Notes in the News
Notes in the News After China When President Nixon announced, a few days after his return from China, that he had arranged invitations to Peking for the majority and minority leaders of the...
...This practice is routine in America, 1972, not only at Dulles but at other ports of entry...
...Women are asked to remove their coats for inspection...
...In spite of the powerful case made by Stern, Reuss, and others for a thorough overhaul of the nation's cruelly unjust tax laws, there is no reason to expect the Nixon Administration, with its profound commitment to the nation's privileged interests, to do anything about tax reform...
...One senior U.S...
...That the United States lost the service of such able men was one of the tragedies of the hysterical decades, but it was by no means the greatest one...
...officials search in the land of the free...
...Had a sane American policy toward China prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s, would the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings have been snuffed out in Korea and Indochina...
...Thus in January it voted to prohibit military and economic aid to the Greek dictatorship for the fiscal year ending this June 30 unless—and here comes that loophole big as a barn door—the President decided U.S...
...It will not do for the President's Democratic opposition to dismiss his China trip as a mere exercise in "politics...
...Yet there was the President in Peking, declaring that "neither of us seeks the territory of the other...
...The official communique released at the conclusion of his visit, and the various interpretations and extrapolations issued since by Government spokesmen, show very little in the way of substantive agreement...
...Prime Minister Lynden Pindling called a Bahamian cabinet meeting to discuss the matter...
...Nixon took office, "we've been giving or selling Greece about $75 million to $100 million worth of military equipment every year...
...It was political, of course, and Mr...
...Why is it done...
...health team meeting with Soviet scientists in Moscow...
...Steinem and other notables, including some distinguished males...
...An immediate consequence of the California decision was the release on bail of Angela Davis, who had previously been denied bond as a person charged with a "capital offense...
...But it can furnish a lot of information to women about legal abortions elsewhere...
...The FTC has taken some recent actions against automobile advertisers who are notorious for making false claims...
...Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, is on the Alliance's board...
...Neither of us seeks to stretch out our hands and rule the world...
...Customs officials say it is all part of a drive against the narcotics traffic...
...national security was involved and therefore arms should be sold to Greece...
...Stern, author of The Great Treasury Raid, a best selling 1964 book on tax loopholes, and of the forthcoming book, The Rape of the Taxpayer, told the Joint Committee that just one of the major tax loopholes, the preferential tax treatment of "capital gains," provides tax "welfare" allowances totaling nearly $14 billion a year, nearly six times the Federal outlay for environmental protection...
...Hardly a release emanates from the Democratic National Committee that does not assail the Administration for failing to submit a fair tax program...
...It was only about four years ago, we recall, that a Democratic Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, invoked the melodramatic imagery of the Yellow Peril, warning his countrymen of the threat posed by "a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons...
...Still waiting in prisons elsewhere in the United States are some 600 others under sentence of death, whose fate depends on a decision the Supreme Court of the United States is scheduled to hand down this term...
...he seems to have a tremendous and fervent following among the young, including many young workers...
...Is it that they are equally committed to the same privileged interests...
...A mini-crisis developed...
...Then, turning to Rogers, he asked: "Do you agree, Mr...
...This landmark opinion arose from a case involving Sperry and Hutchinson, the country's oldest and largest trading stamp company...
...The President will soon have an opportunity to demonstrate how serious he is about his Long March...
...Francis was so enraged at the treatment he received he returned to Nassau and ordered that no American be allowed to enter his country...
...According to a recent Harris poll, "the underlying mood of women in America today is one of conflict, frustration, deep division, and change...
...These are secondary considerations, however, compared to the major impact of the California ruling—the reprieve of 107 men and women who have languished on death row for years, waiting helplessly for the state to decide whether it will murder them...
...When the State Department announced the shipments, which reportedly will include F-4 Phantom jets, tanks, and other equipment, Representative Benjamin S. Rosenthal, New York Democrat and chairman of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee whose hearings on Greece last summer led to the Congressional ban, was sharply critical...
...It is this that tells us what kind of a nation, what kind of a people, we are becoming—or have become...
...They comprise fifty-one per cent of the population...
...You get the feeling it is a growing possibility...
...One day all mankind might work together to use space for peaceful purposes for the benefit of everyone...
...Muskie and Humphrey might not be as far out front as they appear to be right now in this primary race...
