Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 119, Ed. 1 Sunday, May 20, 1990 Page: 2 of 60
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3
A-*—THE NEWS-TELEGRAM, Sulphur Springs, Tsxas, Sunday, May 20,1990
editorials
\a
Leadership class
offers high promise
The Leadership Sulphur Springs program wound up its
initial effort this week with the graduation of the first
class of 19 members. From every comer the program
drew high praise, but no more so than from the par-
ticipants themselves.
The leadership class involves individuals nominated
from throughout the community who attend a series of
educational sessions about the historical, cultural and
economic aspects of the Sulphur Springs area. Par-
ticipants took off one day a month from their work for
nine months to attend day-long class sessions and tours.
The received a behind-the-scenes look at industrial, cul-
tural and educational institutions; they studied the struc-
ture and influence of the federal, state and local
governments; and they hopefully developed perspectives
as to the prospects for the future of our community.
The program is sponsored by the Hopkins County
Chamber of Commerce and was directed in its first year
by the Past Presidents Council of the chamber.
The program is designed to afford younger members of
the business community or those new to tne area the op-
portunity to acquire a tremendous amount of information
about this community in a relatvely short period of time
and in the process to attain a better understanding of its
strengths and weaknesses.
If nothing more is accomplished beyond convincing
these people of the vital role of personal involvement in
community affairs, the program will have been worth it.
More likely, accomplishments have included the
development and motivation of future leaders for the
greater Sulphur Springs area.
Setting up new programs is seldom easy, but from all
accounts tne Leadership Sulphur Springs plan went
smoothly all year long. Those who were involved can
share in the pnde of this accomplishment.
When local businesses hear that nominations for the
1990-91 class are being solicited, leaders would be well
served by encouraging interest and participation from
among their staff and employees. The continued success
of this program depends on the
those wno participate in it.
le quality and diversity of
The opinion page
Did CIA reap fraud profits?
By Robert Walters
HOUSTON (NEA) - What role did
the,Mafia and the Central Intelligence
Agency play in the looting and col-
lapse of savings and loan associations
in Texas and elsewhere in the
country?
For almost a year, the Houston
Post has been probing for answers to
that intriguing question. Its investiga-
tion, conducted under the leadership
of veteran journalist Pete Brewton,
has produced disturbing results.
“A number of sources, including a
former Justice Department prosecu-
tor, have told the Post they are con-
vinced the CIA either masterminded
or condoned a certain amount of S&L
fraud," says David Burgin, editor of
the spunky newspaper.
“The Post has found evidence sug-
gesting a possible link between the
CIA and organized crime in the fail-
ure of at least 22 thrifts, including 16
in Texas,” says the first of the paper’s
reports, published earlier this year.
The S&Ls in other states include
one apiece in Florida, Pennsylvania,
New Mexico, Kansas, Louisiana and
Colorado. The Texas S&Ls include
four in Houston, five in Dallas and one
each in Austin, Lubbock, Wichita
Falls, Llano, Cameron, Alvin and
Kingsville.
“Eighteen of the 22 were either
owned or controlled by people with
links to organized crime, the CIA or
both. And in each institution’s failure,
fraud was a key factor,” the paper
says.
“The evidence obtained by the Post
from court documents, sworn testi-
mony, law enforcement records and
interviews with key government in-
vestigators and prosecutors suggests
that the CIA may have used part of
the proceeds from S&L fraud to help
pay for covert operations and other
activities that Congress was unwilling
to support publicly,” it adds.
Brewton says his probe of S&L fail-
ures “has found numerous links be-
tween organized crime figures and
CIA operatives, including some in-
volved in gun running, drug smug-
Robert
Walters
gling, money laundering and covert
aid to the Nicaraguan contras.”
He quotes Lloyd Monroe, a former
prosecutor with the Justice Depart-
ment’s organized crime strike force,
as saying that the federal agencies
mandated to probe S&L fraud are
“being precluded from investigating
wrongdoing that is possibly being con-
ducted in the name of national securi-
ty.” Adds Monroe: “How do you ex-
pect the government to investigate
itself?"
Brewton cites an unrelated mid-
1980s attempt by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation to probe the collapse
of a small commercial bank in Kan-
sas. In that case, he says, the FBI was
waved off by the CIA, which designat-
ed a key figure in the investigation as
being “off limits.”
