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IBM sucks the sweat off an Indian's balls, here's why you should hate IBM exec
invite response
2016 May 5, 4:18pm 5,598 views 23 comments
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Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 5, 4:44pm
So before 1980 capitalism was good and productive and after that it was bad and destructive. What changed? Not the nature of capitalism.
What changed is the deliberate decision to add millions of people in the labor supply, thus starting a race to the bottom.
Let's not throw capitalism away with the bath water.
Dan8267
2016 May 5, 4:57pm
So before 1980 capitalism was good and productive and after that it was bad and destructive.
I would argue that the benefits that proponents of capitalism claim, namely things like competition and innovation, are no longer achieved once the permanent corporation has been adopted, which happened during the building of the railroads in the 19th century.
What changed is the deliberate decision to add millions of people in the labor supply, thus starting a race to the bottom.
Any economic system that requires massive numbers of unproductive people, i.e. consumers who are not producers, is by definition wasting the potential economic productivity of those unproductive people and thus is a highly inefficient and wasteful system. The greatest source of wealth creation, especially in modern times, is the intellectual labor of human beings.
Let's not throw capitalism away with the bath water.
Let's be precise in our statements. What exactly are you afraid of throwing out with the bath water?
Commerce is not capitalism. All economic systems engage in commerce. They would not be economic systems if they didn't.
Free markets are not capitalism, and capitalism does not promote or in many cases allow free markets. A market is, by definition, free if and only if no entity can manipulate it. A free market is not a market in which the players are free to do as they please or to rig the market. A free market is a market that is free. The freedom applies to the market, not the players. Free players will always choose to rig a market, making free players and free markets mutually exclusive.
Capitalism is the specific mechanism of giving control over the distribution of wealth and resources to a small class of private owners. What exactly do you believe we would be losing if that specific and particular mechanism were replace with something else?
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 5, 5:17pm
Capitalism is the specific mechanism of giving control over the distribution of wealth and resources to a small class of private owners. What exactly do you believe we would be losing if that specific and particular mechanism were replace with something else?
What I would describe as capitalism:
- free markets (implying competition and price discovery, and applied to several layers of the economy: end products/services, labor, and financial markets)
- free enterprise (where anyone can create a company)
- organized financing (including loans for interests, and capital participation (which means, yes, there are owners))
- all of the above taking place under the rule of law, and regulations guarantying its freedom, transparency, and social acceptability.
When you talk of the owner class, this is leftist talk, but what is behind it? If I invest $100K in your startup, buying shares, I am part of the owner class. There is nothing nefarious about this. Of course I expect a return. Without a return (as interests, dividends, or capital gains), no one would invest, which means people could only realize project with their own savings. i.e. most of the economic activity that takes place today would never happen. Unless the government does everything and this has been shown not to work.
And the return is not in exchange of nothing. By investing I allow a project to be realized, and I do that by taking a risk of losing my investment. The return is just payment for that. I think the return absolutely has to exist. The truth is: it's absolutely fair.
You raise many good points, but we need to be careful not to throw away the baby with the bath water.
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 5, 6:06pm
Ever since the 1980s IBM's strategy has been to fire U.S. and western European STEM workers -- who are absolutely critical to the success of our economy -- and to replace them with H1B Visa workers not because H1B workers are better or because there are not enough qualified domestic workers but rather because H1B workers have far less bargaining power and therefore can be exploited more than domestic workers.
If you are a unique developer with special knowledge of some code that is critical to the company, then you pretty much have your employer's balls cast in a concrete slab. Of course he won't like that kind of situation. The American school of management of large companies says that employees must be commodities, i.e. they want to be able to replace employee A for employee B with minimal training. They want employees to operate with minimal knowledge. And if they can get that overseas, they will.
Maybe they don't understand that there is a basic conflict between that vision and innovation. Innovation is never a commodity. Cannot be.
