Apple makes the iPod, right? Sure they do, but where? Try overseas. Apple employs 27,250 overseas employees at an average salary of $11,743. Sure, the company is making great profits, but that’s because it’s both exploiting overseas labor and refusing to give jobs to Americans. Most of its US jobs are low-paying, to be fair. No, wait, that’s unfair!

7789 of Apple’s US jobs pay an average of $28,244, about 2.5 times what the Chinese and Filipinos are paid, but still hardly anything relative to what it costs to live here. And before someone brings up the “it’s cheaper to live in Asia” argument, there’s a reason why it’s cheaper there: they don’t have access to lots of things that are necessary for getting around in the USA. They still face massively more expensive food prices, crowded living conditions, and poor access to health care – kind of like the poor in the USA, but without cars.

6101 professionals and engineers working for Apple’s iPod division made an average of $86,051. They can afford the stuff the rest of the workers made. This is a pattern common across US-based firms and firms that were formerly based in the US, but which moved their HQs to Switzerland to avoid paying taxes to support the nation that gave them their start.

While my own salary is just above the nation’s per capita income, I don’t earn enough for my household of 5 to have a total income equal to that per capita number times 5. I don’t have health care, it’s kinda crowded in this house, and food and fuel are part of my inflationary worries, even if the USG doesn’t want me to think about them. I’m not part of the world of the Apple engineers and the rest of the iPod users. I’m constantly asked to “do more with less”, which is a codephrase for “you’re going to be exploited more.” The whole world has to do more with less so that those who have more can get more still.

Emergent promises a great return on their African funds. The Oakland Institute would like you to know that, yes, the great returns exist, but that you might not like the way in which the returns are attained.

Basically, the people of Africa targeted by Emergent’s investors are stripped of their lands and left to starve as their subsistence farms are plowed under to make way for plantation economies. Lands that supported 50,000 people are bulldozed to “create over 2000 jobs” that support no-one. To throw a wrench into the minds of ultra-conservative Christian free-market boosters, the bulldozing included the largest Christian church in East Africa. Seriously, people… Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said between God and money, you can serve only one. You either have unfettered free marked capitalism OR you have Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter), but you can’t have both. But I digress, even if it is with a purpose.

The “job creation” is a mask for paying basement-level wages that are just enough to avoid laws against chattel slavery. It was the same in Juarez when the maquiladoras went up there. Should workers ask for more money, the labor organizers are fired or murdered and the rest are told that the factory jobs will go elsewhere if wages go up, so shut up and get back to work if you want to earn enough so 75% of your family can have enough to eat. Maybe.

It’s outright plundering disguised as a solid, sane retirement plan. Free market cheerleaders will say that the people are better off with those jobs: that’s an outright lie. What they had was subsistence, which I admit is a harsh existence. What they get is unemployment, starvation, marginalization, wage slavery, and a industry-government partnership we used to call “fascism.”