PRAGUE
Last week, by an odd twist of my schedule, I found myself visiting two sites in two hemispheres that each focus on apartheid.

One is well known: Robben Island, the prison off Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was jailed for 18 years. The other is hardly visible: Maticni Street in Usti nad Labem, a gritty industrial town in the Czech Republic, where locals built a block-long wall in 1999 to separate an enclave of the Roma (gypsies) from the Czechs across the street.

Robben Island, a seminal training ground for anti-apartheid forces, was a maximum-security facility from which no political prisoner ever escaped. The wall at Usti, a seven-foot-high noise barrier with several open gates through it, prevented nobody from moving anywhere. Robben Island endured for decades. The so-called “wall of shame” lasted about a month.

Some say the story out of Usti — near the border with the former East Germany, and only a decade distant from the Berlin Wall — loomed larger in the press than it deserved to. But did it? Apartheid comes in many forms. But it always starts from a premise that “they’re different from us,” and that they need to be separated from us, often forcibly.

In today’s Western developed nations, it’s easy to think that apartheid is something that happens elsewhere. It’s easy to see it as perpetrated by old-fashioned bigots whose mental motherboards are missing the human-rights chip. It’s easy to get angry at the narrowness of human exclusion — and to pride ourselves on an attitude of fairness and respect that saves us from practicing such dreadful policies.

So I was struck by a comment from a professor I met at Cape Town University. Yes, he agreed, since the 1994 election we’ve come a long way in South Africa in eliminating apartheid. Now, he said, we’ve got to recognize a different kind of enemy, which he calls “global apartheid.” His point: The developed world, through its economic structures, is imposing a kind of apartheid on the developing world — isolating the poorer countries, keeping them at a distance, and depriving them of the means to progress. It’s not a conscious attitude, but something that happens unwittingly through national and regional policies and practices. But its effects can be as brutal as a Robben Island cell.

In many ways, of course, he’s dead wrong. The West provides significant aid — governmental and voluntary, regular and emergency, cash and in-kind, goods and services — to developing nations. What’s more, every practicing democracy feels some compulsion to help nascent democracies prosper.

Yet in a way made sharply visible during this past week, he’s right. Last Wednesday the U.S. Senate passed a new farm bill that President Bush has now signed into law. Reversing course from 1996 laws designed to wean farmers from subsidies, this one pours a projected $20 billion a year into support for U.S. farmers growing cotton, rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and other crops. The European nations have long had similar policies, used to ensure that their own farm products won’t be undersold by cheap foreign imports. The motives are understandable: to ensure the quality of the food chain, and to make it worthwhile for farmers to keep farming.

But the moral impact on the less developed countries can be devastating. How can a farmer in southern Africa make money on cotton? The subsidies paid to richer farmers elsewhere in the world keep the global cotton price so low that the African farmer can’t sell it for enough to cover his costs. Because his country can’t afford such subsidies, he can’t afford to farm. The result: developing economies that can’t use the one thing they know well — agriculture — to help lift them into greater prosperity.

These are huge, complicated issues, bristling with right-versus-right dilemmas that lend themselves to no formulaic answers. So the developed world needs to be alert to global apartheid. It needs a form of moral futurism that looks over the horizon at the future ethical impacts of its actions. It needs to ask broad questions about the benefits and damages of its policies and practices — not just for its own voting constituents, but for the wider world.

One thing is clear: Free trade and global apartheid won’t mix.

(c)2002 by the Institute for Global Ethics

“These guys talk themselves into believing what they did was okay. But then we go back after the visit and look at what was presented in court, and realize the truth. It’s a valuable lesson.”

WASHINGTON
The United States last week angered many allies and human rights groups by announcing it was withdrawing all support for the International Criminal Court (ICC), an agency formed to investigate and prosecute war crimes around the world.

The United States signed the treaty setting up the ICC in 1998 in order to have a hand in shaping the war-crimes court, which for the first time would create a stable, ongoing agency to handle allegations of war crimes.

Last month, the ICC passed a vital threshold after 10 nations joined 56 others to ratify the treaty, giving the ICC the 60-nation minimum that puts the agency into effect.

