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Original URL: The Register
IBM staff have petitioned the company to – among other things – express concern that "IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's open letter to President-elect Donald Trump does not affirm IBMers' core values of diversity, inclusiveness, and ethical business conduct."
The petition's authors respect Rometty's "willingness to engage in constructive dialogue with the president-elect" but argue IBM's culture is essential "to our transformation underpinned by cloud and cognitive initiatives."
[...] There's also a call to "Respect our right to refuse participation in any U.S. contracts that violate constitutional and civil liberties" which sounds like an option to opt out of working on Trump's planned register of Muslims. Another demand wants IBM to "Prohibit perceived influence-peddling of elected officials by restricting IBM and its employees from using any Trump owned or Trump branded properties for business purposes, in accordance with the IBM Business Conduct Guidelines."
In part the petition reads:
We have a moral and business imperative to uphold the pillars of a free society by declining any projects which undermine liberty, such as surveillance tools threatening freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
[...] Taking a conservative approach has grave implications. Our own founder's experience and the rest of history teach us that accommodating those who unleash forces of aggressive nationalism, bigotry, racism, fear, and exclusion inevitably yields devastating outcomes for millions of innocents.
Full text: IBMers to CEO Ginni Rometty: Affirm IBM values!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Friday December 30 2016, @02:29PM
Like that time you automated the holocaust? [wikipedia.org]
IBM has served one genocidal master, and clearly learned nothing from the experience.
Actually, that's not true. They learned it was very profitable. So why not sign on for round two?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:28AM
I heard an account[1] which said that IBM rejiggered the maintenance recommendations for the Nazi equipment such that it significantly increased the downtime.
Of course, it seems unlikely IBM didn't charge extra for the extra service calls, so, cha-ching there as well.
...and there's no shortage of USAian elites who prospered from Nazism.
Prescott Bush (GHW Bush's daddy and Dubya's granddaddy) was a banker who got rich financing The Third Reich.
[1] I'm too lazy to Google it up right now.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Saturday December 31 2016, @05:09PM
This is exactly the kind of claim that explicitly requires a source. It's a wild an unlikely claim, and now unsubstantiated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @05:17PM
Not GP, but
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush#Union_Banking_Corporation [wikipedia.org]
The summary:
According to journalist Joe Conason, Prescott Bush's involvement with UBC was purely commercial and he was not a Nazi sympathizer.[9] Historian Herbert Parmet agreed with that assessment.[7]
So not a nazi ideologue, but apparently had no moral problem with making money from it either.