22
Jun
2010

BEFORE UN 1947 Partition Resolution

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READER’S DIGEST – September 1946

Will the awakening Middle East turn toward Russia or the United States?

Condensed from “The Washington Post” – Edwin Muller

THERE is trouble Middle East. We read of bomb outages in Palestine, riots in Cairo, demonstrations in all the Arab states, from the Tigris to the Nile. What happens in the Middle will greatly determine the kind of world in which we and our children will live. For in this trouble spot Russia comes in direct conflict with the vital interests of Britain and the United States. Millions of Arabs are stirring uneasily, in a national renascence. not yet decided whether to turn toward the East or the West, toward communism or democracy.

The central fact about the Arabs is that they are in a state of violent and rapid change. They are shifting in one generation from medieval feudalism to a 20th-century tempo. Beside an up-to-date Arab filling in Palestine, Bedouins camp in the kind of tents Abraham used. In Damascus, in one house in the Street Called Straight, is a harem in which the women live in veiled seclusion. The lady of the house next door, wearing the latest Hollywood fashions, drives her car downtown to attend a feminist meeting in agitate for votes for women.

A nomad desert sheik has the power of life and death over his wild tribesmen. He could burn one of his wives or concubines at the stake if he had the whim. Sometimes he does. But he pilots his own plane to Cairo and puts up at Shepheard’s.

One city block in Alppo shows the whole course of the Industrial Revolution. At one end a cotton weaver sites at his loom at the back of his shop, a sort of cave open to the street. He clears about 50 cents a day. At the other end of the block a cotton factory employing 1200 has the latest machinery, a cafeteria, shower baths, a hospital, a retirement pension plan. On this and on his other enterprises the owner last year reported a profit of $2,000,000.

Before there were only the -pashas at the top, the lowly fellahin and desert Bedouins at the bottom. It is said that, until recently, in all the Arab states there were only 30 men whose decisions really counted. Now to be reckoned with are the busi¬nessmen, engineers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, students. They are the hope — and the danger — of the Arab world. Which way will they go? Among them are leaders trying to establish strong democratic governments, but as yet there are not enough free voters, not a large enough informed body of public opinion.

You can’t hold a free election in a Bedouin tribe over which the Sheik has despotic power. At the capital he sits in the chamber of deputies with two guns and a cartridge belt strapped under his robe. A recent debate in the Syrian parliament between the tribes and townsmen grew so warm that a group of sheiks drew their guns, advanced toward the opposition. The session broke up.

In most of the Middle East outside the cities the feudal system still exists. One man owns a whole village—his family has owned it for generations. He “represents” it in parliament. He forms alliances with other feudal chiefs. Groups of them owe allegiance to some bigger chief.

Yet some progress is being made, even in Iraq, where the feudal system Is at its worst. Here some of the sheiks own as much as 100,000 acres of (he limited amount of fertile land and have incomes up to $250,000 s year. The Iraqi Government is not yet strong enough to expropriate those great feudal baronies. But it has begun a plan much like the American Homestead Act. On the lower reaches of the Tigris a large tract of barren land has been irrigated and divided into 85-acre sections. A section is allotted free to any man who agrees to live on it and cultivate it. After five years it be comes his property. The government develops model farms, to which the homesteader can go for his seed, take his cows to be bred to government bulls, and get instruction in agricultural methods.

Egypt has a somewhat similar project. The Arabs of Palestine also are breaking up large tracts into small individually owned farms.

Another area of reform is labor. Hitherto the Arab factory worker has had no legal protection. Child labor has been uncontrolled by law. Certain kinds of Oriental carpets. can be woven best by the tiny fingers of young children. They work at the weaving ten or more hours a day, seated in front of the loom on a narrow board, their feet dangling. Many bone deformities result. Where schooling is supposed to be compulsory, the owner calls his factory a school-one half hour a day of reading, writing and arithmetic, nine and a half hours of carpet weaving.

Public health is another urgent concern. Egypt’s Health Department can’t afford enough hospitals and doctors for wretchedly diseased peasants. So traveling hospitals and doctors tour the country in trucks.

Under the Ottoman Empire the Arabs of Palestine were almost entirely illiterate. Now there are 125,000 pupils in the schools, and an Arab college in Jerusalem. Egypt has two state universities founded in the last 25 years. In 1928 Iraq, with 3,000,000 population, had 264 schools with a total of 26,700 pupils. Now there are three times as many — but illiteracy is still incredibly high.

Egypt has established an unemployment fund to help the thousands thrown out of work by the withdrawal of the Allied armies. And a proposed new personal income tax would provide funds for a long-term program of social reform. This feeling of responsibility toward the impoverished masses is almost unprecedented in the Middle East.

The men who are trying to remake the Arab nations need much technical and administrative advice. But they want that help from advisers who will really advise, not control.

Rightly or wrongly, the Arab doesn’t trust British imperialism. In the past, his finances have been controlled by the British, his purchases abroad confined largely to British goods on British terms. Although he may admit that the immediate effect of British withdrawal will not be entirely beneficial, he wants a chance to make his own decisions.

For the French he has downright hatred. In ruling their mandates in Lebanon and Syria the French met Arab opposition with military violence, culminating in the bombardment of Damascus in 1945. That spray of lead made any close ties between France and the Middle East unlikely for a long time.

The Arab is also dead set against Zionism. The problem of Palestine certainly cannot be adequately discussed here; suffice it to say that a peaceful solution will be most difficult to find.

The Arab states stand solidly together. Prick one of them and the others will wince. After the last riots in Cairo there were great public demonstrations in every other state for the Egyptian “martyrs.” The French violence in Damascus stirred all the Arab world to fury. And, most of all, the Zionist issue unites all Arabs.

To whom then will the Arabs turn? To Russia, perhaps? The Soviet Union is mightily interested in the Arab states. In each capital the Russian legation is larger than the American — although Soviet commercial interests are less than ours. Each Russian legation is a distributing center for Soviet propaganda. The Kremlin has lately been very solicitous of the many Moslems in Soviet territory and loses no chance to tighten the ties between them and the Moslems of the Arab states. Many Russians now attend the Azhar, the great Moslem University at Cairo.

