Notes of the News
Knoll, Erwin
NOTES in the NEWS Freedom and Jobs Three years ago last August the leadership of the civil rights movement, coordinated by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, engineered the historic March on...
...Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at any Speed and whose testimony at Congressional hearings contributed measurably to passage of the safety acts, has warned that as a result of the cut Herblock in The Washington Post "Calling all cars-reports of auto malfunctions are grossly exaggerated-and please drive back slowly to your local dealer" in funds "the quality of the program will be severely harmed...
...Already one corporation, General Motors, piles up more in net, after-tax, profits than the 1965 tax revenues of any state in the union except California and New York...
...December, 1966 181 opposed this move...
...T he Progressive did some addition of figures shown in the Group Research study and found that the combined paid circulation of the sixteen leading "left-of-center" periodicals for the year ending with issues of September, 1965 was 557,852...
...The Freedom Budget is designed to wipe out poverty in the next decade, and Randolph pointed out that while Negroes would benefit greatly from the proposal, "we must not forget that seventy-five per cent of the poor are white...
...in the past HUAC has triumphed by much greater margins...
...On the right, Human Events led with 123,435 followed by Liberty Letter, 92,379...
...Now the pace is accelerating...
...What can be done to halt this dangerous trend...
...In the 1950-1964 period the 200 largest manufacturing companies ac quired more than 2,000 other firms...
...Over the past fifteen years Congress has obediently voted contempt citations against 129 persons at the demand of HUAC...
...The ACL U support of Sherman is based on a major policy adopted this year which recognizes selective conscien tious objection as a civil liberties-pro tected right of conscience which should be included in the draft law...
...Johnson himself had described as the gravest problem "next to the war in Vietnam...
...we now spend that much in three years on the almost totally non-productive military machine alone...
...There has been no decline in housing values, he emphasized...
...He suggested that Lola Belle Holmes and Lucius Armstrong, two witnesses who testified before HUAC on the alleged Communist affiliations of Dr...
...The individuals who should qualify as conscientious objectors to a particular war are rather those who find participation in such a war to be so great a wrong that even government's command will not relieve them of responsibility for committing that wrong...
...Only the United States and Canada harvested bumper crops and experienced a gain of food production over population growth...
...Further, Keyserling and his crew assumed a five per cent economic growth rate annually, which would easily produce ample additional revenue to pay for the program and still allow for increasing costs of other Federal responsibilities...
...Economist Irving Beller, writing in the AFL-CIO Federationist, tells us that the rate of mergers rose twenty-five per cent from the first six months of 1965 to the comparable period in 1966...
...The Councilor, official organ of the (White) Citizens Council of Louisiana, ranked sixth on the rightist list, with 60,496 circulation...
...A number of individual mergers have been successfully averted or reversed, but, overall, the concentration of economic power grows relentlessly...
...Stamler and 219 in favor...
...There is grim irony in the fact that Senator Warren G. Magnuson, Commerce Committee chairman, wrote to President Johnson stating his "near disbelief" that so little was being requested by the Administration for automobile and highway safety which, the Senator reminded him, Mr...
...The budget listed 140 sponsors in cluding 1. W. Abel, president of the United Steelworkers...
...Sherman, who is not a pacifist, was denied exemption by his draft board because he is not opposed to "war ;yt any form...
...It will then find itself in accord with so conservative a citizen as Albert E. Jenner, a past president of the Illinois Bar Association, who is representing Dr...
...Those nations to whom food will be sent are required to make a reasonable effort to develop fertilizer, farm equipment, transportation, and other industries, and to train farmers in newer methods and improve markets for their crops...
...Well-heeled backers sometimes subscribe in quantity for lists of persons they wish to influence...
...For civil liberties," the ACLU concluded, "conscience so central to a man's belief becomes an aspect of the religious liberty protected by the First Amendment-whether or not the objector calls his conscience 'religious.' " Monopoly by Merger The merging of industrial firms into ever-larger corporations is no new phenomenon...
...In the underdeveloped countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa food produc...
...Contrary to predictions," Hasselblad told the Mid-America Conference on Equal Opportunity in Housing, "the law brought no increase in racial demonstrations, but a decrease...
...These are among the major findings of a fascinating-and disturbingstudy made by Group Research, Inc...
...NOTES in the NEWS Freedom and Jobs Three years ago last August the leadership of the civil rights movement, coordinated by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, engineered the historic March on Washington under the banner "Freedom and Jobs...
