NOTES IN THE NEWS
NOTES in the NEWS Nixon's Peace Spectacular If there was ever any doubt about President Nixon's formidable talent as a practitioner of the fine art of manipulative politics, it should have been...
...Nixon not only revealed that he had been engaged in protracted secret negotiations with the government of North Vietnam, but that his ubiquitous emissary, Henry A. Kissinger, had made no less than a dozen clandestine trips to Paris...
...The investigative panel headed by Lieutenant General William Peers found, Hersh notes, that no less than 347 Vietnamese peasants—about double the number usually cited—were actually killed at Mylai by units of the Americal division...
...In a performance shabbier than any under the Johnson Administration, H. R. Halde-man, a major aide in the White House, accused unidentified critics of Mr...
...Leon Reed, author of the CEP study, commented: "This report illustrates clearly that small shareholders, churches, universities, and 'clean' mutual funds actually do have investment alternatives...
...President Johnson offered war reparations in 1965, and proposed in 1966 to withdraw all U.S...
...searching for ways to make an unfair tax system still more inequitable...
...Watch the pea: The increase includes $50 million in a welfare program which is far from passage...
...The big difference in the new law, therefore, will be the availability of more information on the murky business of campaign finances, and the challenge will be to exercise enough vigilance to keep everybody honest—or as honest as can be expected in the business of politics...
...and for pay raises, 208 per cent (from $260 million to $800 million...
...It was only when the initial excitement had subsided, when the fine print in the President's program had been scrutinized, that it became evident that he had not changed tracks at all...
...but let's not get picky over a few more billion...
...Right...
...Moreover, records show some taps continued for months after the information sought was obtained, a violation of the law...
...On the other hand, he pointed with pride to recent individual income tax reductions totaling $22 billion—a little less than next year's projected deficit—which he described as "the return of power to people . . . economic power, real power...
...Compare the 8 THE PROGRESSIVE 1973 HEW authorization in actual Federal funds with last year—$25 billion—and its increase is tiny...
...Said The Star: "Overall, the number of crimes of violence—murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, has continued to inch steadily upward...
...A key weakness is the failure to provide for an independent Federal elections commission or other mechanism to police the new law...
...The authorization for education lumps in money for the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which the President's new Office of Telecommunications, with a budget increase of fifteen per cent, has been trying to gut), and the Smithsonian Institution...
...More on Mylai On March 17, 1970, Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor pledged that "substantially all" of the voluminous Peers Report—the Army's official inquiry into the massacre at Mylai—would be made public once judicial proceedings in the Mylai cases were completed...
...a crucial first step toward cleansing politics of the secrecy, duplicity, and special-interest influence which has sown widespread cynicism and doubt among the American people...
...the formula, based on ten cents per voting-age person, will permit each Presidential candidate to spend up to $8.4 million on broadcasting after the nominating conventions this year...
...But violent crimes, the kind of crime that people fear they will encounter in the streets, were on the rise...
...Best of all, he said, was the nation's capital: "In the one city for which the Federal Government has a special responsibility—Washington, D.C.—the picture is even brighter, for here serious crime actually fell by thirteen per cent in the last year...
...This, clearly, is tantamount to a charge of treason against critics of the Administration, especially the Democratic Presidential candidates...
...Which means that there is no real increase of Federal funds on which poor people can count in the coming year...
...he was still riding the ruinous road to "victory" in Indochina...
...All proceeds from fund-raising events will have to be reported...
...The Commission should promptly investigate electronic surveillance in detail: how widespread it is, how much of it is done without court order by any level of government, and other facts which would inform the public about what Big Brother is doing to destroy privacy...
...President Nixon, in a public offer in October, 1970, had spelled out almost the same terms that were at the core of his secret plan last year...
...The Council on Economic Priorities, which conducts valuable research on corporate behavior in such areas as pollution, job discrimination, military contracting, and political influence, has identified March, 1972 7 110 corporations among the nation's top 500 which manage to flourish without the benefit of arms contracts...
...This year a Republican is pushing the shells and palming the pea, so it is the Democrats who raise a fuss...