Unlike the British and French, who confined their attention largely to the leaders in the towns and the ruling sheiks of the desert, the Russians direct their propaganda chiefly toward students, shopkeepers, factory workers and farmers. Russia takes the side of the Arabs against their foreign “oppressors,” advising them to “get the British and the French out.” As to Palestine, Russia is cautiously anti-Zionist.

Russian propaganda doesn’t have smooth going. The Arab is descended from, still close to, the Bedouin of the desert, the complete individualist, Hence Arab Communist parties are .not large. But neither are the other parties yet. The future voters are just beginning to line up in political groups. The announced programs of the Communist parties are, so far, rather mild, not likely to offend the Moderate Socialists, and well designed to cater to the discontent of the working classes. The Arab world may turn to Russia — if there’s nowhere else to turn.

What of the U. S. A. in the Arab world?

The Arab awakening can be traced partly to the influence of the school founded in Lebanon 80 years ago which has become the American University of Beirut. Many Arab leaders are Beirut alumni — for example, 19 of the delegates to the United Nations conference at San Francisco. It was the influence of Beirut which led to the founding of the American schools in Cairo, Aleppo and Damascus. These, together with the sending of student missions to the West, brought the Arabs their first knowledge of Western learning, technology and way of life.

Civilization was born in the Arab world. Arab culture reached a high peak after the followers of Mohammed welded the peoples east and south of ‘the Mediterranean into one empire with one religion some 1200 years ago. But the Arabs were swept over by foreign conquerors and, during the 4oo-year rule of the Turks, progress ceased. The Arabs stagnated while Western civilization swept past them.

In the 19th century there was a cultural stirring, but the first opportunity for revolt against the Turks came in World War I. The Arabs fought with the Allies, believing their reward would be freedom. But the Allied Conference at San Remo awarded Britain mandates over Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq, and gave France mandates over Syria and Lebanon. Egypt remained virtually a British protectorate.

The Arabs struggled against this control and won some concessions — but no real independence. And they lost most of their gains when World War II brought Western military might back to their lands. War brought industrialization, too, and a further education in Western ways.
Now the war is over, and although the French and British are trying to stay, the Arabs will have none of it. Both powers are on their way out, leaving a partial vacuum.

During the war America gave the Arabs a glimpse of our material power. Then we left. Only our oil interests, commercial airways and educational institutions remain.

The Arabs do not see us making any effort to help them solve their many problems, and their good will toward the United States is not so strong as it was. Yet our prestige is still immense.

Purely from the business standpoint, we’ could with moderate effort develop a profitable market among the 50,000,000 Arabs. Air-cooling machinery is greatly needed out there, but it must be adapted to their higher temperatures — up to 150 degrees — and our manufacturers haven’t bothered. Our refrigerating systems don’t work well because they are not protected against blowing sand. Our automobiles aren’t adapted to desert travel. In Bagdad I talked to one of the Nairn brothers, who run a famous overnight bus service across the Syrian desert. He’d just been to the United States to try to buy about $250,000 worth of new buses and equipment adapted to his desert run. He couldn’t even get any American manufacturer interested for long-term delivery.

But commercial advantage is a short-sighted view. We should go into the Middle East and align ourselves with those Arabs striving to make free democracies of their nations. We should help them establish more schools and universities, send them teachers. We should encourage the visits of their students to America and send students there. We should send advisers: engineering, agricultural, financial, administrative. We should send medical missions to help them fight disease. We should satisfy their hunger for more books about America. We should do everything we can to help them help themselves.

For centuries the Arabs were led by foreign nations who came there to fatten themselves. The United States might be a leader who comes there to serve — and thereby serve ourselves and the world.

ENDED WITH: (Usual Reader’s Digest “space filler”)

Category: Arab History, BRITAIN, HISTORY, Long read, Middle East, READER´S DIGEST, Russia  Tags: ,  627 Comments
21
Jun
2010

The End of Labor Monopoly is Near

By

By David Lawrence . . .
Editor, The United States News

Reader’s Digest – February 1947
Condensed from The New York Sun

For 14 years union labor has abused its powers and special privileges. In the coal controversy the American people saw actual insurrection-defiance of the courts and of the Government itself. The people have been amused as never before. They are beginning to see nation-wide unions as a form of tyranny and despotism. The die has been cast for new labor legislation, and every change now will be toward the restriction of organized labor’s monopoly.

Inherent rights, such as the right to work or to quit work, never will be disturbed, because these are protected by the Constitution. But the so-called right of two or more individuals to conspire and persuade others to commit acts of economic violence, and the privilege of such a group to monopolize the job-giving power by means of the closed shop, will be taken away.

Monopoly never can be popular in America, whether it is practiced by corporations, labor unions or any other organization. Several unions enjoying nation-wide power have developed an arrogant leadership not unlike that which characterized executives of big corporations a few decades ago.

The days of appeasement are over. An economic recession faces America because 16,000,000 workers have been exploited by a few men in wage drives that have cut the purchasing power of the dollar for the other 44,000,000 workers not in labor unions. Such a distortion has introduced fear and uncertainty into business generally.

A deep depression will be averted, a balanced economy will be restored, new confidence will be created in business, and the use of new capital to expand domestic and world markets will be encouraged only if Congress and the President deal resolutely with labor-union arrogance and its abuse of power.

No responsible group in Congress wants the Wagner Act repealed or collective bargaining eliminated or unions destroyed; but there is a demand for applying to unions all the restrictions which apply to corporations wherever and whenever the public interest can be damaged.

The organized power of any group to control or dominate the economic life of the country is about to be destroyed by legislation. The coal strike was a salutary influence in opening the eyes of the people.

Category: HISTORY, POLITICS, READER´S DIGEST  Tags:  489 Comments
16
Jun
2010

Even hard to post here

By

There are changes going on that keep me from adding things here or Twitter in any regular time flow.

