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Siemens, Nokia Helped Provide Iran's Censoring Tech
An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal has an article about Nokia and Siemens selling the censoring technology to Iran's government. Do you believe that the public relations damage to these companies can persuade them from selling this kind of technology to other dictatorial regimes?" I don't believe there will *be* any PR Damage, and that makes me a little sad.
These are capitalist corporations. Their goal is to make money. People are willing to buy censorship technology (just look at any government office). Why do you act shocked that this is happening?
Good point. Unfortunately if Nokia and Siemens didn't sell it, somebody else would. Nokia surprises me, but not Siemens. The Germans have always loved money and they have no ethical problems with doing business with unfriendly states. I can remember back when Ronald Reagan was president that there were issues with German companies that made illegal or quasi-illegal deals with various unfriendly nations just to make a little money, so this kind of thing has gone on for some time.
Of course the US is planning for deep packet inspection.
"Free Market, YAY!!!"
If one of you "free market" ideologues can explain to me what market force would possibly address high-tech sales to tyrants, I'd love to hear it.
Whenever I hear someone from the Right talking about how "free markets" support individual and political liberty, I am just amazed. In fact, the result of any "free market" will always be a corporatocracy or at least a close working relationship between widespread tyrannical governments and the most powerful corporations. They are made for each other. Further (and this is a slightly different issue) Capitalism will always result in some form of slavery.
You won't hear that on the Sunday morning news/talk shows, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
IBM sold the Nazis the tabulating machines as well as customizing the field inputs and tabulation outputs of the punch cards used for recording Jews/Gypsies/homosexuals/dissidents expelled as well as those sent and processed through the concentration camps. The president of the entire company demanded that verbal instructions to his German managers be the rule, to avoid a paper trail. IBM was the sole servicer of machines at all the concentration camp, for FSM's sake. Of course they knew exactly what they were selling. And they sold yet more equipment, customized punch cards and services to Nazi Germany after we were at war with them via their Geneva office which is, at the very least, treason. Do blame the maker for the use of the tool if the tool was customized for mass killings. Don't listen to people with no comprehension of moral responsibility or professional (not to mention general human) ethics. Don't open your digital pie hole if you don't actually know what you're talking about.
I'll try to stick with your most egregiously wrong statements to keep this fairly brief.
"Free market" forces don't deal with Tyrants, and they shouldn't.
They don't? Since when? Even when there are sanctions against a government, trade still occurs. And let's not forget who loaned Bush / America the money for the foreign policy debacle that was Iraq, as well as the bank bailout after all those 'free market' idiots enabled the bankers to play roulette with our money... China (or are you arguing that China is not a tyranny?)
You probably wouldn't be able to call the leader a "tyrant" or a "despot" either. It would be more like "benevolent ruler"
We have reasonably free market, yet Bush was clearly a tyrant. What else can you call someone who starts a war of choice and tries to legalize torture?
To flip the whole thing around, you can't have complete liberty if you don't have the freedom to trade. If you aren't free to trade to whoever you want, whenever you want, then you aren't completely free.
So far as I know, there is no place on earth that does not place SOME kind of rules and regulations on trade. Please show me these 'free' people. And demonstrate reasonably that they have absolutely no restrictions. For what it's worth, I'll agree that tyrannies commonly controlled trade ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE.
It's not a free market if the government prevents individuals from competing.
This is the huge straw man argument of closet republicans (Libertarians), neocons, and every other corporate apologist. So far as I know, Rearden Steel never existed, and I have never heard of an instance where the American government tried to force a company to give technology to their competitor, although I could conceive of it happening in a limited number of special cases in WW2, since there were 2 military juggernauts threatening to take over the world. Since I'm not speaking German or Japanese, I'd say that it was a good move if it happened then.
If you want to see slavery (which occurs based on the morals head of society, and has nothing to do with the market) on a mass scale, go take a look at the USSR and their Communism...
This is the second biggest straw man argument of the corporate apologists and economic anarchists. First and foremost, It is not Socialism that made the USSR bad, it was CORRUPTION (not to mention having a paranoid sociopath like Stalin in charge for so long). No matter WHAT system you have in place, corruption will topple empires period. Did socialism open the door to corruption? Possibly, but in the long run corruption plus corporate domination (I wouldn't even call it a free market, since the corporations own 90% or the Republicants and 40% of the Democraps) has the potential to do as much if not more damage, and ultimately fall as hard if not harder.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF