Europe must pay say US economists

ON THE first anniversary of President Nixon's deci. sion to sever the link between the dollar and gold, American government spokesmen stressed their determination to press ahead with the economic war on Europe and Japan.

The Council of Economic Advisers in Washington marked the anniversary with a policy document attacking the Common Market agricultural policy and demanding new trade concessions from the EEC.

The Council report recomA GROUP of American trade union leaders have come out against the policy of the AFL-CIO and formed a national committee to support Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.

Five of the unions have put up $125,000 to support McGovern's campaign. The new committee claims to represent 5 million workers.

The AFL - CIO, America's largest trade union confederation, has refused to back the Democrats because of McGovern's long record of hostility to the workers' movement.

George Meany, the AFL-CIO president, has urged members not to vote for either of the two big business candidates but to back Congress candidates known to sympathize with the labour movement.

In this way, Meany hopes to avoid the burning question of an independent Labour Party being built in the United States on the basis of the trade unions.

A section of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, however, is still trying to paint McGovern as a 'friend of labour'.

Joseph Kannan, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and chairman of the newly-formed McGovern mends that in negotiations over trade and monetary questions next year the US should aim primarily to force the Common Market countries to open their markets to American food produce by dismantling the common agricultural policy.

In particular, the Council says that 'the trade agreement should place the real cost of domestic social programmes on the McGovern committee, said McGovern had *a record 93.4 per cent favourable to labour' If this is the case, it is the other 6.6 per cent that counts.

McGovern has consistently voted in the Senate against minimum wage proposals and against the extension of unemployment compensation. He has also been a firm advocate of so-called 'right to work' laws which legalize the use of scabs in strikes.

He is also on record as favouring the retention of section 14B of the infamous Taft-Hartley Act and voting against laws legalizing the closed shop for government employees. country ceciding to them'.

In other words, if the Europeans want to protect their tarming, they must do so without infringing America's right to sell its goods anywhere it pleases without let or hindrance.

The logic of this demand is that the Common Market should disband altogether as its basic purpose is the protection of domestic industry and agriculture against foreign competition.

The US is also demanding that any changes in the monetary system—due to be discussed on a new Committee of 20—must be linked to questions of trade and capital investment.

The EEC has opposed this idea because it knows the main aim of American policy is to open new markets at the expense of Europe and Japan.

In a separate statement issued by the Treasury department, the Nixon administration refused to consider restoring the convertibility of the dollar with gold until it has increased its reserve holdings by running a series of balance-of-payments surpluses.

The only way this situation can be brought about is by the total capitulation of the European and Japanese capitalists to American demands on trade and investIn fact the Commerce Department has already predicted that the US deficit this year will be around $4,000m, twice the 197. figure.

The Department complains that: 'Even measured in dollar terms, over the latest 12-month period an overwhelming majority of America's largest trading partners reduced the value of their imports from the United States while buying more from others.

"The US share thus fell sharply in each-in fact, declines are shown in three-fourths of the listed markets' In Germany, for example, the US share of imports declined from 10.3 per cent last year to 9 per cent, although total German imports had increased 18 per cent.