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Import Export in India – Global Relations is Important
Import-export is considered as significant areas of business. When a person or even a company buy goods such as groceries, textiles, machine parts, farm produce, or even rough oil from its own nation and dispatches them to various countries for sale at a higher cost, it is known as export. In goods and raw material are shipped from other countries to sell in one's own nation keeping a profit edge, it is known as import.
The trading completely depends on the internal productions of a nation whose surplus is sold in the overseas market. A share of the right profit approaching from the sale of a country's creations also goes to the national funds of the nation. So Import Export in India is important for a nation's country.
Global relations too have an immense impact on import export. If a nation is not on good terms with one more which is a potential buyer of the past's products, there obviously can be no trade.
Import export data in this system of global trade show there is also rivalry among all importers. So, one should not make any compromise with the quality. If the excellence of the item for export is poor it turns anxious for the exporting country's market as it may permanently lose its market by harming its status in the worldwide trade circuit.
Import export explains India's jute generally has a tough rivalry with Bangladeshi jute, which is generally superior in quality to the past. Beforehand, there had been cases of the sale of lower quality Indian jute in the worldwide market. As a result, India's sale of jute suffered a deficiency for many years.
If you are planning to begin Import Export in India, it is compulsory to first collect all important statistics and buyer’s supplier’s data to assist you make a decision on the product and the country you will be trading with.
Bell Labs goes with this deal..
France's Alcatel to buy Lucent for $13.4 bln
By Sudip Kar-Gupta and Jessica Hall Sun Apr 2, 7:22 PM ET
PARIS/PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - French communications-equipment maker Alcatel said on Sunday it would buy smaller U.S. rival Lucent Technologies Inc. for $13.4 billion to gain market heft and broaden its product mix.
Together, the companies would have total revenue of $25 billion, roughly matching current industry leader Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCO - news). They would also wield greater clout to negotiate prices with customers and enjoy a broader research and development base.
"Competition is increasing and size and scale really matter," Lucent (NYSE:LU - news) Chief Executive Patricia Russo told analysts and reporters on a conference call, adding that the prospect of joining the companies' research and development muscle helped to cinch the deal.
Russo, 53, will serve as CEO of the combined Paris-based company, although she does not speak French.
The transaction, which analysts said could trigger other mergers throughout the equipment sector, comes five years after Lucent and Alcatel first discussed a merger. Talks broke down in 2001 after Lucent balked at the idea of a takeover, rather than a so-called "merger of equals."
Alcatel (CGEP.PA) (NYSE:ALA - news) would now own 60 percent of the combined company, whose name has yet to be determined. It expects the deal to boost earnings per share in the first year, excluding restructuring charges.
JOB CUTS
The companies plan to cut about 10 percent of their combined work force, or about 8,800 jobs. Alcatel Chairman and Chief Executive Serge Tchuruk would be nonexecutive chairman.
"The question for Alcatel/Lucent is, can they put this company together without a lot of integration risks?" UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos said.
With the deal, Lucent would gain a stronger partner after struggling to cut costs and restructure following the loss of business after the burst of the Internet bubble, analysts said.
Alcatel, which has expertise in high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, would gain Lucent's dominance in wireless technology and contracts with big carriers such as Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ - news).
Alcatel also gets Bell Labs, Lucent's historic research arm, which is responsible for technological inventions ranging from transistors and lasers to cellular telephone technology, data networking and communications satellites.
The companies expect the deal to close in six to 12 months, but analysts said the French and U.S. governments will likely scrutinize the structure of the transaction to ensure that each firm's sensitive military contracts are protected.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Lucent said it would create an independent unit that would run some U.S. government work. The subsidiary would be separately managed by a board composed of three U.S. citizens "acceptable to the U.S. government," Russo said.
Analysts said exactly what would go into that subsidiary is likely to be open for debate, as well as a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which must clear foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies.
Lucent's government work includes an advanced communications system for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's technology incubator.
"I don't think there's any rational reason for anyone to oppose this deal. But rationality and politics are two different things. It doesn't mean that this deal doesn't become a political football," said Stephen Kamman, an analyst with CIBC World Markets.
Several recent deals with international companies have raised national security concerns among U.S. lawmakers. Most recently, state owned Arab company Dubai Ports World agreed to transfer operation of six U.S. port terminals to a U.S. entity to defuse a political firestorm.
DISCOUNT PRICE
Under the terms of the deal, Lucent shareholders will receive 0.1952 of an ADS (American Depositary Share) of Alcatel for every common share of Lucent that they currently hold.
The deal values Lucent at about $3.01 per share, or slightly below its closing stock price of $3.05 on the New York Stock Exchange Friday.
Despite that discount, Lucent Chief Financial Officer John Kritzmacher called the deal "fair and equitable." The price reflects a 6.7 percent premium over the price of Lucent's stock before news of the merger talks first emerged 10 days ago.
The price also values Lucent at about 17 times projected earnings, which is below the industry average of about 22 times.
Analysts said the deal could force rivals to add more sales staff, revamp their product lines or consider mergers as a way to cut costs.
"I think everybody's thinking about what they want to do when they grow up," CIBC's Kamman said. "This is going to drive some more soul-searching."
SATELLITE COMPLICATIONS
The Alcatel-Lucent deal has been partly complicated by Alcatel's desire to transfer its satellite unit to France's Thales SA (TCFP.PA) in exchange for a larger stake in Europe's biggest defense electronics company. The move is aimed placing Alcatel's sensitive civil and military satellite projects under control of a French entity.
Meanwhile, Franco-German Airbus parent EADS (EAD.PA) has campaigned to be allowed to contribute its own satellite unit in return for a Thales stake and shared power with Alcatel.
Thales said its board would meet on April 4 and look at the "complementary" proposals from both Alcatel and EADS.
Alcatel shares closed down 1.5 percent at 12.77 euros on Friday. Its ADS closed at $15.40, off 31 cents, or 2 percent.
(Additional reporting by Michele Gershberg and Robert MacMillan in New York, and Jean-Michel Belot in Paris)
($1=.8254 Euro)
Immigration: basic 0000
illegals are costing local governments/state(in education, medical expenses, and security: 1/12 reported to have criminal backgrounds....OK, lets say it is 1/1000, still high).
most of the immigrants are unskilled and uneducated, period!
this has been pointed out by most economic studies.