...It was noteworthy, too, that the networks and major newspapers drew on the expertise of such men as John Stewart Service, O. Edmund Clubb, John K. Fairbank, and others who were hounded out of public life during the Joe McCarthy years because they dared to offer a realistic assessment of developments in China...
...It is commonplace today for the luggage of ordinary tourists and businessmen to be tamped and poked and searched as though they were common criminals...
...The urgent task of "normalizing" relations between the United States and China still lies in the distant future...
...the Court ruling should encourage the FTC to bestir itself to far more intensive policing of advertising in the auto industry, as well as in other areas of the merchandising of products and services...
...In this, my native land, customs inspectors opened every bag and briefcase and went through them with probing hands...
...Europeans are not alone in being more enlightened, more civilized, than Americans on the customs front...
...The Alliance will try to harness the momentum created by women's lib and channel it into coordinated creative efforts to end what it describes as "sex discrimination . . . throughout America...
...More Arms for Fascism The Congress rarely votes bans on U.S...
...The agreement established a U.S.-U.S.S.R...
...Rosenthal's subcommittee should investigate Mr...
...This writer has visited Japan, South Vietnam, Laos, and Hong Kong within the last two years...
...Nixon did not pledge himself to withdrawing the American military presence from Taiwan...
...And even in wartorn Saigon it did not take as long to clear customs as it did at Dulles airport, right here at home...
...arms aid to foreign governments, and when it does it leaves a loophole called "national security...
...Centuries of travelers had marveled at the sight, and so did the President...
...But their officials do not find it necessary to search the way U.S...
...On February 17, the day he left for China, Mr...
...I certainly do, Mr...
...You get the impression they are generally more radical than ever, more willing to listen to new ideas, new voices...
...Men are not being forgotten...
...While Richard Nixon, peacemaker, was in Peking, the wheels he had set in motion to ship arms to Greece were turning—all unknown to Congress...
...But reentering America proved to be a fifty minute ordeal, while officials probed every bag of every passenger on a huge 747 jet...
...Morgan is a news commentator on the ABC network...
...I drove from West Berlin for 110 miles through Communist East Germany with two suitcases of personal belongings...
...The nation's highest tribunal can do no better than follow the splendid example set by the California Supreme Court...
...To do this it will field representatives in all fifty states, not to fund projects—the Alliance is working on a shoestring and may charge for membership—but, among other things, to act as clearing houses of information for women of all ages and at every economic level as to their legal rights...
...But it wasn't the bun-faced, uniformed customs inspectors themselves who were most enraging...
...if he perceives a new relationship with China as a means of preserving and extending American hegemony in the Pacific...
...He did not bring the United States any closer to extricating itself from its calamitous Indochina adventure...
...Supreme Court ruling...
...Nixon is likely to derive some benefit from it in his campaign this year—though not as much, perhaps, as he now expects...
...The FTC charged the company with antitrust violations...
...Nixon's claim that U.S...
...The President was so moved by the sight of the wall, in fact, that he went on to say that it had been worth traveling 16,000 miles to see...
...The agency has the power, said the opinion, to go beyond the letter or even the spirit of the antitrust laws and combat an apparently unlimited array of unfair or immoral trade practices...
...His words were reminiscent of those offered by a member of the British House of Lords who compared the abolition of capital punishment to the earlier abolition of the practice of disemboweling and quartering traitors: "We did not abolish [such practices] because we sympathize with traitors, but because we took the view that it was a punishment no longer consistent with our self-respect...
...Under the program, welfare payments averaging some $720,000 a year will go to the nation's wealthiest families (those with annual incomes of more than a million dollars...
...Recently, without publicity fanfare, they signed an agreement to cooperate in research on cancer, heart disease, and environmental problems...
...Nixon doubtless is looking—as Presidents have a way of looking—to his place in history...
...The notice reached Congress about two weeks later—and two days after that the State Department announced the United States would sell $70 million worth of arms to Greece before June 30...
...Egeberg heads a seven-member U.S...
...Entering the United States by plane from abroad today can be akin to entering a police state...
...California Points the Way Civilized men everywhere must hail the recent ruling of the California Supreme Court that the imposition of capital punishment by the State violates constitutional safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment...
...The endless arms race between the two super-powers remains the major threat to the world's peace and the foremost obstacle in the search for humane solutions to problems of human survival and development...
...The fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated...
...One Alliance goal is the integration of fathers into early childhood training...
...Nixon signed a formal notice calling Congress' attention to a Soviet naval build-up in the Mediterranean...
