NOTES IN THE NEWS
NOTES IN THE NEWS Uncle Sam's Flying Lemon Question: What costs $60 million, smells like a lemon, and flies (sometimes, when its wings don't drop off) ? Answer: The C-5A cargo jet, which the...
...Cold War Relics For more than two decades American taxpayers unknowingly provided the financing for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, the two propaganda networks which beam their broadcasts, respectively, at the Soviet Union and its East European allies...
...After two years' work, the President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future concluded that "no substantial benefits would result from continued growth of the nation's population...
...But the days of wine and roses have dimmed and they can now be perceived as heroes still, but far more human than they appeared to be after they splashed down in the Pacific in July, 1969...
...Married astronauts separated from their families for long periods have been subjected to the most strain...
...it left discretion to the states to set their own clean water standards—and, therefore, to create "pollution havens" to which industries could flee...
...The Schneebeli bill was written to benefit the Kellogg cereal and Pew oil families in maintaining control over funds in their tax-free family foundations...
...So was the wear and tear of internal politics and rivalry...
...Astronauts are chosen for a number of reasons but a major factor is our stability...
...The military contracts just keep rolling in...
...obeisance to the power of bigness by men—and women —of small but greedy minds...
...They could be, but they have not been, and it seems unlikely that they will be...
...Nixon told this Commission even before it began its work a year ago that he saw "no social or moral justification whatever for legalizing marijuana...
...Under that procedure, Chairman Mills summarizes the bills to be considered...
...And removal of these legal barriers will not, as black Americans have had ample opportunity to observe, automatically bring an end to oppression and exploitation...
...What Aldrin revealed about himself in The Los Angeles Times interview makes him more admirable than ever...
...Each then passes automatically, without vote, unless a Congressman stands and objects...
...The New York Times reported that members of the Pew family have been generous contributors to Republican campaigns, giving more than $142,000 to national GOP organizations in 1968 alone...
...The U.S...
...Milton S. Eisenhower, who headed the Presidential Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, told the Kennedy Subcommittee that his group's fifteen-volume report had met with "almost total silence" after it was presented to President Nixon...
...We've got to be rock solid in the head...
...He recalls that Life magazine had a contract with him, Armstrong, and Collins for their personal stories during the flights and the stories about their families: "I remember reading the story and thinking, 'If only it was really like that.' "Here were all the happy contented wives and children smiling out from happy backyards with husbands standing proudly by...
...A small group led by Democratic Congressmen Wright Patman of Texas and Les Aspin of Wisconsin successfully blocked Mills' attempt to secure House passage of twenty-two Ways and Means "members' bills...
...Saying 'No' to the Military The Senate Armed Services Committee which almost always says "Yes" to the Defense Department's requests has suddenly discovered the word "No...
...It will include some "candid comments about NASA, politics, and all the other things we became involved in...
...it restricted the right of citizens to seek redress against polluters in the courts...
...Durham's allegations have now been investigated—and corroborated—by staff investigators of the General Accounting Office...
...He says Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe should be consigned to "their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics...
...All of his documents and materials were found to be authentic," Proxmire notes, "and additional evidence was discovered by GAO in support of what Mr...
...There they proceed to consider bills often written for favored constituents seeking special tax relief...
...citizens...
...But Mills agreed not to push the members' bills later in the day...
...Three of them were considered worthwhile by the reformers and allowed to pass...
...The fourth bill establishes tax exempt status for veterans' organizations, and allows them to engage in "Americanism, youth activities, community activities, and information and educational programs relative to national security and foreign affairs...
...And what more eloquent epitome of the victim of all this ineptitude and chicanery than Chaplin, the magnificent tramp, the little man with the ill-fitting derby, the baggy pants, and the shambling walk, but who nevertheless manages to preserve his own dignity in the face of utter outrageousness...
...and prohibit importation of pre-Columbian art smuggled out of the home country...
...As for loans of ships by the Administration to other countries, the Committee held that this would require Congressional authority...
...Industrial polluters, who perceived in the Senate bill a threat that they might have to meet the expense of cleaning up their operations, found the House Committee sympathetic and receptive to their "suggestions for improvement...