THUS, your creating a huge UNDERCLASS OF PEOPLE!!!
WOW! nice situation!
NO ONE IS A RACIST HERE! THIS IS A REALITY! IF I AM
A RACIST! YOUR A MORON!
Keith
CAFTA: Exporting American Jobs & Industry
by William Norman Grigg
The New American, April 18, 2005
CAFTA, a forerunner of an "EU of the Americas," trades away American jobs in the name of rewarding Latin American "democracies."
Allen Johnson, chief agricultural negotiator for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, was enjoying his vacation in late February when he received a panicky call from the White House. The mid-year meeting of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) was on the verge of delivering a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration by passing a resolution opposing the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
CAFTA would build on the three-nation North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by expanding the trade bloc to include Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. Congressional ratification of CAFTA is coveted by the White House, its political allies in Central America, and politically connected corporate interests who stand to profit from outsourcing production to low-wage nations in the region. It is stoutly opposed by U.S. agricultural and textile producers, who are reeling from the economic impact of NAFTA and are understandably worried that CAFTA would trigger another flood of imports and another hemorrhage of industrial jobs. Most importantly, since the agreement would further undermine our nation's ability to control its economic destiny, it has prompted opposition from Americans who seek to preserve our national independence.
As a February 26 AP report noted: "CAFTA is the most significant multilateral pact for the United States since the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada more than a decade ago. It is seen as crucial to the greater goal of establishing a free trade zone for all the Western Hemisphere." The supposed hemispheric "free trade zone," the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), would actually be an embryonic mega-state modeled after the socialistic European Union (EU). The EU, it is important to remember, was initially sold to the European public as a "free trade" area, as well.
Having succeeded in moving several bilateral free trade agreements through Congress in its first term, the Bush administration "faces its toughest test" in seeking approval for CAFTA. According to CAFTA supporter Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), passage of the agreement is "difficult but doable."
Congressional Quarterly reported that Republican congressional leaders in both houses are preparing to hold hearings on CAFTA. The hearings would be followed by "a non-binding advisory markup" in which House and Senate committees would "draft the implementing legislation that the administration will send to Congress for an up-or-down vote." Under so-called fast track rules, noted Congressional Quarterly on March 14, "a 90-day clock for congressional approval starts ticking when the administration officially sends the legislation to Congress."
The Bush administration was painfully aware that winning congressional approval for CAFTA would require strangling the opposition before it found a public voice. Thus Allen Johnson was summoned back to Washington to address the meeting of state agriculture officials in an attempt to persuade them not to denounce CAFTA.
By the time Allen Johnson had been bundled into a Washington-bound jet to address NASDA on February 21, the group's Marketing and International Trade Committee had unanimously (with two abstentions) adopted a resolution opposing CAFTA. Although he prostrated himself shamelessly before the group's general assembly, Johnson was not successful in convincing the required two-thirds majority to overturn its Marketing and International Trade Committee's anti-CAFTA resolution. He was also unsuccessful in persuading the group to keep news of its disagreement with the White House out of the press.
"Fat chance," commented syndicated agricultural affairs analyst Alan Guebert. "The vote sent shockwaves through the usually pro-trade NASDA, whose members literally know the lay of the food and farm land in their home states. That's their job; looking farmers and ranchers in the eye every day. On February 19 … almost half of them looked in the mirror and said, 'My producers are right; CAFTA is wrong.' Moments later, the White House fire bell rang." According to Delaware Agriculture Secretary Michael Scuse, vice chairman of the NASDA committee that condemned CAFTA, "we're more concerned about how CAFTA affects farmers than how it affects trade."
"Free Trade" — or Foreign Aid?
Chief among the objections offered by NASDA and many other CAFTA critics is the fact that the supposed "free trade" agreement would impose what amounts to unilateral trade disarmament on U.S. agricultural producers. The six foreign nations included in the pact would be granted immediate access to U.S. food markets. However, U.S. producers would have to wait for years, or even decades, in order to be granted reciprocal access.
If, as expected, the FTAA follows the CAFTA model by opening U.S. domestic markets first, with access to foreign markets coming only years later, the results for U.S. farmers would be nothing less than devastating. During the prescribed interval, Guebert observes, "nations like Brazil, Russia and India will become food exporting powerhouses to both the U.S. and the world while American farmers become calendar watchers."
If the point of CAFTA is to promote free exchange of goods and services between producers and consumers, why is the pact designed to offer artificial competitive advantages to foreign food producers? Rather than promoting what could honestly be called free trade, CAFTA amounts to a foreign aid program — using nonreciprocal access to U.S. markets as a roundabout subsidy for agricultural programs in foreign nations.
And this is hardly the only way in which CAFTA amounts to a foreign aid scheme disguised as a "free trade" initiative. The Bush administration and its pro-CAFTA allies habitually refer to the pact as a means of promoting economic "development" and building "democratic institutions" in Central America. This refrain was featured prominently in a hastily assembled nationwide tour of ambassadors from the CAFTA nations.
"Ambassadors and officials from Central America made a passionate plea in Seattle … for U.S. passage of a regional trade deal they see as a vital tool to help lift their countries out of poverty," reported the February 25 Seattle Times. "While acknowledging that CAFTA isn't perfect, the officials said it is a vital tool for development and forms part of a package of government and market changes that would promote stability and democracy, and energize the economies of the Central American nations."
Roxane Premont of the Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA (an ad hoc project of the John Birch Society, of which this magazine is an affiliate) attended a session of the "CAFTA Roadshow" in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, where participants preached exactly the same message. "They definitely offered the argument that CAFTA was vital as a way of promoting economic development in Central America," Mrs. Premont told THE NEW AMERICAN. "Several of the speakers emphasized the idea that we should use CAFTA as a form of foreign aid, rewarding these 'emerging democracies' in the region."
It's important to recognize that economic growth is a result of production, not consumption. Thus the logic of the "trade as foreign aid" argument dictates that CAFTA is intended to promote the importation of goods from Central America, rather than the export of U.S. goods to the region.
Pro-CAFTA Congressman Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) describes the region as "a potentially significant trading bloc with the United States." However, the aggregate economy of the six CAFTA nations is minuscule. "Add up the six CAFTA economies and you get a market the size of New Haven, Connecticut," points out trade analyst Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council.
Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Christopher Padilla insists that while the CAFTA nations are small, "they are actually very big markets for our products. In fact, we trade more with Central America than we trade with Brazil or Australia." If that claim were true, it would make CAFTA redundant — assuming, once again, that promotion of free trade is the desired result.
However, as Tonelson writes, "U.S. exports to the CAFTA [nations] are dominated by what might be called 'turnaround exports.' That is to say, exports that are not final products which are actually consumed abroad, but parts and components of final products that are assembled or further processed abroad, and then shipped right back for consumption in the United States. As a result, they don't service net new demand in foreign markets — which eventually would require domestic employers to expand production, hire new workers, and boost wages. They service the same old demand in the same old market — America's."
Put in the simplest terms, the CAFTA nations are an economically stagnant population of 46 million people, more than half of whom live below the poverty level (as defined by their standard of living, not ours). Costa Rica, the wealthiest CAFTA nation, has a per-capita GDP of $9,000 — roughly one-quarter of ours. Every nation other than Costa Rica displays net emigration, meaning that their citizens are leaving home in search of economic opportunity.
Is this the raw material of a potentially lucrative U.S. export market — or a low-wage population that will act as a magnet for further outsourcing of our embattled manufacturing sector? Tonelson concludes that CAFTA is a "classic outsourcing agreement" — an arrangement in which the only significant U.S. export would be manufacturing jobs to poor, low-wage nations.
According to CAFTA supporters, this is precisely why it's important to ratify the accord. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) insists that CAFTA is a proper reward to Central American nations that "have emerged from years of war and dictatorial rule to make major steps toward promoting democracy and human rights," reported the AP. "Kicking them down the ladder would be a major mistake," insisted the congressman. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) makes a similar point, stating that his "primary" reason for supporting CAFTA is his belief that the agreement would "spur U.S. investment … and promote economic development in the region."
Of course, Reps. Brady and Flake, like scores of other congressmen who express support for CAFTA, were elected to represent the interests of U.S. citizens, not the interests of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, or the Dominican Republic. Nor is promoting "economic development" in foreign lands at the expense of American prosperity among Congress's constitutional responsibilities — a fact that voters should impress on the minds of their representatives before CAFTA is brought to a vote. Moreover, even if the purpose were to help poor peoples in foreign lands improve their standards of living, the long-term solution can only be found in political and economic freedom, not in pulling the U.S. down.
"No" on CAFTA Is "Yes" to China?
Approval of CAFTA would offer, at best, negligible economic benefits to the U.S. — and very likely inflict severe damage to our already suffering industrial sector. This much is obvious to anyone who invests a minimal amount of time to examine the mathematics of the proposition. Knowing that the positive case for CAFTA is nonexistent, the Bush administration and its allies have chosen to accentuate the negative by playing the China card. Reports CNN correspondent Christine Romans: "In Washington, CAFTA supporters call a vote against CAFTA a vote for China."
In January, the World Trade Organization (WTO) lifted the worldwide system of nation-based textile import quotas. This resulted in an immediate surge in textile exports from China, and the beginning of what the August 5, 2004 Christian Science Monitor predicted would be "a massive transfer of jobs and wealth in the developing world over the next few years." The Chinese textile tsunami stands to wipe out what remains of the U.S. textile industry, as well as thousands of low-wage jobs in the six CAFTA nations.
Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Christopher Padilla, the Bush administration's point man for CAFTA, insists that "only by uniting together through CAFTA will the textile makers in the Southeast states and apparel makers in Central America be able to face the oncoming competition from China.... A vote against CAFTA is a vote against U.S. textiles and a vote for China."
There really is no choice, former U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.) told textile manufacturers during a CAFTA tour stop in Raleigh, North Carolina. Citing the WTO's action in lifting Chinese textile import quotas, he emphasized: a vote against CAFTA is a vote for China. This refrain was immediately taken up by other participants in the nationwide pro-CAFTA tour. A vote against CAFTA is a vote in favor of China, recited El Salvador's ambassador Rene Rodriguez. A vote against CAFTA is a vote for China, echoed Costa Rican ambassador Tomás Duenas.
"The bottom line is the Chinese are eating our lunch," stated Mark Smith, managing director of Western Hemisphere affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which favors the agreement. "They will do it with or without CAFTA. The question remains how much lunch there will be left for them to eat." According to Keith Crisco, CEO at Asheboro Elastics of North Carolina, the alternative to enactment of CAFTA would be "Asia wiping that place off the map." For this reason — can you guess what comes next? — "a vote against CAFTA is a vote for China."
Representative Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), whose district is heavily dependent on the textile industry, finds the CAFTA-China refrain both tiresome and unconvincing. "I've heard that plenty of times, and I'm certainly not convinced," Rep. Foxx told THE NEW AMERICAN. "While I certainly don't want to lose our markets to China, the fact is that it was NAFTA that practically wiped us out — and CAFTA would do even more damage than NAFTA did."
"Most of the people in my district are very opposed to CAFTA for economic reasons, although there are some [textile] industry people who sincerely think it represents the best of several bad options," she continued. But she opposes the pact not only because of the damage it will do to our economy, but also because of the threat it represents to our imperiled national independence. "I have concerns about our involvement in any kind of international arrangement of this sort that undermines our sovereignty — whether it's NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, or certainly the United Nations," she explained.
Once the role that CAFTA would play in a WTO-administered global economic regime is recognized, the breathtaking cynicism of the Bush administration's pro-CAFTA "China card" becomes apparent.
During a special "lame-duck" session in 1994, Congress ratified U.S. membership in the WTO. This resulted in what GOP congressional leader (and then-incoming House Speaker) Newt Gingrich described as "a very big transfer of power" from Congress to the global trade body. In committee testimony, Gingrich — who supported the WTO — told his colleagues, "we need to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization. This is a transformational moment."
The scope of that transformation was described in Our Global Neighborhood, the 1995 report of the UN-aligned Commission on Global Governance. The WTO, explained that august body, is "a crucial building block for global economic governance.... The WTO and advanced regional groups such as the EU will increasingly be faced with the issue that will dominate the international agenda in years to come: how to create rules for deep integration that go way beyond what has traditionally been thought of as 'trade.'"