...Men are asked to take off their watches...
...If he believes, as he may well believe, that he has devised a clever new strategy for protracting and intensifying the Cold War with the Soviet Union...
...Customs Outrage On January 21, Carlton Francis, the finance and education minister of the Bahamas, was bodily searched by U.S...
...The words and spirit of that amendment apparently have never been called to the attention of customs officials...
...The newsmen present carefully preserved his observation, and the White House xeroxed copies of it for those who were absent...
...Now it is launching Phase II...
...It is really a tremendous privilege we have had...
...Part of this exercise is the new magazine Ms., edited by Gloria Steinem, who believes women are interested in more than learning how to stop diaper rash or unstop the sink...
...They would sidle up to the incoming tourist or businessman and ask, a. la Jack Webb, if he would step into a back room for a private search...
...The saturation television coverage of the President's visit—arranged with the eager cooperation of the White House—enabled Americans to catch at least a fleeting glimpse of China, and served as a wholesome antidote to years of indoctrination by the Government and most of the media...
...he considers the Russians to be world leaders in research on viruses as a possible approach to a cure for cancer...
...The President can signify in Moscow that America is ready to abandon a quarter century of national paranoia...
...Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, one of the House's most knowledgeable Democrats on tax legislation, believes that it would be "no trick at all" to close tax loopholes yielding $4 billion or more—enough revenue to relieve unemployment by financing a comprehensive public service jobs program—and that a thorough program of loophole-plugging could produce at least $20 billion...
...East German police and border guards were satisfied with a cursory look at my luggage...
...D. J. R. Bruckner Chicago Sun-Times...
...While nobody has been guarding the ramparts with troops, U.S...
...People you talk to on the streets, in stores, in their homes here [Milwaukee] and in Madison certainly seem to be more fed up with all the familiar names in politics and government than at any time in the last decade...
...Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to this country, said, "Our combined forces to combat these diseases are quite impressive...
...What is saddest about this is that thousands upon thousands of Americans in this age of intercontinental travel have gone through this, have seen it and been victimized by it, and somehow failed to become outraged...
...The Alliance wants to reach out to working-class and poor women of all ethnic groups...
...The women's liberation movement is here to stay...
...In this crowded [Wisconsin] primary, thirty per cent could mean victory and a new lease on political life for McGovern...
...He did not establish a permanent diplomatic channel between Washington and Peking, even in the guise of a trade mission, and the minor cultural and trade exchanges stipulated in the communique will hardly serve as a substitute...
...His visit to Moscow next month will call for more than a television festival of banquets and sight-seeing trips...
...It couldn't happen in America...
...if he sees himself as the architect of a new "balance of power" controlled by the United States—then his mission to Peking will have proved to be not only a waste but a net loss...
...Faced with prejudice and discrimination—the handout goes on—it is not surprising that nine out of ten women believe that if women do not change their status themselves, no one will change it for them...
...Through such gaping holes Presidents can arm whom they please when they please...
...Hope Ahead The United States and the Soviet Union have embarked on a joint venture which we hope will be followed by others designed to bring the two superpowers together for the benefit of mankind...
...In no city in Europe—London, Paris, Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt, or Vienna—did it take this traveler longer than ten minutes to clear customs...
...It is casting about, instead, for ways to institute a new, regressive sales tax...
...Davis, whose trial is now under way, had served sixteen months in prison—itself cruel and unusual punishment for one who has been convicted of no crime whatever...
...national security requires us to keep arming the Greek dictators, and should expose the hypocrisy of Congress for providing "national security" loopholes in bans against arms shipments...
...Other experts place the potential gain much higher, suggesting that tax reform could yield the Treasury up to $70 billion, while easing the burden on taxpayers in the lower brackets...
...But we do not cite them in order to denigrate his achievement: By design or inadvertence, he took a long step toward dispelling the atmosphere of irrational anti-Communism which, in the past, he had done so much to foster...
...As if he did not quite trust Rogers, the President wheeled around to the reporters on hand for further confirmation of his opinion: "Let me ask the members of the press, do you think it was worth coming...
...The Secretary had a ready answer...
...President," he replied...
...I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall," he said...
...Congress knows this quite well when it pretends to stop arms shipments while not really stopping them at all...
...In no city in Europe was it necessary to do more than make a written or verbal declaration of possessions...
...But at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, it was a different story...
...The Long March on which the President says he has embarked can hardly undo the crimes and blunders of the past, but it could prevent making the same mistakes in the future...