...There was rioting in Detroit when he issued the Executive Order and, as the President noted, "wholesale looting and violence" had occurred "in small towns and great metropolitan areas...
...Former Governor William Scranton's Commission on Campus Disorders incurred the wrath of Vice President Agnew...
...The event is also used to provide favors for other members of the House, to be returned at a politically opportune moment...
...Well, the fact is that the husband probably flew halfway across the country to pose for the picture, the kids were half strangers to him, and the wife was scared to death about any number of things...
...Once or twice a year the twenty-five Committee members —attended by Committee and Department of the Treasury staff—gather behind closed doors, and in cheerful spirit seat themselves around a large green felt-covered table...
...He has disclosed his personal ordeal in the hope that it will encourage others—no matter what their occupations—to come to terms with their own inner selves...
...Refusing to submit to such degradation, Charlie Chaplin went off, with dignity, to live in Switzerland, vowing never to return...
...Both have been met with official indifference, if not hostility...
...By the time the bill cleared the House four months later, it was a noxious hodgepodge of loopholes and escape clauses...
...It will, of course, take more than a constitutional amendment to break those bonds...
...Well, all-American maybe, but not perfect...
...Perhaps more important, Democratic Congressmen are especially fearful of crossing Wilbur Mills or his Committee...
...A. Ernest Fitzgerald, the former Air Force procurement specialist who first disclosed the huge C-5A cost overrun to Proxmire's subcommittee on economy in government, is still fighting for reinstatement to the job from which the Pentagon fired him after his testimony...
...These included special tax benefits for banks, cable TV stations, olive importers, the cigar industry, retread tire manufacturers, shrimp boats, and a single anonymous importer of used airplanes...
...Former Attorney General Nicholas Kat-zenbach testified that the same fate had befallen the report of his Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice...
...A few months ago in The Progressive, Erwin Knoll told the story of Henry N. Durham, the former Lockheed engineer who exposed mismanagement, incompetence, and corruption on the C-5A assembly line, and consequently found himself unemployed, ostracized, and subjected to threats and harassment in the company town of Marietta, Georgia ("The Education of Henry Durham," January 1972...
...The Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which presented its report in 1970, was denounced for its pains by the President and other official spokesmen...
...NOTES IN THE NEWS Uncle Sam's Flying Lemon Question: What costs $60 million, smells like a lemon, and flies (sometimes, when its wings don't drop off) ? Answer: The C-5A cargo jet, which the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation builds (after a fashion) for the U.S...
...Despite their opposition, the reformers did not object to this bill because of some confusion on the House floor—an example of the way the fast procedure helps pass poor bills...
...In recent weeks, two more Presidential commissions have issued thorough reports calling for major changes in critical areas of social policy...
...We were portrayed as perfect all-American people...
...Given the power of Wilbur Mills in Congress, that sounded more like a promise than a threat...
...Hitherto, as an article in the Yale Law Journal recently observed, women "were conceded few rights" in the common law...
...savage racial prejudice in the midst of pious platitudes, mouthed by politicians from the President down, about their commitment to human rights and equal opportunity...
...Among these malpractices was a $400 million overpayment to Lockheed by the Air Force, based on the company's unfounded progress and completion reports—and an additional payment of $705 million made after the first overpayment was called to the Air Force's attention...
...Nixon, having declared a year ago that abortion is "unacceptable," has displayed no interest in his Commission's finding...
...He had been divorced three times and finally married for a fourth to playwright Eugene O'Neill's daughter Oona...
...of the remaining seven, he was able to pass only four...
...Brushing aside the last-ditch obstructionist efforts of a little band of die-hards who warned against undoing "the handiwork of God," the Senate passed the amendment by a vote of eighty-four to eight, and sent it to the states for ratification...
...Proxmire has pointed out the "striking contrast between this action and the steps that might be taken were a similar problem to arise in a civilian agency with an ordinary citizen: If a welfare or a Social Security overpayment is made, the welfare mother or the retired widow is either cut off from further benefits until the Overpayment is liquidated or a refund is required...
