Apple: Underage Workers May Have Built Your iPhone
That iPhone you adore may have been built by a child.
Nearly a dozen underage teens were working for Apple-contracted facilities in 2009, the company has revealed. The news was posted to Apple’s Web site under a section labeled “Supplier Responsibility.”
Apple’s Child Labor Discovery
The underage workers, Apple says, were at three different suppliers’ facilities. Though the specific locations aren’t disclosed, the report says inspectors visited facilities in China, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States. The factories in question built iPhones, iPods, and various Apple computers.
“Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, although the workers were no longer underage or no longer in active employment at the time of our audit,” the report says.
The legal age in the facilities’ countries, according to Apple’s report, is 16. The workers in question were only 15 when they were hired.
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More towns and cities print their own money
February 15, 2010 by supermario
Filed under Economy
smartmoney.com
Last year, two Detroit tavern owners were sitting at the bar, sampling their beverages and bemoaning the local economy — no one in the city had cash, and when they did, they spent it in the suburbs. Then the pair hit on a solution: Print their own money.
It is, after all, perfectly legal for anyone to issue currency, as long as it doesn’t look too much like a U.S. dollar. Thus was born the Detroit cheer, a local scrip accepted by a handful of city businesses, including a pizzeria, an electrician and a doggy day care center.
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListWisconsin company erects billboard calling for President Obama’s impeachment
An unnamed company in Wisconsin has rented a billboard calling for President Obama’s impeachment — which is in no way meant to suggest that Obama has committed an impeachable offense, according to a representative for the group.
The billboard along Highway 41 in Oshkosh reads, “Impeach Obama.” The tagline says: “America’s small businesses are failing; help us spread the message.”
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VANCOUVER – The mascots were Itchy the Bedbug, Chewy the Rat and Creepy the Cockroach. The two showcase events: the Broken-Promise Slalom and the Housing Hurdles.
And so began on Sunday the public demonstration labeled the Poverty Olympics in Vancouver, where the Winter Games are only three days away and where residents of this hip, laid-back, economically strapped city are wondering why officials ever agreed to spend up to $6 billion in taxpayer money for the place to endure commercialism, network intrusions and a surge of surveillance cameras.
“Here in the socialist republic of Vancouver, Big Brother is suddenly very much alive,” said Joe Cutbirth, a journalism professor at the University of British Columbia and a transplanted Texan. “There’s a sense of, ‘What’s happening to our nice little community?’”
Yes, Toto and Dorothy Hamill, this is not Beijing anymore. You can tell that by the unfettered expressions of discontent, and the decided absence of official retaliation against an assortment of protesters.
Vigorous anti-Games demonstrations figure to continue right through the Opening Ceremony, possibly beyond. Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, Monday received a briefing by the Vancouver organizers about a large, planned protest march scheduled for Friday.
“For us, it’s not an issue,” Rogge insisted. “We accept protests. What we want is no violence.”
There is no denying that pretty little Vancouver has been unhappily overrun by the Olympics, often against its will. The poorer east side of the city, in particular, is understandably upset following the standard (remember Atlanta?), pre-Olympics homeless roundup.
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The city of Vancouver is picking up most of the price tag for the Olympic games that are scheduled to start this week. Many people are angry about this because most of the prices told to the people of Vancouver were under estimated. Many social services have to be cut because the city is trying to pick up the tab for the games.
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NEW YORK — The earthquake that killed more than 150,000 people in Haiti this month may have left clues to petroleum reservoirs that could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, a geologist said.
The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said Monday.
“A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn’t been drilled,” said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas, a Dallas-based company that’s drilling in Israel. “A discovery could significantly improve the country’s economy and stimulate further exploration.”
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February 2, 2010 by supermario
Filed under Economy
Eamon Javers
Politico.com
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.
Book Mark it-> del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Window Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkListPaulson accuses Russia of plotting to disrupt US economy
The former U.S. Treasury secretary has accused Russia of trying to undermine the American economy, shortly before the global recession.
