The implosion of Mike Daisey’s Foxconn stories may have, in the short term, returned focus to Apple’s suppliers of their electronic products. Now Foxconn, the notorious Chinese manufacturer, has announced a series of changes to working conditions at the plant.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current issues that may be of interest.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current topics that may be of interest.

The world’s greatest games are about to begin in London. But outside the sporting spectacle this summer, few will notice where the real cheating is going on: in Asian factories that churn out plush mascots and other Olympiad gear, corporations have freely exploited lax labor regulations. As the Olympics approach, activists are racing to push the brands behind the games to play by the rules of fair trade and human rights.

Trying to avoid an instant replay of London’s age of imperialism, the Play Fair 2012 campaign aims for accountability and transparency in the corporations scoring massive profits from cheap labor in the global south.

In The Short American Century, Andrew Bacevich and a group of distinguished contributors take apart the idea of the American Century. Although Henry Luce was not the first “American Exceptionalist,” his 1941 essay on the role that the United States ought to play in the world provides the contributors with a useful touchstone for modern conceptions of America’s messianic role in the world. Appearing in the February 1941 edition of Life magazine, sandwiched between an advertisement for Havoline motor oil and a profile of Betty Carstair’s private island, Luce’s editorial argued that the path to US hegemony was now open.

Bacevich and the other contributors to the volume probe the historical, social, intellectual, economic, and political foundations of modern American exceptionalism, investigating how beliefs about a unique American place in the world developed, and how those beliefs affected American foreign policy.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current topics that may be of interest.

So we’re going to have another fatuous debate about gas prices in this country, as if the President has a ticker on his desk that he can set to the 9/10 of a cent. President Obama made the effort to mock this. As a national politician he obviously feels he cannot say “there’s not much I can do,” but he came extremely close in this speech.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches on current topics that may be of interest.

A “level playing field” sounds inherently fair, so why should domestic solar manufacturing have to suffer for the sins of legacy energy production?

Last week several groups, including the United Steelworkers, petitioned the federal government to whack the latest trade mole – illegally traded auto parts from China.

With President Obama announcing creation of a new trade enforcement unit in his State of the Union Address, the feds probably will investigate. But even if they whack down the auto parts mole, experience has shown a new mole will pop up.