l~2-2. PO w au ,-- 19 I'r Ii O(NG ( 4e 4 E NWm - 1 s Y 1970, so quietly that only the readers of business journals were aware of the development. The goal was a smooth transfer of stewardship over world oil prices from an Anglo-American cartel to one essentially dominated by two good friends of the United States and Britain: Saudi Arabia and Iran. It was the political and military turmoil of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war that sparked the oil shock, not OPEC greed. By the mid-1970s, OPEC indeed began to function smoothly, like a cartel, and predictably oil prices stabilized. They were only disrupted again by a political event: the Islamic revolution in Iran in November, 1978. And though prices rose then, beginning in 1980 they settled back down, finally stabilizing and even falling as a result of a Saudi-engineered oil glu1t.The stocmarket took noteof this as it-went on its euphoric spree last August, just as it reacted with a drop when the Geneva talks broke down. The warning signs therefore are clear. If OPEC were to dissolve into the band of thieves so many Americans seem to think they are, the results- for the consumer would more likely be disastrous than delightful. Oil is bought in large bulk by giant organizations, planning for the long term. With so many of them already on the brink of financial disaster, the collapse of OPEC could well ignite the 1930-style global depression which people have been openly dreading for several years. I Schurmann wrote this article for the Pacific News Service.