The "regional groups" referred to above include NAFTA, as well as CAFTA and the FTAA, if and when the latter come into being. They would be regional affiliates of a WTO-managed global economy, in which our government would be required to implement economic policies established by unaccountable socialist bureaucrats in Geneva.
Essentially the same people who promoted the WTO are now telling us that we have no choice but to encourage Congress to approve CAFTA — which would be a regional affiliate of that same WTO.
Stop CAFTA!
The Bush administration is clearly frantic about CAFTA's prospects in Congress. Witness Allen Johnson's hasty deployment to try to stop NASDA's anti-CAFTA resolution. Another illustration is found in the nomination of former Ohio Republican Congressman Rob Portman to serve as U.S. trade representative. A Capitol Hill source told THE NEW AMERICAN that Portman was chosen "specifically because the Bush administration believes that Portman's connections in Congress will help push CAFTA through."
This view is shared by Jamal Abu-Rashed, chairman of the economics department at Xavier University, who told the Cincinnati Post that "the push to enact the Central American Free Trade Agreement needed a congressional insider to get legislators who have become wary of job losses from sweeping trade treaties behind the pact." "Congress has been less enthusiastic about trade lately because of the job impacts," stated Abu-Rashed. "Bush wants somebody to resist Congress' efforts to resist [trade pacts]."
Congress displays remarkable composure about the loss of American jobs and the steady surrender of our sovereignty to regional bodies. However, congressmen take immediate alarm when their own jobs are threatened. Americans must make it clear to their congressional representatives that if they vote for CAFTA, they will be given the chance to explore new career opportunities in the private sector they are doing so much to destroy.
Keystone to Convergence
By William Norman Grigg
A keystone is the crucial piece holding together two sections of an elaborate structure. If it is removed, the structure will collapse. If it's not put in place, the structure cannot be built. CAFTA plays that precise role in the planned hemispheric merger through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
Through NAFTA, the United States, Mexico, and Canada are being rapidly merged into a single economic and political bloc. On March 14, shortly before President Bush met with Mexican leader Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin at a trinational summit in Texas, the Council on Foreign Relations released a report calling for the creation of a "North American Economic and Security Community" by 2010. The key points of that report were reiterated in a March 28 New York Times op-ed by Rafael Fernandez de Castro and Rossana Fuentes Berain, editor and managing editor of Foreign Affairs en Español (a Spanish-language publication of the Council on Foreign Relations).
Invoking Jean Monnet, founder of the European Union, the Mexican authors declared: "We must move beyond just managing trade and into constructing a new relationship … [intended] to bring a North American community closer to reality." Referring to the recent trinational summit, the authors predicted: "Maybe, just maybe, the men gathered at the Crawford ranch could someday be seen as the Jean Monnets of their age, the founding fathers of the North American Community."
But the vision behind the Crawford summit encompasses the entire hemisphere.
Speaking on March 23, President Bush explained: "In order to make sure the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas has a chance to succeed, it is important to show the sovereign nations in South America that trade has worked amongst the three of us." He also pointedly referred to CAFTA as "an important part" of this process of hemispheric merger, demanding that "Congress … make sure that they approve CAFTA this year."
But if the CAFTA keystone isn't put in place, the grand vision of an EU-style megastate will lose its forward momentum. This is why CAFTA must be defeated.
Why CAFTA Must Be Defeated
* Taken together, the six CAFTA nations have a minuscule consumer economy — but represent a huge pool of low-wage labor. Thus the only export encouraged by CAFTA would be U.S. manufacturing jobs.
* CAFTA is a critical steppingstone toward creation of a 34-nation Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), an embryonic regional government modeled after the socialistic European Union.
* Under CAFTA, barriers to agricultural imports from our "trading partners" would be removed immediately, while barriers to U.S. exports wouldn't be lifted for anywhere from 10-20 years — thereby crippling U.S. agricultural producers. And this precedent would almost certainly be followed in the FTAA.
* Promoters of CAFTA clearly perceive the pact to be a form of foreign aid to "emerging democracies" in Central America — tacitly recognizing that it wouldn't result in genuine free trade, but rather a huge transfer of wealth from the U.S. to the region.
What You Can Do
* For more information on CAFTA and what you can do to stop it, including congressional contact information, go to: http://www.stopcafta.com/
This could be a tough call, because after of all this job and labor cost cutting, one could opine and rightfully so that they may get the benefit of better prices because of the savings that these corporations are getting as a result from outsourcing jobs, one would think less labor cost should equal less product or service cost. Well forget about that, everyone knows that in most cases prices have risen, from manufacturing, to supplies and even the service sectors are all up. So any extra saving that these guys aquire as a result of cheap labor is only used to enhance the bank accounts of upper management and to pad the pockets of highly overpaid ceo with multi million dollar salaries and bonuses, then what little is left may be reinvested back into their respective companies for general improvements.
I have been trying to learn more about each of these companies that are prefering to export American jobs rather than to support Americans that are fighting every day just to make ends meet.
Plain and simply put no questions about it , Bush and his administration have touted in no uncertain terms that the outsourcing of the American workers job is very good for this countries economy. Well I happen to disagree with Bush and those types of corporate welfare supporting ideals.
I happen to believe that, if I buy something with American money in my own country, I should have a reasonable expectation that the money goes to my fellow Americans and not to a foreigner that lives abroad and has contributed nothing, to our country or our society,
Therefore I try my hardest to spend my money with companies that are not Exporting American Jobs, here is a list of companies that are currently exploiting cheap foriegn labor and taking jobs away from deserving loyal Americans that in most cases have to face this digusting situation with one lasting disgraceful act of having to even train their foriegn replacements before being let go. The practice of exporting our fellow Americans jobs is ugly. So in closing all I can say is, try to spend your money with the companies that choose to to the right and patriotic thing and hire Americans, and don't support an administration that prefers to send your job to Pakistan, India or other countries. Please register to vote, and vote against Bush and help protect American jobs. After all this is the first administration since President Hoover to have a net loss of jobs, over 1.3 million American jobs have been lost since the Bush administration has taken office.
Joseph M. Fasciana
http://www.ididnotvoteforthatsonofabush.com/anti/bush/1/36/
Exporting America: An Interview With Lou Dobbs
News: The CNN anchor is mad as hell about offshore outsourcing and faith-based economics.
