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111….1.VVOW. BILL DANIEL’S WATER LOU Bill Daniel, Gov. Price Daniel’s much-publicized brother, recently was mentioned in Walter Winchell’s column. Winchell’s story: Daniel pinched glamor girl and she shoved him into a swimming pool at Palm Springs, Cal., boots, cowboy hat, and all. Bill Daniel told his story last week to Bill Roberts of the Houston Press. He and his wife Vara, without whom he never travels anywhere, were in Palm Springs so he could represent Texas at the annual Palm Springs Desert Circus, he explained. He and Vara were standing beside a pool talking to Clark Gable and Zsa Zsa Gabor when a publicity-seeking cutie shoved him in, a waiting photographer snapping a. picture of the event. The girl was bounced out of the place and the camera smashed. Daniel displayed a letter from Gov. Goodwin J. Knight of California which said in part: “I understand that you were the intended victim of a publicity seeking young woman who wanted the notoriety of having herself photographed dunking you in the swimming pool. I assure you that her actions were completely selfish and in. poor tastefar below the congenial level of our California hospitality. I deeply regret this incident occurred.” Jobless Benefits Exhausted for 66,000 TEXANS ARE COUNTED About 60,000 Texas workers exhausted their unemployment benefits in Texas between July 1, 1957, and May 1, 1958, and another 88,000 may exhaust their benefits by April 1, 1959, Robert Newman, worker representative on the Texas Employment Commission, declared Tuesday at an economic conference of the state AFL-CIO in Austin. Newman said there are serious legal questions whether the governor or TEC can enter into an agreement with the federal government to agree to repay all money paid out under the new federal law permitting states which so desire to extend jobless benefits payments to 39 weeks. Sam Houston Clinton, Jr., AFLCIO attorney, argued, however: “By making federal funds available through an agreement with TEC there is no need for a special session to accept the funds, since TEC acts as agent for the federal government in making the payments to exhaustees, and nothing in the agreement creates a debt or obligation on the part of the state treasury to repay the federal treasury.” Under the new law states must agree to repay the money extended by the federal government for the extra benefits. If it is not repaid the state’s employer tax rate can be raised. NEWMAN MADE a full and candid statement of his position on the commission. He has frequently voted against the commissioner for employers, Maurice Acers, and the public representative, Perry Brown. Under “the conservative ideas of the other two gentlemen,” Newman said, “the screws have been tightened to the point that if a plant sees fit to close up temporarily because of a recession, the plant managers simply declare an ‘extended vacation’ and, by this flimsy device, deprive their workers of the pro tection of unemployment insurance. This is absurd.” Newman called “stupid” another line of commission decisions which seem “to reflect the view that if a worker decides to go to school and try to improve himself, he thereby should eliminate himself from the protection of unemployment insurance.” While an average of 90,000 men qualified for unemployment pay last winter, the jobless total averaged 200,000, he said. “Only four out of ten unemployed could qualify for unemployment insurance payments. The why of that is simple. Our state program extends only to those employers hiring four or more persons.” Eighteen states extend coverage to all regularly employed persons, he said. “What is ‘American’ about a law which discriminates against over one-third of our working population?” He advocated extension of the law to all regular workers, possibly excepting farm workers, and doing away with any fixed ceiling on maxmium benefits. THE PRESENT Texas ceiling is $28 a week. Newman did not share in rejoicing that Texas employers pay only six tenths of one percent tax rate for jobless compensation insurance against a 2.7 percent average. “Of those employers who qualify for experience-rating tax rates, 54 percent pay only one tenth of one percent,” he said. “I find nothing great and glorious about any comparative statistics which show lack of concern for the welfare of 2,700,000 Texans: the 1,700,000 covered by the Texas Unemployment Compensation Act, and the 1,000,000 who are not covered … Texas … has kept its benefits low to … permit large employers to escape taxation at a rate higher than the ridiculously low minimum Texas rate of one tenth of one percent … The unemployment act has been administered from a