Posted on 04/09/2004 12:22:04 PM PDT by Havoc
Dear Mr. President,
You don't know me, nor do I expect you to. But I'm one of those voices out here in the ether that actually did vote for you. I'm not one of those seminar caller types nor a Democrat pretending at being a republican to subvert the party faithful in dishonest fashion because their ideas aren't popular enough to win them anything. No, I'm a life-long republican who cherishes the memory of Ronald Reagan and who thought highly of you right up to the time you sunk a knife in my back economically.
Sir I understand it's a hard job being president. I also understand that in IT my job causes me to have to think on my feet and respond to an everchanging environment just to keep it. And while I was busting my behind for a company I happened to love doing a job I happened to love, you decided it's a good thing to do an endrun around equal protection and hand my job to a Mexican worker at 1/3 of the rate I'm being paid. Sir, Retail employees get paid more than that Full time and they're earning below the poverty level. The Job I hold for the moment requires a lot of hard work and problem solving skills, it requires good customer care skills, and it requires a long knowledge of Computers and software I didn't get from a degree but from practical experience.
I worked long and hard for years looking for the break that would get me in the door with my current employer. And I currently have a carreer with them. Or had, rather. I've worked for EDS for nearly 4 years. I will lose my job just short of that anniversary or just after it depending on how the breakdown happens.
I have a handicap that keeps me from driving a car. Not an official handicap, because it's so rare a problem that 1/2 of 1% of Americans have the condition so it doesn't rate being called what it is. I'm a blip on the screen. But, it means I have to live close to my employer and sometimes rely on others to help me get things done. I've lost everything and put my life back together 3 times in 15 years sir. And having just accomplished it again after 4 years with my employer, your policy has killed any protection I might have otherwise enjoyed from having my job destroyed by foriegn competition. And it puts me right back on the brink again. Sir, if I don't stand a chance of winning, it isn't competition - it's fish in a barrel. Where is my equal protection under the law?
The "competition" didn't get hired because of race or creed; but, because of national origin. They got hired because their cost of living is low enough that they can be paid sub-poverty wages to do my job. They are taking my job because they aren't constrained by the laws we have in this country to protect us and preserve our liberties. Lower cost of living, and no laws to constrain them. See, we used to have what was called ANTI-DUMPING laws on the books before Nafta to prevent the subversion of our economy by those who would attempt to compete on an unfair basis and put American firms out of business. We aren't a global economy, the globe is not the United States of America. They don't respect our rights, our Constitution, our laws or ourselves. The average citizen of the world might; but, we aren't dealing with them, we're dealing with the leaders who have their boots on the neck of the citizen of the world.
It seems today that I have to be a Mexican to get a fair shake in America. There are some 8 million of them here illegally as a tax on our system and working here taking jobs that Americans can do; but, which apparently, nobody wants to offer a fair wage for as long as they can get slave labor off the books. That isn't enough though. We need to employ More workers from Mexico, India, China.. As long as we're doing it, sire, why not be obvious and lets put Sally Struthers on the TV to advertise IT Jobs for the people under repressive regimes in africa who can live on 52 cents a day, "the price of a cup of coffee." I don't care what color their skin is, No citizen of the United states could live on that and shouldn't be asked to compete with it. It's too blatently obvious that it's unfair. And that seems to be why it's "good for us all".
Your policy sir. It's you on the tube telling me it's good for me to lose my job to a Mexican worker outside of our system and in a manner with which I cannot compete. There isn't a job comparable to it here that I can take to make up the difference cause those are being outsourced too. Outsourced. How about endran. Because sir, that is what is happening - it's an end run around our system - around our rights, our laws, our constitutional provisions and protections. Your policy has relieved me of my job without due process. It tied my hands before I had a chance to respond. And so many businesses are being forced to do the same thing, that I don't stand a chance any more than those earning 3 times what I do in the same field who have lost their jobs already and have had to take 11k a year Retail jobs just to eat while their houses go up for sale.
I don't have a degree. I don't get retraining. I just get to lose my job at the whim of your policies and will likely lose more than that in the end. You see, I bought a new home too - a year ago. This job made it possible for me to do that. And as with my Job, I had to get a huge break to be able to pull it off. I've been behind you and a cheerleader of yours since I first heard you speak. I understand that the tanking economy isn't your fault. I understand it isn't your fault we were attacked. I understand and agree with pretty much everything you've done to date, sir. This however is in my mind beyond sickening. It is a betrayal of myself, my coworkers and every other hard working IT worker, Auto worker, etc that has lost their job due to this. It is a betrayal by their government and their employer. And it's a distrust you've earned by subverting them and me. For me, it's not just my Government, it's my own party.