Dan8267
2016 May 5, 7:59pm
What I would describe as capitalism:
It does not matter what you want the word capitalism to refer to. What matters for the subject matter of this thread is how I used the term in the original post, and I used the term according to it's actual, real, accepted, and intentional definition: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
If you want to use the sequence of letters c, a, p, i, t, a, i, l, i, s, m to refer to anything else, then you aren't arguing against any of my points. You are only arguing that you prefer I used some other nomenclature. Using a different nomenclature would not change the meaning or the truth (or falsehood) of my arguments any more than using base 12 rather than base 10 would change mathematical truths.
If the thing that is important to you is the word "capitalism", say because it conjures a warm fuzzy feeling in you, then we are free to call other economic systems like the one Marx proposed capitalism. If that's what floats your boat fine. But if your problem is with the definition of capitalism I am using -- which by the way is the proper definition -- then you are not objecting to the claims I am making, which are what's important.
In no way, shape, or form, did anything I write in this thread propose the elimination, or even reduction, of free markets, free enterprise, or organized financing. I argued that capitalism, the control of trade and industry by private owners, should be replaced with a different mechanism because such control by a non-wealth-producing class enables that owner class to steal the wealth production of laborers rather than contributing to wealth production.
Private ownership and control of trade and industry is the one and only defining characteristic of capitalism. Everything else you mentioned, good or bad or both, is not a defining characteristic of capitalism and most certainly is not unique to capitalism. In fact, capitalism absolutely and inevitably prevents the existence of free markets. Whether you think free markets are perfect things, abominations, or anything in between, the fact remains that no free market can remain a free market under capitalism because eventually a few players become dominant and powerful enough to control the market and they choose to do so. In fact, this is the entire goal of capitalists in any market. And a market that is controlled is, by definition, the opposite of a free market.
[Side Note: I doubt that you are completely in favor of free markets either. If you believe that any kind of monetary policy, drug regulation, copyright law, patent law, or trademark is a good idea, then you are rejecting the concept of a free market. At best you believe that markets should be "somewhat free". Make no mistake, copyright laws and patents are ways of guiding markets and are justified by the belief that the free market fails at some things and government intervention in the form of coercion is needed to fix the problem. Trademark laws precisely prevent any person from opening a restaurant and calling it McDonald's even if his god-damn birth certificate name is Henry McDonald and he comes from a thousand years of the McDonald clan.]
When you talk of the owner class, this is leftist talk,
but what is behind it?
From the original post, Computer World magazine states
IBM is trying to convince the government to allocate funds and establish policies that would help increase the number of STEM (or science, technology, engineering and math) graduates in the U.S., and it's also calling on Washington to raise the cap on H-1B visas, said Hira. "Yet at the same time," he added, "IBM is actually decreasing its demand of that same labor."
From NPR, When Lobbyists Literally Write The Bill
The New York Times and Mother Jones obtained draft language that lobbyists for Citigroup — one of the largest banks in country — offered to lawmakers. And it turns out that 70 of the 85 lines in the final House bill reflected Citigroup's recommendations. In fact, as The Times reports, two paragraphs were copied almost word for word — except lawmakers had changed two words to make them plural.
From the New York Times
Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.
One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.
Industry officials acknowledged that they played a role in drafting the legislation, but argued that the practice was common in Washington. Some of the changes, they say, have gained wide support, including from Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman.
From the Center for Immigration Studies
Industry leaders screamed they would rather have no H-1B expansion than lose the ability to replace Americans with H-1B workers. When big money talks, Congress listens. The Republican leadership arranged for the substitution of a lobbyist-written "compromise" bill that eventually became law.
If you compare the two bills, the first thing you should notice is that the lobbyist-written version of the bill is 23 pages longer than the original.
The main offending provision in the original bill can be found on p. 3 in "SEC. 3. PROTECTION AGAINST DISPLACEMENT OF UNITED STATES WORKERS." That section contains a provision that prohibited replacing an American with an H-1B worker "obtained by contract, employee leasing, temporary help agreement, or other similar means." (p. 4, lines 2–4) It would have closed the loophole in the law (that still exists) allowing employers to replace Americans with H-1B workers.
