Tilting at windmills: outed farmers plane too far careless cooks Philby of the FBI NBC's shame bribes for admission - brief notes

Washington Monthly, March, 2002 by Charles Peters

NBC MAY RECONSIDER ITS DECision to accept liquor advertising, reports The New York Times. I hope the Times is right. I've been waiting for Tom Brokaw, a man I usually admire, to speak up about this shameful decision, but the only mention I've seen on his "Nightly News" was a report by Pete Williams on Dec. 20 that featured some expert who contended that advertising does not persuade people to drink, that it does not "affect drinking habits." Why then do liquor companies advertise? Are we to assume that they do it to lend a helping hand to needy newspapers, magazines--and to NBC?

WHEN NEW YORK AND THE Pentagon were attacked by terrorist-operated aircraft, more than a few citizens were dismayed to learn that protection from U.S. fighter jets wasn't exactly forthcoming. In each case, the fighters had to be summoned from more than 100 miles away and arrived too late. Those dismayed then were dismayed again to learn that the same thing took place when that 15-year-old plowed his plane into a Tampa building after flying over MacDill Air Force Base, the home of the Pentagon's central command, which oversees our war in Afghanistan. In the Tampa case, "the military command that orders fighter jets to respond to acts of terrorism did not hear of the [threat] until after the plane had crashed," report Greg Schneider and Bill Miller of The Washington Post. "Even if the Air Force had been notified instantly," they add, "its jets would not have been able to get there in time because they were based at the other end of the state." Do you begin to suspect that it's just possible that our military is not optimally deployed to meet the threat of domestic terrorism? "We weren't built for this mission," Maj. Barry Venable of the North American Aerospace Defense Command tells The New York Times.

"IT WAS LIKE being outed," said one farmer. He was talking about the Web site that has revealed how much subsidy individual farmers are receiving. John Dollinger, for ex-ample, has man-aged to collect $362,068 in five years. In one Illinois county, reports Elizabeth Becker of The New York Times, two farmers got more than $1 million each. They're pikers, however, compared to David Griffin of Elaine, Ark. According to John Lancaster of The Washington Post, Griffin is the principal owner of Tyler Farms, which collected $24 million in subsidies from 1996 to 2001.

The impression that these subsidies are designed to help the average farmer is strictly an illusion. According to Lancaster, 47 percent of subsidies now flow to large commercial operators. And even though there are farmers in all 50 states, half of the benefits go to just six states. The obvious solution is to limit any annual subsidy to no more than $100,000 for any one farmer or commercial entity that tries to collect in his place. Unfortunately, the best Congress can do so far is a Senate bill that limits the subsidy to $275,000.

HERE'S ANOTHER WAY COLLEGE admissions are tilted against the poor. Early admission programs require the student to commit to the school before he knows what financial aid is available. As a practical matter this means that the disadvantaged student has to wait to see which school offers the help needed. But by delaying the decision, writer Nicholas Thompson points out in The Boston Globe, the poor student finds that as many as 40 percent of the slots have already been taken by early admission applicants. At Yale, the number of students receiving financial aid has declined as the number of early admissions has increased.