In response, the Bush administration last week said it was “unsigning” the treaty and would not be bound by ICC requests and rulings, the New York Times reported.

“We think it was a mistake to have signed it” in the first place, an unidentified administration official told the Times, saying the United States was afraid the ICC could be politically manipulated to target U.S. military personnel and political leaders for actions committed abroad.

John Bolton, the State Department’s undersecretary of state for arms control, has warned against participation in the ICC, calling it “not just naïve, but dangerous.”

According to the Times, Bolton warned in a 1999 National Interest article that the ICC would usurp some U.S. sovereignty and jeopardize the authority of “the president, the cabinet officers who comprise the National Security Council, and other senior civilian and military leaders responsible for our defense and foreign policy.”

Simultaneously, other officials told the Times that the States will refuse to be bound by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a 1969 agreement outlining nations’ international obligations to one another.

Last week’s announcements by the Bush administration have angered most European nations and Canada, who say Bush is dangerously isolating the United States by turning his back on international treaties, including the Kyoto Climate Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

“The perception will be that the United States walked away from international justice and forfeited its leadership role,” warned David Scheffer, President Clinton’s ambassador at large for war crimes, who signed the ICC treaty in 2000. “It will be a dramatic moment in international legal history.”

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told the Reuters news agency that “the administration is putting itself on the wrong side of history. ‘Unsigning’ the treaty will not stop the court. It will only throw the United States into opposition against the most important new institution for enforcing human rights in 50 years.”

“It puts the Bush administration in the awkward position of seeking law-enforcement cooperation in tracking down terrorist suspects while opposing an historic new law-enforcement institution for comparably serious crimes,” Roth added.

With or without U.S. support, the ICC is set to launch next summer at The Hague in the Netherlands, with jurisdiction over war crimes committed after July 1, 2002, according to the Times.

WASHINGTON
The Bush administration last week reversed more than 60 years of federal gun-control policy by penning footnotes to two legal briefs supporting the right of individual U.S. citizens to bear firearms.

Since at least 1939, all U.S. federal appeals courts and Justice Department heads have held that the Second Amendment protects the rights of state militias — not individual citizens — to carry guns.

Last October, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals broke ranks with that view, leading to two appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court involving gun rights, the Boston Globe reported.

Those appeals — one by a Texas man arrested for carrying a gun while under a domestic-violence restraining order, another by an Oklahoma man arrested for illegal possession of two machine guns — were introduced last week.

Although many doubt that the Supreme Court will hear the appeals, the U.S. Justice Department last week used the cases to reinterpret the government’s long-standing view of the Constitution.

“The current position of the United States … is that the Second Amendment more broadly protects the rights of individuals … to possess and bear their own firearms,” Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the government’s lead attorney, wrote for the Justice Department.

Although that right is subject to “reasonable restrictions,” the government should adopt a more expansive view toward constitutional rights of gun ownership, Olson claimed.

Last year, Ashcroft, a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), wrote a letter to the group saying he “unequivocally” believes the Second Amendment shelters the arms-bearing rights of individuals.

At the time, Justice Department staffers insisted that Ashcroft was simply expressing his “personal” views. But last November, Ashcroft wrote a memo ordering all federal prosecutors to alert him when a case involving gun rights and the Second Amendment arose.

Ashcroft said he wanted to “coordinate all briefing in those cases” — a plan that included last week’s footnotes reversing the standard interpretation of the Second Amendment, the New York Times reported.

“Obviously we’re pleased by this,” NRA chief lobbyist Chris Cox told the Los Angeles Times last week. “This is a very good start.”

Mathew Nosanchuk, legislative counsel for the pro-gun-control Violence Policy Center, blasted Ashcroft for “flouting decades of precedent to embrace an expansive view of a heretofore unrecognized individual right to own a gun, and that could put many gun laws at risk.”

Andrew Frey, a former deputy solicitor general who handled the government’s criminal cases in the Supreme Court from 1973 until 1986, was equally harsh in condemning Ashcroft.

“This has been the government’s position for more than 60 years,” Frey told the New York Times. “People who happen to be in office temporarily shouldn’t use the office to promote their personal views.”

