Datelines
al., John Logue et.
Social-Democratic Comeback in Sweden STOCKHOLM In a campaign fought on economic issues, the Swedish Social Democrats won a clear victory in the September elections, an appropriate way to...
...The Social Democrats rallied their supporters with the call for restoring full employment and reversing the welfare cuts...
...Social-Democratic Comeback in Sweden STOCKHOLM In a campaign fought on economic issues, the Swedish Social Democrats won a clear victory in the September elections, an appropriate way to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the party's assumption of power in 1932...
...NCBA charged that Avon discriminates against independent bookstores by giving secret discounts to chain stores...
...These stimulative policies helped Sweden stave off the repercussions of international recession...
...Opponents of Radio Marti—it takes its name from Jose Marti, who led Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain— received support from an unlikely source: the normally sedate WHO in Des Moines, the radio station that first employed young Ronald Reagan as a sportscaster...
...BN responded by introducing special low rates for fifty-two-car or twentysix-car unit trains—huge, grain-packing runs that can take on cargo at only a few large terminals in Montana...
...This is the pitch the State Department tried out on Congress in August and September as it lobbied for Radio Marti, a $15.2 million proposal to "give the Cubans the means they now lack to know what kind of society has been imposed on them," according to Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders...
...The VOA now broadcasts five hours a day in Spanish into the entire Caribbean area...
...The three parties were slow to tamper with the welfare state, but quick to cut taxes with almost Reaganesque glee...
...Unfortunately, Valier's victory against BN is an exception among towns trying to stave off abandonment of their rail service...
...VOA was especially industrious during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but gave up its Cuban focus in 1974 as relations with the island took a less confrontational turn...
...Ironically, the nonsocialists nationalized more industry in their first four years than the Social Democrats had taken over in the previous forty-four...
...But satisfaction is tied to expectations, and it did as little good for Center Party Prime Minister Thorbjorn Falldin to reassure Swedes that their unemployment was lower than the Americans' as it would for Ronald Reagan to tell unemployed autoworkers in Detroit that they are better off than idled autoworkers in Sao Paulo...
...Meanwhile, the deepening international economic crisis increased the costs of unemplyment compensation, emergency employment measures, and support for depressed industries...
...This is phenomenal growth, and the independent booksellers' market share must decline accordingly...
...Irrigation was greatly expanded in the Valier area ten years ago, and harvests have been increasing ever since...
...In 1979-80, as Jimmy Carter raised his hackles at Soviet garrisons in Cuba, antiCastroites in and out of the Government drew up plans for Radio Marti...
...Tax bases will erode, schools close, and towns deteriorate to nothing more than a dusty gas station or ramshackle bar or two on the plains...
...The Social Democrats propose to revive the economy with a two-part strategy advanced in the party's campaign...
...in November, funding legislation came before Congress...
...This could gum up U.S...
...Mike Dennison (Mike Dennison is a staff reporter for the Great Falls Tribune in Montana...
...In power, the nonsocialists forgot that generous social programs and full employment presuppose high rates of economic growth...
...The Reagan Administration was pushing a funding bill for a fiftykilowatt station that would broadcast Spanish-language programs into Cuba from Southern Florida...
...Unemployment compensation levels, for example, were set on the belief that unemployment was a temporary phenomenon affecting relatively few individuals...
...Part two is already far more controversial—a spurring of investment in the private sector through the creation of "wage-earner funds," financed by a tax on wages and excess corporate profits, and controlled collectively by workers...
...More than three million bushels of grain were shipped last year over Valier's seventeen-mile branch line that connects with railroad tracks leading to Pacific Coast ports...
...The outgoing government—the agrarian Center Party (fifty-six seats, down by eight) and Liberals (twenty-one seats...
...Indeed, Representative Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, offered an amendment to call the authorizing legislation the "John Foster Dulles Cold War Mentality Memorial Broadcasting-to-Cuba Act...
...up by thirteen) on their right...
...The wage-earner funds proposal was the hottest issue of the campaign...
...Of the $6.6 million in Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) money allocated to Montana this year, $5 million already has been earmarked for only three projects, including the Valier line...
...Today, two national chains, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, operate 1,400 stores between them, and account for 50 per cent of all the bookstores in the United States doing at least $100,000 of yearly business...
