CONTROVERSY OVER CHROME
Gibbons, Russell W.
tion of the Presidency as that "bully pulpit" has been reduced to only the bully. There are transgressors enough, in addition to Mr. Nixon. But, no saints. The blood of martyrs is the seed of...
...A man after his time is Mr...
...Some of this has found its way to "delegations" of specialty company employees who have visited Doc Morgan and his colleagues...
...Jack Sheehan, Washington legislative director of the Steelworkers--which represents most American ferrochrome and specialty steel workers --has declared that jobs are not threatened by the loss of chrome ore from Rhodesia but have been lost through imports of processed ferrochrome...
...McLaughlin, S.J., must certainly know...
...Conscription of all whites has defused Smith's white immigration and settlement programs and Africa-watchers now suggest that the April 24 Portuguese revolt has only escalated the inevitable political and military success of the Zimbabwe liberation forces, the ZANLA (Angola and Mozambique provide a colonial perimeter on both of Rhodesia's flanks...
...enterprises--Union Carbide and Foote Minerals...
...The chrome controversy which has again erupted in Washington, and which has triggered the actions and passions of some within the small but strategic specialtymetal industry, can be traced to U.S...
...Life inside Ian Smith's "independent" garrison state sounds all-too-like the strategic hamlet period of South Vietnam: strangers (i.e., Blacks) seen outside hamlets may be shot on sight by security forces...
...House action is expected sometime in May or June, and it is Doc Morgan and his colleagues from half a dozen states--where chrome imports have been significant in the manufacture of specialty-steel products--who are now feeling pressure from the chrome lobby...
...The Stainless-Steel Industry has spent $200,000 in efforts to defeat the Rhodesian sanctions bill in the Senate, the Southern Africa Committee reports...
...And if foreign relations are not passing affairs to his House Committee, then the particularly foggy status of the United States defiance of the United Nations sanctions against the outlaw Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith is a case in point for limited-duration attachment without long-range considerations...
...What recourse now for Mr...
...One wonders if this is not the fleeting attachment of House-style "foreign afairs," an encounter with short-term corporate investments, rather than heeding the advice of the African National Council Representative in the U.S., who asked the House subcommittee on Africa last year: "Is it good economic sense to invest in this regime which is bound to crumble and fall--at the expense of all five and a half million Africans who will certainly rule Zimbabwe in the near future...
...In 1971 conservative forces in Congress, led by Virginia's Harry Byrd, won an amendment which reversed the U.S...
...Foote Minerals, with multi-million investments in Rhodesia, is able to send its own cheap fcrrochrome into the U.S...
...The chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, in keeping with the pun, is a man who some say is not about to let the lofty objectives of international law get into the way of Congress if there appears to be any real or imagined injury to their constituents...
...Nixon, as even his speechwriter/ advisor, Fr...
...Utilizing all of the strident techniques of plant shutdown scares, the loss of American jobs and a thinly-veiled anti-UN campaign, the lobby has sought to salvage the 1971 Byrd amendment, which reversed the U.S...
...I watch a palmtree fountain green fireworks overhead...
...A third party---one of decency, i.e...
...Chrome is the largest export of Rhodesia, the rump racist state created by the five per cent white minority who broke away from the British Commonwealth in 1965...
...Commonweal: 303...
...But, in political terms, there being no martyrs in this situation, the future for our political institutions that have held together our disparate nation is not bright...
...Inevitably," a Foote executive told Business Week last year, "Union Carbide will be forced to move its ferrochrome production overseas in order to compete...
...White cloudpuffs smoke in the sky...
...Rhodesian chrome has become a symbolic rallying point for many Black action groups with a Southern Africa independence orientation, for strong UN advocates and generally those who see U.S...
...support of the world body, liberals Hubert Humphrey and Gale McGee in December led a fight to override a filibuster in the Senate and again secured compliance with the UN sanctions...
...without roots in the state capital in Alabama--may well emerge...
...That may make more profits for Carbide investors, but will be of questionable value for American ferrochrome workers...
...The wheat rustles as it blows back and forth, yellow and brown...
...Twelve crows circle above, black wings flashing gold...
...Ian Smith's police state to them represents racial and ideological purity...
...Nixon has moved by the sweep of events from his mountain-top Berchtesgaden to his besieged Berlin bunker...
