UNDERNEWS November 10, 1999 Editor: Sam Smith The Progressive Review 1312 18th St NW (Fifth Floor) Washington DC 20036 202-835-0770 Fax: 835-0779 PROGRESSIVE REVIEW INDEX: http://www.prorev.com/ UNDERNEWS: http://www.prorev.com/indexa.htm SUBSCRIBE: Reply with "subscribe" in the subject line UNSUBSCRIBE: Reply with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. ---------------------------------------------------------- WORD Issues aren't real. Issues are just masses of opposing scenarios vying to become perceptions. -- Mark Alan Stamaty INFOWARS PACIFICA RADIO CENSORS NEWS AGAIN FAIR: FAIR's national radio show, CounterSpin, was interrupted in mid-show as it aired on WPFW-FM, the Pacifica-owned radio station located in Washington, D.C. The show, which airs on WPFW between 11:00 and 11:30am, was in progress when host Janine Jackson began to announce an item about the November 1 "reassignment" of Dan Coughlin, the Pacifica Network's news director. Just as Jackson began mentioning the reason for Coughlin's removal a musical interlude crudely interrupted the report and continued for 50 seconds, until after the Coughlin item was finished. This marks the fifth time in 1999 that CounterSpin's broadcast has been altered or withheld by Pacifica stations. In April, the Los Angeles-based KPFK pulled the entire CounterSpin show, which included an interview with then recently fired broadcaster Larry Bensky. On WPFW, the same show was interrupted by music which continued throughout the show's normal timeslot. In July, a CounterSpin broadcast on KPFK was interrupted following an interview with Pacifica critics J. Imani and Norman Solomon when KPFK general manager Mark Schubb came on the air and spent the duration of CounterSpin's time slot commenting on Pacifica issues and taking calls from listeners. On WPFW that same show was pulled entirely. CORRECTION We referred to Rogers, AK, in our story yesterday about a boy killed by a gay man. AK is the symbol for Alaska. The incident occurred in Arkansas, whose symbol is AR. COLLEGE CRIME REPORT APB News has completed a 1400-campus study of crime and has compiled a list of the safest and most dangerous universities and colleges based on neighborhood (not on-campus) crime reports. Except for the Air Force and Army military academies, the safest colleges are all in rural areas. The most dangerous college neighborhood was that of Morris Brown College in Atlanta's University Center, a cluster of small historic campuses. Three other schools in University Center -- Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College -- were also among the five highest neighborhood crime risk rankings. The most dangerous Ivy school was the University of Pennsylvania which ranked 41st nationally. Among Ivies, Penn was followed by Columbia, Yale, Brown, and Harvard. APB NEWS http://www.apbnews.com PRESIDENTIAL TERM LIMIT FINE WITH VOTERS A recent survey finds that only 28% of American voters would support Bill Clinton if he ran for office again. Here's how respondents rated current candidates on the question of whether they said what they believed. 44% Bradley 37% McCain 36% Gore 35% Bush Asked with whom they wold rather spend an evening the results were: 27% Bush 23% Gore 15% Bradley 11% McCain CLINTON SCANDALS WALL STREET JOURNAL: The FBI questioned [John] Huang extensively about whether Lippo fronted in the U.S. for Chinese-government interests because of business ties between the company and government-controlled China Resources Corp., long a subject of interest for investigators. In 1985, the FBI interrogation record says, China Resources allegedly paid for a Lippo-organized trip to Asia by then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton. In 1992 and 1993, according to the FBI, China Resources bought a large number of shares in Lippo-controlled Hong Kong Chinese Bank, for about 80% of equity. And a China Resources purchase of shares in Lippo itself, Mr. Huang said, saved Lippo from bankruptcy during a real-estate downturn. The FBI says Mr. Huang called that deal an explicit agreement for favors from Lippo, but "Huang did not know what the 'quid pro quo' was for having China Resources as a partner." The FBI says, though, that China Resources was controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, the primary lobbying agent for most-favored-nation trade status for China. TPR: To put this in perspective, here are some other things, not mentioned by the WSJ, that were going on in the 1980s around the time of Clinton trip to Asia. 1983 Mochtar Riady forms Lippo Finance & Investment in Little Rock. A non-citizen, Riady hires Carter's former SBA director, Vernon Weaver, to chair the firm. The launch is accomplished with the aid of a $2 million loan guaranteed by the SBA. Weaver uses Governor Clinton as a character reference to help get the loan guarantee. First loan goes to Little Rock Chinese restaurant owner Charlie Trie. State regulators warn McDougal's Madison Guarantee S&L to stop making imprudent loans. Gov. Clinton is also warned of the problem but takes no action. 1984 Riady buys a stake in the Worthen holding company whose assets include the Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank. Price: $16 million. Other Worthen co-owners will eventually include BCCI investor Abdullah Taha Bakhish. 