law designed to help the justifiably unemployed workers into a law designed to keep tax rates low for the large employers.” WASHINGTON During the past month here Texans in the Senate and House have been called upon to take their stands on some of the major issues of the times, none less important than the labor reform proposals. Sens. Johnson and Yarborough stood together with the Democratic majorities which beat down GOP amendments and confirmed passage of the Kennedy union reform measure. On May 27, however, both Johnson and Yarborough voted against a band of 21 Senate liberals led by Sen. Kentend the amounts, coverage, and length of unemployment benefits. The Senate instead agreed to House legislation authorizing states which so desire to extend the unemployment benefit payment period to 39 weeks. In Texas the issue is still in doubt whether this can be done without a legislative act. The Texas legislature does not meet again until 1959. Yarborough did not vote on the foreign aid bill. Johnson voted against a move to preclude economic aid to India and aid to Yugoslavia and to cut military assistance $500 million and for requiring that $200 million of a $235 million cut be taken from military assistance. Congressional Quarterly said Yarborough indicated support of the $500 million cut and the application of most of the $235 million cut to military aid. Yarborough made the prevailing motion in the Senate interstate and foreign commerce committee for a bill to appropriate $49 million, not more than $1 million to any one state, to help finance educational television. Yarborough called on Texas to take whatever legislative steps are needed to obtain the grant. The money could be used to finance apparatus for educational TV but not for structures housing the apparatus. Yarborough introduced a bill to prevent VA rulings that advancing along toward a higher degree by a GI Bill student constitutes a change of direction in his course of studies which might cause him to lose benefits. Johnson and Yarborough called for passage of the rivers and harbors act which Yarborough said will mean more than $40 million for seven Texas projects. Johnson hailed the Kennedy labor reform bill as one which “will drive many unsavory characters out of the union movement and strengthen the position of honest, descent unionism and its leaders.” Johnson led the fight to beat down the more stringent union reform measures proposed cently. The Kennedy bill provides for secret ballot in union elections, federal standards to govern trusteeships, reporting of union operations, including financial transactions, prevention of the use of union funds to perpetuate union officials in office, Prevention of criminals or falsifiers of union records from holding union office, and criminal penalties. Johnson and Yarborough voted together to help defeat an amendment to prevent the defining of plant supervisors in a stricter way; to preserve the state limits on public utilities’ workers’ right to strike; to set federal standards on misuse of trust funds, now covered by various state laws; to bar from the National Labor Relations Board unions which fail to comply with reporting provisions Three Texans, Fisher, Rogers, Teague and Young, opposed ,as the House approved, extension of the reciprocal trade act. Eight voted to send it back to committee A 1 g e r, Beckworth, Burleson, Dowdy, Fisher, Rogers, Teague, and Young. All except Fisher, voted for the five-year extension. Rep. Wright Patman, Texarkana, demanded angrily that the House investigate GOP monetary policies. “The robber barons are back in grey flannel suits this time,” he charged; people are being robbed through “the slick devices of high interest and money manipulations.” “This administration and the Wall Street financial. houses mobilized all their forces to prevent an investigation” in 1955 and 1957, Patman said; he suggested the recession is “a deliberate objective plan of the money managers.” Patman rued the merger of UP expect that the high crimes of high finance, the big bread-and Two Polls Going On Party Changes AUSTIN Polls of Democratic leaders throughout the state are being conducted both by Gov. Daniel and by a Milam County Democratic leader to sound out opinion on Daniel’s plans to take from precinct conventions the right to elect county convention delegates and elect these delegates in the primaries and to move up primary election dates to May and June. Max McClaren, Cameron, chairman of the Milam County Democratic executive committee. said replies of 100 county chairmen so far responding to his mail poll are running 80 to 85 percent against the two plans. McClaren, acting for his committee, said it “strongly favors