OPINION
The University Daily
KANSAN
September 12, 1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kannan (USPS 606-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer Fint Hall, Lawn, Kan. 62515, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions. Subscribes are $15 for six months or $24 for seven months. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $24 in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 for a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $3 a semester paid through the student activity for FOSTMASTER. Mail subscriptions are $3 a semester paid through the student activity for FOSTMASTER.
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM
Managing Editor
STEVE CUSICK
Editorial Editor
MICHAEL ROBINSON
Campus Editor
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
DAVE WANAMAKER        MARK MEARS
Retail Sales          National States
LYNNE STARK
Campus Sales Manager
JOIN OBEZAN
ADVERTISING Advisor
Tactless remark
If the city of Lawrence gave its commissioners awards for tactless remarks, Commissioner Howard Hill would have been last week's winner for his gaffe about Haskell Indian Junior College students at Tuesday's commission meeting.
After hearing a resident who lives near the Haskell campus complain about the number of liquor bottles thrown into her yard over the Labor Day weekend, presumably by Haskell students. Hill had this to say: "There will always be some problems when you bring people from a reservation in Arizona to the relative sophistication of Lawrence, Kansas."
Not only does this remark border on being tasteless and insulting to Haskell students who have often traveled thousands of miles — from states other than just Arizona — to come to school in Lawrence, but it is downright laughable.
Certainly, Hill cannot delude himself that University of Kansas students are any neater or more polite than Haskell students. For
years, residents who live around bars frequented by KU students have complained about the noise and mess the students created in their vards.
On football game days, Hill should take a little walk around these establishments and count the number of cars parked outside them with Johnson County license plates. The extremely "sophisticated" students from Johnson County, Kansas' most urban area, and probably some of their parents in town for the game, have thrown their share of beer bottles in peoples' yards while whooping it up after the game.
Thoughtless remarks such as Hill's are damaging to Haskell and the city's relationship. They are alienating and keep alive the old notion that Haskell is a world of its own.
These notions are unfair, destructive and, we had hoped, outdated. They continue a harmful stereotype. The City Commission, especially Commissioner Hill, needs to apologize to Haskell students.
Soldiers are in combat
President Reagan can no longer deny that the U.S. Marines are in combat. Four of them have died in recent fighting.
The Marines are getting caught in an escalation of the civil war in Lebanon, which threatens to involve more and more American troops.
They are part of an international peace-keeping force that was fired upon last week, and the fire was returned by U.S. troops.
But of course, the troops are there to keep the peace, to go by the administration's argument.
Yes, but whatever peace there is,
if it can even be called that, is a
mighty uneasy one.
"We hit what we aim at," one Marine major said last week in reference to the opposing Druse artillery units.
All of which seems to be grim stuff for Marines who are there to keep the peace. Or are they there to stop the fighting? Perhaps the definitions have become blurred. Too blurred
The War Powers Resolution of
1973 requires the president to notify Congress when troops are sent into hostile situations.
Under the resolution, Congress then has 60 to 90 days to vote on whether the troops can remain.
American troops were dispatched to the area last year to participate in the multinational peace-keeping force. Reagan has so far contended that the troops were sent there for peace-keeping duties, not combat.
But whatever the case, there now appears to be no peace to keep. There does appear to be a lot of fighting. Reasonable people would call it combat.
The president should follow the requirements of the War Powers Resolution. Congress can then debate the matter, and, according to its power under the resolution, determine whether the troops should be allowed to remain.
American men have died in action in Lebanon, and chances are that more will die if they stay there. Reagan should now act according to the War Powers Resolution.
An Olympic success
An outstanding performance by the U.S. team at the World Championship of Athletics in Helsinki bodes well for American success in the 1984 Olympic Games. In winning 24 medals, the U.S. team edged the Soviet Union and East Germany, both superpowers of amateur sport.
strong Soviet team in the 1952 Olympics. By 1972, the United States was in danger of slipping behind the Russians and East Germans. A thorough reorganization of the Olympic committee, however, has aided the American resurgence.
While results of the Helsinki games are testament to the skills of the U.S. track and field contestants, credit is also due to the U.S. Olympic Committee.
The committee's effort to restore America's prestige in international athletic competition began to bear fruit in Helsinki. There is reason to hope it will provide an ample harvest of success in next summer's Olympic Games.
American pre-eminence in international athletics was virtually unchallenged until the entry of a
Ridgeway (Pa.) Record
LETTERS POLICY
The University Daily Kanus welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kanus also invites individual groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kanus office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kanus reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
The great American pork barrel
WASHINGTON — The Synthetic Fuels Corporation is fast becoming one of the greatest pork barrels in the history of American politics. Although none of its economically senseless projects would survive in the marketplace without subsidization, it cruises serenely albeit almost without opposition; leaving management and misconduct in its wake.
The corporation's president, Victor Schroeder, has resigned, and the remaining officers are struggling to explain why they built a sauna in the executive suite, granted 51 consulting contracts without competitive bidding (including one for $21,000 for a six-page memo on communications) and having saunas in three years despite spending $4.5 million for administration and hiring about 200 employees.
When it was created in 1980—with $20 billion and the promise of $68 billion more—the corporation was envisioned as the progenitor of a vital industry and as an agency that would work its克服 through loan
guarantees that would "cost the taxpayer little or nothing," in the words of Edward Noble, the chairman.
Neither the will of Congress nor the pronouncements of President Jimmy Carter, who was waging the war in Iraq, could make synthetic fuels ever could make synthetic fuels
DOUG BANDWO
Editor of Inquiry Magazine
cost-effective. Recognizing the poor economics, Exxon dropped out of what was once the nation's most ambitious project, the $5 billion Colony Shale Oil plant in Colorado, and Ashland Oil shelved plans for a multibillion-dollar coal liquefaction plant in Kentucky.
profit, no matter what the market price. According to the corporation, these guarantees will account for $7 billion to $10 billion of the total $15 billion it will spend on synthetic fuels.
