Hot Spots

First off, our deepest respects to the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam on the first anniversary (May 1) of the liberation of their country from the American attempt to turn Vietnam into a string of Coca-Cola billboards and junk-food boulevards. What we want to know is, why doesn't the press ever allude to the Paris Peace Agreement, which provides that the U.S. aid in the reconstruction of Vietnam, which of course it hasn't? (Not to mention then President Nixon's promise in 1971 of $3.25 billion in aid over five years.)
The mentality which spawned Vietnam is made painfully evident in the current Woodward/Bernstein proliferation of movie and print.
All the President 's Men and The Final Days are masterful indictments of the character of the Nixon regime's henchmen: the book in particular goes a long way towards stripping down the mythology of personality behind men like Nixon and Kissinger, showing them as the thoroughly corrupt beings they inhabit. But nowhere' in the body of work has any indictment the system which allowed the Nixonian Empire to develop, nor the forces of capital behind it. The Nixon episode comes off as an aberration, instead of the norm it truly represents in government and industry. . .
Kudos here to Robert Redford on another project the successful stopping of a proposed coal-burning power plant which would spoil the beautiful Utah wilderness. Redford went on CBS's "60 Minutes" (the best show on tv) last month to protest the project, and the outpouring of letters and lawsuit threats has apparently convinced the Utilities to abandon the project, which local conservationists had been fighting for years.
The FBI last week was forced to bring into a Chicago courtroom over 14,000 documents on the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton which it had previously sworn did not exist.
The massive holding of evidence was inadvertently revealed by FBI agent Roy Mitchell during his testimony in a suit being brought by Hampton's relatives. Attorneys for the plaintiffs have moved to hold the U.S. attorney and FBI agents in contempt for deceiving the court on the existence of the documents.
In the face of mounting protests against Senate Bill One, sponsors of the bill have worked out a compromise which they hope will save it from defeat.
Naturally, part of the deal includes assigning the bill a new number, since S-1 is now so notorious. Sections on disclosing classified info, reporters withholding information, wiretapping without warrants and other repressive features have been deleted, yet many others remain, including the reinstitution of the Smith Act.

A California appellate court ruled last week that male customers must now be arrested as often as women prostitutes, or the cases against women will be thrown out on grounds of sexual discrimination. A landmark ruling, indeed. . .
The Third World: You didn't read about it in the Free Press, but riots erupted recently in Johannesburg, South Africa, outside a courtroom where seven black activists are on trial under the Terrorism Act. Police dispersed the demonstrators, who were shouting "black power slogans" and fighting back by drawing their guns. . .A high Chinese official told Pacific News Service recently that China 's role in Angola had been distorted by the western press. He said China had aided all three Angola liberation movements, including MPLA, but had ceased its support of MPLA "when the USSR encouraged the MPLA to claim it represented all the Angolian people."'
The U.S., meanwhile.is of course panicked by the prospect of imminent black rule in adjacent Rhodesia and eventually throughout Southern Africa, and continues to threaten Cuba with a new blockade if its so-called "mercenaries" join the struggle. There were no complaints from Henry the K, however, when Zaire and South Africa invaded Angola on the eve of independence, aided later by true mercenaries from the U.S., England " and elsewhere.