Nixon Plan To Let Private Firms Aid Poor Negroes

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31863, 16 December 1968, Page 17

Nixon Plan To Let Private Firms Aid Poor Negroes

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, December 15. Mr Richard Nixon’s choice for key urban affairs jobs indicates that he is preparing new methods to deal with the plight of cities, and the Negroes living in their ghettos, writes Robert Trautman, an N.Z.P.A.Reuter correspondent.

Trautman continues:

It is still too early to discern Mr Nixon’s exact tactics, but it seems clear by the nature of his “city aidss” that he is going to discard the methods used first by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 19305, and carried on in only slightly altered form by succeeding presidents Democrats and Republicans alike.

The Nixon strategy will be to put private enterprise into the forefront of the battle to rebuild city ghettos and provide jobs for Negroes, and relegate federal efforts to coordinating and secondary roles—as foreshadowed in his election campaign. This would mean cutting back the operations of the sprawling Department of Health, Education and Welfare (H.E.W.), headed by Mr Robert Finch, a close friend of Mr Nixon.

H.E.W. now employs more than 100,000 staff and commands a budget, including social security payments, of more than SUS37,OOOm. In the Nixon scheme, the money outflow of H.E.W., which under the Johnson Administration was in the forefront of the “Great Society” programme, would be pared, and business would receive tax considerations for work

in re-building slums and training the unemployed.

This will be a break with the old philosophy of fighting poverty, which achieved moderate success. It tried generally to ease the burdens of the poor through such methods as make-work jobs, welfare payments and federal housing.

While easing the burdens of the poor, President Johnson’s programme also tried to eliminate the “psychology” of poverty which was seen as enveloping the poor, generation after generation. President Johnson's attempts to finance his approach were blocked to a great extent by the millions of dollars required by the Vietnam war. Other Appointments Accompanying Mr Finch in the new Nixon tactic to cure the ills of America’s cities and their poor, mostly Negroes, will be Mr George Romney, now Governor of Michigan, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Mr John Volpe, the Governor of Massachusetts, as Secretary of Transportation. All are described as “technocrats”. Balancing this trio of ad-

ministrators will be Mr Daniel Moynihan, as chief of Mr Nixon’s new White Housebased Council on Urban Affairs. Mr Moynihan, a Labour Department official in President Kennedy’s Administration, is described as an “urbanologist,” part economist, part sociologist, and part philrsopher. He will leave his present post as director of the Joint Centre for Urban I Studies at Harvard University ’and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Flu Vaccine Arrives.— The first Australian vaccine against “Mao flu”—the Hong Kong strain of influenza that is reported to be sweeping the United States—has reached Britain. British doctors have warned that "Mao flu” is expected to reach Britain byJanuary or February. —London, December 15.