Foxconn Hires Minors for its Chinese Factory

REUTERS | OCTOBER 17, 2012

Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, has acknowledged hiring teenagers as young as 14 in a Chinese factory, in breach of national law, in a case that raises further questions over its student intern program.

Labor rights activists in China have accused Foxconn and other big employers in China of using student interns as a cheap source of labor for production lines where it is more difficult to attract young adult workers to lower paid jobs.

Foxconn, the trading name of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, said it had found some interns at a plant in Yantai, in northeastern Shandong province, were under the legal working age of 16. It did not say how many were underage.

“Our investigation has shown that the interns in question, who ranged in age from 14 to 16, had worked in that campus for approximately three weeks,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This is not only a violation of China’s labor law, it is also a violation of Foxconn policy and immediate steps have been taken to return the interns in question to their educational institutions.”

China’s official Xinhua news agency, citing an unnamed Yantai government official, said that 56 underage interns would be brought back to their schools.

The students had been employed after Foxconn asked the development zone in which the factory is located to help solve a labor shortage last month, when they were needed to make up a shortfall of 19,000 workers, Xinhua added.

Foxconn is Apple Inc’s largest manufacturing partner, and also makes products for Dell Inc, Sony Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co among its other clients. It said the Yantai plant does not make Apple products.

Foxconn made the announcement after investigating Chinese media reports of underage interns among its China workforce of 1.2 million. It said it had found no evidence of similar violations at any of its other plants in China.

Foxconn said it would work with local government to bar the schools involved in the Yantai case from the intern program unless shown to be compliant with labor law and company policy.

“However, we recognize that full responsibility for these violations rests with our company and we have apologized to each of the students for our role in this action,” the firm said.

Foxconn and Apple have been forced to improve working conditions at Chinese factories that make most of the world’s iPads and iPhones after a series of well-publicized suicides in 2010 and reports of labor abuses, such as excessive overtime, threw a spotlight on conditions inside the plants.

Last month, a riot broke out at a Foxconn plant assembling iPhones in the northern city of Taiyuan over living conditions inside Foxconn’s on-site dormitories for migrant workers.

In response to the scrutiny, Foxconn plans to cut overtime to less than nine hours a week from the current 20.

It defended its intern program on Tuesday, saying they made up only 2.7 percent of its workforce in China. Internships could be long-term or short-term, carried out in cooperation with vocational schools and other educational institutions.

The average internship lasted about three-and-a-half months, it said.

Threats, Torture and Death during land Expropriations in China

Amnesty International denounces government abuses during illegal property seizures.

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | OCTOBER 11, 2012

China is one of the largest countries in the world. However, its size does not prevent the Chinese government from using force to steal property of the people whenever it see wants. Not even the rapid development experienced by the Asian giant can explain why citizens are being evicted from their houses and other properties so massively, or why the government uses brutality to take them out of their homes without paying them a fair price for them.

The Chinese government increased the number of forced evictions of people from their homes and land throughout the country just as fast as the country develops. These evictions are often done illegally. The government practice of taking people out of their properties almost always includes abuses of power and corruption, as the population gets fed up with the requests to leave. The strong discontent in the population resulted in numerous protests, as documented in the report presented by Amnesty International (AI), headquartered in London.

AI says that cases of forced evictions have increased significantly in China, because local officials collude with developers to seize and then sell the property seized, to pay government debts. The organization, citing activists, lawyers and Chinese scholars, says that evictions have increased during the construction boom that the country has experienced since launched a plan to stimulate the economy in late 2008 to address the global crisis.

Local officials often resort to the sale of land for capital to meet the goals of infrastructure construction set by Beijing. The report issued by AI includes the period between February 2010 and January 2012, details how pressures and violence are used often. The Mafia that runs this scheme resorts to sending thugs on people whose lands are to be seized, which usually results in the torture and death of the property owners.

Of the 40 cases of forced evictions Amnesty International describes on the report, nine ended in deaths when the land owners resisted. In a case, a 70 year old woman was buried alive by a bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of her house. The event took place in the province of Hubei.

