Many Houstonians, however, when they turned on their television sets May 24 for the evening news, got to hear a different explanation of the gasoline shortage.

“As an oil refinery worker, I know something firsthand about the energy hoax … and the profits the oil companies are making,” said Debby Leonard, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Houston, at a well-attended news conference announcing her campaign.

“At the refinery where I work, the pipelines are full, crude storage tanks are overflowing, the docks are full of tankers and barges, and the company is renting storage tanks at other facilities. But the gasoline producing units at the refinery are operating at a reduced rate—a rate barely sufficient to keep them on stream.”

“The energy industry,” says Leonard, “should be taken out of the hands of private profiteers. In order for us to find out the real truth, the energy industry should be nationalized and placed under public ownership.”  
 
June 7, 1954
At the behest of the brutal, profit-hungry United Fruit Company, the Eisenhower administration is stepping up to a screaming climax its campaign to incite outside invasion and internal counter-revolution against tiny Guatemala.

This impoverished Central American country of less than three million people has invoked the wrath of American imperialism by introducing mild agrarian reforms that have affected the property holdings of United Fruit, one of the ten largest holdings of American foreign investments and notorious exploiter of the “Banana Empire” in Central America.

Washington is attempting to incite Guatemala’s neighboring countries, including Nicaragua and Honduras, to invade Guatemala. The U.S. has already signed military alliances with these countries and is sending them huge shipments of arms.

This campaign of U.S. intervention has been mounting ever since the land reform measures were enacted in 1952. The law provided for distribution among landless peasants of uncultivated estates of more than 667 acres. According to the United Fruit Co. officials, by May 1 of this year the Guatemala government had expropriated from the company a total of 392,945 acres. This left the United Fruit “only” 145,187 acres for banana production and “other operations.”  
 
 
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