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President Defends Global Outsourcing
mytrip wrote to mention a New York Times article discussing President Bush's trip to the Indian subcontinent. There, he urged Americans to welcome global competition for their jobs. From the article: "Mr. Bush, reiterating a theme of his trip, strongly defended the outsourcing of American jobs to India as the reality of a global economy, and said that the United States should instead focus on India as a vital new market for American goods ... 'The classic opportunity for our American farmers and entrepreneurs and small businesses to understand is there is a 300 million-person market of middle class citizens here in India, and that if we can make a product they want, that it becomes viable,'"
Your job gets outsourced? Don't worry. Just upgrade your skills. Eventually everyone will be a CEO!
That's the usual refrain here when outsourcing debates start. In addition to the fact that we can't all be the best and ok but not amazing programmers have to do something for a living, if we don't have the entry level jobs here, who will learn the skills to let them design programs?
All donations should be required to be anonymous
I disagree. We should just carry the current system to it's logical conclusion without wasting any more time:
All donations should come with a patch that is sewn onto the politician's clothing, so they look like NASCAR drivers, and we know who gave them money.
And legislation should be clearly labeled with corporate sponsers, like advertising.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
"If you're okay with children starving in China, then it's fine to oppose this leveling."
I'm not exactly sure why, because India and China failed to control unsustainable population growth, that the rest of the world needs to destroy their economies and economic well being to insure they are well fed. Economics is in reality a form of warfare. Sometimes a rising tide raises all boats but most of the time there are economic winners and losers. The U.S. was the big winner in the 20th century. It is poised to be a big loser in this one, at least for the vast majority of its people, while its top 1% will probably continue to do very well. In this brand of warfare there really is no reason why U.S. workers should aid and abet their own destruction to insure the "Chinese" are well fad.
This isn't really about insuring China and India are well fed anyway.
The bottomline at work here is there is a global economic elite, less than 1% of the world populations who are rich and getting richer. In the last 30 years many powerful communist party members in China abandoned socialism, for Fascism, and are entering the ranks of this elite along side the long established rich in the U.S. and Europe.
This elite embraces and loves globalization. They have the capital and the ability to invest it anywhere in the world where it will yield the greatest return on their investment. By contrast working people have limited resource and they can't just invest in the new economic hotspot in the world like China. If their nations economy craters they get to starve.
Its a basic axiom of capitalism that labor cost is one of the basic factors in profitability. In the past trade and physical barriers allowed labor costs to diverge in different regions. The U.S., Japan and Western Europe could have high wage rates and a good standard of living because they weren't competing head to head with people making a few cents an hour in Asia. A key barrier that allowed this was that it was expensive to ship goods between nations both because of tarriffs and the cost of hand loading and unloading ships using longshoremen. The WTO has dismantled the tarriffs, at least in to the West, though they still seem to thrive in places like China blocking Western good going there. Shipping costs plunged thanks to container shipping. Communications costs disappeared thanks to fiber optics and computer networks.
What we see today and what Bush is really saying is, that multinational corporations, and wealthy capitalists embrace globalization. It is great for them. In particular its causing a dramatic drop in labor costs to them and capitalism thrives on low cost labor.
The thing they continually gloss over is that this means that in nations where labor costs are high, those workers are mostly doomed unless they have or can acquire skills that justify a premium salary. They will either hit unemployment or their will be constant downward pressure on their incomes. People now in the middle class will be pushed in to poverty. In fact this is already happening in the U.S. The number of people living below the poverty line is increasing dramatically in recent years. The U.S. economy still appears prosperous because most of its big companies are globalized so they are still making lots of money, so the DOW and Nasdaq do just fine, as they slowly dispose of their expensive U.S. work forces and reap big gains from low cost foreign labor. Unfortunately their U.S. work forces are being quietly destroyed in the process.
Its really easy to see where this ends. The U.S. is going to end up where it was at the beginning of the 20th century. There will be a small number of very wealthy people, doing very well, and a huge body of desperately poor workers, barely making enough to survive, working in dismal working conditions if they can get work at all.
The ruling elite which really is George W.'s only constituency will still be very comfortable and very happy. They have money and they can keep making money
@de_machina
The amount of goods and services that a person can afford per hour of labor has been steadily increasing. Your average middle class worker now can afford more food, more housing, more automobile, and certainly more consumer electronics than he ever could.
