Word: reform
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Robert E. Keeton, Professor of Law, and chairman of the new committee, said yesterday, "We have a very limited charge. We're to determine whether or not it's worth the effort to make a full investigation of calendar reform, given the needs and maneuverability of each of the separate faculties...
Once the peasants started streaming back to their villages, the NLF could begin to implement the policy which had brought it, and its predecessors, the Viet Minh, widespread popular support--radical land reform. In traditional Vietnam, land had been distributed relatively evenly, and the tax rate was low and applied fairly. But when the French invaded in the middle of the 19th century, they expropriated vast tracts of lands, creating a tiny new class of French and Vietnamese landlords, and they hiked the tax rates and added new taxes. The majority of Vietnamese peasants were plunged into a frightful life...
This situation could not last long without prompting resistance. When the Viet Minh began mobilizing in the early 1940s, land reform was at the top of its agenda. And similarly, when the U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem regime refused in the late 1950s to implement a serious land reform program to redress the century-old grievance, peasants in the south began to resist, forming the National Liberation Front in 1960. Today, the Thieu regime has reversed its faltering steps toward land reform and handed back vast tracts to the former owners, while reforms in the NLF-controlled areas...
...does not view land reform as merely a material benefit, although in a country where people have starved to death because they had no land, the material aspect should not be discounted. But land reform for the NLF is more than a material concept--it is a construction of a new set of social relationships. The Front never entered villages simply to redistribute land by fiat. Instead, the NLF organized village discussions, usually lengthy, at which even the humblest peasant would air his or her views concerning the reforms. When a certain consensus was reached, the reforms would be enacted...
...Senate report overstated the case in branding the use of street names a "massive cover-up of the extent to which holdings have become concentrated." Yet, this practice has served to obscure the growth of the big institutions' control over business. As a step for reform, the Senate subcommittees urged that holders of 1% or more of a company's voting shares should report quarterly to the Library of Congress, which would then publish the facts about who really controls U.S. enterprise...