Apple’s Rotten Core
By Larry Romanoff, November 26, 2022
Introduction
A few years ago,
China's CCTV aired its annual Consumer Reports program in which one of the
topics was the products of Apple, Inc. Naturally, the Western media trashed
CCTV for having the gall to challenge anything American, accusing the TV
station of being "a government mouthpiece" wanting to destroy a
foreign brand to help the locals, or to "send a message" to the White
House, or to retaliate for poor treatment of Chinese firms in the US, or ...
But in the end, CCTV just runs a consumer affairs program to enlighten
consumers about dishonest or unfair practices, poor quality products and
similar issues, not different in scope or style from many such programs in the
US and elsewhere. CCTV does a commendable job with this program, highlighting
both domestic and foreign firms according to the scope of the problems, and
often identifying serious commercial frauds or scandals. From this, the program
earned an excellent reputation and became quite influential among Chinese
viewers. And, in one typical program on World Consumer Rights Day, Apple found
itself in CCTV's sights, a litany of consumer abuses being identified. Let's
begin with the issues CCTV identified. You can read the details and draw your
own conclusions.
Warranty Repairs
One key issue was
that in any Western country, if I am dissatisfied with my purchase of almost
any consumer product, I can return it to the shop for a full refund, and with
no questions asked. If the item is defective, I can obtain a new replacement,
again with no questions asked. In China, Apple would replace the innards of the
device but use the old casing, thereby categorising the device as the old
original with perhaps little or no warranty time left, whereas if the entire
device were replaced - as it should be - the device would be new and the
warranty period would begin again. CCTV quoted an Apple employee as saying,
"We are told not to replace the back. If you want to get a new one, please
pay 580 yuan (US$92)." In any Western country this would be considered a
cheap and low-class trick that any intelligent person would be ashamed to use,
but also the practice is illegal in China; under Chinese law, a replacement
must be a new device covered by a full warranty period. Apple had knowingly
flouted Chinese law for years, both Apple and the Western media refusing to
address the point. Another law that Apple openly violated was that tablet
computers like ipads were classified as computers in China, necessitating a
two-year warranty, but Apple, making up its own laws, claimed its ipads were
really phones, and so ignored the laws, repeatedly avoiding fines by claiming
the regulations were "unclear".
Moreover, the
fundamental purpose of a product warranty is to ensure that defects are
repaired free of charge to the consumer, but Apple charged Chinese customers
between 2,000 and 3,000 yuan for a warranty repair - often about 50% of the
original purchase price - another practice that was illegal under Chinese law.
Moreover, Apple's repairs were not only expensive, but the entire repair
process was complicated and hugely inconvenient by design. Customers with
warranty problems were required to first make an appointment for a time slot
and a reservation simply to bring in a defective product for repair. In alternative
cases, customers were often forced to stand in line for many hours waiting for
a single clerk to deal with complaints or defects, then in most cases waiting
weeks for the return of their (sometimes) repaired device. This was so true
that many customers, perhaps the majority, abandoned the Apple process
altogether, taking their defective product to a small local shop where they
could receive immediate service at a much lower cost. An overall examination of
this landscape leads one to the inescapable conclusion that Apple's entire
after-sales service program in China was carefully designed to obtain precisely
the result of avoiding virtually all costs of warranty repairs, a program
clearly fraudulent and criminal in any Western country, as well as contemptibly
unethical, to say nothing of being illegal in China.
Apple products in
China certainly had their share of factory defects, with items like screen
damage, dead keys, and battery charger failures. With iphones, the most common
complaint was of total system failures, along with blank screens, graphics
chips with brain damage, frequent software malfunctions, cameras that either
didn't work or produced very poor picture quality, and the famous short standby
time. I would add a suspicion here that I have not yet investigated
sufficiently to obtain proof, but one that has been verified against other
American (and a few Japanese) companies in China in other industries, and this
has to do with quality control. In several consumer products categories in
China, one being a well-known American brand of blue jeans, the factory has
excellent quality-control procedures in place, where even the smallest flaw
results in a garment being rejected and only the perfect items passed. These
perfect items are then packaged and shipped to the US, Canada and Europe, the
quality rejects reserved for sale in the China market at four or five times the
Western price. I have documented this practice on more than one occasion, and I
have a strong suspicion the same occurs with Apple products in China, which may
be one reason Chinese customers prefer to purchase their Apple products in Hong
Kong or the West.
Another issue is
that to my best knowledge, Apple is the only company that forces customers to
agree warranty repairs will be made with used or reconditioned parts, and to
further agree that the parts will then be retained by Apple to install in
warranty repairs on other phones. This is really a disgusting contract
provision, which Apple would never dare use in any Western country. It is also
a violation of China's consumer laws, but once again Apple simply ignored
domestic law. The company was instructed on several occasions to modify its
refund and repair policies to conform to Chinese laws, but apparently ignored
those orders. Also, Chinese law states clearly that repair operators are
"liable for maintaining the confidentiality of data and the privacy of
business or personal information", but Apple violated this law as well,
one of the company's repair clauses stating that users must copy their data and
remove anything confidential or exclusive before sending Apple's products for
repair, something many customers cannot do. "Apple specifically does not
warrant that it will be able to repair or replace your product without risk to
or loss of programs or data and maintain the confidentiality of data." And
that's just rubbish, Apple using this clause as a cheap excuse to cover its
potential incompetence. In any case, data transfer is primitive technology; any
competent person can download data from a device, then store and reload to that
same device. But the point is that Apple's repair clauses on personal data
protection and compensation did not in any way conform with local laws. Yet
another complaint about unfair treatment was that in preparation for the launch
of its new iphone 5, Apple had offered to re-purchase all the used iphone 4 and
4S models in its home market, paying about 50% of the original purchase price.
But in China, Apple graciously offered to take delivery of all iphone 4 and 4S
models (without compensation) to "recycle them free of charge". Who
in their right mind would agree to such an insultingly stupid proposition? With
China providing almost half of Apple's total profit at the time, why the double
standard?
One widespread
complaint was that Apple deliberately shortchanged customers on memory and
battery capacity, with an almost universal conclusion that Apple executives
deliberately manufactured iphones with memory barely sufficient to contain the
operating system, giving a customer an essentially useless phone and forcing an
upgrade to a more expensive model with more memory. The prevailing view was
that Apple effectively designed the iphone to self-destruct within about one
year, almost forcing customers to purchase a newer model. Every Apple iphone
user tells the same story of their phone becoming increasingly slower over
time, to the point where the device becomes almost unusable, and where even
deletion of all data and reinstallation of the O/S make no appreciable
difference except further ensuring the frustration of all users. As well, after
perhaps one year an iphone must be fully recharged at least once per day, often
twice, with even standby time becoming worryingly short. It is not for nothing
that Apple's phones have been described even in the US media as
"handicapped" and "terrible." But as others have noted,
Apple charges $100 for a memory upgrade that costs less than $15, adding
billions to its profits by what could be easily categorised as a planned process
to defraud consumers. By contrast, my own Xiaomi 3, which is now going on three
years old, is about as fast today as when I purchased it, still able to scroll
through a thousand photos as quickly as I can move my fingers, and battery
capacity has not significantly degraded.
