Santa Cruz Sentinel from Santa Cruz, California • Page 31

Ooinion Tuesday, Sept. 22, 1981 Santa Cruz Sentinel 31 Sentinel Editorial CopUy Nwt Srvic Gasoline Conservation While it may not be a true conservation effort there is no question that Cahfornians are using a lot less gasoline these days. For the first seven months of the year gasoline useage in the state dropped by 62 million gallons. Considering how much gasoline is used in California, the decline isn't particularly dramatic, only about 1 percent, but it is a drop. No one has any definitive reports on why drivers are using less gasoline, but the state Board of Equalization, which collects the gasoline tax in California, says it is probably a combination of higher prices, more fuel-efficient cars and less driving.

However, some studies have shown that traffic counts in the state are rising, not declining which would put more emphasis on the fact that the switch to cars getting better gasoline mileage is making the difference. Obviously, the price increase is involved to some degree although we are more inclined to believe that the price hike was more of an incentive a year or so ago. Now motorists have become accustomed to higher prices for gasoline. Driving habits did change when prices took the big jump and pleasure travel decreased as drivers tried to do a better jobs in planning trips, including shopping trips. If the switch to more fuel efficient cars and trucks is the answer, then one could conclude that the decline in gasoline useage will continue for some time as new cars replace older, less fuel-efficient models.

The drop would be more dramatic if it were not for the decline in new car purchases the past couple of years. The combination of higher prices and much higher interest rates was devastating to automobile sales. Depending upon the state of the economy and the modest change in interest rates, auto sales could improve this year although few officials are predicting a major change. Nevertheless, as people trade in cars getting 15 miles to the gallon for a car which gets better than 20 miles per gallon, the gasoline use will drop even further. There has been a great deal of discussion about just how well Americans are conserving energy and whether they will continue to do so in the future.

The gasoline sales report is one indication and it is fairly similar to the decline in the use of electricity and natural gas by domestic users. In the home energy field the conservation effort was primarily sparked by an increase in utility costs, but it was fairly evident that consumers were making an effort to conserve. The same thing holds true in the vehicle field. If the present trend continues throught the remainder of 1981, gasoline consumption in the state could drop as much as 700 million gallons from 1978, the record year. We are not convinced that the total decline could be attributed to a massive conservation effort, but certainly it represents a modest step in the right direction if we are to avoid getting into another gasoline crisis.

There is still a great deal of pleasure driving and obviously a certain amount of unessential driving, but the record shows that we are using less gasoline even though vehicle registration remains high. We may get another energy conservation test this winter if predictions for a more severe weather period hold true. Last year it was a rather mild winter and this year consumers could face much more difficult weather along with higher utility bills, a major factor toward encouraging conservation. Jack Anderson CIA's Misleading Tactics Andrew Tully Getting A Whiff Of Status WASHINGTON In a triple assault on the public's right to know, the Central Intelligence Agency is (1) trying to shut off channels of information to the electorate, (2) seeking criminal penalties against reporters whose stories might identify CIA operatives and (3) spreading "disinformation" to news agencies. The most disturbing is the disinformation campaign.

This poisons the well from which Americans draw the facts they need to govern themselves. The wise Thomas Jefferson sought to lay this issue to rest two centuries ago when he argued that the people's right to know is more important than the officials' right to govern. Now along comes Bill Casey, the doddering CIA director, wjth the argument that the government has the right to mislead the public by planting phony stories in the press. His purpose ostensibly is patriotic. He wants to build public support for the political, economic and military measures that the Reagan administration believes are necessary to counter the worldwide conspiracies of the Soviet Union.

Legal experts have warned that the CIA is forbidden by law from conducting operations within the United States and that disinformation aimed at the American public, therefore, would be illegal. But Casey has found a way that he thinks the CIA can get around the law. The disinformation will be planted with foreign news bureaus whose stories are routinely picked up by U.S. newspapers. Thus the phony stories may be con cocted by CIA dissemblers in McLean, but will reach the American audience circuitously through foreign sources.

