Cantwell’s cheaper shoes are pinching

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 7, 2011

Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray have a proposal to lift tariffs from imported shoe wear, saving consumers (or shoe companies) close to $1 billion annually. But what’s in it for shoemakers in sweatshops?

On the sensibility spectrum, it’s hard to top a title like Sen. Maria Cantwell’s “The Affordable Footwear Act.” The words tumble out bourbon-smooth: affordable footwear.

The bill’s name even bigfoots the evocative Barefoot Schoolboy Act of 1895, the Washington law that established school-levy equalization. Americans sympathize with suffering barefoot schoolboys, but bargain shoes? That one transcends gender, race, and all manner of hoof-related wants.

Cantwell has teamed with Senate colleague Patty Murray and Republicans Pat Roberts and Roy Blunt to craft the legislation that knocks down onerous duties on imported footwear, a legacy of 1930s-era protectionism. The Tri-City Herald reports that the bill would have saved Americans $800 million last year, presupposing shoe distributors and retailers passed the attendant savings along to consumers.

Cantwell’s bill also throws light on the collapse of the nation’s shoe-manufacturing sector. Duties on imported shoes affect all Americans, because almost all shoes are imported nowadays. In a global economy, spookily cheap labor and often-Dickensian working conditions in China, Vietnam, and India are a windfall for American shoppers.

And so the Cantwell bill snaps into place: Erase an outmoded, regressive tariff, and save consumers millions on the price of shoes. Could there be enemies of affordable footwear, organized opposition to something so grossly obvious?

Cantwelll’s bill will pass Congress with the kind of ease that should immediately arouse suspicion in the hearts of Northwest Hobbesians. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and, well, you know. This good bill could be a great, substantive bill, one that also addresses some of the less-savory aspects of human nature.

Here’s a modest proposal: Somewhere in the Affordable Footwear Act embed a human rights carrot. Duty waivers would only apply to overseas factories that meet a specific human rights or anti-sweatshop benchmark. Receive the waiver and spur additional business.

Paul Wolfe, a legislative aide for Cantwell, said that such a provision is technically possible. However, various labor and environmental standards are already codified in NAFTA and other free trade agreements. Linking tariff reform to labor and human rights could be redundant or worse, toothless and ineffective.

The potential hitches are significant. Trade acts are dense and arcane, with industry lobbyists whispering to bill scribes and bill scribes scribing away. The central question of government, qui bono? (who benefits?), would reach from Nike’s Phil Knight to poor families hunting for affordable kids’ shoes. The benefits would not, however, extend to drained Vietnamese sweatshop workers (nor should they, many economists would argue).

We live in the post-GATT World Trade Organization era where fiddling with tariffs is a big no-no. This bill, however, offers a rare exception. It’s about eliminating, not creating a trade barrier. Lawmakers can be as innovative and nettlesome or as inspired and meretricious as they want.

There is at least one non-amending option: Sen. Cantwell and company could ape LBJ and convene a come-to-Jesus meeting with America’s shoe barons. We’ll do this, but you’ll be expected to demand X from foreign producers. The philosophy behind a closed-door shakedown is as transactional and crude as it is simple: When you’ve got ’em by the, er, aglets, their hearts and minds will follow.

In the coming years, Vietnam, China, and other developing countries will reach a tipping point. Something will give, worker discontent will manifest itself politically, or universal standards will ultimately shame the shameless.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, last spring’s Solomon Katz lecturer at the University of Washington and the author of The Honor Code, How Moral Revolutions Happen, posits that appealing to a nation’s honor is one of the most effective catalysts for advancing human rights. Tinkering with international trade could, however, produce a Niebuhr-esque outcome, underlining American hubris and the limits of prescriptive power. Would a human rights benchmark appeal to a country’s sense of national or cultural honor or would it have just the opposite effect?

In the end, a re-jiggered Affordable Footwear Act would attempt to harmonize men-are-no-angels American realism with the Judaic notion of Tikkun olam, to repair the world. Okay, yes, it’s a pretentious-sounding argument.  Advocates should nix any reference to Federalist No. 51 or Jewish mysticism. How about this: Cheaper shoes for fewer sweatshops?

