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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmerican Workers Can Kiss Their Behinds Goodbye - Corporate America Is Taking Jobs To
India and China and the GOP and US Chamber want to keep giving them tax money to do it. Our American CEO's are not interested in having good paying jobs for Americans or bringing them back here. Pelosi had passed bills stopping tax breaks for outsourcing companies and the Senate killed them. The GOP in the house wants to INCREASE tax credits to outsourcing company. There is NO CHANCE to stop tax breaks to take jobs out of the country.
To add insult into injury the GOP and US Chamber favors UNLIMITED immigration work visas. They claim that there are not enough workers to fill jobs.
After watching the Accenture sponsored golf tournament there were a number of commercials touting India as the future of the job market and the future of workers. Accenture is an outsourcing company.
bluestate10
(10,942 posts)Commerce, treasonous teabaggers and DINOs come to kill you. Go ahead, other americans are waking up to the fact that corporations can't sell shit or make money unless we buy their stuff - those people are choosing to buy from companies that believe in american and are saying "fuck you" to the rest.
Now, you can sit around and wait to be impoverished, or you can take control. Which choice will you make?
lib2DaBone
(8,124 posts)I do everything I can to buy local... at locally owned stores.
The big box stores out on the highway (crammed with cheap Chinese goods) are dying a rapid death... as the price of gasoline heads to $5 a gallon.
I believe we will see a return of small central shopping areas in the center of town. Downtown areas that were driven out of business by Walmart and corrupt politicians.
People are going to have get used to using public transportation.. and buying only what they can carry at one time. The ubiquitous Fruit and Vegetable stands and small hardware stores will make a comeback.
James Kunstler has some very informative articles on this topic.
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http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/02/scale-implosion.html
(snip) Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)1) Most big US corporations make more profits overseas than they do here; and that share is growing, not shrinking.
2) In the US, almost 40% of consumer spending is done by the top 5%. The bottom 80% do 39.5% of the consumer spending.
The bottom 50% are responsible for a negligible share of consumer spending, because: they don't have enough money.
The top 20% take home half of all income in the US.
Citigroup sez:
In a plutonomy there is no such animal as the U.S. consumer or the UK consumer, or indeed the Russian consumer. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the no-rich, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.
http://www.salon.com/2010/10/05/lind_america_plutonomy/
Your stirring comments about "taking control" might have made some sense in the 80s. I heard them in the 80s, actually -- but not as part of a mass movement, which was the only way such a strategy could have made any difference. Everyone was just supposed to exercise their 'consumer choice' and magically corporations would keep their operations in the US.
Except they didn't.
It's an even stupider strategy now, when incomes are declining and jobs are in short supply. So many people are struggling just to keep their heads above water, and they're shopping at the dollar store.
Besides which:
3) Corporations don't keep their manufacturing plants in the US just because you buy their products.
The "Shopping for Change" meme was always a big crock, and it's an even bigger crock now.
Shifting manufacturing is *deliberate strategy,* aided and abetted by legislation which gives corps *tax breaks* among other things, for moving.
You'd have better results with a mass movement designed to pressure Congress to rescind the tax breaks and other bennies. But *any* fight requires a mass movement, not a bunch of yuppies feeling virtuous about their shopping 'choices'.
1) Consumers don't have enough information. Too many products, not enough information.
2) Most consumers won't take the time to sort through the information that *is* available, for various reasons.
3) Most consumer products today have at least some foreign content.
Skittles
(153,182 posts)I call those people OFFSHORE WHORES
OhioChick
(23,218 posts)Skittles
(153,182 posts)yes INDEED
Scuba
(53,475 posts)laundry_queen
(8,646 posts)Wow, going to have to go read up on that one...
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)defraud investors and the government. Accenture was the part called Arthur Anderson consulting. Same company, different divisions. The consulting/job exporters changed the name when the accounting part dissolved to conceal their association.
They're still bottom-feeding slime, but a different form of bottom-feeding slime.
AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)donnasgirl
(656 posts)Are people going to wake up it is both sides of the isle who are sending our jobs off shore,and i mean both sides no one excluded.I have been reading the AFLCIO site and everybody on that site recognizes it,it is time for all blue collar people to stick together and i mean republican and democrat alike or all Americans will be on the friggin bread lines.Wake up damn it wake up.
Initech
(100,099 posts)Until we change the change the system it will be hopeless. China and India are thriving because it's profitable to do so. And when those countries become too expensive they'll move to Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. When those get too expensive they'll move to Africa and the Middle East. And then when that gets too expensive they'll fire everybody and replace the workers with machines. The cycle will go on and on until we stop it.