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New York Times article on the decline of American manufacturing

post #1 of 61
1/22/12 at 3:07pm
Thread Starter 

Excellent article from the NYT on why iPhones are not made in the US, and what that means for US manufacturing ...

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

 

A lot of things we already know, but I like how the article frames it in the context of an object everybody understands (an iPhone). Some of the comments are interesting, because by using Apple as an example you see some Apple fans really upset that the NYT dared attack the company and Saint Steve.

 

Some interesting tidbits:

 

* Almost impossible for us to compete with slave like conditions of Chinese workers, who live in plant and are woken up at the middle of the night to satisfy the whims of the US executives

* Even with the low wages, the article mentions Chinese govt subsidies. I really hope the people who harp on the administration getting involved with the car industry, etc would pay attention to this

* The arrogance of some of the US execs is infuriating;

 

Quote:
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

 

While that's technically correct, it ignores all the benefits Apple gets by being a US company, like all the unreasonable patents we've granted them so they can compete with other companies by the legal system (not capitalism).

 

It's worth a read, kind of makes me want to pay for a NYT subscription so they keep writing well research stuff like this.

 

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post #2 of 61
1/22/12 at 4:13pm

I went shopping for a new frying pan awhile back, hoping to find one 'made in America'....no luck.

Checked a bunch of local stores...most were made in China or India. I ended up looking online and did find some that are supposedly made in the US...haven't ordered on yet though. Just because it says "Made in the USA" isn't a guarantee that it is.

 

Now with Apple products, I'll be the first to admit I like Apple products. I have a MB and iPhone and enjoy these amazing gadgets frequently. I also realize that they come with some 'baggage', but almost everything electronic made these days, does (and a lot of other products as well).

It's quite the moral quandary.

 

At least they aren't blood diamonds....?

 

This American Life/NPR had a great story on a couple weeks back about Apple and Apple manufacturing.

<excerpt from the transcript>

Quote:

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

 

So I'm reading one of those news sites when this article gets posted. And it's about the fact that someone bought an iPhone, and when they got it, it wasn't blank. It had information on it from inside the factory. And in fact in the camera roll, there were pictures on it from inside the factory. And they posted these pictures into the article. And I looked at these pictures, and they took my breath away.

 

They're not very good pictures, you know? They're just testing that the camera on the phone works. They're not of anything. But I'll never forget them. There were four of them. First there was a stack of pallets, wooden pallets stacked up.

 

And the second one was the edge of a conveyor belt. And the third was totally out of focus. It could just be an enormous space. And the fourth was a woman. She doesn't know her picture's being taken. She's looking off in another direction.

She's wearing a clean suit. She has no expression on her face.

And I looked at these pictures, and I downloaded these pictures to my desktop, and I put them in a folder on my desktop. And in the weeks and months that followed, I found myself returning to them again and again almost compulsively. I would mouse over there, and I would fan them across my desktop, and I would look at them. Who are these people?

 

Because you have to understand, I have dedicated an embarrassing amount of my life to the study of these machines. I'm an amateur, but I'm a dedicated amateur. I understand as best I can how the hardware works, and how the software rests on the hardware. And in all that time, until I saw those pictures, it was only then I realized I had never thought ever in a dedicated way about how they were made.

 

It's actually hard now to reconstruct what I did think. I think what I thought is they were made by robots. I got an image in my mind that I now realize I just stole from a 60 Minutes story about Japanese automotive plants. I just copy and pasted that. I was like, pwop, Command-V, pwop. It looks like that, but smaller, because they're laptops.

 

I started to think how if this phone has four pictures on it taken by hand in testing, then every iPhone has four pictures on it taken in testing, every iPhone in the world, by hand. I started to think, and that's always a problem for any religion, the moment when you begin to think.

 

after listening to this story; which ironically, I was doing on my iPhone; it made me have a new appreciation for the tech. in my hand but I also felt really guilty...

 

food for thought?

 

edit to add:

Apple responded to the TAL piece

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/01/a-response-to-the-news-from-apple

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post #3 of 61
1/22/12 at 5:07pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by VTRan View Post

At least they aren't blood diamonds....?

 

No, not diamonds....

 

The Vice Guide to The Congo

 

 

Yeah, we're running low on guilt free products.

The story on TAL was great.  I saw a story on Daisey somewhere a couple of years ago, but I don't remember Apple jumping to in response quite so fast.  You don't mess with the Glass.

The coda about the ways people are trying to fix this (but not so hard that it ruins a real opportunity for a lot of poor people) is reasonable and optimistic.  What you do about those mines I don't know.

Anyway, slightly off topic.