This demonstrates that Congress was clearly aware of the mechanism employers were using to replace Americans with H-1B workers./blockquote>
From the Rachel Maddow Show, chemical lobbyist is exposed as the author of the bill proposed to regulate the chemical industry.
I could go on and on. The fact is that owning a few thousand dollars, or even a few hundred thousands of dollars, of stock in publicly traded companies does not make you part of the owner class. The owner class owns far more than you ever, ever could and have preferred shares and have access to financial instruments you will never, ever have access to, and have access to senators that you will never will.
but we need to be careful not to throw away the baby with the bath water.
Throwing out capitalism would not throw out free markets, banking, commerce, or private property. This is a false dichotomy based on a deliberate misrepresentation of what capitalism is. The economic system I describe, Americanism, has largely free markets (freer than the markets in our economy), banking, commerce, and private property yet is antithetical to capitalism and communism.
If you are a unique developer with special knowledge of some code that is critical to the company, then you pretty much have your employer's balls cast in a concrete slab.
Actually, that is precisely not true because under capitalism the developers of goods and services including software do not own their creations. The economic system prevents most creators from having ownership of their creations. The entire system is organized to coerce forfeiture of intellectual property from the actual creators to those who control trade and industry through private ownership. Such owners pull up the ladder behind them to prevent other people from taking over control and ownership of that trade and industry.
Dan8267
2016 May 5, 8:02pm
It's all Clinton and Obama's fault!!!
On a serious note, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Hillary Clinton are no different on this issue than Reagan, Bush Sr, Bush Jr, Romney, or Cruz. I'd include Trump as he's a pathological liar, but since he has no political history his statements of his beliefs cannot be confirmed or denied.
The only candidate in the past 16 years who is materially different is Bernie Sanders. The rest, including Trump despite what he says, are perfectly happy with the status quo and don't want change.
HydroCabron
2016 May 5, 8:12pm
Trump is the only one speaking about H1B abuse.
While flying in foregners to work at his resorts.
And the middle-class white Trump supporters just shrug that off, because they're engneers, not busboys. Which basically means they don't give a shit about the issue - they're just out for themselves.
HydroCabron
2016 May 5, 9:22pm
What kind of executive with budget powers says to himself "You know - I think I'll bring IBM in to solve this. They have off-the-shelf products and would never embed consultants in my firm."
Hahahahaha!
lostand confused
2016 May 5, 9:38pm
While flying in foregners to work at his resorts.
And the middle-class white Trump supporters just shrug that off, because they're engneers, not busboys. Which basically means they don't give a shit about the issue - they're just out for themselves.
Nope he admits it, because he says it is part of the system. If you are running a business and paying somebody minimum wage and make them work 16 hrs a day vs an American 20-25 bucks- well the latter will go out of business.
He is saying-just saying for now-he will change that and change the rules-which makes sense. lets see -the others are not even saying it.
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 6, 10:24am
Private ownership and control of trade and industry is the one and only defining characteristic of capitalism. Everything else you mentioned, good or bad or both, is not a defining characteristic of capitalism and most certainly is not unique to capitalism.
The heart of the matter here is how do you separate "private ownership and control of trade and industry" from what I said about organized financing, i.e. someone investing in your startup by buying shares of that startup?
Ownership is corporation share ownership, correct? This is an investment, correct?
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 6, 10:30am
In fact, capitalism absolutely and inevitably prevents the existence of free markets.
Please refer to the 4th point I raised as necessary for "capitalism": "all of the above taking place under the rule of law, and regulations guarantying its freedom, transparency, and social acceptability".
Free markets absolutely require regulations, anti trust laws etc. Just like free circulation on the road requires traffic laws.
IBM is trying to convince the government to allocate funds and establish policies that would help increase the number of STEM (or science, technology, engineering and math) graduates in the U.S., and it's also calling on Washington to raise the cap on H-1B visas, said Hira. "Yet at the same time," he added, "IBM is actually decreasing its demand of that same labor."