In 2012, a lawsuit
was filed in Beijing court on behalf of customers who bought "new"
iPhones for RMB 5,000 ($780) each at the Apple retail store in Beijing’s Xidan
Street. On examination, the iphones proved to have been refurbished used items.
This is a complaint I have heard repeatedly from all across China. Yet another,
and much more serious charge, is that Apple dealers will purchase iphones that
have been stolen, refurbish them, then offer them for resale as new. There have
been many reports of customers finding their old iphone in an Apple shop, and
providing definitive proof of ownership, but being unable to obtain their
return with the Apple stores flatly refusing to return what were clearly stolen
goods. This has been a large enough issue that it could not possibly have
escaped the attention of Apple's headquarters, but Apple executives chose to
remain totally silent on this matter. Apple had repeatedly been asked to lock
stolen phones in China, a simple process, but the media offered evidence that
the Apple stores refused to do so without a police order. One of the reasons
iphones are thieves' favorite target, at least in Shanghai, but I believe in
many cities, is because Apple dealers are eager to purchase them cheaply for resale
as new. One local newspaper quoted an unidentified salesperson as saying this
so-called "whitewashing" of stolen smartphones was a common practice,
and that during reconditioning, parts of the iPhones usually were changed, to
make them look like new to unsuspecting customers. One Western columnist
suggested this problem occurred only in China, but that's untrue. Go to eBay,
and identify all the iphone sellers who are actually Apple stores or authorised
shops.
Another issue was
Apple's deplorable labor practices. Even in an internal company report, Apple
admitted the "sweatshop" conditions inside the factories that make
and assemble its products, admitting that at least 55 of its 102 factories were
making staff work more than 60 hours per week, that only 65% were paying legal
minimum wages or statutory benefits and that 24 factories paid nothing near
China's minimum wage. The pressure placed on these young people is truly
unconscionable, a fact which has not at all escaped Tim Cook and Apple's
executives. One young university graduate working in the logistics department
when an iphone prototype went missing, was treated so badly for an event that
wasn't his fault that he jumped to his death from the 12th floor of his
apartment building. Neither Apple nor Foxconn had any noticeable sympathy. A
human rights organisation accused Foxconn of having an "inhumane and
militant" management, the executives of neither Foxconn nor Apple being
available for comment.
Other Issues
Another damning
complaint was that Apple had knowingly violated the copyrights of famous
Chinese writers and publishing houses, by selling unauthorised copies of
Chinese works on Apple's App Store. Apple's CEO Tim Cook adopted what some
called an "ostrich policy", sticking his head in the sand and
pretending he didn't know, in spite of the increasing flood of complaints and
multiple requests for removal. This would appear to be Cook's standard practice
of lying low and hoping the storm blows itself out. But this time it didn't. As
Xinhua news reported, "A group of Chinese writers have filed a claim
against Apple, alleging that the company's App Store sells unlicensed copies of
their books and seeking Rmb50m ($8 million) in compensation. The claim, filed
on behalf of 22 famous writers, involves 95 [different] books that have been
sold as pirated copies on Apple's App Store." Apple executives had to have
participated in what was clearly a deliberate practice and surely would never
have attempted such an obvious violation against American authors. The American
public are of course never informed by their media of such sins by American
firms, knowing only of alleged pirated sales on Taobao in China.
Apple is also in
trouble in several countries, most especially the US and Europe, for what may
prove to be a vast and illegal tax-avoidance scheme. The company has cleverly
arranged its affairs, moving its headquarters to Ireland where it pays
virtually no tax, and further creating a web of shell companies that are
apparently resident in no country anywhere, through which it funnels much of
its revenue and pays no tax of any kind. Apple apparently paid only about $10
million in taxes, if I recall correctly, on income in the tens of billions. In
Europe, the European Commission ordered Ireland to levy nearly $15 billion in
taxes that were avoided by the clever tactics of Apple's executives, the
European Commission reporting that in 2014 Apple illegally paid tax on its
profits of only 0.005%. The European Commission said Apple was also accused of
fraudulently repatriating its foreign profits to the US by having its Irish
subsidiary pay large amounts of money to the US parent for R&D.
Yet another problem
was Apple's trademark row with Shenzhen Proview Technology for the name
"iPad', which Proview had registered some ten years before Apple developed
their ipad. The name clearly did not belong to Apple, who eventually purchased
the name from Proview - for use in Europe, but then proceeded to use it in
other countries where it did not own the trademark. Naturally, the Western
media accused Proview of 'cybersquatting', but that was never true; Proview
owned a name that Apple wanted and simply appropriated without legal
entitlement, yet another example of Americans respecting IP - so long as it's
their own. When Apple began using the name in China, Proview sued Apple for
trademark infringement, to the great chagrin of Americans everywhere, but the
courts upheld Proview's claim and Apple was forced to pay another $60 million
for the China rights to the name. Apple of course applied for injunctions, and
made a lot of media noise in attempts to blacken China's name internationally,
but to no avail.
Apple's final claim
was that when they had purchased the trademark for Europe, they
"understood" it also applied to China. Once again, a lie that should
be punished by public flogging, since there is no lawyer anywhere in the world
who is so dense or incompetent as to misread a contract and not understand such
limitations. The evidence is Apple executives assumed that, being Americans,
they could simply confiscate and use Proview's trademark and bully the company
into submission. It didn't work, and Apple got a taste of its own medicine. And
in fact, Apple may end up losing its own name, since the word 'Apple' is by
nature descriptive, and cannot reasonably be copyrighted or trademarked. It is
likely only a lack of serious court challenges that has protected Apple so far.
In the event, Apple was forced to take its ipads off the Chinese market until
it settled and paid the dispute. There have been many such issues with Apple,
using expensive lawyers and the US' aggressive IP legislation to bully competitors
and waste everyone's money. One recent example was Apple obtaining a US patent
on "a rectangle with rounded corners", then suing Samsung for having
such a product.