...However, they also inflated the budget deficit from a manageable 2 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1976 to 10 per cent of the GDP in 1979 and an estimated 13 per cent this year...
...radio service, began broadcasting Cuban-directed propaganda in 1961...
...Cuba says it will name its opposing station Radio Lincoln...
...The small Communist Party (twenty seats...
...Soon Congress realized that Radio Marti, despite the havoc it may visit on American broadcasters and the souring of U.S.-Cuban relations that will inevitably result from its programming, is the cornerstone of the Reagan Administration's Cuban policy...
...Foreign critics have variously attacked the Swedish model for dullness, for furthering sin, sex, and suicide, and for introducing a new form of totalitarianism into the industrialized West, but Swedish voters supported the Social Democrats with a string of election victories that kept them in office for forty-four years...
...The first mention of such a station appeared in the so-called Santa Fe Report, written in 1980 by a few security analysts who now serve the Reagan Administration...
...Without the trains, these towns face slow economic death...
...B. Dalton's main computer in Minneapolis is keyed into the cash registers at its local stores, and it knows what sells from Albany to Albuquerque...
...The business community launched an advertising blitz against it that even took the issue to the beaches during July vacations, an unprecedented breach of Swedish political decorum...
...In September 1981, Reagan signed an executive order setting up a factfinding commission to develop plans for the station...
...Seen through the eyes of a small bookshop owner, the book chains are mammoth indeed, but they are owned by still larger corporations...
...Representative Henry Gonzalez, Texas Democrat, argued that the station would be an affront not only to Cuba but to other Latin American countries, and said he was "concerned because I think we're headed straight for a . . . radio Bay of Pigs...
...Many independent booksellers are convinced that the chains pressure publishers to give them discounts, thereby allowing the chains to buy books for 5 to 10 per cent less than the independents...
...An additional 4 per cent of the Swedish working population are involved in retraining programs and various forms of emergency employment...
...Most likely, their lines will be abandoned...
...If the people get together, they can make something wrong turn around...
...Yet BN's decision was a simple matter of dollars and cents...
...Radio Marti's path on Capitol Hill was rocky, but it seemed for a time that the station would be built whether Congress voted the money or not...
...With more than 2,000 outlets around the country, such bookstore giants as B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, and Crown are truly ubiquitous, and even big publishers can ill-afford to resist the squeeze for special treatment...
...While the involvement of Hearst adds a nice touch of irony to the lawsuit, no one believes Avon is alone in teasing the chains with discounts...
...Putting the Train Back on the Track VALIER, MONTANA When Burlington Northern announced early this year it would end rail service to this tiny grainbelt town in north-central Montana, area farmers refused to believe it...
...As the votes indicated, the legislation encountered more than token opposition...
...WHO now serves an area from Louisiana to the Canadian border...
...If the Public Service Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission decide the railroad cannot make money and promulgate rules that do not allow us to make money...
...If you can't fight Castro with guns, try radio waves...
...Since 1976, the three nonsocialist parties have managed four different governments, as disagreements over nuclear power and tax policy have taken their toll...
...Dial 'D' for Dulles WASHINGTON, D.C...
...The choice was between accumulating huge deficits (with severe consequences for interest rates and investments) or cutting benefits while unemployment rose...
...allowed inflation to erode unemployment benefits, and delayed the activation of sick pay for manual workers to the fourth day of illness, rather than the second...
...We will spread the money as far as it will go," says John Craig, an official with the Montana Department of Commerce, "but it is up to the BN to take up the construction...
...Radio Marti is not the first U.S...
...Saving the Small Bookstores BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA The story has a perverse Citizen Kane flavor to it: independent business taking on none other than the mighty Hearst Corporation...
...During the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Radio Swan called on Cubans to overthrow Castro, but the station was silenced a few years later...
...Dalton is spending $300 million to add 556 more stores by 1987, while Waldenbooks expects to continue opening eighty to ninety new stores annually for the next several years...
...The Social Democrats first took office in the depths of the Depression, and initiated an ambitious program of social reform that led to the development of a model welfare state (some would say the model...
...This rampant growth will accelerate...
...Construction began in September, and Valier farmers hope their grain will be moving over the branch line before the end of the year...
...Full employment was maintained principally by expanding the public sector to soak up natural growth in the labor force and those displaced by technological innovation in industry...
...Over the last two years it has curtailed expenditures by trimming social welfare programs: The party has reduced the cost-of-living protection for pensioners...
...Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the great Beat poet, now a publisher and the owner of City Lights Books in San Francisco, says if these discounts continue long enough, "they will spell the end of practically every independent bookstore in the country...
...Because they want to attract the widest range of readers possible, they appeal to the lowest common denominator of the book-buying public...
...Franz Kafka said a book should be "an ax for the frozen sea within us...
...Because farmers tend to conduct business in the towns where they sell their grain, local grocers, car dealers, farm machinery repair shops, and banks also will go out of business...
...Jeff Biddulph (Jeff Biddulph is a free-lance writer based in Stanford, California...
...Having established Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Eastern Europe in the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency, in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution, built Radio Swan, a fiftykilowatt station on Great Swan Island off the Honduran coast...
...More than forty Montana towns, many of them small grain-farming communities, are either trying to stop a BN pullout or already have had rail service cut...
...Senator Christopher Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, called the proposal "a juvenile foreign policy idea...
...This is capital which, as Palme put it, "will not move to Liechtenstein," the European tax haven, but will go into investments that create jobs...
...If the idea works in Sweden, wageearner funds are likely to be put on the agenda by Social Democrats elsewhere in Europe by the end of the decade...
...Chain bookstores resort to the same marketing techniques—calculated appeals to mainstream tastes and massmerchandising methods—that made their parent companies what they are...
...With the passage of the Staggers Rail Act by Congress in 1980, railroads were allowed more leeway in setting freight rates...
...Arguing that the funds constituted backdoor socialization that threatened to turn Sweden into another Poland, the strident campaign forced both Center and Liberal parties to join the Conservatives in rejecting the scheme...
...But for most small-town Montana fanners, being right won't be enough...
...That sum is two to four times the new capital generally raised through the stock market, and will clearly lead to substantial employee ownership of Swedish industry...
...Simultaneously, the government has permitted unemployment to double to almost 4 per cent...
...We will shut down, and we will shut down quickly...
...Eventually, the chains determine which books will be published as well as how many...
...His book, "Socialism and Abundance: Radical Socialism in the Danish Welfare System," was published this fall by the University of Minnesota Press...
...If BN's huge "unit trains" were to continue shipping grain out of Valier, the track would need repairs—and BN refused to invest the $1.7 million or so needed to upgrade the track...
...In 1972, only one bookstore chain had more than 100 branches...
...BN is guaranteeing all this in its careless pursuit of operational economies and greater profits...
...Residents of this town of 700 decided to fight BN...
...The practice is widespread in publishing, and the independents hope their test case will outlaw it...
...James Mullin (James Mullin is a library science student at Berkeley and a free-lance writer...
...While academicians and intellectuals may see this as a vulgarization of bookselling, the mass marketers see it as literary democracy...
...We can't tell a private corporation what to do...
...That economic context shaped policy assumptions...
...local grain elevators will go bankrupt...
...Small-town farmers are raising their voices in protest, but few towns can boast the shipping volume of Valier...
...The high benefit levels that characterize Swedish welfare programs were established in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the final years of the postwar economic expansion...
...cut subsidies to municipal services...
...In both steel and shipbuilding, which were particularly hard DATE LINES hit, the government stepped in as "owner of last resort...
...BN encourages farmers through price incentives to bring their grain to the large terminals serving the unit trains, drawing business away from small local elevators...
...Forbes reported last January that "B...
...Waldenbooks is owned by Carter Hawley Hale, which also owns the Emporium Capwell and Neiman-Marcus department store chains...
...it would be managed by directly elected boards at the county level...
...The Social Democrats found themselves cast in the unaccustomed role of arguing for a more balanced budget...
...Even after the cuts, Swedish social service levels, unemployment compensation, sick-pay systems, and the like, seem generous...
...The bill won approval in the House by a vote of 250 to 134, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee supported it by an 11to-5 vote, though the Radio Marti legislation probably won't reach the full Senate this year...
...They formed a lobbying group composed of local farmers, ranchers, and businessmen, wrote letters to their House and Senate representatives in Washington, and appealed to state government...
...Without government assistance, it's doubtful BN will make investments in small-town lines and stations when it can make out better elsewhere...
...Indeed, BN doesn't like being told how to run its business...
...The Social Democrats found it difficult to explain the complicated proposal to the voters, especially since they intended to leave details open for post-election negotiations with the Centrists and Liberals...