July 7, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Burning holes in the state’s indoor-smoking ban

originally published on Crosscut.com

Wing chairs, tobacco smoke, rose-colored prints of…fox hunts. Throw in a whiskey sour (or two, or three) and you have the “Mad Men” meme, fully expressed in a bill wending its way through the Washington legislature.

Senate bill 5542 would crack open Washington’s smoking ban and permit special licenses for cigar lounges and retail tobacconist shops. It appears, at least on the surface, to be a trivial tweak of Initiative 901, the 2005 clean-indoor-air law that passed in every county in Washington. Northwesterners are free agents, mind you. If we walk into a cigar bar we should (gasp) presuppose that we’ll get blasted by cigar smoke.

On May 17, the cigar bill passed the Senate, albeit barely, with bipartisan support. It’s strange bedfellows at work: Democrats who want to bolster their small-business cred in common cause with conservatives who savor challenging a tribal monopoly on all things tobacco. In the midst of a recession, what could be more symbolically rich than politicians laboring to bring back the smoke-filled room?

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May 23, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Go West, Young U.W. President Young

originally published on Crosscut.com

The University of Washington, which is today announcing its new president, Michael K. Young of the University of Utah, is at an inflection point that will define higher education for decades. The next UW president needs to be a transformational figure, a savior who can finesse politicians, business barons, professors, and churlish alums. No job in the Northwest is freighted with higher expectations or longer odds.

In addition to enduring Olympia’s budget cuts, the UW is getting starved by the feds, including a potential 40-percent reduction in Title VI funding. At the confluence of these misery streams stands the University’s newly named president, Michael Young.

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April 25, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Why a Seattle church takes up the cause of a Guantanamo detainee

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 25, 2011

Adnan Latif, who suffers from mental health issues, was once cleared for release from Guantanamo. But he remains trapped by bizarre circumstances and political pressures.

Guantanamo Bay muddles the American narrative on wartime conduct. Torture and unjust detention are nothing new, but arbitrary, indefinite detention is.

On a Sunday in March, the University of Washington’s Jamie Mayerfeld spoke to congregants from the University Temple United Methodist Church about the case of Adnan Latif, a Guantanamo Bay inmate since 2002. Latif’s detention is one of the more bracing instances of knucklehead injustice, a Guantanamo prison saga that would have roused Kafka or Dario Fo.

The latest WikiLeaks revelations from The New York Times and other papers underline the problems and confusion that have marked the overall Guantanamo operations, including the particular problems for Yemenis like Latif with weak or no ties to terrorism. The newly published documents seem to confirm much of what critics have been saying about the lack of remedies where individuals appear to be wrongly or unnecessarily held.

Latif’s existential detour began in 2001 when the Yemeni national was snatched by Pakistani security and handed over to American forces for a $5,000 bounty. Mayerfeld, an associate professor of political science who writes extensively on human rights, observed that only 5 percent of Guantanamo prisoners were captured by the U.S. The rest were nabbed by others in a spirit of post-9/11 bonhomie. Bonhomie and, well, the hook of liberal bounties, sweeteners to lasso America’s real or perceived enemies.

Latif became a victim of wrong-place, wrong-time circumstance. He had suffered severe brain damage in a 1994 car accident, a condition that magnified his despair and greased subsequent suicide attempts. And his prison timeline hasn’t helped on the despair front. With no documented link to terrorism or a terrorist network, Latif was recommended for release in 2004. It didn’t happen. His release was cleared in 2007. No action was taken.

In 2009, the Obama administration initially consented to a transfer back to his native Yemen. Finally in 2010, federal District Judge Henry Kennedy, Jr. heard Latif’s habeas corpus petition and ordered his immediate release. The Obama administration needed to take “all necessary and appropriate diplomatic steps to facilitate Latif’s release,” Judge Kennedy wrote. This time, however, the Obama administration decided to appeal.