...In what turned out to be prophetic testimony, one of the first witnesses before the Kerner Commission, sociologist Kenneth B. Clark, said: "I must in candor say to you members of this Commission—it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland, with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction...
...Once the bill is accepted—possibly in modified form as a result of staff comment—the second member gets his turn, and so on one or more times around the table until everyone is satisfied...
...They exempt the incomes of military and civilian POWs from taxes...
...Chaplin's "sin" a generation ago, which robbed him of the home where in some forty years he had built an indestructible reputation as a supreme comedian in films, was to be a nonconformist...
...Why, then, preserve such obvious instruments of provocation as Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe...
...We had been so busy preparing to go to the moon that we were unprepared for the impact the trip would have on our lives...
...Waldie first forced withdrawal of the bill from the consent calendar, and then beat it on the floor in a 203-148 vote...
...Government's insult to his character...
...We hope it will not take another half century for it to reach its goal of equal justice...
...Aspin protested that "to bring these bills up at this time when we are discussing tax reform could not be worse . . . The bills from the Committee on Ways and Means represent a disaster...
...The cutting irony is that if "moral worth" were declared the key requisite to holding high office, in either the public or private sector, an uncountable number of politicians and corporation presidents, not to mention trade union officials, would be out of a job...
...This made him prey to the likes of the witch-hunting late Senator from Wisconsin...
...Perhaps they learned that in legislative pollution, as in other types, contamination is best controlled at the source...
...So it was against this background that Charlie Chaplin was summoned to prove his "moral worth...
...Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had declared the funds for ULMS were needed to meet "a growing Soviet threat...
...Durham said and in support of some malpractices that even Mr...
...The GAO reports that fifteen C-5As accepted by the Air Force from February through September 1971 had an average of 251 deficiencies per aircraft, many of which were considered major...
...Feuds existed in the space program just as they do everywhere...
...The Rights of Women The forty-nine-year struggle to win Congressional approval of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women came to an almost anticlimactic conclusion a month ago...
...When the bill won unanimous approval in the Senate last November, it was a relatively pure piece of legislation—one that imposed reasonably strict standards for cleaning up the nation's filthy waters...
...Morgan is a news commentator on the ABC network...
...But Mr...
...It recommended, among other measures, removal of legal restrictions on abortion, which it viewed as "obstacles to individual freedom...
...Lockheed was allowed to hold on to the excess $400 million and was promptly paid another $705 million...
...Would Mr...
...The work that you do ought to help guide us not just this summer, but for many summers to come and for many years to come...
...Or, for that matter, Radio Free China...
...In one six-month period last year, more than 3,300 landing gear failures were reported in the C-5A fleet, requiring a total of 82,673 man-hours of maintenance...
...Recent reports to Congress have confirmed that the C-5A richly deserves the status conferred on it long ago by Wisconsin's Senator William Proxmire as the most outrageous boondoggle in the boondoggle-riddled history of military procurement...
...It attacked the secret process surrounding members' bills, rather than the substance of each particular tax break...
...He is absolutely right...
...The struggle for women's rights has barely begun...
...But Lockheed—which Congress and the Administration rescued from bankruptcy last year with a $250 million Federal loan guarantee—is having a fine year, according to recent statements by its corporate officers...
...The bill produced by the House Committee weakened the Senate measure in several significant respects: it provided no specific deadlines by which clean water goals would have to be met...
...She was eighteen, Chaplin fifty-four...
...Representative Jerome Waldie, California Democrat, led a successful floor fight to kill a bill which he charged would give a special tax break to four influential timber companies—Areata National, Georgia Pacific, Simpson, and Miller-Rel-lim...
...Indeed if it were not for the tragic damage being done to the nation's integrity and sense of direction, we could find high comedy in our preposterous predicament—dire want in the midst not just of plenty but an over-abundance of riches...
...The more recent Patman-Aspin action on February 29 was even more precedent-breaking...
...Calling one of the bills—relating to the wagering tax—an anti-crime measure, Mills told Patman there were no hearings because "I couldn't get in touch with the leaders of organized crime...
