Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 20

Editorials jy ill "The policy of our paper is very simple merely to tell the truth." Taul Foynter, publisher, 1912 1950 20-A Wtdnetday, July 19, 1972 Who Should Pay? nightmare THEY had an air force and The Public Service Commission (PSC) has set a major precedent which dilutes the benefits of the corporate profits tax for citizens. By allowing Gulf Power which serves Florida's Panhandle, to Include a corporate tax of $756,499 In its rate base, the PSC in effect has contravened the Legislature's rollback of the old household utilities tax. Gov. Reubin Askew is right to ask the PSC to reconsider the decision, which was made without benefit of consumer representation. If the regulatory agency does not heed the governor's request, legislative action should be taken.

RATE REGULATION is one of the most complicated areas of price and profit interplay, with the balance traditionally weighted toward the profit interests of the utilities. The profits tax while it applies to all corporations corrected the balance somewhat toward the utilities' consumers, by allowing repeal of the utilities tax. But in the period of adjustment after passage of the corporate profits tax, some power companies are trying to return the burden to consumers by paying the tax from customer billings instead of corporation's profit returns. The utilities want to compute the profits tax as part of operating Boss Wooing Youth Postal Service's Second-Class Price Increase Endangers Ideas By TOM WICKER Now York Tlnwt Sorvk (c) WASHINGTON First it was the Nixon Administration, scaring ideas out of the market with the vice presidenfi attacks on the press, and with the court cases against publication of the Pentagon Papers. Then it was the Supreme Court, rul-ing ideas out of the market by its holdings that reporters have no constitutional right to protect the confidentiality of their sources, and that members of Congress have no protected right to inform their constituencies, if in so doing they violate security classification procedures.

And on June 29, it was one of those faceless administrative agencies over which the American people have so little control in this case, the board of governors of the U.S. Postal Service pricing ideas out of the market by ordering into effect on July 6 second-class postal rate increases that average 127 per cent. The word to note here is AVERAGE; in some of the most sensitive cases, the rate increases will be much higher. THE FIRST increase in the new second-class rate structure will average over 30 per cent; the full increase will go into effect within five years. Its impact on the flow of ideas and opinion in America Is likely to be catastrophic, for it is precisely upon smaller, usually less profitable publications that it will impose the heaviest burden.

In such journals, the liveliest and most controversial intellectual traffic is usually to be found. The television networks can hardly provide such material; they are under the shadow of government regulation and intervention (as witness President Nixon's recent veto of funds for public television) and the necessity for widespread popular acceptance (even the entertaining Dick Cavett, it appears, is too intellectual for commercial TV). The big-circulation newspapers and magazines, In most cases, also cater to the conventional wisdom or, in deference to their supposed impact on public opinion, conduct themselves with a certain prudence (Agnew to the contrary notwithstanding). That leaves it up to the "little magazines," the trade journals (Stone's Weekly was probably indispensable to a national peace movement in the 1960's), even the so-called "underground press," Mideast Opportunity? ideal choice for a youth spokesman, but who is there? Not Connally, not Agnew, not George Shultz or Earl Butz. Laird presentsHixon forcefully as a man, who after a mere four years, has performed miracles of disengagement VIETNAM WAS much on the minds of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

It was, after all, the reason they had nominated McGovern. No passage of his acceptance speech was more widely cheered than his promise to "stop the bombing on inaugural day." "There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools, there will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or tire cities of the North," McGovern shouted, and there was an answering roar from the crowd. Laird was asked about the bombing of the dikes. He was smoothly noncommittal. He wasn't sure.

The President preferred not to, of course. But if we did drop any bombs on the dikes, it was not because we wanted or intended to. The North Vietnamese sometimes forced us. Either roads carrying military 'Do you have any medical jyi 'St Pentagon By MARY McGRORY Washington Star Strvlco WASHINGTON Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird is clearly the lead tank in the Administration's onslaught against George McGovern.

In his latest "nonpartisan" press conference, the secretary opened up on two fronts, one to prove the senator is just another politician and the other to suggest that today's youth is just like yesterday's. Laird is the most acute politician still in the Cabinet, and he loves the fray. John Connally attacked McGovern the peace talks last weekend, but that's old stuff. His patron Lyndon Johnson was saying that six years ago about his war critics. Laird's charge that the Democratic nominee was making a backroom deal to maintain a defense contract dear to his running-mate, Thomas Eagleton, was the first real thrust since the convention.

