COMMENT

...Such demonstrations are politically embarrassing to the NATO governments, and they may indeed delay or block the stationing of new missiles in Western Europe...

...Furthermore, the political power structure in such economic institutions as the International Monetary Fund is rigged in favor of the wealthy nations, which make sure that any financial arrangements entered into perpetuate the existing international inequities...

...The Left must, of course, continue to organize against this Administration's policies...

...Unfortunately, the same words also suggest the low estate of current radical politics...

...COMMENT Cause and Cure The mails recently brought us a handsome brochure from the Riverside Church Disarmament Program—an invitation to a mid-November convocation on "The Arms Race and Us" set for New York City...

...Yet many on the Left seem to find political causes meaningful only when they can be presented in personal, even Manichean, terms...

...It's not just a matter of getting rid of those bad guys...

...So it was easy to cheer when Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo declaimed that changes must be made in the "unjust and unfair" world economic order...

...The Reagan Administration," the brochure began, "appears determined to reverse the priorities of the Magnificat, filling the rich with good things and sending the poor empty away...

...Maybe the networks needed to do something to hold the attention of those who resented a tainted series after a season in which one-third of the games were not played...

...Poverty Benins at Home The summit conference of developing nations held in October at Cancun, Mexico, gave leaders of the poor countries a rare opportunity to highlight the role of the wealthy industrial states in perpetuating world poverty...

...To retain the gold standard, the government must curb the growth of its money supply until inflation is halted or held to a manageable rate...

...A return to the gold standard would deprive the Fed of the power to avert a major economic collapse by increasing the money supply and thereby easing the availability of credit...

...The plan was scrapped when residents protested that the technology posed unknown dangers to health and the environment, and that its presence would make the region a prime target in a nuclear war...

...The regulatory apparatus that was supposed to protect Americans against corporate abuse has been decaying not since Ronald Reagan's inauguration, but for decades...

...policy will have to come, ultimately, not from a resurgent peace movement in Europe but from peace mobilization here at home...

...Without a political movement that can make the connections between the arms race, unemployment, the loss of community, and an economic system that places profits before human needs, we will have many more Presidents who resort to the facile solutions of a Ronald Reagan—or a Jimmy Carter...

...It wasn't Reagan who sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic or the CIA into Guatemala...

...The Navy proposed to relay these signals from huge underground transmitters buried in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where geological formations make for an ideal ELF site...

...One U.S...

...The Europeans recognize the danger, and every weekend of late hundreds of thousands of them have demonstrated in the streets of Brussels and Antwerp, Bonn and Berlin, Oslo, Paris, Rome, London, and other cities...

...Certainly it is a political and moral obligation to oppose a billion-dollar cut in food stamp funding or a few-billion-dollar increase for the B-l bomber...

...In a modern capitalist economy, however, the gold standard serves one basic function: It provides an automatic, self-regulating control over the money supply...

...Judging from the rush of official statements and media commentary, the choice has been made: The restoration of the gold standard is to be the magic that rescues us from the doldrums of stagflation...

...Like the media giants, we readily fall into a preoccupation with the Presidency and its current occupant, overrating his power and importance while neglecting the larger and more permanent forces that set the terms of our political life...

...Difficult as it may be for some of us to accept, Neanderthal pontics have systemic causes...

...Existing sections of ELF would be put on line within a month, and more would be built over the next four years...

...Invariably, these efforts have enjoyed the cooperation and support of indigenous elites eager for a share, however small, of the corporate take...

...A similar pattern can be seen in many nations of the Third World: Functioning economies have been destroyed, or the creation of functioning economies has been thwarted, by multinational corporations eager to develop crops or products for export rather than for local consumption...

...There were even more television closeups of Steinbrenner than of players' wives, and commentary focused incessantly on Steinbrenner's ultimatum to Yankee catcher Rick Cerone, Steinbrenner's plan A and plan ? if the Yankees booted the series, Steinbrenner's stormy relations with Billy Martin, Gene Michael, Reggie Jackson, and fisticuffs with assorted fans...

...Those conservative economists who are now convinced that only a severe recession—or depression—can restore our system to economic health...

...Truman announced in December 1950, for example, that he was considering the use of nuclear weapons in Korea...

...To the victorious Dodgers, we offer the sound of one hand clapping...

...This isn't just a Reagan trick...

...As Michael Parenti observed in these pages last month ("The High Cost of Empire"), foreign aid is a matter of taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country...

...They execute the imperatives of our economic and political system...

...But the small American Left does a grave disservice when it fails to point out that the Reagan Administration's program is a natural extension of the profit-mad policies we pursue at home and the imperial objectives we pursue abroad...

...The grievances of the poor nations are certainly legitimate...

...Our world is, of course, much more complicated than Truman's, and much more dangerous...

...Seeing the radio project come, go, magically take on new forms, vanish, and reappear has become something of a tradition in those parts...

