Valley News from West Lebanon, New Hampshire • 4

A Conservative View -sji 'JU i 3rj Getting Back To CETA The Valley News Published afternoon and Saturday morninp except idayi and Hoiidiyi for the Upper Valley by the Valley Publiihini Corporation PO Box 177 White River Jet Vt 06001 Under the device known as municipal governments have abused foe-program by uring federal fewto to pad thr local payrolls In terms of national contributions toward a significant lasting reduction in hsrd-core record is Walter C- Paine Pubiidier and Editor-In-Chief James Napoli Editoni Pife Editor Wednesday September 27 1971 WASHINGTON The determined to the Comprehensive 1 and Training Act knownfor short as CETA and it perhaps is fotile to keep hollering against it thdeas for the record this wasteful mismanaged program continues to provide a prime example of much that is wrong in governmeent today Yes the CETA outlays have accomplished some good It would be impossible for even the most incompetent bureaucrats to ladle out MO billion a year and not do some -good Since I last wrote about CETA scores of local ad- ministrators and jobholders have written in defense of the program and their sincerity is not to be questioned But the faults in CETA are too deep to be- remedied by cosmetic amendments to the' law or by conscientious people here and there At bottom the problem is simply that the Congress is attempting to work miracles and the Congress im to the job The theory is that if only enough billions are ap- propria ted somehow the hard- core unemployed will be born again as skilled labor Life work that way Too many billions have been provided Given an appropriation of ten or eleven billion dollars no agency on earth could spend the money responsibly The temptations are irresistible and hundreds of con artists hustlers and streetwise opportunists have made no effort to resist them Merry-Go-Round Elderly Surveyed One of the recurrent arguments for establishing a public transportation system in the Upper Valley is that the poor and elderly in rural areas are in dire need of one It comes as no surprise then that a survey of elderly people in seven New Hampshire counties including Sullivan and Grafton has found that transportation is considered their second' most serious problem The elderly respondents listed their first problem as inadequate income which of course contributes to their lack of mobility "In some parts of the state particularly in the North Country there is just no way for people to get around if they're not affluent enough and healthy enough to own a car" commented Jim Verschueren who works on social programs for the elderly The lack of transportation in turn contributes to the third most frequently cited problem the loneliness and isolation that afflict many of the state's 95000 elderly people The NH Association for the Elderly deserves credit for conducting the door-to-door survey under the auspices of the NH Council on Aging and for document- ing the scope of the problems facing older persons A rural transit system in the Upper Valley could help alleviate those problems War Against Crime Bumwr Research Report Growing Independence Marks Burger Court In Tenth Year showed up The CETA workers spent their idle hours working hard at doing nothing and being well paid for their labor The Northern Virginia Daily and tiie Winchester Star last week chronicled a CETA i involving Puerto Ricans in chartered planes to Dulles Airport with a view towird putting them to work as apple pickers nothing wrong with that idea but many of the Puerto Ricans who arrived were totally unprepared for the arduous demands of an apple orchard They could not -manage the 22-foot ladders or heft the Sdpound apple buckets and even with some patient tutelage they were picking only six to eight bushels an hour The growers faced with harvesting a 44 mil lion-bushel crpp in 40 days refined flat-out to hire more than about half of foe Puerto Ricans flown in The rest had to be housed in motels and finally most of them were flown back to San Juan It was a costly fiasco in every way and a cruel disservice to the disap printed workers Government can make a sensible contribution of course to the unemployment problem Government can create an atmosphere in which business and industry can make the profits and retain the capital that add up to tools and jobs and production But little of lasting value can be created by throwing bill ion of tax dollars into bray little artificial jobs with no past and nri much future either Faltering Coast underworld Michael RizziteQo Louis Tom Dragna Thomas Ricciardi Jack LeCkero Dominick Brooklier known on the streets as and of course Bomp and Fratianno 32SSS0 Tribute Bomp kept the FBI informed on the shakedowns There was me porno operator for example who paid a 320000 tribute to the mob for foe privilege of staying in business For betraying such confidences to foe FBL Bomp was efficiently rubbed out it is alleged under the direction of the ruthless Fratianno Now It Is Fratianno who is talking to the FBI and watching over his shoulder for a Mafia hit man Fratianno jumped sides after a Cleveland racketeer Ray Ferrito began singing to the FBI to save his own skin One of the big names he mentioned was that of Fratianno Meanwhile the FBI learned about a murder contract on Fratianno for plotting against his syndicate superiors The FBI used inside information to persuade Fratianno that his life wasn't worth a plugged nickel if he stayed on the streets So Fratianno under in-dictment on racketeering charges and facing execution by his underworld bosses began squealing He filled in details that his erstwhile victim the late Bomp had omitted about the porno shakedown The FBI built a strong case against the Los Angeles mobsters even setting up its own undercover porno business to gather the proof The investigation led to indictments against ex-associates an indictment that has been dismissed but according to insiders will be renewed Footnote: We attempted without success to reach foe figures named in this column for their comments Either we could not locate them or they tailed to return our calls Quote Mr A BATTISTA: greatest tragedies in man's history have occurred when well educated