No guarantee, but, starting tomorrow I “may” be posting something here each day (Today being June 16, 2010) – Plan to anyway. I have a never-ending library of tid-bits, articles, entertainment, history and information that I have been wanting to share for months.

Want to share more and still have no interest in Facebook, so typing here would be a good place to spend my time. If I try too hard to be too organized (constant roadblock) – I will never get started.

Thanks for “Being There” – Type at ya soon.

Category: BABBLE, Web Log  Tags:  557 Comments
08
May
2010

“Liberals” in Glass Houses

By

Found in Reader’s Digest – January 1947
Ralph Robey in Newsweek

There must be many who share our annoyance at the frequency with which our so-called liberals label as a Fascist everyone who doesn’t agree with them. Just what really determines whether a person is a Fascist?

In broad terms, there are three economic systems: Communism, Fascism and Capitalism. The distinguishing characteristic of Communism is common ownership through the government of all property used in production and marketing. This government ownership may come through revolution, as advocated by Communists, or through “evolution,” as advocated by Socialists.

Fascism also calls for complete government control of production and marketing, but within the framework of a system of private property. And this control of what private owners shall do with their property is the only distinguishing characteristic of Fascism.

Both Communism and Fascism, in basic concept, are strictly economic, and the curious antisocial traits that those who run the system may develop have no necessary relation to their underlying philosophy. As person may be arrogantly intolerant in his attitude toward other races, and still not be a Fascist. Or he may be a Fascist and still be thoroughly tolerant. The confusion on this point arises from regarding German Nazism as synonymous with Fascism. German Nazism was based upon Fascism, but it included many policies which had nothing to dow with the economic tenents of Fascism.

The distinguishing characteristic of Capitalism is private ownership of property and private determination of what and how much shall be produced, with only such government regulation as necessary to protest the general welfare.

The next time you hear a “liberal” ranting about the necessity for government planning of ouir economic lives and calling everyone who opposes him a Fascist, just ask him whether he wants the government to take over all private productive property in the country. IF he says “yes,” put him down as a Communist. IF he says “no” then ask if it isn’t he who really is the Fascist.

____________________________

Fairly current post Interesting photo history of “Fasces” Symbol of Facism.

Category: HISTORY, POLITICS, Ralph Robey, READER´S DIGEST, WAKE UP  Tags: , , , , , , ,  174 Comments
23
Apr
2010

"Teach-In" to Save the Earth

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The biggest town meeting in the nation’s history will take place on April 22. Its subject: the future of our plundered planet. Its leaders: the concerned youth of America.

BY SEN. GAYLORD NELSON (D., Wis.) – Reader’s Digest April 1970

FROM ONE end of the country to the other, a new movement has been gathering momentum among our young people. Where once they occupied deans’ offices—and headlines—to protest black poverty, or our involvement in Vietnam, or any of a hundred other causes, today they have added a major new concern—the environment. How, they want to know, can we clean up our dirty air and water, how beautify our ravaged landscape, how control our burgeoning population?

This concern will reach a peak on April 22, when hundreds of thousands of Americans, participating in a massive “Teach-In on the Environment,” will protest the destruction of our planet. But the movement has already produced a series of small miracles in college communities around the nation. At the University of Illinois, “Students for Environmental Control” took 30 tons of refuse from a creek near the Champaign campus. A group of law students in the nation’s capital brought legal action recently to force the transit authority to reduce pollution from its buses. At the University of Texas’ Austin campus, students filed a formal complaint against the university to prevent trees being cut down to make way for a new building. Some of the trees were saved. Last December, students and faculty at the Binghamton campus of the State University of New York protested the bulldozing of a unique 5o-acre marsh on the edge of the campus; not only was construction halted, but 30 more acres have since been set aside as a nature preserve.

Whether they are burning bill-hoards, burying an internal-combustion engine or giving out “dishonor awards” (“Smokestack of the Month”), students everywhere have shown a flair for spotlighting the issue. At the University of Washington, conservation militants put out a bucket of oil and invited onlookers in dip their hands in it so they’d know how it felt to be a bird caught in an offshore oil slick. A 19-year-old coed put dye and peanut hulls into I lie toilets of Miami’s shoreline hotels to see if raw sewage was going into Biscayne Bay; it was. On April 22, a group at the University of Minnesota plan to march to the Minneapolis Mall, where they will set up rents and hand out free oxygen.

Aware of this intense interest among students, I first proposed the national environmental teach-ins in an address at Seattle, last fall. (co-chairman of the teach-in effort, Rep. Paul McClosky of California, and I both expected the response to be good. It has been tremendous. A thousand colleges and universities are expected to participate, along with hundreds of high schools; civic groups, garden clubs, the League of Women Voters and conservation organizations have also offered a helping hand to make the day a success.

Soon after that speech, plans for what students quickly came to call “Earth Day” were pouring into Teach-in Headquarters in Washington, D.C., nerve center for this massive effort. Some campuses even jumped the gun. Prior to last fall, Michigan had been planning an ambitious week of speeches, seminars and demonstrations for early March. Dickinson College canceled all classes on February 11 so students could hear conservation speakers. San Jose State ran a week-long “Survival Fair” during early February.

Biologist Barry Commoner set the tone for the Teach-in when he gave an address at Northwestern University late in January. “We are in a period of grace,” he said. “We have the time—perhaps a generation—in which to save the environment from the final effects of the violence we have already done to it.”

The younger generation means to get going now! Berkeley students plan to march from San Francisco to Los Angeles during April, inspecting pollution along the way and shouting the environmental message. Seattle’s “Committee on Environmental Awareness” has mobilized college and high-school groups and civic organizations in a mammoth “Scavenger Hunt for Visual Pollution.” Stanford University is organizing a house-to-house canvass in Palo Alto, giving students a chance to knock on doors and talk up conservation.