...The Hungry Millions Last year world population increased by seventy million persons, a figure we estimate to be equal to the combined total of the inhabitants of the fifteen largest cities in the world...
...of Washington, D.C., an independent organization which monitors rightist activities...
...With 50,000 highway fatalities a year it seems incredible that the Administration-and Congress-could divert such a huge proportion of the money needed to operate programs that would save lives here, to help feed a war that kills Americans and Vietnamese every day...
...the use of government purchasing policies to support anti-trust policies...
...When Congress passed the safety laws in September, it authorized an appropriation of $93.9 million for their enforcement during the period ending next June 30...
...loans to be repaid in twenty years, with a ten-year grace period...
...Objective, care ful, and thorough news collection and analysis is . . . so vital to a free society that every precaution should be taken to shield the mass media from any possibility of undesirable influence from external economic interests...
...Yet the Federal Communications Commission held only a brief hearing, in September, and took testimony only from spokesmen for ITT and ABC, whose views of the merger were, not unexpectedly, most reassuring...
...The Administration claimed that too much of the fiscal year had passed for more than $26 million to be used effectively...
...This was brought home vividly in some recent comments on fair housing legislation by John I. HasselbJad, a prominent Denver realtor, in a speech at the University of Missouri...
...But only one-third of the fiscal year had elapsed, a fact which challenges the logic of the Administration's recommendation to eliminate almost three-fourths of the authorized funds...
...Appalled at HUAC's contracts with "consultants" and witnesses, Hays...
...Perhaps if local and state experience converts enough realtors like Hasselblad we can eventually adopt fair housing as a matter of national policy...
...It's spread to the middle-of-theroaders...
...Now, at a time when the civil rights movement is slowing and sputtering, the tt:am of Randolph and Rustin, with broad backing from labor, civil rights, and religious groups, has come forward with a $185 billion, ten-year "Freedom Budget" designed to fulfill the promise of the "Freedom and Jobs" ideal of three years ago...
...If the right is growing as rapidly as past reports of its finances and political activities indicate-a trend which the recent study of its periodical circulation confirms-it will increase its pressure :upon the center and move it rightward...
...Like most of his fellow realtors, Hasselblad was long a vigorous opponent of fair housing legislation, which went into effect in Colorado a few years ago...
...The Defender, 82,385, and Christian Crusade, 81,000...
...In the first place, this is a ten year budget...
...The March caught the imagination of the nation and so impressed Congress it approved a flood of civil rights legislation and throughout the land unlocked public and private doors to jobs, to education, to voting, to restaurants and hotels, and to other opportunities long denied...
...ITT and ABC One of the most striking proposals ever to come under review by the Federal regulatory agencies was the merging of International Telephone and Telegraph with the American Broadcasting Company...
...special financial assistance to new or THE PROGRESSIVE small firms in a monopoly-threatened field...
...In this respect, the left-of-center journals are probably more effective per thousand subscribers...
...By 1962 the 100 largest corporations (one-fortieth of one per cent of the nation's 400,000 manufacturing firms) owned 56.9 per cent of all the land, buildings, and equipment in manufacturing...
...We have not achieved our present stature in the world," said Reuther, "by patient acceptance of explanations, however plausible, of why something cannot be done...
...It can advertise more extensively, do more intensive and extensive research, buy up the inventions of others, defend its legal rights or alleged rights more thoroughly, bid higher for scarce resources, acquire the best locations and the best technicians and executives...
...An ever more crowded planet in which millions of babies are born to a life of suffering and starvation will be a planet on which even the prosperous nations will know no peace...
...In his capacity as chairman of the Monopoly Subcommittee of the Senate Select Committee on Small Business, Nelson wrote to the FCC expressing his concern that the merger might be approved without adequate consideration for its effect on the public interest...
...Group Research assembled the paid circulation figures for the years 196065, as reported by the periodicals to the U.S...
...and Congressional investigations of the price-profit-investment policies of dominant firms...
...If the surge of resistance to HUAC that developed in the House during the closing days of the Eighty-ninth Congress can be maintained in the next session, HUAC should find rougher going in the future...
...He is in a position to know because he signed the contracts-almost "automatically," he said-as chairman of an administration subcommittee of the House...
...But on analysis it is not at all unreasonable...
...Another undesirable revision by Congress forbids or greatly limits food ,shipments to countries which trade with North Vietnam or Cuba...
