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Congressional Commitee Rips Yahoo Execs
A number of readers sent word of the hearing by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in which committee members raked two Yahoo execs over the coals. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," the committee chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said angrily after hearing from Jerry Yang and Michael Callahan about Yahoo's actions that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a Chinese dissident. In 2004 Yahoo turned over information about journalist Shi Tao's online activities requested by Chinese authorities. In Feb. 2006, Yahoo's General Counsel Callahan testified that he had not known the nature of the investigation the authorities were conducting. He later learned that several employees of Yahoo China were aware at the time that the investigation involved "state secrets," but Callahan did not go back to Congress to amend his testimony. Committee members were withering in their disdain for Yahoo's refusal to help Shi Tao's family after his arrest.
So if that's the beginning and end of corporate responsibility, then clearly IBM was quite right to help the Nazis exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables. Good to know that corporations doing business abroad shouldn't be held to any level of basic responsibility for human rights and human dignity, and should be nothing more than money making machines directing funds for any ol' human abusing shit hole to Western investors.
Bring on the blood diamonds! Who the fuck cares who gets abused! Money is the only thing worth consideration.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"What if the law in the US says you cannot follow the law in China?"
Sovereignty means the country establishes the rules within their boundaries. If the US doesn't like it, they can always go to war with China. It will be the quickest war ever - China immediately dumps their vast US currency holdings on the open market, the US dollar becomes (even more) worthless within 1 minute due to programmed trading, etc.
China and Japan (and pretty much the rest of the world) are already looking to divest themselves of their reserves of US dollars, since Barneke has made it clear that he will destroy the dollar's value in a stupid attempt to delay the consequences of the collapsed housing bubble as long as possible, which will only make it worse when the time of reconning arrives,
The USD is no longer a "reserve currency". This has broad implications for the US' ability to "project force", and its loss of superpower status.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Is this not exactly the same thing as what Yahoo! is being lambasted for, except Yahoo! was *following* the law, and AT&T (and others) were *breaking* it?
It's quite simple really. If you're "with us", you're not breaking the law(when the president does it, it's not illegal). If you're "against us", you are.
What?
No, I think it was completely fucked up. I think a lot of how we do things is completely messed up. I don't think it should have ever been the business of any civilization that curbed the excesses of industrialization to do business amorally. I just object to the charade perpetrated by a neocon hypocrite that lambastes Europeans for not partaking in the U.S.'s sticking of its toes into the water of becoming China, while a cadre of Democrats berate individuals for doing exactly what has been demanded of them by law.
They aren't doing it to change anything, they're doing it for show. The Congress has been instrumental in letting the U.S. become China's bitch since Nixon began relations with China. We need to put the boot on the neck of Congress to do something other than tell us what we already know in hopes that it will entice us to vote for them.
It's hard to imagine anyone but laissez-faire crackheads actually looking at the amoral structure of corporations and thinking it's for the best. The drugs are powerful in Libertopia.
Tu quoque
Just because a congressman might be hypocritical, doesn't make their arguments any less valid.
How about upholding basic human rights as put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights charter of the UN?
Would that work for you, Mr. Philosopher, because you seem more interested in the moral relativism of something rather than the fact that it violates some fundamental precepts of human dignity?
Let's see a Congressman get away with substituting in Black/Jew whatever and lasting out the day.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Very nicely done. But think that only illustrates the point; both can kill, just one's death toll is much larger than the other, even though individual victims of the latter may be more notable.
Likewise, Congress passes laws that affect literally millions of people, many in a negative way, and yet here we have a congressional committee upbraiding a company for ruining one person's life with their policy. It's not that Yahoo!'s actions are qualitatively less repugnant than Congress's...it's just that the relative quantities defy reasonable juxtaposition.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Actually, it can. This is not a logical syllogism situated in the abstract we are talking about, but rather an issue in which Congress no less than Yahoo! (and probably much more) has a role to play. If a Congressman upbraids a corporation for undertaking acts that are morally repugnant, did that Congressman also introduce or vote for legislation that would make such a stance a practical option for that corporation? Did congress rattle sabers over protecting Yahoo! China's executives if they were to defy Chinese law to aid the dissident? Threaten trade sanctions? Place restrictions on how and in what manner Yahoo!'s international subsidiaries can aid foreign governments? Any of those would have aided Yahoo! in making such a choice palatable to its board of directors and its shareholders, and given cover if Yahoo!'s executives wished to do the "moral" thing.
If Congress had in its power the substantive means to encourage Yahoo! to do the moral thing or at least give it legal cover to do so, and failed to so act, Yahoo! can indeed say "you too, asshole" and not be staking out a morally vacuous position. It might also help if Congress wasn't green-lighting retroactive immunity for similar crimes domestically; one might argue from that that Congress has shown it doesn't so much care about the rule of law when it comes to corporations complicit with government orders.
ad hominem tu quoque is not automatically a fallacious argument if the agent so identified is culpable in the very same matter (and not a merely equivalent matter) as the subject.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Technically speaking the UDHR is a non-binding document and therefore doesn't really mean much. But I'm of the mind that the UDHR is one of the most important documents that mankind has ever produced. Now if we could only get countries to follow it (my own included).