Because both the CIA and the Mafia
have to do their banking somewhere,
their involvement with commercial
banks and S&Ls is hardly surprising.
It has only rarely been documented,
however.
The CIA’s alleged extensive in-
volvement in a host of unlawful oper-
ations financed through Australia’s
Nugan Hand Bank was explored in a
1987 book, “The Crimes of Patriots: A
True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and
the CIA,” by Jonathan Kwitny.
Currently pending in U.S. District
Court in Baltimore is a civil suit filed
by a former vice president of the
First National Bank of Baltimore,
Robert Maxwell, who alleges that his
ex-employer assisted the CIA in ille-
gally laundering money and establish-
ing secret accounts to finance more
than $20 million worth of covert
weapons deals. First National denies
the charges.
In Washington, CIA Director Wil-
liam Webster recently turned down'a
request to appear before the House
subcommittee investigating S&L
fraud to respond to the Poet’s revela-
tions. Instead, he wrote a letter to the
congressional panel summarily dis-
missing the paper’s work as “scurri-
lous and unsubstantiated.”
Meanwhile, Brewton’s reports have
attracted the attention of news media
ranging from New York’s Village
Voice, the country’s leading alterna-
tive weekly newspaper, to National
Public Radio. *
But the nation’s largest and most
influential news-gathering organiza-
tions unfortunately remain reluctant
to join Brewton in exploring the
murky world of the S&Ls, the CIA and
the Mafia.
© 1M0 NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN.
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Crisis for a prudent man
■&
By Joseph Spear
Lithuania’s braAen attempt to win J q q
instant independence by stirring up a
crisis and playing the West against $DeQr
the Soviet Union called for extreme K
circumspection on the part of the
United States — and who should be
there but that paragon of prudence,
George Bush? ^
For days, the president chewed policies, no clear principles,” echoed
over the situation and his options. Elliott Abrams, an assistant secre-
Lithuania had declared its indepen- tary of state under Ronald Reagan,
dence on March 11. The Kremlin had Lithuanian President Vytautas
retaliated by shutting off oil and natu- Landsbergis reacted with even great-
ral gas distribution to the Baltic re- er fury. The decision was “another
public, as well as the shipment of var- Munich,” he fumed, referring to the
ious raw materials. The United States 1938 agreement between Britain and
instinctively sympathizes with any Germany that tacitly legitimized Hit-
pro-democracy movement. So, how ler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia,
should we respond? Perhaps suspend “We were afraid that America would
trade and commercial negotiations sell us down the river.”
with the Soviet Union? Publicly, Bush responded with ad-
In the end, Bush did what he usually ditional prudence. “The policies, deci-
does and is exceptionally talented at: sions that I’ve taken have had strong
Nothing. “I am concerned that we not support from the American people,”
do anything that would cause the So- he said, “and that’s who I work for.”
viet Union to take action that would Privately, White House officials
set back the cause of freedom around scratched their heads. “The Lithua-
the world,” he said. nian leadership strikes us at times as
His decision was jeered by conser- a little flaky,” said one. (I can em-
vative zealots who have been starving phathize: As an Army officer 25 years
for a commie crisis since the Berlin ago, I shared quarters with a Lithua-
Wall went down. “The conduct of the nian-American who went to sleep ev-
United States government passes ery night with a full-throated Douglas
from the inexplicable to the shame- MacArthur thundering on the hi-fi.)
ful,” lamented columnist Patrick Bu- Bush and his advisers have ana-
chanan. The White House position to- lyzed the situation perfectly: The
ward Lithuania was “unprincipled” Lithuanians have pushed for indepen-
and similar to “the China situation,” dence with headstrong abandon. No
declared Sen. Gordon Humphrey, R- one with good sense would deny their
N.H. President Bush has “no clear right to breathe free. As the president
himself put it, “The American people
feel that the independence and the
self-determinatiqn of Lithuania is
right, a part of our very fiber, a part
pf our very soul.”
But the past year has seen the
winds of democracy blowing in al-
most every corner of the world, and
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
has been the most conspicuous vortex
around which they swirl. He is under
tremendous pressure from hard-lin-
ers in the Kremlin and the Soviet mili-
tary to keep rebellious factions in
line. The Warsaw Pact nations have
gone their way with little interfer-
ence, but if the union itself starts
crumbling, Gorbachev will go with it.