In a separate case, police in the city of Wenchang kidnapped a baby and refused to return him to the mother unless she signed eviction documents. Some of the people who refused to leave, were sent to jail and concentration camps. Others went to detention centers which are spread all over China.

The report includes testimony from a woman from the city of Hexia, who was beaten and sterilized after she protested her having to leave. Amnesty International documented the occurrence of 41 cases of people who lit themselves on fire in an act of desperation due to the abuse which they were submitted to by the police and the thugs. These events happened between 2009 and 2012.

“The problem of forced evictions is the greatest source of popular discontent in China and is a serious threat to social and political stability,” says AI. The organization requested the end of the evictions and to guarantee that people will not be left homeless or abused because of their opposition to the expropriation process. AI does not have the complete accounting of the number of people who have been forced to leave their properties, but the organization says that there is no question that the number of victims has increased exponentially.

In China, just as it happens in most countries, the land belongs to the government or local authorities, and these entities can simply argue that the evictions are in the interest of the majority and that the projects to be developed there outweigh any property rights. In general, governments are obligated by law to pay the value of the property, but more often than not, the payments are well below the right amount. In China as it happens in other countries, a bribery system is employed to assure developers that they won’t have to pay too much for the property. In other cases, the government buys the land with taxpayer money and hands the property over to the developers, who then make millions on a small investment.

In the case of China, the call from the Chinese Communist Party to force development encouraged local authorities to use any means available to carry out that mission. The plan of the Chinese government includes the seizure of lands to build roads, factories, shopping centers and other infrastructure. The problem is in China is that government has resorted to all kinds of violent acts to kick people out without paying them what they deserve for their homes.

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Acabar con monedas reserva y el control financiero centralizado

POR LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | 21 SEPTIEMBRE 2012

Durante muchos años, los Estados Unidos ha disfrutado de una ventaja injusta con respecto al resto del mundo: casi todo el comercio internacional se realiza en dólares estadounidenses. Tanto amigos como enemigos de los EE.UU. han tenido que comprar materias primas, partes, productos terminados, pagar aranceles y tasas de cambio en dólares debido a que el mundo aceptó la moneda estadounidense como un instrumento fuertemente posicionado respaldado por el poderío económico y militar de ese país norteamericano.

El resultado de tener una moneda de reserva, tanto para los EE.UU. como para el resto del mundo es claro: los estadounidenses han disfrutado de décadas de abundancia, en gran parte porque casi todo lo que es necesario para vivir se ha comprado y pagado en dólares estadounidenses. Desde el petróleo hasta los alimentos básicos, los países y las empresas utilizan el dólar de EE.UU. para completar transacciones comerciales.

Pero la abundancia de los estadounidenses no fue la única consecuencia — u objetivo, dependiendo de cómo se vea. Debido a que el dólar de EE.UU. fue la moneda de reserva del mundo, su valor se mantuvo artificialmente alto. Personas, empresas y otros países compraron dólares para usarlos en sus actividades diarias, tales como gastos de viaje, intercambio de divisas en transacciones de pequeños y grandes volúmenes.

El valor de la moneda, especialmente una ‘fiat’ como lo es el dólar de EE.UU., es artificial, ya que después de que el banco central decide imprimir dinero más allá de lo que un país produce — PIB — con el fin de promover una economía basada en la deuda, es sólo una cuestión de tiempo antes de que las ruedas del camión se aflojen. En el caso de los Estados Unidos, tres de las cuatro ruedas ya han caído. La moneda de EE.UU. ha sido hiper-inflado de forma controlada desde la creación de la Reserva Federal, que es el mismo sistema de poder centralizado utilizado en casi todos los países, no importa si es desarrollado, en desarrollo o subdesarrollados.

Hoy en día, el valor del dólar, el euro, el peso o el real no representan la capacidad de un país para producir, innovar y vender productos en los mercados locales, regionales e internacionales a través de acuerdos bilaterales o multilaterales. El valor de las monedas es fijado por las instituciones bancarias y luego libremente manipulado por los mercados artificialmente administrados, y no por el verdadero capitalismo de libre mercado.