...He is opposed to "participation in the Vietnam war in any form" because he conscientiously believes that "the war is unjustifiable, inhuman, and the opposite to every ideal I wish to live for...
...The contempt citations were voted against Dr...
...If the trend continues, these 100 corporations will increase their holdings to two-thirds of the total by 1977...
...The Food for Peace program, we be lieve, has been an important step in the right direction, but it will have to be vastly expanded if mankind's oldest disease-starvation-is to be checked or even slowed...
...The most rapid growth of rightwing journals, Group Research reports, took place in 1961 and 1964 but "substantial circulation growth continued for the periodicals studied in 1965...
...Supreme Court extended the basis for conscientious objection to include not only traditional theism but also "a given belief that is sincere and meaningful [and] occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by [the] orthodox belief in God of one who clearly qualifies for the exemption...
...For we, like Reuther, have no doubts that American ingenuity and imagination are equal to the task of ridding our society of poverty in a single decade-if we have the will to act...
...Traditionally, and currently, the law has recognized only conscientious objection to "war in any form," and until now this principle was not widely or seriously challenged...
...Significantly, the F AO reported that the food output has risen fastest in countries that have undertaken land reform and provided farmers with better credit and markets...
...Administered prices replace competitive prices, and the consumer is at the mercy of the few firms that...
...We here deal," stated the ACLU, "not merely with political protest, or with dissent from the policies of gov ernment...
...Hall, and Cohen in a Federal court suit challenging the constitutionality of the law establishing HUAC...
...Colorado realtors, Hasselblad reported, were sure the law would encourage demonstrations and heighten racial unrest, depress property values, and have an adverse effect on business generally...
...It derives more than half its income from overseas...
...Mitchell Svirdoff, director of the New York City Department of Human Resources, and a galaxy of similarly prominent labor, religious, and community leaders...
...it has been described by the Anti-Defamation League as "a notorious anti-Jewish hate sheet...
...Two days later he entered in the Congressional Record a list of such HUAC payments totalling more than $35,000 in the past six years...
...Readers on the Right Right-wing publications are growing faster than those that are left-of-center, and at more than twice the growth rate of a sampling of mass circulation magazines...
...told the House, "I'm serving notice here and now, that I'm not signing any more...
...Commenting on the size and nature of the opposition to HUAC evidenced in the votes against the contempt actions, Representative Benjamin Rosenthal, New York Democrat, said: "It wasn't just the hard-core liberals...
...The major development these days, is the "conglomerate" merger, in which companies in unrelated fields and markets join forces-as when the Columbia Broadcasting Company bought the New York Yankees, and Textron, a textile manufacturer, took on the production of helicopters, chicken feed, bathroom fixtures, men's shoes, rocket engines, eye glass frames, and hearing aids...
...Beller recommends more aggressive enforcement of existing legislation, stronger deterrents to antitrust violators, such as jail sentences...
...Fair Housing Convert • There's an old folk saying that it's not the things you don't know that cause trouble, but the things you know for sure that ain't so...
...What will the future be like," Beller asks, "if the merger movement continues and an even greater portion of the American economy becomes concentrated in the hands of a small number of extremely powerful enterprises...
...Hall and Cohen by sending the motions to a select House committee for study...
...Food stocks around the world have been shrinking...
...This pressure has already paid political dividends to the extremists in some parts of the country...
...It is hard to see how this contributes to anything but increased tension III world affairs...
...can outbid, outspend, and outlose a small firm...
...But the nearly three-to-two preponderance of right-wing circulation figures over "left-of-center" figures -a lead that is widening-should be cause for some concern, and not only among the country's liberal elements...
...If it overdoes its expenditures, it can absorb losses that would bankrupt a small riva...
...The world food situation," said B. R. Sen, the F AO director-general, "is now more precarious than at any time since the period of acute shortage immediately after the Second World War...
...control the field...
...Furthermore, Hasselblad said, the law has been instrumental in creating a "good human relations climate" which has encouraged business and the Federal government to locate in Colorado...
...Morris B. Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee...
...If some of the U.S...
...Shipments of food, particularly from the United States, were credited by the F AO with staving off widespread famine last year, most notably in India...
...only nine have been convicted...
...Nor were all these acquisitions small and weak...
...No combination of measures, however," Beller concludes, "can ever be fully effective without a much greater appreciation of the dimensions of corporate power in the American economy today [and1 the freedom with which that power is currently exercised...