...It was, first of all, a triumph of timing...
...He had proposed an eight-point program providing, among other things, for the total withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam, the scheduling of new elections in the South, and the provision of American aid funds for the redevelopment and reconstruction of Indochina...
...Nixon's eight-point program of "consciously aiding and abetting the enemy of the United States" and of being "in favor of putting a Communist government in South Vietnam, and insisting that it be done...
...Clearly this was the effort the President had in mind when he predicted, more than a year ago, that he would "pull the rug out from under" those who opposed his pursuit of the war— and for a few days, at least, it seemed he had succeeded...
...In the first nine months of 1971, fifty-two major cities "recorded a net reduction in crime...
...And finally, the authorization for old-age "income security" includes retirement trust funds for the judiciary, foreign service officers, civil servants, and the fellow who runs the game—-the President...
...The one which lists the totals authorized by "function," includes these increases: the Pentagon, eight per cent...
...mass transit and highway safety programs, down one per cent...
...This "brighter" picture—the decline of "serious crime" in the nation's capital—is worth examining...
...the Subversive Activities Control Board (to compile a new list of no-no organizations) 100 per cent (from $500,000 to $1 million) ; to the President (in an election year) for contingencies, forty per cent...
...no court approval is needed when one party agrees to the interception and is wired for sound...
...Nixon was finally "on the right track...
...If the President is aware of the special problems confronting America's powerless poor, or blacks, or Indians, or women, it didn't show in the State of the Union address...
...But it is a real start...
...Empty as all these shells are, the flim-flam is compounded, as if to mock our frustration watching the sleight-of-hand: The meager manpower training budget is padded with funds given to the Pentagon for the training of soldiers before discharge...
...Still, we are not totally in the dark as to the contents of the Peers Report, thanks to the enterprising efforts of Seymour Hersh, the tireless investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize two years ago for his initial work in calling public attention to the atrocity at Mylai...
...That's true as far as it goes, which isn't very far...
...Saul Friedman (Mr...
...The big news in the speech was Mr...
...However, it is not picky to point out that most of that money for HEW has nothing to do with the Administration's alleged concern for human needs...
...In some cases, law officers might have had enough other evidence to convict...
...Of course, the defense funds do not include military-type money within the budgets of the President, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, the space program, or the Atomic Energy Commission...
...These are useful steps but far less productive in the long run than dealing with crime at its source through programs to reduce unemployment and poverty, replace ghettos with decent housing, and improve schools...
...The Justice Department, which will be charged with prosecuting violators, has never shown any enthusiasm for the task...
...And besides, if no one protested while the rubes kept losing, they wouldn't come back again...
...The Electronic Dragnet Since 1968, when Congress authorized police wiretapping and bugging, the law's minions have been weaving a net of electronic surveillance which now covers vast numbers of innocent persons along with those suspected of crime or subversive activity...
...It also misleads the public into believing that what was done in Washington—increasing police patrols in some areas and modernizing equipment—constitutes the basic attack on crime...
...The "crime issue" stirs so much emotion that the public would be wise to view with skepticism any claim, whether issued from the White House or the courthouse, that purports to disclose a sudden major reduction in crime...
...The mass media, as the President learned long ago, are capable of focusing on only one great issue at a time...
...This huge electronic dragnet, the ACLU reported, has produced the grand total of 257 persons convicted of crime—less than one out of every 200 persons subjected to wiretapping or bugging...
...This habitual tactic of dropping out a major part of the truth continues to damage the President's credibility...
...The burden is real enough but the solution, from all advance indication, will be even more inequitable— a "value added tax" whose heaviest impact will be on those least able to pay...
...Their names and additional useful data are available in a report, Corporate Military Contracting 1971, available for $5 from the Council, 456 Greenwich Street, New York, N.Y...
...These are tragic assumptions, for they point inevitably to more death and devastation in Indochina...
...Even our esteemed colleagues at The New Republic were moved to abandon their customary caution and proclaim that Mr...
...A recent survey by the conservative Washington Star has disclosed that violent crime has not decreased in Washington since the White House made the capital city its law-enforcement model...
