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Today's
Stories
March 25, 2004
Saul Landau
Is Venezuela Next?
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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March
25, 2004
Offshoring Is Only One Cause of High Unemployment
Who
is the Blame for Lost Jobs?
By LEE SUSTAR
Is your job going to Guangdong or Bangalore--and
is George W. Bush to blame? While corporate outsourcing and offshoring
of jobs has already become a central question in the 2004 presidential
elections, the debate has so far only scratched the surface of
the real reasons for the worst job growth since the Great Depression
of the 1930s.
An estimated 2.8 million factory jobs
have been lost since Bush took office in 2001. While the unemployment
rate is officially 5.6 percent, that's only because long-term
joblessness--the worst in 20 years--is so bad that people have
either dropped out of the labor market or have never even entered
it. Count those people, and the real jobless rate is 7.4 percent.
That's why outsourcing--factory jobs
moved to China or call center operations sent to India, for example--has
emerged as such a hot issue. The Bush administration's response
has shown only contempt for working people. "Outsourcing
is just a new way of doing international trade," said Gregory
Mankiw, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. "...More
things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that's
a good thing."
Tell that to the workers at the Maytag
plant in Galesburg, Ill. Their factory is set to shut down while
production moves to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers will be paid
just $2 per hour, compared to an average hourly wage of $14.15
for the workers in Illinois.
As if Mankiw's let-them-eat-cake remarks
weren't outrageous enough, it turned out that Bush's first choice
to be the White House "czar" for manufacturing, Anthony
Raimondo, himself outsourced 75 jobs to China. To Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry, Raimondo is a "Benedict
Arnold CEO"--a reference to the traitor in the Revolutionary
War.
Kerry has taking a cue from Bill Clinton,
who has a presidential candidate in 1992 liked to roll up his
sleeves while speaking to union members and denounce George Bush
Senior's lousy record on jobs. Once in office, Clinton, of course,
rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through
Congress--and got Kerry's vote in the Senate.
NAFTA led to the loss of 500,000 U.S.
jobs between its launch in 1994 and 2002, according to the U.S.
Department of Labor. A separate study by Robert Scott of the
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that some 879,000 U.S.
jobs disappeared as a result of NAFTA. While even this higher
number is a tiny fraction of the total number of jobs in the
U.S. economy, many of the manufacturing jobs lost were unionized
and decently paid.
According to a U.S. government commission,
trade is responsible for at least 15 percent to 25 percent of
the growth in wage inequality. However, there's more to this
story, according to the EPI's Scott. "When trying to identify
the causes behind trends such as the disappearance of manufacturing
jobs, the rise in income inequality, and the decline in wages
in the United States, NAFTA and the growing trade deficits provide
only part of the picture," he wrote.
"Other major contributors include
deregulation and privatization, declining rates of unionization,
sustained high levels of unemployment, and technological change."
In other words, Corporate America has eliminated jobs and lowered
wages even where trade isn't decisive.
That's why politicians like Kerry find
that it's safer to confine the debate to trade rather than challenge
the Wal-Martization of America, created by the corporate backers
upon which Kerry depends. After all, his campaign Web site, JohnKerry.com, posts an
adoring article touting Kerry's "healthy respect for market
forces."
* * *
TODAY, THOSE "market forces"
are driving increasing numbers of white-collar jobs overseas.
The media is rife with stories about "offshoring" of
technology, financial and call center jobs to India, where a
large pool of highly educated English speakers offer a low-wage
labor pool for Corporate America.
The focus on India, however, is misplaced.
According to a study by McKinsey Consulting, of $20 billion in
outsourcing revenue from the U.S. in 2002, Ireland accounted
for $8.3 billion; India for $7.7 billion; and Canada, $3.7 billion.
In fact, Canada also was one of two industrial countries--Spain
was the other--to have gained manufacturing jobs between 1995
and 2002, according to a recent study by Alliance Capital Management.
Overall, some 22 million factory jobs
were eliminated worldwide over this period--an overall loss of
11 percent. Even China saw a 15 percent decline in factory jobs.
The reason for much of this job loss is advances in productivity--especially
in the U.S.
"With productivity growing at an
annual rate of 3 percent to 3.5 percent rather than the expected
2 percent to 2.5 percent, the reason for the jobs shortfall becomes
clear," Business Week concluded. "Companies are using
information technology to cut costs--and that means that less
labor is needed." Given the global gut in industries from
airlines to autos to steel--the result of the boom years of the
late 1990s--business is reluctant to invest and hire more workers.
If China and India are blamed for U.S.
job losses, it's in part because Washington wants to use the
issue to get trade concessions from those countries. And, as
with trade tensions in the past, racism plays a role. The supposed
threat of two billion-plus Indians and Chinese stealing "American
jobs" is seen as more politically effective than, say, blaming
Canada.
These dynamics can be seen in the AFL-CIO's
formal complaint against China, which blames that country's suppression
of labor rights for low wages that have allegedly led to the
loss of 727,000 manufacturing jobs in the U.S. While this approach
seems to highlight the conditions of Chinese workers, it nevertheless
effectively allies the AFL-CIO with the Republican China-bashers
in Congress.
If U.S. unions want to challenge China's
labor practices, they should step up organizing at the 10 U.S.
companies who are among China's top 40 exporters. And if the
China-bashing is destructive, so too is relying on employers
in a "buy America" campaign. For example, steel tariffs
enabled companies to raise prices, but job losses and concessions
have continued.
* * *
INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY is the only
way workers can avoid being pitted against one another in trade
wars between governments. The international labor opposition
to the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade Area of the
Americas show the potential for such a strategy.
If union leaders are serious about defending
jobs, they have to break with the tradition of partnership with
employers. For example, steelworkers could demand that the government
to purchase steel for the reconstruction of run-down public schools
and inner cities--or the nationalization of the steel industry.
Unions not only need to take a stand
against concessions but demand that workers' higher productivity
be used to support shorter hours for full pay in order to increase
the number of jobs. The bosses can certainly afford it--profits
as a share of national income are at an all-time high.
Rising health care costs--cited by employers
as a reason to hold down hiring--can be brought under control
with a national health care insurance system. Workers in factories
slated for closure could take inspiration from the sit-down strikes
that built the unions in the 1930s, and occupy their plants to
fight for their demands. Organized labor can demand a real jobs
program of public works--not the Clinton "workfare"
that forces welfare recipients to take jobs for sub-minimum wages,
but long-term employment
All this will be dismissed as "unrealistic"
by union officials--as if pinning labor's hopes on a free-trader
like Kerry is rational. It should be recalled that it was "unrealistic"
to build unions during the mass unemployment of the 1930s as
well. The fight for jobs will remain an issue beyond the 2004
elections. It's time to develop a realistic strategy--one that
centers on fighting back.
Lee Sustar
is labor editor for Socialist
Worker newspaper. He can be reached at: lsustar@ameritech.net
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
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