Henry Paulson’s newly released memoirs claim Moscow approached China with a plan to devalue the assets of America’s key mortgage companies by dumping bonds.
Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows: Bloomberg News?
Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.
Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.
We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system — apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout — deserves further congressional scrutiny.
The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.
That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s own mid-September bankruptcy filing.
Saving the System
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time of the AIG moves. He maintained during Wednesday’s hearing that the New York bank had to buy the insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps, to keep AIG from failing, which would have threatened the financial system.
The hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also focused on what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed’s subsequent attempt to cover up buyout details and who benefited.
By pursuing this line of inquiry, the hearing revealed some of the inner workings of the New York Fed and the outsized role it plays in banking. This insight is especially valuable given that the New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve.
This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed’s bailout programs. It’s as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank.
Geithner’s Bosses
The New York Fed is one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks that operate under the supervision of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, chaired by Ben Bernanke. Member-bank presidents are appointed by nine-member boards, who themselves are appointed largely by other bankers.
As Representative Marcy Kaptur told Geithner at the hearing: “A lot of people think that the president of the New York Fed works for the U.S. government. But in fact you work for the private banks that elected you.”
And yet the New York Fed played an integral role in the government’s bailout of banks, often receiving surprisingly free rein to act as it saw fit.
Consider AIG. Let’s take Geithner at his word that a failure to resolve the insurer’s default swaps would have led to financial Armageddon. Given the stakes, you might think Geithner would have coordinated actions with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Yet Paulson testified that he wasn’t in the loop.
“I had no involvement at all, in the payment to the counterparties, no involvement whatsoever,” Paulson said.
Bernanke’s Denials
Fed Chairman Bernanke also wasn’t involved. In a written response to questions from Representative Darrell Issa, Bernanke said he “was not directly involved in the negotiations” with AIG’s counterparty banks.
You have to wonder then who really was in charge of our nation’s financial future if AIG posed as grave a threat as Geithner claimed.
Questions about the New York Fed’s accountability grew after Geithner on Nov. 24, 2008, was named by then-President- elect Barack Obama to be Treasury Secretary. Geither said he recused himself from the bank’s day-to-day activities, even though he never actually signed a formal letter of recusal.
That left issues related to disclosures about the deal in the hands of the bank’s lawyers and staff, rather than a top executive. Those staffers didn’t want details of the swaps purchase to become public.
New York Fed staff and outside lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardell edited AIG communications to investors and intervened with the Securities and Exchange Commission to shield details about the buyout transactions, according to a report by Issa.
That the New York Fed, a quasi-governmental body, was able to push around the SEC, an executive-branch agency, deserves a congressional hearing all by itself.
Later, when it became clear information would be disclosed, New York Fed legal group staffer James Bergin e-mailed colleagues saying: “I have to think this train is probably going to leave the station soon and we need to focus our efforts on explaining the story as best we can. There were too many people involved in the deals — too many counterparties, too many lawyers and advisors, too many people from AIG — to keep a determined Congress from the information.”
Think of the enormity of that statement. A staffer at a body with little public accountability and that exists to serve bankers is lamenting the inability to keep Congress in the dark.
This belies the culture of secrecy obviously pervasive within the New York Fed. Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns noted during the hearing that the bank initially refused to disclose even the names of other banks that benefited from its actions, arguing this information would somehow harm AIG.
‘Penchant for Secrecy’
“In fact, when the information was finally released, under pressure from Congress, nothing happened,” Towns said. “It had absolutely no effect on AIG’s business or financial condition. But it did have an effect on the credibility of the Federal Reserve, and it called into question the Fed’s penchant for secrecy.”
Now, I’m not saying Congress should be meddling in interest-rate decisions, or micro-managing bank regulation. Nor do I think we should all don tin-foil hats and start ranting about the Trilateral Commission.
Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.
(David Reilly is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aaIuE.W8RAuU
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithners denial that he played any role in the AIG cover-up is contradicted by emails which confirm that both Geithner and the New York Federal Reserve were both intimately involved in keeping details about payments to banks including Goldman Sachs from the public.
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