Teach-in Headquarters has made it clear that students are to do their own thing, suggesting only that they might start with the problems on campus and in the neighboring community. Thus students at upstate New York’s Skidmore College hope to show movies of sewage being dumped into nearby Lake Saratoga. A University of Arizona group will make a detailed study of air pollution caused by local copper smelters, and then follow up with a debate between GASP (Group Against Smelter Pollution) and industry spokesmen.

So far, the “environmental revolu¬tion” has been peaceful. And there is every indication that Teach-In will be a calm, sober appraisal of the problems that confront us. But the growing concern of our young people outlines the need for some radical changes in our national habits. Are we prepared, for example, to make economic modifications in our system to reverse the disastrous trend? Are we prepared to say to manufacturers, “You must take that thing off the market or prove that the waste it generates doesn’t pollute the atmosphere”? Are we prepared to dispose of disposable bottles? Are we prepared to levy some kind of tax to assure that junk cars are collected and recycled? Are we prepared to say to the oil companies that they must not drill offshore? Are we prepared to develop a land use policy, to say, “You must not destroy anymore?”

The massive demonstration on April 22 will dramatize these questions. And this is important: in a democracy, people must be informed before they can demand action from their public servants. But the demonstration must do more than inform. It must spark a national commitment to do something.

Such a commitment seems increasingly likely. Only a few short years ago there were few political figures interested in environmental questions. Today more than half of Congress is committed to the cause. Last January, in his State of the Union Message, President Nixon himself sounded the alarm. “Shall we surrender to our surroundings?” he asked. “Or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?”

Nobody knows the final answer to that question. But Teach-in—and the growing movement it represents—offers a dramatic reason for hope.

Editors’ note: How will your community participate in Teach-in? How can you get involved? Call local schools and colleges, or local civic groups; ask them what they’re doing, and how you might help. Or contact Teach-in Headquarters, 2000 P St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036, and ask them what plans have been made in your area.

Category: Earth Day, HISTORY, READER´S DIGEST  Tags: , , , ,  526 Comments
17
Apr
2010

How's Your Credit?

By

What the credit bureaus know about you and your financial habits

Reader´s Digest – August 1954 – Condensed from The Kiwanis Magazine William F. McDermott

IN a Chicago jewelry store the customer, a middle-aged office clerk, was selecting a diamond-studded watch for his wife as a 25th-wedding-anniversary present. He asked if the purchase could be charged.

“I think so,” said the salesman. “Fill out this blank, and while the watch is being inspected and polished we’ll arrange the details.” Minutes later he returned with the timepiece in a velvet case. “Shall we wrap it as a gift?” he asked.

“You mean I can take it with me? You don’t know me.”

“Maybe we know more about you than you think. Happy anniversary!”

While the customer had waited, the store had telephoned the Credit Bureau of Cook County. There a signal light atop a long row of files flashed; a girl with a portable headphone took the man’s name, pulled out his record.

“Home; prompt, three houses; stable,” she reported, which, expanded, meant he owned his home; had accounts, which he paid promptly, with three business houses; and was considered a man of stability. The report enabled him to charge anything within reason.

The Credit Bureau of Cook County has records on approximately three million individuals and firms in the Chicago metropolitan area and answers an average of 40,ooo queries a month. It is one of 1721 belonging to the Associated Credit Bureaus of America, whose members maintain upward of 100 million credit records. Because of their quick exchange of information, a man’s credit rating will follow him wherever he goes.

Country clubs, fraternal, business and professional organizations frequently give weight to credit-bureau rating in considering a candidate’s application for membership. Landlords in many cities turn to credit-bureau reports on prospective tenants. Even parents sometimes look up the credit standing of their daughters’ suitors, figuring that good business habits mean stability, industry and other husbandly virtues.

A good credit rating is a valued possession. It will be indispensable if you ever start your own business. It may also help you get a job; many employers, especially larger corporations, look up credit ratings when considering applicants. For such customers several credit bureaus have expanded their service to include character-and-ability reports.

You may wonder how an organiza¬tion of strangers can assemble the facts of one’s personal life. Much of the basic data — date and place of birth, parentage, schooling, previous jobs and length of service in each — comes from the credit application forms themselves. Salary reports arc obtained from former employers. High school and college furnish educational reports and personality characteristics. Business houses report on installment payments.

When a major checkup of an individual is being made, information may be obtained from court records, vital-statistics bureaus, fraternal organizations, clubs, landlords and the corner grocer. Death notices, reports of lawsuits and inheritances, even personal advertisements “Not responsible for anyone’s debts ex¬cept my own,” and every other item that may have any bearing on anyone’s credit or character are daily clipped from newspapers and filed. Little escapes a credit bureau.

A bad credit rating usually is not a sign of dishonesty but of bad habits, says Carl S. Hobbet, general manager of the Credit Bureau of Cook County. Ninety-five percent or more of all delinquents are essentially honest; carelessness, laziness or lack of management ability makes them procrastinate until pressure forces them to pay. Persons who wouldn’t beat anyone out of a dime will let three or four installments pile up, then pay all at once.

A high-salaried executive applied to a Chicago store for credit on sev¬eral expensive items. His application was Hashed to the Credit Bureau of Cook County. Back came the cryp¬tic answer: “39,000; 14 houses, 10 adverses; 90 to 180.” Translated, that meant his income was $39,000 a year; he had charge accounts at 14 business establishments, ten of which had made adverse reports on his payments, which averaged 90 to 180 days’ delay. The store refused to give him credit.

He stormed in on manager Hobbet. “Why did you give me a bad credit rating?” he demanded. “I make nearly $40,000 a year, and can and do pay all my bills.”

“You make your record,” said Hobbet. “We merely keep it. Several stores report you are three to six months late in paying your accounts.”

Credit is as sensitive as a fine precision instrument. You may spend 25 years building up a good credit structure, then quickly demolish it by some act of negligence. It’s strange but true that the man who goes into debt for furniture or a car, or borrows money at the bank for personal use, and pays promptly may have a better credit rating than the man who always pays cash. A well-established Chicagoan, who prided himself on paying cash for everything, was recently turned down by a bank when he applied for a loan — he had no credit standing!