Now I've heard all the arguments for outsourcing and all the copout phrases about what we do about companies that have outsourced to the US. Tell me, sir, how many of them outsourced to do an endrun around their system of government, their constitution, their laws and their workers. How many of them outsourced to us to produce goods for their home market. That isn't an argument that flies with me in the face of doing an endrun around us. They've built plants in our land and are working within our market, within it's rules, within our laws, within the constraints of our constitution and are paying a competative wage. Our companies are doing the opposite. And any way you cut it, it is economic and constitutional tyranny. I'm not a single issue voter sir, until that single issue is my life and livelihood.. until members of my own party call me a robber and a thief for expecting to keep my job when I've worked my behind off to do so.
I did it right. I've busted my backside under an ever increasing workload, kept my promise to my employer and my client. Never missed a metric, never dropped the ball for either of them and have always exceeded expectation as a member of one of the best teams on this planet in my humble opinion. My job is gone not because we didn't produce and not because either couldn't afford it; but, because Mexicans work cheaper and don't have our protections, laws, rights or constitution. I have a strong work ethic and a loyalty to my company that even now makes me shudder to say a bad word about them. I have no illusions; but, I was raised that if you do your best it pays off. I know now that if you do your best, you get kicked in the teeth just as hard, and if you get ahead a little bit, the government will be there to kick you back down. I appreciate how hard your job is. Mine is pretty dang hard too. But how about you and everyone in government work for $600 a month from now on like the Mexican workers replacing us. How about you all work for the income you're forcing me into. If it's good for us, it should be good for you too. You, and all the ivory tower types in our party that hiss at me for being upset over losing my job and wanting to defend myself. How would that be, sir? I'd just as soon see little Tommy Daschle and Ted Kennedy go fly a kite as hear them spout one more offensive evil lie about you. But I'd just as soon, too, see you join them holding the string if you're gonna ruin me and tell me it's good for me. How about if we just outsource your jobs too - oh, wait, that would be unconstitutional too, wouldn't it.
Indeed. Karl Marx's entire point of Das Kapital was that *every* capitalist society would get progressively poorer each year, until things got so bad that the workers all rebelled and overthrew the "ruling classes."
But Marx has a poor historical track record. Socialist nations such as North Korea and Cuba have faired rather poorly compared to their capitalistic neighbors in South Korea and the U.S., for instance.
So I'd take Marx with a grain of salt. If he said it, it's probably wrong.
Not always good, but not always bad either
probably using a buggy-whip maker analogy. Or maybe the ice delivery man vs. refrigerators (false) analogy.
And don't forget the ever-popular bromides (slaps-in-the-face):
(Sometimes it takes a slap in the face to wake someone up to reality) How about some real life experiences:
1. Start your own business (with no money)
I've started my own business three times with no money (OK, once I sold my motorcycle for $5000 seed money) and , yes, once I failed and had to start over from zero.
2. Relocate to where the work is (where is that, India?)
Relocating is a sound strategy. My Father packed up the family and moved from Vermont to California when I was ten years old because the jobs dried up in our home state. I have relocated to a different state three times in the last thirty five years looking for work.
3. Get a job, any job (just throw away everything you ever learned or worked to have)
On the way from Vermont to California in 1959, we ran out of money in Casa Grande Arizona. My Dad, a printer by trade, took a job digging irrigation ditches in Eloy in July and my mom waitressed in a cafe to make enough money to get us the rest of the way to California. When I lost my job as a retail manager I took a job as a janitor to put groceries on the table. You do what you have to.
4. If they can't adapt, screw 'em (i.e., let them eat cake)
If it weren't for the socialist safety net, unemployment benefits that allow one to sit on his ass, literally for years, the traditional choices are: move, adapt or die. Crying in your beer is not an option.
See how easy it is to view things from the black-and-white free trade mantra point of view (especially if you are not the one hit...yet)?
See how simple it is and how many options there are when you take personal responsibility for your situation?
Here, have some cheese.
What else do you tell telephone switchboard operators, except to adapt?!
Their jobs have been replaced by computers. What, you don't want them to adapt?!
What sort of paralyzed economy do you want to create and then suffer to live in?
Market forces are driving them away. Like I said before, you want your employer to pay you more than what your job is worth. He found a mexican that could do the same thing you were doing for less money. The price your employer has to pay for your skills dropped. You are correct when you say that the only reason your job got sold out from under you is because of cheaper labor. I bet you could keep your job if you accepted the salary of the mexican labor. I am going to have to repeat myself again: you want your employer to pay you more than what your job is worth.
