NOTES IN THE NEWS
NOTES in the NEWS 'Tax-Dodger's Delight' "This is indeed a sad day for the Senate," sighed Senator Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania Democrat. The Senator's reflection was a model of moderation. For...
...Surveying the ruins of the program after a series of humiliating Administration reversals, Senator Clark observed: "It is very difficult for me to understand why the Administration is willing to take a bill which is so far removed from what the President wanted...
...For Universal's To Hell and Back, the Army supplied 800 men for several days of battle scenes, and staged an 18,000-man review, complete with tanks, artillery, trucks, and planes—all at taxpayers' expense...
...For example: ¶ The Army flew four helicopters from Fort Lewis, Washington, more than 1,200 miles to Arizona for Columbia Pictures to use as camera platforms in filming the 1960 picture Mountain Road...
...But the price of the propaganda gambit is a loss of authenticity, to say nothing of the improper use of taxpayers' money...
...There is ample evidence that if the Administration had so much as lifted a finger, they could have had a victory...
...This time the British government has to decide what it means by British liberty...
...Like those who are trying to tear Germany to pieces on both sides of the Wall, they are preponderantly young...
...In our crusade for an expanding democracy and against Fascism and reaction, we welcome as members of ADA only those whose devotion to freedom is unqualified...
...Supreme Court decision that had denied such deductions under existing law, the Treasury, meaning the rest of the taxpayers, will bear fifty per cent of the cost of corporate lobbying...
...One of the principal beneficiaries of the Senate's action will be the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, which will collect a $75 million tax windfall it doesn't need and announced it didn't want by opposing that portion of the bill...
...Osier L. Peterson, of the Harvard University medical staff...
...f ADA believes that its goals— "the achievement of freedom and economic security for all people everywhere"—must be sought through "education and democratic political action...
...A small band of progressives fought a long, lonely, and Losing fight without help from an Administration which had listed its tax reforms as major, "must" legislation...
...The violence they thus precipitate by their mere appearance creates a furious clamor (in the name of anti-Nazism) for the suppression of freedom of speech...
...f The ADA is governed by democratically elected officers...
...Well, what happened was that an enterprising Air Force public relations officer, sensing an opportunity to boost his branch of the armed services in the military's dogged inter-service rivalry, persuaded Disney to drop the Army, the Navy, and even NASA, under which such projects are actually coordinated...
...Peterson...
...In New York City, some families have had to move almost annually from slum to slum as the bulldozers take over area after area of the city's wretched tenements...
...Under this provision, which sets aside a U.S...
...That under a government insurance plan people would abuse the system and swamp doctors with needless and trivial office calls...
...Today the Federal government is sharing in the financing of nearly a thousand projects in more than five hundred cities...
...We would like to have both war abroad and liberty at home—at least for the libertarian victors...
...What happened...
...In practice, when slums are torn down, tenants are forced to move into still other crowded and run-down neighborhoods...
...Peterson pointed out that Sweden, with a national insurance system, spends 3.5 per cent of its gross national product on medical care...
...The mobs attack the Nazis as soon as they rise to speak—or before...
...far from plugging loopholes in the present tax structure, it created new escape corridors that will enable special interests to avoid payment of hundreds of millions of dollars for which they are now liable...
...Theophrastus Such...
...Instead, they took a defeat without a fight...
...The John Birchers oppose increases in American programs of foreign aid...
...Nor is it only the giant cities that are feeling the pains of urban renewal...
...Because we think the statement by Rubin and Doyle answers the false charge of "extremism" and demolishes efforts to equate ADA with the John Birch Society, The Progressive is presenting it below, only slightly abbreviated, for the benefit of our many readers who may find it useful...
...The John Birch Society, on the other hand, operates in secret and, again according to its founder and leader, "is to be a monolithic body...
...It has charged that "the largest single proportion of Communists is in our Protestant clergy—about 7,000 are Communist sympathizers...
...That a national health plan would be financially ruinous...
...A recent circular letter promoting a real estate periodical stated: "If you're the man we're talking about, you should know about eight electrifying new profit-bombshells that will stagger the imagination of every broker and builder who wants to line his pockets with gold...