...John Glenn, America's pioneer astronaut, recently expressed the hope that there will be joint U.S.-Russian manned space flights by 1974 or 1975...
...There was a time in the history of the world, a time within memory of living man, when "Europe" conjured up images of guards and border problems, of "customs delays" and questioning by uniformed officials...
...A major problem is to change the women's lib image, which is largely that of white, militant, middle-class females...
...Roger Egeberg, President Nixon's consultant on health affairs, acknowledged that Soviet scientists "are ahead of us in many areas and we hope to learn from them...
...The death penalty, the Court held, "degrades and dehumanizes all who participate in its processes...
...The Court, in an unanimous decision, expanded the FTC's authority to take action against unfair or deceptive merchandising practices...
...Before her release Ms...
...The Court Aids Consumers The American consumer, so often the victim of flimflam in the marketplace, may get some long overdue help from the Federal Trade Commission because of a recent U.S...
...much of the liquid assets of the country are held in their names...
...Bodies are patted down...
...The program does exist now, he said, in the form of our present Federal income tax law which, as structured by Congress over the years, provides more than $2.2 billion in yearly tax benefits to be shared by about 3,000 families, each with incomes greater than one million dollars a year, while doling out about $92 million to be shared by the six million poorest families in the country...
...It is a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation called the Women's Action Alliance...
...At the signing, Dr...
...Nixon's trip achieved...
...Neither of us seeks domination over the other...
...The cost of this "Rich Welfare Program," as Stern identified it in his imagined news story, comes to $77.3 billion a year...
...But why won't the Democrats translate their fine words into deeds...
...They stand docilely in line at Dulles and wait, without comment or complaint, while a stranger paws their private possessions—as though it were only to be expected as a part of the American way of life...
...That the House leaders, whose dedication to the shoddy shibboleths of the Cold War has never wavered in the past quarter of a century, should manifest such enthusiasm for a visit to the homeland of Asian Communism was a significant indication of what the President's journey had accomplished: He had brought about a major shift in domestic attitudes toward an important segment of the world community...
...Welfare for the Wealthy Without exception, every candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination is publicly committed to the need for reforming the loophole-ridden and inequitable Federal tax structure...
...Who could have envisioned Richard M. Nixon approvingly quoting the thoughts of Chairman Mao, or solicitously helping Chou En-lai into his overcoat, or warmly applauding a Red propaganda ballet...
...they could assume far more meaningful proportions if in the process both sides acquired the measure of mutual trust and understanding that might yet lead to the long elusive agreement on reduction of armaments...
...One of the country's leading tax reform crusaders, Philip M. Stern, testifying recently before the Joint Congressional Committee on the Economic Report, dramatized the issue by asking the members to imagine a news story, datelined Washington, that opened like this: "Congress today completed action on the final part of a revolutionary welfare program that reverses the usual pattern and gives huge welfare payments to the super-rich but only pennies per week to the very poor...
...official estimated that since the two-year embargo against arms for Greece was lifted soon after Mr...
...Tax-exempt, it can't lobby or, for example, fight a male Catholic judge's injunction against abortions in New York City municipal hospitals...
...Nixon was so instrumental in creating that mythology...
...Some of his staff people say they hope to get thirty per cent of the vote, at least...
...Chief Justice Donald R. Wright, writing for six of the Court's seven members, noted that the decision was "not grounded in sympathy for those who would commit crimes of violence but in concern for the society that diminishes itself whenever it takes the life of one of its members...
...South Vietnam, hardly famed for its democratic traditions, was the only other country in which I was asked to open a bag...
...As Income Tax Day approaches, the drumfire of rhetoric is sure to rise...
...The incident highlighted a situation that has become a disgrace to the United States...
...With this greater grant of power the FTC can move—if it has the will to do so—on a broad front to protect the consumer from being systematically deceived...
...Whether his mission to China is recorded as a minor aberration or a major triumph will depend, in large measure, on what he chooses to do next...
...It has survived a lot of bad nightclub jokes and media cartoons, half-baked books, and rib-punching (Adam's rib, of course) at the men's bar in the Biltmore...
...This writer recently visited five European countries on a business trip...
...Soviet-American cooperation in medical science and space science are modestly hopeful steps forward in their own right...
...Secretary...
...If he does less, his mission to China will assume the classic attributes of a Chinese dinner —momentarily filling, but leaving one very empty very soon...