It was no surprise, since Laird is normally in charge of the issues where McGovern bears down hardest, the war and defense spending. WHAT IS more interesting is that Laird is acting as Nixon's youth leader. He opened up his press conference with pointed references to subjects of most interest to the new young voters who could rob Richard Nixon of re-election, the reduction of draft-calls to zero, and the ruling that draftees will not be sent to Vietnam against their will. The McGovern view of young America is that they wish to save the country. The Nixon view is that they merely wish to save their own skins.

They are not the altruists and the patriots praised by McGovern. They are motivated, thinks the White House, like their parents, by self-interest. Laird, who looks like a warhead and talks like a general, does not seem the Trade May By CARROLL KILPATRICK Washington Post Sorvlca WASHINGTON The Soviet Union's agreement to purchase large amounts of grain from the U.S. brings to mind a visit this reporter had with a Soviet citizen in Moscow in May. Mr.

had spent nearly a dozen years in a forced labor camp, because although he has long been a Communist and served with distinction with the Soviet armies in World War II Stalin thought he was a dangerous Intellectual. This man was pessimistic about the future of his homeland. Materially, the Soviet people are much better off than at any time in the past, he said. But as far as freedoms are concerned, they are worse off today than they were under Khruschev. IETTH1S Taxes Editor: Remember Father Coughlan, Padre of Royal Oak, and his Great Crusade to "drive the money changers out of the temple?" Inspired by his eloquent and dramatic oratory, I thought, here is a man that will awaken the Congress and Senate to their responsibilities.

But slowly and steadily he ran out of gas, running into a solid wall of big business. Now once again there is a new crusade to close the tax loopholes. Big conglomerates are wrecking the country. The door is open to a dictator and someday a fiery orator will lead the way. The people are fed up.

At 70 years, I am ready to join the revolution. A. R. WESTRA Largo Poor Addition Editor: I was shocked at the killing of a Clearwater youth by North police. The youngster and Ms friends were camping on the Fourth when they were suddenly confronted by the sheriff and his deputies armed with shotguns.

The police are apparently pleading a case of resistance. A scuffle ensued, and a gun went off accidentally, they say. Yet, they charged no camper with assault. And, more importantly, reports in The Times say they forcibly awoke a 'In my expenses. This false means of determining profits would both Inflate the company's actual expenses and deflate the actual profits.

EVEN WITH a reasonable rate of return, however, there is no reason why stockholders and management should not bear the major burden of the corporate profits tax. It is their profit and their tax. In order to meet their profit margins, the utilities should first consider cutbacks in such expensive and wasteful areas as advertising. In special cases where the corporate profits tax would actually cut into the utility's minimum reasonable return, Gov. Askew is ready to concede some increase of utility rates.

There were two basic errors in the Gulf Power decision, Askew argues. First, the decision was made on the basis of a hypothetical $756,499 rather than a proven tax burden. Second, fhis figure did not consider the 48 per cent federal tax allowance to the utility for its corporation tax. These errors in the PSC decision reflect that agency's historical indifference to consumer interests. As a precedent, the decision could influence other utility rate hearings, including those for the Florida Power and it should be reversed.

reduced its arms shipments to Egypt, thus angering Sadat to the point that he ordered Russians out of his country in retaliation. Mr. Nixon's partisans, however, cannot yet make that claim. The evidence is inconclusive, although Sadat unquestionably has been frustrated over the number of arms he has received after his several visits to Moscow. Speculation must be cautious, but if indeed the two big powers are beginning to defuse the Mideast time bomb insofar as they can, there are major implications for the United Nations, tooSince 1967's six-day war, the U.N.

has voted more than 50 times on war-peace issues in that region. Results have been minimal, primarily because the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. withheld their support on one issue or another. SINCE the U.N.

can be only as effective as its big power members permit, a Washington-Moscow accord on the Middle East might set the stage for greater U.N. participation in solving global problems. That would be an important bonus for the cause of world peace. Pinellas week showing that only one in three Pinellas citizens could name a state senator and only one in five could identify a state representative. There is still time for good candidates to step forward and offer themselves as alternatives to present candidates.

Undoubtedly some will. Where they do, hopes for good government will be raised. Apathy is no answer to the problems that threaten this growing county. School Harmony It is saddening that solution to differences between the Pinellas School Board and its Biracial Advisory Committee must be sought in federal court. There is also irony in the fact that disharmony has been the result of attempts to create integration harmony.