BALTIMORE, Maryland
The governor of Maryland last week imposed a moratorium on all state-ordered executions, saying further imposition of the death penalty should wait until the release of a pending report on the fairness of the state judicial system.

Gov. Parris Glendening, a term-limited Democrat who must retire this fall, said he still supports the death penalty in extreme cases, but that current statistics cast doubt on the state’s fairness in prosecuting death penalty cases.

The Baltimore Sun, for instance, noted that even though 80 percent of Maryland’s homicide victims are black, the majority of the state’s death row inmates — 60 percent — are to be executed for murdering whites.

“It is imperative … that I and our citizens have complete confidence that our process is fair and impartial,” Glendening said last week.

Maryland’s moratorium follows a similar move by Illinois in 2000, announced after Gov. George Ryan said he could no longer trust the fairness of his state’s death-penalty system.

Last month, a commission appointed to investigate Illinois’s death penalty said that massive reforms were necessary to repair the system — and that even those steps may not be enough.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

OTTAWA
In a lead editorial that reflects the thinking of many in the Canadian government and population, the Globe & Mail is warning of the consequences of what is perceived as rising U.S. trade protectionism.

The editorial pointed to the U.S. Farm Bill, which will pour billions into the already heavily subsidized agricultural sector, the 30 percent tariffs on non-North American steel imports, the 27 percent duties imposed on Canadian softwood lumber products, and most recently the Senate-approved subsidies totaling billions of dollars for the proposed Alaska natural gas pipeline intended to give Alaska gas producers a major competitive edge over their Canadian counterparts.

Both the editorial and Canadian government contend that such protectionist actions have made a mockery of trade agreements signed by the United States and are inviting retaliation from the European Union, Canada, and developing countries, such as Brazil, which rely heavily on agricultural exports.

The paper also argues that the agricultural subsidies in the Farm Bill gravely undermine the prospects of making the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks, one which would be primarily concerned at making the international trade regime equitable for developing countries.

Finally, the paper reminds its readers that the collapse of free trade and the rise of protectionism at the beginning of the last century helped fuel two world wars and the Great Depression.

WASHINGTON
Enron Corp. used a series of possibly illegal schemes to secretly manipulate energy prices in California, possibly adding to the crisis that caused a series of rolling blackouts in early 2001, according to documents released last week by federal prosecutors.

Using code names such as “Death Star,” “Fat Boy,” “Load Shift,” and “Ricochet,” Enron used false paperwork, inflated figures, and sales tricks to play a shell game with its energy supplies, reaping steep profits in the process, prosecutors claimed.

According to company memos, one strategy involved buying power supplies in California at a capped rate of $250, and then turning around and selling the power to out-of-state firms for $1,200, the New York Times reported.

“This strategy appears not to present any problems other than a public relations risk arising from the fact that such exports may have contributed to California’s declaration of a Stage 2 Emergency yesterday,” stated one memo.

The schemes, outlined in papers written by Enron lawyers, were released by the company’s board of directors, which waived its attorney-client privileges after finding the documents last month, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The documents also state that other power companies used similar tactics in California, possibly contributing to the state’s multi-billion-dollar energy crisis in 2000 and 2001.

“To us, this is really the smoking gun” Sean Gallagher, a staff attorney with the California Public Utilities Commission, told the Associated Press.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) responded last week by ordering a large portion of the state’s energy industry to clearly state whether or not they engaged in similar activities.

“It is hardball,” energy lawyer Roger Berliner told the Los Angeles Times. “It is unusual, but the circumstances are unusual. Given the vociferous denials from producers that they were engaged in any of these activities … FERC is properly concerned whether people have been saying things that aren’t true.”

The Times notes that while some of the schemes may be technically legal, merely exploiting loopholes in a poorly constructed regulatory system, they almost certainly violate ethics provisions of FERC, qualifying them for punitive measures.

Energy companies have until May 22 to answer FERC’s demand.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. government last week sued poultry giant Tyson Foods Inc. for allegedly violating fair labor laws by ordering workers to wear protective gear without paying for the time needed to change into the gear.