Apple’s Rotten
Core
On December 7,
2012, a 44-year-old Chinese woman named Li Xiaojie went to an Apple store in a
New Hampshire mall in Massachusetts to buy three iphones as Christmas gifts for
her friends in the US. The store staff informed her that two phones was the
limit, but when she pointed to other customers who were purchasing three and
four, the staff told her she had "bought the limit", then called the
manager who asked her to leave the store, and apparently issued a
"stay-away" order for her. In other words, don't return again to any
Apple store in the US. The woman returned home, ordered two Apple phones online
and went to another store to pick them up. The store manager called the police
and asked them to remove Ms. Li. The police assaulted her, knocked her to the
floor and tasered her, leaving her daughter to call for an ambulance, and have
her mother admitted to a hospital with more than minor injuries. Police later
claimed the woman was violent and resisted arrest, failing to specify the
grounds they might have had for arresting a customer. One person in the store
had the presence of mind to take video and post it on YouTube, the video
clearly showing an innocent customer being assaulted and that both Apple
officials and the police lied about the incident. When interviewed, the manager
of the Apple store claimed Apple enforces purchase limits to deter customers
who buy iphones and ipads to sell at a profit overseas, having no explanation
for other (white) customers who were clearly, within sight of the interview,
purchasing many more than two phones.
Many people had
this experience in US cities during that period, and the practice continues to
this day. Apple identifies Chinese customers and treats them differently from
all other people. Any Apple store will sell any number of iphones to people
other than Chinese, but the company claims Chinese customers want to send extra
phones to China's black market. Let's deal with this. First of all, the claim
is almost certainly untrue. I have on many occasions brought an item back from
a foreign country for a friend, where that item was very expensive or difficult
to find locally. Those were one-off favors, and often given as gifts rather
than for profit. No Chinese tourists to the US would be interested in
purchasing huge numbers of iphones to sell at a profit in China. The very
concept is ludicrous, since Apple carried the same price differential between
Hong Kong and Mainland China as between the US and the Mainland, in other
words, the retail price in China being about twice that of other locations. The
point is that anybody wanting to profit from reselling phones would go to Hong
Kong, not New York City.
But why shouldn't
customers do that if they want? There was no justification for the higher price
in China, and besides, that's called 'free enterprise', 'free trade', and
'letting the market decide'. And in any case, in that period, Apple sold almost
48 million iphones. What possible difference could it make to the company if a
few hundred or thousand customers did indeed take a few phones from a low-price
location to another? The same sometimes occurs in reverse: the Disney release
of the DVD movie "Narnia" was priced at $42 in Canada. The same DVD
was available in Hong Kong and Shanghai for 30 yuan, about $5.00. Entrepreneurs
will naturally buy hundreds or thousands of the DVDs and ship them to Canada to
sell at $20. And why not? Apple and Disney cleverly couch these transactions in
moral terms, claiming anyone wanting to buy their product at the lower price is
committing a despicable felony and should be in prison, and often try to have
the local police enforce their greed by accusing customers of breaking laws
that in fact do not exist. It is the accusation that is the felony, not the
purchase.
But let's not lose
the main point, which is an appalling combination of greed and racism on the
part of Apple's senior executives. One friend sent me the following:
"Two Chinese
friends of mine in the US, one in San Francisco and one in NYC, ordered several
iphones online with no problem, but on appearing at the Apple stores to pick up
the phones and the clerks saw they were Chinese, their orders were cancelled
and they weren't permitted to buy anything. Another Chinese friend sent me this
message: "I just called the store in NH and politely asked if I can buy 3
phones for my 3 daughters for Christmas, and they said yes. But when I
expressed my concern about the woman being tasered, and told them I’m Chinese,
they told me the phones were sold out and hung up the phone on me."
Another Chinese friend wrote the following: "I called the manager of the
Apple Store, and he called me back and told me there’s no purchase limit on
iPhones. Then he told me that what happened to Ms. Li was none of my business,
and he hung up the phone on me."
Just so it doesn't
go unsaid, these anti-Chinese policies could not possibly have been implemented
nationwide in the United States without the express approval of Tim Cook. There
is a learning curve here, one that has been much steeper in China than in many
other nations passing through the development process. With LV as an example,
the Chinese quickly discovered prices in China were twice those in Europe so
they quit buying in China, reserving their purchases for European trips, and
very often preferring other brands to LV. It is worthy of note that the
Europeans in Europe were not so stupid and racist as Tim Cook at Apple in the
US, and welcomed their Chinese customers instead of calling the police to taser
and arrest them for purchasing where the prices were lower.
Apple's Response
to the Storm
In fact, Apple's
staff and executives were totally unmoved by their customer complaints, which
is not a surprise since it would be a foregone conclusion the company's
policies would produce precisely such consumer reactions. Apple's executives
planned the policies to maximise the company's profits by squeezing customers
until they bled, and by violating a dozen Chinese laws in doing so. Just a
simple combination of greed and arrogance, highlighted with a strong blush of
racism. It was all done in the dark, company executives confident they could
handle Chinese lawmakers and regulators behind the scenes in silence. The
crisis arose only because CCTV brought the details out into the light where
Apple could not hide, but even then CEO Tim Cook chose to lie low in the hope
the storm would blow itself out with no action being necessary. It didn't, and
Cook found himself on a plane to China where he was then forced to deliver his
apology - clearly insincere, but perhaps better than nothing.
In Shanghai, the
government's Quality and Technical Supervision Bureau held a meeting and press
conference with all phone manufacturers to clarify publicly and in the media
the laws relating to after-sales service and warranty repairs for such devices.
All companies were notified - twice - in writing of the necessity to attend,
but Apple returned both of the letters, apparently refusing to even open them.
The bureau then faxed the documents, but Apple ignored them as well. No Apple
staff appeared at the meeting and conference. Apple did finally offer to
improve its after-sales service, including warranty repairs, but only for its
new iphone 5 which was then hitting the market, refusing to amend its practices
for the previous iphone 4 and 4s models, leading critics to accuse the company
of twisting warranty repair into yet another cheap marketing gimmick. Moreover,
Apple's repair statement mentioned only the iphones but ignored the legal
violations in its warranty practices for the ipads.
But Apple didn't
just ignore the government and then sit back and do nothing about the bad
publicity. Apple did indeed take action - against its own customers, by
immediately cancelling its online repair reservations system, thereby making
customers come to an Apple store, and stand in line for hours, to either have
their iphone or ipad repaired - or - to make an appointment to return another
time to deliver their Apple product for repair. So, Apple will teach the
government of China a lesson for daring to challenge Apple's flouting of
Chinese law, by punishing the company's own customers with hours of needless
inconvenience. At many shops, there were 30 and 40 people waiting in line for
hours to deliver their iphone for repair. The Shanghai Evening Post reported
more than 100 people in some lines, who had each waited more than three hours.
