VERSE
Cotter, James Finn
desian products at the request of Great Britain. In 1971 conservative forces in Congress, led by Virginia's Harry Byrd, won an amendment which reversed the U.S. boycott position, which in effect...
...Ian Smith's police state to them represents racial and ideological purity...
...The wheat rustles as it blows back and forth, yellow and brown...
...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...
...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...
...Some of this has found its way to "delegations" of specialty company employees who have visited Doc Morgan and his colleagues...
...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...
...Twelve crows circle above, black wings flashing gold...
...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 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...
...That may make more profits for Carbide investors, but will be of questionable value for American ferrochrome workers...
...boycott position, which in effect flaunted international law...
...enterprises--Union Carbide and Foote Minerals...
...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...
...Foote Minerals, with multi-million investments in Rhodesia, is able to send its own cheap fcrrochrome into the U.S...
...White cloudpuffs smoke in the sky...
...The Stainless-Steel Industry has spent $200,000 in efforts to defeat the Rhodesian sanctions bill in the Senate, the Southern Africa Committee reports...
...Poppies and daisies spangle the bank where I sit...
...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 afternoon light slants in behind the stocks, leaving the sky immense and blue...
...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 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...
...Commonweal: 303...
...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...
...I watch a palmtree fountain green fireworks overhead...
...Last year, following agitation by those who saw the violations of the UN sanctions as a contradiction of U.S...
...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...
...Inevitably," a Foote executive told Business Week last year, "Union Carbide will be forced to move its ferrochrome production overseas in order to compete...
...to compete with other domestic producers...
...The Rhodesian connection within the industry becomes apparent with the multinational involvements of two U.S...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 13