El tipo de “contrato comercial” que ayudó a los EE.UU. a establece su moneda como “moneda de reserva mundial” y que proporcionó la ventaja injusta frente a sus socios comerciales y competidores está llegando a su fin. El surgimiento de China como uno de los mayores productores — a través de procedimientos y normas cuestionables por decir lo menos — junto con la posición económica débil de Estados Unidos en el escenario mundial, ha llevado a los países a buscar formas alternativas de completar transacciones comerciales que hacen no utilizar dólares estadounidenses.

Aquellos que compiten con Estados Unidos, especialmente los que prestan dinero al país, se dieron cuenta de que Estados Unidos probablemente irá a la banca rota debido a los niveles de deuda que tiene, lo que abonado a una moneda devaluada que no valdrá mucho, les ha hecho utilizar sus propias monedas en lugar del dólar de EE.UU..

Por ejemplo, China y Rusia han cerrado varios acuerdos para realizar transacciones comerciales en sus propias monedas, en lugar de usar  dólares. Los chinos y los rusos, al parecer, se enteraron de que mediante el uso del yuan y el rublo, no están solamente valorizando sus monedas, pero también evitan pagar el “impuesto de dólar”, o el costo de tener que comprar y vender en dólares estadounidenses, lo que les había mantenido en una situación de desventaja competitiva frente a su rival comercial y militar.

La devaluación del dólar debido a la manipulación bancaria llevada a cabo por la Reserva Federal o el debilitamiento de la moneda en los mercados internacionales, es una mala noticia para el pueblo estadounidense, ya que significa que si el dólar no puede mantener su estatus de moneda reserva, todo va a ser más caro para ellos: materias primas, alimentos, energía, tipos de interés, etc, pero peor que todo eso es que la demanda de dólares estadounidenses en el mundo se reducirá significativamente, lo que en sí mismo hará que el dólar sea menos atractivo para comercializar bienes y servicios.

La pérdida de valor de la moneda estadounidense también agravará otro problema: la deuda de EE.UU.. El país ha sido durante mucho tiempo la mejor nación deudora del mundo, porque sus prestamistas pensaron que al tener la moneda reserva del mundo les garantizaría que los préstamos serían pagados en su totalidad. Pero ahora, la realidad muestra lo contrario.

La caída del dólar de su pedestal de  “moneda reserva mundial” también hará que sea más caro para EE.UU. pagar su deuda actual, así como la deuda que en la que va a incurrir en los próximos años y décadas. Cuanto más débil es el dólar, más caro se vuelve para los EE.UU. pagar sus deudas. Este escenario se ve ahora en España, Grecia, Italia y Portugal, que han entregado su soberanía a las instituciones bancarias extranjeras a cambio de “rescates financieros”.

Aunque la sabiduría popular sugiere que el endeudamiento de EE.UU. con China sería la peor situación posible mientras que el dólar declina, en realidad hay un escenario peor y este no incluye a China. El prestamista principal de EE.UU. no es más China, sino el Sistema Bancario Centralizado, representado por la Reserva Federal, una institución privada que vela por los intereses de un consorcio bancario internacional con sede en el extranjero, no en los Estados Unidos.

La mafia bancaria continuará prestando voluntariamente a los EE.UU. porque toda la deuda creada por la Reserva Federal en nombre de los Estados Unidos y su pueblo siempre tiene una manera de ser pagada. Los Estados Unidos, al igual que muchos otros países en el mundo hipoteca la vida de las personas presentes y futuras cobrándoles impuestos hasta el día de su muerte para pagar intereses sobre la creciente deuda.

Esta “confianza” que las instituciones bancarias tienen en los Estados Unidos y otras naciones sólo puede romperse si el dólar falla como la moneda reserva mundial. Es por eso que los banqueros europeos han creado monedas paralelas como el euro, el cual también pretenden colapsar el fin de establecer una especie de forma electrónica de comercio.

