Obama's Macaca Moment - Blurring the line between trade and treason.

“Obama Just Got Less ‘Brown’ Friendly,” reads the Indian American blog Sepia Mutiny. The US-India Political Action Community, having elicited one tepid pseudo-apology from the Barack Obama campaign, then demanded an acceptably contrite expression of contrition. Barack Obama’s macaca moment is hardly the campaign killer that George Allen’s proved to be, but the spectacle of a Kenyan Kansan would-be president deflecting criticism from pro-trade Indian Americans is at least more interesting.

Last week, Obama’s campaign sent out a not-for-attribution memo to media professionals, slamming Hillary Clinton for courting Indians and the Indian American Community. The dossier, delicately titled “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjabs)’s Personal Financial and Political Ties to India ,” suggests that Clinton’s pro-trade, pro-India proclivities will compromise her commitment to Americans. It’s Lou Dobbs-level rhetoric, straight from the platitudinous fluff-factory known as the Barack Obama Campaign. Obama has since apologized for the memo, calling it a “screw-up on the part of our research team.”

To pro-trade types, the list of Clinton’s high crimes and misdemeanors will read as less than damning. “Outsourcing will continue,” Clinton apparently told an Indian audience in February. “We are not in favor of putting up fences.” When Lou Dobbs attacked the Senator for supporting Tata Consulting, the Indian company that pioneered IT outsourcing, Clinton countered, “Outsourcing works both ways.” The document charges that the Clintons have “reaped significant financial rewards from their relationship with the Indian community,” and draws a straight line from investments in Indian companies to a lack of support for protectionist trade measures. The implication is that Clinton will be more loyal to her Indian friends than American workers. Trade is apparently Clinton’s religion; Bangalore is her Vatican, with some money-grubbing, call-center-operating Indian her pope.

Both Clintons have courted the thriving, prosperous Indian American community, noting its disproportionate economic influence and potential as a donor pool. Indian Americans comprise less than 1 percent of the population, but they enjoy the highest median salary of any national origin group stateside. And the Clintons have been enthusiastic about increasing the size of that group: They have consistently supported increases in the number of H1-B visas, many of which end up in the highly trained hands of Indian IT professionals. Today, Hillary Clinton co-chairs the Senate India caucus. She has joked that she could be elected as the Senator from Punjab.

So is Clinton in bed with the enemy? It all depends on whether you consider trading partners enemies. The trader-as-traitor boasts a proud pedigree; a history extending from lawbreaking anti-mercantilists to John Kerry’s “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” And the juxtaposition of trade and treason has never made less sense. Offshoring will enrich some and hurt others in the short term, but the two groups will not be distinguished by the citizenships they claim. To whip up hysteria about outsourcing is to pit American against American; the Americans who benefit from lower prices, increased productivity, and job creation, against those whose jobs are lost to more efficient producers.

Barack’s (second) apology is thorough and appropriate, but he has flirted with these sentiments before. At a speech after the Virginia Tech Massacre, Obama explained that “There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways.” What kind of ways? Well, for one: “the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country."

This is an ugly, antagonistic vision of peaceful cooperation and the endless churning it effects. It plays into in-group/out-group atavism, eschewing the counterintuitive truth (an audaciously hopeful truth!) of gains from trade for the lazy fiction of a zero-sum game. It’s a cheap shot. And when a candidate who promises to rebuild alliances with the rest of the world characterizes mutually beneficial trade relationships as violence; when his campaign casts investment in allies as a failure of fealty; you’ve got to wonder what his actual diplomacy is going to look like.

It would be a mistake to confuse the posturing of presidential politics with actual policy. Obama’s views on trade remain buried in the equivocating palaver he advances as policy positions. Clinton voted against CAFTA and expressed opposition to the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement. She has attacked the Bush administration for saying that outsourcing makes the economy stronger. If Clinton's rhetoric is less hateful, her policies may not be much different.

Still, the willingness of campaigns to stoke fear of peaceful exchange with outsiders is disconcerting. During the 2004 Democratic National Convention—Obama’s coming out party—the Illinois state senator spoke out against “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers.” It’s nice, I guess, that Obama wants to bring people together. Now perhaps his research team can find a social glue superior to a shared xenophobia.

Well when manufacturing was ‘outsourced’ we were going to work in high tech. That worked for about a decade till the H1-B scam came in. Americans I knew were suddenly being replaced in our firm by Indians (working for Tata, as it happens) living four to an apartment on “contracts” that paid them a “stipend” and a lump sum on return to India. Many people I knew had severence pay tied to “cross training” Tata replacements.