The extra cost of paying you will translate into higher prices for the consumer. Consumers always look for the best value and if someone can do the same thing for cheaper they will always pick the cheaper. Just ask Toyota and Ford.
It boils down to damning the entire company just so you can have your old salary back.
...you sure can run your mouth.
Guilty as charged.
Any adult American male who thinks that he's a "victim" is a whiner.
That sort of attitude is precisely what I get from the more depressed of the street people that I serve supper to at the local shelter. They don't like taking orders...and circumstances conspired to make them all "victims."
Well, that's not how the real world works.
In a capitalistic society, supply and demand determines prices for everything, including your labor. If your particular labor is more valuable, it is either because of its type of supply being short or of its demand being high.
If you get replaced, then a better deal was found. 100 years ago kids were hired to sell newspapers on street corners. Today, most of them have been replaced with simple mechanical machines. No doubt the kids moved on to better jobs, however, even though they were replaced by better deals for that particular service.
But the newspaper kids weren't "victims" of the newspaper street vending machines.
The kids did have to *change*, however. They had to go do something else, much as many system administrators and Java programmers are finding that they have to go change about themselves today.
Change, however, is something that some people would rather fight than embrace.
For those fighters of change, life will be rather frustrating for them.
Has it dawned on you that the brunt of this recession has been borne by highly educated people ? Engineers, IT professionals, skilled manufacturing workers, etc. In 2000, 58% of people earning six figures supported free trade. Today, it is 28%. So obviously it has dawned on highly educated middle aged workers, all of them, that their jobs can be done in India for a pittance. Telling such a person to "retrain" is unspeakable foolishness. He doesn't want to hear any crap about starting over at the bottom at age 45+. He wants to keep the job he has and support his family at the standard of living they now have. He is not going to consider his life expendable to the "global economy" or "free trade theory". And this November he is going to vote for a presidential candidate who promises to put his wellbeing and the wellbeing of his family ahead of comparative advantage textbook theory.
If American workers are asked to put up with pervasive job insecurity and "start your own business" or "move to where the jobs are" or at worse "suck it up, loser" crap from free traitors, they will demand European levels of social safety net protection. As the percentage of American workers without health insurance continues to rise, expect national health insurance to become a winning issue for Democrats.
For those fighters of change, life will be rather frustrating for them.
Has it ever dawned on you that decline is change, too ?
When historians fifty years from now list the reasons for the collapse of American power, they will list outsourcing and the consequent destruction of America's high tech advantages as a reason. If you are a MNC or an MNC shill, outsourcing is the greatest thing in the world. After all, MNC's are run by globalist "citizens of the world" who are above the petty concerns of nation states. When Carly Fiorina proclaimed in classic free traitor fashion that "No American should feel that any job is his birthright", she proclaimed that America can go to hell. She is a citizen of the sovereign state of Hewlett-Packardia. It's no surprise that free traitors tend to be so short on basic ethical decency.
On the other hand, if you care at all about this nation's future it is obviously suicidal.
No, My client and my employer had a contractual right to cut heads to meet demand and excercised it as needed. If the cost of my job was so out of line, my employer wouldn't have given me two raises in four years that I didn't ask for.
Furthermore, you're begging the question. The market forces driving companies away are outsourcing. You can't say that outsourcing is driving them away so you can't blame outsourcing - yet that's exactly what you're trying to argue. My pay rate wasn't a problem until slave labor rates came available to make slavery look attractive to my client. But that won't stop you from the standard attack of trying to make me feel bad for asking you to pay higher rates for something just to keep my job.. You're pathetic. And you disgust me. It doesn't damn my whole company to have my job back. Not unless outsourcing isn't done away with, and that's the point. Outsourcing is the cause of all of this. Were it not for outsourcing, my employer would not have had to outsource. But because of it, it was either outsource or lose the contract to someone who would.
The consumer didn't want to pay the going rate and found a way to force the issue, and that was by doing and end run around the system in a fashion crafted for them by government policy. I lost my job because I'm an American in America with and American cost of living. If I were in Mexico, I might have just gained one; because that was the criteria for getting my job on their end. Slave wages.
Here's the dirty little secret that no one has been letting out of the bag: it ain't cheap labor, but rather, cheap *currencies* that drive outsourcing.
For every 10,000 unknowlegable persons who cry about the low cost of Mexican and Chinese and Indian labor, fewer than 5 will be able to explain why those outsourced jobs went to China instead of to Nigeria.
