It's Money That Matters

(I know we knew that, but it bears repeating.)

About a week ago, the U.S. lobbied the U.N. Human Rights Council to keep Belarus out and allow Bosnia to get in, as noted here.

I’m not saying we should reward bad guys, but there are a couple of double standards here as far as I’m concerned.

As noted in this Wikipedia article, the U.S. doesn’t even have a seat on the council, though Dubya did pledge to former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that he would “help the council financially” (it would be nice if he was as good as his word for a change).

I think this excerpt gives the reason why we’re not slated to join the council, by the way (from the Wikipedia article)…

(Former) U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton rejected a reporter's question which asked him if the United States thought that, after the alleged abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantánamo Bay, the United States would be unable to muster the 96 votes from the General Assembly necessary to gain a seat.

Also, if we’re going to be serious about trying to get Belarus to clean up its human rights act (and, based on the information from this link to the State Department, they have a long way to go under strongman Alexander Lukashenko), then we should hit them where it hurts.

There’s a lot of software development going on in Belarus, and if this government were really serious about trying to pressure them, they’d cut off the exporting of jobs to that country until they decided that maybe arbitrary detentions and punishment without trial, as well as preventing citizens of that country from assembling peaceably and worshiping as they choose (to say nothing of beating opposition party candidates with truncheons) might not be good ideas after all.

And if we wanted to start applying that kind of pressure, we could begin with the following businesses (here, here, and this company in Texas that uses this outsourcing service - it would be a challenge because of the portability of these jobs all over the world, but sometimes just making noise is all it takes).