Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Unsustainability of Cheap Labor and Cheap Oil

 
Time to Put the Brakes on the Neo-Frat Boy Corporate State
(Very Special Thanks to Chris Farley and David Spade in Tommy Boy)

 Defostering Globalization and Embracing Local Civic Sustainability


Corporate America's love fest with cheap oil and cheap Indian labor is like watching a hustling car parts salesman try to sell brake pads to a  disinterested prospect with too much overstock.

Two excellent articles converge today to describe the unsustainability of America's reliance on cheap oil and cheap foreign labor where Emily Spence asks After Peak Oil Are We Heading For Social Collapse? and Rob Sanchez reports  Teacher Assistant Graders Outsourced To Bangalore. Both articles emphasize the crucial need for U.S. citizens to unite and work towards restoring civility and defusing the growing tolerance of the neo-frat boy corporate state's “tyranny of civilized arrogance”. America's reliance on cheap oil and cheap foreign labor must stop in order to preserve and create healthy, local and sustainable energy and ecosystems if America is to avoid social collapse in this 21st Century. With a surplus of underemployed and unemployed educated Americans, this  shocking report from Sanchez makes the case for an overdue overhaul on America's addiction to cheap Indian labor as the U.S. has  an overstock of U.S. citizens who need jobs.

While the American job killing Hubris Disease has broken out of the blowsy confines of the Beltway and Corporate America and has now squarely hit the halls of America's higher institutions of learning, Rob Sanchez's timely report about the inhumane and uncivil reliance on foreign labor to sell out American student TA's jobs to India by a University of Houston teacher with a corporatist background might beg the following questions: Where is the local commitment and accountability boards to sustainable and socially responsible behavior to U.S. citizen students who need those jobs, much less to Houston's local economy? What motivates corporate citizens to work against the local needs of American students and citizens?

Sanchez explains that the Houston teacher, “who teaches business law and ethics at the University of Houston, is offshoring the job of grading the assignments from her students to India” below:

Outsourcing teaching assistant (TA) jobs to Asia might seem like a lack of the ethics she is supposedly teaching–until her corporate background is reviewed. She worked at international corporations and Wall Street investment firms such as Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, which might help to explain where she honed her globalist ideologies.
Seven TAs seems like an adequate number of graders for one professor. Since she teaches management, is it not reasonable to expect her to manage the work load of her TAs? These types of jobs are very valuable for students who need a steady paycheck and work experience. Outsourcing these jobs will only serve to hurt students and to further the deterioration of our university system. It makes far more sense to hire a few more TAs than to send the money offshore.”

Indeed, it also makes sense to start concentrating higher education learning subsidies upon university systems dedicated to educating U.S. citizenry if we are to strengthen social responsibility within our local economies.

As Sanchez documents the clearly unsustainable nature of U.S. corporate sponsored social irresponsibility, Emily Spence's article also cites the imperative need for U.S. communities to move away from dependence upon the false fruits of globalization (as in Tom “Flatworlder” Friedman's hoax “globalization is good”) and reinvent local economies of scale that feed and employ educated U.S. citizens. This move towards a new paradigm of local sustainability/social responsibility and away from the false promise of globalization is not only good for America, but for other countries like India which has a vast population dependent upon local agrarian economies harmed by corporate Big Ag schemes, as well. When will the U.S. finally cut this parasitic dependence on cheap Indian labor when the people of this country need to locally focus on “innovation” of their own? It is nothing short of tyrannical for corporate America to continue giving our jobs away. Spence writes:


Jan Lundberg indicates, in The People Of The Brook Versus Supermarket Splendor, “Social relations are defined today by tolerance of tyranny: of harmful industrial profit schemes, unfair ownership of huge property holdings, and astronomical financial wealth. As soon as the post-peak oil house of cards topples, ‘new’ social structures will be (re)established. There’s a growing number of people already welcoming the end of false wealth’s tyranny and of civilized arrogance.”


But where are the teabaggers (right: “hands off my Medicare/I hate socialism”) and the fleabaggers (left: “progressives”... too-smug to fail and wail”) to unite and protest Indian outsourcing/insourcing? The left/right paradigm of yore as it once applied to their respective bases is old-school, as the war on America's middle class is working out just great with these suckaz taking the bait from the neo-frat boys' divide and conquer propaganda units (left: HuffPo, AlterNet, etc.) and (right: Faux News, Drudge, etc.) to hurl “hater” rhetoric at each other while the neo-frat boys steal their jobs and laugh all the way to the bank.

What motivates the self-indulgent, neo-frat boy corporate state to work against local sustainability and local social responsibility? As LWOH readers know, yours truly has reported on corporate America's U.S. job killing CHEAP LABOR JUNKIES over and over and over again (and then some). By now, EVERYBODY KNOWS America's “best and brightest” corporate thought leaders (as they call themselves) are little more than a greedy, inner circle jerk of narcissistic, hubris soaked insufferables who loathe competition from their educated American neighbors enough to throw them out of the workforce by importing India's dubiously “skilled” workers and exporting our jobs via harmful H-1B, F and L visas. Make no mistake: U.S. corporate boardrooms are filled with petty, jealous frat boys and beady-eyed hos who peddle the “Americans lack of innovation” lie when the only innovation these “in-league” (as they call themselves) frauds know is their way around padded spreadsheets and cooked books to fire American workers and hire cheap Indian labor so that this grubbing subset can profit horde at the expense of U.S. educated citizens. It has to stop. This well-funded, organized American job killing racket is built upon lies about a Great American Labor Shortage supplied by American ivy league sponsored think tanks hired to “innovate” numbers and skewed data for corporate America to “legitimatize” the crime of selling out U.S. jobs by importing India's dreadful caste system to the United States. American jobs are disappearing for American citizens, and for a local college teacher giving one job – even ONE job – to foreign citizens when U.S. citizens need to work is a recipe for social collapse and is as unsustainable as our false reliance upon unlimited, cheap oil.