Interviewed By Jeff Fleischer
February 7, 2005
When American manufacturing jobs headed overseas in the 1990s, supporters of tariff-free trade argued that newly unemployed workers could simply find jobs in the growing high-tech sector. Yet multinational corporations soon outsourced white-collar and service-industry jobs as well, with overseas labor fielding support questions from computer users, programming software, and even examining X-rays and MRI scans for American consumers.
Outsourcing has found a fierce opponent in journalist Lou Dobbs. Since 2003, his CNN news show Lou Dobbs Tonight has featured a recurring segment in which Dobbs and his team report on corporations sending jobs overseas. He has compiled an online list of outsourcers, and recently wrote a book on the practice entitled Exporting America. Dobbs recently spoke with MotherJones.com about outsourcing and its effects, current and potential, on the American economy.
MotherJones.com: When did the current outsourcing trend really begin in earnest?
Lou Dobbs: It began really with the collapse of the telecom and communications bubble in 2000. The corporations took advantage of a digital universe to start moving jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets, and then expanded from there -- to what's now an estimated 400,000-500,000 jobs a year being exported to cheap overseas labor markets.
Moving from the manufacturing offshoring to outsourcing was really a creation of the Internet; the bandwith made it all possible. And while the web-based companies and technology companies and telecommunications companies were obviously first with outsourcing, it's now expanded to nearly every industry in the country and the world.
MJ.com: In your book, you also describe how state and local governments are now outsourcing. How did that start?
LD: It's come about because state governments are being approached by the outsourcing facilitators, consultants and outsourcing companies themselves. We've reported extensively on a number of state governments whose outsourcing contracts are based in their unemployment divisions and departments of labor -- where, for example, people in Indiana at one point could call up their state unemployment office and be talking to someone in India about unemployment benefits -- denying citizens of Indiana a job to help citizens of Indiana. It becomes increasingly mind-boggling what's going on.
MJ.com: Obviously, the most immediate cost of this outsourcing is the loss of people's jobs and livelihoods. What are some of the other long-term consequences?
LD: Among the many consequences is the pain that is being felt by working men and women in this country, particularly our middle class. But the other impact is the transfer of technology and our knowledge base. We're exporting our privacy as well, because medical and financial records are being exported so that cheap overseas labor can work with those documents and records.
Each time we transfer knowledge bases overseas, whether it be manufacturing or technology or research, that is a service that will obviously be performed by a competing economy -- whether emerging or not, a competing economy. And it is work that will not be done by the U.S. economy and our workers. The result is -- and this is at the margins at this point, but could grow to an increasingly larger share of the trade-deficit problem -- the result is further pressure on the U.S. economy.
And a further impact in terms of labor is not just the loss of jobs. Study after study, survey after survey, shows that every job that replaces one that is outsourced pays approximately 20 percent less than the job that was exported overseas. So we have a continuing downward pressure on wages in this country. That has an impact on education because obviously that money's not available to the tax base that pays for education. It diminishes, in point of fact, the income-tax base for the federal government and state governments. So the impact is broad and it is deep.
MJ.com: When asked about outsourcing during the presidential debates, George Bush talked about workers needing more education and more skills. But where will the jobs come from for them to use those skills?
LD: That's a question I've been asking for two years. This faith-based economics that seems to be the hallmark of this administration is leading us into a no man's land of inexplicable possibilities. This administration -- and frankly, it's both parties, Democrats and Republicans as well as the administration -- seems indifferent to the impact of a trade deficit that now amounts to $4 trillion in external debt. We have to borrow nearly $3 billion a day to support it. The dollar has plummeted. And yet everyone keeps saying, "Free trade is good for you." I cannot find anyone for whom free trade is good.
As we go deeper in debt, we continue to lose jobs and diminish our manufacturing base. Many people want to talk about our dependency on foreign oil, and it's a legitimate and real concern. But so is our dependency on the rest of the world for our clothing, our food, our computers and our consumer electronics. Our dependency isn't just on foreign oil; we can't even clothe ourselves. Free-trade economists will tell you we're a technology economy, but we don't even produce the technological components that are the foundation of a technology economy.
MJ.com: What steps have overseas markets such as India and the Philippines taken to attract these jobs?
LD: It's just a straightforward sales proposition: "Give us your business, whether it is Wall Street research, call centers or radiology, and we will provide the same service for one-tenth of what you're paying." It's impossible for an American worker to compete with that. It's not because the American worker is any less educated, because he or she is not. It's not because our workers are any less productive, because they're more productive. It's simply the labor-cost issues. In all the talk from the U.S multinationals, and the orthodoxy of business, government, academia and media, they're all using code words like "competitiveness," "productivity" and "efficiency." Those are simply code for "the cheapest possible labor."
MJ.com: It seems there isn't as much debate about the merits of outsourcing as one might expect in politics and in the media. Why do you think that is?
LD: Over the course of the past 20 years, there has been an absolute move to market-based economics. And there's a libertarian impulse to American politics right now, whether Democrat or Republican. That outlook, of course, means as little government as possible. What I'd like to see is a government that would actually be responsible for its citizens, who are workers as well as taxpayers, but that runs absolutely counter to the prevailing political notion, which is basically libertarian in foundation.
MJ.com: How do you respond to the free-traders' argument that outsourcing is a short-term problem required for long-term economic growth?
LD: Well, there's nothing short-term about 28 consecutive years of trade deficits. There's nothing short-term about a mounting external debt as a result of our reliance on imports -- an external debt that has reached $4 trillion. I see no basis whatsoever for the sophistry that's coming from some of the conservative think tanks and much of academia that says this is a short-term issue. This is real and present pain for literally millions of Americans, and a clear and present danger to an economy that has generated most of the wealth of the entire world over the past 50 years. We could be near the end of that role.
MJ.com: Proponents of outsourcing also point to what they call "insourcing," with overseas companies opening factories here. Does that provide any hope?
LD: It's an interesting semantic game that has been played in the free-trade debate. The Bush administration has created this expression of "insourcing" to counter arguments and concerns about outsourcing of American jobs to cheaper labor markets. When they talk about insourcing, they're really referring to foreign direct investment in this country. We can't even keep up with the Chinese government on foreign direct investment in this country; China has for the first time surpassed the United States in that regard.
