Slashdot Mirror
Shareholders Pressure Internet Companies on Rights
whamett writes "A group of investment firms is putting their shareholder weight behind asking high-tech companies that deal with repressive regimes to pay more attention to rights violations. Meanwhile, two of the firms have drafted a separate resolution for Cisco shareholders that's up for vote on Tuesday. All this comes not long after Yahoo's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist left a bad taste in everyone's mouth." This isn't the first time that investment firms have stepped up to the plate on human rights violations.
It is funny when I believe in voting only with your dollars (political voting is evil always), and get slammed for it. Yet here is proof that money is the only non-force mechanism for change. Unfortunately, no one external to a corrupt government can really stick to the capital solution for long. The problems in our own lives eventually take precedence.
Even if Cisco stops dealing with Badmanistan, the Badmanistanians can still import from other countries. How do you stop the use? Maybe DRM restricting what country an item works in? I don't think so. Yet funny if the thought crossed your mind.
Maybe we can make a more concerted effort. Get the U.N. involved and completely stop technology from getting there. I'm sure the hospitals and schools can get by without technology.
Here's a solution. Smuggle guns and ammo into countries with no respect for private property. Let the inner hope of revolution make real change. Rights won't be protected with sanctions. Only by blood do we truly stop those who dare to take our lives, our properties and our natural right to both.
Maybe after we've brought true freedom to everyone else, someone will kindly help us find it, too.
The only way most firms will push to respect human rights is if we make serious domestic penalties for companies that break human rights laws overseas or use companies that break codes.
We can't even get Walmart to stop hiring illegal immigrants and hiding them in the backs of stores in America, how are we going to stop The Gap from using sweatshops or whatever it is they do to get clothing made?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...but the almighty dollar will still end up ruling all. If ethics mattered, there wouldn't be any US company at all dealing with China.
involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
But an hour later, they were hungry for totalitarianism again.
Personally, I said no, and explained why. I was unsure of what would happen, but I'm still gainfully employed; my performance review noted a commitment to integrity, and I just got promoted.
All this will be moot once the UN takes over the Internet. No doubt the Committee on Internet governance will include representatives from China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and other such beacons of freedom and demoncracy.
/Sarcasm
[Insert pithy quote here]
Is to do the bidding of the owners .. aka shareholders .. so a cmpany can be "responsible" .. if he shareholders demand that responsibility .. even if it means reduced profit or share price. So if you want a company to be moral, a good way to acheive that is make sure society is moral.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Yahoo handles content, the routers just pass bits
We are just like you. We live in the same world, and have similar concerns. We want human rights just as much as you do. Not only that, a loss of goodwill can result from poor business practices. China has an emerging market we want access to, but we see better returns from a free market with free organization, thus leading to human rights concerns.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
As someone who trades stocks, I don't really see this the same way. Generally, I don't buy a stock because I want to own that company, I buy it because I think later I call sell it for more. I wouldn't buy Yahoo because I think they are overvalued, and they are facing increasing pressure from Google which they aren't handling very well. In my opinion, the stock does not have very much upside potential.
Generally, making people mad is costly for a stock. Bad news is bad, but uncertainty is much much worse. Will all of their customers leave? What effect will this have? There's thousands of publicly traded companies out there, so there's no reason to buy stock in one which has an uncertain future.
While i'm glad to see there are some responsible investors out there, they don't amount to a very large portion. When you look at the ownership of Cisco, you see that the two investors mentioned in the article aren't even listed. They each own less than 1% of the company's outstanding shares.
Recently, I was amused by something that happened to Intel. They received an award for corporate social responsibility. The stock traded down that day.
I'm not really a political or litigious person by nature, but as I've aged, I've come to this somewhat depressing conclusion; occasionally, the only way to effect change in this world is to exact some kind of financial cost on those who disregard the rights of their fellow human beings.
David Brancaccio (from public radio's Marketplace) wrote a quite entertaining book that deals with the concept of socially responsible investing, and asks the question of whether or not applying fuzzy concepts of "good " and "evil" to publicly traded companies makes any kind of sense.
