Apple Faces Boycott Over Worker Abuses In China. It's Not Crazy Talk. - Forbes

Fair-labor organizers, Change.org and SumOfUs.org, delivered 250,000 signatures to Apple stores in six cities around the world on Thursday in protest of the company’s working conditions in China, according to a report in Mashable.

Last month, an excellent New York Times exposé ripped at Apple’s core, building on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling iPhones, iPads and Mac computers.

The claims should be familiar by now as Foxconn in southern China, one of Apple’s primary suppliers, has repeatedly been the subject of accusations of worker mistreatment and unsafe working conditions. From Mashable:

Foxconn has been accused of making laborers work long hours without breaks, use dangerous chemicals that have caused severe health problems and exposing workers to dangerous conditions. The repetitive work and spartan living conditions have also been to blame for suicides at the factory.

Charlotte Hill, communications manager at Change.org, pleaded with Apple to use its creativity to “think ethically” and create an iPhone without using factories that have harsh working conditions.

“No iPhone is worth that cost,” she said.

At the same time, Apple has also generated billions of dollars in profits, in part due to the cheapness of Chinese labor. (Revenue last quarter surged 74 percent to a record US$46.3 billion and profit more than doubled to US$13.1 billion, blowing away Wall Street‘s expectations as Apple sold more stuff than in any quarter in its history.)

The Mashable report comes as rumors point to Siri, the much lauded iPhone 4S intelligent personal assistant, adding Mandarin Chinese support next month.

For perspective, read “The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing.”

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This week in crazy: Glenn Beck - Salon

It is one of the oldest pieces of wisdom in conflict. Every successful military leader, every good chess- or poker player, every successful electoral politician, everyone ever in a conflict situation (as we are all sometimes) should have that maxim "pasted on the inside of his hat". So it is not surprising that Soros, being a very smart fellow, looked closely at Hitler, presumably the better to resist similar characters (there will always be such, alas) in his future. Indeed, anyone who is concerned with Nazism (and it's possible re-occurrence, which is not an inconceivable event as the world spirals into economic chaos and the inevitable enormous social dislocations coming) has to read "Mein Kampf". In it Hitler clearly laid out what he meant to do, and how he meant to do it. And he came awfully close to succeeding; but for his own fatal lack of judgment he could have won all his wars. The main military mistakes being: misjudging the strength of the USSR, failing to support Rommel's drive to the Suez Canal and beyond, not being prepared to follow up the quick defeat of France with an invasion of nearly defenceless Britain, and above all, unnecessarily declaring war on the US after pearl Harbor, which his treaty with Japan did not require him to do. It's possible that his monomaniacal drive to destroy the Jews also led him to mis-allocate resources to that end rather than in more strategically useful directions, not to mention depriving his economy and research of the talents of many Jewish experts: many of the men who developed the A-Bomb for us were refugee Jews from Hitler's Europe.

Much of his book is the tedious ranting of an auto-didactic, power-mad sociopath who found what he was pre-disposed to believe in various writers...but the pages on propaganda and the use of deception and outright lying (e. g. The Protocols of Zion, a well-exposed forgery) and PR is crystal clear, as he openly acknowledges his debt to American advertising for many techniques. Had he had to hand the power of television, who knows what he might have accomplished (among other things, putting me in a gas chamber)?

The raw materials for an American fascism are lying around us everywhere, not least in the frothings of Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin. Neither of them has the craftiness to be the leader of such a development, but rest assured that there are some out there who just might. If the economy really collapses (as it could if, say, the Mad Hatters of the Tea Party succeed in blocking the raise of the debt limit and so throwing the US into default and destroying the world's credit system) that possibility becomes ever more plausible. And Mr. Soros is a ready-made hate figure around which such a movement would happily coalesce.

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