ustxtxb_obs_1987_11_06_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

that drastically reduced the tax base of the United States by taking significant burden of taxation away from the rich. The 1981 act did that by enormously increasing the tax subsidies to capital. The 1986 act took away some of those subsidies, but then overcompensated for that little essay in fairness by drastically lowering the maximum rate so that it had the same impact. A major part of the budget deficit is to be found in Reagan’s subsidies to the rich. Related to that, obviously, the Pentagon. Military spending creates no jobs for poor people, no jobs for minorities, women, laid-off steelworkers, autoworkers. It does create jobs for people with Ph.D.s or high technical skills. And there is enormous evidence that it is a perverse kind of industrial policy which diverts money from uses that might make us competitive with the West Germans and the Japanese, to uses that make us competitive with nobody. The budget deficit is to be accounted for, not by the inner workings of the economy, but to a large extent, the decisions of the Reagan Administration on subsidies to the rich and the Pentagon. The world is now going through the most radical transformation of international division of labor that it’s known in 100 years. America is falling behind. The fact is that America is no longer competitive. The result is, that we are now more dependent on foreign borrowing than we have ever been in this century, because of the balance of trade deficit. And I would look at that balance of trade deficit as the decay and ruin of many of our smokestack industries. That to me is much more key than the budget deficit or the stock market. Even if they found progressive ways to reduce the budget and there are ways: one of them is progressive taxation that doesn’t solve the problem. What we need is industrial policy, reindustrialization. I see this whole development as very dangerous to people at the bottom of society. One of the things I know about American society is that when the top and the middle are not doing well, the top and the middle are not generous to the bottom. It is not an accident, in my opinion, that the War on Poverty and the social programs of the 1960s occurred in the most affluent decade that this country has ever known. I think, in a sense, people have to feel secure to be generous. I’m very fearful that a certain new consciousness of poverty might be undercut. I think that it would be a very serious error for those on the left to think that the system has now taken a nose-dive and will do itself in. The system never does itself in. The system has taken a nosedive. Ideologically, I think that capitalism looks a lot less attractive than it did two weeks ago. But that only becomes an opportunity, to those of us who are opposed to Reagan, for those of us who are critical of this society, if we have alternatives. And what bothers me, as I listen to the Presidential candidates, with the exception of Jesse Jackson and Paul Simon, is that I don’t hear even the whisper of serious alternatives. I don’t get any sense of people really understanding that we are in the middle of a deep crisis. There is an enormous opportunity for the broad democratic left. But I wish that I were a little more confident that the broad democratic left was capable of this opportunity. If the stock market crisis has brought one thing home, it is that we now live, to a degree unprecedented in human history, in an international economy. The stock market is now open, so to speak, 24 hours a day. It closes in San Francisco and opens in Tokyo. Therefore, it is not enough to have an American solution. It has to be an international solution. I believe that Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, Michael Manley have worked out the basic outline for such a solution. Which is, if the countries of the north, communist as well as capitalist, committed themselves to the economic development of the south, through aid, through in some cases giving money away, as we did in the Marshall Plan when we gave up to three percent of our Gross National Product away.. . . If we do that, then I think we can create jobs here. We need a vision of a new world economy in which global reflation, rather than global deflation is the issue. By the way, I think that somebody like Secretary Baker understands that. The smart conservatives know that if we force the Third World to pay their debts, they won’t be able to buy a toothpick from the United States. And they understand that in a way, it is in our interest that the poor countries have the money to buy things. We are in a much more radical situation than even the best liberals understand. I’m terrified that the Republicans will win in 1988. But I’m even more terrified that the Democrats will win, take power in January of 1989, then get hit with a worldwide recession and not know what to do with it. Austin MARCOS JOHN VALLE is an eleven-year-old Salvadoran child, who two months ago was living in a refugee camp near his country’s ravaged capital. How he came from his home, in a small rural village in the Department of Cabanas, to a hospital bed in Austin’s Seton hospital, is a story that was set in motion four years ago when the Salvadoran army began a sweep through the isolated rural region where his family farmed a small plot of land. Johnny Valle is one of 12 Salvadoran children who recently arrived in the U.S. for treatment of war wounds. In June of 1983, his left hip was destroyed in an army artillery attack on the small rural village where he lived with his parents and brothers and sisters. Fragments from an artillery shell, or shells, according to Austin orthopedic surgeon James Hood, destroyed much of the muscle and bone tissue in the child’s right hip. During the same artillery attack it resulted in the abandonment of the village that had been his family’s home Johnny’s mother was wounded in the upper arm by metal fragments. She is still unable to raise her right arm above her shoulder. His 12-year-old cousin, Virgini, was killed in the attack. In the east room of the Austin Friends Meeting House, Antonio Valle, the 38year-old farmworker who accompanied Johnny from El Salvador to Los Angeles, and then to Austin, tells, in straightforward peasant Spanish, how it was that his son traveled from their small village, through makeshift hospitals, refugee camps, the Los Angeles International Airport, and Robert Mueller Airport \(where Johnny was received finally to a hospital bed in this Daughters of Charity Hospital. Antonio Valle, as he speaks, is oddly at ease, considering that he had never seen a city until he traveled to San Salvador on September 4, to be united with his son, and had never used a telephone until earlier on The Children’s War By Louis Dubose 16 NOVEMBER 6, 1987