6 Articles Worth Reading
6 Articles Worth Reading
Date: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 6:10 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
April 05, 2005 No. 1228
Comments from Rob:
Article #2 is another shortage shouter that we don't have enough math
and science teachers. Of course we will never have enough until
teachers earn even less.
Article #3 is rather blunt in its blackmail threat to Americans - give
us foreign workers or we will outsource your jobs. My answer to the
threat: give me a job, or give me death!
Thomas Friedman has just announced his new book about the "flat earth".
I always suspected he was a flat earther! The dangerous thing about
Friedman is that he skillfully buries his free-trade advocacy into a
soft form of subliminal globalist hype. Keep your eye on the target
when you read article #5,
Article 1:
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=75132
Logan hasn't learned post-9/11 lessons: Airport sweep uncovers lax
security, nets 14 aliens
In what amounts to the largest security breach at Logan International
Airport since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more than a dozen illegal
immigrants with unfettered access to the terminal - and possibly beyond
- were arrested at the airport yesterday, according to a source and
federal officials. The 14 Brazilian nationals - 12 men and women, and
two juveniles - worked as airport janitors for Hurley of America, a
company with offices in Stoneham, officials said. One of the men was
wanted on a fugitive warrant for evading deportation.
Article 2:
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Mar-28-Mon-2005/news/26153393.html
Clark County School District recruits teachers in Philippines
A lack of qualified special education and math teachers in the United
States has caused the Clark County School District to travel more than
7,000 miles away for recruits. More than 25 residents of the
Philippines have committed to teach in the district and are expected to
begin working in August. They will work under temporary visas that
expire after three years. "Living in the United States is very much a
dream for many people from the Philippines," said Derek Ramage, an
official with the Los Angeles Unified School District. "When you do
recruit from the Philippines, you can choose from hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of teachers."
Article 3:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/03/29/14OPreality_1.html
Reality Check
Green-card regulations encourage offshoring
New rules make hiring foreign nationals more difficult than ever
Policies such as these will certainly encourage offshoring. Why go
through the expense - including not just the visa fees but also the
legal fees needed to process the visas, the time it takes to get new
employees trained and up and running, plus the uncertainty, delays, and
lack of permanency of investments you may have made in hiring foreign
workers - when you can just contract a company outside our borders and
still get most of the benefits of having the best and the brightest
working for you?
Article 4:
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=67213
US gives Pak F-16s, India gets F-16s plus plus
Bush Allows India to access aerospace industry to buy F-16s, F-18s,
licences for production; energy cooperation, upgrade of strategic
dialogue Washington is offering India a wider array of weapons systems
and more importantly the option to produce them in India.
Article 5:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position
It's a Flat World, After All
Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they
are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because
they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their
American workers.
Article 6:
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/04/314741.shtml
Are You A Slave?
The New American Slavery
It doesn't matter if you're a "white collar" or "blue collar" employee.
If you're an American, you're too highly paid. There are billions of
people who want your job, and your government is doing all they can to
see that you lose it to them.
1. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=75132
Logan hasn't learned post-9/11 lessons: Airport sweep uncovers lax
security, nets 14 aliens
By O'Ryan Johnson
Saturday, March 26, 2005 - Updated: 07:42 AM EST
In what amounts to the largest security breach at Logan International
Airport since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more than a dozen illegal
immigrants with unfettered access to the terminal - and possibly beyond
- were arrested at the airport yesterday, according to a source and
federal officials.
Relatives and loved ones of victims killed in 9/11 called the
security lapse a ``disgrace.''
``They're putting everybody at risk,'' said Mary Bavis, the mother
of Mark Bavis, who was on United Flight 175, one of two planes hijacked
out of Logan and crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New
York. ``I just can't understand how that can happen. We're supposed to
have so much more security.''
The 14 Brazilian nationals - 12 men and women, and two juveniles -
worked as airport janitors for Hurley of America, a company with
offices in Stoneham, officials said. One of the men was wanted on a
fugitive warrant for evading deportation.