...The John Birch Society, on the other hand, harbors a deep distrust of people and politics...
...For MGM's Honeymoon Machine, the Navy anchored a cruiser on the waterfront outside a Long Beach, California, hotel...
...But war teaches its winners its lesson as well as it teaches its losers...
...This, in our judgment, is the cheapest form of double talk and demagoguery...
...But when it reached the screen, the moon flight had been transformed into a solo effort of the Air Force...
...Welch, has extended its character assassination technique to include the leadership of some of the great religious bodies in the nation...
...if Corporate interests were granted a special tax privilege—one which Senator Estes Kefauver, Tennessee Democrat, described as "a giant sleeper"—when the Senate voted that they be allowed to deduct for tax purposes the funds they spend in lobbying for and against legislation at the Federal, state, and local levels...
...But the Navy came through only after it had censored from the script the characterization of an admiral who was too stuffy for the Navy and a young lieutenant who took a poke at him...
...The John Birch Socier ty, on the contrary, follows Communist-style tactics by setting up "front" organizations and by instructing its members to "infiltrate" community organizations and PTA's and harass speakers at church meetings and pub-lic forums...
...The Senate, however, ordered the loophole opened wide again...
...We know that kind of thing goes on," explained an Air Force officer, "but we don't like to publicize it...
...ADA has a fundamental faith in the institutions of the American form of government even though some of those institutions do not always produce the results ADA would prefer Thus, ADA sometimes feels obliged to take a critical attitude toward a decision by the U.S...
...In the first twelve years of its existence, the urban renewal program took a total of $2 billion in Federal funds...
...so are the Communists...
...The first is the gravitation of British liberalism to the support of suppression of the only kind of opinion that liberty needs to protect, namely, hateful opinion...
...In discussing the cost of medical care, Dr...
...In direct contrast, the founder and leader of the John Birch Society, Robert Welch, has publicly proclaimed: "Democracy is merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery, and a perennial fraud...
...In its relentless war against any form of Federal health care program, the AM A has repeatedly asserted: ¶ That the United States is the healthiest nation in the world...
...In a statement that ominously implied he might in the future be quite willing to seek overthrow of our government, Robert Welch said that the John Birch Society could not rely on "politicians, political leadership, or even political action...
...Their disreputable sentiments serve to push significant segments of the British populace— war veterans, Jews, Negroes—beyond the bounds of peaceable public behavior...
...ADA fights for the principles in which it believes, but it has never been accused, even by its bitterest opponents, of the kind of character assassination that has marked the activities of the John Birch Society— character assassinations which include the impugning of the motives and the patriotism of a President of the United States (Dwight D. Eisenhower), his Secretary of State (the late John Foster Dulles), the Chief Justice of the United States (Earl Warren), and many others of comparable stature and undoubted patriotism, all of whom Mr...
...In return for giving the Air Force all the glory, Disney received lavish aid in the production of the film...
...It convenes and deliberates in public...
...There is no question that the British Nazis (often choosing Jewish and Negro neighborhoods for their meetings) want to incite to violence...
...The police then wade in and close the meeting...
...Thus, new ghettos based on economic, racial, and dependency factors replace old ones based on the same factors, and the seeds are sown for new slums...
...Welch has accused of being dupes or agents of the Communist conspiracy...
...The irony lies in the fact that, as Dr...
...Supreme Court, but it has never sought to destroy confidence in the judiciary or impugn its devotion to the nation...
...A projected film portraying an overly-ambitious general sending improperly equipped pilots into combat during the Korean war was rejected by the Air Force...
...The biggest tax plum of all was handed corporate interests when the Senate voted, this time with the blessing of the Administration, to provide an investment tax credit for industry that will cost the rest of us a billion dollars a year in tax revenues...
...Defeat without a Fight' The most striking development in the struggle for tax reform was the Kennedy Administration's silent submission while its program was being riddled beyond recognition...
...Designed mainly to relieve the larger central cities of metropolitan areas, the program has been amended recently to discriminate against the large cities by allowing suburbs and small communities to participate with only one-fourth local funds, whereas the large cities must still provide one-third...
...All violence must be put down by Government—except war, which must be put up by Government...