Who are the best credit risks? The Cook County Bureau found that business executives, accountants and store managers score a high of 90. Physicians, engineers, dentists, farm owners, Army and Navy officers, office workers and college teachers follow, rating 89 to 87.

Railroad and post-office employees, skilled factory workers, restaurant managers, schoolteachers, clergymen, nurses and public officials are in the 86 to 82 category. Salesmen, printers, lawyers, plumbers, policemen, firemen, carpenters and watchmen register a little farther down in the prompt-payment scale. Farmhands are last.

Here are some suggestions bureaus offer for maintaining your credit rating:
1. Don’t be afraid of legitimate, useful debt. But make it your servant, not your master.
2. Before incurring indebtedness, carefully calculate your ability to make the payments, remembering that a close budget is not safe. Leave a fair margin for emergencies.
3. Pay all bills promptly.
4. If loss of job, sickness or an unusual expense causes serious delay in payment, call the credit manager and explain.
5. Never ignore a demand for payment, however strange or unjust it may seem. At least investigate it.

Category: CREDIT, EVERYDAY STUFF, HISTORY, POLITICS, READER´S DIGEST, WAKE UP  Tags: , , ,  1,195 Comments
16
Apr
2010

He Lets the Punishment FIT the Crime

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Reader’s Digest August 1954 – Condensed from Time

The Defendant in the case was a 17-year-old boy who had just been convicted of stealing a motorcycle and roaring about the streets.

“You will never know the beauties of nature,” said the Judge, “if all you do is drive through it like a madman.” The boy’s sentence: a year-long membership in the local walking club.

In the past four years Darmstadt, Germany, has grown accustomed to such unorthodox punishments meted out by District Judge Karl Holz-schuh, A kindly man of 47 with a fringe of yellow hair about his bald heads he is known throughout the district as the “Chocolate Judge” because he once sentenced a Little girl, convicted of stealing chocolate, to donate a candy bar each week to an orphanage. More respectful Germans, however, have another name— “The Solomon of Darmstadt” —for the man chiefly responsible for cutting the local delinquency rate by 40 percent.

Before each trial Holzschuh tries to get to know the defendant. He makes the accused talk about his interests, asks him about the books he reads. Then, when the Judge has heard the case, he makes the punishment fit the crime.

A baker’s apprentice who stole a small sum of money from his employer was sentenced to bake a batch of Easter bunnies for the children in the Darmstadt hospital. A 16-year-old boy convicted of robbing a younger boy in a swimming pool locker room was sentenced to help the younger boy with his school lessons .for one year. Two boys who “borrowed” two motorcycles were required to buy ten subscriptions to Die Brilcke, a magazine for released convicts, and to take them each month to the Darmstadt prison.

“Each time you go there,” said the Judge, “just think how terrible it would be if the big gates closed behind you.”

A 17-year-old employee of a Communist newspaper who was arrested for disturbing the peace in a Communist demonstration was sentenced to read one “neutral” book each month and submit a report of it to the court. Result of the case, one new recruit to the anti-Communist cause.

“Except for obvious criminals,” says the Judge, “most young people have simply gone astray and must get another chance. They must perform some good deed related to the bad one they have done.”

Category: CRIME, HISTORY, READER´S DIGEST  Tags: , , ,  625 Comments
08
Apr
2010

From Washington Back To You

By

Veteran observer examines the electric power industry as a prime example and predicts a redisposition of the many Government-owned businesses and a new conception of local responsibility From Washington Back To You

By William Hard – Reader’s Digest – May 1953

THERE may be quite a revolution—or counterrevolution — headed in your direction. Some things that you have let Washington do for you may be flung right back at you to be done in your states, your counties, your towns. The present state of affairs as follows:

In every country in the world today the basic political question is:

“How much of business will the government own and operate?” In Communist countries the answer is: “In effect, all.” In many non-Communist countries the answer is: “A big lot.” In the United States, during the last generation, the answer has been: “A bit here and a bit there, with little final aim but with more and more momentum.”

Today the U.S. Government owns all rubber factories, a tin smelter, a couple of railroads, numerous river barges, a fleet of ocean going ships, fertilizer factories, sugar factories, a rum factory, importing agencies, exporting agencies, a helium-gas factory, an agency for buying and selling agricultural commodities, warehouses for storing ag¬ricultural commodities, a large number of money-lending agencies, a land-mortgage buying-and-selling agency, abaca-hemp plantations, large-scale housing projects and vast systems of electric light and power plants. Its total business investment is some 20 billion dollars.

Well, why be concerned? The ultimate answer was given by President Eisenhower when he was president of Columbia University:

“If we allow this constant drift toward the central government to continue, ownership of property will gradually drift into that central government;” and finally we shall have to have dictatorship as the only means of operating such a huge organization.”

Let us consider here only the adventures of the federal government in the field of electric light and power. Should the federal distribution of light and power be sent back to local agencies, public and private? The search for the answer to that question will be attended by some of the grandest political fireworks in American history.

We have had local public electric light and power plants for more than 50 years. The entrance of the federal government into the power field, in a big way, is relatively recent. In 1935 the federal government owned less than one percent of the country’s electric generating capacity. Today it owns almost 11 percent. It is today by far our largest electric power company.

How did it get that way? Because of great “multiple-purpose” dams in navigable rivers. The Government, within its proper powers, was building those dams for improvement of navigation, prevention of floods, reclamation of arid lands, and so on. Why not produce-electricity as a “by-product”? So now the Government, through its Tennessee Valley Authority and its Interior Department, markets electric power from more than 100 dams, constructed or under construction.

But see now what a fine show of “creeping” encroachment can be put on by a benevolent and aggressive central government!

At first the Government built only dams at which electricity would be a “by-product.” Now it builds dams at which electricity is a primary purpose.