State police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents
arrested the aliens in a sweep early yesterday morning as part of an
ongoing investigation by Homeland Security into an illegal worker
scheme at Logan International Airport, said Jane Zuieback, spokeswoman
for ICE.
In an arrangement with the airport, Hurley issued its own
temporary security badges to employees, side-stepping checks on
workers' documents and backgrounds, an immigration source said.
But Hurley disputes the claim, saying all of their workers showed
documents to prove they are eligible for work, including Social
Security cards, though they could not explain how they hired one man
who had been ordered deported.
``I welcome them (ICE) to come look at our files,'' said Janet
Walsh, director of human resources and labor relations at Hurley.
Hurley has roughly 140 janitors working at Logan. Walsh said the
14 with temporary badges arrested yesterday had all worked at the
airport for between one and two weeks, and adhered to TSA rules that
they not be out of sight of a worker with a permanent badge.
Investigators said just how much of the airport the cleaners had
access to was unknown, though one law enforcement source said, ``Use
your imagination,'' and did not rule out the possibility that the
cleaners got as far as airport towers.
Zuieback said she did not know how the immigrants arrived in the
United States. She said 13 of the group will face deportation hearings.
Zuieback said depending on what their investigation uncovers,
charges could be lodged against Hurley for hiring the immigrants.
She said since 9/11 ICE has detained about 1,000 illegal
immigrants who were working service jobs at airports nationwide, a
sweep that also has seen 775 indictments against the companies who
hired the workers.
``Hopefully, this will wake up a few people out there,'' said Rob
Landrum, whose girlfriend, Betty Ann Ong, was killed on American
Airlines Flight 11. ``We're still a far cry from where we need to be.''
2. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Mar-28-Mon-2005/news/26153393.html
Monday, March 28, 2005
Copyright ) Las Vegas Review-Journal
Clark County School District recruits teachers in Philippines
By ANTONIO PLANAS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
A lack of qualified special education and math teachers in the United
States has caused the Clark County School District to travel more than
7,000 miles away for recruits.
More than 25 residents of the Philippines have committed to teach in
the district and are expected to begin working in August. They will
work under temporary visas that expire after three years.
Recruiters spent a week interviewing about 150 candidates early last
month. District officials say 30 more teachers from the island nation
could be signed as well.
Clark County is the first district in thestate to recruit overseas, a
practice officials said is necessary to fill the high number of
vacancies in the district.
JoAnn Schlekewy, director of licensed personnel in charge of
recruiting, said there are about 280 special education openings in the
district, the majority of which are specialized positions such as
speech pathologist and professional therapist.
"Right now, we're recruiting in 43 states. I don't think we'll be able
to fill the voids of our regular teachers, let alone our specialty
teachers," Schlekewy said. "That's why we've considered other avenues."
Schlekewy said the need for math teachers is not as urgent, with five
openings in the district. But as 11 new schools open this fall, the
need is high in both areas.
It cost the district about $7,000 to send three recruiters to the
Philippines.
Substitutes have been filling in at schools without permanent math and
special education teachers.
District and national officials said the teacher education programs in
the Philippines parallel those in the United States, and prospective
teachers there can meet No Child Left Behind guidelines calling for
teachers to have either bachelor's or master's degrees in their
particular disciplines.
Schlekewy said the Filipino teaching candidates were all bilingual and
had at least three years of experience. Some held multiple degrees, she
said.
Although the candidates possessed impressive credentials, some had to
cope with challenging circumstances in their native land, including
classroom sizes of up to 60 students, tattered textbooks and chairs
fashioned out of rice bags.
"Living in the United States is very much a dream for many people from
the Philippines," said Derek Ramage, an official with the Los Angeles
Unified School District. "When you do recruit from the Philippines, you
can choose from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of teachers."
Ramage said his district has recruited about 800 foreign-born teachers
since the mid-1980s in countries such as Canada, Spain and Mexico, as
well as the Philippines.
District and national officials said school districts from states such
as New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia have all recruited in
other countries.
But Filipinos who have committed to teach in the county still have many
obstacles to surmount before they are placed in district classrooms.
