Outsourcing on The Huffington Post

David Isenberg: Contractors 'R U.S.

2009-12-23T13:24:32Z

Welcome to the wonderful, and frequently wacky, world of military and foreign policy outsourcing and privatization.

Currently, over 30,000 more U.S. troops are deploying to Afghanistan per President Obama's recent announcement to surge more U.S. forces there. But the number of U.S. forces now going there, combined with the U.S. troops already in Afghanistan, total around 100,000--a figure dwarfed by other the American force there, i.e., private contractors.

In mid-December 2009 it was reported that as many as 56,000 new contractors will be hired as Obama escalates the war. This is in addition to the estimated 104,000 contractors already there. This 160,000 total is more than the combined U.S. and NATO forces that make up the International Security Assistance Force currently operating in Afghanistan.

As of September 30, 2009, contractors comprised more than 60% of the Defense Department's workforce in Afghanistan. In December 2008, contractors comprised 69% of the Defense Department's workforce, the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.

From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.

Of course, the above numbers exclude contractors working for the U.S. State Department and USAID. As of March 31, 2009 (the most recent date for which data is available) there were 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors working in Afghanistan. Due to problems with the completeness and accuracy of contractor personnel data, the total number is likely to be even higher.

The U.S. military is so reliant upon contractors now that it literally can't go to war without them. The planned surge of military and civilian personnel is expected to be accompanied by a surge in contracts and contractor personnel. Contractors in Afghanistan provide a wide area of services, including dining facilities, logistical support, translation, security, reconstruction and development projects, and contract management. In 2008, the Defense Department, State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) combined had more than 16,000 active contracts in Afghanistan.

Yet, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the continuing debate over whether and how to utilize private military and security contractors (PMC) generates is full of sound and fury, and mostly signifying nothing.

One can argue for and against such contractors but what nobody wants to discuss is that the U.S. government's huge and growing reliance on private contractors constitutes an attempt to circumvent or evade public skepticism about the United States' self-appointed role as global policeman. The U.S. government has assumed the role of guarantor of global stability at a time when the American public is unwilling to provide the resources necessary to support this strategy. Private contractors fill the gap between geopolitical goals and public means.

The reason we have such reliance on private contractors is simple enough. The end of the Cold War gave states a reason to downsize their military forces, freeing up millions of former military personnel from a wide variety of countries, many of them Western. At the same time, the end of the Cold War lifted the lid on many long-simmering conﬂicts held in check by the superpowers. Because markets, like nature, abhor a vacuum, PMCs emerged to ﬁll the void when conﬂicts emerged or wore on with no one from the West or the United Nations riding to the rescue.

Even though the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union is a historical memory the United States still reserves the right to militarily intervene everywhere. This, however, despite the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld championed, is a highly people-powered endeavor.

And most people have decided that their children, much like Dick Cheney during the Vietnam War, have "better things to do."

Still, most people will continue to stick their heads in the sand on this central issue so let's look at another, underappreciated, aspect of the issue.

Far too many people, including those who should know better, try to stigmatize contractors as mercenaries. They are clearly not. If people still believe that words have meaning then the meaning of mercenaries is spelled out quite clearly in Article 47, Additional Protocol 1 of the Geneva Protocols. And people from Blackwater, DynCorp, ArmorGroup, et cetera don't fit.

Before going any further let's acknowledge that that vast majority of contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere are decent, honorable men and women, doing their best to do difficult jobs in dangerous and hazardous environments.

But that is not to say that all the reasons for using contractors are credible. More on that in my next post.

Jeff Ballinger: ON THE MEDIA Fawns Over Sweatshop-Loving Kristof

2009-12-13T15:42:02Z

On the Media with Brooke Gladstone in the anchor chair is always a good deal more than a diversion while cleaning the garage or running weekend errands; she explores many topics that are otherwise not covered, or didn't even appear as problems, opportunities, &c. But, when you do an interview with someone like Nick Kristof -- whose audience dwarfs your own -- you ought to be especially prepared to "afflict the comfortable." She needn't have searched too long to find controversy in this man's last decade of columns and, no, it is not because he practices "advocacy journalism" unless -- and here's the point -- he's advocating for sweatshops.

He "flinches" when he hears his work called advocacy (I believe that he meant "wince" or "cringe" but, hey, who gets the big bucks for putting words together?); she countered by pointing out that he often directs readers to his favorite charities when riding his Sudan hobby- horse. This is certainly not to say that we hear enough about Darfur or even to denigrate the notion of journalist-as-advocate, but there is a back-story here.

The brutality of the global, outsource-everything economy was being covered very well by Kristof's colleague, Bob Herbert. In nearly ten searing anti-sweatshop columns in the mid-Nineties, he captured Americans' disquietude about corporate-led globalization while pointing out the tone-deaf callousness of Bill Clinton's team; the latter was summed up nicely by James Carville when asked about his Nike deal (by another journalist, not Herbert): he berated the reporter for deigning to ask, snarling, "I own stock in Royal Dutch Shell, too." This was just like saying that any Democrat who was internationalist and concerned with human rights ought to just get with the program; just go get "yours" and don't worry about the other guy. Carville dismissed concern about abused workers as "protectionist."

So, it was clear that Herbert was out of step -- especially the trenchant truth-telling which left the named shoe and toy brands with nowhere to hide. When Phil Knight (Nike's prickly CEO, at the time) asked for a meeting with the NYTimes' editorial board in 1998, the multi-billionaire was accommodated. Herbert never wrote another anti-sweatshop column and Nick Kristof reformulated the Times' editorial page position to "pro-sweatshop."

What do you think would happen if a consumer or anti-sweatshop group would demand a meeting with the Times' editorial board to complain about Nick? This is the type of question one might ask to get down to the nitty-gritty (which OTM usually does). An additional quibble: Kristof explains his work as "reporting" and he is not challenged on it. In fact, he is an opinion-monger -- with no need to apologize for advocacy, quite the opposite!

Outsourcing Homework: American Students Get Help From India

2009-11-18T07:56:53Z

But now a growing number of individual Americans are following in the footsteps of businesses -- and outsourcing homework.

For $99 a month, American customers of TutorVista get unlimited coaching in English, math or science from Patnaik or one of her 1,500 fellow tutors. Similar personalized services in the United States charge about $40 an hour.

NYT: 22 Republicans, 20 Democrats Used Lobbying Firm's Statements In House Health Care Speeches

2009-11-14T22:55:58Z

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world's largest biotechnology companies.

Elkhart Coroner Blames High Suicide Rate On Recession

2009-11-10T16:18:50Z

As part of its Bearing Witness 2.0 project, the Huffington Post is rounding up a few of the best local stories of the day.

In Elkhart, Ind., coroner John White has linked the rising suicide rate to the continuing economic recession, reports MSNBC's JoNel Aleccia. As many as 24 people have killed themselves this year in the Northern Indiana region, and over a quarter of them can be directly tied to recent job loss or financial hardship. Elkhart has suffered more than any other county with more than 25,000 residents, according to a stress map from the Associated Press released in May.

One woman shot herself in the head the day after her car had been repossessed, her home already on the brink of foreclosure. "This was a vivacious, very strong woman, and she was taken to her knees because of money," said her daughter.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the recession has caused higher suicide rates nationwide, but a data lag prevents full analysis -- the most recent national data only go up to 2006.

*********

A little over a year ago in Tavares, Fla., four-day-old Chase Jucha had to undergo open-heart surgery, reports the Orlando Sentinel. His parents, Brian and Jessica, were uninsured, and got emergency Medicaid to help save his life. Then, as Chase was recovering -- exactly a year after his surgery -- Brian had a headache that turned out to be a tumor twice the size of a golf ball, and he had to undergo brain surgery. And then Jessica lost her job at a childcare center in September.

The Juchas have been receiving help from their church, the First Baptist Church of Tavares, whose 200 parishioners have already donated more than $1,800 to help the family, which also has another three-year-old son, Bradley. Brian, a landscaper, is also out of work. "Our desire was to be able to make sure their day-to-day and week-by-week needs were going to be met," said Rev. Tom Keisler. "They're a wonderful couple. This really hit everybody hard."

Donations can be made by contacting the church.

*********

A homeless shelter in Fayetteville, Ark., has seen a record number of homeless veterans, reports 40/29 TV. There's been "a huge increase, and we didn't think it could get any higher," said Jon Woodward, executive director of the Seven Hills Homeless Center. The center reports that about half of its patrons are veterans, caught in the midst of high unemployment and unable to transfer their battlefield experience into civilian employment and a stable home. "The challenge is just like anybody looking for jobs," said Terry Jaggers, of the Department of Workforce Services in Fayetteville. "There's just not that many jobs available."

*********

Peter Whoriskey reports for the Washington Post about a region of North Carolina that has had more jobs outsourced to other countries than just about anywhere else in the nation. Local workers are struggling to switch careers in a job market already strained by high unemployment and the lingering recession.

Many laid-off employees cannot enroll in a federal program designed to re-educate workers for new kinds of jobs, because their unemployment checks aren't enough to support them long enough to earn a degree or training certification. "The people in the think tanks keep saying we are going to become -- what's the term? -- an 'information and services' economy," said Allan Mackie, manager of the local North Carolina Employment Security Commission office. "That doesn't seem to be working out too good."

*********

In Michigan, the high number of foreclosed houses threatens to throw off totals for the 2010 census, which could rob the state of a congressional seat, reports Catherine Jun of the Detroit News. Massive unemployment across the state has caused many to move away, and even more to lose their homes.

HuffPost readers: Seen a compelling local story? Have a neighbor going to bizarre lengths to get through the recession? Tell us about it! Email jmhattem@gmail.com.

Designers Rally To Save NYC Garment District

2009-10-21T19:39:32Z

Hundreds gathered on Wednesday in the heart of New York City's garment district to sway city officials against a decision that may push out the struggling garment manufacturing industry.

Rally organizers say the once-booming district may soon disappear if a plan to lift zoning regulations goes through. Union workers, fashion students, politicians and designers turned out in support of the district, with the repeated chant, "Save the garment center!"

For 22 years the city has seemed to protect the area comprising the district - from 34th to 40th street, between Broadway and Ninth Avenue - by requiring building owners to match any new office space with an equivalent manufacturing space elsewhere. The rules are loosely enforced, and as designers shifted their factories abroad, landlords rented space out to higher rent-payers.

A recent decision by Mayor Bloomberg to push the entire district into a 300,000 square foot building fell through when the building became unavailable. Many say that sort of compromise would do little to keep the garment district in any meaningful way and are pushing Bloomberg to commit to zoning laws before mayoral elections in November.

Speakers at the rally positioned their cause as an antidote to the kind of specialized economy they said caused the economic collapse. "We cannot base New York City's entire economy on Wall Street and real estate," said City Council Speaker, Christine C. Quinn. "If we didn't know it before this year, we know it now."