...Furthermore, such investments are totally unnecessary...
...Such investments, as the Center suggested, are utterly inappropriate...
...The figures for murder chill the blood: The New York Times said that during the first thirty-three months of the Nixon Administration there was an average of twenty-one murders a month in Washington, a city of only 764,000 people...
...300 million in Department of Agriculture funds borrowed from another program...
...He has asked $85.4 billion in new obligational authority for the Pentagon and related activities—an increase of $6.3 billion over the current year...
...But there was even better news...
...they assume that American forces have as proper a place in Indochina as do those of North Vietnam...
...For the entire year 1971, murders top the high level of 1969...
...In the budget as in other games, each party needs the opposition as a shill...
...And the $6 billion rise in the military authorization remains untouched...
...To add injury to this Administration insult: How many know that the budget and the law permit the Pentagon to borrow from the Social Security trust funds—at low rates of interest— to finance its authorized projects (and its overruns) until the people's tax money comes rolling into the Treasury...
...Nixon constantly refers will apparently be one in which America is armed not just to the teeth but to the eyeballs...
...This legislation is neither perfect nor all-inclusive," says Russell Hemen-way of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, which has lobbied energetically for campaign spending reform...
...incapable of offering jobs to all its workers...
...Bank robberies set a record...
...Campaign Fund Reform The Federal Elections Campaign Act, which finally cleared the House of Representatives a few weeks ago and which President Nixon has now signed into law, is certainly better than no law at all...
...Why should they withdraw their forces from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, when they will still be threatened by American planes and ships based in the region...
...But that's part of the game...
...Like the man says, "The hand is quicker than the eye...
...and $1 billion in mortgages) are moved around like that old pea to subtract from a deficit or to pad a program...
...NOTES in the NEWS Nixon's Peace Spectacular If there was ever any doubt about President Nixon's formidable talent as a practitioner of the fine art of manipulative politics, it should have been dispelled once and for all by his sensational television address of January 25—the speech in which he disclosed to the American people and to the world his "secret plan" for settling the Vietnam war...
...The biggest of this year's flim-flams was the announcement by the Administration that for the first time in many years the 1973 budget for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare exceeds the Pentagon's...
...it now contends it is not bound by the word of former Secretary Resor and will therefore "abide by the long-standing policy that investigative reports are not subject to public release...
...The "generation of peace" to which Mr...
...Crime in the Capital We have President Nixon's word for it, as set forth in his State of the Union message, that while nationally "crime is still increasing, the rate of increase has slowed to a five-year low...
...The operating expenses for the White House, its National Security Council, and its Domestic Council are going up by as much as fourteen per cent, but its office of Consumer Affairs will be the victim of a twenty-eight per cent budget cut...
...For example, it is right there in the budget: an increase in "public assistance" programs—from $9.7 billion to $11 billion...
...his speech, and the flurry of press briefings and news conferences that accompanied it, had the immediate effect, therefore, of eclipsing the hollow program and huge deficit embodied in his budget and State of the Union messages...
...Last year Congress voted to set up the National Commission on Individual Rights to study taps, bugging, and other matters affecting civil liberties...
...Now, then, if all the trust funds— nearly $61 billion—are deducted from that big HEW authorization, it is left with about $26 billion in Federal funds from the treasury—$56 billion less than the Pentagon gets...
...From this data the American Civil Liberties Union has learned that through 1970 Federal and state peace officers installed 1,001 wire taps and bugs which picked up 622,292 conversations involving 61,400 persons...
...And trust fund spending for Social Security and Medicare increases because of the natural growth of the programs and their cost, and not because the Administration has developed greater concern for the old, the ill, and the needy...
...Crimes against property—burglaries, auto thefts—were down sufficiently to reduce the "serious crime" category on which the President pinned his claim of crime-fighting progress...
...advancement of business," twenty per cent...
...that the only way to stop the war is to stop—now, completely...
...Virtually every item in his plan had previously been proposed by the United States, and all had previously been rejected by the other side...
...Thus the increase—and HEW's fiscal superiority over the Pentagon—vanish like a mirage...
...the Justice Department, thirteen per cent...