Schlekewy said that all teachers must submit fingerprints and have
their transcripts thoroughly analyzed. Other requirements include
attending workshops with a focus on classroom management and Nevada's
educational curriculum. They must also take a multitude of tests
covering general teaching, specialized fields and Nevada's
constitution.
Bill Hanlon, director of the state-funded regional professional
development program, said the district has had a shortage of math and
special education teachers for the past decade.
He said the problem is national and not exclusive to Clark County.
"It's bad news in the sense that we have to go out and recruit," Hanlon
said. "But we don't have the teachers here."
Hanlon's program helps teachers in the district meet state academic
standards. He said that between 35 percent and 50 percent of teachers
leave the profession within the first five years.
One constant complaint among teachers has been low salary. In the past,
teachers in the district were able to find cheap housing. But with
property values soaring, Hanlon said, the district becomes less
attractive to teachers.
John Farley, a physics professor and director of the Center for
Mathematics and Science Education at UNLV, said teachers with a
bachelor's degree in Clark County typically start out at a salary of
about $27,000.
He said the district has discussed adjusting the starting pay for
high-demand teachers -- such as those in the special education field --
to a level comparable with teachers who have master's degrees. Starting
salaries would then be near $38,000, Farley said.
He acknowledged that even with higher starting salaries, UNLV will
still not be able to churn out enough teachers for the district, which
requires about 2,000 new teachers a year to keep up with growth.
Schlekewy said the success of the recruiting trip to the Philippines
will determine whether the district considers tapping the resources of
other countries. She added that Mexico and Spain are being considered
as potential destinations to find teachers who are bilingual.
"We're not just limited to the Philippines," she said. "We're still
doing some exploring in other countries."
3. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/03/29/14OPreality_1.html
Reality Check
Green-card regulations encourage offshoring
New rules make hiring foreign nationals more difficult than ever
By Ephraim Schwartz
March 29, 2005
I recently spoke with Frida Glucoft, a leading immigration lawyer and a
partner and chair of the immigration practice at law firm Mitchell
Silberberg & Knupp. She tells me that changes made by the U.S. Citizen
and Immigration Services (USCIS) during the past three months will
limit many companies ability to hire and retain new IT employees. If
you typically hire recent computer science grads who are not U.S.
citizens, you should listen up.
As of December, filing fees for H-1B visas have gone up more than 1,000
percent, from $185 to $2,185 per applicant. But you might as well add
on another $1,000 for whats called "premium processing" of the visa
application. Premium processing guarantees 15-day turnaround;
otherwise, processing can take between four and six months, according
to Glucoft.
If you think your company can afford to wait six months for some
hotshot software engineer, consider this. Last year, as they do each
year, 65,000 H-1B visas became available on Oct. 1. When the 65,000 are
gone, employers have to wait another 12 months for new visas to become
available. All of last years visas were spoken for by Oct. 3.
Heres another interesting glitch. The Department of Labor announced
a new program on Dec. 27, 2004, which went into effect March 27, 2005.
Called PERM (Program Electronic Review Management), it is the first
step in applying for lawful permanent residence status - also known as
a "green card" - as part of the greater Permanent Labor Certification
program.
Case law suggests that non-U.S. citizens who want green cards need
about two years of work experience even if they have a bachelors
degree. Work experience with an applicants first employer, however,
is considered on-the-job training and does not count.
So, if you have an employee working for you on an H-1B visa who has
just graduated from a U.S. university and you want to get that employee
a green card, you cant. Employees who want to stay in the country on
a more permanent basis have to change jobs; time served at their first
employers counts only toward green-card status after theyve taken a
job with a second employer.
Finally, heres another beaut. Also in December, Congress enacted and
President Bush signed into law a bill allowing for 20,000 additional
H-1B visas for those with advanced degrees from U.S. universities. This
added 20,000 additional visas to the existing quota of 65,000.
The law was to take effect on March 7, 2005, Glucoft said; however,
USCIS has issued a statement that it will not accept these cases until
further notice, pending "publication in the Federal Register." So, we
have employers ready to hire workers, we have workers who may have
given notice to their current employers, but now everything is on hold.
