WHAT WENT WRONG? -- The betrayal of the American Dream

As Apple grew, American workers left behind

Photo by Bobby Yip, Reuters--  Many of Foxconn's
factories, like this one in Longhua in southern China,
installed nets to discourage workers from jumping to
their deaths last year. Foxconn manufactures many
Apple products. June 2, 2010 file photo.

 By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

This story is being co-published with The Philadelphia Inquirer, which will host a live chat at 1 p.m. Monday. 

The death of Steve Jobs was followed by an avalanche of superlatives — brilliant, genius and visionary among the more common. He was likened to Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison.
But in the case of Edison, there was one significant difference that went unmentioned. For more than a century, just one of Edison’s inventions alone — the incandescent light bulb —was manufactured at numerous locations in the United States, providing employment for millions of Americans across family generations.

The Apple home computer not at all. After only one generation, all the Apple manufacturing jobs in America disappeared, as the work of building and assembling the machines was turned over to laborers in sweatshops in China and other countries. Jobs that should have provided employment for Americans for decades to come were terminated.

For Apple, the corporation, the system functioned beautifully. This year the company had more cash in its bank accounts than the U.S. Treasury. And for one day, Monday, Sept. 19, the company was the most valuable corporation on the planet, its stock worth $382 billion. It was a sum that exceeded even the worth of Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest international oil and gas company.

Needless to say, Apple proved a disaster for its onetime production workers. It turned out to be a classic bait-and-switch con for working folks. One day they held jobs that allowed them to do all the things people had come to expect from their employment. The next day the jobs were gone.
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Now You've Gone and Made Newt Cry

Newt Gingrich... So Sad!

Sam Stein reports that little Newtie is feeling all sorry for himself now that he's tanking in Iowa after being barraged by 10 million dollars worth of negative ads:

At the Rotary Club, he waxed nostalgic about the old days, recalling -- in a sanitized way -- how he had run a "positive" campaign to taker over the House based on his "Contract with America."

"It was a positive, issue-oriented campaign that fall," he told the Rotarians. He said he had wanted to do the same in the presidential campaign but had been blindsided by how nasty and "cynical" the contest was. "We got off to a bad start," he said. "I can't do modern politics." A tired Gingrich suddenly looked the part of the college professor he once was.

Right. He don't know nothin' bout all this negativity. He's just an old country perfesser --- a political Mr Chips, if you will --- who got caught in the crossfire of modern political warfare. 

Except, of course, he invented the weaponry used against him:

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