NOTES IN THE NEWS

...A number of distinguished Americans, including theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and New York University law professor Edmund Cahn, who have studied the record, have concluded that Sobell was convicted on evidence "vague in content and slender in proof...

...f Per capita farm income is less than half non-farm income...

...others, including Reverend Peter McCormack, who was chaplain at Alcatraz when Sobell was there, are firmly convinced that Sobell is innocent...

...We share this view, along with the dean of civil libertarians, Roger Baldwin, whose concern is not only the injustice to the individual man, but the implications for our constitutional freedoms and safeguards of due process...

...They take the form of reduced rates, cancelled taxes, or payments hidden in various departmental budgets...

...In 1959 farm workers (operators and labor) received an average of seventy-one and one-half cents an hour...

...This somber picture bears little resemblance to the frequently-drawn picture of the pampered farmer, singled out by the Federal government for unique and special spoon feeding...

...Clemencv for Morton Sobell Success in the pursuit of legal justice is uncertain under the best of circumstances...

...But there were two items of farm lore on which almost everyone, candidate and voter alike, seemed to agree: The farmer is heavily—usually excessively—subsidized by the Federal government...

...But whatever the differences regarding Sobell's innocence or guilt, or the manner in which he was tried, there is almost unanimous agreement that his thirty-year sentence was harsh to the point of constituting "cruel and unusual punishment...

...f Many hundreds of millions of dollars have been assigned by the Federal government to ocean and airmail subsidies...

...That same year, the net loss to the government under the price support program was $1.1 billion, not all of which went to farmers...

...If the Kennedy Administration looks homeward to this hemisphere by restoring good neighborliness and by holding out a helping hand to the people of Latin America, rather than, as now, to the powerful elite of generals and landowners, it can do much to arrest the decline of our stature and help build the foundations of a healthy, democratic society strong enough to resist dictatorship from either the Left or the Right...

...Some who plead for clemency for Sobell, like Dr...

...Farm operators actually paid their hired hands more per hour than they themselves received...

...Treasury...

...Airlines subsidies, from 1939 to 1959, were $744 million...

...It is noteworthy, moreover, that the government generally obtains the industrial materials of defense under contracts drawn to assure profits to the producers, whereas the food for the armed forces is procured generally without reference to profits or losses of farmers...

...The uprisings in Guatemala and Nicaragua were by no means isolated islands in the mainstream of Latin American affairs...

...U Between 1827 and 1866, the government granted 6,340,339 acres of public lands to private interests to encourage canal building and river improvement...

...Its mission was to help the rightist dictatorships of Guatemala and Nicaragua, struggling with internal rebellions, to ward off "Communist-directed" invasion, presumably from Castro's Cuba...

...The latter program provides that if the market price of the crop goes higher than the parity price, the farmer may repay the loan and sell the crop...

...f Average prices paid to farmers at the close of last year were lower than at any time since 1933...

...Land of Subsidy By the time the recent political campaign had ended, it had become apparent there were few candidates, from the Presidential nominees on down, who saw eye to eye on either the nature of the farm problem or its solution...

...And yet, since hope does spring eternal, President Kennedy, as we indicated at the outset, takes office this month as a symbol of hope and change for countless Latin Americans, despite all the ill-will that has been building up these fifteen years...

...Many of our politicians and much of our press were quick to blame Castroism and Communism, but this cozy oversimplification clearly constitutes a self-defeating flight from the harsh facts of life in Latin America...

...Three out of every four Guatemalans are landless, illiterate peasants whose average income is less than $250 a year...

...The second major point to be made is that farming is by no means the only area in the economy that receives subsidies...

...Nearly everywhere south of the border there was, and is, the wistful hope that victory for Kennedy might mean the resurrection and enlargement of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, which atrophied under the Truman-Ache-son Administration and died under the Eisenhower-Dulles regime...

...And yet President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes squandered a million dollars to put down the recent uprising which Richard Dudman, correspondent for the St...

...The biggest single reason these subsidy programs flourish in relative obscurity is because they consist largely of monies not paid into or out of the U.S...

...f Farmers' net income, in relation to volume of sales, is at its lowest ebb since 1910...

...The two dictators had not taken their request for aid to the Organization of American States because some evidence of possible Communist invasion would have been required by the OAS...

...We asked for no such evidence...

...The House Committee on Agriculture has published a review of government subsidies which makes it clear that "their impact is felt by virtually all elements in the nation's economic structure...

...The extremes of bitter poverty and fabulous wealth are hard to believe...

...At least one Federal judge, the late Jerome Frank, considered this not only extremely prejudicial, but illegal...

...hangs over not only Morton Sobell, but over all of us...

...Some one hundred of the nation's largest corporations have received $133 billion in government contracts during the past nine years...

...But in the case of agriculture, farmers responded to war needs with a forty per cent increase in their productive capacity...

