Tag Archives: culture

Lack of Understanding

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This is demonstrated in the lead paragraph of a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Chief executives are taking vocal stands on issues like gun control, climate change, and immigration, but global affairs bring a different complexity and calculation, especially for companies doing business in China*.

After all,

In the aftermath of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s now-deleted tweet, the National Basketball Association has found the consequences of even implicitly criticizing Chinese policy can be swift and sizable.

Not to pick on the NBA in particular (although its behavior has been especially public, cowardly, and so reprehensible), Apple and Alphabet, among lots of others, also have sacrificed principle for company “security” in the PRC, while favoring yuan, also, over principle.

No, taking principled positions don’t get complexified by the environment in which they’re taken. The fundamental tenets of ethics, of morality, are universal and constant; the only adjustments are in the manner of their implementation.  There’s nothing at all complex about that. Company personnel are either principled, ethical, moral, or they are not. These are not matters of situation or convenience.

And this:

Executives have to thread a needle when a company’s commercial and financial interests clash with the CEO’s personal values and the cultural values of an enterprise and its home country, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a leadership expert at the Yale School of Management. “One of the rarely discussed downsides of globalization is you get caught in those crosscurrents,” he said.

Those “cross-currents” are irrelevant. Either the CEO or the enterprise have principles worth standing by and sacrificing for, or the CEO or the enterprise have no principles. It’s that simple.

Another misunderstanding is this one by Paul Argenti, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Professor of Corporate Communication:

The job of a CEO is not to save the world or make the world safe for democracy[.]

No, but it is a core part of his job to be, at all times and in all circumstances, ethical, moral, and not hypocritical.  An example of business’ glaring hypocrisy: the Business Roundtable. That group is carefully and with deliberation silent on the NBA’s, et al., meek acquiescence to the PRC’s tyrants.

One last misunderstanding, this one by Rick Wartzman, Drucker Institute’s Director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society [paraphrased by WSJ]:

The fracas sparked by ephemeral statements can distract from more substantive questions of social responsibility[.]

And

“What concerns me is whether statements, while important, become a substitute for the more meaningful work around what it means to be a responsible company and take care of all your stakeholders[.]”

Again, no. The only way such things can distract is if the statement maker chooses to be distracted. Staying focused on the business of the company in such a circumstance may be hard to do, but being hard means it’s eminently possible.

 

*The WSJ, like most of the NLMSM, refers to the People’s Republic of China as though it were the one and only. They ignore the nation just across a narrow straight from the mainland, the Republic of China that sits on the island of Taiwan.

Warren, Again

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At last Thursday’s CNN-hosted Equality Townhall attended by many of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Presidential candidates, Senator and candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) had this exchange with a townhall questioner:

Townhall Questioner: “Let’s say you’re on the campaign trail … and a supporter approaches you and says, “Senator, I am old-fashioned, and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.” What is your response?
Warren: Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that, and I’m going to say, “Then just marry one woman.  Assuming you can find one[.]

Now, the question appears to have been planted by Warren or her staff, but that just emphasizes the matter: this is the utter contempt with which she, and by extension, Party, view ordinary Americans.

Keep this in mind next summer and fall.

First, They Came for our Guns

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Then they came for our freedom of speech.  Now they’re after our freedom of religion.  Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke has made the attack on the core of our Bill of Rights open and explicit.  After having promised to take our guns (and his Bestie, Eric Swalwell (D, CA) presaged him by threatening to nuke us if we didn’t give up our guns), and after Party has pressured social media to censor speech of which Party disapproves, we get this from O’Rourke at the CNN town hall meeting which it held with a number of Party Presidential candidates last Thursday:

…religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights or the full civil rights of every single one of us,” the former Texas congressman said at CNN‘s Equality Town Hall in Los Angeles.
He added: “And so as president, we are going to make that a priority, and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

Never mind the human rights of believers.  Religious institutions will be punished by the state if they don’t destroy their religions by violating their religions’ fundamental tenets in favor of state diktats.  Our religious institutions must surrender themselves into instruments of the state.

The 1st Amendment, along with the 2nd, have no place in the lives of modern Americans.

The Constitution, having been written more than 100 years ago isn’t, as that sage philosopher Ezra Klein has said, binding on anything.

After all, no less a light than Woodrow Wilson, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement and the first Progressive-Democrat President, said this of our Constitution:

This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

We the People—us ignorant voter-citizens—have no role in the life of our Constitution; Article V is just a bunch of pretty words.  No, our Constitution, the very fabric of our nation, is to be modified at will according to whatever our Progressive-Democrat Betters determine to be the relevant pressures of life.

Keep this in mind in the summer and fall of 2020.

First-Name Interactions

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The familiarity of business’ personnel charged with interacting with members of the public conducting those interactions on a first-name basis is unwarranted and unwanted.  Those business personnel don’t know me (for instance) well enough for the uninvited closeness.

