The Charlotte News

Wednesday, October 14, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a nearly 35 million dollar deficit in California had been turned in just one year to a 50 million dollar surplus thanks to war industry.

Republicans, listen up. There is another platform plank for you to nail into the 2010 races for Congress and governorships—world war to get us out of the economic jam into which your Party drove the country since 1994. Try it. Who knows? Maybe those who listen to talk radio and voted for your policies will pay attention again. They were certainly ready to listen in 2001 through 2003.

No more girly-men. Let’s drop the big one. And, by it, stimulate the economy.

Heinrich Himmler is reported to have visited Rome to speak to Mussolini about something. Speculation was that the subject was his too cozy rapport of late with the Allies, permitting a personal envoy of FDR to come to Rome to visit the Vatican.

To show that one person could still make a difference in 1942, with a little press support, that is, Tom Jimison’s series of firsthand accounts on the deplorable conditions of the state mental hospital at Morganton, published statewide in late January and early February, continued to redound to the benefit of the patients. First, the governor’s blue ribbon panel’s recommendations on improvements had been adopted the previous month; now, a commission on the budget was being asked by the hospital, with the governor’s support, to increase substantially funding for the institution.

Just why it took so long is answered by the distinction between an institution of society in occlusion, with no voice but that of the easily despised and dismissed to call from out the shadows, and one whose airing in the democratic light of day shows, without bias or hypocrisy, the true conditions, bad or good, which are extant. Society’s primary institutions, its hospitals, schools, courts, executive agencies, regularly need that sort of airing and vigorous oversight, perhaps now more than ever, lest we become—well, look at our society and ask whether it is functioning as we would wish it to function, fairly, openly, democratically.

Have our institutions as a whole not been bought and sold by corporate fascism, with the individual citizen who understands and can articulate the problem, either from the inside or astute observation from the outside, ordinarily coerced out of fear of reprisal, of ostracism, into silence? That, while the opinion makers largely have been bribed into complicity in the most anti-democratic form of government the country has ever before seen, at least since the advent of mass communication? Address that problem from the grassroots, Congress, and some of the rest might begin to take care of itself without the need for specific legislation and expenditures of billions on billions of dollars. For if we eradicate the need of the needy, all boats rise—the reverse of trickle-down economics. Call it, trickle up economics. More consumers mean more sold cars, more sold widgets of all kinds. More people involved in the determination of their environment means a more responsible environment without the need for so much regulation, for no one will be the offender.

In short, we need to change the mentality of the country which has pervaded for too long since the law and order people slowly took over the machinery of democracy in the 1960’s and turned the country into a corporate state, its resources available to the highest bidder or those who can exert influence--fascism.

On the editorial page, "Grim Facts" takes issue with the Navy’s belated release of the news of loss of three heavy cruisers at what would become known as the Battle of Savo Island, the disastrous battle taking place on Sunday morning, August 9. The piece suggests that there was no basis for the delay other than to cushion bad news with the passage of time, that such motivation did not improve war morale at home but caused a false sense of security and failed to accustom the public properly to the acceptance of sacrifice as a condition of active warfare.

In addition, the editorial might have mentioned that such a failure of reporting the facts soon after their occurrence merely created distrust of all war information and thus in the long run dampened ardor, rendered the claim of victory in any given engagement a nugatory contention subject to cynical doubt.

The editorial column had consistently recognized the need for secrecy and delay in reporting certain types of engagements, hit and run raids by ships and planes, to provide time for the raiders to return safely to home port before the enemy became aware of their positions. Savo Island, however, was obviously not that sort of battle. It was the result of a Japanese attack to try to regain Guadalcanal and Henderson Field two days after the Allied invasion.

Regardless, the sluggish jungle warfare on Guadalcanal and the nearby islands, inadequately supplied until the previous three weeks, was about to turn, in a matter of days, decisively in the Allies’ favor.

"Brutus Gets His" suggests sympathy for Caesar Petrillo’s attempt to nix recorded music on the radio in order to obtain increased royalties for his union musicians and to insure a continued market for live music on the radio. The advantage, however, contended the government, was to the union itself more than the member musicians and worked merely as an unfair, discriminatory restraint on trade, against non-union musicians' recordings being played on the radio, in violation of anti-trust laws.

It is the little middle-man bullies Petrillo who make the world less than a democratic place. And no sympathy for this devil should have been provided, merely on the notion that the New Deal had gone too far in endorsing labor unions and thus, when it tried to reel in their activities, was properly rebuffed by an anti-New Deal judge in Chicago playing political football with radio music.

