The Timaru Herald FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1934. “EPIC” PLAN REJECTED.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19952, 9 November 1934, Page 8

The Timaru Herald FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1934. “EPIC” PLAN REJECTED.

Upton Sinclair’s defeat in the hard-fought contest for the Governorship of California has, significantly enough, .sent a thrill of jubilation through the Democratic Party. The defeat, we are assured, is highly gratifying to President Roosevelt and the Democratic campaign managers, because the decision of the people of California overwhelmingly endorses the attitude of the Central Council of the Democratic Party which refused to accord Mr Sinclair the official backing of the Party, although he scored a resounding victory in the primaries. It is suggested in tlie cable messages this morning, that the defeat of Mr Sinclair purges the Party of radicals! Mr Sinclair, on ills part, lias become so positive that he represents a newer deal for the United States, that he feels his defeat and the rejection of Ills Epic plan will be followed by great uprisings. The Democratic Party, on their part, however, has not hesitated to interpret the sweeping success of the Roosevelt Administration, as an emphatic 1 endorsement of the New Deal, which has encouraged the President and his colleagues to begin immediate preparations for the extension of ilie New Deal. In view of this intention it is a little difficult to understand the attitude of the Dedocrats to Mr Upton Sinclair, unless the President feels that the most radical of the Democratic nominees for a State Governorship may he stealing some of the thunder Mr Roosevelt will need in his future campaigning. The meaning of the movement which he has inspired, ,o End Poverty In California, and its polling the largest vote ever cast in a Californian primary, Mr Upton Sinclair told the people of the United States in a nationwide broadcast, is that the American people have reached the saturation point as regards suffering, and here we can explain in Mr Sinclair's own words:

“We are just about to begin the sixth year of the depression. We have one-and-a-quarter million persons dependent upon public charity, and probably as many more who are able to get only one or two days’ work a week or who are dependent upon relatives and friends. That is too heavy a burden of suffering for any civilised community to carry.

A man’s attitude toward this situation depends upon one factor. If he believes that private industry is “coming back,” he is willing to wait and endure and patch things us. But finally it must occur to him to wonder whether the thing called “prosperity” will ever come back again. If he makes up his mind that it is not coming back, then his whole attitude changes and he is ready to consider some new procedure, thoroughgoing and drastic. I have been telling the people of California for the past year that this is the permanent crisis, the one which does not pass away. I claim to speak with authority, because I have devoted my whole thinking life to the study of depressions, their cause and their cure; I proved my knowledge by predicting thirty-one years ago, and continuously ever since, this particular crisis, the “permanent” one. I assert that it is caused by the overproduction not merely of consumption goods such as food and clothing which are quickly used up, but of production goods, the great machines and factories, which do not get used up by stay right where they are.

Mr Sinclair’s campaign plan was designed to enable him to enunciate a remedy for the depression through a. new co-operative system. Here is Mr Sinclair’s plan to end the depression in the United States by gradual stages in a peaceable and human fashion without violence and the overthrow of the political, industrial, or social system of the United States: The “EPIC” (End Poverty In California) movement proposes that unemployment in the United States shall be put at productive labour, producing everything which they themselves consume and exchanging these goods among themselves by a method of barter, using warehouse receipts or labour certificates or whatever name you may choose to give to the paper employed. The plan asserts that the State must advance sufficient capital to give the unemployed access to good land and machinery, so that they may work and support themselves and thus take themselves off the backs of the taxpayers. The “EPIC" movement asserts that this will not hurt private industry, because the unemployed are no longer of" any use to industry. Mr Sinclair insisted that he was planning a new co-operative svsem for the unemployed. Whether it will be permanent depended upon, Mr Sinclair admitted, whether he was right in his belief about the permanent nature of the depression. Tf prosperity comes back to the United Sates the workers will drift back into private industry. No harm will have been done, because certainly the unemployed will produce something in the meantime, and the State will be that much to the good. But the people of California rejected Mr Sinclair’s too radical plan and preferred to stand by the President in his promised extension of his recovery plan.

SUBSIDISED SHIPPING. “We must have an adequate American deep set fleet,” declared the American PostmasterGeneral in discussing the subsidising of American mail carrying

shipping, “for if war should fall on us in this uncertain world, we would find it a dire necessity.” The people of Australia and New Zealand who have watched with no little concern the success of highly subsidised shipping services gradually “worming their way” into the shipping business of the Pacific, ought to read into that declaration a reminder of the plain needs of the far flung British Empire in relation to shipping. If, however, it is a dire necessity for the American people living as a self-contained nation, to possess an adequate dee]) sea fleet, how much more necessary is it for Britain and the scattered Empire to possess adequate British deep-sea shipping. The statement issued from official sources which we publish in another column throws an illuminating light on the scope of the American policy of subsidising mail carrying lines. Testimony is given of the high value of subsidies paid by the United States Government as a means of developing American merchant marine. Some idea of what this means can be gathered from the official returns. For example, it is revealed that a total of 111,36(5,757 dollars are due to the Government from mail contractors for construction loans, reconditioning loans and the purchase of ships to carry mails; moreover, it is most interesting to learn that the United States Post Office Department has paid 1 1D,257,756 dollars to 44 contract holders under the subsidy law, whereas the cost of carrying the mail on the poundage basis would have been 15,534,500 dollars. These figures expose the purpose of the shipping subsidy plan, namely, to strengthen tlie American shipping lines regardless of the comparatively insignificant part they play in the carriage of mails. Tf, however, the people of Australia and New Zealand will look a little deeper into the vital problem of subsidised shipping, they will discover that the American Government not only provides rich subsidies under the pretext of mail contracts, and furnishes substantial financial assistance for the purchase and reconditioning of American ships, but that all the new ships recently built by American subsidised shipping lines were financed by the State; indeed, the investigations of the United States l’ost Office disclosed the arresting fact that only 32 new ships had been built, and that more than 120,000,000 dollars of the 121,000,000 dollars the ships cost was loaned by the Government at a low rate of interest. The report might have gone further and shown that in reality the mail subsidies provided under some of the biggest contracts, really represent the deliberately designed process whereby the State indirectly repays itself the loan provided for shipping companies for the construction of new ships. It is interesting to note, therefore, that public opinion in Australia and New Zealand no less than in England is rapidly coming to the conclusion that if British shipowners are to survive the attacks of subsidised foreign shipping, then the State must insist upon equality of shipping conditions along the sea lanes that traverse the oceans separating the Homeland and the Dominions within the Empire.