There appears to be guilt on both sides. The committee may have been too dogmatic, too insistent in its tendering of "advice," while the all-white school board may have been insensitive to the need for biracial guidance in its new and unfamiliar duties of running a desegregated school system. The court can help by clarifying the committee's role and reminding the Board of Its obligations, but only the two parties involved in the dispute can create success or failure in their joint endeavor for quality education regardless of race. Bring 'Moscow Spring' traffic passed over the dikes and became eligible or they had placed missile sites on them in which case there was no choice, although we do not wish to cause the floods and famine the President cited several weeks ago as reasons for not doing it. LAIRD APPARENTLY shares the President's view that young voters who are not involved in the war will learn to live with it until election day.

Drastic moves he privately says he opposed, he publicly defends as the only possible course to take against a cruel war and relentless enemy which has shown no quarter to the world's largest power. Like the President, Laird believes that the war, which is now being fought largely on the sea and in the air by Americans, can be drained of its moral content. The approach is quantitative. The President has made overtures to two large Communist nations, Russia and China, with a combined population of 980-million people. Therefore, the argument goes, how can anyone fault him for bombing with unparalleled ferocity a little Communist country of 21-million? It's world peace divided by one.

THE YOUNG people who worked for McGovern across the country will not be persuaded. Nobody in the Administration would dare take the argument onto a campus. So Laird and Nixon must hope that there is a division between the student and the working young who will account for about two-thirds of the new 25-million votes from the 18 to 25 age group. The only way Nixon can expect a hearing from the young peace movement is to end the war before election day. He has little chance of that, so in the meantime Laird is pressing for it with his claims that there's nothing wrong with a war that nobody you know is dying In.

and they appeared to have material necessities. What they lacked and sorely missed were contacts with other scholars, the freedom to teach and write and the freedom to receive books and other materials from abroad. THE FIRST THING Mr. asked me when I entered the apartment was, "Didn't you bring me a copy of your paper?" I had some copies in my hotel room, and I knew that the couple read English. But it did not occur to me how much they wanted to read a paper from America.

That visit raises a question: How Is the Brezhnev regime to reconcile Its earnest desire to trade with its conviction that its own people must be Isolated from the contaminations of Western thought? Even in the matter of wheat and feed grain sales there must be more contacts between Soviet and American citizens in the ports, In business offices, in banks and in government offices. If the Kremlin wants trade badly enough, won't it have to make some concessions in these matters? "When a dictatorship decides that it can relax its firm grip, the oppressed first dream about more freedom finally they shout, and Intoxicated by their own screams, they revolt. That was what happened in Hungary in 1956," Endre Marton writes in a new book, "The Forbidden Sky," a first-hand account of the Hungarian revolution. Marton's book ought to be taught in every school not so much to show what is wrong with dictatorship as to impress upon Americans, that they must constantly safeguard their freedoms. MARTON RECALLS that Khruschev once told a group of visiting Frenchmen that to permit any party but the Communist Party to function "is the same as to permit of one's own free will a flea into one's shirt." Now, because of the imperatives of history, the Brezhnev regime must allow a flea into its shirt in the form of contacts with the West.

The regime now faces the necessity of opening some doors into its own country. While controls there have not been relaxed, could Mr. be too pessimistic in saying that they cannot be in the future? If they are not, how can the Kremlin do business with the West business which it desperately needs? It is clearly too early to say how much the Middle East conflict has changed after yesterday's startling events in Egypt. Reports of President Sadat's apparent expulsion of his Russian military advisers are sketchy and vary in emphasis. NONETHELESS, it is difficult to restrain hopes that a situation has been created in which at least three things may happen: First, Cairo and Jerusalem will relax their rigid policies toward each other and finally begin negotiations to resolve their angry differences.

Second, Washington can take advantage of these new stresses and strains in Cairo-Moscow relations to improve the United States' own ties with Egypt. Third, U.S.-Soviet relations can improve in direct proportion to the easing of tension in the Middle East. OBVIOUSLY, the third item might be a cause, not a result, of Sadat's actions. President Nixon's summit talks with Kremlin leaders in May could have achieved an agreement under which Moscow Unpolitical Much is required of those to whom much is given, John F. Kennedy often observed.