...Presumably, his forthcoming trip to the Soviet Union, like his recent visit to China, is intended to ease tensions among the super-powers and hasten the end of the twenty-five-year folly known as the Cold War...
...What a devastating film Charlie Chaplin could make on the current American scene, if only he had the time and strength...
...But what's happened to me can happen to anyone...
...So did the Nixon Administration, which naturally allied itself with the polluters in opposing the Senate measure...
...Mills had to withdraw fifteen of the twenty-two...
...Members' bills are among the rewards for good conduct which the members of Ways and Means bestow upon themselves...
...Mills did not allow his anger to cloud his tactical skill...
...Partly because tax bills are complex and obscure, there is rarely opposition...
...The Kerner Commission, after seven months' work, issued a massive, thoughtful report which warned of the deep and deepening divisions in America and called on the Government to mount "new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society...
...But today, just a fortnight short of his eighty-third birthday, the magnificent little tramp is back, graciously forgiving and ¦—publicly at least—forgetting the U.S...
...It would be "a tragedy," he says, if support were withdrawn from "these two unique voices of freedom" which provide "uncensored news and commentary for tens of millions of people...
...The log rolled twice around the table before members were satisfied that enough tax concessions had been handed out for the season...
...As best you can, find the truth, the whole truth, and express it in your report...
...Thomas H. Stanton (Mr...
...A member proposes a bill for the consent of the whole Committee...
...Calling it "unfair" to force Congress to vote on a bill without the information from a public hearing, Patman charged that many of the bills were "raids on the Treasury" which Congress was being asked to approve "without any real knowledge...
...The peoples of the Communist nations are certainly not the only ones in need of "un-censored news and commentary...
...It isn't...
...The bill was sponsored by Ways and Means member Al Ullman, Oregon Democrat...
...Now that the CIA's cover has been blown, President Nixon wants the taxpayers to go right on picking up the tab...
...What they are like in real life was disclosed recently by one of them, Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong onto the surface of the moon to become history's second moonwalker, while Michael Collins remained in the command ship...
...Given the circumstances, one is almost tempted to run Charlie Chaplin for President...
...The Commission Game Almost five years ago on July 29, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders...
...We had problems just as everyone else does...
...Aldrin, now retired from the Air Force, is writing a book about his "personal experiences as a man and an astronaut...
...It was, rather, the all too common experience of most of the Presidential panels appointed in recent years to examine issues of critical public concern...
...Edward P. Morgan (Mr...
...We are looking to you not to approve our own notions but to guide us and to guide the country through a thicket of tension, conflicting evidence, and extreme opinion," Mr...
...Stanton is head of the Tax Reform Research Group, an offshoot of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen program in Washington, D.C...
...It was a rare display of independence by the Committee, and in keeping with the Chairman's recent statement that henceforth it would give "the closest sort of scrutiny" to new weapons and manpower programs...
...Usually members' bills are reported quietly out of Committee and gently eased through the House on the "consent calendar...
...The National Association of Manufacturers described the House bill as "tough but realistic...
...Legislative Pollution The Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, which passed the House of Representatives a month ago by the impressive margin of 378 votes to fourteen, is a prime example of legislative pollution—a form of environmental contamination that has received altogether too little attention in the current ecological crisis...
...HR 3544, sponsored by James Burke, Massachusetts Democrat, to cut cigar taxes by tens of millions of dollars...
...Heroes as Human After the three Americans who made the first moon flight came back to earth, they faced months of adulation in which they were hailed as supermen...
...We are entering, according to the President, a "new era of negotiation" which is to supplant the "confrontation" of the past...
...permit American Samoans to take the usual personal exemptions available to U.S...
...They constitute the Democratic Committee on Committees and, as such, control Democratic committee assignments—an important factor in every Congressman's career...
...Its 184-page study asserted that "the time for politicizing the marijuana issue is at an end," and therefore called for the abolition of criminal penalties for the personal possession and use of pot...
...In addition, the Committee refused to give the Administration authority to lend seven ships to Spain in exchange for base rights, and it approved a bill to set a five-year limit on the loan of several destroyers and submarines to Spain, Turkey, Greece, South Korea, and Italy...
