Albert Bigelow was commanding the destroyer escort U.S.S. Dale W. Peterson as it sailed into Pearl Harbor when he learned that Hiroshima had just been destroyed by an atomic bomb. He soon concluded that “morally, war is impossible,” and resigned from the Naval Reserve a month before becoming eligible for a pension.
As time went on, Bigelow’s convictions only deepened. In 1955, he and his wife Sylvia, by now members of the Religious Society of Friends, hosted two “Hiroshima Maidens”—young Japanese women disfigured by atomic bombs who had come to the U.S. for plastic surgery.
Using facts, logic, and argument, Bigelow and numerous colleagues tried again and again to slow the nuclear arms race. Faced with official indifference, they looked for a new way forward. In January of 1958, they put their bodies where their hearts were. In 2010, Lawrence Wittner wrote about their plan for Truthout:
“…Bigelow and three other pacifists wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower of their plan to sail the Golden Rule into the U.S. nuclear testing zone in the Pacific. ‘For years we have spoken and written of the suicidal military preparations of the Great Powers,’ they declared, ‘but our voices have been lost in the massive effort of those responsible for preparing this country for war. We mean to speak now with the weight of our whole lives.’”
After a difficult journey from San Pedro, California, the Golden Rule arrived in Honolulu to find a federal court had issued an injunction barring the crew from proceeding any further. They went anyway.
“Overtaken by the U.S. Coast Guard on their journey to Enewetak, they were arrested, tried, convicted and placed on probation,” Wittner wrote. “Undaunted, they set sail once more… . Once again, their voyage was halted by U.S. authorities, and they were arrested, tried, convicted and—this time—given sixty-day sentences and imprisoned.”
The Golden Rule never made it to the Enewetak Proving Ground, but it accomplished its mission by proxy.
As Wittner relates, Earle and Barbara Reynolds, accompanied by their two children, sailed their own 50-foot yacht Phoenix of Hiroshima and reached the proving ground on July 1, 1958, announcing their presense by radiotelephone. Reynolds was tried, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison.
“These events, which received considerable publicity, triggered a surge of activism,” according to Wittner. “Picket lines sprang up around federal buildings and AEC offices all across the United States. In San Francisco, 432 residents—proclaiming that they were guilty of ‘conspiring’ with crew members—petitioned the U.S. attorney to take legal action against them. Reynolds, out on bail before a higher court ruled in his favor (and, implicitly, in favor of the crew of the Golden Rule), gave a large number of talks on radio and television, as well as to college, high school and church audiences, on the dangers of nuclear testing.”
We don’t know if Bigelow’s letter ever reached Eisenhower. We do know that 18 months after it was sent, public opinion had turned against nuclear testing. On August 31, 1959, during a televised conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Ike said, “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”
After helping to spark a global movement, the Golden Rule slipped into obscurity. She sank twice, and was refloated. In 2015 she was re-launched, after thorough restoration, by members of Veterans for Peace. Since then she has sailed the West Coast, and voyaged to Hawaii.
Her visit to Portsmouth next week is part of its 2022 – 2023 Great Loop Tour: from Minneapolis to New Orleans, around Florida and up the East Coast. From here it will be Down East to the St. Lawrence, and on to the Great Lakes.
The festivities will begin with an official Mayor’s Welcome at the Prescott Park “Free Speech Zone” * at 11:00 a.m. Thursday, June 22nd.
Visitors will be able to view the 39-foot gaff-rigged ketch and and talk with the crew between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. on the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th.
A Community Farewell will commence at 6:45 p.m. Saturday, June 24th, at the South Church, 292 State Street. The Leftist Marching Band will kick things off with a half-hour of Early Bird Merriment. The event will be free; donations will be accepted.
* For the record, we object to the term “Free Speech Zone.” It implies that there are zones in which free speech may be prohibited. We use it in this instance because it occurs in the source material used to prepare this news item.
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Commissioners Mum in Response to Flynn Marker Petitioners
[Note: We received the following release on June 5th. We called Transportation Commissioner William Cass for comment on Monday, but he he has not deigned to reply. – The Ed.]
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE—The initiators of a petition for a historical roadside marker at the Concord birthplace of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn say they have received no response to their latest call for the marker to be preserved and reinstalled.
