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From International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.2, Spring 1961, p.34.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Editor:
I am in the great army of the not working, no jobs, too old to get a job, too young to die – unless I cut my throat, as the big bosses would like me to do. One less then to bother them.
I would like to read Depression Ahead, by Lynn Marcus, an ad I read in the Militant about the International Socialist Review. Could I borrow it from you and send the money when I once again get some kind of labor? At 56 you know how hard it is to get a 70-year-old Big Boss or Company owner to hire me. They only advertise for 25-30 ages. J.C. Penny here won’t hire anyone over 25-27 in new jobs. Sears, Kresses – they are all the same. The Hearst Press (San Francisco Examiner) will not take men in clerical office jobs over 30. So what can I do?
About the article in the paper by Tom Kerry on the employers-union Auto Pact, dictated by the White House when it comes to featherbedding, etc., who in the heck does more of it than the First Vice-President corporations, Second, Third or Fourth?
I used to work at Shell Oil during the 1929 “recession” and there was one big floor of VIPs who did nothing all day but lean back on their chairs and put their feet on desks and look out the windows and watch the building sites. They could sit and watch the workers put up the S.F.-Oakland Bridge and even see men being killed on the waterfront – and get BIG pay for it. But who got fired or laid off? I did and some others to cut down on expenses. So this still happens.
They ought to remove profits and then these loafers and conditions might soon get better. Maybe even I could still get work. So it goes. But I wonder if JFK’s big-brain cabinet realizes this stuff?
E.H.
San Francisco, Calif.
Editor:
Would you be willing to be an instrument in teaching my students social democracy and modern problems? I am now facing difficulty in finding good material for them. I have seventy-five top students who are eager to learn and are excited about current events. But their reading material consists of Look, Life and Readers Digest.
Could you possibly send me some 20 copies of International Socialist Review back issues. Your magazine is just what I need for background material. They can be soiled, torn or used. But these old pages of ISR are packed full of ideas and facts which the young student needs.
I feel a keen responsibility in helping young people to shape their views. But my small teacher’s salary is not enough to pay for the materials needed. For this reason I am writing to you with the hope that you may be willing to give us some help and advice.
S.L.
Baltimore Md.
Editor:
In order to survive, the USA must be put to work. Capitalism is unable to put it to work and this is driving the USA relentlessly towards the day when it must purchase the property of the capitalists from the present owners. The cost will be great but the value of the gross national product will absorb the price if the USA is operated at its full capacity to produce. The USA is face to face with financial disaster and economic defeat in a competitive war and the only way it can raise the funds to put the USA to work is to add the value of its gross national product to its tax collections.
It must quit running to its business rivals and competitors for help and buy all the banks, industries, land, business and housing and add the interest, profits and rentals to its tax collections or the USA will be subdued, crushed and conquered in a war of peaceful competition. Unemployment and part-time employment, recessions and depressions are a way of life in the USA and the competition will bury it in a war of peaceful competition unless the USA is put to work. The value that it is failing to produce could pay for all the banks, industry, land, business and housing in this country within the next decade.
Suppose, for example, that the gross national income from all the banks, industries, land, business, housing, interest, profits, rentals, tax collections and production in the USA is only $600 billion per year, although it is undoubtedly a great deal more. Then this figure divided by 170 million, or the entire population of the USA, would give each and every person in the USA an annual gross income of $3,530 regardless of whether they worked or produced anything or not. If there were only two people in the family then its average gross income would be $7,060 per year. For a family of three the average gross income would be $10,590 per year and for a family of four it would be $14,120 per year.
If it cost them $240 billion per year which is 40% of their $600 billion gross income per year to buy the property of the capitalists from the present owners and pay their taxes then a family of four would still have an income of $6,354 per year, a family of two would still have an income of $2,118 per year. When I compare what people should have with what they don’t have, I conclude that there is something radically wrong with our system of distributing the gross national income and I declare that there is a more equitable way, a highly superior and more preferable way.
During the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt under the laws of Delaware the government formed a group of corporations with charter powers so broad that they could embrace ownership and management of all business. They were like corporations except that their officers were all officers of the government and the capital stock was all government owned. The amount of capital was in each case nominal, but it was expansib’e to any degree. What they were formed or what they were for was never published because there was danger of a rebellion against the government of the USA on the part of the capitalists who opposed Federal ownership. There was no danger of a rebellion of the people against the government of the USA. But there was danger of a rebellion by the capitalists against the people and their government because capitalism itself is a government hostile to federal ownership and to any extension of Federal government.
Today there is still a virtual rebellion by the capitalists against the United States government and the elected representatives of the people because the capitalists don’t want to let the president elect of the USA even enter the White House which is an inauspicious omen for the Republic which is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “government by the people.”
Donald White Eakins
Chicago, Ill.
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