Policies such as these will certainly encourage offshoring. Why go
through the expense - including not just the visa fees but also the
legal fees needed to process the visas, the time it takes to get new
employees trained and up and running, plus the uncertainty, delays, and
lack of permanency of investments you may have made in hiring foreign
workers - when you can just contract a company outside our borders and
still get most of the benefits of having the best and the brightest
working for you?
4. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=67213
Saturday, March 26, 2005
US gives Pak F-16s, India gets F-16s plus plus
Bush Allows India to access aerospace industry to buy F-16s, F-18s,
licences for production; energy cooperation, upgrade of strategic
dialogue
C RAJA MOHAN & PRANAB DHAL SAMANTA
NEW DELHI, March 25 Barely hours after an official spokesman said that
the Prime Minister expressed great disappointment to US
President George Bush over his decision to sell F-16 fighter aircraft
to Pakistan, there was quiet satisfaction in New Delhi.
In a statement issued after midnight, the MEA spokesperson put on
record Washingtons wide-ranging offer that not only allows India to
buy F-16s and the latest F-18s from US firms but also seeks to
upgrade the strategic partnership giving it a much
more global character.
In fact, the US announcement this evening signals a significant
differentiation that the Bush Administration is making between India on
the one hand and its long-standing competitors in the region --
Pakistan and China.
That Bush was going to reward Gen. Pervez Musharraf with F-16s -- a
sale blocked for 15 years -- for his cooperation in the war on
terrorism was long known. What has been on offer to India from the
United States, however, has been less clear until recently.
In his conversation with Prime Minister Singh today, Bush informed
India on the final decision about F-16s to Pakistan and reaffirmed the
Rice proposals on strategic cooperation. The Bush package marks a
radical departure from the decades-old American policy towards India on
defence cooperation and the transfer of advanced technologies.
Washington is offering India a wider array of weapons systems and more
importantly the option to produce them in India.
The Bush Administration has now taken a decision to permit its
companies to bid for the Indian Air Force contract on the acquisition
of 126 multi-role combat aircraft and give them licences for
manufacture and production in India.
Sources in the American aerospace industry say once they receive formal
communication, they will fully compete in meeting the stringent Indian
demands on technology transfer and licensed production.
Lockheed Martin that produces the F-16 and the Boeing that makes the
F-15 and F-18 are expected to join the bidding for the Indian purchase
of the multi-role combat aircraft.
This is the first time Washington has offered F-16s to India, a country
outside the zone of its non-NATO allies.
On missile defence, the classified briefing given to India by a
Pentagon team last month was on the PAC 2 Plus system. This takes care
of integration with radar systems being developed now by Raytheon. Such
a briefing has only been given to Israel outside the NATO.
The Bush Administration is also proposing a major change in its
non-proliferation policy towards India by offering cooperation in the
area of commercial atomic energy generation -- including nuclear
reactor technology -- for the first time in three decades.
This comes days after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- she
spoke to External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh in Myanmar today -- had
revealed a package of proposals aimed at addressing Indias security
and energy needs.
Having opposed the natural gas pipeline with Iran, the Bush
Administration believes it has an obligation to offer alternative
options to India. It is in this context that Washington is proposing
nuclear energy cooperation.
The Bush Administration is expected to shortly take up the possibility
of such cooperation with the US Congress that has put in legislative
constraints on the transfer of nuclear energy technology.
To top it all, the Bush Administration wants a dialogue on global
issues with India aimed at increasing New Delhis role in
international institutions such as the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) and Group of Eight industrial countries.
5. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position
April 3, 2005
It's a Flat World, After All
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the
Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he
called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his
king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years
later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had
Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife
and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''
And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is
fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many
people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while
we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even
prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just
the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare
ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is
no time to waste.
I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the
flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of
last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore,
working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about
outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who
wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from
Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new
software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I
became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering
the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had
missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of
Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing
and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing
me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size
flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he
explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its
entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that
supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen
speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian
manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about
today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that
pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were
labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong,
Japan, Australia.
