IBM criticised heavily as US website attacks corporates that offshore jobs

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/inside-outsourcing/2010/10/us-organisation-names-and-shames-corporate-that-outsource-jobs-and-ibm-criticised-its-report.html

By Karl Flinders on October 11, 2010 4:59 AM

I read an article in the New York Times at the weekend. It was about a new website created to name and shame US corporate that have offshored work, amongst other things. The AFL-CIO which is a federation of unions has created a website which contains a job tracker.

You put in a post code and it tells you about the outsourcing of jobs at companies within a specified area. Here is the site.

The AFL-CIO has also done a major report about some of the damage being done by offshoring to US workers and economy. It criticises IBM in the report (see below).

Here is the "Sending Jobs Overseas: The Cost to America's Economy and Working Families" report as it is titled if you want to read it.


I will go through the report and blog about it but just for a taste of its tone, here is the first paragraph:

"Outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries is one of the great hidden economic issues of recent years. It is big business, with multinational corporations actively shifting jobs out of the United States and around the globe in search of the cheapest possible labor. But, following popular outcry against the practice in 2004, corporations have done their best to hide the details even as they expand their offshoring activities. As a result, outsourcing has by and large fallen out of the headlines."

FULL story at link.

[Scuba]

1. Oh, and don't pay taxes either if you can help it. They're not Americans. They're Corporatists.

[Frustratedlady]

2. ...and they vote with their money.

This has to be stopped as soon as possible.

[Scuba]

3. Perhaps more accurately....

...they buy votes with money. Help stop them, please.

The ONLY thing that matters at this point is getting voters to the polls on November 2nd.

You can help do that.

Volunteer down at Democratic HQ. They need people to make phone calls, knock on doors, compile lists of local events, do data entry, etc.

Help others get their early ballots in case they can't get out on election day.

Get a yard sign.

Talk to your cousin/nephew/aunt etc.

We need to focus on this or the next two years of DU will be not about how to improve the country, but about limiting damage.

thanks,

Scuba

[The Wielding Truth]

4. Yep.corporatocracy. They are corporatocratists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy

The concept of corporatocracy, in crass terms, is that corporations, to a significant extent "own" or have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people, and that they exercise such power not by back-room conspiracies but by their enormous, concentrated economic power, and by legal in-the-open mechanisms (lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and more subsidies etc). Oliver Stone captured "Wall Street, you know, you could say..runs the world. Wall Street, the pharmaceutical lobbies, the oil lobbies, they run our government"<2>

First, corporations provide financial support to competing political parties and major political party candidates. This allows the corporations to hedge their bets on the outcome of an election so that they are assured to have a winner who is indebted to them. As politicians are increasingly dependent on campaign contributions to become elected, their objectiveness on issues which concern corporate interests is compromised.

Second, in many cases former corporate executives are appointed as powerful decision makers within government institutions. They are often charged with the regulation of their former or future employers. Government employees who collude with corporations often accept high ranking positions within corporations once they have demonstrated their commitment to serve the corporate interest. These lucrative offers provide incentive for government employees to serve Lobby groups as well as provides their new employers with access to governmental decision makers. This is known as the 'revolving door' between corporations and the institutions established to regulate their behavior; and can lead to regulatory capture.

Finally, the economic regime, while often called 'free market,' involves centralized economic planning and coordination by corporations, with governments playing the role of an assistant to such corporate central planning. Chomsky described this dimension, noting about international trade that "trade" is "a dubious term for a system in which some 40 percent of U.S. trade takes place within companies, centrally managed by the same highly visible hands that control planning, production and investment.