A Beat, a Bong, and a Bang
Billy Does a Right-Wing Pundit
Billy Does a Vampire in a Tree
Jesus Was an Arab
Mescaline CatechismThis post was originally written on 20 February 2012. Like an increasing number of posts on this blog, it sat in the drafts folder until I decided to push it out as-is!
The mightly Bill Black does it again, over at The Real news, this time looking at Steve Jobs and Apple.
Bill points out the obvious: If Apple can do the following, they can get Foxconn to change its employment practices:
Steve Jobs takes the prototype iPhone out of his pocket, shows his key engineers and executives that there are scratches on it, and says, I want this perfect in six weeks. And then it’s this wonderful story about how they go to China and they get people working around the clock, and within six weeks they have scratch-free glass and it’s all working. Right?
He also discusses the NYT report – whose reporter I was not very enthused with in his recent Democracy Now interview.
the initial story by The New York Times got it almost completely wrong. It claimed that the key advantage China had was having more engineers.
The US is filled to the brim with engineers. I remember companies laying them off by the tens of thousands. Now the country’s filled with H1-Bs and contractors working for a pittance. And the situation ain’t much better in China, either, with gobs of unemployed grads and engineers. They, too, were made promsies!
Of particular note is this statement of his:
it begins with Apple putting such severe pricing pressure in the bidding for suppliers that only cheaters can win the bids.
The NYT article says,
The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said en executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10percent price cut.
But is this not what Capitalism does, instrinsically? In the absence of a mechanism for customers to determine whether a low price is due to efficiency or due to exploitation, the latter always wins. Like someone else said, “Capitalism drives everything to the bottom!” And the bottom is populated with bottom-feeders.
He calls this
A Gresham’s dynamic in this context is when unethical activity drives ethical activity out of the marketplace. … the second Gresham’s dynamic is among nations. The nations that are most fraud-friendly win this competition for where the suppliers will locate, because they need to have a safe haven for their frauds. So among the frauds are making people work more than 60 hours a week, where The New York Times articles report that the people develop such severe edema—that’s huge swelling—that they are unable to walk even normally and are forced to waddle. Now, that may just sound embarrassing, but edema is actually very dangerous in terms of heart—cardiac risk as well.
Yes, Indonesia and Vietnam were afraid of their cheap-textile factories moving away when China opened up; and now China is afraid of a reverse move … towards an even more desparate people. Cannibalistic, vampiric capitalism.
P.S. One thing of particular note is the fact that, by their very nature, by definition, modern computer devices are not recyclable. The entire industry is built (no pun!) on that. They are made, literally, of integrated circuits.
People say that ebooks are more environmentally friendly. Well that is true in the way that the nuclear-power industry claims that it is. If, on the other hand, the cost of clean-up is taken into account, then (like much of contemporary capitalism), it will be unsustainable.
) It makes one almost nostalgic for the Cold War! Whatever happened to the old statesmen? Granted, we wished them dead, at the time, but that only shows how much worse things have gotten with AIPAC/neo-cons!