Nigeria has 100+ million people, and 47% of Nigerians earn annual salaries of just one tenth (yes, 10%) of the average Chinese income. That's $100 in Nigeria for a year of labor, versus $1,000 per year in China.
Yet the outsourced jobs are going to China, not Nigeria.
The difference, of course, is in various transaction costs (e.g. red tape, bribes, crime, chaos, and most of all, in currency valuations).
What both China and India have done is to *undervalue* their Yuan and Rupee versus the U.S. Dollar. That makes all of their exports of goods and services cheaper than would ordinarily happen in a free market.
OK, that's all fine to say and explain, but what is President Bush doing about it?
Well, GWB isn't having the Fed buy Dollars on the global currency markets any longer. This means that India and China are having to prop up the Dollar by buying and hoarding huge amounts of Dollars.
And if they ever stop buying and hoarding U.S. Dollars, the value of the Dollar on foreign exchange markets willplunge.
And if the Dollar plunges (it's already dropped 20% against the Euro since Bush/Greenspan stopped intervening in the currency markets to buy Dollars), then suddenly the cost of Chinese and Indian goods and services skyrockets.
Watch Bush hold Greenspan to this policy until the Dollar drops at least another 20%. The 40% overall drop in the Dollar is pretty close to just about what is needed to stop the majority of offshore outsourcing.
Nigeria has 100+ million people, and 47% of Nigerians earn annual salaries of just one tenth (yes, 10%) of the average Chinese income. That's $100 in Nigeria for a year of labor, versus $1,000 per year in China.
Yet the outsourced jobs are going to China, not Nigeria.
Silly analogy. 1. Nigeria has a deserved reputation as a den of thieves and scammers. 2. A country of raging religious warfare is a poor investment climate. 3. Pervasive failed state violence in the region. 4. Poor communications infrastructure.
You have quite an ego there, buddy. Phone operators are just as good as you, perhaps better (after all, they all went out and found other jobs).
Yeah, I don't have to hire 20 Java programmers to build my corporate web page any longer (due to advances in technology). That's good news for my company and for my clients, bad news for those 20 Java slingers.
Get over it. Technology introduces changes into the marketplace...even for technology workers (software or hardware).
The overall job climate in the U.S. is fine, however, at any given time you are *always* going to have layoffs in a competitive economy.
It is this creative destruction that makes us more and more competitive each year. The U.S. has less than 5% of the world's population, for instance, but produces 30% of all goods and services.
And it can do this because the U.S. doesn't "protect" old phone operators jobs from being replaced by computers. Ditto for Java programmers being replaced by HTML software design programs, or system administrators from network automation software.
I'm certain its already in the works. Expect a massive shift to Kerry in the polls around August.
Free traitors remind me of the Liberty League of 1935. They were a GOP pressure group formed to fight the New Deal. It came off as rich people in their yachts and mansions preaching "suck it up, loser" bootstrap rugged individualism to the guys on the breadlines. It enabled the Democrats to spend the next generation as the party of the "little guy" against the "selfish interests". If the Democrats take this issue and run, they will be the new majority party for the next generation.
Real people in the real world are not going to consider their lives and families expendable to comparative advantage textbook theory. There are no atheists in the foxholes and no free trade libertarians in bankruptcy court.
Ego has NOTHING to do with it any more by saying that auto plant workers are not buggy whip workers ... and YOU know it ... BUDDY. You are just using the standard free traitor debate technique of avoiding the point and casting disparaging remarks. Chip designers jobs are NOT being phased out just shipped out.
One who is educated in economics would know that to best secure the economy is to protect it from regulation and unfair levies. Capitalism is a beautiful thing when it is allowed to do its magic. There is no need at all for government to impose restrictions on it, unless it compromises national security or violates rights of individuals (having "fair" hours and "fair" pay is not a right, it is a luxury that is your responsibility to get). The only job of the government beyond protecting our rights and our national security as far as jobs are concerned is to make sure that businesses are free to practice as they choose.
Government has already screwed me. It has screwed you by putting regulations in place that force businesses to look for employees overseas.
because the mexican cost of living is far lower
So you are telling me that you cannot acquire a skill that a poor mexican laborer cannot?
Not to get me a job, but to get out of my way so I can do for myself and not deprive me of what I have without due process - isn't that what the constitution says.
But you fail to see that "Big Business" is comprised of single citizens who depend on that business for their living. They should be just as free to pursue any means necessary to succeed, that does not violate the rights of others. If I, as a business owner wished to hire programmers out of New Zeland for $10 a day, which I actually did some time ago, it is my right.
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