For weeks now, I’ve been metaphorically lugging Steve Jobs around with me. I bought Walter Isaacson’s biography shortly after Jobs died, but I got side-tracked by the controversy over hazardous working conditions at the plants in China where Apple products are manufactured.

Once I started reading, I was again wowed by Jobs’ early vision for personal computers and how his interest in both Zen Buddhism and calligraphy, not to mention the influence of LSD, shaped his sensibilities. They seemed to explain the elegance and grace that Apple products have always communicated.

But then I would come across a passage in which Jobs treated a friend, relative or worker with such unspeakable cruelty that I’d have to put the book down before finishing a chapter. The more familiar Jobs was with the object of his abuse, the meaner he permitted himself to act.

He saw things (and people) in black and white. Objects were excellent or “shit.” Food was delicious or inedible. People were A Team or idiots. People around Jobs referred to his “reality distortion field.” No matter how difficult the engineering or design demand he placed on them, he refused to believe it was impossible. Time, materials, logistics, even human ability, were all fungible. He had a vision, and he refused to surrender it.

I found Isaacson’s biography remarkably even-handed. But this is not a book review. My point here is political.

While Jobs struggled against the cancer that would kill him, his wife, Laurene Powell, learned that President Obama was coming to California, and she wanted him to meet her remarkable husband. A meeting was arranged in late 2010 at a hotel near the San Francisco airport, and Apple’s CEO pulled no punches with the nation’s chief executive.

The first thing Jobs told Obama was that he was headed for just one term unless he changed his ways. At the top of Jobs’ agenda was that the President needed to be more business-friendly. Jobs reminded him how easy it is to set up a factory in China versus doing the same thing in the United States, how the regulations and costs weighed business down.

Then Jobs attacked the American education as “hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules.” Teachers needed to be treated as professionals, and principals need to be able to hire and fire them at will. After bending Obama’s ear for forty-five minutes, Jobs offered to set up a meeting with other Silicon Valley industry leaders.

More about that later. First, let’s unpack Jobs’ initial advice. Those regulations that Jobs railed against include safety and environmental laws that protect workers, residents and the surrounding countryside. They include taxes that pay for roads and public services to a factory and that fund public schools for the workers’ children. (Elizabeth Warren says it better, but you get the point.)

In China, young workers migrate from the countryside and move into dorms. Since they do not bring their families, no one worries about new schools. And since they arrive by public transportation, no facilities must be arranged for their vehicles (and, of course, it’s easier to control their comings and goings.) Although working conditions have improved some due to international public pressure, business negotiates with the central government, not the locals or unions. For workers, that means no health or disability insurance. No workmen’s compensation. Environmental requirements are negligible. Do we really want this Paradise here? Isn’t it possible for corporations to operate profitably in a more equitable environment?

And, as for teachers, Jobs made a mistake shared by so many in the business and financial community. “Professionalizing” teachers should not put them at risk of being fired summarily. Time and time again, Isaacson reports that Jobs dismissed engineers because their solutions were pedestrian or they were part of a team that lost a competition within the company. And then there were his legendary tirades against workers and colleagues at their most vulnerable points.

At Apple, Jobs created an atmosphere where people lived by his rules and his whims in order to be a part of a ground-breaking enterprise. Eventually, Apple hired people to soften the consequences of his arbitrariness, and because of the phenomenal growth of the Silicon Valley tech industry, we can probably assume that most workers Jobs discarded were able to find employment elsewhere. Let’s not forget that Jobs himself was kicked out because he alienated so many people. His return restored Apple’s visionary mission, but I don’t think it’s a good model for education or for governing.

Elsewhere in the book, Jobs and his archrival, Bill Gates, discuss the disappointing lack of impact of electronic technology on education. Like them, I’d hoped that electronics would lighten the heavy load of textbooks that students carry, and I’m sorry there haven’t been more breakthroughs in electronic instruction. But certainly that is not the fault of teachers or of the National Education Association or of the American Federation of Teachers.

