Oregon daily emerald., July 20, 1972, Page 4, Image 4

( Editorial
No rent raise
There are several ways of looking at the
proposed rent increase for Amazon married
student housing.
First, the University claims that in
surance costs, building repairs, accounting
expenses and labor expenses have risen
dramatically since 1966. University housing
officials say this justifies raising rents from
$42.50 a month to $45 a month.
Amazon Cooperating Tenants (ACT), a
.group trying to stop the rent increase, says
these are not good reasons for raising the
rent. ACT points out that some im
provements have included bike racks and the
installation of television cable service which
is incompatible with the idea of low cost
housing.
Another argument against the financial
considerations involved is that ot pnce
controls. A raise by non-university landlords
of the percentage proposed by the University
might be in violation of price controls. While
the University is exempt from these controls
in this case, ACT says it is questionable
whether they should act outside the
philosophy of the controls.
Rent increases for Amazon can easily be
justified on financial grounds. But before a
rational solution to the problem can be made
by looking into both sides of the issue
something else must be done.
Rent increases for Amazon and. other
-student housing units must not be on a solely
“need” basis. This has been done with regard
to tuition time and again and it just doesn’t
work. As with tuition, student housing must
be looked at with a philosophy in mind.
Questions must be asked aoout wny student
housing exists, how the present situation fits
in with current modes of living and whether
University operated student housing is a
good idea in the first place.
Unless certain questions are asked,
unless there are sound ideas about student
housing serving as a base for changes such as
rent increases, the present haphazard
system of administration will cause nothing
but grief for all concerned.
The State Board should postpone the
current rent increase for married student
housing until it can study the total philosophy
of student housing. Then, if rent increases
can be justified as part of a larger plan, fine.
Otherwise, rent increases will continue,
fostered by financial crunches rather than
sound thinking.
Commentary
On the right. . . William F. Buckley Jr.
Fair elections must prevail
When the South Vietnamese had their
election in 1967, Lyndon Johnson invited a
bunch of liberal professors to go over there
and satisfy themselves that the election
was clean. This they did, and one professor
from the Boston area reported to the
President his conclusion that the election
in South Vietnam was as clean as the
typical election in the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.
This comment was the source of enor
mous underground mirth among the
cognoscenti, who understood exactly what
the good professor was trying to com
municate That democracy in South
Vietnam, while passably fair, is a pretty
relaxed thing, along Massachusetts lines I
think it was in Boston, or maybe it was in
Chicago, a little while back that an election
district reported 183 votes, all of them for
the Democratic candidate, and guess
what? By sheer coincidence, the 183
citizens had filed in and voted
alphabetically! That is democracy plus
law and order
1 have always thought that if you’re
going to have democracy, you may just as
well do it right. After the decision is
reached as to what voter qualifications
are, let them vote, and go ahead and count
their votes. The evidence is overwhelming
that the political machine in Brooklyn,
New York was recently concerned to
return the incumbent to office, rather than
to ascertain whom the majority wanted.
It would have been absorbed as routine
Democratic graft except that the
challenger is none other than Allard
Lowenstein, the president of Americans
For Democratic Action. Mr Lowenstein
has a particular stake in the contest
unrelated to the question of whether he will
be sent to Congress. He is the young man
who has already made the history books in
virtue of having persuaded Eugene Mc
Carthy to make the race against Lyndon
Johnson in 1968, thereby proving that The
System was alive and well He is as in
fluential among the young as anyone in
America, and if he gives out the word that
you cannot have a reliable democratic
contest in the heart of metropolitan New
York, his constituency will experience a
disillusionment that will redound to the
benefit of the crazies in American politics.
In his primary contest, every kind of
fraud and harassment was exercised. New
voters found their registration cards
missing. Others were given runarounds.
Some spent as much as four hours trying to
locate the right polling place, and filing
their votes. Others found machines rigged.
One lady wrote, “I was told that I had
been redistricted. That I should vote at 75
Cadman Plaza. 1 left (but there is) no 75
Cadman Plaza. On my walk back I noticed
that some people were voting at 140
Cadman Plaza. I stopped in there and was
told I would have to go to 75 Henry Street.
When I got to 75 Henry Street I was told
that it would be another two hours’ wait. I
gave up.”
There were only 30,000 votes cast, and
yet the Lowenstein forces are talking
about as many as 14,000 irregularities, and
hard-core fraud in four to five thousand
cases. At that, the incumbent beat
Lowenstein by only a few hundred votes.
The evidence suggests that Lowenstein
would have won by something like a
landslide.
So now it goes to the courts. It being
widely suspected that local state judges
are not going to upset the political machine
that put them where they are, Lowenstein
will probably end up in federal court.
There he will be given an opportunity to
document his grievances, in behalf of the
electorate. And the message may go out to
the bosses: cut it out.
It happens that Mr. Lowenstein backs
enthusiastically almost every mistaken
political idea that ever issued out of the
social imaginations of man. But that isn’t
the point, any more so than when us good
guys sat around in 1964 worrying how
many votes would be stolen from Barry
Gold water by the Democratic poll tenders.