The Japanese car plants are here because Ronald Reagan -- who many of the so-called free traders hold up as a paragon of free trade -- demanded that those plants be created here if they were going to participate in our economy and enjoy the benefits of the world's largest consumer economy. That wasn't free trade; it was rational, balanced, reciprocal trade -- which is the course we should be pursuing right now, and which all of our trade partners are pursuing. We're the only nation in the world that just mindlessly opens our markets irrespective of the constraints on our own goods and services.
MJ.com: You talk about the need for a balanced middle ground between protectionism and wide-open trade. What would be an ideal balance?
LD: Overall, we're going to have trade deficits with a given country and a given economy. But we should not be borrowing money to support our consumption habits over the course of 28 years. The argument has been styled by the free-traders as opposition between economic isolationists and free trade. The fact is free trade isn't working, and nobody's talking about economic isolationism. We're talking about mutuality and balance in which we eliminate deficits and maintain vigorous, healthy trade with the world. But that requires that we have a manufacturing base and reduce our dependency on foreign oil, clothing and a host of other goods and services that we can no longer afford to import.
MJ.com: Do you see a tipping point where the U.S. will have outsourced so many jobs that the economy becomes unsustainable?
LD: The Federal Reserve did a study four years ago that demonstrated that any time a trade deficit rose above 5 percent of a national economy's GDP, an inflection point had been created. We are now approaching 6 percent of GDP. Obviously, I hope this does not result in crisis. That is, a debt crisis because of the amount of money we have to borrow from overseas to support our imports, nor a diminishment of our tax base through outsourcing to the point that jobs become so poor-paying that we can't maintain our tax base. But all of that is entirely possible unless people awaken to the dangers that are being posed. I know this is dull stuff for many people, to talk about external debt and currency devaluations. But the fact is, they're all in prospect if we do not reverse these mindless policies.
MJ.com: What type of protections can the U.S. include in future trade agreements to place the American worker at less of a disadvantage?
LD: To make the American worker more competitive, what we should really be talking about is preserving the American way of life. Environmental protection. Protection for our working men and women. That has built up over 100 years in this country, and we are simply at risk of losing all of those protections. As we should have with NAFTA, we should sign only agreements with protections on the environment and on labor. Either we have that with every trading partner, or we will be at a disadvantage.
The ultimate extension of the free-trade policies that are being pursued is that not only will there be a race to the bottom for wages for working men and women, but we're also going to have to eradicate the "inconvenient" and uncompetitive environmental protections that allow us to drink clean water and breathe clean air. And, by the way, those nasty child-labor laws could be an encumbrance to competitiveness; maybe we should get rid of those as well. How far are we going to roll back the progress of the past century?
MJ.com: If the federal government were suddenly to choose to fight outsourcing, what should it do?
LD: The first issue is to stop the destruction of an American job. The principal issue I have with outsourcing is that American companies -- based in the United States, providing goods and services to the U.S. consumer economy -- are killing jobs in this country and sending them overseas to provide the same goods and services back to the U.S. economy. I have no problem if they want to invest and create a market in India or the Philippines or wherever. That's great, but don't kill an American job and put it in the hands of someone making one-tenth as much just to send that same good or service back to the United States. That's what's unique and different, and that's what has to be stopped. As far as ways to do it, we could do it with regulation. One would hope that before that, corporate America would find a conscience. But failing that, regulation is entirely necessary, I'm all for it, and my apologies to the libertarians.
MJ.com: What about those jobs already shipped overseas? Could some of those come back?
LD: Some of those jobs are already coming back, because companies are finding that despite whatever huge labor savings [the gain], there are also hidden costs, including the quality of the programming that's being done. For example, the quality of the code work that's being done by programmers in a number of the cheap labor markets, including India. Indian workers are remarkable people, highly entrepreneurial and well-educated, but they still cannot compete with American programmers where it's a matter of quality instead of cost. There's also a bit of a backlash now on the export of these jobs on the part of consumers. And my guess is that backlash is going to rise, and there will be economic costs as a result.
MJ.com: It seems like you've been more active about outsourcing than probably any other issue during your years as a journalist. Why has this issue gotten you so involved?
LD: Because at a time when this economy needed to be growing jobs, we were exporting jobs. At a time of economic downturn, we were raising the U.S. trade deficit even further. And the sophistry of the free-trade orthodoxy -- talking about how uneducated Americans are, how unproductive and incapable of competing -- just frankly rankles the hell out of me. We were smart enough in the ‘90s to generate 22 million new jobs. Did we, in the course of four years, become so stupid, so lazy and so unproductive, or did something else change? I maintain something else changed, and that was policies that permitted destructive business practices like outsourcing, and a continuation of free-trade policies that are leading to greater trade deficits and greater indebtedness on the part of the United States. We simply cannot sustain the path we're on.
Jeff Fleischer is an editorial fellow at MotherJones.com.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/02/lou_dobbs.html
SECURE OUR BORDERS, SECURE OUR COUNTRY
We cannot hope to protect our homeland unless we take steps to remedy our porous borders by improving our dysfunctional immigration policies and procedures. The first step must be to create a new political reality -- namely, a counterweight to the influential special interests whose priorities take no account of national security.
The time has come for the American public to hold our elected representatives responsible for making the necessary changes in immigration policy, legislation and enforcement. Toward that end, more than thirty organizations representing millions of Americans have come together to creat the "Secure America" Pledge, a set of ten principles that every politician in America should be asked to sign.
The Book:
War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World
http://www.warfooting.com/
Immigration 101
By Molly Ivins
AlterNet.org
Thursday 30 March 2006
Racists seem to think that illegal workers - the hardest-working, poorest people in the US - are getting away with something.
In 1983, I was a judge at the Terlingua Chili Cookoff, and my memory of the events may not be perfect - for example, for years I've been claiming Jimmy Carter was president at the time, but that's the kind of detail one often loses track of in Terlingua.
Anyway, it was '83 or some year right around there when we held The Fence climbing contest. See, people talked about building The Fence back then, too. The Fence along the Mexican border. To keep Them out.