Leveraging the public outrage against outsourcing, rally organizers pitched the age-old "Made in America" concept.

"We were all promised that the bad jobs would be sent abroad, and the good ones would stay here," said Marc Levin, director of a recently released HBO documentary on the history of the garment district, called Shmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags. "We thought we could maintain our standards of living or even be richer if we kept the flashy jobs here. Well that's what fell apart. The economy has no clothes."

The garment district was the heart of New York's biggest industry in the mid-1900s, and an easy symbol of a time that seems irretrievable. "I have friends who would come to New York, and say, 'First thing: take me to the Garment District,'" said 74-year-old Leola Phillips, who worked in the district from 1957 to 1992, at a time when its prominence was beginning to fade. "They could get nice sweaters for cheap, they could even get their wedding dresses there."

Phillips worked as a clothes-tagger, while her mother performed the more taxing duties of actually tailoring the clothes. "She had to make so many collars an hour. It's hard work and you got to get paid," Phillips said. "You don't even want to know where our clothes are getting made now - they get pennies for it."

According to Marc Levin, Ninety-five percent of the clothes sold in America today are made abroad. That statistic has reversed since 1965, when only 5 percent of American clothes were manufactured elsewhere.

"I don't think it'll ever be what it was," Levin said. "But if all we do here is marketing and financing, we've lost something."

Despite its low production numbers, the US manufacturing industry accounts for 24 percent of the revenue made in clothing sales. That is because most high-end pieces are still made in the garment district, a boon to designers, many of whom show their work during the city's Fashion Week.

"When you're getting a show ready and you need buttons or zippers or pleating done at the last minute, quite frankly it's a big help," said designer Michael Kors.

Held in February and September, New York's Fashion Week brings in hundreds of millions of dollars to the city. Without a garment district at hand, Manhattan could become less appealing both to established designers and to young people without the money to outsource their manufacturing, said designer Nanette Lepore.

"When I was a fashion student here, the garment workers taught me so much because I could stand right by them while they worked," she said.

Lepore believes the garment district could conceivably migrate to places like Brooklyn or Los Angeles, where immigrant workers have fueled a rise in manufacturing, leaving Manhattan without one of its signature artistic industries.

Middle-Class Faces Homelessness After Job Loss

2009-09-29T17:09:41Z

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Robertson family was living in a storage unit. Save The Family Arizona supplied the family with a small apartment for themselves -- and a storage unit for their possessions. At no point was the family living in the storage unit. Save the Family doesn't place families in storage units.

As part of the Huffington Post's efforts to bear witness to the effects of the current economic environment on ordinary Americans, we're rounding up some of the most compelling stories reported by local news organizations around the country.

Bridget and Ed Robertson were a normal a middle-class couple from greater Phoenix, Arizona. Then, within just weeks of each other they were both laid off from jobs they'd had for years. Neither could get anything new despite hundreds of applications. They couldn't make their car payments or pay their rent. Soon, they found themselves homeless.

The Robertsons and their daughter, Sarah, moved into a small shelter apartment supplied by a local community service organization, Save the Family Arizona, which kept them from going on the street. The apartment was too small for most of their belongings, which now sit in a 12- by 25-foot storage unit. To make matters worse, Ed had a stroke in January, flooding the family with debt, and Bridget's father passed away recently, compounding the Robertsons' stress and anxiety.

Something often overlooked about homelessness is how embarrassing it can be, how it hurts people's dignity. The Robertsons tell Karina Bland of the Arizona Republic about the shame and guilt that comes from waiting in line at the food bank, Sarah's fear that other kids at her school will find out where she lives, how she now has to stay close to home when playing because of the lack of safety of their new neighborhood. These are emotional battles that are as real as the physical problems.

"I miss feeling like a man," Ed says, choking back a sob. When he used to come home on Friday nights with a paycheck in his pocket, he felt like he was providing for his family. He'd have the guys over, and they'd sit around in the garage, talking and drinking cold beer.

"When you're getting unemployment, and things are being given to you, you're not earning it," he says. "I'm grateful, but I'm not earning it."

******

DeWitt, Nebraska, a little over an hour south of Lincoln, used to be the classic mid-century industrial town: A factory hiring hundreds of workers, farms on the outskirts growing corn and wheat, picket fences and flags flying. It was a veritable Norman Rockwell painting. But the plant closed and the jobs were shipped to China, leaving an empty building and a heartbroken town, report Leslie Reed and Aaron C James of the Omaha World-Herald.

Former factory workers now find themselves lost; what was once a stable and respectable living has disappeared, and picking up the pieces of a dissipated career is turning into anxiety. Workers try other jobs, some retire, and some seek to go back to school, but all options are equally vexing and none allow the remnants of a working generation to feel as comfortable -- or as in control -- as they once did.

Janis Turner of Beatrice and Anita Oltmans of DeWitt are among those back in school after decades in the work force.

Turner, a single mother who raised her four children on her Vise-Grip paychecks, is studying to become a licensed practical nurse.

Oltmans, who worked 15 years at the plant, is studying agribusiness and hopes to find a job in a veterinary clinic after she graduates in December 2010.

Both felt like fish out of water.

"I had hardly used a computer," Oltmans said. "I took an English comp class, and we had to send assignments in as e-mail. I didn't know how to do any of that."

In the factory, she knew what she was doing.

******

Fewer state funds means a decrease in state services which, for the state of Maine, means that fire investigators are being pushed to the limits on their arson investigations. Those investigations have increased as result of the recession and foreclosure crisis. The state government's money has come up short, and a number of potentially intentional fires are left unexamined. The State Fire Marshal's office has been short on funds after its reserves were cut off to help balance the state's budget, reports Mal Leary of the Bangor Daily News.

Arson can be a sad end to financial troubles, as people try to get insurance money by destroying their own homes. On the flip-side are the thousands of homeowners who cannot afford and do not acquire home insurance, taxes of which would go towards the Fire Marshall budget. As a result, citizens suffer from a mangled system.

"Our investigators are literally running from fire to fire," State Fire Marshal John Dean said Monday. "Anyone that listens to the news or reads the paper everyday knows the numbers are up."

He said one investigator in his office has more than 70 open cases, some going back to last year. Dean said it can take a long time to complete the investigation and analyze all the forensic evidence with 12 investigators to cover the state.

"It's not unusual to have 75 people to interview in a case," Dean said. "With no reserves, we can't use overtime, so the backlog of cases continues to grow."

******

Bob Jordan, of Newport Beach, California, spends his days driving around Orange County, picking up leftover food from grocery stores and restaurants to give to the less fortunate. His organization, Share Our Shelves, distributes food to homeless and financially struggling families who are worrying about keeping their bellies full. But more people made hungry by loss of jobs and a shrinking economy means that Share Our Selves has had to increase its supply and stretch its dollars to meet the demand, and the group is now distributing 40% more food than last year. Patrons come from all backgrounds, of all ages, and in all different types of clothes. Michael Miller of the Daily Pilot, followed Jordan around for a day, and provides a look into one individual committed to keeping his neighbors fed.

"It's not something that's going to serve them the whole week," Jordan said en route to his first stop.

"It's supplemental food. A lot of them are on food stamps and get most of their food that way."

At the same time, Jordan -- and Share Our Selves' other drivers, who make the rounds six days a week -- know that every bite counts. The nonprofit gives out about 300 bags of food every day to people who can't afford to buy it, and Jordan makes a point to refuse nothing.

******

Potatoes are the agricultural symbol of Idaho, but farmers there are worried that harsh economic times will affect their crops' demand and put fewer potatoes on dinner plates across the nation. Danielle Grant, of Eastern Idaho and Western Wyoming's Local News 8, reports that there is no shortage of field hands to help farms harvest, especially among migrant workers, whose home economies are hurt worse than our own.

"If you work here, you can just live. And out there [Mexico] you can't even make it too good, so that's why we come out here to work," explained Nicholas Camrgo, who comes to the states to work.

Plowing through the potatoes, tooling around on tractors or raking up the remains; they do whatever it takes to get the job done.

"It's kind of hard work especially when it's cold, raining, snowing but what can you do," Camrgo said. "Just keep on going?" asked Danielle. "Just keep on going," he laughs.

But demand is down as fewer Americans dine out. Still, many are glad to have a job, even if it doesn't last. "This year, it's people that have lost their job and they're desperate for some income even if it is just for a few weeks," said one farmer.

HuffPost readers: Seen a good local story? Heard about a heroic judge, neighbor, or doctor helping people stay in their homes? Tell us about it! Email jmhattem@gmail.com.

Bearing Witness 2.0: Economy Forces One Family Business To Move Jobs Overseas

2009-09-23T13:00:55Z

Sarah Atkinson Ramirez shared her story with HuffPost. Her story affect her entire town, a town that her family helped build. Sarah runs the Atkinson Candy Company, which has operated out of Lufkin, TX since 1932, and she faces a choice she is loath to make, outsourcing the jobs of people who have come to rely on her.

In Sarah's words:

My great grandfather started this business during the height of the Depression. He was laid off his job as a factory worker and had two young children at home to feed. He took what little money he had loaded up the family in the car and drove to Houston, TX, which in those days was a two week jaunt (now only two hours). While in Houston he purchased a good amount of candies, cigarettes, and other tobacco goods to bring back to Lufkin to sell. He continued his wholesale operation for several years running as a candy/tobacco jobber. In the late 1930's he decided that it would be more profitable manufacturing candy so he set up shop and the rest as they say is history.

Flash forward to today. I am the fourth generation to be working in the business my dear great grandfather started out of necessity for his family. We are not the biggest candy manufacturer in the business, but we're not the smallest either... Our business has grown tremendously from the small one room kitchen in the 1940's to the ever-expanding facility we have today. Our products and manufacturing techniques have evolved over the years...all in all we are the all American entrepreneur's dream. Until now.

When the economic situation first began to make headlines we were hardly affected. We are still a family owned business without any shareholders to report to...we had plenty of working capital...we had workers ready and willing to get the job done...we had costs that were challenging, but manageable. Now we are watching as most of our business is taken off shore to China, Mexico, and Brazil. With the current Farm Bill and sugar import quotas it is no longer possible for us to apply our trade within the confines of the USA (See a recent article from Business Week here regarding this crisis within the food industry).

What kind of country do we live in that small to medium sized business owners with an entrepreneurial spirit and some decent working capital (we rarely borrow from banks) has to LEAVE the country to keep a 76 year old business IN business? Now my great grandfather always said "candy sells when times are good, but even better when they aren't." For him this was true...even during the Great Depression he was able to build a thriving business. In today's depression/recession whatever you want to call it we have to bail to third world countries!