Lobbying congress is precisely something that is NOT part of capitalism as an economic system. Coupled with campaign financing, this is basically corruption. Corruption is not a necessary part of any economic system and you can throw it away with the bath water while keeping the baby (i.e. all the rest).
Dan8267
2016 May 6, 1:49pm
The heart of the matter here is how do you separate "private ownership and control of trade and industry" from what I said about organized financing, i.e. someone investing in your startup by buying shares of that startup?
Just don't connect them. They are not connected by default.
Instead of having laws that effectively require creators of wealth and passive wealth generating goods to give up control and ownership of these things, have laws that do the exact opposite. There are billions of possible examples. I will give one common example. Instead of letting corporations own the copyright for works of art, only let individuals own part or all of the copyright. To prevent coercion to give up the copyright to say a music label, only allow the music labels to rent on a year-to-year basis the copyright from the artist. As a song or artist becomes more popular, the artist gets more revenue instead of being controlled by the label. The copyright benefits the artist as it was intended to instead of middle men and owners of distribution channels.
Transitions from capitalism to superior economic systems can be made gradually, continuously, and without disrupting commerce or banking.
Dan8267
2016 May 6, 1:58pm
Free markets absolutely require regulations
That does not invalidate the fact that anti-drug laws like the criminalization of marijuana are mechanisms that are intended to and that do prevent free markets.
Lobbying congress is precisely something that is NOT part of capitalism as an economic system.
The acts of capitalists lobbying and bribing Congress and handing Congress legislation to pass do not in any way contradict the definition of capitalism, the control of trade and industry by private owners for profit. You might want capitalism to be defined as virtuous, but it is not, and even if it were, that does not change the simple important fact that the control of trade and industry by private owners for profit motivates those owners to bribe and corrupt government and motivates government to accept and even seek out bribery and corruption. This truth is unchanging regardless of how you redefine capitalism or what nomenclature and marking terms you use to describe economics.
Changing how you phrase things does not change the nature of reality. If you call the second power cube instead of square, you can truthfully say that gravity is inversely proportional to the cube of the radial distance to the source, but that doesn't change the mathematical relationship which is still the equation Fg = G*m1*m2/r^2. That two doesn't become a three simply because you change the definition of the word "cube" to "the second power".
Nor does changing the word capitalism to mean "not raping babies" change the fact that control of trade and industry by private owners is bad even though you get to say "capitalism is good" because you mean "not raping babies is good". That rewording does not make control of trade and industry by private owners good. Changing words does not change underlying meaning of things.
Dan8267
2016 May 6, 2:06pm
you can throw it away with the bath water while keeping the baby (i.e. all the rest).
That is exactly what I'm proposing. Throw away capitalism, the control of trade and industry by private owners, and keep the rest. The rest, the stuff that has nothing to do with capitalism, is
- private ownership of personal property
- trade
- commerce
- money
- banking
- partially free markets (Clearly, no one wants fully free markets, but one could have fully free markets without capitalism while fully free markets are utterly impossible with capitalism.)
You seem to be stuck on some religious dogma that the defining characteristic of capitalism must be commerce or free markets when in fact capitalism has one and only one defining characteristic, control of trade and industry by private owners for profit. This is not an ancillary or esoteric aspect of capitalism. It is the one and only thing that distinguishes capitalism from any one of an infinite number of alternative economic systems. It is the defining and only required attribute of capitalism. It is the very core of the economic system in intent, in structure, and in practice.
Unless you defend that specific mechanism, you are not defending capitalism. Defending commerce is not defending capitalism. All economic systems, by definition, involve commerce. And advocating the free market is, in fact, an attack on capitalism as the two are mutually exclusive.
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 6, 2:33pm
Just don't connect them. They are not connected by default.
Yes they are. "private ownership and control of trade and industry" is directly related to financing through capital participation. I don't think you can dismiss this.
