When the House of Representatives recently voted 319 to 80 to bar loans and most-favored-nation status to the Soviet Union, it reflected the growing majority feeling of the American people who are fed up with the costly and dangerous policy of taxing Americans to provide handouts to the Russians, so they can deny freedom to their own people, and spend their money on weapons to threaten or destroy us.
The Soviets have already received $750 million in loans from the Commodity Credit Corporation to buy our wheat and other grains, plus $760 million in loans and guarantees from our Export-Import Bank to finance the world’s largest truck plant and a huge fertilizer plant. They are continuing to buy our wheat on credit, and additional loans to duplicate vital American technologies are now being negotiated.
The same week that the House voted so overwhelmingly against further handouts to the Soviet Union, Congressman Ben Blackburn announced that he is introducing a bill called the “National Protection Act” to prevent the exportation of American products, including agricultural commodities, technology, scientific accomplishments and capital equipment, to any country which takes actions to harm the U.S. economy or endanger the security of the United States.
On October 24, Congressman John Ashbrook provided the documentation for his conclusion that “there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Perhaps as much as 90 to 95 percent of Soviet technology came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. … In effect, the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union — its, industrial and its military capabilities. … Fifty years of dealing with the Soviets has been an economic success for the U.S.S.R. and a political and economic disaster for the United States. It has not stopped war, it has not given us peace. It has given the soviets increased industrial and military power and the ability to accomplish its never ceasing goal of world domination.”
Congressman John Ashbrook, and Dr. Anthony Sutton in his new book called NATIONAL SUICIDE, have described how American-built plants in Russia made the weapons, and the trucks which carried them, to kill American boys in Korea and Vietnam, and to kill Israeli boys in the Sinai. As an additional example of current folly, Congressman Black- burn stated that the sale of an American scientific computer to Russia enabled the soviet military to shorten by about two years the time required to create and perfect their first MIRV missile—the only nuclear area in which the United States had enjoyed a definite lead.
When we give loans to the Soviet Union to build modern industrial plants, we are not only making our overburdened taxpayers pay for Soviet military and economic weapons, but we are also taking jobs away from American workers. It’s time we stop using American technology and agriculture like a giant aid-to-dependent-Soviets welfare program. Their dependence on our industrial and scientific skills can be a powerful instrument for world peace — but only if we use it that way.