Our company is currently working to relocate some of our production to Guatemala. Given the cost factors we can no longer afford to operate our entire business here. This means that people will lose jobs. This means that one of the largest employers in a small East Texas town will disappear after being around 76 years. We don't want to do this. I don't want to have to tell people sorry you can't work here anymore. I don't want to have to move to Guatemala! I want to stay right here in my hometown and keep the family tradition going. It's a sweet business, but it is a business after all. If we want to be able to leave a legacy for the fifth generation we have to do something...we are left with no other choice and that is sad.

As long as major corporations and large lobby groups continue to wrap their collective fingers around the necks of our Senators and Congressmen...and as long as those Senators and Congressmen keep giving in...people like us will continue to disappear and all that will be left are greedy, manipulative, impersonal, and cold hearted corporations.

This story is part of Bearing Witness 2.0. HuffPost Eyes & Ears is asking for stories of the tragic human cost of the corruption and greed that have brought us this financial crisis, and for examples of recession heroes.

Get HuffPost Eyes&Ears on Facebook and Twitter!

David Paul: Time for Congress to Face Facts: They Are the Death Panel

2009-09-12T13:41:11Z

A specter is haunting America--the specter of debt.

Birthed in the dying years of the Cold War, the American polity lost its way. Public policy, as encapsulated in the federal budget, was always about making hard choices among competing priorities and constituencies. The notion that resources were limited was a critical discipline, and the ability to navigate the process of allocating resources was the stuff of which Congressional leaders were made. Throwing arrows is easy. Building a budget in a democracy is hard stuff.

Traditionally, Democrats were the party that believed in spending more--and taxing more, while Republicans once were the grownups of the American political system, sternly cautioning against the political urges toward deficit spending and international adventurism.

But the world changed over the last quarter century. Faced with the realities of survival in a competitive world economy--and the exigencies of political fundraising--Democrats brought corporate America inside their tent and muted their hostility to the private sector. For their part, since George H.W. Bush uttered the words Voodoo Economics in his failed efforts to derail the Reagan Revolution, the unholy alliance of tax-cutting Republicans and big-spending Republicans marked the death knell of that party's claim to the moral high ground in matters of fiscal propriety, while neo-conservatives brought to the GOP an evangelical fervor to change the world that was once a Democratic credo.

The numbers are stark. Over the past 25 years, Democrats and Republicans alike forswore their allegiance to the central responsibility of elected legislators to make choices, balance priorities and pass budgets with integrity. Perhaps they were not to blame, after all East Asian countries led by China continued to fund our deficits by buying our bonds and offered cheap money as an alternative to the more painful options of cutting spending or raising revenues. These foreign purchases of our debt were not an act of faith in the almighty dollar as much as a simple expedient of the export-driven model of economic development that has become the norm across the world.

Over the past quarter century, China, the Asian Tigers of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, and more recent converts such as Vietnam, pursued a successful economic development strategy built on selling manufactured goods into the U.S. consumer market. As these countries took in massive amounts of dollars, they faced two options: They could recycle those dollars back into the U.S. or watch the value of the dollar decline and their own currencies rise. There really was no choice, as the export-driven development model that was lifting the Asian nations out of poverty required that their currencies not rise in value relative to the dollar, so that their low-cost goods remained attractive in the U.S. market. Accordingly, U.S. Treasury securities became the preferred investment for Asian trade-surplus dollars, and our financial markets become flush with that kept long-term interest rates low.

What was lost in the orgy of low cost debt that ultimately engendered the securitization boom in credit card and home equity lending--and enabled growing deficit spending at the federal level--was that the American economy, like the American household, was living on a chimera of growth that belied the underlying damage that was being done to our economy.

As the table here illustrates, over the past 25 years, our economic growth has increasingly been driven by imported capital. In the same way that the average American household saw no real income growth during the past decade, but increased their spending through borrowing, so too the national GDP was flat, but for the growth realized through externally borrowed dollars.

Today, we are faced with stark choices. But if the health care debate is any measure, it is evident that our political establishment has lost much of its capacity for honest debate and real decision-making. Twenty-five years of free money and no discipline has made a mockery of the federal budget process, as we now are accustomed to avoiding choices and accepting the false notion that there are obligations that are non-negotiable.

For two decades now, we have become accustomed to justifying any manner of spending, from education to tax cuts, as an investment in our future. This rationale is a direct outgrowth of the availability of low-cost capital that has itself undermined the ability to weigh and make choices. This has undermined as well the notion of a national consensus on foreign policy, as we now go to war with little regard for the financial cost. With no fiscal consequences and no universal service, war has become a sideshow of American political life.

Today, the generation-old paradigm may well be shifting. It is with no small amount of irony that even as our Republican and Democratic representatives have lost anything but a rhetorical commitment to the traditions of responsible budget policy, it is the Chinese Communist Party--the largest holder of our debt and the most at risk for the consequences of a devalued dollar--that is becoming insistent that we pay attention to our cascading fiscal mess.

Surely, as the source of the free capital to which we have become addicted, the Chinese have little more standing to scold us than the crack dealer who declares to the destitute customer that it is time to stop. The true dividend to the Chinese is not the return on their investments, but rather the economic growth that has lifted the livelihood of hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty over the past two decades--paid for graciously by the American factory workers whose livelihoods were lost.

But ironies aside, we have to listen. A new economic model could be beneficial to us--over the longer-term. Increased domestic savings and a declining dollar in the short-term could make overseas manufacturing less competitive, and allow America to begin building things again. But the near-term pain will continue for some time, as the process of paying down the debts that we have accumulated will take years. And we have become a very impatient nation.

The problem, however, is not our ability to listen. The problem is that after 25 years, the very skills required to build a federal budget that faces up to real facts, weighs priorities and makes real choices, may be gone from our political DNA. The Death Panel debate, while fraudulent on its face, offered the first inkling of the challenges to come when capital becomes scarce once again, and we are confronted with competing priorities for limited budget dollars.

The truth is that there is a Death Panel, that is charged to sit and decide how limited resources should be allocated. To weigh the needs of the elderly against the needs of the young, the costs of health care against the costs of war. But it is not the faceless panel of bureaucrats of Sarah Palin's imagination. It is Congress. It is time they got used to it.

John Feffer: Outsourcing Assassination: to China?

2009-08-25T14:13:07Z

To: Leon Panetta, Langley HQ
From: Operative 650, Shanghai office
Re: Memo XE1250

Leon:

I just received the memo on the latest Blackwater scandal. Talk about embarrassing! Why did we outsource assassination to those bozos? Remember in 2006 when a Blackwater guy, drunk as a skunk, killed the Iraqi vice president's bodyguard? And we were going to deputize these trigger-happy Rambos to take down America's Most Wanted? I wish we could simply put all the blame on the last administration. But we're still shelling out millions to the company to provide "security" in Iraq.

Look, if we're going to outsource, we should outsource to the experts. The Chinese. They make our clothes. They make our computers. Heck, they even supply the components for our weapons systems. Why not give them the task of assassinating jihadists?

Here are the top five reasons to go with the Chinese:

It's an easy way around the 1976 executive order banning us from conducting assassinations. We keep our hands clean. What's a little more blood on the hands of the Chinese?

We're cooperating with the Chinese on everything these days: the global economy, climate change, those pesky North Koreans. I hear that there is even talk in Washington of a G-2, in which Washington and Beijing set up a formal structure to manage the world. Let's seal the relationship the good old-fashioned way: with a covert op.

The Chinese dislike the jihadists as much as we do, if not more. They're cracking down on their own Muslim population in Xinjiang. Why not give them a shot at going global?

Plausible deniability: No one would expect us to partner with the Chinese on this. And the media expects the worst from Beijing, so revelations of an assassination squad wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

We'll save money. Blackwater -- I have a hard time using the company's new name Xe since it makes them sound like a cologne -- has been ripping us off for years. The Chinese give good product at a reasonable cost. Which reminds me: send me your measurements and I'll get you a top-quality suit.

Leon, I know this suggestion will encounter some resistance in Langley. But we have to start thinking outside the box here in the Agency. I've developed a great network of Chinese colleagues in Shanghai. We've got an active Container Security Initiative program here. The FBI has a counterterrorism office up in Beijing at the U.S. embassy. Let's bump the relationship up a notch.

If it's good enough for Wal-Mart and the boys over at DoD, then it should be good enough for us.

Sincerely,
Operative 650 in Shanghai

Broadband In Tanzania Opens East Africa To Outsourcing Possibilities

2009-08-19T11:10:19Z

Eamon Kircher-Allen | GlobalPost

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania -- Ramadhan Mubarak shook his head as he gestured to his six forlorn PCs.

"I believe that many people want to use the internet," he said. "But most Tanzanians are poor, so they can't manage the cost."

Mubarak owns two of the handful of internet cafes in downtown Dar es Salaam, and he can barely cover his overhead of $1,500 a month. Like many people here, he's hoping that will soon change: East Africa's new fiber-optic cable has been laid across the Indian Ocean and made landfall here on July 23. When it goes into use in late August, it is likely to dramatically reduce costs and improve connectivity speed.

The cable, which is a two-year, $650 million project of the private venture Seacom, connects East and Southern Africa to India and Europe and will end the dependence of Tanzania's internet on satellites.

Even accounting for exaggeration -- some boosters have promised it will improve education and healthcare and curb corruption -- pretty much everyone who uses the internet here agrees that fiber-optic connectivity is nothing short of a revolution.

"I think you'll see a wave of creativity and new business opportunities as more and more Africans come online by the millions," wrote Jon Gosier, a founder of the Uganda-based software development firm Appfrica in an email message. East Africa could become an outsourcing hub, said Gosier, who maintains a blog on African tech innovation. "I think in 5 years or so we'll be where places like India and Singapore are now."

At Dar es Salaam's iStore -- the city's Mac vendor -- employees were optimistic that fast Internet would make their high-end machines attractive to more businesses and home users.

"The fiber cable's going to work," said Kishan Vadher, a salesperson. "Especially because of the way we are used to the internet."

What Tanzanians web surfers "are used to" is fickle and crushingly slow browsing. The internet is also astronomically expensive. Businesses signing up for a connection of one-megabyte-per-second (MBps) with BensonOnline (BOL), a Tanzanian ISP that offers unlimited data transfer, pay $4,800 a month. In contrast, in the United States consumers can pay less than $100 a month for that kind of bandwidth.

Even "normal" BOL subscribers -- who get 256 kilobyte-per-second connections -- pay $1,500 per month for their subscriptions. When small businesses split the bandwidth between several computers, basic internet activities can be excruciating.

"If you divide this between 20 users, you probably get 8 to 12 kilobytes fluctuating," said David Adila, who works in customer support at BOL on the 16th floor of the PPF building in Dar es Salaam. "You can imagine 8 to 12 is horrible. You could watch YouTube, but it would take a long time." In other words: load, pause, wait and -- after a few minutes of downloading -- play. Uploading content to YouTube is even slower.