...The President urged the Democratic Congress to be nice and pass the ninety—count 'em, ninety—"major proposals" which he said were awaiting action...
...churches should invest their money in accord with their role of "bearer, communicator, initiator, and arbiter of personal morality...
...On the other hand, these were the figures for activities associated with human needs: hospitals and clinics, down three per cent...
...It also removes any excuse for investing church funds in destruction and death...
...The ACLU said some of the 257 convictions might have been secured even without electronic snooping...
...In particular, the citizen should be wary of claims that those in office produced the miracle...
...Nixon owned up to a few little problems—unemployment, for instance, which he blamed on peace, and another whopping Federal deficit for next year, which he blamed on unemployment...
...Nixon's pledge to submit "later in the year" a plan for school financing that will "relieve the burden of property taxes...
...Still, there have been no limits at all in the past...
...The Administration's commitment to spending most of this money came after extreme pressure from Congress and the economy...
...and $1 billion from the unemployment trust fund...
...The limits are hardly austere...
...It doesn't matter which party is running it from the White House...
...Friedman is a Washington correspondent for the Knight Newspapers...
...In his long career, this was certainly Mr...
...Wrong...
...Under the Federal law, information on each surveillance must be sent to the Administrative Office of U.S...
...Of the $10.4 billion increase so magnanimously "given" to HEW over the present budget, about $7 billion comes from the Social Security trust funds, over which the Administration has no control...
...Among the key items is $1 billion for a new force of missile submarines which may ultimately cost $30 billion, and an expanded research budget to develop still more strategic weaponry...
...Beginning next month, candidates for the Presidency and for House and Senate seats will be limited in the amount of their own money they can spend on their campaigns, and in the amounts they can spend on advertising over broadcast and print media...
...The budgeteers get away with their game because the rubes are powerless, because billions blur in the mind, because the plethora of annual budget stories say little that means anything...
...Investing in Peace A recent study by the Corporate Information Center of the National Council of Churches disclosed the depressing fact that ten leading Protestant denominations in the United States have investments valued at more than $200 million in the securities of some thirty major military contractors...
...Budget Shell Game Virtually everyone knows that the annual Federal budget is the oldest established continuously operated permanent floating shell game in Washington...
...We cannot know," it explained, "except from self-serving Justice Department statements, whether the electronic surveillance was necessary or even helpful in the cases where it was used, even if convictions resulted...
...One thing Big Brother is doing is bringing back the party line —with some parties on it that the telephone company doesn't tell you about...
...It is not difficult to fathom why these proposals are unacceptable to Hanoi and the Vietcong...
...And when you focus even closer on that increase, you discover that it is supposed to include revenue-sharing (which is in Congressional limbo) and the Family Assistance Plan (which won't take effect until 1974, if at all...
...They will soon be published in book form, and deserve to be read as examples of journalism at its best and militarism at its worst...
...that the only way to get America out of Indochina is to get out...
...A similar though smaller massacre took place on the same day—March 16, 1968—at the nearby village of Mykhe 4. Officers of the Americal Division systematically stripped the files of documents that might incriminate their colleagues...
...Why should they stake all they have fought for in decades of desperate struggle on "elections" to be administered by the same corrupt South Vietnamese regime, regardless of whether or not President Thieu steps down for a month...
...Nixon's outstanding performance...
...higher education, down two per cent...
...It also indicates that many leading companies survive profitably without the guaranteed market of military contracts...
...Meanwhile, tens of thousands of persons not even suspected of anything, were overheard because they talked to suspects...
...10013...
...Deduct $4.7 billion in trust funds, and the amount the Administration actually wants authorized is $18.9 billion, a one per cent decrease...
...The President found it "difficult to see how anyone, regardless of his past position on the war, could now say that we have not gone the extra mile in offering a settlement that is fair to everybody concerned...
...The figures cited here refer only to court-approved surveillance...
...only twenty-three major cities made comparable progress a year earlier...
...Appropriately, Hersh's articles were entitled "Cover-Up...
...He did not bother to confuse the issue by pointing out that some of these proposals have been abandoned by his own Administration and others seem to be opposed by his own lobbyists...
