Capitalism at Work: U.S. Corporations Support Chinese Police State

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

—Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814.

How does an essay opening with that quote get featured on both Huffington Post and Dakota Voice? Maybe by being flat-out right... and those aren't words I use lightly to describe anything Bob Ellis posts.

John W. Whitehead reviews a May essay by Naomi Klein ["China's All-Seeing Eye", Rolling Stone, 2008.05.14] in which she points out that American corporations like IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric are happily making big profits building Big Brother technology that helps China stifle democracy and human rights.

Klein says our corporations have a keen interest in helping repress freedom in China by monitoring citizens and controlling their communications: they've discovered that "the most efficient delivery sytem for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state." The Chinese government and America's corporations realize that bubbling dissent, not just from Tibetans out in the mountains but from rank-and-file Chinese farmers and workers harboring a lot of anger with China's system, threatens their profits:

This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China's rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a halt [Klein 2008].

And so China uses American technology and investment to install work toward installing three million surveillance cameras in Shenzhen. China uses the "Great Firewall" to limit Internet access to acceptable sites. China plans to acquire and deploy face-recognition technology that will link to a database with images of every citizen.

When I complain about overreaching government surveillance here at home, some commenters tell me, "Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about." I don't think that response will sit well with Chinese Christians and folks demanding government investigation of shoddy school construction after the May earthquake....

But that's China. Surely America wouldn't succumb to such totalitarianism... right. Our Constitutional freedoms face a powerful opposing force: the profit motive:

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism [Klein, 2008].

How does such a damning critique of capitalism—Klein suggests "market Stalinism" is a better term—make it onto the pages of Dakota Voice, which all too often serves as a mouthpiece for faith in the corporate plutocracy? Has Bob Ellis been passing the pipe with another popular West River Bob?

Or might the convergence and cooperation of American profiteers and Chinese oppressors be making even Bob Ellis realize that the greatest threat to human freedom is not the secular humanism of eggheads like me but the selfish, amoral materialism of the corporations?

I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. —Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816.

The selfish spirit of commerce... knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain. —Thomas Jefferson to Larkin Smith, 1809.