THE SUMMER
SESSION, KANSAN editors
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of the editorial team.
JULY 16, 1979
Shortages are near
The post-World War II baby boom is rapidly becoming just an echo and the University of Kansas had better prepare itself. According to an official at the Brookings Institute in Washington, the decline in the number of 18-year-olds available for enrollment in Midwest colleges could be as high as 40 percent. That's important information for the administrators of a campus that has costly expansion projects brewing.
Serious consideration should and must be given statistics that indicate a nationwide decrease of more than a million college-age students by the early 1990s. Although the decline of available students still seems far enough away to ease worry, the gradual closings of many small private colleges in the near future might serve as an omen.
KU's student recruitment policies should begin to adapt to the inevitable and develop strategies to emphasize the campus' best educational programs. More emphasis should also be placed on continuing education of adults.
In addition, the University administrators will have to take into account the expected improvements in
the job market for college graduates and deal with controversial funding of research at a time when the need for doctoral graduates is predicted to be low.
Although other small Kansas colleges may be more adversely affected by the enrollment declines, KU should not take the predictions lightly.
Meanwhile, another study indicates a scarcity of Midwest teachers for some secondary school districts and rural areas. Without careful planning, KU professors may someday be filling posts in Kansas high schools. Teachers, once plentiful, are already beginning to be sought in fields of math, vocational education and special education.
According to a recent survey of Midwestern school superintendents, increased numbers of teachers must be turned out in the next four years to avoid widespread shortages.
in the survey, the superintendents said that many of today's teaching graduates are not qualified in more than one area, and smaller districts need teachers who can teach more than one specific subject.
That's a problem for the school of education.
America views Mexico of 80s a land of poverty and petroleum
By JOHN PILGER
By JOHN PILGER
N. V. Times Feature
MEXICO CITY—Mexico is that place, south of the border, that Americans know best. The city acquires a acquire a tin, a big hat and a papier-mache dying Christian, a place to get married, divorced, aborted, doped, a place to live. It takes a cheap labor on the cheapest possible labor.
SO IT IS not surprising that an assortment of power brokers, from Carter to Castro, have come to court a people who have sat in history's shadow for half a century, dominated and scorned by their all-powerful "grimo" neighbors north of a
And yet, to most outsiders, Mexico remains impenetrable: a secret country whose people greet tourists with opaque faces, who don't mind, not directly, but in stark images.
"Mexican men are like trees that the white man felled in their coming. But the roots of the trees are deep and alive and each new shoot that comes up overthrats a Spanish church or an American factory. The roots and the life are there. What else is needed is the word for the forest to begin to rise again."
When I asked a Mexican friend what the future held for his people, he referred me to a passage in D.H. Lawrence's shrew that spoke of a woman in which one of the characters says this:
There is truth in these words today, and a warning for the United States. In the next 10 years Mexico could be the greatest producer of oil in the West; according to the State Department, Mexico's oil reserves may amount to almost twice those of Saudi Arabia.
border that was once the very heart of Mexico.
These new friends of Mexico come with obsequious gestures that only the pursuit of oil inspires, many of them veteran kneelers before the Peacock Throne in Iran, now defunct, and the speeches they make are echoes of speeches made over there. They laud Mexico's "stability" and her rate of "development" - euphemisms for the stability of a fossilized and corrupt system, for the existence of things, not people. They ignore the truth, now shouted from Iran, that oil has the power to turn a system, a whole society, upside down. And Mexico, unlike Iran is just south of the border.
AROUND THE POOL of the mighty Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City that is built and secured like a fort, the Chicago conventioneners wince as their eyes are attacked. The dust comes from behind the capital's prosperous facade, sweeping in from the horizon of garbage, parish dogs in the grass, shredded leaves on millions live, beside open sewers, without running water or work, like a silent army camped at the city's gates, waiting.
Mexico City, with 13 million people, is the largest poor city on earth. By the end of the century, it will be one of the world's biggest cities.
A dozen miles from the hovels the dust settles on the gleaning bed of Senior Duck.
between his cherubic fountains and the columned porch. The Rolls is bright red and has mink carpets. Senior Romulo O'Farall, whose interests range from the media to property, says, "Ah, the oil, yes, benefits in ring benefits to the ordinary people."
TVM TONITORS scan his mansion;
arm guards guard the barbed-wall walls
of the prison.
In Villahermaosa, the oil city, the road to six great wells is like a road of war, as the tanker trucks hurle past infernos of gas, the roads were blocked by peasants have erected roadblocks and dug trenches to stop them; once again, they have lost their lands. In Morelos state, people plow with oxen and sow by hand; in Oaxaca, there are water bins and the children are sheooles.
This is "Zapataland," and in recent years Emilio Zapatland's cry of land and liberty has been echoed by some 15,000 peasants who have occupied land in the name of his failed revolution. Throughout Mexico there have been similar eruptions—20,000 have risen up in Oaxaca and leaders often disappear into prison along with those who try to organize "unofficial" trade unions.