Latif’s nationality presaged the administration’s reversal. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber and a citizen of Nigeria, was trained and equipped in Yemen. After Abdulmutallab’s unsuccessful attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 over Detroit in December of 2009, the administration adopted a blanket ban on releasing Yemeni detainees. Largely as a result, Yemenis form the the largest group of current Guantanamo prisoners. It’s Camus meets the accident of birth.

Mayerfeld offered a primer: Guantanamo Bay held 779 prisoners in January of 2002. Today that number is just 172 (seven have died while incarcerated). All the while and as early as 2002, one CIA report declared that one-third to one-half of detainees had no ties to terrorism. Nevertheless, a utilitarian calculus infected executive-branch decision making. There are evil actors at Guantanamo. Better to delay justice for a few, the conventional wisdom goes, than imperil American security over the long term.

Most of Guantanamo’s overarching questions transcend partisanship. Separating the innocent from the merely suspect has been delegated to a body called the “Guantanamo Review Task Force.” Mayerfeld terms it “trial by bureaucracy.”

Improvements have taken place, Mayerfeld said, and the consensus is that by the summer of 2009 detainee treatment drew closer to international norms. There are still flagrant violations of normative justice, however, such as arbitrary detention, deprivation of due process, and the denial of a fair trial. The question of solitary confinement also looms large. “Imagine living and sleeping in your own bathroom for 23 hours a day,” Mayerfeld said.

Mayerfeld, whose scholarship revolves around issues of torture and human rights, teaches a UW class on Guantanamo. In addition to extensive research, students are required to keep journals documenting the quotidian and often soul-deadening anomie of specific detainees. Individual profiles range from an Adnan Latif to unabashed killers such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

In a recent Crosscut interview, Dr. Esther Brimmer, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, said, “The president has said that he plans to close Guantanamo, and cases are under active, regular review. We’ve moved out 68 prisoners to third countries.” Brimmer, who said that she was not familiar with details of Latif’s case, insisted that Guantanamo’s future also depends on the consent of Congress.

For Mayerfeld the essential question centers on Guantanamo’s afterlife. The conundrum of arbitrary, indefinite detention will not disappear if the United States shutters Guantanamo tomorrow and simply scatters prisoners to mainland purgatory.

Here the proverbial lessons of history don’t apply. “The fallacy of prediction by analogy occurs when analogy is used to anticipate future events — as it often is, in the absence of anything better,” David Hackett Fischer wrote more than 40 years ago. It’s an axiom that resonates still.

Guantanamo Bay is not about American servicemen in 1898 learning a novel technique for torturing Filipino POWs called the “water cure;” it is not Camp Harmony, the Puyallup way station for Japanese-Americans in the 1940s; and it is not President Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of habeaus corpus.

If Guantanamo is without clear antecedents, then the model for combatting it seems equally elusive. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s isn’t instructive because so much revolved around a judicial strategy in addition to political mobilization. Thurgood Marshall was the linchpin and Martin Luther King, Jr., was the closer. Justice would be revealed in the courts.

Capital punishment may be the closest analogue: a manifestly moral issue that loses juice because the lead characters are often heinous or unsympathetic. Latif — an ill and troubled man, but not a terrorist — has become an accidental metaphor, a force greater than himself.

So on a cold spring morning, two dozen Methodists ask questions and grab letter paper to write their members of Congress about a 34-year-old prisoner.

“What has been done will be done again,” reads Ecclesiastes. “There is nothing new under the sun.” Well, mostly.

No one aims to amend scripture in the basement of a Methodist church. It’s tempting though.

April 25, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

AmeriCorps at risk in GOP budget plans

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 2, 2011

All that volunteerism? Apparently, it’s too Democratic, even though Republicans led the 2009 Senate action that more than doubled the number of AmeriCorps members. Or maybe it’s just too Northwestern an idea.

Sargent Shriver was the consummate public servant and pop to the Peace Corps (along with Hubert Humphrey, who merits a long-overdue hat tip). When Shriver died in January, former Republican speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote, “His restless idealism, his serious faith, his belief in the power of engaged citizenship, have been an inspiration to generations. And the institutions he shaped will serve the poor and struggling for generations to come.”

