Funny how things seem to come together every week to give me fodder for another column. Thus far, in my columned tenure, topics have been exclusive to the CSU system-but this week I'm on to bigger, better, more global issues. I'm sure that a lot of people will be happy to hear that I'm thinking more "globally."
One of the big stories going on in the Bay Area press is the fiasco that is eating up the administration of Hewlett-Packard. It seems as if former chairwoman Patricia Dunn and the rest of the HP leadership are in a bit of trouble after an internal investigation into boardroom leaks went awry and turned into a scandal that has thrown the organization into chaos.
The leaders of HP hired investigators who used techniques such as spying on directors, planting monitoring software in e-mail correspondences with journalists, and even a bizarre plan to infiltrate Silicon Valley newsrooms disguised as cleaners in order to justify rifling through garbage.
They also used a technique called "pretexting"-a colloquialism for "lying"-in order to get private records from phone companies.
So far, four executives have been ousted-including Dunn and HP general council Ann Baskins-and at least 10 witnesses have plead the fifth rather than testify in front of a House of Representatives commerce committee.
The matter is under investigation by the California Attorney General's office and is a fine example of a modern corporate boardroom acting as if it is above and beyond the law.
Dunn does not accept responsibility for a situation that, in the words of Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), looks like "a plumbers' operation that would make Richard Nixon blush."
In a rather amusing side development, Dunn recently received a "hall of fame" leadership award from a regional business lobbying and networking group known as the Bay Area Council, after she was forced to resign.
It's almost funny how shameless and unintentionally ironic modern business leaders can be. It brought to mind the Barry Munitz saga, but that's not really what I'm writing about this week.
The thing that struck me about this sick comedy is the way in which HP's leaders thought that it was okay to break the law in order to stop leaks to the press.
As I have followed the HP story over the course of the past two weeks, I can't help but think of the parallels to the BALCO story, in which two San Francisco Chronicle reporters have been sentenced to 18 months in jail for refusing to divulge the source of their information for a series of articles on the baseball/steroids issue.
The reporters-Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada-refused to give the names of their sources from a grand jury testimony leak and will sit in jail unless they agree to divulge the information. As they pay an unacceptable toll for doing their jobs well, scummy hacks like Bob Novak-a real threat to national security-walk amongst us, free to spew the corporate line.
Both of these stories represent a very real and looming threat to public access to information. In the HP case, corporate leaders felt comfortable enough in the current political climate to break the law in order to stop the leak of information. BALCO has shown us that the imprisonment of journalists has become an all too acceptable practice in the post-9/11 world.
For those of us with a scorecard, this should be a very troubling turn of events. Real journalists reporting news from around the world are being jailed, censored, and/or murdered for reporting uncomfortable or dangerous truths, while the flacks of the powerful continue to spread lies and misinformation unencumbered by accountability to the people.
Access to vital information about the way in which members of the business elite or elected officials behave is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Whistleblower protections are eroding, and if we are not careful, soon the only information available to us will be happy press releases written by PR flunkies who assure us that everything is okay, and every decision is the right one.
That type of "reporting" has become a hallmark of modern information dissemination. Statistics that back happy claims, written by minor bureaucrats are presented as fact, even though events on the ground belie the pretty numbers. What used to be called "fuzzy math," now goes by the names of "justification for war," or "growth projections," or even "necessary capital project."
While the bean counters walk around trying to convince everyone that things are all right, people continue to die, tax dollars are funneled into crony coffers, or the massive growth in the economy goes to the top 1 percent of the population while the taxpayers get stuck paying for missed projections.
The targeting of journalists and whistleblowers has become even more disturbing in light of the recent actions by the Bush administration, particularly in regards to detainee rights in the "war on terr'r."
Over the course of the past week, our government has passed legislation that flouts the Geneva Conventions as well as the tenets of the Magna Carta, all in one fell swoop. There is now a vehicle in place to deny American citizens the right to defend themselves in a court of law.
Our government is now free to unaccountably engage in torture-which will surely come back to haunt our men and women in uniform-and the rights of human beings now exist at the whim of the president of the United States.
Add to that $800 million worth of "detention centers" that Halliburton has been contracted to build, and the shiny new "fence" that is going up on the Mexican border, and we suddenly have what looks like a great big prison where a once-mighty nation stood. If you are not with us, don't bother trying to escape.
Hang on to your free speech zone, people. We're in for a long and scary ride to the lowest common denominator of humanity, thanks to the corporate failures that run our government.
I think that next week I'm going to return to covering CSU happenings. Thinking "globally" gives me the willies.
Published October 4, 1006, SSU Star
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