Starchitects and Despots

Sometime last year, I had a discussion with a friend about how Western starchitects have been working for various despots and such over the last few years. This article in Foreign Policy isn't actually enlightening (architects like working for powerful people who give them the money and authority to create pretty much whatever they dream up - in other words, it's all ego and greed, surprise!), but I'm glad someone wrote about the subject. In contrast to the early Modernists who worked on competitions inside the (young) Soviet Union (Corbu comes to mind), today's architects know better just what dictators and totalitarian governments or "less-than-free" countries are capable of, and what they do to their citizens. I like a lot of Rem Koolhaas' work - have done for years - but when he agreed to build the headquarters for China's state-run TV ministry, the governments primary propaganda arm, I think he crossed a line from which there is no return. I've read his defense of accepting the job and it just doesn't cut the mustard. Most of these starchitects were around in 1968, so it becomes even harder to accept their arguments for accepting these jobs and aligning themselves with these despots and tyrants. Here's a link to some images of the projects mentioned in the Foreign Policy article.