The fiber-optic cable will mean a dramatic reduction in cost for BOL, which is a client of Seacom. BOL currently pays about $60,000 a month for the 20 MBps it rents from a satellite connection, which it then repackages and sells to consumers. With the Seacom cable, it expects to pay just $15,000 a month for 150 MBps -- though BOL doesn't yet know how much government fees will affect costs.

After investing some of the savings into expanding its network, BOL hopes that the cable will bring a 90 percent price reduction for consumers. That's the same savings figure that was tossed around in Kenya before the SEACOM launch. But when the Seacom cable "went live" in Kenya last month the cost savings were drastically re-estimated to a price reduction of 20-30 percent.

But even if prices for, say, BOL's "normal" subscribers decreased by 90 percent, the $150 per month would still be far out of reach for most Tanzanians, where the gross domestic product per capita is about $540. Personal computers are also prohibitively expensive for most people. Computers are all imported and marked up to often twice their price in the United States. Computer hardware would need to be locally manufactured in order to bring down its cost to a level that would allow many more consumers to enjoy the cable's full potential for East African economies.

In fact, there are many obstacles to Tanzania becoming an internet utopia in the next few months. For one thing, only about 5 in 100 people use the internet here, according to the International Telecommunication Union, so there will be a steep learning curve.

There are other unique challenges, too: Pirate attacks delayed the launch of the Seacom cable earlier in the summer. And when a damaged undersea cable in West Africa paralyzed the internet in several countries there a couple of weeks ago, it was a reminder that Africa's internet connectivity is still a long way from other parts of the world.

That hasn't stopped an air of excitement from creeping into local tech circles.

"When fiber-optic comes, I'm talking a vast difference," Adila said with a glint in his eyes. "I'm talking way faster."

Read more at Global Post.

Get HuffPost World On Facebook and Twitter!

Helene Pavlov: Teleradiology as an Option for Non-Radiologists Who Self- Refer

2009-08-12T16:22:36Z

In this posting I will refer to an excerpt from my interview in RT Image. Some of the questions and answers in this piece further highlight my position that "not all images are created equal." This posting specifically focuses on teleradiology as a potential option to physicians who buy their own equipment, house it in their own facility and outsource the interpretation of the images that are taken. You can read the full article by logging on to www.rt-image.com.

Teleradiology is used in two ways. Teleradiology can be an excellent resource for quality image interpretation. For instance, images performed in private offices and imaging centers that send their acquired CT or MR or conventional x-rays examinations to be interpreted by Academic Centers and sub-specialty fellowship trained Board Certified Radiologists benefit their patients. Board-certified radiologists with a specific sub-specialty, such as dedicated spine, dedicated shoulder etc., provide patients with optimal interpretation for accurate diagnosis.

Part of a good teleradiology service is also providing oversight for the acquisition of those images and assures that the images are of optimal quality. If a study cannot be interpreted because it is of suboptimal quality, the academic physicians should inform the facility in which the images were acquired.

On the other hand, private offices and imaging centers that need a radiologist to interpret the image may send their images to other countries because they need a radiologist to interpret the image in order to get reimbursed, which may offer the least expensive radiologist to provide interpretations. Most of these arrangements work on volume, so the speed of each interpretation, not the quality, is rewarded. The qualifications of the interpreting physician and their oversight of the protocols to obtain the images are questions requiring answers. Are the physicians interpreting the examination trained in America? Are they sub-specialized for the condition that they are interpreting? Some teleradiology services do screen and validate the credentials of the physician performing the interpretation but it is not required. Also , physician oversight varies with each Teleradiology site and may not be part of the teleradiology services.

As a patient, you should always ask the question -- Who is performing, reading and interpreting my imaging studies? Your physician should be working with fellowship and sub-specialty trained radiologists to help both with acquiring and interpreting the images. Collaboration between the radiologist and the clinician have the greatest potential to provide the best diagnosis and treatment decisions.

www.hss.edu

Mike Elk: Lobbyists Paid Off by China vs. 30,000 U.S. Workers: Which Side Will Obama Choose?

2009-08-11T18:18:00Z

As the International Trade Commission considers comments on its recommendation to impose tariffs on Chinese tire imports, President Obama stands at a crossroads in the fight to rebuild the American economy.

President Obama has made a commitment in the past to uphold previously signed trade agreements. China, however, is violating these agreements by flooding the market with a massive 300 percent increase in tire imports in an attempt to wipe out American tire manufacturers. In 2004, China sent 14 million tires to the U.S. valued at $453 million. By last year, that had increased to 46 million tires valued at $1.7 billion.

The Chinese are shipping cheaply-made tires in an effort that isn't just killing American manufacturing, but also killing people. So far, two people have died as a result of the low quality of some of these Chinese import tires. The U.S. Government has launched a massive recall of the tire in question, but so far the Chinese manufacturer has refused to cooperate fully with the recall.

So far over 8,000 people have lost their jobs, and over 20,000 more jobs are at risk if the Chinese are allowed to continue with this strategy of not obeying trade laws.

Next month Obama will be challenged to uphold his campaign pledge to enforce current trade laws when a decision on illegal Chinese tire imports came to his desk. Last month, a majority of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) found that tariff relief was needed to urgently reduce tire imports because of market disruption. According to the United Steelworkers, between 2004 and the end of this year, more than 8,100 workers in the tire industry have lost or will lose their jobs and another 20,000 jobs are threatened.

Speaking last week, USW President Leo Gerard said that this will "prove to be a test of enforcement of trade laws that China agreed to." A ruling to enforce current U.S. trade laws would mark a clear break with Bush era economic policy. During the Bush Administration the United States International Trade Commission ruled four separate times that China had violated trade law and recommended measures to stop the flow. However, each time Bush refused to obey these recommendations.

If President Obama follows the commission recommendations, it would send a stern message to China that the Obama administration, unlike the Bush administration, intends to enforce U.S. trade law. He is expected to decide on September 17, one week before the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. If Obama chooses to enforce tariffs on illegal Chinese competition, that would send a message throughout the world that U.S. intends to enforce trade law.

Unfortunately, corporate lobbyists paid for by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, like former Bush official and Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Robert Portman, are running an aggressive misinformation campaign in attempt to thwart U.S. trade law. These groups have been claiming that limiting tire imports would cost Americans jobs and raise the costs of tires for consumers. However, the United States Commission on Trade found that the total benefits exceed the costs by $884 million.

Chinese importers, in conjunction with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, have formed a lobbying front group ironically named American Coalition for Free Trade in Tires. The coalition is run by Jochum, Shore & Trossevin, a Washington D.C. lobby firm run by former Bush trade officials who are cashing in on their years of U.S. government service to advise foreign competitors. The law firm has used its ties to power to advise Chinese manufacturers on how to get around loopholes in the law. As a result, eight members of Congress wrote a letter this past June calling on the Government Accountability Office to investigate.

Congressman Michael Michaud of Maine said, "Many of these individuals appear to be repaying the investment that the American taxpayers made in them with their hard-earned tax dollars by using the knowledge, expertise and contacts they gained while on the federal payroll in ways that are adverse to the interests of our workers and our producers."

Speaking last week at a factory in Indiana, President Obama said that rebuilding American manufacturing was the key to build a vibrant economy. As President Obama has said previously many times we can't go back to an economy, where 45 percent of our profits come from the financial sector. As Dave Johnson pointed out last week we in his piece "Manufacture or Borrow (Until We Can't)":

When it comes down to it you can't have a healthy service sector unless you are manufacturing items to sell and trade because you can't pay for the restaurant bill or insurance or hotel room or lawyer or even the doctor if you don't make something to sell and trade. And mostly you can't keep buying the things made elsewhere. You can only borrow for so long.

President Obama has announced bold new initiatives to invest billions of dollars into new green energy initiatives. However, if we don't have to even enforce the current trade laws that we have, American manufacturing will be wiped out by low-wage Chinese manufacturing. As I highlighted previously, companies such as GE have already begun to move so-called green jobs to China already.

The fight over whether to enforce trade laws against illegal Chinese tire imports will set a precedent that the U.S. will enforce previous trade agreements. President Obama has a choice of whether he will side with American workers or corporate lobbyists paid off by China.

Outsourcing Of Mass To India Hit By Global Financial Crisis

2009-08-05T16:12:58Z

It is dawn in Kerala, a palm frond of a state in India's South West. As the sun's first rays hit the church steeple, a Holy Mass is being conducted in the local Malayalam language.

Only, the prayer is dedicated to a newborn by his Catholic family half a world away in the United States.

Requests for these so-called Mass Intentions, or prayers offered for a specific reason, pour into India from the United States, Canada and Europe, where there is a huge shortage of priests.

This outsourcing to faraway India is a quaint practice that has been called "religious outsourcing."

But now, the severe global economic crisis and bankruptcies in Western churches are hitting even this unusual practice. In Kerala and other parts of India, where the Roman Catholic Church still thrives, outsourced mass intentions are dwindling and striking the income of poorer priests and impoverished churches.

Sebastian Adayanthrath, bishop of Kerala's Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese, one of the oldest in the country, said he is observing a big slowdown in incoming requests for mass intentions from the West.

"There is a 50 percent fall recently in outsourced mass intentions," Adayanthrath told GlobalPost in a telephone interview.

Church bankruptcies, diminishing Sunday collections and falling donations from the faithful in Western parishes are all reasons, Adayanthrath said.

Outsourcing, a practice where tasks are sent to cheaper, more efficient locations, has been a sore point for Westerners especially in these economically depressed times.

For the last decade, India has particularly benefitted from the outsourcing of a multitude of tasks such as writing software code, providing customer service, reading x-rays and filing tax returns.

With religious outsourcing, Westerners request Indian churches to hold Holy Mass in memory of a dead family member, or thanksgiving for a child's college admission, to celebrate a wedding anniversary or even for unusual causes such as the well-being of their favorite sports stars.

"Each mass is paid a stipend of $5 (250 rupees) upwards, supplementing the income of priests who are otherwise paid 50 rupees for the same service by locals," said Rector Father Augustine Thottakara of Bangalore-based seminary Dharmaram College.

About two percent of India's 1.2 billion population is Christian, mostly of the Roman Catholic faith. Kerala in Southern India has a big concentration of churches and the faithful.

The requests come to the churches and the local clergy through the Vatican, through clergymen in overseas churches and even through religious bodies. In these days of digital communication, requests have speeded up through email.

Western labor unions have criticized such outsourcing as commoditizing spirituality.

The Indian church stoutly defends the practice. "Offering mass intentions on behalf of Westerners are not a business, it is a custom that benefits both sides," said Father Paul Thelakkat, spokesman for the Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala's Cochin town.

