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Ronnie's Boys: Recruited by Alice from Wonderland

By VVAW

(News Item: "After the defeat of Ernest Lefever of the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, the Reagan Administration is now considering abolishing the office altogether.")

OK—so Ernie Lefever—champion of Chilean, South African and South Korean regimes—didn't make it as head of the Office of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Is that any reason to close down the office entirely?

Ronnie, if you can take a dentist—James Edwards—from South Carolina, whose primary qualification is membership in the American Conservative Union, and turn him into a Secretary of Energy who supports no controls on oil or gas and who loves nuclear energy, then you could find someone else to cover your Human Rights Office.

James Watt made it as Secretary of the Interior. Now here's a man whose own "public interest" law firm is financed by coal, oil, timber and mineral companies and yet he gets to oversee the conversation of our natural resources as well as the Ocean Mining Administration. His firm once sued to keep the handicapped, elderly and poor forgetting lower utility rates. He was even involved in lawsuits challenging the rights of Native American Indian tribes to control mineral leasing on their reservations, and he's going to oversee the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (You'll find someone—maybe some juanta could spare one of their guys for three and a half years.)

The Defense Secretary, Casper Weinberger, was known as "Cap the Knife" for his swell budget cutting back in California's free-the-mental patients days. And together with your budget man Stockman, he attempts to take from the poor and give to the defense contractors, like United Technologies (the 3rd largest) whose president was Secretary of State Alexander Haig. (Come on Ron, isn't Theiu hanging out in London now?)

You've got Samuel Pierce as Housing and Urban Development Secretary who, as previous member of Prudential's board of directors, can now oversee the Federal Insurance Administration. Oh, and the vice-president of a company which was caught violating safety standards 135 times since 1974—Raymond Donovan—is Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dick Sweiker, who once sponsored anti-OSHA legislation, takes his new job so seriously that his department is planning to recommend that his office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs try to solve the teen pregnancy epidemic through abstinence on the part of the teens.

Edwin Meese III—your chief of staff and #1 advisor—has been working with the Heritage Foundation for years. This radical right think-tank has been involved in textbook censorship battles and believes food should be used as a weapon, that the neutron bomb should be deployed in Europe, that you should use McCarthy type tactics against dissidents because the treat to internal security is greater today than at any time since World War II.

So, it naturally follows that if you can get all this crew, who won't do one damn but of good, surely you can find someone for your human rights post. Why disband the office? It's the same as if you did anyhow! (Maybe Godzilla is still around.)

Lynne Miller
Chicago,IL