January, 2001: Publius

By Greg Rushford
Published in the Rushford Report

It’s time again for the annual award (admittedly in questionable taste) for the Protectionist Piggies of 2000 — the bad economic actors who did the most during the year to hurt the innocent while taking care of themselves.

It is not easy to be a Piggy of the Year.

Hypocrisy is not enough.

If it were, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) could win. To shore up his financial and political support from organized labor, Brown made speeches on the House floor saying that America’s corporate heads have the same interest in democracy as do the leaders of China’s Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. At the same time he was defaming the CEOs, Brown was shaking them down. The Ohio Democrat and Commerce Committee member raked in some $150,000 in campaign contributions from a long list of round-heeled corporate luminaries for whom the China PNTR vote was a top priority. One wonders what the moneybags at Lucent Technologies, Time Warner, and New York Life Insurance Co. really think of Sherrod Brown.

Being a crude protectionist is not enough.

If it were, a lot of lawmakers could be Piggies. Take Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.). This year the Cuban-born congresswoman actually justified U.S. sanctions against Castro’s (impoverished) Cuba on grounds they protect Florida vegetable, citrus, and sugar industries from competition. The day will come when the Cuban-American leadership will pay a heavy political price for this. When I was in Havana in September, I learned that many ordinary Cubans understand that they are being exploited by Fidel Castro. Wait until they figure out that some of their rich cousins in Miami have plans to keep on exploiting them.

Even piggish exploitation of U.S. trade laws isn’t enough to be a Piggy of the year. However odious, hiring lawyers to stick it to foreigners is perfectly legal conduct.
Otherwise, the Magnesium Corporation of America – one of America’s worst corporate polluters — would be Piggy of the Year. The Utah-based Magcorp successfully used U.S. trade laws this year to penalize competition from Canadian firms that employ clean technology (for additional details, see the Yankee Trader column at page 2).

To win the Piggy award, it isn’t enough just to have your hired guns shoot your competitors. You have also to do your protectionist thing in an intellectually dishonest manner — and you have to fool the press (a lesser requirement, but still essential).

Sens. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) are the first runners-up.

Last month I reported on the so-called Byrd amendment — now U.S. law — that Byrd sneaked into the agriculture appropriations bill in a House-Senate conference. Talk about abuse of process. Neither House nor Senate had ever debated on or voted for this before. And when he explained this controversial measure to his colleagues, Byrd was less than candid.

The new law requires the U.S. Treasury to pay millions of dollars in tariffs collected in antidumping cases directly to the domestic lobbies (including campaign contributors to both senators) that brought the cases. Talk about theft.
DeWine, who chairs a Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust law, must know better. Every antitrust authority I’ve ever met understands why respectable the antidumpint laws are regarded in respectable economics circles the antitrust laws’ evil twin. DeWine’s antidumping position was tailored to please influential campaign contributors such as Tim Timken, of the Timken Company (and chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers). The senator had to know that the measure would hurt other, more important, Ohio businesses — from Procter & Gamble to precision metalformers and many other smaller enterprises in Ohio that depend upon free trade.

Furthermore, the Byrd amendment — a major piece of trade news — was not reported by the trade reporters at the Washington Post and New York Times.
But other news organizations — including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times – reported on the provision. Even Washington Post editorial writer Sebastian Mallaby wrote a stinging op-ed column that criticized Byrd. (This fellow Mallaby obviously has learned his economic fundamentals somewhere; he sure doesn’t get his news on trade from his own newspaper.)
But Ralph Nader got away with his (intellectually dishonest) act, big time.
Nader — on behalf of the motley crew of his supporters who once again turned to violence in the streets — is the Protectionist Piggy of 2000. This is the second year in a row that the “consumer” advocate has earned the award.

Last December, Nader and his aides sent people to the streets of Seattle, where they trashed the place. Small businesses lost millions of dollars. Nader’s aide Mike Dolan denied direct responsibility for the violence. Maybe Dolan didn’t participate directly. But Ralph Nader, Mike Dolan and their colleagues loaded the gun, pointed it at Seattle, and then expressed surprise when some of their anti-capitalist allies pulled the trigger.

One afternoon during the Seattle WTO ministerial, Ralph decided to use a nearby park to exercise his rights of free speech and assembly. As I reported at the time in some detail, this “consumer” advocate expressed no concern that intimidated small businesses in the area had to close for their own safety.

This year, running as a candidate for president on the Green Party ticket, Nader went around college campuses telling students that the World Trade Organization has made the United States water down its air pollution standards. This is absolute, provable, laughable nonsense and Nader knows it. Yet no reporter held Ralph to account for such deliberate distortions. The scrutiny would have revealed that, on international trade, Nader’s entire platform rests on deliberate distortions and misrepresentations.

Some Nader supporters at the Republican and Democratic national conventions once more used violence to express their views. In April, thousands of anti-capitalist protestors came to Washington to try to prevent the World Bank and International Monetary Fund officials from holding meetings. Now, using force to prevent others from exercising their rights to go about their jobs unmolested is simply wrong. This isn’t a civil rights stance, it’s thuggery.

The effort to shut down the Bank/IMF meetings failed, as police bussed in most of the delegates before sunrise. But the demonstrators did succeed by forming human chains and in using force to prevent journalists and Bank/Fund staffers who weren’t on the pre-dawn busses from getting through the lines later that Sunday morning. The American Civil Liberties Union did not shy from branding this conduct illegal. But when I asked Nader if he would also speak out against this use of force to prevent others from going about their business freely, he refused to do so.

When his own interests are involved, of course, Nader is for free speech. Nader was angered when he was excluded from the presidential debate between George W. Bush and Al Gore. He threatened to bring in his allies in organized labor to retaliate in 2004.

Ralph got away with such hypocrisy and truth-twisting all year.

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