NOTES IN THE NEWS
NOTES in the News Turn toward Peace President Kennedy, caught these many months in a crossfire of clashing advice, may now have broken free, at long last, to embrace "a strategy of peace" which...
...The address contained two specific announcements: 1) The nuclear powers will try again, in Moscow in July, to achieve a nuclear test ban, and 2) The United States will not again test in the atmosphere unless others test first...
...Exclusive Clientele The Ways and Means Committee has shown extraordinary vigilance in protecting not only the mink-and-Cadillac set in the oil industry...
...The oil industry promptly mounted the greatest lobbying drive in its long and influential history...
...The Missouri civil defense agency faced extinction, at the time of this writing, after that state's senate voted to deprive it of all operating funds...
...Its last bastion is Bull Connor and his dogs, supported overtly by hooligans and covertly by the red-neck majority (and the demagogues who exploit them...
...Civil defense has always been a hotly debated subject, but the heat seemed to stay at the theoretical level...
...Who, then, but Negro Americans could have been expected to swarm to the historically laughable "passive resistance" movement in America...
...Another writer suggested that Senator Kuchel read a booklet entitled "The Catholic Plan to Control the United States...
...Some say," said Mr...
...Let us re-examine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points...
...Two million—or ten million— there are now...
...We use words like "if" and "may" and "perhaps" because we have been seduced before by the President's oratory, only to find ourselves abandoned when the time came for him to implement the eloquence...
...Newsweek might well have added that the rest of us pay for it all with an additional billion dollars in taxes which the law invites the oil industry to escape paying...
...After first rejecting President Kennedy's proposals in their entirety, the House Ways and Means Committee made a feeble gesture toward reform by accepting one of the Administration's four recommendations, the net effect of which will be to plug the billion-dollar loophole by a token $50,000,000...
...The Beginning of the End George Kirstein, publisher of The Nation, pointed out in an article, "The Myths of the Small Magazine," in the June issue of The Progressive that "these small magazines are little giants often carrying an impact that extends far beyond the size of their circulations . . . their exposes sometimes are widely reprinted...
...He said it to me, and I said, "And if there should be two million—or ten million...
...The two top newspapers, Pravda and Izvestia, went to the extraordinary lengths of publishing the address in full...
...But there was more to what Khrushchev had to say, and it was hardly reassuring...
...President Kennedy proposed no frontal attack on this citadel of special privilege...
...We have noted with satisfaction," the Soviet spokesman said, "the call for better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...We agree, too, with Khrushchev that the President can give life and meaning to his words by embarking on creative bargaining on the critical problem of Berlin and Germany, on which the American position has remained frozen and sterile for much too long...
...And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever...
...And I can't answer it...
...They present the terror of a general strike...
...But the Ways and Means Committee must have ways and means to determine that special need that are denied to the rest of us, including the President and the Secretary of the Treasury (the latter a Republican and Wall Street banker), for it was their recommendation that this loophole be closed forthwith that the Committee rejected...
...Senator Kuchel's attack on the "fright peddlers" of the far Right released a flood of mail which encouragingly ran four to one in support of his assault on the hysterical ultra-reactionaries who demand that the United States withdraw from the United Nations, stop all foreign aid, clean the "traitors" out of the Administration, Congress, and the courts, and repeal the income tax...
...Communities throughout the nation gave only lukewarm support to the program, largely from a vague sense of patriotism rather than from conviction...
...In the Soviet Union, there was a wave of applause, albeit a cautious one...
...I hope they do...
...it has been equally alert to safeguard the special interests of those whose income is derived from investment in corporate securities, as contrasted with their fellow Americans whose income comes from wages and salaries...
...Its powerful friends, ranging downward from Vice President Lyndon Johnson, mobilized for action...
...Billion-Dollar Giveaway President Kennedy's tax reform structure, designed to achieve a modest measure of equity in a system shot through with special privilege, is crumbling, a brick at a time, in the House Ways and Means Committee, which his party dominates...
...Kennedy, "that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament— and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude...
...The miracle is the way of Christ-redemptive suffering—and the force is the way of the "black" Gandhi...
...Nixon has a brilliant mind," wrote someone from Los Angeles, "but he let Jews (Ike and Mamie) run him...
...Now when you consider on the order of 300 million people dead in those areas, it is very difficult to conceive of what kind of military weapons . . . would continue to exist...
...As Americans, we find Communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity...
...translation of ideas into practical action almost invariably met with apathy...
...NOTES in the News Turn toward Peace President Kennedy, caught these many months in a crossfire of clashing advice, may now have broken free, at long last, to embrace "a strategy of peace" which could do much to give American foreign policy a new and compelling turn toward peace...
