The Charlotte News

Monday, February 2, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Well, they don't talk that talk anymore since the 1960's, but some of them still walk the walk nevertheless. Why else would a state have flown the Stars 'n' Bars on its state flag for so long? Whatever the case, the irony of course is that a Georgia black man, 13 years old at the time of the Governor's statement, would one day just 14 years hence, foster a movement which would transcend all national boundaries and inspire peace between humans based on their merely being human. Unfortunately, however, the price he had to pay for that lesson in justice and fairness was his own life.

It is a sad testament on mankind that the Gene Talmadges and their worse like abounded in the South, sometimes in other parts of the country, if less openly racist in their rhetoric, even over 100 years after the Civil War, well into the mid-1970's, before finally losing their wind and sulfurous odor. Most of them simply died and gave way to a new generation born into an integrating, though not yet integrated, country.

It is an improved testament that an African-American has just taken the oath as the 44th President of the United States and enjoys, with some few loud-mouth idiotic exceptions on the radio, the full support of the country at the inception of his term, in a time where the country should be thinking about pulling together as no time since World War II. Gone is the free ride which many have grabbed and ridden for all it was worth.

Our suggestion is to ferret out the corporate executives of those large firms, especially mortgage lenders, who benefited enormously from making high interest rate loans at a time when interest rates were the lowest in forty years, prosecute them to the full extent the law allows for loan fraud and securities violations, of which there are no doubt plentiful counts for each of those companies' executives and officers with knowledge of the fraud, and provide them a choice: 20 years in prison or skip the trial, dismiss the charges, and each pay a fine equal to 90% of their current net worth, the proceeds of which would go to a fund to provide both housing for those who lost their homes to these crooks and to enable low-interest rate, relaxed qualification restriction loans to those who are stuck with high interest rate loans made by these crooks, especially loans made to the elderly and those on fixed incomes, and further to pay for ailing homeless shelters for those dispossessed entirely of homes, at a time when we read that homelessness is on the rise as at no time since the 1980's, precisely because of these crooks who belong in jail, on whose backs belongs the guilt for an economy failed. They took up where they had left off in the 1980's, with the Party. Now, it is time once and for all to put an end to the Party--where it hurts it the most, in its pocketbook.

More letters, plus a couple of pieces from two other newspapers, appear on the page today in support of Tom Jimison's series on the intolerably deficient conditions at the mental institution at Morganton, a mental institution become non compos. The series had become a hotter topic among the letter writers than the war.

The piece in the far right column, below Raymond Clapper's piece, tells of the outcome of the Pan American Conference, that rather than forfeit unanimity to obtain a tough agreement mandating cessation of diplomatic relations with the Axis nations, the Argentine's stubborn insistence on riding the fence, playing both the hound and rabbit as the piece suggests, led to a flimsy position, unanimously adopted, whereby each country would decide whether or not to terminate relations with the Axis.

We are foregoing the front page for awhile as it will be more of the same for the next couple of months, the Army and Navy getting largely chewed up in the Pacific, along with the British and Australians. Singapore would be invaded from the north on February 8 and the crucial port and naval facility there would fall to Japan a week later.

Incidentally, the roll of dimes which Willie shot through our window on Saturday turned out to be 100 valuable rare coins, sufficient to buy plenty of war bonds and replace the glass. He shot them with an air hose attached to the vacuum on his distributor, such that the charge was just enough to shatter our glass which he already had ascertained was break-away glass so that no one got hurt. No gunpowder was used, he later assured us. Willie is thoughtful like that.

After he told us of being wanted, we felt obliged to do our civic duty and to alert the sheriff, who then checked him out on the interstate teletype and came back with the report that only a handful of animal shelters in East Texas were looking for Willy, that is Willie's dog, also named Willy. It seems Willy was a real worker among the doggies out that way and had befriended enough female companions to produce upwards of 300 litters inside of three years. So much so that half a dozen counties swore out animal control warrants for Willy. As a matter of fact, Walt Disney is said to be contemplating a motion picture cartoon on the subject, calling it "101 ___-__-_______". But that's only rumor.

Anyway, Willie called us yesterday evening from an undisclosed location in Mexico, saying that he had driven all day and all night since leaving here on Saturday, evading all the "heat" along the way, and had arrived safe and sound at the "hideout", the rendezvous point, he said, for all the desperadoes of the South. The only hitch, he went on, in the whole journey in his flatbed, flathead '34 Ford came with a busted flat in Baton Rouge, in the pouring rain. At least, we think that's what he said. We could barely discern some of it though for the din of dogs barking in the background.