He was sort of sarcastic about it, and had a tendency to make fun of new-age hippies showing at the annual shareholder's meeting in Montana with their 100% natural non-bleached cotton moccasins, and painfully detailed dietary requirements, but overall it was funny, and it made an otherwise dry subject a lot more palatable. Check it out if you're sick of O'Reilly books - it was a good companion on the road last summer.
Hopefully, we will continue to develop more accurate and effective ways to evaluate companies and maybe even their corresponding Good:Evil ratios in the future; maybe then companies guilty of human rights violations or severe pollution disasters will feel a direct effect on their bottom line.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
The idea being that democracy works better when voting is disproportionate based on the amount of self sacrifice that has been offered by the individual. For example, someone who works for a company and uses 90% of their salary to buy stock in the company has more say in the running of that company than someone who chooses to invest nothing in the company.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I was walking around campus yesterday when I saw a poster saying "Is Slashdot Your Home Page?" in huge letters. Apparently it was a recruiting poster for some investment firm. Of course I immediately appropriated it and thumbtacked it above my laptop in my room.
I think that (anti-)nationalist ideas are part in forming individual identity. China has a very old culture and saying their way of htink threatens the long term investment is one step to far from the reality. These western originated companies have different systems and they cannot trust in complete different systems (such as in China). And maybe we have problems with their culture, so do they. I do believe in human rights and I am from the culture which conflicts with those of for example China, on this matter. Money is not the only power, maybe it is even not the most important one. I would say having faith in oneself, trust another (to a realistic and wise level) and in mutual interests and benefit is the greatest. These are motivations to invest in clients and reflect also in these ideas of share holders. Thinking and behaving related to have faith and see mutiual interests is done differently in other cultures. Like most people they don't trust what they don't know and at the same time they compete on cultural level. I think it is to easy to believe if some shareholders says its only because of the human rights.. I think there is more to it.
The article talks about Cisco, Yahoo & Google but the summary only mentions Cisco & Yahoo.
What?! Capitalists working on the side of good?! I smell a rat! A great big communist rat! Ronnie!! Ronnie come back and save us from these pinkos! How will I be able to afford my hummer if I can't sell a few activists out to the boys in Beijing? I blame television! Danm liberal media!
May the Maths Be with you!
We are just like you. We live in the same world, and have similar concerns.
We are also immortal! Inviolable! Unassailable in our Glory! Our mighty hosts of lawyers sweep all before us!
Kneel plebain! Kneel and gaze upon the world which we have wrought for you! Bite not the hand that feeds thee!
So Preacheth The Church Of The New Global Capitalism!! Hail Satan!
May the Maths Be with you!
Even if the majority of shareholders back such human rights declarations I'm not sure this is legal. Under US law corporations have an obligation to maximize profit irrespective of anything else. Strange but true.
This doctrine was established in a landmark Supreme Court case Dodge v. Ford Motor Company which established that even minority share holders can prevent a corporation from doing anything that hinders the maximization of profits.
I could be completely wrong.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
If thine eye offend thee pluck it the hell out. Divestment movements are built for this. But I as a shareholder, watching you demand they harm my investment, well I'd like to come to your house and burn it down. Or better yet, you can pay for my kid's college education.
Leave YOUR morality at the door, thank you.
You know, we put Saddahm Hussein in power... along with several other "bad guys' in the world.
We have a hell of a lot of house cleaning to do here before we go judging others.
Certain slashdot members have a political agenda and love to write comments and stories trying to further their agenda. "whamett" has written 3 comments in total and all have to do with attacking China. If Slashdot members, and Americans in general, are really concerned about people in Asia, why not address the sweatshops in Indonesia or sexual tourism in Thailand? Instead of worrying about "human rights" what about human poverty? People in China don't care much about political rights as long as the leaders are making their quality of living better. At my workplace, over 30% of the people are from China, and they *don't care* about the politics in China. They had a good childhood, got a good education, and now have a nice job. Sure, everyone in China isn't as well off, but you can't change everything all at once. People here complain about "human rights" in China, and then they also complain about China "stealing our jobs". Seems like people here would prefer them to work in sweat shops like democratic countries like Indonesia. Bottom line: Quality of Living > Political Rights This post will probably be modded down by people with a political agenda (ironic how they decry censorship in China), but something has to be said about the anti-China sentiment here. It's gotten so bad that *every* article about China always has some nut bringing up politics.
