NOTES IN THE NEWS
Notes in the News Let Them Eat Clay If all of the hungry men, women, and children in the United States could somehow drag their gaunt and ailing bodies to Washington, the Dan-tean spectacle of...
...Benjamin M. Spock, who is under indictment for anti-war activities...
...The tenure of the Renegotiation Board, which ends this summer, may not be renewed by the Congress...
...It then had 550 employes...
...If the past is any basis for prediction, they are more liable to return to their traditional obsession with the violent results of national neglect while ignoring the causes...
...It disclosed such conditions as these: f Each year thousands of infants die from lack of food...
...f Food assistance programs reach only eighteen per cent of the poor, and these are not the nation's poorest families...
...They will have been stabilized by the uncontrolled sale of handguns, rifles, and shotguns to the criminal, the feeble-minded, the emotionally disturbed, the alcohblic, and the frightened housewife who shuts her eyes as she squeezes the trigger...
...It will take the vigilance of every American who believes in our Constitutional liberties to see that we are not plunged once more into the dark night of McCarthyism...
...We share the President's hope— and Mr...
...The documentary, Hunger, U.S.A., has received a fair amount of attention in the mass media, which refused to admit the intensity of the problem before...
...defense industries have been reaping ever greater profits...
...Soviet approval of the convention is the first dividend of the agreement to seek peace...
...Arms Race at Home In the first shock waves that followed the assassination of the Reverend Dr...
...Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, has now been selected as chairman of a Senate Subcommittee to investigate the hunger problem and bring the weight of Government to bear on solutions...
...The same judgment can be applied to a whole people...
...The poor have learned, of course, that the time is always inappropriate for them to press their demands, and the circumstances are always dangerous...
...An earlier generation of civil rights leaders would have left Washington buoyed by promises and hopeful of great things to come—as the thousands did who marched in the Capital on a memorable August day in 1963...
...But the time for tokenism and cheery assurances has passed...
...vice-admiral who is considered the "father" of the nuclear submarine, disclosed part of the disgraceful story of war profits in his recent testimony before the House Banking and Currency Committee...
...Senator Clark last fall led a drive, which won Senate approval, for emergency funds to feed the hungry, but the measure was bottled up by a Dixiecrat-GOP coalition in the House Agriculture Committee, with the secret compliance of Administration spokesmen...
...Among targets of this omnibus bill (see The Progressive, April, Page 7) are nearly every civil liberties decision of the Federal courts since 1955, antiwar demonstrators, labor unions, the Supreme Court, the United Nations, black power advocates, Communists, the State Department, and opponents of witch-hunting...
...The latter group, which she believes supports Vice President Hubert Humphrey for President, will include white Mississippians and some Negroes, "mostly house niggers...
...Laws designed to hold down such profits, he said, are not used by the Pentagon because it is "too much influenced by an industry viewpoint...
...Martin Luther King Jr., the Senate Judiciary Committee found the votes early in April to add a watered-down gun control amendment to President Johnson's Safe Streets and Crime Control bill...
...Established by Congress in 1951, the Board recovered more than $800 million in renegotiated contracts in the Korean War alone...
...Under the House bill's garnishment provision, the first $30 of weekly wages would be exempt, and garnishment would be limited to no more than ten per cent of the remainder...
...Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, president of the Union of of American Hebrew Congregations...
...Instead of seeking out basic causes for unrest, Dr...
...Robert M. Hutchins, president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...Lack of uniform standards for letting defense contracts and lack of uniform standards of accounting, he told the Committee, are costing taxpayers "hundreds of millions of dollars each year...
...But Congress, always wary of international disarmament, seems equally bent on maintaining the arms race at home...
...Louis Post-Dispatch warns that "talk of a deadlock is being heard on Capitol Hill...
...Senator Eastland received $162,000 in Federal farm subsidy payments during the last year...
...Along with six other religious and civil liberties leaders, Dr...
