Unintended Silence

Didn't intend to let this blog go dormant so long. Will catch up soon . . .

Google's Latest Outrage

Fyi, I just learned today that Google offers a brilliant new service that allows anyone to type in your home phone number and get your name and mailing address. A great service for stalkers, predators, postal-mail-spammers and other prying eyes.

Predictably, the onus is on the individual to opt out. This can be done by typing your area code and phone number in the Google search-engine box and opening the page containing your (now very public) personal information. There is a link on the lower left that says "Request to have your name removed from this list." A form will pop up asking for your name, city and phone number. Submitting that, they say, takes you off the list within 48 hours.

Granted, if your phone number is listed, the same information can be obtained fairly easily via several online services, such as WhitePages.com. Before the dawn of the Internet, it was readily available in print from reverse-directories used by snooping newspaper reporters, private investigators and real estate brokers.

But Google' has taken it to an extreme, mass-marketing your home addresses. Even if you ask the phone company to un-list your number, your address will live forever in Google’s omniscient zillion-gigabit database unless you go to the trouble of getting removed. It's probably legal, but obnoxious and foreboding. What will the next layer of privacy stripped away and mass-marketed by arrogant internet companies? Information on the brand of boxer shorts you wear? The titles of books you bought on Amazon dot com?

Agent Orange - A Personal Requiem

Asia Colloquium

UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

AGENT ORANGE: A Personal Requiem

Documentary screening and discussion with filmmaker Masako Sakata

When: October 3, 2007, 4:00 pm -- 6:00 pm
Where: North Gate Library, Hearst at Euclid Avenue, Berkeley
Tickets: This is a free event.

Journalist Masako Sakata's documentary film chronicles the effects of the herbicide known as Agent Orange and the tragedy of losing her husband, an American photojournalist who died from liver cancer that was, Sakata is convinced, caused by his exposure to the defoliant while serving in Vietnam

This the US premier screening if the documentary, which was shown in the Havana Film Festival in December and televised in Vietnam in August.

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Boeing’s Fingerprints on Torture?

Here’s a corporate responsibility story that belongs in the textbooks. A subsidiary of the giant airplane maker and defense contractor Boeing Co. is being sued by the ACLU for alleged complicity in the CIA rendition program, which transfers terrorism suspects to secret prisons located outside the U.S. to interrogate them without legal constraints.

The suit was filed on behalf of a certain guest at the exclusive Guantanamo Bay Resort for Terrorists (Gitmo for short) and two other suspects held in Egypt. All guilty before proven innocent. Boeing’s Denver-based subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. is accused of providing the CIA with transportations services to take the prisoners overseas, where they were tortured.

Boeing is denying any knowledge of the case. Sound familiar? Multinational retailers also claim they have no knowledge of their apparel contractors operating sweatshops in developing nations CEO’s say they had no idea their accounting departments were cooking the books. American contractors in Iraq say they didn’t know about the corruption in the UN’s oil for food program.

The guilty ones aren’t the terror suspects – they should have been given their fundamental rights to be free from torture and not to be condemned to punishment before proven guilty in a trial. The War on Terror doesn’t suspend the sanctity of human rights, and any corporation that is complicit in human rights violations, knowingly or not, deserves to be taken to task. Nor can Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan get off the hook by claiming it’s operatives didn’t know who they were transporting or why when they took care of logistics for the CIA. Corporations have an obligation to be transparent in their activities, even when a customer like the CIA can get away with disinformation and deniability in its rogue operations.

This lawsuit will be interesting to follow, even if it is likely to be thrown out of court. It may help unravel the shroud of deceit covering the Bush Administration’s battle against civil rights.

Fly Me to Darfur

In an exciting new use of technology to promote the cause of human rights, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has teamed up with Google to create the Darfur Mapping Initiative, an online information trove on the popular mapping site Google Earth.

This is an amazing interactive lesson on genocide. And it’s must-see for anyone interested in the intolerable situation in Sudan, where more than 300,000 people have already been killed and 2.5 million victims driven from their homes.

If you don’t already have Google Earth on your desktop, you can download it for free by going to http://earth.google.com. The software isn’t hard to install, but it takes some patience to learn how to use it. It allows you to fly anywhere around the world and zoom into city streets and people’s backyards with fairly good resolution.

There are few bugs with the Darfur Mapping process. If you use Google Earth’s search template to navigate, you’re liable to get lost. When I tried to instruct the program to “Fly Me” to Darfur, I ended up in Dafur, Minnesota (Pop. 137), which looked like a typical Midwestern farming community. No genocide there, I pray. When I changed it to Darfur, Sudan, I landed back in Minnesota. (Note: This problem has been fixed since the Initiative's debut)

The trick is to input Sudan. That will get you to Africa after a brief flight. Zoom in on the “Crisis in Darfur” flag to get a tour of the devastation on the ground.

A legend will pop up instructing you how to click on the markers on the map to get information. The little flames will take you to the damaged and destroyed villages. The blue triangles tell you the names of the location and the number of displace people. The cameras will show you photographs.

It was a little clumsy at first, but I managed to click a camera that generated a gruesome photo called “Victims Outside Adwa.” I’ll leave the image to your imagination. From the triangle for Shangli Town, I learned that 19,494 residents had been displaced there. If you put a little time into it, you can check out data on refugees, see video clips and read testimony.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has turned the lesson of Europe’s historical shame into a powerful tool for understanding that the crime of genocide occurs with virtual impunity across the world today. I can only hope that the Museum and Google Earth will some day be flying us to other hot spots on earth where the bloodshed and the inhumanity are unfolding – in the early stages, when there’s time to intervene before the death toll rises.