“Following the removal and retirement of Historical Marker #278 for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, we are writing to get your assurance that the marker’s integrity will be protected and that it will not be defaced, destroyed or transferred out of the possession of the state of New Hampshire,” Mary Lee Sargent and Arnie Alpert wrote in a letter they hand delivered on May 22nd to Sarah Stewart, Commissioner of Natural and Cultural Resources, and William Cass, Commissioner of Transportation. The two departments jointly manage the Historical Marker Program, which is administered by the Division of Historical Resources (DHR).
“As good faith participants in the Historical Marker program, we ask that you reconsider and restore Historical Marker #278 regarding Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to its rightful place on Montgomery Street in Concord,” they wrote. “We hope to have your response within ten days.”
The 10-day period expired on June 1.
“Given the attention this matter has received,” Alpert said, “we are disturbed by the commissioners’ non-responsiveness.”
Alpert and Sargent have retained the legal services of former Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky, whom they said is helping them explore their legal options to have the marker reinstalled.
“As we have said in previous communication with Commissioner Stewart, our proposal to have the marker approved strictly followed Division of Historical Resources guidelines,” the May 22nd letter said. “We also said, and still believe, that the removal of the marker took place in violation of the Department’s policies regarding retirement of markers.”
Flynn, born in Concord in 1890, achieved prominence at an early age as an advocate for labor and women’s equality. As labor organizers faced persecution, imprisonment, and violence especially during the first “Red Scare,” she also became an influential advocate for civil liberties and was among the ACLU’s founders. Later, she joined the Communist Party and served in its leadership. Following a 1951 arrest and lengthy trial, Flynn was imprisoned under a law, the enforcement of which was later found to be an unconstitutional infringement on the right to free speech and association.
Following the process outlined by the DHR, Sargent and Alpert submitted a petition, draft wording, and footnoted historical research to the department on July 8, 2021. Five months later, the DHR approved the text, design, and production of the marker, which was installed at the corner of Court and Montgomery Streets on May 1, 2023. Two weeks later, the DOT removed the marker, reportedly on orders from Governor Chris Sununu after Executive Councilors Joe Kenney and David Wheeler raised objections.
“Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s place in history is secure,” said Sargent, who taught American history at community colleges and universities for several decades. “It is outrageous that the judgments of three men could overrule a thoughtful process that marked the significance of a woman whose role in history is well established.”
According to the DHR, the purpose of the marker program “is to educate the public about New Hampshire’s history, not to honor, memorialize, or commemorate persons, events, or places.” Markers can be proposed by nominations from municipalities, agencies, organizations, or individuals in accord with a process outlined by the DHR.
In their May 22 letter, Sargent and Alpert also asked the commissioners to preserve all records of the Flynn marker’s creation, installation, and removal, “including notes and minutes of meetings in which it was discussed and correspondence between state officials.”
Arnie Alpert, of Canterbury, is the creator of the website, NHRadicalHistory.org. His “Active with the Activists” columns appear frequently in InDepthNH.org.
Mary Lee Sargent, of Bow, has decades of experience teaching American history at community colleges and universities in Illinois and New Hampshire.
Both Sargent and Alpert have decades of experience in movements related to labor, feminism, and protection of civil liberties.
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Could We Actually End the CEO Defense Contractor Gravy Train?
by Sam Pizzigati
Could corporate CEOs anywhere in the universe have a deal much sweeter than U.S. defense contractor chiefs?
The CEO at CybeCys, Inc., a Texas-based defense contractor, might quibble with that question. He isn’t feeling all that much sweetness these days. Last month, federal prosecutors announced a deal that will have this CEO and CybeCys pay over $283,000 in penalties and damages for cheating on two Covid-era federal loan programs.
The CybeCys CEO seems to have transferred hefty chunks of taxpayer dollars into his own personal investment accounts and used those dollars, prosecutors charge, to buy up “securities, exchange-traded funds, and cryptocurrency.”
Federal officials brought all sorts of firepower to bear on this case. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, the IRS criminal investigation office, and the Small Business Administration’s office of inspector general all had a hand in bringing CybeCys and its CEO to justice.
Need any more assurance that the feds have corporate profiteering off defense contracts under eagle-eye control? How about this: In 2023, under the terms of the 10-year-old Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, no top exec at a U.S. defense contractor can directly pocket over $619,000 in tax dollars.
Alas, both this $619,000 annual CEO pay “cap” and the CybeCys penalties amount to nothing more than pure show. Federal defense contracting remains among the lushest of playgrounds for America’s rich.