...Some funds to feed the hungry were eventually included in the poverty bill but any such help that may have reached the poor seems to have made little measurable difference...
...Finally, I just quit...
...When the Congress gets the courage to stand up to the National Rifle Association," says trial lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, "it will have taken its first significant step toward the suppression of violence in the cities...
...King signed a letter addressed to each member of Congress and to the public which warned that these committees of Congress "threaten to repeat the experience of the 1950s when the cry of Communism by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his acolytes stifled all but the most orthodox politics...
...Contractors are permitted to increase their costs, delay deliveries, and hide profits as part of "costs...
...I think he'd just blow up if he seen me," said Mrs...
...We all think more should be done...
...they will be trying to get their delegation seated at the national Democratic convention in Chicago in late August...
...the Government had never even made a study to determine the gravity of the problem...
...The House Committee on Un-American Activities, which is investigating the New Left and especially the Students for a Democratic Society...
...Secretary of State Dean Rusk's response was typical: "I think we all agree," he said, "the time has come to make good on the great commitments of our Constitution...
...Wor Profiteers While American casualty lists in Vietnam have been growing longer over the past few years, U.S...
...I have a friend gets seventy-seven dollars welfare a month," Mrs...
...Fannie Lou Hamer certainly knows, and that gives special importance to her beliefs about the killing of Martin Luther King: "It was a plot, a well-hatched plot that went beyond Memphis...
...Curtailing this "barbarous relic" is an excellent example of the kind of legislative relief that Congress can provide without committing any additional Federal funds...
...King and his colleagues...
...The committees whose activities were criticized by the signers are: f The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, headed by Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, which is investigating participants in the National Conference for New Politics, held in Chicago in 1967...
...A Barbarous Relic' The practice of garnisheeing a worker's wages to satisfy debts has been described by the Consumer Federation of America as "a barbarous relic of a bygone age . . . like the debtors' jail of medieval days...
...They have never met but she knows Negroes who work on the Senator's holdings of 5,235 acres "who need money for food stamps...
...Box 284, Madison, Wisconsin...
...Last October, when the Board's study was in an early stage, The Progressive published "Starvation in the Affluent Society," a crusading article by Senator Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania Democrat, which revealed that starvation exists on a nationwide scale, that Federal programs are totally inadequate, and thafr...
...There are 80,000 members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party...
...Hunger and malnutrition were found clearly present in 256 counties—classed as "emergency hunger districts"—in twenty states...
...Malnutrition is found not only in rural areas but in such metropolitan centers as Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, Boston, Des Moines, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Seattle...
...He charged that in the past few years defense contractors' profits have risen by twenty-five per cent...
...Grandmotherly Fannie Lou Hamer, who lives just six miles from Dodds-ville, home of that national symbol of racism and reaction, Senator James O. Eastland, is planning to run for mayor of Ruleville...
...Other signers of the letter, recently released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), are the Reverend John C. Bennett, president of the Union Theological Seminary...
...Significantly, the official response to the demands of the Poor People's March—the demands for two million jobs, for guaranteed income maintenance for the unemployable, for better schools, housing, and nutrition— is not that these demands are unreasonable but that the timing is bad and that the means of presenting them is dangerous...
...Going Hungry for Freedom "Nobody tells us we have to move from Mississippi...
...Abernathy's—that the Capital will be spared violence and destruction...
...Many Americans eat laundry starch and clay to fill out their inferior diets...
...Abernathy and his cadre of about 100 found ready access to the offices of Cabinet members and Congressional leaders...
...Tennessee law, by contrast, now permits all but $17 of weekly wages to be garnisheed for debt...
...Thus did Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the Deep South's most effective civil rights leaders, make it clear how white officials in rural Mississippi employ their own non-violent weapon —starvation—in efforts to drive out Negroes who seek to register, vote, or exercise the other rights supposedly guaranteed them under Federal civil rights legislation...
...Renegotiation Board...
...Down in Mississippi they are killing Negroes of all ages, on the installment plan, through starvation...
