Spiro Agnew and “Bagman”

by William H. Benson

February 21, 2019

     News of two separate scandals rocked the White House and stunned the American people in 1973.

     The first was President Nixon’s coverup of his election committee’s burglary at the Watergate Hotel, and the second was Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s criminal scheme to accept kickbacks, actual cash payments, from contractors who Agnew had lined up to receive contracts for county and state and Federal government-funded projects: for roads, streets, water and sewer plants.

     The kickbacks extended back to the 1960’s, when Agnew served as Baltimore County’s Executive. Then, once elected Maryland’s governor, Agnew continued to receive cash payments, and when he moved into his office in the White House’s West Wing, bagmen brought him sealed envelopes stuffed with cash, outright criminal action.

     Agnew had no knowledge of and did not participate in the Watergate coverup, and Nixon was unaware of Agnew’s crimes until the spring of 1973, four years after the two entered the White House.    

     The American people may remember details about Nixon’s scandal, but they are vague about Agnew’s crimes. “Didn’t he resign for something?” Rachel Maddow, host at MSNBC, hopes to rectify that lack of clarity with her recent podcasts, “Bagman.”

     Maddow reveals the truth that Nixon’s Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, forced Vice-President Spiro Agnew to plead no-contest to one felony charge of income tax evasion, and to resign, rather than face a rock-solid case that included some forty counts of “criminal conspiracy, bribery, and extortion.”

     Agnew submitted his resignation to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on October 10, 1973, on the same day that he appeared before a judge in a courtroom. Agnew though refused to admit any guilt.

     One wonders why Elliot Richardson agreed to accept a plea bargain for a lesser crime, income tax evasion, when the prosecutors had documents, testimonies, and hard evidence of bribery.

     Maddow reveals that the Attorney General’s first priority was to remove Agnew from the line of succession to the presidency, in case Nixon should face impeachment and removal. Few in the Justice Department, or the Federal government wanted Spiro Agnew sitting in the Oval Office.

     The heroes in Maddow’s story are three young Federal prosecutors in Maryland—Barney Skolnick, Tim Baker, and Ron Liebman—and their supervisor, George Beall, the Federal attorney in Maryland then. Their homework and evidence convinced Elliot Richardson of Agnew’s guilt.

     Rachel Maddow found another egregious detail, unknown until now. She listened to Nixon’s tape recordings, and heard Nixon, Agnew, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman form a plan to obstruct justice.

     These White House officials decided to ask George H. W. Bush, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, to approach J. Glenn Beall—George Beall’s brother and a Maryland Senator—to lean on George Beall and insist that he stop the government’s investigation into Agnew.

     Senator Glenn Beall took the high road and refused Bush’s request.

     After Agnew resigned, the Federal judge ordered Agnew to pay $160,000 in taxes on the bribes he had received but not included on his tax return. The judge also insisted that Agnew pay a $10,000 fine, but jail time the judge suspended. The bar association then disbarred Agnew from practicing law.

     And where did Agnew get the money to pay the taxes and the fine, after he had spent the bags of cash on “mistresses, sports cars, and jewelry?” A friend, Frank Sinatra, loaned him the money.

     Jonathon Baird, a columnist at the Concord Monitor—Concord, New Hampshire’s newspaper—listened to Maddow’s podcast and asked, “How does a corrupt government official under criminal investigation maintain his or her grip on power?”

     Baird answered, “On TV, I saw Roger Stone describe the game plan: ‘Admit nothing, deny everything, and counterattack.’ Stone was not the first in American politics to advocate such a game plan. Forty-five years ago, then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew pioneered the modern plan.”

     Indeed, on the day Agnew appeared in court, he denied any guilt and blamed his accusers. In his 1980 memoir, “Go Quietly . . . or else,” he said, “it wasn’t shakedown stuff; it was merely going back to get support from those who had benefitted from the Administration.”

     In other words, he believed he was raising campaign contributions from those who had received state contracts. But, the truth was, it was bags of cash that he received, and not checks made out to an election committee.

     On August 9, 1974, ten months after Agnew resigned, in the face of almost certain impeachment, President Richard Nixon also resigned.

California’s Housing Crisis

by William H. Benson

February 7, 2019

     Last time in these pages, I discussed Michael Greenberg’s recent article in the New York Review on the plight of migrant workers in California’s central valley, Indians from Mexico hired to pick fruits and vegetables. In a second article published also last month in the New York Review, Greenberg discusses California’s lack of affordable housing.

     The statistics are disheartening. California now ranks 49^th in housing affordability. Only Hawaii is more expensive. Zillow placed the median price on a California home last July at $597,000, whereas the national median price is $218,000.

