The Ed Show - 2/14/12

I hate what I've learned about Apple's outsourcing to China. I hate knowing that Steve Jobs, who I admired very much in some ways, ignored repeated reports that employees were being cheated and endangered. I hate knowing that his business practices are destroying the kind of good middle-class job his adoptive father had.

I hate watching this week's news stories about China, knowing most of them ignore the fact that American companies who outsource to China have employee fraud and death built into their business plans.

In the words of the old Bob Seger song: Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then. But I do.

Where the Blame Belongs

China and trade are back in the news, thanks to the trade visit of Chinese Vice President (and future President, by most reports) Xi Jinping. Last week on The Breakdown radio show I interviewed William K. Black, Jr., the former regulator who is now a Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

Prof. Black, who describes himself as a "white collar criminologist," makes a compelling argument that the cruelty and cynicism of both Chinese authorities and American companies like Apple are far worse than most people can imagine. He identifies Apple's greatest misdeed - one that may be shared by most of its competitors - as "anti-employee control fraud" which it tolerated despite repeated reports.

Before the interview, Bill Black and I shared stories of the working conditions we'd both seen in other countries. Sometimes it isn't pretty at all. So let's not kid ourselves any longer: Companies like Apple don't outsource to China because the workforce is better-educated or more highly motivated. They don't even outsource just because the labor is cheaper there. They outsource because employers who defraud their workers can make products more cheaply, and those who ignore their safety can produce them more quickly.

“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” Steve Jobs said in a famous anecdote. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”As Prof. Black noted in our interview (audio here), "Imagine what would have happened if Steve Jobs cared as much about the health of his workers as he did about the quality of an iPhone screen."

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Apple Inc.'s chief executive officer, Tim Cook bristled at suggestions that his company didn't care about the fate of workers in the Chinese factories that produce popular products like the iPad and iPhone. The comments came in the wake of New York Times reports of terrible work conditions in the factories.

Apple Inc.'s chief executive responded to a wave of negative attention to conditions at overseas factories that make its products, saying the insinuation that Apple doesn't care about the welfare of its workers is "offensive."

"Unfortunately, some people are questioning Apple’s values today," Tim Cook wrote in an e-mail to Apple employees. "Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern."

...

"We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues," Cook wrote. "What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain. On this you have my word."

Foxconn is the actual company that runs the factories and has been the target of complaints in recent years. The Times reported on recent fatalities in one of Foxconn's factories:

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

...

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.

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My little sister and I had an Apple II+ in the early '80s: games, mostly, but also goofing around with graphics and BASIC programming and such word processing as was necessary in junior high and high school (dot matrix printer).

Our parents' courier company in Milwaukee got a refrigerator-sized computer maybe five years before that, with disks the size of a 17-inch Macbook Pro (but rounder and thicker). There was a lot of data entry involved, as each driver would turn in a "tickets" for each delivery they made during the day, and clerks would type in the information on each, for monthly billing of customers, for keeping track of employees' work, and I suppose some statistical analysis. Each month the billing—miles of zig-zagged dot-matrix perforated sheets—had to be "de-collated," a numbing manual task akin to de-detasseling corn or running a stamping press in a factory: stripping off the accompanying miles of carbon paper.

It had a suite of "games," and they had a modem so they could work at home. If we wanted to have a family game night at home they had to go through a complicated production firing up the modem before they left work. I remember everyone gathering around the HAL-looking blue terminal at a party for my brother's bar mitzvah at our home in what had to have been late 1978. One of the games was blackjack. Another was a horseracing game where you bet on which cursor would cross the screen first. Another bizarre part of the program was that you could print out a giant life-sized banner of a pinup shot of Bridgette Bardot in ACII characters. It sounds like I'm making this up, but I'm not.

Entered college in 1988 with an electric typewriter with little screen where you could word-process a single line at a time. Next year started using the little Macintoshes in the dorm lab and at the library. First one on my own desk was inherited from Linda when she went on an internship in Europe, I think.

No Internet on that, though, not for me. I remember one day at the campus mailroom—an ancient institution, kids, where the sort of announcements you get in your email inbox every morning were placed, as fliers, in folders for each student—everyone was given some sort of code for their "account" on the campus system. I had no idea what it was and threw it out. Others, of course, were not so naive. They were mostly science students. They were the ones who were pioneering networked communication. It was part of their geek culture. One of them, I remember, a kid named Justin Boyan, was featured in Time magazine for writing software to help people "get online." What did that mean? I had no idea.

