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"Even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building."-- Jim Hightower
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Hightower Lowdown:
Big biz wants to own the information superhighway while We the People bump along the backroads
In the 1970s, Lily Tomlin developed an iconic comic character she named Ernestine--a telephone clerk who took perverse pleasure from hectoring customers. Her character was a perfect portrayal of the arrogance of AT&T, the monopolistic telephone giant of that day. In one skit on on the TV show, Laugh-In, Tomlin had Ernestine delivering a TV pitch for the corporation:
"A gracious hello," she cheerfully began, speaking directly into the camera. "Here at the Phone Company, we handle 84 billion calls a year. So, we realize that every so often, you can't get an operator, or for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you didn't make. We don't care!"
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WHY SUPPORT CORPORATIONS THAT DON'T SUPPORT US?
Yes, our overall economy is a wreck – but you'll be glad to know that one business sector is booming: outsourcing American jobs to India.
It almost makes you burst with patriotic pride, doesn’t it? Even as unemployment nears 10 percent across our country, more and more U.S. corporations are literally cutting out on America's middle class, eliminating employees here as they shift their operations and jobs to low-wage workers 8,000 miles away.
Some in Washington talk about measures to keep good jobs in the USA, but greedheaded corporate executives lobby furiously to prevent any action. "Anything that stops the globalization activity," declares David Cote, CEO of Honeywell, "will be harmful."
Oh? To whom? Perhaps to him, but not to Honeywell's American workers, who're suffering from Honeywell's pell mell pursuit of globalization. Cote has been closing plants here and eliminating hundreds of jobs at the same time he is investing $50 million to build a new R&D center in India that will hire 3,000 people.
Likewise, Hewlett-Packard is offing some 15,000 American employees, even as it is establishing "HP Software Universities" in eight Indian cities to train thousands of new high-tech workers there. Why not invest in training Americans? Because those running these multibillion-dollar outfits feel no allegiance to America, thus they feel free to abandon our middle class – for nothing more noble than lining their own pockets by paying low wages to workers abroad.
Insurance giants, drug makers, corporate law firms, media conglomerates, and others are joining in the abandonment. They say "it's less costly" for them. Never mind what it cost their country.
If these profiteers have no loyalty to us, why be loyal to them? We should yank away all subsidies and every single benefit they get from America.
"India feels Less Vulnerable As Outsourcing Presses On," The New York Times, June 3, 2009.