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Show to raise nen "u k The wheat deal Dr. Henry Kissinger may well De, as the public and Jill St. John believe, be-lieve, a genius at international negotiations, nego-tiations, but right now it looks like we the people got royally screwed in the $680 million Russian wheat deal. The wheat deal is now at the center of a political controversy-did controversy-did the government tip off large grain dealers and thus allow them to reap profits at the expense of small farmers? But regardless of the facts in this specific matter (accusations made more plausible by the move of a $38,000 assistant agriculture secretary to an $85,000 vice presidency presi-dency of a major grain exporter, Continental Grain) the government was guilty of monumental bungling. bungl-ing. We (meaning American taxpayers tax-payers and consumers) will pay out some $130 million in export subsidies sub-sidies so the Russians can get cheaper wheat; we will loan the Soviet Union the money they need to buy it; and we will pay higher prices for flour and flour products in stores since the Russian pur chases pushed up the domestic price of wheat so much. Making a bad matter even messier mes-sier is the vice president, Mr. Ag-new. Ag-new. To reassure the voters before Nov. 7 that all these blunders were not deliberate, he announced that the FBI will investigate the case. Here again, we all lose, as the FBI is injected into a political debate and loses more of its reputation for impartiality. As in the Watergate Water-gate caper, the FBI seems to be used as a partisan investigator, closely controlled by political consideration. con-sideration. What we need and what we probably won't get is an independent independ-ent and nonpolitical investigation of the whole affair and some assurance assur-ance that it won't be repeated. And if the giant corporations were favored over small farmers by the government, we need assurance 1 that won't happen again. Public confidence in the government govern-ment is low enough as is, without the wheat deal to convince us the government is both stupid and controlled con-trolled by the rich. |