Mike Johanns Quotes
When one cow was found with BSE in 2003, many of our trading partners closed their borders to our beef.
Johanns, Mike. "Remarks on BSE and Agricultural Trade." United States Department of Agriculture, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005.
This agreement was not a law as an English colony like South Carolina could not pass a law that prohibited buying English merchandise. It was unofficial and great pressure was put on any citizen who would not sign it. The merchants that did import goods other than those allowed in the agreement were boycotted by most of the signers. This quotation illustrates what may have been the first organized protectionist actions to assist domestic producers and manufacturers. It is valuable for another reason. The quotation lists goods that are exempted from the boycott. These were goods that were not made in South Carolina or nearby states at the time since if they were, they would have been protected, So we can learn what was manufactured in the colony or nearby at the time—that which is nit on the list but was important to colonial life. The list tells us what was not manufactured locally, and one of the most important were firearms and ammunition. The inability to manufacture armaments plagued the colonies and early America after the revolution. One of the major public expenditures was to create and subsidize domestic arms manufacture.
Surprising to us today is the reality that before this law, it was perfectly legal for American Citizens to sell transport all kinds of goods and materials to enemies of the country—even in the midst of a war. At the beginning of the War of 1812, New England merchants were selling, shipping, and delivering meat and other critical provisions to the English Armies in Canada. There is an unfortunate long history of this. IBM sold punch card equipment and technology to the Nazis through European subsidiaries prior to and during WWII. American oil companies were helping the Arab countries enforce their embargo against is in the 1970s. American firms shipped weapons technology to Iraq when they threatened to create weapons of mass destruction. It has often been difficult to get American companies to pass up profits for patriotic reasons unless there were strong laws and enforcement.
There was, well before the American Revolution, a restriction on the importation of British goods into the American colonies. Partially this was to pressure Parliament to stop some of its most repressive lawmaking. But it also supported what had become a very lucrative protectionist monopoly of large American merchants. See {636861}.
2nd Earl of Guilford. This bill cut off all trade with the American Colonies. It was meant as pressure to cease the rebellion. It did not work.
Michael Owen Johanns is an American attorney and politician who served as a United States Senator from Nebraska from 2009 to 2015. He served as the 38th governor of Nebraska from 1999 until 2005, and was chair of the Midwestern Governors Association in 2002. In 2005, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as the Secretary of Agriculture, where he served from 2005 to 2007, becoming the fourth Nebraskan to hold that position.
