ustxtxb_obs_1960_02_05_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

Bartlett Appears Exclusively in the Texas Observer Judge Lynch’s Gavel THE TEXAS OBSERVER i/511 ilTSZ-i .1′ 7 Pt W17,% 7 Let tho,de flatter who fear, it is not an American art.JEFFERSON `I Don’t See Any Strings, Do You?’ While reserving judgment until there has been full investigation and debate, no careful reader of Congressman Wright Patman’s thoughts on money and banking can fail to be alarmed by the possibility that the public are being stol en blind by the bankers. The Federal Reserve System, Rep. Patman avers, has become the tool of the bankers. The vital open market committee of twelve members is set up, by law, so that private bankers designate five of the members ! Billions of government securities are traded behind the public’s back by this bankers’ committee, acting for the government. Mr. Patman takes a straightforward approach to the government’s debt financing. The source of the strength of the money system is the government’s credit ; the Constitution specifies that Congress has the power to issue money; why in the world doesn’t the government issue banks interest on the government’s own credit !’ Unless this cycle of reasoning can be broken, it is essentially true that the government gave the private bankers ,ten billion dollars in 1958. The bankers are now inundating the public with propaganda in de fense of high interest. It is obvious to students of modern American economics that high interest inhibits investment, home building, and con sumptionthus brakes economic ac A..actoi A toast to the Corpus Christi school board for preserving its public schools against the propagandist gift for “Americanism” studies. By now, we trust, many school officialseven gducation Cmsr. J. W. Edgarhave become leery of this business program to “get into the curriculum” of the public schools. Sweetwater remains the most conspicuously irresponsible school system on the issue, continuing to take. $10,000 from the Texas Bureau for Economic Understanding and using the money to pay teachers and a principal extra salaries for doing what they are sworn to do anyway teach the best principles of the country to their students. We suppose Sweetwater school people are more interested in saving face than saving principle. Let’s hope they drop the program at the end of the present semester, in any case. Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Entered as second-class matter, April 26. 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. FEBRUARY 5, 1960 Ronnie Dugger Editor and General Manager Sarah Payne, Office Manager Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 10c each. Quantity prices available on orders. tivitythus slows down economic growth. The bankers clean up ; the economy stalls out. Russia’s economy is growing now at seven percent a year ; we grow two percent a year ! This trend, too, Mr. Patman and other classic monetary liberals fight valiantly, and without success. We are appalled and disgusted by the implications of Time Magazine’s Feb. 1 report on Lyndon Johnson!s secret meeting with New York bankers. Said Time : “Johnson …. told the bankers and financiers in private session that he knew they were for Vice President Nixon for President but reminded them that Senate Leader Johnson would have to play the major role if interest-rate ceilings are to be lifted on long,-terns Government bonds, as President Eisenhower has requested.” There has -been no denial of this from Johnson’s office. He has voiced platitudes against high interest but where does he stand on the issue of the long-term government bond interest rate? This is the Democratic majority leader of the U. S. Senate? This is the man loyal Texas Democrats are supposed to support for President, on pain of ostracism from the Republic? We are called back to the time of Sam Houston, when he told the Texas jingoists Go Hang. The people do not entirely realizethough many dimly gues it, and many believe it as a matter of basic suspicionthat the election of the Republicans to run the country means the bankers run it, and plain people, small businessmen, consumers, homeowners, are drained of buying power as a. direct result. Wright Patman represents the best in the Democratic Party’s heritage on this issue. Let us hope the national Democrats, too, are smart enough, and bold enough, to take up money and banking as an issue of the first importance in their Los Angeles convention and carry to the people the fight for fair interest and an investigation of the Federal Reserve System. AhJI. The Abilene Reporter-News had better run a Texas loyalty check on its copy desk staffers. The Sunday morning Reporter-News, carrying the AP story on Headliners Club awards to Senator Johnson and. John Wayne, headlined it : HEADLINER AWARDS TO LYNDON, ACTOR EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504. West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: 1010 Dennis, Mrs. It D. Randolph. We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. One would not think it possible for the human mind to justify the failure of a system of customs against a lynch mob which grabbed a man from jail and, strong in its numbers, dragged him, shot him to death, and threw him in a river. The Marshall News Messenger, however, has published an editorial entitled “Usurpation” which cornmends the judges and juries of Mississippi who have refused to indict anyone in the Parker lynch case. The editorial said: “While the taking of a man’s life by a lynch mob is one of the most heinous of crimes, the usurpation of the people’s rights by the federal government is an equally grave crime. “It is in this light that-, the Mack Charles Parker lynch case in Mississippi can be viewed. After a much publicized FBI investigation, a state grand jury failed to return an indictment. After much more political talk from ‘Washington by Atty. Gen. Rogers, a federal grand jury was convened in Biloxi. “This grand jury also failed to indict anyOne. The jury said, ‘on the basis of evidence presented, we were unable to arrive at any true bill.’ Such action must come as a great blow to the huge , powerful justice department. 1:3 “Citizens everywhere should rejoice that there are still federal judges and federal grand juries who .refuse to knuckle under to government prosecutors no matter how much control they may appear to have over some federal courts.” The celebrated plaintiff’s attorney and Observer columnist, Franklin Jones, has been planning an Observer column about the Parker case, but the editorial provoked him, instead, to write the editor of his home town newspaper. His letter : “The Marshall News Messenger “Marshall, Texas “Dear Editor : “Your editorial that gloated over the fact that two Mississippi juries had failed to indict in the Mack Charles Parker case is viewed more in sickness than in anger. It could not have been written, I will always be lieve, had not the facts divulged by the FBI last summer been overlooked. “They were that the Federal Bureau had solved the case, and turned the names of ten killers -overto, Gov. Coleman. These, the report said, were selected by lot from a mob that gathered for the primary purpose of finding a way to prevent a cross examination of the white rape victim by a. Negro Aawyer on Parker’s coming trial. The three who entered Parker’s cell to drag him out by his heelS were named, and identification was made of the car in which Parker was driven to the river, where he was shot while in a prone position. The fact was established that tinder threats of the gang the jailer left a key readily available for it and went home. “When the grand jury in the State Court was convened, its attention was not even specifically called to the case, but it was delivered a diatribe against the National Supreme Court, and the prosecuting attorney stated he would not present the FBI report to it ; nor did he plan to subpoena any witnesses or in any way push the investigation. The writer is without knowledge of the evidence submitted the federal grand jury at Jackson, but it is fair to assume that it had the benefit of the facts developed by the FBI. “Now if, as your editorial Says, there are citizens everywhere who should rejoice that there are federal grand juries which will fail to , indict under these circumstances,. our country is far sicker than we think. If your vaunted ‘States’ Rights’ are to be nurtured on unpunished mob murder, some will doubt their purity -. True, Parker was a Negro, a member of a race that some can never seem to forgive for having at one time been enslaved. by the South. But mistake not the virus that produces mob violence. It can be color blind, as evidenced by the New England mobbing of a white dairyman some two years back: Ask not for whom Judge Lynch’s gavel bangs in 1ii,sissippi ; it bangs for thee. “Franklin Jones” oney and Ranink