...Doc" Thomas E. Morgan, chairman of the House Committee and thus a counterpart to Senator J. William Fulbright, is an affable but astute onetime general practitioner from a southwestern Pennsylvania hamlet...
...According to a Carnegie Foundation study, Union Carbide's Rhodesian properties have been "tremendously expanded" since the embargo, and the company's objective is "a total end to sanctions, so it can legally get" at profits which the Smith government has restricted since 1966...
...These political institutions have been ill-used and the expectations Americans have of them have been seriously thwarted...
...Not surprisingly, lobbyists for the two companies became highly involved in the successful efforts to pass the Byrd Amendment three years ago, under which Rhodesian chrome and ferrochrome could again be imported into the United States...
...The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, we are told...
...RUSSELL W. GIBBONS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 O0 JAMES FINN COTTER FIELDS, ES SENIA The wheat bends in the wind, bobbing in different directions...
...The irony to the American industry concerned with chrome imports, however, has been that several hundreds jobs in ferrochrome and ferroalloys plants along the Ohio River and two Southern states have been lost as a direct result of Rhodesian imports...
...The afternoon light slants in behind the stocks, leaving the sky immense and blue...
...boycott position, which in effect flaunted international law...
...to Union Carbide, Foote Mineral and their stainless-steel-maker associations, Rhodesia represents a source of cheap chrome, processed by black workers who earn little more than a dollar day (in neighboring independent black Zambia, miners earn four times as much...
...Political Luddites may soon be prowling about...
...position backing Rhodesian sanctions...
...Poppies and daisies spangle the bank where I sit...
...The socalled major "national" political parties may undergo re-alignment...
...Last year, following agitation by those who saw the violations of the UN sanctions as a contradiction of U.S...
...For Doc Morgan is but one of several Congressmen from Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia districts who have recently been barraged with a concerted lobbying effort from the vociferous and well-heeled American specialty steel industry...
...Watergate may not be the catharsis that it is characterized as by editorial writers...
...Seven centuries ago in England, he could have claimed "benefit of clergy," that privilege extended to literate persons wishing to escape criminal prosecution in secular courts for alleged felonies...
...to compete with other domestic producers...
...These facts are not highly touted by the stainless lobby, who have employed scare tactics resembling previous threats of plant shutdowns upon the advent of unionization, health and safety enforcement and pollutioncontrol enactments...
...Lessened participation in elections is a possibility...
...The Ferroalloys Association told Congress in 1973 that low-cost imports from Rhodesia had reduced employment in that industry by some 30 percent...
...The sun explodes into red...
...Like Gresham's Law, bad politics drives out good...
...Such claim would have been granted upon demonstration that he knew the first verse of Psalm 51: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy loving kindness: according unto the multitudes of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions...
...In 1973 Assistant Secretary of State David Newsore told a Congressional committee that $50 million of the $57-million of direct American investments in Rhodesia was in chrome ore mines owned by the two firms...
...Rhodesia (it is Zimbabwe to Black African liberation movements) today represents more than a potential crucible in Africa, for the complexities of chrome on the world market, the crisis situations developing in Portugal and her African Colonial holdings and the game of geopolitics being played around the UN sanctions all suggest a crescendo of Vietnamese-type proportions...
...SISYPHUS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PROPPING THE RHODF~IAN REGIME r VEBSu 0 VER CHBO IE In the Congressional foggy bottom of international concerns, so the quip goes, members of the Senate have "relations" while those of their counterpart committee in the House have "affairs...
...Another, one notes, in difficult circumstances chose not to resign----or to be captured...
...policy toward Africa as but the same holding action which advocated a bankrupt Southeast Asia policy and one which supports safe corporate investment in a militarized Latin America...
...Security Council sanctions which were imposed eight years ago on Rho31 May 1974:302 desian products at the request of Great Britain...
...Members of the Tool and Stainless Steel Industry Committee soon rubbed corporate elbows with some of the more sordid types on the radical fight, who had adopted "Rhodesian independence" as a respectable front for racism and a diminishing anti-Communism...
...The Rhodesian connection within the industry becomes apparent with the multinational involvements of two U.S...
...The president of one of the specialty firms lamented that he "could not compete with companies that pay blacks $1 a day in Rhodesia, when we pay $24 a day in our Charleston, South Carolina plant...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 13
