Trade jones
by Michael Maiello

So, I'm a week into my first gig at a big, reputable magazine named after a labor activist from the early part of the century, and claiming to be a bastion of liberal thought. So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal.

I guess it happens with all ideologies. If you hang out with people who take them seriously, you realize that the ideologies aren't too well thought out. Take, for instance, a story about USA*Engage which ran in last month's "Mother Jones" magazine and will have a follow-up next month. The point of the story is that USA*Engage which represents 661 corporations and agriculture groups is lobbying against legislation that would impose trade sanctions against countries who practice religious persecution. This would be Burma, Sudan, Indonesia, and bad places like that. Of course, we already have trade sanctions against all those places, but this is specifically for religious persecution.

USA*Engage members, which include Boeing, PepsiCo, UNOCAL, and Caterpillar, would of course like to go wherever there's cheap labor. Cheap labor saved Caterpillar a few months back when they were able to ignore striking workers in the US and shift the workload elsewhere. So, the corps are bad. As usual.

But, there are other people against trade sanctions for philosophical reasons. many of them are religious, and they fear that trade cut-offs will throw their countries into starved panic and just worsen the situation. Also, since they represent oppressed religious minorities, they'll be the first to feel the impact of sanctions. Like in Iraq -- the Kurds starved before anyone.

Makes sense. Well, USA*Engage got wind of this and through the National Council of Churches, another big U.S. organization, gathered a group of these religious leaders together and brought them to Washington to speak out against trade sanctions. The Mother Jones angle? Corps dupe religious leaders. I don't know if that's right.

These religious leaders have no money. They can't fly themselves over to Washington to lobby in for their interests. so, they used the corps. Sometimes it's not all a dupe. Sometimes people just do what they have to do.

USA*Engage makes some good points about the religious sanctions bill. It's either purely a Christian protection bill, or its scope is ridiculous. The Germans, after all, oppress the Scientologists. You think we're going to embargo Germany? What about Mexico and its treatment of native peoples?

Of course, it escapes attention that the Christians in many of these countries deserve to be oppressed. Seriously. In Sudan, the Islamic government is harsh. They amputate the hands of thieves, they're all for public execution. So, people have something to complain about. The Christians have led the Sudanese People Liberation Army for years. And they're just as bad. They've committed near genocide against non-Christian tribes such as the Nuba.

Our trade sanctions drafted against Sudan are a joke anyway, and would still be a joke after the new bill. Ninety percent of Sudan's exports come from gum arabic, a flavoring used in colas and candy. Sudan has cornered the market on the stuff. So there's an exemption that lets US companies buy Sudanese gum arabic.

In Burma, another of those bad places, all U.S. corporations are out except UNOCAL, who were building a pipeline when sanctions were imposed and were exempted from the new law.

So, the corps are bad. The Christians are bad. The governments are bad. But what worries me is Mother Jones. Because they've told the story without really acknowledging the "other point of view." The USA*Engage stories have been blindly cynical. Sanctions worked in South Africa. Fine. But our sanctions against Cuba are ridiculous.

The biggest angle missed? Our government's involvement. The U.S. government has consistently used sanctions as a means of cultural imperialism. We won't trade with you until you act more like us.

But Mother Jones told a story about corporations duping religious leaders and then duping the government. They forgot to mention that the government started it by duping us first, using sanctions and alienation to control the world.

Michael Maiello is beginning to get a handle on that thing newspeople call "saturation cynicism".

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