The energy hotch-potch
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The spigot has been turned on and the mass media, which gave short and perfunctory attention to the shooting-down of black school children in the unpaved streets of Soweto, has kept us up to date on every lie and evasion concerning the murder of Steve Biko. Feckless Frisbee, Jane Jumpsuit, and a succession of other television news stars who spent last winter rehabilitating Castro are now cluttering up the tarmac in Johannesburg. Prime Minister Vorster, who does come across as your basic beer-and-sausage racist, can be seen almost every weekend, repeating his intransigencies on the public affairs programmes, all of which seem to be Sponsored by oil companies.
There are days when one gets the feeling that Abraham Lincoln Carter is being seduced by the thought that if he can emancipate the blacks slaving in South Africa's diamond mines, the blacks vegetating in North America's slums may rest content. Even if racism is the strongest human force in the world, as any American has cause to suspect it may be, the masses of black people here have yet to act as though they Closely identify with the Africans. Nevertheless, the black members of Congress are pushing hard on the issue and for strange psycho-political reasons the administration not only finds such pressure difficult to resist, it really doesn't want to.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, whi is also known as the Polish Kissinger, is peddling a wonderfully specious rationale for American intervention of a discreet sort. He says he's afraid that if the US doesn't intervene what IS now a race war might be converted by the Rooskies or their demoniacal little helpers, the Cubans, into an ideological war. If he's right, of course, the blacks will be the reds, and then our honkjes can enjoy the ultimate nightmare, with the perfect two-for-one satisfaction of getting a black commie with each bullet.
Vice-President Mondale has been telling everybody that the South Africans must accept one-man-one-vote but since it is by exactly that system that Mondale achieved his own present eminence, a few are having misgivings about thrusting the arrangement ori South Africa. One of the foreign policy Influentials who has been objecting is George Ball, who has spent most of a !tfetime going back and forth between jobs in Wall Street and Foggy Bottom. It was from his State Department position in the latter place that he won a reputation for sanity by whispering to Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam might not be worth the effort. He may have lost his reputation with a recent magazine article arguing that, since oneman-one-vote was unrealistic, the United States ought to pressure South Africa into making segregation work. If it's going to be separate but equal, then let it be 'really' equal, Ball said, and if Jim Crow is the counsel of enlightened pragmatism, the only conclusion is that the interlocking set of institutions, public and private, which shape American foreign policy are suffering from terminal zucchini.
The focus of attention, however, remains here. Jimmy has cancelled his international trip later this month because it might have cost him his energy programme which is in such chaos that a number of Senators who are supposed to be on his side are saying they'd vote to shoot it down entirely, but think 'the people' want it. If 'the people' do wara it, they are being very cagey about showing it, perhaps because 'the people' have long since lost any sense of what is being proposed or what might befall them if this grotesque hotch-potch were enacted into law. Billions upon billions of tax increases and tax cuts have passed either the House or the Senate in vast, irrational globs that are to be reconciled by a joint committee of both Houses. That committee has already been meeting for some weeks and will continue for many more.
In so far as the dispute is susceptible to understanding it appears that the House would deal with the energy crisis/situation/problem by cutting consumption through raising taxes: the Senate, on the other hand, proposes to create larger supplies by cutting taxes for those who invest money in finding or producing energy. Using taxation for non-revenue purposes such as these has a long and rather rotten history in the,United States. As often as not the economic results have been nil or very different from those intended by the writers of the legislation. You are likely to find that a Bill designed to encourage natural gas exploration is being used by Southern California fig-growers or Las Vegas luxury apartment house builders as a legal tax-avoidance gimmick.
Congress is also trying to craft a social security Bill that will forestall the oncoming deficits of what was sold as a prepaid insurance programme for pensions and other disabilities. The benefits under the system are modest, to say the least: the taxation to pay for it is ferociously retrogressive and to make for more ill-will, government employees of every rank and station are exempt. They get higher pensions paid for through general revenues. Even though the old will continue to be the poor, the money involved in any change in the system is liable to be so large, it may affect jobless rates, aggregate purchasing power and flatten out the economic upswing.
In the face of all this braying, milling around and uncertainty, Carter has announced he is cooling out on the submission of any more new ideas to Congress. And none too soon. The New York Times recently ran an article on 'the changing contours' of the President's ageing face. 'There are new furrows in his brow,' It was observed, 'deeper creases in his cheeks, fresh lines around his eyes and more flesh beneath his chin.' But if you think that's discouraging, Governor John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, a much younger man, held a press conference to announce he suffered from eleven different allergies. Carrying the new come-clean ethics of postWatergate America about as far as it need go. Jay Dee explained that he has been allergic to eggs since the age of two and has been wearing glasses since he was three. The only thing left about this promising political figure which we don't know, although no one disputes our right to know it, is ekactly when and under what circumstances and with whom he lost his virginity, if indeed he has. In place of that, the TV cameras were invited to photograph the young leader getting his allergy shots.
Uncle Nelson Rockefeller is also in the news for wanting to sell his twenty-five-acre $15.5 million place in Washington to a real-estate developer. The neighbours are up in arms because the developer intends to build one hundred houses, selling at $300,000 apiece, on the place. They're `ticky-tacky' according to the nearby property owners who always knew Nelson was a traitor to his class.
Lesser royalty, Prince Charles, had a very successful tour. Reports of his being heckled by Irish Republican Army people should not be regarded as representative of American opinion on the issue. American opinion is largely non-existent except if the Prince is for it, whatever it is, so are we, and besides, the dear English people aren't such a bad socialist lot after all: their money's worth more.
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