`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 11

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its recent bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest has been owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 10 of article).

As a result of their 100 percent ownership of the Reader’s Digest Association’s voting stock, both DeWitt “Wally” Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace became quite wealthy during their lives [before both dying in the early 1980s]. Fortune magazine estimated DeWitt Wallace’s worth at nearly $300 million [in 1960s money] in 1968 and this made the Reader’s Digest co-founder among the 31 wealthiest men in the United States at that time, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry. The same book also noted that, at the time of her death in 1984 at the age of 95, Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace “was the richest woman in the United States,” with a net worth of at least $250 million [in 1980s money] that was “two and a half times the size of the estate left by Henry Luce” of the Time-Life magazines media conglomerate.

As early as 1935, Mr. & Mrs. Wallace had pocketed a huge fortune from their Reader’s Digest publishing hustle and they used part of this fortune to buy 105 acres of land in Mount Kisco, New York, upon which the childless couple built a 22-room castle called “High Winds”—during the height of the Great Depression. Although Mr. & Mrs. Wallace were quite eager to spend $277,336 [of 1930s money] in the 1930s to build their “Reader’s Digest Castle,” in 1936 their Reader’s Digest Association only donated $4,418 to 13 organizations, including “a check for a mere $10” to the American National Red Cross, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom. The same book noted, however, that “As the Digest’s fortune grew, Wally and Lila…established trust funds for numerous members of the Wallace and Acheson families.” But over $500,000 [in 1930s money] per year from their Reader’s Digest Association’s gross income was personally taken home by Mr. & Mrs. Wallace in the form of salaries during the late 1930s.

To reduce their federal income tax bills, Mr. and Mrs. Wallace apparently utilized the “non-profit” philanthropic foundations which they established. As Theirs Was The Kingdom revealed in the early 1990s:

“Wally’s greatest vulnerability lay with his philanthropies, which he often used as a cover to pad the retirement or compensation packages of favored employees…He arranged for Digesters to serve on the boards of organizations to which he gave money. But honorariums, free travel, and other perquisites—many of them nontaxable—were often involved. Another of Wally’s tax-evading ploys was to arrange for the children of privileged Digesters to travel abroad courtesy of the Reader’s Digest Association’s Foreign Study League…”

(end of part 11)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

Firefighter Appeals For New 9/11/01 Investigation

On the Fire Fighters For 9-11 Truth blog

http://firefightersfor911truth.org/

, a retired firefighter named Anton Vodvarka recently made the following appeal for a new investigation of what actually happened on 9/11/01 in Downtown Manhatan:

An Appeal to Firefighters, Present and Past

Fellow Firefighters, A great tragedy befell our community on September 11, 2001, an unprecedented 343 deaths in the line of duty. As horrible as that toll is, if there were a rational explanation for it, we could accept it and mourn. We all understood the risk we accepted when we took the oath of office, that chance might cut short our lives when we placed ourselves in harm’s way in the public’s service. This is what we are paid for and it is our honor. However, in short, the official explanation of the events of that day are not only insufficient, they are fantastic and cannot bear rational examination. We are asked to believe that on that day three structural steel buildings, which have never before in history collapsed because of fire, fell neatly into their basements at the speed of gravity, their concrete reduced to dust. We are asked to believe that jet fuel (kerosene) can melt steel. We are asked to believe that the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, that responded to sixty-eight emergencies in the year prior to 9-11 in less than twenty minutes allowed aircraft to wander about for up to an hour and a half. We are asked to believe that the steel and titanium components of an aircraft that supposedly hit the Pentagon “evaporated”. There is much, much more if anyone cares to look into it. Trade Tower #7 by itself is the “smoking gun”. Not hit by an aircraft, with only a few relatively small fires, it came down in a classic crimp and implosion, going straight into its basement, something only very precise demolition can accomplish, which takes days if not weeks to prepare. The 9-11 Commission actually stated the they DIDN’T KNOW WHY IT COLLAPSED AND LEFT IT AT THAT. Brothers, I know that the implications of the above are hard, almost unthinkable, but the official explanation is utter nonsense, and three hundred and forty three murdered brothers are crying out for justice. Demand a genuine investigation into the events of September 11!

-Anton Vodvarka, Lt. FDNY (ret)

Lt. Vodvarka served on FDNY Ladder Co 26, Rescue Co. 3, Rescue Co. 1, Engine Co. 92, Ladder 82 and Ladder 101. He was awarded the Merit Class 1 award, the Prentice Medal

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 10

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest  was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 9 of article).

In 1950, the Reader’s Digest Association established its lucrative Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club which condenses a number of novels and/or nonfiction books into one volume and distributes these volumes around the globe to its members. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club quickly became the largest book club in the world, with over 2.5 million members by 1955.

In 1955, after its newsstand sales began to drop when many of its readers began buying TV sets, Reader’s Digest then began to sell ad space for the first time in its U.S. edition to make up for its lost revenues. Reader’s Digest has also sold ad space to U.S. corporations like Eastman Kodak, Gillette, international Harvest, Exxon, Mobil, U.S. Steel, Texaco and Lockheed in its international edition. By 1980, a full page ad in the U.S. edition of Reader’s Digest cost $65,000 (in 1980s money) per issue.

