tA.

will increase. The butter. fat sub-
sidy of $25,000.00 a year will be
stopped on April 30. Butter may
go up eight cents and perhaps
ten cents, The government also
intends to end its subsidy on
wheat going into flour consump-
tion. The removal of this sub-
sidy which provides millers with
wheat that costs $1.25 a bushel
on the domestic market for 77
cents a bushel may mean an in-
crease in the price of bread
from 15 to 25 percent.

Bread manufacturers are ex-
pecting at least one cent in-
crease. in the price of bread.
They have been campaigning for
this all last year. However, it
is expected that should the
wheat subsidy be removed, a
retail price of three and one-

cents a loaf more would be
needed.
e

Tt threatened price increase
in bread should be no surprise.
In the Portage La Prairie by-
election last October Hon. Jas.
G. Gardiner, true to his old
tricks of pitting the farmers
_ against the workers, sought to
explain away ~ his inadequate
wheat policies by talking about
_ cheap bread.
_ “There has been increasing ob-
jection to the wheat price situ-
ation from the farmers since the
cost of implements went up 12.5
* percent,” he told an_ election
_ audience.” As the result of in-
creases in the price of steel and
with. wages going up, farmers
are asking why the. consumer

has to continue to get ‘cheap ©

bread at his expense. :
What cheap bread is Gardiner

_ FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1947

ND BY THE sweat of your brow shall ye earn your bread.”
They plow not, neither do they sow,
history, Federal Agricultural Minister
to give them more profits at the expense of the

prattling about? The flour and
baking monopolies have made
Plenty of dough. Their balance
Sheets after all the usual finagl-
ing of bookkeeping to avoid tax-
ation and hide profits still leave

but they reap. With p

Te aT

@ Monopoly - engineered

Price increases are

stealing the food from the

tables
families

of working class

~ By ALFRED C. CAMPBELL

them with huge amounts they
find unavoidable to report.
For instance, Ogilvie
Mills — whose president, Hon.
Charles Dunning, is an old friend
of Jimmie Gardiner—has made

Flour,

But not so the milling and bakery monopolies.
roduction, income and dividends the highest in
James G. Gardiner and Prices Board Chairman Donald Gordon intend
consumers. Reports from Ottawa state the price of bread and butter

huge increases €ach year in its
net profits after carefully laying
away sufficient untaxable swag
for depreciation and renewed
working capital. Here are the
figures and the same trend is

é Se em

~ Anglo-US monopoly grips

—RIO DE JANERIO

: ANY Americans can
M not understand why
their country is call-
ed imperialist by the peoples
of Latin America. But you
don’t get the other side of the
story—the real story—until you
hear it from the Brazilians
themselves. The _ imperialism
they are fighting is’ not at this
moment a direct attempt to take
territory. Neither are they fight-
ing against the American
people, as such. They are fight-
ing the big American corpora-
tions in Brazil, the companies
‘which are today threatening
their precarious and unhealthy
economy with utter ruin.

Take this vast, undeveloped

country of Brazil, the largest

and potentially greatest in Lat-

‘in America, Its economic struc-
ture is suffering from a funda-
mental disease: 70 percent of. the
people are landless peasants
working on

cocoa, sugar and cotton planta-
tions. Their purchasing power
1s practically nil: there is no
internal market. Their transport
is miserable—a few railways on

semi-feudal coffee,

the coast, in a deplorable condi-
tion,

Perhaps the only real indus-
try is in textiles; there are a
few chemical plants, glass fac-
tories, _Shoemaking _ establish-
ments, and only now is the fam-
ous steel mill at Volta Redonda
coming into production, but it
will give no more than a few
hundred thousand tons of steel.

The economy depends almost
to 50 percent on export of coffee
and cocoa. The bulk of indus-

trial _goods—especially heavy in-

dustrial goods — comes from
abroad. And the power and
light companies are divided be-
tween British, Canadian and
American capital, Inflation rages
like’ a cancer in the nation as
a whole.

During the war there was a
certain development of Brazilian
national industry. Today it is in
mortal danger of being destroy-
ed by the competition of Amer-
ican imperialist firms, who are
ravaging the country like con-
querors in the name of ‘free
trade’ This is the imperialism
which Brazil fears—except for

the small oligarchy of banks and

importers which are the camp
travelers of the ‘dollar plague,’

through maneuvers on the

_ establishment?