...It is "shocking and outrageous," said Senator Kefauver, to no avail, to provide such massive assistance to those who lobby for business interests while making none available for those who lobby for the public interests...
...A mortuary tycoon claimed and received deductions of $26,495 for yacht expenses to entertain visiting morticians and clergymen, plus an allowance of $2,875 for cottage expenses, plus an additional allowance of $22,630 for personal residence and entertainment...
...ADA In a recent public statement, Philip G. Kuehn, the Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, rejected the support of the John Birch Society, which has no votes as an organization, but declined to reject the support of its individual members, who do have votes...
...One request for Pentagon assistance was turned down—at least temporarily...
...The classic concept of incitement has never applied to the incitement of one's opponents, nor its punishment to the government's fear that the inciter will be injured...
...Now the London Economist, opposing suppression, asserts the government's responsibility to "put down all violence, however directed...
...The John Birch Society will operate under completely authoritative control at all levels...
...Each of the military services maintains a staff that provides not only technical advice—understandable in the interests of accuracy—but frequently men, planes, ships, and often large-scale operations, with the strict proviso that the film make the military "look good...
...The House refused to abolish the racket, but it did adopt an amendment limiting deductions to expenses that could be shown to be "directly related" to the active conduct of the business...
...For example: ¶ The Senate killed the provision that would have withheld twenty per cent of dividends and interest at the source of payment by corporations, banks, and savings and loan associations, just as taxes are now withheld on wages and salaries...
...so do the Communists...
...The British government is hard put to know what to do...
...Similar attacks on ADA are multiplying around the country as the election campaign moves into its final month...
...Said the Right Reverend Horace W. B. Donegan, bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of New York, in criticizing the "dan-gerously subversive" activities of the John Birch Society: "To call such programs which sow the seeds of suspicion and ill will 'conservative' is a misnomer...
...Precisely nothing, except that it takes positions which, for different reasons, happen to coincide with those of the Communists—just as ADA takes positions that, for different reasons, happen to coincide with those of the Communists...
...The problem has become a crucial social and political issue in many of the nation's urban centers...
...Overcrowding in these slums is so great that an estimated 50,000 New York families live in single-room flats...
...A great many other Americans are wondering too...
...Ever since the days of World War II, when Hollywood and the military teamed up to make morale-building movies, the Pentagon has worked closely with the movie-makers...
...lt is absurd to characterize, as some conservatives have, as "at least as extreme as the Birch group" an organization like ADA which, unlike the John Birch Society, meets openly, presents its views before legislative bodies, pursues a progressive, middle-of-the-road course on the major issues of our time, refuses to indulge in character assassination of secular or religious leaders, and above all else, is irrevocably committed to the principles of freedom and democracy and squality of opportunity which constitute the very essence of the American ideal...
...As a result, the American public is cheated, not only of its money, but of a free and balanced use of one of the great educational and entertainment media...
...Instead of increasing revenues by some $700,000,000, it reduced tax receipts by nearly half a billion dollars...
...Thus, residents who fled the central city to escape its social and financial problems are now offered the advantages of urban renewal at a bargain rate...
...But money and mortar will not solve our urgent urban social problems if we persist in neglecting human needs...
...The Catholic priesthood, he also charged, has several hundred "Comsymps," the inclusive word he has coined to lump Communists and their sympathizers...
...They stage public meetings, which their opponents attack with rocks...
...What does this prove about the John Birch Society...
...But the most disturbing aspect of urban renewal is the distance it has strayed from its initial aim to improve housing and the surroundings of the people inhabiting deteriorating slums...
...It is widely predicted that the government's share will soon exceed $1 billion annually...
...Thus, the John Birchers are opposed to our NATO alliance...
...What it all adds up to is that under our private system we are paying more—a good deal more—for medical care than the British and the Swedes, who have national programs, yet our nation's health is poorer...
...Thus: • A road-building equipment company was allowed more than $34,000 in deductible expenses over a two-year period for liquor ($13,750), football tickets ($2,000), a two-week vacation in Las Vegas ($1,500), a speed boat ($1,410), and related activities...
...This fantastic new 1961 housing law dumps a $6 billion gold mine—more cash than has ever before been available in U.S...
