YA baby Thats what IM talkin about.  USA USA USA USA ... u get the picture

and thats why I read your stuff.

RELATIVES OF JAILED VIETNAMESE PRIEST SENTENCED TO PRISON

Hanoi - Three family members of a jailed Vietnamese priest were handed prison sentences on Wednesday, officials said.

Court officials in Ho Chi Minh City said the two nephews and a niece of Father Thaddeus Nguyen Van Ly were found guilty in one-day trials of providing “reactionary” organizations in the US with information about religious freedom in the Communist country. Nguyen Thi Hoa will be jailed for three years, Nguyen Truc Cuong for four years, and Nguyen Vu Viet for five years. They were arrested in June 2001, shortly after their uncle was detained.

Human rights groups have said the siblings’ arrests were directly related to official ire against Father Van Ly.

Father Van Ly was arrested after a statement he wrote was read before Congress during debate over Vietnam’s human rights and religious freedom situation. He is serving a 10-year jail sentence that was handed down earlier this year.

http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=39015

This is grim reading but not surprisng.  Perhaps we can consider the actions of Vietnam’s Stalinist regime “merciful” in comparison to what they might have done twenty years ago, which is to say, public executions or life terms in the Bamboo Gulag for not only Pham Hong Son but also his whole family.  “Pour encourager les autres,” as they say.

If the Twentieth Century taught us nothing else, we should have seen that this is the nature of totalitarian regimes, whatever ideology they claim to espouse.  It ashames me that so many Western nations, including the US, trade with genocidal police states like Vietnam, but it no longer surprises me.  We--and by “we” I do not merely mean the US--have sacrificed all our dearest ideals on the altar of “free trade,” which is to say, profits for the few at the expense of the many, even if it means importing goods made by political prisoner slave labor, even if it means trading with nations that arm and train terrorists.

“I used to be disgusted, but now I’m just amused.” --Elvis Costello

It is merely that I do not believe that workers in the First World ought to be forced into cutthroat wage competition against political prisoner slave laborers in China or Vietnam, or seven-year-olds in Mexico or Indonesia.  I do not believe that free nations should trade with totalitarian regimes at all--this is not only because it is morally unacceptable to legitimize totalitarian regimes by having relations with them, not only because totalitarian regimes generally have little with which to engage in trade except a surplus of concentration camp slave labor (meaning that the net flow of wealth will be out of my society, rather than into it, as it should be), but also because, as a practical matter, Stalinist regimes are one and all hostile to my own free society, and “free trade” with them means a hemorrhage of hard currency flowing out of my society into the coffers of governments that hate us and will surely spend the money on weapons (Communist China comes to mind here).  I believe that I have a moral right to exist without being forced into merciless wage competition against lao gai concentration camp slave laborers, a competition that can only end with my wages and standard of living being equalized with theirs (incidentally, it is not only manual laborers who are suffering this fate, but also millions of American technical workers who have watched all the computer programming and information technology jobs vanish to India in the past three years--no doubt it will be engineers and scientists next).

I believe that under the social contract a government’s first obligation is to its own productive citizens.  Surely one of the core values of conservatism is that the productive have the first claim on the wealth that their labor creates.  I see no moral difference between one parasite and the next.  Drug-addled welfare recipients far outnumber billionaire bankers who demand that my tax money be used to back their Third World investment schemes (and bail them out when they fail), but the latter may well do more damage to my society.

It is, I suppose, fashionable to call this stance “protectionist” today, as if that were an evil word, but I always thought that those who have the good fortune to live in free societies had something called a “social contract” with their rulers:  a quid pro quo under the terms of which the rulers protect the lives and interests of the ruled in exchange for their loyalty.

I will not make the hysterical and ridiculous claims that those on the far left make; I do not believe either that I live in a fascist police state or that the social contract has been destroyed.  But I do believe that a very powerful, very wealthy, very tiny minority here is attempting to do great damage to the social contract, by demanding that the government allow them to force American workers into cutthroat wage competition against six-year-olds in Bangladesh (a competition that can only result in higher unemployment in the US, more poverty, lower wages, and higher crime, all the inescapable results of exporting hard currency) so that the few can profit at the expense of the many.  I am only 50 km from the smoldering ruins of Detroit, Michigan, and have seen what “free trade” has wrought upon the people of that unfortunate city.

My brother in law spent a couple years at a “camp” in Vietnam so I am familiar with the way they railroad suspects and then treat them brutally in the prison system of Vietnam.  He was actually a police officer and was imprisoned for a mistake (seeking petty bribes) that was committed not by him but by his subordinate.  The prosecutors publicly acknowledged after the arrest that the offender was the subordinate, but held my brother in law responsible anyway.  I mean, hey, he was already under arrest.  They couldn’t just say “oops” and let him go.  Nope.  They had to save face by keeping him in prison for a couple years.  He’s free now, but he is a physical and emotional wreck.  And he prbably got favorable treatment from the guards.  Five years as a political prisoner (considered lower than all other living things in prison, including the cockroaches) for Pham might as well be life.  The guards in those places are the type of country bumpkins who grew up kicking cats, slaughtering pigs and have now graduated to sadism’s big leagues.  They would love to shit on an intellectual like Pham.

Get the book “Vietnamese Gulag”.  You’ll see how brutal and arbitrary the VN justice system is.

Free trade means not using the police power of the state to force consumers to buy goods &ervices only from approved sources.  If you wish to boycott the exports of a dictatorship, do so, and encourage others to follow your lead.  For that matter, you can boycott any nation or seller for any reason.

In general, it is best to expand trade and all links with the “developing” nations.  Their inclusion in a network of commerce tends to militate against exploitation of their work forces.

Free trade is not just a goal, it’s a process that opens societies up, brings change, enhances the flow of infomation and challenges the enemies of Liberty. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than discriminating against your own citizens—using them as pawns in your ideological war against your perceived villains. In some cases, regime change should be imposed because the villain really needs to be removed and his people freed, but we do that with bullets and bombs, not boycotts.  See The Pentagon’s New Map, by Barnett, ISBN 0-399-15175-3, for more on this.

In short: withhold your money from specified vendors if you wish, but don’t deny me the option to buy what I consider best for my purposes.