Nowhere is that sentiment more valid than in democracies; government "for the people" requires that the people participate in government. WITH FEW exceptions, Pinellas citizens have shirked that duty in the approaching election. Although the deadline for qualifying is less than one week away, 14 Pinellas officials remain unopposed for reelection. Regardless of the 14's merits, democracy cannot function in an election vacuum. That is not to say there must always be opposition in every race; nonetheless, the principle of competition to stimulate ideas and guide policies is indispensable if the public's best interests are to be served.

Clearly, the Pinellas Democratic Party's efforts at revitalizing itself have produced a poor showing. Twelve of the 14 uncontested candidates are Republicans. If Democrats hope to participate in a flourishing two-party system, or even provide a strong dissenting voice, they must do better than they have so far. ONE ALARMING aspect of the lack of candidates is the indication that it represents not public satisfaction with the status quo (this county's problems from questions of government integrity to schoolhouse deficiencies are obvious) but that it reflects public apathy abdut politics. That fear was underscored by a poll last to propagate unpopular ideas, circulate contrary opinions, prod their larger colleagues, and act as intellectual and political gadflies in a nation all too prone to conformity and complacency.

This is not a question of party or ideology. Right-wing publications will suffer from these rate increases as quickly as those of the left; Human Events is as much affected as The Texas Observer. Aside, moreover, from political, economic and social commentary as Herman Wouk put it to Congress on behalf of writers and artists: "Much of the best contemporary literature poetry, fiction, criticism and scholarly work is published in the very magazines that will be the earliest victims of the scheduled second-class rate increases." SOME WOULD make the case that manageable second-class rates are, in effect, government subsidies to publishers. This is to turn the matter around be-, cause it is clear that to increase the postal costs of a marginal publication from, say, $100,000 annually to $227,000 annually, is to strike it a death blow. Besides, it has been congressional policy since 1792 to provide certain per-ferential postal rates, not to enrich publishers but because, as Justice Douglas once put it, it was considered heretofore that "periodicals which disseminated information of a public character or which were devoted to literature, the sciences, arts, or some special industry contributed to the public good." That is not quite the same thing as subsidizing corporate farmers like Sen.

James O. Eastman or subsidizing oilmen with the depletion allowance; and the Senate Post Office and Civil Service Committee, reporting on the legislation establishing the Postal Service in 1970, made it quite clear that "the Postal Service is in fact and shall be operated as a service to the American people, not as a business enterprise." Clearly, therefore, Congress ought to roll back the disastrous, second-class increases that have been administratively imposed on a vital segment of the American press, and which may quite possibly destroy or cripple it. That can be done at this session, through legislation sponsored by Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, which would freeze the rate increases at the first-step level already in effect, phase future increases over a 10 instead of a five-year period, and prevent the kind of surcharges particularly damaging to the smallest-circulation, lightest-weight publications. This legislation would have no effect on third and fourth-class rate increases.

Its whole effect would be to stop the Postal Service from pricing ideas out of the market, at a time when the First Amendment is beginning to look like a swlss cheese. THE BREZHNEV regime, he said, is extremely reactionary. He acknowledged that the regime must exercise tight controls over dissenters, over those who might have contact with Westerners and over imports of foreign books and periodicals. If it relaxes controls at all, he said, the lid will blow off. Mr.

X's wife was more hopeful. President Nixon's visit would be helpful in relaxing tensions in the world, she said. She believes there Is so much yearning for freedom that some relaxation of the present controls must be permitted. Her husband shook his head. He Is free to move about Moscow, and he seemed not to be disturbed by my visit, which he, in fact, had invited.

Their apartment is cramped by American standards, but Mrs. works th ditor number of campers and allegedly kicked others who were lying on the ground. It seems to me that if there was resistance, as the sheriff says would he run the risk of forcibly awaking other campers to join their friends in the so-called If he and his associates had their hands full, would he have time to prod more "enemy campers" to aggressive wakefulness, including dragging some out of their camper vans? No, the sheriff's story does not add up. C. R.

BERGWIN St. Petersburg Eggs Editor: At your sponsored free baseball game at Al Lang Field on July 23 you are going to have a "Fresh Egg Throwing Contest (24 players)." I am urging you not to have the fresh egg throwing contest. You are willfully destroying edible food. Many persons would like to have those eggs as food. LESTER BUDNIK St.

Petersburg Chess Editor: Re: Your editorial, "Fischer, Go Home." Them's my sentiments only better expressed! PAUL HIRSCH St. Petersburg.