...When it comes to imposing curbs on gun sales, even the normally sacrosanct advice of J. Edgar Hoover is ignored by Congress...
...I've given some of them money we got in donations to buy food stamps...
...But once there was U.S.-North Vietnamese agreement to negotiate in Paris, the Soviet Union ratified the consular convention, in the judgment of correspondents in Moscow, as a signal to Washington that if the Southeast Asia conflict can be settled, relations between the world's two greatest powers can be quickly improved...
...Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz has testified that between 100,000 and 300,000 workers lose their jobs each year because employers do not want to be burdened by wage garnishments...
...Anyone who disagrees should take a walk through a military cemetery and think it over...
...The gun lobby is as effective as any operating in Washington, and its flagrant disregard of the realities seems to enhance rather than diminish its influence...
...Now she's got to spend seventy dollars to buy food stamps...
...There is no justification for further delay in reporting out of conference the House version of the truth-in-lending bill...
...The Senate voted down Senator Church's excess war profits tax, seventy-four to eighteen...
...Too Late for Tokenism There was a time—and it was not too long ago—when the official welcome accorded early in May to the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy and the vanguard of his Poor People's March on Washington would have been hailed as a major breakthrough for the victims of poverty and discrimination...
...In New Hampshire, only $20 a week is secure from garnishment, and California and Minnesota permit holding out as much as fifty per cent...
...Hamer of Senator Eastland...
...In the last six years the number of persons aided by Federal food programs has declined by 1.4 million while malnutrition has risen sharply...
...The Board once had power to review contracts of $250,000 or more...
...But we see no reason to spare it the discomfiture of a confrontation with the nation's disinherited...
...A new registration drive will begin in June...
...There is a way to fight back against this "non-violent" weapon of white officialdom...
...We don't just want sympathy," said Mr...
...It is a provision of the Consumer Credit Protection Act, the House's version of the truth-in-lending bill, passed February 1. The Senate's version, passed last July 11, contains no such provision and is also significantly weaker than the House bill in other respects...
...The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders found garnishment to be a major grievance in the Negro ghettos...
...In one case cited by the Admiral as an example of industry's lust for ever greater profits, a contractor for the Navy demanded $10 million for propulsion turbines that cost $5.5 million six years ago...
...Hamer said in an interview with The Progressive during a recent trip to Madison to raise funds to buy food stamps for Mississippi's hungry Negroes...
...and Roger Baldwin, a founder of the ACLU and formerly an adviser to the late General Douglas MacArthur in Japan...
...County officials have stopped distribution of free Federal food commodities to needy black families, requiring them to buy food stamps instead...
...They were given an attentive and, for the most part, sympathetic hearing...
...included in the higher bid was a $1.5 million increase in profit...
...Hamer said...
...It is doubtful, too, whether well-fed Americans are sufficiently ashamed and aroused to demand corrective action from Congress and the Administration...
...As usual, nothing," Mrs...
...But the shock waves have passed—as did those that followed President Kennedy's assassination—and it now seems likely that the Ninetieth Congress will adjourn this fall without taking any meaningful step to curb the accelerating arms race at home...
...We all want more to be done," President Johnson said at a news conference...
...Today, through Congressional and Administration budgetary neglect encouraged by profiteering munitions merchants, the Board's staff has been reduced to 180 employes although defense buying has soared from $25 billion to more than $45 billion in the last few years...
...Notes in the News Let Them Eat Clay If all of the hungry men, women, and children in the United States could somehow drag their gaunt and ailing bodies to Washington, the Dan-tean spectacle of such massive suffering might shame into silence those brass-boweled Senators and Representatives who have been attacking the audacity of a Poor People's March which may bring a mere 100,000 persons to the nation's capital...
...Pending in a House-Senate Conference Committee is legislation that would substantially curb the practice...
...The cities, if the NRA is to be believed, should be more stable than ever this summer...
...Several wars later, the idea has become a reality...