...There are two basic types of Federal subsidies to farmers: the direct payment, typified by the conservation and soil bank programs...

...housing in Germany—turn up regularly under the Agriculture budget's tent...

...Our government decorated the dictators and armed the generals while our diplomats broke cake and played around with the powerful few at the top...

...For example, approximately $40 million in subsidy was paid recently on the privately owned luxury liner, United States, that plies between this country and Europe...

...If existing price supports and production controls were abandoned, the Committee reported, farmers' net income by 1965 would fall thirty-six per cent below 1959 levels...

...Is the consumer-taxpayer subsidizing the farmer...

...When no longer needed, industrial war plants were recognized as surplusage, and charged off to war or defense...

...Moreover," the Committee emphasized, "it should be pointed out also that in the production buildup for World War II and for the Korean conflict our industrial expansion was underwritten by the government...

...The first mail subsidy was paid more than one hundred years ago, in 1845...

...Violence flared recently in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Haiti, Venezuela, and Argentina, and there were new tensions in Honduras, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil...

...Both nations are rotten-ripe for reform, if not revolution...

...It was a profoundly disturbing film which, despite occasional distortions, caught the temper of much of Latin America—the despairing mood of those of middle-age and beyond, and side by side, the surging militancy of youth determined to build a better life, by whatever name it goes...

...f Business aids and special services, including tax amortization, in the postwar period amounted to $43 billion...

...Approximately 183 million acres of Federal and state lands were granted to railroads between 1850 and 1871...

...The total cost of the ship was given as $76,800,000...

...Profits in industry producing with government contracts were guaranteed...

...or is it the farmer, in the absence of adequate bargaining power in the marketplaces, who is subsidizing the rest of us as he accepts returns for his labor and intelligence substantially below that paid to non-farmers...

...Ranging over Latin America for the New York Times, Tad Szulc concluded a recent survey by acknowledging that the impact of the Cuban revolution is unquestionably great, but fundamentally Castroism "is no more than a catalyst in situations that breed discontent and foster rebellion...

...If the market price stays below parity, the farmer delivers the crop to the government in payment of the loan...

...We had little time and less aid for the submerged nine-tenths of the population living in hopeless misery and indescribable squalor...

...rather they were part of a pattern of disorder that runs through much of the continent...

...The Senate-House Economic Committee, headed by economist Senator Paul Douglas, recently reported that prospects for the 1960's are no less bleak—and that significant reductions in farm aid programs would lead only to total disaster for the farmer...

...But the facts in neither case fit this generally accepted impression...

...First, some facts about farm subsidies...

...The Committee's review opens with the sobering statement that "The subsidy is the oldest economic principle written into the laws of the United States," and goes on to enumerate a score of subsidy programs, starting with the protective tariff of 1789...

...Recently, the American Broadcasting Company presented an hour-long television documentary on Latin America entitled "Yanki, No...

...luxury products over the roofs of the rickety hovels in which the hopeless poor huddled in filth...

...He was tried with the Rosenbergs, although there was no evidence to link him to the atom bomb spy conspiracy involving the Rosenbergs and David Greenglass...

...Even a great many of those who approve of farm subsidies have a grossly exaggerated notion of how much farmers receive from the government treasury, and little or no knowledge of the comparatively huge subsidies paid to other areas of our economy...

...Our ambassador to Nicaragua, Truman-appointed Thomas E. Whalen, a man of monumental insensitivity who keeps pictures of his heroes, Senator William Jenner and the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, on his wall, runs interference and errands for the Somoza tribe and keeps President Luis Somoza's popularity high in the State Department...

...Who Ts Subsidizing Whom...

...Pondering our continuing embrace of dictatorship in Nicaragua, one of our distinguished friends in Latin America, Ricardo Figueres, anti-Communist former President of Costa Rica and one of the first Latin Americans to break publicly with Castro, mused out loud: "The United States can't stand two years of Castro, but it has put up with the Somozas for twenty-five years...

...The poverty of our policy was graphically revealed recently when President Eisenhower, insensitive to Latin American needs for so long, dispatched a flotilla of warships to Central American waters...

...There was none...

...The Progressive makes no pretense of offering the new Administration a neatly-packaged solution to the perplexing farm problem...

...The Committee brought out an aspect of the farm problem that places the farmer in a whole new perspective: "The question sometimes is raised in public discussions as to who is actually being subsidized...

...The farm price support program, from its inception in 1933 until 1960, has cost $6.8 billion...

...Sidney Hook, assume Sobell to be guilty as charged...

...We do know that no solution can be achieved until the murky atmosphere of misinformation, misunderstanding, and misleading propaganda concerning the farmer has been cleared away and his true problems examined in a clear and accurate light...

...In comparing the cost of the farm subsidy program with subsidies in other areas, the Committee came up with some startling figures...

