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We filled 77,000 requests for Mr. Armstrong's new book,
The Incredible Human Potential.
Also in 1978, we received 1.8 million letters plus 450,000 telephone
calls on our toll-free line. All told, 600,000 new people were added
to our mailing list and 64,000 enrolled in the Bible Correspondence
Course.
I hope this brief summary can be encouraging to you as
it
is to us
in MPC.
--Richard Rice, Mail Processing Center
ON THE WORLD SCENE: FITFUL START FOR EMS
The new European Monetary System will begin, as expected, on January
1, 1979. However, some of the glitter surrounding what would have
been Europe's most ambitious step toward unity to date has been rubbed
off. At the last minute Italy and Ireland decided against taking the
EMS plunge.
The decisions on the part of Rome and Dublin surprised all the dele
gates who had assembled in Brussels for the December 4-5 EEC summit.
The summit was expected to routinely endorse the EMS plan, backed
primarily by the Germans and the French. Everyone knew the British
were not going to join up, although Prime Minister Callaghan had
promised to closely coordinate British fiscal policy with EMS members.
In effect, Britain would be a "half member" of the currency alignment.
Other than British reticence, the go-ahead decision on the part of the
remaining eight was such a forgone conclusion that the summit was
expected to conclude early afternoon on the second and final day.
Instead, the summit dragged on fruitlessly for another eight hours.
In the end, Premier Giulio Andreotti of Italy and Prime Minister Jack
Lynch of Ireland were unsuccessful in getting the other six to agree
to a $3.6 billion economic assistance package they felt was needed to
help their weaker, more inflation-prone economies adjust to the strict
discipline of the MES currency "snake" (named for the tunnel-like
appearance, on a qraph, of the fluctuations permitted in the rela
tive values of the member currencies).
The last-minute pullout by Italy and Ireland came as an embarrassment
to Chancellor Schmidt, prime mover behind EMS. From all indications,
Germany was willing to respond favorably to the Italian and Irish
demands, even though these were much larger than earlier anticipated.
But as has happened so often in post-war European history, it was
France that was the fly in the ointment.
President Valery Giscard d'Estaing stood fast. "This is not a system
to hand out money," he reportedly commented at one tense moment during
the deliberations.
Giscard was under heavy political pressure back home from the French
Assembly to curb any drift toward European federalism. The German plan
to expand the Community's regional fund to provide the massive loans