Public education is a social as well as an intellectual enterprise. Ideally, it takes place in a supportive, humane community. The best teachers struggle to reach every student, but often they must compensate for factors beyond their control like poverty, family dysfunction, and poor facilities. If teachers were truly treated as professionals, they would not have to look over their shoulders for punitive administrators.

Because of Jobs’ deteriorating health, he didn’t see President Obama again until February 2011 when the venture capitalist John Doerr scheduled a dinner in Palo Alto that included Jobs and executives from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Cisco, Oracle, Genetech and Netflix among others. And, Isaacson reports, the conversation became a litany about what the President might do for them rather than what they might do for their country.

One mentioned a tax holiday for overseas profits in return for investing domestically, but Jobs pressed the education issue again. In China where Apple employed 700,000 workers, it hired 30,000 engineers to oversee them. In the United States, he would be hard-pressed to find 30,000 engineers, he said, and he was not looking for people who were geniuses or PhD’s, but simply knew enough about basic manufacturing to run the factories. Those aren’t available in America, he insisted.

This rightly captured the President’s imagination, although he does not seem to have created a program to address it. He’s had a hard time even convincing Congress to keep down interest rates on student loans, and I wonder if he really believes there will be jobs for those engineers if we educate them.

Nevertheless, the conversation between Jobs and the President offers valuable insight about the dilemma in which we find ourselves as a nation. Republicans have sold the idea that any regulation or restraint or enforced taxation on the business and financial sectors is anti-American. Both Democrats and Republicans have even encouraged industry to send its jobs abroad and found no way to tax profits parked overseas. With pressure to keep down public expenditures, the President has diminished avenues to create jobs.

Many people have hailed Steve Jobs as the Benjamin Franklin of our day; he may have seen himself that way. My view is that he was more like Thomas Jefferson, a person with high ideals and a refined sense of design and innovation who remained deliberately ignorant of the inhumane conditions necessary to sustain his vision. Whichever comparison you favor, keep in mind that Franklin and Jefferson lived before the industrial revolution and the evolution of a consumer society. These exponentially magnified Jobs’ accomplishments and the consequences of his actions.

Of course, Jobs was not alone in profiting from China’s labor and oppressive leadership. Most of his competitors use the same factories, and Apple has used its leverage to improve working conditions. But the mentality in Silicon Valley seems unchanged. As Facebook goes public, it has been revealed that one of its founders, Eduardo Saverin, took up citizenship in Singapore in order to avoid paying U.S. income tax on his payout. He’s one of 1800 U.S. citizens who bailed out of this country last year.

Being a genius in one realm does not qualify one as a genius in another. Jobs was too individualistic and self-obsessed to design or rescue a democratic society. China’s totalitarian politics seem not to have bothered him much, nor will Singapore’s bother Saverin. But we must resist the urge to let business innovators dictate domestic policy, and I don’t believe that forcing them to contribute their fair share of taxes will kill innovation.

I doubt Obama ever dreamed of creating a new machine. But his 2008 campaign did convince me that he knew how to restore our society. I thought he understood the damage being done to our nation by out-of-control financial and government institutions and the undermining of the middle class. I thought he understood that the life of our planet hangs in the fragile balance. And I thought he could inspire us to achieve through democratic means. But, unlike Jobs, the President sees things in infinite shades of gray, and it often makes him unable to act decisively.

Like a lot of Democrats, I hope he’ll step out of the reality distortion field created by the mega-rich and amplified by Fox News and remind us how democracy allows genius to thrive but it demands something in return. I’d like to see a plan for educating 30,000 engineers that doesn’t demonize teachers and their unions. We might begin by offering them interest-free student loans for higher education and a job when they graduate. And, of course, they should have access to union membership.

So Mike Daisey has recast his show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” and apologized again and again, and he seems to get more sincere as he progresses.
http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/2012/03/some-thoughts-after-storm.html

And other interesting things happened in the Apple orchard.

First, Apple stockholders will get a dividend of $2.65 a share, something they haven’t seen since 1995. Apple will use some $45 billion over the next three years to pay these dividends and to buy back some of its outstanding shares.

