The Marshall Mao Plan
America is weak when it should be strong. Our leaders from both parties are to blame.
In 2011, the EU was still dealing with the global financial collapse. I wrote this in 2011, titled the Marshall Mao Plan, and I think it still holds up:
Perhaps the most significant accomplishment in the post-WWII world was the initiation of Public Law 472, otherwise known as the Marshall Plan. In the current era of European anti-Americanism and the purposeful denigration of America’s greatness and global leadership in the 20th Century by a “progressive” intelligentsia, this 4 year plan of rebuilding financed by the American people is mostly forgotten.
Albrecht Ritschl of the Humboldt Universitaet in Berlin remembers and describes it thusly:
Between 1948 and 1951, the United States poured financial aiding totaling $13 billion (about $100 billion at 2003 prices) into the economies of Western Europe. Officially termed the European Recovery Program (ERP), the Marshall Plan was approved by Congress in the Economic Cooperation Act of April 1948. After a transitory 90-Days Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan spanned three ERP years from July 1948 to June 1951. Congress appropriated payments to European countries in annual installments. Most of U.S. assistance under the ERP took the form of grants; the loan component had deliberately been kept low to avoid transfer problems. Distribution of the ERP funds among the recipient countries and their allocation to key sectors were placed in the hands of a U.S. board operating in Europe, the Economic Cooperation Agency (ECA). Countries would present requests for deliveries of goods to the ECA, which evaluated and decided them according to a set scheme of priorities. Dollar payments by the ECA for any deliveries were complemented by a system of national matching funds in the recipient countries, called counterpart funds. Countries would pay for ERP deliveries, not in U.S. dollars but in their own national currencies. These payments were credited to their respective counterpart funds. With a view to the German transfer problem of the inter-war period, no attempt was made to transfer these payments into U.S. dollars. Instead, the ECA employed these counterpart funds to channel investment into bottleneck sectors of the respective national economies. Repayment to the U.S. of the ERP’s loan component was effected in the mid-1950s.
For those who want to know more or just to remind their friends of the true greatness and magnanimity of the United States of America and its people in the face of reconstruction after the most devastating war this planet has ever known, I highly recommend visiting the USAID website here and the US National Archives and Records Administration here. This is the introduction to the Marshall Plan at the Archives and Records site:
As the war-torn nations of Europe faced famine and economic crisis in the wake of World War II, the United States proposed to rebuild the continent in the interest of political stability and a healthy world economy. On June 5, 1947, in a commencement address at Harvard University, Secretary of State George C. Marshall first called for American assistance in restoring the economic infrastructure of Europe. Western Europe responded favorably, and the Truman administration proposed legislation. The resulting Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 restored European agricultural and industrial productivity. Credited with preventing famine and political chaos, the plan later earned General Marshall a Nobel Peace Prize.
Sometimes we need reminding of how great our country and its people really are.
Unfortunately, our country has missed another opportunity to strike a blow for freedom in the wake of yet another global disaster, the global financial meltdown. The poor stewardship of our resources, our navel gazing about exploiting our own resources and the refusal of our political class to seek global leadership is to blame. Combined with the meddling and market distortion of an increasingly socialist governing philosophy these actions have wrought an America that is weaker on the modern field of battle that it has been since the Revolutionary War. As a result of our weakness, Communist China is stepping in to fill the void.
There was a key provision of the Marshall Plan that guaranteed the freedom of Europe in a post-war power vacuum, one that another powerful communist state attempted to fill. That was the compulsory rejection of the Eastern Bloc (communism) and the equally compulsory acceptance of Western Bloc principles (capitalism). The Hoover Institution at Stanford University describes it here:
The Marshall Plan formed the greatest voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another known to history. Technically known as the European Recovery Program, the plan was passed by the U.S. Congress with a decisive majority and was signed by President Truman on April 3, 1948–just in time to influence the Italian election in that year.
