New York financial crisis

Well, for most of the country, but not all, it does seem that the petrifying winter is just about over. You'd expect Anchorage, Alaska still to have 15 degrees of frost which it does, but not Albany, New York which it did. But apart from these freaks and some snow in northern New England, even the prairie and the Great Plains seem to melting into a bearable spring.

The trouble with the middle of the country is that once it ceases to be Arctic, it tends to become infernal. Kansas City had snow a week ago; yesterday it was 80 degrees. Even New York City, which had a run of shivery days last week, suddenly zoomed up to 82, which is the kind of thing which gives the mayor sleepless nights and tremendous rows with the controller of the city's budget. 

You no doubt heard the shocked cries of visitors to this city over the cracked pavements and the potholes in the roadways and the inevitable consequence – cars and trucks and taxis that rattle like crockery in an earthquake. Of course, most American cities have always suffered from these extremes of heat and cold and their streets and roadways have always been subject to crackings and meltings and burstings. But in other years, the money, the crews and the equipment were there to mend them come the spring. 

The money, as you may have heard, is no longer there. The crews are shrunken, the equipment is old and while, at the moment, midtown Manhattan is jammed with traffic wriggling around repair sites and fenced-off islands bang in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the farther north you go uptown, the fewer fences and the non-existent crews. By the time you reach Harlem on the east side and the Bronx further east still, the buildings, the streets, are so pitted and ruined and the streets so waist-high with long uncollected garbage bags that you'd think you were looking at some malicious Soviet film on the decay of the West. 

Add to these chronic woes the acute crisis of last weekend. The mayor was seen on television several times a day striding in to hotel lobbies under a blare of arc lights while television reporters jammed a forest of microphones under his nose and begged him to say something. He was in and out, night and day. He was commuting between the managers and the unions of the Long Island railroad and the underground railways and the bus companies, not to mention the besieged offices of the New York Times and the Daily News, our only morning papers. 

Until Friday midnight, the city was faced with four strikes – no trains, no buses, no tube, no newspapers. In the nick of time – they always wait till about a minute to midnight – all the threats were called off. There were no strikes. The newspaper settlements were, of course, the business of the newspapers but the new contracts for the railway, tube and bus workers – 33,000 of them – was the mayor's business. These people are called transit workers and they got a six per cent wage increase and other benefits which are going to cost the city $96 million the mayor says the city hasn't got. But he hopes for money from Washington and he says the transit settlement is fair and reasonable. But it seems the transit workers, who followed their leader, don't think so. About two-thirds of them say they will turn it down when the ballots go out this weekend. 

What will keep the mayor sleepless is the fact that a whole raft of other unions, other city workers, are getting ready to strike a couple of months from now unless they get a new contract at least as substantial as the one that the transit workers wangled. Now even if this happened, if everybody settled for six per cent, a cash bonus, cost of living clause, it would cost the city about $900 million extra a year for its municipal employees. And that's where Washington comes in. 

New York City is today the ward, you might say, of a Senate committee, the Senate banking committee, which says how much federal money New York shall get in the form of loans. It's got to the point, by the way, where to a New Yorker, a federal loan is an outright gift of money that may be paid back in the unspecified hereafter. 

Well, Washington exploded at the terms of the transit settlement which, it seems, the transit workers are not about to accept. 'It would be outrageous,' said Senator Proxmire, the chairman of the Senate – the New York bailing-out – committee. 'It would be outrageous if this pact serves as a precedent, a pattern for other settlements with city workers.' After his first eruption, Senator Proxmire simmered a little and said he would go over the figures carefully and see what effect they're likely to have on the prospects for balancing the city budget. That is a phrase which caused long and jolly laughter. 

New York has survived precariously for three years now on vast federal loans received entirely in the expectation that they would be followed by vaster federal loans. Well, where all this will end knows only, as Time used to say, God. For three months anyway, till 1 July when the other city worker unions come up for their bite, we shall go on living in the rousing dream world of New York which the mayor – and most of its citizens – insist in song and speeches is the greatest city on earth. One thing’s for sure, it's the greatest 'borrowing' city on earth. 

The other two explosions that excited many more Americans than New Yorkers came from a little bomb and a big bomb. The little bomb was dropped as we're told – 300 million people around the earth were watching – by Miss or Ms Vanessa Redgrave during the annual circus of the Oscar awards in Hollywood. Things were going along much as usual, sets of incredible dimensions, damp firecracker jokes, iridescent gowns cut down to here, a scene of what the New York Times's Irish critic called 'inimitable vulgarity', when Miss Redgrave's regal beauty moved toward the rostrum. 

Now there've been some awkward moments in the past. George C. Scott didn't show up, Marlon Brando sent an American Indian girl to pick up his Oscar by way of a symbolic protest against the American treatment of the Indians. On Monday, Woody Allen in a gesture of droll, if bad-mannered, eccentricity affected not to care about Oscars or Hollywood and kept to his usual Monday night routine which is tootling on a clarinet in a local pub. 

But we've never had anything like Miss Redgrave's quick shock when she thanked the assembled mob of beautiful and garish people and said, 'You should be very proud that in the last few weeks you stood firm and you refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums'. There was a gasp like that of a wounded whale so there was barely time to hear the rest of the sentence which went, 'whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record against fascism and oppression'. 

She was evidently referring to the pickets of the Jewish Defence League who were traipsing around, peaceable enough, outside. But the ill-timed structure of the sentence made it sound – made a lot of people jump to the assumption – that she was talking about Jews in general and Israel in particular. The unhappy, ill-chosen little bomb was the phrase 'Zionist hoodlums' which Miss Redgrave may or may not know is a phrase patented by the Soviets and shared by terrorist groups and other anti-Semites everywhere in the world. She went on to pay tribute to those who stood firm against Nixon and reaching back a quarter of a century the late Joseph McCarthy. 

Well, this may not have been the time or place to reassure us about her stand against fascism and Senator McCarthy but it was an unfortunate place to mention 'Zionist hoodlums', whoever they may be. I mention this sorry episode only because, two days after it, the New York Times published a survey it's been making on the attitude of American Jews towards American and Israeli policies in the Middle East. And it concludes that American Jews are confused, uneasy, distressed or even angry, as rarely before, about the policies of both the American and the Israeli governments. 

In warning you a week or two ago not to pick up the lazy assumption that there is a solid Jewish vote in this country, I hazarded the guess that American Jewry is split in its views on the Middle East and the Times has amply confirmed the guess. Many Jews are unsure about what American policy now is. Many are critical of Mr Begin's leadership. Many are afraid to say so for fear of losing the good opinion of their neighbours. Very many make a point of saying that fanatical Palestinians do not represent all Palestine. 

In short, there's just as much range of opinion as there is elsewhere. What is new is the willingness of Jews to announce their views to accept a split and to share the general belief that the security of Israel is the main issue, but not necessarily to be secured on the terms the present Israeli government wants. 

The big bomb that dropped on Washington last week was, of course, the argument over the neutron bomb. It's an issue loaded with emotionalism ever since the phrase got out that 'the neutron bomb destroys people not buildings'. It comes up at all because Western Europe is now convinced that the Soviet Union has a massive superiority in men, tanks and all other ground forces. And if they moved, what would stop them would, presumably, be atomic artillery that spreads wide radiation and destroys both people and buildings. 

The case for the neutron bomb is that it would annihilate advancing motorised divisions, but that it would not devastate the countryside and the towns. The case against it is that its effectiveness might bate the Soviets into a full-scale nuclear war.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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