Tightened their bolts and cut their rations. But food rationing has been completely eliminated in the Soviet Union, almost done away with in Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia is the one land in Europe where shops are well stocked at reasonable prices.
These lands still need help desperately, but they are recovering because they are not ruled by a plan for pauperism, for perpetual dependence, political and economic.
Now there's a domestic side to ERP. The money for this gigantic scheme comes out of American pockets, millions of them. It goes back into American pockets, too—a handful of them.
We've seen how this confidence game works abroad. At home, it must work overtime because here’s where it must pay off.
Just as the crusade against Communism abroad serves only to subserve all Europe to the aims of American monopoly, so at home steps taken in the name of anti-Communism lead to a get-tough policy with the people and fatter profits for the monopolists.
The Marshall Plan and the Taft-Hartley Act go together. It’s double talk to be for one and against the other because the men behind both know that they’re part of the same plan. The United Press on February 15th had this to say: “A top Federal labor official said today that the Government ‘cannot and will not permit’ big strikes in coal, oil, atomic energy, railroads, or shipping this year.”
“The official, who did not wish to have his name used, declared that the Administration would use the national emergency section of the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Act to halt strikes in essential industries.”
This same official was quoted as adding: “Labor and management cannot be allowed to endanger the Marshall European Recovery Plan with work stoppages. They have got to settle their differences without strikes.”
And the story ended on this note: “There is nothing in the labor law which bars the President from recommending new and stronger legislation to curb labor and management.”
So it goes, from loyalty oaths and the inquisitions by those who would censor our minds on to imprisonment without trial. And with it goes the cry for more arms, universal military training, the glorification of our military strength. The United Nations, in such a program, tends to become a tool of ours.
We have seen that ERP worsens the economic plight of Europe, reducing it to beggary, that it shuts off all of Eastern Europe from our trade, that it strengthens the control of American monopolists over the world. Does that lead to the kind of commerce that will mean stable prosperity for the United States? It does not.
It has manufactured a boom that even now is straining at the seams. In 1920-1921, Herbert Hoover had a much more modest plan along similar lines. He, too, used...
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