Apple's lame excuse was that it cancelled the repair reservation system
"to deter scalpers" who would obtain multiple repair slots and bring
items needing repair from other nearby cities and towns where the company had
no repair facilities. It was a lie, of course, that these people were scalpers,
but let's look at it. In China, the company's second-largest market, Apple has
a repair shop in Shanghai but in no other location for 1,000 or more Kms, requiring
customers to either ship their Apple product to Shanghai or have someone bring
it to the city for repair. Given the volume of Apple products requiring repair,
mobile phone shops in many smaller centers filled the need by collecting
defective local Apple products and taking them to the city in one lot. They
charge each customer a small fee for the service, and incur a great
inconvenience themselves since Apple insists that an online
"reservation" be made for each individual product, requiring these delivery
personnel to make dozens or even hundreds of separate appointments. It was this
reservation service that Apple killed, creating much inconvenience for local
residents and placing a much greater burden on customers not living in the
city, leaving them no choice but to ship their Apple product to Shanghai for
repair. I know of no other country in the world where it is necessary to make
an appointment or a reservation to either return a defective consumer product
or bring it in for repair. As I mentioned earlier, the conclusion is
inescapable that Apple's entire after-sales service and warranty programs were
deliberately designed to be so inconvenient, troublesome and expensive as to
deter all but the most determined customers from demanding warranty repairs,
and to free the company of hundreds of millions of dollars of liability.
Shipping Apple
products to a company repair shop also revealed planned problems on many
levels. Online shopping in China is an immense industry, so successful in part
due to the plethora of couriers and small shipping companies who deliver
anything, anywhere, for a small fee. And safe delivery too. I have purchased
countless dozens of items online over the years, with not a single problem of
damage. I suppose some packages must be damaged in shipment somewhere, but
neither I nor anyone I know has ever had the experience. Except with Apple.
There is not exactly a shortage of complaints about an Apple product being sent
in for repairs and being returned in damaged condition, in which case Apple
inevitably blames the damage on the delivery company and refuses to compensate
the customer. In at least some of those cases I have investigated, damage in
transit would have been impossible, like a broken screen on a laptop that is
shipped closed and with the exterior in flawless condition, or an O/S chip with
brain damage, or all the user data deleted from an iphone or ipad. You can draw
your own conclusions.
In response to this
infamy crisis, Apple CEO Tim Cook did more than nothing. First, he released a
brief statement containing the usual arrogant (and irrelevant) nonsense that
emanates from every American MNC finding itself in trouble with the law or
facing a consumer revolt. Statements about 'commitment' and 'values', about
being "dedicated to making first-class products", and attaching
"high importance to every consumer's ideas". Apple China executives
were quoted as saying, "We pay attention to the feedback from every
consumer and try to provide services beyond consumer expectation." Cook
said further that he "deeply reflected" on the "feedback"
received on warranty policies he had established for China. But that wasn't
actually 'feedback' he received. It was a legal demand from the government of a
sovereign state that he obey the laws as constituted. In such a case,
'reflection', deep or otherwise, isn't really necessary. Cook further
apologised to Chinese consumers for any "concerns or
misunderstandings" they "might have had" about Apple's warranty
policies. But that was disingenuous and self-serving since there were no
'misunderstandings' about Cook's warranty policies but instead anger at the
clearly discriminatory fundamentals of those policies which Cook either wrote
or approved and which can be summarised as follows:
"You're Chinese.
I will charge you (more or less) twice the price for my products that I charge
customers in any other country and, since my company has no obligation to obey
the laws in your country, I will give you only half the required legal warranty
and will charge you an unconscionable (and illegal) amount for warranty repairs
that are free in every other country. I will replace your hopelessly defective
(but cute) product with a used one, and I will continue to repair your product
with used parts. If my incompetent repair people damage your phone, I'm sorry
but that's too bad for you. I will buy your phone from the people who stole it,
then clean it up and sell it as new in my store. I will continue to sell
unlicensed copies of Chinese works on my website because Chinese copyrights and
IP are worthless, and I will continue to pay far less than the minimum wage to
the two million Chinese who make my (defective, but still cute) iphones and
ipads. And of course, I will be dedicated to making first-class products and
will attach high importance to your concerns. To be honest, I see little room
here for misunderstanding but, if my meaning is not clear, let me re-phrase:
You're Chinese."
Cook issued another
statement in Chinese that said in part: "We've come to understand through
this process that because of our poor communication, some have come to feel
that Apple's attitude is arrogant and that we don't care about or value
feedback from the consumer." But once again he got it wrong. It wasn't due
to Cook's 'poor communication' that so many people (certainly including me)
believed he was arrogant and racist, but rather because of his arrogance and
racism that we believed he was arrogant and racist.
Commentary
At the time of
writing, Apple had 250 billion dollars stashed offshore, with gross revenue in
China almost $7 billion in one year, yet hugely overcharged Chinese consumers
for its products, refused to provide free warranty repairs for its China
customers, made repairs with used parts, refused to replace defective products,
and callously refused to pay reasonable salaries to the people who assembled
its products. Apple outsources, makes unreasonable demands, pushes suppliers
into cutting corners and breaking laws, then denies any knowledge or
responsibility, and deals with all this by making insulting and fatuous
statements about core values and dedication to quality while
"treasuring" customer feedback. And Apple, as with every other rich
company and wealthy person, attempted to clean its face by boasting of a small
donation it made to some charity. I find these claims despicable; these
corporate executives lie, steal, cheat, defraud, violate every law that stands
in their way, function as the most vicious of predators, extract an enormous
human toll on the weak and helpless who produce all their wealth, then, with
the willing compliance of the media, bury that vast litany of crimes and sins
in a pretense of generous philanthropy. In the case of Apple and Tim Cook, that
philanthropy should have been directed to the young workers in Foxconn's
factories. We could ask Tim Cook what he thinks about, that he so willingly
preys on these young people, quietly and out of the light, then publicly boasts
of his so-called "charity". Some of these companies, like General
Motors, would be bankrupt if not for their sales in China, but many still try
to cheat Chinese customers. One Apple user wrote me to say:
"Apple keeps
all the good jobs and PR stateside and exports the exploitation and depravity
to China. The company's greed is shocking. Americans understand only brute
force. Apple will only follow the rules when it pays a high cost for breaking
laws and cheating customers. Apple's American executives should all be arrested
and imprisoned when they come to China, and forced to accept responsibility for
the actions of their suppliers. No foreign corporation has an inalienable right
to exist in any country; it does so only at the whim and pleasure of the
government of that country. If there is a hell, I hope Apple goes there."
The government did
take some actions: Apple was ordered to equalize its China warranty periods
with those of other countries, to cease the use of used parts for repairs, to
provide new product warranty replacements, and some other terms, officials
stating Apple would face "severe repercussions" if it failed this
time to adhere to China's warranty laws. It was reported that China's commerce
authorities were considering the restriction or prohibition of sales of those
products with unsatisfactory after-sales policies. In other words, if Apple
disobeys the law one more time, its products will disappear from the country.