At first the Government disposed of its power at the dams. Now it has built 25,000 miles of transmission lines to carry its power to spots far away from the dams.

At first it produced power only from falling water in navigable rivers properly within its jurisdiction. Now it produces power also from steam plants. The TV A presently will be producing more power from steam than from falling water.

At first the Government’s objective was to bring subsidized federal electric light and power to the little householder and the little farmer. Now it sells enormous blocks of subsidized power to wealthy corporations like the Aluminum Co. of America, Union Carbide and Carbon Co., Monsanto Chemical Co.

At first the Government’s reason for its dams was that private companies could not afford to build them. Now on many rivers — such as the Niagara and the Roanoke — it has diligently endeavored to prevent private companies from building power plants even when the private companies were able and eager to build them.

At first the electric power of the federal government was to be just a “yardstick” lor measuring the performance of the private electric companies. Today the Government’s electric power has driven many private electric companies partly or wholly out of business.

If we continue on this road, we shall come closer and closer to a wholly governmentalized electric light and power industry.

Thereupon let us be quite frank. This federally subsidized electric light and power, in many areas of the country, has had wide popularity. Why? Precisely because it is subsidized, and therefore “cheap.”

The private electric companies pay full federal taxes. The Government’s electric systems pay none. The private companies pay full local taxes. The Government’s electric systems make usually quite small payments “in lieu of local taxes.” Let us look at two figures:

The private electric companies pay total taxes to the extent of some 23 percent of their gross revenues. The Government’s TVA system pays taxes to the extent of only some jive percent of its gross revenues.

A task force of the Hoover Com¬mission on the Organization of the Government looked into the matter. It reported that the difference between the rates charged by public power agencies and the rates charged by private power companies was “roughly equal to the tax component.”

What, then, is the resulting social situation? It is this:

Most of us still get our light and power from private companies. And we are being taxed to enable the federal government to be Lady Bountiful for those of our fellow citizens who are able to get subsidized light and power from federal power plants. Could any situation be more unfair? But there is now a revolt. It says: The states and the localities should do more for themselves in the development of our river resources. Harry S. Truman said, in one of his last messages to Congress:

“We should increase our efforts to see to it that every affected state and community is given an opportunity to share in the responsibility for river-basin development.” And President Eisenhower, in his message to Congress on the State of the Union, said:

“The best natural-resources program for America will not result from exclusive dependence on federal bureaucracy. It will involve a partnership of the states and local communities, of private citizens and of the federal government, all working together.”

And now comes our new Secretary of the Interior, ex-Governor Douglas McKay of Oregon. The Interior Department has been the marketing agency for all federal power outside of the Tennessee Valley. It has been noted for its fervent advocacy of more federal control of light and power developments. It did its best to try to persuade Congress to establish in Mr. McKay’s own region a Columbia Valley Authority which would be based on the model of the TVA and which would supersede all state and local governments in the control of the natural resources of the Columbia River basin. Mr. McKay took a big part in frustrating that federal ambition. He has declared himself as follows:

“Many localities need federal help. But people should try to help themselves as far as they can. The biggest dams have to be built by the Government. But private enterprise can assist in the production of power and should be allowed to. The private electric companies should not be throttled.”

Prophecy:
1. Under this Administration there will be no new TVAs.
2. Under this Administration the private companies will get more chance to show what they can do.

On that second point the present head of the Democratic Party — Adlai Stevenson — will have no complaint. He has said:

“Where private enterprise can and is willing to do the job, it should be left free to do so.”

Our biggest agricultural group — the American Farm Bureau Federation — agrees. And organized labor ‘is losing a lot of its zest for public light and power. Two unions have had exceptional experience in working for light and power outfits, both public and private: the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Utility Workers. Both were once for public light and power. Now both are bitterly against it. They say they have more freedom and better conditions when they work for the private companies. They are against all public light and power. They say that under Fascism and Communism the people work for the State. They say they are cured of wanting to work for the State.

So, putting all these things together, here is a final prophecy:

The federal government’s TVA is likely to stay as it is for a long time yet. The people of that region, in comparison with the people of the Far West, are showing scant signs of any serious rebellion against federal dominance of their local river-basin resources. But, query:

Even in the Tennessee Valley should not federal power agencies pay federal taxes, just as private power agencies pay them? Federal individual employees pay federal taxes. Why should not federal business enterprises pay federal taxes? Then the competition between federal power agencies and private power agencies would be fairer.

In the Far West the rebellion against federal dominance is stronger and stronger. In the Columbia River Basin there are earnest attempts to arrive at some sort of interstate organization which would participate with the federal government in the management of regional water-use and land-use developments. There are similar stirrings in the vast valley of the Missouri. And there is a precedent already existing in the basin of the Colorado.

The four slates of the upper Colorado River Basin have a sort of “compact commission” in which each state has one vote and the federal government has one vote. The Wyoming legislature has petitioned the federal Congress, asking that “the compact-commission approach” be applied to “the development of land and water resources in regional watersheds.”

Here we see one of the greatest revivals of the instinct for local self-government that has ever happened among us Americans. It will be welcomed and fostered by our present national Administration.

Then comes the question: What part will local agencies be allowed to play at federally owned “multiple-purpose” dams? Here again there is a lively precedent. At the mammoth Hoover Dam in the Colorado River two local agencies operate the power plant and distribute the electricity that it produces. One is a public agency: the city of Los Angeles. The other is a private agency: the Southern California Edison Co. That precedent will now have large consequences at other federal dams — especially new ones.

So let us glance at the present state of our private companies.

The advocates of public power still rage against “the power trust.” There isn’t any “power trust.” The great holding companies, which were guilty of so many vicious practices, have been broken up. We now have hundreds of electric-light companies, each operating independently in its own area and each headed by executives who give their time not to stock-market speculations but to producing electricity.

And how they can produce it! Their technological improvement has been as remarkable as their moral improvement. In 1937 they were charging residential customers 4.30 cents per kilowatt hour. Today they arc charging only 2.77 cents per kilowatt hour. How many outfits have done better for their customers in this period of inflation?

