The U.S. September 2012 monthly trade deficit declined by -5.1%, or -$2.25 billion. August's trade deficit was revised down by -$427 million, which gives a 3.1% monthly increase instead of the originally reported 4.1%. While the press touts the lowest monthly trade deficit since December 2010, the reality is September gives the second largest China trade deficit in history.
The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.
In “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month’s worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.
The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the report said.
“These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels,” the authors wrote.
Is that what it takes to be a corporate leader? The ability to screw anybody, anytime and put the money in their own pockets?
When else in history have we seen this? What happened when the people had enough?
If this doesn't get your blood boiling then you're dead. The Obama administration is spending $36 million dollars to train foreign workers in foreign countries for skills needed to offshore outsource your job. I'm not making this up. $36 million dollars to educate foreign workers, when the U.S. unemployment rate is at crisis levels. Our government is paying for education, classes and training so foreigners can get the skills needed to do American jobs.
Despite President Obama's pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $36 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.
Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent's low labor costs.
Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.
USAID is contributing about $10 million to the effort, while its private partners are investing roughly $26 million.
Believe this or not, Whirlpool received Stimulus funds to create jobs and instead they are closing plants! This is obscene that they are being given funds to create jobs and instead offshore outsourcing them. We should demand at least those funds be rescinded.
It can barely get greedier than this: We're in tough economic times, so Whirlpool receives $19 million in taxpayer funds to create jobs. Then it turns around and announces it will shutter its Evansville, Indiana refrigerator plant and displace the 1,100 workers there. Disgusting.
Few people realize that for the past fifty years the policy of the United States government has been to get rid of jobs.
So says former Senator Fritz Hollings in SOBER UP, a piece calling for an end of the inane rhetoric and a start to seriously formulate trade, labor policy that is in the national economic interest.
Hollings notes on the Stimulus:
With stimulus, we bail as fast as we can to stop the leaks, but do nothing to plug the hole in the hull ripped by offshoring. Stimulation can be a total success and we’ll still loss more jobs than are created.
Hollings calls cash on what globalization is really all about:
Globalization is nothing more than a trade war with production looking for a country cheaper to produce. What we have now is a trade war, without guns.
From an obscure newsletter on Emerging Markets comes this report:
Infosys and Wipro Set Up Units to Bag Government IT Outsourcing Contracts
10/08/2009
Infosys Technology and Wipro Technologies, two of the most prominent Indian IT firms, are setting up centers to tap growing opportunities in the USD 100 billion government IT outsourcing market. Both the companies have not only started investing in marketing campaigns to attract more clients globally, but have also began recruiting consultants and experts from government companies for placing them in the markets of India, the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Computer World overviews some new data on just how badly I.T. jobs are being offshore outsourced or U.S. workers are displaced by foreigners on guest worker Visas.
Okay, so where are U.S. jobs going? What's the data show? Data prepared by Everest Group Inc., a research and outsourcing consulting firm, shows in broad brush fashion the shift of jobs overseas by some major IT services vendors. In 2006, U.S. and European firms typically had less than 20% of their workforces offshore; Now, for most companies that figure may well be generally over 30%.
Now check out the ethnicity of one Indian company operating in the United States:
Stirling Newberry argues that the failure to achieve real reform of the financial system means we are in the same place we were just before the 2007-07 crisis: central banks’ “easy money” policies, coupled with a paucity of real investment opportunities, is already resulting in continued stagnation of the real economy and wages, and increasing reliance on offshoring to countries with lower wages, benefits, and safety regimes. In the process, Newberry performs the inestimable public service of slapping down the pretensions of Niall Ferguson.
Newberry begins by noting where the hot money is going now.
GM is getting yet another $4 billion of U.S. taxpayer money. This makes their bail out loan total $19.4 billion. This figure does not include the Canadian taxpayer money also given to GM.
Yet GM is heading towards bankruptcy at the end of the month. Supposedly the bankruptcy is a show down with GM bondholders and investors, but why pump more U.S. taxpayer money into a company that is planning to offshore outsource the jobs?
GM has already stated their intent to offshore outsource 98% of production, as part their (government approved) restructuring plans.
Do you want your taxpayer dollars going to a company who is busy squeezing workers and planning to offshore outsource their jobs?
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