...Forget it...
...Notes in the News After China When President Nixon announced, a few days after his return from China, that he had arranged invitations to Peking for the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, the leadership of the House of Representatives was visibly and volubly upset about having been overlooked...
...Another part was unveiled in Washington recently by Ms...
...A major target for the FTC should be misleading and fraudulent advertising...
...That is a possibility...
...Power of a Womon Never, the Ladies Home Journal used to say, "underestimate the power of a woman...
...Space exploration is another area for productive collaboration which is commanding more attention...
...committee for health cooperation...
...It just may be that it is the women who have been underestimating themselves...
...They were delayed for three hours until the ban was lifted...
...they can be brilliant, brave, and desirable, but they are still known largely as the "weaker sex...
...This decision affirms in my mind the impotency of Congress," he said...
...But no one can picture John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson or Hubert H. Humphrey daring or even wanting to go so far toward challenging the mythology of the Cold War—whether for the sake of politics or statesmanship...
...About 200 American tourists trying to enter Nassau were innocent victims...
...No customs official in any of those countries—Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, or Austria—demanded to search within a bag...
...It now turns out that the President waited only a short time indeed before setting in motion the machinery for arms aid to the Greek colonels...
...No Democratic politician makes a speech these days without paying his respects to the topic of tax reform...
...customs procedures have become the most blatantly militaristic in the western world...
...It is one of history's ironies that Mr...
...The newsmen, like Chinese schoolchildren reciting a lesson, responded in unison: "Yes, Mr...
...A cooperative effort such as this by the two space powers," he said recently, "could lead to a program of true international space cooperation by all nations...
...It is unnecessary to any legitimate goal of the State and is incompatible with the dignity of man and the judicial process...
...Well, it has happened in America...
...These are critical failures, and they have received too little attention in the general euphoria surrounding the President's mission...
...It was the customs bureau's plain-clothesmen, hovering in the background, eliciting memories of grade B movies and of last year's television shows...
...Or at least, begin to forget it...
...Sex discrimination," says an Alliance fact sheet, "and assigned sex roles, which involve the stigma of a generally inferior status as well as specific denials of equal opportunity, are no longer acceptable to women...
...McCartney is a Washington correspondent for the Knight newspapers...
...James McCartney (Mr...
...They know it hasn't happened to them elsewhere in the world—because they are returning from elsewhere in the world...
...It may well turn out that this was just about all that Mr...
...Although the Supreme Court upheld the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that there was no antitrust violation, the high court agreed with the FTC on a far more important point—it accepted the agency's contention that its action against a merchandiser need not be based on the antitrust laws...
...Some males have volunteered to help...
...That was Europe...
...Customs officials at the Miami airport on a visit to the United States...
...Certainly it was not, as he exuberantly proclaimed, a "week that changed the world...
...Edward P. Morgan (Mr...
...In the opinion written by Justice Byron R. White, the Court held that the FTC is not limited to providing protection against antitrust violations...
...China Chatter The President gazed upon the wall as it wound through the brown loess mountains into the horizon...
...Aside from his interest in the short-run political gain, Mr...
...She will benefit—justice will benefit— from the decision in a second sense, for it will no longer be possible to exclude from her jury those citizens who hold moral scruples against the death penalty...
...Stanley Karnow in The Washington Post The Race in Wisconsin He [McGovern] is becoming increasingly credible as a genuine Midwestern radical in a long and honored tradition: His organization is superb...
...Would the wealth of the United States have been squandered on wars and weapons designed to ward off the peril of "monolithic Communism...
...Despite the near-hysteria of the Republican ultra-right over the "betrayal" of Chiang Kai-shek (in which such unreconstructed Democratic Cold Warriors as Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey joined with dark mut-terings about "giving away Taiwan"), Mr...
...France, Germany, Britain, Japan, Laos, South Vietnam, and Hong Kong all have drug problems...
...It is happening every day at airports across the land, from Dulles, to Kennedy, to Friendship, to O'Hare...
...When a uniformed official found something he, or she, thought "suspicious," a signal would be transmitted to plain-clothesmen...
...For the poorest families (those earning $3,000 a year or less), the welfare allowance will average $16 a year, or roughly thirty cents a week...
...Why is it, then, that no one seriously expects Congress—which is, after all, under Democratic control—to mount an earnest effort at tax reform this year...
...Luggage is searched...
Vol. 36 • April 1972 • No. 4