''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing
happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened
over the last years is that there was a massive investment in
technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of
dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the
world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added,
computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there
was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and
proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one
part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making
it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things
suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a
platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be
delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered,
distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a
whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of
an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is
really the culmination of all these things coming together.''
At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered
a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field
is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to
compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that
America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus
that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I
kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''
''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is
being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the
world is flat!''
Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed
over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the
rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely
to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's
smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute
and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me
that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a
meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was
citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a
great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made
our world flat!
This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to
1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the
dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and
imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world
from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies
globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started
around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny
and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the
dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the
dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the
dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its
unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing.
Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global
competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own,
collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only
differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening
the world and in how it is empowering individuals. It is also different
in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and
American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less
and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by
individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite --
group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every
color of the human rainbow take part.
''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old
in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the
information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply
knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of
Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That
is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field.
As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as
all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some
point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''
Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0
and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the
process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together.
We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin
Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his
Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off
upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the
cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven
from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and
South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student
in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have
chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not
really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and
play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with
smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the
innovation fray.
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate.
This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative
destruction on steroids.
ow did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?
It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during
the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through
them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but
11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was
critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a
single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people
inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our
future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the
wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough
Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the
playing field even more by creating a global computer interface,
shipped six months after the wall fell.
The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went
public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet
alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web
sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom,
which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive
overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications
cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted
in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber
network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data
and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston,
Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the
Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a
whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other
people from more different places in more different ways than ever
before.
No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than
India. ''India had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar
Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street,
whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the
University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ''It produced people
with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of
India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get
out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called
fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a
professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don't
have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could
never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India
with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes,
crazy overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads
turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. ''But the
railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too,
were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads,
''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.
The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian
engineers were enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer
bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K should be a national
holiday in India. Call it ''Indian Interdependence Day,'' says Michael
Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that
the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the
first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.''
Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and
electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all
those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the
Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the
workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so
that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and
shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.
Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and
application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six
more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies
could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.''
When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your
applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to
software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to
any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The
second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio,
to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next
operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online
and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company
like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics
operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my
goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no
idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was
''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global
supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an
item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart
were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.)
The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is
Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate
with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.
So the first three flatteners created the new platform for
collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that
flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the
steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet
protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new
forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from
anywhere, with any device.
The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the
year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows
for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time,
without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even
language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique
attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that
made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig
Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.
No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to
more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like
it in history. Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of
journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of
software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free
to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and
Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the
most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being flattened
and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more
and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between
companies and among individuals.
Do you recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been
pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was
just the prologue. The last 20 years were about forging, sharpening and
distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real
information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities
among these collaborative tools start to converge. One of those who
first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former
Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public
speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the
beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just
been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she
said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will
truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of
life.''
s if this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally
occurred during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three
billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the
playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia,
Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and
political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990's so that
their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And when
did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and
the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened, right
when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more
horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed,
thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants
didn't even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10
flatteners, the playing field came to them!
It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field,
developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe
is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in
the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and
compete. In fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But
even if we're talking about only 10 percent, that's 300 million people
-- about twice the size of the American work force. And be advised: the
Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us
to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next
generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in
China'' but also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are
heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to
''made in China'' to ''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China''
-- or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on
nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient
collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India.
Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't bring three
billion people into the world economy overnight without huge
consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China
and Russia -- ''with rich educational heritages.''
That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western
Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping
onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so
far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without
having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means
that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art
technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in
China today than there are people in America.
If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me
share with you two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft
officials who were involved in setting up Microsoft's research center
in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after
Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests
in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people.
Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested,
Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia
center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a
job there and explains why it is already the most productive research
team at Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when you are one in a million,
there are 1,300 other people just like you.''
The other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian
entrepreneur who started an electronic-game company from Bangalore,
which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile
computer games. ''We can't relax,'' Rao said. ''I think in the case of
the United States that is what happened a bit. Please look at me: I am
from India. We have been at a very different level before in terms of
technology and business. But once we saw we had an infrastructure that
made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best use of
it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and
today what we are seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest.
