[Peace-discuss] Foundation's David Goyer shilled for Apple while Apple is being sued for exploiting children

[J.B. Nicholson]

Apple recently announced a new sci-fi series ("Foundation") based on and named after 
Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" book series. One of the new series authors, David Goyer, 
was quoted in the ad for the series which was posted to YouTube.

In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgbPSA94Rqg David Goyer took some time to shill 
for Apple:
> David Goyer: If ever there were a company that was hoping to, sort of, better 
> people's lives through technology, through connectivity, it's Apple.
Tim Cook, Apple CEO, as quoted in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISJLvwDjxvU :
> Tim Cook: Things must change. And Apple's committed to being a force for that 
> change. [...] Today, I'm proud to announce Apple's Racial Justice and Equity 
> Initiative with a $100 million commitment.
RT's Jacqueline Vouga focuses on proper priorities in 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISJLvwDjxvU :
> Jacqueline Vouga: Thanks for the equivalent of your spare change, Tim. But let's 
> not forget that your company is one of a number accused of benefiting from child 
> labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Apple, Tesla, Dell, Alphabet (parent company of Google & YouTube), and Microsoft are 
among the firms being sued over forced child labor in Congo by Congolese families.

Quoting from their lawsuit:
> Defendants Apple, Alphabet... Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla are knowingly benefiting 
> from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in the 
> Democratic Republic of Congo to mine cobalt, a key component of every
> rechargeable lithium-ion battery used in the electronic devices these companies
> manufacture.
Apple has made horrific management decisions for years; from suicidal assembly lines 
in China -- remember the Foxconn suicide nets? -- to this.

So it seems that what Goyer claimed Apple "was hoping to, sort of" achieve comes down 
to the reality of a virtue signaling donation instead of practical things that would 
help improve people's lives such as finding non-exploitative means of obtaining 
needed rare earths, ongoing policy changes to prevent exploiting workers, ensuring a 
living wage for all of their workers, and making cash payments to the families 
adversely affected by Apple's ongoing exploitative labor practices.

Speaking of Apple's "spare change": Not that exploitation would be any more 
acceptable if Apple were poor and struggling to make ends meet, but they're clearly 
not. This is particularly striking given how much money Apple has to spend on making 
all of their workers' lives better (whether directly hired into Apple or working 
under subcontract, whether they're located close to the head office or far away).

 From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Finance
> As of August 3, 2018, Apple was the largest publicly traded corporation in the 
> world by market capitalization. On August 2, 2018, Apple became the first
> publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market value. Apple was ranked
> No. 4 on the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations
> by total revenue.