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post #4 of 61
1/23/12 at 12:03pm

It's so ironic to watch hipster Apple fans defend slave labor.  Apple is the market leader and has an obligation to set an example.  Even though most Americans consider them an American company, they're clearly a stateless multinational just like the rest.  Gross.  I'm glad I haven't bought an Apple product in 20 years. 

 

Thanks for the article, ElCap.  It's so incredibly rare to see the media go anywhere near manufacturing or trade policy. 

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post #5 of 61
1/23/12 at 1:07pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by yt View Post

It's so ironic to watch hipster Apple fans defend slave labor.  Apple is the market leader and has an obligation to set an example.  Even though most Americans consider them an American company, they're clearly a stateless multinational just like the rest.  Gross.  I'm glad I haven't bought an Apple product in 20 years. 

 

Thanks for the article, ElCap.  It's so incredibly rare to see the media go anywhere near manufacturing or trade policy. 


Not to sound too 'dickish' but, just because you haven't bought any Apple products in awhile doesn't mean you, as well as hundreds of thousands of other people, have hands that are morally "clean". How many people here have an XBox. PS3, or Wii ?

 

Foxconn makes alot of hardware...from wiki

Quote:

Foxconn manufactures products for companies including:

(country of headquarters in parentheses)

In 2011, Amazon and Foxconn formed a joint-design manufacturing company. The move was meant to produce an Amazon branded smartphone sometime in 2012.[25]

 

 

as Muzman said, "we're running low on guilt free products."

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post #6 of 61
1/23/12 at 1:12pm
Thread Starter 

That's true. That's what I like about the article, it uses Apple but makes it clear that this is not exclusive to them at all. But the article gets more attention because its Apple.

 

We also see what the effects innovative thinking, like Jobs deciding at the last minute he wants a scratch resistant glass screen (not really scratch resistant in my experience). It results in thousands of workers woken up in the middle of the night, and put to work like slaves. And Apple execs just *love* that and compare it to our nation, without thinking that they wouldn't want to live in a country like that.

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post #7 of 61
1/23/12 at 3:26pm

VTran, I didn't say that.  What I said was that Apple has a responsibility as the market leader and an American company to set an example, and I know people love their Apple products, but this is the reality.  There is no justifying their disgusting, greedy corporate ethic, period. 

 

I'm old enough to remember a time when I could go out and look at labels to make sure what I bought was made in the USA.  Then it became impossible on a retail level, and now the only way it's possible is either through blind luck or doing "made in the USA" internet searches, which I do often, especially when I'm buying something with a big price tag like furniture or whatever.

 

The fact is that big profitable companies like Apple can and should be blamed, but there's a lot of blame to go around.  To Reagan for ending tariffs and creating permanent normal relations with China, to Clinton for NAFTA, to the media for REFUSING to ever entertain the subject of manufacturing and trade (including NPR, which all but hung up on a caller who once asked why we can't reinstate import tariffs), to politicians who take money from multinationals to keep the money train roaring toward the people at the top, to us, for taking our eyes off the ball and buying into the bullshit myth that somehow we have to be "competitive" in a "global economy" and not boycotting the hell out of Apple, Nike, Gap, WalMart and all the worst offenders.

 

I have a lot to say about it, but there's nothing that sticks in my craw more than Mactards (which both my sisters virulently are) telling me that what it does is ok because every computer manufacturer does it.  Steve Jobs used to spout off about how proud he was that Apple products were made right there in Northern California.  Apple could still make a profit if it made its products here, just not as steep a profit.  And then I wouldn't feel so sick when I saw those ads that said "If you don't have an iPhone you don't have an iPhone" knowing that the poor slaves who make them get roused from their barracks at midnight to work 12 hour shifts for all of $17 per day.

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post #8 of 61
1/23/12 at 3:42pm

I used to look to Lego as the last, shining example, of a big manufacturer the treated their workers well.  

 

Now? Components from China and Mexico.

 

My heart died a little.

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post #9 of 61
1/23/12 at 4:35pm

For me, it was Levi's.  Such a quintessentially American brand.  We need to bring back import tariffs.  Did you know that back in George Washington's time, the British did not allow any US manufacturing of anything.  George Washington sent a messenger to the single clothing maker in North America to make the suit for his inauguration because he wanted to be inaugurated in an American-made suit.  For something like 150 years there were no income taxes because tariffs paid the lion's share of the budget.  Domestic manufacturing really is the American way.  Of course CEOs and shareholders want free trade.  "Competitive" to them doesn't mean the same thing as it does to us.  It doesn't mean that we will be competitive as a country; it means they will be competitive as masters of the universe.  For workers, it means a race to the bottom.  That's why Newt Gingrich wants child labor and other GOP figureheads have such a hard-on for prison labor.  Slavery is essentially what they want the American worker to compete with, and there goes any concept of a middle class.  Then this country will look more like that Romero "Dead" movie where Dennis Hopper lived up in a penthouse behind a big wall and the rest of the zombies just milled around for scraps outside.  Overdramatic I know, but this subject just makes me so angry!

