UNDERNEWS
Sam Smith
July 12, 1999
The Progressive Review
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JOURNOPROP OF THE WEEK
The President's Progress: Spiritual Advisers Praise Clinton's Efforts After
Lewinsky Scandal. -- Washington Post
LOOSE CHANGE
In 1939 the price of wheat was 96 cents a bushel. In the same year a new
Model-A tractor cost about $700. Therefore, a farmer had to produce 729
bushels over and above his farming costs in order to pay for his tractor.
The price of wheat last Friday was $2.40. Wheat's price increase during the
last six decades was a mere 1.5% per annum. .... A standard new tractor
today costs approximately $55,000. Obviously, the cost of farming increased
7.5% compounded yearly (ironically equal to Wall Street's annual
appreciation) .... Today, the American farmer is forced to produce almost
23,000 bushels of wheat over and above his farming costs to pay for his new
tractor. -- Keyser Soze
GOLD EAGLE http://gold-eagle.com
DAVID TICE, THE PRUDENT BEAR FUND: Yesterday, the American Banker reported
that the FDIC had raised its estimate to $200 million for the cost of the
failed BestBank of Boulder, Colorado. Just last July when regulators closed
this bank, the FDIC expected a loss of $28 million. How could a bank with
total assets of just over $300 million end up costing the Federal Deposit
Insurance fund $200 million? Well, the culprit was a sub-prime credit card
portfolio. It is our view that the collapse of Bestbank should be a wakeup
call for bank regulators, Wall Street investment bankers, investors and,
especially, the Federal Reserve. One thing is for sure, it is an ugly story.
JIM GRANSBERRY, BILLINGS GAZETTE: "Scrap it." That is the two-word answer
that Brian Schweitzer has for what to do with the Freedom to Farm Bill of
1996. Schweitzer and other political candidates were on hand Friday at the
U.S.-Canada border where more than 860 farmers and ranchers held a protest
against low livestock and grain prices, food processing monopolies and
inaction by the U.S. government. .... "We need to start over," said
Schweitzer, the only announced Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat held by
Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont. "It was a grand experiment to empower the farmer
in the market. But we don't have a market. We have monopolies. It took us
two years to go from $5.50 wheat to $2.50 wheat" .... Schweitzer said four
companies mill 62 percent of the wheat in the United States. "What we need
is competition," he said. "These are the same monopolies worldwide. What
they want is cheap grain and large volume.
YOUTH NOTES
JON RAUCH, NATIONAL JOURNAL: Between 1976 and 1992, the proportion of
12th-graders who reported smoking one or more cigarettes in the past month
declined gradually but steadily, from almost 40 percent to under 30 percent.
In 1992, something happened. After years of progress, the trend reversed.
Since 1992, even as adult rates held stable or fell, smoking by 12th-graders
has risen by almost 10 percentage points (and smoking by younger adolescents
has also increased, though not as much). No one knows the reason.
Antismoking activists sometimes blame Joe Camel, but he came along in 1988.
I have what I think is at least an equally plausible theory: As antismoking
education graded into something more like antismoking hysteria, adolescents
stopped listening .... Presumably, adolescents who are attracted to risk and
rebellion -- the ones who are most likely to smoke -- are also the least
likely to listen to adults who bluster about making America a land of
"tobacco-free kids." Or, worse still, they may listen, and then decide that
not being tobacco-free is a good way to show that they aren't kids.
LAND OF THE FREE
MICHELLE HOLCENBERG, ALTERNET The Smoking Gun's 14 pages of one-time Harvard
lecturer and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary's FBI file .... include reports
and interview transcripts, detail how the 60s revolutionary, known for the
line "turn on, tune in, drop out," actually copped out and snitched to the
FBI in 1974. According to the documents, when faced with the prospect of
doing hard time on narcotics charges, Leary informed on the Weather
Underground, a radical group that helped him escape from a California prison
a few years earlier. Leary told an agent he was cooperating not only to gain
his freedom, but to establish a "collaborative" and "honorable" relationship
with law enforcement. While his loose lips don't seem to have brought about
any criminal charges, they could do some posthumous damage to his reputation.
SMOKING GUN http://thesmokinggun.com
ALTERNET mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
WELL, THERE GO THE SOCCER MOMS
ABC NEWS Neither [Women's World Cup] goalie was tested much, and the crowd's
biggest reaction of regulation time was when the crowd booed as Clinton was
shown on the scoreboard.
ROLE MODEL
What's the big deal. President Clinton did it. -- Middle school girl
discussing oral sex, quoted in the Washington Post
CYBER-ETHNICITY
W.J. Clinton made a big thing of a "digital divide" following release of a
Commerce Department report on who uses Internet. The Washington Post led
with the headline "US Cites Race Gap in Use of Internet." In fact, the
situation fails to live up to the headlines.
For example, as far back as 1993, the Census Bureau found that 46% of black
and Hispanic children used computers compared with only 38% of white adults.
Unfortunately, the new report fails to give information to make a similar
comparison, but the data once again does indicate that age may be a far
bigger factor than ethnicity to wit:
-- 17% of all Hispanics and 19% of all blacks use the Internet while only
14% of all adults 55 and older do.
-- Most strikingly, a Hispanic youth in school is more than twice as likely
to use the Internet than the average adult 55 or older, and 92% as likely to
use a computer as is the average white American. The average black student
is almost twice as likely to use the Internet as the average 55 year old
American and 71% as likely as the average white American.
-- Perhaps most dramatically, Hispanic students use the Internet slightly
more than the average American under 25 years of age, while black students
are 79% as likely to use it.
THE OTHER HATE POLITICS
Proving once again that the safest person to hate in America these days is a
Arab, Rep. Gephardt withdrew his appointment of an American Muslim leader to
a congressional counter-terrorism committee following pressure from Jewish
groups.