...Peterson then pulled the rug from under the AMA's fears of general abuse of a government medical system by revealing that Americans visit the doctor more often than either the English, who make no out-of-pocket payments to doctors, or the Swedes, who pay, but are reimbursed about eighty per cent under their national insurance system...
...Senator Albert Gore, Tennessee Democrat, hurt and angry, was less gentle...
...The John Birch Society, through Mr...
...Unless we can somehow put the urban renewal program back on its intended course, the nation will awaken some day soon to find it has created a Frankenstein which has only multiplied and intensified the very social ills the program was created to cure...
...If one were to borrow these sordid tactics, he could quickly prove that members of the John Birch Society hold views that "coincide with those of the Communists...
...The Internal Revenue Code allows as deductions all "ordinary and necessary" expenses incurred in carrying on a trade or business...
...The greed of the motion picture industry and the vanity of the military are responsible for reducing independently produced films to propaganda vehicles for the Pentagon...
...Peterson observed, the cost of medical care is in inverse relationship to the state of health of the three countries...
...Furthermore, the program is expanding rapidly...
...As it cleared the Senate and headed for conference committee adjustment with the House of Representatives, the so-called tax reform bill was indeed the "tax-dodger's delight" that Senator Clark called it...
...The Expense Account Racket Perhaps the most insidious tax loophole is the one that permits the escape of hundreds of millions of dollars each year through the expense account and entertainment racket...
...A shoe manufacturer was allowed $16,943 for a yacht he claimed was necessary to demonstrate a non-skid sole sneaker...
...England with a tax-supported comprehensive medical plan, spends 4.5 per cent, whereas the United States spends 5.3 per cent of its proportionately greater gross national product, most of it out of the pockets of individual citizens...
...More than twenty per cent of Federal funds goes to communities with less than 100,000 population...
...Not so, says Dr...
...This new loophole was created only a few months after the Administration had handed the business community a billion-and-a-half-dollar tax bonus through modification of depreciation schedules...
...The Profit in Blight The nation's urban renewal program has wandered far from its intended course...
...After leading and losing the fight, fifty-four to thirty-nine, for the Administration's demand for an end to the expense account and entertainment deduction racket, Senator Gore exploded on the floor of the Senate: "The Administration lifted not a finger to give me any help...
...Said The Pilot, official organ of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, of the John Birch Society movement: "Nothing discredits a good cause quicker than supporting it by misrepresentation...
...Peterson placed the United States behind a dozen countries in infant mortality, and singled out England and Sweden as two of several countries where both men and women live longer than in the United States...
...We would like to have it both ways...
...Aroused by Kuehn's flagrant misrepresentation, Morris H. Rubin, Editor of The Progressive, and James E. Doyle, both officers of ADA, issued a statement refuting Kuehn's claims...
...Such programs are dangerously subversive in the true meaning of that word and we warn all church people to avoid becoming involved in their activities...
...They are all three miniscule, but they have the time- and Communist-tested secret of success...
...And the government is pressed to prohibit the meetings entirely, thus penalizing British citizens (Nazis or no) not for what they say, or even for what they might say, but for the disorderly conduct of others who might not like what they might say...
...When we feed the cause of genuine anti-Communism with overstatement, we err just as badly as those who nourish Communism itself by understate-ment...
...New housing is erected on the cleared site, but usually it is either too expensive for the displaced residents or it is public housing, available only to the most poverty-stricken or socially-rejected families...
...But the law is so loosely written and tax lawyers and accountants are so skillful in stretching its language for wealthy clients that huge amounts are deducted each year for what are essentially personal luxuries...
...So free speech falls in any case...
...A textile manufacturing company leased a plantation resort from a stockholder for the annual rental of $1, and then proceeded over a period of four years to deduct more than $75,000 for the maintenance of the resort...
...Instead, it is being completely rewritten to suit the Air Force...
...Enriching real estate operators at the expense of the most impoverished of our fellow citizens only adds to their already intolerable burden...
...Its lesson is violence, its graduates men of violence, and its diploma a certificate of faith that violence is the last best hope of earth...
