Shock! Apple, Nike Lobby Against Cracking Down on Chinese Slave-Labor Factories That Make Their Shit

These are not American companies. They are corporate pirates with no nation.

LeBron James would be proud.

The New York Times reports that Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola are among the many global companies and business groups lobbying Congress to weaken a bipartisan bill that cracks down on human rights abuses and forced labor in China.

"The bill also targets so-called poverty alleviation and pairing programs that ship Muslims from impoverished areas to work in factories elsewhere, which human rights groups say are often coercive."

For human rights supporters, the bill is great news. For companies that care about their bottom line first, it's terrible.

Whenever these transnational buccaneers do some evil shit, they immediately spring to repair their reputation with the hard left by running virtue-signaling commercials or punishing the right.

I expect them to run this play again. Expect more censorship from Apple against the right to appease the left for their own use of slaves to make their slave phones.

Meanwhile, functionaries of the Chinese Communist Party are pumping out crude terrorist-encouraging propaganda against the west, even as China Joe promises to treat them as allies:

Also, James Mattis -- he beloved by Know-Nothing NeverTrump Permanent Twitter Residents -- failed to acknowledge his ties to a firm that will make money off expanded trade with China when he was writing China-trade-boosting op-eds and planting them in major media.

n an online column denouncing President Trump's "America First" policy that includes measures regarding Beijing, ex-Defense Secretary James Mattis did not disclose his affiliation with an organization that fosters international business deals with communist China.

As coauthor with three other writers in a Nov. 23 Foreign Affairs column, Mattis did not mention that he works for the The Cohen Group consulting firm. Nor did he challenge China's tough talk against U.S. policies regarding Taiwan, nor the strict economic retaliation Beijing levied against Australia.

Instead, Mattis criticized Trump administration policies toward Beijing. Such policies, touted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are not in line with The Cohen Group's approach toward international business dealings with Beijing.

I don't want to let out any Deep State Secrets, but generals cannot wait to retire and began peddling influence to foreign countries.

A lot of generals provide "security consulting" to foreign countries. But this is widely known to be a sham. The foreign countries aren't really interested in what the generals have to say about security.

What they're interested in is paying them to be Friendly Forces for lobbying lawmakers and executive bureaucrats in DC, and assisting with information operations.

The claims about "security consulting" are in fact just a cover story to hide the fact that these men are in fact in the employ of foreign governments for the purposes of lobbying the US government. It's a lie designed to provide a legal defense if they should ever be prosecuted for failure to file as an agent of a foreign government.

It's a type of money laundering -- disguising the true commodity being sold for money by resort to a deceptive euphemism.

Mattis' op-ed was in fact an undisclosed paid advertisement for American corporations seeking to make money from China at the expense of the rest of America.

And it was also an information operation conducted on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

James Mattis, you might have forgotten -- if you ever avoided the media blackout about it -- was a pitchman for the gigantic stock fraud machine and criminal enterprise called Theranos.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis is back in the public eye with a book to promote, doing interviews and speaking in public about his career in government service.

That’s a golden opportunity to finally ask some tough questions about his prior service on the board of Theranos, a company that allegedly peddled fake blood tests and peddled connections to influential people in the national security world to get away with it for years.

Theranos was one of the largest business scandals of the past decades, described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud” in which CEO Elizabeth Holmes and President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, “exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”

Mattis not only served on Theranos’s board during some of the years after he’d retired from military service, while it was perpetrating the scheme, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the company’s technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general. Holmes settled the SEC case, paying a $500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court. (Holmes and Balwani are both battling criminal fraud charges.)

Nobody on the board has been directly charged with anything. But accepting six-figure checks to serve as a frontman for a con operation is the kind of thing that would normally count as a liability in American politics.

St. James of Twitter Memes is not above a little corrupt feather-bedding.

Or even a lot of it.

These people are all corrupt.

All of them.

posted by Ace at 04:35 PM

| Access Comments