And since it seemed clear that Tim Cook harbored little intention of reforming,
the government ordered local commercial authorities to "enhance legal
supervision" of Apple's activities and policies. It was really just a
simple matter of obeying local laws and being fair with consumers, but there
are almost no American companies with such values, at least not in China, and
certainly not in Apple. The 2-year warranty on ipads was a well-known issue in
many countries with legislation similar to that of China, leading the company into
legal troubles in much of Europe:
"Apple's
product warranty has been under fire outside the U.S. before, though especially
Europe. The company was fined multiple times in Italy over its AppleCare
warranty service, which extends beyond the company's one-year warranty. Local
law required a warranty period of two years, something that led to regulators
hounding Apple to change its disclosures of the product ... the European Union
urged member states to look into warranty practices by Apple, and noted that
Denmark, Finland, and Luxembourg were currently in the midst of investigations.
[Recently], the EU was also said to be scrutinizing Apple's agreements with
European wireless carriers over possible antitrust violations."
Apple's continued
refusal to offer a two-year warranty on its ipads was noteworthy since this was
by no means solely a problem in China. In all European countries (as in China),
a two-year warranty was the legislated standard, but Apple put its products in
those markets with only a one-year warranty, attracting government and legal
action in most of those nations, actions typically thwarted by the US State
Department, relieving Apple of obligation to conform to those countries'
domestic laws. To understand this clearly, the 'world standard', if I can
loosely use this expression, is a two-year warranty, but Apple executives
decided one year would be the world standard and simply imposed it on the rest
of the world, demanding that all other nations revise their consumer product
warranty policies to reflect the American view. And they did so with the full
backing of intense diplomatic bullying from the US State Department and
Department of Commerce. As you will soon see, many US firms in China follow
this pattern, totally ignoring local pollution laws, food contamination
restrictions, auto safety requirements, and a host of other laws and
regulations, on the basis that they answer only to 'a higher authority' and
thus follow only American standards which are by definition universal values
and the will of god.
The Media Spin
No articles
anywhere in the Western press listed the valid complaints against Apple, nor
did they inform their readers of the essential differences between warranties
in China and the US, vaguely mentioning only "minor infringements of
warranty regulations" instead of "major violations of the consumer
laws" of another country. Certainly, if the picture were reversed and it
were a Chinese company shortchanging American customers on warranties, we would
hear no talk of 'minor infringements'. Naturally, the Western media mounted
their white horse of morality and rode to Apple's rescue, primarily by omitting
all the dirty details of Apple's dealings in China, and secondarily by making
Apple the victim and soundly trashing China in the process with all manner of
unfair, unsupportable and quite dirty accusations. We had headlines screaming:
"Apple forced to apologise; Apple bends to the will of Beijing; Apple bows
to Chinese pressure; Apple has given in to intense pressure; Beijing's Bite of
the Apple; State Media's Attacks on Apple Rotten to the Core; China showing
itself for what it really is." Why all the bitter attacks on China and the
intense media pressure? After years of gentle treatment, Apple was finally
forced to obey China's consumer laws and stop cheating its customers. Nothing
more than that.
The Financial
Times' Tim Bradshaw wrote that, "Chinese state media outlets persisted
with prominent coverage lambasting Apple for being "greedy" and
"incomparably arrogant". True. And why not? Tim Cook and his
colleagues were unquestionably greedy and incomparably arrogant, having for
years refused gentle and private requests to clean up their act, believing
themselves pampered and immune. Why feel sorry for them? Cook knew his warranty
policies were against the law but felt he was higher than the law. Apple should
have been fined billions of dollars for their transgressions, and a dozen Apple
executives should have been charged with criminal offenses and put into prison.
Next time, they will be, and their arrogance will further spoil the landscape
for everyone. There was a mind-twisting article in the WSJ with no byline,
telling its readers, (apparently somehow according to Chairman Mao)
"Apple's desire to provide the best user experience" (don't make me
laugh) is a threat to China's one-party political system, and that Beijing had
no choice but to stomp on Apple. Did you get that? If 2% of Chinese citizens
like a foreign product, that could bring down the government. Now we know. Jamil
Anderlini of the Financial Times wrote that Volkswagen Hewlett-Packard,
Hyundai, McDonald's and Carrefour, had all been targeted "for relatively
minor consumer complaints", which was an outright lie. These companies and
others were indeed featured - not "targeted", and for reasons that
were major, not minor. The replacement of 400,000 defective transmissions at a
cost of several thousands of dollars each, hardly qualifies as 'minor'.
The media report I
found the most offensive was by the Chinese-Jewish-American Nailene Chou Wiest,
who claims to be a visiting professor at the College of Communication and
Design of Sun Yat-sen University (and also at Tsinghua University, a claim I
sincerely hope is untrue). This woman decried the fact that the issue was becoming
political, then quickly politicised it, culminating with deeply offensive
political insults against the entire Chinese people.
"... out of
desperation, state media pushed the anti-imperialist emotional button, which
has been programmed to produce rage in every Chinese since grade school. A
moth-eaten rant, reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution days. That
backfired."
What a stupid and
reprehensibly despicable thing for this woman to write. How dare she? Like a
great many non-Western nations, China suffered terribly under that imperialism
for more than 150 years, and the Chinese need much more rage than they have, to
ensure it never occurs again. It is not China, but the US and Israel who own
all the 'victim' buttons and 'rage' buttons programmed from childhood. What a
base and foul person this woman must be. How dare she make such statements?
This woman seems to specialise in trashing China. Some of her writing is just
ideological bad taste, but much is worse. In a Caixin article (where else) Wiest
trashed the CCTV program and the government with mockery, insults, and abuse of
her host country, cheap attempts to deflect blame from Apple's arrogant
law-breaking by looking to shame China for irrelevant events. I have no doubt
her vicious attitude does real harm to the minds of her students, and I cannot
imagine what the people at Sun Yat-sen or Tsinghua University think about, that
they would want such a person on their faculty.
Lastly, many
columnists in the Western media took note of what appeared to be Chinese people
posting comments on Weibo or WeChat that were supportive of Apple and critical
or even condemnatory of CCTV, China's government authorities, China itself, and
often listing China's "more serious" problems that deserved priority.
I have news for you. Few, if any, of those posters were actually Chinese, and
were almost certainly making their posts from Langley, Virginia, not Changsha
or Shenzhen.