...As long as I'm boss," said Selective Service Boss Hershey in 1940, "a pacifist will be 4-F for flat feet...
...We have nonetheless faced that issue, and we have systems provided that we believe would survive . . . "But it exceeds the extent of my imagination to conceive of how those forces might be used and of what benefit they would be to our nation at that point...
...The President hinted that we may be on the threshhold of an historic reversal of alliances, and he seemed bent on preparing American public opinion to adjust to the possibility of at least a solid modus vivendi with the Soviets...
...A subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, which is conducting hearings on the $300 million civil defense budget, has issued a staff study which questions not only the mechanics but the basic concepts of civil defense...
...But the Jews are the chief villians in the tortured and demented minds of the fright peddlers, and Jewish demons are conjured up in the most fantastic places...
...The rejection of civil defense by Portland's City Council may well mark a major turning-point in the program nationally...
...Still another common theme, which encompasses both religious and racial bigotry, is typified in this message to Senator Kuchel from Long Beach, California: "Don't forget, sir, that this country was founded by white Christian people and we want our country to remain in the hands of white Christian Americans...
...The Progressive's role in this chain began with the publication in 1960 of an article by Senator Stephen M. Young entitled "Civil Defense: Billion Dollar Boondoggle," in which the Senator lucidly and colorfully exposed the contradictions and absurdities of the civil defense program...
...And it is different...
...Both camps, he emphasized, "are caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counter-weapons...
...Victory for Farm Workers At long last the bracero farm program is dying...
...Surely this paragraph from the President's speech shows the blessed influence of the great Pontiff: "No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue...
...The House of Representatives has voted against renewing the program, and it is now scheduled to expire at the end of this year...
...If the President meant what he said, if he would deal with the world as it is, recognition of the Communist-dominated East German Republic, however distasteful such a course may be, becomes mandatory...
...Still, there is no justification for Khrushchev's truculent reneging on his offer to agree to three on-site inspections...
...These announcements constituted the hard news featured in most of the press, but more significant, in our judgment, was the President's clear-cut repudiation of the more bellicose forces in and around the White House, and his equally emphatic summons to the nation to re-examine its attitude toward the cold war and to join with him in seeking a great new beginning in the pursuit of peace...
...Kennedy said: "We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last eighteen years been different...
...Said Newsweek: "With the lucrative fallout from the depletion allowance, successful oilmen have been able to live in fabulously expensive homes, deck their wives and daughters in the most costly mink, buy fleets of Cadillacs...
...The exclusive character of the clientele for which the majority of the House Ways and Means Committee expresses so much anxiety is revealed in a recent official figure showing that seventy-five per cent of all reported dividends were contained in only two per cent of the income tax returns filed...
...That," he said, "would be different...
...On a half dozen occasions during the past month the Committee rejected the President's proposals to plug tax loopholes and distribute the burden more fairly...
...However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors...
...The Committee turned its back on this proposal despite persuasive evidence that the law now favors the aged in the upper brackets as opposed to those with much lower incomes...
...Total depletion charged off by all oil and gas companies ran to more than two billion dollars, resulting in a tax loss of a billion dollars—a loss made up by the rest of us...
...There may be two thousand of them...
...f Ten giant oil companies charged off nearly a billion and a half dollars in 1961 as depletion allowances, saving themselves, legally, $700,000,000 in taxes for the year...
...Kirstein's article was hardly off the press when his assertion was documented by the withdrawal of the city of Portland, Oregon, from the civil defense program, an act constituting one more link in a chain that started with an Avrom in Canadian Tribune article in The Progressive and could conceivably conclude by involving the entire nation...
...After a decade of effort, its opponents, which always included The Progressive, finally convinced Congress that the importation of cheap Mexican labor was not in the best interests of the American farmer or farm worker, nor, in the long run, of the Mexicans...
...It is war...
...Kennedy refreshingly abandoned the ritualistic American (and Soviet) habit of blaming the other side for everything that has gone wrong...
...Aftermath The aftermath of President Kennedy's memorable address at American University followed a largely predictable course...
...But the Senator was deeply disturbed by the powerful streak of racial and religious bigotry revealed in the scores of letters which vilified him for the position he took...
...f One oil tycoon with an income of $14,000,000 for the year paid only $30,000 in taxes, or about six-tenths of one per cent—as contrasted with the average of forty-eight per cent paid by companies not engaged in the oil industry...
...The next link in the chain was forged when Stanley Earl, a member of the Portland City Council, read the article and found it so persuasive he launched a crusade against civil defense which, aided by the total failure of civil defense in a disastrous windstorm last fall, finally culminated in Portland's recent scuttling of the program...
