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Pell Speaks To ClubAmericans Need New DirectionBy DICK COVINGTON Congress should lead Americans away from lha object-oriented society towards production oE things of the mind, “degradable things,” Sen. Claiborne Pell told the Newport Discussion Club last night at the Hotel Viking.A concert, for instance, is a degradable thing/he said. It employs at least 300 people and when it's all over the audience . leaves, the musicians leave, the stage workers leave, and the environment hasn’t suffered.Federal monies should be redirected from the hardware sector to the human sector,’ he told the audience. Palming theair, Pell assured the ISO present that hewas concerned with'what is troubling the saverage man to his daily life” - Jobs, (education, health care, social security benefits and the environment. But the questions after his speech were directed mainly toward foreign policy matters.The same number of people are being killed in Vietnam, Pell said. Only now the soldiers are South Vietnamese. These facts were met with a ho-hum attitude at the colleges, he said, because fewer Americans were being killed.After the announcement of the mining of Haiphong harbor, young people streamed tnto his office. Either they were afraid of World War Cl or of being drafted, Pell said. This is the wrong morality, he said.PeU said President Nixon has used a “method I don't approve oE” in trying to end the war.This week 'the State Department approved a Pell-sponsored bill that would ban weapons from being planted on the seabed floor, the senator said.Pell told Uie group he was opposed to bilateral foreign aid programs, but favored multilateral aid programs. The wife of an official of an Indochinese country once told him at a dinner, “please Mr. Senator don't give us an aid program.” Aid programs can make a neutral country an international battleground, Pell noted.. As an alternate adviser to the Stockholm conference.' bn the Human Environment, Fell will be working for international cooperation to control pollution.Pell criticized the Department of Defense for becoming what he called a Department of Offense and said substantial cute could be made In the Air Force and Army, the branches of offense. More funds should be channeled Into the Navy, which‘he termed the defensive branch.In his prepared text Pell reviewed what he called a laundry list” of recent ac-1 compllshments tn the Senate. The much-maligned seniority .system has played a role in what I have done and can do for Rhode Island,” Pell said. He cited the billfor a proposed medical school for Brown University as ah example of his seniority influence.Troubles with educating his children, finding a job, paying for rLs tog health costs have made today's American a neo-isolationist, Pell said.As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee cm Education, Pell has worked for a bill that would approve “directdollar grants to qualified students based on family needs ” Seventy-five years ago the goal was to give everyone a high school education. Now everyone has a right to continue his education past high school,and not just college liberal arts, Pell noted. The country' needs'career training vocational training and more technicians ' and secretaries, he said.Although Pell told the audience he had proposed a program for comprehensive national health care, he had to tell a man in his.SO’s that this goal wouki not be realized in his lifetime. He said he Is supporting in the Senate a 2(1 per cent increase in social security benefits. The version the House hag passed called for a 5per cent increase.PeU said a fair tax system would come when the more glaring loopholes are closed and when property taxes are balanced. The senator said the government needs to restore the faith of Its people.
Newspaper Details
Newport Mercury
Newport, Rhode Island, US
Fri, May 26, 1972
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
John R.
USA 05 Nov 2019
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