Salam Al-Marayati, head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, was attacked
for having once issued a news release making the patently obvious comment
that, "because the Palestinian people have no avenues to redress their
grievances, some of them have been pushed beyond the margins of society and
have adopted violent reactions to express their despair." Taking political
correctness to new heights, Al-Marayati was also attacked for failing to
denounce the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah and of failing to support
the peace agreements with Israel. His critics included the Anti-Defamation
League and the American Jewish Congress, two groups that have difficulty
distinguishing between someone not agreeing with their own prejudices and
someone being anti-Semitic. A number of west coast Jewish groups that
actually know Al-Marayati supported his nomination.
Ken McCarthy of Brasscheck recently reported that the ADL's list of targets
have included not only the KKK and Aryan Nations but the "African National
Congress: the ACLU, Irish Americans, the United Auto Workers, ACT-UP, Mother
Jones magazine, Pacifica News Network, Lesbian Agenda for Action,
Greenpeace, Christic Institute, Rep. Roy Dellums, National Lawyers Guild;
NAACP; CISPES, Carpenters Local 22, Jews for Jesus, and many Arab and
Palestinian individuals and organizations."
It would help matters if the media and politicians spent more time diffusing
ethnic prejudice and less time stigmatizing those who display it and
sensationalizing their acts. After all, most Americans have been affiliated
with organizations that at some point in the not too distance past fully the
met the qualifications of a hate group including southern Baptists,
Lutherans, Episcopalians, Catholics, and the Democratic and Republican
parties. The road to reconciliation starts with a bit of humility.
JUST POLITICS
NH PRIMARY SOURCE: The so-called pundits and alleged journalists who come to
NH every four years to tell Granite Staters what they think have finally
caught on - Bill Bradley is going to win the NH Primary. The New York Times
(whose reporter on Hampton Beach with Bradley wore an extra-starched white
shirt and gabbed incessantly into a cell phone, played the part of the
pompous ass perfectly), believes news hasn't happened until it appears in
its dry-as-dust gray pages and now mentions Bradley favorably. Why the shift
from covering Bradley as a quixotic candidate to a contender? Money, of
course. Thirty percent of Bradley's $11.5 million came from New York, which
means March 7th, the date of the CA, NY, OH, MA, CT, GA, VT, MD, ME and RI
primaries may effectively hand Bradley the Democrat nomination.
NH PRIMARY SOURCE: http://nhprimarysource.com
BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS: "The press coverage has been pretty tame, to say the
least, and I'm beginning to wonder. The conventional wisdom has been that
boy when she gets up there in New York, you know the hounds of Hell, the New
York media are loosened on her, that she'll never be able to get away with
all these explanations that she's given on everything from billing records
to who knows what all else. I'm beginning to wonder. We journalists, sort of
superficially sometimes, think that campaigns are always the stuff of
intense and close grilling by reporters on issues. They're not. Campaigns
are usually a series of staged events, press kept at bay, carefully managed
debates in which something can get stirred up but it doesn't already, she
may well, I'm not predicting this yet, but she may well be able to skate
through this whole campaign and be completely unscathed by any of these
issues."
NEWS FROM THE COLONIES
PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN: It was Britain itself, after World War II,
which escalated "ethnic cleansing" into state policy - only in those days it
was called "forced repatriation." Immediately after World War II, tens of
thousands of refugees, possibly hundreds of thousands - prisoners of war,
escapers from communism - were forcibly sent back to Stalin's Soviet Union
and Tito's Yugoslavia and certain death. Britain instigated the policy,
which the U.S. echoed, giving it the cynical code name Operation Keelhaul.
This shameful policy has been dubbed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the "last
secret" of World War II, in violation of every tenet of decency and justice.
British troops forced men, women, children into boxcars headed for the USSR
and Yugoslavia, using rifle butts as prods. One British regiment, the London
Irish, refused, saying their duty was to fight German soldiers, not club
refugee women and children. American soldiers were more inclined to open the
gates of refugee camps, and look the other way as they fled.
JAMES P. LUCIER, INSIGHT: Former chief counsel for the House Watergate
committee, Jerome Zeifman, has filed charges before the International
Criminal Tribunal seeking the indictment of Clinton and Secretary of Defense
William Cohen for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. These
formal legal documents have been submitted to the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Zeifman, a lifelong
Democrat whose meticulous preparation of the case against Richard Nixon
forced the Republican president out of the White House, is serious. And it
raises concerns that, in an age of internationalism and depreciated national
sovereignty, the president of the United States as well as the defense
secretary could be placed in the same defendant's box as Slobodan Milosevic,
the indicted Yugoslavian war criminal.
INSIGHT ARTICLE http://www.insightmag.com/articles/story2.html
FEEDBACK
FAIR: Microradio is currently an illegal form of radio broadcasting, which
takes advantage of unused radio spectrum to broadcast low-watt
transmissions. Microradio has the potential to be an ideal, low-cost form of
community media. The FCC is seeking public comment until August 2 on a
proposal to create new regulations that would legalize this sort of
broadcasting. Legalization would protect microbroadcasters, while at the
same time ensuring that microradio signals do not conflict with other
spectrum users.
SIGN-ON LETTER ENDORSED BY NOAM CHOMSKY, BARBARA EHRENREICH, HOWARD ZINN AND
JANINE JACKSON http://artcon.rutgers.edu/mec.html
NATIONAL LAWYER'S GUILD COMMENTS http://www.nlgcdc.org/99-25.htm
INTERVIEW ON MICRORADIO http://www.fair.org/counterspin/micro-transcript.html
MICRORADIO EMPOWERMENT COALITION http://www.nlgcdc.org/mec/index.html
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