As reported in last week's ETS!, the Selective Purchasing Burma Ordinance, which would inhibit city contracts with corporations that do business with the military dictatorship of Burma (there currently are none), is back before the Seattle City Council after being shelved last fall by business interest opposition. It passed committee last week on a 2-1 vote, and will go before the full council in the next week or two.

The story behind the one "no" vote is fascinating, however. It came from council president Sue Donaldson, who offered to replace the Burma Ordinance with one drafted in cooperation with the Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT), which says it was working with the US-ASEAN Business Council. The latter group is a D.C. lobbying group highly critical of current U.S.-Burma policy, which forbids U.S. corporate investment in the pariah state. Unocal (the sole remaining U.S. corporation in Burma, partner of the junta, and defendant in a federal court lawsuit over human rights violations on its Burma project) is on the executive committee of the US-ASEAN Business Council.

So Donaldson didn't consult any democracy advocates, but got her wording on how to help Burmese from an oil company in partnership with the junta. No wonder her substitute resolution doesn't mention Burmese elections, nor the phrase "human rights," nor U.S. policy, nor U.N. resolutions. One has to wonder why Donaldson is more responsive to the needs of an oil company with no business interest in Seattle (Unocal sold its retail side last year) than to her own constituents.

Donaldson promised at the committee hearing to take her alternate, toothless resolution to the full council. Her love of business-friendly totalitarians, as effused after her recent Singapore trip, seems completely unfettered by any impulse toward human decency.