     Certain well-paid employees in Silicon Valley have given up on the thought of ever buying a house there and have opted to commute from two hours away, driving up housing prices “in Oakland to the north, Salinas to the south, and across the Coast Ranges as far east as Sacramento and Fresno.”

     It is sad but true, that only 30% of California households can afford the state’s median priced home, but in San Francisco only about 15% can afford the median priced home there. In Palo Alto, a suburb south of San Francisco, the median price on a home is $3,155,700.

     Yet, California, for all its wealth and high-priced homes, is one of the poorest states. Greenberg writes, “California has the highest poverty rate in the US.”

     Homelessness is rampant. Greenberg says that “the homeless colonize almost every public space: under freeways, in parks, in private lots whose chain-link fences have been cut and bent open. Pup tents and ripped plastic tarps are everywhere. Thousands more live out of cars or RV’s parked on the street.”

     A professor at the University of California at Irvine told Greenberg that “at least 10 percent of his students, at one time or another, sleep in their cars.”

     How did California get into this position, where employees and students lack affordable housing.

     The acronym NIMBY explains in part the underlying reason. “Not in my backyard” contains within it the drawbridge attitude, the idea that once someone moves into an unspoilt neighborhood, he or she should work hard to prevent others from entering after them.

     Greenberg writes, “In most localities homeowners have tight control over their neighborhoods and reject proposals for moderately priced multi-unit buildings.”

     People who subscribe to Nimbyism may want affordable development—apartments, townhouses, and condominiums—but elsewhere, not in their backyard.

     Then, there are others who fear the model of urban sprawl, the ugly type of development that gave California a bad reputation decades ago. Instead, they preach conservation, and then they point to laws that they use as a pretext to limit construction of housing for people of modest means.

     For example, in 1970, then Governor Ronald Reagan signed into law the California Environmental Quality Act, an act that promotes land use that protects the environment, but in recent years, Nimbyists have used “arcane provisions in that act to block high-density development that would reduce pollution and help alleviate the housing crisis.”

     Those who want to delay or block development file a series of costly CEQA lawsuits, but not because they wish to protect the environment.

     Then, in June of 1978, California voters approved Proposition 13, an amendment that froze property taxes, and allowed only a maximum 2% annual increase. If the property is ever sold, then officials can increase the property tax, but they are limited to just 1% of the sales price.

     As a result, owners of homes or commercial property are hesitant to sell, shorting the supply of real estate in the face of accelerating demand. This drives prices up.

     Because of Nimbyism and zoning laws, California cannot build enough affordable housing units.

     California state’s Senate Bill 827 “would have legalized apartment construction in area’s well served by transit,” including trains, buses, or subways, but California’s congressmen voted it down.

     In 2016, Governor Brown proposed to exempt affordable housing construction from the state’s crippling CEQA review process, but the congressman voted his proposal down as well.    

     Greenberg sees a little hope. He says that “At the very least, voters are likely to support an end to the tax freeze on commercial real estate.” He also suggests that California’s cities should look to Minneapolis, “which has eliminated single-family zoning in every neighborhood, and now allows for three units on plots of land where only one was permitted before.”

     Until the zoning laws change though, housing prices in California will continue to spike up.

California’s Farmworkers

by William H. Benson

January 24, 2019

     Michael Greenberg, reporter for the New York Review, examined California in two recent articles, the first in December on agriculture, and the second in January on housing’s high cost.

     In the first, he paints a stunning picture of agriculture in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a stretch of land “234 miles long and 130 miles wide,” with Stockton to the north and Bakersfield to the south.

     Greenberg writes, “Measured by yearly production, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the highest-value stretches of farmland in the country, and is dominated by large growers who preside over a labor force of migrant workers. A few hundred families own the land. Some own 20,000 or 40,000 acres.”

     The owners grow “raisins, table grapes, pistachios, almonds, tomatoes, fruits, garlic, cabbage, the clementines we buy in netted bags at the supermarket, as well as pomegranates.” All together those “few hundred families” receive annual gross revenues of about “$47 billion, more than double that of Iowa, the next-biggest agricultural state.” 

     One of the people whom Greenberg interviewed, Mark Arax, was blunt when he said that the valley “is like a Central American country. It’s the poorest part of California. There’s almost no middle class. To find its equivalent in the United States, you’d have to go to Appalachia or the borders of Texas.”

     Greenberg was surprised to learn that the farm laborers “speak none or very little Spanish, much less English,” even though “at least 80% of them are undocumented Mexicans.” Instead, they are “Mixteco and Trique Indians, from the states of Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Gerrero, the poorest regions in Mexico.”