Once an investor, for example a venture capitalist firm, buys a share of a startup they exercise some degree of control on it. They own a share of the intellectual property produced. They influence what product it builds, what market they address, etc... They have this influence because they use their money to pay for the project, and they take the risk.
The same with an artist: companies buy the copyrights become because they invest in the marketing and they have to take the risks, whereas the artist doesn't in this case. Artists are free to not sell copyrights and I'm sure there are platforms to sell music with compromising your copyrights, but in that case they do not have the same marketing power. In the end it's all business decisions between free people: what do I get, what do I give? Each do the best they can and things balance themselves.
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 6, 2:44pm
You might want capitalism to be defined as virtuous, but it is not, and even if it were, that does not change the simple important fact that the control of trade and industry by private owners for profit motivates those owners to bribe and corrupt government and motivates government to accept and even seek out bribery and corruption. This truth is unchanging regardless of how you redefine capitalism or what nomenclature and marking terms you use to describe economics.
Of course people are greedy, I'm not naive on how capitalists acts. But you fail to distinguish between the organization of economic activity and basic laws regulating campaign financing and corruption. These things are logically separate. In fact there are many countries in which have the economic system I described above and do not let companies (or PAC) give campaign donations, or have much stricter regulations on what constitutes corruption.
So when we are talking of IBM lobbying congress, we are talking of an idiosyncrasy of the US that is by itself separate of the organization of economic activity including "the control of trade and industry by private owners for profit". Regardless of the motivation of capitalists. If this was forbidden, the source of motivation wouldn't matter.
I'll stick around & see how capitalism works out.
Bailouts,QE infinity, fiat currency, spending more than one makes,no conviction & punishment for fraud/theft
is successful economic theology.
Shall we pray?
Dan8267
2016 May 9, 7:25am
Yes they are.
Prove that neither banking nor funding of projects can be done without private ownership and control of trade and industry. There's a Nobel Prize in economics waiting for you if you can.
the organization of economic activity
Economic activity can be organized in many ways, not just the way our society chooses to do so.
I have shown how letting an owner class control trade and industry disrupts free markets and reduces GDP. You have not shown that this specific mechanism does anything good. And no, you don't get to use commerce and banking to prove that as commerce and banking have nothing to do with that mechanism.
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 9, 11:15am
Prove that neither banking nor funding of projects can be done without private ownership and control of trade and industry. There's a Nobel Prize in economics waiting for you if you can.
I never said "no funding of projects can be done without private ownership and control of trade and industry", because this sentence is obviously wrong. Examples of other financing of projects:
1- government funding
2- self funding.
3- loans
But:
1 - Outside of shared infrastructures and institutions, government funding amounts to communism: It lacks the self regulation properties of markets and is highly susceptible to corruption.
2 - Self funding exists, but would be an incredibly limiting if this was the main source of funding for projects. Relying on it would essentially destroy most of the economic activity in our society, ranging from for-profit companies to buying a house.
3 - That leaves loans. Loans don't involve direct ownership of the project you lend to, but they are very similar to capital participation in that they allow someone with money to extract a "rent" from the economic activity that it enables, in compensation for a risk. Bonds (loans) and stocks (capital participation) are just variations of the same thing:
- They allow funding,
- they represent a financial risk taking (that varies depending on the case)
- they extract a rent from a project.
And this last aspect is what many people find unsavory, but it should be obvious that it is absolutely necessary for the very existence of the funding to exist. No one would take the risk of funding a project without some kind of reward for it.
Again the market sets this reward/rent, and does so in a way that reflects the availability of capital, the general risk of the project, etc... In other words this just reflect reality. This respect of this reality is the basis of the morality of this mechanism. It's better socially to have a win win situation for people who have a project and people who have money than any other outcome.
Heraclitusstudent
2016 May 9, 11:30am
I have shown how letting an owner class control trade and industry disrupts free markets and reduces GDP.
