GOP CAN'T IGNORE FARM, HEALTH BILLS
STOUT, JONATHAN
Washington and ihv Nation GOP Can't Ignore Farm, Health Bills By JONATHAN STOUT New Leader Washington Correspondent WASHINGTON, D. C. THE EARLY HEADLINE grabbers at the second session...
...An interesting meeting of minds took place last month between George Morris (see above) and the editors of Business Week...
...That is no longer so clear a possibility as a result of the activities of two outstanding liberal Senators, Paul Douglas of Illinois and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota...
...This week, for instance, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce issued the results of a special farm study by Chamber economists, .which declared that the present farm law is "wholly pleasing to no one...
...Morris Pizer (on the dissension among his fellow-furniture workers): "We cannot reconcile ourselves to dictatorial practices of coercion upon international board representatives...
...he begins to use words like "faciiitalional," phrases like "it behooves us...
...Pizer, it now turns out (as ft usually does), has always been a rat...
...Joseph A. lieirne (signifying his telephone union's approval of a bill to promote workers education-): "The possibility of workers- fulfilling these obligations would be substantially enhanced following widespread educational opportunities...
...It might have turned out to be the first compromise position on which conservatives and liberals could have rested their oars for the time being...
...Douglas' dies Is to provide health insurance only on a "disaster" basis...
...the contract provides for SlOO-a-month non-contributory pensions...
...and sentences like "It being the last of the month, we herewith submit our monthly report...
...Lewis' actwities between 1935 and 1940, or to speculate whether there would have been a CIO News urithout the outrageous faker...
...Secretary Brannan says we can cut this 100 per cent loss to a lower loss by selling all perishable farm commodities on the open market at the prevailing market price, and then make up to the farmer the difference between the market price and the support price guaranteed the farmer by Congress...
...Lawrence P. Lindelof (testifying on the background of a recent strike involving his painters): "The president of the American Federation of Labor appointed a committee of three to proceed to Hollywood In an endeavor to make an investigation and recommend a way of adjusting the controversy there...
...But they saw this as a problem of implementation rather than a problem of principle...
...At no time did I indicate . . . that profit-sharing might be considered an acceptable substitute either for higher wages or fot pensions...
...Then, having induced and promoted great abundance of production...
...A« Maury Mavorick and several dozen other amateur philologists have irequently observed, the bureaucratic way of life does some ling to a man's speech...
...Where the Brannan Plan attempts no more than to find the cheapest way out of immediate circumstances, the Truman health insurance program marks an innovation and a distinct forward step in social policies...
...BACKING it FILLING...
...It turned out to be a marveloua anti-climax: the comrades didn't ahow...
...The only practical suggestion to come from any source on how to solve our agricultural dilemma and end the schizophrenia was made last year by Agriculture Secretary Charles Brannan...
...The results of this "wholly satisfactory to no one" farm policy have been (1) an alarmingly sharp decline in the level of farm incomes, (2) a piling up of unsalable agricultural surpluses which have cost the taxpayer millions of dollars, with almost none of it recoverable, (3 the re-introduction by the Government of the deliberate policy of ueder-production, as was done during the dark days of the depression when we "plowed under" litle pigs...
...We do not propose in these few lines to settle the question...
...Squinting at Labor By Daniel Seligman REVERSE ENGLISH...
...It got its first big contract with Philco...
...The first concerned Morris Pizer, president of the United Furniture Workers, wlio made the discovery last November that the, Stalinists who have been running his union are less than saints...
...More surprising than this, however, is the ClO's discovery that John L. Let»i* has always been not/ting at all...
...He added that he, and inferentially, the whole CIO, would tolerate profit-sharing only where wages and conditions were already satisfactory, and provided it was attained through collective bargaining This distinction proved too fine for Morris, who commented: "Can't see what Baldanzi is kicking about Business Week gave him credit for no more than he asked...
...In any case, the result will now be a head-on collision of liberal and conservative forces on this issue with the main drama to be played out on the floor of Congress . . . and the audience delivering its applause next November * * * THE NATIONAL HEALTH insurance issue has completely different overtones...
...Neither city worker, farmer, government...
...By advancing this position as a proposal from the liberal side before the conservatives have taken any lickings and before they are ready for compromisees, it now appears logical that the area of compromise has been narrowed and that the first compromise position that can be reached will fall between the die-hard plan of no national health insurance and the Douglas proposal of "disaster" insurance...
...why they chose this one defies logic...
...Morris charges him with having been a renegade as long as ten years ago, with having persistently created faction where only harmony existed, and with responsibility for the UFW's loss of 10,000 members...
...Douglas and Humphrey have proposed the compromise prematurely...
...and since organized labor has traditionally opposed the idea as an inadequate substitute for collective bargaining, Business Week thought it detected in Baldanzi's remarks the dawn of a new era...
...it would maintain the farmer's annual income at the same high level of parity with other economic groups in the nation...
...Since this was also the day on which "Death to Curran" was painted on Joe's garage, the pot was really boiling, and soma five hundred anti-Communist seaman gathered to meat the comradaa outside the Mutual studios...
...Congress has discouraged domestic and foreign consumption of this abundance by keeping agricultural prices beyond reach of a readily available market...