Al mismo tiempo, y mientras sea posible, individuos poderosos que han hecho sus fortunas a través de prácticas engañosas, como George Soros, así como otros gobiernos, han comenzado una carrera para deshacerse de sus reservas en dólares — un hecho que también debilita la moneda norteamericana — para invertir en oro, metales raros plata y otros instrumentos valiosos. La venta de fondos en dólares a otras monedas, metales preciosos o materias primas amenaza con acelerar la caída de la moneda reserva mundial aún más, como sucede con cualquier otro producto que deja de ser consumido.

La caída del dólar ha envalentonado a países como China para considerar seriamente dejar que su moneda fluctúe libremente en el mercado abierto. Esta práctica está programada para comenzar en 2015 y continuará hasta el año 2017. Los chinos apuestan a que en 2015 el dólar va a estar lo suficientemente para no poder competir directamente con el Yuan.

Pero en un mundo financiero donde casi todo es falso, no hay ninguna razón para creer que el gobierno de Estados Unidos o las instituciones bancarias que su gobierno representa no se van a plantear una manera de ralentizar o detener el colapso de su moneda. Muchos expertos financieros esperan lo contrario, sin embargo. Algunos de ellos incluso creen que el colapso del dólar va a pasar en algún momento entre el invierno de 2012 y la primavera de 2013.

Si hay una cosa que el mundo ha aprendido que naciones independientes que establecen acuerdos comerciales de manera bilateral o multilateral, están en mejor situación que aquellas que son prisioneras de una moneda común con un sistema de poder financiero centralizado. La única razón por la que el mundo está dominado por una moneda común y las llamadas Uniones Políticas y Comerciales, es porque esos esquemas facilitan controles monopólicos, que es lo que la mafia bancaria internacional busca tener.

El euro es un claro ejemplo de cómo un monopólio funciona perfectamente cuando un grupo de oligarcas tiene la intención de crear economías artificialmente para luego colapsarlas y así consolidar poder. Para los miembros de esa oligarquía el sistema funciona muy bien. Para el resto de nosotros, es mejor acabar con monedas reserva que proporcionan ventajas injustas, así como el poder centralizado que sólo rinde beneficios para la élite anglo-sajóna.

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Tokyo Injects Fiat Money while Beijing Talks about Bond Attack on Japan

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

The territorial conflict for the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands on the East China Sea have revealed two things in the last few days. First, China’s thirst to defeat its rivals in the region, despite American interventionism. Two, China will not necessarily use military weapons. Instead, it will use its economic might.

While the Japanese Central Bank announced it will follow on the steps of the American Federal Reserve and European Central Bank in flooding the market with money to keep its economy afloat, in Beijing the Communist Party led government is now considering attacking Japan by imposing sanctions on its main funding source: the sale of government bonds.

China is Japan’s main creditor today with holdings of over $230 billion in Japanese government issued bonds. This is China’s strongest weapon at the moment, or at least the one that the Chinese may use to obligate Japan to withdraw from the territorial dispute that has now called for the intervention of United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

The most recent asset purchase program in Japan was extended by about 10 billion yen (€ 97,200 Mn), to 80 trillion yen (778 000 € Mn). In turn, the types of interest are maintained between 0 and 0.1%, a level at which they are since October 2010. The same policies are now being used by the United States Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, which continue to facilitate funds to large financial institutions while denying loans to small and mid-size entrepreneurs.

The Bank of Japan opted, just like the Fed, to inflate its currency, by printing fiat money into the banking system in an attempt to revive the economy. As seen for the past 4 years, the insane policy of creating fiat money out of nothing does not work. In fact, it only prolongs the crisis because governments are not doing anything to kick start their economies.

The decision has favored the Nikkei, Japan’s stock market. Transactions closed with a rise of 1.19%. Stock markets are another tool in the rigged game that governments use to paint a colorful picture about otherwise dying economies, because they do not represent the actual state of those economies, but that of specific sectors. Stock prices, as in the case of Facebook, can be manipulated to show whatever the manipulators want to show.

The fake snowballing effect of the fiat money printing mechanism reached Europe, where the local markets received the news about the Japanese Bank injecting the worthless money into the economy as a good sign, which helped lift the markets.