Although $1.6 million worth of Reader’s Digest equipment at its Havana, Cuba plant—that had been used to produce its Spanish-language edition for Latin America—was confiscated in June 1960, following the Cuban Revolution, the Reader’s Digest Association continued to prosper during the Vietnam War Era of the 1960s and early 1970s. A division to sell vinyl record albums around the globe, which had been set up in 1959, had also proven to be quite profitable.

By 1980, the Reader’s Digest Association was a billion dollar/year business that employed 10,000 people around the globe and earned $100 million (in 1980s money) per year in profits. But in 1981, Reader’s Digest co-founder DeWitt Wallace died at the age of 91 and, in 1984, Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace died at the age of 95. (end of part 10)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 9

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 8 of article).

According to the book Little Wonder by John Bainbridge, the “transformation of the Reader’s Digest into something other than a digest began in the early 1930s.” The magazine began to hire writers directly to produce articles for Reader’s Digest to reprint—after Reader’s Digest first “planted” these same articles in other magazines. Theirs Was The Kingdom by John Heidenry recalled: “The Digest…subsidized original articles in its client magazines” like Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, but “nowhere in those magazines, were readers given notice that articles purporting to be original with the respective editor of each publication were, in fact, either original with the Digest or paid for with Digest money.” According to Little Wonder:

“In the five years from 1939 through 1943, the Digest planted articles in more than 60 publications…Of 47 articles reprinted from Harper’s, eight were Digest plants; of 39 furnished by the Atlantic Monthly, eight were plants;…of eight taken from The Nation, five were plants; of 26 credited to the New Republic, eight were plants and 13 others were on the Digest’s presses before the New Republic appeared on the stands with them…The Digest gave Commonwealth credit for nine reprinted articles; all were plants…”

By 1962, according to Theirs Was The Kingdom, “articles planted in other magazines for reprinting later in the Digest now constituted 70 percent of every issue in the U.S. edition.” Its policy of subsidizing and planting articles in other magazines before re-printing them in Reader’s Digest “gave the Digest power to propagandize its right-wing political views across a broad spectrum of the periodical press,” according to a reference book titled The Magazine In America. (end of part 9)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

African-American Male Worker Jobless Rate Under Obama Regime: 17 Percent

The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for African-American male workers over 20 years-of-age under the Democratic Obama Regime jumped from 15.8 to 17 percent between July and August 2009; while the rate for African-American female workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 11.7 to 11.9 percent in August 2009, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all African-American workers (which also takes into account the 34.7 percent jobless rate for African-American youth between 16 and 19 years of age) increased from 14.5 to 15.1 percent between July and August 2009.

Between July and August 2009, the official “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Hispanic or Latino male workers over 20 years of age increased from 11.2 to 12.3 percent. For all Hispanic or Latino workers over 16 years of age (which takes into account the 34 percent “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Latino youth), the official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate increased to 13 percent in August 2009.

For white male workers in the United States over 16 years of age, the official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate increased from 10.5 to 10.9 percent between July and August 2009, while the rate for white female workers over 16 years of age increased from 8.1 to 8.2 percent.

The “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Asian-American workers did decrease from 8.3 to 7.5 percent in August 2009. But the official “seasonally adjusted” national jobless rate for all U.S. workers increased from 9.4 to 9.7 percent between July and August 2009.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September 4, 2009 press release:

“In August, the number of unemployed persons increased by 466,000 to 14.9 million, and the unemployment rate rose by 0.3 percentage points to 9.7 percent…

“In August, the number of persons working part time for economic reasons was little changed at 9.1 million. These individuals indicated that they were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job…

“About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in August…

"These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey...

“Among the marginally attached, the number of discouraged workers in August (758,000) has nearly doubled over the past 12 months. (The data are not seasonally adjusted). Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them….

“Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 216,000 in August….

“In August, construction employment declined by 65,000...

“In August, manufacturing employment continued to trend downward, with a decline of 63,000…Motor vehicles and parts lost 15,000 jobs in August…

“Financial activities shed 28,000 jobs in August, with declines spread throughout the industry…

“Wholesale trade employment fell by 17,000 in August. Employment in information continued to trend down over the month…

“The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from -443,000 to -463,000, and the change for July was revised from -247,000 to -276,000…”

`Reader's Digest''s Hidden History--Part 8

(The following article originally appeared in the October 27, 1993 issue of the now-defunct alternative Lower East Side weekly, Downtown. Between 2007 and its 2011 bankruptcy, Reader’s Digest was owned by Citigroup board member Tim Collins’ Ripplewood Holdings’ private investment/leveraged buy-out firm. See below for parts 1 to 7 of article).

