□ Mengele’s grave has been identified for two weeks now, and the President has not yet visited it. Is everyone mollified?
□ The political debate on South Africa has hurtled left so fast that it is now the conservative position, in Congress at least, that we should impose only slow or partial economic sanctions, while the liberals want sanctions all at once. Among the proposals is one to set labor standards for U.S. firms operating in South Africa, patterned after but not identical to the widely known Sullivan Principles. As the Labor Policy Association points out, the leading Senate bill on this subject would impose a number of legal requirements that are not even found in U.S. law—proposals that previous Congresses have turned down as likely to harm the U.S. economy. The bill would index the minimum wage, require affirmative action in cases where the employer had never discriminated, compel arbitration of grievances even without no-strike pledges, and give union organizers unlimited access to a workplace during working hours. The bill may pass, on the nothing’s-too-bad-for-South-Africa principle. But if conservatives roll over on this one, they are going to have to answer the question a few years hence: Why shouldn’t the requirements apply here too? In response, meanwhile, South Africa always has the legal option of nationalizing all U.S. holdings, since Congress is declaring economic war.
Comments