That is gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing
you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in
a tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance.
That is what is going to happen to so many jobs -- they will go to that
corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most
opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work
if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy
today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are
up and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work, using the
same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you
and if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in
business.''
Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and
Western Europeans would ''be better off thinking about how you can
raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better.
Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century.
Americans whining -- we have never seen that before.''
ao is right. And it is time we got focused. As a person who grew up
during the cold war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and
listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a
grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say: ''This is a test.
This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.''
And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched siren sound.
Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when
the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''
That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a
test.''
The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the
world puts before the United States are profound. Therefore, our
ability to get by doing things the way we've been doing them -- which
is to say not always enriching our secret sauce -- will not suffice any
more. ''For a country as wealthy we are, it is amazing how little we
are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,'' says Dinakar Singh,
the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. ''We are in a world that has a
system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and
we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a
nice coincidence if all the things that were true before were still
true now, but there are quite a few things you actually need to do
differently. You need to have a much more thoughtful national
discussion.''
If this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the
height of the cold war, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead
of America in the space race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. The
main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls; the
main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls
are being taken down and many other people can now compete and
collaborate with us much more directly. The main challenge in that
world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China
and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those
practicing extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The
main objective in that era was building a strong state, and the main
objective in this era is building strong individuals.
Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic
and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It
requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get
smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering
and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health
care that will help every American become more employable in an age in
which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.
We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to
Communism, maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at
our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin
with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which
connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the
other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening
nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager
to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new
piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita
Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it
has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ''From Russia With
Love.'' No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt
that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ''Hello,
my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?''
No, Rajiv, actually you can't. When it comes to responding to the
challenges of the flat world, there is no help line we can call. We
have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the basic economic
and educational tools to do that. But we have not been improving those
tools as much as we should. That is why we are in what Shirley Ann
Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, calls a ''quiet crisis'' -- one that is slowly eating away
at America's scientific and engineering base.
''If left unchecked,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman
to earn a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., ''this could challenge our
pre-eminence and capacity to innovate.'' And it is our ability to
constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been
the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle
class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product of
three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition
gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many
Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in
the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we
need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a
serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and
scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India
and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and
compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely
keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the
world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap.
That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not
here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty
little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just
outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often
get better-skilled and more productive people than their American
workers.
These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman,
warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American
high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I
compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am
terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our
fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth
grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students
are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The
percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so
are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more
students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice
as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six
times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international
competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers,
America is falling behind.''
We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good
engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science.
So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get
your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world,
every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she
wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up,
my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in
China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world
for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your
homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''
I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that
won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer
so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.''
Thomas L. Friedman is the author of ''The World Is Flat: A Brief
History of the Twenty-First Century,'' to be published this week by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux and from which this article is adapted. His
column appears on the Op-Ed page of The Times, and his television
documentary ''Does Europe Hate Us?'' will be shown on the Discovery
Channel on April 7 at 8 p.m.
6. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/04/314741.shtml
Are You A Slave?
author: Pirates Are U.S.
harr matey... how to take a long walk on a short plank over deep
water... wearing really heavy chains....
The New American Slavery
By Jolly Roger
slicingthroats@yahoo.com
4-2-5
The average American in the year 2005 lives a fragile existence, in a
struggle for survival that can be ended by missing a few paychecks. The
carrot at the end of the stick which was formerly known as "the
American dream" has been replaced by a whip that can best be described
as the American nightmare of homelessness, and slow, early death. You
no longer work to achieve a better life for yourselves and your
children. You work to keep a roof over your head, and you pray that you
don't lose it. You became a slave when fear replaced incentive as your
motivation to work, but I still suggest that you work while you can,
because if the company you work for can't send your job overseas, the
U.S. government is allowing 2000 people per day to enter this country
illegally, because they're willing to do your job for less.
It doesn't matter if you're a "white collar" or "blue collar" employee.