Gerson mostly got it right. The Peace Corps will continue to serve the poor and the struggling for generations to come.

Its domestic counterpart, AmeriCorps, however, may soon get the hatchet.

The U.S. House’s H.R. 1, a measure that’s a grab-bag of draconian budget whacks, would shutter the Corporation for National and Community Service and its various programs such as AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, Learn & Serve America, and VISTA. It’s a partisan slam of an inherently nonpartisan program. Had he been re-elected, President George H.W. Bush hoped to midwife his Points of Light initiative into what is now AmeriCorps. Instead it fell to President Clinton to elevate national service, subsequently branding the Scarlet “D” on AmeriCorps.

Fortunately the program’s return on investment was meaningful enough that, over time, partisanship fell away. It culminated with the 2009 passage of the Serve America Act, which more than doubled the number of AmeriCorps members. Its two shepherds in the U.S. Senate were — partisans, take note — Orrin Hatch and John McCain.

In Washington state alone, H.R. 1 will zero-out $38.5 million dollars and remove more than 3,000 national-service participants from community and faith-based organizations. That number doesn’t include 420 foster grandparents and 257 senior companions as well as thousands of kids who benefit from Learn and Serve America. If the Senate gives its assent, this measure will immediately extinguish or hinder service programs from Seattle to Wenatchee to Spokane.

It’s all disappointing because in DC-wonk vernacular, the Corporation for National and Community Service is “budget dust.” Instead of means testing or evaluating outcomes, it’s deemed nonessential and given the heave-ho. There are wiser ways to balance the federal budget, of course, beginning with a laser-like analysis of those departments with colossal expenses and redundant services. (No hints, but consider starting with that large, five-walled building across the Potomac in Arlington).

H.R. 1 may call for some volunteer-driven jingoism: a citizen-volunteer culture is after all part of the Northwest’s social fabric. Washington state contributes one of the highest number of volunteers per capita to AmeriCorps, many hailing from local colleges and universities (the UW also remains the number-one campus for Peace Corps recruitment). Giving back is a natural extension of Mother Joseph and the Sisters of Providence, dang it. The Northwest is a public-service heavyweight. Or was.

True, the sun will rise tomorrow and, hopefully, the day after that even if the U.S. Senate or President Obama doesn’t sprint to the rescue of national service. In the meantime it feels like a reprise of the 1975 New York Daily News headline, “Congress to AmeriCorps: DROP DEAD.”

March 2, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Everett and Boeing: Perhaps we should celebrate?: A Scandinavian community is not inclined to boastfulness. But the Everett plant will be at the center of work on the new refueling tanker.

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 25, 2011

A Scandinavian community is not inclined to boastfulness. But the Everett plant will be at the center of work on the new refueling tanker.

We lurch from bed, we stare in the mirror (with acceptance, not narcissism) and we whisper memento mori, remember you are going to die. It’s the Everett catechism.

Everett’s defining sensibility is a mix of manic optimism and the Scandinavian humility of Jante Law, the first rule of which is don’t think you’re anything special.

And so this afternoon’s news about the aerial refueling tanker unfurled like the French tricolor. Not. Rule number four of Jante Law and its pattern of Scandinavian group behavior: Don’t convince yourself that you’re better than the rest of us.

Is it possible to act prideful and be without sin? No, we’re never without sin, so sinfully we celebrate Boeing’s unexpected windfall.

The collective letdown was tangible after the Pentagon’s decision three years ago to award the $35 billion contract to a consortium of Northrop Grumman and EADS, the parent company of Airbus. Back then it was as if the serotonin god had turned down the rheostat. Neighbors shuffled. Playgrounds emptied.

We didn’t anticipate a Boeing victory, so conditioned are we to bad news. It feels like a slow earthquake that doesn’t register until it’s over. In 2008 we presupposed that the company’s implosion traced back to the hubris of Phil Condit, to the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, and ultimately, to the 2003 Darleen Druyun procurement scandal.

In 2008, the political hand-wringing combined boosterism and shock with an emotive country-first appeal. “We are outraged that this decision taps European Airbus and its foreign workers to provide a tanker to our American Military,” read a joint press release from eight members of Washington’s congressional delegation. “This is a blow to the American Aerospace industry, American workers and America’s men and women in uniform.”