This is like claiming that letting people drive on the freeway will cause them to want to go fast and create accidents.
This is why you have regulations - that limit speed - and ensure things are working correctly.
In the case of capitalism that includes market regulations such as anti-trust, and government regulations such as laws against corruption.
Such regulations are obviously absolutely vital to using capitalism in a positive manner.
I have no will to defend what happens when you remove them.
Dan8267
2016 May 9, 4:23pm
This is like claiming that letting people drive on the freeway will cause them to want to go fast and create accidents.
This is why you have regulations - that limit speed - and ensure things are working correctly.
To use your analogy, imagine replacing human drivers with privately owned, self-driving mag-lift vehicles on a smart highway. It would be a better system. No accidents. No traffic jams. No drunk drivers. Extreme high speeds and energy effeciency.
Regulations are attempts to fix the symptoms of problems. That's fine, but it's a poor substitute for eliminating problems in the first place.
Why regulate an economy when you can build in crime prevention in the first place? A smart economy can enforce all regulations internally and would require no police. At this point economics stops being a political art and starts becoming an engineering discipline with the precision of software development.
I used to really like IBM. More precisely, I liked the engineers who worked there, many of whom are still close friends of mine. However, the executives of this company are the quintessential example of why capitalism is inherently a parasitic and inefficient economic system that is incompatible with democracy or even uncorrupted republics. In this post I will use the term slave labor to mean a form of economic slavery in which the labor has essentially no bargaining power and is subject to the whims of the employer. Slavery, like almost every evil, can be throttled and comes in many gradients.
Ever since the 1980s IBM's strategy has been to fire U.S. and western European STEM workers -- who are absolutely critical to the success of our economy -- and to replace them with H1B Visa workers not because H1B workers are better or because there are not enough qualified domestic workers but rather because H1B workers have far less bargaining power and therefore can be exploited more than domestic workers.
And since the late 1990s IBM expanded this strategy to include and even prefer to outsource STEM jobs because outsourced workers have even less bargaining power and thus can be exploited even more. This became possible in the late 1990s solely because of the rise of the Internet.
You see, capitalism does not reward productivity. It does not reward wealth creation. It does not reward innovation or enterprise. It does not reward solving major economic, social, political, medical, or other kinds of problems. Capitalism rewards one and only one thing, bargaining power. That's the entire purpose of capitalism, to consolidate as much bargaining power into the hands of a few who then can use that power to gain massive wealth and to hold onto power without ever having to produce or work in their lives. They can become fat parasites whose cushy position in life is never challenged because they have all the bargaining power. And they corrupt the law to ensure that bargaining power stays with them no matter how the environment changes.
The first thing about IBM to know is that IBM Could Lay Off Every American Employee and indeed wants to do so without occurring political consequences that would compromise its ability to have legislation passed to ensure its power is not challenged. So it has to lay off massive numbers of people, time and time again, while hiring their H1B and outsourced replacements in such a way that politicians and the public won't notice.
What the above article is saying is that IBM stopped disclosing its U.S. employment figures back in 2010 when it had only 92,000 U.S. employees. It also had some western European employees that it also wants to outsource for the same reason. Employees who live in a developed nation cannot be exploited like those in undeveloped nations where life is cheap.
What you need to realize is that while IBM is firing all these western workers, it is hiring workers in undeveloped nations from China and India to South American countries, because those workers are effectively cheap slave labor. The IBM workforce is not being diminished, but rather replaced. And it's not being replaced because the third-world workers are more productive, smarter, or in any way better. In fact, they are far less productive! However, they are also cheaper, so the executives get a bigger share of a smaller pie that amounts to a net larger piece for the executives.