...The trouble is that the NRA is believed on Capitol Hill...
...It may lead, as it did then, the six spokesmen cautioned, "not only to silence but also to persecution, prosecution, and loss of jobs...
...Leslie W. Dunbar, co-chairman of the Citizens' Board and executive director of the Field Foundation, emphasized that Federal food programs reach too few of the poor because the Department of Agriculture is concerned principally with making major crop producers richer and has "little interest in feeding [poor] people...
...The Board recently issued its report, based on a nine-months' study...
...The Senate Investigations Subcommittee that is still probing last summer's riots in Negro ghettos...
...All of it will be sent to Dixie to buy food stamps for hungry families, and to buy time for them to win their freedom...
...There were many more counties, in these and other states, rated as having "serious hunger problems...
...Congress has since exempted all contracts under $1 million...
...If you are a Negro and vote, if you persist in dreams of black power to win some measure of freedom in white-controlled counties, you go hungry...
...Malnutrition and starvation are most heavily concentrated in Appala-chia, the Deep South, the Gulf states, and the Southwest, but few states are free of either scourge...
...A $100-a-week wage earner could therefore have no more than $7 taken from his pay...
...The consular agreement had been accepted in principle in 1964, and was considered by the two governments as far back as thirty-five years ago when Franklin Roosevelt was President...
...K From ten million to 14.5 million Americans may be hunger victims, and the situation is "worsening...
...Johnson said, and "then we expect to get on with running the Government as it should be run...
...The Pentagon—with the approval of Congress and the Administration—has permitted war profiteering to go far beyond the limits laid down in World War II and the Korean War...
...The revelations, then brushed aside or ignored by the nation's press, have now been wholly confirmed...
...Two other competing delegations are expected, she said, one of them probably all white, and the other offered by the young Democrats...
...Though the eight-year fight for a truth-in-lending law seemed to have been won when the House voted in February, the St...
...On an earlier occasion, Senator Frank Church, Idaho Democrat, seeking Senate support for an excess war profits tax as a substitute for the proposed ten per cent surcharge on individual income taxes, pointed out that "on one recent gigantic contract for the manufacture of M-16 rifles, Colt Industries made a 1,400 per cent profit...
...All this must be tremendously encouraging to the National Rifle Association, which holds that "the armed citizen represents a potential community stabilizer...
...Nobody tells us we're not wanted...
...The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency estimates that gun ownership in the United States increased by twenty-five per cent in the two-year period ending last December...
...It will take billions, not millions, to feed ten million hungry Americans...
...Abernathy...
...As evidence of the Department's care and feeding of the rich, the Board's report pointed out that in 1967 alone, "nine large landowners received a total of over $14 million from one of a combination of farm programs designed, as the Department of Agriculture puts it, 'to encourage, promote, and strengthen the family farm.'" Yet last July, the report states, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman "returned to the Treasury $200 million authorized for use in feeding the hungry...
...But when you're starving you know...
...Where a couple of years ago white people were shooting at Negroes trying to register, now they say, 'Go ahead and register—then you'll starve.' " What is the Department of Agriculture doing about it...
...The time is long past due for some direct pressure on the seat of a Government that has been sitting still too long...
...Since the Senate's approval was granted a year ago, the Soviet's delay in ratifying has been attributed to tensions arising from the war in Vietnam...
...According to the Louis Harris Survey, more than fifty-four per cent of American homes are now equipped with firearms...
...Most Negro civil rights leaders working in rural areas of the Deep South know the dangers they run and why...
...She is also campaigning for Mrs...
...The Old McCarthyism One of Martin Luther King's last acts before his assassination was to warn his countrymen that the activities of three Congressional investigating committees may produce a new era of the old McCarthyism...
...That leaves her seven dollars to take care of a family of thirteen...
...If the inflammatory propaganda purposes of these inquiries are achieved, it will strengthen the chances of passage of one of the most vicious proposals ever submitted to Congress—the Internal Security Act of 1968, sponsored by Senator Eastland along with nineteen other Senators and seventeen Representatives...