...Pray tell us," implored an Ontario, California, writer, "why the Senate is allowing Kennedy to disarm America and leave us at the mercy of the Communist Jews in the Jewnited Nations...
...The Progressive would take only pride in any part it might have played in hastening the end of the ill-conceived civil defense program...
...A Kremlin commentator called the Kennedy speech "extremely significant...
...A recurring assertion seemed to tie the Catholics and the Jews together in a conspiracy: President Kennedy was frequently accused of placing ninety-four Jews in key positions in the government, a line apparently being spread by Common Sense, a notorious anti-Semitic hate journal...
...In the same interview in which he praised what the President had said—he was to make a speech on the subject after The Progressive was scheduled to go to press—the Soviet ruler brusquely announced that he was withdrawing his earlier offer for three on-site inspections of a nuclear test ban because "our proposal was not properly appreciated by the partners in the talks...
...This is precisely our own concern, as we indicated earlier...
...Who, then, but Negro Christians could have been expected to use the technique in a Christian country...
...The depletion allowance is the provision in tax law which permits oil and gas operators to deduct 27.5 per cent of their gross income from each well each year before they start to figure their income tax...
...Southern Negro Christians...
...But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage...
...This study, incidentally, reflects much of the analysis set forth so brilliantly by Sidney Lens in "The Case Against Civil Defense," published by The Progressive a year and a half ago...
...The insult—typified by the station waiting room—on which the whole structure of segregation depended is in ruins...
...The state of Oregon quickly followed the example of its largest city, its legislature slashing a $400,000 proposed state-wide civil defense budget to a token $50,000...
...Khrushchev not only made the considerable concession—for him—of agreeing to three on-site inspections, but moderated his position on Berlin, and traveled to East Germany to quiet the raucous demands on the West by Walter Ulbricht, his proconsul in East Germany...
...Portland's action was touched off by what one Oregon newspaper termed "a grass-roots revolt...
...Its demise brings no regrets...
...The Bigots Recently, as we reported in these columns last month, Senator Thomas H. Kuchel, California Republican, took the Senate floor in an attempt, as he put it, "to drag from the shadows into the clear light of day some of the extraordinary activities and the miserable menace of those whom I termed the fright peddlers...
...The result was almost everything the oil lobby sought...
...The Soviet premier was on sounder ground when he said, in "welcoming" Mr...
...Developments in the months just ahead should go far toward determining if the President is prepared to match his eloquence with action...
...The Southern system is attacked and destroyed without due process of Southern law...
...Kennedy's eloquent phrasing, make "the world safe for diversity," and a peace "where the weak are safe and the strong are just...
...The national civil defense program is in serious trouble in Congress...
...I think probably . . . the fatalities in Western Europe would approach ninety million, the fatalities in the United States would approach 100 million, and the fatalities in the Soviet Union would approach 100 million...
...They will not wait for law, or disperse in the name of order...
...We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment...
...If the President meant what he said, and acts on his words, the conflict over foreign policy has been resolved in favor of a vastly more creative approach to the cold war—an approach that would bring new heart and hope to those committed to a peace that would, in Mr...
...And the national system, under the national Constitution, can only validate the attack ex post facto and put its seal upon the lawless destruction of the blatant Southern (and devious Northern) system...
...As wild as these hallucinations are, they are too widespread to ignore...
...The idea is the revolutionary miracle of nonviolence harnessed to the revolutionary force of the empty-handed mob...
...They overthrow the Government...
...Students of conduct in the Kremlin have felt for several months that Khrushchev was becoming greatly annoyed at President Kennedy's reported failure to respond more affirmatively to friendly overtures the Soviet leader was said to have made after the Cuban crisis last fall...
...Instead, he cautiously recommended several complicated changes in the law whose net effect would have been to leave the principle of depletion allowance undisturbed while cutting the giveaway from 27.5 per cent to about twenty-two per cent...
...Some of the rich results of the depletion allowance are part of the official record...
...Advertise them, and there'll be ten thousand...
...Thus, a married taxpayer with two children and an income of $10,000 a year, all of whose income is derived from wages or salary, pays some twenty per cent more than the married taxpayer with two children who has exactly the same income, all of which comes from dividends...
...Gandhi once said that Satya-graha would sweep America if it ever got rolling there—because everything sweeps America that gets rolling there...
...This latter legal loophole, which costs the rest of us half a billion dollars a year, permits a tax credit— in other words, a deduction not from taxable income but from the tax itself—of up to four per cent of the individual's taxable income...
