Joe,

could this be the reason?
The people have to be patriotic but not the companies.

In 2002, Bush said: "The U.S. government has no more important mission than 
protecting the homeland against future terrorist attacks." Yet, the other 
day, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said: "We have to balance 
the paramount urgency of security against the fact that we still want to 
have a robust global trading system."


Wanna Buy a Port?
By Harold Meyerson    Wednesday, February 22, 2006; Page 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.

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