The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 60

11 Piling It Onto the Poor Cuts in Federal Aid Put Much of the Budget Burden on Them Ihursdiiy, IK, 1982l'iirl II By J. RICHARD MUNRO We in the business community have applauded an Administration that is more attuned to our interests than any since the 1920s. But, as a citizen as well as a business executive, I am concerned that this Administration's retreat from federal aid for the less fortunate among us the poor, the sick and disabled, the elderly is doing grave damage to the quality of life in America. The most recent example of this retreat is President Reagan's proposed 1983 budget, which cuts social programs even more deeply than his inaugural budget did. In the 1982 budget, about 70 of the $35 billion in cuts came from programs that affect the poor.

In the 1983 proposal, roughly 90 ($23 billion of the $26 billion in cuts), comes from these programs, such as the Job Corps, food stamps, child nutrition and aid to families with dependent children AFDC While defense spending rises by 18 ($34 billion), the poor may even lose their spare change. I was astounded to read that one of the cost-cutting proposals would round off the cents on each AFDC and unemployment check to the next lowest whole dollar. We all know that there was fat in these social programs. But the 1982 budget cut deeply into the muscle. The 1983 budget cuts into the heart.

In short, despite reassurances to the contrary, the budget shows a safety net getting even more tattered. Also disturbing to me is the New Federalism, the proposal to shift huge new costs to the states, which will further burden the poor. Instead of the present national standard of assistance set by Washington, we would have a national standard set by the least generous states, a lowest common denominator. States that already provide little direct aid would probably do even less. Other states might choose to decrease the level of aid rather than raise taxes.

To hold the line would raise fears of an influx of the dependent poor from a less generous state and an exodus of the productive skilled and their employers voting with their feet, in other words. I also object to how this program ignores long-term economic interests. If we are serious about solving our productivity problem, we must invest more, not less, in our human capital. This includes training and education and social programs that give people sustenance and dignity. We are, after all, rapidly entering a hightech economy that Alvin Toffler has called "the third wave." However, we can already see potentially damaging shortages of workers to string our cable-TV lines, program computers, operate word processors, repair robots and do the countless other complex jobs that technology is creating.

Yet the people who can make the difference in our industrial future are going nowhere today. They are poorly housed, in ill health, illiterate, becoming parents at the age of 13 or 14, with the odds against them at every step of their lives. I cannot forget how I and many other business executives benefited from one of this country's biggest social programs and best investments ever: the GI Bill. I went to college on that program after I served in the Marine Corps in Korea. It helped 9 million veterans like me in its first two decades.

The World War II GI Bill alone produced 450,000 engineers, 300,000 teach ors, hundreds of thousands of professionals in medicine, law and science, and many more in skilled trades. That huge payoff should remind us that today, more than ever, we could use more such investments rather than jeopardize our future by allowing the potential of millions of Americans to languish. Even if there were no economic case for aiding the poor, the fact remains that the Administration's program is just plain unfair. Deficits are soaring because of contradictions in the program that were obvious from the start. Business leaders knew that, but we went along anyway.

Yet who gets the blame? The poor. Who makes the sacrifices? The poor. And who had less to do with this mess than anyone else? The poor. Is this the best that we can do? Is making the poor bear this heavy new burden the only way in which we can achieve our economic goals? I do not think so, and I urge my fellow business executives to help forge a different approach that is truly even-handed, humane and in the interests of our economic future. J.

Richard Munro is the president and chief executive officer of Time, Inc. This commentary represents his personal opinion as expressed in remarks he made recently to a group of advertising executives. Still Life tSSfX A Nuclear Freeze Would Leave America in the Cold The Murderous Mind of the Latin Military "Si, I got that one when I graduated from Ft. Bragg, and I got these for wasting nuns!" By CHARLES MAECHLING JR. In the space of two years, nearly 25,000 people have been killed in El Salvador not in combat or caught in cross fire, but tortured, mutilated and butchered in cold blood.

