OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
August 24, 1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University daily Kanaan (USPs) . . . a460 is published at the University of Kansas, 118 StuartFell Hall, Lawrence, Kan. 60004, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions, excluding Saturday, Sunday holidays, and final periods. The course includes two sessions in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 for a week outside the county. Student subscriptions are a $1 semester fee through the student activity book *POSTMASTER*. Send resumes to USPS, PO Box 27995, Chicago, IL 60611.
MARK ZIEMAN Editor
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM STEVE CUSICK
Managing Editor Editorial Editor
MICHAEL ROBINSON
Campus Editor
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
Business Manager
DAVE WANAMAKER MARK MEARS
Retail Sales Manager National Sales
Manager
LYNNE STARK
Campus Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN
Advertising Adviser
The gender gap
Ronald Reagan's world is white, male and middle- and upper-class, but it may be facing the biggest invasion of his political career — women.
Women traditionally have not voted much differently from men. But there are signs that in 1984 women will vote on their own, and that could mean political trouble for President Reagan.
Polls show that Reagan has a lower standing among women than among men. But that's no wonder. This administration, although it has a few female Cabinet members, has done little to fight sex discrimination in the United States.
Early in his term, Reagan proposed a program to eliminate sexually discriminatory laws.
But according to a Justice Department official who resigned Monday that proposal turned out to be "a sham."
Barbara Honneger, a Justice Department official responsible for carrying out the program, resigned
after blasting the Reagan administration's sluggishness in stopping sex discrimination.
She had sent the White House 114 laws that may have been tainted with sex bias, but the administration hasn't acted on any of them, she said.
And now administration officials are trying to undercut Honneger's credibility by saying she was "someone who was preoccupied with how many titles she had behind her name."
Even if she was an overly aggressive job-climber, her comments could easily be true. The Reagan administration, although it tries, has had a hard time convincing women that it is sympathetic to them.
It will put on a show for women between now and election day in 1984. But until Reagan does something of substance, like eliminating some of those discriminatory laws, his few appointments of women aren't likely to fool female voters.
Line returns to Strong
Adding or dropping a class cannot be accomplished by just going to a department anymore.
Instead, students who wish to change their schedules need to pick up appointment cards from enrollment officials in Strong Hall.
The card, an attempt to lessen the monotony that students face while waiting in lines that wind around the corners and down the halls of Strong, is a good effort by University officials to make adding or dropping classes an easier process.
enrollment officials. And the lines returned to Strong early yesterday morning, as students waited to drop and add classes.
But the new method isn't exactly an in-and-out process. Students now are issued cards that specify the times and dates they should return to have their schedules modified. About 3,000 appointment cards were distributed yesterday, according to
The new system, although easier, requires students to make at least two trips to Strong, assuming that everything goes smoothly.
Officials should be applauded for trying to cut down on the time students have to wait to complete the process. But students still face a somewhat bureaucratic hassle by not being able to complete the process in one fell swoop.
Computerized pre-enrollment is a big improvement over the frenzy of Allen Field House. Perhaps the add-drop system will need a little fine tuning before it becomes a more hassle-free process.
Letter is a cheap shot
The Republican Party seems to have borrowed an old election trick from Richard Nixon. In the 1946 House of Representatives election campaign, Nixon sent out letters written on pink stationery accusing his Democratic opponent of having Communist leanings.
In this recent case, Robert J. Perkins, treasurer of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent out a letter to 300,000 potential contributors that began with, "As I write this letter to you, I imagine my eyes still burning from the clouds of tear gas that seem to be a regular occurrence in the beleaguered city of Paris, France."
Perkin's letter, which was written on a Paris hotel's stationery, described conditions in France under President Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government as a "nightmare" and warned that it was "an
The timing of the letter is politically stupid because relations between the Reagan and Mitterrand administrations have never been particularly good and are especially strained now because of differences over what role France should play in the war in Chad.
Just as awful, though, is the letter's message. It is a cheap shot, a political scare tactic designed to frighten people into contributing money to the Republican election coffers. But both Democrats and Republicans sometimes play dirty when elections draw near.
example of what could happen in the United States" if the Democrats gained control of the White House.
They shouldn't. Such smear tactics may have helped put Nixon in office back in 1946, but they just add to the lies and personal attacks which blur the real issues.