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post #10 of 61
1/23/12 at 4:54pm

I'm there with YT...Apple should be an industry leader, but I don't place them above any other of the companies that do business with Foxconn, et al.

Even if Apple were to move all their manufacturing back to the US, I have no doubt business at Foxconn would continue as 'normal'...another company would just move into the vacated space.

 

Walmart, Gap, Nike, Home Depot, etc. are all good examples of the "maximize profit whatever the cost" corporate mentality that permeates much of our society.

Not shopping at these places is a good start, but there are alot of people out there that just want their shit as cheap as possible and don't care otherwise.

Also, alot of these companies seemingly have their tendrils so twisted about our economy that any attempt to remove them may kill the 'patient'? It's really a Catch-22, don't shop at WalMart, the store closes, putting all the employees out of work...OR you can shop at the stores and some kid in China ends up dying due to pneumonia he caught after working 30 hours straight.

 

it makes my brain hurt thinking about the moral implications of these type of decisions.

I do know there can be positive change to rectify these problems, but unfortunately, I don't think it will be overnight and possibly not even in my lifetime.

 

As far as Mac fanatics go; personally, I've never heard anyone try and justify poor working conditions for the employees...I do know that the great majority of consumers are completely ignorant of where and how their favorite gadgets are manufactured and I believe that a lot of this is willful ignorance...it's the "if I don't know about the bad things, they don't exist" kind of mentality that is all to pervasive in western society...and we both know that this isn't a new concept.

People like to eat meat, but they don't like to know the process of how the burger arrived on their plate.

 

Maybe...hopefully....the attention that the TAL story has received will be the catalyst for more ongoing positive changes for the Foxconn employees...and maybe it will also wake up the people here in "the west" to the the actual origins of that thing in their hand, hopefully before they choose to spend their (quickly disappearing) money on it?

 

(apologies for somewhat rambling nature) 

 

 

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post #11 of 61
1/23/12 at 5:55pm

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post #12 of 61
1/23/12 at 6:48pm

You all should realize that if Apple decided, for moral reasons, to move all of their manufacturing back to the United States, they would be sued by their shareholders and they would lose.  Corporations have a duty to shareholders to maximize profits, not social welfare.
 

Not saying it's right.  What I'm saying is, at the root of so much of our modern social disfigurement is the perpetual drive to increase profits.  It's not enough for a company to earn a profit.  In today's world, if a company doesn't earn a bigger profit in this quarter than the last, it's losing.  That's just nuts, and totally unsustainable.

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post #13 of 61
3/16/12 at 1:34pm

addendum to the "This American Life" / Mike Daisey Apple/Foxconn story....

 

Quote:

 

Fabricated claims about Apple's manufacturing prompt retraction from 'This American Life'

 

The radio program "This American Life" has retracted an Apple-centric episode it aired earlier this year about the working conditions at Foxconn, after it was revealed a critic lied about what he saw when visiting the Chinese facilities.

The program aired an episode earlier this year entitled "Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory," which was based on a monologue by performer Mike Daisey. The show admitted on Friday that details from the episode were fabricated, and it has accordingly retracted the episode.

Both "This American Life" and American Public Media's "Marketplace" will detail "numerous fabrications" that were stated in the original program. In a statement, it was said that "This American life" cannot vouch for Daisey's claims made in his monologue.

When the original 39-minute excerpt was broadcast on This American Life on January 6, 2012, Marketplace China Correspondent Rob Schmitz wondered about its truth," the press release reads. "Marketplace had done a lot of reporting on Foxconn and Apple's supply chain in China in the past, and Schmitz had first-hand knowledge of the issues.

"He located and interviewed Daisey's Chinese interpreter Li Guifen (who goes by the name Cathy Lee professionally with westerners). She disputed much of what Daisey has been telling theater audiences since 2010 and much of what he said on the radio.

"During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey's story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her."

 

<cont.>

 

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post #14 of 61
3/16/12 at 2:51pm

Well that's a shame.

 

The suicide-prevention nets aren't a lie though.

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post #15 of 61
3/16/12 at 3:08pm

The only lie is that Daisey personally encountered all of those things. They all still actually happened.

 

Which won't stop thousands from breathing a sigh of relief and thinking that they now don't have to worry about any of this.

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post #16 of 61
3/16/12 at 3:09pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBananaGrabber View Post

Well that's a shame.

 

The suicide-prevention nets aren't a lie though.


 I still can imagine there is a good deal of truth in the original piece, but unfortunately now, the whole of the story will be swept aside as being false.