Casey believes this deception does not violate the restrictions against domestic operations. Trusted CIA sources have told my associate Ron McRae that the foreign press, in the words of one insider, "is already being manipulated directly." Consider the campaigns to discredit Libya's radical ruler, Muammar Qaddafi, for example. There should be no need to portray him as being any more vile than he is. He has committed outrages that should be sufficiently repugnant to arouse American public opinion against him. I have called Qaddafi the world's most irresponsible ruler and have backed up this opinion with facts that need no embellishment.

But under the imaginative Casey, the CIA is busily creating rumors connecting Qaddafi to the slave trade in Mauritania, the only nation that still auctions people on the block. The CIA is also spreading stories that Qaddafi is manipulating Libyan accounts in international banks and otherwise mis-managing the Libyan peoples' petrodollars. The agency has even considered arranging the disappearance of a moderate Moslem leader after a visit to Libya. This could revive the outrage against Qaddafi in the Moslem world that followed the actual disappearance of a holy man, named Mousa Sadr. He never returned from Libya after a set-to with the dictator.

What Casey doesn't understand is that truth just the simple, straightforward truth is the most effective method of persuading people and influencing events. If the U.S. government could re-establish its credibility, its word could become a powerful weapon for combating communism. Casey has done his utmost to obstruct the flow of CIA information to the public. He has also sought criminal penalties against newsmen who divulge the identity of CIA agents.

These steps are necessary, he has contended, to protect the CIA's secret operations. The truth is that the CIA's own inept-ness, not newspaper stories, has jeopardized secret activities and exposed its operatives. The most damaging disclosures have come from Philip Agee, who is a renegade CIA agent, not a newsman. The CIA allowed him to slip through its fingers. The CIA has loudly complained that its station chief in Athens, Robert Welch, was gunned down because his identity was revealed in anti-CIA publications.

But the CIA station chief had occupied the same house in Athens for two decades, and sightseeing guides used to point it out to tourists. So Welch was more likely the victim of CIA carelessness than press exposure. Untied Feature Syndicate and, for that matter, for anything in between. It does not bruise my ego to encounter a female U.S. senator.

Women make good cops. They are adept at changing oil and in the art of lubricating assorted spots in my car. But what I can't understand is why some members of the opposite sex would seek to stop looking and smelling like women when they embark on careers in commerce, politics, and ditch-digging. Most of them were born prettier than males and their architecture is much more attractively designed. Thus, were I a woman, I would not long to look like a truck driver or Martin Van Buren or even Paul Newman.

I would squirt a gill or two of allure behind my ears and treat my natural beauty to a session with a makeup box. Then, calm in the assurance that I was irresistible, I would step outside and set about the pleasant chore of leading my favorite male off to a life of delightful shame. McNaught Syndicate would wear it only when entirely alone." I recall nostalgically the age of "forbidden" scents that drove men mad with lust and caused them to abandon jobs and run away to live in sin in Providence, R.I. Mind you, I have always been unequivocally opposed to such abdication of responsibility, but it was nice to know that a girl might be trying to sign me up for at least a tryst in a comer at Mike's. When a girl smelled as if she had just emerged from a bathtub of My Sin, a regular fellow could assume she had not arrived to discuss international monetary policies.

Nowadays, however, women do seem to neglect the glamour a bit. On buses, trains and flying machines, more and more of them come in a plain wrapper no powder, no lipstick, no eye shadow, no rouge. I don't know what they do for a living, but is plain they do not toil in a chorus line. Maybe they're all corporation presidents who spend their evenings playing poker and smoking big cigars. I am in favor of equality for both sexes WASHINGTON-Is it possible that equality for women eventually will do us males in? A flack outfit for a soap company which will be nameless claims that more and more females are deserting perfumes in favor of a proper wash with its client's product.

The reason, it is claimed, is that in the rush to doff their femininity in order to get elected president, many women feel that a whiff of detergent is more appropriate to their new status. I hope that this is just the pipe dream of a press agent, but I don't know. Funny things do happen these days. Some males, for instance, do their best to smell like women. There are linebackers who wear earrings and baseball sluggers who affect necklaces.

