Free Republic

I.B.M. has sent a holiday chill through its American employees with its plans to ship thousands of high-paying white-collar jobs overseas to lower-paid foreign workers. "People are upset and angry," said Arnie Marchetti, a 37-year-old computer technician at I.B.M.'s Southbury, Conn., office whose wife gave birth to their first child in August. The company has not made any announcements, and the employees do not know who will be affected, or when. The uncertainty about whose jobs may be sent to India or China, the two main countries in the current plans, has raised workers' anxiety in some cases to an...

Decline Of Manufacturing Could Impact Innovation 'Ecosystem' The Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has finished the first phase of a study that finds the health of the U.S. high tech industry is in rapid decline. With manufacturing leaving the country, the United States runs the risk of losing the strength of its innovation infrastructure of design, research and development and the creation of new products and industries, warns the PCAST Subcommittee on Information Technology Manufacturing and Competitiveness. Foreign governments -- and especially China -- have done an effective job of creating a rich environment for the...

If you're a draftsman, an architect, a computer programmer, a graphic designer, your days are numbered. If you're a plumber, electrician, construction worker, contractor, bricklayer, you're secure for now.

The Bush administration has slapped high duties on Chinese TV sets for the alleged problem of "dumping"—which increasingly means selling at prices lower than sets sold by established firms. Let's leave the issue of dumping for now and examine the claim that jobs are being shipped overseas, which is usually what is said when great foreign products appear in US stores. A number of people have observed that TVs are no longer made in the US. The implication is that at least the Bush administration recognizes a problem. The jobs that used to go into making TVs have effectively been...

.Profiles in Self-absorptionTwo new books paint damning pictures of administrations loyal only to themselves.by Hugh Hewitt 11/26/2003 12:00:00 AM SOME BOOKS should be read in tandem. One pair for parallel reading: William Manchester's second volume in his life of Churchill, "Alone," and Rich Lowry's fine new effort: "Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years." Manchester's book chronicles the wilderness years of the greatest man of the 20th century, and it is thus obliged to follow the doings of the not-so-great men who held power in Britain through most of the '30s, including Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Here is...