Fair elections, like precautions against
accidental wars, are in everybody’s in
terest. It is lucky for our international
reputation that we didn’t invite any South
Vietnamese professors over to monitor the
Lowenstein election.
Nicholas Von Hoffman
A populist commentary
WASHINGTON <KKS> By the time
George MctJovem got to the podium to
make his acceptance speech he had
reassured a lot of people whoso hair was
scared straight up at their earlier im
pression of him as “the prairie
Populist." He'd done that not only by
waffling on some of the major issues the
democratic National Convention was
toying with but by appearing to be the
political tough guy In politic's we
Americans an* frightened by anyone
whom we call a “true believer," and
reassured if a man shows himself to be an
ordinary louse
Senator McGovern never has been
either, but his apparent transition during
the week in Miami Beach from the* one to
tl»e other encouraged people who get
nervous in the presence of a politician who
may not tie a hypocrite St George got
just dirtied up enough so that tht' experts
could say his candidacy is "viable " In tht'
process of gaming viability he has gone
somewhat out of focus In that respect he
differs from the Populists of the past who,
whatever their follies, never left you in
doubt as to their politics In the 18%
Democratic Convention, the last to
nominate a near genuine Populist, the guy
who played Frank Mankiewicz was the
Governor of Illinois, John l*eter Aitgeld
lake Mankiewicz. he liau the votes, and
more so because to win at Chicago in 18%
meant driving the incumbent Democratic
President out of the parly Unlike
Mankiewicz, ho could say, "Our people are
in earnest. They will have neither
straddling on platform or straddling on
candidate Those prudent, cautious, wise
gentlemen who have to consult the tin
roosters every morning to see what their
convictions should be during the day can
have no show in this convention "
At Miami Beach in the McGovern
headquarters then.' unquestionably was a
certain amount of tin-rooster consultation
But then Altgeld was not of the George
Haft school of political toughness brought
into vogue by John F. Kennedy, the outer
toughness of having to prove yourself and
overcome the insecurities bred into upper
class preppies
Altgeld had no inner or outer political
need to get a reputation as a tough tac
tician He was tough What made him that
way was a settled, distinct and well
developed set of ideas about what would be
good for America
That was not the case with the con
vention in Miami Beach or w ith McGovern
and his people as they showed themselves
through the week Vietnam aside, what
you got from them was inclinations,
leaning, tendencies toward Benign, to be
sure, but so indefinite that no amount of
accommodating flexibility would con
tradict their supple doxology
For all that, though McGovern has gone
far enough toward Populism so that the
themes of 76 years ago have a present ring
Who is talking here, a black welfare
mother in Miami Beach or Lorenzo D.
Levelling, a long-dead Populist governor
of Kansas:
"We have so much regard for the rights
of property that we have forgotten the
liberties of the individual themonopoly of
labor-saving machinery and its devotion to
selfish instead of social use have rendered
more and more human beings superfluous,
until we have a standing army of the
unemployed numbering even in the most
prosperous times not less than one million
able-bodied men .”
In the intervening time our population
has grown somewhat less than three times
while the "standing army of unemployed"
has risen five or six times or larger,
depending on how you want to calculate it.
To deal with this, Populism had a
coherent program that looked to the use of
government pow er to restore and maintain
a gentle, not destructively competitive
free-enterprise system Some of the main
elements in the program were the
nationalization of the railroads,
democratization and increased ac
cessibility of the people to the political
process, heavy anti trust legislation and
the graduated income tax, something that
George McGovern is still seeking to this
day.
In 18% there was, above all. the issue of
silver coinage What this grudge fight
really had to do with was who shall have
the benefit of the government's power to
create money and credit It's an ancient
American struggle that goes back to
Andrew Jackson, the losing of which in
sured the primacy of Wall Street, and
accounts for the fact that you must pay
such enormous interest charges on your
house, your car, and everything else you
buy on credit.
The Democrats of 1972 do not have as
logically formulated a program. Nor does
what they do have get to the heart of the
structures that bind us and force us to
repeat our failures, except perhaps in the
area of anti trust. The banking, finance
and credit structures, the mechanisms
that “allocate our priorities,” are left
alone; the indicated direction for future
action remains primarily bureaucratic
and unpromising for the individual spirit.
Some of Sen. McGovern’s supporters
suggest that he is secretly a man with a
well-defined program which he’ll pop on us
when he gets in the WTiite House. Let’s
hope we re not going to have that again
Then, he may not have thought it out
himself yet. He’s been taken up by the war
issue for years now and if he’s like most
Presidential candidates he probably has
little taste for economics.
Or, the consultations of tin roosters
aside, he may doubt he can speak well
enough to get his meaning across. He is
dry George McGovern in 1972, and not
William Jennings Bryan in 1896. who lost,
but lost right, laying it out vivid and clear
so that others might not lose
Copyright. 1972. The Washington Post