Of course, the only reason the pie does not shrink to zero is because western STEM workers created a massive amount of capital goods, automations, patents, inventions, etc. that continue to bring revenue streams into the company long after the people who created those wealth-generating mechanisms have been fired. In a just economic system the revenue streams created by those wealth-generating mechanism would be owned by the creators of those mechanism rather than the preferred stock owners of the company, and when those employees left the company they would take their share of the revenue stream with them. Of course, this does not happen with capitalism, and that is precisely why capitalism sucks for anyone who actually generates wealth and makes our economy better. Capitalism is essentially an economic system whose sole purpose is to divert the wealth generated by productive people, especially passive (often automated) wealth generation, away from the wealth creators and towards owners. And that is why Communism was so demonized. Although neither the Russians nor the Chinese implemented what Marx envisioned, Communism still suggested that the actual creators of wealth should own that wealth, and this means no ruling owner class siphoning the productivity of others.
Before H1B Visas were common and before outsourcing, IBM had to hire western workers. IBM grew to a huge size precisely because these workers were so damn productive, inventing and creating the world we live in today. So, by 1980 IBM had a massive workforce. For the past 30 years, IBM has been trying to get rid of this entire workforce and replace it with third world labor that cannot demand high wages for its productivity, but that means firing a lot of people, too many to be politically viable to do so all at once. And IBM has to stay on the good side of government because keeping the revenue streams created by the work of those employees being fired means keeping politicians happy, and keeping politicians happy means not looking like you are selling out America. Now politicians don't care if you actually sell out America -- hell, they do that themselves -- but they insist that you don't look like your doing it lest they look like that too when they rubber-stamp whatever legislation you give them.
So IBM's strategy is to use every economic downturn as an excuse to fire massive numbers of western workers while continuously outsourcing those jobs to third world workers, preferable those living abroad but also H1B Visas where they have too. The IBM execs call this Workforce Rebalancing but that is just a euphemism for replacing the labor of free persons with slave labor. Yes, IBM executives fire hard working and productive Americans while keeping the revenue streams created by those Americans and hiring slave labor in their place.
Now you may be thinking, "Why should I care? I am not an IBM employee or a STEM worker.". Well, this practice hurts you regardless of what job or business you have because it affects the overall economy.
Neither IBM nor any other big corporation should get any tax breaks or privileges from the government. Senators and representatives who try to pass legislation written by these companies should be arrested and imprisoned for corruption including bribery and conspiracy. All H1B Visa programs should be ended immediately and never started again. If America needs to import labor, then the imported labor should immediately become U.S. citizens with the right to live in the U.S. and vote in elections. Any U.S. based company that outsources or "owns" part or all of foreign companies should pay high tariffs and a high capital gains tax (long and short) for all capital gains of its executives. We should reverse every perverse financial incentive to use slave labor.
The key to a good economy and a high standard of living for all is the virtuous cycle in which wealth creators (labor) retain the lion's share of their productivity and then use that wealth to purchase goods and services encouraging further production. Denying labor the fruits of their labor by limiting their compensation to their bargaining power rather than their productivity is not only unjust and Unamerican, it is also economically devastating because it disrupts the virtuous cycle of production and consumption. It also has long-term consequences like slowing down technological advancement, stifling innovation, and discouraging the development of skilled labor, something that takes a good 20 years to develop and that benefits greatly from intergenerational passing down of skills.
Ultimately, in order to compete with the rest of the world and to ensure a productive and stable economy, we will have to abandon capitalism, the giving of ownership and control of wealth created to people who did not create the wealth, with a mechanism that gives ownership to the wealth creators themselves. We can call this new economic system Americanism. It has commerce, free markets, trade, etc. just like capitalism and many other economic systems, but it does not have the perverse incentive to use and discard the people who create the wealth we all want and need. The total wealth and the wealth per capita would be far greater under Americanism, or any economic system that rewards wealth creation rather than ownership, than under capitalism.
Of course, the priests of capitalism will tell you otherwise. They will say that capitalism and communism are the only choice and that capitalism is the only system that can work. Like with all religions, lies must be told, the public deceived, and heretics denounced in order for the priests to continue to rule and behave as parasites.
#economics #politics #ibm #outsourcing #h1bVisas #capitalism