The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1934-05-21
barrow Board
Flags NRA as
Wall st. Yoke
Continued from Page u

I 4
| seen"
Two days later the General. the
avowed colleague of Gerard Swope,
author OF the fascist SWope plan
and president Of j. P. Morgan &
Company's General Electric Com
pany, made the following com
ment' on the supplementary re-
ports final paragraph:
stripped Of shad0wy verbiage,
this means that the choice Of the
American people is between Fas-
ciSTn and Communism, neither Of
which can be espoused by any
one who believes in our demo-
cratic institutions Of self govern
ment; nor can any public official
who has taken an oath to defend
the Constitution of the United
States adopt or officially advO-
cate such program. The sup
Elementary report demonstrated
completely the prOpriety Of my
recommendation that the review
board should be abolished"
Donald Richberg, N.R.A. General
Counsel who recently described the
MIRA. as counter revolutionary,
in report accompanying Johnson's
letters to Roosevelt and published
together, denounced the Review
Board as a "haphazard, one-sided
investigation"
The only thing that didn't rile
the MIRA offlcialdom was the re-
port submitted by John F. Sinclair,
who declared that "the inability to
secure credit has been the major
cause in many cases of extreme
hardship. Ample and safe credit,
easily available, for the little man,
is necessary to give him equality
with his largest competitor" Sin
clair recommended that "a Review
Board of Appeal" be established by
Executive order, independent Of
the MIRA" This board, he wrote,
should be "non-political," some
thing never yet established in
Washington or anywhere else.
"Small Man" Doomed
The NR.A. Administrator was
also disturbed by the Darrow-
Thompson suggestion that industry
should produce "for use and not for
profit" This part of the supple
mentary report, obviously, opposed
the childish recommendation of the
majority report, written by Charles
Edward Russell, old-time reaction
airy Socialist Party celebrity, to go
back to the antitrust laws and Gre
store" competition.
ITO go back to unregulated
competition in which the small
man can gain his share Of the
market by some special advantage
of skill or other factor, is not pos
sibIe in a situation where techno-
logical advance has produced
surplus so that unregulated COM
petition demoralizes both wages
and prices and brings on recurrent
and increasingly severe industrial
depression" The supplementary
report said only by the fullest use
of productive capacity for the
raising of standards of living Of
individuals and the community
can steady balance be achieved
in an age of abundance.
This, however, is possible only
when industry produces for use and
not for profit, since it is essential
that enough wealth should be dis
tributed through the return to the
workers to set them as consumers
free to use industry's plentiful out
put"
Few people expected the Review
Board to produce any excitement
It was created as sop to the Nye-
Borah little business fnan faction
in the Senate, to stop the Senatorial
attacks on the monopoly character
of the code setup. The $25-a-day
Board members were expected to
spend their energies in dull, sterile
research. The demagogie language
of the Instructions ascertain ano
report to the President whether any
code or codes of fair competition
approved under the authority of the
MIRA. are designed to promote
nlonopolies or to eliminate or OPP
press small enterprises or operate
to discriminate against them, OF
will permit monopolies or n1enopo-
listie practices" made it clear that
the product Of the Board was in
tended to be an anestEetic.
Steel Monopoly
The Review Board heard 113 COM
plants against IS codes. Those re-
ported on tonight concerned codes
for the electrical manufacturing in
dustry, footwear, rubber manufac-
turing, motion pictures, retail solid
fuel, steel, ice, cleaning and dye
ing and bituminous coal. Code hear
| tngs from which recommendations
have not been drafted include pc
troleum, lumber and lumber prod
ucts, wood case lead pencil, as
bestes, motor vehicle retailing, saw
and steel products.
In its section on steel, the Board
pointed out that the iron and steel
institute, The name Tor the steel
trade association and the prop
uganda organ of the big steel com
panieS, which is also the steel code
authority, is "a body not only per-
fectly equipped to exercise monop-
olistic control but is endowed with
extraordinary powers incompatible
with the ideals heretofore enter
tanned in a free country
"The steel CODE" it added, "is
a code designed and made by and
for the great companies"
In the bituminous coal section OF
the report, the Board concluded
that 1T is evident that when conop-
oily utilizes its power to increase
prices (Which it did under the
Bituminous Coal Code, it is the
consumer who must pay for the in
creaSes."