If you're an American, you're too highly paid. There are billions of
people who want your job, and your government is doing all they can to
see that you lose it to them. You see, we're not really Americans
anymore. Now we're just anonymous faces in the "global village,"
because our government has sold our nation to foreigners and
international bankers, and the new bankruptcy law has doomed the
American citizen to a life of debt slavery. They'll insist that illegal
immigrants are only doing jobs that Americans refuse to do, and you'll
probably believe it, because if you're watching the TV that shovels
that crap, you probably still have your job. The illegal immigrants are
doing jobs that Americans always did, and every unemployed American I
talk to can't find a job anywhere. And just like the European
immigrants that flooded this country before the economic depression of
the 1930's, today's illegal immigrants also have no gripe with a
government that has allowed them work for high wages in America, and
send billions back to their homeland. Nor do they care very much about
our constitution, bill of rights, or way of life. They're only here for
what they can grab, and our government has welcomed them with open
arms, because they're grabbing it from you.
You're already working much longer, and much harder, to achieve a much
lower standard of living than the previous generation, and 25 percent
of working Americans no longer even get a vacation. The Social Security
retirement age has been raised to match the life expectancy of American
males, so apparently, you're also expected to work until you're dead.
When you do finally get a vacation, they only trip you'll be taking
will be in a pine box, and that's only if you're one of the lucky ones.
Most of us will only get the state-issued canvas bag that gets tossed
into the pit with all the others. If you don't mind the fact that
you'll be working until you're dead, you might also want to consider
the fact that you'll get nothing for your labor, because this nation's
economy is about to crash like a freight train, and when it does,
everything you've worked for will vanish. After the depression gets
ugly, and your family has made the adjustment from three meals per day
to three meals per week, the newspapers will blame your hunger on "the
economy," as if it were some magical force that uncontrollably ruined a
couple hundred million lives. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Politicians and international bankers can manipulate national economies
at will, much in the way the media manipulates your mind, and a
decision has been made to impoverish Americans, because global
government requires that everyone in the world have an equally low
standard of living. Simply put, we're being robbed of all we've worked
for, because our government wants us to be poor, hungry, and docile,
dependant upon them for our existence, and in fear of them for our
lives. The government of the United States is intentionally destroying
the economy of the United States, because the politicians and the
international bankers they work for have decided that the American way
of life, and catering to the demands of the American constitution, is
simply too expensive.
Regardless of how wealthy you think you are, you actually have no real
money at all. The "federal reserve notes" that are in your wallet, and
your bank account, aren't really money, but are actually only paper on
a debt that can never be paid, not even by combining all the assets and
labor of every American alive today. Any loan-shark with a third grade
education will tell you "the paper's no good," and naturally, the
foreign investors who allow us to float this debt, have come to the
same conclusion.
What is commonly known as the "U.S. dollar," represents a debt that is
owed by the U.S. federal government, to the federal reserve bank. The
federal reserve bank happens to be the privately owned entity that lent
the money that's represented by the paper in your wallet. The federal
reserve act signed away everything you own, and the fruit of your labor
as collateral on this debt, and as foreign investors are becoming
increasingly unwilling to invest the $2 billion per day needed to cover
the interest, our creditors will want to collect it.
About 90 percent of all Americans are mortgaged to the hilt, and would
have little or no assets left if all debts and liabilities were to be
paid.* Most Americans have taken advantage of low interest rates, and
are now paying a mortgage on their homes. The booming real estate
market has made every purchase profitable, because the price of a home
always rises. The problem is that the price of a home today is
incredibly over-inflated, and the real estate boom that's been keeping
the American economy afloat, is about to bust. Interest rates are going
to rise, and the price of your home is going to drop drastically, which
will leave you stuck paying for a house that probably wouldn't pay the
interest on your debt if you sold it. If you're lucky enough to remain
employed, inflation will shred your paycheck until you can no longer
make mortgage payments. This is when you need to remember that when a
nation's economy collapses, the wealth of the nation doesn't disappear,
it only changes hands.