...For once, this kind of scare talk did not whip the Committee into line...
...All this—and even the $2 billion cost overrun on the C-5A program— might be forgivable if the C-5A were the splendid plane once depicted in Lockheed and Air Force promotion brochures...
...Durham was not aware of...
...The pressure to excel, to accomplish, was intense...
...Sometimes the members use the occasion to report small technical reforms correcting inequities in past laws...
...The Kerner Commission's sad and frustrating experience was hardly unique...
...he no longer agrees with this decision...
...In Senator Kennedy's view, Presidential commissions "could be the nation's conscience, spurring us on to do what we know ought to be done, showing us the way, strengthening our determination to build a just and peaceful and productive society...
...The episode should encourage action on other fronts too long immobilized because of the fear of reprisals from the ruling clique...
...We share the view of the women's organizations who believe that passage of the Equal Rights Amendment is not an end but a beginning—a national commitment that has finally been stated, but that remains far from fulfillment...
...Senator J. William Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been fighting a lonely battle against further funding for the two stations—a fight he will soon renew, for current financing runs out June 30...
...But given his fresh assessment of our "moral worth" he probably would decline the nomination...
...Reuss may have been thinking of the Revenue Act of 1971—the $7.5 billion annual corporate tax cut measure— which Mills brought to the floor last October during lunch when only about thirty House members were present to vote...
...Nixon ask Congress to fund Radio Free Greece, or Radio Free South Africa, or Radio Free Brazil...
...The forty-one bills included such treats as HR 6547, sponsored by Chairman Mills to cut taxes on banks by $70 million...
...The formal report of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse encountered the same problem of Presidential preconceptions...
...Maybe I can give some person somewhere the courage to face his problems by saying something about mine...
...Most of the dirty work was done behind closed doors in the House Public Works Committee, which specializes in pork-barrel bills and therefore has much expertise in accommodating the special interests...
...Mills had not requested a roll call vote, which would have alerted the other Congressmen...
...Well, we all know what happened— and what didn't...
...The Committee would have heard witnesses, he replied, but no one had asked to be heard before the secret October sessions...
...Recently the Committee turned down a Pentagon demand for emergency funds to develop the undersea long-range missile system (ULMS), a new class of missile-launching submarine given the highest priority by the Navy...
...But the Pat-man-Aspin action, following so closely Waldie's successful fight last fall, shows a new determination by tax reformers not to be awed by the power of the senior leadership of the House...
...It is incredible," says Proxmire, "that funds appropriated by Congress can be so misused by a Federal agency...
...He ardently supported liberal, even far left causes...
...Henry Durham is still unemployed, devoting his time to telling anyone who will listen what he has learned about the workings of the great American free enterprise system...
...He may have overlooked Mills' parting shot: "If we do not pass them this way, we will have to get another way to pass them...
...Perhaps the lesson is that if a problem is urgent enough to warrant the appointment of a Presidential commission, it is too urgent to be left to a Presidential commission...
...I'll tell you for sure it won't be like the old stories in Life magazine...
...The Air Force kept Aldrin's trouble a secret...
...The President was firm in his instructions to the Commission chairman, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, and the other commissioners...
...Objections by Patman and Aspin prevented Mills from passing three other bills...
...Over the years, while making heart-rending appeals for public contributions, the two radio stations received some $500 million through the clandestine channels of the Central Intelligence Agency...
...Steel Corporation, which lobbied energetically against the Senate version, found the House bill "eminently fairer...
...This is because the Democratic members of Ways and Means, led by Mills, have another powerful role in the House completely separate from their function as a legislative committee...
...to avoid further confrontation he withdrew from floor consideration the remaining fifteen bills which he had scheduled...
...Though American society has supposedly grown more sophisticated, there is no guarantee that that monstrous display of official self-righteousness could not recur today...
...Mills maneuvered to bring up the least objectionable bills first...
...Some two dozen conservationist and consumer organizations supported the unsuccessful fight for a stronger House bill...
