Regional Rivalry

To the Editor of The Crimson:

After reading your editorial about George Bush's attempts to negotiate oil price stabilization, I was dismayed by your willingness to dismiss the oil crisis as a problem only of the "fatcat oilmen who have soaked it in for 10 years of high oil prices." Apparently, your editorial writers have watched one too many episodes of "Dallas."

You accept the idea that any human cost is expendable for the sake of economic efficiency and lower prices. My family lives in Texas, and I can tell you that the oil crisis hurts everyone in Texas--from the urban poor to the middle class to the oil magnates. Your editorial shows not only ignorance of the economic impact of collapsing oil prices--on Third World debtor nations like Mexico as well as on regional U.S. economies--but also some Yankee bigotry. Your attitude is "Screw Texas and the other oil states because we've been screwed by high oil prices in the past."

The lesson that we should learn from the last decade of economic dislocation in the industrial North is not the Reaganism of "survival of the fittest." Instead, we should have learned that the whole country has a responsibility to ease the painful process of industrial/regional economic adjustment. The same economic process which left thousands unemployed in the auto and steel industries is now affecting workers in the oil states. Our response to this regional depression shouldn't be joyful declarations of "Christmas in April," but a concerted governmental effort to minimize the short-term impact of falling oil prices--through programs to aid dislocated workers and some form of world price stabilization.

I guess you all just couldn't resist the opportunity to take a swipe at George Bush's hypocrisy. In the process, you buy into the same free-market fictions which helped wreck the Rust Belt. I hope that in the future you can look beyond petty regional rivalries and corrupt conservative formulas to see and respond to the real human costs of economic change. Kim Ladin '87-'88