October 20, 1976

McCarthy Worth Listening To

As a champion of lost causes myself, I am increasingly impressed by the things Eugene McCarthy is saying in the presidential campaign.

Even though there isn't the slightest chance he will change anything, McCarthy is telling it like it is.  And this is an extremely valuable service to the Republic.

It takes conviction and courage and knowledge to undertake the Quixotic campaign McCarthy wages against impossible odds.  His only reward will be the personal satisfaction of telling the emperor he has no clothes on.

As a Democrat who has "seen the light", only McCarthy can say with some effect what others have been preaching to the wind for four decades or more.

McCarthy says there are three powerful institutions of the United Stated today that the writers of the Constitution could not foresee:

• The two-party political system.  
• Corporations.
• The military-industry complex.

His views make sense even if you don't fully agree with them.

McCarthy is an "independent" candidate for president though he insists he is not a third party - a rationalization I can't follow, but provocative nevertheless.

He says the Founding Fathers were aware of the dangers of political "factions" and took great pains to squelch them by inventing the Electoral College.  The College was used to elect George Washington to two terms as president.  Thereafter, the procedure was an anachronism overshadowed by the two-party political system jointly created by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

McCarthy contends that two powerful political parties have to adopt essentially the same policies, cater to the same wide range of supporters and in time become mirror images.

There is no opportunity in this closed circuit system for fresh ideas and constructive dissent, according to McCarthy.

The biggest problem in the nation today, says McCarthy, is the dominance of corporations over our economy.

Private enterprise - where the owner also managed his business - was the pattern two hundred years ago.  A new element has been development of an economic enterprise in which ownership is fragmented and management is carried out by salaried professionals relatively independent of the owners.

Today, a few big corporations possess economic power greater than half the countries in the United Nations and challenge the United States government itself.

McCarthy says the giant automobile companies, for example, are, strangling America and must be broken up "very soon" if this country is to survive.

"The Big Tree auto companies, with the support of the United Automobile Workers union, now are able to make agreements on wages and prices that jolt the whole nation," McCarthy says.  "Their decisions affect government efforts to stabilize inflation and employment.  The big corporations are powerful enough to ignore government policies and, indeed, set policies that the government must adapt to."

McCarthy points out that the big corporation - big union partnership operates to take an ever larger share of the economic pie through near monopolistic powers.  They prosper, but at the expense of all other Americans who do not work for those few super corporations and super unions.

Another dangerous and debilitating influence on American government not foreseen by the early Patriots is the tremendous growth of the military and the industries that supply armament.

Technology has far outrun the most imaginative of planners in every generation.

McCarthy says so much of our national wealth now goes for military hardware and manpower (about one third) that we can not risk the temporary unemployment that would result in a cut-back of defense manufacturing.

"As a result, we continue to make weapons we don't need when that effort and money should be going into development of energy sources and social services," says McCarthy.

If this sounds like the McCarthy of old, he tempers it with some new conclusions straight out of the conservative lexicon: a person should be allowed to accumulate a $100,000 estate before being nicked by taxes, it is "sheer nonsense" to think you can fund social services without increased taxes, and we should fill our energy needs with nuclear fission reactors.

McCarthy's new outlook is hardly New Testament.  The alternatives are unacceptable to me - coalition bargaining among a half-dozen political parties, obsolete factories, a weak national defense.

But McCarthy's contention we may have reached a dead end with the old approaches has enough merit to encourage bolder thinking.

Author: Lindsey Williams