...The Committee's relentless resistance to reform reached its climax when it bowed low to the sacred cow of the tax system—the depletion allowance, richest tax bonanza of them all, which enables the powerful oil and gas industry to escape payment of a billion dollars a year in taxes...
...And recognition would do much to help dissolve the deadlock in one of the most explosive areas of conflict be-tweeen the Soviets and ourselves...
...A recent nationwide survey by The New York Times revealed that "except in a few instances, civil defense organizations range in competence from inadequate to hopeless...
...The Committee concluded its month's labors on a note of consistency: It voted against a Kennedy Administration recommendation that would have provided a modest degree of tax relief for persons over sixty-live whose incomes are under $20,000 a year while increasing, just as modestly, the taxes on those whose income is more than $20,000 a year...
...Kennedy's American University address, that "good statements must be sealed by action...
...His commencement address at American University last month, an address that has been long maturing, constitutes, perhaps, the historic resolution of the inner struggle between the "hawks" and the "doves" inside and around the Administration...
...Hopefully, Congress may yet forge that final link in the civil defense chain by declining to invest further millions to buy the illusion but not the reality of security...
...Say what you will, they are a mob, effecting mob rule by force...
...Social segregation by "race" is no longer protected by law or defended by gentlemen...
...The program itself rarely merited public respect...
...Mr...
...World peace, like community peace," he explained, "does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement...
...that is by putting the spotlight on it and having men, in and out of public office, speak out against it...
...From Knoxville, Tennessee, came the request: "Would you be willing to make public how much the international Jews paid you . . . Communism is Jewish...
...Kennedy took a "sober approach" to the "real state of affairs...
...There is one way to banish this ugly movement," said Senator Kuchel...
...Premier Nikita Khrushchev took the unusual step of announcing that the President's speech made a "favorable impression" on Soviet leaders in that Mr...
...A number of commentators have pointed out, and quite rightly, we think, that the President found a considerable measure of inspiration— and perhaps courage—in making the kind of speech he did in the celebrated encyclical, "Peace on Earth," proclaimed to the world shortly before his death by Pope John...
...Thus: f In a recent five-year period a big oil company paid no Federal income taxes on a net income of $62,000,000 because of depletion and other special tax favors...
...The Progressive's article received widespread attention, and was reprinted in quantities of many thousands...
...It all works out beautifully—for those who live on dividends...
...Beyond Imagination At the hearings before the House Armed Services Committee this year, Representative Charles E. Chamberlain, Michigan Republican, asked Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara: "We hear of this tremendous nuclear exchange [that would be possible between the Soviet Union and the United States] . . . what is the military situation after we have had this tremendous exchange...
...A New Jersey correspondent offered "twenty-five startling and vitriolic similarities between the international Catholic church and the international Communist party...
...President Kennedy, still torn then by conflicting counsel, did not take a positive position toward Khrushchev's overtures, and the latter interpreted the President's indecision as a rebuff, according to some who specialize in assessing Soviet moods and moves...
...There is nothing we know about to indicate that this tiny proportion of our population in the highest brackets is in greater need of tax relief than those who earn their incomes by working for wages or salaries...
...I believe we can help them do it...
...Several counties in Oregon have taken similar action...
...We are in hearty agreement with the Senator, and we commend him for his continuing campaign to flush the hate-mongers into the open and destroy their vicious doctrines with the floodlight of truth...
...It is, still more, a frightening precedent...
...Desegregation is the fact...
...And it is war waged by an army armed only with an idea at precisely that point in human history at which war waged with anything else has become impossible...
...of a revolution...
...Secretary McNamara replied: "This is a question we have considered...
...This special allowance is not limited to recapturing the cost of the well, most of which is recovered for tax purposes in the year the outlay is made through still another deduction, but is permitted in perpetuity—as long as there is any flow of oil or gas from the well...
...But I also believe we must reexamine our own attitudes—as individuals and as a nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs...
...But the idea whose time has come is not the same as the fact...
...Theophrastus Such The bigots do not all agree that the Jews are in the driver's seat...
...In that speech we applaud so warmly, Mr...
...And from Chico, California: "The Jews control every country in the world . . . Get wise to yourself . . . Don't be so hard on the Birchers...
...Where the Frontier Is In the South an idea whose time has come is pitted against an idea whose time is gone...
...It is a dangerous game and a distressing spectacle...
...All in all, the Ways and Means Committee did a handsome job last month in staking its claim as our national custodian of special privilege and guardian of the interests of the few as against the many...
...It sent a surge of hope through the troubled world, but there was only grumbling and even downright rejection among the professional warriors in the Pentagon, the Goldwater-Dirksen crowd in Congress, and the ultra Rightists throughout the country...
Vol. 27 • July 1963 • No. 7