In the meantime, in China, Jin Baisong, a member of the Chinese Academy of International Trade wrote on the China Daily newspaper that his government should “impose sanctions on Japan in the most effective manner” to bring Japan to its knees. He said China should consider invoke the security exception to punish Japan.

Other Chinese media such as the Hong Kong Economic Journal published an article about China’s plans to to cut off Japan’s supplies of rare earth metals which Japan needs to produce high tech consumer goods for local and international electronic giants. The considerations to punish Japan through credit lending, imposing cuts of raw materials and calling on international trade organizations to sanction Japan are three of the first steps China is considering to tame down the country’s intent to claim the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands as its property.

In the last two days, multiple protests exploded all over China against the Japanese which prompted many Japanese companies to close their doors for fear of retaliation.

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U.S. will set up Second Missile Shield System in Japan

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta ended his visit to Asia with the announcement that a new agreement was reached with his Japanese counterpart, Satoshi Morimoto, to install a second missile defense system in addition to the one already on the island, which Panetta emphasized, is for the protection of the Japanese people. Panetta drew attention to the idea that Japan continuous to be threatened by possible attacks from North Korea; a Chinese ally.

Panetta traveled to Asia to meet with the Japanese Secretary of Defense, as well as to meet with the Chinese representative, with whom held conversations regarding the latest tensions between China and Japan over the territorial dispute that has caused the latest friction between the two Asian nations.

“Everyone should be involved so that Japan and China have good relations and find a way to avoid an escalation” in their current differences, Panetta said Monday in Japan before arriving in Beijing. The Defense Secretary called on both countries to remain “calm and restraint”, and to avoid initiating actions that could turn the dispute over the islands into a more difficult issue to resolve.

This dual action summarizes the complicated crossroads where the U.S. is on the continent: the obligation to protect its allies, while not drawing the ire of China. U.S. has signed a defense treaty with Japan and is responsible for decades of security in that country, while assuring China that the military build up is not a direct threat to the Chinese government. The United States escalated its move of troops and military equipment in Asia, which has raised the voice of alarm in China and Russia.

Both countries have been almost completely encircled by US military equipment, such as missile shield systems. In other cases where the US has not directly build weapons systems in Asia or Africa, it has sold or simply given military equipment to other allies, which is also seen as a threat in Beijing and Moscow.and the like that has with various countries of the region. China and Russia have stepped up their own build up of force in response to the massive US intervention in the continent, mainly through special operations or actions from allied countries such as Japan. For the Chinese and the Russian it is very difficult to believe that the American encirclement is for reasons other than to establish itself on the continent to challenge their power.

Two weeks ago, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, suffered some rudeness in Beijing and was heavily criticized by the press for the position she showed with respect to China’s territorial problems with some of its neighbors in the South Sea. Clinton expressed her wish that the sea in that region remained open as the vital and intense trade route it is today. Some Chinese media replied that the best guarantee for that to happen would be the the U.S. stayed out.

But the U.S. is not going to do that. On the contrary, is increasing its military presence. In January, the Pentagon announced that transit of the bulk of a fleet would sail all over the region for the next few years. The U.S. has opened a new Marine base in Australia and has reached an agreement to increase its transit through Philippine waters. The reason for this increase is, officially, the growing threat of North Korea and the vulnerability of some U.S. allies such as Japan or South Korea. China interpreted it, however, as interference in a region where the Chinese would otherwise be a dominant power.

During her visit, Clinton could not meet with the Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who was unavailable for public appearances. Meanwhile, Leo Panetta has scheduled an appointment with him, which may facilitate the dialogue since Mr. Xi was an advisor to the Ministry of Defense in China. He also happens to be an expert in military affairs.

The militarization of the rivalry between China and the U.S. has always been seen as a frightening possibility by the international community and as a risk that both countries have tried to avoid so far. Very dependent on each other for economic progress, both China and the U.S. have always understood how much they would lose if a conflict broke out. But at the same time, neither is willing to relinquish control of a strategic region that provides most of the world’s wealth.

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