As a general proposition, when a court decision makes no sense under the law or the facts, you may rest assured that either the prevailing party has something on the judge which might subject the judge to embarrassment or even impeachment, or the judge is on the take, either by payola or less direct means--favors for that niece in Buffalo with the wonderful singing voice who just needs a break on the radio, or something of that nature.

That, or the judge is simply a political tool of one party’s interests who doesn’t deserve to be on the bench in the first place.

In any event, from some of the junk on the radio through the years--not to mention other things in the streams of commerce, widgets of all types--somebody had to be paying somebody to get it before the public.

It is despicable not to question the veracity and fairness of these institutions in a democracy where no one has the right to occupy a publicly paid position under cloak of secrecy or immunity, to allow them thus to exercise absolute power. Lawyers, the public should be aware, are threatened with discipline should they dare question a judge’s fairness or veracity—or even that of a plainly corrupt employee of the court, not a lawyer or judge—and it is so whether done publicly or even privately. Those are not properly the rules of law, but it is the way they are being applied.

And until Congress and the various state legislatures, too closely aligned with corporate lobbyists and special-interest legalized bribe machines, first divorce themselves completely from that system, and then find the guts to begin to investigate it, removing from office any public official who makes decisions affecting the public on the basis of improper influence, not just elected officials but also judges, Federal and state, nothing is going to change. Nothing.

We have said it before, and we say it again: a large part of the problem in the United States today is the result of a disheartened, dispirited populace which no longer believes in the fair working of the society’s institutions, that those institutions have been bought and sold by corporate money. And there is a good deal of evidence daily adduced to the public to support that belief.

The lying crooks know that if they can afford the price of admission, they can buy justice in this country—the little hippity, hoppity crooks who lie and cheat, even to the point of perjury and fraud, with paid immunity from the ordinary prosecutorial consequences for it, to get their way. The result is licensed fascism. The ultimate result is economic depression.

We do not tolerate royalty in this country. And if the self-anointed Royalists, in and out of government, keep it up, they are going to find themselves in a very sad state indeed.

"Scrapdoggle" renounces as wasteful for an already strained Treasury a New York gubernatorial third-party candidate’s proposed version of cash for clunkers whereby old cars would be turned in for scrap in exchange for a specified amount of war bonds, thus providing the much needed scrap metal while increasing war bond sales. But, if you don’t try it, how can you say it won’t work? Plainly, the ordinary course of voluntary scrap collection was failing miserably.

"Exit, Worm" tells of the silkworm’s displacement by synthetic variants produced by the Celanese Corporation. It was the embargo of silk during the summer of 1941, the barring of further trade of its exchange commodities, oil and scrap iron, plus the freezing of Japanese assets in the United States, which brought to crisis Japanese-American relations after the Japanese occupied French Indochina in late July, 1941 with the gracious acquiescence of Vichy. After that turn of events, the impossible "peace" tenders made by the Japanese, based on normalization of trade and the United States standing aside and not aiding China or Indochina, set the stage only for another post-Munich grab of the Philippines, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. The United States had already been suckered into acceptance of the terms of Munich and had seen the bloody results; it was not going to repeat the mistake it made with respect to Czechoslovakia in dealing with China and Indochina, enabling the fall, not only of those countries to the Japanese, but also the vast additional territory and materials thus made accessible from them.

The Allied military experts’ failure to realize the daring nature of the Japanese Imperial High Command, daring to the point of insanity, as well both the skill of Japanese pilots and the authority of the air afforded them by a combination of Japanese technology culled from German designs and the pilots’ suicidal zeal to the Emperor enabling the dauntless exchange of armor and self-sealing gas tanks for speed and maneuverability, all joined to form the complacency which resulted in the unpreparedness of United States defenses in advance of the attack at Pearl Harbor.

"Lost World" says that, like, ye know, the mob’s gone into uniform, and, like, is no longer boss of the streets.

Maybe that was another reason why the Italian aliens were given a pass to perambulate at will without interruption from the gendarmerie—for being so loyal. Take a guy handy with a tommy gun and stick him behind a machine gun in the Solomons, maybe. But, we digress.

Raymond Clapper argues for breaking diplomatic relations with Vichy, while recognizing that the reason for their continued maintenance was to afford a listening post within the Reich’s sphere of influence.

Dorothy Thompson employs stream of consciousness to recount movingly a scene in a Red Cross hospital in Brussels, October 12, 1915.