But the eastward flow of prayers has ebbed somewhat recently, following the graph of the worldwide economic state.

Where thousands of prayers were flooding parishes in Kerala, church leaders say that they are unable to get or route Western prayers and stipend to cash-strapped parishes and needy priests.

The trends in Kerala mirror what is happening in churches elsewhere in India.

The drop in religious outsourcing is hurting those like Father Bosco Puthoor, rector at the St. Joseph's Pontifical Seminary in Aluva near Cochin.

Father Puthoor earns 2,500 rupees ($50) as a monthly salary and supplements his own income, as well as that of 22 other teaching priests in his seminary, through religious outsourcing.

"It is a pity that this practice of mutual support between the East and the West is declining," Father Bosco said.

Story originally appeared in the Global Post

Dave Johnson: Misuse Of The Words Protectionism And Trade Is Making Us Poorer

2009-08-04T15:37:56Z

Can one be called "protectionist" just for pointing out when other countries are being smart? Maybe so. I'll get to that in a minute, but first...

Language has tremendous power. People like George Lakoff and Drew Westin, who study the use of language in political discussion, say that our choice of words has the power to actually affect the "wiring" or neuron circuits that our brains use to think.

The corporate marketers and political persuaders have certainly learned the power of language to influence us. It has even gotten to the point where "neuromarketing" uses MRI and EEG to study how our brains react to certain stimuli so they can be used to market and persuade.

In politics, I think that we have even reached a point where we give words more power and importance even than the ideas the words represent. In the Bush years we learned that the persuaders believed they could "create their own reality."

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he [Bush administration official] continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The influencers have become adept at scaring up the public into stampedes that can have sudden and dramatic effects on politicians. So lawmakers have gotten into the habit of basing their decisions on what they think (fear) the public believes (according to what Drudge and Fox are claiming they believe) rather than what is the best policy. And in fact, it is often the case that the public was behind the right policy all along. (Like with a health care public option -- the manipulators had the politicians convinced it was "centrist" to oppose that.) Consequently, words are used as weapons by professionals who wish to distract us from things that are in front of our own faces.

I was conscious of this the other day in the post, "How Should We Talk About Industrial And Manufacturing Policy?" in which I wrote:

"The phrase "industrial policy" sounds so Walter Mondale, 1970s, smokestacks and brick factory old-fashioned. I suspect the subject turns people off, eyes glaze over, hands reach under the table for iPhones and Blackberries..."

Making things in America is crucially important to our future economy. But today, as we join the discussion of how to restore America's economy, the manipulators have been busy, so it matters as much that we use the right words as that we explore the right ideas and policies.

The Words "Protectionism" and "Trade"

Two words that have significant power today are "protectionism" and "trade." In current usage anything that can be labeled as "trade" in any way shape or form is in all cases considered by most to be a good thing. And anything that can be labeled as "protectionism" in any way shape or form is in all cased a bad thing. Simple as that. If you want to engage in some practice that people might oppose you try to label it as "trade" to shut down discussion. It you want to block a policy that people might favor you try to label it as "protectionism" to shut down discussion.

I am thinking about this because of the post, American Protectionism Is A Myth, by Leo Gerard and Scott Paul. They wrote about the "shrill warnings against protectionist measures have been issued by editorial pages and foreign officials."

But what is this "protectionism?" They write:

"This is the untold story of protectionism: the barriers that other governments erect to block American goods and the mercantilist measures they utilize to gain market share in the U.S. These practices range from China's currency misalignment and massive industrial subsidies to non-tariff barriers in Korea and Japan. All these impediments have been well documented by U.S. trade officials, but the mere act of identifying these practices is now viewed as protectionism, even though taking action to eliminate them would expand world trade, reduce global imbalances and preserve the free market."

Yes, just talking about what other countries are doing to protect and promote their own manufacturing can be labeled as being "protectionist." This is because once these practices are pointed out the natural next thought is that America should be just as smart about encouraging our own domestic manufacturing.

The op-ed, Falling Behind On Green Tech, by John Doerr and Jeff Immelt in yesterday's Washington Post, reflects this fear of being branded with the word "protectionism." They write:

". . . Do we want to win the race to lead the next great global industry, clean energy? That is the choice before us.

We are clearly not in the lead today. That position is held by China, which understands the importance of controlling its energy future. China's commitment to developing clean energy technologies and markets is breathtaking.

[. . .] How can we catch up? Not through protectionism or massive government intervention but through the power of good old home-grown innovation."

This statement is an example of how people react to the fear of the negative associations that the manipulators have placed on the word "protectionism." (They also show a bit of fear of being branded with the word "government.") They try to escape from any such notion by using the "good" words, "home-grown innovation." But of course you can't have "home grown" without protecting your home, which involves government. And you aren't going to have innovation without the protection and enabling that government brings through schools to educate the innovators and courts to protect their intellectual property. But never mind, that's another post.

So it is "protectionist" to say that other countries have smart planning policies that are increasing their wealth because it naturally makes people realize that we ought to do the same.

For example, if I tell you that China requires that 70 percent of the content of wind turbines used in China be manufactured in China, where does that take your thinking about our own country's efforts to stimulate green manufacturing jobs? It is inevitable that your thinking turns to, "Then why don't we do that?" And there you inevitably are: protectionism.

Or if I tell you that GE won't buy wind turbines from American companies, even at the same prices, it is inevitable that your thinking turns to, "Why don't we do something about that?" And there you inevitably are: protectionism.

You see, being smart and supporting our own country's manufacturing is labeled "protectionist," which is bad. China is smart to do this but we are "protectionist" if we suggest we should, too.

It can even be called "protectionist" just to point out that a country's wealth comes from making things. Because making things here inevitably brings the thinking back to having the government protect our jobs. If we say we should make things here we are undercutting the profits to be made by using exploited labor there.

"Trade" is another word that the manipulators have managed to take control of. "Free trade" is now hardwired as the ultimate good. "Free trade" is trade involving no interference from government. ("Government" is another word that has "bad" attachments.) So I guess "free trade" means no police protection from thieves at the ports, no courts to enforce the purchase agreements, no protection of the ships that carry the traded goods or rules for the sea lanes they follow, no roads for trucks to carry the goods from the ports... (I can't figure this anti-government stuff out, really. But that's another post.)

The reason I bring this up is because misuse of the word "trade" is something I keep coming back to. When a company closes a factory here and opens it in a country where workers are exploited with low wages, or the environment is not protected, making the same thing, using the same machines, and the same raw materials, and selling it in the same stores, how is that "trade?" That isn't trade, that is closing a factory here and moving it there so you can take advantage of exploited workers or dump toxins into the environment.

But by attaching the word "trade" to a scam like this, they get away with it, because "trade" is considered to be good. You can't be against "trade," so you can't be against using exploited workers to make the same stuff you were already making here. And you certainly can't call for protecting our jobs from being undercut by the use of workers who are exploited and have no recourse. That would be "protectionism." And that is bad.

The result of this obstruction-by-words is that debt increases as we make less with which to trade, our jobs are sent elsewhere, workers elsewhere are exploited, our government is weakened and we get poorer and poorer.

So as we try to work out new policies that will get our country past the current economic crisis and move toward a new economic paradigm where we all share the benefits of the country we have built, powerful words are in our way.

When we overcome the power of these words to brand us, and our fear of that, we can begin to be smart ourselves. When we cease being afraid of being branded as "protectionist" or "against trade" then we can be as smart as the countries with which we compete.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Mike Elk: GE Moves Green Jobs To China

2009-07-24T10:48:00Z

While Ohio is traditionally thought of once being a center of auto manufacturing, there was such a strong tradition of light-bulb production in the state that the world's largest maker of light bulbs, General Electric, located the headquarters of its light bulb division in Cleveland. The jobs provided by light-bulb manufacturing allowed people to buy homes, send their kids to college, and fuel a vibrant economy in Ohio for decades.

But in the last decade, GE has closed over fifteen factories in Ohio and downsized numerous others. Since 1980, employment in GE Lighting has dropped by 68 percent.

A large chunk of that manufacturing has gone to China, and now GE plans to send even more to China in the wake of new clean energy policies. By 2014, Americans will only be able to purchase more energy efficient CFL light bulbs. However, GE has located all of its facilities for high-efficiency light bulbs to China and has told the union representing the workers that they have no intention to locate compact flourescent facilities in the United States.

GE is currently threatening to close one factory in Niles, Ohio that produces light bulbs. The workers, members of United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) at one are calling on GE to look for a way to refit their plant so that they can be part of the new clean energy economy. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Tim Ryan wrote a letter to GE's CEO Jeffery Immelt expressing "deep concern" for the workers at the plant:

"The workers and tradition of the Niles facility present an enormous opportunity to show how we can transition manufacturers from contracting industries, like incandescent bulbs, to emerging industries in energy and medical IT."

Ohio could indeed be a hub of new light bulb production. Recently, a Chinese-owned manufacturer of high-efficiency light bulbs has opened a factory, citing Ohio as having some of the world's most highly skilled light-bulb workers.

Ohio's legacy of bulb production, and its factories that could easily be converted from incandescent production to CFL production, presents a grand opportunity to employ workers in building a green energy economy in Ohio.

The IMPACT Act introduced by Brown in the Senate would help small and medium-sized manufacturers transition to the clean energy economy. Brown's bill creates a $30 billion Manufacturing Revolving Loan Fund to provide these manufacturers with much-needed access to credit to improve energy efficiency and retool for the clean energy industry.

The Apollo Alliance--a coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups--estimates that the IMPACT Act could create 680,000 direct manufacturing jobs nationally and 1,972,000 related jobs over the next fiver year.

So far, GE has shown every intention to take the American tax dollars being used to subsidize the green-energy economy and use them to build Chinese factories and pay Chinese workers. As I wrote earlier this week, in spite of GE CEO Jeffery Immelt's statement that companies need to stop outsourcing, GE continues to lead the effort to outsource clean-energy jobs. Most recently, GE has cut off a contract with a windmill factory in Indiana and shipped the work to China despite the factory offering to sell their parts at the same price as their Chinese competitors.

To add insult to injury to workers losing their jobs from foreign outsourcing, GE has even launched a television ad campaign promoting American manufacturing. "GE has the ability to locate its new manufacturing for CFL's, LED's, as well as the new incandescent lighting technologies in Ohio and elsewhere in the U.S. So far they have not done this, and we see no sign that they are even considering doing this. GE Lighting workers in the U.S. see little to cheer in GE's pronouncements and feel good advertising because for several decades now every plant has been on an extended deathwatch," said Chris Townsend of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers.

It's time that CEO's like Jeffery Immelt live up to their word and help rebuild the American economy by keeping American manufacturing jobs in America. It's also time that we adopt a comprehensive policy that promotes American manufacturing and prevents companies like GE from using taxpayer funds intended to stimulate the American economy to undermine our economy instead.

