U.S.-Japan Trade Situation
It seems the United States is becoming a financial colony of Japan. Of the world’s greatest banks, seven are now said to be Japanese. Increasingly, often successfully, they are competing in the United States. As everyone knows, one’s banker has great, sometimes decisive, influence. Financial hegemony is already being followed by Japanese ownership of American industries. One hopes, in a charitable mood, that anodized parachutes will be provided for the ideologically brain-bound managers who may be displaced.
What has made America so weak that it appears unable to resist re-colonization? I suggest that while we waste our financial, material and intellectual resources defending ourselves against a bogeyman, Japanese military spending is almost nil, even though they are next door to both bogeymen. Our banks, businessmen and ad agencies relentlessly pressure us to obsolescence and spend, while the Japanese save three or four times as rapidly as we do. While we noisily boast our inventiveness, resourcefulness and good Christian virtues, the Japanese have been modestly studying the accumulated knowledge of the human race and putting it to use.
And while we have been suborning, bombing and killing the people of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Central America and, yes, 50,000 or 60,000 of our own young people, the Japanese have abandoned “samuramboism” in favor of peaceful growth.
Clearly, America’s slippage can be stopped. We have a beautiful, fertile country. Resources are virtually unlimited if wisely used. We have strong, skillful, willing people. We can easily support ourselves in comfort and help the rest of the world as well. To do so we need do only what the stockholders of any slipping corporation would do, namely, dump the present management and change direction.
As the real owners of this country, it is up to us to take it back from the military-industrial-financial complex and their lobbyist-politicians. Their greed and ineptitude have reduced us in a few short years from the world creditor to its greatest debtor.
The first and most important step toward restoring the financial strength and economic independence of our country, and the well-being of its people, is to replace the present gang with leaders who will disarm simultaneously and carefully with the Soviet Union and all other countries. If we can make that decision, everything else can follow. If we can’t, there is nothing in view but further wasteful expenditure, increasing debt, deteriorating social conditions and war.
J.F. DAUBER
Laguna Hills