The Marshall Plan did not, in and of itself, cause Western European economic recovery. Indeed, there was little direct correlation between the amount of U.S. aid received and the speed of economic recovery in the various recipient countries. France and Britain obtained much more aid per capita than West Germany, which nevertheless progressed more quickly than either. But the Marshall Plan (guided by the European Cooperation Administration, ECA) helped to tide Western Europe over a dangerous period. The plan provided new confidence to Western Europe; the plan furnished money, food, fuel, and machinery at a time when the Western European economies were all in disarray. Marshall Plan experts argued in favor of free trade, decentralized management, breaking up of cartels, the elimination of quotas and customs, and labor-saving technologies.
The Marshall planners were convinced that only a prosperous Europe could resist communism.
The Plan worked.
Russia and its Eastern Bloc allies fought it tooth and nail. After initially deciding to accept the aid, the Soviet ambassador in Washington saw the Marshall Plan as means to create an anti-Soviet bloc. In negotiations to be held in Paris regarding the aid, Stalin decreed that countries in the Eastern Bloc must not agree to accept economic conditions. Once he learned that credits would be extended only on willingness to accept economic cooperation and that Germany would also be extended aid, which he thought would hamper the Soviets’ desire to exercise influence in western Germany, he changed his mind and immediately sought to take stronger control over the Eastern Bloc countries, abandoning the illusion he had presented to the West of building democratic institutions. When it appeared that non-communist parties might receive in excess of 40 percent of the vote in the August 1947 Hungarian elections, an all-out repression was instituted to suppress independent political forces. In that same month, total annihilation of the opposition in Bulgaria began.
People forget that Russia was then, like China today, on the rise in the post-war era and well in its way to forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR is something that the younger folks don’t remember since Reagan broke their backs with the fall of the Berlin Wall).
From the Financial Times:
China is very likely to contribute to the eurozone’s bail-out fund but the scope of its involvement will depend on European leaders satisfying some key conditions, two senior advisers to the Chinese government have told the Financial Times.
Any Chinese support would depend on contributions from other countries and Beijing must be given strong guarantees on the safety of its investment, according to Li Daokui, an academic member of China’s central bank monetary policy committee, and Yu Yongding, a former member of that committee.
And the markets and investors are slavering over China as their great savior:
Financial markets reacted with relief hours after a European deal was agreed at a summit aimed at calming the two-year-long sovereign debt crisis. The plan includes recapitalising European banks, making them accept a loss of 50 per cent on their holdings of Greek debt and boosting the firepower of the rescue fund, known as the European Financial Stability Facility.
Do you think that China might have some conditions of their own?
Europe is like a bunch of addicts, a group of nations filled with crack whores, just looking for a fix – and it doesn’t matter where or who they get it from. They don’t care who they have to have anal sex with and what the ultimate cost is to them or their freedom, they just want to ease back into nothingness with their universal health care and state pensions at age 55.
Before we get too judgmental, we need to realize that we are standing on the same corner in our fishnets and stilettos, completing our ensemble with the requisite halter top and miniskirt, waving lustily at the next 7 Series BMW rolling by. Back in July, I wrote how our addiction and our dealer (now China) control our lives. The United States is in essentially the same condition as Europe because we have adopted a version of the European democratic socialist model. To be indebted to a communist enemy like China would have been unthinkable just 30 years ago and because we are now in a weak position, we have likely handed Europe back to the same communist ethos that the Marshall Plan prevented.
The only positive is that the Russians and Chinese know how to deal with radical Islam.
America should be able to withstand the rising communist tide due to being separated from China and Russia by two oceans and, in spite of Democratic efforts to the contrary, still having the strongest military in the world. Europe is not so fortunate. They now count on a weak and unreliable ally, America, to protect them…our financial condition severely limits our ability to project power and our political class lacks the willingness even if we had the funding.
Europe will eventually succumb to the terms of surrender offered by the Communist Party of China. Maybe they won’t care – many countries are already there – but America should care.
America missed an opportunity to free the people of Europe for another century. Yet more evidence of our ruling class’ abdication of the mantle of global leadership that the “Greatest Generation” fought and died for.