The University Daily Kansan 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 Kansas also invites individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansas office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansas reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
LETTERS POLICY
That's show business
NEW YORK — As a woman, particularly a woman in television, I know what I'm supposed to be able to do. Craft cardet, but I don't feel it.
It's not that I'm sorry Craft was awarded $500,000 in damages.
Nor does it seem she won her suit unfairly. The station that hired Craft did assure her that she was being hired for her journalistic abilities; then it turned around and fired her, not for any lack of those abilities but rather for her alleged lack of ability to charm the Kansas City viewers.
Any station dumb enough to
BETTY ROLLIN ABC Correspondent
With some obvious exceptions like the morning and late-night news programs, and other special news programs where journalistic skills come into play, the job of anchor has nothing to do with journalism.
But who's everybody kidding? An anchor may be a journalist, just as an actor may be a playwright. But what's that got to do with the job?
The anchor's job is to read and to get everybody to love and trust him
or her. If audience loves and trust older men more than older women — I’m not convinced they do, by the way — that still does not mean the man is there for "journalism" any more. This is true, especially there for reasons having to do with how they appear and what they project as personalities.
pretend to hire an anchor — any anchor of any sex — for his or her journalistic skills deserves to lose a lawsuit. And just because Craft was naive enough to believe that the station wanted her for her journalistic skills doesn't mean she didn't deserve to win one.
The words the anchor reads, particularly on local news programs, are seldom if ever written by the anchor are virtually never the result of his or her reporting. Those are tasks performed by other people.
Anchors read the news. They read from Teleprompters conveniently rolled inside the camera, thus giving the impression that the anchors are earnestly fixed on you, the audience, rather than what they are, in fact, earnestly fixed on; moving lines of text written by people you never see.
Those on-camera recitations are called stand-up-ups, not to be confused with the stand-upers reporters and correspondents do. Reporters and correspondents almost always write what they say, whether there's a producer along or not. They have to look good, too, and probably women reporters have to worry about looking good more than men. They need to know the local or network, and observe the woman who stands shivering in front of the prison riot with a microphone in her hand. As a rule, she doesn't look that好. And if she does, that's truly a small part of why
she's there. She's there because she knows how to put a story together — that is, gather the information, write the script, work with the camera crew and at least participate in the editing.
So if a woman who's a terrific reporter got sacked because somebody thought she failed to turn on the camera, she would cheer if a woman saed and won. I'd cheer
But it probably would not happen. Because if she were a good reporter, they probably would not let her go. Good reporting is hard and not many people of either sex do it well. Whereas any dope can read.
The question is: Why don't they hire dops? Sometimes they do. But Craft, who has been a reporter, clearly isn't one. Nor are most anchors — certainly not the current three on the networks. The reason again is not journalism but show business. It's extremely important that the person playing the role look intelligent. So sometimes it's necessary to hire someone who actually is.
The next question is: Why would a smart person take a job that a dope can do? That's easy. Because in TV news the job that involves the least amount of work, anchoring, carries with it the most money, the most prestige. So if you are in a show business job and get canned for show-biz reasons, you can complain but maybe you shouldn't.
Copyright 1983 the New York Times.
An economic collapse nears
The single fact that now makes our materialistic society unworkable is that it is materially unworkable. The U.S. economy and social order were built with and depend on unrenewable resources. And as a consequence, the United States and most of the rest of the world tilts toward economic collapse.
In late 1980, Gore Vidal gave a checklist of the list of the republic: a dropping per-capita income, an industrial plant with the lowest productivity rate in the West, double-digit inflation, high unemployment with no relief in sight and a wasteful military establishment whose clients in Congress and in the press can always be counted on to yell, "The Russians are coming," during appropriations time. And so the military budget grows while our military capacity, by some weird law of inverse ratio, decreases.
GUEST COLUMN
Things have gotten worse since Vidal made his checklist. Reaganomics, by tacitly generating a recession in order to "wiring inflation out of the system," has put the U.S. economy in a perilous position. The greatest danger is the rising national debt.
rise. In a recession like the one of the past year, that's not particularly important because people aren't buying houses and cars, and businesses don't need capital to expand. However, economic recovery spurs expansion, and interest rates become crucial at times. It also means that for loan money is more intense and can determine whether a business survives.