 

 

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post #17 of 61
3/16/12 at 3:12pm

Annoying thing to do on Daisey's part.  It'll be interesting to see the list of corrections.  Most of the substance of it I'm pretty sure has been confirmed elsewhere.  It can't all have come from Daisey.  The basic sweatshop/assembly line with mad hours of the Chinese tech sector isn't really in dispute.  Some people can't resist sexing up even that I guess.

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post #18 of 61
3/16/12 at 3:20pm

 

 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Whiteboy Jones View Post

The only lie is that Daisey personally encountered all of those things. They all still actually happened.

 

Which won't stop thousands from breathing a sigh of relief and thinking that they now don't have to worry about any of this.

 

From my observations, there hasn't been much of a twinge of conscience for anyone.

 

As I read it, the story of a poisoning, and a man who's had was crushed, may have been fabricated.

 



 

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post #19 of 61
3/16/12 at 3:24pm

Daisey never met any of them, but it's not anecdotal at all that workers have suffered Hexane poisoning.

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post #20 of 61
3/16/12 at 3:52pm
Thread Starter 


Quote:

Originally Posted by JuddL View Post

You all should realize that if Apple decided, for moral reasons, to move all of their manufacturing back to the United States, they would be sued by their shareholders and they would lose.  Corporations have a duty to shareholders to maximize profits, not social welfare.
 

Not saying it's right.  What I'm saying is, at the root of so much of our modern social disfigurement is the perpetual drive to increase profits.  It's not enough for a company to earn a profit.  In today's world, if a company doesn't earn a bigger profit in this quarter than the last, it's losing.  That's just nuts, and totally unsustainable.

 

I'm not sure how true this is. There's always a lower cost center, why aren't they suing them now for not building iPads in Haiti?

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post #21 of 61
3/16/12 at 4:14pm

It's going to make the hard-core apple lovers I know even more insufferable.

 

Now I need a suicide-net.

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post #22 of 61
3/16/12 at 8:28pm

Just finished listening to the follow-up episode of This American Life.  It's utterly fascinating to hear Ira Glass take on Daisey again.  With what's come out of this whole thing, Daisey now ends up sounding like Hayden Christensen in Shattered Glass.  That's basically what it felt like as I listened to the program.  A radio dramatization of Shattered Glass with Ira Glass as the Chuck Lane character.

 

It's maddening to try to listen to Daisey try to squirm, wiggle, and rationalize what he did.  Even in audio, you can just feel the gears turning in the guy's head.

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post #23 of 61
3/16/12 at 9:34pm

listening now.... " i-Frey "

 

I haven't seen 'Shattered Glass' but this is the "A Million Little Pieces"  story all over again.

 

If Daisey had initially said that his monologue was semi-factual and was loosely based on some of his travels, he could have 'saved face'...but listening to him...he's just digging his own literary grave.

 

edit...heh, Ira brings up Frey.

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post #24 of 61
3/16/12 at 9:55pm

Seek out Shattered Glass.  It's a really good film with a great performance by Peter Sarsgaard.

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post #25 of 61
3/16/12 at 10:00pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcnooj82 View Post

Seek out Shattered Glass.  It's a really good film with a great performance by Peter Sarsgaard.


I don't know....does Christensen scream "Nooooooooooo!" at the end of the film? ....because I won't watch it if he does. :)

 

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post #26 of 61
3/16/12 at 10:07pm

Christensen has been praised for his performance.  But I'm in a weird spot.  I don't know how well he's actually acting.  I think he was just SO WELL CAST.  His petulant voice just made my skin crawl and it was perfect for his character.

 

Pretty sure he doesn't scream, "NOOOOOOOO!" at the end.  hahahaha

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post #27 of 61
3/17/12 at 12:15am

Yeah Shattered Glass is really good (silly title though.  Sounds like some DTV Danielle Steele thing).  It's the film that brought Chritensen to everyone's attention.  Since then people noticed that's just the way he acts all the time.  Hard as it might be to imagine, his whininess in this is spot on.  All praise to the direction for giving you just the right facet of Christensen when it's needed and moving the audience's sympathies around the way it does.

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post #28 of 61
3/17/12 at 4:29pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Whiteboy Jones View Post

The only lie is that Daisey personally encountered all of those things. They all still actually happened.

 

Which won't stop thousands from breathing a sigh of relief and thinking that they now don't have to worry about any of this.



Which is what makes him such a douche. He took incidents from various places (apparently, because now everything he says is suspect) and said that Apple specifically was responsible for all of them. So now yes, people will simply roll their eyes and say "oh you actually believe NPR?!".