Just how lush a playground? The United States, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation detailed earlier this spring, last year spent more on defense than the next ten highest defense-spending nations combined. The federal budget deal just brokered by the White House and the House majority leader ups that defense spending 3.3 percent. Defense contractors will pocket about half the resulting $886 billion.
A little perspective from Popular Information’s Judd Legum: Just eight years ago, the national defense community had to somehow make do with over $300 billion less.
But making do with “less” doesn’t come easy to that community’s corporate titans, folks like Dave Calhoun, the CEO at Boeing, the nation’s second-largest defense contractor.
This past March, Boeing’s annual filings revealed that poor Calhoun had missed his initial CEO “performance” targets and would not be receiving the $7-million bonus promised his way when the Boeing board hired him in 2020. Calhoun, as a result, had to be content with a mere $22.5 million in 2022 compensation.
The Boeing board clearly agonized over the decision to dock Calhoun that $7 million, so much so, notes Seattle Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates, that board members earlier this year felt duty-bound to grant their CEO over the next three years an extra stack of shares—“not contingent on company performance”—worth some $15 million at today’s share value.
Investigators with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the GAO, may have had incidents of executive excess just like that in mind when they concluded back in 2019 that the Department of Defense needed to “comprehensively assess” its contract financing arrangements, something the DoD hadn’t done since 1985. This past April, the DoD released an analysis that attempted to do just that.
“In aggregate,” this new DoD analysis concludes, “the defense industry is financially healthy, and its financial health has improved over time.” The nation’s “traditional major defense contractors” are “out-performing” their commercial counterparts “in many key financial metrics.”
But despite this “increased profit and cash flow,” the DoD found, corporations with massive defense contracts have chosen “to reduce the overall share of revenue” they spend on R&D and capital assets. They’ve put their higher profits instead into “significantly increasing the share of revenue paid to shareholders in cash dividends and share buybacks.” Those dividends and buybacks have jumped by an astounding 73 percent!
“Operating in the DoD environment,” the DoD report deadpans, “has its advantages.”
And defense contractor CEOs have been lining their pockets accordingly. In 2021, the most recent year with complete stats, the nation’s top five weapons makers—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—grabbed over $116 billion in Pentagon contracts and paid their top two dozen execs some $287 million, Pentagon-watcher William Hartung noted this past December.
Taxpayers are generously subsidizing these more-than-ample paychecks, adds Hartung, the Center for International Policy arms program director. Corporate giants like Boeing and Raytheon depend on government contracts for about half the dollars they rake in. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman depend on those contracts for at least 70 percent.
“Huge CEO compensation,” Hartung observes, “does nothing to advance the defense of the United States and everything to enrich a small number of individuals.”
That huge CEO compensation has nowhere to go but up once the new budget deal brokered by the White House and the House majority leader kicks into effect. But even before this deal, the Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project calculates, the “militarized portion” of the federal budget already accounted for 62 percent of all discretionary federal budget dollars.
We have precious little to show for this enormous expenditure of national treasure.
“The post-9/11 ‘war on terror,’ for example, has cost more than $8 trillion and contributed to a horrific death toll of 4.5 million people in affected regions,” the National Priorities Project points out. “Meanwhile, a U.S. military budget that outpaces Russia’s by more than 10 to 1 has failed to prevent or end the Russian war in Ukraine.”
So what can we do? The National Priorities Project analysts, in their latest report, advance a variety of steps that begin with immediately reducing the national military budget by at least $100 billion and reinvesting the savings in non-militarized discretionary priorities.
Progressive members of Congress, meanwhile, have also been pushing for a major change in contracting standards. Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s “Patriotic Corporations Act” would give companies with modest pay gaps between their top execs and typical workers a leg up in the bidding for federal defense contracts.
Or we could go the FDR route. In the months right after Pearl Harbor, the nation needed a major boost in revenues to wage and win the new world war. President Roosevelt and his New Dealers believed that those revenues should come first and foremost from the nation’s most affluent.
At a time of “grave national danger,” FDR told Congress in April 1942, “no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year,” about $465,000 in today’s dollars. Later that same year, a presidential executive order limited top corporate executive pay to $25,000 after taxes, a move, Roosevelt pronounced, needed “to correct gross inequities and to provide for greater equality in contributing to the war effort.”
