SELLING OUT AMERICA
By William K. Shearer, Esq.
Constitution Party Chairman Emeritus
September 2000
Here we go again; this time in Africa.
Last February, the world government promoting Carnegie and Ford Foundations, in alliance with internationalist business interests, funded a Washington convention - -described as a summit - - in which "black Americans and others interested in Africa participated."
The summit's president was a former assistant secretary of state. Madeleine Albright, present Secretary of State, blessed the proceedings.
Principal recommendation of the conference was that the United States enact and pay for a Marshall Plan - style reconstruction program for Africa. The summit group said the proposal was necessary because Africa needs "a massive inflow of public and private capital and technology." Not only was reconstruction demanded, but reparations as well.
According to the summit group, the African Marshall plan should "systematically transfer capital and resources to Africa and people of African descent . . . commensurate with their historical losses due to slavery, colonialism and the Cold War."
What an unleashing of unbridled slop! The United States never had any colonies in Africa, and slavery was abolished in the United States 135 years ago. Where did the United States pick up a duty to modern African despotisms for the long-gone practice of slavery in the United States?
Yet Madeleine Albright told the Washington conference that she was looking forward to receiving its reconstruction and reparations plan.
Meanwhile, at the United Nations, a seven member international group, assembled by the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.), decided that the United States, and other nations that did not prevent or stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, should pay a "significant level of reparations" for the killing of Africans by other Africans. The group singled out the United States, France, Belgium, the U.N., and the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches as those most guilty of not doing enough to stop the atrocities that killed up to 800,000 people in Rwanda.
These atrocities, remember, occurred in a self-governing African nation, surrounded by other self-governing African nations. The Rwanda genocide had its roots in long standing tribal hatreds, and constituted a sad chapter in the history of the continent. But where, along the course of African history, did the American taxpayers pick up the responsibility to pay for the consequences of these exclusively African hatreds?
The United States is not tribal Africa's police force. Yet, the O.A.U. panel, which reached many of the same conclusions as another study commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, determined that "external forces" had a responsibility for what happened in Rwanda.
The panel asked the Secretary-General to establish a commission to formally identify those who owe Rwanda the money to rebuild the devastated country, and to set an appropriate scale of compensation. It further demanded that Rwanda's international debts be canceled.
All of this conforms to the current U.N. pressure for a world court to punish so-called war criminals. This latest O.A.U. proposal would extend the duty of nations beyond their acts, to include failures to act in a way believed appropriate by the U.N. and the O.A.U. - - and, it may be noted, in a way that African nations and the U.N. did not, themselves, act.
As Foreign Policy Review pointed out in December, 1998, Kofi Annan, now U.N. Secretary-General, was head of the U.N.'s so-called peacekeeping operations at the time of the massacres in Rwanda. He knew about the plan of the Rwandan government to exterminate the minority Tutsi tribe, and his office ordered the U.N. peacekeepers not to intervene.
Now, however, the U.N. and the O.A.U. are attempting to shift the blame to the United States for a failure to intervene in Rwanda, though the U.S. had no duty to do so. The only excuse for this sudden shift is that Annan and the O.A.U. think they have found a deep pocket into which they can dig for money, but the United States has no responsibility to intervene in tribal conflicts in far flung nations.
President Andrew Jackson correctly stated that the United States will extend its best wishes and good offices to promote the peace of nations with which we have intercourse, but:
"Any intervention in their affairs further than this, even by the expression of an official opinion, is contrary to our principles of international policy, and will always be avoided."
The United States is properly the guarantor only of the liberty and tranquility of its own people, not those of foreign nations, whether in Africa or elsewhere. There is no constitutional authority to tax the American people to reconstruct foreign nations, or to pay reparations to foreign peoples. President William Clinton and the Republican Congress have already given away the store to Africa, and multi-national business interests that operate there. A law, enacted this year, grants greater duty-free access to the American market for 70 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America. This African Trade Act will have a particularly devastating affect on the already battered American textile industry. Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, opposing enactment of the bill, told his colleagues that, in recent years, America has lost 100,000 textile jobs nationwide since NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) was enacted; and the new African Trade Act would ship the rest of America's textile jobs overseas. He said:
"In short, it's going to make it cheaper and more enticing for the textile companies to locate overseas, where labor costs are lower, and to take jobs with them . . . .
