America's Middle Class Becomes the New Working Poor
By Frosty Wooldridge
Washington Dispatch.com
In the past ten years, American jobs screamed out of the United States at an ever-accelerating rate of speed. While American workers stood in unemployment lines, major corporations insourced, outsourced and offshored jobs to Third World countries. Why? They could obtain labor for $1.00 an hour and sometimes less. Capitalism knows no loyalty to man, beast or country.
At the high end, Congress offered hundreds of thousands of H-1B and L-1 visas that displaced 890,000 American high tech workers out of jobs while importing cheap labor from overseas.
To add insult to injury while displacing American workers--meatpacking, chicken processing, paving, construction, hotel, roofing, landscaping and other trade jobs were insourced to millions of illegal alien workers.
America's manufacturing base and ability to sell products to the world diminished with the rising power of corporations to control taxes, tariffs and commodities markets. These huge corporations, run by American CEOs, took advantage of their American roots and benefits enjoyed in a First World country - while giving millions of jobs to people in other countries. For what? Obscene profits! It's why you hear of their $125 million annual paychecks. They are the Ken Lays of Enron crowd who don't get caught. Why not? Because what they do is legal, but then again, they paid enough money into Political Action Committees and other organizations to make sure they gained tax breaks and other benefits from Congress.
It's a hell of a rich man's club, but it's turning America's Middle Class into the Working Poor Class.
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it's humanity in general. By nature we are all selfish to some degree- like all other living things on this planet. The only thing capitalism is really guilty of is accepting human nature.
As for trading wages for obscene profits- well the data doesn't completely support that
while corporate profits are at an all time the trend does not directly follow the hourly wages trend
Wages decreased 20 years prior to the "profit boom". With this data it's hard to see a direct connection between the two
The timeline for wage trends follows the trend of outsourcing, which started in the late 1970's. Outsourcing was not done to necessarily "bring in huge profits" but to actually protect current profits. Essentially it was seen as a corporate necessity- something that had to be done in order to compete with others companies. I don't like it, but it's a reality based on our laws of economics. Companies/corporations that don't make "profits" (I use quotations because in the non-profit world it's called Net Income) over the long run don't survive. Companies that have lower profit margins to their peers are at a severe disadvantage and often will either shrink or disappear entirely.
Sadly, there is very little that domestic policymakers can do to change this. Our economy is coming under global influences- influences that are out of our control. Unless you start instituting massive tariffs and instituting laws requiring 100% (or close to) of goods and services sold in the U.S. to be of U.S. origin (As well as sold by U.S. companies), we are pretty much in the passenger seat. This situation can be helped by a global policy, but that would require many third world nations (who actually benefit from outsourcing) to go against their best interest.
It all comes back to our nature. We are generally selfish. There are limited resources and we are all trying to get the most we can.