Profits first, safety second, rights third...

Selling Our Secrets
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

They never learn.

Remember, a couple of years ago, the scandals about the way corporate giants like Hughes Electronics and Loral Space, led by big Democratic contributors, sold secret U.S. satellite technology to Chinese aerospace companies and semiconductor manufacturers?

...the Bush administration is getting ready to let our ever-hungry multinationals do the same thing. This time, however, it would all be legalized. If current legislation (Senate 149, the Export Administration Act) being urged by the White House passed, American executives would be encouraged to sell the fruits of their most advanced research to foreign nationals who may not wish us well.    [...]

In general, I don't pay a lot of attention to international trade legislation.  Its not that I consider it unimportant, I just find it mind-boggingly boring.  I don't do a whole lot better with economics in general.  I'm much more of an abstract issues person, not a concerete numbers person.  Despite all of this, even *I* remember the flap about our companies selling technology to Chinese companies.  It was big, it was loud and it was one more thing used to demonstrate the horrific immorality of the Clinton administration.

I must give Mr. Safire credit, at least he admits it's no better when the Bush administration does it than when the Clinton administration did.

This is one area, though, where those abstract issues and concrete numbers do intersect. The issue is our safety.  The numbers are profits. And in this case it appears that profits trump safety, even though the administration has shown repeatedly that our civil rights don't.  This law would allow companies to sell technology to customers around the world, many of whom are free to turn around and resell it to our enemies.  As Safire notes:

Iraq buys dual-use nuclear components through cutouts who could easily buy them from us. Take high-strength aluminum tubes, for example, which can be used in bicycles — but a thousand of them in easily hidden gas centrifuges can produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear bomb every year. Under the proposed law, a country like Russia or Jordan could buy ours and re-sell them to Saddam with no weapons inspectors the wiser.

You like the composite glass fibers in your tennis racquet? A sinister use is to form the rotors of those centrifuges, and their export has been controlled for 20 years. No more, if those who would sell our technology to multifarious middlemen have their way.

So, if our homeland security is so important that twenty people have to be detained because one of them has a name on a "no-fly" list, why isn't it important enough to maintain controls on the export of goods that could be used by our enemies - by Iraq, for example -  to harm or kill unknown numbers of our citizens?