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Review

EDITORIAL PAGE +

Comment

'Hold the line’ on prices

OVERNMENT statistics record
that prices hit a new high of

) 125.2 between July and August this
4 Year. With the 1949 base index at
| 100, that is quite an increase over
the years =~ and it only tells half

€ story.
The current issue of the Labor

4 Gazette describes the latest 0.4 per-

» cent rise in August as the “usual
» S€asonal increase.”

«“ ee
Seasonal,” it seems, has become

F @ very popular term with Tory and

Liberal statistical jugglers. They

/ sed it overtime to explain away

| "sing unemployment. Now they are

) plying it to price increases.

In B.C., bread recently went up

~ Wo cents a loaf. The Milk Board

q has just authorized a one cent in-

Crease on a quart of milk. These are
ssentials on any working man’s
table, but no one has heard a
Murmur about “holding the line”
®n prices — only on wages.

: The head of a big wholesale firm
'n Montreal, Themon Yappe, testi-
fying last week before the Royal
Commission on Price Spreads de-
clared that consumers were being
Tobbed” by chain stores.

Potatoes costing the chain around
half a cent a pound are retailed at
four and five cents a pound. Onions
Which cost the chain less than five
fents a pound are retailed for 10
Sents or more, while the consumer
‘8 charged 10 cents a pound for
“trots which cost the chain two
‘nd a half cents a pound.

: Phone, electricity, fuel oil, cloth-
Ng, shoes, there’s no end to the

_ Stowing list of essentials which are

Rien acy. + : : :

teadily increasing in price. The
0 6

nly Seasonal” feature about these
Ptice increases is that the “season”

“Sees

Pacific Tribune

Phone MUtual 5-5288

Editor — TOM McEWEN
aging Editor — HAL GRIFFIN

Subscription Rates:
One Year: $4.00
Six Months: $2:25

Published weekly at
Room 6 — 426 Main Street
Vancouver 4, B.C.

Man

conse tadian and Commonwealth
. Ntries (except Australia): $4.00
© year. Australia, United States
@ all other countries: $5.00 one
year.

has extended to 365 days a year.

In a number of British cities re-
cently a well organized boycott by
housewives compelled the butchers
to trim one shilling (13.5 cents) off
beefsteak being sold at seven shill-
ings a pound, with corresponding
price cuts in other meats.

That type of action to combat
spiralling prices is much more ef-
fective than the “‘seasonal” explana-
tions of Tory politicians or the end-
less hearings of royal commissions
whose findings are invariably tossed
into government archives to gather
dust.

The evidence is on every working
man’s table — it’s obvious in the
wide disparity between his pay en-
velope and price tags.

What is needed is a nation-wide
united effort to “hold the line”
on prices, and bring wages up to
that line.

U.S. — get out!

F U.S. ARMED FORCES were

not on Chinese territory and in
Chinese territorial waters, where
they have neither legal claim nor
moral right to be, there would be
no danger of war in the Far East.

And if the U.S. government were
not actively intervening in Chinese
international affairs, against the will
of the overwhelming majority of
the Chinese people, the Chinese
people themselves would long since
have settled the problem of For-
mosa. as

Not all of Eisenhower’s false
analogies with Munich, not all of
Dulles’ brazen charges of aggres-
sion can hide the incontrovertible
fact that the U.S. itself is the. ag-
gressor. Chinese forces are not en-
trenched on Hawaii nor are Chin-
ese warships standing off San
Francisco harbor; but U.S. forces
are on Formosa and the U.S.
Seventh Fleet is in the Straits of
Taiwan.

x

From the time the People’s Re-
public of China came into being,

U.S. policy toward it has been one
of undisguised hostility — the vir-
tual occupation of Formosa, the
wars in Korea and Indochina, the
trade embargo and diplomatic non-
recognition are all aspects of a policy
which has had as its aim the des-
truction of the new China. To ac-
complish this aim the U.S. does
not hesitate before the risk of
plunging the world into a new war.

Dulles does not want to get out
of Formosa, for that would be to
admit the collapse of his policy.
Chiang Kai-shek does not want the
U.S. to get out of Formosa, for
that would foreshadow the collapse
of his regime. But the peace,of the
world ‘does require that the U.S.
get out of Formosa, that it end its
meddling in Chinese affairs and
cease its provocations against the
Chinese people.

*

That, it. is obvious, is the senti-
ment of most Canadians — and it’s
time the Diefenbaker government
voiced that sentiment in unequivo-
cal terms at Washington and in the

UN.

Tom
McEwen

HE PROFESSORS have “dis-
T covered” socialism. Yes sir, no
doubt about it. This, I hasten to
add is all to the good, even if the
net results at the moment are not.

It all-started with Sputnik. The
driving power which sent these
Soviet - made moons orbiting
around Mother Earth also blew
the lid clean off our highly-
touted and highly - monopolized
“higher education.”

In pre-Sputnik days .we sat
smugly complacent with our
superiority complexes. Sputnik
shattered all that and to make
matters worse, the rocket boys at
Washington and Cape Canavarel
(with whom we have been “in-
tegrated” in unholy. wedlock)

kept chalking up» more flopniks _

than the B.C. Lions.

Hence the professional safari to
the first land of socialism. Many
pundits of higher learning in the
field of history, economics, langu-
ages, science and so forth from
our ‘free’ west have recently

visited the Soviet Union.

Until a few weeks ago I had
labored under the illusion that
such egghead ‘excursions were
mainly prompted by the desire to
observe and study at first hand
the educational methods, curri-
culum and so on which have
transformed a backward illiterate
people into sputnik scientists in
the short space of half a lifetime.

Last week a few of these pro-
fessional types from UBC on a
locally - produced CBC-TV pro-
gram cleared our noodles of such
childish illusions. It was a cold
war menu, pure and simple, with
a lot of half-truths well larded
with inference . and innuendo
tossed in to sweeten this “intel-
lectual” mulligan.

When some Soviet educational
achievements were mentioned at
all, the inference of some sinister
Soviet motive or design was in-
variably tagged on. Let’s skip the
education part of it, prompted the
CBC prompter, “what wefe your
impressions of the people?”

Here we learned that some 200
million .people had just been
waiting for some professor from
UBC who could speak Russian ,to
tell them all about the “outside
world,” and the unfeigned joy
they expressed when he gave
them the real. professorial low-
down. The inference, of course,
was that Soviet government poli-

cy was to keep it§ people in the
dark on world events. On the
Hungarian counter-revolution of
two years ago, these poor mis-
guided Russians just simply didn’t
know the real “facts” until a
prof. from UBC gave it to them, a
la “free” western sandwich style.

Language studies in the Soviet

curriculum? Qh yes, all Russian
students study foreign language,
with perhaps “eighty percent
studying English.” The prof’s. per-
centages may be correct, but the
inference he left to be drawn
couldn’t be missed — it was just
another part of communism’s plan
to conquer the “free’’ world. The
professor didn’t say so — but he
might as well have.

During the past 40 years we
have noted that whenever work-
ers, communist or non-commu-
nist, returned from a visit to the
Soviet Union, press, radio and
TV were invariably closed to
them, because their opinions of
things Soviet were held to be
“biased” and therefore not fit to
be heard or read. Either that or
the daily press garbled what they
did say. :

Not+so however,, with profes-
sors who “discover” socialism,
and pretend to be searching for
its fundamental truths — but re-
turn with nothing save cold war
garbage for wide public distribu
tion.

October 24, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 5