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A Century of War
The newly created U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity weakened the political voice of traditional American labor and the influential urban constituency machines. The targeted white blue-collar industrial operatives, only a decade earlier hailed as the lifeblood of American industry, were suddenly labeled ‘reactionary’ and ‘racist’ by the powerful liberal media. These workers were mostly fearful and confused as they saw their entire social fabric collapsing in the wake of the disinvestment policy of the powerful banks. Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy had run the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s, and later as Johnson’s White House national security adviser. By 1966 Bundy had gone to New York to turn the United States into a new ‘Vietnam,’ as head of the influential Ford Foundation. Black was pitted against white, unemployed against employed, in this new Great Society, while Wall Street bankers benefited from slashed union wages and cuts in infrastructure investment, or funneled investment overseas to cheap labor havens in Asia or South America. This writer had direct personal experience of this sad chapter in American history. STERLING, THE WEAK LINK, BREAKS By the early 1960s, de Gaulle’s independent policy initiatives were not the only major problem facing the financial interests governing New York and the City of London. In 1959, the external liabilities of the United States still approximated the total value of her official gold reserves, some $20 billion for both. By 1967, the year the sterling crisis threatened to break the entire Bretton Woods fabric, the U.S. total of external liquid liabilities had soared to $36 billion, while her gold reserves had plummeted to only $12 billion, one third the liability sum. As U.S. short-term liabilities abroad began to exceed her gold stock, certain astute financial institutions reckoned, quite correctly, that something sooner or later had to break. In his first State of the Union Address to Congress in January 1961, President Kennedy noted that, since 1958 the gap between the dollars we spend or invest abroad and the dollars returned to us has substantially widened. This overall deficit in our balance of payments increased by nearly $11 billion in the last three years, and holders of dollars abroad
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