Specifically, when the 1983 fiscal year ends on the last day of September, the federal budget will total more than $200 billion, the second straight deficit record or ourBUD record for the year, to cover the huge deficit, the department of the Treasury will print short-term notes and bonds and either offer them for sale on the open market, which would mean higher interest rates, or send them to the Federal Reserve System.
Large government deficits increase the pressure. And once the federal deficit begins to drain liquid funds out of the banking system, interest rates will rise, as they already begin to do, and the meager
Either way, interest rates will
ROGER
BLAND
Guest Columnis
recovery that's now taking place will be in serious trouble.
In the meantime, banks can only extend loan payments to keep things moving in a classic vicious circle. A
There is another complication to this whole mess. Not only do the rising interest rates fuel the recession and create a great deal of panic, they also hurt Third World and less developed nations. There are banks more than $700 billion, $450 billion of that to American banks.
One example, Mexico, currently carries $84 billion in loans and suffers 30 percent unemployment and 80 percent inflation. Mexico and Argentina have the highest oil use as collateral, but the oil glue and price war have cut profits.
larger debt makes for larger payments, which cut into export profits, which in turn cause the need for more loans.
These problems have been a long time in the making. For 20 years, the United States enjoyed unequal wealth and prosperity. Not only did the country have valuable resources at home, but the republic made profitable alliances and arrangements with other countries. The new empire expected its blessings to endure, but nature decrees that there are times when punishments, or frequently, a point was reached in the 60s and late 70s when shortages of natural resources started showing up.
Resources are now progressively more expensive to find, process and transport. Thus, inflation propels upward on its relentless spiral. And when the oil-rich oil cured to an orange form carved into the 30% and 40% by forming a cartel of their own, inflation leaped.
The writing is upon the wall, and Joseph Granville, the Wall Street forecaster, reads it to say that things will become interesting later this year or early in 1984. If such chaos as economic collapse does not produce that apocalyptic fire of which many seem fond of forecasting, it will produce change or at least opportunity.
Meanwhile, for the average American, that docile worker and consumer, the future inspires nothing so much as a feeling of vertigo. Perhaps this is a good thing, better than the usual absent-minded self-deception. For it means that we still have one of the most important survival tools — the ability to anticante change.
Roger Bland is an Abilene senior majoring in English.
Playing chicken
WASHINGTON — When members of Congress left town Aug. 4 for an extended summer recess, they left a number of unanswered questions to haunt the halls of Cantol Hill in their absence
The biggest one is what to do about the federal deficit that is projected to top a record $280 billion this year, and remain near that level for at least the next three years.
Everyone knows how to do it; cut spending and raise taxes.
President Reagan had an idea. Although he opposed any tax
But Congress and the White House are playing a game of chicken over the issue, each daring the other to make the first move. No one seems to have the guts for the challenge in the dawn of a presidential election season. Just Beagan had an idea
United Press International
MARY BETH
FRANKLIN
increases in 1984 or 1985, he has proposed a $46 billion revenue increase in 1988 by imposing a surtax on income and a tax on capital gains.
In June, Congress took the first step to minimize the deficit by passing a budget resolution calling for $73 billion in unspecified taxes and $12.3 in spending cuts over the next three years. But the resolution was merely a blueprint, and meaningless unless Congress approves implementing legislation
Despite the better-thanexpected economic news in recent months, interest rates remain high.
The most vulnerable sections of the economy are the ones acutely affected by interest rates, like housing. Big deficits mean the government must crowd out private borrowers in the credit markets to finance its red-ink spending.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Robert Dole, R-Kan. has repeatedly expressed his frustration with his congressional colleagues' propensity for dumping the burden of reducing the deficit on his tax-writing committee.
In the Democratic-controlled House, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Restowski, D-III, faces a similar quandry. He believes Reagan should make the first move to reduce his record high budget deficit.
To demonstrate the extent of the problem, Rostenkowski held a bearing on July 20 to determine whether any support for tax increases
He said at the start of the hearing that the "consensus" in Washington was that "revenues that spendting must be reduced."
"The political facts, however, tell a different story Bucking the forces of inertia — beginning with the president — will take an extraordinary act of political courage from Congress."
Congress returns to work Sept. 12. Prospects for decisive action on the deficit are meager. Only a combination of public outrage and interest rates convince the lawmakers to do their duty.