Brazil —

the matter runs even

deeper into more dangerous
channels. The U.S. Army has
largely evacuated its wartime
military bases in northern Bra-
zil, but the Brazilians eannot

understand why huge airfields —

are being built under U.S. super-
vision along the Argentine boun-

dary. They can’t understand why.

the Brazilian army is going
sou-
thern boundary under the direc-

tion of U.S. military chiefs,
Many Brazilians are also won-

. dering about the current mission

of the Brazilian chief of staff,
Gen. Cesar Obino, in the U.S.
ye.

There are alarming rumours
that the U.S. is Proposing to
equip and train 30 motorized
divisions for the Brazilian Army
which now has only two. This

would mean an increase of the -

army from 60,000 men to per-

haps 500,000.

Why this pressure for mech-
anization and a huge Military
ask the  Brazil-
ians who take the rumor to be
true. Against whom does the
U.S. State and War department
think these divisions are to be

used? Why? And when?

_ Of 1934 stated:
_ dustry today

| of the. country

JEU AL =

noticeable in the accounts of
the milling and baking mo!
opolies, : ? :

1,055,004
1,111,865
1,138,562
Charlie Dunning, as a director
of Stelco received a $5 a ton in-
crease in the price of steel, but’
refused all summer to grant thé
reasonable wage demands of the
Steelworkers. Now he intends to
boost the price of bread and
take another clip at the work: |
ers’ pay envelope. What he lost
with one hang he takes back
with the other, }
Gardiner, who is an expert on
the rural hustings at creating
divisions between the farmer and
the worker, attempts to leave
the impression that there exists
a relationship between thé
prices of bread and the prices
which farmers receive for wheat.
Nothing is so far removed from
the truth. ?

Here are some price figures
that are quite revealing:

Year Wheat
1917-18 $2.22 a bushel
* 1925-26 $1.45 a bushel
1928-29 $1.18 a bushel 7.7¢
1930-31 $0.76. a bushe] 7.3¢

The flour-milling industry in
,Canada has grown with the de-
velopment of the wheat areas —
of western Canada, The system-
atized robbery of Canada’s fam-
ily table begins with the farmer
and ends with every housewife
and her family, Volumes have —
been written about this theft.
Royal Commissions have droned _
through sufficient volumes of
evidence to paper the House of.
Commons inside and out and
still leave plenty over, so ex-
tensive is the record.

e

a be same men who control the —
flour industry also sit on the z
directorates of large chain bak- —
eries. The Price Spreads report
“The milling in- _
controls a majority —
baking companies
and has a finan-
Cial interest in a substantial
number of bakeries.” The millers
who are also’ associated with
elevator and fooq companies —
have the industry tightly in their
grip. «The Prices report show-
ed: “There was an increase in
the spread between flour and
bread prices from 2.33 cents per
pound in 1916 to 5.13 cents per
pound in 1930, which is equal to
4.2 cents per one and one half
pound loaf,”, \

_ During the war years the con-
sumption of bread increased in
Canada. In 1939 consumption of
bread was 999,457,000 pounds or
88.3 pounds a person, In 1944
Canadians ate 1,249,083,000 Ibs.,
a percapita consumption of 104.3
pounds, That consumption will
go down, Large families in the
low bracket wages cannot afford
to pay a boost in bread prices. —

An increase in” the price of
bread will not reach the pockets
of the farmers no matter what
Gardiner may say to the con-
trary. The ddded profits go into
the pockets of Charlie Dunning
“who is willing to create scarcity
in Canada in the mad scramble
to ship flour overseas on the
foreign market. Nor will the Z
hungry millions in Europe or
Asia receive the bread any
cheaper, a :
The flour milling industry with
its chain of bakeries from coast
to coast has no need of a price
increase, Its profits Are Ute
milling reached its highest levels
in December 1946 when’ the out-
put reached 2,518,555 barrels.
There is plenty of flour. There
is plenty of profits. Why then
the price increase? «= =
Once again unless the labor
Movement takes prompt action
and stops this bread boost the
families of the working people
who can scarce afford it will
have another cut, in their living
standards. atten.

Bread
170 |
71.60.

of the large

PACIFC TRBUNE — PAGE 12