Preserving American Dominance: Clinton Fernandes on US Global Supply Chains & Free Trade Agreements.
Channel: Wage Peace
Date: 2020-05-23

Professor Clinton Fernandes, (Australian Defence Force Academy (UNSW)) speaks about how the US bullies and manipulates other countries, so that its transnational corporations can keep making enormous profits out of the 'value' in  ‘Global Supply Chains’ while keeping the 'Third World' disadvantaged. 

He uses Apple as a case study do describe this. (figures from Wikileaks cables 2010)
- iPhones, iPods and iPad are assembled in China by approx. by 1 million Chinese workers.
Foxconn owns the factories. Hon Hai Precision Industry (Tiawanese) trades as Foxconn.
- Foxconn made a profit of $3Billion from those Chinese workers in China assembling those iPads and iPods. 
- Apple in California made a profit of $38Billion: Almost thirteen times the profit of Hon Hai Precision Industry. (Apple’s profits come from the branding, the intellectual property, the marketing and the design) 

China expects that after 5-10 years there should be mutual benefit, the companies should then share the technology in joint ventures with a Chinese companies. China thinks it should be able to climb the ladder of technical complexity in order to become a second world or first world country in due course. And that is what the United States is trying to prevent. 

The result is a sort of technological cold war where the US is actively trying to stop China from developing capability to produce higher value products - with a higher value.

Clinton Fernandes is the author of
What Uncle Sam Wants: U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives in Australia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave, 2019). (from the Wikileaks Cables)
and
Island off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).

(This video recorded in a talk organised by Wage Peace Sept 2019. www.wagepeaceau.org)