University Daily Kansan, February 19, 1985
OPINION
Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University, Daily Kaman, USPS 60-6400 is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stairfer Fitt Hall Lawn. Kan 60405, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and finals periods second class postage paid at Lawrence. Kan 60404. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or 12 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $10 to $15 per month and address changes to the University Daily Kaman 118 Stairfer Fitt Hall Lawn. Kan 60405
MATT DEGALAN Editor
DIANE LUBER SUSAN WORTMAN Managing Editor Editorial Editor
ROB KARWATH Campus Editor
LYNNE STARK Business Manager
DUNCAN CALHOUN MARY BERNICA
Retail Sales National Sales
Manager Manager
SUSANNE SHAW
General Manager and News Adviser
DAVID NIXON Campus Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Unorganized labor
The '80s, they will say, were marked by wage concessions to save jobs and a president who set the anti-union tone for the decade by firing striking air traffic controllers in 1981.
When future historians put the 1980s in perspective, they are likely to point to the decline of organized labor as a striking example of broader changes in the social fabric of the nation.
Most tellingly, they will note the overwhelming failure of organized labor's 1984 presidential candidate, who barely received a majority of union members' labor votes and actually lost the battle for blue-collar voters despite heavy financial and organizational support from organized labor.
A recent study showed that union membership dipped to 20.6 percent of the work force — an all-time low and more than 10 percent less than in 1950.
This week, AFL-CIO leaders will meet in Bal Harbour, Fla., to plan for the year ahead. The biggest problem the group will face is how to deal with organized labor's image.
To many Americans, organized labor's past evokes images of cigar-chomp political bosses callously sacrificing workers' interests for their own political fortunes. Today, organized labor is viewed as selfish and as having lost touch with mainstream America, despite efforts to help struggling industries remain competitive in world markets.
The United Auto Workers, for example, has worked closely with General Motors to develop more efficient assembly lines. In return, displaced workers have been retrained and jobs have been saved.
So far, however, these efforts have failed to make a dent in organized labor's bad image. This present image tends to obscure labor's positive contributions to American society.
Since the rise of the labor movement in the late 19th century, workers have made great progress. Safer conditions, higher wages and a decent standard of living for workers are the legacy of the labor movement. Today, union workers earn about one-third higher wages than non-union workers. This, too, is a legacy of many battles over many years.
Presently, the role of organized labor in the United States is changing — and diminishing. As technology removes more and more blue-collar workers, unions are increasingly seeking more clerical and technical workers. Their success in this area will be a key to the future for organized labor in America.
The benefits unions have brought to millions of Americans should not be forgotten. But when union leaders gather this week to assess their situation, they should take a hard look at their image problem and take steps to correct it.
They never learn
A pyramid scheme, possibly begun in Chicago, has reached the University of Kansas. One Naismith Hall resident estimated that between 100 and 200 residents of that hall had participated, as well as members of some fraternities.
Like chain letters, pyramid schemes entice takers with promises of easy money. Like too much business done through the mail, they are shady at best.
in tact, pyramid schemes and chain letters of this sort are illegal under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. When they operate through the mail, they violate the U.S. Postal and Lottery Law. The laws are appropriate, for the essence of the schemes is fraud.
As usual, the scheme requires a monetary investment — in this case, $20 — which goes to someone who entered the scheme earlier. Each participant hopes to profit from the entry of a larger number of investors later, so that each step expands the pool of investors rapidly.
Simple mathematics shows the inevitable collapse of such a scheme. Even if every person from Chicago to Singapore had $20 to put in, the pool of new investors on this planet would drv up.
The absurdity of these scams shows in a fictional story in which churches participated in a chain to send their ministers elsewhere and have new ministers sent to them. The arrangement promised that within three months each church would receive about 16,000 ministers.
Only two things can happen when money changes hands this way. If everyone ends up with as much as he or she started with, then it's wasted effort. If not, some are gaining unfairly at the expense of others.
However, the students at KU who participated in the scheme do not deserve prosecution, unless perhaps they were in it as big operators who knew its fraudulent character. Usually, participants simply have not thought, and they can learn without being arrested.
and they can lend. Conviction under the federal law carries as much as five years in prison, and the state law imposes fines as much as $2,000 a transaction. Certainly nothing of the sort is in order.
But recognition of the strength of those laws could help potential participants, and victims, to understand the true nature of pyramid schemes. They are simply ingenious ways to take money from other people.