Mike Elk: GE Promotes Manufacturing Jobs in US, Then Ships 'em Overseas

2009-07-21T12:18:00Z

Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, has led the outsourcing charge in the past. So commentators were shocked last month when, speaking at the Detroit Economic Club, Immelt said that the United States needs to invest in American manufacturing in order to get out of our current economic crisis.

Some companies had gone overboard with outsourcing in the past and now it was time to bring that work back into the United States to create a strong economy, Immelt said at the forum. "This country ought to be, and we can be, not just the world's leading market but a leading exporter as well. GE plans to lead this effort," he said.

Immelt should heed his own advice.

While Immelt was calling for manufacturing to stay in the U.S., his company was at the same time shipping manufacturing jobs overseas by canceling an order with an American-based wind turbine maker, ATI Casting Service in LaPorte, Ind., so that GE could instead buy the parts from a factory in China.

Recently, ATI made $30 million worth of investments to buy, convert, and modernize a shuttered factory in economically ravaged Michigan so the company could provide more parts to GE as the green economy expands with federal stimulus funding. But a Chinese firm underbid ATI, and the factory faced having to lay off 302 union workers and shutter the plant.

In an aggressive bid to keep the factory open, ATI offered to match the price of the Chinese producers. GE once again said they would prefer to buy from China. The ATI plant is now closed, the jobs gone.

After Immelt pledged to create jobs in America, for him to make a U.S. company shed jobs so GE can buy Chinese goods for the same price is beyond hypocritical.

More troubling is the fact that President Obama is receiving his economic advice from people like Jeffrey Immelt. Immelt serves on the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, but is doing very little to encourage economic recovery himself. "This is an unacceptable example for the country and the promise that the 'green' economy will lead to a manufacturing revival," said Leo Gerard, president of the United Steel Workers.

Gerard has accused Immelt of being a hypocrite, not just for undermining ATI, but for doing so while raking in millions of dollars in federal stimulus money intended to support a "Buy America" strategy.

It's time that lawmakers put a stop to this madness. Today, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is holding a hearing on Capitol Hill with governors and mayors to look at ways the U.S. can adopt a comprehensive manufacturing job policy that makes sure that the green economy keeps jobs here in America. Through a series of measures, including incentives for companies to stay in America, "Buy America" provisions and trade law reform, lawmakers like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown are hoping to keep green jobs in America.

The president correctly views the green economy as the pathway to economic recovery. But if the windmills, solar panels and other key building blocks of that economy are made in China, we'll only end up in deeper debt. As Campaign for America's Future fellow David Johnson noted in his blog post "It's the Economic Paradigm, Stupid!" without a new American manufacturing policy there will be no economic recovery. We need to move beyond a bubble economy built on debt and financial speculation and into a real economy that actually makes products.

Frank Naif: Congress Demands Full Account of Intelligence Outsourcing Mess - and It's a Mess

2009-07-14T13:10:45Z

After eight years of acquiescence to the executive branch on intelligence matters, Congress is finally getting around to questioning the intelligence community's trend of secret outsourcing. Legislators are going to find a mess of wrongdoing and incompetence.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 recently made headlines after the Obama White House threatened to veto it if it contained provisions that would expand legislative branch oversight of intelligence operations.

Nonetheless, other provisions of the bill promise to expand Congress' visibility into how the intelligence community does business. The House Intelligence Committee is especially interested in intelligence contracting.

Provisions in the bill would require the Director of National Intelligence to submit a comprehensive report on intelligence contracting. This could begin to expose the tangle of ethical conflicts, waste, and corruption that results from the intelligence community's secretive, unaccountable system of classified outsourcing.

The intelligence contracting report required in the legislation would force CIA and other intelligence agencies to total up the numbers on contracts, contract costs, and contractor personnel currently supporting agency operations. The report also requires cost-benefit analysis of contracts, as well as comparative analysis of contractor and government employee compensation and an assessment of how the upswing in intelligence contracting since 9/11 has impacted the intelligence workforce.

The outsourcing of intelligence has impacted nearly every aspect of intelligence operations, and Congress wants to know how and why. Other parts of the Intelligence Authorization Act also examine how other, specific aspects of intelligence outsourcing have impacted core intelligence activities. For example, Congress wants a separate report on the intelligence community's foreign language capabilities, with a specific focus on determining how much agencies rely on contractors for core language capabilities.

Another provision of the Intelligence Authorization Acts bans contractors from participating in "interrogations involving persons in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency."

That language takes unambiguous aim at Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a contractor firm believed to have designed and partly executed CIA's torture program. CIA Director Panetta fired the firm in April, but the revelation that contractors played a key role in the controversial torture programs is a reminder that persistent problems with intelligence contracting are yet another major problem that the Obama national security team cannot sweep under the rug.

As Congress peers into the murky world of intelligence contracting, three major problem areas will become apparent.

First, CIA's over-reliance on contractors and the takeover of core intelligence missions by contractors is reducing the overall effectiveness of CIA and other agencies, and maybe even introducing new weaknesses.

One fundamental problem is that the rapid growth of intelligence contracting has decimated the spy workforce. Marc Ambinder reported earlier this year that the ranks of mid-level intelligence officers are currently thin, with a majority of intelligence employees at the beginning or ends of their careers.

Where have all those mid-career intelligence officers gone? They have been recruited by contractors, who offer higher pay and slightly more felicitous working conditions.

The employee recruiting, or poaching, problem got so bad that by late 2004, intelligence contractors started seeing stringent contract provisions that circumscribed when and where contractors could court new applicants. No more job interviews in the CIA cafeteria.

Internally, CIA has taken steps to dissuade employees from leaving government service for the filthy lucre offered by its contractors. A kind of non-compete clause prohibits departing employees from accepting a job with an intelligence contractor for a period of 18 months.

While intelligence officials downplay the bite that contracting has taken out of the intelligence workforce, outsourcing is complicating the already tricky business of conducting covert intelligence operations.

Mitchell, Jessen & Associates is not the only intelligence contractor embroiled in CIA's rendition and torture programs. The American Civil Liberties Union brought a civil suit against Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, for its role in facilitating rendition flights on behalf of former detainees Binyam Mohamed, Abou Elkassim Britel, Ahmed Agiza, Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, and Bisher al-Rawi.

Jeppesen files flight plans, obtains flight and landing permits, and arranges refueling and other services for international flights for aircraft operators. A 2006 New Yorker article by Jane Mayer reported that a senior Jeppesen manager boasted, "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights -- you know, the torture flights."

A Federal judge recently ruled that so-called State Secrets protections don't apply to private firm Jeppesen, which could make the firm liable for damages against Mohamed and other complainants because it facilitated their torture and illegal imprisonment. The Jeppesen case, currently in review, could end up in the Supreme Court.

But the upshot is that an intelligence contractor could be held financially responsible for CIA's detention and torture program -- even though it did not design the program, and participated indirectly in only one aspect of the program.

The Jeppesen case casts doubt on CIA's contract management and contract security practices. Most significantly, CIA created a single point of failure by relying on a contractor for a high-risk mission need. Even if Jeppesen hadn't mishandled or leaked information about CIA operations, managers in charge of hiding CIA aviation operations in the plain sight of international civilian air traffic probably overestimated Jeppesen's ability to keep CIA's flight data under wraps. What Jeppesen does for its clients is facilitate the bureaucracy of air transport -- including filing flight plans, obtaining permits, and expediting fee payments -- with the US FAA and foreign governments' civil aviation authorities. In most countries, including the US, civil aviation records and transactions are a matter of more or less public record.

This isn't the first time that slipshod CIA contracting has been out of sync with the agency's operational needs.

In 2007, for example, the Iraqi government effectively brought operations at CIA's Baghdad station to a standstill after it suspended the US State Department contractor Blackwater (now called Xe), according to Pajamas Media. Apparently, CIA had become solely dependent on Blackwater security for its Iraq operations, prompting speculation that anti-US elements in the Iraqi government engineered the Blackwater ban -- ostensibly, the result of a Baghdad shootout that left dozens of Iraqis dead -- to hobble CIA activity in the country.

In short, CIA has opened the door for its operations to be compromised with its poorly managed, bet-the-farm approach to outsourcing.

A second problem area in CIA contracting is ethics conflicts and fraud. Investigative reporter Tim Shorrock's comprehensive study of intelligence contracting, Spies For Hire, documents the revolving door that connects the executive offices of major intelligence contractors with the executive offices of US intelligence agencies.

Former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is the poster child for how intelligence chiefs and intelligence contractor executives are more or less interchangeable. McConnell worked his way up through Naval intelligence ranks to become the Director of the National Security Agency. Upon retirement, he became a senior executive at Booz-Allen and Hamilton, and headed up the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a secretive industry and lobbying group that represents intelligence contractors. From Booz-Allen and INSA, he moved on to become the second DNI in the Bush administration. He promptly returned to Booz-Allen upon the arrival of the Obama administration.

With a former Booz-Allen exec and INSA president at the helm, it should come as no surprise that contractors made up 50 percent or more of the workforce at the Office of the DNI's top unit, the National Counterterrorist Center.

The contractor influence on intelligence policy has continued right on into the Obama administration. Obama's top pick for CIA Director was John Brennan, who had been a campaign adviser on national security issues. Like McConnell, Brennan was also a former INSA chairman and an executive at The Analysis Corporation, or TAC, a prominent intelligence contractor.

Ultimately, Brennan's nomination for CIA Director came undone. While cheetos-eating bloggers have been blamed for calling attention to Brennan's on-camera endorsement in Bush-era torture policies, the Washington Post reported in January that Brennan's contractor ties had also raised red flags.

But Brennan is still in the picture, serving as top counterterrorism adviser in the National Security Council. He has reportedly severed all financial ties with TAC.

Meanwhile, INSA soldiers on. The group boasts a board and membership consisting of both contractor executives and government officials. At best, INSA has the appearance of a conflict of interest that can be explained away by national security exigency.

More likely, INSA is a hotbed of collusion and anti-competitive practices that would be intolerable were it not for the veil of official secrecy surrounding INSA's activities.

Put another way: officials of the National Park Service or the Social Security Administration would never be allowed, under Federal Acquisition Regulations, to form a special club and meet in secret with select contractor executives -- and exclude other contractor executives who aren't "in the club" -- for undocumented discussions of upcoming contracts and competitions. But that's business as usual for INSA and the intelligence agencies.

Not that whispered tips of upcoming contract opportunities are the exclusive province of the senior-most contractor execs and government officials. When CIA's Executive Director, Dusty Foggo, was convicted on fraud charges, court documents offered a glimpse into the world of low-level CIA contracting impropriety.

