Mike Daisey, noted fabulist, is back at his original theatre in DC, The Woolly Mammoth where he is holding encore presentations of his debunked – and now slightly rewritten – show about working conditions at Foxconn. Gone are the guards with guns, the fake crippled man who touched the totemic iPad, and the real/fake translator named Cathy. Daisey replaced those stock characters with a bit of self… → Read More
A group is asking Change.org to withdraw the petition which asked Apple to protect workers’ rights in China. The petition, which had previously gathered over 255,000 signatures before being delivered in-person to Apple stores in major U.S. cities, including New York, recently made headlines following a New York Times series on the harsh conditions of factory workers in China. The series examined… → Read More
Rob Schmitz is a reporter and Marketplace Correspondent based in Shanghai, China. He has spent time in many factories – as well as a bit of time outside of the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, the same factory fabulist Mike Daisey interviewed workers he purported were 12 and 13 years old. Schmitz’s findings definitely didn’t jibe with Daisey’s and I decided to sit down for a few minutes to go over his… → Read More
It seems that noted firebrand Mike Daisey’s story – the one about the crippled, underaged factory workers who unspooled tales of woe and torture at the hands of their evil Foxconn masters at Apple’s behest – was at least partially fabricated. He was outed as, at best, a bad journalist and at worst a fraud. To be clear, he’s a monologist and playwright and had no business telling this story (just… → Read More
Last week, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook appeared on my show and extolled the virtues of the Chinese economic development model. Cook used the example of Deng Xiaoping’s establishment of “Special Economic Zones” such as in Shenzhen that, he said, has resulted in 300 million Chinese people being liberated from “grinding poverty”. Today, the acclaimed monologist Mike Daisey responds to… → Read More
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