In the following article from Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith discusses Wired magazine's whitewash coverage of worker abuse in China by Foxconn, one of the world's biggest multinational electronics manufacturers, and China's largest private employer.
The New York Times also featured an article in late January documenting abusive conditions at Foxconn, which included the following passage:
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.Naked Capitalism's Smith notes how easily Apple could have injected $1 billion dollars into Foxconn to dramatically improve worker conditions that would barely have touched Apple's bottom line profit margin, and concludes:
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
What stood in the way when [Apple founder Steve] Jobs was alive was his monumental ego and his desire to leave a legacy though his products rather than his conduct as an industrialist. And now that he is dead, Apple’s practices are likely to be guided by American short-sightedness and bad incentives for executives of public companies.Smith contrasts this with the mentality of the great American industrialist Henry Ford, who took a much broader and patriotic, long-term view of business than Jobs, and helped lay the foundations for the greatest economy that created the broadest middle class in world history.
Ford, of course, was a Christian, and notoriously anti-Jewish, and it occurred to me while reading this article that the egomaniacal mentality of Jobs that Smith complains about, as well as the insatiable greed mentality of the larger Wall Street culture, are both very Jewish characteristics. Now Jobs wasn't Jewish, but he is the product of a very Judaized American business culture, which has been infected with the greedy, short-sighted mindset of Jewish-dominated Wall Street.
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Henry Ford, fought against organized Jewish racketeering and economic predations; the last true, American patriot?---------------------
This is yet another example of how and why Zionist Jews, who in their hearts and minds are clearly primarily loyal to the Jewish Zionist nations (Israel and the various ethnocentric, racketeering Diaspora Zionist virtual nations they establish around the world) are so corrosive and destructive to the long term interests of not only any given Gentile country, but the entirety of Gentile humanity around the world in general.
In order to compete with the kind of self-serving greed and tribal racism that radiates from their rackets as they gain ever more control over key centers of the economy, EVERYONE must become a ruthless, Judeofascist-like cretin in order to compete with the Tribe; and of course, non-Jews are already at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to self-serving ruthlessness because Jewry has been perfecting its ethnocentric racket over millennium -- all of which ratchets up the corruption and cravenness even more.
Now contrast this with the "anti-Semitic" (read: little tolerance for organized Jewish racism, racketeering, and economic predations) playing field established by an America that was once governed by Greco-Christian moral authority, and we can quickly see why that America succeeded, and Judaized America is balkanizing, eating its own tail, funneling ever more income and resources into Jewish hands, and quickly heading to the bottom. And we can see why it will continue to fail until something is done about the Zionist problem, with its insatiable, self-serving economic machinations that are now falling out across the entire world like a radioactive cloud cover.
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From:
Wired’s Embarrassing Whitewash of Foxconn
(Naked Capitalism) -- by Yves Smith --
Wired’s Joel Johnson has written a stunning bit of PR for Foxconn, now-controversial supplier to the consumer electronics industry, duly wrapped in credibility-enhancing guilt over Western materialism.
The article, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?” pretends to be about Foxconn’s factories...
Did he try to talk to Foxconn workers outside the factory? Ex Foxconn workers? Apparently not. The only perspective he has outside his guided tour and his noisy imagination is from one Paul, a “steward for Western electronics companies seeking to procure components or goods from one of the city’s thousands of suppliers.” Do you think someone who makes his living connecting Western tech executives to Chinese manufacturers is going to say ANYTHING bad about the biggest fish in the electronics pond?
The piece goes to obvious lengths to soften the perception of the situation. He frames his account in terms of the suicides, when the recent New York Times series on Apple and Foxconn did not focus on those deaths, but the extreme hours and sometimes grinding physical toll (such as workers getting swollen feet from standing and working more than 24 hours straight). So the article skips almost completely over that issue, juxtaposing the seeming niceness of the clean factory he visited versus the deaths, and only very much later gets to the conditions that produced the suicides...
There is a huge, unexamined leap between “things critical to our survival” and those critical to what we have come to define as our comfort. It’s the unwillingness to examine the difference between the two, or any serious question raised by the role of Foxconn, that makes this piece so dubious...
I find this little chart (hat tip Richard Smith) from ninety9 via Alea (who is the antithesis of a socialist) to be more though-provoking than the entire Wired piece:
There have been numerous articles complaining about how the Chinese don’t consume enough, and the blame is laid on the high savings rate, which is in turn attributed to the lack of social safety nets (and a second, related issue is the lack of retail infrastructure). Yet it was a sonofabitch capitalist, Henry Ford, that helped create the American middle class in 1914 by paying his workers double the prevailing rate, which partly paid for itself by reducing costly turnover and increasing productivity (well paid workers are grateful workers and want to help their company what a thought!). But the big benefit for Ford was the higher wages were in large measure met by manufacturers in other cities, and created a consumer base for Ford’s own big ticket product. It was not safety nets that created higher consumption and greater American prosperity; it was higher wages.Ford didn’t see his pay raise as a wage increases but as profit sharing. The chart Alea highlighted shows Apple could kick start a revolution in China that would help American companies, including Apple, at comparatively little cost to itself. What stood in the way when Jobs was alive was his monumental ego and his desire to leave a legacy though his products rather than his conduct as an industrialist. And now that he is dead, Apple’s practices are likely to be guided by American short-sightedness and bad incentives for executives of public companies...MORE...LINK
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