I think that there's an issue in how industrial nations abuse the lack of protection for workers in developing nations and how this usually results in profit extraction and massive human rights violations.

It would be nice to be able to force companies to take responsibility for crimes happening in their supply chain. I think this is the only way to prevent willful blindness. Otherwise the profit motive of the whole will always override the morality of the individual.

We should also improve whistleblower protections so that instead of just relying on hearsay and vague accusations we can actually have solid proofs of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, especially in tyrannical dictatorships like China this is very unlikely, given that even a 'democracy' like the US is struggling with those.

That said; I don't that China as a whole is a developing nation anymore. There are big chunks of the country that might still be 'developing', but as a whole China is very much an industrial superpower.

Since I don't live in the U.S. either, I don't see why we should include the U.S. in this discussion. I'll happily comment about the prison-industrial-complex or legalized corruption or about the dangers of militarized police... if it is the topic at hand.

The issue at hand is how China and Apple are profiting from slave labor, how much this is by design or by neglect and what to do about it.

Let's keep the discussion limited to that.

I'm quite willing to bash the U.S. too, believe me. The massive corruption in their political system, the systemic militarization of their police, the wasteful social inequality are just the tip of the iceberg of internal issues. Problematic is also their pursuit of dominance by military force, their financing and arming of groups opposing legitimate democratic governments. And that's just the beginning of my issues with the U.S.

In general I'm very skeptical that prison operators should be able to "rent out" their prisoners and that companies should be able to make profit of prisoner's work. The potential for abuse is just too high. (Maybe in a country like Finland that has some reasonable ideas about reintegration of criminals, but even there I see the dangers of corruption.)

The global production chains have put workers in jeopardy of exploitation. As long as there are no legal means to force companies to take responsibility, they will not take responsibility. It doesn't matter if a company is from the U.S. from Denmark or Finland; if there's no accountability, the profit motive will overrule any ethical concerns. Because that's what these companies were created for in the first place; to turn a profit.

Here we have just one more 'externality' that companies 'socialize' in their quest to squeeze out ever more profit. In this case it's not clean water or clean air, it's the mental and physical health of fellow humans that for one reason or another have deemed disposable.

That countries and the governments - whose job it is to server all their citizens - are such willing participants in these atrocities small and large is just the bitter icing on this putrid cake.