What will happen then to the reform
movement in the Soviet Union, to
arms control negotiations and the lib-
eration of Eastern Europe?
Put another way, it is in the interest
of global freedom and peace that
Lithuania show patience and negoti-
ate its independence with the Krem-
lin. The Soviets have indicated a will-
ingness to compromise, and rapidly
sobering Lithuanian leaders seem to
be leaning in that direction.
Lithuania is not another China.
Deng Xiaoping squashed reform; Gor-
bachev is pushing it as hard as he can
Parents play drop-out role
By Vincent Carroll
The higher one goes in our society,
the less free one is to speak common-
place truths. Just ask Lauro Cavazos,
the U.S. education secretary, who re-
cently remarked that Hispanic par-
ents bear some of the blame for the
dropout rate among their children.
Most Americans would undoubted-
ly agree. Parents, whatever their
race or ethnic group, obviously bear
some responsibility for how much
their children value education. One
would think this an unremarkable ob-
servation. And yet no sooner had Ca-
vazos spoken than various Hispanic
Uincent
Carroll
i
not faced such
but their rise was no less impressive
considering the suffocating racism
they overcame. German immigrants
fared well in school, too, as did a few
other groups.
#
Every ethnic group likes to believe
that it prizes education, and each in
its own way does; but the inescapable
fact is that some do not prize it as
much as others. So, while it is true
that public schools must do a better
job teaching minorities, greater com-
mitment is also required of parents.-
America has
conditions?
Do most teachers know anything
about Indochinese or Korean culture?
Then why do the children of these na-
tionalities achieve at such astonishing
rates?
When the Irish came to America in ..
leaders began to object, insisting that the 19th century, they were subjected Enthusiastic VOUthS
the drnnniit nrnhlem is the fault, in- to an Anglo-Protestant teaching corps *
jitters
I
srs to the editor
The public forum
i
the dropout problem is the fault, in
stead, of inferior schools, discrimina-
tion, poverty, language barriers and
insensitive teachers who don’t under-
stand Hispanic culture.
“It is really going to be hard to sup-
port the secretary as much as we’d
like to,” said Antonio Rigual, presi-
dent of the Hispanic Association of
Colleges and Universities.
Poverty does, of course, afflict
many Hispanic families, and they of-
ten have little choice but to send their
preside over a few of this nation’s
assembling an empire; Gorbachev is
dismembering one. Lithuania is a sit-
uation that calls for prudence. George
Bush is right; the man and the mo-
ment are met.
© 1W0 NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN.
classrooms, and that many other
teachers know next to nothing about
Hispanic culture. Yet what ethnic
group attempting to make its way in
Child support enforcement lacking
openly contemptuous of their Catholi-
cism. When waves of Eastern Europe-
ans arrived around the turn of the
century, they found the schools
staffed with descendants of earlier
Irish and German immigrants. And
by the time blacks trekked to the
North several decades later, the
schools had been taken over by still
another ethnic mix of teachers, al-
most equally alien to the newcomers.
Yet consider the differing fates of
these groups. Although they all suf-
fered indignities, you’d never know it
from the academic record of some.
Jews embraced New World educa-
tion with a matchless fervor. In little
more than a generation, they rose
from the cramped squalor of New
York's East Side to dominate the pro-
fessions of law, medicine, teaching
and dentistry there. Chinese and Jap-
anese immigrants on the West Coast
didn’t quite equal that dazzling pace,
Editor, The News-Telegram:
Thursday morning Sheila Fun-
derburk and I went to Bowie
Elementary School, as represen-
tatives of Hopkins County Histori-
cal Society and talked to the
students.
One hears so many derogatory
remarks about today’s young
people that I would like to say
these young ladies and gentlemen
were such an attentive, polite
audience, it was a real pleasure to
talk to them. I would like to com-
mend the students, their parents and
the school staff. I believe there are'
some fine young people in that
school.
My thanks to all of you for A
very nice and interesting morning.
RuthMacy
Sulphur Springs
By Jack Anderson
and Dale Van Ana
WASHINGTON - An estimated
one in every four American children
lives with only one parent, usually a
mother. And in a staggering number
of cases, the other parent, usually the
father, pays little or no child support.
