Stalinist crisis NIXON AIDE ASSESSES

What does American big business stand to gain from the trade treaty Nixon is currently concluding with the Soviet Union? Commerce Secretary Peterson gave out some of the answers in a recent speech to the California Chamber of Commerce.

Peterson heads the American delegation to the USUSSR commercial commission which is now putting the final touches to a package trading agreement including a maritime deal, settlement of the outstanding Soviet wartime debt to the US and matters of credit and trade.

The final package is expeted to be ready for signing before the end of the year- -a comprehensive agreement taking into account practically all conceivable problems which might arise in the trading relationship between the two countries.

Peterson called it 'a sturdy and well-engineered bridge' between America and the Soviet Union. Justifying the new deal, he referred to its political implications:

"The worlds of international politics and international commerce are . • • intimately linked. Relaxation of political and commercial tension stands in both cause and effect relationships to one another.

'As political relationships improve, commercial relationships increase. As commercial relationships increase, the incentive to avert political differences is strengthened.' These words will doubtless be noted with justified suspicion by the liberation fighters in Vietnam who have more than once voiced their hostility to the US-Soviet rapprochement.

High prices Peterson was quick to reassure those who thought flood of cheap Soviet goods would undermine American domestic markets: Nothing could be less likely •. Anyone who saw what i saw lin the Soviet shops] could hardly believe that the Soviet Union poses much of a threat to US producers at least in the consumer-goods market.

"The goods On sale in Moscow were characterized by non-competitive features and extremely high prices... The products which the United States is most likely to sell to the Soviets machine tools, machinery and equipment and grain - have a considerably higher labour content than the raw materials which will constitute the bulk of our imports from them.' This is a shrewd capitalist assessment of the real relationship between the Soviet economy and that of the United States. Because of its inherited backwardness, its isolation from the centres of capitalist production and the Soviet CP chief, Brehznev, recent host to Nixon and Kissinger bureaucratic mismanagement of the Stalinists, the Soviet economy is in no position to compete on equal terms with the US.

And the US negotiators have been careful to ensure that the Soviet Union does not pony reign trade Person, cerive any nenent in the rea said.

One of the main American targets in the deal is to corner Soviet supplies of oil and natural gas: Peterson pointed out that US energy requirements are doubling every 15 years and said that under present schemes the USSR would soon become the No 1 natural gas supplier, surpassing both the Middle East and Venezuela.

This, Peterson said, would decrease American dependence on the 'increasingly unpredictПрести" mainly • the Middle able' group of Oil Producing and Exporting Countries East oil states. Farmers too would benefit, he said, as they were doing ilready from sales of wheat.

These sales were likely to continue, he said, cynically noting the 'dramatic contrast' between the productivity of labour on farms in the USSR and the USA.

'In 1971, the average Soviet farmer produced only oneninth the amount produced by his American counterpart,' Peterson said.

He also referred BOOKS