After three years of putting the English people unmercifully through the wringer of “austerity,” of ever-more crippling taxes and governmental wage controls; after three years of protesting to everyone up and down the country that the pound sterling would never, never be devalued, and that austerity was necessary to “protect the pound,” Prime Minister [James Harold] Wilson finally threw in the sponge. One Saturday morning the stunned British public awoke to find that their sacrifices had been in vain and that the pound was now devalued.

Most economists have thought that “It Couldn’t Happen Here” — not, in mighty America, the home of high productivity and, therefore, the home of free international trade. But is has happened, and because of the chronic inflationary policies of the U.S. government, we are now boxed into a situation where the administration has adopted that despotic and tyrannical method of rule hitherto confined to despised backward countries: exchange control.

For at least two decades we have been living in a society that has taken on all the characteristics of fascism. At home we have the fascist corporate state economy: an economy of monopolies, subsidies, and privileges run by a tripartite coalition of Big Business, Big Unions, and Big Government; and we have a military garrison state, with permanent conscription, tied to a permanent war economy fueled by armament contracts.

Well, this month marks our fourth full year of the presidential rule of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and it is high time to sum up his reign. These four years have been years of enormous frustration and resentment on the part of America’s liberal intellectual community. Here was a man who looked and still looks upon FDR as his political mentor — a man who ran with the support of the ADA [Americans for Democratic Action], of old and new New Dealers, of all authentic liberals — and here is a man who is now universally reviled by those former supporters.

In recent years the nation’s conservatives, bitter and angry at Supreme Court decisions preserving the rights of the individual against the police, have begun to demand a new Constitutional convention which could totally rewrite our present document.

The 1967 elections present many heartening features. The main trend shining through is the confirmation of all recent public opinion polls: the disastrous plummeting of support for the Johnson administration. Never in recent history has a president been so mistrusted, deplored, and reviled by all segments of the population; his popularity has reached an all-time low in the polls.

When the Establishment Press really zeroes in on someone and smites him from pillar to post, day after day, then it is a safe bet that he can’t be all bad. It is also a wise move to dig further and find out the reason for all this uniform wrath. So in the case of Charles de Gaulle, whom the press, liberal and conservative, has been denouncing and vilifying for years.

Turk and Greek are once again threatening war over Cyprus. No patchwork peace settlement will last. In the United States, both the left and the right are confused; since there is manifestly no Communist issue involved, and since Communism dominates everyone’s thinking, neither rightists nor leftists are able to come to grips with the complex of rights and wrongs involved.

A lot of people throughout the country are beginning to realize that getting into the Vietnam war was a disastrous mistake. In fact, hardly anyone makes so bold as to justify America’s entrance into, and generation of, that perpetual war. And so the last line of defense for the war’s proponents is: Well, maybe it was a mistake to get into the war, but now that we’re there, we’re committed, so we have to carry on.

Ever since I was a little tot, General Lewis B. Hershey has been in charge of that selective slavery system known as the draft. The man seems ageless and, as in the case of that other seemingly Indispensable Man, J. Edgar Hoover, General Hershey’s retirement rights were waived for the greater good of us all, and he rolls on, presumably immortal, ever calling out his creed of Draft ’Em All. The latest effusion of our Simon Legree was to urge the local draft boards to draft those youngsters who interfere with the workings of the Selective Service System.