Which Side Are You On?
Some years ago the labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan wrote a fine book called Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. (Some of his concrete advice to unions is here. He's also written a more recent book on the rule of law, or lack thereof, thoughtfully reviewed here.)
I think of him tonight because the question's running through my head.
It's pretty simple: The top guys at Google are rich, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, flying around the country in their personal 767, doing magazine interviews, holding pep rallies with their best-and-brightest employees. It's good to be rich.
But, apparently, it's very important that they be richer still. So important that, to pick up those extra dollars, they are willing to give a dictatorship tools to make its censorhip more efficient. They're not unique - Yahoo! gives up dissidents when asked, and fellow billionaire Bill Gates defended them today at a posh resort in Switzerland.
I have nothing against posh resorts, or being rich in general. But when you're getting richer by collaborating with an authoritarian government to keep its people down, well I do have something against that. And I think Abe Lincoln, or Mark Twain, or George Orwell or Dwight Eisenhower would have had a problem with it too.
posted by Anonymous at 10:01 PM
3 Comments:
Of course. But Lincoln, Twain, and Orwell didn't have to convince a board that they were doing everything conceivable within the law to maximize shareholder equity. (Probably Eisenhower, too, but I'm less certain.)
Surely this is a tired old chestnut of an argument, but it's the first thing that leaps to my mind nevertheless.
Will the top guys at GOOG give a fig if they hear that SRI analysts have changed their advice from "hold" to "rip up and jump on" unless their valuation suddenly plummets?
No offense, but I will be very shocked (if pleased) to learn that the forces of SRI can bring that kind of throw weight to bear.
I believe it's already happening.
Google dropped a lot this week- suddenly people are suspecting that 126 billion might be overvaluing it a tad. I strongly suspect this move might have triggered it.
But the much larger point; what do we really value in Western culture? Since Tiannamen, we've been teaching to the Chinese people, through our actions, that shareholder value is much more important that democracy, human rights and equality of opportunity; we believe so much in the principle of shareholder value in the U.S. that we're dismantling our industrial capacity, debasing our currency, removing economic security from the equation of labor relations, and allowing ordinary health care to become a class privilege.
What our policy makers fail to understand is that compromising our democratic principles regarding China erodes our our democratic culture, our own belief in and ability to act on democratic principles in the US and Europe. As China grows more powerful, the effect will be magnified. We're teaching a 5th of the world population how to run a nation by example, and the first lesson: capital is more important than democracy; more important than life, liberty and that strangely resonant phrase, the pursuit of happiness.
Google is signing on and selling out - like the whole damn country - and it is missing that this compromise is cancerous to its own reason for being.
We're chasing the ideal economy from your annoying libertarian TA in an Econ 101 market theory class: the Cayman Islands. Large concentrations of capital, no moral obligations, total indifference to the lives of human beings.
If you pick the three month graph or any longer graph, GOOG's growth doesn't look bad at all. What we're seeing so far can be shrugged off as a minor correction. I don't think it takes even this long for the market to factor in the price of evil. Barring revelations of kitting-smashing, declines from here on out are due to fundamentals and not moral revulsion.
Mind you, I'm not a stock analyst, nor do I play one on TV.
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