Fast forward three years and here’s what Governor Gregoire had to say today (Feb. 24):

“What a great day for The Boeing Company, and for the 11,000 aerospace workers in Washington state alone that will play a role in assembling the NewGen tanker. Following an open, transparent process, the Department of Defense realized what I’ve been saying all along — and that is that Boeing has designed the safest, most cost-effective tanker to serve both our military and our taxpayers well.”

All communities have a creation myth and a defining sensibility. Everett was conceived as the Pittsburgh of the West, with street names like Rockefeller and Colby and other East coast investors — who quit and pulled out. Once in a while, on an afternoon like this, we buck defeatism and the sun filters through.

Everett doesn’t think it’s anything special, mind you. But we won.

February 25, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Can we discuss Tucson in a way that lets us learn?

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 11, 2011

Beyond the raw horror of Rep. Giffords’ attempted assassination, it will shape thinking for years to come.

The raw horror of Saturday’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has already become shorthand. It stings, and Arizona’s lax gun laws may partly be to blame, concludes the New York Times. It stings, and this is what you get when you incite the lesser angels, argue Democrats and Republicans alike.

“We all know that there are unstable and potentially dangerous people among us,” writes former Sen. Gary Hart. “To repeatedly appeal to their basest instincts is to invite and welcome their predictable violence.”

Hart is spot on, but a gut check is needed to divine the exploiters. In determining whether facts are cited authentically, historians employ the “drunk leaning on a lamppost” test: Is the light getting used for support or for illumination? Both?

The Tucson tragedy will insinuate itself in the collective memory of a new generation. Younger citizens, those recharged by the 2008 Obama campaign, may now think twice about a career in public service. Or perhaps they’ll feel more emboldened to give back.

Generation Xers replay the clouded image of President Ford wincing at the echo of Sara Jane Moore’s missed gunshot or John Hinckley Jr.’s rampage outside the Washington Hilton Hotel that nearly killed President Reagan. Both were senseless acts, however uncrowded by politics. All the while, we knew about the age of political assassinations that extended from President Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr. to the unsolved Shoreline murder of the Urban League’s Edwin Pratt. Politics as a career? A mostly honorable but dangerous profession, we Xers thought.

In the Pacific Northwest the coarsening of political speech, and what flows from it, is no abstraction. This winter my Seattle commuter bus will not be adorned with an “Israeli War Crimes” banner. That’s because last month King County Executive Dow Constantine put the kibosh on an ad blitz underwritten by the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign. Yes, it was a retroactive decision that felt heavy-handed. Yes, given the potential for escalating divisions and anti-Semitic backlash, I’m grateful. It would have defined political-hate speech down and made it normative. It might have (with a double emphasis on “might”) invited the violence of someone unstable.

So I’ll use Saturday’s raw horror as shorthand. I hope it’s more for illumination than support.

January 11, 2011 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Conservation projects need congressional action

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 5, 2010

Congress should support full funding of conservation projects that are paid for by fees from offshore oil and gas leasing. 

“Lame duck” seems like a self-fulfilling label. With just two weeks left, this (sudden death? two-minute warning?) Congress should defy conventional wisdom and stick its bill out.

Thirty years ago, a lame-duck Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands and Conservation Act (ANILCA) the signal law that overnight doubled the size of the National Park System. ANILCA was the coda to an eye-smarting process that traces back to Alaska statehood in 1959.

In 1980 Democrats acted more emboldened than paralyzed by the end-of-session blues. The cudgel was a just-elected President Reagan, veto pen in hand. Deadlines sharpen the mind. Mostly.

The final days of our sudden-death Congress will revolve around tax cuts, online gambling and enough picayune dreck to make a fifth grader lose faith. One low-hanging bill with a bipartisan history, S2747, might stanch some of that cynicism. S2747 is the Senate counterpart to a House bill that passed last August to provide full and dedicated funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The Fund, established in 1965 as a bipartisan solution to benefit states and local communities with conservation and outdoor-recreation needs, is paid for using a portion of the receipts from offshore gas and oil leases (Read: BP and Exxon-Mobil help underwrite projects in places like the Yakima River Canyon and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest).