     One day in June, Greenberg visited a tomato field that the Gargiulo family owned, and estimated that “250 were working that day, almost half of them women, some of them visibly pregnant.” Each day the laborers work for five hours, “from 5 to 10 a.m., when the temperature rises to 113 degrees.”

     To protect themselves against exposure to pesticides, the workers wear “several layers of clothes: caps, hoodies, scarves, sweatshirts over sweatshirts, two pairs of pants, heavy socks and boots; only eyes and cheeks and fingers were exposed,” while the merciless sun beats down on them.

     The workers receive “73 cents for every five-gallon bucket they could fill.” Forced to stoop over to pick the tomatoes, “the Oaxacans went at it with dizzying speed. The younger workers filled two buckets at a time. In five hours, a skilled picker could earn between $75 and $85.”

     Once tomato season ends in October, “the laborers will move to the east side of the Valley to pick citrus fruits. With luck, a diligent field hand can find work for eight or nine months a year, and earn $20,000 to $23,000, before taxes.”

     Greenberg researched the amount of taxes that the workers received and discovered that, “In 2010, undocumented workers paid about $12 billion in Social Security taxes, money that accrued to the retirement benefits of American citizens—benefits those farmworkers will likely never receive.”

     Some Indians from Mexico have worked the fields “for at least a decade, have established families here, but live in terror of la migra, the Spanish word for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instant deportation or imprisonment would wrench them from their children.”

     Greenberg said, “Thousands exist in a cordon of terror.” Determined to stay and work, they evade ICE by watching for unmarked cars, and by avoiding all legal troubles, such as traffic violations.

     The farmworkers refuse to “allow their children to follow them into the fields, because of the heat, the physical toil, the pesticides, the low wages, and the feudal power of the growers.”

      Thus, fieldwork in central California, Greenberg explained, “is a one-generation job, and that means that a constant supply of impoverished Mexican immigrants willing to do the work is required, but those immigrants are not coming now.”

     “In 2000, when the border was far more porous than it is now, 1.6 million Mexicans were apprehended trying to cross into the US. In 2016, the number was 192,969. This reduction is due to  improved conditions in Mexico, plus the cost and fear of venturing across the border.”

     Immigrants do not steal farm labor jobs from American citizens. A farm labor contractor said that he “has never had a white, American born person take an entry-level job.” Another said that one day he hired “twelve citizens or legal residents, and not one of them lasted longer than a day.”

      Each week millions of Americans buy a bag of table grapes, another of tomatoes, or a netted bag of clementine oranges, but few understand the arduous and dangerous physical effort that a farm laborer exerted to pick that fruit from its stem. Yet, ICE wants to deport that laborer back to Mexico.

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

by William H. Benson

January 10, 2019

     Economic and political ruin strikes one country after another. Yes, it seems that, on occasion, the world’s nearly two hundred countries will suffer a disaster, a disintegration of the country’s stabilizing political and economic forces that pushes its citizens into the very center of chaos.

     For example, the civil war in Syria drags on. An estimated 500,000 people have lost their lives since 2011, and another 13 million have found themselves displaced and forced to flee the country. Once the U. S. troops leave, the Syrian people can expect more barrel bombs, bullets, and bloodshed.

     Venezuela’s economy has disintegrated. Since 2014, at least 2.5 million people, possibly as many as 5.0 million, have packed their few belongings, walked away from homes and jobs, and migrated to neighboring countries. The reason: Venezuela’s inflation rate now stands at 1,299,744%.

     The country’s previous ruler, Hugo Chavez, and its current ruler, Nicolás Maduro, engineered a complete economic collapse by draining the national treasury and then borrowing billions. Today, $50 billion of their bonds are in default, and “90% of the population live in poverty.”

     Officials in South Sudan, the world’s newest country, also looted some $7 billion from its national treasury and parked the funds in bank accounts in Kenya and Uganda. A war over who will control the country, has caused “perhaps half a million deaths, mostly aggravated by hunger and disease.”

     In Yemen, the rebel Houthi party controls the prized western region, including the ports on the Red Sea, while the government controls the central and eastern regions. The war between the two factions has caused mass starvation and disease for the people. A writer for the Economist said last week, “There are many who do not want peace. Powerful people on all sides are profiting from the conflict.”

     These calamities in these four countries are today’s disasters, and one can predict that at some point in the future, each will subside, and then other calamities in other countries will appear and replace the current crop. Nothing bad stays bad forever, even if the current inflation rate exceeds 1.2 million%.