...The country and Congress dare not ignore the warning of Dr...
...If it is extended, there is a strong possibility that the Board's woefully inadequate powers may be still further reduced...
...He submitted General Accounting Office figures to demonstrate that profits as a percentage of cost on Defense Department contracts averaged 7.7 per cent in 1959-63 and rose twenty-six per cent to 9.7 per cent in 1966...
...Now the Soviet government has formally approved the agreement and in due time there will be American consular offices in Russian cities and U.S.S.R...
...Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Dean of the Boston College Law School...
...We want action...
...As if this were not bad enough news for taxpayers who finance the war profiteering, there may be an additional jolt on the way...
...For there are at least ten million Americans now wasting away from chronic hunger and malnutrition in the wealthiest nation of this or any other age...
...The agreement, useful in itself, is even more important as evidence that the cold war can be thawed out if we can settle the hot one in Vietnam...
...consular convention with the Soviet...
...I been goin' to Secretary Orville Freeman's office since 1964...
...The views of the demonstrators will be "seriously considered," Mr...
...Glowing business reports from urban and suburban gun dealers indicate that 1968 should be another banner year for the firearms manufacturers...
...Consequently, lobbyists for the collection industry have mounted a major effort in behalf of the Senate version—if, indeed, there is to be any legislation at all...
...When he began organizing poor people, poor Mexican-Americans, whites, as well as poor Negroes, they had to kill him...
...In a December editorial, entitled "Let Them Starve," The Progressive revealed the facts and attacked the incredible callousness of the House Committee and the Administration, and the way in which the mass media blacked out the whole issue in spite of a press conference on the subject held by Senators Clark, Robert F. Kennedy, and Jacob Javits...
...Peppery Hyman G. Rickover, the pint-sized U.S...
...The House and Senate, which include members with close ties to defense industries, have protected war profiteers not only by refusing to demand that the Pentagon safeguard the public interest but by legislative crippling of the U.S...
...It is doubtful, however, that their interest will be long sustained...
...King and the other signers noted, these committees are following the "discredited path" of "searching high and low for malevolent political influences—generally foreign—which are supposedly manipulating protests...
...But he went on to warn of "the possibilities of serious consequences flowing from the assemblage of large numbers over any protracted period of time in the seat of Government where there is much work to be done and very little time to do it...
...The signers warned that no matter what the merits of the protesters' opinions, their views must not be dealt with by tagging on the labels "Hanoi," "Communist," "Moscow," or "agitation...
...He went beyond the ideas of the middle class...
...consular offices in American cities...
...And he left not to spread the gospel of a great day coming but to marshal forces for what may prove to be one of the most massive acts of petitioning for a redress of grievances that the nation has ever seen...
...These and other facts in the shocking story of the nation's cruel neglect of its poor are fully detailed in Hunger, U.S.A., a report by a distinguished twenty-five member Citizens' Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States...
...To obtain food through Mississippi officials, Negroes will have to win political power, she said, pointing out that half of the state's 400,000 voting-age Negroes are registered...
...During World War II, the Government recovered a significant portion of such excessive profits—over $10 billion in 1944 alone...
...Send contributions to the Martin Luther King Memorial Food Stamp Fund, Measure for Measure, P.O...
...First Dividend Thirteen months ago, in spite of bitter opposition stirred up by Liberty Lobby and other rightist groups, the Senate ratified a U.S...
...Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, Texas Democrat, urged in an article in The Progressive last August that Congress not only extend the Board's tenure and increase its authority, but that there be "a full-fledged Congressional investigation into war profiteering...
...Telma Barnes who seeks to become Mississippi's—and the country's—first Negro Congresswoman, replacing Representative Thomas G. Abernethy...
...It is said that you can judge a man by what it takes to make him angry...
Vol. 32 • June 1968 • No. 6