keeping grass-roots control in the hands of the people.” Rep. W. R. Poage, Waco, hooked into Father James L. Vizzard, representing the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, who had said that investigation of the bracero program would uncover “some of the most sordid and illegal bribery and profit-making here in. America.” Without evidence, Poage said to the priest, “you place yourself in the position of being a character assassin.” AP reported that 15 Texas individuals or companies received payments of $50,000 or more for withholding cotton, wheat, or rice acreage from cultivation. Another 31 Texas persons or corporations received between $30,000 and $50,000 under the program . The 15 largest Texas recipients: Crews farm, Pecos, $107,200; Moser ranch, DeKalb, $87,000; Duncan brothers, Alvin, $86,000; Porter and Wentz, Brownsville, $76,000; E. J. Carpenter and Patricio Brij alba, Pecos, $71,000; Progresso farms, Pe co s, $65,000; Winters farm, Pecos, $62,000; Chandler Co., Fort Stockton, $60,000; Rio Grande Care, McAllen, $60,000; Clark and Roberts, Pecos, $76,000; Delmar Durrett, Amarillo, $56,000; T. L. Moran, Dumas, $55,000; W. N. Moore, Alvin, $54,000; Bentley Johnson, DeKalb, $53,000; Torn Moore, Navasota, $50,000. `LUCKY’ OILMEN AREN’T SO SURE ABILENE Speaker Sam Rayburn, in a letter to Abilene Jaycee president Sid Parks, advised Parks that the provisions in the reciprocal trade bill “is all the oil industry can expect” as curbs to further oil imports. Rayburn wrote: “I think the oil folks are lucky to have such people as Frank Ikard, Bob Anderson, Lyndon Johnson, and myselfand, especially, do I give the most credit to Frank Ikard.” Parks said: “The Abilene Junior Chamber of Commerce does not propose to assess the degree of luck which occurs to our area oil fraternity by reason of having the Washington representation as set forth in Mr. Rayburn’s letter. But, we would rather leave the valuation of the lucky factor to the people in the oil industry who are most affected.” THE TEXAS OBSERVER Page 8 June 20, 1958 butter issues, the hall-hidden manipulations of government for the special advantage of groups holding great concentrations of wealth, the struggles for domination over the minds of men, and all varieties of fact which fail to flatter this administration and the big business leaders who run it, such matters as these will become even less newsworthy than they have been previously.” Patman said only the correspondents for “many of the larger papers” in Washington “stand between us and disaster.” Rep. Paul Kilday, San Antonio, blasted the Eisenhower plan for military reorganization, saying it would make the secretary of defense a colossus with control over spending nearly two thirds of the national budget and that legislators are better qualified to preserve civilian control of the military than “persons who spent their lives in the armed services.” Scripps-Howard Eyes Girardian AUSTIN Washington Scripps-Howard reporter Neil McNeil, continuing a series being published in the El Paso Herald-Post on Senate candidate William Blakley, say s Blakley was “one of the very few insurance officials named personally in an FTC complaint” when FTC filed charges of using misleading health insurance advertising against Blakley’s Girardian Insurance Co. of Dallas. McNeil quotes Robert L. Sills, FTC legal adviser, as saying FTC was “afraid” the name of Blakley’s firm might be changed because Blakley’s insurance companies had a record of “constant change” in name. Girardian has not changed names but other Blakley companies have. “Best Insurance Reports,” says McNeil, report that 91 percent of the admitted assets of Blakley’s Guardian Underwriters are in two “unusually large” mortgages. Another Blakley firm, Girard Life, Best’s says, includes in its assets two “unusually large mortgage loans,” McNeil reports. The FTC case against Girardian is still pending. An FTC examiner suggested it be dismissed on grounds of lack of jurisdiction; a case is now before the Supreme Court to settle the question. Johnson, Yarborough Favor Union Reforms \(which the Kennedy bill makes a ficers by majority petition or by 33.3 percent of the members in a petition; and to make impracticable the use of any union dues in closed shops for purposes other than collective bargaining. They supported a prevailing amendment to provide for recall of union officers by majority vote at a union meeting and a defeated NLRB to assume jurisdiction in all cases applying to interstate commerce. On the House side, Texas congressmen voted 16-2 against Alaskan statehood, which the House majority favored. The ayes: Beckworth and Wright, with Thompson also paired for statehood.