PARIS BIG FOUR'S LAST CHANCE
GIDEONSE, HARRY D.
Paris Big Four's Last Chance Germany Not Real Issue; We Need Sound Economy, To Build Peace, Freedom By Harry D. Gideonse President of Brooklyn College THE SUPREME GOAL OF AMERICAN...
...Congress will no doubt investigate some of these groups with gusto...
...After all the huff and puff on the House floor about lobbyists, Mrs...
...Whitney should not get unduly uneasy...
...Another group of men, who actually exert considerably leas influence than their backing warrants, will probably come in for the most scrutiny...
...Is the sgeiety "open" to diversified racial, religious and political opinion or "closed" to all but members and agents of a single dominant group...
...Green and Mr...
...We mutt take advantage of every opportunity to negotiate a modut Vivendi that may prevent or even postpone actual military hostilities, but we must do so with a deep awareness of our weaknesses...
...The Marshall Plan has engendered new faith in Europe's future as a free community...
...If the disaster implicit in such speculations occurs, will it have been due to Stalinist propaganda, or to the stubborn stupidity of Western democracies that are unwittingly providing the setting in which Moscow's propaganda can "take...
...Our own American public opinion is so unaware of the real conflicts between Americans, British and French—not to speak of Germans, Belgians and Dutch —that it does not realize why a "diplomatic formula" is necessary...
...Now aha hag a powerful psychological weapon In her drive for German "unity," which appeals to almost every German...
...But the time is short—too short to waste on discussions of splintered German markets, reparations from non-existing German surpluses or similar essentially irrelevant Russian diversions...
...The institution of lobbying itself is one of those unavoidable embarrassments of democratic life, like sound-trucks...
...That is the final test which ail our short and long-range policies must meet...
...Other lobbies exerting such undue influence include spokesmen for private utilities, who have held up realistic river development...
...We must agree to take more of the world's products...
...Yet they have somehow managed to frustrate the American people's most passionate desire: speedy, large-scale, low-cost public housing...
...political" democracy...
...The supreme goal is not "peace," either...
...Is it possible to vote against the dominant political group and survive without fear of the political police...
...Germany as a whole has shrunk, and its population has increased because of the flow of refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia...
...The lady has said a mouthful...
...If there is to be peace and self-respect in Central Europe, these people must earn a living—and their youth must have a vision of a future more attractive than political or military adventure...
...The worst lobbyists are those that get elected to Congress...
...THE SHOCK ACCOMPANYING naked exposure of Russian objectives has made it easy to blame the Russians for the immediate stalemate...
...But facts are brutal—and they need to be faced...
...These are surface problems and it is a success of Russian diplomacy, including the barefaced holdup of the Berlin blockade, that we have our sights adjusted to such secondary objectives...
...The struggle for solvency has led—and will lead increasingly as the Marshall Plan comes to its legal termination—to a tight budgeting of foreign exchange earnings and expenditures...
...The only remedy for the political evils that flourish in the wake of a competitive scramble for reciprocally exclusive na-tional economies is a broad program of economic expansion on a world basis, or—if the Russians close their door—on as broad a regional basis as the political facts may permit...
...On the highest diplomatic level, general verbal formulas have been developed between Acheson, Schuman and Bevin...
...To put matters quite bluntly: If Indonesia, for example, is unable to command credit in the West—owing to her political and economic chaos—the consequences in retarded reconstruction will not be merely a decrease in Dutch exports, or establishment in Indonesia of a starvation economy in which Stalinism flourishes...
...There should be no appeasement, and our vigorous and imaginative policies during the past eighteen months have contributed to the strength of free society throughout the world...
...It merely restores the stalemate that existed before it began...
...RUSSIA HAS DISTRACTED our attention from the essentials...
...The UN European Economic Commission has already warned that there is a strong trend towards economic self-sufficiency everywhere in Europe...
...Do we think another generation of starved Germans will Income peaceful democrats if the world refuses to buy their goods...
...It is the problem of catching up with history and admitting the futility of national remedies for world maladies...
...These are the representatives of the fifteen million organized workers of this country, their families, their friends, and their sympathizers—in other words, "the labor lobby...
...at any rate, it will furnish good copy for the newsboys...
...Either we build a world Of larger units in which free men can live in peace and In strength-* or the old pattern repeats itself...
...the gentlemen of the American Medical Association, who will stop national health insurance at this session...
...There is only one dynamic and expansionist remedy...
