The Tower | Apr.7-Apr. 27, 2010
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VIEW CHINA FIRES BACK AT U.S. ON HUMAN RIGHTS By Joseph Tingle
Just days before Google officially pulled out of mainland China, Xinhua, the government-run press agency of the People’s Republic of China, posted a document on its website that blasted the United States on, of all things, the subject of human rights. The document, which can be found at news.xinhuanet.com, criticized the United States for carrying itself as the “world judge of human rights,” and listed a plethora of widelyknown and widely-documented abuses in the United States—sometimes accurately, and sometimes twisted and stretched beyond what many American Citizens could recognize as reality. “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009 is prepared to help people around the world understand the real situation of human rights in the United States,” the Chinese government-run document says. The six-part document lampoons the United States on, among others, the topics of racial inequality, rights for women and children, and what it calls “United States abuses of human rights in other nations.” Examples pruned to fit the document’s agenda range from accurate and noteworthy to downright absurd. For example, on the issue of worker’s right the document notes that, “Only eight percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed for compensation. Up to 26 percent of those surveyed were paid less than the national minimum wage. Among those who complained about wages or treatment, 43 percent had experienced retaliation or dismissal (The New York Times, September 2, 2009),” before matter-of-factly stating: “according to a report by the USA Today on July 20, 2009, a total of 5,657 people died at workplaces across the U.S. in 2007, about 17 deaths each day.” The example provided by the Xinhua article completely neglects to mention that most of those people likely die for reasons other than “their rights being severely violated,” and thus fails to convey any reasonable understanding of real problems faced by workers in the United States. On wealth and racial inequality, the document asserts that, “according to a report issued by the U.S. Bureau of Census, the real median income for American households in 2008 was 50,303 U.S. dollars. That of the non-Hispanic white households was 55,530 U.S. dollars, Hispanic households 37,913 U.S. dollars, black households only 34,218 U.S. dollars.” But for every good point the document makes, there’s a silly, over-exaggerated blanket statement to counter it, like, “[American] Children are exposed to violence and living in fear.” Then, there was the documents criticism of what it called the United States’ hege-
monic goals. “The United States with its strong military power has pursued hegemony in the world, trampling upon the sovereignty of other countries and trespassing their human rights,” the document claimed. What may have been most ironic, though, was the government agency’s treatment of freedom of the press in the United States. According to the document: “The so-called ‘freedom of the press’ of the United States was in fact completely subordinate to its national interests, and was manipulated by the U.S. government. According to media reports, the U.S. government and the Pentagon had recruited a number of former military officers to become TV and radio news commentators to give “positive comments” and analysis as “military experts” for the U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to guide public opinions, glorify the wars, and gain public support of its antiterrorism ideology (The New York Times, April 20, 2009) […] In September 2009, protesters using the social-networking site Twitter and text messages to coordinate demonstrations clashed with the police several times in Pittsburgh, where the Group of 20 summit was held. Elliot Madison, 41, was later charged with hindering apprehension of the protesters through the Internet. The police also searched his home (http://www.nytimes.com, October 5, 2009). Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.” For a government that was just abandoned by Google for censoring searches and hacking into human rights leader’s e-mail accounts, this bit about “freedom of the press” was probably the most ironic of all. Overall, China’s critique of the United States on human rights was sometimes accurate, sometimes twisted, and sometimes just plain silly. But, increasingly, the US demands for China to take human rights seriously have been met more and more with replies from China that amount to little more than “shut up, America. You don’t talk to us that way.” As China continues to develop as a world power, it’s important that the United States and China exist as “partners” rather than “competitors.” But when the relationship between these two powerful nations boils down to propaganda-driven lies; when mutual business interests fall apart; and when misrepresentations of problems meant solely to discredit become more common, articles like the one in Xinhua don’t seem so funny anymore.
Tiger Woods Matters to the People By Matt Chin
Honda is a car company. Sony is an electronics company. Pepsi is a beverage company. Tiger Woods is the world’s topranked golfer. What do all these things have in common? They are all major, worldwide brands. What separates Tiger Woods from all these brands? In the last four months a sex scandal centered on Woods has caused his world to spiral out of control and implode. Woods is the world’s number one golfer. In the gap between him and Jack Nicklaus, in his prime, there were other number one golfers. Woods won his first Masters, was considered golf’s most prestigious major tournament at the age of 21, and separated himself from the rest. The rest after that is history. Major companies such as Accenture, Gillette, Nike, and Gatorade sponsored Woods and he instantly became worth millions of dollars. In 2009, Forbes estimated Woods worth at $110 million – first on the list of athletes. The next closest was a tie between Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers and retired basketball great Michael Jordan valued at $45 million. People purchased products because he
But in the case of Woods, I never felt betrayed. Yes, people cheat on their spouses all the time, but I was disappointed with Woods. It’s tragic to see the all-time greats fall from their pedestals of greatness. Even though people wanted to be like him, people never really knew Woods. He kept his affairs hidden from the world for almost a decade. Even his wife, Elin, never really knew the real Tiger Woods.
“It’s tragic to see the alltime greats fall from their pedestals of greatness.” Photo: Baltimore Sun
Tiger Woods.
used them. They bought Nike golf clubs and golf balls because he used them. Athletes drank Woods’ Gatorade brand because it had his name. Quite simply, people spent their hardearned dollars because those companies smacked his name on their products. In the 90s there was the “Like Mike” catch phrase because everyone wanted to be like Michael Jordan. In the 2000s, even though a catch phrase for Woods didn’t exist, people wanted to be like him.
He constructed a posse of his most trusted friends to help hide his extracurricular activities. In his interview with Tom Rinaldi of ESPN, he said the life he was living was a lie. And when asked if people know him better now, he answered “A lot better now.” Unfortunately, it took the losses of multimillion-dollar endorsements for Woods to realize that his actions affect people. In America, cheating on a spouse is viewed as the ultimate evil. A lot of Americans base their lives on moral character, and a lot of
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people put their faith in Woods. But Woods’ loss of endorsements is more far reaching than expected. Our economy loses money. Obviously our economy isn’t going to crumble because companies dropped Woods from their label. When a company pulls products, like Gatorade did when they dropped his endorsement and pulled four Tiger Gatorade flavors from store shelves, that company has to somehow make up for their lack of a product. And more likely than not, they don’t have a product with as much marketing power to replace it right away. There is an old cliché saying that time heals all wounds. I’d like to offer a different one for Woods’ case since after all, he’s in a situation that not many of us will ever deal with in our lives: Championships heal all wounds. It’s probably silly to think that a simple win on the golf course will grant Woods automatic forgiveness. It will. I promise anyone that it will. Tiger needs to make a comeback. There’s nothing people like better than to see a comeback. Tiger Woods is the world’s most prominent athlete in a sport full of obscure athletes.