Spence notes that while other countries protect jobs for their citizens, it is time  the U.S. began doing the same:

All considered, it is easy to notice that some individuals and countries faring relatively well throughout the ongoing recession are ones whose economic foundations have been largely isolated from worldwide influences. Moreover, the nations mostly immune to the downturn tend to be oriented towards serving the needs of their own populations, have been largely regionalized in focus, and generally have smaller, comparatively simple, manageable economies, as the U.S. and other countries, in my opinion, should aim to duplicate as much as possible.”


Aside from corporate America and Wall Street picking off Main Street, our university system is now aggressively being plundered by neo-frat boys who are selling out U.S. jobs and student work/study slots for educated Americans to India. It's time to divert massive concentrations of U.S. wealth away from counter-productive land-grab wars abroad and neo-frat boy, corporofascist subsidies and bailouts to, as Spence so aptly describes it, “defoster globalization.”

It's high time for America to stop buying this defective, deadly Great Labor Shortage Myth and put the brakes on these dangerous neo-frat boys peddling their unsustainable, destructive bullshit compost.

Spence recognizes that weeding out “unchecked corporate exploitation” (the same kind that may have driven, perhaps, the Texas college teacher), without meaningful regulation towards local sustainability and social responsibility is essential to avoid social collapse:

Simultaneously, it is apparent that ‘revolving door‘ politics between corporate executives, politicians and bureaucrats with whom global-scale moguls sometimes collude do, in fact, exist and even lead, in some instances to regulatory capture. The overall outcome from such a pattern is unchecked corporate exploitation, deceit and power mongering during which time nations’ general populations become progressively destitute. Meanwhile, the über-class, without meaningful regulatory brakes on free market enterprise, obtain ever greater control over worldwide resources and the financial wherewithal to seize even more control over time.”


And hey, fleabaggers – the next time you want to dump on those teabaggers, try lifting one shoe out of the steaming pile of your so far useless carbon footprint and get out there and make noise. At least the teabaggers try (even if they can't get their fascism vs. socialism facts straight.)

Make them accountable.

Party on, plebes!

-2Truthy

4 comments:

Red "Aylsthorpe" Oak said...

...our university system is now aggressively being plundered by neo-frat boys who are selling out U.S. jobs and student work/study slots for educated Americans to India.

And they just won't quit...came across a story the other day about how my state's public universities (that's right, not private, though they all get a hunk o' public money, too) are aggressively increasing their recruitment of foreign nationals, as there are no longer enough Americans who can afford the price of admission. Were pretty shamelessly straightforward about the bald revenue seeking, too, only bothering to tack on the "diversity" and "globalized world" bullshit at the end of the piece, for form's sake. They're rubbing our noses in it while continuing to extort the money. They don't even try to hide it anymore.

Chatted with a professional fundraiser for the local uni's endowment recently - she was mortified, absolutely mortified, at a state senator's suggestion that part of the university's endowment might be used to help qualified residents afford an education at their own state's public university. Guess I'm unclear on what these land-grant universities were founded for in the first place. Apparently, their main purpose is to provide educations for Chinese nationals, even as the children of the American subsidizers do without.

2Truthy said...

"Were pretty shamelessly straightforward about the bald revenue seeking, too, only bothering to tack on the "diversity" and "globalized world" bullshit at the end of the piece, for form's sake. They're rubbing our noses in it while continuing to extort the money. They don't even try to hide it anymore."

Hey Red "Plenderleith" Oak,

Thanks for sharing your experience with that old windbag uni fundraiser. Shameless, indeed. Your observation above sums up the core of the problem: the HUBRIS DISEASE, which I can't emphasize enough underpins sick, anti-citizen/community labor/educational policies responsible for this 'jobless recovery' that stuffs this ilk's piggy banks at the expense of our local citizenry & economies.

Economic "experts" like Reich are out there now in full force with the usual Spaghetti Western schtick "he went thataway!" to divert the plebes from the behavioral changes, as in REHABILITATION - that must occur to clean up this mess of U.S. broken local economies and spiraling unemployment that guys like him and Clinton created when they opened up the work/student visa floodgates to China and India.

Driving around yesterday I heard an NPR radio pitch about donating to a 'save the baby seals movement' and thought "hell yes, sounds good to me." But where is the same compassion/morally responsible social conviction and mobilization from the plebes to organize a 'save our CEO's and University boards from sociopathy'to reform corporate America into locally sustainable, civic-minded labor practices?

2Truthy said...

RO, btw, which state senator suggested that a portion of the uni's endowment be used to assist local residents? These senators are worth noting.

Anonymous said...

Denver Colorado? Say hello to progress?