The swindle is being carried out with the collusion of the Texas Railroad Commission, a state body that is supposed to regulate utilities and the prices they charge.

The Lo-Vaca Gathering Company sells natural gas to 400 Texas cities and towns, large and small. In 1973, Lo-Vaca went before the railroad commission and explained that the price it was paying for gas was going up and it wanted permission to pass on the increase to its customers. The commission agreed.

Since then, every month, Lo-Vaca simply has added to its bill what it says is the increased cost it is paying.

A fight is being waged against this highway robbery. It is being led by the Raza Unida city council in Crystal City. They refused to pay, and some twenty other municipalities have since followed suit.

Lo-Vaca put their lawyers to work. So far courts have upheld Lo-Vaca and the railroad commission. Crystal City is now appealing to the State Supreme court.

I recently talked about Lo-Vaca with Esequiel Guzmán, the city manager in Crystal City. What did he think of Lo-Vaca's recent threat to go out of business?

"I wish they would," Guzmán replied. "I don't think they should be in that business. I think it should be controlled by the government. A natural resource should be available to everybody. I don't think profit should determine the availability of a natural resource."  
 
May 28, 1951
The intellectual atmosphere of American university campuses is dominated by "fear...uncertainty...frustration...hysteria," according to a study of thought-control at 72 colleges and universities by Kalman Seigel, in the N.Y. Times May 10 and 11.

Seigel quotes an article in the Yale University paper, The Daily News, which typifies the student attitude:

"We cannot believe that the American people will indefinitely tolerate this control over youthful lives by looming up before them the spectre of the 'loyalty check.' We cannot believe that this virtual blockade of the market-place of ideas can go on for a lifetime.

"And yet, despite hope, we see the sky growing darker, the night of thought-conformity closing in. We see college men growing more and more docile, more and more accepting the status quo, paralyzed by fear of their futures, radicalism snuffed out where it should flame the brightest."

Seigel sums up the situation as a "subtle, creeping paralysis of freedom of thought and speech...attacking college campuses in many parts of the country, limiting both students and faculty in the area traditionally reserved for the free exploration of knowledge and truth."

But Seigel points out that on many campuses students and teachers are fighting back. "At a number of...colleges students reported that the pressures toward conformity, which many felt had filtered through college walls from the community at large, made them 'mad' and more articulate, and had stimulated increased free expression."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home