...Americans for Democratic Action was founded fifteen years ago as an independent liberal force avowedly opposed to all form of totalitarianism, Communism no less than Fascism...
...history—squarely in the path of every real estate man in the country...
...While Mosley himself is on in years now, both the bully-boys who follow him and those who fight him are not...
...A beverage manufacturer was permitted $10,903 in deductions for entertaining at a Kentucky Derby weekend...
...There are two other Nazi groups besides Mosley's...
...Is it any wonder, not that Nazis and Communists attack liberty with force, but that libertarians cannot think of anything but force any more with which to defend it...
...These are but a few of the countless abuses under the present law...
...Originally designed to eliminate the worst of our larger cities' slums, the program has shifted its emphasis to providing communities with an enlarged tax base...
...The second sign is even more melancholy...
...but the same Economist, in another connection, attributes the phenomenal British crime rise in the 17-30 age-groups to "the disturbing effects of the war on children...
...Win or lose, the Nazis win...
...The John Birch Society, on the contrary, shows its hostility to court decisions by sweeping charges that "Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our Federal government" and that the Supreme Court "is one of the most important agencies of Communism...
...so do the Communists...
...The John Birchers oppose increased American appropriations for armaments...
...Using infant mortality and longevity as yardsticks of the nation's health, Dr...
...f ADA openly appears before committees of Congress and state legislatures to present its position on the major issues...
...The penny-dreadful press does its bit by exaggerating the Menace, and the Communists (as hostile to libertarian tolerance as the Nazis) unabashedly summon their adherents to the "democratic" barricades...
...The Senate's action robbed the Treasury of some $800,000,000 a year, the amount by which the government is defrauded in unreported dividend and interest payments...
...I wonder what has happened to the Irish element in the Kennedy Administration...
...The Air Force extended a helping hand to United Artists' Flight from Ashiya—but insisted that the script be revised to get rid of a romance between a male non-commissioned officer and a female Air Force captain...
...A common mode of attack on ADA is to admit that members of ADA "are not Communists," but "many if their positions coincide with those of the Communists...
...Neither is there any question of their contempt of the historic right they invoke...
...The membership creed of ADA reads as follows: "We believe that rising living standards and lasting peace can be attained by democratic planning, enlargement of fundamental liberties and international cooperation...
...President Kennedy called on Congress to plug this loophole in order to "strengthen both our tax structure and the moral fiber of our society...
...Conceived as a method by which Federal aid would enable hard-pressed cities to finance large-scale housing rehabilitation programs, the program has increasingly allowed benefits to reach the pockets of private developers...
...Movies and the Military When Walt Disney's recent motion picture, Moon Pilot, was in the planning stages, the fictional lunar journey around which the picture is built was to be depicted as a joint effort of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force...
...We believe that all forms of totalitarianism, including Communism, are incompatible with these objectives...
...The producer did not go ahead and make the story into a picture anyway...
...It amended the House language to permit deductions for entertainment "associated with" the conduct of a business, which just about restored the original loophole...
...There are two characteristic signs of our new times in this situation...
...Medical Myths Exploded A few of the modern medical myths so carefully nurtured by the American Medical Association were rudely exposed recently by a member of the profession, Dr...
...Once the government is yielded the power of suppression prior to such paradoxical incitement, there can be no guarantee of liberty left at all...
...For example: ¶ The heart of the ADA philosophy is its dedication to "an expanding democracy...
...But in taking his position Kuehn called on his liberal Democratic opposition to repudiate Americans for Democratic Action as an organization "at least as extreme" as the John Birch Society...
...Even the most casual comparison of the John Birch Society and Americans for Democratic Action shows how wickedly false are attempts to lump them together...
...This was his privilege, of course...
...Liberty Runs Scared SIR Oswald Mosley is trying to tear up England again with his native-son Nazism, and this time there is no Hitler, as there was in '39, to solve such problems everywhere by setting the world on fire...
...The Birchers vs...
...For on that day the Senate passed, fifty-nine to twenty-four, a tax bill that completely mutilated the Kennedy Administration's proposals for tax reform...
...Barron's, the respectable financial weekly, estimates, for example, that private profits run easily four hundred per cent...
Vol. 26 • October 1962 • No. 10