Every night, men and women are dragged from their homes by armed men; every morning, their mutilated corpses turn up in roadside ditches and garbage dumps. In the last 60 days, 400 to 800 villagers have been massacred. In Guatemala, whole villages of Indians and a wide spectrum of the intelligentsia-journalists, teachers, social workers, students, doctors have been killed in political violence. Who is killing the people of Central America and why? All reputable sources with first-hand knowledge the Roman Catholic Church, the Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the Organization of American States' Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, our own former ambassadorstell the same story: A small number are certainly being killed by the rebels.

But guerrillas have no vehicles, and the bodies turn up either after motorized "sweeps" by the security forces or after visits by masked men in vehicles who circulate freely through roadblocks and shoot-first curfews. These atrocities are not just a tragic byproduct of civil war. Nor are they accidental. Not understood by the American public, and concealed by the Reagan Administration, is that the Latin American military Salvadoran, Guatemalan or Argentine routinely employs terror to exterminate guerrillas and insurgency movements. Devised by the Nazis for occupied Europe, perfected by Argentina and now passed from hand to hand by Latin military staffs, the strategy involves torture and murder of anyone suspected of association with "subversives." Guilt or innocence is immaterial; the object is to exterminate the opposition and, by cowing sympathizers into submission, deprive the guerrillas of support.

In the phraseology of Mao Tse-tung, the idea is to kill the fish by drying up the waters. All this is part of a brutal military tradition handed down from the savage Spanish conquistadors to the dictators and generals who have been a plague on the people ever since. Merciless atrocities are inseparable from Latin American warfare; combat casualties tend to be light. The 30,000 victims of the 1932 peasant uprising in El Salvador were exterminated in cold blood. So were the Indian population of Argentina and most of that country's recent the 300,000 victims of the 1948-61 violencia in Colombia; the 1 million dead of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-28; the countless unnamed victims of tyrants like Porfirio Diaz of Mexico, Juan Vicente Gomez of Venezuela, Rafael L.

Trujillo of the Dominican By GEORGE F. WILL I note with regret, but not amazement, that those advocating a mutual U.S.-Soviet "freeze" of nuclear arsenals are not like Albert Einstein, who said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Simplicity makes the freeze proposal politically attractive, and irresponsible. In the 1970s, while the Soviets raced ahead, America unilaterally practiced a semi -freeze. It deployed multiple warheads on some existing missiles, but deployed not a single new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). America deployed not a single new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM)in the 1970s.

Applied to intermediate-range missiles in Europe, the freeze proposal is the Soviet negotiating position: Accept the Soviets' 275 SS-20s and permit no comparable U.S. missiles. Furthermore, if their general superiority in offensive systems were secured by a freeze, the Soviets could further refine their destabilizing capabilities for attacking our missile forces. For example, a freeze would prohibit new SLBMs but not new attack submarines that hunt SLBM submarines. These could eventually give the Soviets a destabilizing capability for destroying the U.S.

sea-based deterrent. A freeze would kill the B-l bomber, but would not inhibit the air defenses by which the Soviets degrade the effectiveness of America's ancient B-52s. To try to preserve even a shadow of this leg of the strategic triad, America would have to spend heavily. The B-52's "escape time" (the time it takes to get out of range of nuclear effects from missiles attacking the United States) is inferior to the B-l's and inadequate to the threat of Soviet SLBMs off the U.S. coasts.

Therefore, the B-52s would have to be rebuilt for better escape capability, and would have to be more dispersed (B-52s can use fewer airfields than B-ls, so airfield modernizations would be necessary) at prohibitive cost. The budgetary effect of a freeze would be modest. Strategic programs weapons, command, control, communications account for just 15 of the defense budget. The freeze would prevent some procurements, but would make other spending necessary to ameliorate the freeze's destabilizing effects. (The freeze proposal makes it timely to note that some aspects of existing arms-control agreements are destabilizing.

The ban on missile defenses (ABMs) is one example. Another is the ban on new silos. This prevents, for example, deploying any of our permitted number of ICBMs on the south side? of mesas. Given the inherent limits on ballistic missile trajectories, such basing would make America's land-based deterrent more survivable, and the world safer. The proposed freeze would extend to "testing, production and further deployment of nuclear warheads, missiles and other delivery systems." But proponents cannot explain how they will provide for verification of, say, a freeze prohibiting improved yields of warheads, or improved throw -weights of missiles, or even new missiles.

