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Friday, March 16, 2012

And THIS is when he's not even president; imagine what Bain Capital will get with their guy in the White House
Posted by Jill | 5:39 AM
Though the Republicans seem to have wiped George W. Bush from their memories, in their alternate universe in which the Presidency somehow went right from Saint Ronnie of Santa Barbara to the Kenyan Muslim Socialist Fascist Anti-Colonial Al-Qaeda Terrorist currently occupying the White House, those of us in the reality-based community still remember what it was like when someone in the executive branch stood to make money from American foreign policy. During the Bush years, whether it was Katrina reconstruction or the war in Iraq, it seemed that everywhere you turned, Halliburton or its then-subsidiary, KBR, was being handed piles of government cash.

A front-page story in the New York Times reveals that Bain Capital, from whence the quarter-billionaire Romney family is still gleaning the income that is allowing them to demolish a perfectly acceptable California beach house and build a brand new Xanadu for themselves, stands to make a pretty penny helping the Chinese goernment do constant surveillance of its citizenry:

As the Chinese government forges ahead on a multibillion-dollar effort to blanket the country with surveillance cameras, one American company stands to profit: Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney.

In December, a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust has holdings purchased the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that claims to be the largest supplier to the government’s Safe Cities program, a highly advanced monitoring system that allows the authorities to watch over university campuses, hospitals, mosques and movie theaters from centralized command posts.

The Bain-owned company, Uniview Technologies, produces what it calls “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that enable police officials in different jurisdictions to share images in real time through the Internet. Previous projects have included an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Such surveillance systems are often used to combat crime and the manufacturer has no control over whether they are used for other purposes. But human rights advocates say in China they are also used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” said Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.


I realize that this is private investment, not government policy. But given that Mitt Romney stands to make money off of deals like this, I think it's relevant for someone to ask Mitt Romney whether holdings in Bain would influence his policies as president. Not that I expect him to be truthful, but someone should ask. After all, haven't we had enough of political families that believe the entire world is a private fiefdom for themselves and their friends?

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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Imagine that...a corporation willing to sacrifice billions of dollars on principle
Posted by Jill | 4:48 AM
You know, sometimes it seems that Google is getting to be a pretty scary company. They know what you search on, if you have a gmail account they know your correspondence, if you use Blogger they know what you think. Now they even have phones so they can know where you are and what you're doing every single minute. Imagine a company like, say, Blackwater having so much information on so many people.

Imagine a company like, say, Procter & Gamble telling the government of an entire country of billions of people that if it doesn't clean up its act, it can go fuck itself:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

[snip]

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

--Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer


Don't Be Evil indeed.

(Heh. Underneath the post is a list to all the sites that are linking to the release.)

(h/t)

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Saturday, August 16, 2008

More proof that for conservatives, life begins at conception and ends at birth
Posted by Jill | 8:44 AM
...unless you're born into a wealthy, white, Republican family. Because this is the sort of thing we are doing to those who aren't:

In the first seven months of this year, the United States has deported 90,000 children to Mexico - without a parent or guardian.  (Link goes to a Spanish-language news site.)

Frankly, it is a disgrace that this country has become so overtaken by xenophobic hysteria with regard to human migration that the health, safety and well-being of children is disregarded and they are abandoned to the fates on the streets of frequently violent and crime-ridden border towns.    

According to the report linked, 13,500 of those children, or 15%, find themselves in limbo at the border. With no family and no way to take care of themselves, the lucky ones are taken in by social service and religious organizations, but the unlucky ones are simply abandoned to the streets to beg for their existence, or to fall prey to human traffickers. Many are sexually exploited.
In addition to the unbelievable inhumanity of treating children as de facto felons, the practice of deporting these children is having a huge impact on Mexican states with high migration rates that are ill-equipped to deal with this massive influx of untended children dumped by the United States government.



More from Blue Girl, here.

This is the net result of dehumanizing immigrants. This is what happens when you et the hatemongers take over. You get a society that thinks of these children as vermin instead of children...and that cares not one whit what happens to them, even as politicians in Washington continues to give lip service to the well-being of children.

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Thursday, August 09, 2007

Spit take-inducing headline of the day
Posted by Derek | 4:49 PM
Put down that cup of coffee, unless you like a mess. Courtesy of TPM Muckraker:


Gitmo to Stay Open as Human Rights Sanctuary


Turns out it's more than just a catchy headline. The story is that the good ol' Bush administration wants to slim down the prisoner headcount at Gitmo from the current 360 to 150. So good news for 210 wrongfully-imprisoned and even-more-wrongfully tortured detainees? Actually, no. We've still got one more level of wrongful to go: there's nowhere to drop them off. Their home countries and all of the possible foster-home states that have been asked either won't take them, or won't take them without promising not to torture or kill them. So they get to stay in Guantánamo, where their human rights will be, uh, protected.

I wonder if they'd take any consolation in not being among the other 150 prisoners - the ones the Bush DoD doesn't want to get rid of. Of those 150, Bush & Co. have selected 80 finalists whom they want to [beverages down again...] charge with war crimes. I shit you not. The Bush administration, having exempted itself from international accords and the U.S. Constitution in order to avoid being charged with war crimes, is gearing up to charge some of the victims of its war crimes with war crimes. Yes, some of them are surely guilty of war crimes, but we'll never really know with the kangaroo-court military tribunals that will try them.

What about the 50 semi-finalists? The Bush junta says that they're too dangerous to release from Gitmo, but not bad enough to put on trial. Um... I have nothing to add to this point. I guess my digust has reached critical mass, at least for the moment.

The thing that's saddening me the most right now is that after 6+ years of Bush, this level of absurdity doesn't even seem unusual anymore. It's like a ghastly, global-scale version of one of the "Cowboys and Indians" games I participated in during my single-digit years: the ones where the biggest kids make up the rules as they go along, and their manipulations become more and more illogical until chaos and disillusionment set in and the game collapses.

Would that I could just say "I'm not playing anymore," quit the war on terror and walk home.

Cross-posted at Cheek and Bluster

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