Reagan's imperial longings
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington, The battleship New Jersey, built anno domini 1943, tethered all these many years to a crumbling dock in the impurities of the blackish green water of the port of Philadelphia, is to be refurbished. The cost: about a quarter of a billion dollars but, as a result, we shall have a grey ghost on the decks of which President Reagan and his backward-looking buddies can re-enact scenes for films in which they played slim-hipped young ensigns.
The initial request for an increase in arms expenditure is so large — 32 billion dollars — that it will come close to cancelling out the expenditure cuts proposed on the civilian side. Thus, in terms of the Reaganian objective of turning over more wealth to the private sector for investment, he has put himself back approximately to where he was on Inauguration Day. Every kind of armament is to be increased. The purpose is universal dominion. It would be difficult to wring any other kind of reason out of the Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger's remark to the Senate Armed Services Committee that 'basically we need to control the seas. `To which a sympathetic chairman, John Tower of Texas, inquired, 'you mean "Rule Britannia?" 'It was a pretty good song,' Casper replied.
So it is to be more of everything including the new M1 or 'Abrams' tank,' named after General Creighton Abrams, one of our big, non-winning generals in Vietnam. It was one thing to name a Mississippi river paddleboat after a losing general as in the old minstrel song, Waitin fo' the Robert E. Lee.' But a tank or a battleship after a recent loser? Our next bomber will doubtless be called the General Custer.
In truth, though, naming a tank after a man who lost fits in with the tendency in many large organisations to divorce promotion and distinction from accomplishment. It also fits in with the stab-in-the-back explanation why 'America lost in Vietnam. It wasn't her brave men, nor the incapacities and infirmities of their dundering generals; it was those yellow-bellied, peacenikity, self-indulgent, liberal sop heads who betrayed our victorious arms in the field and forced the shameful flight from Saigon. It goes nicely into the argument that we can conquer the world, if, next time, we suppress treason at home.
We are pumping ourselves up, and indulging in mighty escapades of heroic imagination. In this drama, we talk much about consultation with our friends, but we act as though we were alone in the world. The President has pointedly not urged the Senate to ratify a rather important fishing treaty with Canada long in the negotiating, at the last hour the United States has refused to sign the Ocean Floor Mineral Rights Treaty and it goes without saying that there is no current intention to negotiate with the Russians about anything. We've asked for what amounts to an indefinite postponement for the RussoAmerican Committee, which has met regularly for years, in order to adjust complaints and misunderstandings relating to Salts I and II. These treaties have been more or less in force up until now, although one has expired and the other has never been ratified. But the Reagan administration is coming very close to abrogating them.
This unfocused truculence may have been encouraged by Mrs Thatcher. One gets the impression that, since her visit, the babes in bombland at the White House think that the British Government is reflecting what the rest of Europe thinks. Nor do the Japanese help by shouting out, 'Sure thing, you get 'em good an' we sell you another one helluva swell Honda, right Joe?' De minimis , the Administration might consider levelling a 'defence import duty' on Japanese goods entering the United States if the Japanese are going to continue to refuse any yen in their own defence. It is bizarre for the Americans to be stationing several divisions thousands of miles from California, in Korea, while the Japanese, a few hundred miles away, provide nothing for the defence of the happy little democracy. As the US loses increasing shares of its own domestic market to the Japanese, Ford and General Motors have told the automobile workers' union that they expect them to take pay cuts of the sort already in effect at Chrysler. Ford says, with some reason, that it cannot compete if it must spend 200 dollars more per car on labour than the other fellows. The union leadership, far from blowing its collective top, has signalled that it understands and is willing to open negotiations to talk about what, in the way of future profit-sharing and other considerations, it may get for working for less now.
Until a few years ago it was axiomatic that the price of labour in basic industries here went in only one direction — up. Now either in the form of deferred wage raises, fewer fringe benefits or outright cuts, workers are getting less in car-making, rubber, coal mining, steel and the building trades. Although these comparisons are difficult w make, it appears that, in a number of industries, workers in the US now make less than their counterparts in Japan or Germany. For a very long time, of course, one of the loudest and proudest Fourth of July boasts from our politicians' mouths was that, 'the American worker is the hi h vest paid worker in the world'. You don't hear that any more. Once upon a time, it was the peons in the places where they ate garlic and raw fish eyes who broke their fannies for a few pfennigs, not your free and fortunate American worker. Henry Ford, the origin' al, not the dwarf grandson, astounded the world in 1916 by offering the five-dollars-a day wage. They said he was crazy, that he'd go broke, but he said the American worker deserved it, that when you pay a man he'll work well and he'll have money to buy what you make.
Now, for the first time in the 20d; century, it is official government policy neither to encourage, endorse nor defend efforts to raise the standard of living but to ask people, a la Lenin, Stalin and their successors, to sacrifice their own standard of living for capital goods. That is what 'supply side' economics is all about. We are to build oxygen furnaces for steel, not homes.
The Carter administration was moving in this direction but it has taken the Reagan administration to come out with it, in its tax Proposals, and in its cutting of government expenditures, which might result in consumer spending. They don't call it a 'five Year plan', but Stalin would be able to say, You start from a much bigger base, but what you're doing is what I tried to do.' But Reagan's situation is more complex. To save some of these industries and to rebuild them, he may have to protect them from imports, thereby both violating his ideology and alienating those allies whose help he is going to need, even with his battleships. Beyond that he has got to calculate, at some point, how badly his capital investment programme will be emasculated by his arms programme.
There is no better way to get businessmen td defer and avoid making new plant investment than to give them a munition order to fulfil. Unless some of the 150 new ships the navy has been promised are going to be made of Japanese, Mexican or French steel that'll be the day! these orders will be met by using the oldest, least efficient equipment in the shop. Let the per-unit costs go out of sight. With war production, it is always a seller's market. Under the circumstances, we should • consider ourselves fortunate that Secretaryl Weinberger is willing to use old battleships made of steel manufactured when our industry was still 'state of the art'.
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