"Passing this bill simply rewards the U.S. companies that have already moved off shore, and entices others to do the same. In the process, we stand to lose another 1.2 million jobs in the apparel and textile industry."
Pointing out the unfairness of such trade laws, Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina noted that before an American company can operate, it faces minimum wage laws, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicade contributions, parental leave, environmental regulations and contributions, and safe plant requirements.
Foreign producers face none of these burdens, and pay only slave wages to their workers: Bangladesh, 1 cent an hour; Burma, 4 cents; China, 23 cents; Colombia, 70 to 80 cents an hour; the Dominican Republic, 60 cents; El Salvador, 59 cents; Guatemala, 37 to 50 cents; Haiti, 30 cents; Honduras, 43 cents; India, 20 to 30 cents an hour; Indonesia, 10 cents; Malaysia, $1; Mexico, 50 to 54 cents; Nicaragua, 23 cents; Pakistan, 20 to 26 cents; Peru, 90 cents; the Philippines, 58 to 76 cents; Sri Lanka, 40 cents; Thailand, 73 cents an hour.
The transshipment provisions of the new African Trade Act are so inadequate that countries such as China can ship their goods through Africa to take advantage of duty free access to the American market. When did China become an African nation?
Today, over half of the American market has been lost to foreign imports in a vast variety of manufactured products. Foreign goods now account for over half of American consumption of these products: textile machines and parts, 67 percent; machine tools for metal forming and parts thereof, 55.3 percent; semiconductor manufacturing equipment, robotics, 51.9 percent; aircraft engines and gas turbines, 70.3 percent; microphones, loudspeakers, and audio amplifiers, 77.9 percent; tape recorders, tape players, video cassette recorders, turntables, compact disc players, 100 percent; radio transmission and reception apparatus, 57.9 percent; television apparatus, 68.5 percent; electrical capacitors and resistors, 69.5 percent; automatic data processing machines, 51.6 percent; optical and opthalmic goods, 51.5 percent; photographic cameras and equipment, 63.8 percent; watches, 100 percent; clocks and timing devices, 62.2 percent.
The list goes on and on: drawing and mathematical calculating and measuring instruments, 71.4 percent; luggage, handbags, and flatgoods, 79.7 percent; musical instruments and accessories, 57.2 percent; umbrellas, canes, etc., 81.1 percent; silverware, etc., 59.9 percent; precious jewelry, 55.8 percent; men's and boys' coats and jackets, 62.5 percent; shirts and blouses, 62.9 percent; sweaters, 76.4 percent; robes, nightware, and underwear, 68.8 percent; gloves, 76.1 percent; footwear and footwear parts, 84.2 percent; and the list of cited items is by no means all-inclusive.
Finally, take a look at who is directing the U.S. government to sacrifice patriotism and American jobs for the sake of multi-national profits. Here are just some of the big businesses which endorsed the African trade giveaway: Gap Inc., Ford Motor Company, Chevron Corporation, Kmart Corporation, Bechtel, Exxon Corporation, Bank of America, Mobil Corporation, Boeing Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, National Retail Federation, Caterpillar, Inc., Archer Daniels Midland Company, Eastman Kodak, Eli Lilly and Company, Texaco Inc., Flour Corporation, General Electric, General Motors Corporation, Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical, Lehman Brothers, McDonald's Corporation, National Softdrink Association, Phillip Morris, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Raytheon, Weststar Group, Inc., and, of course, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Add to the power of these multinational business interests the support of do-gooder internationalists like the National Council of Churches, World Vision, the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the political clout of the National Association of State Legislatures, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and you get a panoramic depiction of how the sell-out of American workers is being accomplished.
With urging from Clinton, the new law was approved by the House with only 110 members and 18 members of the Senate in opposition. The majority of members of Congress of both major parties supported the bill.
You don't need four lifelines to answer the question: Who is selling out America?
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