Originally posted by: OCguy
I'm more disturbed by the suggestion that we are all OK with China now because they put on a good opening ceremony.
So we automatically forget about their insane human rights violations??
Whether US corporations or international trade partners, money corrupts. That's why our liber... er, corporatist Democratic White House has basically put human righs to the side.
Funny, though, that you care more about the human rights abuses of a foreign nation, than you do about the human rights abuses of foreigners that happen by your own country.
Edit: thought I should add a couple more points. One is that of course the paranoid right is hyping this to a crazy level. I don't mean to endorse their hype of this ceremony with my agreement that we are being too soft on human rights issues. The last time we seemed to have human rights as a priority in foreign policy was with Carter IIRC; it's more an issue used to beat up enemies with who we want to get the public to support actions against.
(But they took babies out of their ncubators and stole the incubators!)*
Second, well I can't remember second, but there was one. Edit edit: Oh, ya. This is how China works. They have a group of rules who have a somewhat precarious hold on power, who have taken the approach of a trade with the people of China: let the government continue to have complete political power, and in exchange the people will be allowed to prosper financially with significant economic freedoms.
As I understand it, the people who push for Democracy are largely seen as a danger to public tranquility, including by many Chinese, and the government is going to do what it needs to keep power. There's a lesson there for us, but it seems lost on many on the right who don't understand that corpotocracy + government needing that corporotocracy to get elected has a lot in common with the Chinese situation; too many think of the corpotocracy as not being the government, instead of recognizing it as the same sort of power.
Look how in our own country, the guy who won had his biggest private donor Goldman Sachs, who provides the government's top econmic officials, and the guy who lost was even MORE beholden to the corporatocracy, and yet we don't see riots in the streets over this domination of our economy by a sector who has become dominant in our country in ways jeopardizing our economy.
We van better say how China should get rid of their corrupt government when we no longer have financial institutions too big to fail.
*For anyone who has forgetten the issue, when the public was against the war with Iraq in Kuwait, the first Gulf War, a woman was called before Congress who told the story I quoted, in tears about the poor Kuwaiti babies left on the floor by monstrous Iraqi occupiers, and it was a big national story and public support for the war increased.
The only problem was, we learned later, that the woman was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and had not been anywhere near a Kuwaiti hospital and the whole story was a propaganda lie, and her testimony was orchestrated by a PR firm's branch headed by the former chief of staff to the then-President of the US, George H. W. Bush, in a marketing campaign to get the US to support war with Saddam and restoring power to the Kuwaiti government, who paid for the marketing campaign.
I'm not aware of any repercussions to those involved in this fraud to the American people. It's funny how the same technique works over and over with the American people.
The Alamo for the Mexican-American war, the blowing up of the Maine for the Spanish war, Pearl Harbor for WWII, attacking a destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin for Vietnam, 9/11 and WMD for Iraq obvioulsy... for the Clinton war in Serbia, the public support was built up by stories of genocide commited by Milosevich who was compared constantly to Hitler - and you guessed it, the 'Hitler' references were part of a marketing campaign by a US advertising agency hired to build support for the war.
Even for wars we didn't have - in the Kenned administration, when many wanted a war with Castro, the Pentagon created and submitted a plan, which was not accepted by McNamara, for war with Cuba, which had a list of pretenses the US could create for the war to get public support, that included having people in Cuban uniforms fire on US forces in Guantanmo, and the fake hijacking of a US civilian aircraft by the Cuban government.
When has htis technique not worked on the American people to start a war?