Over the past 40 years, LWCF projects have added up to more than a half-a-billion dollars for Washington state and goosed an outdoor recreation industry that annually adds $11.7 billion to the regional economy, according to the LWCF Coalition.

Let-no-fund-go-undiverted budgeting means that the LWCF’s authorized annual level of $900 million has only been met a couple of times since 1965. S2747, sponsored by New Mexico’s Sen. Jeff Bingaman and co-sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell, will ensure the LWCF’s integrity and end the disconnect between mission and means. It has the power to appeal to Republican budget hawks and to conservation Democrats and, most critical of all, to a majority of Americans (77 percent, again according to the LWCF Coalition).

A lesson from 1980 is that history hates hangdogs. Passing S2747 should be easy, with one webbed foot in front of the other.

December 5, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Boeing should make amends for its link to CIA torture case

originally published on Crosscut.com on October 13, 2010

Plaintiffs in the case say Boeing jets were used to transport prisoners for interrogation. As the case winds through the federal appeals process, can the company continue hiding behind the argument that it was merely carrying out a client’s wishes?

The “Lazy B” is in our bones.

From William Boeing’s 1916 B&W Bluebill to Rosie the Riveter and the B29 Superfortress. From Tex Johnston’s 1955 barrel roll to the the Boeing Bust inspiring the infamous billboard, “Would the last person who leaves Seattle please turn out the lights?” From the 2001 move-to-Chicago sucker punch to the more recent Air Force tanker competition:

Boeing defines us.

If we think of the Lazy B as an expression of Northwest values, then the only time the words “Boeing” and “torture” should fall together is to describe Friday afternoons for a mid-level manager.

And yet, a Boeing subsidiary has been entangled in a lawsuit accusing it of helping the CIA fly prisoners to black sites overseas, a policy known as extraordinary rendition. The prisoners were subsequently tortured by bone-breaking friendlies in Afghanistan, Morocco and Egypt.

Last month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the lawsuit on grounds that it could reveal government secrets.The New York Times quotes Judge Raymond Fisher describing the case as “a painful conflict between human rights and national security.” The ACLU, backing the plaintiffs, has vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In practice the Ninth Circuit ruled that Boeing and its subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, are within their right to hide behind their status as simply the contractor carrying out the government’s plan. It was the CIA, after all, that stage-managed the rendition and torture. And few multinationals delight in saying, “I ain’t gonna help ya” when the CIA comes knocking.

Following President Bush’s example, the Obama Administration invoked the state-secrets privilege, a legal catchall that puts the brakes on justice to safeguard national security. The judicial doctrine dates to a 1953 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, United States v. Reynolds. That case involved the widows of victims of a military airplane crash who were denied accident details for fear of compromising top-secret intelligence. It’s a doctrine that’s been applied legitimately and, in all likelihood, stretched and extended for expediency. On Sept. 8, The New York Times editorial page weighed in:The state secrets doctrine is so blinding and powerful that it should be invoked only when the most grave national security matters are at stake — nuclear weapons details, for example, or the identity of covert agents. It should not be used to defend against allegations that if true, as the dissenting judges wrote, would be “gross violations of the norms of international law.” All too often in the past, the judges pointed out, secrecy privileges have been used to avoid embarrassing the government, not to protect real secrets. In this case, the embarrassment and the shame to America’s reputation are already too well known.

Boeing took the legal and fiscally prudent route. While not technically liable, however, the company was morally wrong to abet torture. Transporting prisoners for purposes of bone-breaking also runs counter to the company’s stated values. The Boeing Company Code of Basic Working Conditions and Human Rights declares that “Boeing is committed to the protection and advancement of human rights in its worldwide operations…” It’s a statement consonant with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Global Sullivan Principles of Social Responsibility. And it doesn’t come with an asterisk and footnote stating “except to secretly jet prisoners overseas for Medieval-style beat-downs.”