 

I am glad that Ira Glass coped to a fundamental error (yeah This American Life is a show about story telling, but are you really going to feature a self described "performance artist" explicitly tackling a story that journalists should be pursuing?)and spent a show analyzing the error. I'd love to see 60 minutes do that.

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post #29 of 61
3/21/12 at 9:06am

Good Blog post about this:

http://gratuitousviolins.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-im-mad-at-mike-daisey.html

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post #30 of 61
3/21/12 at 10:40am

I'm sorry, but this high level outrage at Mike Daisey is such a load it makes my gums ache.  He may have used artistic license to tell the story but the base facts are true.  NPR, which is retreating so hard it's giving everyone there whiplash, fact-checked it.  Foxconn is no less disgusting now than before Apple and its army of believers hung Mike Daisey up on a cross.  

 

35cna83.gif

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post #31 of 61
3/21/12 at 11:13am

The outrage is warranted.  He used an audience's trust in a completely cynical way by taking the shortcuts he did.  His one-man show would not have been the big deal it was if it had been preceded by a disclaimer the way non-fiction movies do.  For his noble cause, it was a super-cynical move.

 

It's not Foxconn's army of believers that hung him up on the cross.  It's the very people who bought his story hook, line, and sinker.  The outrage is as strong as it is because he was unable to maintain his 'magic trick.'  He was foolish enough to think he could sustain this lie.  Now, I can sympathize to an extent with someone who gets themselves in a situation like this (that retraction interview was gripping but PAINFUL to listen to).  But it's also the way Daisey is 'standing his ground' in such a passive-aggressively retreating way that gets my ire up.

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post #32 of 61
3/21/12 at 11:51am

You're so full of shit, yt. Always were. Always will be. I bet you haven't even bothered to do any research on this -- in fact, I know you haven't, otherwise you wouldn't have posted such a stupid, arrogant, narrow-minded thing. The people who are outraged and angry about this aren't necessarily members of the cult of Apple or corporate-supporting drones. I thought that defending 9/11 conspiracy theorists was going to be your lowest low, but this is really a cheap shot and very unfair. It's a complex issue to process, unpack, and discuss. It's not binary at all. 

 

Why am I even saying this? You're not going to be bothered to read this, or even consider the fact you might be wrong. 

 

Full. of. Shit.

 

 

Deal with that. 

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post #33 of 61
3/21/12 at 6:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mcnooj82 View Post

The outrage is warranted.  He used an audience's trust in a completely cynical way by taking the shortcuts he did.  His one-man show would not have been the big deal it was if it had been preceded by a disclaimer the way non-fiction movies do.  For his noble cause, it was a super-cynical move.

 

It's not Foxconn's army of believers that hung him up on the cross.  It's the very people who bought his story hook, line, and sinker.  The outrage is as strong as it is because he was unable to maintain his 'magic trick.'  He was foolish enough to think he could sustain this lie.  Now, I can sympathize to an extent with someone who gets themselves in a situation like this (that retraction interview was gripping but PAINFUL to listen to).  But it's also the way Daisey is 'standing his ground' in such a passive-aggressively retreating way that gets my ire up.


Outrage at artistic license from a performer. Okay. Do you take everything you see, hear and read at face value in 2012? Or do you learn something, do a little research and then form an opinion? Maybe in this way the kerfuffle will be instructive but when you see outrage at the messenger greater than outrage at the message, considering what it is, then something is seriously rotten in Denmark.

Daisey didn't hear those stories himself, hence the retraction and humiliating coal-raking but those stories have been thoroughly documented and while we're linking to blog posts, here's one that I thought hit the nail on the head: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/03/apple-china
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post #34 of 61
3/21/12 at 6:42pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by yt View Post


Outrage at artistic license from a performer. Okay. Do you take everything you see, hear and read at face value in 2012? Or do you learn something, do a little research and then form an opinion?
 


Wait, did you notice how Daisey had "THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION" printed on the handbill to his show? He was stating implicitly that everything he presented was fact, but he outright lied about some things, and seriously misrepresented others.

 

Or should we simply accept that, well, we don't like how third world countries do things in general, so let's just assume they're all poisoning their workers? Honestly yt, how can you decry the Right wing when they do exactly what this Daisey did, but defend him?

 

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post #35 of 61
3/21/12 at 7:23pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cylon Baby View Post


Wait, did you notice how Daisey had "THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION" printed on the handbill to his show? He was stating implicitly that everything he presented was fact, but he outright lied about some things, and seriously misrepresented others.

 

Or should we simply accept that, well, we don't like how third world countries do things in general, so let's just assume they're all poisoning their workers? Honestly yt, how can you decry the Right wing when they do exactly what this Daisey did, but defend him?

