Sunday, November 30, 2008

Globalization: Spreading Democracy, Killing Your Jobs




In The Lonely Plight of a Visonary, Citizen Carrie at Carrie’s Nation takes an exceptional view of the Scrooge MacDucks running amok who seek to sell out your jobs. Citizen Carrie cites Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column “A Penny for My Thoughts” that describes the aftermath of what “quality” really looks like when journalists, too, become sacked and stacked upon the Slagheap of History.


President-elect Obama campaigned on the promise to tax businesses that offshore American jobs. Americans can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of foreign workers and to what one commenter described as “stabbing American workers in the back” by corporate executives who use the “labor shortage myth” to hire cheap labor to drive down wages at home and eliminate jobs for our citizens. Very few Americans, if any outside the billionaires’ boys club -- see outsourcing as an advantageous proposition, as the world watches as The United States slips from its superpower status. Unfortunately, what even fewer Americans understand is that president-elect Obama promised to import workers from India to take white collar jobs by pledging to the same corporations to raise and or eliminate the H-1b visa cap, making his campaign promise of taxing corporations who “offshore” American jobs a moot point, if not an outright, fast hustle. In other words, corporations are now getting what they really want: the ability to import more cheap labor here to drive down wages and further give away the few white collar jobs left for Americans. Talk about stimulating the economy, Barry…

MoDo’s NYT article also includes many insightful comments from people across the country who have had enough here. Below is what one commenter had to say about what it means to restore communities and the economy by putting our own citizens back to work again:



“Globalization and outsourcing will be the death of the middle class and democracy as we know it. It will be a death by a billion cuts as American labor and industry is slowly whittled down to nothing. I ask, what is the value or worth of maintaining a sovereign nation if the people of that nation are not considered as integral to its survival? For surely, as outsourcing and globalization continue to devastate individuals and families across the American landscape, the country becomes increasingly weakened. The only people who benefit from such a process are the business owners. But ultimately, even they will have to pay the piper as there will be no one left with sufficient funds to purchase the outsourced and globalized goods and information. To me, this is a disgustingly pathetic outcome for a people who sacrificed much for independence and freedom. It speaks to a soulless entity where honor and decency and loyalty means little. And that is a place I do not wish to live.”
— Mike B., Carver, MA


When will organizations like MoveOn.org and so-called progressive organizations and blogs start to get the picture? Or, do they revel in the Us vs. Them mentality that is dividing this nation into a country of Have and Have Nots, content to be crushed by the glorious underbelly of globalization?

-2Truthy

4 comments:

Peter of Lone Tree said...

The Coming Great Depression: Leaving Fantasyland:
(...)
"The FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economy based on transaction and debt volume/velocity: gone, over, toast. Housing market based on speculative flipping and one-person households: over, gone, toast. Loose lending by delusional lenders to risky, over-indebted borrowers: gone, over, toast. Borrowing based on rising real estate values: gone, over, toast.

"The notion that we "need" more of anything: gone, over, toast. The idea that you can force lenders to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers: gone, over, toast. The idea you can force people drowning in debt to borrow more: gone, over, toast."

2Truthy said...

PoLT, thanks for the link to this site. Who needs more stuff, indeed...

I am amazed at how so called progressive people are still in denial when they talk about "the economy" but refuse to talk about outsourcing.

As long as there are jobs for the people of this country, none of this should be a problem, right?

Citizen Carrie said...

Peter, let's hope all of the excesses are all gone, over, toast. When I hear the newscasters talk about the importance of holiday sales figures, I wish they would qualify it by saying "If sales figures go up, that's a possible sign that our economy is improving." Instead, it sounds like they are pushing people to spend money that they don't have to get the economy jump-started. No rational person (I ask sweetly) would really want shoppers to overspend, would he or she?

2Truthy, that was a great comment to Dowd's column. I noticed that the Times published about 400 comments, than closed the board. I'm not sure if it's unusual for the Times to attract 400 comments or not, but I notice that outsourcing articles are starting to attract a lot of comments these days. In fact, I'm waiting for publications to realize that it's a hot topic that attracts lots of readers (and where readers go, advertisers will follow) and start publishing more articles about the topic. To me, the fact that Maureen Dowd talked about it in the New York Times is news in itself.

Anonymous said...

I am retired now, and have watched my investments plummet. I can't even imagine what it must be like for people of boomer age and their children to watch their jobs vanish, only to then watch the "populists" or progressives of both parties around them pretend it can't happen to them. Do these unthinking people not understand what growing poverty their neighborhoods will entail? I am tired of watching Hollywood glamorize how wonderful it is to give to the poor of other countries when right before our eyes, we are being turned into a poor country.

If Obama really wanted to go down in history, he would put a moratorium on sending our taxpayer dollars to other countries and make a point of putting every citizen to work before thinking about bringing in cheaper workers to take jobs and undercut pay here.

President-elect Obama is currently highlighting how much his administration is going to "aid" other countries, but then he insists on giving jobs away to them?

What does "progressive" even mean? I don't see one alleged progressive blog that even uses the words "job outsourcing" and insourcing. It is as if they pretend it can't happen to them.
These are the same people who were duped by Nancy Pelosi going to bring change.