How, for example, will they verify whether new Soviet cruise missiles are nuclear-armed? Such verification is beyond the capability of our national technical means, and the Soviets will not permit the necessary on-site inspection. The freeze proposal illustrates the dangerous asymmetry inherent in U.S.Soviet arms negotiations. Such seductively simple panaceas pander to the widespread desire to believe that there can be an easy, cheap escape from dangers posed by modern physics and the modern Soviet state. In the only superpower where public opinion matters, the freeze proposal will undermine support for modernization of strategic weapons. The argument will be: Any new U.S.

program will "provoke" the Soviets to reject a freeze. But the Soviets are serious about arms limitations only when America's continuing programs compel Soviet seriousness. The Soviets rejected the idea of limits on defensive systems until the Nixon Administration won congressional approval for ABMs. Then the Soviets reversed themselves. However, the fact that congressional support for the ABM was so fragile (a one-vote margin in the Senate) encouraged the Nixon Administration to accept a destabilizing result in SALT a temporary (five-year) and ineffective restraint on offensive systems, but a ban in perpetuity on ABMs.

Proponents of a freeze advertise it as a first step toward President Reagan's more amibitious goal of reductions in force levels. But were the Soviets to agree to a freeze, it would remove the only incentive continuing U.S. programs for the Soviets to negotiate reductions. The freeze proposal is popular with many who supported and served in the previous Administration. That Administration wasted four precious years killing and retarding U.S.

strategic programs and, not coincidentally, negotiating arms-control agreements so imbalanced and porous that a Democratic-controlled Senate would not ratify them. The freeze proposal is another example of posturing and wasted motion that the world can ill afford. George F. Will is a syndicated columnist in Washington. weed out the drug racketeers and war criminals, and no indoctrination in civilized standards of warfare.

Senior officers indistinguishable from the war criminals hanged at Nuremberg after World War II have passed through the Inter-American Defense College in Washington. Neither in training programs nor thereafter does the Pentagon insist on compliance with the Geneva conventions regarding humane treatment of prisoners and noncombatants. Equipment is given without strings. For the United States, which led the crusade against Nazi evil, to support the methods of Heinrich Himmler's extermination squads is an outrage. It is also counterproductive.

Unless mass killing stops, the tide of violence will inundate the whole of Central America. Continued U.S. support of Mafia-like oligarchies and their uniformed gunmen is alienating the restive and increasingly vocal masses of Latin America. Not another cartridge or spare part should go to Central American military regimes until the atrocities stop. We should encourage others to take the road of democratic Costa Rica, the only heretofore stable country in Central America, to dismantle predatory military establishments and replace them with efficient gendarmeries under strict civilian control.

Charles Maechling Jr. led counterinsurgen-cy and internal-defense planning for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson while in the State Department from 1U61 to 1966; he is now a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Republic and the Somozas of Nicaragua.

As for the rebels who surrender, one looks in vain for prisoner-of-war camps. Most are shot on the spot. The brutality of military culture in the former Spanish colonies is almost inconceivable by Anglo-Saxon standards, and shows up at its worst in El Salvador and Guatemala. Latin America's military academies do not turn out Robert E. Lees, and few officers-and-gentlemen.

Great emphasis is placed on ceremony and punctilio, but discipline is both slack and cruel and humaneness is regarded as weakness. High rank is often a license for racketeering witness the drug-dealing generals of Bolivia. In their endless quest for "stability" south of the border, U.S. Administrations repeatedly turn a blind eye to the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military. Not until 1961, however, was there direct complicity (as opposed to occasional direct interventions) by the U.S.

government in aiding domestic repression in Latin America. In that year, under pressure from the Pentagon, the Latin American military role was changed from "hemispheric defense" to "internal U.S. assistance programs were retooled to strengthen the hold of the local military forces over their own people. For 20 years, the Pentagon has lavished training and equipment on the Latin American military, both at bases in the United States and at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the former Panama Canal Zone.