leaders act with intellectual consumers I utility stocks and bad decide after tiie poor The Republican Study Committee haa been putting together a CETA acrapbook A typical item: CETA recently gave 3336100 of our tax to La Raza a Kilpatrick organization a history of political The purpose of the CETA grant is to help -others get CETA grants This is hardly the kind of training in job skills envisioned by the naive authors of the act Out in California the Thousand Oaks News-Chronicle reported last month that CETA ere being used in its conduct a- toilet-conservation Down in Louisiana the States-Item charged that CETA finds were used to help a state senator run for office Among the hard-core unemployed hired by the New Orleans regional service center- were the senator's niece and nephews This particular CETA center was supposed to provide a reading program for children but for six months no children But the crackdown will never be successful as we have pointed out in pari crime reports as long as the populace patronizes the rackets For it is the American people who provide the substance' that the Mafia needs to spin its spiderweb Every payoff to a bookie prostitute or pusher strengthens the mob and subsidizes lawlessness in this country The General Accounting Office has concluded that demand for organized goods and services provides billions of dollars of income each All federal lawmen can do is to throw an occasional running block in the path of a dangerous crime lord They recently got a break which has turned a notorious Mafioso into the most important underworld witness since Joe ValachL This inside informant is 63-year-old Aladena Fratianno known in crime circles simply as whose life is now better protected than the For every hit man in the murder business would like to collect on the contract that the crime chiefs have placed on life As one source close to the case told our associate Marc Smrionsky information could them aU Years ago the Chicago Mafia dispatched Fratianno to help protect its crime operations on the West Coast The FBI believes Fratianno was the chief West Coast executioner He has performed 15 alleged killings that the FBI has heard about He is most celebrated in the underworld for allegedly knocking off Frank BocnpensierO once a fearsome figure on foe West Coast Bomp was killed for violating the Mafia's most deadly taboo: he was slipping information to the FBL He had tipped off the FBI about mob shakedowns of pornographic operators in Los Angles Allegedly applying the squeeze were some of the ugliest customers in the West SCWIP a Makes Makes Good for the (Again aU III When lines: enough Of a He was Still Open abortion and upheld affirmative action programs Despite these and other rulings the Burger Court haWound it difficult to shake conservative reputation Nearly 99 percent of the lawyers and judges responding to a survey by US News World Report magazine last year described the Burger Court as more conservative than the Warren Court Mis leadiag Comparison But comparisons of court philosophies can be mislnsiHng since different courts rarely have the opportunity to consider identical legal questions in similar contexts Many of the issues confronting the Burger Court including reverse discrimination busing and abortion kre quite different from the issues facing the court in the 1950s and 1960s and in many ways are more complicated According to some court watchers there would have been a tapering off of the judicial activism that characterized the Warren Court even if there had been no in the mem- University of Virginia law Professor AE Did: Howard who is writing a book on foe Burger Court sees the court's overall restraint as being in tune with the tenor of the 1970s the heady activism of the he said became disenchanted with grand designs and overreaching reform There is a sense of skepticism that foe court One of the hallmarks of the 1977-78 Supreme Court term was a loosening of the past voting patterns In 1973-73 their first foil term together the WASHINGTON The federal law enforcement apparatus appears powerless to cope with organized crime- whose ominous growth has reached crisis proportions in America If the Mafia were suddenly to incorporate its assets and' revenues would place it dose to the top of the Fortune 500 The mob has mushroomed into a 350 billion empire with the money and muscle to challenge city and state governments The symheate bosses control the illegal drug flow into the United States They direct tiie back-alley commerce in pornography prostitution and gambling They have also invested billions of dollars in such legitimate enterprises as real estate hotels restawants construction companies and liquor stores Notorious Mafia figures also hold key positions in some labor unions thus giving sticky mob fingers access to lucrative pension fluids All the crime endeavors of course are attended by bribery violence and murder In all too many localities the corruption of politicians and police has rendered law enforcement relatively ineffective against organized crime It has fallen on the federal government therefore to battle the underworld an intense struggle with the good guys pitted against the wise gqys Sadly the wise guys are winning Pattering Two years ago the General Accounting Office charged that the on organized crime is The campaign declared the study not planned organized or directed But there is mare behind this federal failure than common inefficiency Under ex-President Richard Nixon foe Justice Department was more enthusiastic about enforcing the laws against street crimes than the rackets This strange reluctance to pursue foe criminal godfathers reached such a stage under ex-Preaident Gerald Ford that several organized crime strike forces were disbanded Now foe Carter administration is bringing a new vigor to the subterranean war against tiie crime syndicate By SANDRA STENCEL WASHINGTON When the Supreme Court opens its fall term Oct 2 it will mark the beginning of Chief Justice Warren tenth year on the court Burger 'was President first appointment to the court During bis first term in office Nixon appointed three additional justices Harry A Blackmun Lewis Powell and William RehnquisL AH fora were described by