ustxtxb_obs_1981_11_06_50_00022-00000_000.pdf

A Public Service Message from the American Income Life Insurance Co.Waco also enacted favoring those in the fifty percent and higher tax brackets and those with large estates. The crass insensitivity and shortsighted selfishness of the social services funding and tax reductions is well illustrated by comparing the cutback in breakfasts for school children with the perpetuation of tax-free industrial bonds. The latter program gives several billion dollars of tax money to stockholders of ordinary but favored businesses around the country. The falling standard of living within the propertyless sector and its growing sense of isolation and alienation encouraged by government policy has replaced hope with despair and frustration. The nation’s bottom thirty percent own no part of this capitalistic society, and there is no plan for improvement. There is an awareness among the people of examples of social change abroad socialism in France and Sweden and a viable communistic economy in Hungary. There is an awareness that violence can produce change. The spreading gap between the rich and the poor of comparative incomes, property ownership, and social control is unsustainable. It constitutes a real present danger to democracy, civil liberties, and to private ownership, free enterprise, and capitalism. The push for radical change in the United States is now on. It will continue to come from the poor and the excluded, and especially from the ethnic poor, doubly oppressed by racism, whose dynamic leaders, trapped with their people, are receiving growing support from third world Marxism. In a strictly economic sense, millions of Americans may soon think they could do just as well, perhaps better, under communism. The chronic unemployed and the propertyless the latter are 2 out of every 7 Americans have little reason to be committed to free enterprise and private ownership. Disparity of income and ownership of property between the relatively few at the top and the millions at the bottom is reflected in the disparity of social and political power of these two groups. The affluent few, in addition to the political influence that emanates from their personal wealth, also manage the corporations and exert the concomitant economic, political, and social power that goes with the control and use of corporate income, property and the political action committees. Democracy, as the founders of our country knew, will not survive where excessive power is controlled by too few. Statistics describe the growing accumulation and concentration of material resources, power, and control by fewer, to the exclusion of the many. The tax structure now reinforces the trend. The statistics cannot describe the frustration and hopelessness of the poor and ethnic minorities their growing realization that there is no prospect for improvement within the system. The statistics do not describe the families who witness on television the good life as others have it. The statistics do not describe the Marxist organizers, active in every ghetto and barrio in America today, telling the poor that exploitation does not have to be, that there is a better system, one that promises full employment, a minimum standard of living, free college education and medical care, and a government that belongs to them. So far, the organizers have probably recruited few of the poor, but they are being heard. The danger is that frustrated and hopeless people will increasingly resort to violent and illegal acts, both planned and spontaneous. These can take the form of riots, looting, terrorism, , TexasBernard Rapoport, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer kidnapping, and assassination, as well as acts of simple defiance, such as rent strikes and demonstrations. Consider the following scenario which could take place during a hot summer of high unemployment and disappointment among the voiceless and the excluded: A few radical organizers lay the plans. In our finely tuned, interdependent, and specialized economy, it requires only a few to cause disruption. Several key electric transformer stations in an Eastern, highly urban state are sabotaged. The state is blacked out. Immediately there is massive looting and rioting, led and encouraged by a few revolutionaries. Propaganda is distributed to the rioters. Clandestine radio broadcasts urge them on and provide the moral justification for political revolt. Conditions might be such that the people are aroused; the situation is turned into a full-scale rebellion supported by a large minority. Finding initial success, the organizers, according to prearranged plan, repeat this sequence on the following night in one Western, five Eastern, and two Middle Western states. Within a week the country is under martial law, troops are patrolling the streets of every city; civil liberties are suspended; media censorship is imposed; the contour of our freedom is irremediably altered; and democracy is mortally imperiled. The potential for such a scenario exists. If it occurs, there is no place where the middle and upper economic classes can hide The system is tilted to favor the affluent and to handicap the poor to a degree which may disintegrate the system. The system survives on lawful order, compromise among the sectors and interest groups, and a unity of spirit. We are set upon a dangerous course of polarization. The new controlling conservatives show the social concern of a piratical boarding party just gaining a stray merchant ship. They have no discernible philosophy but to make out. Irving Kristol deplores the paucity of conservative intellectuals. For lack of living conservative thought, he could not go wrong examining again the philosophy of Edmund Burke, an archconservative, law and order advocate, who never believed men were born free and equal, but who told Parliament that fairness toward the American colonies would bring order and that inequities would bring disorder and loss of the territories. He was alarmed by the fury of the French revolution. Listen to portions of his speeches: “It is, in truth, nothing more than the old and, as I thought, exploded problem of tyranny, which proposes to beggar its subjects into submission. But remember, when you have completed your system of impoverishment, that nature proceeds in her ordinary course; that discontent will increase with misery; and that at critical moments in the fortune of all states when they who are too weak to contribute to your prosperity may be strong enough to complete your ruin.” Again, “The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not in your interest to make them happy. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. Is a politic act the worse for being a generous one?” His advice went unheeded, and the Empire paid the consequences. If people believe themselves unfairly treated for too long, they will rebel. American Income Life Insurance Company EXECUTIVE OFFICES: P.O. BOX 208, WACO, TEXAS 78703, 817-772-3050 BERNARD RAPOPORT Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer 22 NOVEMBER 6, 1981