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Senator Grassley is rightly concerned that recession layoffs will shield increased jobs off shoring and use of H-1B workers. On February 13, Pravda reported that “America has begun the initial steps to final outsourcing of its last dominant industry”, oil/gas and oil/gas services. Pravda reports that “as with other formerly dominant industries, such as light manufacturing, IT, textiles,” recession is “used as the knife to finally do in the workers.”
According to Pravda, “IT is a prime example. The companies used the bust to lay off hundreds of thousands of tech workers around the US and Britain, citing low profits or debt. The public as a whole accepted this, as part of the economic landscape and protests were few, especially with a prospect of the situation turning around. However, shortly after the turn around in the economy, it became very clear that there would be no turn around in the IT employment industry. Not only were companies outsourcing everything they could, under the cover of the recession, they had shipped in tens of thousands of H-1B work visaed workers who were paid on the cheap.”
It is rare to find US Representatives and Senators, such as Grassley, who will take a stand against powerful special interests. Some do so inadvertently, forgetting that patriotism is no longer a characteristic of the American business elite. Hoping to stimulate American rather than foreign businesses, the House version of the economic stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, required that funds provided by the bill cannot be used to purchase foreign-made iron, steel, and textiles.
The Senate provision was more sweeping, mandating that all manufactured goods purchased with stimulus money be American-made.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Caterpillar, General Electric, other transnational corporations, and editorial writers whose newspapers are dependent on corporate advertising set out to defeat the buy American requirement. As far as these anti-American organizations are concerned, the stimulus bill has nothing to do with American jobs or the American economy. It only has to do with the special interest appetites that have the political power to rip off the American taxpayers. [see Manufacturing & Technology News, February 4, 2009]
Senator John McCain is their man. “Protectionism”, exclaimed the man the Republicans wanted as president. McCain said the buying American provisions would cause a second Great Depression. U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said that buying abroad was “economic patriotism.”
The American economic elite are hiding their treason to the American people behind “free trade.”
I want to say this as clearly as it can be said. The off shoring of American jobs is the antithesis of free trade. Free trade is based on comparative advantage. Jobs off shoring is an activity in pursuit of lowest factor cost, an activity that David Ricardo, the originator of the free trade theory, described as the betrayal of one's own country in pursuit of “absolute advantage.”
The “free market” shills on the payroll of the U.S. Chamber, NAM, and in economics departments and think tanks that are recipients of grants from transnational corporations are whores aligned with elites who are destroying the American work force.
Obama has appointed to his National Economic Council blatant apologists for the off shoring of American jobs.
Possibly Obama loves the country that elevated him to its highest office. But his administration is populated with people whose loyalty does not extend beyond elites to the American people.
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