...Hays also charged that HUAC had paid $1,000 to its "consultant," Philip Luce, after he had testified at the riotous hearings on antiwar domonstrations which the Committee held in Washington last August...
...Another Vietnam Casualty For the remainder of this fiscal year at least, the new automobile and highway safety laws will be among the Federal programs crippled by the Administration's policy of pumping more and more funds into the Vietnam war...
...Although the mass magazines began from a much larger base, the gains made by the reactionary periodicals indicate their increased infiltration of the middle-of-the-road segment of the public...
...Common Sense, ranked seventh with 52,000, is published by the Christian Educational Association...
...Stamler, Mrs...
...Senator Wayne Morse, Oregon Dem ocrat, joined Nelson's protest in a Sen ate speech in which he raised a vital question: "Is it not possible," Morse asked, "that ITT, in view of its large foreign investments in so many nations, will tailor its news commentary and report ing so as to minimize any conflict with local governments...
...After this key test, the House approved the contempt citations...
...He pointed out that the proposal was still under active study by the Justice Department...
...During the House debate on the citations Representative Wayne L. Hays, Ohio Democrat, disclosed that HUAC has paid many of its supporting witnesses...
...This former opponent of fair hous ing urged Missouri realtors to abandon their opposition, and recognize, on the basis of Colorado's experience, that fair housing is a positive and creative act that benefits the whole community...
...For poor nations that are centuries behind the Western world in development, repayment on such terms will be enormously difficult...
...In 1965 the U.S...
...Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, protested the haste and the perfunctory nature of the FCC's review...
...William Buckley's National Review, 86,273...
...They included more than 800 that were each worth $10 million or more, most of them thriving and profitable...
...It has been amply demonstrated in the courts that HUAC's procedures are in contempt of the civil liberties safeguards of the U.S...
...Selective Objection In the whirlwind of controversy over the moral aspects of the war in Vietnam one of the eddies asserting pressure more and more frequently is the question: Should conscientious objector status be granted to one opposed to this (or any other) particular war but not necessarily to war in general...
...Hall, and Cohen, were, in effect, paid for their testimony...
...aid for the improvement of agricultural output in the have-not countries...
...Now, twenty-five year old Benjamin Sherman is appealing a Selective Service denial of his claim for conscientious objector status on new grounds, and he is being defended by the American Civil Liberties Union and its New York affiliate...
...Yolanda Hall and Milton M. Cohen...
...The New Republic second with 118,528...
...Congress has improved the program by increasing the emphasis on U.S...
...More than a dozen of the rightist journals showed circulation increases of fifty per cent or more in the 1960-65 period-more than twice the growth rate of a sampling of mass circulation magazines...
...The citations were based on their refusal to testify at the HUAC hearings in Chicago in May, 1965...
...Ramparts fourth with 29,471, and The Nation fifth with 27,167...
...The Progressive and the Birch Society monthly, American Opinion, it is interesting to note, ran close together -36,725 to 35,400 respectively...
...There is no limit on American ingenuity and imagination...
...But the right wing press has grown so phenomenally that American Opinion's circulation ranked it in only ninth place on the right, while The Progressive held third place among liberal publications...
...But the world output of food failed to increase at all, with the result that there was two per cent less food per capita for the people of our planet...
...We can only agree with Senators Nelson and ~'Iorse that subjugating our news media to the domination of such huge corporations poses a grave threat to the best interests of a free people...
...The program should be carefully and seriously considered by citizens and by Congress...
...In the past, the highest level of resistance to HUAC had been the twenty-nine votes against the Committee's 1965 appropriation and the fifty-eight votes supporting a public hearing on the appropriation...
...billions now earmarked for armament were spent instead on an expanded Food for Peace program, countless lives would be saved and made worth living-and the real security of nations would be strengthened...
...Some day the House of Representatives will discover what the Constitution means...
...But concepts of conscience in a free society are constantly evolving...
...The next day sixty-nine Representatives voted against citing Dr...
...Post Office Department each fall...
...tion declined by two per cent last year while population rose so that there was four to five per cent less food for each person...
...Wealthy individuals and companies have poured money into some of these journals as well as into the membership organizations that help promote circulation growth...
...Moreover, it has long been recognized that such moves toward monopoly are usually not in the public interest, and it was to prevent, or reduce, this growing concentration of power that Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, the Clayton Act in 19B, and the CellerKefauver Act in 1950...