1985 Arkansas state pension funds -- deposited in Worthen by Governor Bill Clinton -- suddenly lose 15% of their value because of the failure of high risk, short-term investments and the brokerage firm that bought them. The $52 million loss is covered by a Worthen check written by Jack Stephens in the middle of the night, an insurance policy, and the subsequent purchase over the next few months of 40% of the bank by Mochtar Riady. Clinton and Worthen escape a major scandal. Mochtar's son James comes back to Arkansas to manage Worthen as president. He bonds with Clinton and Charlie Trie. Lippo executive and Chinese native John Huang becomes active in Lippo's operations in Arkansas. Mochtar and James Riady engineer the takeover of the First National Bank of Mena in a town of 5,000 with few major assets beyond a Contra supply base, drug running and money-laundering operations. Further, last spring we reported: PENSION FUND INVESTS IN CHINA The Clinton crowd, which almost caused a disaster in the Arkansas state pension fund in the mid-1980s by its risky investments, is at it again according to Investor's Business Daily and the American Spectator. The state teachers' fund has put large sums into four companies with strong links to Chinese intelligence and the People's Liberation Army, including the China Ocean Shipping Co., China North Industries, China Resources Enterprises and China Travel. Some of these firms are also linked to Indonesian Clinton crony Mochtar Riady. The system owns nearly $2 million worth of stock in a COSCO subsidiary. Says Charles Altmon of the highly rated Growth Stock Outlook newsletter, who manages portfolios worth $130 million, the pension fund investments are "downright foolish." In November 1998, TPR reported: Four of Panama's ports are controlled by a company partially owned by Hutchinson-Whampoa Ltd., which in turn is owned by Li Ka-Shing, a billionaire so close to the Chinese power structure that he was offered the governorship of Hong Kong. Another owner of the Panamanian ports is China Resources Enterprise, which has been called an "agent of espionage" by Senator Fred Thompson. CRE is also a partner of the Lippo Group, owned by the Riady family that has played a central if mysterious role in the rise of William Clinton. According to congressional testimony by ex-JCS chief Admiral Thomas Moorer, Hutchinson-Whampoa has the right to pilot all ships thought the Panama Canal, including US Naval vessels. THE RISE AND FALL OF JEWISH LIBERALISM Judicial Watch chair Larry Klayman, who has pursued the Clinton machine where neither special prosecutors nor the media wanted to go, has now taken on the Jewish liberal intelligentsia. Writing for Worldnet Daily, Klayman, the grandson (on both sides) of Jewish immigrants (Poland and Ukraine) and eventually what he calls a Jew who believes in Christ, grew up among traditional stories of escape, struggle, and survival. He writes of his grandmother Yetta: "When I was six, my grandmother Yetta, a Polish immigrant dress saleslady on Philadelphia's Chestnut Street, would sometimes take her grandchildren downtown for a movie and dinner. Over hamburger, baked beans and mashed potatoes at the Horn & Hardart automat, she explained to my four-year-old sister and me how much it meant to escape persecution, come to America, earn an honest day's living and raise an only daughter and grandkids .... She had lost her husband, my grandfather Louis (for whom I am named under Jewish custom) at 40 and was on her own, living as a guest in my mother and father's house. She never spent lavishly, and saved almost every penny she ever earned, fearing that she would not have enough to remain self-sufficient when she got older. When Yetta grew old she was abandoned by my mother, who at my stepfather's urging also misappropriated the life savings my grandmother had entrusted to her to invest for a rainy day." Klayman tells his stories to back up his point -- that since he took on Clinton he has been under heavy assault from a curious source: "In article after article by many in the liberal Jewish intelligentsia -- such as Anthony Lewis and Frank Rich of the New York Times, Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek, Stephen Glass formerly of the New Republic (he was dismissed for fabricating facts and stories, one of them about me), David Segal, Paul Blustein and Al Kamen of The Washington Post, Harvey Berkman of The National Law Journal, Jeffrey Rosen of the New Yorker, David Corn of The Nation and Salon, Jacob Weisberg of Slate, Jonathan Broder and Murray Waas of Salon (which even attacked Catholics who have been critical of Clinton), David Goldstein of Knight-Ridder, and Bruce T. Rubenstein of Corporate Legal Times -- I have been mocked and ridiculed for my efforts and my conservative beliefs. (Some liberal or libertarian Jewish writers and television hosts, like Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair, Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice, Alan Colmes of FOX News, and Charles Grodin of MSNBC, have praised me and my work, but this is rare.) Nary a non-Jewish journalist has written such invective, and most laud the success of my group." Writes Klayman: "In viciously attacking Judicial Watch and me, these liberal Jewish journalists have forgotten the roots of their religious