...In such circumstances, infusions of foreign aid or development funds may do little or nothing to relieve poverty and may, in fact, create new problems...

...NBC News quoted one unnamed White House aide as explaining that the President had not been adequately briefed on the matter of nuclear war...

...Unfortunately, we pay a high price for this readinesss to stagecraft our political dramaturgy as morality play...

...The Navy scaled things down, scaled them down again, and finally last spring, said it was ready to abandon Project ELF...

...It is ever so much easier to vent frustration and anger at the "evil" Reagan Presidency than to focus on the economic and political system that has produced both the thirty-ninth President and his policies...

...The Soviets were swift to make the most of Reagan's gaffe, and the news media in this country and abroad had a field day...

...Arthur Laffer, he of the curious supply-side curve, has gone so far as to suggest that Ronald Reagan's program can't work unless the gold standard is swiftly put in place...

...Unfortunately, the conference also gave these leaders an opportunity to conceal the role played by their own governments and economic elites in perpetuating poverty and dependency...

...Environmental and civil liberties groups—yes, even progressive publications^—have been able to raise money effectively by appealing to apprehensions about the Reagan Administration...

...But his statement, like much of the oratory at Cancun, glossed over the gross inequalities in poor societies—including Mexico's—and the political and economic power that sustains such inequalities...

...Even when multinational investment boosts a poor nation's gross national product, it may simultaneously increase unemployment and widen the gap between rich and poor...

...All this should be understood first of all as an exercise in nostalgia...

...a faltering Jimmy Carter did not hesitate to turn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan into a cosmic confrontation that served to justify a massive escalation of bellicose oratory and military spending...

...It can lead to a kind of cult of personality in reverse...

...holders of currency lose confidence and turn it in for the precious metal...

...That is precisely why the Reagan Administration is so eager to deploy new nuclear weaponry in Western Europe, to develop a new generation of super-missiles, and to get the B-l bomber into production: The United States must have the capability not only to initiate a tactical nuclear exchange, but to prevent the Soviets from retaliating with strategic weapons...

...Wiring the Woods For years, a nagging problem has kept the Navy going around in circles: Its nuclear submarines are said to be the strongest leg of the "military triad," but the brass claims it has not found a reliable way of communicating with them...

...That was the crux of Reagan's apparently careless assertion that "you could have the exchange of tactical weapons in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the button...

...For them, Ronald Reagan now occupies the niche that was so amply filled by Richard Nixon a decade ago, figuring as both the symbol and the cause of our public woes...

...President Eisenhower directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to weigh the possibilities of deploying them against an Iraqi move into Kuwait as well as in defense of the Chinese off-shore islands of Quemoy and Matsu...

...It wasn't Reagan who dispatched the first U.S...

...Who, then, would favor a return to the gold standard...

...Cancun made it clear that many leaders of the Third World are content to invoke genuine grievances not to achieve such change, but to perpetuate their own power and hide their own role in exploitation at home...

...official insisted that "technically, the President didn't really say anything new"—and he was right...

...Reagan's big blunder was not to articulate a dangerous new nuclear doctrine for the United States, but to state clearly and explicitly what has, in fact, been American policy on atomic warfare since the dawn of the nuclear age...

...But the impact on U.S...

...Bod os Cold Now that even the Reagan Administration's throatiest cheerleaders for supply-side economics are beginning to understand that free-market bromides won't return the country to prosperity, a frantic search is on to find a new quick fix for what ails us...

...To be effective, however, a threat must be credible—and it becomes credible only when an adversary knows that the threat will be carried out...

...The tax laws that provide the most bizarre advantages to the rich have not been enacted in this Administration...

...The Navy's answer, first advanced some twenty years ago, was extremely low frequency (ELF) radio signals, which do penetrate the waters...

...diplomacy by other means...

...At a time of approximate nuclear parity between the Soviet Union and the United States, it takes a formidable first-strike capability ?? mount a persuasive nuclear threat...

...A "Marshall Plan" for the developing countries, advocated at Cancun by many Third World leaders, would provide no cure for international poverty...

...And what better diversion than Steinbrenner's revolting soap opera for concealing the ways the business of baseball has taken the game away from the players and fans...

...Unfortunately, however, the achievement of effective first-strike capability increases the likelihood that someone will be tempted to launch a preemptive attack, and the presence of nuclear weaponry in Europe or other areas of superpower confrontation increases the likelihood that a conventional conflict would soon lead to final catastrophe...

...The practical effect, in our present political and economic climate, would be to compel the Federal Reserve to adopt and maintain severely restrictive monetary policies regardless of the consequences...

...Similarly, the people (and politicians) of the Upper Midwest can send an unmistakable message that the time has come to shelf ELF...

...COMMENT limitless Nuclear War President Reagan's casual observation on the possibility of waging limited nuclear war in Europe set off a flurry of explanations and denials here at home and an uproar in Western Europe, where it lent new momentum to a rapidly growing peace movement...