As a result, nearly half of the
American families headed by single
mothers lives in poverty.
In 1988, the most recent year for
which the federal government has the
figures, about'$18.6 billion in child-
support payments were due to change
hands between parents. Only $4.6 bil-
lion of that was actuaHy paid. That’s
$1 collected for every $4 owed, when
even the $4 was probably not enough
to meet the child’s expenses in the
first place.
This inexcusable abdication of the
most basic of human obligations —
parenthood — has been matched by
abdication of governmental responsi-
bility, too.
Ronald Reagan signed the Family
Support Act into law in November
1988, tightening the enforcement pro-
cedures for tracking down delinquent
parents. But it took George Bush
nearly a year and a half to appoint
someone to the job of enforcing that
law - the post of assistant secretary
of family support in the Health and
Human Services Department.
At least desperate mothers now
Jack
Rnderson
have an assistant Cabinet secretary
on their side. What they still don’t
have is the monthly check
Single mothers like Mina Veazie of
Washington, D.C., find ways to cope.
They can pay the rent or the utilities,
but not both. The father of Veazie’s
child is not on the lam. She knows
where he is. The judicial system
knows where he is. She has a court or-
der forcing him to pay child support
— a court order that cost her $3,500
of her own money for lawyers and
other fees in three jurisdictions. She
has been in court 10 times, and still no
one is making the father send the
checks. Veazie isn’t on welfare, so the
government hasn’t pitched in to make
up what she has lost in child-support
payments.
The rising divoroe rate isn’t the
only social phenomenon contributing
to the child-support deficit. This is
1990, and marriage is not a prerequi-
site for having a baby. Before the
courts ban assess child support, they
have to find out who fathered the
child, and that has created a bigger
web of red tape than collections
alone.
In Washington, D.C., 90 percent of
the child custody cases on the books
are still at the stage of establishing
paternity, and Washington is not
unique among urban areas. Last year,
the District of Columbia Office of Pa-
ternity and Child Support Enforce-
ment took 2,500 blood tests at a cost
of $300 each.
The office has 100 staffers and an
annual budget of $9.5 million. Nation-
wide, state and local child-support
collection agencies spend nearly $2
billion a year, all to track down peo-
ple who have perfected conception
but can’t quite picture themselves as
mommies or daddies for the duration.
Even that amount of money isn’t
enough. Irma Neal, who runs the
child-support enforcement program
in Washington, D.C., told our reporter
Paul Zimmerman that her annual
budget hasn’t increased in the past
three years. Her office can handle
7,000 enforcement cases a year, but it
has a backlog of nearly 70,000. The
office established a hot line in Febru-
ary for anyone with child-support
problems to call. It has 12 lines oper-
ating 24 hours a day, and in the first
two months, 26,000 calls came in. ; -
It isn’t that the federal and local
governments aren’t trying. Since
1950, Congress has been passing laws
to make child-support collection easi-
er. The most progressive step was to
standardize the state’s procedures so
a parent couldn’t avoid the law sim-
ply by moving to another state. Yet
custodial parents still must dicker
with different states over who has ju-
risdiction. They still have to hire law-
yers and waste hours on paperwork
and court time. And the check still
isn’t in the mail.
The state and federal governments
should start with paternity. In Wis-
consin, some fathers who are ready to
admit paternity are turned away be-
cause they can’t afford the filing fee
to change the baby’s birth certificate.
In Washington, D.C., even if a man
and woman both agree that they are
the parents of the child, they are not
allowed to simply sign an affidavit.
They must both go before a judge to
explain their sexual activity during
the time the baby was conceived.
Once the paternity issue is settled,
child-support enforcement agencies
simply need more money to track
down the delinquent parents. The fed-
eral government has an incentive
program to give more money to the
states that have a better collection
record. But in only a handful of states
does that money go back to the collec-
tion agency. It is more often used to
build new highways.
In the meantime, single parents
struggle to make ends meet.
Copyright ttM. United Future Syndicate. Inc.
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Keys, Clarke. Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 119, Ed. 1 Sunday, May 20, 1990, newspaper, May 20, 1990; Sulphur Springs, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth823969/m1/2/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hopkins County Genealogical Society.