...By what appears to be a miscalculation in timing and tactics...
...WHO SAID WHAT...
...THE BRANNAN "PLAN" offers a way in which we can do all the things we want to do at the lowest possible cost to the nation...
...Some farm groups are quite aware of this reality...
...it would open up new markets of consumption for the farmer's products...
...As president of the United Mine Workers of America, Lewis was an arrogant, seedy and grandilolquent bum, who could neither build a strong union nor cope with the coal operators until Roosevelt and the New Deal came along to help him . . . one of the most outrageous fakers of our era...
...7 KNEW IT ALL THE TIME...
...The December 19 issue of the CIO News reprints from the Chicago Daily News a review by Edwin A. Lahey of Saul Alinsky's John L. Lewis We had read several reviews of this book, including a few that were distinctly unsympathetic...
...It would avoid policies of under-production...
...Although Pizer s dejection left the union's general executive board still in Communist hands...
...Finally, we are happy to report that the NLRB is holding up its end...
...but in a preliminary sort of way we would like to record the following specimens of the native tongue, all of which came from the mouths of American labor leaders in recent months: John L. Lewi* (on being asked how negotiations were proceeding): "I wouldn't even undertake to be responsive to the interrogatory...
...But we hadn't seen anything as vulgar or vitrolic as Lahey's hatchet-job...
...This would have evolved from the knock-down and drag-out with the conservatives...
...it would lower prices to the domestic consumer...
...nor business can ignore this dilemma...
...On December 22...
...His English becomes pompous and heavy-footed...
...which meant first getting the principle accepted that the nation as a whole shall accept the responsibility of mainaaining the health of the American people...
...The Douglas position, on tactical examination, appears almost certainly to bt the position to which the conservatives eventually would have retreated after defeat...
...So the UMroJs behind the President concentrated/ in getting first things settled first...
...it would bring our farm prices in closer relationship to the world price level...
...Washington and ihv Nation GOP Can't Ignore Farm, Health Bills By JONATHAN STOUT New Leader Washington Correspondent WASHINGTON, D. C. THE EARLY HEADLINE grabbers at the second session of'Congress will be taxes and civil rights, with expansion of social security slated to go through quietly...
...This is his indictment of Lewis: ' He has a love of self that was not even surpassed by Adolf Hitler...
...Baldanzi tore off a letter to Business Week stating...
...Disregarding the political considerations aimed boyishly at putting the Republicans on the spot in November, there is a serious undercurrent of reality behind the Administration position on.farm prices and health insui ance that would have to be grappled with no matter who was in the White House or what political party was in power in Congress...
...George Morris of the Daily Worker felt obliged to let him have it between the eyes...
...The most ardent supporters of the President, for instance, understood quite well that to achieve a health insurance system that worked well would require some pre-requsites: more medical schools, more doctors, more rfurses, more hospitals...
...This condition is at least partly due to a form of schizophrenia in our domestic farm policies...
...When the President first advanced this proposal the terms of the struggle between the conservatives and liberals were quite clear and easily understandable...
...At the very least, it directly affects 25 per cent of our population...
...They could have chosen many others...
...Secretary Brannan starts by accepting the reality that no matter what we do in this dilemma it is going to cost us money The only question, he says, is whether it will cost us nunc or less He points out that under present price support laws the taxpayers' loss is practically 100 per cent...
...When the UE was formed back In 1938...
...Eventually a compromise acceptable to the majority would have evolved...
...Two remarkable instances oj hindsight hare popped up in recent weeks...
...George Baldanzi of the Textile Workers, at the annual meeting of the Council of Profit-Sharing Industries, expressed sympathy for certain forms of profit-sharing...
...Last month, Philco turned out to be the first major company to come through for the new IUE-CIO...
...It declared that Baldanzi "recognizes that, in an unstable industry like textiles, an employer may be able to provide more benefits for employees if he doesn't saddle himself with higher wages or fixed costs such as pensions...
...the day before Joe Curran was to appear on Meet the Press, the word went out on the waterfront that the Communists were readying an enormous picket line for the broadcast...
...W. L. Hutcheson of the carpenters (reporting dissatisfaction with a Jurisdictional agreement): "The others were alienated out...
...No sensible liberal underestimated, from the start, the complexity of what tha President was proposing...
...The gist of the reality on farm price supports is this: There is a gratifying strength in all parts oT our national economy—with one exception: our agriculture...
...How would it do all this...
...Lahey's review providentially fails to notice any of Mr...
...For some reason, the conservative forces have decided to gang up on the Brannan Plan and make a last ditch fight on this particular issue...
...On the one haijd, our farm price support laws endourage greater agricultural production by government guarantees of high price levels...
...How bureaucratic is the American labor movement?, though we have seen it settled in fewer...
...considerations of expediency...
...But the real ideological batles will rage on the subjects of farm price supports and national health insurance...
...Trial Examiner Irving Rogonin closed up shop last year with this sonnet: "Administrative agencies cannot permit their determinations to be influenced by...
...The Phllco Radio Corporation seems destined to play a big part in Jim Carey's life...
Vol. 33 • January 1950 • No. 1