...Millions for Defense The House Committee on Agriculture points out that "A significant part of our industrial establishment operates today on government defense and other non-competitive contracts, without normal risks, and with profits assured...

...President Eisenhower himself, for example, has referred to overall Department of Agriculture expenditures as if they were all direct payments to farmers, accounting for half or more of net farm income—a figure too large by several times...

...The average pay of factory workers that year was $2.22 per hour...

...and the price support program, under which a government agency makes a loan to the farmer for the parity value of his crop...

...Much the same trend ran through all Latin America...

...They paid from their own pockets for this vast expansion of their productive resources...

...Their surplusages, from a war-generated capacity, still are listed on government books as charges against the farm program, and some opinion seems pleased to regard these charges as subsidies to farmers...

...Now, more than twelve hundred clergymen have appealed to President Eisenhower to grant Sobell a new trial or commute his sentence to the time served...

...We confess that our prejudice against people starving leads us to look hopefully to the adoption of some variation of the "Food for Peace" plans proposed by Senator Hubert Humphrey, Leon Keyserling, and others...

...Whatever may be the solution to the farm problem, the search for it must be based on an understanding of where we are now—an accurate portrait of the farmer today, and his position in our economy...

...Most of this came under the Eisenhower-Benson soil bank plan, which was recognized soon after its inception as a disastrous failure and abandoned...

...The situation in Nicaragua is even more desperate...

...In a continent surging with revolt against poverty and seething with suspicion of Yankee imperialism, President Eisenhower's action could only recall for Latin Americans the hated era of gunboat diplomacy and identify the United States still more closely with right-wing authoritarianism bent on throttling reform in Nicaragua and Guatemala...

...For more than a decade and a half our stock has been falling steadily in Latin America, as Carleton Beals warned readers of The Progressive in a number of notable articles during that period...

...Price support payments to farmers vary widely...

...There is a tradition of sorts that the Holiday Season is an appropriate occasion for acts of clemency...

...Some crops, such as corn and wheat, receive substantial subsidies, but it seems not to be generally known that fifty-seven per cent of farm production is unaided by price supports, and that much of the remaining forty-three per cent receives only sporadic support, depending on current market conditions...

...Perhaps the most painfully uncomfortable shots for an American audience were those of towering neon signs flashing the names of U.S...

...In comparison: ^ Mail subsidies during the most recent twelve year period were $6.5 billion...

...In contrast, because the Agriculture Department's budget represents direct Congressional appropriations, and because of accounting practices which do not readily show income from such items as sale of surplus crops, or transfer to State Department programs, agricultural expenditures are easily confused with costs...

...H Last year consumers bought sixteen per cent more farm-produced foods, yet farmers received $100 million less income...

...Surely one of the more pitiable victims of that tragic era is Morton Sobell, now serving the eleventh year of a thirty-year sentence on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage...

...f Life magazine, only one of several of the highly profitable Henry Luce publications which regularly attack farm subsidies, enjoys a $10 million a year subsidy in reduced mail rates...

...Today we are paying a staggering price for our neglect and indifference...

...Ydigoras proceeded to "suspend the leading Guatemala daily newspaper for an article that told the truth about the revolt, close a radio station that complained about suppression of the newspapers, and swathe the whole business in a cloak of censorship...

...At the end of World War II and again after the Korean conflict their excess capacity was not written off by the government and charged to war...

...Louis Post-Dispatch who was on the scene, reported "probably could have been suppressed with two truckloads of soldiers...

...and, he constitutes the only major segment of the American economy to receive such support...

...After World War II the billions in surplus war materials, including trucks, automobiles, and the many other items usable in peacetime, were kept off the normal competitive markets, to protect industry...

...Almost every aspect of the Sobell case lies under a cloud of doubt...

...In 1958, when farmers' total cash receipts were thirty-three billion dollars and net income about thirteen billions, direct payments amounted to a little more than one billion dollars...

...A decade and a half of neglect and indifference in official Washington have brought a staggering deterioration of the position of the United States in all Latin America...

...President Luis A. Somoza, whose dictator father's graft made the Somozas one of the richest families in all the Americas, runs a tight little police state which he largely owns...

...It is a grim portrait...

...Yanki, No...

...Hundreds of millions of dollars have been used to subsidize the building of ships on American ways...

...We hope President Eisenhower will respond affirmatively to this simple, humane plea, and help remove the cloud of injustice that...

...But in the climate of hysteria that prevailed at the time of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage trials a decade ago the prospects for a calm and dispassionate dispensing of justice were gravely diminished...

...Moreover, because of bookkeeping procedures, a host of items unrelated to farmers' benefits—such as more than $100 million in G.I...

...See Louise Brown's report on Brazilian reaction to the outcome in the People's Forum of this issue...