Epilogue
Times change. By
early 2016, Apple experienced its first quarterly revenue drop in 13 years, the
stock had fallen to a two-year low, iPhone sales suffered a worldwide slowdown
with China accounting for about one-third of the total sales decline, Apple's
sales in China plunged by 35% in only a few months and Apple's market position
plummeted precipitously from first place to sixth, overtaken by almost
everybody - including the apparently invisible Xiaomi. In fact, as a direct
result of its predatory arrogance, Apple is in such dire straits in China that
in late 2016, Apple's iphones were cheaper in China than they were in the US,
all sellers in this crucial market pushing deep discounts to get the product to
move. Apple executives declined to comment on the reasons for the massive
lowering of their prices in China, nor on the facts that their market share was
disintegrating by the week while sales of Chinese-branded smart phones like
Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo were soaring. In a separate, but equally welcome,
blessing, the profits of Foxconn, the manufacturer and assembler of Apple's
products, also suffered a 35% drop in operating profit. And Tim Cook was
magically transformed from peacock to sycophant, coming to China not to strut
and boast but to kneel, kiss and beg, conducting a charm offensive without the
charm, the haughty self-importance and arrogance transformed to humility:
"We are happy to work with you. We are proud to work with you. We are
humble to work with you." Yeah. Until the next time.
According to
Michael Schuman of the Wall Street Journal, Cook was in China "wowing
government officials and customers", though media reports were a bit short
on anybody actually being 'wowed'. We were told Cook was on an official visit
"to learn more" about the Chinese market, which claim was apparently
a cover for his real purpose of "making a down payment on a better
relationship in China" by showing that Apple was "becoming more
Chinese". How nice. Too bad he didn't do that a few years earlier when it
might have made a difference. By 2016 nobody much cared anymore, and the common
sentiment was that Cook preferably become either North Korean or Vietnamese
instead of Chinese, those other two countries not being noted for their
fussiness in welcoming ethnic wannabes. And, in late 2016, Apple lost the
copyright violation lawsuit and was ordered by a Chinese court to pay 1 million
RMB to eight Chinese writers and two book companies whose copyrights were
infringed by Apple selling their works illegally online and not paying
royalties.
I have no
particular dislike for Apple's products, and there has always been a small but
hard-core group of Apple fanatics who loved everything Apple. And in some part,
for good reason. The company's computers were always preferred by those in
publishing or who dealt with graphics, or who just hated Microsoft - a category
that must include almost everyone everywhere. In any case, for those purposes
and those people, Apple satisfied their small market very well and, more
recently, some of their offerings have been cute and possessed a genuine cool
factor. It's the company and its executives I despise, not the products, a
distinction I do not make for other American companies like General Motors. But
the truth is that Apple's market has always been a niche and is unlikely to
ever become more. The old ipods and their ilk were cute, useful, and quickly
dead. They were fads. The iphone was also largely a fad, not the phone part but
the 'i' part. In the end, a phone is a phone and, while Apple did reach the
market first with some attractive features, the market has hundreds of
comparable products at better prices and without the service and warranty
frauds and inconveniences. Many of them also have better quality and
reliability, especially the higher-end Chinese and Korean brands. In terms of
the higher-priced products like expensive computers, Apple has always been a
small niche player of attraction to advertising and publishing personnel but to
few others. There is nothing to suggest this will ever change.
It is only the
iphone and ipad that gave Apple the big surge and goosed the company's stock to
a level insane by economic standards but, with the diminished novelty and fad
factor combined with the rampant price-gouging and fraudulent practices, the
sales are now not only experiencing moderated growth but are falling, in some
places dramatically. The pace was sustained so long as Apple brought very new
products and ideas to market, but those are gone and there is nothing in the
pipeline now but more of the same. And of course, competitors have not been
sitting still, evidenced by the substantial drops in Apple's sales and market
shares, and certainly abetted by Cook's shoddy ethics. Given these factors and
the very bad taste in China's mouth (and not only China!), the iphone will in
another few years be just another phone and the ipad just another tablet, and
Apple will have retreated back into its niche, no longer "the most
valuable tech company in the world" and no longer on anyone's mind.
Probably the majority of products emanating from the US have had the same
experience. Literally hundreds of "world-famous" American brands have
disappeared, partly due to natural life cycle but mostly due to the American
lack of competitiveness and respect for quality. Apple's success was
transitory, due solely to a couple of good ideas that have now run their
course. Apple's products have already been matched and surpassed, and will soon
be forgotten, leaving only that small hard core. Cook's dream of being the
market leader in China and China being Apple's largest market are an
astonishing delusion, leaving me to conclude Cook will be gone and forgotten
even before his products earn that fate.
Lastly, we should
try to nip in the bud the false and foolish mythical narrative that is already
being built about Steve Jobs. In earlier chapters, I tried to explain how the
Americans build marketing myths which are then promulgated to the world as fact.
The legends about people like Einstein, Bell, Edison, and the stories about
products like Coca-Cola and Nike, are all fiction, simply the brand marketing
of America. This marketing machine applies equally as much to the myth of
American education, health care, food safety, or business practices being
'superior' to those of other countries. The only thing superior about the US is
the brand marketing. The historical spin masters are at it again, this time
creating yet another mythical narrative about Steve Jobs. We already have
thousands of people sitting up all night, attributing to Jobs hundreds of wise
sayings that he never actually said.
The Financial
Times' Tim Bradshaw wrote of Apple "living up to the vision of Steve
Jobs", and Paul Hudson wrote that Jobs "almost singlehandedly shaped
the history of the past three decades". Wow. Well, let's see. What were
the major historical events of those past three decades? Certainly the rise of
China. We had the Sichuan earthquake, the tsunami in Indonesia, and the 2008 US
financial meltdown. We saw the invasion and destruction by the US of
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the US overthrow (twice) of the government
in the Ukraine, as well as all the CIA's "color revolutions". We had
AIDS, Ebola, SARS and MERS. We had hundreds of enormous mass protests like
Occupy Wall Street, in dozens of cities in the Western world, popular revolts
against the ruling class and the bankers for their extermination of the middle
class. We had the collapse of the European economy and the death of Greece. I
would ask Hudson how, exactly, Steve Jobs shaped any of those events,
singlehandedly or otherwise. We did of course have the death of the ipod and
birth of the ipad but, in light of the events listed above, the significance of
these latter two, on a scale of one to ten, would be approximately zero. Hudson
did admit that Apple (under Jobs) had "a negative impact" in
"certain parts of the world", that many of Jobs' methods were
"questionable", and that Apple's (Jobs') actions were "instrumental
in the suffering of many". But that was okay, because Jobs turned Apple
into "the most powerful and wealthy company in the world". How nice.
