Word: eca
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Marshall Plan's latest appropriation bills are up for congressional approval. During the past week both the Senate and House got the bills from committee; the Senate measure gives ECA just what it needs, while the House bill could cripple our relations with Western Europe...
Both bills look much a like. Each grants ECA $3,100,000,000, each wants Europe to set up machinery for breaking trade and currency barriers. But the Senate resolution turns over the money with no fine-print restrictions, the House bill requires that $1,000,000,000 of its fund must be used to ferry our agricultural surpluses to ECA countries...
...reason for this predicted spending looks wonderfully logical. The proponents of the House bill, and there are apparently a lot of them, claim that ECA was going to send a billion dollars worth of food to Europe next year, and that taxpayers could save this money by shipping already-purchased surplus produce instead of allowing ECA to buy it on the open market...
What is wrong with this little exercise is that it ignores one of the things that has made the Marshall Plan so effective. For under ECA's set-up requests for goods originate from the joint decision of needy countries; ECA rubber-stamps these requests as approved unless the goods are in short supply in the U. S. or can be bought in Europe. And these requests do not frequently coincide with our agricultural surpluses. Western Europe is far more interested in flour and fertilizer than in powdered eggs and blue-dyed potatoes. Much of ECA's value, both political...
...roughly $6,000,000, have already rejected as discriminatory one British compromise proposal-to permit U.S. companies to boost their sales in proportion to any additional dollars they spend in sterling area countries. And they still believe that Britain is less interested in saving dollars than in using its ECA-created oil surplus to drive the U.S. out of existing markets. Nevertheless the State Department is still trying to work out some formula that will meet the British need for saving dollars and still permit the U.S. to compete on equal terms in the world oil market. But Texas...