Nixon as con- who would reverse the judicial activism that characterized the court under Chief Justice Earl Warren The label also seemed to apply to John Paul Stevens who was 1 to the court in 1875 by Ford following the retirement of Justice William 0 Douglas With departure only four members of the court remained who had served with Warren William Brennan Jr Potter Stewart Byron White and Thurgood Marshall Of the four only Brennan and Marshall could be 1 counted on to take the liberal side on most issues But even in its early the socalled Burger Court not as restrained and conservative as it frequently was portrayed to be by its critics or as President Nixon might have wanted it to be Since 1971 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the press in the Pentagon Papers case ordered President Nixon to turn over to Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski the taped conversations he sought approved the use of busing to desegregate public schools struck down most death penalty' laws overturned most restrictions on Wooden Nickels Nixon appointees voted together 70 percent of the time according to a statistical analysis by The New York Times During the 1973-74 term the Nixon bloc voted together 75 percent of the time in 1978-77 67 percent But last term the Nixon bloc voted together on only 36 percent of the cases The growing independence of the Nixon appointees was especially striking In criminal cases Two years ago the four voted as a Moc on 04 percent of such cases last year 66 percent but this year on only 375 percent Although there are no vacancies on the Supreme Court five of the nine including three Nixon appointees are 69 years of ajge or older Given the ages it is conceivable that President Carter might have an opportunity to make at least one Supreme Court appointment and perhaps several if he is elected to a second term Carter ms asked during the 1978 presidential campaign what kind of qualifications and philosophy he would look for in making appointments to the coot He responded in part: emphasis of the court system should be to interpret the Constitution and tin tows equally between property protection and personal protection But when a very narrow decision I think the choice should be with human Thomas Mason a of tiie court cautioned two decades ago that jratices in the past displayed conspicuous determination mid capacity to stay on drat Carter may have to a long time to put his on the cowt' A Test For Libertarians The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire which is fielding 13 candidates for state office in this year's election insists that it provides a positive alternative for those who want less government and more individual freedom Libertarians depart from the liberals who they see as responsible for the growing intrusion of government into the free economic system and into our everyday lives And they depart from the conservatives who they see as favoring interference into other people's civil liberties by legislating morality and lifestyles Libertarians favor an unadulterated combination of free enterprise and civil liberties But the civil liberties aspect of their platform isn't what's getting the big push this year That may be wise because the so- called "conservative wave" that's sweeping the country is downright careless about some people's civil liberties Charles A Burris executive director of the state's Libertarian Party instead stresses the party's anti-government position on his business cards certainly closer in keeping with the apparent national mood The back of his cards carries a condensed version of the Libertarian Party platform regarding government which reads like so: "1) We favor the abolition of damn near everything "2) We call for drastic reductions in everything else "3) And we refuse to pay for what's left" That kind of platform will no doubt appeal to a lot of overtaxed taxpayers in a mean mood But whether it constitutes a positive alternative is another question Meldrim Devises Prospective Laureates Obviously foe governor takes a keen i in the matter which is why hehas deviaed foe following teat for prospective poet Inmates (the answers are farfudnH in' parentheses): -L A fill-in-the-blank verse Choose the correct but seldom chosen Number One and a the reason why the Top Cheezey A Everyone here to a simply great from Massachusetts usually (The correct answers are a a a and a) three are right) Robert Frost wrote his what did he mean in the trust New Hampshire not to have radium or anything to expressing the dire need for Dayton Duncan been more than a year since Vinton the former poet lunate of New Hampshire died and the state is still without an official rhymer Miss Vinton was the lari person to hold life tenire as the poet laureate The state Legislature has passed a law changing the tenure to five years the pay remains the same which is nothing It's not the salary however tfaat'a preventing New Hampshire from taking on a new poet Gov Meldrim Thomson Jr hssn't nominated anyone yet to the Executive Council which must confirm the appointment Observers of the literary scene will remember that in 1974 Thomson withheld funds from Granite magazine because he thought a poem in it was obscene A year later he release money tar a aeries of poetry roarings unless he got assinnees that none of them would include objectionable IL Choose the proper following words' I Conservative Caucus a Fun group and raucous Only Commies mock like Dukakis (The correct answer to b) 1 1 a Unthinkable (AU three are appropriate) He was describing a state liquor store after tiie Columbus Day weekend rush No one ever knew exactly what Frost meant in any of his poem (Tiie correct answer to a) IV Write a 34-stinza poem on the topic: Why the United Statea should not recognize Red runs and should support South Africa and th Danama CbniI htalflfli mil Words Of Wisdom There is very little difference in people but that little difference makes a big difference The little' difference is attitude The big difference is whether it Is positive or negative Clement Stone endtags for this fourstanza poem Here in New Hampshire we live free a or die 1 and easy or cheap And called a foe Granite hfeka rubea and whoozits.