 


Fox News, Fair and Balanced. That's what you see on Fox. No rant, no slant. That's what you hear on NPR. Yet almost every day on NPR I hear that supply and demand is causing gas prices to rise or Paul Ryan's budget would give people a "choice between Medicare and private insurance" or that Occupy Wall St. Is "anti-capitalist." You believe I'm defending Daisey but nowhere am I actually doing that. If I took anything I saw, heard or read at face value without checking multiple sources on my own and then drawing my own cnclusions, I'd hang my head in shame. It's the outrage that I think is ridiculous. Foxconn and a lot of third world producers do these things. People don't want to think about it and outrage at one guy who fabricated his frame story probably feels a lot nicer than having to deal with the conflict of wanting what Apple (or many other manufacturers) make even though they're made by slave and child labor.

Apple is the market leader. It's hoarding billions in profits from their sweat, much of it overseas to avoid US taxes. Those are facts. That's what enrages me, not that someone in the media lied. In 2012, I think we should be all pretty used to that.
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post #36 of 61
3/21/12 at 7:29pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by JuddL View Post

You all should realize that if Apple decided, for moral reasons, to move all of their manufacturing back to the United States, they would be sued by their shareholders and they would lose.  Corporations have a duty to shareholders to maximize profits, not social welfare.
 

Not saying it's right.  What I'm saying is, at the root of so much of our modern social disfigurement is the perpetual drive to increase profits.  It's not enough for a company to earn a profit.  In today's world, if a company doesn't earn a bigger profit in this quarter than the last, it's losing.  That's just nuts, and totally unsustainable.



Well said, hate the game not the player.

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post #37 of 61
3/21/12 at 7:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica View Post


Quote:

 

I'm not sure how true this is. There's always a lower cost center, why aren't they suing them now for not building iPads in Haiti?



Because there's a middle ground between "absolute lowest cost" and "still reliably providing a product that meets the quality standards the company wants."  In the long run, it wouldn't be cheaper to produce iPads in Haiti because Apple would not only have to build the factories from scratch, build the infrastructure to support the factories (massive commercial docks, power, roads, etc...), and pretty much buy off tons of different political and criminal factions in order to make sure their product actually makes it to the ships (and/or hire a private army of security goons).

 

China remains the preferred place for manufacturing because it already has the needed infrastructure, and you only have to bribe the Chinese government.

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post #38 of 61
3/21/12 at 7:48pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by yt View Post


Fox News, Fair and Balanced. That's what you see on Fox. No rant, no slant. That's what you hear on NPR. Yet almost every day on NPR I hear that supply and demand is causing gas prices to rise or Paul Ryan's budget would give people a "choice between Medicare and private insurance" or that Occupy Wall St. Is "anti-capitalist." You believe I'm defending Daisey but nowhere am I actually doing that. If I took anything I saw, heard or read at face value without checking multiple sources on my own and then drawing my own cnclusions, I'd hang my head in shame. It's the outrage that I think is ridiculous. Foxconn and a lot of third world producers do these things. People don't want to think about it and outrage at one guy who fabricated his frame story probably feels a lot nicer than having to deal with the conflict of wanting what Apple (or many other manufacturers) make even though they're made by slave and child labor.
Apple is the market leader. It's hoarding billions in profits from their sweat, much of it overseas to avoid US taxes. Those are facts. That's what enrages me, not that someone in the media lied. In 2012, I think we should be all pretty used to that.


When the facts are on your side, you have no excuse to lie. He's set back the efforts of people who are trying to change things.

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post #39 of 61
3/21/12 at 8:14pm

YT's full of shit, and she clearly doesn't understand the argument about why people are pissed off about Daisey. Everyone, please stop talking to her. This is the same "sheeple" argument she makes whenever somebody disagrees with her. She won't understand. She never has.

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post #40 of 61
3/21/12 at 9:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cylon Baby View Post



When the facts are on your side, you have no excuse to lie. He's set back the efforts of people who are trying to change things.


That definitely can be argued, but who would that be? I was once listening to NPR and a panel was talking about USJobs. Someone called in to ask about trade agreements with slave labor nations and he was brushed off. They didn't even bother discussing it. The NY Times article about Foxconn barely made a blip in the news cycle. Daisey's mistake was obviously in not disclosing that his was a performance piece that used documented facts rather than a first person account, but please show me where the awareness and activism is for changing our own laws to not permit American-based transnational corporations from exploiting cheap labor overseas or south of the border.

Also, I see lies in the media every day, outrageous cynical ones, including on NPR, and where is the outrage on those? The victims of those lies just happen to not be as visible and as well-liked as Apple, but the damage gets done and no one says a word about it. Just my take.
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post #41 of 61
3/21/12 at 11:14pm

Leonard, please don't be such an insufferable cunt. Your usage of the term 'unpack' flags you as an intellectual douchebag. YT is well known on the basis of her political philosophy. Engage the approach, don't attack the partisan. Jackass.