     Time levels all. An American physicist named John Archibald Wheeler pointed out, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” 

     This brings up a question. “If we know that today’s disasters will recover, what will cause a nation to turn itself around?”

     The English language has an interesting phrase: “The worm has turned.” It describes how a situation can change, when a person, an institution, or even a country that has been weak, unlucky, and unsuccessful can become strong, lucky and successful.

     Two weeks ago in the New York Times, a columnist named Ruchir Sharma pointed out that bubbles happen—think tulips in Holland, emus in Texas, and last year’s bitcoin craze. The bubble’s mood is greed, defined by mania and driven by hype.

     But then the same columnist pointed out that there are “anti-bubbles,” and their mood is fear, trepidation, and suspicion—think war, rumors of war, looting public coffers, famine, disease, an exodus, hyperinflation, a busted economy, and onerous debts.

     Sharma says, “Bubbles and anti-bubbles share one thing; they don’t last forever.” When greed turns to fear, or when fear gives way to hope, then we say, “the worm has turned.”

     The economist Albert O. Hirschman wrote of “exit, voice, and loyalty.” In most market economies, people have a choice, and if they do not like the choices, the products and services offered, they will head to the exit signs. They are free to leave the shop or pack up and leave the country.

     In most democratic countries, people will not leave if dissatisfied with their leaders’ political decisions. Instead, they will speak their minds, and voice their opinions, hoping that others will listen and change the political status quo.

     A third option: people neither leave or say anything. Instead, they choose silence and remain loyal. They adopt a wait and see position. Hence, exit, voice, and loyalty.

     Yes, time changes all. It will heal gaping wounds, rectify deep injustices, knock down the powerful and mighty, and lift the downtrodden. The 18^th century writer and thinker William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time. In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. The cut worm forgives the plow.”

The Emancipation Proclamation

by William H. Benson

December 27, 2018

     Jill Lepore, Professor of history at Harvard, published this fall her most recent book, These Truths, A History of the United States. In it, she writes a most riveting account of the days leading up to Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation.

     On September 22, 1862, Lincoln announced that “he would free nearly every slave held in every Confederate state in exactly one hundred days—on New Year’s Day 1863.” Later, Lincoln explained to his cabinet. “I said nothing to anyone, but I made the promise to myself and to my maker.”

     Like a prairie wildfire, word spread south and west, to those bound in chains, stuck in bondage. Jill Lepore writes, “Across the land, people fell to their knees. A crowd of black men, women, and children came to the White House and serenaded Lincoln, singing hosannas.”

     Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, said that “in all ages there has been no act of one man and of one people so sublime as this emancipation.”

     Some wondered if Lincoln would keep his promise. The former slave Frederick Douglass said, “The first of January is to be the most memorable day in American Annals. But will that deed be done? Oh! That is the question.”

     In December, Lincoln spoke to Congress and said, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” On Christmas Eve, day ninety-two, a concerned Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts, visited Lincoln at the White House, and asked, “Would the president make good his pledge?” Lincoln assured the worried Senator that, yes, he would keep his word.

     On December 29, 1862, day ninety-seven, Lincoln read his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet and invited their comments. Salmon Chase, secretary of the the Treasury, suggested a different ending, “I invoke the considerate judgment of all mankind and the gracious favor of almighty God.” Lincoln adopted Chase’s words. 

     “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight. Ninety-nine: New Year’s Eve 1862, watch night.”

     That night an overflow crowd gathered at the Shiloh Presbyterian Church to hear the black abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnet, preach. “At exactly 11:55 p.m., the church fell silent. At midnight, the choir broke the silence: “Blow Ye Trumpets Blow, the Year of Jubilee has come.”

     Day one hundred. At 2:00 p.m., in the White House, President Abraham Lincoln picked up his pen, and said, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.” He signed the document. The deed was done.

     Near the document’s conclusion, Lincoln cautions the former slaves. “ And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defen[c]e; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.”

     Lincoln understood human nature. If a laborer works for a landowner, then he or should expect to receive “reasonable wages.” It is a terrible to thing to work hard and receive nothing back.

     “In South Carolina, the Proclamation was read out to the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of former slaves. At its final lines, the soldiers began to sing, quietly at first, and then louder: My Country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!”

     Jill Lepore writes, “American slavery had lasted for centuries. It had stolen the lives of millions and crushed the souls of millions more. It had cut down children, stricken mothers, and broken men. It had poisoned a people and a nation. It had turned hearts to stone. It had made eyes blind. It had left gaping wounds and terrible scars. It was not over yet. But at last, at last, an end lay within sight.”

     As Union troops advanced, and the Confederacy’s power dwindled, black men and women dropped their rakes, shovels, and hoes, and began leaving the fields where they had labored for so little.