Conservatives in Congress would eventually beat back that executive order, but FDR had, by that time, successfully recast the defense-revenue debate. The political battle would be fought on Roosevelt’s terms—not on whether to tax the rich, but on how much. By the war’s end, America’s wealthy would be paying federal taxes on income over $200,000 at a 94 percent rate.
That top rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades and help give birth, in the process, to the first mass middle class the world had ever seen. Miracles can happen.
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Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. Twitter: @Too_Much_Online.
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House Hearing Puts “GOP Tax Scam 2.0” in Spotlight
by Kenny Stancil
House Republicans are poised to advance regressive taxation measures that would increase the federal deficit just weeks after they nearly blew up the global economy over ostensible concerns about the U.S. government’s debt, eliciting condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocates.
The Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing Tuesday to mark up the so-called American Families and Jobs Act (AFJA), which packages three bills: the Tax Cuts for Working Families Act, the Small Business Jobs Act, and the Build It in America Act.
This trio of bills—dubbed the “GOP Tax Scam 2.0” by the panel’s ranking member, Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.)—would expand Trump-era tax cuts whose benefits flow overwhelmingly to corporations and the wealthy. In the wake of demanding—and winning—sharp reductions in anti-poverty spending along with other reactionary reforms during negotiations to raise the debt ceiling, the GOP-controlled House is now moving to starve the federal government of essential revenue.
“It didn’t take long for the MAGA majority’s alleged debt ‘concerns’ to go right out the window in pursuit of more wasteful tax breaks for their billionaire donors and corporations that ship jobs overseas,” Liz Zelnick, director of Economic Security & Corporate Power at Accountable.US, said in a statement.
“If the recent past is prologue, the MAGA majority will try to pay for their trillion-dollar corporate tax giveaway on the backs of average Americans, including devastating cuts aimed at seniors, veterans, and the food insecure,” said Zelnick. “Once again, the MAGA House majority has only corporations and the wealthy in mind.”
Zelnick’s sentiment was echoed by Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
“This is the most ill-considered piece of legislation that I’ve witnessed in years in front of this committee,” said Neal. “Just 10 days after our Republican colleagues were prepared to bring the nation to the brink of default… to the precipice, if not over the edge, they now come back with a tax cut.”
“Apparently, the debt only matters if it’s about spending, never about tax cuts,” said Neal, who lamented “$10 trillion of tax cuts” enacted in 2001, 2003, and 2017—years when Republicans held both chambers of Congress and the White House.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) derided what he called the GOP’s “tax scam 2.0” as one of the worst sequels in history.
“After months of some of you actually liking the idea of keeping other people hostage, some of you are back to the single issue that unites your party: Tax cuts for the well-off,” Pascrell said in a message to Republicans on the panel. “It’s far past time to retire” the argument that “tax cuts ‘pay for themselves.’ They just don’t. You can’t prove it.”
Among other things, the AFJA would expand corporate and business tax breaks enacted in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) approved by congressional Republicans and signed into law by then-President Donald Trump in 2017.
If the new proposal were to pass, the richest one percent of U.S. households would receive $28.4 billion in tax cuts (an average of $16,560) next year, compared with $1.4 billion for the poorest 20 percent ($40, on average), according to Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Because foreign investors own a substantial share of stock in U.S. corporations, they would also receive $23.8 billion next year under the legislation.
House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) has claimed that the cost of the tax cuts would be offset through a repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits. But as Wamhoff explained in an analysis published earlier this week, deliberately hindering the nation’s renewable energy transition would impose additional costs “in the form of greater climate damage.”
Moreover, “the true costs are hidden by budget gimmicks,” Wamhoff noted. “The most important budget gimmick is that the legislation enacts the biggest tax cuts for only two years even though its proponents plan to extend them in the future, making them, in effect, permanent.”
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: “The bill would cost $80 billion over a decade with interest ($19 billion before interest), including $320 billion through the end of fiscal year (FY) 2025. The smaller 10-year cost is driven by several factors but mainly by the fact that most of the bill’s tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. We estimate that the plan would cost over $1.1 trillion ($950 billion without interest) through 2033 if these temporary tax cuts and extensions were made permanent.”
The benefits of the 2017 TCJA “never trickled down,” Americans for Tax Fairness tweeted. “Instead, the rich got richer and corporations made bigger profits. We should be repealing the Trump tax cuts, not making them permanent.”
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Kenny Stancil is a staff writer for Common Dreams. This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.