Thursday, February 02, 2006

Corporate Human Rights Violators: Practicing Evil

Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Being Evil: American Corporations Protect Police States

American based corporations run by profiteers that collude with police state China to restrict speech, violating human rights, reporting on activists, and resulting in citizens going to jail.

"These massively successful high-tech companies, which couldn't bring themselves to send their representatives to this meeting today, should be ashamed," said Rep. Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which organized the briefing. With all their power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day," Lantos went on. "They caved in to Beijing's demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it."

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo join Caterpillar, KBR, Monsanto, Phillip Morris, Chevron, Coca Cola and Nestle and other Americans who magically lose their American values once they leave our shores, human rights being relative in their eyes.

These giant American corporations don't want to miss a dollar, even if it violates human rights. Of course this is nothing really new. Henry Ford made deals with the Nazis in World War II, as did GM, Chase Bank and several other giant American corporations.

The corporate response is cynical innocence defined: that they encourage more spread of information being in China and other oppressive countries than if they didn't profit there. We're just an innocent little corporation that can't do anything until government steps in.

Please!

Are you Americans or not? Do the values we stand for as Americans more important than short term profits or not?

Are you deaf to world wide cries for universal human rights, that includes not colluding with police state oppression -- silencing China's Tom Paine's?

Please define evil for me.

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