While still a mid-level CIA officer, Foggo used his government contracting authority to make a lucrative sweetheart logistics deal with his childhood friend, Brent Wilkes. Under the deal, Wilkes' company, Archer Defense Technologies, supplied bottled water and household goods for an undisclosed CIA overseas location. Wilkes' nephew, Joel Combs, an ADT employee, stated in deposition that Foggo rigged a sham contract competition to award ADT the logistics support contract. Combs' deposition describes how ADT ordered goods from Sears, Amazon.com, and other US retailers, arranged for shipment to the undisclosed CIA overseas location, and charged the US government a markup of up to 60 percent.

Other documents in the case show Wilkes returned the favor by providing Foggo with lavish vacations, meals at pricey Washington restaurants, and other blandishments. Foggo told his co-workers that he expected to join Wilkes as a business partner upon retirement.

Foggo never succeeded in delivering his big score to Wilkes, though. Foggo attempted to ramrod through CIA's secret contracting process an aviation services contract for Wilkes worth hundreds of millions. Another witness in the case -- a senior operations chief in charge of air operations--called Wilkes' proposed aviation services solution "unwieldy, cumbersome, and lacking a real understanding of what the Agency needed...If implemented as presented, I believed the proposals would be wasteful, misguided, and contrived." Nonetheless, CIA would likely have accepted Wilkes' subpar aviation services, if not for the FBI investigation that brought Foggo down.

That it took an FBI investigation to get to Foggo is a troubling fact on its own: CIA's own contracting and ethics enforcement mechanisms did not stop Foggo from making sweetheart deals with taxpayer money.

The sprawling FBI investigation of corrupt California Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham led to Wilkes and eventually Foggo. The CIA Inspector General appears to have launched its own investigation of Foggo in response to FBI's investigative interest, but not because it had pro-actively investigated or suspected Foggo.

The laxity of CIA's internal safeguards is apparent throughout the court documents, and several deposed witnesses mentioned that they knew of Foggo's friendship with Wilkes, yet there is no indication that the agency took corrective action.

In my own experience around CIA contracting, I came to realize that cronyism -- sometimes coincidence, usually not -- underlay many contract awards.

Major intelligence contractors regularly assign managers to proposals based on their personal affinity to government contracting officials or decision-makers -- even though such managers might be otherwise poorly qualified.

In numerous instances that I recall, CIA contracting personnel maintained various levels of close, continuing personal relationships with contractor personnel, ranging from friendship to marriage. Add to that CIA's practice of awarding contracts in secret, with minimal opportunity for outside review or disclosure, and the result is an environment ripe for corruption, fraud, and waste.

If Congress wants to usher in a new regime of accountability in US intelligence, there will need to be a systematic effort to prevent CIA employees from whispering tips about new contracts into the ears of friends and loved ones who could benefit, or creating contracting opportunities for themselves and confederates, much as Foggo had done with Wilkes.

A third and final problem evident in CIA's and other Federal agencies' classified contracting is how both contractors and government agencies such as CIA use these secret processes, with their obstacles to redress and transparency, to evade accountability and oversight.

Contractors working in the classified arena have a history of hiding behind their government sponsors' real or perceived need for secrecy and discretion. In one famous case, for example, a tiny defense contractor called Crater developed a device that could be used by the Navy for submarine intelligence gathering. Lucent, a well-known and well-resourced defense contractor took Crater under its wing as a subcontractor. When Lucent took Crater's technology directly to the Navy and cut Crater out of the picture, Crater sued. The Navy had the case thrown out, citing the state secrets privilege.

The Crater case shows that classified contracting favors large, established intelligence and defense contractors who enjoy cozy relationships with their classified government sponsors. But the reality is that those cozy relationships introduce dynamics into the business of classified government contracting that don't exist conventional, open government procurement.

On one hand, classified contractors are more willing than their non-classified counterparts to absorb minor liabilities on behalf of their classified government clients--such as claims by mistreated employees or aggrieved subcontractors or vendors.
At large contractors where I have worked, corporate attorneys and program managers frequently authorized cash settlements to keep potential litigation from "touching" classified clients. Such an approach has the effect of introducing additional waste to the classified contracting process.

But if the stakes are high enough, contractors will attempt to intimidate judges and litigants with an actual or threatened assertion of the state secrets privilege.

Since January, for example, the Las Vegas Sun has been reporting that pilots and flight attendants of Las Vegas-based Vision Airlines are embroiled in a lawsuit claiming the company owed them $21 million in unpaid for hazardous duty pay they earned on classified charter flights to Baghdad and Afghanistan. According to various press reports, Vision's charter flights have been linked to CIA, and one plaintiff in the case told the Las Vegas Sun "passengers typically included CIA and State Department personnel."

Vision's attorneys sought to have the case sealed, and later sought a dismissal, apparently based on their own country courthouse version of the "state secret" privilege. The judge overruled the dismissal motion, and the case, which may now be moved to a Federal court, is still pending.

(As an aside, it's more than a little worrying that an airline on contract to the government may be endangering intelligence personnel by shortcutting pilot pay.)

Government officials are also misusing classified contracting to evade accountability and reduce transparency.

The reliance on intelligence contractors for the post 9/11 buildup of intelligence agencies like CIA and ODNI is itself a kind of bureaucratic sidestep. Intelligence managers expend less bureaucratic effort letting a contract build up a particular intelligence capability than they would organizing a new unit, seeking authorization for hiring and staffing, and then hiring and staffing the new unit.

But that reduced effort doesn't translate into lower cost to the taxpayer--witness security personnel who earn $800 to $1000 per day in Iraq and Afghanistan, while their civil service counterparts probably would be lucky to earn $300 per day, after travel and hardship allowances.

The involvement of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates in CIA torture illustrates one way that classified contracting dilutes the culpability of government officials in controversial activities. A variety of high-profile press reports detailed how CIA 'fired' Mitchell, Jessen & Associates earlier this spring, as if to visibly demonstrate that Panetta's CIA had solved the torture problem by throwing the responsible parties off the island.

In my own experience with CIA contracting, I have witnessed numerous instances of CIA officials shifting blame on to contractors when things went wrong. In one program I managed, my CIA sponsors were in a hurry to station a team of my company's skilled technicians on a classified facility. Unfortunately, my skilled team had Department of Defense clearances, not CIA clearances, so my CIA sponsors made a special exception to allow the team into the secret facility. When a new CIA security officer took charge at the secret facility, the security rules abruptly changed, and our special security exception was revoked. My skilled team was out on the street, and my CIA sponsors and the new security officer blamed my company for the security exception they themselves had made.

An affidavit recently submitted by CIA Director Leon Panetta to fend off an American Civil Liberties Union FOIA request on documents related to CIA's torture program included the justification that contractors' names could not be disclosed under FOIA because of individual privacy concerns.

Federal contract law does not allow privacy protections of contractors beyond those that cover such personal data elements as social security numbers, bank account numbers and the like.

Put another way, if officials of the National Park Service or the Social Security Administration were faced with a FOIA request or a Congressional inquiry into contractors involved in official wrongdoing, they would not be allowed to withhold contractor names to protect their privacy.

Indeed, under Federal Acquisition Regulations and FOIA, there's very little contract information that's not releasable to the public -- when the contracts are unclassified.

But CIA managers routinely abuse classification and "need-to-know" principal when it comes to classified contracts. Contractors who bid on competitive CIA contracts and lose are entitled to receive post-award briefings -- detailed reports of how the winner won and how the losers lost. Often, CIA's post-award briefings are paltry in comparison to post-award briefings that are given by other agencies on non-classified contract awards.

The reason given by CIA contracting officers: protection of sources and methods. They even give that reason when everyone in the room has a clearance. But few contractors complain, for fear of being blackballed out of the next lucrative CIA contracting opportunity.

Congress' demand for more accountability on secret contracting is likely to become a serious headache for Panetta, who promised transparency and cooperation with the legislative branch.

Such a closed system invites corruption and abuse. As congress moves forward in learning more about outsourcing in the Intelligence Community, CIA can be fully expected to resist meaningful scrutiny and reform of its contracting.

And if recent Obama administration efforts to defend the national security status quo are any indication, Panetta and his CIA will be leading the charge to resist transparency and accountability.

Crossposted from Examiner.com

Michael Likosky: A Fashion Foreign Policy

2009-07-13T03:02:29Z

On the campaign trail, President Obama made a well-received promise to put more value on American labor when negotiating trade deals. He spoke of revisiting trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO to make sure that we didn't continue to erode American wages in the name of free trade. In Carla Behrle's comment to my last post--Bailing Out Luxury--she astutely points to how decades of outsourcing has undercut skilled artisans in the luxury sector. Her comment makes clear that the real threat to artisans is not just the absence of a clause protecting worker rights. Instead, the Rules of Origin clauses within these trade agreements which promote reckless outsourcing are to blame. To protect American workers, in the luxury sector and elsewhere, our government trade negotiators should revisit these outsourcing rules.

Talk of the production of fashion--the culture industry--typically revolves around stories of designers, fashion houses, and Madison Avenue advertising firms and boutiques. Television shows either take us behind the scenes to the production of marketing, i.e. America's Next Top Model and its multinational counterparts, or else to the proliferation of fashion advisers, i.e. What Not to Wear. The media has also pressed the case for fashion as subversion from Vivienne Westwood's punk rock looks to Jennie Livingston's documentary, Paris is Burning. In all this, discussion of the manufacturing of luxury has been consumed rather than scrutinized. Sumptuous materials and artisan labor infuses the luxury label with intangible bankable value.

However, as Carla Behrle underscored, since the 1980s, the luxury market has restructured its manufacturing process by globalizing. Like sporting goods and automobiles, luxury has outsourced. In How Luxury Lost its Luster, Dana Thomas eloquently shows how this restructuring has been driven by bankers and corporate managers.

However, our government foreign commercial policy has also been a main driver of the outsourcing of luxury. The Rules of Origin, which allow factory goods to masquerade as luxury, have been created by our government negotiators in the World Trade Organization and elsewhere. Also, for decades, our government's Export-Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation gave low interest loans and insurance policies to set up the factory network that produce all these so-called luxury goods.

This is why President Obama's promise to renegotiate trade deals must not only include revisiting labor provisions. The Rules of Origin provisions must be reworked.

Right now, the luxury label tells us more about price than value. Luxury invokes design, material and artisan labor. The artisans built the luxury labels, which the banks and luxury houses are now cashing out.

It's no wonder that Target is keeping Bernard Arnault and LVMH up at night. Target maintains its reputation for affordability while attracting designers like Loomstate who promulgate a model that values design, quality quotidian materials, and fair labor practices at an accessible price point. Loomstate represents a quintessential American tradition which places a premium on working class-led styles--denim has moved from the mines of California to the Paris runways. Still, we must also reinvest in another artistic tradition, luxury brands that value artisanship, sumptuous material and design.

