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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.
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 article talks about Cisco, Yahoo & Google but the summary only mentions Cisco & Yahoo.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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
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
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.