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Show Washington, D. C. LITTLE PIGS GO TO MARKET Agriculture officials are staring with bulging eyes at the telegrams received from the livestock markets. The number of hogs killed in a single sin-gle day has passed the figure of 300,000, and is still going up. November has already set an all-time all-time record in hog slaughter of 6,900,000 (federally inspected). December De-cember will go still higher. Cattle slaughter also set a record in November, No-vember, but is now tapering oft. Not so with hogs. Nothing like this has ever happened hap-pened in the history of the world. Nature, plus a low ceiling price on corn and the delay in putting a ceiling ceil-ing price on hogs, is now scatter--ing pork all over the landscape. This will continue through January, February, Feb-ruary, and into the month of March. In spite of the pork flood, however, there is no surplus, and officials insist in-sist that there must be no "holiday" from rationing. OPA and War Food administration agree on this. They have had many differences in the past, but they stand together on the matter of red points. Fact is, they have debated removing remov-ing pork from rationing, but ran into so much prospective grief that they gave it up. For if housewives could buy pork without stamps, they would use their stamps for beef and butter, which are still short. Or if OPA tied the points to the product, making separate stamps for pork, others for beef, and others for butter, but-ter, etc., there would be outcries from different groups, such as Jewish Jew-ish people, who ban pork. Conclusion is that the ration books must be left alone, and the only way to solve the bounty problem is to make federal purchases heavier and move them more rapidly. Army purchases of beef were extremely ex-tremely heavy in the beef months of September through November. Today, To-day, Lend Lease purchases of pork are growing heavy and will hold up through the "hog run" now flooding the market. But this does not always take the meat out of storage. Lend Lease shipments to Russia can be made only when Russia is ready to eat the pork; since they have no storage space. Britain, on the other hand, can store pork, and is taking shipments ship-ments faster than the rate of use. With livestock production high, and submarine sinkings low, more beef and pork are getting to Allied fighting forces overseas than ever before. MORE STRIKES AHEAD There are a lot more strikes in the country than the public is aware of. The government has abandoned the policy of regular announcements of the number of strikes and the number of man-hours lost. Thus the strikes do not get into the newspapers. news-papers. But here are some figures which reveal that the no-strike pledge of labor organizations is not very effective. ef-fective. In November alone, there were 120 strikes. The December figure will be only slightly lower. In the week before Christmas, 91,000 man-days were lost in plants engaged in' war production. . Two days before Christmas, Christ-mas, 21,000 people were out on strike, and a number of critical items were behind schedule. Some of the strikes have no relation rela-tion to wages. Take for example the strike which Washington officials refer to as "the Baltimore backhouse back-house strike." The Western Electric plants at Baltimore are producing such highly important items as marine ma-rine cables and radar wire. But white workers went on strike because be-cause white and colored workers did not have separate toilet facilities. The war department was obliged to step in last week and taKe over the plants solely because of toilet trouble. Workers began coming back slowly, but four days after the plants were taken over, over half the workers were still out. Unfortunately, there is every probability prob-ability that strikes will increase, rather than decrease in the future. Next in line demanding wage increases in-creases will be aircraft, steel and shipyard workers. John L. Lewis' victory broke the line, has stimulated stimu-lated demands for increases in many industries. After the President yielded to Lewis, George Harrison, railroad brotherhoods chief, visited the White House and said: "For Gawd's sake, you give it to your enemies, why not to your friends?" ... MERRY-GO-ROUND C. President Rios of Chile recently told newsmen he expected to visit the United States. This plan is now set aside, due to the grave situation in Argentina and Bolivia. C. The Germans now make mines of plastic, which cannot be located by magnetic detectors. They are reported re-ported to have sowed a dense minefield mine-field along the coast of France to head off the second front. C Army has a special course of instruction in-struction for cooks serving in cold climates Alaska, Iceland, etc. C. Senator Wiley of Wisconsin, recently re-cently leading a visitor through the labyrinthine subway of the Capitol building, said: "I'll take you through the catacombs and they might really real-ly be the catacombs to judge by the smell." |
