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    Wishful Thinking and Reality - GDR Review

    Several years ago I bought several copies of the GDR Review for 1988 and 1990 from a college professor on E-bay. This was an English language magazine extolling the virtues of the GDR and it's readership was primarily in the UK and Western Europe.

    I was leafing thru a copy yesterday and came across this insightful article from Aug 88 on the arms race between the Soviet Union and the US. Unfortunately, they predicted the collapse of the wrong superpower. The description of the US stock market crash is eerily reminiscent of the last year. A classic piece of DDR Agitprop which always contains a small kernel of truth.

    Wishful Thinking and Reality
    GDR Review, Magazine from the German Democratic Republic 8/88
    Peter Ehrlich

    "THE UNITED STATES should develop weapons, for which the Soviet Union will have difficulty finding a re­ply, which will impose dis­proportionately high costs, open up new areas of com­prehensive military competi­tion and render earlier Soviet investments worthless." This was the idea put forward at the Pentagon in 1983 and then laid down in a guideline document of the US Depart­ment of Defence for the fol­lowing four years.

    In a nutshell this means: military superiority remains the declared objective. If, however, this superiority cannot be achieved, the next priority must be to employ the supposed technological superiority of the West to cause as much damage to the Soviet economy as possi­ble or even to ruin it. Great hopes (and in the meantime also large amounts of mon­ey) have been invested in the star wars project to this end...

    A few years later now, the situation has taken an unex­pected turn. The boomerang has come back. The knock­out for the Soviet Union has failed to materialise. Instead the United States' own econ­omy has been hit. Stock mar­ket crash, budget and trade deficits of record size, runa­way increases in net foreign debts, social decline and shrinking growth rates are all clear symptoms.

    Commenting on the stock market crash in November last year. Business Week noted that the United States had been presented with the bill for its wasteful expendi­ture. That arms expenditure, which has risen from 144,000 million dollars in 1980 to just under 300,000 million dollars today, has had a very signifi­cant role to play is no longer a secret in the United States.

    U.S. News & World Report

    was able to state that the ner­vousness brought about by the deficits had caused pub­lic support for increased spending by the Pentagon to dry up.
    Caspar Weinberger's suc­cessor, Frank Carlucci, in his first representations to the Senate, then said it was his aim to work closely with Congress, in order to bridge the budget gap between the requirements of the Depart­ment of Defence and the economic potential of the country. The worldwide "jus­tified duties" of the USA ex­ceeded its current capacity. Even though we could dis­cuss further on the "justified duties", the overall admis­sion is self-evident.

    Let us look back to the be­ginning once more. In 1980 the Reagan administration set about solving two tasks at the same time: not only to finance a wide range of am­bitious arms programmes, but also to satisfy the wishes of big business and smaller firms by means of generous tax handouts.
    Taxes, on the other hand, are the principal source of in­come for the state. As a re­sult-as arms spending rock­eted and taxes on pro­fits dwindled-a huge hole opened up and grew in the United States' budget. The deficit increased from about 50,000 million dollars in 1980 to 220,000 million dollars in 1986. Ronald Reagan, who had also promised to halt the growth in the national debt when he took office, will now leave behind him a mountain of debt more than twice as high as that permit­ted by the seven presidents in the preceding 40 years taken together.

    Those profiting from arms production will probably be unconcerned. For them the eight years of the Reagan ad­ministration have been very fat years. Their "goods" have always found a market and brought in super-profits.
    For the most varied branches of civilian industry in the United States, how­ever, the development trends have been rather dif­ferent. The increasing mil­itarisation of the economy has undermined their com­petitive position on both na­tional and international mar­kets. Such negative effects can even be observed in the case of high technology. For example, for highly inte­grated memory chips, where Japan's share of the world market is growing con­stantly. In other spheres-notably in robot technology and modern machine tools-Far Eastern partners and competitors have already taken over the United States' position as world leader.

    Above all the almost exclu­sive orientation of science towards military research has been discovered to be a reason for this negative trend. The military share of state research and develop­ment expenditure in the USA has risen from 48.2 per cent in 1980 to 72.7 per cent in 1986. As this situation will continue, a burden has al­ready been placed on the fu­ture.

    After the years of cam­paigning aimed at military su­periority over the Soviet Union the situation is even more depressing for those Americans living on the fringes of society.

    The numbers of poor and homeless in the United States runs into millions. And continue to grow, because the falling income is accom­panied by annual cuts in so­cial programmes. On the subject of the causes of In­creasing homelessness Busi­ness Week wrote that, under Reagan, government spend­ing on social housing, both in the public and the private sector, had been drastically reduced-from 30,000 million dollars in 1981 to just seven thousand million dollars last year. In 1987 only 23,000 homes for low-income fami­lies were built, whereas the figure was still 100,000 per year in the late 70s. All told a million low-cost homes have been lost over the past ten years. The consequences of the arms drive can be read from all kinds of details from everyday life in the USA: In New York the number of soup kitchens has risen from 30 to 150 in the last eight years. Even so, all of them have to turn away dozens of needy people queuing up for a free meal.

    Even the Wall Street Jour­nal, which can hardly be considered the defender of the millions of people living on the edges of American so­ciety, was forced to admit that, at 13.6 per cent of the population, the poverty rate was higher than under the Carter, Ford and Nixon ad­ministrations. The number of children living below the poverty line had also risen sharply.

    In view of all this the lec­turing to be heard so often and so strongly from the American side and from the President personally on the subject of human rights is-to put it mildly-rather gro­tesque.

    The media are concerning themselves more and more frequently with balance sheets of the Reagan era which is coming to a close. Disillusionment is the order of the day. Business Week summed up a few months ago that, since Reagan had been holding down social spending for the past eight years, a whole range of so­cial problems had reared up for the solution of which his successor would have only limited means at his disposal. The essence of the article: It has been a world of moral convictions, family unity and pretty white garden fences. For almost eight years he has led many of us to believe that this is all true. His successor, who may possibly be less skilled in the art of communi­cation and in the creation of myths, and who will be fac­ing difficult economic condi­tions, will have to present the people with a less rosy picture, namely reality.

    And today this reality means that in the United States, too, the times have gone in which the arms race could be continued unabated without any serious conse­quences for the country's own economy and society. Undoubtedly President Rea­gan and his circle have come round to this view in recent years and this has enabled a turn to the path of peace along which the two great nuclear weapon powers have made considerable progress via Geneva, Reykja­vik, Washington and Mos­cow.

    Of course there are still forces in the USA who don't want to admit this, who try to ignore the realities. The way out which they propagate is to persuade the partners within and outside of NATO to take on a larger share of the armaments burden. How­ever, in truth, this only means shifting the problems which they can't master-i.e. the ruinous consequences of the arms build-up-on to their allies and thus provo­king a collective collapse. This has nothing in common with the sense of reality which is required today.

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