     Lepore writes, “The American Odyssey had barely begun. From cabins and fields they left. Freed men and women headed north, south, or west, searching. They were husbands in search of wives, wives in search of husbands, mothers and fathers looking for their children, children for their parents. Some of their wanderings lasted for years. They sought their own union, a union of their beloved.”

     January 1, 1863, the day Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves.

Antarctica’s Summer Races

by William H. Benson

December 13, 2018

     Fifty-three runners will compete in the fourteenth annual Antarctica Ice Marathon on Thursday, December 13, 2018. A Russian-made Ilyushin-Il-76TD aircraft will transport the runners from Punta Arenas, in southern Chile, to Union Glacier, Antarctica, on Wednesday, the twelfth, and then the same aircraft will return them to Chile on Friday, the fourteenth.

     While at Union Glacier, runners will reside in double-occupancy tents that the sun heats during the twenty-fours of daylight, sleep in polar sleeping bags, and endure temperatures of just above or below zero degrees Fahrenheit, depending upon the windchill. No chance for a hot shower after the race.

     Participants this year will include fifteen from China, nine from the USA, seven from Australia, and lesser numbers from Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Ireland, Italy, and other countries. It is an international event. Runners will run two loops of a 13.1 mile-course, equal to a marathon’s 26.2 miles.

     Who would have thought that women and men from all over the world would run a race in Antarctica to re-enact a historical event that occurred in 490 B.C., 2,508 years ago? A Greek soldier ran 26.2 miles from Marathon to inform Athens’s citizens that the Greeks had defeated the Persians.

     Last year’s women’s winner at the Ice Marathon was Kelly Allen McLay of the USA, in 4 hours, 56.37 minutes. Winner of the men’s division was Frank Johansen of Denmark, in 3 hours, 37.46 minutes, and he then joined the Seven Continents Marathon Club.

     This year each runner paid 16,000 Euros, or $18,211 to run.

     Another far more arduous race is now underway during Antarctica’s summer season, November through January, but with only two participants: Colin O’Brady, 33, an American adventurer, and Lous Rudd, 49, a captain in the British army. Both decided, independent of the other, to achieve a first, cross the Antarctic continent solo, unsupported, and unaided.

     Solo means alone. Unsupported means without dogs or food drops. Unaided means without kites that harness the Antarctic’s ferocious Katabatic winds and pulls a skier across the ice.

     Instead, both O’Brady and Rudd intend to ski alone, miles apart, ten to twelve hours everyday, and pull a 300+ pound Norwegian sled called a “pulk,” that carries a tent and a ninety-day supply of high-calorie food, but no change of clothes.

     On November 2, the men departed at the point where the Ronne Ice Shelf meets land, headed uphill toward the South Pole, and once there, they will turn to the right and head to that point where land meets the Ross Ice Shelf, a total distance of 921 miles.

     The first leg is all uphill, and most strenuous, from just above sea level to the South Pole’s 9,301 feet above sea level, just shy of Leadville, Colorado’s elevation. A man tugging a sled in white-out conditions, “like being inside a Ping-Pong ball,” may not notice the uphill climb, but he can feel it.    

     Louis Rudd, “The beginning was crazy. The weight was so heavy.”

     A writer for Wired magazine, said, “It’s straight-up impossible to take enough calories with you to get across the continent of Antarctica.” The two men hope to prove that writer wrong. Both men eat as many calories as they can, but “they still expend more calories that they take in.”

     Both O’Brady and Rudd know the risks, and that Antarctica is unforgiving. In January of 2016, an adventurer named Henry Wolsely tried to do the same, but gave up when only thirty miles from the finish line, after an infection sidelined him. Days later he died.    

     Both O’Brady and Rudd carry cell phones and GPS devices to alert their rescuers should they exhaust their food supply, or fall into a crevasse, or develop an infection, or break a leg. Before they sleep, they lay out their solar panels and charge their phones.

     Also, before they sleep, they hang up their wet clothes. Sweat is deadly in a polar environment because moisture can freeze on the skin when motions stops, causing body temperatures to plummet toward hypothermia.

     Every day, the two men feel overpowering pain and utter exhaustion. They slip, fall, get up and trek onwards. On Thanksgiving Day, O’Brady described the first four days as very emotional. “Crying, frustrated, physically rocked.” Rudd says, “It is grueling, a different level to anything I’ve done before. It just takes so much out of you.”

     A one-day marathon in Antarctica sounds exhausting, but to ski nearly 1,000 miles across the frozen continent over three months at a high elevation far exceeds a marathon’s physical demands.