You know, lately I've been seeing a lot of fear-mongering Slashdotters talking about how we all have a moral responsibility to not to business with companies that do business with China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, etc.
Now, last I checked it was illegal for US corps to do business with North Korea and Iran, so I'm never quite sure why those are brought up. But China is a popular target. I can only imagine this is because we are starting to get nervous about such a massive economic force. Sort of in the same way people in the eighties used to yell "Go Home, Jap!" to anyone who looked Asian on the street. But I digress.
Well-meaning (and I do believe they are well meaning) people have said lots of things about how we ought to "not buy Chinese goods" because the Chinese government doesn't respect basic human rights, and the only way to make them see the light of day is to hit them where it hurts -- financially. We say the same thing about "sweat shops" in Vietnam or wherever operated by firms like Nike or Reebok. Not sure if it's still the rage to go off about these.
Now, as a disclaimer, I actually live in China (I'm American, though). I want to advance a theory about totaletarian regimes: they are non-sustainable if the populace is becoming wealthy.
Now obviously this doesn't apply to a place like North Korea where trading with the country (if it were even legal) really means trading with the government, and not with the people. But China and Vietnam are not like that, despite what you may have heard.
In the 1970s, China was in the throes of the cultural revolution; people truly had no rights, they were expected to spend several hours of their day reciting "Wei Renmin Fuwu" and other works of Chairman and Poet Mao Ze Dong. But those days have been a thing of the past since Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms in the late seventies and early eighties, reforms which continue to this day.
As a direct result of these reforms, money paid into China not only makes the government richer (you can't avoid this, people pay taxes on income) but also, and this is important, it makes the people more wealthy.
Chinese people are not living like beggars (unless you're in Guizhou or something). Especially people in the cities are beginning to do very well for themselves. And if you're in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, well, you're essentially living at first world standards. Really.
The problem is, as people get more wealthy, more prosperous, more educated, more connected to the outside world -- read, not isolated from it as they were during the cultural revolution -- they come into contact with a lot of ideas that had previously been considered non grata by the government. You know, like democracy. The other week I was in Beijing and there was a huge advertisement for a development site with Chinese characters as tall as me saying "Bringing a little more culture, a little more civility, and a little more democracy (!!!) to Beijing."
This is the city that sent tanks against students demonstrating just 15 years ago.
Why is this happening? Because the Chinese government too wants to get rich. Even back in the days when Mao had a swimming pool built for himself in Zhong Nan Hai while everyone else was starving, the best the government cronies could hope for was a lifestyle equivalent to a beverly hills hillbilly. Not shabby, certainly. But nothing (and I mean nothing) like what they enjoy now.
Because they want to encourage more investment, they are continuously relaxing their controls. There are two reasons for this. One: certain technology, like the internet, is necessary for commerce. It can also be used by Chinese citizens to learn uncomfortable truths. Because they are addicted to wealth, they mostly ignore the second issue (the Chinese firewall is a joke -- it's there so they can say they're doing something: most of the stuff that's blocked is irrelevant and a surprising large amount of openly rebellious material in Chi
...prefer to just brand any such suggestion as "Flamebait", thereby giving a whole new meaning to that "Yes, Slashdot is US-centric" entry in the FAQ.
Shareholders pressure "content producers/providers" etc... to back off or the gravy train stops.
What a novel concept! Essentially we as shareholders own these companies, we can put the screws to them to back off.
If free speach is hurt in any way by anonymonity, then why do the most repressive, anti-free-speach regimes always try to stamp out anonymous speach?
