Steve Jobs is obsessed with privacy and security; has been his whole life. It's an obsession that has put Apple at an advantage and also in high legal and public relations exposure. How convenient that Apple was able to move production offshore to a country with such a poor human rights record that it allows for employers to beat and imprison their employees, and to search their homes without legal warrant. Are we to believe that this is really the first of such abuses? I doubt it. This is beyond the pale. How about canceling that FoxConn contract and bringing those jobs home to America where workers have some rights against illegal search and seizure, against illegal imprisonment, where people are innocent until proven guilty and have a right to trial by independent parties instead of being hounded to suicide by a vindictive corporation that has already decided upon a worker's guilt? Or are American's simply too greedy for cheap iPods to tolerate having to pay for someone else to have the rights they themselves enjoy? Is owning an iPod really worth being a party to this?

It would be great to see production brought back to this land, but the demand to have lower prices makes that impossible. US workers want to be treated fairly, and paid a fair wage. The costs of which would make Apple non-competitive against other manufacturers that don't do that.

Well sorry about what I am about to say... But this is GLOBALIZATION, where an American or European workers pays can pay for 5 Indian People or for 20 Chineses People. Big Companies don't care about human rights or about every country play the some rules... Just care for profit.

And let me say that Globalization was invented in AMERICA. So ... Rest my case!

Globalization without rules and controls are the reason for our Global Crises. I usually compare Globalization as the extreme of capitalism and Communism as the extreme of Marxism... Each one if you ear for the first time look pure and innocent looks like a good idea, but they are the some, an ideology that only works for some few get richer and the rest get poor.

'Or are Americans simply too greedy for cheap iPods to tolerate having to pay for someone else to have the rights they themselves enjoy? Is owning an iPod really worth being a party to this?'

Sadly not just America, but most of the Western World. Few people in the (Western) World think about everything they do. Many people think that things should be as cheap as possible - they don't care or really want to know why they are so cheap. Even 'nice' people buy from stores where the goods have been sourced fromt he cheapest supplier who is barely scraping by.
Cheap flights, cheap food, cheap gas, cheap labour. Apparently it is what we all want.