Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • May 29, 2013 House denied any responsibility for seizure of telephone records just as the White House denied any responsibility for the tough tax auditing. White House defenders have already cited the fact that Republicans have used the Justice Department and the IRS to make their opponents uncomfortable. While pointing, they miss the point: This is such a serious matter that prosecution to the full extent of the law should fall upon any instigator. In April of 1934, U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. William Albert Wirt told a congressional committee he believed American communists were plotting a takeover of the United States. An earnest progressive from Indiana, Dr. Wirt was known around the world for mixing academic and vocational training with the education of students and served as an educational consultant. Wirt was a liberal, and had been invited to serve as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal secretary of education after he circulated a report urging that the United States rescind the gold standard that stabilized the value of paper money -an idea that had been advocated by populists, progressives, and urban socialists since the days of William Jennings Bryan. While a liberal, Wirt was not a communist. He was a Freemason and an Episcopalian and advocated giving students academic credit for off-campus Bible studies. The indignant Wirt told the committee that in 1933 he attended a party organized by his federally-paid secretary, Alice Prentice Barrows. He paraphrased the statements of several communists at the party. “I was told they believed that by thwarting our thenevident economic recovery, they would be able to prolong the country’s destitution until they had demonstrated to the American people that the government must operate business and commerce. By propaganda, they would destroy institutions making long term capital loans -- and then push Uncle Sam into making these loans. Once Uncle Sam becomes our financier, he must also follow his money with control and management. “We believe we have Roosevelt in the middle of a swift stream, and that the current is so strong, that he cannot turn back or escape from it. We believe that we can keep Mr. Roosevelt there until we are ready to supplant him with a Stalin. We think Mr. Roosevelt is only the Kerensky of this revolution. We are on the inside. We can control the avenues of influence. We can make the President believe he is making the decisions for himself.” The allegations brought down New Deal ridicule on Wirt and he was shortly rusticated back to Indiana. Arthur Schlesinger, the court historian of the liberal Democrats and the Kennedy family in particular, treated Wirt as a deluded eccentric. Schlesinger chose to ignore the fact that Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White had been established as a Soviet “agent of influence” following his death by heart attack after a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing, that Alger Hiss of the U.S. State Department had been charged with treason and convicted of perjury after the statute of limitations on treason had expired, and that Owen Lattimore had been run out of academia after being charged with betraying the Chinese Nationalists and handing China over to Mao, a mass murderer. At the end of the 20th century, after Schlesinger signed off on the eccentric Wirt, decoded Soviet documents revealed that Barrows had been a member of the Communist Party USA since 1919, and served as the executive secretary of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, found by congressional investigation in 1953 to be a communist front organization. Wirt and Barrows have since each had schools named after them. Go figure. The Roosevelt administration was not slow to jettison Wirt, though the people in Gary still admired him. They were very slow to jettison accused communists in high positions, and once the United States entered World War II, anyone who had opposed communism was castigated as a Nazi sympathizer or a home-grown fascist. This was not always wrong. William Dudley Pelley, a genuine home-grown fascist, was the target for an indictment for sedition shortly after Pearl Harbor. Pelley was an anti-Semite straight out of the lunatic fringe, but his act of “sedition” was asserting that the damage inflicted by the Pearl Harbor attack was far worse than the public had been told. In this, he was right. Pearl Harbor was far worse than Americans knew in early 1942. Pelley’s report got him 10 years in prison. The actual sentence was for 15 years -- for telling the truth in print -- but he was let out when Harry Truman lost the election. Conversely, Kilsoo Haan, the Korean patriot who told eight federal officials that Pearl Harbor would be attacked -- at the end, he even got the date right -- was first threatened with federal custody and then marginalized and made to look as ludicrous as possible. Haan predicted the use of midget submarines at Pearl Harbor as early as 1940. “Official” news operations like Time-Life treated Haan like a man in a loud