YAHOO FOR CHINESE TORTURE AND IMPRISONMENT

No, I'm not cheering Chinese Torture and Imprisonment on, I'm saying that the company Yahoo is supporting the torture and imprisonment of at least one Chinese dissident. This is what makes me mad about Big Business. Forget the fact that when a big business breaks the law they can just buy their way out of it the fact that they put the bottom line above the literal human rights of human beings is disgusting. It makes me frustrated that I am supporting them by using Flickr (Flickr is owned by Yahoo). Now it turns out that the World Organization for Human Rights USA is suing Yahoo in American courts and Yahoo doesn't like that.

Check out the facts as presented in an August 28, 2007 article (here: http://urltea.com/1d10) :

Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Latest News about Yahoo is asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a human rights organization that claims the Internet portal's cooperation with the Chinese government resulted in the torture and 10-year jail term of Wang Xiaoning.

Xiaoning had used a Yahoo account to anonymously post to the Web materials relating to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yahoo turned over identifying details for the account at the request of the Chinese government, which subsequently arrested Xiaoning.

Ironically, Yahoo isn't censoring it's own coverage of this story as you can see in a Reuters article (here: http://urltea.com/1d13) that reports:

Attorneys for Yahoo and its Hong Kong unit argued in a motion filed on Monday that U.S. laws governing issues such as privacy rights, torture and false imprisonment do not apply to Chinese citizens for actions by that occurred in China.

That's fine, Yahoo! Those laws don't apply to people in the US, either!

HA.

But seriously. Isn't it funny that they're not arguing against the accusation that they indirectly helped torture Wang Xiaoning? Now, I'm all for being honest and not trying to fight the obvious truth, but with accepting said truth comes the acceptance of the consequences. Yahoo is just trying to completely dodge the responsibility they have for causing this man to be tortured. They could fess-up and tell the Chinese government to fuck off, but they won't do that. Why? Because they're interested in money which is clearly more important to corporations than human rights are.

I know, I know, more hate-hate from ThePete. Well, what else can I do but complain? There is no solution. I can't just bail on all Yahoo-owned services and, say, go to Google since they do business in China, as well. There's basically no escaping corporate blood on consumer hands in today's world. No matter what you do you're helping support some sort of unfair exploitation in some sense, in some way, even if you're not aware of it.

So, what else do we do, but bitch about it all? Our lawmakers have made sure that we are all powerless to do anything. A group of activists and lawyers tried to get the state of California to revoke Unocal's corporate charter because of it's environmental damage and it's political machinations in the oil-rich countries it does business in (specifically, I believe they were helping fund terrorism against locals--but don't quote me on that). The state of California obviously did not revoke the corporate charter for one of the biggest oil companies in the state (if not the biggest). There's just too much money in it for the state and for politicians.

So, where do we go from here?

Beats me, man. The only solutions I see are illegal and life threatening and I'm too much a coward to even think about encouraging those options.