The great, old national tradition of trying to get something for nothing has not died, but it stinks as much as ever.
Subsidies:
The lifeblood or millstone of farm
How can you keep the feds off the farm?
There is no doubt about it. The farm sector is facing a crisis that, if not corrected, could spell bankruptcy for more than 15 percent of America's 600,000 farms earning more than $40,000 a year. That is the percent of farms with a debt-to-asset ratio over 70 percent.
In 1983, economics columnist Warren Brookes reported that 90 percent of net farm income came from
BRYAN
DANIEL
Staff
Columnist
government subsidies. Another $10 billion was spent paying farmers not to produce, even though thousands were dying of famine in Ethiopia. Farm income has fallen to a 20-year low as government subsidies to farmers have climbed to a staggering $26.6 billion in 1983.
But when we look to possible solutions or alternatives, we find that the farm community itself is in disarray. Some groups side with the Reagan administration, calling for extreme cuts in government spending in the agriculture sector and a redirection of the programs' goals.
Other farm groups say that the situation has deteriorated too far, and now is the worst possible time to change anything. In times such as these when there is a lot of quirreling behavior, it is much more difficult much of which sails over the heads of the average layman, it is appropriate to return to first principles.
farms? Feds sowing bad seeds for farmers
Modern farm policy, claims William Peterson, professor at the Center for Economic Education at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is a "useless and quite irrational attempt to repeal the law of supply and demand
Staff Columnist
Many have already gone broke and lost not only their livelihood but their way of life.
Funny things are happening in the heartland of the greatest food-producing nation in the world.
DAN
CROCKETT
Many more are on the brink.
Many more care of the fish.
The seeds of the farm crisis have ripened since the turn of the decade and the grim harvest is being reaped.
A harsh reversal from the high inflation, high land values and low real interest rates of the 1970s to low inflation, land values down from 25 to 50 percent and exorbitant interest in the 1980s threatens to break farmers.
— to reinvent the wheel." The tug and puli of the unregulated price mechanism directs the supply and demand toward equilibrium, optimum efficiency and economic growth. And whenever shortages or surpluses do materialize, they are "fleeting and short-lived."
James Bovard gives a three-point solution to the farm dilemma. First, the government should end contradictory farm policies. Let us decide whether we want more or less, and stick with it. Second, the government should get out of the market. American farmers are the most productive and efficient in the world. They can compete successfully on the international market if their prices are not inflated to alleviate domestic political pressure. Finally, let's stop treating farmers like a welfare class. The average farmer's net worth in 1982 was $350,000 — that isn't bad for a welfare recipient.
Farmers, bankers, state and federal government all share the blame. Fault is not the issue, though Solutions are.
John Baize of the American Soy Bean Association tells us his members philosophy towards government: "Let us sell — we will do quite well, thank you." Quite understandably Baize is suspicious of governmental attempts to "protect" the farmer.
Soy beans were not included in the Payment In Kind program, or PIK, and the price support for beans was based on 75 percent of the average market price for the previous five years. The price support, therefore, was rarely above the market. Consequently there was no overproduction of soy beans.
Hence it comes as no surprise that our largest and healthiest export crop is the least regulated. Soy bean exports have increased about 23 percent since 1981 and had only an 18 percent protected carry-over from the 1982 crop. Wheat and cotton had carry-overs of 60 and 81 percent respectively.
This is not the case with the other crops. Claiming that the farmers needed the extra money to make a profit, the government continues to raise price supports beyond what the market can bear. So while farmers are assured a high rate of return on land and corn, their ability to compete in the international market is diminished.
Many people, Reagan's budget director David Stockman included, think that farmers dug their own furrows to go bankrupt it is just their tough luck
Manure. It's tough luck for all of us.
for the microfinance and the Farm Journal called the 1982 price support hike the "Canadian Agriculture Development Act" since American exports were undercut by cheaper Canadian exports.
"Most people don't realize how integrally linked farms and banks in the Midwest are," said State Rep. Robin Leach, D-Linwood. "If there is a significant wave of farm foreclosures, don't be surprised when a wave of forestclosures follows right behind it."
The above-market price supports lead to overproduction in the protected markets which, in turn, forces the market price down even further — often below the cost necessary for farmers to grow a crop. Then to circumvent this problem, the government now pays the farmer not to produce.
