Tim Cook, The Apple of My Eye?

Over at a financial forum...

Sorry, this needs correcting… Apple CEO Tim Cook – 60 minutes interview

Charlie Rose: Will there be, at some point in the near future, a bigger market than the United States?

Tim Cook: And not just the numbers of people, but the numbers of people moving into the middle class. That, for a consumer company is the thing that really begins to grow the market in a big way.

Charlie Rose: And most Americans would be surprised to know that nearly all Apple products are manufactured by one million Chinese workers in the factories of Apple contractors, including its largest: Foxconn. Yet Tim Cook insists that China's vast and cheap labor force is not the primary reason for manufacturing there.

Charlie Rose: So if it's not wages, what is it?
Tim Cook: It's skill.

Charlie Rose: Skill?

?Tim Cook: It's skill. It's that Chi--

Charlie Rose: They have more skills than American workers? They have more skills than--

Tim Cook: Now-- now, hold on.

Charlie Rose: --German workers?

Tim Cook: Yeah, let me-- let me-- let me clear, China put an enormous focus on manufacturing. In what we would call, you and I would call vocational kind of skills. The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we're currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.

Tim Cook on repatriating Apple's outsourced operations: I'd love to bring it home.

Charlie Rose: Why don't you?

Tim Cook: Because it would cost me 40 percent to bring it home. And I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do. This is a tax code, Charlie, that was made for the industrial age, not the digital age. It's backwards. It's awful for America. It should have been fixed many years ago. It's past time to get it done.

According to its most recent internal review, Apple has limited the work week to 60 hours, raised pay, and cracked down on child labor. But 30 percent of the facilities that make its products around the world still do not meet Apple's own safety standards.

Tim Cook: We believe that a company that has values and acts on them can really change the world.

About coming out….Tim Cook: When you're in a minority group, it gives you a sense of empathy of what it's like to be in the minority. And you begin to look at things from different point of views. And I think it was a gift for me.

"it would take the average Foxconn worker more than 31 months, or about two-and-a-half years, to earn enough money to afford the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition they are helping to build. That’s assuming a monthly base wage of 2000 Chinese yuan ($320), according to China Labor Watch" –MarketWatch.

We Natter: Click on that MarketWatch piece, its worthy insight. Cook is nothing more than one of a long list of professional corporate liars like most SillyCON Valley CEO's are. Despite the good paying manufacturing jobs being outsourced by CEO's like Cook, and therefore the schools no longer teaching skills for jobs that NO LONGER EXIST, the skills are still here.  Witness our steelworkers who have been locked out since August, proving that corporate liars like Cook are nothing more than greedy, as they just don't want to pay a decent living wage much less a "middle class" wage. 

Yeah if only our people would work 60 hours a week for $320 a month like the Foxconn "middle class" slave labor, and Apple could pay no tax. So much for that MINORITY EMPATHY of Cook's, his corporate values and giving a shit about what he calls "the middle class".  

The disconnect that Cook and those of his ilk suffer from is starting to come home to roost.  Namely, those Foxconn workers can't afford the non essentials they manufacture, and neither can the corporate dispossessed victims of outsourcing to labor at the margin. Well at least Foxconn did put up some nets around their Pottersville corporate housing to catch the jumpers. That way the workers in hock to the corporate store can't commit suicide. See, they do care. 

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all and I'm only going to say the nicest thing I can.  Mr. Cook, you were brave enough to come out of the closet. So quit pretending, your actions speak louder than words and as it is plain to see, we know what you are.  Until you can grow and show a real pair of balls, by doing the right thing instead of the greedy thing, you and your corporate ilk can stick it where the sun don't shine.