I'm a little puzzled that you can write "I have nothing to add". The article didn't draw any conclusions (to say that American workers are getting our butts kicked by outsourcing is a summary of the situation, but not itself a lesson or a suggestion for a remedy).

There's a lot there, nevertheless. Here's a conclusion to try on for size: Karl Marx didn't know the half of it when he predicted that capitalists would sell you the rope to hang them with. What the article is describing is capitalists selling off capitalism itself...to Communist China...and as the article makes clear, because the Chinese system of industrial collectivism has proven more profitable. This is pretty earth-shattering, really.

The nature of the system that's destroying our livelihoods was hinted at early in the article:

Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Yeah, breathtaking. No American plant can match that because we outlawed slavery over a century ago. Rousted out of bed, given bread and water, and chained to a workstation for a twelve hour shift...we're losing out to slave labor.

Did you read as far as the description of "Foxconn City"?

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

...

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Barracks...uniforms, color-coded by sex no less...mobilization of workers by the thousands on command...sixty hour workweeks at starvation wages...that's industrial collectivism.

Have you heard that the suicide rate among the "employees" at Foxconn City is astronomical?

I think there's a deeper lesson here, and it's not the easy one about the evils of capitalism. I think it actually shows how far we've strayed from classic free market capitalism.

While it's true that one would expect any capitalist to put profit ahead of loyalty to some country and its people, I think there's more to the powerful affinity between American corporations and the Communist government of China than just profit.

It helps to understand the nature of a corporation: A corporation is a collective, of the variety characterized by a rigid formal hierarchy. While sole proprietorships and certain kinds of LLCs involve direct ownership by a capitalist, the stock corporation is all about collective ownership of an enterprise by a large number of people. A corporation is an enterprise guided by a central committee (the board) and usually headed by a charismatic (or baseball bat-swinging) Great Leader (the CEO) who generally owns little of the company on paper but wields vast power, and about whom a cult of personality develops. (The article focuses on Apple, does that description ring any bells?)

This corporate politburo in turn tries to exercize dictatorial control over an unruly mass of workers, but here's where Commie-envy sets in: In America we used to allow unions, and we still have laws on the books regulating unfair and exploitive labor practices. The Constitution itself outlaws indentured servitude, and the 14th Amendment outlawed slavery. Those 60 hour weeks the American CEOs admire so much can't be compelled out of American workers. And nobody would work for tea and a biscuit.

What an American CEO sees when he looks at China is the corporation perfected. He sees a familiar hierarchical collective with room at the top for those with megamaniacal ambition, and not a whisper of trouble from a cowed and beaten workforce. He sees business nirvana.

None of that sounds like traditional free market capitalism, does it? I fully expect a knee-jerk disagreement based on its lack of resemblance to the myth...and that's my point. This isn't Adam Smith's vision, and it wasn't really anybody's vision until about the 1980s. This is a pathology, a cancer on capitalism.

Maybe it's "end-times capitalism". The time when capitalists stop the penny-ante creative destruction of baining individual companies, and now they're baining the entire American economy. At some point the merry-go-round stops and they cash in their chips. Sounds like that time is now.