That's the difference between slashdot and a repressive regime. Your post is good in theory. However I have no wish to see tons of GNAA posts on slashdot. So I have to have some way of filtering them. I can choose to surf at 0 or 1, but in that case, I'm filtering out tons of good informative posts merely because they don't conform to slashdot groupthink. Instead I choose to filter based on anonymity instead of slashdot's screwy moderation system. By doing so, I haven't filtered out anyone who has been forced to post because their government is a repressive regime (at least to my knowledge. I surfed slashdot for a few years without filtering out ACs and never encountered someone posting anonymously because of their government). I also haven't ever filtered out anyone who was verifiably posting anonymously because their employer would sue and/or sack them for posting (and because their claims weren't verifiable, their message was pretty much meaningless).
Sure, I do filter out some good posts. But in my experience they're in the minority of crap posted on slashdot. People still have freedom of speech, and I have the freedom to not listen to them.
Also, in a country like America where they do have free speech, it is important to use it responsibly, and a very important part of using it responsibly is being accountable. Most people who post on slashdot anonymously do so because they want to flame, harrass or be a general ass. Which (in my opinion) isn't using free speech responsibly.
Actually, "cleaning house" would be saying "we fucked up btu we're not gonna make that mistake again."
It is not our responsibility to "liberate" people. If you are being held captive it is YOUR responsibility to fight for your liberty. Nothing wrong with helping, but helping doesn't mean "we are here to liberate you."
Go home dad, you're drunk again...
let me sing the karaoke first .....
........
"testicles on fire"
That may have been true before the term "Intellectual Property" was coined. Given the existence of laws against manipulating markets and regulations on monopolies though, I find the assertion highly suspect. The old cliché "The rich get richer" is also strong evidence to the contrary. Had there been no truth to the phrase, I doubt it would have endured for so long.
Maybe the wealthy will buy all the land? How will they maint in it? How will they build on it? How will they clean it, paint it, power it?
Or maybe they'll monopolize information. Digitize it, lock it up, and insist you pay a fief for access to it. Welcome to the digital dark ages.
Why don't y'all go tell Bush to sign the god-damn anti-torture amendment before grandstanding against other "evil" countries?!
Its a rare post indeed that acknowledges rights entail responsibilities. Sir, I salute you.
Blank until
In the real world no huge company is going to launch a moral crusade against a country like China, I mean come on, yahoo could withhold information, google could not play along with the firewall and help dissidents, but it's not going to happen, because most shareholders will spew at the idea of such a huge and emerging market being boycotted.
Epoch Times is run by an anti-China group, why link to an article there? It's like sourcing a negative article about Linux from a Microsoft Magazine. ...or a negative article about PS3 from Redmond Magazine. ...or an anti-immigrant article from a KKK site ...an anti-Conservative article from a gay-rights article. ...you get the idea. Everything contains bias, but some at least try to be impartial and objective. The linking to biased sources tells more about the reader than about the situation.
IF shareholders are able to exert influence, as we see here, should they not be considered legally responsible for both the positive and the NEGATIVE things their companies do?
A share devaluation isn't enough. I would like to see shareholders tried for criminal negligence.
Am I the only one who can't help picturing that guy typing that with the blood of a puppy dripping from his lips?
That's odd, the main oppressive regime I see here is the one being created by the blood-sucking copyright holders with the help of their fully-paid-for politicians.
That and much worse awaits for him at that chinese prison, thanks Yahoo, a human life thrown to the can values less than your business in China. The bubble should burst for Yahoo.
I think it's time the companies were compelled to "do the right thing" by someone other than the government. In the classical ages, good-based economies resulted in very authoritarian corporations, with an elite at the top standing on the shoulders of the proletariat. But service-based economy has brought the idea of rights and ethics here. Services are easy to implement, and therefore are much more likely to have competition. Would rather buy clothes from Wal-Mart or Target if you found that Wal-Mart used Chinese children about age 8 to make their clothes (assuming the clothes are around the same price)? Companies hate bad press. That's the bottom line (no pun intended). Shareholders don't want bad press leaked, and the 100% sure way to not have bad press leaked is to have clean policy. I read an article not long ago about environmental groups petitioning boards of directors rather than governments. The result? Companies moved quickly to enact changes. Folks, the private sector is where growth occurs. It eliminates costs, maximizes profit (thereby maximizing efficiency) and it is not invincible. This is a great era!