The public-power advocates still rail against allowing a private company to develop power at a river site “to enrich a few” and to satisfy “unchecked private greed.” This is demagoguery. The companies are public institutions with millions of stockholders and their rates are regulated against undue profit by state and local governmental agencies. They are making less than six percent on their investment.

A federal power agency is regulated only by Washington. It is above local regulatory law. A private power agency is subject to all local regulatory law. Which sort of agency will a free people finally want? I say: the latter. I say that free American citizens, wishing to govern their own localities, will want their locally controlled private electric companies to build local river dams, when they can, and to get a fair break at distributing the power from federal dams.

I venture a closing generalization which I believe to be sound:

Public business enterprise is specifically European. It is not natively American. But what then is American? Not private business enterprise operating lawlessly beyond all control by the people. The economic genius of America is private enterprise, free to take chances, free to make innovations, but regulated by public authority for fairness of methods and for service to the public.

Category: Changes, EVERYDAY STUFF, HISTORY, POLITICS, READER´S DIGEST, WAKE UP, Web Log  Tags: , ,  131 Comments
05
Apr
2010

What Happened on April 5th?

By

1987 Fox TV network premieres showing Married With Children
1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, atomic spies, sentenced to death
1923 Firestone puts their inflatable tires into production
1896 1st modern Olympic Games officially opens in Athens
1722 Jacob Roggeveen discovers Easter Island

Just experimenting with information. Trying to keep my 12345 tweet count for a day or so. Playing is good for you!

Today is the first day for another new sidebar “toy” also. A “Visitor Globe” – Not sure if this will be worth the time?! Depends on whether or not people come back from time to time. {paste stupid grin here}

The “big picture” for kibitzette.com is to get busy placing words that are worth your time and visit – NOT – This and other dribble. Check back soon and hold me to this goal. My wishes are for your wonderful week!

Category: BABBLE, EVERYDAY STUFF, New Toys, Web Log, WEB LOGGING  Tags: , ,  622 Comments
28
Mar
2010

What the "New Left" Did to Me

By

By Phillip Abbott Luce – Author of “The New Left”

An angry young man discloses the full cycle of his thinking – from rebellion against all authority, to communist “activism,” to disillusionment with communist demands, to defection. And he sees a way to avoid such “wasted years”

A communist must be prepared to act upon command. Once he begins to develop scruples, he’s on his way out. How and when the break comes depends on the man and the circumstances.

I began dabbling in “revolution” in 1958, when I was 20. I became a free-wheeling “activist” of the New Left in 1960 and a secret member of the Chinese-oriented Progressive Labor Party in 1963. By the winter of 1964 I was trusted enough to be selected to join a special group to go underground.

The plan was discussed for weeks in quiet restaurants and coffee-houses in New York City. We would be trained in the techniques of disguise, forgery, wiretapping, karate, evasion of surveillance. Later, this education would be rounded out abroad, in Cuba or China. Then we would change our names and trades, drop all open contacts with communists and blend into the submerged world of secret operatives.

As a start, I was instructed to give up my friends, my relatives, my girl, my job, my apartment. Since I was a the time awaiting trial under federal indictments for my connection with trips to Cuba. I would become a fugitive from justice. There would be no turning back.

I chose not to go underground. A few months later, I decided to break away. It was not a sudden thing. The underground project was only the climax. For months I had been worried by scruples, but I was kept too busy with meetings, picketings, sit-ins and editorial writing to think things through. Now I was forced to reappraise communism and my own relationship to it — not the abstract ideas, but the grim facts.

I defected because, when the chips were down, I couldn’t accept total obedience. Sucked into the movement by hunger for absolute freedom and rebellion against all authority, I finally recognized that there were no margins for personal freedom among hard-core communist revolutionary organizations.

I defected because I saw young people being deceived and possibly destroyed by lies which we, as leaders, were telling them; by actions in which they were just expendable pawns. Some were my friends, drawn into the movement in part by my example.

I defected not because I was reconciled to the injustices of American society as I saw them but because I realized that communism would bring more and infinitely worse injustice.

The Inner Frustrations. My story is not unique. Thousands of young people through nearly half a century have believed that revolutionary radicalism held the answers to their own grievances and the world’s problems. Few joined the movement for bad reasons. Mostly we were naive, romantic, misinformed — above all, angry and impatient.

I was born in Ohio of middle-class Republican parents. I graduated from Mississippi State University in 1958, then earned a master’s degree in political science from Ohio State University in 1960. By the time I got to Ohio State, I had begun to flirt with communism. My inner frustrations led me to the illogical conclusion that only the overthrow of the whole political and economic structure of the country could cure its ills.

These inner frustrations are difficult to explain, being more emotional than reasoned. I was in rebellion against parents, school, society — any authority. I wanted things changed and changed now. The normal democratic tempos seemed to me too slow, the “establishment” too entrenched to yield to anything but violent pressures.

My rebellion was fed by the reading of communist hate propaganda and sustained by the itch to “do something.” The civil-rights struggle seemed made-to-order for my mood — not only a thrilling cause in itself, but an outlet for protest generally. I was expelled from the staff of the Mississippi State newspaper for my attacks on the state legislature and the White Citizens Councils. I found the experience of “struggle” with “reaction” intensely intoxicating. As a graduate student, I joined picket groups, sit-ins, boycotts. I was becoming an “activist,” quite sure what I was against, but pretty hazy about what I was for.

Upon finishing at Ohio State, I went to New York. I wrote for the communist Worker under several pseudonyms, and I fellow-traveled with a variety of communist organizations, coming to know the whole spectrum of ultra-left groupings, some of them communist creations, some infiltrated, some independently radical. I was searching for a “home” in the frenzied world of revolution. It was not until the summer of 1963, however, that I became fully involved.