...The failure to produce more food last year followed "a long period in which production has only barely kept up with the rapidly mounting population," he said...
...There is only a limit on our will to use them...
...The budget ranges over medical care, education, housing, and minimum income, and includes areas which are not usually thought of in connection with a war on poverty, such as air and water pollution and mass transportation...
...This means that not all of the rightist circulation is among "true believers...
...Walter Reuther's statement on the Freedom Budget strikes us as an excellent response to its critics...
...Jeremiah Stamler, head of the Chicago Board of Health's heart disease control center, and against two of his professional associates, Mrs...
...Unfortunately, however, Congressagainst Administration opposition-revised the law to require U.S...
...Hasselblad is a past president of the Denver Board of Realtors, a member of the Board of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and he was named "Realtor of the Year" by the Colorado Association of Real Estate Boards...
...One of the most disturbing facts brought to light by its report, as Group Research notes, is that "such vehicles of extremism and bigotry as Common Sense and The Councilor enjoy larger paid circulations than all but two of the liberal periodicals-and more than twice that of most of the 'left-ofcenter' press...
...But the White House requested only $26 million, and a Sen- December, 1966 ate-House conference cut this to $20 million...
...The economic aspects of the budget were handled by a team of economists headed by Leon Keyserling, who was chairman of President Truman's Council of Economic Advisers...
...ABC is one of only three national radiotelevision networks, and therefore constitutes one of the nation's vital sources of news and opinion...
...Stamler, Mrs...
...The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in releasing these findings on population growth and food output, disclosed that this was the first time in thirteen years there had been no gain in food production...
...ITT is a giant, far-flung corporation, with a variety of business enterprises operating in 118 foreign countries...
...We may well have before us a practical, down-to-earth plan to wipe out poverty in America in ten years...
...Horizontal" mergers-those between companies producing similar products -are declining...
...Vertical" mergers-in which a company joins with a customer or a supplier-arc up slightly, but, Beller reports, account for only a small proportion of all mergers...
...The combined total for the sixteen leading publications of the right was 856,244...
...Fortunately in this country," said Jenner in commenting on the contempt citations, "we have courts where even-yes even-the House Un-American Activities Committee can be called before the bar of justice and made to answer for its depredations...
...A comprehensive program is under way to win nationwide and Congressional support for the Freedom Budget...
...The burgeoning of the extremist press has been made possible by heavier financial backing of the right during recent years...
...Already, such economic power has practically eliminated bona fide price competition in a number of fieldsautomobiles, for instance...
...In most cases the courts have decided against HUAC's citations, either refusing to convict or reversing the lower court convictions on appeal...
...The Reporter, which Group Research's report says is sometimes characterized as "Establishment Liberal," was first with 200,906...
...It may be easy to be complacent in our relatively affluent era, but clearly this is the time to halt the march toward monopoly-before we are helplessly trapped in the control of a handful of giant all-powerful corporations...
...We have demanded, rather, that we find ways to achieve our goals, and in the shortest possible time...
...The current merger wave, now in its twelfth year, is the longest ever, and in Beller's estimation shows no sign of losing its "vigor...
...The resistance to HUAC mustered ninety votes in favor of side-tracking the contempt motion against Mrs...
...The courts may curb or invalidate the Committee, but how much healthier it would be for democracy if the other two branches of government -the legislative and executive-stopped propping up HUAC and took steps to get rid of it...
...These legislative acts have served to slow the trend toward monopoly, but only slightly...
...In two important tests the Committee's requests for contempt citations carried by votes of only two to one and three to one...
...Trouble for HUAC No observer with a realistic grasp of the facts of political life expects the Ninetieth Congress to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee or even cut its appropriation sharply when it convenes in January, but there is hope that some of its disreputable practices can be discouraged...
...Monsignor George Higgins, a director of the National Catholic Welfare Council...
...Government under law means that the conduct of those who disagree will yield to the command of govern ment when democratic processes have resolved the subject of debate...
...It has created an atmosphere in which organizations and individuals can work together effectively...
...Constitution...
...At first glance, $185 billion may seem a preposterous amount of money...
...With such enormous economic resources and power, a big firm, Professor Corwin Edwards of the University of Oregon points out...
...HUAC encountered problems shortly before the recent election that encourage this degree of cautious optimism among its opponents...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
