I enjoy glibness, a little bit too much, and nothing gets me more interested in a conversation that well-deployed sarcasm. So it’s easy–sometimes a little too easy–for me to get all jaded about…everything, even things I care a lot about. Like, say, Darfur. And while I still maintain that Breaking Toys for Darfur is not exactly a way to end genocide, and that I’m tired of listening to the same old political rhetoric, I have bit of bright, shiny news for those of us who need to be reassured our teensy voices can amount to something.
It needs some quick background. Last fall, Congress passed and Bush signed the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act, which essentially makes it illegal for U.S. companies to invest in foreign companies that are investing in Sudan. It sounds like divestment-once-removed, but it’s more like divestment squared: It’s already illegal for U.S. companies to invest in Sudan directly, thanks to anti-terrorism laws that’ve been around since Clinton. This new bill, which the Sudan Divestment Task Force of the Genocide Intervention Network pushed hard, makes it illegal not to notice that the millions of dollars you’re funneling into–let’s take an obvious example–that massive Chinese oil company, say, are in turn finding their way to Khartoum.
In a touch of refreshingly pragmatic thinking, the bill also stipulates that the U.S. government can’t keep contracts with foreign companies that don’t pass anti-genocide criteria (it’s pretty strict; you can read about it here). But the bill gave the government 120 days to implement that little part.
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Wow. Jina, there’s a lot of minutia here.” True. Even if you knew the bill was there, as I did; and even if you knew about that fancy-schmancy-smart provision on U.S. government contracts, as I did; you probably didn’t realize there was 120 day window. I didn’t.
Until I got an email from the staff of GI-Net, most of whom are younger than my own younger sister. (Disclosure: I wrote about these guys last fall. They are actually one of my favorite topics, because I find what they do, with all its difficulties, really imaginative.)
That email asked me to call not Bush, who is actually is in charge of that window (according to GI-Net), but a guy named Jim Nussle.
Know who he is? Neither did I.
He’s the director of the Office of Budget Management, or OMB–a familiar acronym to anyone with a West Wing addiction of respectable severity. The OMB is in charge of the Federal Acquisition Regulation Council, which in turn is in charge of implementing that provision about the federal contracts. Which represent, by the way, millions of dollars.
In the bureaucratic rabbit hole that is our democracy, I would never have found my way from the “issue”–divestment–to the person who is functionally in charge of making sure it happens. I probably would’ve just called my senator.*
But what happened is that, in a matter of hours, 1300 people called or sent emails to Nussle. And then?
OMB staff contacted us [GI-Net] soon after, saying they were unaware of the 120-day deadline but after receiving your messages they will implement the relevant provisions in the next week or two!
We– “we” being this motley group of now thousands who ramble on and on about genocide and how to stop it– talk a lot about a “lack of political will.” Sometimes it’s not about that. Sometimes it’s just about getting the memo.
My jury is out on the utility of divestment–as a journalist, I am professionally obliged to keep my jury out on the utility of all such things until I’m basically dead. So don’t read this as an endorsement of divestment. But it seems to me, as a lifelong student of genocide and U.S. government response, that such surgical advocacy is smart advocacy–the kind that doesn’t make headlines (can you imagine spinning all that into a story you’d see on A1 of the Times?), but helps close the gaps between policy and action.
Now if only there were a poet on their staff, who could help rewrite
“seized of the matter…”
—
* And while I’m making qualifying statements, let me just say for the record that I didn’t call my senator, or Nussle, or anyone else. Can’t. (See above, “jury out”)
