The Exporting of America

Posted on March 12, 2004

He is not who you might think of as a populist hero, someone willing to take on corporate greed and avarice in order to fight for the American middle-class worker. Lou Dobbs, the anchor of CNN's Moneyline, looks like a corporate CEO himself. His suits and haircut are conservative, his knowledge of business and finance is extensive and his politics have always seemed quite conservative. So why has Lou Dobbs been running an extensive series of programs about how giant American corporations are outsourcing jobs to third world countries and putting millions of Americans out of work?

Because he believes there is a difference between being fiscally conservative and being downright evil. He believes that this massive jobs outsourcing is destroying our middle class, increasing unemployment and the trade deficit and setting the stage for disaster when consumer spending (which is currently holding our economy together) grinds to a halt.

On his website, Dobbs provides a list of American companies who are sending their jobs to overseas to people who will literally work for a pittance, sometimes in slave labor conditions. The corporate shills' answer to the outsourcing charges are consistent: "Just retrain the workers for another job in the service industry and it will all be fine." But if you actually talk to one of the $60,000/year computer programmers whose jobs are being sent overseas to someone who will work for $4 an hour, you will hear fear and disbelief in his voice as he discusses the insane idea that he should quit the job he trained for all his life to sell insurance or change bedpans as an orderly at the local hospital.

Gartner, a research and analysis firm, has said one of every 10 jobs at information technology companies and at companies that provide IT services will move overseas by the end of this year. That means more unemployed Americans. It also raises some disturbing issues. Credit cards, medical records and tax records are being handled in third world countries that have no privacy laws at all.

As for the long-term results of this jobs migration? Well, for starters, MIT's Engineering program enrollment is down by 30%. Enrollment in computer programming classes at colleges has decreased by a similar amount. So in twenty years, America won't even have the expertise to program a computer or engineer a space shuttle.

And the only major news personality brave enough to talk about it is Lou Dobbs. Moneyline airs on on CNN, Monday through Friday, 6:00 - 7:00 pm, Eastern time.