Show GENERAL HUGH so S JOHNSON LOANS TO FOREIGN LANDS washington poor mr hoover once set out to help our foreign trade to dispose of our surplus products by loans to backward and crippled countries loans to bankrupts have a way of turning sour these did and what a panning mr roosevelt in 1932 gave the great engineer for that suggestion mr hoover was only proposing a policy of private loans the money of risk takers for profit his project was relatively bikers chickenfeed chicken feed mr roosevelt now wants to take out of the treasury to lend to latin american cou countries atries to enable their governments to buy up and hold their own surplus of agricultural products this is a price pegging plan such as mr wallace has practiced in american farm products it has never worked in the history of the world although it has frequently been tried notably in brazilian coffee east indian rubber canadian grain and american wheat corn and cotton it work because it is the rather than the mere own enship of unmanageable surplus and nd the certainty of oncoming crops that overhangs the market and depresses price that was the basic fault with mr wallaces joseph or ever normal granary day dream joseph could successfully buy and store the surplus of egypt for seven fat years and then sell it at holdup hold up prices during seven lean years until he owned all of egypt he could do it because he had a dream book and a direct wire to the pearly gates henry apparently has a dream book but no direct wire although the he president says we are to underwrite the south american surplus only for one year how does he know in the romantic days when spices were the only practical food preservative and therefore invaluable the dutch controlled much of the east indian trade they had a rougher remedy for market gluts if too much anise cinnamon pepper nutmeg cloves or whatnot what not was congesting on the wharves they simply sank the surplus in the sea mr wallace has tried variations of that also that is why he killed the little pigs and cattle plowed under the cotton paid farmers for not producing and recently and more intelligently through the food stamp plan sold farm surplus to the poor at a great discount in price and all the rest of Us footed the grocery bill 0 K for our own people this column is for a direct federal subsidy to a parity price to our farmers for all their products that can cab be consumed at home and also for the food stamp or any similar plan to subsidize consumption of our food products to all low income groups not merely to help consume our farm surplus but to relieve us of the insufferable charge of permitting americans to starve or be undernourished der nourished in the midst of rotting overabundance but it is absolutely opposed to pouring five hundred or any other number of millions of public money down any latin american rat holes to subsidize our own competition and possibly to find their way into hit lers coffers or certainly in no small degree into the pockets of various satellites of the assorted dictatorships of the banana republics sure we need pan pait american solidarity and friendship but we cant buy it the only thing that will make it on any worthwhile basis is cold blooded community of interest if that there any amount of billions is just money thrown away mr roosevelt has neither right nor reason in calling this a loan intimating that one years operation will do the trick or limiting his request to half a billion it is well known in washington that this first step is part of a two billion dollar program to make uncle sam the international broker for all the products of the western world that too is grotesque fantasy its cost would eventually take us gut out of the multiplication tables and into the field of logarithms the essence of all new deal planning statesmanship diplomacy and solution of all public problems can be expressed in a singled single phrase give us billions of dollars As statesmanship that is about as realistic as santa claus chaus and alad dins lamp LOUIS JOHNSON I 1 returned to washington aft otter erthe the conventions to find a rumor that the new tory republican secretary of war had asked his vigorous assistant si louis johnson to get the hell out of there politics marches on ruthlessly respecting nothing sparing nothing I 1 have not always seen eye to eye with mr johnson at first I 1 thought he was political izing and new realizing Deal izing the army my criticism was well informed but it proved premature that job differs from any other sub cabinet position it is charged by statute with industrial mobilization of the whole nation in an emergency my observation was that mr johnson did not fully appreciate this vast problem in the beginning tir ming he certainly does now 11 his is work here is not paralleled parallel d elsewhere in government |