The government’s suit against Tyson follows failed settlement talks with the poultry processor over fair compensation for the workers, the Associated Press reported.

Also last week, the government settled a similar suit against Tyson rival Perdue Farms Inc. for $10 million.

That agreement requires Perdue to change its pay policies to cover the time required of workers to change into protective clothes and sanitize their workstations, a task the plaintiffs estimate as consuming about eight minutes a day. Roughly 25,000 current and former workers will split the settlement.

“Most poultry workers are immigrants who earn less than $7.00 an hour,” U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said last week. “We want to make sure they are getting paid what they deserve, especially when they are performing health and safety precautions that are required by their work.”

The department’s lead lawyer, Eugene Scalia, told the AP he hopes that last week’s deal with Perdue will have a trickle-down effect.

“A number of companies have this practice and we will be contacting them shortly,” Scalia said. “I hope the agreement we have reached will serve as a model.”

WAKEFIELD, Massachusetts
The U.S. economy may be showing signs of a recovery, but one lesson learned from the recent downturn is not being forgotten: the importance of keeping workplaces safe, according to an article last week from USA Today.

As a growing number of workers were fired, laid off, and otherwise relieved of their duties during the latest downturn, headlines of angry workers lashing out in violence caught employers’ attention.

Last month, a former employee of Edgewater Technology in Wakefield, Massachusetts, was ordered to life in prison without parole after he killed seven coworkers in December 2000.

The man, a software engineer, was found to have acted out of rage after discovering that Edgewater was planning to withhold part of his salary for delinquent taxes that he owed.

That case, and others like it, have prompted businesses to adopt a new raft of measures meant to prevent violence when employees receive bad news and pink slips, USA Today noted.

Wakefield Police Chief Stephen Doherty said the shootings have underscored an underserved role for his coworkers: community policing, which has proved beneficial in the public sector.

“Let’s see if we can apply it to the workplace. Local police always are called to bind the wounded, counsel the survivors. What about prevention?” Doherty asked USA Today. “I don’t want to go through that door again at Edgewater.”

The article also details other efforts under way in the private sector, including asking for restraining orders to protect employees from domestic violence that could follow them to the workplace, and safeguarded procedures for firing workers.

UNITED NATIONS
Child labor remains a persistent and crippling part of many young lives around the world, with 246 million children — one child in eight — facing dangerous working conditions, the United Nations warned last week.

“A wide range of crises — including natural disasters, sharp economic downturns, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and armed conflicts — increasingly draws the young into debilitating child labor,” notes a report from the UN’s International Labor Organization (ILO).

The ILO blames much of the problem on international demand for low prices, which pushes underdeveloped nations to poach unprotected children for hard labor, according to the Associated Press.

“Child labor often assumes serious proportions in commercial agriculture associated with global markets for cocoa, coffee, cotton, rubber, sisal, tea, and other commodities,” the report states. “Studies in Brazil, Kenya, and Mexico have shown that children under 15 make up between 25 and 30 percent of the total labor force in the production of various commodities.”

The problem is especially acute for children in the Asia-Pacific region, where 60 percent of the world’s working children live, and in sub-Saharan Africa, where 23 percent live, the Reuters news agency reported.

“Despite the increasing commitment by governments and their partners to tackle child labor worldwide, it remains a problem on a massive scale,” ILO director-general Juan Somavia said last week.

WASHINGTON
U.S. railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. last week agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a lawsuit filed after the firm secretly tested the DNA of 36 injured workers in the hopes of avoiding paying health benefits.

Between March 2000 and February 2001, roughly 125 Burlington Northern workers filed injury reports complaining about carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful hand and wrist ailment caused by repetitive motion.

Burlington Northern ordered 36 of those workers to submit blood for testing — without telling the workers that their DNA would be decoded and checked for a predisposition to carpal tunnel.

In at least one case, the railroad threatened to fire a worker who balked at giving blood for the tests, plaintiffs claimed.

After a nurse married to one of the workers pushed Burlington Northern into explaining its actions, the workers complained to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which then investigated.

