| OCR Text |
Show 101ngfim Washington, D. C. BRITAIN'S BANKRUPT STATUS One of the most important docu ments bearing on the postwar worlc soon will be issued by the Britist government in the form of a Whit Paper. It will be a survey of Brit ain's financial position and a franh admission that she is bankrupt. The White Paper will tell in detail how British investments throughout the world have been liquidated tc pay for the war and will come tc the conclusion that, if the British Empire is to continue free trading, she must have outside help. The alternative to free trade and free competition, the White Papei will say, is a system of barter, restricted re-stricted trade and cartels, such as : that practiced by Germany aftei I the last war. International cartels, I of course, have been blasted public j ly by President Roosevelt and one British corporation, Imperial Chem-' Chem-' ical Industries, already has been prosecuted by the justice department depart-ment on a charge of conspiring with I the Du Ponts before the war to con-! con-! trol the world production of certain j chemicals. According to inside word from the I diplomatic corps, the publication of I Britain's frank survey of her bank-1 bank-1 rupt financial position will coincide with the secret conferences now taking tak-ing place here between Lord Keynes and U. S. officials regarding the renewal re-newal of lend-lease. With the war in Europe nearing a close and with U. S. forces now getting a greater proportion of war supplies direct from the United States, British war needs for lend-lease lend-lease are dwindling. However, the British have proposed, in Lord Keynes' private conversations, a new type of postwar lend-lease whereby the British could resell goods to foreign for-eign countries in order to reestablish reestab-lish their export trade. . Keynes Proposal Word leaking from the diplomatic diplo-matic corps is that Lord Keynes now proposes a total lend-lease allotment to Great Britain of 6 billions for 1945, of which VA billions could be reexported in British trade. Most of this would be in the form of American raw materials which the British would process into finished goods and then sell. The British do not propose that finished American Ameri-can products be given them for reexport, but only that they get lend-leased raw materials to revive re-vive their crippled industries. One proposal is to set up a new postwar lend-lease court composed of one Britisher and two Americans which would decide de-cide which goods could be used for British trading purposes. The whole plan will be submitted to congress probably before Christmas. Christ-mas. ARMY'S PREFABRICATED BRIDGES One of the great but little known stories of the Western front is the way in which army engineers got a group of bridge experts together nearly two years ahead of the European Eu-ropean invasion and designed fabricated fabri-cated sections of bridges which would exactly replace specific bridges in France, Holland and Belgium. Bel-gium. Through the European underground, under-ground, army engineers were able to get exact measurements of the bridges which they knew would be destroyed by the retreating Nazis. Each part was numbered, and special spe-cial assembly crews, trained in England, Eng-land, rehearsed the job of putting them in place. When the invasion came, these bridges traveled so close behind our advancing armies that they were frequently fre-quently ahead of the field kitchens. And on arrival at a destroyed bridge its replacement was a matter of hours. ... HILLMAN WOULD END PAC Sidney Hillman didn't advertise H but, during the last days of the campaign, he took steps to disband dis-band his controversial Political Action Ac-tion committee. The final decision will not be up to him alone, for the whole thing will be threshed out at the CIO national convention in Chicago. Chi-cago. But not waiting for the convention, con-vention, Hillman sent notice to most of the 200 members of the PAC staff that they go off the payroll before then. Originally PAC was set up as a permanent organization, and there are several schools of thought inside in-side the CIO regarding its continuation. continua-tion. One group, including auto workers president R. J. Thomas, wants to keep PAC alive. Hillman, on the other band, wants to shut up shop, concentrate on New York politics, poli-tics, and also get his health back. MERRY-GO-ROUND C All during the war, FDR hat been a close reader of Carl Sandburg's Sand-burg's "Lincoln" and has continued his reading during the campaign. Someone who dropped into his private pri-vate study one day found a copy of the book open to Lincoln's war days. . . . During the 1864 campaign, Mc-Clellan's Mc-Clellan's followers accused Lincoln of squandering public funds, mismanagement mis-management of the government, de-Uroying de-Uroying civil liberties, meddling with the war, and standing out for "unconditional surrender." |
