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Asian Call Center Workers Trained With US Tax Dollars
gManZboy writes in with a troubling story about tax dollars being used for overseas call center training. "Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to 'insource' jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses. The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka. Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York), told about the program on Tuesday, called it 'surprising and distressing.' Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts."
This just in: Politicians lie. Film at 11.
They *do* increase employment. In China.
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Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
So they're saying that they're no longer going to purchase HP, Dell, or Acer PCs? Somehow I suspect that bill is just posturing, and will not amount to anything.
I wonder if USAID would be willing to sponsor a similar program up here in Canada?
We have lots of friendly college folk who need ESL training and an economic leg up -- so what better way than to operate your call centers up here?
It's as near shore as you can get and these ESL trained immigrants would do the natural, Canuck thing, and spend their USAIDed wages across the border at Costco and Wal-Mart.
It's ironic. Recently SallieMae called to talk to me about one of my employees who's delinquent on his student loans. The caller was clearly Indian. I remarked that it hardly seems to help American students repay their loans, in general, if SallieMae itself outsources its operations to India, thus depriving a number of Americans from the opportunity to repay their loans.
The rep hung up on me.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
...or else important programs like this will have to be cut!
Why do we fight so hard to keep/return the shitty jobs?
The Obama critque is not irrelevant. The problem with this election is that the guy against him has one goal and that is to help his corporate buddies. The GOP doesn't need to spend the time or the money on a platform committee this year because choosing Mittens makes it their sole platform plank. Romney already goes on the stump and says only what his pals want him to say (not to mention different things for different crouds.) Obama is a corporatist without a doubt, but at least he thinks about the little guy 1% of the time.
Across the board spending cuts are supposed to take effect in January of 2013... You know who's crying about them already... The military. I can already hear the backtracking in congress about how dangerous it is to cut military spending, and I'm sure we'll have across the board cuts in 2013... for social programs.
Gee, I hope they succeed in bringing all of the call center work back to the United States! I would love to pay higher prices so that my countrymen can work menial jobs for 10 times the pay of their Asian counterparts (which still fails to provide a decent standard of living here), because more expensive products are good for everyday Americans already struggling to get by!
Actually, and all sarcasm aside. you are quite right. The few dollars more that you might spend on your PC, for example, could create living wage jobs for people here in this country. We need some major adjustments to the economy, but the math is what it is and when you stop sucking dollars out of it by off-shoring your labor, things are better. Period. We saw this throughout the eighties in the Pacific Northwest. Reagan's corporate welfare policies allowed corporations to make more money shipping raw logs overseas than they could by processing them into salable products here. The result was the virtually complete collapse of the timber industry. Entire communities became ghost towns when the paper and lumber mills shut down. Same shit, different decade, only on a much bigger scale.
You could cut military spending to zero, and you'd still have a huge deficit. The only ways to eliminate the deficit are big cuts everywhere, big tax increases, or big economic growth.
Sorry, but since I detect no sarcasm I have to assume you are really ignorant. You do understand that an Economy needs to be able to accommodate every level of education and desire to work in order to be an economy right?
The Political speak of the last decade or so tends not to mention how important that is. "American's don't want to work in factories" is another good line. It's great rhetoric that has been working to increase the wealth disparity gap in the US, put millions of Americans out of work, and made a select few more wealthy than they already were.
Look, I'm not going to try to teach you the fundamentals of economics and sociology. I simply don't have the time or energy to even try. I will suggest that you do some research before repeating propaganda targeting lower and middle class Americans and giving benefit to the wealthy. Spend some time reading about the economics of Rome prior to collapse. Greece is another great example and much more recent. Read some of the works by the founder of Capitalism Adam Smith, Marxx's commentary is very good as well. Both will point out the short comings and dangers of the system rather nicely.
In all societies, the majority of people are content with menial work for fair pay. There is a minority on either end. When the top owns enough to steal from everyone below them, the society is doomed. Plato's "The Republic" is an excellent reference for that aspect. And yes, the United States is a Republic and founded that way intentionally. Though it has been turning in to something completely different very quickly.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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The whole point of USAID since inception has been to very publicly give financial aid to allies and countries with whom we want to establish stronger ties, and to less publicly give American foreign service personnel an excuse to be in a foreign country with a bunch of cash. And that's not some Cold War stuff, either. Like, right now, American military advisors and CIA operatives act in places like Afghanistan under the auspices (and budget) of the USAID, which, ironically, stands for United States Agency for International Development. It's a major foreign policy arm of the US, and if you think the government, no matter which party is in power, is going to rush to put a leash on it just because outsourcing has some feathers ruffled, you're very much mistaken.
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