...As he explained to a surprised Gerald Ford, Michigan Republican, "Where there is a questionable gain politically, I do not ask for one...
...It has been kept somewhat of a secret, but the fact of the matter is that I was on my way to having a good old American nervous breakdown...
...We find the President's position somewhat puzzling...
...Tax Reformers Talk Back The House of Representatives does not often disobey Wilbur Mills, Arkansas Democrat, on tax issues...
...Although the Pentagon classed the funds for ULMS and the 747s as emergency appropriations—expecting to ram them through independently of the regular military budget—Committee Chairman John S. Stennis of Mississippi and his colleagues ruled that such major new weapons systems proposals should be given comprehensive hearings...
...It also vetoed a request for four Boeing 747 jets to serve as airborne command posts...
...America's political system, like most of its institutional framework, remains, to all intents and purposes, a male preserve...
...Aspin saw the victory as a sign of a new House determination not to allow the tax laws to be written by Ways and Means "in virtual secrecy and without challenge...
...If past practice is any guide, it will be the House's version, rather than the Senate's, that prevails in conference...
...Johnson said...
...But recently the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee suffered a setback at the hands of tax reformers which left him red-faced and angry...
...A major breach in the pattern of Congressional acquiescence came last November...
...The report was published by the Commission, ignored by the Administration, and promptly forgotten by almost everyone else...
...and HR 11197, sponsored by Herman Schnee-beli, Pennsylvania Republican, soon to be the Committee's ranking Republican member...
...Furthermore, his private life did not adhere to the hypocritical norm of middle class America...
...Even when the process of ratification by the requisite thirty-eight states is completed, dozens of discriminatory Federal statutes and hundreds of state laws will remain on the books, and will have to be challenged, revised, or repealed...
...Representative Henry Reuss, Wisconsin Democrat, rose to inquire whether the wily Mills planned to resubmit his bills later in the day, perhaps when many of the tax reformers would not be on the House floor...
...Air Force...
...I speak for myself," Aldrin said in an interview with Wayne Warga of The Los Angeles Times Service, "but I think the others would agree that everything was fine until splashdown...
...Perhaps the next time the President gravely announces he is naming a blue-ribbon panel to study a pressing issue, we all should say, "Okay, but what are you going to do...
...told a House appropriations subcommittee that the plane's actual structural life is barely half the projected 30,000 flying hours, and that training flights may have to be restricted to make the planes last longer...
...Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure conducted hearings last year on the ramifications of the commission game, was moved to comment that commissions "are merely so many Jimminy Crickets chirping in the ears of deaf Presidents, deaf officials, deaf Congressmen, and perhaps a deaf public...
...These few Committee rebuffs still leave the military's budget and its power vastly greater than it should be, but at least there is encouragement in the fact that Stennis and his associates for once did not lie down and let the Pentagon juggernaut roll over them...
...It was an achievement of which the sponsors of the amendment and its supporters in the women's movement could justly be proud...
...The most recent members' bill sessions were held last October...
...We look forward to his book...
...There's no such thing...
...After he returned from the moon, Aldrin underwent psychiatric treatment for a month because "the whole thing gradually got to be too much...
...Every member of the House must stand for re-election this year, and every member who helped pollute the Water Pollution Control Act ought to be defeated...
...it reduced the Environmental Protection Agency's power to review individual discharge permits granted to industries...
...And Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans Jr...
...Courts classified women with children and imbeciles, denying their capacity to think and act as responsible adults and enclosing them in the bonds of protective paternalism...
...Magnificent Little Tramp Twenty years ago, at the height of that evil time called the McCarthy era, the attorney general of the United States decreed, in all the grave and hollow pomposity of his high office, that one of the most famous figures of the Twentieth Century could not reenter this country unless he proved his "moral worth...
...These endorsements were good enough for the House, which resisted all attempts by a few members to add strengthening amendments...
...Constitutions were drafted on the assumption that women did not exist as legal persons...
...Tax reformers were jubilant...
...six of sixty-three have been divorced during the ten-year space program...
Vol. 36 • May 1972 • No. 5
