"The administration cannot thwart the Congress's conduct of its constitutional duties with sweeping assertions of secrecy and privilege."

Oh really? Just watch them try -- they've been doing a damned good job of it so far!

You Democrats in the legislative branch have the power to stop them. But you are far too timid, far too terrified of losing, to actually use it. So another election will come and go and nothing will have changed. Except that you will quite possibly lose your majority because your supporters will be so sick of your inaction that they'll stay home rather than vote for you again.

The administration only has to succeed in holding you guys at bay for another year and a half. Then a last-minute blanket pardon, and presto, they win. And hey, you're off the hook at that point too -- they're out of power, so why open up old wounds, right?

I'm curious, critiqal, exactly what course of action you'd recommend. I'm posting this from Dalian, a midsized city in northeast China, so perhaps I have a somewhat different perspective than you do. I can't speak for India, having never been there.

China does not have zero unemployment, so to the extent you reduce the number of goods manufactured here, you will put some of my neighbors out of work, and they won't always be able to immediately jump to another job.

I wonder if you've ever actually been to India or China and talked to any low-wage workers. I'm not saying their lives are great -- I don't have to walk very far from my front door to find houses whose roofs are tin sheets held down by piles of bricks -- but the actual situation on the ground is more complicated than it looks from the outside.

Actually in a lot of cases it's not wholly dissimilar to the situation of illegal Mexican immigrants working in US agriculture. A couple weeks ago I had a chat at a local hole-in-the-wall restaurant (where, BTW, you can get a full hot dinner with leftovers to eat the next day for under US$0.50, a fact well worth bearing in mind when you look at the low wages here) with a few construction workers who moved to Dalian from the countryside in 2000. They work long, grueling hours -- but they send money back to their families and have no inclination to return to their hometowns any time soon because, crappy as it is by our Western standards, their quality of life is actually better now than when they weren't being exploited for their cheap labor.

That is certainly not always true. But it is sometimes true (perhaps even most of the time, perhaps not.) Point being, any action you take to reduce the number of low-wage jobs in third-world countries might have consequences other than the ones you're aiming for.

Also, if you were to walk up the hill a bit from my place and see some of the aforementioned ramshackle houses, you might be pissed off at the companies forcing people to live like that. But you would be ignoring the fact that people already lived like that before China opened up to the outside world and became a low-cost manufacturing center. Some of those houses look like they easily date back to the Cultural Revolution, not exactly a hotbed period of capitalist exploitation.

You can't look at the current situation here and blame it on the current actions of the current foreign employers. Poverty in the third world is not a western invention; like a lot of other things, China already had it down to a science before anyone in the west even knew there was a China. Are western companies benevolent saints? Not at all; they're often downright psychopathic. But they are not the root cause of the bad living standards of much of the Chinese population.

And finally, bear in mind that the west doesn't get to see most of the really cheap stuff made here. The domestic market is flooded with ultra-low-cost crap, and even if you successfully manage to stop western companies from buying Chinese-made goods (which, I realize, is putting words in your mouth) you will not stop 1.3 billion Chinese consumers from buying Chinese sweatshop goods. That alone is enough to suggest to me that any real change in Chinese working conditions and labor standards is going to have to come from the Chinese themselves, not from the outside.

I'm convinced that the draft is the only reason the war protests were as huge as they were in the Vietnam era. Sure, lots of the marchers were out there on general principle -- but a whole heck of a lot of them were trying desperately to stop the war out of pure enlightened self-interest.

Until the draft is reinstated, no war protest in America will be big enough or angry enough to make any difference whatsoever. Better to stay home and do something productive; all you're doing by marching right now is making yourself a target of scorn and ridicule. Nobody in a position to make policy changes cares one iota what your signs say or what slogans you're chanting, and you won't change the minds of enough passers-by to matter.

It's sad, but I think it's true.

Reinstate the draft, though, and it'll suddenly be a whole different ballgame. That's why it's not going to happen; the people in charge know full well the kind of civil unrest they'd be setting themselves up for.