The Slave-Free Business Certification Act (S. 4241) – One response So Far

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22146 – 718:

You may recall the post I wrote about the Communist Chinese using the Uighur Muslims as slave labor making name brand products. That post is here. In that post, I told you about a bill by Sen Hawley (D-MO) which is listed in the above title. I wrote to the two senators from my state asking them to endorse this bill. I received a canned response, which I expected to be followed by a more personalized response. I received one personal response, which came on Tuesday, from Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO) in which he did not address Senator Hawley’s Bill, which was only introduced in the Senate on July 21, 2020. He did talk about human rights issues in China and the work that he and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) worked on to address several issues and work with our allies in the Indo-Pacific region, promoting Democracy and addressing human rights. S.2736 – Asia Reassurance Initiative Act of 2018 looks good but I think I will still watch Sen. Hawley’s bill as well.

 Dear Mr. Thiel, Thank you for contacting me regarding human rights. I appreciate you taking the time to write.  It is an honor to serve you in the United States Senate and I hope you will continue to write with your thoughts and ideas on moving our country forward.Respect for fundamental human rights should be a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy, I have worked with my colleagues to continue this advocacy and condemn human rights violations all over the world including chemical weapons attacks in Syria, deadly violence against gay men in Chechnya, and the murder and starvation of civilians in North Korea, among others.On December 31, 2018, President Trump signed into law the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA), bipartisan legislation that I authored with Senator Edward Markey (D-MA). ARIA requires that the United States government actively promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in the Indo-Pacific region and authorizes over $1 billion over 5 years for these efforts. Rest assured, I will continue to use tools at my disposal to advance human rights around the globe.Again, thank you for contacting me, and do not hesitate to do so again when an issue is important to you.  Sincerely,

Cory Gardner
United States Senator

11 Comments

  1. It’s good to see some words about human rights in general, but there was no focus on the slavery issue in particular. The letter looks like boilerplate I receive from my Senator, Ben Sasse.

  2. The problem is how easily so many US companies export jobs they absolutely know will be done in this manner. They absolutely know. I worked for a very well known Maine company that pretended as if it didn’t, but of course it did. They wouldn’t have exported those jobs if they didn’t know they could get it done cheaply, and they would be fool to not know how that was achieved. On the one hand it gives these people jobs. On the other, it’s completely unregulated. We do a poor enough job here not exploiting workers when given half a chance. This whole system needs overhauling. We keep trying to say “socialism will fix it!” But of course it wouldn’t. It would just make the exploitation look different. People with unfettered power will always abuse it. That’s the problem. Inequality is inevitable. But it doesn’t have to be barbaric. Those people at the bottom deserve a decent living. If you work, you should be able to make a living. That ought to be the whole point. Too many people at the top and of course the middle think the point is to mark extreme disparities in living conditions. “If you work hard enough you can be like us!” Which is just not true except with exceptions. So stop selling it that way.

    • Yes and the articles I connected to in the original post detail a lot of what is going on but it takes a long time for anything to get traction. Sen. Hawley’s bill would be a good start.

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