What we are left with is a vicious, self-feeding circle. The only people not the losers in this whole mess are the farm politicians and the farm bureaucrats. Peterson reports that while the number of farms and farm population has plummeted, the number of Agriculture Department employees has grown from 26,050 in 1930 to 129,139 in 1890.
When banks go, the entire system begins to fall apart in a hurry.
When banks go, the entire system begins to fall apart in a hurry. The problem is that they don't know how to rage. President Reagan has acknowledged that "people out there need help."
Lowering the national deficit is the essential change. This is the most effective way to bring down crippling interest rates.
"Interest payments are eroding the equity of the most successful farmers," said State Rep. John Solbach, D-Lawrence. "Their sweat and toil is soaked up by lending institutions while land prices have fallen so far that farmers stand to lose all if they quit and lose all if they keep farm."
To help lower the deficit, Reagan proposes sweeping cuts in agricultural and rural programs. He suggests ending nearly all federal rural housing, electric and telephone subsidies, which amount to more than $8 billion.
Reagan's decision to kill the Soil Conservation Service is even more intriguing.
The SCS budget of $610 million will be cut by two thirds in fiscal year 1986 and eliminated by the end of 1987. That will put a 14,156 people out of work annually.
"With no consultation or incentives, farmers will have much higher erosion and sedimentation rates and steadily decreasing productivity," said Mike Watkins, Douglas County district conservationist. "There's only so much to soil and water."
True, Reagan calls for $650 million in loan guarantees to banks and the farm credit system.
Mark Drabenstatt, agricultural economist on the president's Federal Reserve Board, estimates that the loans will help less than 1,500 of more than 210,000 deeply troubled farmers.
Reagan's ultimate goal is to get the federal government out of farming and have a free market once again. There hasn't been a free market since long before the Great Depression, when the federal government began heavily subsidizing farmers.
"The free market is a myth." Solbach said. "The farm economy is a balanced mix of free enterprise principles and government policies and regulations."
Nobody knows what the federal farm bill will amount to. So Kansas lawmakers are writing their own proposals to help farmers.
The most important of these involves a moratorium on all farm foreclosures in Kansas.
The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 1935 that such a moratorium was unconstitutional. That hasn't changed, so a moratorium would not be legally binding. Legislators can only pass a resolution asking lenders to cooperate.
Perhaps bankers will go along with the proposal for their own sake as well as the indebted farmer's.
Let's hope so.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Take a closer look
To the editor:
To the editor
Dear Miss Susan Harper.
I understand that you think heaven should forbid working in the Gertrude Sellers Pearson Hall cafeteria. Well, let me explain something to you: Gertrude is a barber, Gertrude, regardless of whether it meets your standards of a real job or not.
You, evidently, must be one of the many (but not all) GSP residents who do not appreciate all the hard work the cafeteria employees do to prepare your meals. It seems to me that some of them are a gourmet chef during times a day. Compared to what some people eat, consider yourself fortunate.
It is fine if you are putting yourself through school and are not one of
those "red-cheeked GSP girls," but you should take a better look at yourself before you condemn someone else because of his or her job.
Wendy Eckert former GSP resident and cafeteria employee
[it doesn't compare]
To the editor:
I am responding to the Jan. 28 issue of the University Daily Kansas: "Students offer university an alternative newspaper," written by Michelle T. Johnson. In the Streets, a student newspaper, is trying to familiarize the students with what it can offer the University of Kansas.
I totally oppose the publication of another University paper. I feel the
John Quinn
Wichita sophomore
I feel that In the Streets is in a whole other league. In the Streets does not even compare to the Kansan.
I have read In The Streets, and I feel that it is not nearly as well written or as diversified as the Kansan. If the University were to publish another newspaper, it would have to be smaller. Having another University paper would only cause problems between the two different papers.
Kansan does a very fine job of reporting many of the different issues on and off campus. The Kansan offers a mixture of editorials, art, photography, sports, news and weekly advertisements.
To the editor:
Simply, thank you
I'd like to offer sincere thanks to the thoughtful person who turned in my lost rental car keys at the Allen Field House the night of Feb. 4.
Driving in from Columbia that day,
I was delayed by the snowstorm and
arrived for the game a few minutes
late. In my hurry, I must have
h dropped the keys on the way from my
car to the arena.
Luckily for me, someone was kind enough to turn them in to the announcer. I'm eternally grateful.
Randy Holtz reporter for Rocky Mountain News, Denver
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