Al Gore takes aim at "unsustainable" capitalism

[hughee99]

55. Hey, look over here, look over here.

For the purposes of THIS discussion, what the NY times admitted or didn't admit is irrelevant. What HP, Amazon and Microsoft did is irrelevant.

Gore has been on Apple's board for a long time. Apple has had a deal with Foxconn for a long time. I don't expect people at Apple to know if the workers in the Foxconn plant's sector 7G are getting shortchanged 5 minutes a day on their break, but they should know if people are making slave wages or forced to work 12 hours a day. If Apple couldn't be sure the supplier wouldn't embarrass them, they SHOULDN'T have gone into business in the first place. A lot companies don't give a fuck, but people seem to expect more from Apple and particularly Al Gore, especially when talks about the evils of our capitalist system. Apple didn't do much about this issue, and seems to be getting a lot of credit for putting up with the same abuses as the other companies FOR YEARS, but coming out a few weeks earlier than other companies to denounce them. No word about Apple offering to give Foxconn more money for what they buy on the deal they pay their workers better. No word about Apple threatening to move manufacturing to a place where they have more say in the labor practices. Nope, they just find the current situation unacceptable and are "working on it". Don't give me this "But APPLE is socially responsible" crap. If they were, they wouldn't be weeks ahead of other companies on these sort of issues, they'd be YEARS ahead of them. The difference between Apple, HP, Microsoft and others is just that Apple has more adept PR people who got out in front of this issue better than the other companies once they knew it was going to be a story anyway.