...Russia seeks ultimate control of all Germany — and through Germany of Western Europe in its entirety...
...Psychologically and politically, it is tempting to proclaim that "no compromise with Moscow" is the core of our policy...
...Congress will probably release enough hot air on this subject to All all America's dirigibles and some of Russia's besides...
...We can hardly expect to maintain our present surplus of exports forever on the basis of gilts or loans...
...AMERICA MUST BUY more of Europe's products and more of the world's products in general to make dollar exchange available elsewhere which can be earned by European exports to countries other than the United States...
...the economic royalists of the South, who have stymied both an increase in the minimum wage and enforcement of the Constitution's words about civil rights...
...If they are to remain afloat, the tide of trade must carry them when our subsidies cease...
...The basis of world trade itself would shrink and the consequences would become visible immediately in deficits In Western Europe s balance of trade — internally among themselves, externally with us and with Latin America...
...We Need Sound Economy, To Build Peace, Freedom By Harry D. Gideonse President of Brooklyn College THE SUPREME GOAL OF AMERICAN DIPLOMACY, in the Paris Conference of Foreign Ministers is not modus vivendi with the Russians, or even a settlementof the German question...
...The Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact are milestones along America's road to political maturity...
...THE "PROBLEM" OF GERMANY is not the problem of Germany...
...This is, of course, the exact opposite of a rising tide for continental trade as...
...We shall lose every inch we have" gained since the fall of 1947 if we do not relentlessly pursue both the economic and the political policies which have produced this initial success or if we allow ourselves to forget that the Paris Conference begins precisely where its predecessor ended...
...It becomes dangerous only when any given interest exerts influence out of proportion to its size...
...Such a probe may either enlighten or further confuse the Washington situation...
...and Anally, our old friends, the agents of Bigger Business, who have prevented re-evaluation of the tax system and thus are clamping a firm lid on all public improvement...
...It must include our former enemies if we wish to avoid ultimate responsibility for selling them out to the Cominform...
...The credits of the Marshall Plan are floating ships that had been beached...
...They are problems affecting world trade as a whole...
...Reva Beck Bosone pointedly remarked...
...These are not merely "colonial" problems...
...the "old," or about "economic" vs...
...Munich and Yalta are one-word reminders of the futility of appeasement—and of the ultimate cost of a policy of buying peace by an unending series of unilateral concessions to a powerthirsty dictatorship...
...A good example is the real estate lobby during the past four years...
...Are poliMtel J^lUr* abo^*, tlu» law...
...a whole: Europe will not be a community of free men if the economic base of its society shrinks...
...She sought i\ when the-last conference of foreign ministers broke down ia London in December 1047...
...The tes^s are .old and simple...
...Similarly, the Oerman question is not merely one of the Russian zone and our cone...
...Others may get off with a line or two in the record...
...But Mr...
...Can a government be challenged in its own courts...
...Once again we begin to bargain amid all the ha sards of internal division of opinion and interest in America, in France and in Great Britain...
...After a year of political gangster methods in Berlin, it has so completely obscured basic realities that mere removal of its illegal blockade has led a large section of vDlegtern opinion to believe that peacejis at hand, and that the financially costly Marshall Plan and the politically risky Atlantic Pact are now obsolete...
...The and of the Berlin bloafcada to not "a solution...
...The ultimate goal of American diplomacy must be the preservation and the extension of the area in which individual freedom can endure...
...Murray and Mr...
...AN EDITORIAL— The Lobby Hobby NOW THAT THE 81st CONGRESS (first session) has failed to enact President Truman's program, it looks like a joint Congressional investigation of lobbying is in the works...
...The sober facts are: The blockade was broken by our air power...
...It is time to face the agenda which destiny presents...
...The time has now come for a positive program designed to enlarge the political and economic framework in which the present narrow approach has led to a stalemate...
...She has pursued this end since Potsdam in IMS...
...It is not a question of verbal camouflage and propaganda smokescreens about the "new" democracy vs...
...The Atlantic Pact is introducing political stability even before its ratification...
...We cannot face the consequences of shrinking exports without concern for domestic reperaussiosu...
...For while the big money talks in ^nost newspapers and in some Congresses, the big numbers on the voting machines generally have the last worcL Finally, let us call your attention to the sage words of a freshman Congresswoman from Utah...
...These gentlemen represent one of the smallest and—thanks to their "trickledown" philosophy—one of the most backward segments of American opinion...
Vol. 32 • May 1949 • No. 22