...attempt to fill the Cuban airwaves with anti-Castro propaganda...
...broadcasting in all but the Far Western states...
...the same thing will happen to us that happened to the Milwaukee Road," says William Thompson, BN's regional vice president in Montana...
...While such measures have proved themselves in bridging recessions, they faltered in extended periods of little or no growth...
...unchanged), which is so Eurocommunist that it recently expelled its Moscow loyalists, pledged its support to the Social Democrats...
...On April 13,1982, the Northern California Booksellers Association (NCBA) filed suit with the Federal District Court in San Francisco against Avon Books, a major publisher and a division of the Hearst Corporation...
...Capturing 166 seats (a gain of twelve), they outpolled the three nonsocialist parties combined, returning Social Democratic leader Olof Palme to the Prime Minister's office after six years in opposition...
...The corporate owners see bookselling as mass entertainment, like movies or television...
...We knew we were right," says Gene Stoltz, who ranches north of Valier...
...Finally, in March, Valier won a reprieve in the form of a Federally funded, low-interest $1.8 million loan made to BN for repairs on the track...
...Although Radio Marti's signal would be aimed at the Caribbean and would not in the normal course of things interfere with WHO, the Cuban government has promised to jam the station and broadcast a counter-message...
...The Reagan Administration now wants to broadcast Radio Marti on 1040 khz, WHO's frequency...
...After the Cuban counter-broadcast test, the general manager of WHO said the interference "would be devastating...
...BN, which enjoys a statewide monopoly on rail freight in Montana, would still profit from Valier farmers, who would be forced to truck their grain to terminals in neighboring Conrad or Cut Bank...
...The gist of the proposal, however, was clear: Some three billion to four billion kronor of new capital would be channeled annually into Swedish industry through direct purchase of stock in the open market...
...The Voice of America, the official U.S...
...That's how our literary landscape will be if the independent bookstores and small presses die out: frozen, flat, and deadly silent...
...The chains rely on a centralized computer buying system, and decisions on what books to stock in far-flung outlets are made at corporate headquarters...
...Book publishers are influenced in turn, and they generally refuse to establish press-run sizes on projected books until the chains place their orders...
...The independent bookstores would have a tough time competing against the chains under the best of circumstances, but with the added benefit of the discounts, the chains are rapidly driving the independents out of business...
...B. Dalton, the nation's largest bookseller, is owned by the Dayton Hudson Corporation of Minneapolis...
...The NCBA's lawsuit is the last slim hope in their fight against the encroaching chains...
...These analysts suggested that "if propaganda fails, a war of national liberation against Castro must be launched...
...First will be a return to the tradition of increased state investment in energy, transportation, and housing designed to cut domestic unemployment...
...Farmers will be forced to take their grain elsewhere to ship it...
...Last June, Broadcasting magazine reported that the Navy was nearing completion of construction of a tower in Saddlebunch Key, Florida, the site chosen for Radio Marti...
...Despite the antic quality of Harkin's proposal, it underscored the Reagan Administration's indebtedness to the benighted views of the late Secretary of State...
...that is roughly equivalent to a $400 billion deficit in an economy of the American size...
...In an apparent demonstration of Havana's resolve to fight back, Cuba interrupted WHO broadcasts for four hours on August 31...
...Four per cent unemployment sounds like the millenium to American ears...
...In 1980, the government began to change course...
...It would prevent us from being heard much beyond thirty or forty miles beyond Des Moines...
...Congress was outraged that work on the tower had begun at a time when the legislation was still stalled in the House Energy and Commerce Committee...
...John Logue (John Logue teaches at Roskildge University Center, Denmark...
...BN's tough talk doesn't stand for much in Valier, where farmers are still talking about how right beat might when they took on BN and won...
...down by seventeen)—lost to both the Social Democrats on their left and the Conservatives (eighty-six seats...
...When they finally lost power in 1976 (see "Sweden: Changing of the Guard," The Progressive, December 1976), it was a major shift that made front-page headlines in the international press...
...And, like most Federal funds, the FRA money won't be any more plentiful in years to come...
...BN then labels these smaller stations "unprofitable," and petitions the Montana Public Service Commission and Interstate Commerce Commission for the right to abandon service...
Vol. 46 • November 1982 • No. 11
