WORLD By SI GERSON Wow many will go to the polls on November 4? And ho will actually cast these fateful ballots? The answers ve nese questions may well determine the character of oming 100th Congress and especially the political ance in the now Reagan-controlled U.S. Senate. The experts tend to be gloomy. Looking at the bare __es of the last few decades, there is reason for con- Voter participation has gone down, no question jt. ; £960, when President Kennedy was elected, 62.8 In pt of the eligible voters cast ballots. However, by 4 only 53.3 percent voted for president. In short, only ¥ palf of the eligible electorate votes in presidential : ply a third in the mid-term congressional elections, : 4rding to the Committee for the Study of the Ameri- i gjectorate (CSAE), a Washington-based research apization. | The recent primary turnout sank to the lowest level in s, the CSAE reports. The average national turn- of cligible voters for major statewide races (senate or enor) was 10.3 per cent. That’s way down from 1966 ve" st was 18 per cent. @ wonder that political analysts write books with sue" >? and “The Empty Polling Booth.”’ These well-in- “sedge oned people make surveys, draw graphs, list tables 4 nly occasionally provide insights into the profound o jon of the alienation of millions of eligible voters. wever, most agree that a maze of laws, regulations estrictions — not to speak of hostile intimidation ine ted at poorer people, particularly Blacks and La- i — have kept millions from exercising their right to nO” his grouping is variously estimated from 4 to 13 ORAS CSAE director Curtis B. Gans came closer to idee mark in a Boston College speech last year when he pot it seems clear that the principal causes of con- i dlow and declining voter participation . . . lies not in J plaintive titles as ‘‘Where Have All the Voters. Voter turnout could determine face of the next U.S. Congress mobilization and demography, but in the quality and content of our politics.” “‘Quality and content of our politics.” Here Gans is obviously referring to standard major party politics and the failure to advance the issues meaningful to masses, such issues as peace, a nuclear test ban, jobs, equality, affirmative action, affordable housing, health insurance, educational opportunity, etc. Precisely the failure to ad- vance fighting programs along these lines induce the mass disillusion with the two major parties and increas- ing abstention from voting. Also, the persistent strangling of third party and inde- pendent political action through a myriad of laws and regulations discourages many who would otherwise participate in the electoral process. Note, for example, the burial in committee of Rep. John Conyers’ (D-Mich) bill, HR 2320, which would have liberalized the law for federal elections. However, despite the mountain of barriers, an anti- Reaganite movement is rising in the country, principally fueled by organized labor and the Black and Latino communities. These forces are independent of the major party machines and have as their principal aim defeating Reaganism and especially shifting the narrow balance in the Senate to create an anti-Reagan majority there and a firm peace majority in the House. Despite the soothsayers’ predictions of a low vote in the general election in November, labor and its allies are busily mobilizing to attain their goals. In virtually all cases they are supporting Democratic senatorial candi- dates of various shadings while advancing their indepen- dent programs. Many of their methods are conventional. However, a high degree of sophistication has also been developed. In union local after local, computers have been installed. Registration books are checked against union lists and members are called upon to register and vote for the labor-backed candidates. The same holds for Black, Hispanic, peace and church groups in a variety of ways. With slightly more than three weeks left, the phone 3 we GREAT Pe, 2 & “= ig ‘ a ws. Ena a ‘Despite mountains of barriers an anti-Reaganite move- ment is rising in the country ...’ Photo: Peace marchers head toward Three Mile Island on their way to New Jer- sey, New York and Washington. banks are humming, the leaflets are being distributed and the doorbells are being run in hundreds of communities. At this stage, the central task is to get out the vote of precisely those who can make the difference —the work- _ ing people and their allies, the family farmers, the Black and Hispanic peoples and all others who are victims of the monopolies. It is the supreme task of the day, for on it depends, ina very literal sense, the peace and welfare of the nation and the world. — People’s Daily World sN TERNATIONAL FOCUS Tom Morris ff godis _neir co-pilot jsraeli pilots flying regular : mbing runs over Lebanon est feel it’s just another day # the office. Many will recall U.S. pilots ‘ag similar runs over Viet- Le telling the media it was a nojean war up there 30,000 { above the carnage. De- KE before, Mussolini's son, Italian pilot bombing aD jopia in the 1930s, called cricnce ‘‘beautiful’’. We | gut American airmen found Ne, ~on the ground after being | lif ot down less than clinical. | oo ey came face to face with pe people they once peghtered from afar. Their e had come to pay the piper. st week, on the 13th raid Roer Lebanon by the Israeli air o this year, a Phantom F-4 fener was blown out of the sky, one of its two pilots captured. In the Israeli raid that day four Lebanese were killed, 12 wounded. There was not a murmer — dead and wounded Lebanese are commonplace to a hardened media. But the captured pilot created a storm. Israel angrily demanded his return. ‘‘There must be no wavering,’ de- clared Prime Minister Shamir before a jingoistic Knesset. Think about it. Israeli pilots who _ kill surgically and efficiently from high in the sky must truly be God’s chosen people. Direct from New York City! Folklore has it that New York taxi drivers are among the world’s most versatile and resourceful people. Perhaps that’s why one of their cabbies was invited last week to speak in Toronto by Act for Disar- ment, a local peace group. The problem isn’t that cabby Mikhail Ostrovsky was invited — it’s that he was invited to ‘represent’ the Soviet view- point as a former member of the so-called Moscow Trust Group. And so, in addition to per- haps finding a New York tour- ist a good restaurant, or tickets to a Mets game, we saw the versatile Ostrovsky: e Claim that ‘an independent peace movement’’ in the USSR “is growing in size and in- fluence’, and now numbers 5,000. No Toronto cabby could tell you that. e Claim the Moscow Trust Group ‘‘probably influenced Gorbachev to seek a nuclear weapons test ban with the U.S.” Ostrovsky’s sources of infor- mation are awesome, consid- ering he left the USSR in 1982, almost three years before Gor- bachev became Soviet leader. e Claim the Moscow Trust Group “‘is not based on political ideology’. Well, even New York cabbies can have a bad day... The Toronto peace group also invited a U.S. spokesman (who at least didn’t claim to represent another country), but who also spent his time So- viet-bashing. Bob McGlynn from Brooklyn, N.Y., (just ac- ross the river from Ostrovsky), boasted how he handed out leaflets in Gorky Park last summer warning of radiation hazards from Chernobyl. Muscovites must have been duly impressed, considering their media was full of the accident. . . Just about now you'd think that ACT would be wondering what sort of New York side- show they brought to town with this dynamic duo. You’d think the nickel would drop. If it was anti-Sovietism ACT wanted, they got what they paid for. If they wanted voices for peace, ACT was just had by a couple of pros from the Big Apple. High cost of ‘success’ We've seen a bevy of Cana- dian politicians travel to South Korea in recent months, in- cluding Prime Minister Mul- roney and other assorted top government and _ business people. The South Korean Hyundai automobile grows in popular- ity in Canada and that country is increasingly in the news as site of the 1988 Summer Olym- pics. All this is enough to give the impression that South Korea is another mysterious Asian suc- cess story — an economic miracle happily building its economy and _ international trade prowess, strong in hi- tech and labor efficiency and merrily preparing to play host to the world in 1988 — a real Shangri-la. In fact, South Korea is a brutal military dictatorship where opposition political par- ties are banned, unions are suppressed, labor is cheap, life is arduous, profits are high, the rich wallow in wealth and the poor are ground down. South Korea is also a bul- wark of American military power in Asia, supporting 40,000 U.S. troops and a mons- ter domestic army poised both against its own people and pointed north. And if all that isn’t enough, last week the regime an- nounced it will “investigate” about 30 religious, student and “‘dissident’’ groups in a new crackdown. This is expected to involve about 10,000 persons who have the courage to op- pose the dictatorship and, therefore, must be removed. Our travelling Tories seemed to have missed all this. PACIFIC TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 29, 1986 « 9 i abies aca a ARAN REMBE ET He. ets came = hh SM BS RS AEN ee uMUNR RENE.