Is thinking that that’s a bad deal for the USA stupid, as the authors imply. Ideology is a good thing, but needs to be tempered with reason. Most of these political ideals have some positives to them, but if extended to totality become problems. Hard libertarians remind me of Marxists in that they, and they alone, have the correct answer to all political and economic problems.

It is why I found Reason Magazine ultimately boring. I think it’s why Libertarians tend to poll at 1-2%. Most Americans instinctively know that there is no magic ideology bullet that will make everything perfect, and anyone claiming to have it is to be carefully checked for signs of Rabies, whether she is a Junior Senator from a left-leaning state or an editor of Washington based magazine who has memorized the John Galt monologe from “Atlas Shrugged”.

The H1b is supposed to be a gateway visa to keep high tech graduates of american universities in the US and pull graduates away from other countries. I think highly educated college graduates are the kind of legal immigrants the US wants not the illegals that hop across the border and live off welfare.

If there is no H1B there is NO OTHER legal way of becoming a US citizen on merit. The only ways that remain are amnesty, lottery and marrying an american.
Educated people are not going to go that route.

Good point, but the H1B visa program is being used to hold down U.S. citizen’s wages (refer to the recent video on techniques a law firm described to avoid hiring a U.S. citizen).

Now we are all exposed to globalization, but being a U.S. citizen should have some economic value in our own country. I am not sure of the exact way to bring this off in an information age where information freely flows, but I am concerned about the end game (suppressed wages and loss of standard of living).

I tell my daughters to consider professions that are not as easily outsourced.

I recently experienced a moment where outsourcing impacted my career (though not seriously yet). I was moved from a primarily analysis job doing computer modeling (which I love) back to doing project work (which is ok). That computer modeling is now done by Indians.

The whole issue of “outsourcing” is very much a media propaganda and a very well organized mass campaign targeted against a selected community/country. And as will most kinds of propaganda, certain (selective) facts are doctored and presented to the gallery audience in order to evict a certain kind of response from the public. The communist US media have for now selected the small but financially influential Indian American community that’s at the forefront for driving the US economy as their current target. The politicians and public alike are now catching no to the fashionable trend of Indian bashing in every election campaign.

Lets consider some facts here that we never find anyone discussing whenever we have people ranting against outsourcing or H-1B visas.

1. US overall exports are currently at $1.4 trillion in 2006 .... an increase by 12.7 percent over 2005.

2. US exports to India are at $10 billion in 2006, up from $3.6 billion in 2000.

3. Export of aircraft, aviation machinery and parts to India grew from US $ 665 million in 2005 to US $ 1623 million in 2006.

4. In the next 5 years India would be buying $30 billion dollar worth of aircraft/ aviation equipments from the US.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2007/070126-india-defense.htm
http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/2295.asp

5. US companies stands to make something around $15-20 billion in next 6-8 years thats will create a large number of jobs in US.
http://www.saag.org/%5Cpapers18%5Cpaper1740.html

6. Indian exports to US all good and services included (including call-centers), are at $21 billion in 2006 compared to a whooping $300 billion Chinese exports to US. (So why is India singled out for the public bashing?)

Its easy to bash Indians when IBM outsources job to India, cuz that visible and it gets all the media attention. The target is easy to identify as India or Indians. Whats not so visible is that 60% of the new startup companies in the sillicon valley that produces job are started by Indians including Indians like Vinod Dham (NexGen, AMD, and Silicon Spice) and Amar G Bose of Bose Corporation.

My post did not bash Indians. I have great respect for many Indians and U.S. citizens of Indian descent with whom I work. What we need to overcome is that the cost of living in India is so much lower than the U.S., the flow of information creates stress on wages of workers who deal with information, and companies are conciously using H1B visas to suppress wages for U.S. workers in this country. As information outsourcing continues to be more efficient, I see the strain from visas declining.

I believe that being an U.S. citizen should count for something given our huge market. It may be that information technology will eliminate all realistic barriers (when I say realistic I mean barriers that won’t hurt productivity too much).

I have been impacted by globalization in a small way. Many others have been impacted in a big way. I can’t imagine a worse situation than training your Indian replacement.

We all need to take ownership for our careers, but I see so many people struggling with Wal-Mart type jobs, and I cannot help but feel sympathy for them. I understand that my employment can end at any moment so I maximize the amount of money which I save for that day which I feel is coming.

I agree with your post regarding China as a much greater threat. I would prefer to trade and do business with India over most other countries. The Indian government does not practice mercantilism like China does. The Indians are not spending our import dollars hand over fist to build up a military which could prove a major regional threat in the event we are forced to fight them.

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