I'm a little unclear why someone posting under aussie_a is so much less anonymous than someone posting as an AC. People who have URL's, like you do, or an email address associated with their alias maybe are a little more identifiable but those URL's and email addresses may be aliases too. I think all in all your standard is a little arbitrary. If people are saying something controversial, but insightful, doing it as AC is A-OK with me, I've read some great AC posts, though most are garbage from people posting as AC because they have nothing intelligent to say. If someone posts flamage under a login, they could discard it in a heartbeat, create a new one and be pretty much as anonymous as an AC.
If someone from China is posting here as an AC chances are China's government can watch the whole IP transaction and track down the person if they want to, same probably goes for an American thanks to extensive tapping of the Internet by various three letter agencies.
Fact is American's, like the Brits and everyone else, have "free speech" only as long as their government lets them have it and within the bounds they set. The UK did let people have free speech to advocate fundamentalist Islamic causes, but it is now speech likely to lead to deportation or jail. You don't really have free speech when there are all kinds of arbitrary bounds on it, i.e. you can speak freely until you say something we've decided we don't like and then you don't.
In reality free speech is a completely relative concept. The U.S. has free speech compared to China, so it does in relative terms, but in absolute terms there are countless bounds on it.
In eras rich in fear mongering your free speech rights can be abridged in a heart beat. You need to look no further than McCarthyism in the U.S. in the 50's to appreciate how fleeting free speech is, or today when the Executive of the United States has bestowed upon its self the power to arrest people on a whim, detain them without due process, without access to a lawyer, family or court and even to whisk you away to various secret prisons to be tortured indefinitely up to the end of your life which they have often brought about in these secret prisons. The U.S. projects an image of being free, but in many respects it is carefully manufactured facade, again free in relative terms just because there are places worse, and it is less free with each passing day. Countries which espouse freedom don't make people disappear or torture people and the U.S. most certainly does these things now thanks to government by paranoid wackos who were given carte blanche to be paranoid wackos by 9/11.
In most respects 9/11 WAS all about Al Qaeda attacking Freedom and Democracy in the West. The catch is they are destroying them, not by attacking the West, but by giving power mad governments of Western nations excuses to destroy Freedom and Democracy themselves.
@de_machina
I have read many post here where people have been criticizing this article,and the place to where it links.
I don't undertsand how this article is anti-chinese people, unless everyone bashing this post equates the chinese government and chinese party members to chinese people.
Yahoo, and the Chinese government did something bad (and is doing) to an ordinary Chinese citizen (took away his rights).
And as people with conscience, we need to stop them from doing this in the future. And so the shareholders have taken the right step.
But how does this translates to an activity against the Chinese people, as far as I understand this is being done to help Chinese people and their rights.
So, please stop being cynical and thinking of western morality conscience people as dissimulators.
Creativity uninhibited www.kreeti.com
This example shows that the viewpoint that corporations do not have a moral compass is a fallacy. Public corporations are voluntary collectives of individuals. Those individuals are the shareholders. The great thing is that anyone who can afford a share of stock can become a shareholder and therefore give voice to the collective. Race, gender, and old boy networks mean nothing when anyone can make the free an voluntary choice to invest or divest themselves of the corporation's stock.
In this case, the members of the collective are asserting their rights and taking a moral stand against tyranny even though it may not be in their financial interest to do so. This system of publicly owned corporations is a manifestation of progressive ideals.
Wonderful post.
Plus, I like to add my comment. Of course there will always be someone saying something we don't like, but thats the whole point of free speech. The right to free speech is created to insures that someone will say something that some people will not like to hear. Got problem with your government? Speak out. Got problem with your neighborhood? Speak out. Got problem with your boss? Speak out (anonymous of course). Got problem with slashdot? Speak out (at your own website or blog).