But it never occurred to me that women would prefer to smell of Lifebuoy. I am all for the bad old perfumed days of Tabu and Unbridled Passion, when women were dangerous and therefore objects of pursuit. Of Tabu, it used to be said it was "so intimate there might be those who Marianne Means Don Graff Question Is What To Do Finding A New Tiff In India WASHINGTON Never in his more than 40 years on Capitol Hill, Sen. Henry Jackson, said the other day, has he seen the political climate change as rapidly and dramatically as it has the past 60 days. He was referring to the panic which has suddenly infected the nation's capital in the wake of Wall Street's failure to put its money where its mouth used to be.

No modern administration of either party has given business so much so quickly and been rebuffed so mercilessly and conspicuously. Reaganomics, the supply-side miracle which was to simultaneously make possible great tax cuts for the wealthy, a balanced budget, increased military spending and such economic prosperity as to ensure jobs, jobs, jobs, flopped before it even had a decent try-out. Jackson was talking to House Minority Leader Robert Michel as they waited recently to be interviewed separately on a television show. Michel, who had won applause only a few weeks ago for his masterful job of pushing through the Democratic-controlled House the Reagan budget and tax cuts, was not in a cheerful mood. Conceding the obvious, he predicted "a political revolt" if something wasn't done to get Wall Street and the financial markets to demonstrate a little confidence in the Reagan program.

The question is what to do. None of the obvious solutions has any political appeal. Afghanistan, where he displeased the occupying power. The Soviets accused him of spreading false information about conditions in the country and of having a CIA connection, an allegation earlier raised by Indian sources. Washington denies the CIA usiness and is accusing New Delhi of buying a deliberate Soviet "disinformation" campaign.

And in retaliation, it has withdrawn the welcome mat for a senior Indian diplomat. It may well be that the dispute is entirely a matter of Griffin's professional qualifications. It could be that it also has more than a little to do with something more tangible, such as the F-16 jets and other lethal items that Washington is contemplating selling to India's neighbor. That would be Pakistan, with which India has fought three wars in little over 30 years. United States involvement with both countries has been long and subject to some abrupt ups and downs.

Both were courted when carved out of the old British Indian Empire following World War II. India, a functioning if severely flawed democracy, chose to go its own erratically non-aligned way. But Pakistan, the smaller and by far the weaker, opted for a Western connection. Not for ideological considerations it has known mostly authoritarian governments and is now the fief of a military dictator but as a balance against India. Except for an occasional period of bad temper, it has The United States is not on the best of terms with the Soviet Union for any number of reasons, from the imbalance of military power to conflicts of interest in almost any Third World country you want to name.

Then there are the worsening differences with good neighbor Canada over access to energy resources and transnational investments and the squabbling with Israel over the uses to which it puts its American-supplied weapons. And now we are at odds with France and Mexico over which side to back in El Salvador's civil war; with France, Canada. Britain and West Germany over allied policy in southern Africa, and with the People's Republic of China (that's the big one, on the mainland) over contemplated arms aid to the Republic of China (that's the small one, on Taiwan). You wouldn't think we'd be looking for more tiffs but we've apparently found one with India. Briefly, Indira Gandhi's government has refused to accept the assignment of an American diplomat to the New Delhi embassy.

This occasionally happens in the case of the biggest guns ambassadors for world-class political reasons. But rejection is virtually unheard of in the case of small-bore diplomats such as George G.B. Griffin, Washington's nominee to be political counselor in the New Delhi embassy. India ostensibly objects to his performance at his previous post in generally fallen in with whatever line the "free world" happened to be drawing against the communist menace sometimes of the Soviet variety, sometimes of the Chinese. This time it is the Soviets, just over the border in Afghanistan.

As the Reagan administration sees it, bolstering Pakistani military capabilities will stiffen resistance to any Soviet tendency to expand further. As the Indians see it, no number of F-16s could make the Pakistanis a credible deterrent to Soviet military power. The more logical target of new weapons would be themselves. They have won all three India-Pakistan wars and do not doubt they could do it again. But at what cost and for what good reason? Jeane J.

Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on a recent pass through the region informed the Indians in her usual no-backtalk fashion that there was no reason for alarm. Their estimate of the situation is all wrong. Arms for Pakistan would introduce "an element of stability." There has been no comment on that point as yet from George G.B. Griffin.