I went to graduate school in the humanities. My first semester, in our methods class, the force-marched us into this brave new world. And, for the first time, I had that head-swimming, Matrix-y feeling that there was a whole gargantuan universe out there parallel to the one we knew in the physical world. I suspect that all people of a certain age, if they thought about it, can tell you where they were when they first had that feeling. Would be interested to ask folks. What about you?

No web sites, though. Was it 1994 when I first became of those? Once again, it was one of my nerdier friends who lit the way. He started something called the "University of Chicago Philosophy Project," in which people "discussed"—what did it mean to "discuss" something on a computer? that was another new concept to wrap your mind around—philosophy papers they "posted" "online."

My friend also introduced me to another innovation with that site—introduced a lot of people, it turned out. He had some sort of primitive, prototype camera which projected real-time moving images of himself as he worked at his computer. A webcam. Where you could watch someone write philosophy papers. One day he got an "email"—still a strange new concept—from a very unusual source: the much-younger wife of comedian Rodney Dangerfield. Mrs. Dangerfield, apparently, was an early adopter of an eventually ubiquitous notion: the promotional website. She got in touch with my friend, whose name is Jon Cohn, because she wanted to hook up a webcam on the Rodney Dangerfield website too, and wanted to know how to do it.

Geek culture back in the day was like that: random, unexpected, curiously grassroots. I guess I was sort of witnessing history happening. Never quite thought about it that way before.

Hey, Steve Jobs! It would be excellent for you to absolutely deny this rumor now before any unsuspecting consumers buy iPads for their relatives for Christmas. Granted, it's still being reported as rumor, but the idea of any kind of native iPad app running News Corp content 24/7 makes me want to go out and buy a dozen Android devices just to punish you. Right. now.

Rumors are circling that News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch is teaming up with Apple CEO Steve Jobs to launch a new digital-only newspaper. Dubbed, "The Daily," the iPad project will allegedly stream right a user's device seven days a week for the fairly low price of $0.99 per week, or roughly $4.25 monthly.

[...]

"Several sources said Apple chief Steve Jobs and Murdoch have been in conversations about the project for a while," writes Women's Wear Daily's John Koblin. "When the project is announced, don't be surprised if you see Steve Jobs onstage with Rupert Murdoch, welcoming The Daily to the app world."

The day that happens, John Lennon will rise from the dead and haunt Steve Jobs for his remaining days on this earth. And every Apple device in this house and in the possession of relatives will be sent to exile, forever.

In typical techie journalism style, Mashable says "we've gotta give Murdoch credit." Yeah, he gets a ton of credit from me for promoting fools like Sarah Palin and turning lies into commodities that trade on Twitter and Facebook exchanges for friend requests and high-dollar donations to right-wing lunatics.

While I may not like some of Murdoch’s ideas, (see Murdoch: Take Your Google Ball and Go Home), I give credit where it’s due. Murdoch’s commitment to a digital future for journalism is commendable and forward-thinking. He realizes more than his competitors that the future of news isn’t in propping up print publications, but creating truly immersive digital experiences. He may very be creating the template that brings other newspapers into a profitable digital age.

Mashable dude, wake up. Murdoch realizes more than his competitors that if he controls the flow and editorial content, no matter what the device, he wins. But wait, there's a consolation prize:

Let’s be clear, though: while The Daily could very well take off and become the must-have publication on the iPad, it will never be the only player on the block. People won’t stop reading blogs or newspaper websites in favor of the iPad. Instead, they’ll add The Daily to their many sources of news. Some days, they’ll make the $0.99 purchase, and on others they’ll be reading through the archives of Mashable or Perez Hilton.

If you want to see what journalism will become, have a look at Facebook, particularly the discussions on Sarah Palin's facebook page.

Rupert Murdoch has destroyed news and most particularly political reporting. If Steve Jobs thinks dancing with the devil is profitable, he can contend with the demons that haunt him as a result.