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying free speech is just for people who want to flame each other to death. Free speech is for solving or preventing problems in our society because the very first step to solving problems is to get aware of them. If no one aware of the problems, then no one will solve it. Plus, knowledge is power. Governments rely on our stupidity to successfully oppress us. "Don't worry, no one will hack the RFID in your passports..." Free speech allows the knowledge to come out. It doesn't matter if people like it or not, or whichever if it is true or false, the words must come out anyway.
Basically, we have to accept the good with the bad.
Been to Kashmir lately? What Gandhi did was awesome. However, the resolution was not exactly stellar. When India succeeded successfully from Britain, they managed to do it with a minimal amount of violence. Sure there were killing, radicals, and a government massacre or two, but when you look at the numbers, you see that it is was pretty damn bloodless. The problem is that they didn't just break off from Britain. They also managed divided amongst themselves into India and Pakistan. Even this would not have been all that bad of a situation if it was not for Kashmir. Kashmir basically fucked up a perfectly good example as to how to overthrow an imperial democracy.
Kashmir aside, I think it is infinitely disheartening that Gandhi's lessons to the world have fallen on deaf ears. Palestine and Israel in particular could use a Gandhi.
You mean like DVD Region Codes?
Dutch Version of Defence you mean?
Had Yahoo not dropped out of the AOL thing that would have been my cue for for finding an ISP with Linux support at long last.
Investing in companies that get up to baaad things is seen to be high risk for other reasons. Dealings with dodgy regimes tends to be opaque so all kinds of extra costs can appear such as corruption with the possibility of future legal actions against the company.
See my journal, I write things there
Shouldn't they first put pressure on those repressive companies for being such economic feudalists, before going after other countries where they don't even have the right to intervene? I mean what is the reason for a distinct country: You can have your own rules, and as long as you don't do shit OUTSIDE your country, nobody can forbid you anything!
Now in this case companies from foreign states come with their own point of view from their own country and want to impose it on some foreign country just because they went there to play with them.
Guess what: If you don't like the rules of another country, then DON'T GO THERE and leave them alone.
It's SOLELY THEIR decision how those rules are and if they like to change it. Poeple that don't like the rules of a country are free to found their own.
(If they aren't then okay, you can help them to get out if you like to. But you are still not allowed to force this country to do anything. least of all if you have a that crappy government yourself.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
> In most respects 9/11 WAS all about Al Qaeda attacking Freedom and Democracy in the West. The catch is they are destroying them, not by attacking the West, but by giving power mad governments of Western nations excuses to destroy Freedom and Democracy themselves.
This - honestly - was the most insightful paragraph on whole slashdoth for months! Sure, i knew this, but i thought i would be the only one...
Bad that al quaeda succeded that way.
But... hmm... i don't think the us-government was all that good *before* all this... they did senseless wars before. They hat strange three-letter-agencies that play strange things with the poeple before... and much other stuff too...
I just hope america can in some time far away really become that country that you once were so proud of and that most of the time was just an illusion...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
And for every single one of your fuzzy puppy issues I can find a benefit.
Just take Afghanistan as a great example. All through the 80's, we smuggled weapons to their freedom fighters. And, as a result, in the 90's they formed a stable government that embodied all the ideals of democracy and freedom. Let's give a big hand to those mujahadeen freedom fighters and all they've done to promote the cause of peace, democracy, and freedom since the 80's!
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
In case anyone wants to remember/learn about Orz.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Yes, but do you really think that Slashdot is the best place to find psychologists?
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
"Many inner-city minorities are actually doing the logical thing by dropping out of school and selling drugs"
Why do you say that?
You should know that selling drugs usually makes LESS than minimum wage. (for the front line seller, anyway)
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I saw Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Prices this weekend. It was pretty good. I wouldn't call it a documentary. It was more of an investigative journalism piece, like 60 Minutes likes to do, but without all the narration. It also encourages basic activism.
Stuff I learned from the movie:
Criticisms:
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Aren't they supposed to concern only about dollars?
