He promises to work for the abolition of PR. "The PR system was instituted by the Yanks to get the Irish out of politics," he said. "I think it's a rotten system."
MacDonald
Torbert MacDonald '69 asks voters to ask the question "Paranoid or Pragmatist?" in assessing him as a potential city councilman. The question is well put. The electorate's decision to vote for him will depend on which one of those two ways they see him.
MacDonald is perhaps the most radical of this year's candidates. If elected he will use his seat "as an organizing position" and will resort to non-violent civil disobedience if he feels it is warranted.
Eccle
A bizarre tragedy has cut short Rev. Miriam Eccle's first foray into elective politics this fall.
Her 20-year old son Charles has been charged with accidentally killing his younger brother Alfred when a gun he had taken from a car on Putnam Avenue misfired.
Her solutions to the city's problems take an original approach that some observers label naive and unrealistic. For instance, she proposed to ease the local housing shortage by means of a city takeover of all dilapidated housing.
Socialist Workers Party
The four Socialist Workers Party (SWP) candidates for city council--Carol H. Evans, Jane Roland, Nancy D. Charpentier, and Jane E. Strader--are campaigning on a joint platform rather than as individual candidates. They freely admit that they do not expect to win, but are running "to advance socialism and expose Cambridge to socialist ideas."
The four women call for a complete realignment of the city's tax structure, including the payment of full taxes by Harvard and MIT. Charpentier says the universitys' current voluntary payments are "a token fee to keep the people quiet."
The SWP's second major issue is rent control. Evans speaks for her slate in advocating full tenant control of the city's rent control board, and says that rent should be no more than 10 per cent of a person's income.
"If the landlord says he cannot survive with the reduced rents," Evans says, "he should open his books to the public and, if it's so, the property should be bought and run by the city."