The EEOC sued Burlington Northern and won a ruling last July that the firm had violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which restricts companies from using DNA tests for inappropriate reasons.

Although Burlington Northern insists that none of its “actions were contrary to the law,” EEOC attorney Laurie Vasichek slammed the railroad’s tests as “junk science” that may have violated workers’ privacy and federal law.

Last week’s settlement, which still must be approved by the courts, requires Burlington Northern to return all test samples to the workers, purge its medical records of any reference to genetic tests, and pay $2.2 million to be split among the targeted workers.

LOS ANGELES
U.S. chocolate manufacturers last week dismissed as frivolous a new lawsuit accusing the companies of violating a California law requiring them to warn consumers about toxic metals in their food products.

The American Environmental Safety Institute (AESI) says chocolate companies including Hershey, Mars, and Nestle, are exposing children and adults to traces of hazardous metals such as lead and cadmium.

The AESI’s suit is based on a California law known as Proposition 65, which requires businesses to warn individuals before exposing them to hazardous chemicals.

Chocolate companies insist that their products are perfectly safe, the amounts of metals negligibly low and naturally occurring, and the lawsuit entirely frivolous.

“Creating false health scares about food that is safe does not protect anyone,” said Doug Archer, a food and nutrition professor at the University of Florida and a food safety consultant for the Grocery Manufacturers of America. “It is just misinformation.”

From the Gallup New Service:

“For the past half century, both men and women have indicated a greater preference for male than female bosses. A recent Gallup poll shows that pattern still prevails today, although the percentage of people expressing no preference is the highest it has ever been.

“Part of this more accepting attitude may be because there are more women in leadership positions than in the past. The poll shows that people who currently work for women, or have done so in the past, are far more likely to be favorable toward them as bosses than are people who have worked only for men.

“In 1953, when Gallup first asked the question of preference for a male or female boss, overwhelmingly both men and women indicated they would prefer a male to a female boss. Among all Americans, 66 percent chose a male boss, just 5 percent chose a female, and 25 percent indicated no preference.

“By the 1980s, the margin in favor of male over female bosses had slipped to [a ratio of] 46 percent to 12 percent, at the same time that the percentage of respondents indicating no preference increased to 38 percent. Overall, this meant that exactly half of all Americans saw female bosses as either better than, or just as acceptable as, male bosses.

“Over the next two decades, there was only a slight increase in the percentage of people who indicated a preference for female bosses — going from 12 percent in 1982 to a high of 22 percent in 1993 and 2000, only slightly above the current level of 19 percent. The percentage of people expressing no preference during this period has varied from a low of 28 percent in 2000 to the current high of 49 percent. Combined with the 19 percent who currently prefer to work for females, these figures show that more than two-thirds of Americans, 68 percent, now find female bosses at least as acceptable as male bosses. Still, the gender bias remains, as 80 percent of Americans find male bosses at least as acceptable as female bosses.

“The initial reading of attitudes in 1953 found more men than women who were biased against female bosses. In 1975, the gender gap narrowed…. In 1982, however, the gender gap reversed. Men expressed more favorable attitudes about female bosses than did women. Over the next two decades, the differences between those who preferred male bosses and those who preferred female bosses were sometimes slightly larger among men than women, but men were much more likely to express no preference so that overall men tended to be more accepting of females as bosses than were women. In the latest reading, the differences between men and women have once again narrowed….

“For women, the younger they are, the more likely they are to find female bosses acceptable. For men, however, the pattern is more complicated. Younger men are more likely to say they prefer female bosses, while older men are more likely to say that either gender of boss is acceptable….

“The poll shows that probably the most important factor in predicting the views of those who are currently working is the experience they have had with male and female bosses…. These figures differ only a little among men and women, suggesting that the gender of one’s current boss is probably the most influential factor in determining which gender workers prefer.”

“No society of nations, no people within a nation, no family can benefit through mutual aid unless good will exceeds ill will; unless the spirit of cooperation surpasses antagonism; unless we all see and act as though the other man’s welfare determines our own welfare.”

– Henry Ford II (U.S. automaker and businessman, 1917-1987)