At the time, the proposal was quite specific - a 17-foot cyclone fence with bob wire at the top. So a test fence was built at Terlingua, and the First-Ever Terlingua Memorial Over, Under or Through Mexican Fence Climbing Contest took place. Prize: a case of Lone Star beer. Winning time: 30 seconds.
I tell this story to make the one single point about the border and immigration we know to be true: The Fence will not work. No fence will work. The Great darn Wall of China will not work. Do not build a fence. It will not work. They will come anyway. Over, under or through.
Some of you think a fence will work because Israel has one. Israel is a very small country. Anyone who says a fence can fix this problem is a demagogue and an ass.
Numero Two-o, should you actually want to stop Mexicans and OTMs (other than Mexicans) from coming to the United States, here is how to do it: Find an illegal worker at a large corporation. This is not difficult - brooms and mops are big tip-offs. Then put the CEO of that corporation in prison for two or more years for violating the law against hiring illegal workers.
Got it? You can also imprison the corporate official who actually hired the illegal and, just to make sure, put some Betty Sue Billups - housewife, preferably one with blonde hair in a flip - in the joint for a two-year stretch for hiring a Mexican gardener. Thus Americans are reminded that the law says it is illegal to hire illegal workers and that anyone who hires one is responsible for verifying whether or not his or her papers are in order. If you get fooled and one slips by you, too bad, you go to jail anyway. When there are no jobs for illegal workers, they do not come. Got it?
Of course, this has been proposed before, because there is nothing new in the immigration debate. As the current issue of Texas Monthly reminds us, the old bracero program dating from World War II was actually amended in 1952 to pass the "Texas proviso," shielding employers of illegal workers from criminal penalties. They got the exemption because Texas growers flat refused to pay the required bracero wage of 30 cents an hour. Instead of punishing Texas growers for breaking the law, Congress rewarded them.
In 1986, the Reagan administration took a shot at immigration reform and reinstated penalties on employers. They weren't enforced worth a darn, of course. In 2004, only three American companies were threatened with fines for hiring illegal workers. Doesn't work if you don't enforce it.
This brings us to the great Republican divide on the issue. Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers. The Chamber of Commerce lobbies for them. They're lobbying now for a new bracero program. What a bonanza for Bidness.
Old-fashioned anti-immigrant prejudice always brings out some old-fashioned racists. This time around, they have started claiming that Mexicans can't assimilate. A sillier idea I've never heard. Why don't they come to Texas and meet up with Lars Gonzales, Erin Rodriguez and Bubba at the bowling alley. They can drink some Lone Star, listen to some conjunto and chill.
Racists seem obsessed by the idea that illegal workers - the hardest-working, poorest people in America - are somehow getting away with something, sneaking goodies that should be for Americans. You can always avoid this problem by having no social services. This is the refreshing Texas model, and it works a treat.
Aren't y'all grateful that we're down here doing exactly nothing for the people of our state, legal or illegal? Think what a terrible message it would send if you swapped Texas with Vermont, and they all got health care. In Texas, we never worry about illegals taking advantage of social benefits provided by our taxpayers. Incredibly clever, no?
One nice thing about the benefit of long experience with la frontera is that we in Texas don't have to run around getting all hysterical about immigrants. The border is porous. When you want cheap labor, you open it up; when you don't, you shut it down. It works to our benefit - it always has.
Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists (and Labor Is Left Behind)
By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams
Wednesday 29 March 2006
The corporatist Republicans ("amnesty!") are fighting with the racist Republicans ("fence!"), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America.
Both the corporatists and the racists are fond of the mantra, "There are some jobs Americans won't do." It's a lie.
Americans will do virtually any job if they're paid a decent wage. This isn't about immigration - it's about economics. Industry and agriculture won't collapse without illegal labor, but the middle class is being crushed by it.
The reason why thirty years ago United Farm Workers' Union (UFW) founder César Chávez fought against illegal immigration, and the UFW turned in illegals during his tenure as president, was because Chávez, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability.
As Wikipedia notes: "In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valley to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of illegal aliens as temporary replacement workers during a strike. Joining him on the march were both the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and US Senator Walter Mondale. Chávez and the UFW would often report suspected illegal aliens who served as temporary replacement workers as well as who refused to unionize to the INS."
Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages.
Progressives fought - and many lost their lives in the battle - to limit the pool of "labor hours" available to the Robber Barons from the 1870s through the 1930s and thus created the modern middle class. They limited labor-hours by pushing for the 50-hour week and the 10-hour day (and then later the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day). They limited labor-hours by pushing for laws against child labor (which competed with adult labor). They limited labor-hours by working for passage of the 1935 Wagner Act that provided for union shops.
And they limited labor-hours by supporting laws that would regulate immigration into the United States to a small enough flow that it wouldn't dilute the unionized labor pool. As Wikipedia notes: "The first laws creating a quota for immigrants were passed in the 1920s, in response to a sense that the country could no longer absorb large numbers of unskilled workers, despite pleas by big business that it wanted the new workers."
Do a little math. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 7.6 million unemployed Americans right now. Another 1.5 million Americans are no longer counted because they've become "long term" or "discouraged" unemployed workers. And although various groups have different ways of measuring it, most agree that at least another five to ten million Americans are either working part-time when they want to work full-time, or are "underemployed," doing jobs below their level of training, education, or experience. That's between eight and twenty million un- and under-employed Americans, many unable to find above-poverty-level work.
At the same time, there are between seven and fifteen million working illegal immigrants diluting our labor pool.
If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways.
Between the Reagan years - when there were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce - and today, we've gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result - a César Chávez predicted - of illegal immigrants competing directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it's most obvious in the construction trades over the past 30 years, it's hit all sectors of our economy.
Democratic Party strategist Ann Lewis just sent out a mass email on behalf of former Wal-Mart Board of Directors member and now US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In it, Lewis noted that Clinton suggests we should have: "An earned path to citizenship for those already here working hard, paying taxes, respecting the law, and willing to meet a high bar for becoming a citizen." Sounds nice. The same day, on his radio program, Rush Limbaugh told a woman whose husband is an illegal immigrant that she had nothing to worry about with regard to deportation of him or their children because all he'd have to do - under the new law under consideration - is pay a small fine and learn English.
The current Directors of Wal-Mart are smiling.