Its entirely reasonable to be pissed off at Daisey while maintaining a fair amount of disgust at what Foxconn represents. Obviously Daisey doesn't deserve a pass. Fuck him. There is a legitimate argument to be made that people who exist in closed economic servitude, in corporate-controlled dormitories, existing to serve the beck and call of Western corporations for Western profits at the hands of Western consumers, are being exploited. The argument goes that this exploitation far outweighs whatever dumbshit self-aggrandizement Daisey was engaged in. Unpack that, you pretentious prick.

Nothing has been said in this thread that rises to justifying your particular level of vitriol. Maybe the bit about 'hanging Daisey up on a cross.' 

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post #42 of 61
3/21/12 at 11:55pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zhukov View Post

The argument goes that this exploitation far outweighs whatever dumbshit self-aggrandizement Daisey was engaged in.

 

One of the many counter-arguments goes that by engaging in dumbshit self-aggrandizing and self-promotion, Daisey made himself part of the story of those workers' exploitation -- not unlike these Kony 2012 dipshits. By fabricating elements of this story out of whole cloth, Daisey has tarnished not only the serious issues going on at places like Foxconn, he's also called into question the many people who do good reporting on this issue. The Times article was well-sourced and well-documented and fact-checked, but Daisey just gave critics a very big brush to tar everyone with. By attempting to do something grandiose in service of a greater truth, like the Invisible Children guys, he ultimately wound up "making it worse."

 

If my level of vitrol comes off as aggressive, it's only because this is an issue I take very seriously, especially when it comes to journalism, creative nonfiction, and such. This is actually what I'm sort of studying in school (which leads me to lace my posts with such admittedly douchebaggy phrases as "unpack"; I like the term but didn't realize it had such pretentious airs). I've been obsessed with the story since it broke, and I've had a lot of conflicting emotions about it. There's also the fact that I'm taking this issue to heart, because last year, I narrowly avoided running an interview with a plagarist who fabricated pretty much every single passage from his book. There's plenty I'm still processing, and yes, part of it has to do with my history with the partisan in question.

 

Should I have said she was full of shit? Probably not, and definitely not twice. But I do think there's a narrow-mindedness to her initial post that indicates she's not willing to engage with the issue, and this is reminiscent of her posting bug-fuck crazy 9/11 conspiracy theories and refusing to listen to reason. And because of all of the conflicting emotions listed above, I reacted from a place of anger.

 

Anyway, you're a person I respect, and even though this post probably didn't make much sense, I wanted to try and expand my views a little bit. 

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post #43 of 61
3/22/12 at 12:58am

I get what yt is saying about all media outlets engaging in varieties of lies.  It's a cynical thing to say, but I think a lot of us already expect a certain amount of it and accept that.  It doesn't get our collective ire up because they're more insidious lies or outrageous lies that are too much to get angry over.  Our defenses are already up a bit.

 

For lots of people (including me), Daisey's story broke past those defenses with the power of drama and storytelling.  He engaged the emotions by using a particularly powerful lie.  That made the betrayal particularly painful and a bitter thing to swallow.  

 

So what I'm saying is that the outrage may not be warranted... but it's warranted.

 

Thanks for the Economist link.  It's a good read.

 

 

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post #44 of 61
3/22/12 at 7:10am

And also, it's actually not impossible to be both outraged at the unfair labor practices being fomented and encouraged by the likes of Apple and other multinationals in third world countries with little regulations to protect workers AND be pissed off at Daisey for lying and cheapening the cause--search for a "larger truth" (whatever that means) notwithstanding.

 

It's a useful conversation to have: 1) we shouldn't offshore slave labor for the sake of cheaper consumer goods; and 2) journalists (or anyone posing as one, and, yes, Daisey did pose as a journalist, bullshit retraction aside) shouldn't lie to the public, unless you explicitly tell the public that you're going to lie to them (see, e.g., standard disclaimer in fictionalized accounts of reality).

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post #45 of 61
3/22/12 at 9:31am

There isn't anything we can do about labor/environmental laws in other countries but there is something we can do about corporate law and federal trade policy in this country.  And I think people accept the "new normal" of this race to the bottom to ensure maximum profits for shareholders, but this wasn't always the law of the land in this country and many people (myself being one of them) believe the laws should be changed for greater good of the country and its people, as opposed to a few hundred gazillionaires.  Years ago I had this very same argument with Frank Cobretti.  It was long and drawn out but neither of our arguments moved the needle an iota.  I just don't understand why so many people accept that corporations that obtain their charters from our government, who use our court system, our consumer base, our publicly educated workforce, tax subsidies, etc., etc., should be permitted to operate in such a myopically greedy and nihilistic way with zero payback for the enormous bite they take out of our infrastructure.