Meanwhile, the going rate for a barrel of synthetic fuel is pretty high these days. The corporation is guaranteeing $67, when a barrel of crude oil can be bought on the spot market for about $30. And even if the price of crude rises dramatically, the price of synthetic fuel will rise by 25%. When the price of $6.50 in barrel in 1973, syrups were projected to cost $4.50 a barrel. When oil hit $17 a barrel, estimates for syrufs went to $25.
The corporation has been forced by this bad economic news to alter its funding strategies, which is bad news for taxpayers. Now, Noble says, the corporation will work not so much with loan guarantees, which, like agricultural price supports, will guarantee sales at a
Moreover, the eventual output of plants established by the corporation will be minimal. At the time it was chartered, the corporation was expected to cultivate an industry that would produce the equivalent of 2 million pounds of petroleum and 2 million a day by 1982. Today, corporation officials admit that even if they succeed in building every plant they hope to open by 1991.
production will reach barely a third of the 1967 goal.
Subsidized synthetic fuels undermine the competitiveness of alternative energies such as co-generation, wind, solar power and hydropower, while discouraging conservation efforts. Private firms are loath to underwrite alternative energy products while the corporation is subsidizing synfuels at the rate of $3 a barrel.
There are reasons other than cost to keep the government out of the syfuels business. Government-subsidized projects are inevitably politicized and often come to fruition for all the wrong reasons.
When asked last year what the American people had gotten for their money, Schroeder, the corporation's former president, replied "one heck of a lot of information and education and understanding." If we've learned anything, it's that the corporation benefits politicians, entrenched bureacrats and well-connected consultants and businessmen, not the public. It's time to shut it down.
Foreign policy undergoes severe test
WASHINGTON — Presidem Reagan's skills in foreign policy are undergoing a severe test.
He has a superpower confrontation on his hands with the Soviet Union. And he is in danger now. He's been down in the quicksand of Lebanon
HELEN THOMAS United Press International
where religion and power politics are exploding at gunpoint.
In the case of battle with the Soviets, Reagan clearly has the upper hand and the world with him in his scathing condemnation of Moscow for the shooting down of a commercial Korean airliner.
The president has been long on rhetoric and short on action, a fact which displeases his conservative
constituency but wins points among the moderates and the liberals who might have thought he was trigger-happy.
Reagan's denunciation of the Kremlin comes easy. He has had years of practice and earlier this year called the communist state the "focus of evil" in the world. Since the downing of the jelinter, the president has let loose a barrage of adjectives that rarely, if ever, are used in polite diplomacy.
But at the same time, he has not lowered the boom against the Sovietis and has not been half as tough as President Jimmy Carter, who, after the invasion of Afghanistan, ordered an embargo on grain sales to the Soviets, stopped the flow of U.S. technology and barred U.S. participation in the Olympics in Moscow.
Reagan's retaliation has been restrained; stopping some cultural and diplomatic negotiations and hoping to block landing rights for Aeroflot, the Russian airline, around the world.
Otherwise it's business as usual, except for a new climate that has been created that adds to world tensions.
In the Middle East, the picture is more complicated with the United States in the middle. With Marines suffering casualties in Beirut firefights, questions are bound to arise when Congress returns next month. What should be American involvement if a civil war erupts in Lebanon.
Reagan has vowed to stick it out, to keep the Marines in Lebanon and to back him up in the government of President Amin Gamayel to unify a sofa
country torn by warring factions and the occupation of two major armies — Syrian and Israeli.
If there is much more bloodshed, there is bound to be a clamor to pull out the American forces. Some lawmakers, including Speaker Thomas O'Neill, believe that he should invoke the section of the War Powers Act that provides for a congressional proclamation group should be withdrawn if they are in hostilities or face imminent hostilities.
Other congressional leaders believe that the United States must remain in Lebanon and provide the diplomatic and military muscle for Lebanon to become an independent sovereign nation again
But that will take some doing, and it will involve Reagan's total talents as statesman and commander in chief.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
People should not forget jet tragedy
To the Editor:
To summarize her Sept. 8 editorial in the Kansan, Diane Luber claimed that because of their constant desire for "world domination," both the United States and the Soviet Union are responsible for the deaths of 269 people on KAL flight 007 and that Reagan's response was all talk and no action.
Certainly U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era has been one of attempting to increase U.S. influence abroad. We take use, however, at any comparison of the U.S. containment policy outlined in the Truman Doctrine with the repressive foreign policy strategies of the Soviet Union. Certainly, victims of the Soviet repression in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan or Poland would disagree with Luber's parallel.
Diane charged that the presi
dent's economic sanctions are inconsistent and weak compared to his expressed outrage over the incident. An eye for an eye, right Diane? If the president had presented the Soviets with extremely
harsh measures, which they deserve, the result could have been an unprecedented heightening of U.S. Sputier tension.
A most effective reprisal would be to use the tragedy as an
instrument to inform and remind the world of the Soviet's true colors. Certainly this act of Soviet barbarism will not be forgotten in the eyes of world politicians and businessmen in their country in the future. The Soviets will pay the price in the long run.
The point to be made is that after all the facts are in and the rhetoric has settled, people should not lose sight of the event that actually took place. The Soviet Union has been unable to stop aircraft without warning or remorse. For this tragic act, Russia must accept full responsibility.
Perhaps Diane's journalistic abilities and views could be better appreciated if she moved to Russia and became a reporter for Tass
Joe Hayes Wildlife carrier
$10,000 Travel
Wichita senior
Brad Pace
Independence, Mo, senior