Before we get
carried away turning yet another ordinary American into a god, let's look at
Jobs' 'questionable methods' that were 'instrumental' in causing 'the suffering
of so many.' It was Steve Jobs who decided to subcontract the manufacture of
his iphone, and who conspired with Foxconn to build a concentration camp for
1.5 million young kids, then to pay them almost nothing and put so much
pressure on them that they were committing suicide. We are so proud of Apple's
offshore cash pile of $150 billion, but we ignore the indisputable fact that if
Steve Jobs had paid a living wage to the people who made his products, that
cash pile would be zero. Steve Jobs was a predator who filled his pockets by
stealing from the weakest and most vulnerable. Almost all of Apple's profits
came from wage theft, not from good products or good management. And he didn't
need the money. Jobs already had $1 billion or more in his own bank account
when he re-joined Apple. Steve Jobs was a sociopath driven by greed, not by
'innovation'. I have no particular dislike for Apple's products, and some of
their offerings have been cute and possessed a genuine cool factor. But that is
not a reason to airbrush Jobs' basic inhumanity out of the picture and build
foolish and totally false historical myths about a man who deserves as much to
be condemned as glorified.
To accompany Paul
Hudson in his delusion, we had some shamefully naive Chinese writing in an
article that "Steve Jobs changed the world by his innovative thinking and
deep insight of human beings." Jesus. I have no idea how many people I
will offend with my comments, but Steve Jobs absolutely DID NOT "change
the world", not in any sense, Look out the window. The world you see out
there is the same world that existed 100,000 years ago, and none of the changes
you can identify as occurring since that time were made by Steve Jobs. Further,
there is no evidence that Jobs had any insight, deep or otherwise, into human
beings and, if he did have, he ignored it and spent most of his time deeply
offending everyone he met. To say Jobs was difficult to get along with, is
quite an understatement. Steve Jobs was not a hero, he was not a prophet, he
was not a visionary, he was not illuminated by the gods, he could not heal the
sick, he could not predict the future, and he wasn't even a nice person. Steve
Jobs was a greedy sociopath, an insufferable, obnoxious ass who designed a cute
mobile phone, and that's the whole story. Live with it.
Apple
Imperialism
Tim Cook was
accused by all and sundry of being obnoxiously arrogant and even defiant, and
of course he was. However, these qualities so common in American executives
toward foreign countries do not occur naturally, but instead spring from the US
State Department, The Department of Commerce, and the military. Whenever an
American firm encounters restrictions on its profits in a foreign land, the
State Department is always on hand to ensure that heavy fines do not ensue,
that criminal charges are never laid, and that American firms are made exempt
from local laws. The kinds and degrees of pressure the US is able (and eager)
to inflict on other nations is too long a list to provide here, but if you
think back to the Chapter on US bullying, many options will come to mind. Think
of the Standard Chartered Bank, where the company's refusal to adhere to US
'sanctions' on dealing with Iran led to the bank nearly losing its license to
conduct business in the US. If a country insists on forcing Apple into a longer
warranty against the "advice" of the State Department, that country's
banks in the US will suddenly find themselves the target of IRS tax audits -
one of the US government's favorite bullying tactics against governments,
corporations, charities, almost anyone. If China insists that Nike and
Coca-Cola begin paying living wages in their sweatshops, we will suddenly learn
that US warships have greatly increased their "freedom of navigation"
incursions into the South China Seas. Americans of course will scream that this
is paranoid delusionary, but it's not; these things occur constantly to any
country having commercial dealings with the US, even 'friends' like Canada or
the UK. When the US has trouble bullying Canada on a trade deal, we suddenly
see American naval vessels violating Canada's Arctic waters and the State
Department publishing photos of their submarine surfacing at the North Pole.
Anyone with access to diplomatic or consular officials of other nations would
learn some very surprising things by raising this issue with them in a private
moment. The point is that the obvious arrogance of an American executive
overseas is not self-generated but stems from the guaranteed protection of his
mother who is truly a nasty bitch when some stranger is mean to her little boy.
Therefore, much of
my above commentary on Apple and other American firms was part of a much larger
issue. I have written before that many apparently disconnected events are often
tightly integrated as part of a master plan, but that this becomes evident only
when we can juxtapose all the pieces and thus see the entire picture in one
view.
This infliction of
American standards on other nations is the main program of the TPP, a program
of imperialism conceived by a small group of European bankers to forcibly
impose their self-interested standards and values on all other nations, their
MNCs eventually becoming supra-national entities like a kind of commercial NATO
accountable to no one and with the power to supersede the legislatures and
governments of sovereign states. The overall plan as clearly outlined in the
TPP is to eliminate national sovereignty, nations to become effectively controlled
by the MNCs and the bankers who are in most cases their eventual beneficial
owners. Consider that the matter of Apple's warranty was not an issue limited
to China but in fact existed in almost every nation outside the US. Consider
also that the matter involved not only Apple but includes Coca-Cola, Pepsi,
P&G, Disney, Big Pharma, banks, payment systems, Monsanto and its GM seed,
law courts, accounting standards, and much more. So, this isn't only Apple, and
not only China, but all American MNCs in all countries, a huge plan containing
thousands of parts, all being executed simultaneously. This category includes
international agreement on government procurement that are being heavily
pressed onto the governments of many nations, agreements which will set the
'standards' by which American business will compete for domestic government
projects in other nations. China wisely refused to take part in the last round
of these discussions, stating that the deals being presented by Washington
contained not "increased standards" but rather higher demands for
unilateral encroachment onto the sovereignty of other nations.
I would refer you
to the comments I made earlier about the imperialism embedded in the pricing
and warranty issues, and more especially of MNCs becoming the eventual
sovereign authorities, superseding local governments. Think now of the response
of Apple executives to Chinese consumers in the US, looking to bypass the
company's price-gouging by purchasing Apple products in a lower-price market. They
instructed staff to refuse the purchases, cancel the orders, and to call the
police to arrest their own customers - to enforce commercial laws that don't
even exist. Tim Cook's despicably racist commercial policy did not go unnoticed
by the State Department who most likely nodded in approval. This is so true
that while the response of Apple's executives to Chinese customers in America
is totally illegal, an appeal to a US court to strike down that policy would
certainly fail, with even the courts conceding Chinese customers are breaking
non-existent laws by wanting to buy iphones. This is one indication of the end
result if the US is permitted to force its so-called standards on other
countries. The people in every nation but the US will pay dearly into infinity
if American standards and American goods are not resisted and rejected.
As I noted in my
comments on Apple, the European Commission ordered Ireland to levy nearly $15
billion in taxes that should have been paid but were not, due to various too-clever
tax schemes. As you might expect, Apple executives responded with astonishing
arrogance. First, CEO Tim Cook went to the media to deny the factual claims of
the case, effectively accusing the European Commission tax authorities of being
liars. Then he wrote "a public letter" to warn the world that
collecting income taxes from his company threatened to "upend the
international tax system", meaning that income tax systems in all
countries of the world would immediately disintegrate if a foreign country
attempted to collect tax from an American company. He further went to the media
to claim that it might be reasonable for a government to "discuss"
taxes with an American company but that "that conversation should be about
future taxes, not retroactive taxes. The EU Commission’s overreach in this
regard, is unbelievable to us." And that means if I cheated on my taxes
last year, a government can 'discuss' with me the correct level of tax to pay
next year, but they have no right whatever to collect any taxes from me for the
prior year, because that would be "retroactive", the word coming from
the corporate MNC bible where god tells us we can be punished only for our
future crimes but not our past ones. That seems fair. So, for the European
Commission to punish Cook's criminality for the past year constitutes
"unbelievable overreach".