past. Judaism and its progeny, Christianity, are based on a strict adherence to living according to certain basic principles -- the Ten Commandments. In personally attacking a fellow Hebrew whom they perceive as a political heretic, these liberal Jews continue to support an administration which, even by their own admission, has repeatedly violated fundamental moral and ethical principles. They have lost sight of their proud Judeo-Christian heritage." Since your editor is neither Jewish nor conservative and would agree with Klayman on few issues beyond Clinton's corruption, why did this article strike me strongly? Simply because, albeit to a far lesser degree, I have also felt the isolation and derision that has come from being tagged an apostate. Further, the marked change in Jewish political thought has interested me, in no small part because I grew up in an intensely political family where some of my adult models were Jewish labor leaders and political activists. I'm currently reading for review the memoir of one of this ilk, Marvin Caplan, and find myself struck once again at the rock-like, unpretentious commitment to social and political morality that such leaders exemplified. This helped produce, for much of the 20th century, a finer politics than anyone under the age of forty has had a chance to see. Here's how I tried to capture it for a book I am writing: *** For the non-orthodox of whatever religion, the struggle for individual space within their religion is often hard-won. For some Jews it began with a rebellion against the centuries-old plenary power of the rabbis. A part of the story is told by Paul S. Green in his memoir, 'From the Streets of Brooklyn to the War in Europe,' as the former Stars and Stripes journalist sets the stage for his own saga. He notes that after gaining ground in places like Italy and Germany, by the dawn of the 20th century, "Jewish youth in Poland grew more and more impatient with the narrow focus of their lives. They were determined to take part in the opportunities opening up around them exciting new developments in science, the arts, in social relationships. This brought them into conflict with their parents and grandparents. In seeking a different way of life, they began to do the unthinkable to reject the strict age-old Orthodoxy of their ancestors." Out of this grew several new movements, one of which, Zionism, looked to retrieving a Jewish nation in the land of their ancestors. Others were socialist, ranging from hard-core Bolshevik to the Bund, which Green describes as "an organization of free-thinking Jewish youth who whole-heartedly embraced Yiddish culture and a Yiddish life that completely rejected traditional religion. The Bundists believed that only a socialist government evolutionary rather than revolutionary could hope to bring together all peoples of whatever origin and outlaw racial and religious conflict, with all men becoming brothers, thereby bringing an end to anti-Semitism and pogroms." And so we find, not too many years later, the New York City Jewish cigar-makers each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked, reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature. As it turned out, the leader of the New York cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, became the first president of the American Federation of Labor. Green’s own family joined the rebellion They became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values that built this country’s social democracy. While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious, conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on modern American politics. Social and economic progress inevitably produced a dilution of passion for justice and change not just among Jews but among the entire liberal elite. Thus we would find a women's movement much louder in its defense of a conservative and corrupt Bill Clinton than about the plight of its sisters at the bottom of the economic pile. Conservative black economists would decry the moral debilitation of affirmative action but fail to defend those suffering because of the massive incarceration of young black males. Economic progress for some has calmed the sound of revolution and reform; in its stead we find the conservative Ben Stein speaking at a Jewish anti-abortion conference: "I'll tell you how I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Jewish position in America had changed dramatically .... The wife of a very close friend of my father died a few weeks ago and they had the memorial service at the Chevy Chase Club. And there was a cantor with a yarmulke giving the service at the Chevy Chase Club. And I cannot describe to you how astonishing a turn of events this was." The great 20th century social movements have been successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind. Minority elites have joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history. But as the best and brightest drive around town in their Range Rovers, who speaks for those who, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, remain fugitives from the law of averages? *** ---------------------------------------------------------- For a free subscription to UNDERNEWS send your postal address with zip code. 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