The horrendous human costs of your beloved gadgets

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So you like your iPhone, do you? And your iPad? And maybe you're even one of those Apple cultists. (I'm not, but I do love my iPod Touch. I go Samsung/Android with my phone.)

Maybe you love all your gadgets. Maybe you think technology has made your life so much better, so much more fun. Hey, I hear you.

But there's a cost to be paid, and not just whatever low, low, ridiculously low price lured you into your local Best Buy. No, there's a human cost. Actually, many human costs. And it's important that you (and I) know about it (and make decisions accordingly):

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.

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.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple's products, and the company's suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers' disregard for workers' health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning. 

And then there's that whole suicide problem. (Yes, a very serious problem. In addition to the suicides themselves, workers at Foxconn, a manufacturer for Apple and others, have threatened mass suicide to protest the horrible working conditions.)

Now, sure, it's easy to pick on Apple and it's huge profits and cash, but it's hardly alone in this. Pretty much every major (and not-so-major) consumer electronics company is implicated.

Will this stop me, or you, or most anyone else from lapping up the latest wonder-gizmo? Maybe not, but, then, what are we to do? Not have these gadgets at all? Please. We need our superphones and tablets and laptops and PCs. I'm on them all the time at home, at work, pretty much everywhere.

But maybe we should at least think twice (or more) about what we're doing, and maybe, if Apple (to take but the most obvious example) is one of the most egregious players in this horrific system, it should pay -- and pay by losing customers, by having customers demand better of it. And perhaps, too, our attention and habits, should we change them in a meaningful way, and the attention this human toll is getting, will turn this into a political issue with governments demanding, and requiring, meaningful change.

Maybe I'm hoping for too much. Actually, I'm sure I am. And I know I'm a hypocrite. Most of us are. But I do know I look at Apple quite a bit differently now, and if making a choice means choosing the less bad of some generally bad options, well, that's something, at least.

Food for thought next time you're playing Angry Birds.

Gingrich says "really poor children" don't know how to make money unless "it's illegal"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You'll recall that Newt Gingrich came out a couple of weeks ago in support of child labor as a way to deal with poverty. Well, now he's making gross generalizations about poor children that feed right into the right-wing view of poverty not as a systemic problem implicating a greed-oriented socio-economic structure and those on the top (the 1%, including Newt himself) but as individual and community failure (particularly when "poor children" is just another way of saying black children):

"Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday," Gingrich said.

"They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash' unless it's illegal."

Gingrich said every successful person he knows started working at an early age in explaining his position that schools should hire poor children in their neighborhoods for part-time jobs as assistant librarians or assistant janitors. 

Again, there's a difference between saying all young people benefit from working part-time jobs, like having a paper route or something, and picking on poor children and saying they should be forced to work. And what Newt, supposedly the GOP's in-house intellectual, is saying about poor children isn't just misguided, it's utterly despicable. He probably believes it, but of course he's also playing right to the conservative prejudice against the poor, the deeply entrenched conservative view, dominant throughout the GOP, that the poor are a bunch of violent criminals out to take your stuff -- and that the poor are deservedly poor for not being better people, people like Newt and his ilk. Here's the WaPo's Jonathan Capehart:

A lot can be said about the plight of families unlucky enough not to make $60,000 for a half-hour of bloviation or about their equally unlucky children who are deprived delightful cruises through the Greek isles. But Gingrich's blanket condemnation of "really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods" is unbelievably disgusting. And it's disrespectful of the overwhelming majority of those children and their families who live their lives with far more integrity and far less cash than Gingrich ever will. 

Newt is all about the 1% and against the 99%. And especially against those on the very bottom who usually through no fault of their own are struggling just to find food and a roof over their heads.

Truly disgusting, indeed. But all too believable coming from such a "know-it-all" piece of plutocratic shit.

And so very telling, as Laura Clawson writes at Kos, that "[t]his is what a Republican presidential candidate on the upswing chooses to help him continue his ascent." In the Republican Party, after all, race-baiting and pissing on the poor can take you right to the top.

Newt Gingrich supports child labor as solution to poverty

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There are, of course, any number of reasons not to like Newt Gingrich and to think he'd be a terrible choice for Republicans next year. We'll get into many of those reasons here in the coming days, and as long as he's a viable top-tier candidate, but for now let's just focus on one of them:

He supports child labor. Seriously:

Newt Gingrich tonight said at an address at Harvard that child work laws "entrap" poor children into poverty - and suggested that a better way to handle failing schools is to fire the janitors, hire the local students and let them get paid for upkeep.

The comment came in response to an undergrad's question about income equality during his talk at Harvard's Kennedy School.

"This is something that no liberal wants to deal with," Gingrich said. "Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.

"You say to somebody, you shouldn't go to work before you're what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You're totally poor. You're in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I've tried for years to have a very simple model," he said. "Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."

Of course, there are also any number of reasons he's popular with conservatives, and here he hits several right-wing buttons at once: unions are bad, government regulation ruins the economy, public schools are failing, children have no rights, the poor are really only poor because they don't work hard enough, and income inequality is the fault of government and unions and the left generally.

He's wrong on all counts, but all across the country conservative knees are jerking. Steve M. explains it well:

If you're a fan of far-right demagoguery, there's so much to admire here. Notice how the simple act of paying people to clean and maintain scholls is now "bureaucratization." (Boo! Hiss!) Notice how the main enemy seems to be liberals -- and not just liberals, but eggheady, social-engineering-obsessed, bureaucratizing liberals (a class of people he demonizes at Harvard, no less) ... and yet Newt's attack also takes out evil broom-wielding union thugs.

But there's more. This is for the children. Making them clean the schools is good for them. This plays in the brains of wingnuts one of two ways: either (a) they imagine hoodlums and ruffians being kept off the streets by doing the sort of work they should just be consigned to at birth and forced to accept for life, or (b) they think this is how you save the underclass from a life of liberal dependency, by turning them into a sort of neckerchief-wearing Gingrich Youth, a cadre of Young Newtian Pioneers doing vigorous labor as a means of refuting the notion that the nation has gone flabby.

It would seem that Newt is just the new anti-Romney (following in the footsteps of Bachmann, Perry, and Cain), but the more I think about it the less sure I am. I thought he was done a long time ago, his campaign over save for his desire for more of the spotlight to enhance the Gingrich brand, but he may actually have some staying power -- if only because his rivals on the right, specifically Perry, are so weak. And it helps that, despite often veering from Republican orthodoxy (remember when he criticized Paul Ryan?), he can feed the conservative Republican penchant for cruelty and brutality with such enthusiastic extremism.

Newt's good at this stuff. He's earned his spot at the top.

Yes, indeed. He's a man of ideas, we are told over and over again. It just so happens that those ideas, such as bringing back child labor and making life even more miserable for the poor, are insane.