That’s the way the oil trust sees it —as a war against American working people. The gasoline crisis now gripping the country is the latest offensive in that war.

The rip-off at the gas pumps has outraged workers. That anger has even forced some sections of the government to lift a bit of the curtain on what’s going on:

• Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D-Mo.) said May 15 that sixteen major oil companies had made profits on domestically produced crude oil ranging from 144 percent to 389 percent of the cost of production.
• The Federal Trade Commission admits it has evidence that oil companies have not made full use of available supplies of crude oil and that “the current gasoline shortage may be contrived.”

Despite the refusal of the government to act, the measures needed to meet this crisis are simple.

The first thing we need to do is to find out the truth about what is happening.

How much oil and gas are really in the ground?

How much oil and gas are in the pipelines or storage tanks right now?

What is the real capacity of oil refineries already in operation?

What are the real profits the industry is making?

Instead of challenging Exxon, Mobil, and the other energy giants, the government is protecting their secrets and covering up their massive frauds against working people.  
 
May 24, 1954
The long fight against Jim Crow segregation in the public schools won an important legal and moral victory on May 17 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such segregation is unconstitutional. But the fight is not yet finished or won.

The Court decided unanimously that the pernicious 58-year-old “separate but equal” doctrine is unconstitutional when it is applied to public schools. This knocks out one of the props of the Jim Crow system. Its effect will be to strengthen the movement of the Negro people and their allies to get rid of other legal props and to increase their confidence in their ability to achieve the abolition of the Jim Crow system as a whole.

But saying that segregation is unconstitutional is not the same thing as effectively prohibiting it. The Court ruled that school segregation is illegal, but it put off any ruling on WHEN or HOW this illegal practice should be stopped. Some hard fights will have to be fought and some difficult obstacles will have to be cleared away before Jim Crow will actually be driven out of the schools.

The Court had the power to rule on May 17 that since segregation violates the Constitution, it should be discontinued at once. But the Court did not exercise this power. Instead, it refused altogether to make any ruling on the time when segregation should be ended or the method that should be used to end it—postponing these questions until next fall, when they will be put back on the court docket and argued all over again.  
 
 
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