And Apple responded to a growing number of petitions, protests and the cries of labor rights organizations and advocacy groups by releasing the names of more than 150 suppliers and saying that it “shares the Fair Labor Association’s goal of improving lives and raising the bar for manufacturing companies everywhere.”

Foxconn Technology, which manufactures about 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics and makes both iPads and iPhones, has agreed to curtail working hours and improve working conditions across China. By July 2013, it promised that no worker will labor more than 49 hours per week, the legal Chinese limit, and that pay will not decline. This will require the Taiwan-based company to hire tens of thousands more workers to pick up the extra work.

And, last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook paid a visit to China, where he visited a Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou where iPhones are made. Earlier in Beijing, he met with its mayor and with Vice Prime Minister Li Keqiang, who is expected to be the next prime minister. (Lest we assume Chinese politics are predictable, the Chinese in the same week closed multiple websites and arrested six people for spreading rumors via the internet that there were cracks in the top leadership.)

All this gives me hope that in Tim Cook, Apple has found a leader that understands that Apple’s consumers expect great electronic devices produced under humane conditions. Notice that it was public television, not Apple, that took Mike Daisey to task. Another corporation might have waged a smear campaign. Somewhere in his heart, Cook must have known that while Daisey fudged the details and heightened their dramatic impact, he was on to something.

Of course, Apple still has about $64 billion in foreign profits parked abroad on which it has paid no taxes. The electronic giant isn’t alone in this. Bloomberg News reports that 70 large firms— including GE, Microsoft and Pfizer—are holding roughly $1.2 trillion abroad. Apparently, they are waiting for a tax holiday like the one Republicans gave them in 2004 when they can bring home the cash.

When our government from the highest levels to the smallest municipalities are cutting essential services and slashing jobs, this may be seen as “good business,” but it hardly feels patriotic. And now that Citizens United has made corporate campaign donations limitless and anonymous, it’s difficult not to imagine that these companies aren’t looking for politicians who will let them off the tax hook.

If Tim Cook wanted to be a real hero, he might pledge some of Apple’s $64 billion to providing more engineering education in the United States and to developing giant manufacturing complexes here. Or he could pay the tax . Apple, once a corporate underdog, could be our 21st century model.

p.s. Clyde Prestowitz who knows a lot more about globalization than I do is a lot more critical of Apple than I was http://prestowitz.foreignpolicy.com/

This has been a humiliating week for Mike Daisey. Now that he has confessed on public radio (Marketplace and This American Life) that parts of his monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” were fictionalized to “get through to people emotionally,” he has to wonder if anyone will trust him again.

For Daisey, there are “different languages for what truth means.” What he does is theater not journalism. But for TAL’s Ira Glass, “When we present something as true, we believe in its factual accuracy.”

When TAL began to fact-check the story told in Daisey’s monologue, parts of which were aired in early January 2012, Daisey said he was conflicted. He came close to confessing that it wasn’t literally true. No, he didn’t see the workers a thousand miles away damaged by using hexane to clean iPad screens. No, he didn’t document that a worker he met at the Foxconn plant was 12. No, he didn’t go to ten factories, only five. No, there were not 25 or 30 workers organizing against Foxconn practices, may five, or less.

While he was tempted to ask that his story not be aired, his nerve failed. Because, Mike Daisey believed that the monologue is “the best work I’ve ever made.”

And I believe him, because I was moved. And, I admit, it fits the narrative in my head. He didn’t have to persuade me that horrendous labor practices that we would never allow in the United States exist in China and other industrializing countries. Nor did I have to be convinced that if Apple is the most powerful company in the world and that it makes a 20 percent profit on every item that it markets, it can afford to treat people well. After all, with the death of Steve Jobs, we had learned how he drove and, yes, short-changed Americans who worked hard for him and for Apple. I can understand why a man like Daisey, whose singular talent is to absorb the world around him and weave it into narrative, was tempted to take liberties. Goliath was his adversary.

And when offered a single sheet of paper that theater personnel passed out after I saw Daisey perform this winter, I used it to construct a blog in which I uncritically amplified his views. I knew that the New York Times had just published (on January 26, 2012) an article that was triggered by staffers who heard the monologue and met with him. In “The IECONOMY; In China, the Human Costs that Are Built into an iPad,” Charles Duhigg and David Barboza wrote with the help of researcher Gu Huini that, “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.”

