Ford Criticized for Asking Congress to Revise Trade Restrictions to USSR

President Ford’s call to Congress to revise U.S. legislation to ease restrictions on financial credits to the Soviet Union unless it modifies its emigration practices, was criticized here Friday by an American trade union leader. “The average American is not really interested in trade with the Soviet Union if that means it will cost the blood of some of the people in Russia.” said Glenn E. Watts, president of the Communications Workers of America.

Responding to questions on the President’s comments in his “State of the World” address Thursday night, Watts told a news conference that the Soviet government had repudiated its trade agreement with the United States last January because of the “low level of credit” it would get under the Export-Import Bank law, He said he “suspects” that the Soviets would not have raised the question of emigration in the trade act if the U.S. had been willing to provide the Soviet Union with a billion dollars in credits rather than $300 million.

Watts also said in respect to the claim that the U.S. legislation interferes with Soviet internal affairs that “our country in one way or another has interfered in the internal affairs of other countries” for lesser reasons. “We may have been well advised if we exported the concepts of our own revolution two hundred years ago.” Watts said. “We would have been better off if we had.”

SIMON; U.S. INTENDS TO REMOVE BARRIERS

Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Secretary William Simon, who arrived in Moscow last Thursday to participate in U.S.-Soviet trade talks, his first visit to Moscow since the Soviet government renounced the 1972 trade accord last January, said in an interview with Moscow Radio last Friday that “The government of the United States intends to continue efforts to remove barriers hindering the normal development of trade between our countries. Above all this concerns the limitations on credits for Soviet-American trade.”

In his discussions last Thursday with Soviet Trade Minister Nikolai Patolichev, Simon said the U.S. Administration “strongly opposed the actions by our Congress which interrupted the normalization of our trade relations with the Soviet Union. The President has committed himself to work for the removal of current restrictions at the earliest opportunity.”

Furthermore, Simon stated, in preparing a legislative proposal to remove the current restrictions “we shall have in mind both the importance of removing arbitrary ceilings on Export-Import Bank credits for U.S. exports and the importance of eliminating the unacceptable aspects of the Jackson Amendment to the recent trade bill.”