It should not pass
without comment that Cook's approach in both Ireland and in China was to bypass
the government and appeal to the people, giving them a one-sided story and hoping
to turn affection for his company's products into widespread public support for
his company, and into political pressure against the government. And of course,
the White House and US State Department were immediately flooding the media
with veiled threats and angry warnings about unfairly targeting American
companies. Perhaps the most interesting part of this fiasco was that the Irish
government didn't want the tax money from Apple, and stated it would appeal
through the courts the Commission's decision to give it the $15 billion as a
gift. You might recall that after the 2008 financial meltdown in the US reached
Europe, Ireland was one of the countries hardest hit, where the international
banks operating there had lost billions of dollars during their participation
in the fraud. But then, strangely, the Irish government, with no warning,
suddenly declared it would absorb in full all the billions in losses of those
banks, leaving the foreign bankers whole while the Irish people picked up the
bill for their frauds. You don't need an imagination to know who is really in
control of the government of Ireland. And who, except major Apple shareholders,
already holding the people of Ireland in contempt anyway, would want the
government (i.e., the taxpayers) of Ireland to refuse a $15 billion gift? Put
the pieces together and see what you get. Both the European Commission's
President and its Finance Ministers stated that Apple's executives failed to
grasp the extent of public outrage at the tax evasion practices of foreign MNCs
and their moral obligation to pay taxes, but that wasn't really true. Tim Cook
and his colleagues understood completely the public outrage; they just didn't
care because sociopaths are bereft of moral obligation and so it wasn't their
problem.
Thus, the tales of
Apple in China were only incidentally about Apple cheating Chinese consumers,
though that surely was one of the effects. The matter is primarily political
rather than commercial, US commerce in a sense getting a free ride on the deck
of a State Department battleship. All American MNCs are an integral part of the
puppet-master driving the American Imperial Machine and inflicting his
standards and values on all other nations while providing his MNCs with an
opportunity to bleed dry domestic populations in the process. So, it isn't so
simple as Americans believing they can disobey local laws because they are
Americans, though certainly this attitude exists. This is mostly political -
Imperialistic bullying at its worst, commercial extortion backed up by the US
State Department and military - the bankers' private army.
The enormous
negative media flood is an essential accompaniment, placing pressure on a
foreign government with violent and widespread media attacks containing tons of
unjustified accusations and innuendo, vicious attempts to blacken the country's
name and place it on the defensive, in an all-out offensive to intimidate that
country into a resignation where it finally permits American companies to
plunder in peace and quiet, unhampered by concepts of law or sovereignty. The
reason this isn't more obvious, and the reason few people are aware of it, is
due to control of the media by these same people, in fact the same charge these
people levy against China. Freedom of speech does not mean all are free to say
whatever they want; instead, it means the US and the tightly-controlled media
sources are free to propagandise the world without effective challenge. The bad
press that China and some other nations receive, functions as a smoke screen to
obfuscate and confuse the core issues by flooding the subject with
irrelevancies, and shifting the focus in this case from the arrogant
criminality of American corporate executives in China to China's alleged
bullying and authoritarian nature, eventually painting the victim (China) as
the aggressor and the criminal (Apple and other) as the victim. The media
accomplish this primarily by providing only sound bytes and never detail, the
theme accompanied only by accusations lacking substance or support. The method
is generally effective, at least on Americans who have become hopelessly
ignorant after generations of this treatment. It is, however, bothersome that
some Chinese too eagerly buy into the false narrative. The American executives
persist, and the Chinese government is reluctant to punish them severely
because of all the bad foreign press it would receive. But China is
experiencing the bad foreign press anyway, and should shut down for 6 months
American companies like Apple, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and so many more,
until they learn to behave.
It often occurs
that something permissible in one country is not permissible in another. Each
country, including the US, has its own standards and laws, due to differences
in culture and legal system. If I want to market a product in the US, I must
adhere to American law; it will avail me little to violate US standards or
laws, then claim in my defense that my actions were legal in my country. US
courts would respond with, "Well, you're in America now, and you obey our
laws." And that's the right approach - except for the Americans, who
attempt to forcibly export their standards and laws to every other nation,
using precisely the excuse that their actions are legal at home and, since all
American standards are universal values that reflect the natural yearnings of
all mankind, the laws and standards of all other nations can be safely ignored.
This is why the precedent has been set in the US, and is being demanded in many
other nations, for the full legal immunity of corporate executives, a practice
meant and planned to be instituted on a world-wide basis, the situation that
will obtain when the TPP, TPIP and other similar schemes have been implemented.
It is preparation for the gradual elimination of national sovereignty to be
replaced by panels of European bankers and executives of their MNCs. This is
the reason the Americans are pushing so hard for a reformation of China's legal
system, especially items like the 'plea-bargaining' now being instituted; to
remove the judiciary from the judicial process and put it into the hands of
lawyers who will decide verdicts, evidence and punishments. It is why the
Americans are pushing China so hard to institute Western-style property taxes
on private homes and residences; the plan is that eventually all national
governments will have only two functions: tax collection and citizen
suppression, making an enlarged tax base important.
A hard look at the
pattern developing by the American (and some other foreign) MNCs offers a
realistic view of the future of the world, if this push is not strenuously
resisted. Remember, this push is not American; rather, the Americans are the
puppets, the front-line soldiers doing someone else's bidding; the bankers'
private army. The threat applies to much more than phone warranties or
manufacturing defects. It includes all regulations relating to food and product
safety, labor, the environment, pharmaceuticals and more. It includes taxes and
government procurement, the privatisation of public assets like health care,
education, communications, infrastructure, and the dismemberment of China's
SOEs. It is this that is responsible for the frantic pressure on China to
stifle its development by abandoning investment and exports and turning to
consumption. Firms like Coca-Cola and Schering-Plough outsourcing their staff
to avoid paying the costs of statutory benefits, an anti-social practice
intended to be, and is now being, slowly implemented in many nations. This is
responsible for the intense pressure on patents, copyrights and IP generally,
to concentrate economic control in a relatively small number of corporate and
banking entities. It is all about eventual economic control of national
economies, to be concentrated in only a few hands. This is already obvious in
the food industry, the manufacture and distribution of many consumer products
and FMCG goods, in health standards, in baby milk production, in labor
practices and property taxes.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on
more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30
countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff
is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior
executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an
international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at
Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs
to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing
a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China
Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with
Demons).
His full archive
can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted
at:
Copyright
© Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2022