... Yeah, there are exceptions, you CAN probably start a little web design buisness, or open a video or music shop, or a resteraunt for less money... or possibly even a super highly specialized item... but you are NOT going to be manufacturing a consumer product in the U.S. for less than a couple million - and that leaves out the vast majority of Americans from opening a buisness. That means less competition for big buisness., etc.
Confirm this for yourself. Find out what the average wage was 30 years ago or 40 years ago. Look in an old catalog, and look at what someone could purchase with their wages then, and compare it with average wages and what they can afford to purchase now. Aside from things like big screen TVs and computers that obviously we can afford more of now, we can now afford more clothes, more lawnmowers, more washing machines, more sofas, etc. We can afford to eat out more, purchase more pre-packaged/advertized food products. People can now afford better housing. People can pretty much afford much more of everything.
You do understand that cheaper goods = higher income, right? There is no difference if a shirt cost $10, and you make $10 an hour, or if a shirt cost $5, and you make $5 an hour, right?
Americans today are the wealthiest people in the world, living in the most wealthy period of history. This is undenyably the truth.
There is something to be said about the so called gap between the "rich" and "poor", but a better way to describe it would be the gap between the "Richest", and the "rich". It is true that the richest group of people have seen their real consumption increase much faster than the middle class or poor. And unlike a lot of people, I would fully agree with you that disparity between the rich and the richest is undesirable. It would be much better to see income increase evenly amoung all people.
But this disparity doesn't have much to do with foriegn trade. It has more to do with the minimum capital required to do buisness in the United States. 50 years ago, lets say you wanted to open a buisness, let say a small factory that machines parts. Such a buisness would be fairly easy for a middle class person to start. But not so today. The cost of OSHA compliance, compliance with local/state/country/federal enviornmental laws and hiring the experts, lawyers, to ensure compliance, insuring that you comply with all the non-enviornment local/state/country/federal laws, ensuring that you meet all the conditions that your workplace is handicapped accessible, making sure you are not only in full compliance with the 75,000 pages of tax laws, but that you can prove to the IRS you are in full compliance... making sure you are an "equal oportunity employer" (this wouldn't be so bad if it was simply banning discrimination, but it is thousands of pages of rules and regulations that can be quite counter-inuitive, and you are going to have to hire a lawyer to deal with them), and lets not forget the cost of liability insurance, because people in America love to deal with them.
Basicly, you are talking a cost of several million dollars to start a significant buisness in the U.S.
Let me start with saying that I sypathize with every person that lost his/her job. That is hard. That sucks and if ever I could do anything about it, I would.
Also I appreciate open mind shown in USA. Most fair and impartial country on this earth. Perhaps I would not get such a fair audience anywhere else in the world.
Now let me tell you the other side of story.
There was a soft drink company called Thumbs Up in India. When the economy opened and Cocacola arrived, they tried to buy the company. When the company refused, Coca cola just baught all their products and sent to warehouse, and kept them off market shelves for a while, so people would forget them. Result? Evantually the Indian cold drink company gave in. Coca cola changed the taste of that product. It sucks now. Now it's all Coca cola.
The same thing happened to many many Indian companies. At many places, American companies did not need to play games. American products were far superior than their Indian counterparts. Obviously people switched to American goods. GM and Ford, losing here, are having time of their life in India. Because old Indian cars sucked compared to GM and Ford offerings.
Many Indian companies were closed, Indians lost jobs as well.
But evantually things stabilized, and bingo, actually turned upwards. Call centers, software outsourcing, people started seeing benefits.
And now people in USA are complaining. Perhaps many of the jobs lost did not belong to USA. They were just borrowed from India. I know I sound like Satan to your ears, but you should see the whole picture.
People in India switched to USA companies because for almost same price, they offered better quality. Now companies in USA are switching to Indian labour, because it costs much less for the same skill level.
Just a list of few Indian companies went bankrupt or got kicked in 1990s- Premier Automobiles, Murphy Television, Thumbs up cold drink. Can't remember more of the top of my head. But there are a lot.
Military equipment producers, OIL companies and such are having time of their lives in USA. Why not ask them to share their profits before blaming Outsourcing?
Dude, this is just other side of capitalism. Face it. You can't just have benefits of something and but not face disadvantages.
And I have strong faith in future of USA. This country thrives on innovation. Evantually Americans will figure the way out and in the process bring a whole new era. The same thing happened at times of Japanese auto makers, at times of South Asian electronics manufactures, the same thing will happen about cheap Chinese goods and about Indian call centers.
And don't throw that list of non USA companies owning USA companies. 53% rubber products? You guys fucking own GPS.