Millions of Americans are about to be tossed into the street, and
because we're a kinder and gentler America, from the street they'll be
tossed into shelters. Once in the shelter, they'll be wards of the
social service system, which will make sure they all have food, and a
bed to sleep in. In exchange for that food and shelter, the "welfare
reform" act will put them to work at jobs where they will collect no
additional salary. I guess the idea of "welfare reform" is a lot more
acceptable to Americans than "forced labor" but regardless of what you
call it, many Americans will soon experience slavery once again, and
the slaves are not just sweeping public streets. Under the welfare
reform act, many Americans are being put to work for private companies
for no wages other than the cost of their food and shelter, both of
which constitute the bare minimum requirements of survival. By causing
the economy to collapse, and then "saving" the poor, our government can
legally force millions of Americans into slavery. The new slavery will
be blamed on "the economy," and it will employ a much larger percentage
of the population than it did before the civil war.
To understand how they're accomplishing this, we need to turn our
thoughts back to our monetary system, because due to the fact that it
is no longer based on the gold standard, our government is in control
of the money supply, and that gives them the ability to cause rampant
unemployment, which is exactly what they're doing. The framers of the
U.S. constitution protected us from this brand of tyranny, but because
Americans were foolish enough to ignore and/or trust their government,
they will become slaves, but most of them will blame themselves for
their plight.
Article 1, Section 10, of the U.S. constitution clearly states that "no
state shall... make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in
payment of debts." The constitution's prohibition of "fiat money"
(what's in your wallet) guarantees that the wealth of the nation
remains in the hands of the people, which leaves the government
incapable of stealing the population's wealth, as they're doing today.
You can collect all the dollars that you like. Our government decides
what they're worth, and by keeping the presses working overtime,
they're insuring that the dollar will soon be worthless.
The U.S. department of labor has also changed the way it collects data
regarding unemployment, which allows for the fraudulent unemployment
figures that are printed in the newspapers, and allows working
Americans to believe that things aren't really that bad. Their new
"household survey" system avoids counting most of the poor by basing
unemployment figures on telephone surveys. A real estimate, based on
population and payroll taxes, reveals that about 25 percent of the
American workforce is presently unemployed, and that will eventually
force them into the social service slavery system. Unless your mortgage
and debts are completely paid off, and you can still pay your property
taxes, there's a good chance you'll soon be joining them. Welcome to
the third world, and to an American world, where slavery is legal once
again.
What are you going to do when your government forces you into slavery?
You can't avoid it, because if you're homeless, you'll be rounded up
and brought to a "shelter", where you'll be fed, and probably medicated
if you're not happy to be there. With so many people becoming homeless,
it will be easy for them to find an apartment for you, and social
services will pay your rent, and give you food stamps.
Soon after that they will find you a job, but naturally, you won't be
taking home a paycheck because you're in debt to the social service
system. They'll tell you that you're working your way back to
independence, but since your salary will never be more than your
expenses, you'll work for free until you're dead. If you refuse to
work, the government "assistance" will be cut off, you'll be back out
on the street, and you'll probably do your next job with a shackle
around your ankle.
I'm not asking that you waste the time or paper required to write your
congressman, because they don't care what you think anyway. What I am
asking you to do is to remember something. When the economy does crash,
and you're forced into the street. I want you to remember that this
isn't your fault, and it's not the result of a "bad economy." Please
remember that you're poor, hungry and homeless, because that's where
our government wants you to be, and they intentionally destroyed the
U.S. economy because they want you to suffer, and beg. And regardless
of how bad things get, never sell your rifle. -- Jolly Roger
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the
capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process
of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an
important part of the wealth of their citizens..... Lenin was certainly
right." - John Maynard Keynes*
*90 percent of all Americans are mortgaged to the hilt, and would have
little or no assets left if all debts and liabilities were to be paid.
--- Rep. Traficant to U.S. Congress.
**John Maynard Keynes is the economist for whom our present monetary
system is named.
Unlike this nation's wealth, anything written by Jolly Roger is the
property of the American people, and the author hereby grants
permission to anyone who so desires to post, copy, forward or
distribute this letter as they see fit, and in fact, the author
encourages you to do so.
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