One of the main takeaways from Rand Paul's disturbing musings on civil rights -- as well as his sturdy defense of the indefensible that is British Petroleum -- clearly was, as John put it, that he's a typical out-of-touch country-club conservative Republican -- not to mention that he likewise manages to carry on his dad's tradition of right-wing extremism.

But these also are revealing moments about the limitations of libertarianism as a political philosophy -- because it clearly demonstrates how libertarian "principle" all too often, and all too consistently, essentially gives unbridled permission to behavior and actions that are toxic to our communities and their well-being, and to our democratic institutions as a nation. Which means that libertarianism all too often is often merely used as a pseudo-principled front for the worst impulses in American society, all under the pretense of "freedom".

Well, that very limitation is also readily self-evident when it comes to Paul's position on a subject that directly affects the Kentuckians he wants to represent in the United States Senate: mountaintop-removal coal mining. This issue, perhaps more than any other, reveals Rand Paul, and all the libertarians like him, to be nothing more than the corporate tools they really are.

Here's Rand Paul in an interview from October 5, 2009, via Jeff Biggers:

PAUL: I think people out here would find that I would be a great friend to coal. Not 'cause I come to Eastern Kentucky to pander to coal, but because I believe business should be left alone from government. I think the permit process needs to be made easier from the federal level and the state level. I think we shouldn't have special taxes on their profit. I think we should have lower corporate taxes. Those who create jobs -- I would much more rather lower taxes on the coal industry so they can hire a new hundred new workers than I would say, let's tax the coal industry, send it to Washington, so that we can get a hundred new people digging a ditch that may or may not need to be dug. So yeah, I'm greatly in favor of that. I think coal's a big part of our future because we have a lot of it, still, in the United States, it's fairly readily accessible, and it's where we get most of our electricity. Coal now competes -- you may not know this, a lot of people out here know this -- but about half of our electrical needs come from coal. And it's cheaper than oil and gas, actually, for your electricity.

Q: What about mountaintop removal?

PAUL: I think whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine. The other thing I think is that I think coal gets a bad name, because I think a lot of the land apparently is quite desirable once it's been flattened out. As I came over here from Harlan, you've got quite a few hills. I don’t think anybody's going to be missing a hill or two here and there.

And some people like having the flat land. Some of it apparently has become quite valuable when it's become flattened. And I think they do a good job at reclaiming the land, and you know, adding back in topsoil, bringing in help. So the bottom line is, it's not just me pandering to coal. It's me believing in private property.

If they bought the property, they own the property, they can do with that property, as long as they don't pollute someone else's property. And I don't think they want to. If they dump something in the river that goes to the next property, your local judges here will stop them. But I don't think they're doing that. I think what they're doing is what they can do with property they own, and doesn't appear to me to be something the federal government should be getting involved with.

It's harder to get any more afactual and ignorant than that, when it comes to the realities. Indeed, either Paul has just swallowed coal-company lies and propaganda whole, or he's just flatly lying himself.

The facts:

With 95% accuracy, analysis shows that nearly 1.2 million acres (10% of Central Appalachia) have been surface-mined for coal. It also revealed that more than 500 mountains have been severely impacted or destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. The study was completed in 2009 by Appalachian Voices based on 2008 aerial and mining permit data.

Over 89 percent of the sites identified in the survey are not being reclaimed. Heckuva job, Paulie!

Wanna see those now-missing "hill or two here or there"? Here's a map of all the hilltop mining operations in the Appalachians. The little green and yellow tabs mark the "reclaimed" sites, while the red ones are for unreclaimed ones:

And here's what a typical mountaintop-removal site looks like without "reclamation" -- this is the Hobet mine in West Virginia, seen from space:

Go here for a before-and-after look at the Hobet mine, just so you can get some perspective of the enormity of this purposeful manmade eco-disaster.

Now multiply that by five hundred, and you'll have a sense of the enormity of what has befallen people living in the Appalachians.

The NRDC's Rob Perks has more:

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This is not an over-sized pocket protector, this is Apple's new Platomorphic Optical Shield, the I-POS, a steal at $399.99. You will need to buy this because, uh, something something petabytes of cool. Something something provenance. Something something lineage. Something something mouth-feel. Something something post-millennial design elements. Something something peevish insouciance.

Open Thread below...