Viewing page 22 of 56

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-7-

In leaflets as well as in open Club meetings to which friends and neighbors can be invited, it would be an interesting educational discussion -- the difference between capitalist-monopoly control and Socialist people's control of public utilities like gas and light and telephone.

In such leaflets the supplying of information on the complicity of city and state officials in the recent power plant deal might initiate fundamental discussions in the neighboring political clubhouses than the more general agitation on democracy and machine control within the Democratic Party.

Constant reminders to the voters of the warnings contained in our State Committee's leaflet attacking the power plant steal as the prelude to an eventual 25 cent transit fare will help the voter-subway rider look with more critical eye on all candidates, incumbent or otherwise, who ask him for his vote on Election Day.

MONOPOLIES IN MILK AND MEDICINES ENDANGER HEALTH OF CHILDREN 

Bordens which has a plant in Brooklyn is one of the milk companies which just reached a settlement over wages and other conditions with the Teamsters Union. The employees received a small increase in pay of 7½ cents an hour. But as the New York Times points out editorially on November 16, 1959 the milk companies, using the pretext of a wage increase made themselves an additional profit over and above the cost of the wage increase of $105,000 a week.

Multiplying $105,000 per week by 52, we find out that the big milk companies net a profit of $6,460,000 annually more than the already fabulous profits these companies make each year. Of course the impression is assiduously cultivated by spokesmen and apologists for the monopolies that the "inflationary" wage demands of the trade unions is the cause of the rise in milk prices. Another item of interest that all voters should know about is the fact that while we city consumers are paying 28 cents per quart - 30 cents if it is delivered - dairy farmers are receiving $5.03 per hundred-weight for their milk. A hundredweight is the equivalent of 46.5 quarts. In other words the farmers receive only 10.8 cents per quart. Doing a little subtraction now, we find that there is the neat little sum of 17.2 cents lying between what we pay for a quart of milk and what the farmer gets.

Most of the Big Four among the milk companies are under more or less constant indictment for price fixing and other violations of the anti-trust laws. Yet their prices increase. Over a year ago when Brooklyn Congressman Anfuso was chairman of a consumer subcommittee, he conducted hearings on the high price of milk in New York. Although he is no longer the chairman of this committee, his constituents as well as other Brooklyn voters should call upon him to lead some kind of a struggle against the milk trust so that workers can provide themselves and their children with milk and butter.

If the politicos were to see some struggles developing around this issue, a picket line around Bordens and other big milk concerns, delegations to the Mayor, City Councilmen and others, including Gerosa and Stark who promised the voters as far back as 1953 to use existing municipal laws to bring prices down. If the consumers can force their elected officials to throw the book containing city anti-trust laws at the milk monopoly before they become voters in November of 1960, there'd be a lot healthier respect shown the consumer-voter by next year's crop of candidates.

If there are some Party Clubs whose meetings are dull and sterile for lack of specific issues to tackle? Here's one: Send out a letter to 500 people or only to a hundred about the local, Brooklyn drug monopoly, Pfizer & Co. This company along with a couple of other drug firms has been indicted on several counts for violation of anti-trust laws because they have conspired to hold the prices of the "miracle drugs," penicilin and other anti-biotics high above the consumers' ability to pay.

Let voters know that this outfit is a major reason why the nation's medicine bill is so high. It has plants in Europe, Africa and Asia, and I am quite sure its treatment of its workers in overseas' plants is quite as notorious as I have been told they are here. One of the major items our children collect money for