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Congressman Quizzes Net Companies on Shame
mjdroner writes "Cnet has a transcript of the House of Representatives hearing on net censorship with Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo reps. At one point, Rep. Tom Lantos asks if Microsoft is ashamed of their actions in China. Microsoft: 'We comply with legally binding orders whether it's here in the U.S. or China.' Lantos: 'Well, IBM complied with legal orders when they cooperated with Nazi Germany. Those were legal orders under the Nazi German system.'"
In general, I would agree with you. However, you are off base on this one because it was Tom Lantos making these statements. He is a HUGE champion of freedom (true freedom, not freedom unless it hurts a corporation). I have taken the liberty of doing a cut & paste of part of his online biography:
An American by choice, Tom Lantos was born in Budapest, Hungary, on February 1, 1928. He was 16 years of age when Nazi Germany occupied his native country. As a teenager, he was placed in a Hungarian fascist forced labor camp. He succeeded in escaping and was able to survive in a safe house in Budapest set up by Swedish humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg. His story is one of the individual accounts which forms the basis of Steven Spielberg's Academy Award winning documentary about the Holocaust in Hungary, The Last Days.
Say what you will about most Congressmen, Senators and the President, but complaints about MFT and coddling those commie bastards doen't apply to Rep. Lantos.
Seriously, you're an idiot. That may be a problem for other members of congress, but Lantos was one of 141 House members who voted for a measure that would have overturned MFN status for China.
He was wrong then and wrong now, but at least he is consistent.
He does what he can. He is a Democrat in a Congress with Republican majorities in both houses. He cannot hold hearings. He cannot force subpoenas. All he can do is vote, and make noise when given a stage. He did so, and did it well.
He has held unofficial hearings outside Congress, but they have no power and get no press.
When the Democrats held control, Lantos was at the forefront of the human rights movement that was reflected in official policy. Today he has no such power.
So he is doing what he can, in the forums he has access to, and I applaud him for it.
Tibet has been a part of China for 700 years.
That... depends on whom you ask, and how you define "a part of."
Yes, Tibet first came under Chinese control 700 years ago, when it was conquered by the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongol Empire. (Prior to that it was off doing its own little mountainous thing, one would presume... so the fact that it is under Chinese control seems to fly in the face of your prior assertion that China doesn't invade people. But anyway.)
That said, there have been periods since then during which China had little if any control over Tibet, and prior to the Cultural Revolution, even when it had control, it apparently chose not to exercise that control very much.
So there are some people who see things differently. And there are some people who feel that China's control, particularly in the last several decades, has had a... detrimental effect on people in Tibet, as far as certain cultural or religious freedoms might be concerend.
It's not surprising that there are misunderstandings, there are a lot of people in the world with many different views. These sorts of things happen.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
After doing quite a bit of research, I discovered two things.
p onsibilityc orporatelaw.html
First, there is no "U.S. Code" (I assume you mean federal law) governing corporate profits.
Second, virtually every state has a law that DOES require maximizing profits.
http://blj.ucdavis.edu/article/533/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_res
http://www.business-ethics.com/resources/article_
Each of these links add information, but because the laws are specific to each state, I'm not going to look them up for you.
Regardless, the point is clear.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
In the late 1930s, Gerald Nye of North Dakota and Martin Dies of Texas were outright for the Nazi party practically right up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They were unabashedly anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, and anti-Roosevelt.
People forget that the Nazi party was probably the most political party in the world during the 1930s. The American Bund (a group formed to promote Nazism in the states, and to encourage neutrality while Hitler invaded the rest of Europe) was not a fringe group - they had among their members Congressmen, Senators, judges, and governors.
Even after World War II had begun in earnest for America in 1942, members of Congress gave classified information to Nazi agents, spoke out for the extermination of "the Jew" on the floor of Congress, and continued to spout anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi rhetoric in newsletters sent to their home district.
Luckily for us, Congress is not beholden to respect the opinions of all of its members individually - it only has to respond to the majority opinion, which usually correlates with public opinion. This is also true of corporations - their "public" is just limited to those who own stock in it.
There are no votes about Gitmo -- the GOP won't allow them. He is the sponsor of legilation calling for an independent inquiry into prisons in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq. HR 3003 is one of them.