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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 31, 17 June 1933, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The new deal government at Washington, so solicitous for the welfare of the poor speculators on the Chicago wheat market and the New Orleans cotton exchange, is about to come to their aid again. The present step, like most of the new deal kind, is completely surrounded with the usual trappings of “aid to the impoverished farmers.” But like most of the farm aid bills, seventy-five percent of the benefit will go to the financiers whose nearest approach to a farm is the wheat room of the Chicago Board of Trade.
This week’s newspapers carried the headline announcements of a fifty million dollar sale of wheat and cotton to the Chinese Nanking government. The money, to pay for the purchases by the Chinese government of the wheat in this country, is to be advanced by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a loan payable after several years. Although no mention of the subject appears in the dispatches relating to the subject, the cotton will most probably be used in the contemplated Nanking campaign against the peasant armies. The Chiang Kai-Shek government which has been spending millions in his unsuccessful campaign against the peasant armies of inner China, has now succeeded in securing the advance of this fifty million dollars from the American government.
For the American unemployed however, the Roosevelt administration, like that of Hoover, is providing merely line phrases. In the same day there appeared the announcement that despite the grain crop failures in many parts of the country, and despite the campaign of the government to cut down the wheat acreage, the total amount of wheat being stored in the granaries of this country at the present totals almost four hundred million bushels. This huge supply of wheat is being let to spoil in the huge warehouses of the country, and attempts made to secure any of it for the unemployed have been frustrated (with the exception of a few million bushels of Farm Board wheat turned over to the Red Cross last year.) A conservative estimate would show that if the four hundred million bushels stored in the country today were advanced to the unemployed, it would last for almost five years.
Instead of taking any measures to relieve the suffering, exactly contrary steps are being taken by the government and the various relief agencies. The New York City Home Relief Bureau has cut off all payments of rent. In addition, the Gibson Committee which through the Red Cross has been distributing food have announced their intentions of discontinuing this work after the summer.
This is the indictment of the present system; amidst plenty, there are many starving. Only a powerful working class movement will force from the capitalists a portion of the huge supplies of all types of food and clothing stored throughout the country.
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Last updated: 4 September 2015