﻿Stomachs Growl While Half Hour Food Rots Away 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
If it isn’t one thing it’s another. About hald of our food products are rotting away and about half of American stomachs are whining like a bass viol in distress. It’s too goddam tragic even for a joke. (I put too much salt in the spaghetti.) Our theme song seems to be numbskullery and skullduggery. 
We ought to know industrial society cannot prosper without industrial democracy. It’s like taking a trip across the ocean without a boat. You get all wet and then the sharks (we mustn’t forget the sharks) get you. 
Our illustrious forefathers would have had industrial democracy in the constitution had they known this nation would one day be industrial. They could not see that far ahead. 
But we’re right here! Our eyesight is good, We need no specs. Let’s take a look at it. 
Ho hum—every so often a great writer spills a story that I heard way before it happened. Thus truth eventually finds its own level. “Make it come true,” is the age-old cry. 
Signs of the Times 
Van Sweringen brothers left behind them a $60,000,000 debt. 
Not so bad at all, and I was just wondering what became of all those nickels and dimes that used to strut their stuff filling growlers and uncasing country sausages. 
Lots of men have gone to jail for less but the Van Sweringens went to a grave. Recently $1,000,000 worth of Van Sweringen art objects were auctioned off in the brothers’ 54-room house for a pittance—one Dickens chair bringing only $230. 
Hearst $20,000,000 art sale takes place Nov. 16. So it goes. 
Reports of rain bring one and one-fourth cent drop in wheat—merely the report. Had it actually rained, I don’t know what would have happened but I surmise they would have taken the wheat and handed the farmer a cent and quarter. 
Nine per cent drop in department store sales reported. 
Furniture sales behind. 
Advertising reported invalid —that’s better than being a corpse. 
Training in streets urged if war comes. 
Curtis-Wright earnings drop to $444,036. Yellow truck nine months profit off to $364,350. 
All signs of the times and—only 12,000,000 unemployed. 
I.W.W. is Always Right 
We have been casting our eyes to foreign lands, passing the buck, and there has been a helpful gleam in our eyes as we viewed the hypocrites weeping over the lost sinecures of the minorities. And it never occurred to us that the minorities are goose-stepping the majorities round the May pole right here in this country. 
We have sorrowed for Lichtenstein, for Czechoslovakia, for Sarawak, etc., and we have condemned their economics and their political prestiges—and we got darn hungry doing it. In other words, we followed the bellwethers. 
It never occurred to us that what we saw over there was not economy but parsimony, same as we have right here. 
We have chosen scarcity and parsimony as a national vehicle to social welfare. So what? (I do not hesitate.) What we see over there can’t hold a candle to the wild-and-wooliness of our own current, past and present, economics. The I.W.W. is always right.