One British observer commented that under the plan, recovery would be so slow that it would take until 1960 before Europe would reach the standards of 1938.
The reason for such a policy was given by the conservative but alarmed journal, the London Economist, which last November declared: “Americans hesitate to spend their dollars in order to build up competitors for their trade. But if the nations of Western Europe are to become solvent, they must be allowed to compete with American trade. Congress can have, in Europe, either solvent competitors or insolvent non-competitors; it cannot have solvent non-competitors.”
It may bewilder some to see Big Business deliberately hampering recovery while distributing relief. That is like establishing a permanent breadline, congenital dependents. That can't be good for business, you say. Who's going to feed the breadlines? The answer is: you and I. We're going to feed the breadlines because we're going to pay in taxes and prices.
Observe how that tax dollar will travel. We'll pay the taxes to help the people of Western Europe who will buy from our monopolists who, since they will operate on a world scale with carefully suppressed competition, will charge high prices abroad and at home. It's a two-way take. Is that a plan to aid the peoples of the world or is it a Big Business deal? Is it a recovery program or is it a scheme to cash in on a world's desperation?
There are other indications of the handiwork of Big Business. Germany, it may be necessary to recall, was our enemy, not Russia. The industrialists of Germany, assisted by our own financiers and those of Britain, built Nazism in the factories of the Ruhr. Guided by our own business brains, the Germans subordinated all of Europe’s economy to the factories of the Ruhr. The rest of Europe, with little exception, was a virtual breadbasket for the Ruhr, an agricultural adjunct, forever dependent on it.
It became necessary during the war for Allied bombers to blast the hell out of Happy Valley, as the airmen called the Ruhr. That may have caused some of our Marshall Planners some uncomfortable moments, for they are now hastily repairing the damage to their Happy Valley while the rest of Europe waits. Last December, Secretary of the Army Royall made no bones about it. He said: "We are not trying merely to make Western Germany supporting; we are called upon to make its potential industrial productivity the cornerstone of the European Recovery Program."
Germany fought a war and lost, but only after she had bled white the rest of Europe, her enemies, our friends. Yet the Truman Administration, under the bipartisan program, during the second half of last year, shipped four times as much wheat to Bizonia as to either France or Italy.
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