After Reader's Digest Founder DeWitt "Wally" Wallace started selling Reader’s Digest on U.S. newsstands in 1929, some of the editors and publishers who had been letting him reprint their magazine articles in condensed forms for free finally realized how profitable the Digest had become by that time. Some now began to view Reader’s Digest as a competing product on the newsstand. So to induce them to keep allowing Reader’s Digest to reprint articles from their magazines and to insure that imitators would not have access to a similar source of articles, Wallace signed exclusive reprint agreements with 35 other U.S. magazines in 1929, in which he agreed to now pay these magazines quite generously.

By 1934, 1.5 million copies of Reader’s Digest were being circulated in the U.S., including over 500,000 copies that were sold on U.S. newsstands. The magazine’s then-net profit exceeded $400,000 during the height of the Great Depression and by 1938 Reader’s Digest’s circulation had jumped to three million—the largest of any U.S. magazine at that time. By 1942, its U.S. circulation was five million. And by 1946, the U.S. circulation of Reader’s Digest was 9 million.

After 1939, the Reader’s Digest Association began publishing the international editions of its magazines in nine foreign languages, as well as in English, which the CIA apparently utilized as propaganda outlets following World War II. By 1947, the combined circulation of Reader’s Digest’s international editions exceeded 4.6 million. The nine foreign languages utilized were Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Arabic, Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, French and German. (end of part 8)

(Downtown 10/27/93)

70th Anniversary of World War II

September 1, 2009 marks the 70th anniversary of German imperialism’s bombing and invasion of Poland. As Hammer or Anvil? Modern Germany 1648—Present by Heoger Herwig recalled, “at 4:45 a.m. on the morning of September 1, 1939, the German armored cruiser Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on Polish fortifications near Danzig as German troops crossed the border into Poland.”

According to the book The Second World War: A World In Flames:

“By 16 September [1939] the German forces had the Polish capital, Warsaw, surrounded, and they proceeded to bombard the city from the air and the ground…Warsaw eventually surrendered on 27 September [1939] with around 40,000 civilian casualties…The Poles…did manage to inflict significant casualties on the Germans. They…killed 13,000 German soldiers, wounding a further 30,000…

“The Polish campaign had been blighted by numerous acts of cruelty by German formations—SS and police units mainly…Now with Poland defeated, these isolated acts of cruelty were approved in the highest quarters of Nazi German and were formalized into a program of terror…During the years of the German occupation, six million Polish citizens died…

“As the German war machine moved eastwards, overrunning territory and population, it also encountered millions of Polish and Russian Jews. Some were shot in mass killings and many others were corralled into walled areas of major cities known as ghettos.”

The Hammer or Anvil? book also noted:

“Stuka dive bombers attacked major concentrations of Polish forces and civilian centers…Covered by a special amnesty issued by Hitler and General von Brauchitsch, five special SS execution units (Einsatzgruppen) roamed the Polish countryside and murdered preselected doctors, priests, civil servants, country squires and merchants. Reinhard Heydrich of the Security Forces [SD] crowed as early as September 27 [1939] that only 3 percent of the Polish intelligentsia survived…On September 21 [1939], Heydrich developed his initial blueprint for the Polish [and later European] Jews. The Jews were to be herded into special `reservations’ through the auspices of Councils of Jewish Elders (Judenrat) for eventual concentration in…ghettos at Warsaw, Craw, Lublin, Radon…”

The same book also recalled that “in Berlin, Adolf Hitler began the war with a lie, informing the Reichstag that regular units of the Polish army had fired on German territory.”

According to The Second World War: A World In Flames book:

“Despite Hitler’s ambition and confidence, the Germans went through an elaborate charade in order to convince the world that Germany was provoked. Men from the…SD department of the SS, under the overall direction of Reinhard Heydrich, planned an operation to precipitate the war that Hitler wanted. This operation, code-named Hindenburg, involved three simultaneous raids: the first was on the radio station at Gleiwitz, the second on the small customs post at Hochlinden, and the third on an isolated gamekeeper’s hut at Pitschen. The raids were to be conducted by men dressed in Polish uniforms, and at Gleiwitz the plan was that the attack would be heard live on radio—with the attackers’ voices, speaking in Polish and declaiming Germany, being broadcast live over the air to maximize their impact…

“…Four condemned men from the Sauchsenhausen concentration camp and a single German (a local Polish sympathizer) were murdered to provide evidence for the Polish incursions—the corpses, dressed in Polish uniforms, were photographed to complete the provocation. Despite the planning, the radio attack failed to be broadcast because of the poor strength of the transmitter. Hitler was nevertheless able to announce to the Reichstag on 1 September [1939] that `Polish troops of the regular army have been firing on our territory during the night [of 31 August/ 1 September]. Since 05.45 we have been returning that fire.’ The Second World was up and running..”

As a result of World War II, 55 million human beings were killed. The same book summarized the World War II casualty figures in Europe in the following way:

“During the five-year conflict, Germany incurred 2.8 million military and 2 million civilian deaths, including 500,000 by Western Allied strategic bombing. The Soviets suffered the worst, with 6.3 million military and perhaps 17 million civilian deaths. Europe’s other populations suffered a further 1.8 million military and 10.5 million civilian deaths, the latter including 5.5 million Jews. The three Western Allied powers incurred 700,000 military deaths in the European theater…”