Vol. 72/No. 2      January 14, 2008

Farmers had come from at least seven states to protest the court-ordered auction of a 320-acre wheat and milo farm near Campo. The owner, Jerry Wright, had missed two annual payments on a $85,000 loan from the Federal Land Bank and a $125,000 loan from the Farm Home Administration.

Wright had earlier made payments totaling $50,000 on the $85,000 loan. But due to a gigantic jump in interest rates, he now owes $86,000 even though he repaid more than half his original loan.

Wright told a rally outside the courthouse that the recession and federal government policies including the embargo on the sale of American grain to the Soviet Union has made it “totally impossible to pay my operating costs and make my land payments too.”  
 
January 6, 1958
DETROIT—The most immediate and urgent single problem facing the United Auto Workers’ Special Convention this month is the beginning of mass unemployment in the automobile industry.

In Detroit last week, Chrysler workers were talking about a corporation statement that everything was “normal.” How “normal” may be judged from the fact that for the past month and a half, Dodge workers here have been on a three to three-and-a-half day week. From Dec. 20 to Jan. 7 the plant will be completely shut down. Ordinarily the winter months are times of peak production in auto. In most years, relatively full employment provides Detroit workers with their Christmas cheer. This year Santa is bringing lay off slips, instead.

At the local DeSoto plant the workforce has been cut by 20% affecting workers with as much as seven years of seniority in some cases. A total of 60,000 workers in the Detroit area alone are “furloughed” for two weeks.  
 
January 7, 1933
The military clique in control of the political fortunes of Japan has embarked upon the second phase of its military adventure of conquest in Northern China. Under some flimsy pretext the Japanese army, navy, marines, and air force has laid waste to the city of Shanhaikwan. After a ferocious assault the Japanese forces with the use of armored cars, bombs thrown from airplanes, cannonades, and all together paraphernalia that goes with a bombardment, the Japanese succeeded in repeating their raid on Shanghai a year ago. The whole Chinese garrison of 500 soldiers and about as many civilians, men, women and children were annihilated, and the city reduced to smoldering ruins by these terrific assaults.

The Japanese invasion will not stop with the capture of this northern city. It is but another step in the campaign of Japanese imperialists to carve a colonial empire out of Northern China.  
 
 
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