As you may or may not have heard, Apple pulled out of the US Chamber of Commerce because said institution displayed the temerity to question Global Warming Dogma. Green Hell (click for photos) notes that if Apple really cared about CO2 emissions (much less actual pollution) they'd be threatening to pull out of grotequely polluted China, where their products (and profits) are actually made, rather than punishing the already-blue-skied US.

Know anything about iPod City, the near-prison facility where oh-so-righteous Apple's products are made by over 200,000 captives workers? Most Americans don't.

Inside Longhua, workers labor a 15-hour day building iPods, for which they usually earn about $50 per month. When they're not on the assembly lines, they live in secluded dormitories that each house 100 people and prohibit visitors from the outside world. The workers are allowed "a few possessions" and a "bucket to wash their clothes."

"We have to work too hard and I am always tired. It's like being in the army," Zang Lan, one of the workers at Longhua, told the Mail. "They make us stand still for hours. If we move we are punished by being made to stand still for longer. The boys are made to do pushups."

According to the report, the iPod nano is made in a five-story factory called "E3" that is secured by armed police officers. The super-slim digital music player is said to include over 400 parts which arrive from component manufacturers all over the world.

Another factory in Suzhou, Shanghai, manufacturers iPod shuffles and is completely surrounded by barbed wire. At this facility, 50,000 workers are housed outside the plant and earn about $99 per month. However, they must pay out of pocket for their accommodations and food, "which takes up half their salaries."

These low wages and inhuman working conditions are enabled by a kind of permanent class-based apartheid system created by the (endlessly hypocritical) Chinese Communist Party, the "Hukao System", which links each Chinese worker to his mother's village of origin, allowing urban employers to send unproductive or troublesome employees back to the impoverished countryside. Rural Hukao holders are thus trapped in a permanent lower-class wage pool, regardless of their own desire or efforts to improve. They cannot move from region to region to compete for better jobs, and they're denied access to urban eduction, medical, and other social welfare services. Opportunities available to urbanites are permanently denied to them.

During the 1990s, we in the US had a golden opportunity to use our moral and economic clout to link human rights reforms to Chinese economic opportunity. Instead, we rushed in headlong, abandoning all former concerns about human rights — partially enabled by a doctrine which imagined that freedom must follow almost automatically on the heels of economic development, partially on lavish Chinese campaign donations (funneled through intermediaries, of course) to the Clintons, many national Democrats, and not a few Republicans, and partially on pressures from companies like Apple and Nike who imagined they be opening up vast new markets for their products, or at least vast new sources of unfree labor.

Ironically, China's pollution woes are also partially due to our own "green" policies. We speak endlessly about "sustainability", but we forget to think on a global scale. Rather than pushing for sensible environmental regulations here in the US, we have pushed for such absurd levels that the only way to make the products we use is to transfer that activity entirely overseas. Sadly, by doing so, the resulting pollution doesn't magically disappear — instead, it is undoubtedly increased, net, since other regions don't have even relatively minimal safety and pollution standards. And never mind the increased demand brought by artificially low wages, and China's massive fuel subsidies — none which would not be possible without China's governmental policies.

But hey, we're "green", so who cares what they're doing in China?