EACH morning, when birds are singing a merry tune and dogs frisking and playing, underground millions of Shanghainese are jostling and battling to get into crammed Metro trains so that they can get to work on time.

There, for the better part of the day, in a carefully insulated establishment, many devote their energies to the serious business of maximizing corporate profits.

Indeed, many are contributing to corporate profits even while commuting - those engrossed in their hand-held gadgets.

And of course, the gadgets to be seen with are the latest generation of iPad or iPhones.

Apple has become a legendary tech juggernaut: green, humane, and smart. To own a device adorned with an apple is now something of a religious quest in this decadent age of crass materialism.

And there has been no shortage of Chinese young people willing to do just about anything to own an iPad or iPhone.

Beijing News reported on August 12 that a 17-year-old high school student in Chenzhou, Hunan Province, sold one of his kidneys for 22,000 yuan (US$3,490), so that he could have the latest apple devices.

Apple miracle

While Motorola is busy laying off, and Nokia hemorrhaging, the Apple miracle is unfolding.

As its stock recently rose to US$660, Apple's market capitalization rose to US$619 billion, surpassing Microsoft, the market value of which peaked at US$616.3 billion in 1999.

And a US court recently ordered smartphone rival Samsung to pay Apple US$1.05 billion in damages for infringing intellectual property. Such a miracle can only be possible in our age of globalization.

This globalization polishes Apple's image to such an extent that it effectively expunges from our minds all unsavory suggestions about Apple suppliers - notably Foxconn, the scandal-ridden company that specializes in making the devices that will be shipped to the United States and baptized "Apple."

Foxconn is a semi-military establishment where workers put in long hours for subsistence wages.

In recent years, there have been reports of explosions, poisonings and more than a dozen suicide leaps in Foxconn.

But if its employees survive all these, they can be consoled by the fantasy of one day owning an Apple device themselves.

Many applaud China for being a miracle for having so many Foxconns, while many Americans pretend to be angry for no longer having its own Foxconns to work with.

When we deprive Apple of its glittering surface, we find something quintessentially capitalist. As law professor Joel Bakan observes in his insightful 2004 book "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power," corporations are exercising increasing control over what people eat, wear, read and watch.

And as they extend the reach of their tentacles, they are dictating public policies, and even what is taught in schools.

Bakan is referring to subcontracting schools to private operators in the US.

But with hindsight we can add that Apple is attempting its own corporate control - in the name of making school instruction a green, entertaining and interactive experience - by having Apple devices the chosen tool for learning at schools.

That would be the acme of corporate control, but according to reports, it's already happening in parts of Ireland, Belgium and China.

When it comes to corporate control, I am also put in mind of the recent furore over extensive tobacco sponsorship of Project Hope School in Sichuan Province.

Emblazoned in huge characters at the entrance to one Hope School is the motto: "Talent comes from diligence, and tobacco will help you succeed."

Bakan, for one, refuses to be distracted by such blatant self-aggrandizement at which modern corporations excel.

"The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others," he claims.

And tobacco companies are just small potatoes beside such corporate monstrosities as GM, Exxon Mobil, BP, or JP Morgan.

This corporate addiction to profit is so established, and so taken for granted, that the US legal system provides that corporations and their executives can be sued if they fail to maximize profits.

Such single-minded pursuit of lucre makes corporate decisions infinitely simpler. Ecological damage, the psychological harm of mass layoffs, sweatshops, subsistence wages - all pale into insignificance beside profits.

Apparently a corporation becomes particularly successful precisely because it becomes expert at privatizing its gains while externalizing its costs - be they pollution, the destruction of rain forests or the plight of employees made redundant for the sake of profits.

The author traced corporate power to the conception of limited liability as pioneered by nineteenth-century railroad barons.

The concept of limited liability caught on because potential losses of shareholders were confined to the amount of their individual investments.

At the beginning, corporations existed for specific reasons, often for short periods, and operated within specific geographic areas.

Today, lucrative corporations are more interested in mergers and acquisitions, diversification and globalization. Paradoxically, some corporations are devoted to philanthropy.

Targeting children

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman explains, if a corporation is pursuing charity and social works for solely altruistic purposes, then it's betraying the profit-motivated interests of shareholders.

He adds that so long as socially responsible programs are a subterfuge aimed at selling more of the corporation's products, such initiatives are fine.

In China, high-profile philanthropy is often practiced by businessmen craving fame, credibility and, most important, governmental ties.

Particularly glaring are blatant corporate attempts to advertise to children.

As the author claims, "children's susceptibility to advertising is exactly what makes them such appealing targets." Indeed, many young children have difficulty telling an advertisement from fact.

Just think how many Chinese families are fighting a losing battle to keep their children away from American junk food and entertainment.

Shrewd marketers have even divided the whining of children into categories: "nagging with persistence" and "nagging with importance."

It's no coincidence that some of the richest people in China are those who specialize in supplying children with junk food or Internet games.