Meanwhile, the millions of American citizens who came to this nation as legal immigrants, who waited in line for years, who did the hard work to become citizens, are feeling insulted, humiliated, and conned.
Shouldn't we be compassionate? Of course.
But there is nothing compassionate about driving down the wages of any nation's middle class. It's the most cynical, self-serving, greedy, and sociopathic behavior you'll see from our "conservatives."
There is nothing compassionate about being the national enabler of a dysfunctional oligarchy like Mexico. An illegal workforce in the US sending an estimated $17 billion to Mexico every year - second only in national income to that country's oil revenues - supports an antidemocratic, anti-worker, hyper-conservative administration there that gleefully ships out of that nation the "troublesome" Mexican citizens - those lowest on the economic food-chain and thus most likely to present "labor unrest" - to the USA. Mexico (and other "sending nations") need not deal with their own social and economic problems so long as we're willing to solve them for them - at the expense of our middle class. Democracy in Central and South America be damned - there are profits to be made for Wal-Mart!
Similarly, there is nothing compassionate about handing higher profits (through a larger and thus cheaper work force) to the CEOs of America's largest corporations and our now-experiencing-record-profits construction and agriculture industries.
What about caring for people in need? Isn't that the universal religious/ethical value? Of course.
A few years ago, when my family and I were visiting Europe, one of our children fell sick. A doctor came to the home of the people we were staying with, visited our child at 11 pm on a weeknight, left behind a course of antibiotics, and charged nothing. It was paid for by that nation's universal health care system. We should offer the same to any human being in need of medical care - a universal human right - in the United States.
But if I'd applied to that nation I was visiting for a monthly unemployment or retirement check, I would have been laughed out of the local government office. And if I'd been caught working there, I would have been deported within a week. Caring for people in crisis/need is very different from giving a job or a monthly welfare check to non-citizens. No nation - even those in Central and South America - will do that. And neither should the United States.
But if illegal immigrants won't pick our produce or bus our tables won't our prices go up? (The most recent mass-emailed conservative variation of this argument, targeting paranoid middle-class Americans says: "Do you want to pay an extra $10,000 for your next house?") The answer is simple: Yes.
But wages would also go up, and even faster than housing or food prices. And CEO salaries, and corporate profits, might moderate back to the levels they were during the "golden age of the American middle class" between the 1940s and Reagan's declaration of war on the middle class in the 1980s.
We saw exactly this scenario played out in the US fifty years ago, when unions helped regulate entry into the workforce, 35 percent of American workers had a union job, and 70 percent of Americans could raise a family on a single, 40-hour-week paycheck. All working Americans would gladly pay a bit more for their food if their paychecks were both significantly higher and more secure. (This would even allow for an increase in the minimum wage - as it did from the 1930s to the 1980s.)
But what about repressive régimes? Aren't we denying entrance to this generation's equivalent of the Jews fleeing Germany? This is the most tragic of all the arguments put forward by conservatives in the hopes compassionate progressives will bite. Our immigration policies already allow for refugees - and should be expanded. It's an issue that needs more national discussion and action. But giving a free pass to former Coca-Cola executive Vincenté Fox to send workers to the US - and thus avoid having to deal with his own corrupt oligarchy - and to equate this to the Holocaust is an insult to the memory of those who died in Hitler's death camps - and to those suffering in places like Darfur under truly repressive regimes. There is no equivalence.
It's frankly astonishing to hear "progressives" reciting corporatist/racist/conservative talking points, recycled through "conservative Democratic" politicians trying to pander to the relatively small percentage of recently-legal (mostly through recent amnesties or birth) immigrants who are trying to get their relatives into this country by means of Bush's proposed guest worker program or the many variations thereof being proposed.
It's equally astonishing to hear the few unions going along with this (in the sad/desperate hope of picking up new members) turn their backs on César Chávez and the traditions and history of America's Progressive and Union movements by embracing illegal immigration.
Every nation has an obligation to limit immigration to a number that will not dilute its workforce, but will maintain a stable middle class - if it wants to have a stable democracy. This has nothing to do with race, national origin, or language (visit Switzerland with it's ethnic- and language-dived areas!), and everything to do with economics.
Without a middle class, any democracy is doomed. And without labor having - through control of labor availability - power in relative balance to capital/management, no middle class can emerge. America's early labor leaders did not die to increase the labor pool for the Robber Barons or the Walton family - they died fighting to give control of it to the workers of their era and in the hopes that we would continue to hold it - and infect other nations with the same idea of democracy and a stable middle class.
The simple way to do this today is to require that all non-refugee immigrants go through the same process to become American citizens or legal workers in this country (no amnesties, no "guest workers," no "legalizations") regardless of how they got here; to confront employers who hire illegals with draconian financial and criminal penalties; and to affirm that while health care (and the right to provide humanitarian care to all humans) is an absolute right for all people within our boundaries regardless of status, a paycheck, education, or subsidy is not.
The Republican (and Democratic) corporatists who want a cheap labor force, and the Republican (and Democratic) racists who want to build a fence and punish humanitarian aid workers, are equally corrupt and anti-progressive. As long as employers are willing and able (without severe penalties) to hire illegal workers, people will risk life and limb to grab at the America Dream. When we stop hiring and paying them, most will leave of their own volition over a few years, and the remaining few who are committed to the US will obtain citizenship through normal channels.
This is, after all, the middle-class "American Dream." And how much better this hemisphere would be if Central and South Americans were motivated to stay in their own nations (because no employer in the US would dare hire them) and fight there for a Mexican Dream and a Salvadoran Dream and a Guatemalan Dream (and so on).
This is the historic Progressive vision for all of the Americas ...
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and Sirius. His most recent books include What Would Jefferson Do? and Ultimate Sacrifice (co-authored with Lamar Waldron). His next book, due out this autumn, is Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/033106H.shtml
this just makes me puke. when you view it in black and white it takes on a powerful scope. i also sense that the unemployment numbers placed out by the government are bogus based on this degree of companies exporting jobs.
there should be a law on the books stating that if these companies want to export these jobs they have to first show proof that the foreign individual(s), foreign companies being hired have to have a quality that is not found in the American worker and that quality would have a direct influence on the profitability of the company.
its all about greed and the mighty dollar. but then maybe not so mighty if this country keeps going the way it is.
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