They’re not retracting that.

Duhigg appeared on the show co-produced by TAL and Marketplace, whose reporter Rob Schmitz documented the inconsistencies in Daisey’s story. Duhigg puts Chinese manufacturing problems into two buckets. In one, are labor practices deemed harsh by American standards: coercion to work more than 60 hours a week, workstations with backless chairs or standing room only, overcrowded dormitories, work in factories still under construction. These may be unacceptable here, but given the rapid pace of industrialization, perhaps they should be acceptable in China, he argues.

In the other bucket, we have life-threatening safety conditions, such as the two explosions in Apple factories caused by an accumulation of aluminum dust from polishing iPad cases. Causes of the first explosion in Chengdu were largely ignored, and the second explosion in Shanghai killed four people and injured another 77. The remedy? Ventilation by fans. These problems, Duhigg maintains, are the ones we should not tolerate.

I’m not entirely convinced. Not many people can stand in one place even for an eight hour shift without extreme discomfort, and I wouldn’t want to return to a room with 20 or 30 other people at the end of a reasonable shift, much less two 12-hour back-to-back ones. I know Chinese workers are younger, hungrier, and have fewer choices than American workers, but I also want to remember that they are equally human.

But on to the issue of the truth, I have to side with Ira Glass. The “traditional” meaning of truth is factual. Accuracy counts, especially in public media. And how many lies recycled from the right (Obama is a Muslim. Unrestrained free markets lead to more wealth for all. God wants women to obey men. Poor people are lazy.) are the deep conviction of the people who repeat them? Why is it that Fox News viewers are less informed than people who watch no media?

Public radio and television are beacons in our society. However imperfect we may find them, their struggle for survival is crucial. Glass must have known his neck was on the chopping block as soon as he heard that Marketplace had located the translator Daisey said was unreachable. No one can afford to broadcast disinformation about the most powerful corporation on earth without consequences. He got an apology from Daisey and an admission that he misrepresented the facts. You could tell he wanted Daisey to call himself a liar, but he didn’t.

Progwoman is about opinion. I gather information from a wide variety of sources filter it through a variety of lens and try to give it shape. I don’t confuse blogging with investigative reporting or with theater, and I hope you won’t either. I’m only as good as what I read, see and hear, and I want to acknowledge errors, because it builds trust with my readers.

Regardless of Daisey’s liberties, Chinese workers are assembling the new iPad as I write. You might want to tell Apple CEO Tim Cook that you haven’t forgotten about them at tcook@apple.com

It’s too bad right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart never met Derrick Bell, because it might have made him a better man.

Of all the news that surfaced after Breitbart’s sudden death, I was most stunned by the evidence that he was preparing to use Professor Bell to attack President Obama. Perhaps you’ve seen the clips of The Hug, taken by WGBH in 1991 while Obama was a student at Harvard Law School. Student Obama introduced Professor Bell to a crowd protesting the lack of faculty diversity. Then, they embraced. This happened the year after Bell had lost his tenured position owing to his taking unpaid leave in protest the school’s failure to hire a black woman as a tenured professor. He was one of three black men on the faculty, but he recognized that black women need a role model, and there were none. Harvard dragged its institutional feet, and he never returned to teach. But his legacy lived on there long after he accepted a position as Visiting Professor at New York University.

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Mike Daisey looks nothing like Steve Jobs. He’s obese and pale-skinned, like you’d expect someone to look after spending too much time using technology rather than marketing it. He grew up in Maine, not California. At 35, he is not rich, and you suspect that even when he’s 56, as Jobs was when he died, Daisey still won’t be wealthy.

The black shirts Daisey wears have an open collar, not a turtleneck, but I thought for a moment on Tuesday night at the Public Theater that he was going to play Jobs in his monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” He didn’t; he played himself. And he’s pretty impressive.

The monologue is about Daisey’s travels to Shenzhen, China, where more than half the world’s electronics are made.

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