And, before we accept that some jobs are simply lost for good, we must also remember that luxury artisanship not only imbued luxury brands with quality and value. Women artisans fought for centuries to be fairly compensated for their contributions to luxury labels. Unlike male tailors, their work was long devalued as unskilled women's work.

Our trade deals have been undercutting the guild-like power that generations of women struggled for. When we subsidize the outsourcing of luxury, we degrade not only their contribution, but also their political and artistic legacy. This is one hidden cost of a foreign commercial policy that creates incentives to recklessly outsource jobs that Americans take great pride in doing.

US Outsources 22,000 Green Jobs To India

2009-04-28T05:57:30Z

Green offshoring is creating demand for sustainability engineers, marketing and business development executives, data center management engineers, utilities and electric engineers and quality specialists in India, Brown informed TNIE.

Dawn Teo: IBM Trifecta: Files For Offshoring Patent, Offshores Jobs, Applies for Stimulus Funds

2009-04-01T05:02:08Z

IBM is currently seeking $30 billion in stimulus money to create 1 million jobs. CEO Sam Palmisano even met with Obama at the White House to discuss IBM's role in the economic recovery. But critics want to know whether those jobs would be in America or offshore. After all, over the last 3 years, IBM simultaneously took $45 million in aid from the state of New York to create jobs while surreptitiously sending thousands of American jobs overseas. In the worst case scenario, a portion of that $30 billion stimulus could fund IBM's efforts to help American companies outsource jobs more easily, since just last week Big Blue submitted a patent for software that would make outsourcing easier for everyone.

While many companies practice outsourcing jobs to countries with lower wages, IBM is among a handful that proactively makes outsourcing easier for companies around the globe. Big Blue recently refiled a patent for software called Outsourcing of Services, which helps corporations move jobs offshore while maximizing tax breaks. The patent was introduced on March 26th according to Slashdot and withdrawn three days later, the same day that IBM cut 5,000 high tech jobs in the US.

In 2006, IBM filed the same patent for an offshore outsourcing tool but withdrew the patent in 2007 when it came under public scrutiny. A month before pulling the patent, however, IBM discreetly filed an updated patent for offshore outsourcing software under a new, more benign moniker, Method and System for Strategic Global Resource Sourcing (MSSGRS).

When IBM canned the patent last week, Big Blue's spokesperson Steve Malkiewicz gave the same reason that had been given when the original patent was withdrawn. "It is contrary to IBM's patent policy on business methods," said Malkiewicz.

IBM's offshore outsourcing software is a complex tool that combines statistical analysis and actuarial math with qualitative analysis to automate the process of pinpointing the cheapest, most exploitable human capital on the planet. According to the patent description, it analyzes:

qualitative and quantitative attributes that influence performance of sourcing strategy with respect to one or more quantitative measures, quantifies an impact of said qualitative attributes using said one or more quantitative measures, and optimizes the sourcing strategy.

Lawmakers, IBM employees, and union leaders across the country have expressed outrage that IBM is asking for taxpayer handouts while aggressively engaging in offshore outsourcing of American jobs. IBM is one of the world's largest global sourcing firms, meaning IBM helps lots of other companies to send jobs offshore. It is impossible to determine how far-reaching IBM's offshore outsourcing tool is (beyond the thousands of IBM's own employees known to have been offshored) because no one knows how many jobs IBM has offshored at client companies.

Last week, IBM began notifying high tech employees that they had been selected for IBM's Resource Reduction Action -- IBM's polite way of saying, "You're fired." Many have reported to Alliance@IBM that they are being required to train their replacements who will be based on India, China, Asia Pacific, or Latin America. According to the Wall Street Journal, this month's layoffs will total around 5,000 jobs. This round follows nearly 5,000 job cuts made by IBM in January and February.

After the current round of offshoring, the Wall Street Journal estimates that 71% of IBM's workforce will reside outside of America. IBM employees in Rochester who were laid off last year were already voicing anger at seeing "job descriptions for their old positions popping up in China."

Rep. John Hall (D-NY), who represents upper New York, condemned IBM for offshore outsourcing, calling IBM "unpatriotic and un-American," and he requested a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation into whether IBM used government money to fund the development of their Outsourcing of Services software.

State Assemblyman Greg Ball (R-99), who recently filed to run for Hall's Congressional seat in 2010, has called for a State Assembly hearing into the $45 million in New York state aid given to IBM through an Industrial Development Agreement (IDA) intended to create jobs. In a formal statement, Ball said,

Yesterday, it was reported IBM would lay off a massive number of U.S. employees in Global Business Services (a division that includes IBM Sterling Forest in Orange County, IBM Poughkeepsie in Dutchess County and IBM Research at Ossining in Westchester County) and replace them with workers in India...

Who was at the bargaining table and negotiating table? Who was there whey they cut this deal to create jobs in 2008, that are now gone in 2009?

Currently, the state of New York does not require companies to disclose compliance with IDA agreements, but a bill pending in the State Assembly would change that.

Lee Conrad, former IBM employee and National Coordinator of Alliance@IBM, said that IBM knows how to play the system so that even IBM's own layoffs are often obscured from the public eye due to loopholes in the Warren Act, which requires companies to report mass layoffs. He says Alliance@IBM has been receiving reports of layoffs from IBMs largest employment centers (i.e., upper New York, Minnesota, Iowa, North Carolina's research triangle, Vermont) and from workers who telecommute from remote locations all over the country.

IBM layoffs are affecting every part of America. We're getting reports of IBM layoffs everywhere, and they are accelerating. IBM is abandoning the U.S. workforce. Executives aren't being offshored, but the workers are.

These are the jobs they told us to train for when manufacturing went offshore. The continued shifting of these jobs offshore is endangering the country's economic recovery.

Sources inside IBM say to expect more layoffs in June.

Will JPMorgan's Outsourcing Push Hurt Bill Daley's Senate Bid?

2009-03-18T12:19:05Z

How exactly does Bill Daley, brother of the Chicago mayor and longstanding chairman of JPMorgan's Midwest Region, expect to make a viable run for U.S. Senate in Illinois with headlines like this surfacing?

JP Morgan Chase Expanding India Outsourcing By 25%?

JPMorgan Outsourcing To India To Increase By 25%

2009-03-10T08:46:11Z

BANGALORE: The second-biggest bank of the US, JP Morgan Chase, which acquired Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns recently, will increase its outsourcing to India by 25% this year to nearly $400 million.

Sandip Roy: Outsourced to Bobby Jindal

2009-03-02T03:11:26Z

Here's Chris Matthews tearing into Bobby Jindal's response to President Obama's non-state-of-the-union speech.

"They had to outsource the response" says Matthews.

Interesting choice of words. Of course, Matthews clarified he meant that they had to get a Republican who was not in Congress because the ones in Congress were all tainted, compromised, less-than-inspiring.

But "outsourced"? To the nation's only Indian-American governor? You could hardly miss the barb. (It's not that Jindal was a total stranger to Congress either. He was re-elected to it in 2006 with over 80 percent of the vote.) I wonder if all-American hockey-mom Sarah Palin had delivered the Republican response, Matthews would have used the same phrase. After all, she has really never been to Congress. And Alaska is pretty offshore.

I am no big admirer of Bobby Jindal, the new brown hope of the Republican party. We are not brothers under the skin. He's bright, efficient, personable, a good family man and socially inflexibly conservative with a grin. But it is interesting how "outsourcing" has become accepted as the smear word of American politics.

A business processing turn has acquired moral tones and found its place in the popular imagination as the new brown peril. The Los Angeles Times once quipped the US had "outsourced" its national security and the hunt for bin Laden to Pakistan. John Kerry hammered home the same point, with the same pointed reference to outsourcing during his presidential campaign. Outsourcing raises visions of your "sensitive personal data" falling into unwashed "foreign hands."

I once did a survey of Indian papers and American papers about that issue. The difference was clear. Papers in India often stuck to the acronym BPO (or business process outsourcing) while American media used outsourcing as the bogeyman. Of course what they were usually talking about was offshore outsourcing. Outsourcing technically could be done to the company down the street.

But in the popular imagination of the call-center world, outsourcing usually meant brown people who looked like Jindal. Good evening and happy Mardi Gras, I am Bobby Jindal. How can I take away your economic stimulus today? In the current economic climate with Obama saying he would eliminate incentives for companies that ship jobs overseas, outsourcing is back as Public Enemy Number 1. The whipping boy is back.

Matthews took that bait and tried to run with it. Jindal became the outsourced rebuttal -- brown, foreign, therefore not to be trusted.

Except this Bobby doesn't just call himself Bobby when he's selling your airline tickets or upgrading your Turbo Tax. This one changed his name to Bobby long before running for congress because he was a fan of the Brady Bunch. You can't get more scarily American than that.

Stacie Nevadomski Berdan: Ultimate Outsourcing: Americans Abroad

2009-02-23T14:08:29Z

It's being called the ultimate outsourcing: Americans looking for jobs overseas. With IBM's recent announcement of Project Match -- in which the company actively encourages employees to take their pink slips and apply for jobs in China, India and Brazil -- more companies are sure to follow suit.

Some people are outraged. Some are scared. Others who understand the value are supportive. To be sure, today's current economic climate is a serious force to be reckoned with. But rather than curse the storm clouds overhead, American workers would be well-advised to see this challenging moment as an opportunity to reap the rewards that others have for decades: By looking beyond their own borders to gain valuable experience overseas.

Make no mistake about it: American intellectual capital is still considered the best in the world, which is why IBM and other companies are willing to incur the expense of sending their people overseas. Those that accept will be rewarded with more than just a roof over their head and a weekly paycheck. The extraordinary personal and professional growth that takes place when living in a foreign culture can be cashed in on future career opportunities -- like when the U.S. economy rebounds and companies need employees who can operate effectively in the international marketplace. When that happy day finally comes, those who have proven that they know how to work across cultures will be prized commodities.

And working abroad does not only mean working for American companies. There are hundreds of large, foreign companies that offer tremendous opportunities. This role reversal may seem scary, but it reflects the future of global commerce. Now is not the time to be afraid of the global marketplace but to embrace it.

Yet picking up and moving yourself and your family to a strange new land is a daunting proposition. Americans must be able to adapt to succeed and, with a bit of caution and a lot of research, many will take the deep dive.

And yes, you can do it even if you're married -- I was -- and have children. And trust me, you'll be doing your children a favor: by the time they enter the workforce, a global mindset will be expected.

Last but certainly not least, living overseas can be fun, interesting and exciting.

So if your employer offers you the opportunity to work abroad, be it as part of a promotion or an "or else" proposition, think twice before you say "no." Not only might it be the best offer you're going to get -- it's probably a whole lot better an offer than you think it is. And who knows? It just might be the best career move you ever made.

Check out: www.getaheadbygoingabroad.com