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Responsibility to Protect

In mid-March the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley hosted an event called Stopping Mass Atrocities, a conference that gathered scholars and activists to discuss “R2P” – the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Basically, R2P demands that international agencies and governments intervene to stop genocide before it happens, instead of watching feebly and waiting until it’s too late to act.

The movement to advance the R2P doctrine has been gathering force and winning widespread support around the world. In time, it may prevent the kinds of atrocities that spun out of control places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.

At the same time, in a less conspicuous corner of the human rights agenda, there's more chagrin than hope. The international effort to protect workers and ecosystems in the developing world from the unregulated excesses of multinational corporations is floundering.

John Ruggie, the Harvard professor and UN adviser charged with finding solutions to global corporate abuse, released a long awaited report on the issue Thursday, but admittedly found few answers.

The report he submitted to the UN Human Rights Council, after two years of study, was evocatively titled “Business and Human Rights: Mapping International Standards of Responsibility and Accountability for Corporate Acts.” Not surprisingly, it found “little movement” toward regulating corporate responsibility in the context of international human rights law, which left a “sizeable protection gap for victims.”

The bottom line here is not the failure of corporations to regulate themselves under international principles of human rights. It’s the fact that governments in the developing world invite unregulated business activity from abroad, and make it a point to create a favorable environment of lax enforcement of their own labor, health and environmental laws. This goes under the banner of Sweatshops are Good for Development.

Could an equivalent to the R2P doctrine of intervention be used to break the cycle of exploitation and abuse that thrives when local laws and regulations are flouted in a tacit agreement between banana republics and global business?

Ruggie, who serves as “Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporationsand other business enterprises,” tried to attack the problem within the framework of the “state duty to protect” doctrine that is embedded in the core of UN human rights treaties. A government's responsibility to protect its citizens from famine, civil violence and even genocide also applies in theory to business practices.

It’s a laudable principle, but it gets bogged down in the reality of political expediency. Even if they had the means to enforce business regulations, many of these governments don’t want to have what they see as unreasonably strict labor or environmental standards of the developed world shoved down their throats.

The multinational corporations are left to enjoy a wide degree of latitude in this gray area of enforcement to focus on what they are chartered to do, make money. In China, they've gone a step further, protesting the Central Goverment's plans to reform its loosely enforced labor laws -- with the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai leading the charge.

A lot of fuss has been made about the rise in corporate codes of conduct to mitigate labor and environmental abuses, but there is still no cohesive system in place to monitor compliance to those codes. Brand protection, not transparency, is the driving force for business in this debate. Self regulation is not the answer.

Are international agencies and foreign governments poised to intervene in the domestic business practices of sovereign nations? Ruggie’s report notes that the “treaty-based human rights machinery” has been paying increased attention to the way governments fulfill their duties to regulate corporate activity. But I can't imagine the International Labor Organization gaining the authority to send inspectors into Burmese textile factories to cite infractions and propose sanctions. The IAEA isn't getting much respect for monitoring nuclear weapons production these days -- why would anyone want to bother with the ILO? Or pay heed to the UN's laudible proposeal for a "Global Compact" for Business and Human Rights.

The Ruggie report concludes that “the permissive conditions for business-related human rights abuses today are created by a misalignment between economic forces and governance capacity," according to a UN statement. "It also notes that it is the most vulnerable people and communities pay the heaviest price for these governance gaps.”

In other words, the tsunami of economic globalization is swamping the developed world, and there’s no one out there to enforce regulations or to be held accountable for the damage. Maybe it’s already too late to intervene. We'll be left to clean up the mess after the fact for the global dispossessed.

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Blood Bananas

The sordid case of Chiquita Banana’s payments to terrorists in Columbia illustrates how a pattern of violating the strictures of corporate responsibility can swing a corporation into the mire of complicity with the worst kind of human rights violations, the murderous kind.

Chiquita Brands International said today it has agreed to pay $25 million to resolve a criminal investigation by the US Justice Department, after admitting that it paid off a terrorist group in Columbia for protection. The company was not only playing with fire, it was helping to finance a militia with a track record of civilian massacres and cocaine trafficking, not to mention an insurgency campaign bent on toppling Columbia’s democratically elected government.

The $1.7 million in payoffs to the United Self Defense Forces of Columbia (AUC) occurred from 1997 to 2004, around the time Chiquita was under fire from critics accusing the company of labor violations and other illegal acts in Columbia and other parts of Latin America.

In 1998, the Cincinnati Enquirer published the results of a major investigation into Chiquita’s business practices in Columbia, reporting allegations that the company had bribed government officials, routinely conducted aerial spraying of hazardous pesticides while workers were in the fields, engaged in union busting and other labor abuses.

Human Rights Watch reported in 2002 that Chiquita and other banana growers allegedly used child labor on their plantations in Ecuador. All this on top of a long history of political skullduggery and violent labor union suppression by American banana barons in Latin America.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that ethically-challenged Chiquita got itself into bigger trouble in Columbia warranting a criminal investigation. The technicality here is that the AUC is on the State Department’s list of international terrorist organizations, inviting scrutiny by US officials. But little or nothing was done by authorities or regulators to curb Chiquita’s human rights violations of the corporate variety. Only an unsuccessful shareholder lawsuit in 1998 claiming violations of the company’s fiduciary responsibilities.

Just like pot-smokers graduating to snorting cocaine, Chiquita shows how a company with a moral void can find itself in moving from committing labor, environmental and occupation health abuses in developing countries to condoning and supporting greater evils. The company's pact with terrorists in Columbia is not that much differnt from the cozy relations other corporations have negotiated with brutal military regimes, such as Unocal in Burma, Shell in Nigeria and Freeport-MacMoran in Indonesia's Irian Jaya under Suharto. What's different is that Chiquita got caught dealing with the wrong gang of thugs.

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