Under guise of "civic-action" programs, Latin American officers have been encouraged to meddle in government and civilian affairs. There has been little screening to Conservatives' RCANBC Boycott Has Potential Appeal for Liberals, Too By MARY MEEIIAN The boycott against RCA and NBC announced recently by the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the Coalition for Better Television may be more successful than network executives expect. Besides its attraction for conservative Christians, the boycott has potential appeal to minority groups, peace people, feminists and parents. One of the boycottcrs' demands is that NBC increase the number of minority and elderly people shown on TV "as full, contributing members of society." Certainly the NAACP and the Gray Panthers would like to sec this happen.

Pacifists would be delighted to see the achievement of another boycott goal: less violence on television. Many women will rejoice if a third boycott goal an end to the advertising of "feminine personal-hygiene products" on TV can be achieved. Feminists also will be happy if the boycott results in less use of women's bodies in commercials to sell soap, deodorant and cars. And many parents, regardless of their political or religious persuasion, are dismayed by the portrayals of sex, violence and drug use to which their children are exposed on television. Reducing all this is a central goal of the RCANBC boycott.

RCA is Included because it Is the parent company of NBC. Although the Coalition for Better Television is critical of all commercial TV, it chose to concen Gloria Steinem sharply criticized the Coalition for Better Television and the Moral Majority, which was then a member of the coalition but has since withdrawn. Curiously, her criticism directly followed a paragraph in which she said that American women "are watching the 'ring around the collar' commercial on television. They are waiting for the day when the wife turns to her husband and says: 'Why don't you wash your Feminists have long complained about the demeaning portrayal of women in TV commercials. It makes sense for them to add their own specific demands to those of the Coalition for Better Television and to join a boycott that may force the broadcasters to pay attention.

Liberals need not fear that they somehow will be contaminated by joining religious conservatives in boycott. In fact, Americans of all political persuasions are. in effect, already boycotting TV programs with many of the same grievances. Nor does the boycott threaten the Bill of Rights. An Wildmon says, RCA and NBC are "free to continue their discrimination, free to refuse to honor our requests We have no power except he-power of moral persuasion." Mary Mcehan is a Washington writrr who contributes often to the National Catholic Reporter.

This commentary is from Pacific S'cics Seri'ire trate on NBC because last year one of the network's Christmas-related shows included an appearance by a Playboy Playmate. And RCA advertised in the December issue of Playboy, which included a section entitled "Prayboy." Wildmon says that this "belittled, mocked and ridiculed Christ and Christians." Cynics believe that the coalition also chose RCA and NBC because the two corporations seem especially vulnerable. RCA had a major decline in earnings last year, and NBC has ratings problems. Also, RCA and Its subsidiaries produce many goods that are vulnerable to consumer boycott television sets, video disc players, records-including a car-rental chain (Hertz). But the two corporations are hardly quaking in their boots at this point.

Henry Bcchtold, an RCA vice president in New York, says that the response has been "all positive our way." Wildmon, on the other hand, says reaction to the boycott has been "better than I had expected," including strong support in the religious press, which has "significant clout." Some people who might otherwise support the boycott are troubled by the charges that It is a form of censorship. But it is not censorship when people cancel subscriptions to a newspaper because they are appalled by its news coverage or editorials, or when students turn their backs to a commencement speaker, or when people announce their refusal to buy certain products to show their displeasure with TV programming. Talking back is the other side of the First Amendment coin. Some liberals have a curious ambivalence toward the Coalition for Better Television, which is a federation of more than 1,800 local and national groups that are socially conservative and largely, but not exclusively, religious. Although many liberals have serious complaints about the trivia of television and about its exploitation of certain groups, many also have a knee-jerk reaction against anything endorsed by conservatives, especially religious conservatives.

An organization called Action for Children's Television has been urging people to sign a petition saying that "the censorship tactics of the Coalition for Better Television limit options and threaten the free exchange of ideas in a free society." Action has worked long and hard to persuade govern -ment agencies to enforce certain changes in TV commercials directed toward children. Government Intervention in the expression of ideas is precisely what the First Amendment was intended to prevent, yet ACT urges government action and berates people who try to make changes through private action alone. Writing in MS. magazine last November, feminist.