 

And Mcnooj, I can see why you'd be more outraged by this lie than other lies but to me, the fact that the retraction got more attention than the piece itself says a lot.  As it was, trade policy and overseas labor conditions got nearly zero coverage in the US.  Now, that can be more or less justified.  Perhaps that's partially Daisey's fault but meanwhile, the problem has not gone away, and the fact that the media "discussion" has been smacked down into oblivion means that it will likely never reach the kinds of conclusion I saw in that Economist piece.  There is an onus on a beloved, leading company not to be evil, to at least enforce what it claims is its policy. 

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post #46 of 61
3/22/12 at 9:41am

I agree with McNoog and Spook, and I'd add that by showing a blase "eh, another Media Lie" attitude, you add to the problem.

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post #47 of 61
3/22/12 at 10:21am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cylon Baby View Post

I agree with McNoog and Spook, and I'd add that by showing a blase "eh, another Media Lie" attitude, you add to the problem.


Well, maybe it's a subtle distinction, but my thing isn't really "eh, another media lie," it's more that selective outrage at one lie doesn't sit well with me when then the attitude towards the rest of the lies is "eh, another media lie."

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post #48 of 61
3/22/12 at 10:27am
Quote:
Originally Posted by yt View Post

There isn't anything we can do about labor/environmental laws in other countries but there is something we can do about corporate law and federal trade policy in this country.  And I think people accept the "new normal" of this race to the bottom to ensure maximum profits for shareholders, but this wasn't always the law of the land in this country and many people (myself being one of them) believe the laws should be changed for greater good of the country and its people, as opposed to a few hundred gazillionaires.  Years ago I had this very same argument with Frank Cobretti.  It was long and drawn out but neither of our arguments moved the needle an iota.  I just don't understand why so many people accept that corporations that obtain their charters from our government, who use our court system, our consumer base, our publicly educated workforce, tax subsidies, etc., etc., should be permitted to operate in such a myopically greedy and nihilistic way with zero payback for the enormous bite they take out of our infrastructure.

 

With respect to your first point (which I made bold), I disagree.  I think we can do a lot to improve the environmental and labor policies of foreign countries, particularly through international institutions like the WTO.  More to the point, the people inside those countries will begin to demand better working conditions as those countries become wealthier.  It happened here at the turn of the century (slow slide in the past decade notwithstanding)

 

With respect to your second point, as JuddL has pointed out a couple of times in this forum, this actually has been the law of the land (and the UK, really) since the creation of the limited liability corporation.  As a matter of law, companies only owe fiduciary duties to shareholders--and no one else.  The only strict purpose of a corporation is to run it for the benefit of its shareholders.  If you don't do that, you'll get sued in court and you will lose.  As JuddL noted, Henry Ford lost this fight when he tried to turn Ford Motor Co for the benefit of shareholders and a wider net of stakeholders (workers, residents near the plants, etc.).  As you note, you need substantive changes in the laws that require American corporations to behave anywhere in the world as they would in the US (although whether or not this is copacetic with traditional notions of sovereignty and territoriality is suspect).

 

I'm not entirely sure anyone here actually disagrees with you, yt.  I think what peeves most of us is Daisey's attitude that the ends justify the means.  If, in the end, he could get Apple to reform its labor practices, it didn't matter that he had to fabricate his account of working conditions at Foxconn to get Apple to do that.

 

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post #49 of 61
3/22/12 at 10:31am
Quote:
Originally Posted by yt View Post


Well, maybe it's a subtle distinction, but my thing isn't really "eh, another media lie," it's more that selective outrage at one lie doesn't sit well with me when then the attitude towards the rest of the lies is "eh, another media lie."



I think people feel betrayed and outraged because they (and this is a particularly narrow slice of the country that is very sophisticated, savvy, and connected) trust sources like NPR way more than they do CNN, MSNBC, etc.  It hurts more when the sources you trust lie to you than when you get lied to by sources you expect to lie (ahem, Fox).

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post #50 of 61
3/22/12 at 10:45am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spook View Post

 

With respect to your first point (which I made bold), I disagree.  I think we can do a lot to improve the environmental and labor policies of foreign countries, particularly through international institutions like the WTO.  More to the point, the people inside those countries will begin to demand better working conditions as those countries become wealthier.  It happened here at the turn of the century (slow slide in the past decade notwithstanding)

 


 


 

It's happening now, in China and the rest of Asia. One reason there's talk of manufacturing coming back to the US is that there IS wage inflation taking place, and Corporations are wising up to the fact that chasing around the world for the lowest possible labor is a losing game in the long run.

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