I started out working for less than minimum wage (farm work).
I am not in poverty.
QED
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
The government could implement laws, but what's the point?
Unlike business decisions, laws stick. When the practical choice is limited to *which* sweatshop makes your clothing or your electronics, you (short of a few billion dollars) are not going to remove the problem. Now with regulations that are well-crafted, those low-quality products would not even make it to the US.
Now, on the other hand, products from countries that put more emphasis on quality of worker and product (such as non-globalized France and Germany) need no real regulation as they practice laws that
Outsourcing helps the US economy greatly.
Unfortunately, it's being used as a loophole to remove the high-quality domestic worker outside of the equation. If it is so good, then why do corporations have to use loopholes and lobbyists to defend it? When you have requirements for a job that are unattainable for even the H1-B/L-1 that steals it, and it goes to a country that will not reciprocate in allowing the US citizen to get the job over there - there's your 2nd and 3rd strikes.
As for educating people, you will have to be able to force every university to accept any student and to fund them for the whole time. That is unfortunately the only way you can get domestic talent to increase. "Competitive Admissions" only perpetuates the problem, as it only allows the top 1% and the 9% who have the money to bribe the admissions board. Those foreign workers would be better used to educate, not to steal educated jobs or university slots - until force is authorized to pack every university with anyone who has a diploma and a willingness to learn.
If you have to use taxes to pay for the forced open admissions, fine. This is where force is needed and can be well applied to remove the Ivy League problem of university elitism.
If one thing gets to you clearly, it's this:
I will not help Asia make the bullet that they use to kill me by support of offshoring and denouncing business regulation. They are stealing jobs for low quality products, and there is no way around admitting it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'm a little unclear why someone posting under aussie_a is so much less anonymous than someone posting as an AC.
Well, you can read previous postings by aussie_a and get the idea that he's, say, a left wing commie terrorist supporting anti-American, and therefore anything of his that you read will be coloured by that view, regardless of the content.
But a generation raised on a spoonfed diet of the People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, it doesn't amaze me.
Say for example you have a brand new stem cell treatment methodology that can cure Parkinson's. But the 'ethics' of some people stand in the way of using it because they don't feel its in line with their values and their morality. It 'exploits' someone. Still want to erect that strawman?
In either case what's clear is that if that stem cell work doesn't go on here then it can go to South Korea which doesn't have the same ethical concerns about it. Ergo capitalism is neither moral nor immoral.
In other words, people SHOULD NOT look to capitalism to solve ethical or moral questions.
Anyone worried about corporations violating human rights, ask yourself: what does a corporation fear the most? Bankruptcy? Lower revenues? No. The greatest penalty a chartered corporation can face, and the only suitable penalty for violations of the basic rights of human beings, is revocation of its charter, the corporate death penalty.
I know this punishment has never been exacted in history, and that is only because governments have always been too cowardly and too bought by the wealthy to use it.
Corporations are created to serve their shareholders and, through commonly agreed-upon market economics, the general good. To these ends they are given charters that grant them life entirely seperate from that of any shareholder, officer or manager, along with any and all of the human rights they require to do business. They are considered legal persons, and yet have few to none of the limitations and mortalities of human beings. To serve humans they are created as economic superhumans.
These privileges should not come free. When a man, woman or child violates another's rights we (at least try) to call it a crime, and they are punished. Likewise, corporations must be punished when they violate the rights of others. And when a human being abuses the powers they have been given in the commission of a crime, their punishment is greater. So should it be with corporations, legalistic humans. It must be remembered, after all, that a fictional persons's rights are false themselves, established only as far as the purpose of that legal fiction's being carries them.
Human rights violations may add to the bottom line, but they are not tolerated for real people and thus should be tolerated far less in paper people, legal robots with rights. If a corporation aides in sending an honest journalist to jail, or does anything else to deprive a human being that organization was created to serve - however indirectly - of their rights, then it deserves to lose all of the rights it was being charitably granted by the state, including its given right to property.
After all, with the shareholders protected it's not like a real person is losing anything.