12.28.10

Allergic to Americans

Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 9:17 am by George Smith

A feature from today’s Associated Press lines underscores the fact the US business is allergic to American labor.

This is not a secret.

For example, it’s just fact that readers now the iconic maker of formerly ‘American’ guitars and amplifiers, Fender Musical Instruments, employs more Chinese than it does US civilians. And Gibson, its rival, runs five factories in China but only one big one here — in Nashville.

The economic crack-up, AP reports, has only accelerated the flight to foreign labor. Emerging markets and countries are where the profit lies. The US, in the doldrums, is not an appealing place to do business. Demand is off.

Long term and with regards to our history, this will have extremely bad effects for the security of the nation.

Having ceded all manufacturing of consumer goods to foreign shores, it will continue the beggaring of its civilian labor force. Which in turn will make the quality of life slip, reducing opportunity and educational vigor, in turn killing innovation. The country will be shriveled for the sake of overseas profits. The generation of thousands of apps for mobile phones will not restore the middle class or make the US a world leader again, in anything.

The implications of this are scary. And the AP deals carefully with the idea that Americans — not just people on the left — may come to realize that American business is not their friend. That it is, in fact, a perhaps irreversibly destructive force in their lives.

It’s also political dynamite. The collapsed hopes of millions have given birth to unstable and often irresponsible government as well as one party that has very clearly decided its future lies only with the wealthy. And that the more quickly it can transfer national treasure into the hands of the same, to loot what is left, the better.

Reports AP:

More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.

But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute’s senior international economist.

“There’s a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy,” says Scott.

“Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria worries that the trend could be dangerous,” it continued. “In an article in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review, he says that if U.S. businesses keep prospering while Americans are struggling, business leaders will lose legitimacy in society.”

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Readers will have noted the paradox inherent in UPS’s overseas “hiring” in Yemen, earlier this year.

And DHL’s flight from the US was well documented in Glenn Beck’s Xmas travesty in Wilmington, Ohio, here, where he prescribed prayer and self-reliance for the locals.

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