Action, Color, Power. By then the so-called New Left was in loud and violent eruption, an outgrowth of the stage of romantic anarchy called the Beat Generation. The movement was “new” — or so we told ourselves — because it rejected the conventional Marxist jargon and working-class mystique. We had only contempt for the Old Left, with its patience and restraints. We relished stirring up trouble for trouble’s sake. We were for police baiting, riots, undergrounds. Ours was an attitude rather than an ideology.

Ironically, today only a few New Left groups remain financially and ideologically out of communist clutches. Some of these, such as the Students for Democratic Society and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), are being rapidly penetrated.

Considering the noise it makes, the New Left is surprisingly small — perhaps 5000, with another 5000 at the fringes. Most are social anarchists, with no more than 2000 communists of all stripe in their midst. These self-willed utopians and most other Americans find it virtually impossible to believe that a tiny handful of communist professionals, using glittering slogans like “peace,” “freedom now,” “equal rights,” or “academic freedom,” can manipulate thousands of innocent young rebels into violent street demonstrations and explosive confrontations with police. On the surface, it is incredible. But having studied the arts of mass manipulation and hate propaganda, and having practiced them myself, I know the power of a few expert hidden persuaders.

In the late spring of 1963, I was approached by a leader of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party to join an expedition to Cuba. No one can overstate the influence of Red Cuba upon immature, alienated minds. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were to us what Lenin and Trotsky had been to others in their time. Here was action, color, our own kind in power — and all of it only 90 miles from the mighty Yankees. Here was David defying Goliath. I jumped at the chance to go. The fact that it might be in violation of federal law added spice to the adventure.

When I returned, I plunged into Progressive Labor activities. I helped organize, in 1964, a second trip to Cuba. I was arrested while trying to kindle a riot in Times Square — forcing a “confrontation with the cops,” we called it grandly. I helped secrete guns in New York City for future “self-defense.” I drafted the original declaration calling on young men to refuse to fight in Vietnam, took part in a violent fracas before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, marched and sat and shouted slogans as directed.

“True Truth.” It was a frenetic life I led, as thoroughly “involved” as any of the communist string-pullers could wish. The change in me was evidenced in a new willingness to lie and deceive others in pursuit of our goals. Looking back, I recognize how utterly self-righteous and intolerant we were, not only of the “enemy” — meaning everyone from conservatives to “bourgeois radicals” — but of all other elements in the New Left. It was the totalitarian mentality in action. We were toddling totalitarians, and uncarded communists demanding instant idealism and “Millennium Now!” We alone had the “true truth” from which dissent was heresy.

By August 1964 I had begun editing the magazine Progressive Labor, but without being “identified.” This deception was based on the hope that a secret party member would be more successful in recruiting. Not until December, only three months before I defected, was my name listed as editor.

Meanwhile, the riots broke out in New York’s Harlem. We were not the immediate spark, but we did everything possible to provide them and to harvest the credit. For weeks we had been preparing the requisite explosive climate, calling for a “long, hot summer” in Harlem.

One hour before the rioting actually began, Bill Epton, a vice-chairman of Progressive Labor, told a street rally: “In the process of smashing this state, we’re going to have to kill a lot of cops, a lot of these judges, and we’ll have to go up against their army. We’ll organize our own militia and our own army.” (Epton was in due time arrested and convicted of criminal anarchy.)

The 25-year-old editor of our party’s newspaper, Challenge, proclaimed: “I advocate precisely that the people disturb the peace. There is no lawful government in this country today. Only a revolution will establish one.” We prepared the infamous posters, “Wanted for Murder — Gilligan the Cop,” which helped to spark the mobs.

By dint of sheer activity I was becoming more and more entrapped within the narrow communist world. If you are a good communist, your time — including evenings and weekends — is not your own. You sell party literature, do volunteer mailings and office work, paint signs, picket, demonstrate, attend endless meetings.

Yet some part of my mind was uneasy, questioning. The caches of arms left a bitter taste. It bothered me to see our individual members time and again become patsies in plans and plots outside their knowledge or consent, so that they often were jailed or injured for reasons beyond their control.

The Break. Finally, all my doubts. and grievances seemed to crystallize when the scheme for going underground was sprung on us. Making the conscious decision to join the communists had taken a certain kind of guts. Now, defection proved even more difficult. The temptation is to slink away in silence; if you decide to break away publicly and try to save others from the morass, you have to be prepared for slander, harassment, even physical attack.

I chose the latter alternative. Then I walked into the FBI office in New York to clinch it. At this, the wrath of my former “comrades” knew no bounds. They accused me of every crime in the book, contended that I was always a “police agent.” I was in the outside world but no yet part of it. It took some time before I discovered not only that I was indeed free but that others had gone through the same ordeal of disenchantment and that, like them, I could ultimately readjust myself to a rational society.

The Wasted Years. I’ve thought a lot about my involvement, and its meaning. It is not enough to condemn impatient, rebellious youth as communists or dupes. The public must distinguish between young communists and young rebels. Youth has always been rebellious. The problem is to understand and channel their zeal for a more just world, and to keep the out of the clutches of communists and other messianic extremists.

I think often that I might have been spared the wasted years if my schooling had included the study of communism — not as a beguiling doctrine through its sacred texts, but as living history on view in Soviet Russia and Red China and in the story of its many mass deceptions and manipulations in the Free World. It seems incredible that I could have acquired a graduate degree in political science without having been encouraged to read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, The God That Failed by Arthur Koestler and others, Child of the Revolution by Wolfgang Leonhard, The Red Decade by Eugene Lyons. There is a rich literature on communism. Surely our colleges have an obligation to use it effectively.

Most of the young rebels in an around the New Left are not, in their hearts, communists. In most cases, their actions are more dangerous to themselves than to the country. But we must win them over to the side of democracy before they get themselves and others into serous trouble.

Free Speech, Ltd.

Adlai Stevenson: “I yield to no man in my belief in the principle of free debate. The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal cords.”

Category: HISTORY, POLITICS, READER´S DIGEST  Tags: , , ,  552 Comments
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