Tunku Varadarajan touched on that in his recent Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview, which centered on a different subject. In response to that peripheral matter, a letter writer to a subsequent WSJ Letters column described an incident involving his and a judge’s interaction with a hospital clerk wherein the clerk addressed each of these, in their separate interactions, by their first name, strangers to the clerk though they were:

“Puzzled by the first name?” I asked [the judge]. “Now that you mention it, yes I am.” “HIPAA” I explained, which we both knew as the acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
So you see, Mr Theroux, what you observed wasn’t youth obsession at all. It was your government protecting your privacy.

Really? HIPAA applies to my interactions with my cable provider? My cell phone company? My interactions with the grocer’s checkout clerk? My calls to tech support? The teller at the bank (which already keeps the line separate from the teller-customer interaction)?

Wow. What an amusing thought.

Attack on Free Speech

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[Heads up: long post]

By American enterprises, no less.  And, no, this time I’m not talking about American social media like Facebook or Twitter.  Keep in mind the NBA’s ongoing assault on free speech in the form of openly rejecting one team General Manager’s tweet supporting freedom in Hong Kong. The NBA’s response—from individual players on up, through team coaching staff and front office personnel, to the NBA’s head office and its commissioner, Adam Silver—was to reject the GM’s tweet in sum and substance and to apologize to the People’s Republic of China’s government and sports authorities so meekly as to be, metaphorically, in deep bows while doing so. And that GM abjectly deleted his own tweet—he didn’t even have the courage of his conviction.

Now we get an American game-making company kneeling and kowtowing to the PRC.  Activision Blizzard, maker of Hearthstone E-sports, an on-line multi-player card game, has banned one of its Hong-Kong players for his heinous crime of speaking out against the PRC’s abuse of Hong Kong during the present ongoing crisis in that city. Activision Blizzard

banned Ng Wai Chung, who plays remotely from Hong Kong, from competing in the company’s online multiplayer card game Hearthstone E-sports for one year. The 21-year-old known online as “Blitzchung” had just won $10,000 in the Hearthstone Asia-Pacific Grandmasters tournament when he declared in a livestream video interview in Mandarin: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” He was wearing a gas mask and goggles, the same equipment worn by Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators, when he made the statement[.]

This company also forced the man to forfeit those $10,000 (HK$78,444.80).

These are American companies that are saying the approval of the PRC government and the flow of the PRC’s money into their coffers are more important than upholding American values.  Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) is on the right track in his tweet, although he has the order of emphasis reversed:

Recognize what’s happening here. People who don’t live in #China must either self censor or face dismissal & suspensions. China using access to market as leverage to crush free speech globally. Implications of this will be felt long after everyone in U.S. politics today is gone.

The PRC isn’t so much using its market power to crush free speech as American companies are voluntarily surrendering free speech and kowtowing from their knees to PRC pressure, favoring PRC money over liberty, preferring personal and company wealth over American values.

Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) is more direct in his tweet:

Blizzard shows it is willing to humiliate itself to please the Chinese Communist Party. No American company should censor calls for freedom to make a quick buck.

Activision Blizzard issued a statement that said this, in rationalization of its ban on Chung:

we have found [Chung’s] action has violated the 2019 Hearthstone Grandmasters Official Competition Rules…”Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image.”
…
While we stand by one’s right to express individual thoughts and opinions, players and other participants that elect to participate in our esports competitions must abide by the official competition rules.

Think about that statement for a moment.  Standing for a people’s right to their own liberty, acting on one’s own right to speak freely, are acts that bring[] you into public disrepute, offend[] a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damage[] Blizzard image.  It’s disreputable to defend others or to speak freely. What Blizzard considers damaging to its own image is offending the men of despotic governments.

 

It’s not just Blizzard, though.  That NBA thing also censors calls for freedom in order to fill its bank boxes with PRC money.  In the league’s ongoing assault on free speech and PRC favor-currying, this happened during a Washington Wizards home game against the PRC’s Guangzhou Long-Lions:

[P]rotesters, who said they were from Freedom House, held up signs that read: “Shame the NBA,” “South Park was right,” and “Memo to the NBA: Principles over profit! No censorship! USA loves Hong Kong.”

Arena security confiscated those signs and others in the same vein addressing Tibet and the Uighurs.  Because free speech is only that speech that doesn’t offend the PRC.

In addition, Apple, after coming in for PRC opprobrium for having an app, HKmap.live, in its store that could allow Hong Kong protestors to track police movements, has meekly removed that app. Apple also has obeyed the PRC’s demand that its news app, Quartz, be deleted from the Apple PRC app store.

More: Alphabet’s Google subsidiary has removed from its Google Play store The Revolution of Our Times,

 a mobile game that allowed players to role-play as a Hong Kong protester.

Alphabet did this on the demand of the PRC’s Hong Kong police.

As an aside, this also happened at the Wizards-Long-Lions game:

After the Chinese national anthem was played, one person shouted: “Freedom of expression! Freedom of speech! Free Hong Kong!”

Notice that: after their national anthem, not during it.  Would that American athletes had that much respect for our own national anthem.

This comes alongside Alphabet’s long-standing refusal to support our defense establishment, for instance on artificial intelligence projects, while enthusiastically working on AI projects in the People’s Republic of China.

Ben Franklin wrote that our Constitution was written for a virtuous people, as that’s what it would take for effective self-governance.  The people who run our businesses are losing that virtue.