With a workforce of more than one million, the electronics giant Foxconn has enough workers in its Chinese factories to fill a small country. So it’s fitting that the company has vowed to make its manufacturing kingdom a bit more democratic by encouraging union elections.

Microsoft, which is trying to position itself in a major advertising campaign as a privacy friendly Internet company, should take a simple step that shows it means what it says.

Online tracking is pervasive and invasive on the Internet.

When Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping formally embraced Neoliberalism in the late 70s it was the final victory for the right-wing within the party. What followed was an opening up of China to Western business for the presumed benefit of all. In reality, China would invert the Maoist principles of the cultural revolution to restructure the country under a system of State Capitalism. The Chinese State, organized and operated by the Communist Party of China, would run the country for its own profit with the Chinese people becoming the State’s property, slaves in effect.

We are honored to have Codebreaker as our FDL Movie Night discussion with the film’s executive producer Patrick Sammon as our guest. Nominated for the 2013 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary, Codebreaker is the story of British mathematical genius Alan Turing whose vision shaped the world we now live in, and who was prosecuted and persecuted  by the British  courts for his sexuality under the same statutes as Oscar Wilde decades earlier.

Today I want to tell you three American stories.

If you want to know where your member of Congress or House staffer is today, there’s a good chance they’re at the State of the Net conference at the DC Hilton, rubbing elbows with the tech lobbyists who love them.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt boasts to Bloomberg about the rapid proliferation of Google’s Android smartphone operating system, comparing it to Microsoft’s domination of the desktop platform in the 90s. and if everyone remembers the 90s correctly, the Department of Justice stepped in and smacked Microsoft around for antitrust violation, without which they would have no doubt strangled Google in its infancy.

Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared with Brian Williams on NBC News last night, and confirmed that the company will bring production of some iMacs to the United States in 2013. It’s largely a PR move, even with the $100 million Cook says Apple will spend to shift assembly to the US.

On September 23, in Taiyuan, China, about 2,000 workers erupted in a burst of anger, leaving a factory compound scarred with broken glass and flames. But the trouble was just as quickly extinguished, and it’s now back to business as usual at Foxconn, one of the world’s premier electronics makers.

Some tech reporters rightly noted that with the formation of the Internet Association, it looks like Google is getting the SOPA band back together again. But nobody asked the rather obvious question: why an industry that spent $129 million on lobbying in 2011 needed yet another lobbing shop, especially when the Net Coalition already exists.

Ahem. Allow Bytegeist to read the tea leaves.