necktie and a funny suit because his unheeded warnings were embarrassing. He was described as a subversive because, working as a double agent, he had penetrated the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu with considerable success, though he had been rebuffed as a known anti-communist by Soviet intelligence operatives in San Francisco. The Koreans also listed, by name, the Americans they believed were Soviet agents or sympathizers. Everybody in Asia knew about Lattimore because he followed a strict Stalinist agenda, but the Americans failed to convict, and the fact that Joe McCarthy had first publicly accused Lattimore in 1950 turned Lattimore into a victim-hero of the liberal left. So we see the story that explains how things work. Wirt, a nice man, lost his job as education secretary because he tried to tell the New Dealers that communists were using Roosevelt, without his own knowledge, as a dupe before an anticipated takeover. Pelley, a nasty man and a cardcarrying member of the lunatic fringe, spent 10 years in prison for accurate reporting. The Japanese already knew what a mess Pearl Harbor was. The only “subversive” element was questioning why it had to happen. Haan, who had warned that it would happen, ended up working odd jobs because nobody wanted to know who he was. The golden glory of nostalgia was evoked and the people the administration did not like suffered far worse than an audit or a request for telephone records – but we are not encouraged to remember that. Just as we were recovering from charges of selective auditing of conservative groups we were confronted with news that the Justice Department seized reporters’ telephone records. Are we still living under the United States Constitution? Of course we are. The people in charge, however, are ignoring those aspects of the Constitution they find inconvenient, just as they so often have. Many of us have differences with one position of the Tea Party: the absurd denial that the man-made carbon imprint is a major factor in global warming. Very few of us have differences with another key position: Taxes that do not benefit individuals and foster intrusive government are out of hand. Here is some of what those taxes fund. The U.S. Justice Department is now investigating the process by which purportedly low-level workers in the Cincinnati office targeted for extraordinary scrutiny those conservative groups that were applying for non-profit status. Documents also reveal that IRS offices in Washington, D.C. and in rural California also sent letters to Tea Party chapters and other conservative groups demanding extensive information before processing their non-profit status applications. The Justice Department was last heard from admitting that a top supervisor in Washington did not adequately supervise her agents. At least two other groups say they were targeted for tough audits: Z Street and Samaritan’s Purse. Z Street, a Pennsylvania-based conservative Jewish group that advocates strong U.S. support for Israel, is still waiting for its tax-exempt status. Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian world charitable program was investigated and approved. Samaritan’s Purse distributes Christian literature and Christmas gifts to needy children around the world, and provides emergency food, job skills training, medical and surgical aid to the tune of about $300 million a year in Africa, Central America, and rural South Asia. This group has been around since 1970, and previous audits showed 88 percent of donations went to people in need, with the rest going to salaries and advertising. The head of Samaritan’s Purse is The Reverend Franklin Graham, son of The Reverend Billy Graham, who supported Mitt Romney in 2012. Samaritan’s Purse opposes gay marriage and abortion. Funny, but I thought that freedom of speech to support Israel or to support a biblical lifestyle was covered by the First Amendment. If I were a more cynical man, I would observe that a Justice Department investigation of the IRS, to quote the late Nikita S. Khrushchev, is something like sending a goat to protect cabbages. The Justice Department, cynics say, frequently uses the IRS to threaten defendants who are not otherwise cooperative. In case anybody in the newspaper or TV business should look into this, the Justice Department recently subpoenaed the telephone records of reporters from the Associated Press to see if they could find out who was telling reporters things they are not supposed to know. The White Tax audits & phone records: Is this still the United States? Business Batteries Plus®, the nation’s largest and fastest growing battery and light bulb franchise, has announced the rebranding of its Paramus store at 669 Route 17 South as Batteries Plus Bulbs®. The store’s new identity is part of a company-wide initiative that signals its leadership in the expanding $17 billion U.S. light bulb replacement industry. Local consumers and business owners now have a one-stop shop for all their lighting and battery replacement needs, with highly trained experts on hand. 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