She also rejected as a canard assertions of American preference for dictatorships over democracies in its foreign partnerships. Maybe, but she would have a hard time proving that on the evidence of U.S. relations with India and Pakistan. Newspaper Enterprise Association Berry's World Jackson, with the luxury of having disapproved with the minority of most of the Reagan theories, offered some free advice. "Your basic problem," he told Michel, "is that the' president doesn't have any private input from major investment bankers.

He needs his own Henry Kaufman." (Kaufman is the chief economist of one of the nation's largest investment banking houses who has been predicting for months that Reaganomics wouldn't work.) Jackson put his finger on an incredible weak spot in the Reagan White House. The president is the first modern chief executive of either party not to turn regularly for advice to one or more big financiers from the Wall Street or corporate establishment. This is a strange gap for a president so unabashedly pro-business. He apparently assumed that if his own rich friends liked what he was doing, so would all of the corporate and financial world. After all, he had been saying what he was going to do all along, and businessmen were so enthusiastic he reached the White House.

But big business and the big-time money markets are not a monolith. Wall Street and the financial markets are $5 trillion in size, which is more than six times the size of the federal government's budget. And the president's wealthy business friends tend to be self-made Californians who were more interested in the ideology behind Reaganomics than the reality of how the financial markets in the East would react to a huge federal deficit and continued high interest rates. The president and his staff forgot that while the business of politicians is politics, and sometimes ideology, the business of business is business. And while financiers are happy to accept any largess governent wants to throw their way they are not about to risk cold cash on a political fantasy contradicted by gloomy budget figures.

They insist upon one peculiarity on Wall Street. They won't buy something, no matter who's selling, if it doesn't add up. Reagan is learning in all this a crucial presidential truth. He relied on his friends, and they let him down. He gave them something for nothing, so they took it.

The lesson here is that presidents cannot have friends or enemies, they can only have interests. The president should have taken a colder look at his budget figures. Common sense all along has indicated that what he wanted to do was impossible massive tax cuts are inflationary, boosting private consumption, reducing necessary federal revenue and resulting in high interest rates which hold back investment. His campaign response to doubters that he would solve any federal financial problems by eliminating waste, fraud and corruption was so frivolous that he doesn't even attempt to raise it any more. So what's next? Congressional Republicans are talking about punishing the financial markets with credit controls and the like, but that's silly and won't solve anything anyway.

The president doesn't want to cut the military budget very much and Congress doesn't want to cut entitlement programs very much. The bottom has in fact been nearly reached in the social program cuts; domestic instability is a very real threat. One solution might be to postpone some of the biggest tax breaks and impose other, new taxes upon the corporations and the wealthy, perhaps through new fees on luxury items. It is time the president tried jawboning and voluntary wage sr.d price guidelines. And, oh yes, calling on an investment banker for advice wouldn't hurt.

tKing Fe0furej Syndicate T7jrni Voice Of The People "economic factors cannot be considered in any matter which involves a risk to public health and safety." Those token words are matched by the token public hearings that have been variously held to lull us into thinking that the input of American citizens might actually be taken seriously by the powers-that-be. I attended a day of hearings in 1979 held near the Diablo plant. I listened to the eloquence, to the facts, to the pleas of all kinds of people scientists, mothers, ministers, workers, college students, professorsand watched the closed faces of the commission members. It was as if they didn't want to hear what they were hearing mcuh less weigh it. As if the conclusion was forgone anyway; they must endure the formality of hearing us.

No wonder then that the only action left is for the people to put their bodies on the line to say no to the inhuman and unacceptable risks of nuclear power, no to the idea that investment is more important than the lives of men, women and children. Ironically, there is less need for the electricity today which will not benefit San Luis Obispo, but is destined for the San Joaquin Valley. Conservation, hardly started, has already lowered former projects. Lea Wood 1745 Cox Road Aptos Do They Listen? Editor: "Premeditated, random is what Dr. John Gofman, former director of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory called the use of nuclear power.

That is what Diablo Canyon nuclear plant will perpetrate upon us and our posterity in the name of the $2 billion mistake made in building the plant in the first place. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, supposedly in existence to protect the health and safety of us all in nuclear matters, has admitted that no permit would be given to construct Diablo today. Back in 1973 when only $500 million had been spent, an NRC spoksman said "Hey, c'mon! I could care less if my wife makes more money than I do well, maybe a I ORIGINAL DEFECTIVE.