So the question looms: Can Boeing make amends for enabling torture while upholding its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders? Well, maybe.

There is the Nick Naylor strategy and there is the sacrament of (qualified) penance.

The Naylor approach, named for the protagonist of Chris Buckley’s 1994 novel Thank You For Smoking, involves a cynical manipulation of the principle of Corporate Social Responsibility. Naylor labored for the sweetly titled “Academy of Tobacco Studies” that denied a link between smoking and health.

Boeing could ramp up its PR engine or establish a bogus entity that celebrates its partnership with the CIA. Call it the “Academy for Patriotic Rendition.” It would be an entertainingly shallow response.

The second alternative, a qualified-penance approach, aligns with Boeing’s stated values. The company could sidestep the torture question (“Er, that’s being adjudicated”) and point to its investment in substantive human rights advocacy and scholarship. Drop a few million bucks and create an unrestricted endowment at Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch or the University of Washington’s new Center for Human Rights (obnoxious-bias alert: I’m a Center booster). The company might also double its humanitarian airlifts, a laudable program that’s benefited thousands of disaster victims around the country and the world.

No one in Western Washington wants to tear down Boeing. Jet City is shorthand for the Lazy B. It’s a generous company. It pays mortgages and gins the economy.

All the while, until Congress and the Executive branch find a way to mitigate the overuse of the state secrets privilege, let’s encourage a Boeing payout. Yes, it’s something like an indulgence in Catholic theology. It’s cynical, it bypasses a direct admission of guilt, and it denies justice to the plaintiffs in the extraordinary rendition case.

Yet we live in an imperfect world with imperfect justice. Better to reach an approximation of justice than no justice at all.

October 13, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , ,

A Northwest take on the Nobel Peace Prize

originally published on Crosscut.com on October 9, 2010

Maybe next year for Billy Frank, Jr.

If Las Vegas had accepted wagers on Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize (there must be a receptive Sin City bookie) I would have bet on “no recipient” or perhaps on Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese writer and dissident who has galvanized support across the globe and the PRC and did win the prize.

Sadly, this has been a year of bloodletting unbound, and the Nobel Committee has a history of voting for none-of-the-above, most recently in 1972, 1967, and 1966. It’s a cold, illustrative gesture by a committee of cold, Nordic depressives that peacemaking, like life, is ephemeral. 

Liu Xiaobo merits recognition for his courage and leadership advancing Charter 08, a manifesto that calls for human rights and constitutional government in China. Vaclav Havel, in arguing for Liu, compares Charter 08 to Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 of three decades ago. “That document called on the Communist Party to respect human rights, and said clearly that we no longer wanted to live in fear of state repression,” Havel writes.

There is a political dimension to a Liu nod, but that’s fine. The Chinese, soon to rule the world, demand some human rights humbling. Moreover, think of Jimmy Carter’s 2002 Nobel (message: W. don’t invade Iraq) and President Obama last year (message: Thank you America for a post-W world). The Nobel committee is comprised of political animals, and sometimes they make inspired choices.  

The first and only Northwest Peace Nobelist was that pusher of all-things Vitamin C and disarmament-related, Linus Pauling.  Pauling was born in Portland and educated at Oregon State. He also won the Nobel for Chemistry in 1954.

My Nobel Peace Prize candidate after tomorrow is also a Northwesterner: Billy Frank Jr. Frank was one of the seminal figures during the Indian fish-ins of the 1960s and 70s, a campaign that culminated in the 1974 Boldt decision. Frank is noteworthy because he made the jump from activist of the MLK non-violent civil disobedience school to the administrative, political maw of natural resources management (for 30 years he’s been chair of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission).

Frank sews together indigenous rights, environmental sustainability and, yes, peacemaking of the methodical, mind-numbing sort (incremental steps and thousands and thousands of meetings).

Too far afield or random? Not necessarily. Who understands the intense politics of fishing and fisheries conservation better than the Norwegians? When the committee musters all the facts about Billy Frank, Jr.’s life and leadership, chances are they’ll preface their 2011 Nobel announcement with, “Sorry this took so damn long.”

October 9, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,