...And surely every President since Harry Truman has added eagerly to our nuclear arsenal...

...That should have been the end of it, but in October, President Reagan announced plans to pick up where the Navy left off...

...No politician—not even Ronald Reagan—is willing to take the political risks entailed in advocating depression as an economic cure, but a return to the gold standard would achieve the same result by impersonal means, presumably avoiding the political consequences...

...military "advisers" to Indochina, or who followed up with hundreds of thousands of troops...

...But this can be a trap...

...the distribution of wealth in America has been virtually unchanged for a century...

...It appears eager to increase our nuclear arsenal, stimulating the Soviets to do the same, and thereby decreasing everyone's security...

...Therefore, the terms of trade operate consistently against the poor nations...

...The poorer nations certainly need development capital, but they also need the economic and political changes that will leave them free to choose their own paths in their own self-interest...

...For the true believer, gold embodies a vast array of virtues...

...In a slumping economy where workers have little control over the future of their jobs and communities, for example, it is easy for a President to appeal to a false sense of power by trying to flex U.S...

...They are compelled, as Argentine economist Raul Prebisch has pointed out, to buy finished products in concentrated, non-competitive markets, but to sell their raw materials in competitive markets...

...The presumption is false, of course—as Herbert Hoover learned in the years following the collapse of 1929...

...Conventional radio signals do not penetrate the ocean depths where the subs prowl on constant alert, the Navy says, and when the crafts surface to receive messages, they give themselves away...

...As they did in the protests against atmospheric nuclear testing that finally led to a test-ban treaty a generation ago, the Europeans are showing the way for us...

...But the witches who are stirring the pot of gold these days don't know much more about politics than they do about economics...

...muscle around the world...

...Surely he is not the first President to pursue economic politics benefiting the rich...

...It wasn't Ronald Reagan who initiated the Cold War or the loyalty purges...

...At this point, residents of Wisconsin and Michigan might be well advised to take their cue from the citizens of Nevada and Utah, who recently served their own ends by saying no, in a loud public roar, to missiles in their midst...

...a nation that adheres to the gold standard, any unusual attempt to inflate the currency must result in a loss of gold...

...What President Reagan has done, inadvertently or by design, is bring this critical issue out into the open in a way unmatched since Truman's press conferences of the 1950s...

...throughout most of our history, political leaders have favored "incentives" for business—tax breaks and loopholes and public subsidies which, somehow, never trickle down very far...

...Others suggested that Reagan needed to be kept on a shorter leash by his advisers...

...World Serious The sorriest baseball season in memory has ended, appropriately, with another round of antics by Yankee owner George Steinbrenner...

...The original scheme was a 6,000-mile antenna grid in Wisconsin—a system so large it could survive even a direct nuclear hit...

...As these and many other instances make plain, the threat of resorting to atomic arms has served for decades as a means of waging U.S...

...Such staunch right-wing Senators as Nevada's Paul Laxalt and Utah's Orrin Hatch managed to make it plain to the President and the Air Force that their enthusiasm for the military did not extend to a willingness to see their home states turned into Pentagon patsies...

...We are no admirer of the Reagan Administration or its works, but it seems to us that even Ronald Reagan deserves a fairer shake than this...

...Richard Nixon raised the prospect of nuclear escalation in Vietnam, and Jimmy Carter informed the Soviets that nuclear weapons would be brought into play to defend Iran...

...Presidents do not initiate, for the most part...

...Beginning with Harry Truman, Presidents of every party and persuasion have found it expedient to rattle the Bomb— even when no conceivable threat to the security of the United States was in sight...

...Such invitations reach The Progressive with some regularity, but this one caught our attention with its dramatic opening words—a text that could readily serve as a rallying cry for the American Left...

...It can lull us into thinking that by defeating this particular President or that particular budget cut, we have really changed the political and economic system...

...The president of West Germany's central bank, in a statement that captured the mood of those who yearn for a return to gold, has said, "As long as we had this dollar-gold standard in the Bretton Woods era, we had growth, we had low inflation rates, low interest rates— a much better world than the world we are living in today...

...And because President Reagan is so clearly perceived in Left-wing and liberal circles as the incarnation of evil, many of our causes have been helped by having him to kick around...

...they execute...

...Mexico's dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party gave its blessings, for instance, to the Rockefeller-funded "green revolution" when it began in the 1940s and continues to support it, though the result has been to promote concentration of landed wealth in Mexico and turn what was once a self-sufficient farm economy into an exporter of luxury foods and an importer of staples...

...More than half of Mexico's national income, for example, goes to an elite 10 per cent of the population that consists of agribusiness owners, real estate speculators, bankers, high army officers, and bureaucrats—the elements that have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Government of the United States and with U.S.-based multinational firms...

...As the citizens' protests gained momentum, they were bolstered by a series of official reports that the project cost too much and would not work anyway...

...And, for that matter, it wasn't Truman or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter who did any of those things...