...The HEW authorization totals $86.8 billion...
...The Nixon proposals," Tom Wicker observed in The New York Times, "like every American peace plan ever put forward, assume that the United States is as much in the right in the war as Hanoi or the Vietcong...
...But the Nixon Administration's ugly accusations could not check the growing convictions in the country that the only successful "peace plan" is one that results in peace...
...Indeed, it was doubtless reacting to the realization that the President had not sold his new "peace plan" to the country when the Administration struck out so viciously at its critics...
...The new law also provides that every political committee raising more than $1,000 for a Presidential or Congressional candidate must report every contribution received and every expenditure over $100...
...But is there really such an increase...
...manpower training (including un-passed revenue sharing funds) up five per cent...
...Perhaps this Administration's priorities can best be seen where it lives and operates its shell game—in the White House...
...It was an exercise in high drama...
...Health care expenditures rose from $19.1 billion to $23.6 billion—or about twenty-three per cent...
...indifferent to the plight of its poor and the injustices inflicted on its minorities...
...In spite of the charts in the front of the budget volume, where you will also find the President saying that human needs now have first priority, other charts in the back of the book tell a different story...
...That is to say, it is better than the totally unenforced and unenforceable Corrupt Practices Act of 1925, which the new law supplants...
...This, then, is the State of the Union —committed to an endless, costly, and dangerous arms race...
...elementary and secondary education, up two per cent...
...Rapes increased markedly, as have assaults with guns...
...1.5 billion in escrow payments from the use of oil lands...
...the Office of Management and Budget, which originally refused to spend this money, could do so again...
...His critics, including some of the Democratic Presidential aspirants, were thrown into obvious disarray...
...troops six months after a settlement had been reached...
...The big news in the proposed new Federal budget is a substantial increase in military spending, with a commitment to still greater increases in the years ahead...
...To top all this off, the Nixon Administration, which contends it does not need a court order to tap or bug suspected "subversives," is believed to be spying electronically on more such suspects without court orders than with such orders...
...Nixon deserves credit for engaging in secret peace talks with Hanoi, but he is mistaken if he feels that his spectacular announcement will persuade Americans to tolerate continuance of this miserable war...
...Courts...
...Under his leadership, he assured Congress and the nation, America has made "significant progress...
...By failing to note this surge in violence, the President was able to claim much more progress in the District's war against crime than the facts warranted...
...Throughout the budget, trust funds, escrow money, and Government assets (like $1 billion in unemployment trust funds...
...The Army has changed its mind...
...The military spending authorized for the year beginning July 1 was estimated at $81.6 billion...
...It was a carefully "nonpartisan" speech, and relatively bland...
...Too many judges have been all too willing to grant approval for taps...
...regulation of business, up two per cent...
...State of the Union President Nixon surveyed the State of the Union in January, as the Constitution requires, and he proclaimed it good, as the political exigencies demand in an election year...
...Nixon calls it "significant progress...
...As more states join the electronic snooping parade by passing enabling legislation, the number of taps and bugging installations will increase sharply...
...and while this latest plan asserts the right of the Vietnamese people to determine the future of South Vietnam, it also assumes that the United States has a right to say how that determination ought to be arrived at—by elections...
...In two detailed articles published recently in The New Yorker, Hersh draws heavily on the suppressed Report, and goes far toward explaining why the Army does not want to release it...
...vocational education, down five per cent...
...they assume that North and South Vietnam are separate and equal nations, a dubious proposition historically, politically, and legally...
...We say that if America can do no better after 196 years of nationhood, it had better think of starting over again from scratch...
...Reports will be filed, as they have been in the past, with the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House, who can be expected to ignore violations and evasions, as they have in the past...
...Most of the politicians, like veteran carnival hands at a county fair, nudge each other and chuckle with admiration for the operator as the rubes are taken year after year...
...When major progress is made against crime, it will come through basic reforms in society, nothing less...
...For, after all, they wouldn't know what to complain about if they didn't know how it worked and had not done it themselves...
Vol. 36 • March 1972 • No. 3
