[Mb-civic] Wanna Buy a Port? - Harold Meyerson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Wanna Buy a Port?

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 22, 2006; A15

We're selling our harbors to an Arab government. Our biggest Internet 
companies are complicit in the Chinese government's censorship of 
information and suppression of dissidents. Welcome to American 
capitalism in the age of globalization.

Here the market rules. National security and freedom of speech are all 
well and good, but they are distinctly secondary concerns when they bump 
up against our highest national purpose, which is maximizing shareholder 
value.

This is a uniquely American value. Other nations designate certain 
industries as too strategic to ship abroad or sell to foreign interests. 
Only in the United States is the corporation answerable only to its 
shareholders -- not to its employees, its host communities, its home nation.

It wasn't always this way, of course: In the decades following World War 
II, you could speak, without undue smirking, about corporate 
responsibility. A sense of national solidarity, high rates of 
unionization, and a labor force that did not extend much beyond our 
borders anchored American business in America. Over the past three 
decades, however, the eclipse of all corporate stakeholders save the 
shareholder, and the creation of a global labor pool, have combined to 
make the very idea of corporate citizenship an anachronism. In 
consequence, the fundamental needs of our financial and corporate 
institutions and those of the rest of the nation diverge with increasing 
frequency.

By the logic of the market, there's no reason why our East Coast ports 
shouldn't be operated by a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. By 
the logic of national security, it may be a good idea or a crazy one. 
But even in the current security-conscious zeitgeist, security concerns 
do not loom that large in our government's attitude to things economic. 
Our high-tech manufacturing has decamped to East Asia, and our machine 
tool industry has all but vanished from our midst.

There is nothing peculiarly American in the willingness of the marquee 
U.S. Internet companies to play in China by the rules laid down by the 
Chinese government; globetrotting companies have a genius for 
assimilating themselves to the worst practices of their host countries. 
Indeed, while the executives at Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Microsoft 
deserved to be taken to task for their complicity in Beijing's 
determination to censor information, they would have been justified in 
noting that every U.S. corporation that goes to China is linked to, and 
almost invariably profits from, that nation's suppression of fundamental 
rights.

After all, when American business goes to China to have a machine built 
or a shirt stitched or some research undertaken, it is in no small 
reason because the labor is dirt-cheap. This is partly the result of the 
nation's history of poverty and partly the result of repressive state 
policy that views all efforts at worker organization -- as it views all 
efforts at establishing autonomous centers of power -- as criminal. Were 
the current labor strife in China to escalate, were the nation plunged 
into turmoil in an effort to create a more pluralistic society with 
actual rights for workers, what would the attitudes of the U.S. 
corporations in China be? Would Wal-Mart, which does more business with 
China than any other corporation, object if the Chinese government 
staged another Tiananmen-style crackdown? Would other American 
businesses? Would the current or a future administration levy any 
sanctions against China? Given the growing level of integration of the 
Chinese economy and ours, could it even afford to?

To the extent that American business or our government even attempt to 
square this circle, the argument they most frequently adduce is that 
modernity -- that is, the integration of a nation into the global 
economy -- will transform that nation into a more pluralistic democracy. 
China, however, is determined to manage its integration on its own 
repressive terms. And, more broadly, modernity hasn't always guaranteed 
the flourishing of democratic pluralism -- a lesson you might think we'd 
learned after that nastiness with Germany in the middle of the past century.

Indeed, at the heart of the Bush administration's theory of democratic 
transformation, we find two non sequiturs: that integration into the 
global marketplace leads to democratic pluralism, and that elections 
lead to democratic pluralism. Yet China and the Arab nations of the 
Middle East tend to refute, not confirm, these theories. Elections and 
economic integration are both good in themselves, of course, but absent 
a thriving civil society, they offer no guarantee of the kinds of 
transformation that these nations sorely need.

What's clear is that neither the task of building democratic nations 
around the world nor ensuring secure ports and cities here at home is 
our primary national purpose. Our mission is to maximize shareholder 
value. Which, by the measure of our strategic interests and our 
historical ideals, amounts to selling America short.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/21/AR2006022101177.html
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