TODAY, THE countryside is here quiet,
the people charming to an outsider; but
the bitterness is like tinder. There is no
soul that can live in the countryside.
There is only, as D.H. Lawrence wrote,
"a sound too deep for the ear to hear and
yettable on the blood, a sound of dread."
Mexico, like the shah's Iran, is a world
of only time, and the coming of
oil, will tell.
John Pilger writes for The Daily Mirror of London.
Propaganda fuels 'energy crisis'
Bv YALE BROZEN
BY PAUL BROZEN
N.Y. Times Feature
1. The world will run out of oil in the 1980s
CHIAGCO—The war against energy, the automobile and a free enterprise economy is changing. The agglomeration war of startling dimensions. The more blunt untruths being propagated in support of higher energy taxes and tighter controls over voluntary markets.
1. The World winn run out of oil in the 1980s. Actually, there is, in the non-communist world today, a record 36-year supply of proven petroleum. This means that producers at today's prices, plus another 20- to 50-year supply that remains to be discovered. Even at the lowest estimate, today's real prices need not change for the coming half century to induce a supply of petroleum sufficient to meet demand. At prices 50 percent higher than today, petroleum will be in sight more than double. It would then become more difficult to extract oil from shale and tar sands, or to squeeze more out of existing wells using costly enhanced recovery techniques.
2. The United States balance-of-payments deficit and declining dollar were caused by the US withdrawal of U.S. dollars from the
3. the reason for those long lines at gasoline stations in 1974 was the Arab en-
trance.
IF OIL IMPORTS caused an adverse balance of payments, then Germany and Japan should be in much deeper trouble than the United States and oil natural gas. Yet their payments balances are positive. The real cause of the United States imbalance and the decline of the dollar is the flood of dollars created to finance federal budget deficits since 1973.
All during the period of the embargo, our stocks of gasoline, crude oil and other
petroleum products in storage kept increasing. The embargo made only a small difference in the volume of imports. But the increase in demand for heating oil production at the expense of gasoline, then underallocated gasoline to metropolitan areas and overallocated to rural areas.
4. We are increasingly vulnerable to an Arab oil embargo.
THE EXPERIENCE of 1974 shows that we are more vulnerable to Energy Department blunders than to a possible oil embargo. During the Arab embargo, we imported from other sources and indirectly from Libya and other Middle East countries. There are more alternative sources for energy, including Mexico, China, Nigeria and the Canadian Arctic are among the actual or potential suppliers of more non-Arab oil.
5. U.S. taxpayers must finance a $25 billion stockpile to reduce our vulnerability
There are less expensive ways of providing a ready reserve than building a taxpayer-financed stockpile. We could expand capacity of our naval reserves, such as Elk Hills. We could also end the threat of mandatory reallocation, thus improving the capacity for research projects ("hoarding") against emergencies. There is no need to pump Arab oil above ground, ship it here and then put it back into the ship.
6. The government must plow billions of dollars into energy research if new energy technology is to be developed by the time the oil runs out.
FIRST, LETS recognize that any shortage is a business opportunity. If anything in the area has been neglected, it needs to be corrected.
rise. Anyone developing a substitute or an additional supply will find plenty easier to handle.
With the increase in the price of home-heating fuels, suppliers began offering automatic damper controls that cut the use of fuel by 20 percent. When fuels were cheap, the capital it would have taken to build the damper was less productive in producing natural gas than in saving gas. Production of the controls would then have been a waste of metal, plastic and time. The rise in the price of energy is inducing the production of energy-saving motors, engines, generators, cement kilns, refrigerators, dryers, freezers, air conditioners and water heaters.
THE ENERGY PRICE increase is also attracting substantial private research investment. Currently, private expenditures on energy research and development are near the $2 billion level. The industry is already paying the $4 billion that the federal government is laying out on nuclear and solar research, but examination of past private and governmental research efforts suggests that we will get a much higher return from each private research dollar. The federal government has spent $4.2 billion on liquid metal, fast breeder reactor. It achieved so little that it is giving up the effort.
The private market does a superior job in allocating resources to their most important activities, including alternative conservation, production and research strategies. If the government wouldn't try to do so much, we would get more of what is needed; it would be far more pleasant than it is now.
Yale Broker is professor of business economics at the University of Chicago
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KANSAN
THE SUMMER SESSION
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KANSAN letter
Safety laws needed for US travellers
The editorial piece by Barb Koenig was touching, and well deserved the space given it last Monday. But why stop with mandatory cycle helmet laws? She says a 15 mph car has her brother a vegetable. I ride my 10-speed and seldom travel less than 15 kmph.
To the editor:
I wouldn't think of riding without my bicycle helmet. When one considers that more bicycles are sold in a year than are automobiles, the magnitude of the need for a bike helmet law becomes more obvious. Pike's car, at a bike's top speed, a helmet can save, live while at a motorcycle's top speed, saving the cranium will not save the body.
Finally, let's not overlook the possibility of mandatory safety-caution and shoulder-strap legislation. Australia has and enforces such legislation, and to avoid $25 fines, people universally wear their belts and straps. And well they should.
In spite of up to 50,000 traffic deaths a year in the United States, there has never been an American, in an American-made car, traveling under 55 mph, wearing a seat belt and shoulder brace, who has been the victim of a fatal car wreck!
Think about that for a while.
Michael Bryan Kelly 06 W. 12th St.
OPEC, oil companies play shortage game
By J.F. BLAKE
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation subtly warned us of the current price increases in 1974, when it compelled the 16 United States oil companies to disclose their respective profit goals. The companies revealed that they had set for themselves target rates of profit that were meant that they try to arrange for yearly profits equivalent to 15 percent to 20 percent of invested capital.
WASHINGTON — The trend of all prices from 1974 to late 1978 was enough to make any self-respecting oil company chairman or OPEC oil minister furious. For five years, the price of oil remained fairly stable, while the price of everything else dropped. It is unclear what caused that price of oil by about 30 percent between 1974 and the start of the latest round of price increases. How long did we expect them to take that down?
The companies lost the benefits of both provisions in 1973-74. Congress restricted the benefits of the oil depletion allowance to small, independent oil producers in 1973. In 1974, nationalization of most foreign oil fields meant the companies now bought oil from countries rather than the on it. The resulting losses gave the companies ample reason to welcome, if not, as has been suggested, instigate the 1973-74 price explosion.
By J. Y. BEARKE
N.Y. Times Feature
Although these targets are somewhat ambitious, they were met during the halcyon year of 1974. The companies might have effectively attained these rates of return before 1973 with the aid of federal tax law. The oil depletion allowance let companies vastly understate the income they received from extracting oil.
THE CREDIT against taxes paid to foreign governments caused the United States Treasury to bear the costs of taxes and royalties that companies "paid foreign countries in exchange for the oil they produced, refined and sold.
PROFIT GOALS also explain the current behavior of OPEC and the big oil companies. By the end of this year, the price of Saudi Arabian light, the so-called benchmark oil, fell to about $13 a barrel this last January to somewhere between $17 and $20 a barrel, an increase of around 40 percent. For the Saudis, this will offset presumable 30 per cent benefit from 1974 when oil cost them, with the benefit of 20, 20 cents a barrel to extract.
For their part, OPEC members hoped increased oil revenues would allow them to transfer themselves overnight into modern economies. They have been working in a few short years the work of centuries.
Inflation, by raising the value of a company's invested capital, also erodes rates of return on that capital if revenues are held under a target "a rate" of return of out reach.
Countries such as Iran and Venezuela, with more mouths to feed than the Saudis, take price erosion very seriously. So do companies that try to maintain a given profit rate when prices are stable and operating costs are rising.
The king and his adviser did not mine words. They said that America's pro-israel policy was "on the verge of getting nuclear war," but he said and that "President Sadat was planning to
An Aramo telegram reprinted in the 1973 Senate Hearings on Multinational Corporations, details conversations its president, Frank Jungers, had with King Faisal and his chamberman on May 3. 1973. Aramo is the congenital of Exxon, Mobil. It is the standard oil of California that produces and markets nearly all of Saudi Arabia's oil.
THE COMPANIES couldn't just quadruple prices because their profits were on the verge of being slashed in 1972, any more than they could have in 1978. Political tumult, and Arab ball-carriers were indeed involved in occasions. So was advance knowledge.
"embark on some sort of hostilities" in the near future.
THE COMPANIES got around to telling the State Department about the danger to American interests that our pro-Israel policy had posed on June 1, 1973. In keeping with the companies' pro-Arab foreign policy, the subcommittee documents record no mention to the State Department of the October 1973 Egyptian attack on Israel.
Aramco promptly increased production in case the coming war led to supply interruptions—or to higher prices and subsequent profits on oil extracted at old prices. Happily, the much-ballyhooed "embargo," did not greatly reduce oil flows to the West Sea. The gas lines that winter have since been attributed to government regulation
The similarities to the Iranian situation are legion. According to the American Petroleum Institute's weekly data, imports were not reduced by the Iran shutdown. Indeed, oil imports during the first quarter increased by 20 percent in 1978. Furthermore, the companies had plenty of lead time in which to prepare to exploit the shutdown.
OIL-FIELD STRIKES were decisive in bringing down the shah's regime and presumably, Western oil-filmed technicians who worked alongside the Iranians had many months to report the growing anti-shah sentiment to their home oil companies. Finally, the Department of Energy has the deception in the hope that higher prices would increase conservation, much as the old Federal Energy Administration did before.
OPEC, the oil companies, and the Department of Energy know that they have to keep prices low because a shortage exists. But suddenly in order to prices without preparing the public would spare resistance, while constituting a price of eliquette. Hence the Shortage Game.
J. F. Blake is the pseudonym of an Energy Department consultant.